Hegseth succeeds in pressuring Scouting America — AKA the Boy Scouts of America — to rid itself of DEI.

"No more DEI. Zero."

The Department of War has officially put Scouting America on notice.

It’s time to get back to basics — and DoW is leading the charge. pic.twitter.com/EnY9mvaFLX

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026

 

From the Department of War:

"Perhaps you’ve noticed.... Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in."

"These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying. William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA... said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.... My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.... [Van Tassel] cited a 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research that found, among other things, that the pull-in, back-out maneuver had a higher crash risk. Since pedestrians are most likely to be found walking in the major lanes, not in a parking space, it’s safer to back into the area with fewer people.... But I can’t bring myself to join in, and I don’t fully accept the safety argument. Since 2018, new vehicles sold in the United States have been federally mandated to have backup cameras, which can assist in reversing out of a spot without plowing into someone...."

I'm reading "Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out? An exploration of what’s driving a change in America’s parking lots" (NYT).

Those who do back up — is it for safety? Do other people believe it's for safety? As the male author of the NYT article says: "My wife suspects they’re mostly men showing off." Ha ha. That's what I think too. And by the way, I've always been quick to suspect that people are just showing off. I was much worse about that when I was much younger. I can honestly say that when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, I thought they were showing off. I looked away! The moon landing was a very big thing; backing into a parking space is a very little thing. In things big and small, I am ready to disrespect the achievement as a matter of showing off. A lateral thinker will therefore ask: What's bad about showing off? Where would we be without it?

"Watch out, girl dinners, the boys have found their own culinary niche, and it’s like dog food but worse."

"While the lady chow of internet fame consists of no-cook, low-effort meals (cheese, biscuits etc), TikTok has now revealed what men eat when on a diet: boy kibble. While I hate to ruin Brooklyn Beckham’s next cooking video, to make boy kibble you need an unseasoned batch of ground beef and very little else."

From "Men may call it a ‘protein-rich bowl’. I call it boy kibble/Meaty snacks are trending online for blokes. Please no, says Eilidh Dorgan" (London Times).

Here's the kind of thing she's talking about:

"A shooter described as a 'female in a dress' killed nine people in a remote part of Canada on Tuesday."

"Seven people died after being shot at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, while two more people were found dead at a nearby home. Another 27 people were hurt.... An alert was issued about an active shooter at the school.... The suspect was described in the alert as a 'female in a dress.' The local police superintendent later described the suspect as a 'gunperson' in a press briefing, without giving further details about their identity.... 'An individual believed to be the shooter was also found deceased with what appears to be a self-inflicted injury'.... Supt Ken Floyd, of the RCMP, later confirmed to reporters that the description of the subject in the police alert was accurate and that they had identified the suspect...."

From "'Female in dress' kills nine in school shooting/Suspect in Canada’s worst school massacre for 30 years described as 'gunperson'" (The Telegraph).

I'm seeing some commentary about the seeming oddity of saying "female in a dress" and "gunperson." Why not say "woman"? "Female in a dress" was the language of the alert, and it looks like typical police talk to say "male" or "female" instead of "man" or "woman." And police reports tend to have very brief factual statement about the suspect's clothing. That's enough to get you to "female in a dress." What about "gunperson"? Why not "gunwoman"? Who says "gunwoman"? It just doesn't feel colloquial. So let's not be too quick to put this terrible murder into the conventional mockery of wokesters who can't define "woman."

I'm not saying "gunwoman" isn't a word. It's in the OED. And here it is in a New York Times headline from 1923:

"There is an easy familiarity between the two men that allows Bannon to call Epstein a 'schmuck' and 'criminal' and even ask if he is 'the devil' fallen from paradise."

"At one point, Bannon comments: 'There’s something deeply fucked up with you.' The interview also becomes an exercise in intellectual peacocking as they invoke Socrates, Isaac Newton and quantum physics but pay little attention to Epstein’s crimes. Epstein reveals himself to be a living museum of racial prejudice...."

