Book Review: 'Darwin's Doubt' by Stephen C. Meyer

Darwinism and Materialism: They Sink or Swim Together

Will Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt be “the most despised science book” of 2013?

By Tom Bethell on 9.18.13 @ 6:09AM

http://spectator.org/

Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design
By Stephen C. Meyer
(HarperOne, 496 pages, $28.99)

Recently the Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt, a book that raises many questions about the theory of evolution. As his title tells us, Darwin himself shared one of these doubts. The book has sold well, reaching #7 on the New York Times bestseller list, #4 on the Los Angeles Times list, and #10 on Publishers Weekly.

Organisms are intelligently designed, says Meyer, who has a PhD from Cambridge University in the philosophy of science. His book is an education, demanding attentive reading but no specialized knowledge. To a large extent it uses the facts and arguments of professional biologists, some bordering on open dissent from the orthodoxy.

Darwin’s Doubt has also been subjected to a barrage of what can only be called hate. “Mendacious intellectual pornography” is among the more inventive descriptions. Hundreds of negative comments appeared on Amazon review page within hours of the 498-page book’s publication.

Donald Prothero, a geologist and research associate at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, typified many when he said that Meyer is a “fool,” “incompetent,” guilty of “ignorance,” in “way over his head,” with a “completely false understanding of the subject.” Further, Meyer argues “dishonestly,” promotes a “fundamental lie,” promotes a “fairy tale,” and so on.

Would a scientist make his case that way if he had real arguments? Prothero did attempt a few substantive criticisms, but inadvertently demonstrated that he had not read Meyer’s chapters that had already addressed them. Prothero, in truth, hankers after creationism as his preferred target. But Meyer’s book is devoid of creationism or biblical references. It’s all science.

Along with the attacks, we find more and more biologists recognizing that intelligent design (ID) is a serious endeavor. Meyer’s book has been praised by George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School; Scott Turner, a professor of biology at SUNY; Russell Carlson, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Georgia and a dozen others. George Gilder, most recently the author ofKnowledge and Power, calls Darwin’s Doubt “the best science book ever written.”

So what is going on? A clue was provided by Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, published last year and the subject of a Weekly Standard cover story (“The Heretic”) by former American Spectator writer Andy Ferguson. But before discussing Nagel, who encountered his own shower of brickbats, I’ll say a little more about Darwin’s Doubt.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species claimed that organisms arose by random variation and natural selection, which must have been a slow business. But the fossil record shows that the major animal forms appeared without visible predecessors — an event known as the Cambrian Explosion. As the Darwinian rulebook regards such sudden changes as highly improbable, the evolutionists encounter two problems: insufficient time and missing fossils.

The Cambrian explosion occurred about 530 million years ago. More recent discoveries in China showed that the new phyla — for example arthropods, chordates, and brachiopods — appeared within a ten-million-year period. Others say the “explosive” period took only 5 to 6 million years. Compared with the reported three-billion year history of life on earth, the Cambrian explosion is the equivalent of just a few minutes in a 24-hour day. It happened in a geological blink.

The Chinese discoveries confirmed what had already been found at the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. No plausible ancestors have yet been found in lower strata, either in Canada or China. Some of the Cambrian creatures are highly complex. Among the earliest are well-preserved trilobites, with lens-focusing eyes and a 360-degree field of vision. “Not so primitive,” as Meyer writes.

Cambrian phyla were originally discovered in Wales. Darwin knew about them and realized that unless ancestors were found, his theory was in trouble. So the problem has been understood for over 150 years.

Meyer’s discussion of the problem is unrivaled in its detail and clarity. He covers the various escape routes that Darwinians have proposed. Maybe, for example, the antecedent forms lacked hard parts and so couldn’t fossilize? Awkward fact: Lots of soft-bodied organisms from the pre-Cambrian have been preserved, but they don’t get us closer to a solution.

Another chapter discusses what is known as punctuated equilibrium. The paleontologist Niles Eldredge became an expert on the ancient trilobites. At first it bothered him that they were all so similar. Then he concluded that “the absence of change” was itself significant. Stasis was “data,” not a mere artifact. With Stephen Jay Gould, he formulated “punctuated equilibrium,” which became well known. Long periods when animal forms are static, they theorized, are punctuated by periods in which new forms of animal life arise quickly — so quickly we can’t expect them to leave a record.

Years ago, speaking in a tone of subdued irony for my benefit, Donn Rosen, a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, wryly summarized what is involved: “Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.”

More formally, Meyer shows that “punk eek” doesn’t work out as hoped. Not only have those fleeting ancestors not appeared anywhere, the proponents of punctuated equilibrium never came up with a mechanism that could plausibly produce so much anatomical change so quickly.

Meyer also describes how work in statistical paleontology has undermined the idea that the missing ancestral fossils are merely an artifact of incomplete sampling. If you hunt in lots of different places and keep unearthing the same old specimens, it becomes ever harder to maintain that you still haven’t looked hard enough. Maybe the missing ones never were there to begin with.

A generation ago, Colin Patterson, the senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a public forum that he didn’t know of any evidence for evolution. There was some grumbling, but he knew that the crucial evidence was missing. And like Thomas Nagel today, he emphasized that he was an atheist — this was no creationist speaking.

IN THE SECOND PART of Meyer’s book, “How to Build an Animal,” the argument changes. Meyer shows that building new animal body plans requires the origin of new genetic information and “epigenetic” information (biological information stored in places outside of DNA). He shows the Cambrian explosion is not just an explosion of new forms of animal life, but an explosion of the information or instructions necessary to build them.

But to generate new information, neo-Darwinism relies on mutations — random changes in the arrangement of the chemical “bases” that function like alphabetic characters in the genetic text stored in DNA. And to build whole new animals, lots of major mutations are needed, but most are lethal.

The geneticist Hermann J. Muller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1946, bombarded fruit flies with X-rays, which he thought would “speed up evolution.” But nothing came of it. Fruit flies not killed by the X-rays remained fruit flies. Also, mutations that occur early in embryonic development are always lethal — generating “dead animals incapable of further evolution,” as Meyer writes. Late-acting mutations may be viable, but these “do not affect global animal architectures.” Hence the Darwinian dilemma: “Major changes are not viable; viable changes are not major.”

