Who's the Bossy?

Today on NRO

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The U.S. needs a serious foreign policy. How to Stop Putin.

JONAH GOLDBERG: How are the Obama years workin' out for ya? The Most Cynical Generation.

RICH LOWRY: Harry Reid is after the "oil baron" Koch brothers. The Un-American Anti-Koch Campaign.

THE EDITORS: Obama's new overtime rules will stifle growth. An Unnecessary Overtime Reform.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: The Obamacare exchange is approaching insolvency in Hawaii, where insurance costs are likely to rise. Fixing What Wasn't Broken.

SLIDESHOW: The Pope's First Year.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

March 14, 2014

I'm Hoping This Is Just the Most Elaborate 'Lost' DVD Promotion Ever

It's been the dominant story all week, and it just gets more mysterious with every passing day: What the hell happened to that disappearing airliner?

The Wall Street Journal throws out a giant curveball:

Communication satellites received intermittent data "pings" from a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, giving the plane's location, speed and altitude for at least five hours after it disappeared from civilian radar screens, people briefed on the investigation said Thursday.

The final satellite ping was sent from over water, at what one of these people called a "normal" cruising altitude. The people declined to say where specifically the transmission originated, adding that it was unclear why the transmissions stopped. One possibility one person cited was that the system sending them had been disabled by someone on board.

The automatic pings, or attempts to link up with satellites operated by Inmarsat PLC, occurred a number of times after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's last verified position, these people said, indicating that at least through those hours, the Boeing Co. 777 carrying 239 people remained intact and hadn't been destroyed in a crash, act of sabotage or explosion.

I think we've all learned a valuable lesson from this: Never get into a dangerous situation where you will be dependent upon Malaysian authorities for your rescue. I'm sure they're trying their best, but every day or so we learn something that suggests everyone's been looking in the wrong place from the beginning.

Anyway, the ping indicates the plane could be . . . could be . . . well, China, India, Australia . . . anywhere in a big chunk of the globe:

So, some hopefully logical speculation . . .

This was a Malaysia Air jet headed from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. At first glance, this doesn't appear to be al-Qaeda or Islamist-style terrorism, as there weren't many Westerners or other usual targets on it. If you had the capability to hijack a jet coming out of Kuala Lampur, wouldn't you aim for one that went to Australia, or eventually to the U.S.? (My checking of air-ticket sites suggests there are few if any direct flights between that city and the United States.) On paper, this could be someone trying to send a signal to China . . . except this is a strangely quiet and indirect way of doing it. No claims of responsibility, no demands, etc.

But we're not crazy to think there's some sort of foul play involved, once we get to this detail:

The people said aviation investigators are exploring the possibility that someone on the plane may have intentionally disabled two other automated communication systems in an attempt to avoid detection.

So it goes off radar and then two automated systems stop working. To quote Auric Goldfinger, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action."

So somebody with knowledge of these systems and access to the cockpit wanted this flight to disappear . . . and the black-box signal and life-raft emergency-radio signals haven't been detected yet. And nobody in any island has reported seeing a plane crash into a mountainside, as far as we know. Then the Journal offers this particularly ominous note:

At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told that investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."

We've all seen one of those other purposes in lower Manhattan, northern Virginia, and a Pennsylvania field.

Who's the Bossy?

Women of the world . . .

I know I'm not the most sensitive man in the world. I have my times where I am particularly insufficiently attuned to your needs, particularly during football season. From time to time, I find your thinking illogical, contradictory, or simply not sensible, and I express that opinion, with usually deeply regrettable consequences.

But to the extent I understand you, I grasp that you've got a lot on your shoulders. You feel like everyone is always counting on you, and you feel that way because usually, everyone really is counting on you. Your husbands and boyfriends may try their best, but there's always more to be done, and it falls to you. You keep track of all the little things. You're not appreciated nearly enough. Toddlers with peanut butter on their fingers hug you when you're heading out the door in your work clothes.

Your bosses expect a lot of you, your kids expect a lot of you, your parents expect a lot of you, your spouses expect a lot of you, you want to be there for your friends when they need you, your siblings fit in somewhere between the friends and the parents, and if you're going to take care of the caretaker, as they recommend, that requires time and energy and attention and mental space, all of which feel like valuable and increasingly rare resource. It feels like there is never, ever, ever enough time.*

So I get that life throws a lot of problems and challenges at you, day after day.