From "'Do you think you’re the devil himself?': highlights from the bizarre, newly released Bannon-Epstein interview/The interview,⁠ revealed in the latest tranche of Epstein files, was reportedly intended for a sympathetic documentary" (The Guardian).

Sample clip, with Epstein posing as thoughtful on the topic of gender difference:

Transcript:

Science doesn't describe romance. I don't know why I'm attracted to somebody. I don't know. People are attracted to each other, and everyone has felt the same thing at some point. They've seen someone walk into a room and thought, "Oh, that person gives me a creepy feeling."

He knows, I infer, that the females he is finding attractive are experiencing him as creepy.

"My 11-year-old nephew is a vivacious reader...."

So begins the first comment I see when I open up the comments section at "Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age/Boys’ reading struggles are not inevitable, research suggests, and addressing the deficit could improve outcomes in school and beyond" (NYT).

The commenter is female or so I surmise from the name Hannah. The malapropism — "vivacious" for "voracious" — amused me. I guess she got overly enthused that her boy — despite the burden of being a boy — was reading, really reading, reading a lot. It's hard to picture reading being done vivaciously, but I enjoyed trying. And "voracious reading" is trite. We ought to stop saying it. I'm tired of the eating metaphor for reading, and it's not as though I can picture people eating books. Vivacious reading is at least something new. 

And please don't try to tell me that "vivacious reader" isn't wrong because Ken Follett is quoted (somewhere) saying "Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer." Follett originally used the old trite expression "voracious reader" and somebody else screwed up copying the quote. 

But let's read the article! Excerpt:

"I’ve been saying for a while that the gender-neutral 'they/them' was going to become even more widespread. As a linguist..."

"... who studies the ways language changes, I noted the rise in people resisting the gender binary and got caught up in — and perhaps even biased toward — what I processed as a pronominal revolution. But surveys show that the number of young people identifying as nonbinary has decreased considerably over the past two years. Binary genders are on the rise again, and therefore so are the pronouns most closely associated with them...."

Writes John McWhorter, designating "He and she" as item #7 of the "Words and Phrases" list in his section of "The Year in Lists."

And that happens to be my last gift link of the year from The New York Times, so enjoy reading all the items on all the lists.

Jennifer Weiner has "9 Retrograde Moments for Women." I guess there were only 9, because if you'd had a 10th, wouldn't you go for the cliché of a 10 item list? And yet Weiner made a single item out of Erika Kirk and Usha Vance. Was it "retrograde" to put them together? Yes, but it wasn't Weiner's doing. Some people on the internet did it: they talked about JD Vance divorcing Usha and marrying Erika Kirk. Was that important enough to repeat? Weiner only purports to give us "moments"....

"Looking out on a pool of less marriageable men, young women are turning their backs on the institution, bolstered by cultural messaging..."

"... from academia to Hollywood that remains critical of more conservative lifestyles. While the country rightfully spent recent decades boosting the educational and economic prospects of women, it deindustrialized, axing and outsourcing jobs in heavily male industries, and leaving men and women increasingly out of step with one another. Efforts to make the workforce and education system more friendly for girls have led to emphasizing literacy and verbal skills, a hemorrhaging of male teachers, and the decline of shop classes and vocational programs.... The trend line of women reporting a declining desire to marry may indeed reflect pessimism about their prospects rather than the institution itself — and not for ideological reasons so much as practical ones...."

Writes Emily Jashinsky, in "A marriage gap is growing — and it could spell disaster/The 'war on boys' could be resulting in some women shunning marriage" (WaPo).

Jashinsky, as a 7-year-old girl, was one of the kids portrayed in the Christina Hoff Sommers book “The War Against Boys,” which came out in 2000, and she also worked as an intern on the re-release of the book in 2012.

It seems that both men and women regard the members of the opposite sex as unworthy of marriage. 

"In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her 'General Strike Piece'..."

