During which days, altogether, I might have got in 18 hours of link hunting time. Nevertheless, one long rant...
Advertising
Norb Leahy seems to imagine a place for traditional, commercial-TV-type advertising in the future. I say that that place had better be imagined as strictly limited to commercial TV. If people who use the Internet wanted an experience similar to watching commercial TV, we'd be watching commercial TV and not paying for the Internet. Advertisers should assume that commercial-TV-type advertising can only harm their brand if it reaches Internet users. Instead they should think about the potential the Internet offers for more introvert-friendly (respectful, patient, respectful, reciprocal, respectful, intelligent, respectful...) communication with prospective customers.
No sane Internet user is going to admit to being rich; some of us do have disposable incomes and some don't, and it's unethical for you to try to form any idea which are which, but it is ethical, safe, and reasonable to assume that people who visit writing, other gig, and advertising sites are interested in only one direction of cash flow. Lose your fantasies about instant online sales. If people are interested in a product they may consider paying cash for it at a local store.
Don't even think about barking "Grab this!" at us. Never use the imperative mode in communication with a prospective customer; if worst comes to worst the appropriate phrasings are things like "May we ask all customers please to walk quickly, not run, to the fire escape." Don't indulge in fantasies about another Waste Age where people spend days just shopping and buying things, just because they can, either. Think about making a good impression.
The best number of times to repeat an advertisement is once. If you want Internet users to think "Oh, didn't they advertise a sale on those things? Which days?", have a web page where they can revisit the ad that interested them. This may not happen twice in any given week but, every time it happens, it's likely to lead to a sale. On the other hand, repeating a message is heard as nagging. Nagging hurts your brand. Don't let an advertising message be heard twice unless people look for it specifically on your site.
Understand that Internet users' interests are usually not in buying things even when we write about things. You can reduce the frustration you experience by planning your advertisements to be seen by people who may use them to coordinate their store displays with yours--either to compete, or to deliver a better integrated shopping/touring experience.
You could have a commissioned link program, like the one Amazon used to have, and bloggers like me might throw links to "Virginia tourism" or whatever other kind of tourism, or whatever else, fit into our blog posts as sources for further information. When would that actually pay you or the affiliated bloggers? When people who spend money as if it were still the Waste Age read our blogs, of course. You could try promoting our blogs. You could also adjust to the fact that more people notice the Waste Age being over every year.
Advertising that does not fit integrally into primary content is wasted and can only generate negative publicity for whatever is advertised. Ads on YouTube would work better if they were posted as separate videos, rather than interruptions shoved into content where they're irrelevant and annoying. Would anybody actually watch ads posted as separate videos? It might not happen in every single year, but again, many of the people who did watch ads would be likely to buy the product.
There are people--this web site actually has a non-writing member who is one of them--who are interested in seeing how advertisers use Madison Avenue tricks like having a barker-type salesman voice blather about a product over a heavy drumbeat. I am not one of those people. I'm totally turned off by that approach. If you want me to listen to anything, don't let speech and music overlap. But some people think that kind of thing, or silly ad visuals where products dance or actors float through the sky, little cartoon dramas between the different colors of M&Ms, that whole 1950s-retro school of audiovisual art, are entertaining in their own right. Fine. Have your own channel. Don't try to force people who are not interested in your product to watch your ad so they can hear the rest of Joe Rogan's sentence. Entice people who are interested in the Art of Madison Avenue to visit your channel to see the latest way you've used digital audiovisual effects to create something they will find entertaining and, perhaps, persuasive.
There are people, quite a lot of people, who are interested in a product if they get one in exchange for writing about it. I think this works best for single-use products such as novels. I'll read a novel if it's sent to me in exchange for a review. Some people will test foods, toiletries, clothing, luggage, and who knows what else in exchange for a review. If the reviews are quirky and voicey and part of an uncensored blog that attracts readers in its own right, that's effective advertising--worth more than a thousand "commercials"--and should be paid accordingly. You have a right to look for bloggers who are more likely to say "This product is for people who prefer garlic-flavored to mint-flavored toothpaste" than they are to say "This product stinks, it's disgusting, and I will never use any product made by this company again," but the advertising is not going to be effective unless blog readers know that at some point a blog post might say, in one way or another, "Don't buy this." Of course, when I'm reading an e-friend's blog, I am likely to skip the "...and today I tested Brand X hand lotion" posts, but there is some remote possibility that the next time The Nephews visit one of them will need some hand lotion, we'll go to a store and see Brand X on display, and I'll say, "Oh, that's what my e-friend tested last month. She liked it," and we'll try it. I can't say that that's going to sell enough of any product to justify investing a huge amount of money, but I can say that it's likely to sell more of the product than interrupting an instructive video on, say, "How to Clean Oil Paintings" with a lot of drivel about a product nobody wants to see within ten yards of an oil painting.
