American society — and perhaps that of the entire Western world — is going to have to make a choice now that the battle cry of Generation Y is starting to sound:

They are perhaps the best-educated generation ever, but they can’t find jobs. Many face staggering college loans and have moved back in with their parents. Even worse, their difficulty in getting careers launched could set them back financially for years.…

Among 18-to 29-year-olds, unemployment is the highest it’s been in more than three decades, according to a recent report from Pew Research Center. The report also found that Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are less likely to be employed than Gen Xers or baby boomers were at the same age.

Millennials are generally well-educated, but they have have been cast as everything from tech savants who will work cheap to entitled narcissists. The recession has pitted these younger workers against baby boomers trying to save for retirement and Gen Xers with homes and families. [emphasis added]

As I wrote in a prior post on how governments (ideally) determine public policy, societies frequently need to choose between two competing priorities. The financial meltdown — with its accompanying unemployment — is a perfect example.

The Baby Boomers worked for their entire lives and paid into retirement accounts and Social Security with the (reasonable) expectation that they would be able to retire comfortably. However, the burst of the housing bubble and the resulting financial crisis demolished many of their investments. So many are choosing to continue to work rather than retire. The motivation is just as understandable as it is unfortunate.

Generation Y — and to a lesser extent, Generation X — got good grades, went to college, took out thousands upon thousands of dollars in student loans, got graduate degrees for even more debt with the (again, reasonable) expectation that they would receive decent jobs that would lead to a comfortable life. However, the financial meltdown has demolished their dreams as well.

Both the old and the young are competing for jobs — any job — at a time when they are extremely scarce. There is always a greater supply of labor than demand in any free market, and the unemployment rate is even higher today — especially when one counts the underemployed, those who have stopped looking, and those who no longer receive unemployment benefits.

There are two competing groups of people who are looking for work. Which priority is more important? Those who worked their entire lives with an expectation that disappeared, or those who made decisions based on societal suggestions that turned out to be wrong? On what should society focus.

Now, as someone who supports capitalism and the free market, I would never argue that the government should dictate one or the other. (Though, the government can nudge societies through economic means including subsidies, tax breaks, and so on.) U.S. society, through the choices of individuals, will make the ultimate decision.

I will be the first to admit that I am biased since I am nearly thirty (and thereby a part of both Generations X and Y), but just as economics determines that women are more valuable than men in the dating market, so should young people be preferred over the old.

The Baby Boomers have a few decades left to live, and only a portion if that will be able to spent in productive work. An impoverished, disillusioned generation of young people, on the other hand, will harm the United States for many, many decades. Parents always sacrifice for their children — well, now it is time for the parental generation to step aside.

The Baby Boomers have collective responsibility for the damage that their generation has done through Reaganomics; hippie-inspired “free love” and extreme feminism; a series of mistaken, costly, foreign wars; two presidents who could control neither their libidos nor their daddy issues; and the excessive greed that resulted in the near-collapse of the financial system. It will be up to Generation X and Y to repair the damage. The questions is whether Boomers — known, perhaps unfairly, as the Selfish Generation — will let us do that.

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For all of the so-called advances of modern society, more evidence is surfacing that relations between the sexes are actually regressing back to prehistoric times as an unintentional result of feminism.

Here is a perfect example:

About 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 are infected with genital herpes, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday…

About 21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men, while 39 percent of blacks were infected compared to about 12 percent for whites, the CDC said. [emphasis added]

The statistics reveal that a small number of (single) men are having sex with a large number of (single) women. The fact that the difference is doubled is astounding. I presume that the rates of other infections that are transmitted only through sexual contact are similar. (Diseases like AIDS do not count because they can be spread through non-sexual means.)

How did Western society get here? As Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, describes the prehistoric, dating past:

Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced…

For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. [emphasis original]

Tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, the men who “got” the women and reproduced were those who could kill the most animals for food and protect the tribe against competitors the best. The men who were weak, small, dumb, or otherwise unsuccessful did not “get” any women. Biology and economics also played a role, as Baumeister continues to explain:

…most cultures have promoted population growth. And that depends on women. To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job. There is usually a penile surplus. If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed. Hence most cultures keep their women out of harm’s way…

Imagine this scenario. After a nuclear holocaust, the ten surviving members of humanity are on an island. There are nine women and one man. There can be nine babies born every nine months. If there are nine men and one woman, only one baby can be born every nine months (and the woman will likely pick the “best” man). Which scenario bodes the best for the survival of the human race?