But if I asked you to list the ten, or twenty, or a hundred, or five hundred biggest problems in your life . . . I'm guessing "being called bossy" wouldn't make the list.

It's just not a big enough problem to warrant a celebrity-laden national awareness campaign, compared to everything else. People have been calling you names since kindergarten. The Internet is one giant F-bomb-laden torrent of abuse, assessment of your appearance, and vulgar threats. You get called worse names by the guy trying to cut you off on your morning commute. Compared to all that, being called "bossy" is almost quaint in its passive-aggressiveness. I'm betting you would happily trade a half-hour of being called "bossy" by everyone you know in exchange for two hours of uninterrupted "me time" once a week.

Ann Friedman of New York magazine is similarly not persuaded:

The response to "Ban Bossy" has ranged from rather tepid to downright hostile. "I am bossy. And I don't give a *$&% if you call me that," wrote Jessica Roy at Time Magazine. Slate's Katy Waldman declared, "I don't intend to stop using it, even if the feminist super-team tells me to." Count me among the detractors. I'm all for encouraging girls to lead, but the term bossy is hardly a problem big enough to warrant the combined star power of Sandberg and Beyoncé and Jennifer Garner and Condoleezza Rice. I'll admit it: Bossy doesn't bother me. Maybe it's because I'm a grown-up, proudly self-identified boss-lady. Or because I associate the term more with Kelis's 2006 single ("You don't have to love me / You don't even have to like me / But you will respect me / You know why? / 'Cause I'm a boss") and Tina Fey's humorous memoir than with schoolyard taunts. Sure, according to the dictionary it means "inclined to domineer," but I interpret it more as "inclined to dominate" — to be a woman with power who isn't afraid to use it…

Which is why it's so frustrating to watch Lean In try to expand girls' options by restricting the way we talk about them. It's counterintuitive, and it makes feminists look like thought police rather than the expansive forward-thinkers we really are.

Let's skip over the argument of whether feminists have behaved more like the thought police in recent decades and just savor a moment of self-professed feminists telling other self-professed feminists to stop telling everyone else what they can and can't say.

I'm sure someone will call me a jerk for saying this aloud, but trying to ban the word "bossy" sounds whiny. Allegedly, a big part of feminism is celebrating strong women, and encouraging them to express that strength and determination and ability to overcome adversity; a strong woman doesn't crumble in the face of criticism or even nasty names. Nobody ever thought better of someone else because they whined, and if calling a woman "bossy" really could hold her back, no woman would ever run anything. As a criticism, the label "bossy" is pretty impotent, to offer a metaphor that Freudian psychologists will analyze for weeks.

You know who gets called "bossy" a lot? Bosses. And bosses run things. They get stuff done. That's why they became the boss, and why they're still the boss.

* None of this is unique to women, of course.

Jobs: They Keep a Civilization Going.

Peggy Noonan is talking about a faraway land, but I can't help but wonder if what she's saying applies a lot closer to home:

I keep thinking of two things that for me capture the moment and our trajectory. The first is a sentence from Don DeLillo's prophetic 1991 novel, "Mao II": "The future belongs to crowds." Movements will be massive. The street will rise and push. The street in Cairo, say, is full of young men who are jobless and unformed. They channel their energy into politics and street passions. If they had jobs they'd develop the habits of work — self-discipline, patience, a sense of building and belonging — that are so crucial to maintaining human society. But they don't, so they won't.

You know who else is having a hard time picking up "the habits of work—self-discipline, patience, a sense of building and belonging"? Young Americans.

ADDENDUM: Tammy Bruce calls our attention to two statements from the president, six weeks apart:

A transcript of Obama's remarks at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Phoenix Awards Dinner, September 23: "You can offer your family the security of health care . . . for less than your cell phone bill."

Much more recently, at a town hall with Latinos, Obama is asked how a family with $36,000 in income can afford $315 a month for the cheapest Obamacare premium. His answer: "…if you looked at their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill… it may turn out that, it's just they haven't prioritized health care."

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