With an eye on “the benefits of marriage to men, women, children and civilization itself,” The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman cheers the apparent end of “the long, sad decline of the family.” Sociologist Brad Wilcox reports: “Divorce is down and the share of children in two-parent families is up” — and “nonmarital childbearing, after almost half a century of increase, stalled out in 2009” at 41%, dropping to about 40% “a few years later, where it has remained. For children, less divorce and a small decline in childbearing outside wedlock mean more stability.” Some of these shifts are modest, notes Freeman, “so let’s hope that this is just the start of a big swing of the cultural pendulum toward thriving, stable households.”
“Is there another government that starves its own people without a single objection from the ‘humanitarian’ world?” asks Commentary’s Seth Mandel. “Hamas is the government of Gaza,” yet “pretty much every single diplomatic statement, newspaper article, and NGO report excludes this fact.” Worse. These groups’ calls for a cease-fire mostly pretend “all food-related obligations are on Israel.” Nonsense! “Hamas is well-fed and well-supplied,” as Gazans must “buy back from Hamas what Hamas has confiscated from them personally.” “Hamas operatives openly guard convoys to their warehouses, systematically skimming off 15-20 percent of the aid,” reports show. “Being clear on this fact isn’t about what Israel can or cannot do to Palestinians in Gaza; it’s about what Hamas owes the people who live there.”
“Government-caused inefficiency has increased wait times for” Freedom of Information Act requests and undermined the transparency the law’s meant to provide, fumes Reason’s Sophia Mandt. Open the Books reported that last year, federal agencies “took an average of 267 days” to respond to “complex” requests and “an average of 39 days” to respond to “simple” requests, despite the 20-day response deadline set by law. The government-wide request backlog has “more than doubled since FY 2013” to 200,000. “While understaffing at federal agencies may be partially to blame, Open the Books found cases of government officials deliberately delaying FOIA requests.” Possible fixes include updating FOIA’s outdated legacy software, removing bureaucrats who slow-walk requests, and instituting staffing quotas” but “won’t fully fix the problems” inherent to “a large and overly bloated administrative state.”
“The Conventional Wisdom machine is coming apart in chunks,” smirks Racket News’ Matt Taibbi, after “a gaggle of well-known Washington Post opinion-makers” took buyouts. This ax-trimming, coming on the heels of the “recent firing of CBS icon Stephen Colbert, the vote to defund NPR” and various other media reductions-in-force resembles “Squid Game.” “American conventional wisdom” is in a “state of abject surrender” as “people like Colbert and [MSNBC’s Chris] Hayes think they have a license to get the biggest stories wrong forever, lose money forever, get paid tens of millions to do both those things, and proudly display all these qualities to audiences without consequence.” Even with friends in the highest places, “nobody gets to screw up forever.”
“Men who achieve a certain level of celebrity have long been rumored to carry a particular type of prophylactic in their wallets,” notes The Free Press’ Kat Rosenfield: a legal one, such as a “ ‘pre-sexual agreement’ form” inspired by Kobe Bryant’s trial “for felony sexual assault over an encounter he claimed was consensual.” Men now use such consent forms “as a safeguard in casual encounters,” especially “in places governed by the notion of ‘affirmative consent.’ ” On US campuses and in Canada, “sexual assault isn’t about ignoring a no — it’s about failing to get exactly the right kind of yes.” Argh! That’s created “a gendered double standard that infantilizes women” and “criminalizes” the way people have sex.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board