The Missouri abduction cases still have people scratching, including me. While reading about the case, I found this in an AP story:
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, about 58,000 children are the victims of non-family abductions. The vast majority of those children are returned safely.
An average of 115 cases, however, involve children taken by non-family members for long periods, put up for ransom or killed by their abductors. Of that number, about 60 come home safely.
So, about 55 don't (I assume this is an annual number, but the article doesn't say). That's a minimal risk, but the absolutely twisted nature of the crime is enough to make one abduction per state too high..
Times Online ran a story this last weekend about a problem that has been bedding for quite awhile:
China will be short of 30 million brides within 15 years, according to an official report into the country's burgeoning population. About one in every ten men aged between 20 and 45 – equivalent to almost the entire population of Canada – will be unable to find a wife.
The findings, from the State Population and Family Planning Commission, outline bleak prospects – and not only for bachelors. The report says that the gender imbalance could result in social instability – a threat that the Communist Party regards as the greatest risk to its grip on power. . . .
Chinese officials have given no clues as to how they plan to find wives for the battalions of bachelors now growing up in Chinese schools. However, the kidnap of baby girls is becoming increasingly common as families seek a future bride for their only son. Trade in women is also a problem in many rural areas where poor farmers are unable to attract a bride.
How do they expect to find wives? The Japanese have plenty of women, don't they? Time for a little Nanking payback?
The Times Online also featured Dawn Eden and The Thrill of the Chaste this weekend. Link. I'd forgotten to order the book, but that's been remedied. I expect it later this week. Great article, incidentally. Excerpts:
Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead. . . .
In the 1960s the future Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown famously asked: Can a woman have sex like a man? Yes, she answered because “like a man, [a woman] is a sexual creature”. Her insight launched a million “100 new sex tricks” features in women's magazines. And then that sex-loving feminist icon Germaine Greer enthused that “groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests”. . . .
Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I've tried their philosophy – that a woman can shag like a man – and it doesn't work. We're not built like that. Women are built for bonding. . . .
My monthly blogging column is at National Catholic Register. It's about humor in the blogosphere. Here's the link, but you'll need a password, which requires a subscription. I'd cut-and-paste the whole thing, but I suspect the Register folks who kindly paid me for the piece wouldn't appreciate that. But here's an excerpt:
You want to be damned? Be humorless.
As earlier noted, human reproduction can be funny. But its wicked step-cousin, pornography, is humorless. Politicians aren't funny. (Laughable, yes; funny, no). The same with radical feminists. Communists have been woefully devoid of humor, as are the student activists who have plagued American campuses for 40 years.
You know what else is humorless? Animals. Laughter is one of those things that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Aristotle said we are homines risibiles (beings who laugh). It's no wonder that the poet John Donne once wrote that a person shows himself “a Man because he can laugh, a wise Man that he knows at what to laugh, and a valiant Man that he dares to laugh.” High praise for laughter, yes, but Hilaire Belloc took it one step further, saying, “laughers have a gross cousinship with the Most High.”