Here is the unmentionable secret: Women are much more important than men. And this is why people, through the media, tend to obsess over “missing (white) women” like Polly Klaas, Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Jennifer Wilbanks, and Natalee Holloway while ignoring missing men (as well as women of other races). Just remember the international outcry over the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan during the Iranian-election protests.

It is also the reason that women have lived with more restrictions in traditional and religious societies. Judaism and Islam is very concerned about women dressing “modestly.” The penalties for infidelity and promiscuity — whether through law or social shaming — have always been far worse for women. Rightly or wrongly, societies wanted to protect women from being abused, raped, attacked, or otherwise harmed — through, for example, contracting genital herpes.

However, conditions improved in the Western world — namely through Christianity — over the past two thousand years. The benefits of monogamy ensured that most men would have a partner rather than die alone and without having children. Monogamy suppressed the erstwhile tendency of women to gravitate towards higher-status males (even if it had meant that they would have to share them with other women) while protecting women (and men) from the risks of having numerous partners. (Of course, women were rarely free to choose their husband until relatively recently, but that is beside the point.)

However, the rise of feminism in the 1960s started to revert society back to the prehistoric paradigm. The encouragement to have “free sex” and the elimination of the social stigma allowed women to act like men at their worst. The attitudes snowballed until today, when young women are now preferring to have numerous sexual partners — with the relatively-few number of men who are deemed “the best” — while they put off serious relationships and marriage:

Short-term sexual appeal largely rested on targets’ attractiveness, particularly among women with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation. Dating appeal was dependent on attractiveness, particularly among unrestricted women, and on ambition. Ambition and attractiveness synergistically influenced targets’ long-term desirability, and these preferences were not moderated by women’s sociosexual orientation.

Societal attitudes have now shifted back to primitive times, but with one significant change. Prehistoric society was a polygamous one in which men called the shorts, but modern society is a hypergamous one in which women are making the decisions. And single women today are collectively choosing to “hook up” with so-called “alpha males” (perhaps in competition with other women) while ignoring lower-status men. As I wrote in a prior post, everyone loses:

“High-status” men are so enam­ored of their avail­able part­ners that they refuse to get seri­ous with any women, and the women who pur­sue such men are only break­ing their own hearts. The alpha-males who live this lifestyle will endure spir­i­tual empti­ness result­ing from the the fact that no one wants to hit on girls in bars when he is fifty as well as the often-mentioned “Para­dox of Choice” — the more women that are avail­able, the harder it becomes to choose one. And mean­while, “lower-status” men remain alone.

The men who are the most successful with women are free to remain happily single because there are always more girls reaching their early twenties. And the women who keep hooking-up the non-committal guys whom they find attractive will end up older, alone, bitter, and — to be blunt — “used” and perhaps with genital herpes.

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BOSTON — Imagine that you ask Jesus of Nazareth and Adolf Hitler the answer to “What is two plus two?” Jesus says, “Five.” Hitler says, “Four.” Who would you believe? Of course, the answer if obvious.

This is an extreme example, but the question highlights one troubling aspect of the polarized media and political culture in the United States. People forget one logical axiom in reasoning: A good person can make a bad argument, and a bad person can make a good argument. Opinions on public policy need to be analyzed based only upon their merits and not on who is making the point.

When I was the editor-in-chief and executive director of the non-profit newspaper Spare Change News in Boston, I published a point-counterpoint on the Israel-Hizbollah war that was occurring at the time in 2006. I wrote the side in support of Israel, and another writer wrote the opposing column.

A few days later, a member of the board of directors came into my office and criticized my decision to publish the pro-Israel essay. (He was a fairly-extreme leftist.) As I explained my reasoning — it was one half of a balanced package and a popular issue that always gains more readership — the board member seemed to settle the argument in his eyes with one sentence: “That is what George W. Bush believes!” (At the time, I was trying to rebrand the newspaper as a professional, alternative newspaper and eliminate the “commie rag” reputation that it had acquired over the years. But that is a topic for another post.)

