Sharing housework causes divorce

Here is a new study:

OSLO, Norway, Sept. 28 (UPI) -- A Norwegian study found that modern couples who share housework are more likely to divorce than couples where the woman does most of the chores.

The divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 percent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work, The Daily Telegraph reported Thursday. ...

Norway has a long tradition of gender equality, however, when it comes to housework, women in Norway still do most of it in seven out of 10 couples.

It got reactions like this:

Whether those people are for or against its pronouncements, it seems to fly in the face of what we thought we knew about marriage, gender equality, and the way modern, successful relationships work.

No, this does not fly in the face of what we know. Gender equality may be a great liberal goal, but if a married couple applies it to housework, then it is a good bet that the wife has a bad attitude.

Women are hypergamous by nature. A wife will usually have no respect for a man who treats her as an equal. If a husband does half the housework and child-rearing, then the wife will probably be looking for another man.

After writing this, I see the Heartiste blog has similar comments:

File under: Don’t listen to what women say, watch what they do. ...

The sex’s division of labor evolved for a reason: it’s most compatible with the feminine and masculine sexual polarity. There are some pursuits and some kinds of work that are simply feminine in nature, and woe be the man who willingly takes up the woman’s work in an effort to appease her; he may as well grow a vagina, for that is how she will perceive his sexual attractiveness.

His blog is refreshing because he is not blinded by the silly things that feminists say.

Laura Wood adds:

This supports an observation I have made here many times, and that is, the feminist ideal of men and women doing equal amounts of housework makes neither men nor women happy, despite the stellar exceptions. Dividing the housework evenly involves a level of conscious management of daily life that is annoying and tedious. Things do not flow naturally. The idea that each person should do an equal amount of housework violates the spirit of interdependence that should exist in a home. Also, under the egalitarian model, men are more likely to end up being the inept servants of their wives, who almost always are more attuned to what needs to be done and much more finicky about how it is done. Women don’t like having husbands who are servile no matter how much feminists say they do.

Finally, one of the worst things about this approach is that it implies that housework is unpleasant. Compared to other forms of work, it is quite enjoyable.

Protecting child privacy

The NY Times reports:

Federal regulators are about to take the biggest steps in more than a decade to protect children online.

McDonald’s invites children who visit HappyMeal.com to upload their photos so they can make collages or videos.

The moves come at a time when major corporations, app developers and data miners appear to be collecting information about the online activities of millions of young Internet users without their parents’ awareness, children’s advocates say. Some sites and apps have also collected details like children’s photographs or locations of mobile devices; the concern is that the information could be used to identify or locate individual children. ....

The current federal rule, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, requires operators of children’s Web sites to obtain parental consent before they collect personal information like phone numbers or physical addresses from children under 13. But rapid advances in technology have overtaken the rules, privacy advocates say.

Advances in technology? Facebook just asks kids to check a box saying that they are over 13. Maybe all kids under 18 should be allowed to friend their parents.

This whole privacy thing is a joke. A lot of people are secretive about their phone numbers, Social Security numbers, home addresses, credit card numbers, birth date, credit score, etc. But all of this info is collected by data companies and sold to marketing companies every day. Most people have a whole lot less privacy than they think they have.

You might think that you can find the public info on yourself by googling your name. You cannot. The good databases are not free. Cheap enough to be bought and sold for marketing purposes, but not free.

In the name of privacy, all 13-year-old girls get the right to free birth control pills under Obamacare, with no notification to parents. We had a voter initiative in California several years ago to require parental notification of abortion, and it was rejected. The initiative was just for parental notification, not consent. Kids still require parental consent for body piercings and tatoos.

When the FTC announces that it is protecting child privacy, it is really greenlighting some approved spying practices. Do you ever get a mailing with pages of fine print about how some bank or other company was revising its privacy. You can try to read those things, but it is useless. There is always some escape clause saying that they can sell your account info to affiliates, with no explanation of who those affiliates are.

The FTC is not going to protect your kids. Neither is anyone else. Not like parents. If they really wanted to protect kids, they would give parents more authority over them.