Advertisements for patent remedies should be allowed only toward the ends of hour-long documentaries in which respectable doctors, i.e. doctors who don't take any kind of gifts or samples from pharmaceutical companies, talk about how symptoms are most likely to be caused and cured by simple lifestyle choices, and at minute 50 either the doctor or a corporate employee is allowed to say, "Drugs such as Brand X are sometimes prescribed to treat these symptoms." There should be no suggestion that "you" are among the lazy, foolish people who want to pop a pill when it's so much more effective to preserve health by not making ourselves sick. Anything addressed to "you" should discuss natural choices. Advertising jingles and blandishments should be saved for things that really might be part of a healthy, happy life, such as clothes, shoes, and sports equipment.
If you want me to remember a brand if and whenever I buy a particular kind of product, your best bet is to pay me to write a research article about how that brand compares with others on customer ratings and review sites. Actually the different brands of products that are designed to compete with each other tend to be unsurprisingly alike, but you can earn loyalty points by being a good customer.
One more tip: Because some corporations that advertise products have brought censorship into the Internet and earned the contempt of the world, it's a good move for advertisers to uphold freedom of speech and oppose censorship...even when product-unfriendly content seems absurd to you. Do you or I mind people's chattering on phones in stores more than we mind their chattering with their car pools? I don't; if anything one person talking on a phone is easier to steer a shopping cart around than four people conversing with each other. Do you uphold people's right to object to other people's chattering on phones in stores? You should, even and especially if you sell phones.
I'm not convinced that polypropylene fabric causes cancer or that the light from electronic products left to charge in bedrooms overnight causes weight gain, but I am sure that I am obliged to oppose anyone who interferes with other people's right to say that they believe those things. If your product is polypropylene winter gear or laptop chargers, you can lose one customer in a hundred when somebody claims that those products are harmful, or you can lose ninety-nine by trying to suppress the person who believes the products are harmful.
Animals
I visit Messy Mimi's blog almost daily and try to avoid linking to the same writers daily, now that we're no longer on a pay-per-click site, but some people may not know that one of the many jobs that make her site wonderfully various ("Messy") is work for an animal shelter. Adorable adoptable pets in Louisiana are featured on her blog at least once a week. This week's photos definitely quality for a Petfinder Photo Contest winner. If I were looking for a tomkitten with purrsonality, which I don't want to be because I have Drudge, I'd want to meet Cheese.
Books
I've reviewed it before...the first (published) volume of Narnia does happen to be one of the best children's Christmas books of all time. Narnia doesn't have the Nativity scene in its history at all; there is no pretense that Christmas is about the birth of Christ, which is an anachronistic splice that was made hundreds of years after the event, not because anyone thought it could have been true, but because some people found it convenient. Narnia doesn't have St Nicholas of Myra in its history either; that's another splice. Narnia has, as we will later learn from its earliest history, a vague tradition that winter starts to subside after a child-friendly holiday called Christmas where somebody called Father Christmas distributes presents. Narnia's celebration of the miracle of God's forgiving love shown through Incarnation starts with the story told in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. We, or some of us, have a tradition of celebrating all these things together but, in the history of our real world, they did not all happen together; the connection is loose and was made by humans, after the fact, because the first half of winter is an excellent time for people to give presents that other people may need to use during the rest of the winter.
My take on the "faux medieval" language throughout the Narnia books is that Lewis was trying to give children a sense that his fairytale royalty talked and acted like proper fairytale royalty without requiring children to learn much about how medieval royalty did talk. (They picked up that speechmode late in life, we are told; most if not all of the humans who came to Narnia were middle-class or working-class Londoners, some born before but all alive in the early twentieth century, so it's understandable that they sound like fairytale royalty rather than the real medieval kind.) In another volume a prince dictating one of his first princely edicts says "abhominable--don't forget to spell it with an H, Doctor," and in another a character who objects to another character's telling a story not quite right is told "She's telling it in the grand Calormene manner." If I think about it this code-switching does seem selfconscious and clunky. When I first read the books myself, and later when I read them aloud to children, it seemed just right. It could even have been used to open a discussion of "linguistic registers" and how we word things differently when we're talking to friends than when we're writing doctoral theses, and so on.