"... which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers.... In August 1971... she undertook another, even more audacious project, 'Decide to Boycott Women,' stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary.... But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction.... 'Lee was very moody, drinking a lot of cheap wine and smoking lots of dope. I was raising my young son and had to ask her to leave after a few days. I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.'... A picture of her last decades emerges only in shards and anecdotes. For several years she lived with her parents, until her father filed a restraining order and she was forced to move into her own apartment in the same complex.... She’s like a character in a Kafka story, or Melville’s Bartleby, but funnier, more perverted, more playful and an invention not of another writer’s mind but of her own...."

I'm reading "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her?/ When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go" (NYT).

Back in the 1970s, one would often read about things like this. I'd thought the culture had lost interest in this sort of thing. I wonder what prompted the revival of interest — wanting to forefront a woman artist? But this woman made a lifelong project out of boycotting women. Are we supposed to believe she sacrificed something she wanted to be able to do?

Here's the comment NYT readers rate highest: "Refusing to speak to other woman is sexist and borderline sociopathic. It is most definitely not art, it's merely an eccentric and fairly selfish personality trait...." That's consistent with my observation that the culture has moved away from seeing weird acting out as art. It's a mental disorder... unless it has the honor of counting as an expression of "identity."

Best bad headline from the Hegsethathon.

The award goes to The New Republic: "Hegseth Summoned Military Leaders to Say 'FAFO' in Disturbing Speech."

I think it's ludicrous for a journalistic article to call it a "disturbing speech."  Who is disturbed? The headline writer? Were the military leaders disturbed? All of them? Some of them? Don't create fake objectivity. Someone needs to have been disturbed. I want to know who and why.

From the article:

“To our enemies: FAFO,” Hegseth said, using an acronym that translates to “Fuck around and find out.”

Hegseth ordered hundreds of U.S. military officials around the globe to meet him at a spontaneous assembly in Virginia.... The message shocked members of the U.S. military, who could not recall another instance in which a defense secretary summoned so many commanders for a sudden in-person meeting—especially without a clear rationale.

Was it a "disturbing speech" because of what Hegseth said or was a "disturbing speech" because it was disturbing to have to travel and sit in the audience to hear?

"After all, if your employer allowed you to wear open-toe shoes, it would have to allow everyone to wear open-toe shoes, and when it comes to toes, our ideas of what is acceptable tend to vary according to gender."

"'Culturally we’re more accepting of women showing a bit of skin, whether cleavage on top or at the toes,' [said Susan Scafidi, the founder of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University]. 'And "mandals" have never read as business attire in the U.S.' Put another way: Your peep-toe pumps may be a casualty of his fisherman sandal."

I'm reading "What Is a ‘Work-Appropriate’ Shoe? Workplace dress codes can be frustratingly vague. Our critic has some guidance on navigating different interpretations and on picking your footwear" (NYT).

Is that really the law? Can't you require men to wear jackets and ties without requiring women to wear jackets and ties? 

I am reminded of my post from August 2010, "Can lady lawyers wear peep-toe shoes?" 

"One of the reasons women are generally more reluctant to use new technologies is that they’ve been socially conditioned to be more risk-averse...."

"[N]ew technology invariably involves risks: What happens if it doesn’t work and ruins a project? What happens if I use it and am then accused of cheating or being dishonest? Women may not consciously be thinking about these scenarios, but centuries of double standards and glass ceilings mean that we’ve grown accustomed to playing it safe. The only real way forward is to ensure that using AI does not feel like taking a risk. It has to feel like an unremarkable way of working: not unnerving, not intimidating, not sketchy, just necessary and obvious...."

Writes Josie Cox, in "The most radical act of feminism? Using AI/Women are far less likely to use AI tools like ChatGPT than men. But the tech is here to stay — and the disparity risks widening workplace inequalities" (London Times).

If women are risk averse, then the world should be made less risky? Or should women be incited somehow to take more risks? It's just the way we've been "socially conditioned," we're told. It's all those "centuries of double standards and glass ceilings." Can't we just be socially conditioned out of our unfortunate risk aversion? No, we're told the risks need to be removed. I'm skeptical. I think the author really suspects that women are risk averse by nature. Why not come out and say that? Risk aversion?!

ADDED: So I boldly approached AI and asked "If you had to argue that women are risk averse by nature, what would you say?"