Demand to cease and desist

I filed a complaint against psychologist Ken Perlmutter last year, and now I get this:

Dear [AngryDad]:

I demand that you cease and desist writing about me on the blog, The Angry Dad. Furthermore, I demand that you correct previous misleading statements about me. I have retained legal counsel in this matter.

The final straw was your Sept. 22 posting comparing me to a child molester. I have never been convicted of a felony, and I do not have any administrative citations or disciplinary actions on record with the California Board of Psychology. Any suggestion to the contrary is libelous.

Professional ethics require that neither you nor I are permitted to comment on your case. It is not in the best interest of your children for you to be using the internet to argue for your so-called parental rights. Your inability to see that is further proof that you lack the necessary empathy to be a father.

Your anger is misplaced. I did not take your kids away. Before taking your case, I called Commissioner Irwin Joseph to clarify what he wanted me to do in the case. He explained that he had already taken your kids away, and that it was not my responsibility to second-guess what he had done. I was merely being asked to make recommendations pursuant his instructions.

I did not even recommend specific actions against you. I merely recommended that the existing orders be continued temporarily for another six months. You were free to come back to me after that to ask for an updated evaluation.

It is not true that I charged you $28,000 for the evaluation. That was the amount for the evaluation, report, and testimony. You case was complicated by the thousands of pages of documents that your ex-wife asked me to review. You blame me for misunderstanding the outcome of your 2005 child custody trial, the CPS allegations against you in 2007, and the nature of the temporary court orders against you. But would you have really wanted to pay me more money to read those documents more thoroughly?

Again, you fail to take responsibility for your own behavior. Had you not contested the allegations against you, there would not have been thousands of pages of court documents.

I would have done that updated evaluation for you after six months, but the hostility of your questions to me in court indicated that you had lost confidence in my professional judgment. A psychologist depends on the trust of the patient. If you truly trusted me, then you would not have asked me for published evidence supporting my recommendations. I recommend based on my professional opinion of the best interest of the children.

I resent your insinuation that my ethics and opinions are shaped by my non-Christian beliefs. You apparently inferred this from my lack of any citation to legal or psychological knowledge in my report. But as I explained to you, avoiding such citations is an accepted practice. In seminars on child custody evaluations, the point is commonly made that any specificity in the premises or reasoning only invites opposing lawyers to ask questions that can ultimately undermine the effectiveness of the evaluation.

At any rate, you do not have the credentials to question the upbringing of your children. You are not a psychologist. And you should not be using the internet to try to disrupt a process that has already been decided by professionals.

This letter is confidential and copyrighted, and you are forbidden to post it. Please inform me in writing that you will immediately correct your web site. I am also informing Bret Johnson and Faren Akins of your libel, so that they may also take action.

Sincerely,
Kenneth Permutter, PhD, Calif Psy #7053

Is this a joke? Yes, he told me that stuff, but he is not foolish enough to put it in writing.

Selfish wife wants suggestions.

Here is yesterday's bad newspaper advice:

Dear Annie: My husband enjoyed sex when we had it, but I initiated every session. After five years, I started to feel as if I was begging for it and asked him to take the lead some of the time. He didn't.

For three more years, I told him it would thrill me to be approached by him, treated to dinner or have a little gift placed on my pillow — the kind of things I did for him. I finally convinced him to go for counseling, but my husband wouldn't do any of the things the counselor suggested. In desperation, I told him that if he wanted sex, he would have to initiate it.

That was seven years ago, and we haven't been intimate since. I can't divorce him because of my own physical problems. He says he loves me, but he's not willing to do anything for me. Any suggestions? — Another Sad Wife

This self-centered wife is only concerned with her needs, and how she wants her husband to change to suit her. I bet that her selfishness is the real problem.

No one gives her the obvious adive:

Ask your husband what you can do to please him. Then do it.

I hate to bash American women, but this wife probably has no idea what is necessary for a happy marriage. No one ever told her, and no counselor will.