Here Meyer also demonstrates the mathematical implausibility of the neo-Darwinian explanation for the origin of new genetic information. The speedy appearance of animals with new body plans creates a big statistical problem. Its key point is easily grasped. Guessing a one-digit number might be easy and won’t take that long. But guessing a ten or a one hundred digit number will likely take you a very long time. In biology, random mutations are equivalent to the “guesses” and the DNA and proteins are like numbers with hundreds or thousands of precisely arranged digits. The “right guess” corresponds to a DNA sequence that will produce a new protein with some heritable “adaptive” benefit for the offspring.

In all animals we find intricately folded proteins made of hundreds of precisely arranged sequences of amino acids. Meyer cites the work of molecular biologist Douglas Axe who has shown that generating even just one new protein by mutating DNA at random has a prohibitively small chance of ever occurring even on the scale of evolutionary deep time. The number of amino acid combinations that mutations much search vastly exceeds the time that is available to evolutionary history, let alone the brief period of the Cambrian explosion.

It gets worse. The improbability of a right guess, or sequence, must be multiplied over and over, because the next mutation could cancel the first. Imagine you are on a desert island with buried treasure, and X marks the spot. You hope to find the X by taking random steps. You may indeed soon step in the right direction. But you have no way of knowing which direction that is. So your second step may return you to square one. The standard Darwinian view takes no account of mutations that reverse the progress made.

In addition, proteins and genes cannot be randomly changed much at all without degrading their function. They are equivalent to small islands of function surrounded by huge seas of disorder. There is no way to “walk” from one island to another and still survive.

Yet, transitions from one body plan to another must be viable at every stage. Darwin once argued that bears may have been ancestral to whales. Consider the difficulty. A brilliant engineer might conceivably know how to assemble a whale out of molecules, amino acids, DNA, proteins, and all its other parts. No one remotely knows how to do this. But let’s posit an engineer of superhuman skill.

Then you give him the bad news. In making the bear-to-whale transition, the ever-modifying creature has to continue living, breathing, and reproducing even as those changes are taking place. That would be like telling a naval architect that he has to redesign an army tank into a submarine, but at every transition the vehicle has to function as a weapon of war. By the way, it must also be able to give birth to baby submarines.

IN THE THIRD PART of his book, Meyer outlines his positive case for intelligent design. Ironically, here he uses the same principle of scientific reasoning that Darwin used in the Origin. Darwin subscribed to a principle of scientific reasoning known as the Vera Causa principle. This asserts that scientists should seek to explain events in the remote past by causes “now in operation.” Meyer applies this to the question of the origin of the information necessary to produce new forms of animal life. He argues that the only known cause of the origin of the kind of digital information that arises in the Cambrian explosion is intelligent activity. He quotes the information theorist Henry Quastler who stated that “the creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” Thus, he concludes, using Darwin’s principle, that intelligent design provides the best explanation for the Cambrian information explosion.

If a correct scientific theory is pursued, we expect new knowledge to comport with the theory. Yet recent discoveries, especially in molecular biology, were not foreseen and have weakened Darwinism. For example, Darwin’s German contemporary and supporter Ernst Haeckel viewed the cell as a simple lump of “protoplasm.” Now we know that it is a hi-tech nano-factory complicated beyond comprehension. A cell can also reproduce itself, something no man-made machine has yet been able to do.

It is said that intelligent design makes no predictions, but it does, and one has been dramatically confirmed. William Dembski, the author of several ID books, predicted in 1998: “On an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If on the other hand organisms are designed, we expect DNA as much as possible to exhibit function.” The “junk DNA” theory has been supported by most leading biologists, including NIH Director Francis Collins.

But Dembski’s view was confirmed last year by prestigious science journals, including Nature. They published papers on the ENCODE project, challenging the view that DNA contains mostly a record of the “errors” in the Darwinian process. ENCODE reported last year that over 80% of DNA in the human genome “serves some purpose, biochemically speaking.” Earlier, 98% had been considered junk.

Meyer also reviews the “Rules of Science” decreeing what is permitted if an investigation is to be called scientific. “Methodological naturalism” is the main one today: Only material causes are permitted. That rule is the basis for Darwinian accusations that ID is creationism. ID does admit non-material causes, thereby flouting the (recently imposed) rule obliging scientists to adhere to naturalism all the way.

Yet science itself abounds with non-material entities. Information is non-material and if it is essential for building organisms, how is it transmitted to the three-dimensional world of matter? There’s an obvious parallel, Meyer points out. How are the decisions we make in our own conscious minds transmitted to the world of physical matter? We know every day that we can transform our mental decisions into physical acts. We choose to lift our arm, and it lifts.

Neuroscience hopes to explain this materially — to show how the brain’s nerve endings translate into consciousness, thence into acts. But one may predict that they will keep looking for a long time, because the gulf separating matter and consciousness is greater than that separating us from the remotest galaxy. That doesn’t mean that mind is too remote, unreal, or can be excluded from science. Mind is within us and nothing can be closer. Without it, the very ideas, theories, and arguments of science wouldn’t exist.

If our own minds can disturb matter in ways that cannot be explained by materialists, is it not possible that some larger or more encompassing Mind can impact the world of nature? No, say the materialists. Why not? Because, in their philosophy, matter is all that exists. That’s why they call themselves materialists. And that is why Thomas Nagel’s book is so significant. His book is subtitled “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” Incidentally, Nagel has also gone out of his way to praise Stephen Meyer.

Even though Nagel is a prominent philosopher with an endowed chair at New York University, his book was reviled by prominent evolutionists — so much so that the New Republic called them “Darwinian dittoheads.” In Britain, the Guardian newspaper called Mind and Cosmos “the most despised science book of 2012.” Maybe Meyer will win that honor in 2013.

Materialism, sometimes called naturalism, is the belief that matter — molecules in motion — is all that exists. Everything else: mind, consciousness, spirit — must somehow be reduced to the orchestrated firing of neurons. It was this bleak philosophy that Nagel challenged.

The point is that if matter is all that exists, then something like Darwinism must be true, because highly complex organisms are real; not just men but mice, and on down to bacteria. How did they get here, in a purely material world? They must have accumulated themselves, bit by accidental bit, over a very long period. Which is close to being a re-description of Darwin’s theory. Darwin wrote in a notebook that he was a materialist himself, but hardly dare say so openly. His theory of evolution by natural selection was his attempt to confine science to an exclusive reliance on material causes.