Changes, Beneficial
Here's another example of a useful social change: that prejudice against lefthandedness. Medieval Europe got this from the Crusades, I was taught. Medieval Arabs had strict rules of etiquette. Right hands were used for relatively clean tasks like writing and eating. Left hands were used for dirty work like self-cleaning. The Crusaders picked up this rule and brought it home--unfortunately they didn't bring the more important rule of washing after using the toilet--and, being Catholic, they worked into their mystical tradition the idea that the virtuous sit on the right hand and the vicious on the left, so the right hand is for God and good people and the left hand is for the Devil and bad people and so blah blah blah...This was all very well for art but it made it unnecessarily difficult for some people to learn to write, draw, and do other useful things. Bah. Today we can keep both hands equally clean so we use the hand we are naturally wired to be able to use. Those of us who are interested in medieval art can file the symbolism of right and left hand, along with the other gestures that sometimes make pictures of medieval saints look so strange, as quaint medieval lore that allowed messages to be worked into images by primitive artists. Those who work with our hands can divide the work between the hands to reduce repetitive motion injuries.
Christian
Something I've often pondered: When Christians focus on "love" we can easily focus on fellow mortals, fallible creatures, body-ridden things. The "love" for which they clamor is not Christian love; it's indulgence of their sinful nature. Not only sexual lust. Unenlightened humans cry out for kinds of "love" that indulge every one of the Deadly Sins.
"If you REALLY loved me you'd WANT me to be happy and you'd buy me CANDY!"
"If you REALLY loved other people YOU would be free from the ego-defenses that make you feel their egos' attacks, and you'd LET them HAVE their little dominance displays."
Perhaps even "If you REALLY loved your country you'd be SYMPATHETIC to the plight of people who are economically harmed by peace, and you'd support another mindless war with another puny little country that doesn't even have economic value for yours, JUST to crank up the industries that profit so much from war!"
The demands for indulgence can come from both sides of a question and be equally unenlightened from both sides.
"If you REALLY love me, your disabled and/or unbelieving family member, YOU'll stay at home with ME and not WANT to go to church."
"If you REALLY love GOD, YOU can find someone ELSE to baby-sit your disabled family member so that YOU can come to CHURCH."
I worked out some time ago that trying to love only God and not listen to the clamor of sinful human neediness is getting above ourselves. We can only do love for God through love toward our fellow humans. We can sit around contemplating Perfect Love but that's not what Christ called us to do with most of our lives.
But there has to be some anchor to sanity. Love is not indulgence of other people's sinful demands. Love is the practice of Good Will. A Hebrew word for this practice is Tov.
Related:
It is traditional to criticize any current Vice-President on any day of the week that ends in Y. It is traditional to criticize a lady when she is beautiful, accomplished, and popular enough to send a writer into spasms of envy. Envying the wife of a Vice-President is, however, indicative of a deeply troubled soul. The position of this web site is that people who are behaving in such a way as to turn Mrs. Vance off Christianity should ask a doctor whether in-patient psychiatric treatment is right for them.
Comedy
These vintage-ad-inspired flash fictions get funnier as they go along. They need a warning: DO NOT read while using your mouth for any purpose other than laughing out loud.
History
People are still trying to use the doomed, unrealistic wheeze about how "climate change is global and can only be dealt with by setting up global tyranny." Humans have not had modern means of documenting weather extremes very long; every year some new weather records are still being set, somewhere. If it's not the hottest summer or the coldest winter, in some place or other it's always, still, likely to be the hottest eleventh of June or the coldest twenty-fifth of February.