It is human nature that men are much easier to please than women. Once a wife figures out how to please her husbands, she usually gets rewards far beyond her effort. But a wife with an attitude like the above letter will never be happy.

The other letter is another sad wife:

Dear Annie: My parents divorced years ago. Dad waited patiently while Mom chose between him and another man. In the end, Mom chose the other guy, but it didn't work out. Neither have any of her other relationships. Meanwhile, my dad married a lovely, classy and extremely wealthy woman. They have found true happiness, while my mom has become bitter and jealous.

I love both of my parents, but it's difficult to be around my mother when she constantly whines and complains about Dad, saying he has money and she doesn't. ...

Child support laws are designed so that an ex-wife like this one can have a standard of living comparable to the man she left.

France bans the word father

The UK Telegraph reports:

The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word "parents" would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

The draft law states that "marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender".

It says all references to "mothers and fathers" in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply "parents".

The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told France's Catholic newspaper La Croix: "Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child's development?"

Who is to say?! Is no one in France willing to defend fatherhood and motherhood?

I hate to say it, but the handwriting is on the wall. Soon the words "father" and "mother" will become hate speech.

A month ago, someone accused me of being a racist because I referred to a man as being "Chinese". My accuser said that he could have been Korean, and I should just say that he was "Asian". But he was not Korean, Russian, or Indian. He was Chinese.

Soon I will call someone a father, and some Frenchman will tell me that I should use the word "parent" instead.

"What is certain is that the interest of the child is a major preoccupation for the government."

The head of the French Catholic Church Cardinal Philippe Barbarin warned followers last week that gay marriage could lead to legalised incest and polygamy in society.

He told the Christian's RFC radio station: "Gay marriage would herald a complete breakdown in society.

"This could have innumerable consequences. Afterward they will want to create couples with three or four members. And after that, perhaps one day the taboo of incest will fall."

Leading French Catholics have also published a 'Prayer for France', which says: "Children should not be subjected to adults' desires and conflicts, so they can fully benefit from the love of their mother and father."

California already passing a law for 3 or 4 parents. Not mothers. Not fathers. Just parents. Are Catholics the only ones to stick up for fathers to be fathers? Next, the French will ban the word "couple" because kids could have several parents.

And Pope Benedict XVI invited 30 French bishops to Italy to urge them to fight against the new law.

He told them: "We have there a true challenge to take on.

"The family that is the foundation of social life is threatened in many places, following a concept of human nature that has proven defective."

President Francois Hollande pledged in his manifesto to legalise gay marriage. The draft law will be presented to his cabinet for approval on October 31.

The Pope is right. We have there a true challenge to take on.

Delaware outlaws spanking

A homeschooling site reports:

When Governor Jack Markell signed into law Senate Bill 234 on September 12, 2012, Delaware became the first state in the in the nation to effectively outlaw corporal discipline of children by their parents.

Sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Patricia M. Blevins (District 7), the legislation creates a definition of the term “physical injury” in the child abuse and neglect laws to include “pain.” Currently the law permits a parent to use force to punish a child for misconduct, but it prohibits any act that is likely to cause or does cause physical injury. By defining “physical injury” to include the infliction of pain on a child, spanking has become a crime in Delaware punishable by imprisonment.

Under the new law, a parent causing “physical injury” (e.g., pain) to a child under age 18 would be guilty of a class A misdemeanor and subject to one year in prison. A parent causing pain to a child who was 3 years of age or younger would be guilty of a class G felony and subject to two years in prison.

Home School Legal Defense Association opposed this bill as a violation of the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children, including the long-recognized right to administer reasonable corporal discipline. HSLDA worked with the Delaware Home Education Association and the Delaware Family Policy Council in an effort to bring about a defeat of this legislation.

The European nanny state is spreading to the USA. Part of Germany has banned male circumcision.

Spanking by public schools is legal in many states, and may be coming back to Florida:

OCALA, Fla. -

The idea of corporal punishment in schools may seem like something out of another era, but school officials in Marion County may bring the practice of paddling back. ...