It follows that those Darwinists who are also materialists — most of them are — can take this philosophy as their backstop and relax. They don’t have to master or rebut ID arguments. They don’t even have to listen to them. Their science is already built into their philosophy. But if Nagel’s doubts about materialism hold up (and few laymen really accept materialism in the first place, because it denies free will and we know that consciousness is real), then the idea that there never was much to support Darwinism may one day be accepted. It was extrapolated from the observed facts of variation; it was assumed but has never been demonstrated.

This much is clear: The Darwinists cannot live with ID as their enemy. They can easily co-exist with creationism, but that came from the Bible, which can be dismissed in our secular age. They rage at ID, on the other hand, because it challenges them in what they have seen as their strong suit: Science.

Student Indoctrination

By Walter E. Williams

http://townhall.com/

September 18, 2013

The new college academic year has begun, and unfortunately, so has student indoctrination. Let's look at some of it.

William Penn, Michigan State University professor of creative writing, greeted his first day of class with an anti-Republican rant. Campus Reform, a project of the Arlington, Va.-based Leadership Institute, has a video featuring the professor telling his students that Republicans want to prevent "black people" from voting. He added that "this country still is full of closet racists" and described Republicans as "a bunch of dead white people -- or dying white people" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUi0rUEc_wI). To a student who had apparently displayed displeasure with those comments, Professor Penn barked, "You can frown if you want." He gesticulated toward the student and added, "You look like you're frowning. Are you frowning?" When the professor's conduct was brought to the attention of campus authorities, MSU spokesman Kent Cassella said, "At MSU it is important the classroom environment is conducive to a free exchange of ideas and is respectful of the opinions of others."

That mealy-mouthed response is typical of university administrators. Professor Penn was using his classroom to proselytize students. That is academic dishonesty and warrants serious disciplinary or dismissal proceedings. But that's not likely. Professor Penn's vision is probably shared by his colleagues, seeing as he was the recipient of MSU's Distinguished Faculty Award in 2003. University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow shares Penn's opinion. Last fall, he went on a rant telling his students that Republicans are "stupid and racist" and "the last vestige of angry old white people" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20jLo200wiw).

UCLA's new academic year saw its undergraduate student government fighting for constitutional rights by unanimously passing a resolution calling for the end of the use of the phrase "illegal immigrant." The resolution states, "The racially derogatory I-word endangers basic human rights including the presumption of innocence and the right to due process guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution." No doubt some UCLA administrators and professors bereft of thinking skills helped them craft the resolution.

The New York Post (8/25/11) carried a story about a student in training to become dorm supervisor at DePauw University in Indiana. She said: "We were told that 'human' was not a suitable identity, but that instead we were first 'black,' 'white,' or 'Asian'; 'male' or 'female'; ... 'heterosexual' or 'queer.' We were forced to act like bigots and spout off stereotypes while being told that that was what we were really thinking deep down." At many universities, part of the freshman orientation includes what's called the "tunnel of oppression." They are taught the evils of "white privilege" and how they are part of a "rape culture." Sometimes they are forced to discuss their sexual identities with complete strangers. The New York Post story said: "DePauw is no rare case. At least 96 colleges across the country have run similar 'tunnel of oppression' programs in the last few years."

University officials are aware of this kind of academic dishonesty and indoctrination; university trustees are not. For the most part, trustees are yes men for the president. Legislators and charitable foundations that pour billions into colleges are unaware, as well. Most tragically, parents who pay tens of thousands of dollars for tuition and pile up large debt to send their youngsters off to be educated are unaware of the academic rot, as well.

You ask, "Williams, what can be done?" Students should record classroom professorial propaganda and give it wide distribution over the Internet. I've taught for more than 45 years and routinely invited students to record my lectures so they don't have to be stenographers during class. I have no idea of where those recordings have wound up, but if you find them, you'll hear zero proselytization or discussion of my political and personal preferences. To use a classroom to propagate one's personal beliefs is academic dishonesty.

Vladimir Lenin said, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." That's the goal of the leftist teaching agenda.

Party Politics

By Mark Steyn

National Review's Happy Warrior
September 17, 2013

http://www.steynonline.com/

Susan Rice arrives with her husband, Ian Cameron, for a state dinner hosted by President Barack Obama for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House Nov. 24, 2009. (AP)

Prowling my hotel room the other night, I discovered a copy of the latest Vogue, kindly provided by the management. So, after bringing myself up to speed on Jennifer Lawrence — a "girl on fire," apparently — I turned to a profile of Susan Rice. She was the girl sent to put out the fire, dispatched by the Obama administration to slog through all the Sunday talk shows the weekend after Benghazi and blame it on some video. In Sir Henry Wotton's famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a U.N. ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — viz., Barack Obama. Happily, it worked. A year on, the director of the video is still in custody, and Miss Rice is now national-security adviser. So she and Vogue were in party mood:

"It's a warm evening in June, and guests are assembling for a party she's throwing in honor of LGBT Pride Month at the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, the official residence of the U.N. Ambassador. Actress turned humanitarian activist Mia Farrow, wearing blue tinted glasses, is one of the first to arrive. Within minutes she's joined by The New York Times's executive editor, Jill Abramson . . ." And soon things are swinging: "They mingle and sip sparkling wine in the elegant living room next to a framed portrait of Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama resting their heads on Rice's shoulders . . ."

Presumably Vogue subscribers are impressed by this sort of thing, but it would seem an odd opening paragraph for a profile of even recent U.N. ambassadors. Hey, maybe I'm wrong; maybe Vogue profiled cocktail soirées chez John Bolton attended by Andie MacDowell or Valerie Bertinelli, and with the great man photographed between Phil Donahue and Barbara Bush, or Merv Griffin and Mamie Eisenhower. Who knows? Out there, in a ramshackle outpost somewhere on the fringes of the map, brave Americans abandoned by their government are dying on a rooftop. But here in the metropolis the dazzling klieg-light luster of Mia Farrow and Jill Abramson plunges all else into shadow.