"How many Americans even know what color the ribbon is for prostate-cancer awareness?"

From "What Does It Take to Get Men to See a Doctor? Men in the U.S. live six fewer years than women. One clinic is trying to persuade men that getting checked out could save their life" (NYT).

Toxic masculinity” has become a catchall term.... But when researchers first began using the term, they meant something narrower and more specific: a culturally endorsed yet harmful set of masculine behaviors characterized by rigid, traditional male traits, such as dominance, aggression and sexual promiscuity. Men trapped in this man box, as it is sometimes called, are less likely to seek medical care and are more likely to engage in risky behaviors detrimental to their health, such as binge drinking or drug use.... Even seemingly positive attributes associated with traditional masculinity, such as providing for one’s family... can have negative health consequences. They may put work ahead of addressing medical concerns.... Or they may take on dangerous jobs or work extreme hours. But why do some men hold so tightly to these cultural notions about masculinity that lead them toward worse health? The answer may be traced to how fragile manhood itself can feel.... 

The NYT stirs up empathy for the man who said "It truly feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge."

In "An Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, Secretly Recorded, Upended His Life/Brent Efron’s 'boring' Tinder date wanted to hear all about his work at the Environmental Protection Agency, so Mr. Efron talked. If only he’d seen the hidden camera."

They matched on Tinder shortly after the November presidential election, shared their mutual disappointment about Donald J. Trump’s victory and agreed to meet for a drink. Sitting at a table at Licht Cafe, a bar on Washington’s U Street corridor, Brent Efron and his date, Brady, talked a bit about home and hobbies. But Brady — or at least that’s the name he used — repeatedly steered the conversation back to Mr. Efron’s job at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It was a boring date,” Mr. Efron, 29, recalled. “He just wanted to talk about work.”...

"As a gay man I applaud this decision. The court may be acting in bad faith, they may be hostile to gay rights, but..."

"... this ruling will help protect gay kids and gender non-conforming kids from this insane gender ideology that suggests that they may have been born in the wrong bodies if they don't fit some retrograde heterosexual gender role. You can't argue on one hand that gender is 'fluid' and on the other that it is somehow fixed in small children who have yet to experience puberty. This is madness, especially as we know these medical procedures lead to a lifetime of medical issues and a shorter lifespan. Only an adult can make these decisions for themselves."

Writes John02116 in the comments section to the Megan McArdle column, "The ACLU bet big on a trans rights case. Its loss was predictable. A Supreme Court ruling shows trans advocates failed to see the fragility of the liberal consensus" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the big disconnect between the column and the comments).

An even more strongly worded comment comes from JR Colorado:

"Did I lie? Yup. Did I also write a book that tore people to shreds? Yeah."

Said James Frey, quoted in "Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. Twenty years after 'A Million Little Pieces' became a national scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience" (NYT)(free-access link).

As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.

I'm using my 3rd free link of the month of June on this because I am a long-time admirer of photographs of the interiors of writers' homes. As I wrote 12 years ago: "I love this book, 'Writer's Desk,' with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike."

I see Frey has an "extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose." I identify. I've been buying chairs that accommodate the lotus position since I first bought furniture, which would have been in the 1970s. I wish I still had the chair I bought at Conran's that got me through law school. I'm one of those people who feel more comfortable with my legs folded up. 

Speaking of things written on this blog long ago, I've been around long enough, doing this low-level writerly thing that I do, to have covered the "Million Little Pieces" foofaraw when Oprah was agonizing:

We were talking about Trump not being "polished or smooth" and about a place called "Creatable World."

The first post of the day, here, quoted a NYT writer who said: Trump "wasn’t polished or smooth. His appearance was shoddy, strange, lacking all polish." Trump has tarted up the Oval Office with gold, but he's still rough, lumbering, and orange.

And here's the post this morning about Mattel's line of "gender-neutral" dolls called "Creatable World." But somehow the kids did not flow into the world that Big Toy had envisioned for them.

So this NBC headline caught my eye: "Obama world loses its shine in a changing, hurting Democratic Party."