"It was very effective the way we implemented it. We only did it on very small occasions, but it was for children who were chronic [misbehavers]," Ely said.

During her experience as principal, Ely said she saw firsthand that paddling was more effective than other forms of punishment, like suspension.

Despite many attempts, no study has shown that spanking is harmful or that any other form of discipline works any better.

This law is a direct attack on family autonomy. Without some clear-cut demonstrable harm, the state has no business telling parents how to rear kids.

Furthermore, this law opens up parents to false accusations. In the old law, physical injury could be documented by objective medical evidence of broken bones, burns, welts, or whatever. Under the new law, a parent can goto prison for "causing pain". Someday Delaware will expand that to "causing physical, psychological, or emotional pain". The vagueness of the law will be justified by saying that authorities need maximum discoretion for child protection. These laws are going to cause a lot more harm than good. There is no evidence that European spanking laws have done any good at all.

Virgin births not rare

National Geographic News reports:

"Virgin birth" among animals may not be a rare, last-resort, save-the-species stopgap after all.

For the first time, animal mothers, specifically pit vipers, have been discovered spawning fatherless offspring in the wild. More to the point, the snakes did so even when perfectly good males were around.

(Related: "'Virgin Birth' Record Broken by Hotel Shark.")

Among vertebrate animals that normally reproduce sexually, virlgin birth, or parthenogenesis, had been observed in only captive female snakes, Komodo dragons, birds, and sharks.

Get used to it, guys. Evolution is at work. Men are not needed anymore. At least not to sharks, giant lizards, pit vipers, and other snakes.

People who are ruining America

A faithful reader sent me this. Did you ever see a better list of people who ought to repent? I especially enjoy its use of the grocers apostrophe. It nicely distinguishes them from the high fullutent grammar freaks.

I might have to expand my prejudices. What is a P.K? An Emo?

I cannot cope with all the evils being caused by these groups. This blog just focuses on govt officials who abuse the law to bust up families.

The Jews are conspicuously absent from this list. I suspect that the reason is a combination of (1) the sign-maker was worried that he would be called a bigot if he included Jews; (2) the Jews serve as great examples of sinners and they make some great Hollywood movies; and (3) we need the Jews to occupy Israel in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy for the 2nd Coming, according to Christian Zionism. But I could be wrong.

Local shrink gets busted

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

CAPITOLA -- A 65-year-old psychologist was arrested Wednesday at his La Selva Beach home on suspicion of child sex abuse and child porn possession.

Capitola police received a report in January that Dr. John Visher possibly had committed lewd acts with a minor who was his client at the time. According to the criminal complaint, the incidents are alleged to have taken place sometime between September 2009 and December 2009, prosecutor Michael Gilman said.

The girl was 8 years old at the time.

During the course of the police investigation, a search warrant was executed at Visher's home and his office on Bay Avenue in Capitola.

Due to potential patient-therapist privilege issues, the court appointed a special investigator to review all items seized during the investigation. Members of the Sheriff's Office and the District Attorney's Office assisted.

Visher was arrested by Capitola police detectives Wednesday. He's charged with committing lewd acts with a child younger than 14, displaying harmful matter to a child and four counts of possession of child pornography.

I called Visher when I was looking for a psychologist for the court. I guess I dodged a bullet. His web site says:

Dr. Visher is retiring at the end of August 2012 after 3O years as a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. He wishes to thank all his former patients and professional associates for the most rewarding and meaningful career imaginable.

Amusingly, his page has a bad link to the APA code of ethics.

This story seems fishy to me. I don't believe that he suddenly became a child molester at age 62, and then was suddenly discovered 3 years later. Either he is being falsely accused, or his corrupt colleagues have been protecting him for years.

I wonder how psychologists like Bret Johnson, Ken Perlmutter, and Faren Akins continue to keep their licenses and testify in court, in spite of shortcomings that are obvious to everyone who deals with them. It is because the whole profession is corrupt. I really doubt that these shrinks are any better than Visher.