Although I silently shook my head at the illogical viewpoint, I remained respectful. If you think that your boss is difficult, try reporting to a board of seven people — each of whom wants you to do something different. It is “Office Space” in real life.

But it is not just on the left. After watching Fox News for a few hours, one receives the impression that liberals, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party — not the “Democrat Party” — can do nothing good. If Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Reid, and the Democratic-controlled Congress support something, there must be something wrong with it. The attitude is the same as that of my former boss — except that it is on the other end of the political spectrum.

The polarization of U.S. politics — and supported by partisan media outlets — has essentially created two camps that reinforce the party lines on each side. If someone is on the left, he must support Democrats, liberals, abortion access, gay marriage, gun control, and the Palestinians. If someone is on the right, he must support Republicans, conservatives, abortion restrictions, gay-marriage bans, gun ownership, and Israel. There is little middle ground — after all, how many pro-life Democrats and anti-gun Republicans are there?

And the camps are self-reinforcing. Several of my longtime friends have read my essays on dating and the Middle East and accused me of turning into a Republican even though I have “liberal” opinions on other issues. It is becoming harder and harder to deviate from each camp’s party line on any specific issue.

On the issues of dating, economics, and the Middle East, I suppose I am conservative. But on the issues of gay marriage, social welfare, and universal health-care, I guess I could be called a liberal. Perhaps I am painting with too broad of a brush, but I hope that I am not becoming a rare breed in U.S. society who holds issue-specific opinions. If I had my way, I would ban words like “liberal,” “conservative,” “Democrat,” or “Republican” from political discourse when discussing policy.

The merits of an issue is what matters — not which side, politician, or media outlet agrees with the issue. George W. Bush and Fox News can make a good or bad argument — and so can Barack Obama and MSNBC. The main idea is that each person should weigh the pros and cons of each issue and decide for himself based only on that criteria.

And here is the interesting part: both partisan sides are correct in their own way. But the extreme ends purposely neglect to give the complete picture and place the given issue in context. Here are two examples:

The talking points on whether to extend President Bush’s tax cuts:

• Left: The government has increasing deficits and needs more tax revenue.
• Right: Tax cuts will stimulate the economy by encouraging business to hire and consumers to spend.

The talking points on universal health-care:

• Left: Every person will have affordable health-care.
• Right: The quality of health care will decline.

Both sets of opinions are correct. But decisions in public policy — as well as in a person’s individual life — are often about deciding between competing priorities.

In the first example: it is more important to reduce the government’s deficit at the cost of impeding economic growth, or is it better to foster economic growth at the cost of increasing the deficit? In the second example: is it better for eighty percent of Americans to have excellent health-care and the remaining people have none, or is it better for all Americans to have coverage that is a little less than excellent?

If politicians and partisan media-outlets were intellectually honest, they would discuss issues in this manner rather than just support their team’s side.

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BELLEVILLE, Illinois — When I was a teenager in the early-1990s, my stepfather introduced me to classic rock, and I never looked back. The bands on the first cassette tapes I had ever bought — M.C. Hammer and the New Kids on the Block — could not hold a musical candle to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

To this day, I still believe that the best popular music ever made was produced from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. (The late 1980s and early 1990s — which gave the world bands including the Pixies, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and Pearl Jam — are a close second.) Although I hate what the Baby Boomer generation has done to society through feminism, free love, and the current economy, they did give us good music.

Does anyone think that Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, or Justin Bieber will be remembered in thirty years as the Beatles are now? So, when I read this humorous BBC article on a teenager giving up his iPod for a Walkman, it brought me back fifteen years because I went through a technological change myself that brings up the issue of quality versus convenience.

I really did not want to by a CD player and compact discs in the early 1990s. I liked my records and cassette tapes.

When I was a teenager, my favorite band was the Moody Blues. The swirling, orchestral sound of the mellotron, the collective three-part harmonies of the vocals, and the lyrics that were vague, emotional, and mystical enough to apply to anyone’s life at any time all spoke to a teenager who was going through the moody, hormone-driven troubles that are universal to all young adults.

