The "surge" isn't a new strategy. It's the same #@!$$#@* strategy with more troops. And it's not what's actually working. What's working is arming the tribes after convincing the tribal leaders to support the Americans. We sure as hell didn't need 60,000 more troops for that.

Of course, these tribal leaders will probably be major players in the coming political correction after we leave but, hey, we'll come up with a fix for that when the time comes, right?

I've also said that it'll be the first time an empire gets taken out without a single shot being fired.

You watch.

Frankly, your article is a sociological screed about why people (that's colorless) are poor. I've know poor white trash and poor black trash and the reasons why they're poor are manifold. Sometimes it's their own damned fault and sometimes it's not.

Your hypothesis is essentially that racism is still alive and well in the United States and that is keeping some unknown number of blacks from making it to the middle or upper class income range. Is racism alive? Yeah, some - both ways by the way. Is it well? No. Not based on what I've observed. The real question is: Are companies making hiring and promotion decisions based on race? Beats the shit out of me. Are there barriers to blacks starting their own companies? No. Quite the opposite. There are SBA programs for you if you're black. As I found out, there are none if you're a white male.

30 years ago you could have legitimately claimed that society was repressing blacks. I don't think that's true anymore. As a result, it is much less meaningful to talk about blacks as a group and you must deal with individual cases. This doesn't prevent one from discussing the blacks in the ghetto as a group but you can talk about the poor white trash the same way. They just don't live in the same ghetto.

I also think that it is counterproductive to "blame" some agency for people's poverty unless you can blame the culture which I don't think you can any longer. And, by the way, if changing your name is the ticket, Do it. You can get a whole list of Hollywood actors and actresses who changed their names to get into the pictures. It's stupid, I know but it is, sometimes, the way the world works. And not just for blacks.

Do males need to be involved in each and every stereotypically female task (I note with some amusement that there seems to be little pressure for the females to become involved in stereotypically male tasks)? Can't we do task allocation based on situational needs or social desires? What I mean is this:

Did I cook Thanksgiving dinner? No. It was great. The spousal unit and daughter #1 buzzed around making the Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat all the while nattering away in a female bonding sort of thing (males, of course, also do bonding things; it's just we don't natter). I got to sit around on my dead ass and tend the fire. Part of the reason that it was great is that I do 90+% of the cooking around here. But that's situational.

When we moved in together 12 years ago, she didn't get home from work until ~5:30. I got home ~3:30. Since I won't do frozen TV dinners or fast food normally (daughter #4 once said that eating at Dad's house was better than a restaurant), did it make any sense for me to wait for her to come home and cook for me when I'd been home for two hours already? No, not normally. I retired. We moved. She's still working (heh, heh, heh). So we have the 1950s redux except the genders are reversed. But it remains situational. Sometimes those male tasks get in the way.

Most of our heat comes from an insert that requires wood to work. About two days ago to feed that need, I took the tractor and a 1/2" wire rope up into the upper meadow and hitched up to a 25' tree trunk I'd cut down the previous day. I drug it down to the arboreal butcher shop and hacked it up with a 20" chain saw and ran most of it through a 25 ton log splitter. By the time I was done, had stacked the firewood, put the tractor and chainsaw away, and put various other bits and pieces away, it was after 5, completely dark, and I was fried. My wife had gotten home about 15 minutes before I was done. Guess who cooked dinner.

So if the ladies want to have a bit of a social event among themselves, why can't they take control of the kitchen without having us males accused of sexual stereotyping? If the situation says workload balancing has me cooking dinner today but she cooks dinner tomorrow, why can't we just do that instead of obsessing about gender roles? And when, I'd like to know, am I going to get some help dropping trees? That chainsaw weighs 15 pounds or so and if you have to wield it over your head, you get tired pretty quick.

Oh, and your inscrutability list omits clothes. Why the creature who needs clothing the least wants it the most is beyond most male's imaginations.

Where is the line between public life, where the state writes the rules, and private life, where it doesn't.