In research news:

Psychopaths have a remarkably poor sense of smell, according to a new study.

Researchers in Australia tested a theory that psychopathy - a severe personality disorder characterised by lack of empathy, antisocial behaviour and callousness - may be linked to impaired smell ability.

Both phenomena have been independently traced to dysfunction in part of the brain called the orbito-frontal complex (OFC).

Maybe the state should give olfactory tests with Sniffin Sticks before licensing psychologists and lawyers.

Toddler plays with gorrillas

How can a dad rear his daughter as he sees best with busybodies turning him into CPS? One strategy is to keep the videos secret for 20 years. Here is the gorilla story:

"I hope people who see this will ... take an interest in the work that we're doing at the Aspinall Foundation, and help gorillas in the wild," British animal park owner and conservationist Damian Aspinall intones over sun-flooded footage of his daughter Tansy -- a toddler at the time the video was shot -- interacting with gorillas in a straw-filled enclosure.

But much of the attention surrounding the 20-year-old video of Aspinall's daughter that was posted on YouTube last week has dealt, not with the lives of gorillas in the wild, but with the question of whether or not letting a child play with gorillas is safe.

ABC News reported that Aspinall "was afraid to release the video before for fear of backlash," and 85 percent of voters in a Today Show poll said they considered Aspinall's actions to be "irresponsible parenting."

The video does not look very safe to me, but I am not a gorilla expert and I do not believe the state should be micromanaging the judgment of fathers. He was wise to conceal the video for 20 years.

Parents get arrested for a lot less:

A Texas woman is suing an officer, a police department, and a neighbor after she was arrested for child endangerment, according to a Wednesday report.
Yahoo.com said Tammy Cooper was arrested and spent the night behind bars after a neighbor contacted police claiming her children were unsupervised while playing outside the house.

Cooper said she was watching the 6 and 9-year-old children from a lawn chair, but police reportedly took the neighbor’s word and arrested Cooper.

Apparently the kids were playing on a scooter in a cul-de-sac.

No father daughter dances

The LA Times reports:

Father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames -- those cherished hallmarks of Americana -- have been banned in a Rhode Island school district after they were targeted by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU, the self-proclaimed guardian of the nation's liberty, says such events violate the state's gender-discrimination law. The organization challenged their existence following a complaint from a single mom who said her daughter was prevented from attending a father-daughter dance in the Cranston Public Schools district. ...

For its part, the ACLU scoffed at the uproar, calling the change "old news" and defending its legal position in a statement laced with a touch of snark. Here it is, in part:

"... the school district recognized that in the 21st Century, public schools have no business fostering the notion that girls prefer to go to formal dances while boys prefer baseball games.

"This type of gender stereotyping only perpetuates outdated notions of 'girl' and 'boy' activities and is contrary to federal law.

"[Parent-teacher organizations] remain free to hold family dances and other events, but the time has long since passed for public school resources to encourage stereotyping from the days of Ozzie and Harriet.

There is a culture war against the Ozzie and Harriet family. The single moms, gays, atheist lawyers, etc. are winning.

Even the New Normal gay couple is too much like Ozzie and Harriet for some. That is the TV show about a gay couple where one man wears the pants and the other has uncontrollable urges to go shopping for baby clothes. The polyamorous bisexuals feel left out.

The San Fran. paper reports:

If one Pride celebration isn't enough for you, pack up your party hat and come to Berkeley.

Berkeley on Tuesday could become what appears to be the first city in the country to proclaim a Bisexual Pride Day, separate from the LGBT events that light up the calendar every June across the globe. ...

Bisexuals have complained for years that they're shunned by the LGBT mainstream, that they're considered fence-sitters or that they're not a legitimate part of the gay movement because they may occasionally be in relationships with the opposite sex.

"They think we have 'straight privilege,' and we hide in that," said Martin Rawlings-Fein, a director of the Bay Area Bisexual Network, a nonprofit educational and cultural group. "We get pushed to the side in the LGBT community and told we don't exist, that we're actually gay or lesbian and just not totally 'out.' "

In reality, more than 50 percent of the LGBT community considers itself bisexual to some degree, and sexuality for most people falls on a spectrum, Rawlings-Fein and others said.