I owned the records for the first seven of the Moody Blues’ albums from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I would put the records on my stereo and look at the album artwork all the time. Best of all, each album was an entire piece of artwork unto itself. Many “concept albums” of progressive-rock bands at the time were devoted to a single, particular theme — unlike today, when singles are more popular than albums since people put collections of their favorite, individual songs onto their iPods.

My favorite album, “To Our Children’s Children’s Children” (1969), was devoted to space travel and what the future may hold for humanity. The album jacket contained photos of the band, lyrics, a drawing of the band in a prehistoric cave, and other items. The music was just one part of the total experience. In addition, each song blended and transitioned into the next one to create a unified experience and work of art. Today, an album is merely a collection of unrelated, individual songs — and the artistry has declined.

Here is a video of my favorite song, “Question,” from “A Question of Balance” (1970) during an undated concert (probably in the 1980s) with a new keyboardist who had replaced founding member Mike Pinder and his mellotron:

The musical transitions were the reason that I did not want to replace my cassette tapes with CDs. I had thought, erroneously, that the setting of track markers on a compact disc would interrupt the transitions between songs. (Of course, I was wrong.)

Eventually, I did move to CDs — but the quality was never the same. Although I have no research to support this theory, my stepfather — whose sense of hearing has always been far better than mine — said that compact discs cut out the extreme treble and bass ends of the spectrum because of “compression” (or something). It seems to be true — the compact discs had always seemed worse than records or cassette tapes (especially compared to listening to records on my gigantic headphones that eliminated outside noise).

Still, my unrealized fears about CDs came true when I eventually went digital. (I had purchased a generic brand of an iPod at Duty Free in Tel Aviv — why pay more for a brand name?) I downloaded all of my favorite albums from the CDs to the digital-music player and then recoiled when the Moody Blues albums were not “whole.” There was a blank pause between songs when the device searched for the new track. It killed the experience. Moreover, it seems that digital files downplay the bass because the small earpieces cannot handle the sound.

To get an idea of the full sound, here is “The Voice” (1981) — another of my favorite songs by the Moodies from the album “Long Distance Voyager”:

And “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” from the 1972 album “Seventh Sojourn”:

The evolution from records to cassette tapes to compact discs to digital files may have made listening to music much more convenient, but it has harmed the audiophile’s ability to appreciate the full sound. And a generation of young people — like the teenager in the BBC article — will likely never hear quality playback. Regardless of which bands they like.

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New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out a disheartening trend on how the financial crisis is increasing the gap between the rich and poor.

A rigorous new analysis for the Rockefeller Foundation shows that Americans are more economically insecure now than they have been in a quarter of a century, and the trend lines suggest that things will only get worse…

The team’s findings were grim. Simply stated, more and more families are facing utter economic devastation: completely out of money, with their jobs, savings and retirement funds gone, and nowhere to turn for the next dollar.

Economic insecurity has been increasing for at least a generation and perhaps longer, with very dangerous levels being reached in this latest recession.

There are many reasons for the increased insecurity despite the obvious effects of the ongoing economic crisis. Banks have been ripping off their customers. Deflation, if it occurs, will hurt the poor and middle-class the most since they have less savings that would increase in value in a deflationary environment. More people are defaulting on credit cards and other unsustainable levels of debt. Companies are hoarding cash instead of hiring additional labor or purchasing capital.

While the general trends are bad enough, the specific data on the increasing gap between the rich and poor is outright depressing:

•    61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•    66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•    Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•    In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•    The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•    More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 — the highest rate in 20 years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Many free-market enthusiasts on the far right — and I do support capitalism myself — see no problem with the increasing wealth-gap. After all, as long as people become successful through legal means, what is the wrong in that? Everyone is free to compete in the market; some win, some lose. But they miss a couple of important points.