Measurements of the awfulness of hurricanes, and earthquakes and fires and snowstorms, are often based on the cost of the property damage they did As more people pack into smaller areas with more expensive buildings, those measurements have risen steadily, in North America, from 1700 on, and are likely to go on rising for some years. However, the combination of a hurricane that was about as awful as any that's been seen since, and some human decisions about human technology, means that the record for human lives lost to a hurricane was set 125 years ago...before the fad for giving human names to storms. Blogger and commenters share fun facts about the Galveston hurricane:
Language Abuse
When a native speaker of US English writes "Epstein allegedly claimed that [Vince Foster] and Hillary Clinton had a relationship."...RRR-crunch.
Of course Vince Foster, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Webb Hubbell had a relationship. They were school friends who went to work at the same place. They were young and put-upon together. They ate lunch together and even laughed together, sometimes. When they went to an Italian restaurant a thirty-year-old Hillary called her lunch buddy "Vincenzo Fosterini," and giggled. Everyone always knew that. Anyone who begrudged hard-pressed, nearsighted HRC an occasional chance to act young is too mean to be reading this web site.
What Epstein allegedly claimed was that they were having sex, which is a different kind of relationship and which it's hard to imagine where Epstein would have got any inside information about, anyway. There always was a lot of groundless speculation about Mrs. Clinton's possibly adulterous relationship with one or both of her lunch buddies, usually Foster, who was considered the good-looking one of the three whereas Hubbell was chubby. (Fat people who are not asexual probably get away with a lot just because some fat people are asexual. Webb Hubbell was tempted to embezzle money because he had four children. I suppose those who want to believe that...do those people believe that any Arkansans are related to their mothers' husbands?) If you can believe that Chelsea Clinton looks more like Vince Foster than like Bill Clinton, your believing skills are above average.
But what bothers me is that native speakers of US English let this use of "a relationship" to mean "an adulterous relationship" stay in a serious article. Owch. Owch.
Men, Appealing
Both the man and the broom could have been better drawn, but men need to know: They appeal to other men when they're playing little boys' games. They appeal to women when they're doing something useful. This is a pose I, for one, would like to see more of.
[Drawing: Vincent van Gogh]
Obamacare
Well, it's failed. And instead of "installing socialized medicine," this administration needs to double down on the message of keeping the cost of medical care within reason by eliminating unnecessary third parties, i.e. the insurance racketeers.
Pay the real cost, and not one penny over!
Insurance is not a medical need!
Pay for the medicine--don't pay for the meddling!
Do fund the "health care," but don't fund the greed!
Obituary
Is it a proper obituary if it only describes the writer's childhood friendship with someone who died old?
Poetry
Though based on Trinidad island (and writing with a Trinidadian accent), this poet doesn't seem to be looking forward to an increase in tourism from vacationers who will not find hotel rooms in Jamaica this winter. Call this a correction to my thoughts about "Montego's Monster." Trinidad is just off the coast of Venezuela. I hadn't been paying attention to the possibility of Venezuela's economic situation worsening. That possibility is impossible to ignore in Trinidad. I apologize.
Politics
On which side of the proverbial aisle is more verbal cruelty found? Senator Fetterman's inside view confirms what this Independent has long thought:
On which side are you found these days? Since I believe that God hath made of one blood all nations of men, have spent my adult life in non-traditional family arrangements, consider myself a more radical feminist than Gloria Steinem, like most of the immigrants I've met, and oppose war, it surprises me to find myself mapped as a moderately conservative Republican. I am not and have never been a Republican! I may respect some of them, I may vote for some of them, but I am an Independent! And always will be!
Anyway, speaking of Senator Fetterman: Let no one ever say he "caved," because that's not what he did. He knew his constituents. He was like our Senators in Virginia in that respect. Senator Warner is primarily a man of the Hump--Northern Virginia, where the federal employees are. His base was telling him to cling to the stupid filibuster, and he did. Senator Kaine is primarily a man of the Swamp, down around Richmond, where some actual low-wage workers live. His base was telling him to show some mercy, and he did. (If you think that something is missing from this picture and we in the Point of Virginia ought to have our own US Senator, I might agree.) There are low-wage workers in Pennsylvania too. Fetterman was decent enough to listen to them, he took a brave stand on behalf of his base, he's caught no end of hate about it, and he's had another cardiovascular incident and is in the hospital. The usual "Thoughts & Prayers" go out to him and I hope some of them are at least coming from his own party. The Democrats used to be a viable political party representing nice people who were often wrong, but for the best of reasons. Let it never be said that they killed their own man with stress just for being a decent human being.