If you're not looking at the world through Mia Farrow's blue-tinted glasses, if you're in Beijing or Moscow, Ankara or Canberra, it's the shadow that everyone sees, very clearly — the sepulchral Habsburgian twilight of a dimming power enjoying its last waltz. Like Vienna exactly a century ago, America retains a certain creative energy, if you're willing to put Jay-Z up there with Franz Lehár. It is at the forefront of therapeutic culture: If Freud had thought to stick his couch on a TV set, he might have made as much dough as Oprah, or at least Dr. Phil. As Vienna sat on an underground "river of sex" (as William Boyd calls it in his recent novel Waiting for Sunrise), so in America the river is overground and its Niagara-like roar the unceasing background din of daily life: A New York mayoral candidate twitpics his penis. A putative successor to San Diego's grope-fiend mayor is caught masturbating in a city-hall men's room. Miley Cyrus in her scanties "twerks" — or is twerked upon (I'm not sure I can reliably say which) — live on TV. Yawn. Next . . .

No one could be further from the octogenarian Franz Josef than our young emperor, but even hip courtiers draw the line at lèse majesté, and so rodeo clowns who disrespect the sovereign are banned for life. On the distant horizon, the contours of the post-American world begin to rise, but the preoccupations of our ruling class grow ever more myopic. One of the world's richest women flies all the way to Switzerland in order to confuse a Zurich boutique selling $38,000 handbags with an Alabama lunch counter 60 years ago, to the consternation of the poor shopgirl who knows nothing of America's peculiar parochial obsessions, has never heard of Trayvon Martin, and lives in a city where pretty much the only black women around are the more fashion-conscious African dictators' consorts in town to visit their safe-deposit boxes. But, as at the Hofbau, the ancient social rituals of our own court permit no diversion from the program: If it's Tuesday, it must be racism.

Alas, in the world beyond the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, it's harder to tell whom the A-list invites should go to: From Afghanistan to Egypt, a debt-ridden America bankrolls its own eclipse, betraying friends, promoting enemies, despised by both. In the dog days of summer, the new national-security adviser tweets it in from her pad in the Hamptons or wherever, even as the hyperpower readies for its next unwon war: After America's slo-mo defeat in the Hindu Kush, and its ineffectual leading-from-behind in Libya, and its thwarted Muslim Brotherhood outreach in Cairo, Obama is confidently dispatching the gunboats to Syria. If you're Bashar Assad, you must be as befuddled as that Zurich handbag clerk: Hillary hailed you as a "reformer"; no senatorial frequent flyer courted you more assiduously than John Kerry; the guys trying to depose you hate the Great Satan far more than you do, and are the local branch office of the fellows who turned lower Manhattan into a big smoking hole. Yet Washington is readying to take you out — or at any rate, in George W. Bush's unimprovable summation of desultory Clinton-style warmongering, readying to fire a $2 million cruise missile through a tent and hit a camel in the butt. The only novelty with this latest of ineptly rattled sabers is whether Tsar Putin will stand by and let Obama knock off a Russian client.*

Putin, Assad, General Sisi in Cairo, and many others think they have the measure of Obama, Kerry, and Rice. Poor deluded fools. If only, like Mia, they could see them through blue-tinted glasses . . .

*I wrote this piece for the last issue of National Review. Re Putin, we now know the answer.

You Must See This New Dramatic Film That Shows the Truth About Communist Cuba

Posted By Ron Radosh On September 16, 2013 @ 12:05 pm In Anti-Slavery Republican,Current Release Reviews,Movies | 11 Comments

http://pjmedia.com

Reading Charles Lane’s important column in The Washington Post about a new indie film, Una Noche,(One Night), I promptly rented it “On Demand” on my cable system. It is also available as an iTunes download.

(CLICK HERE to rent and watch on Amazon.com)

Filmmaker Lucy Mulloy is new to the business. This is her first film, and it is now available after premiering at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in 2012, as well as the Berlin Film Festival that same year. Unless you live in New York City where some theaters are showing it, you have to watch it at home.

What Mulloy has done is to reveal the truth about daily life in Communist Cuba, which few Western visitors to Cuba have little understanding of. Indeed, the very week that Mulloy’s film has been made available for viewing, The New York Times Travel section featured two different articles extolling tourism to Cuba, and in effect encouraging its readers to avail themselves of the opportunity to engage in well-managed Potemkin Village tours, in which representatives of Cuba’s tourism industry — controlled by Cuba’s state-security apparatus — guide the gullible Americans to show them how joyous and happy the people are, and how wonderful the regime is that gives its people such a good life. They come back extolling the virtues of the Cuban government, joining in calls to lift the embargo on Cuba, and reporting on how well off things are for the people.

The first Times article informs readers that “those eager to get to Cuba just have to pay, and agree to take part in a busy, highly organized tour with very little free time.” Sure, if you had time on your own, you might wander off and see the parts of Havana that Mulloy shows us, and see how people really live and learn what they really think. When I went there in the mid-1970s, I did just that, and ended up getting arrested and thrown into a local holding cell in a police station for six hours because I took a photo of a giant line in front of a nationalized Woolworth store that had just received a rare shipment of plastic shoes from Eastern Europe.

The second Times article notes that “nearly every major tour company is now jockeying for the hearts and wallets of American tourists.” Why not? The tours cost a great deal of money, the food is reportedly mediocre (perhaps better than when I was there, and it was close to inedible) and you are given little time for any R and R — continually shuttled to one orchestrated activity after another. As they put it, “you can’t simply show up and luxuriate at the beach.”

Take, for example, National Geographic’s trip. The group informs prospective tourists that they will “engage in a specially arranged question-and-answer session with Cuban professionals, discussing education, economics, the role of government, and other topics of interest.” Just don’t bring up the murder by the regime of Oswaldo Paya or the harassment of the Ladies in White, or ask to see the prominent dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez, or anything like that. Should you persist, you’ll undoubtedly find yourself on the first plane out of Havana or confined to your hotel room.

Or look at the tours from the Insight company. Watch some of their videos. It’s all so beautiful, clean and joyous — especially the music. And when at day’s end you join with Cubans dancing outdoors on a public square, you’ll think you have seen the real Cuba, and that you’ve had an experience few of your fellow Americans have enjoyed.

