Lost Youth

Somehow I think most married men in this day and age, subject to all the implied lust in advertising and entertainment, have felt this at some point or another.  (Unless they've been through a lot of women prior to getting married, that is.)  It's like the single vs. married dilemma: when you're single you want a stable relationship like marriage, but then when you get married you find out it's not all about you anymore and long for your single days.  Link source: an article on the Casual Sex Project.

Spring Link Dump!!

Some of these have been in my reader for a while.

Email from the Koch Institute regarding the Kochs' dispute with Cato: At first I was highly disappointed at the notice of the "takeover bid", but to be honest, I wasn't even aware of the history that Cato was originally the Charles Koch Foundation.  Now I'm not sure what to think.  It seems to be a trend that some of these advocacy organizations turn out to be driven primarily by the egos of their executives, e.g. Wayne LaPierre at the NRA.

So it turns out that extreme liberals don't really understand their opponents positions on the issues.  Surprise, surprise.  I've found empirically that they tend to not spend the time to educate themselves, preferring to wallow in their own poorly-formed, ill-considered ideology.  The study referred to is interesting.

From WSJ:

• Gardening tips for beginners.  I have dirt and seeds.  Now what?
• The end of the sophisticated playboy era.  The nouveau rich don't know how to live.
• How to tell when it's just another fight, and when it's over.  One can always make it work—it just depends on how much one is willing to sacrifice.  If both people are willing to sacrifice, that's a relationship that will survive.

Regarding the Trayvon Martin case:

• Thomas Sowell's Race and Rhetoric and some more commentary on "race hustlers".  Headline from the early '90s: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80’s, Census Shows"—what happened since the Reagan Era?
• John Lott's opinion on the relevance of Stand Your Ground to the case, and follow-up piece on Fox.

An opinion on the use of the term "gun culture": I disagree, because the extreme left has made this a culture war.  Nonetheless, it's an interesting point.

"An Interracial Fix for Black Marriage"

WSJ featured an article—by a black man, one Ralph Richard Banks—on the difficulties black women face in finding a spouse, and proposed that rather than looking within their race exclusively to consider marrying outside their race to broaden the base of eligible males in the near-term, but to ease the difficulties of finding in-race mates in the long-term.

From the article:

If many black women remain unmarried because they think they have too few options, some black men stay single because they think they have so many. The same numbers imbalance that makes life difficult for black women may be a source of power for black men. Why cash in, they reason, when it is so easy to continue to play?

...which perhaps describes the situation of a guy I know.

Others prefer black men because they don't think a relationship with a non-black man would work. They worry about rejection by a would-be spouse's family or the awkwardness of having to explain oneself to a non-black partner.

As one 31-year-old schoolteacher in D.C. told me, "It's easy to date a black man because he knows about my hair. He knows I don't wash it every day. He knows I'm going to put the scarf on [to keep it in place at night]." Discussions about hair may seem trivial, but for many black women, just the thought of having the "hair talk" makes them tired. It's emblematic of so much else they'd have to teach.

Interracial relationships aren't easy, since the downside is certain things you can't take for granted. But the plus side is that you can avoid the miscommunications that result from taking for granted things that weren't safe to assume.

By opening themselves to relationships with men of other races, black women would also lessen the power disparity that depresses the African-American marriage rate. As more black women expanded their options, black women as a group would have more leverage with black men. Even black women who remained unwilling to love across the color line would benefit from other black women's willingness to do so.

Interesting thesis, one that I as a "minority", if not a vested one, think valid.

Wisdom from Chris Rock

"Those are the choices in life: You can be married and bored or single and lonely," Rock said in his 2004 HBO special "Never Scared." "Ain't no happiness nowhere."

Amen, brother. ;-)