Due to the echo-chamber effect of having the news reported by frankly partisan writers, it is possible that some Ds think right-wingers were the ones urging Ds to end the shutdown. Not true. Real right-wingnuts were egging Ds on, saying that the longer the shutdown lasted, the more easily it could be made permanent. They had a point there. Again, I ask those under age 60 either to stay out of any discussion of Social Security pensions or to vote to protect your parents' pensions, depending on whether you have parents and they depend on pensions--but those of us who are over 60 and have no living parents should be talking about redefining retirement from the jobs we did when younger as taking the jobs we wanted to do when younger than that, and cutting Social Security funding back to a point where existing federal revenues can take decent care of those of us who become disabled, if and when we do. I don't want to sit around growing fat and unhealthy--I want to keep working and enjoy the eighty to ninety-year lifespan that seems to be in my DNA. And so no doubt do you. So we want to hold on to the disability pensions that will allow us to enjoy old age while our friends' disabilities are taken care of. The most efficient way to do that is to cut out the idea of retirement pensions. Real right-wingnuts were saying "Don't let's wait for the baby-boomers to decide they'd rather be senior workers than 'retirees.' Just cut'm all out of the budget now! And we know a lot of people on food stamps are the most shameless, obnoxious, disgusting sort of cheats--likely they all are. End food stamps now, because we personally don't know any poor hardworking couple who've planned to raise a child while she goes to college and he works for Wal-Mart with the help of the food stamp program and, if we did, we'd feed them. And all public schools could be made virtual, permanently, overnight, too." If any Ds were "caving" to the right-wingnuts, they were Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, and the rest of the Stubborn Jackasses in the Senate.
(Someone may be wondering...I try not to have anything to say to other people's Congressmen until they've voted on an issue. It can be hard, since some of them aspire to national positions and use Twitter to seek attention outside their States, but I try. I didn't even tweet to Senator Fetterman before the vote; I nagged Senators Kaine and Warner, and hoped one of them would be first to break the shutdown. It may not make sense to international readers but each State was originally meant to be its own independent self-governing political entity in an alliance that did not dictate policy to any State. That anyone active in State government, e.g. Lady Lemon Locks who claims to be our Governor-elect, should be receiving funding or advice from out-of-State connections is discrediting.)
Norb Leahy has the list of thirteen D Senators whose terms expire next year. At least one of them (Shaheen of New Hampshire) voted to end the shutdown--eventually; though she reportedly intends to retire anyway. Most, like Booker, voted to sustain the shutdown because concerns about poor hardworking parents were the only way their minority party could manipulate the majority. Does one of these people misrepresent your State? Time to find replacements is now.
Women's Issues
Prompted by a lot of things scattered around the'Net that don't deserve links...
If the Rs want there to be a Red Wave, they need now to set a policy of zero tolerance for misogyny.
The Loony Left may appeal to a certain type of she-bachelor...a woman who is not usually a very strong, or radical, or committed feminist, but whose conscience is inflamed, even infected, by her having had or considered having an abortion. (Sometimes, like the sad antiheroine of a "novel" or teaching story about birth control options that circulated in the 1980s, she was tearfully deciding to have a surgical abortion when her barren body expelled the never-to-be-a-baby all by itself.) The men of the Left don't respect her, nor do the women who've shoved her down while crawling past her up the ladder of the D Party. She knows this. She is not a happy D Party member. She is not happy at all; she may or may not have been diagnosed as clinically depressed, but she's not having a lot of fun. But she votes for the party that tells her she has a "right" to "choose" abortion, whether she's chosen it, whether it's happened to her, or whether it's been an academic question since the men who've molested and exploited her all had the good sense to avoid causing pregnancy. The D Party does base its whole appeal to women on this wretched female, so she probably does exist. She's probably the sort of government
employee who actively hates a competent contractor.
Calling her a cat lady is a mistake. She's not a Southern Lady; she thinks "lady" means "old" and at no age does she admit being one. And she probably has neither the fortitude nor the living space to keep cats.
Identifying her with "women" or "single women" or even "single middle-aged women" is a mistake, because most women, even most single middle-aged women, don't want to stand too close to this sad apple. Her moods are too likely to swing and her resentment is too likely to latch on to the nearest person as a cause of her misery. "And you think you're so popular and pretty and healthy now but, let me tell you..." "Oh stow it," say her flatmates, going out to parties to which she's not been invited and dances she doesn't have the energy to do, planning to move in with other housemates or flatmates next summer.