First, a lot of wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the rich is through means that are unethical at best and outright fraud at worst. Second, an unrestrained free market leads to a collapse of the market itself. A textbook example is legal action against monopolies. In theory, a single, successful company will eventually dominate a market to the point where no one else is able to compete — and this leads to higher prices and lower quality simply because the firm will be able to do whatever it wants. At that point, the government will act to restore the market to equilibrium by breaking up the company and creating various competitors largely on equal footing. Back to square one.

The same is true in societies — an extreme wealth-disparity between the rich and poor is a market failure of society. When the rich control most of the money, investments, and capital, the poor and middle class are then unable to compete and increase their economic standing because the market is stacked against them. The rich have a monopoly as well — but this time on wealth.

Just as governments need to protect a functioning market by breaking up monopolies, so too does the government need to act to ensure that the gap between the rich and poor does not become too extreme.

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JERUSALEM — If you move to a large city in the hopes of finding a future husband or wife, the search may actually become harder (the article’s text is an imperfect Google translation, but readers will get the general point — the original Hebrew is here):

If you live in one of the swamps of Jerusalem, Givat Shmuel, Tel Aviv or looking for the love you want, you should know that maybe great selection, it will constitute an obstacle to the coast…

…the young religious daily encounters many young, and finding it difficult to decide who will choose about a pair of track life. This phenomenon is reminiscent of a term that was coined — by Prof. sleep Iyengar: “paradox of choice.”

The same difficulty occurs everywhere. I have always wondered why people in rural or small-town areas tend to marry younger than their urban counterparts, and the so-called “paradox of choice” seems likely to be a contributing factor. (There are many other reasons for the difficulties in modern dating, as I have described in a lengthy essay.)

As I wrote in a prior post on the economics behind the advantages of monogamy, most people eventually end up with someone with the same general “value” in the dating market. But the road there can be long or short.

Imagine a small town of ten single men and ten single women in their early twenties. They have known each other for their entire lives. There are no long periods of dating strangers and then seeing who they really are once the masks come off months later. Everyone’s market value has already been set, and everyone (subconsciously) knows where he or she stands. So, there is no more exploration needed and no other available options: the tens, eights, fives, and ones end up with each other at comparatively young ages. The same holds true in any closed community such as Orthodox Jews in the United States, high schools, or small, isolated, college campuses.

Now, imagine a big city like Boston (where I lived for nine years), New York, or Los Angeles in which there are millions of people. The supply of dating prospects in the market is nearly infinite because everyone meets hundreds of new people each day — even if only as someone sitting next to someone else on the subway. There is always the potential to meet someone with a higher value in the dating market. As an acquaintance of mine once put it: “Dating in New York sucks — everyone is always looking to see if someone better comes along.” People need much more time to know whether a person is a suitable “match.” Everyone puts off making a final decision — or, in other words, marriage. The availability of a large number of choices makes it that much harder to make a decision.

I do not really have a solution except to say that men and women should choose a quality person while they are young — and, remember, what excites young people is often the opposite of what makes a good husband or wife — and save themselves years of singleness with future heartaches and increasing bitterness. In addition, the longer that people remain single, the more they become complacent in their singleness.

Moreover, the unfortunate-but-realistic reality is that women lose value in the dating market as they go from their twenties to thirties while that of men increases. And this is true regardless of where a person may live.

Earlier: The Battle of the Sexes

(Hat tip: HaBitza)

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A massive signing for the New York Red Bulls has now turned attention to U.S. Major League Soccer after the World Cup. Former Barcelona striker Thierry Henry recently accepted a transfer to the team earlier this month. He will be another star making his presence in the MLS and further popularizing American soccer. With the season halfway through, the Red Bulls find themselves in second and just five points behind the Columbus Crew.  Henry’s first outing with the Red Bulls came on Thursday in a friendly against a Premiere League big name, Tottenham Hotspur.

Henry did not take much time to thank the 20,312-member crowd at Red Bull Arena. A Lindpere cross in the twenty-fifth minute led to a 1–0 Red Bulls lead. The home side continued their positive game until the end of the first half.  The midfield was well supported, and with Henry’s presence upfront, Kandji and Lindere got the right push to penetrate the opponent’s defense regularly.