So let us return to Una Noche and Lane’s article. He writes the following:

The truth about Cuba, however, is that the revolution’s achievements were never as great as its propagandists claimed and that economic and social conditions on the island trail those of many Latin American countries Cuba once surpassed.
Cholera has returned to Cuba for the first time in more than a century. In three reported outbreaks since the summer of 2012, more than 600 people have been sickened and at least three have died, according to official Cuban data.

Mulloy’s film, Lane adds, “dramatizes the heartbreaking moral and psychological decay of the revolution’s subjects, especially Cuban youth….Denied free expression, forced to hustle incessantly for life’s necessities, bombarded by propaganda and hounded by brutal police, young Cubans live in what Mulloy aptly calls a state of ‘nervous desperation.’”

The film shows us the life of a brother and sister and a friend, and their decision to risk all and build a homemade raft they plan to use to escape to Miami. The actors are all real Cubans — not professional actors — and the homes and the street and neighborhoods you see are the real ones. The film shows the decay and despair of daily life, the horrid routines of Cubans trying to exist and eke out a living, and all of this gives lie to the propaganda which the new tourism bombards visitors with.

If you watch the film — and I hope you do — you will learn that Cuba still matters. Hopefully, the complacency of our people, and the belief that Cuba’s prison island is forever, will disappear, and you will realize that the apologia of the media for the tyranny Fidel Castro created must and will end. We learn that the Cuban people have one way to cope — planning to escape. They knew too well that brave dissidents who began to have a following, like Oswaldo Payá, have been eliminated by the techniques taught by the old NKVD and later the KGB beginning in Stalin’s Russia.

My only question is why the Cuban authorities allowed this film to be made in Cuba. Perhaps the filmmaker had an agreement that there would be no mention of Fidel or Raul Castro, no discussion of communism, no portrayal of political dissidents, and virtually no politics at all. If so, the filmmaker accepted a deal that paid off. We all know who controls Cuba, and how the party’s control is cemented through the apparatus of state security. What we do not know is how Cubans actually live, and by showing us that, Mulloy has broken through the barrier of the false view of Cuba perpetrated by the regime and the new pro-regime tourism.

(CLICK HERE to rent and watch on Amazon.com)

******

Cross-posted from Ron Radosh’s blog

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Today's Tune: Warren Zevon - Desperados Under The Eaves

Warren Zevon’s Secret

By William Doino Jr.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare
September 16, 2013



Ten years ago this month, Warren Zevon died and the world of music lost an extraordinary talent. Gifted and mercurial, Zevon’s tumultuous life often paralleled the self-destructive paths of other celebrities; and yet—in significant ways—also diverged sharply from them.

Zevon grew up on the West coast in the fifties and early sixties in a household where neither parent was musically inclined. His father, Bill, was a colorful Russian-born gambler, and his mother, Beverly, the daughter of prominent Mormons. They came from very different worlds, and not surprisingly, divorced when Warren was just sixteen. But by then, the precocious teenager had decided to become a musician, thanks largely to the influence of composer Igor Stravinsky (an improbable neighbor of the Zevons). Along the way, Warren moved from classical music toward the rhythms of his time—folk and rock—and set out for New York to become a Dylanesque troubadour. But the youthful venture went poorly, giving Warren his first harsh taste of the highly competitive music business.

Undaunted, Zevon returned to California, where he hooked up with an old high school friend, Violet Santangelo, to form the quirky duo, “lyme & cybelle,” which generated an unexpected hit, “Follow Me” (1966). It was astonishingly well crafted for a song written by someone who was just nineteen—a glimpse at Zevon’s future brilliance. The industry began to notice Zevon, and two of his other songs, “Like the Seasons,”  and “Outside Chance,” were picked up by The Turtles (the first landed on the B side of their smash record, “Happy Together”). 

Warren wrote more songs, did session work, and eventually became the keyboard player for the legendary Everly Brothers. But his dream was always to be a successful solo artist, a goal he doggedly pursued, even after his first album, Wanted Dead or Alive (1969), failed.

After a brief sojourn in Europe, he returned home to revive his hopes. His moment came when fellow recording artist Jackson Browne—a great believer in Zevon’s music—produced two of his breakthrough albums, the self-titled, Warren Zevon (1976) and Excitable Boy (1978). The first won raves, even if it sold only modestly, but the second was a critical and commercial success. The title track—about the hedonistic exploits of its wild protagonist—was outdone only by Zevon’s surreal and sensational hit, “Werewolves of London.”

Zevon’s songs told stories about strange and combustible figures. And like all good storytellers, Zevon kept everyone guessing about where his tales would go—often leaving their conclusions to listeners, after sparking their imaginations. That he could do this within the confines of a three or four minute song made his work all the more impressive.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/09/warren-zevons-secret

William Doino Jr. is a contributor to Inside the Vatican magazine, among many other publications, and writes often about religion, history, and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Congress’s Exemption from Obamacare

Make Congress get insurance the same way the little people do? Hill denizens howl in fury. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 16, 2013

Prostitution. Bribery. Blackmail. Thuggery. Hypocrisy.

Those were just some of the incendiary words thrown around the U.S. Senate last week, and that doesn’t count what people said in private.

The Senate may still have a reputation as a genteel club, but lawmakers seemed to abandon rules of decorum completely last week in arguments about whether Congress should be treated like the rest of the country when it comes to Obamacare. 

Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has demanded a floor vote on his bill to end an exemption that members of Congress and their staffs are slated to get that will make them the only participants in the new Obamacare exchanges to receive generous subsidies from their employer to pay for their health insurance. Angry Senate Democrats have drafted legislation that dredges up a 2007 prostitution scandal involving Vitter. The confrontation is a perfect illustration of just how wide the gulf in attitudes is between the Beltway and the rest of the country — and how viciously Capitol Hill denizens will fight for their privileges.

In 1995, the newly elected Republican Congress passed a Congressional Accountability Act to fulfill a promise made the previous year in the Contract with America. For the first time, the Act applied to Congress the same civil-rights employment and labor laws that lawmakers had required everyday citizens to abide by. With some lapses, it’s worked well to defuse public outrage about “one law for thee, one law for me” congressional behavior.