How can this wretched creature be identified? By her politics of course. She is the Woman Whose Political Issue Is Abortion. Bless her heart.
Other single middle-aged women can and should be recruited away from a party that offers them nothing better than "abortion rights." That party's opposition should not waste their talents by offering them nothing better than advice to marry young and have babies, instead of allowing immigrants, to become the huddled masses of second-class citizens on whose backs some people want to balance the dysfunction that is the Social Security system. Republicans need to hire, promote, and encourage working women who do and do not have babies, or husbands, to think about. They need to be the party of the women who really do Have It All though, for maximum enjoyment, not all at the same time. They need to have the offices where women don't have to worry about harassment by male bosses because nobody on a management level is male, and where a "mommy track" resume showing two years off to nurse the baby and ten years of part-time work and homeschooling is recognized as showing all kinds of added skills when the woman comes back to full-time work. ("Mommy brains," some studies have shown, actually gain some functionality after recovering from postnatal brainfog.) They need to focus on the woman entrepreneur who may or may not have a male partner, the "Mom'n'Pop" or "Just Mom" business, that has been represented very poorly by the R Party, in the past, but positively resented and despised by the Ds, so these people tend to vote R. Rs need to recognize these people as an important part of their base.
Between ages 20 and 40 women do tend to polarize around the question of whether or not we are actively mothering babies. Friendships between the baby-free and the baby-addled tend to go into inactive mode...in theory sisters, cousins, and old friends would baby-sit for each other but in practice baby-free women seem to have to push for this, and Zahara Heckscher was the only one I knew who did. We can work together, but our brains are working differently. The mommy brain is even capable of entertaining paranoid fantasies that her baby-free friends covet the little fountain of baby-spew that we blame for having destroyed our friend. Corporate cultures of competition don't help, though in their absence we're probably working on our own as Mom'n'Pop or Just Mom entrepreneurs...
After age 40, however, women who did and did not have babies tend to outgrow the possibly hormone-based antipathy and can reunite as women. The most obvious thing we then have in common is that, whether or not we want to believe that a fetus is a baby or that women who don't want babies probably aren't going to have viable ones anyway and should have a right to abort with no questions asked, our most immediate and pressing concerns do not include abortion. If a woman over 40 is pregnant the role of friends in her life is probably to persuade her that the fetus, if it becomes a child, won't enjoy answering to the name of "Miracle" at school. We can, however, rally around things like the need for all of Hamas and all of the Berlin rapists to be publicly executed, the need to reclaim streets and public space generally as women's space, the need for adequate compensation for women who take boring STEM jobs...and the need for better women candidates for public office who show more rational understanding of women's issues. We should be able to unite in saying to candidates like Angry Abigail Spambucket, "How dare you suggest that all we want is more tax-subsidized abortion!"
Rs must not flinch away from what Charlie Kirk actually stood for in his life--open, uncensored debate, opposition to censorship. They must not be distracted by the detail that, as a very young man, Charlie Kirk was in a position to hire a slightly older woman (already beyond the bounds of what normally happens), and that when he told her he wanted to marry her instead of hiring her she said yes instead of suing him (definitely part of a unique personal relationship that nobody else can reasonably expect to replicate). There are envious, resentful, bitter little boys who might want to rally around the idea that girls should all drop out of school and stay home and have babies. Rs should not make the mistake of giving those boys a platform. What the bitter little boys need is a spanking. Rs should encourage girls to stay in school, have one child or none, after age 25 if ever, and prepare for responsible jobs.
Bashing "feminists" is another move Rs should avoid. Leftist feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem obviously did make themselves bashable. Laura Ingraham's Hillary Trap documented ten of the major ways left-wing feminism failed even left-wing feminists like Mrs. Clinton; it's worth reading by everyone, male and female. The alternative to left-wing feminism was not antifeminism, which withered up and died of lack of contact with reality, but moderate and conservative feminism. The idea that women are inferior to men can survive only in a culture where everyone does heavy physical labor to survive, so it needs no reviving. The idea that women's equal or superior value to society might mean treating motherhood as a counterpart to military service, on a management-level employee's resume, has a better base in contemporary reality and should prove easier to defend.