You see the resonance.

There was once a place called "Obama World" and it was shiny.

Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot/For one brief shining moment that was known as... Obama World!

A brief shiny glimpse at the NBC News article:

Speaking of dolls, whatever happened to "Creatable World" dolls?

Dolls came up in the previous post when a NYT author located Trump's "level of aesthetic consideration" to that which a child gives "her doll’s face before covering it in nail polish."

That took me down the rathole that is the "dolls" tag in my archive, and I was surprised to encounter this 2019 post: "That’s why I applaud Mattel’s Creatable World, a new collection of gender-neutral dolls, which allow kids to customize their Barbie and Ken in ways they never could before."

That's not me applauding Creatable World. I was quoting something. I can't think of a time when I applauded a toy, and, though I like the idea of children creating little imaginary worlds with their toys, I'm wary of Big Toy's packaging of a particular world to capture the creative energy of the child. Was Creatable World — i.e., gender-neutral world — offered as the antidote to the excessive genderizing of Barbie?

But what happened to Creatable World? I don't think Mattel ever announced that it was withdrawing the product. How much of a fiasco was it?

Did kids just not like it? Did the adults who liked that sort of thing simply fail to have children?

Who even remembers Creatable World? It surprised me to run across it this morning. Is it in the junkpile of things people like to forget ever happened? Have we created a world in which Creatable World never existed?

"Scholars who have studied the earlier age of electric vehicles see parallels in their demise in the early decades of the 1900s..."

"...  and the attacks they are facing now. In both eras, electric cars struggled to gain acceptance in the marketplace and were undermined by politics. A big knock against them was they had to be charged and ultimately were considered less convenient than vehicles with internal combustion engines.... Charging and access to fuel were also concerns a century earlier.... They also had to overcome gender stereotypes. Their benefits like quiet, smooth operation were considered by some men to be too feminine, and, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many models like the Baker Electric were explicitly marketed only to women.... In the fall of 2022, Representative Majorie Taylor Greene [said].... 'There’s nothing more American than the roar of a V-8 engine under the hood of a Ford Mustang or Chevy Camaro, an incredible feel of all that horsepower.' But Democrats, she said, 'want to emasculate the way we drive.'... 'Musk has done everything he could to try to make a Tesla a manly vehicle,' said Virginia Scharff, ... author of... 'Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age.'... But, Ms. Scharff added, Mr. Musk may have gone too far... 'Tesla is so associated with a kind of toxic masculinity now...'..."

From "Electric Vehicles Died a Century Ago. Could That Happen Again? Battery-operated vehicles were a mainstay more than a hundred years ago, but only a few still exist — one happens to be in Jay Leno’s garage" (NYT).

Here's Jay with his Baker:

Here's a charming 1910 ad — "Daddy — Get Me a Baker":

She's very feminine but does seem to know about "the business underneath," the "shaft drive."

"I think the NYT has framed men as a problem. They're not thriving, they're not aspiring. We need to figure out what's wrong with them..."

"... maybe even empathize with them, because, after all, we do need them to function."

So I said, in the previous post. And one reason I said it was because I'd already opened a tab for a second article on the home page of the NYT today: "Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone? I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?"

This is a long piece in the NYT Magazine, by Sam Graham-Felsen, and like the article discussed in the previous post, it assures us that there's nothing gay going on here: "I never had sexual feelings for Rob, but there was an intensity to our connection that can only be described as love. I thought about him all the time, and cared, deeply, about what he thought of me. We got jealous and mad at each other, and often argued like a bitter married couple — but eventually, like a successful married couple, we’d always find a way to talk things out."

Graham-Felsen has had many other close male friends — "nearly a dozen other dudes — dudes I spent thousands of accumulated hours with; dudes I shared my most shame-inducing secrets with; dudes I built incredibly intricate, ever-evolving inside jokes with; dudes I loved and needed, and who loved and needed me...." 

But he doesn't have dudes like that anymore. Is that because he's older, and his contemporaries are absorbed in family and work, or is it because American men in general "are getting significantly worse at friendship"?