In 2009, Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) decided that the principle deserved to be embedded in Obamacare, and he was able to insert a provision requiring all members of Congress and their staffs to get insurance through the Obamacare health exchanges. “The more that Congress experiences the laws it passes, the better,” said Grassley. Although his amendment was watered down before final passage to exclude committee staff, it still applies to members of Congress and their personal staffs. Most employment lawyers interpreted that to mean that the taxpayer-funded federal health-insurance subsidies dispensed to those on Congress’s payroll — which now range from $5,000 to $11,000 a year — would have to end.

Democratic and Republican staffers alike were furious, warning that Congress faced a “brain drain” if the provision stuck. Under behind-the-scenes pressure from members of Congress in both parties, President Obama used the quiet of the August recess to personally order the Office of Personnel Management, which supervises federal employment issues, to interpret the law so as to retain the generous congressional benefits.

OPM had previously balked at issuing such a ruling. Even without OPM, Congress could have voted to restore the subsidies or ordered a salary raise to compensate for the loss of benefits, but that would have been a messy, public process, which everyone wanted to avoid.

Senator Vitter says the OPM ruling has removed “the sting of Obamacare” from Congress. “Many Americans will see their health coverage dropped by employers, and they will be forced into the exchanges,” he told me last week. “If Congress is forced into them on the same terms, it will be more likely to fix Obamacare’s problems for others.” The bill he and his co-author, Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming, have drafted would make everyone working on Capitol Hill buy insurance through the exchanges — with no subsidies. White House officials and political appointees in the executive branch would also be required to obtain health insurance through the exchanges.

The Congressional Leadership Empire decided to strike back at Vitter. Politico reported that several Democratic senators have asked staff to draft legislation that would deny federal health subsidies to anyone who votes for the Vitter plan, even if Vitter’s plan doesn’t become law. An even more spiteful draft bill would bar subsidies to any lawmaker or aide found by a congressional ethics committee to have “engaged in the solicitation of prostitution.” In 2007, Vitter’s phone number was found in the records of the “D.C. Madam,” the owner of a high-end prostitution ring. Back then, Vitter held a news conference with his wife standing next to him and apologized for a “serious sin” that he refused to discuss further. He was reelected with 57 percent of the vote in 2010.

Vitter isn’t taking the attempts to strong-arm him quietly. “Harry Reid is acting like an old-time Vegas mafia thug, and a desperate one at that,” he said in a statement to Politico. He also wrote a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee demanding an investigation of Reid and Democratic senator Barbara Boxer of California. “Threatening to take away their colleagues’ health care coverage subsidy if they do not vote a certain way, at worst constitutes bribery and a quid pro quo arrangement, and at best amounts to improper conduct,” he wrote. Senator Reid’s office responded by calling Vitter’s charges “absurd and baseless.”

What Vitter’s opponents fear most is that this fight will penetrate the public’s consciousness. A new poll taken for Independent Women’s Voice, a conservative group, found that 92 percent of voters think Congress shouldn’t be exempted from the insurance provisions of Obamacare. Most voters blame both parties equally for the exemption, which means Republicans will also be hurt politically if it stands. “This is an issue with almost unprecedented intensity,” IWV president Heather Higgins told me. “Republicans have the choice of leading the Vitter parade for repeal or getting run over by it. To duck it will be viewed by their constituents as political malpractice.”

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

Putin’s Horrifying Mirror

Posted By Roger Kimball On September 14, 2013 @ 5:11 am In Uncategorized | 69 Comments

http://pjmedia.com/




What was it about Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary op-ed ^[1] in The New York Times last week that so infuriated the Washington establishment? Oh, how they hated it!  The whole lot of them: the White House stammered that it was “irrelevant ^[2].” Intermittent conservative John Boehner said he was “insulted ^[3]” by it. Speaking from the other side of the aisle, Robert Menendez told CNN that it made him “almost want to vomit ^[4].” And the great Nowhere Man, Col. Gaddafi’s good buddy ^[5], the Madcap Maverick himself, John McCain said that the op-ed was “an insult to the intelligence of every American ^[4].”

Well, John, that’s certainly something you know about.

By the way, have you noticed the streak of masochism in John McCain?  It’s not enough that he repeatedly makes a fool of himself  in public. He must actively court ridicule by announcing to the world that he is going to write a “rebuttal ^[6]” to Putin’s op-Ed for Pravda. I’ve always suspected that the editors of Pravda had a cruel streak.  Now I know it.  Imagine, inviting John McCain to write (or at least sign) a column responding to Putin’s masterly dance around the liberal pieties that inform “debate” in Washington. It’s like leaving Anthony Weiner alone with his internet-connected cell phone: you can count on excruciating embarrassment for the protagonist.

But I digress. What was it about Putin’s op-ed that so inflamed establishment opinion? In a word, it is the fact that it was a perfectly accurate mirror.  The Washington nomenklatura  and their liberal enablers looked into Putin’s op-ed and they saw a most hideous sight: their own rancid clichés repeated back to them in mocking, church-like tones.  “A Plea for Caution From Russia” — how dare he say to us what we have been saying to troglodytic conservatives for decades? And in our paper,  the New York Times. (That was Putin’s final act of genius, to publish  his column in the liberals’ own Bible, where his high-horse moralistic tones — right down to his concluding invocation of God and equality — would be sure to echo most forcefully.) That pulpit had been hitherto reserved for liberal demagogues: how dare a renegade like Putin don the cassock and deliver our own sermon to us?  What gall! What effrontery!

For that was his sin: saying to liberals what liberals for years have been saying to anyone who would listen.  As James Piereson pointed out in a stellar column ^[7] yesterday, “what President Putin said in his column is pretty much what American liberals and leftists have been saying about the United States since the 1960s.” Go back and take a look at what he wrote. If you feel your palms getting slightly moist, if there is some clutching at the back of your throat, if, like Senator Menendez, you “almost want to vomit,” it’s because your own emetic pieties are particularly noxious when they are first regurgitated by someone else.  Those are those hardest to swallow. Piereson is right: “there is nothing the least bit new or controversial in anything Mr. Putin wrote in his column.” It’s just what leftists from Obama on down have been saying for years, only now someone else is saying it to them.