Despite a Tottenham equalizer in the sixty-second minute from Robbie Keane and a later 2–1 advantage from Bale in the seventy-second minute before the home side lost the game, the fans were extremely pleased with the Red Bull’s performance against a team that has qualified for the UEFA Champions League next year. The opinions from the fans were positive, especially due to  the fact that it did not seem like a Henry-dependent side but more like a well-constructed play that took advantage of Henry’s movements.

Will coach Hans Backe’s squad together with Henry be enough to bring the  New York Red Bulls to their first MLS triumph?

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JERUSALEM — So I was walking to a friend’s birthday party last night when I stopped to ask two guys for directions since I had missed a turn. They were older men in their forties, but stocky and built.

While they were telling me to go, the three of us noticed a nearby scene. A twentysomething guy and a girl were arguing — and the girl was trying to walk away but the guy would not let her.

One of of the men turned to me and continued in Hebrew, “I think the guy is an Arab, and the girl does not want him. Let’s go help her.” (The girl was Jewish.)

Crap, I thought, I really do not want to get involved in an Arab-Jewish fight in Jerusalem on a Thursday night. But, of course, I understood the need to help a girl who may have been being accosted, so I walked over with my newfound posse.

We approached the couple, and I did not know what to expect. “I have a bottle [of wine for the party] in my hand, so that is good,” I said to the two guys while trying to mask my nervousness. I had never been in a fight in the Middle East before. And who knows if any of the three other guys had been armed with knives or worse.

Luckily, as we approached, the girl got away and left. The guys with me spoke with the questionable character in rapid Hebrew that I did not understand — but they told me afterward that the guy was Jewish and that everything was fine. They shook hands with each other, and every went their separate ways. As it turned out, the guy was a Mizrahi Jew — a Jew whose family came from Middle Eastern countries — and they are sometimes indistinguishable from Arabs as a result.

I ended up having a nice time at my friend’s party, but I could not get the event out of my mind. There were several interesting questions.

• Would the two men have cared to help the girl if it has been obvious from the start that the guy was Jewish as well?

• Was it a higher priority for them to help a Jew who was being harassed by an Arab or to help a woman who was being accosted by a man? Or both equally? In this situation, it is possible to separate the two issues?

• When the two men with me spoke with the guy after the girl had left, I heard nothing resembling a comment that he should have treated her respectfully. (Though I was a bit lost in the translation.) All three guys were Mizrahi Jews, and women, of course, are treated less well here than in the West. If this had been the case, then the “Arab” part had been a greater cause for concern than the “helpless-girl” part.

The situation has been stuck in my head especially since news broke yesterday as well that an Arab Israeli in Jerusalem had been sentenced to eighteen months in prison for “rape by deception” — he had sex with an Israeli-Jewish girl after telling her that he was Jewish as well. (In the city of Petach Tikva, the municipal government has also been trying to “protect” troubled, Jewish girls who date older, Arab men.)

I may comment later on the rape case, but I am hesitant to do so since I am not an expert in law. Readers, please feel free to opine in the comments.

Still, the fact remains the Middle East is one of the most, well, interesting places in the world. I did take away one positive note from the experience yesterday: as I observed in a prior essay, Israelis take care of each other — much more than nearby Bostonians did when I was mugged with a knife held across my neck.

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The legions of women who adore the vapid, selfish children portrayed in “Sex and the City” might want to keep something in mind:

Romantic comedies might provide 90 minutes of light-hearted fun but the happy-ever-after movies are also impacting people’s real love lives, according to an Australian survey.

A poll of 1,000 Australians found almost half said rom-coms with their inevitable happy endings have ruined their view of an ideal relationship…

“It seems our love of rom-coms is turning us into a nation of “happy-ever-after addicts.” Yet the warm and fuzzy feeling they provide can adversely influence our view of real relationships,” said Australian relationship counselor, Gabrielle Morrissey.

The best fiction is supposed to give insights into the human condition. For example, the great works of literature are timeless because their themes are universal and applicable to anyone at anytime. The characters are complicated figures in which many people can see parts of themselves.

But the worst fiction — like most romantic comedies and modern (post-eighties) teen movies — does the opposite. The characters are tired cliches, and the conflicts into simple, black-and-white situations. When people start analyzing their lives in the context of these pieces of drivel, only disappointment can result because the expectations are impossible to meet.