What, after all, did Putin actually argue in that column? Piereson cites three things:

1. It is contrary to international law for a member of the  United Nations to attack another country without UN approval.  But isn’t that just what leftists always say whenever there’s a conservative in charge?  Go back and watch some re-runs from the second Bush administration.  Of course, Bush actually did  get UN approval for attacking Iraq, but that’s as irrelevant as the fact that he assembled a large coalition of partners to conduct the attack. What matters is the UN-friendly rhetoric that is perpetually oozing out of leftist purlieus.
2. Major powers (especially major powers called the United States) should not intervene in the internal conflicts of other countries.
3. The United States is not an “exceptional” nation.  This perfidious belief, as Piereson puts it, “promotes a sense that the United States is not bound by conventional rule of international conduct. Since Americans believe they are exceptional . . . they believe they can make their own rules.” That’s what Putin said.  But isn’t that exactly what every  left-wing government bureaucrat from Samantha Power on down has always maintained? Isn’t it exactly the sort of thing you expect to hear from every tenured radical in the academy, from every over-coiffed newscaster with a multi-million-dollar contract to worry about?

Barack Obama, as Piereson observes, has at one time or another expressed support for all three of Putin’s main points:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, he said that the intervention in Iraq was illegal because it was not authorized by the United Nations. In 2009, when asked about American exceptionalism, President Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, we are all exceptional alike, just as Mr. Putin said.

Ouch. Will this large and gooey omelet  splattered over the countenance of left-wing self-satisfaction make any long-term difference?  Probably not. The linguistic curiosity that “shameful” and “shameless” are synonyms will doubtless once again come into play. It would, as Piereson says, be a good thing if leftists shelved for good “their doctrines about diversity, multiculturalism, and American imperialism.” But don’t count on it. The next time — and God willing, it will be soon — that a Republican occupies the White House you can be sure that leftists will once again “dust off Mr. Putin’s principles and put them into play once more.” Just wait.

---

Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/09/14/putins-horrifying-mirror/

URLs in this post:

[1] Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[2] irrelevant: http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/11/white-house-responds-to-putins-nyt-op-ed/

[3] insulted: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/12/boehner-insulted-by-putin-op-ed/

[4] almost want to vomit: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/09/12/Boehner-responds-to-Putin.html

[5] Col. Gaddafi’s good buddy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVMIrKwruc

[6] rebuttal: http://www.usatoday.com/story/onpolitics/2013/09/13/mccain-putin-pravda-op-ed-israel-kommersant/2811859/

[7] James Piereson pointed out in a stellar column: http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/13/putin-exposes-the-secrets-of-a

How to Make School Better for Boys

Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding.

By Christina Hoff Sommers

http://www.theatlantic.com

September 13, 2013

I recently appeared on MSNBC’s The Cycle to discuss the new edition of my book The War Against Boys. The four hosts were having none of it. A waron boys? They countered with the wage gap and the prominence of men across the professions. One of them concluded, “I don’t think the patriarchy is under any threat.”

The MSNBC skeptics are hardly alone in dismissing the plight of boys and young men. Even those who acknowledge that boys are losing in school argue that they’re winning in life. But the facts are otherwise. American boys across the ability spectrum are struggling in the nation’s schools, with teachers and administrators failing to engage their specific interests and needs. This neglect has ominous implications not only for the boy's social and intellectual development but for the national economy, as policy analysts are just beginning to calculate.

As the United States moves toward a knowledge-based economy, school achievement has become the cornerstone of lifelong success. Women are adapting; men are not. Yet the education establishment and federal government are, with some notable exceptions, looking the other way.

Women in the United States now earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates. College admissions officers were at first baffled, then concerned, and finally panicked over the dearth of male applicants. If male enrollment falls to 40 percent or below, female students begin to flee. Officials at schools at or near the tipping point (American University, Boston University, Brandeis University, New York University, the University of Georgia, and the University of North Carolina, to name only a few) are helplessly watching as their campuses become like retirement villages, with a surfeit of women competing for a handful of surviving men.  Henry Broaddus, dean of admissions at William and Mary, explains the new anxiety: “[W]omen who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”

Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to have high academic aspirations. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree (13 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls). By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. During the same period, the gap between girls and boys earning mostly A’s nearly doubled—from three to five percentage points.

 This gap in education engagement has dire economic consequences for boys. A 2011 Brookings Institution report quantifies the economic decline of the median male: For men ages 25 to 64 with no high school diploma, median annual earnings have declined 66 percent since 1969; for men with only a high school diploma, wages declined by 47 percent. Millions of male workers, say the Brookings authors, have been “unhitched from the engine of growth.”  The College Board delivered this disturbing message in a 2011 report about Hispanic and African-American boys and young adults: “Nearly half of young men of color age 15 to 24 who graduate from high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead.” Working-class white boys are faring only slightly better. When economist Andrew Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University examined gender disparities in the Boston Public Schools, they found that for the class of 2007, among blacks and Hispanics, there were 186 females for every 100 males attending a four-year college or university. For white students: 153 females to every 100 males.

What can we do to improve the prospects of boys? For one thing, we must acknowledge the fact that boys and girls are different. In many education and government circles, it remains taboo to broach the topic of sex differences. Many gender scholars insist that the sexes are cognitively interchangeable and argue that any talk of difference only encourages sexism and stereotyping. In the current environment, to speak of difference invites opprobrium, and to advocate for male-specific interventions invites passionate and organized opposition. Meanwhile, one gender difference refuses to go away: Boys are languishing academically, while girls are soaring.

 Young men in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada have also fallen behind. But in stark contrast to the United States, these countries are energetically, even desperately, looking for ways to help boys improve. Why? They view widespread male underachievement as a national threat: A country with too many languishing males risks losing its economic edge. So these nations have established dozens of boy-focused commissions, task forces, and working groups. Using evidence and not ideology as their guide, officials in these countries don’t hesitate to recommend sex-specific solutions. The British Parliamentary Boys' Reading Commission urges, “Every teacher should have an up-to-date knowledge of reading material that will appeal to disengaged boys.” A Canadianreport on improving boys’ literacy recommends active classrooms “that capitalize on the boys’ spirit of competition”— games, contests, debates. An Australian study found that adolescent males, across racial and socioeconomic lines, shared a common complaint, “School doesn’t offer the courses that most boys want to do, mainly courses and course work that prepare them for employment.” 