For example, here is reality compared to romantic comedies:

• Sometimes the bad guy (or the jerk) gets the girl
• Most girls will never choose their “nice-guy” best friend
• Most married couples did not in a “meet-cute” situation
• There is no perfect knight-in-shining armor because everyone has faults
• No matter how beautiful a girl, she has many flaws that those who actually know her can see
• If you act like “John Cusack” in “Say Anything,” you will be arrested for stalking
• Sometimes people end up alone, sometimes forever
• People do not stay “just the way they are” and eventually gain respect — every relationship is about compromise. Sometimes people need to change
• The bad boy will not change into a good person just because a girl likes him
• The hot girl will not like a guy if he makes dramatic gestures of his love (unless she liked him from the start)
• People tend to end up with husbands and wives of the same “dating-market value.” The phrase “out of your league” exists for a reason
• When sparks fly when two people meet, it is hormones and lust — not true love at first sight
• Logical compatibility matters just as much as passionate feelings. A marriage without one of the two will not last

For a harsh (though funny) dose of reality, take a look at this clip from the teen-movie satire “Not Another Teen Movie.” Molly Ringwald steals the film starting at 0:40 in this scene (warning — profanity):

The reported survey reported that half of Australians have become jaded as a result of romantic-comedy movies. I would increase that because of statistical under-reporting.) Since romantic comedies are marketed towards women, I wonder if the vast majority of those who answered in the affirmative were women since females tend to be more emotional and illogical than men on average.

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For those who have not heard the latest news circulating throughout right-wing media outlets in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forced an official, Shirley Sherrod, to resign in the past few days after a videotape surfaced of her making comments that were allegedly racist during a speech to the NAACP.

The story has been that Sherrod, who is black, did not offer as much help to a bankrupt farmer because he was white. But now the story is becoming more complicated:

The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People apologized Tuesday to a black civil servant whose ouster the civil rights organization had originally cheered…

Ms. Sherrod said she was pressed to resign after the video whipped around the Web. But she said the clip was misleading. According to Ms. Sherrod and people who have seen the full video, she went on to say in her speech that she had learned from working with the farmer that all people must overcome their prejudices.

After seeing the full video, the N.A.A.C.P. said Tuesday that it had been “snookered” into believing Ms. Sherrod had acted with bias.

The most important thing, of course, is to look at the primary source. Here is the clip from the video in question:

Here is a transcript of Sherrod’s exact words:

The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me.

I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.

Sherrod later said that she gave him less help than she would have given someone else. Now, what does the video and text reveal? First, Sherrod did not give a farmer less help simply because he was white. She did so because he acted in a superior manner towards her at the outset. For anyone in business: if a potential client treats you in a negative manner at the first meeting, will you want to do business with him? I doubt it.

Perhaps the farmer thought that he knew more about agriculture than Sherrod. Perhaps he was simply being racist. It is impossible to know. But the fact remains that Sherrod acted in the manner in response to a provocation by the farmer. It was not inherent, unprovoked racism on her part.

Still, a reasonable argument can be made that Sherrod should not have denied the farmer extra help, regardless of his behavior. But many reports have left out the full context. Here is the recently-released full video of the entire speech:

Sherrod goes on to explain in the entire speech that she later learned from the experience that race should not matter when trying to help people. According to other outlets, she has reportedly said that has been friends with the farmer since the event in question occurred in the 1980s when she was not even working for the USDA at the time.

The fact remains is that this account should have been reported in context. But in a 60/24/7 news cycle, no one wants to wait to publish a good story. And this time, media outlets on the right took the story and ran with it. Even though the initial reports were unfair.

But there was one outlet that was fair. As much as I criticize Fox News pundit Glenn Beck, I have to give him credit — Beck was one of the few voices of reason in this particular case (according to his program last night). He pointed out the full video and placed the comments in their correct context. I just wish more media outlets would do the same.

Still, it is perplexing why the Obama administration would push for her resignation so quickly before the full story came to light. The only reason I can surmise is that the White House is desperate to separate itself from any accusations of racism after debacles like the president’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

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