Sumitra Rajagopalan, an adjunct professor of biomechanics at Canada’s McGill University, developed a program for disengaged teenage boys in Montreal, where one in three male students drops out of high school. The male students she met were bored by their classroom instruction and starved for hands-on activities. She was shocked to find that many had never held a hammer or screwdriver.  Under her supervision, the boys built a solar driven Stirling engine from Coca-Cola cans and straws.” Boys are born tinkerers,” she said. “They have a deep-seated need to rip things apart, decode their inner workings, create stuff.”

Rajogopalan’s insight is supported by a large body of research showing that taken as a group, men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people. Of course, there are female tinkerers who like to work with things and gladly enter occupations such as pipefitting and metallurgy. But the number of men eager to enter these fields is substantially greater. Women still predominate—some­times overwhelmingly—in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education, social work, veterinary medicine, and psychology, while men prevail in the mechanical vocations such as car repair, oil drilling, and electrical engineering.

Young men may be a vanishing breed on the college campus, but there are some colleges that have no trouble attracting them—schools whose names include the letters T-E-C-H. Georgia Tech is 68 percent male; Rochester Institute of Technology, 68 percent; South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, 74 percent. This affinity pattern points to one highly promising strategy for reconnecting boys with school: vocational education, now called Career and Technical Education (CTE).

In a rare example of the academic establishment taking note of boys’ trouble in school, the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently published a major study, Pathways to Prosperity, that highlights the “yawning gender gap” in education favoring women: “Our system… clearly does not work well for many, especially young men.” The authors call for a national revival of vocational education in secondary schools. They cite several existing programs that could serve as a model for national reform, including the Massachusetts system, sometimes called the “Cadillac of Career Training Education.”

Massachusetts has a network of 26 academically rigorous vocational-technical high schools serving 27,000 male and female students. Students in magnet schools such as Worcester Technical, Madison Park Technical Vocational, and Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical take traditional academic courses but spend half their time apprenticing in a field of their choice. These include computer repair, telecommunications networking, carpentry, early childhood education, plumbing, heating, refrigeration, and cosmetology. AsPathways reports, these schools have some of the state’s highest graduation and college matriculation rates, and close to 96 percent pass the states’ rigorous high-stakes graduation test.

Blackstone Valley Tech in Upton, Massachusetts, should be studied by anyone looking for solutions to the boy problem.  It is working wonders with girls (who comprise 44 percent of the student body), but its success with boys is astonishing. According to a white paper on vocational education by the Commonwealth’s Pioneer Institute, “One in four Valley Technical students enter their freshman year with a fourth-grade reading level.” The school immerses these students in an intense, individualized remediation program until they read proficiently at grade level. These potentially disaffected students put up with remediation as well as a full load of college preparatory courses (including honors and Advanced Placement classes), because otherwise they could not spend half the semester apprenticing in diesel mechanics, computer repair, or automotive engineering.

In former times, vocational high schools were often dumping grounds for low achievers. Today, in Massachusetts, they are launching pads into the middle class.

Recent research shows that enrollment in high school vocational programs has dramatic effects on students’ likelihood of graduating from high school—especially boys. But efforts to engage more boys in career and technical programs face a formidable challenge. In a series of scathing reports, the National Council on Women and Girls Education (NCWGE—a 38-year-old consortium that today includes heavy hitters such the AAUW, the National Women’s Law Center, the ACLU, NOW, the Ms. Foundation, and the National Education Association) has condemned high school vocational training schools as hotbeds of "sex segregation."

Because of decades of successful lobbying by NCWGE groups, high school and college career and technical training programs face government sanctions and loss of funds if they fail to recruit and graduate sufficient numbers of female students into “non-traditional” fields. Over the years, untold millions of state and federal dollars have been devoted to recruiting and retaining young women into fields like pipefitting, automotive repair, construction, drywall installing, manufacturing, and refrigeration mechanics.  But according to Statchat, a University of Virginia workforce blog, these efforts at vocational equity “haven’t had much of an impact.”  Despite an unfathomable number of girl-focused programs and interventions, “technical and manual occupations tend to be dominated by men, patterns that have held steady for many years.”  

 In March 2013 NCWGE released a report urging the need to fight even harder against “barriers girls and women face in entering nontraditional fields.” Among its nine key recommendations to Congress: more federal funding and challenge grants to help states close the gender gaps in career and technical education (CTE); mandate every state to install a CTE gender equity coordinator; and impose harsher punishments on states that fail to meet “performance measures” –i.e. gender quotas.

Instead of spending millions of dollars attempting to transform aspiring cosmetologists into welders, education officials should concentrate on helping young people, male and female, enter careers that interest them. And right now, boys are the underserved population requiring attention.

In the U.S., a powerful network of women’s groups works ceaselessly to protect and promote what it sees as female interest. But there is no counterpart working for boys—they are on their own. This contrasts dramatically with constructive, problem-solving approach of education leaders and government officials in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. The British have their parliamentary “toolkit of effective practices” for educating boys—while Americans have the National Women’s Law Center’sTools of the Trade: Using the Law to Address Sex Segregation in High School Career and Technical Education.

The reluctance to face up to the boy gap is evident at every level of government. In Washington, President Obama established a White House Council on Women and Girls shortly after taking office in 2009, declaring: “When our daughters don’t have the same education and career opportunities as our sons, that affects…our economy and our future as a nation.” On the other hand, the proposal for a Council for Boys and Men from a bi-partisan group of academics and political leaders has now been languishing in Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s office for two years.

Similarly, in Maine, the Portland Press Herald ran an alarming story about the educational deficits of boys—reporting that high school girls outnumber boys by almost a 2-1 ratio in top-10 senior rankings, that men earn about 38 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded by Maine's public universities, and that boys both rich and poor had fallen seriously behind their sisters. But the director of Women’s Studies at the University of Southern Maine, Susan Feiner, expressed frustration over the sudden concern for boys. “It is kind of ironic that a couple of years into a disparity between male and female attendance in college it becomes ‘Oh my God, we really need to look at this. The world is going to end.’”

Feiner’s complaint is understandable but seriously misguided. It was wrong to ignore women’s educational needs for so long, and cause for celebration when we turned our attention to meeting those needs. But turning the tables and neglecting boys is not the answer. Why not be fair to both? Great Britain, Australia, and Canada are Western democracies just as committed to gender equality as we are. Yet they are seriously addressing their boy gap. If they can do it, so can we.