Another myth is that bisexuals are polyamorous, he said. Just like people in any group, bisexuals can date many people or be in long-term monogamous relationships, he said.

The problem here is that the gay lobby has based their whole political strategy on convincing everyone that being gay is innate and not a choice. Their dirty little secret is that half of them are really bisexuals who insist that there preference is a choice.

Berkeley might seem very broadminded to have all these Pride celebrations, but they are not. They just canned their black school superintendent because they discovered that he once supported California Prop. 8, affirming marriage being between a man and a woman. Isn't he entitled to have his own personal views? He especially ought to be able to have a mainstream view that was in agreement with both the Republican and Democrat leaders at the time, including B. Obama and H. Clinton. I guess not. Everyone must be dedicated to destroying the Ozzie and Harriet family.

Reporting suspected abuse

Reuters reports:

United States speedskating coach Jae Su Chun has been placed on administrative leave after officials launched an investigation into his training methods following complaints from athletes.

Nineteen skaters, including five Olympic medalists, filed a grievance complaint about Chun, claiming verbal, physical and psychological abuse, U.S. media reported.

The complaints include accusations that he once slammed a skater against a wall and that he repeatedly insulted female skaters by telling them they were "fat" and that he also forced other skaters to train while they were recovering from injuries.

What did they expect when they hired a Korean skating coach? Was he supposed to immediately adopt American tolerance for fat girls?

Olympic athletes all train while recovering from injuries. Otherwise, injuries would set them back too much. You have to train continually to get to the Olympic level?

Maybe the coach has tyrannical methods that work better in Korea than here. But it is silly to complain about the verbal abuse of calling a female skater fat.

Reuters also reports:

The Boy Scouts of America could face a wave of bad publicity as decades of records of confirmed or alleged child molesters within the U.S. organization are expected to be released in coming weeks. ...

About 1,200 "ineligible volunteer" files dating from 1965 to 1985 are set to be publicly released under a June order by the Oregon Supreme Court, including some already reviewed by the newspaper. ...

The organization said it has maintained an internal "ineligible volunteer" file since at least 1919 to prevent suspected or confirmed child sex abusers from joining or re-entering its ranks. ...

The organization is facing more than 50 pending child sexual abuse cases in 18 states, according to Kelly Clark, another plaintiff attorney in the Oregon case.

The BSA is a private organization that has helped many millions of kids. It seems completely reasonable to me for them to keep their own secret scout blacklist, even if it meant discriminating against gays.

Greedy lawyers will try to squeeze millions of dollars out of the BSA by accusing it of a coverup, just as they have fleeced the Catholic Church and will fleece Penn State University. But the BSA has never stood in the way of anyone making a criminal complaint.

The upshot of these lawsuits is that no organization is going to be able to keep a private blacklist, and all suspicions will have to be reported to the govt. Govt agencies will keep their own blacklist of suspected abusers.

I think that the gay lobby ought to be in the forefront of complaining about these policies, because all gay men are (unfairly) suspected abusers.

I myself got put on one of these govt lists of suspected abusers. There is no due process. California does not even have any procedures for falsely accused men to be removed from the list. In the opinion of the bureaucrats who manage the list, it makes no sense to remove anyone from the list because it is just a list of suspected abusers. Thta is, if an innocent man is falsely accused of abuse, then he still belongs on the list of suspected abusers because the accusation made him a suspect.

State law requires teachers and medicos to report suspected abusers. In one case, a physician turned to an expert to evaluate whether a medical record was indicative of abuse, and the expert said no. The physician was criminally prosecuted for failing to report the suspected abuse. The DA said that he must have suspected abuse, or why else did he ask for expert opinion?

My opinions are in the minority here. This is another way in which the world has gone mad.

The new unfunny normal

I commented in July about a new TV sitcom called The New Normal. It is about a gay couple wanting a baby.

I was going to criticize it as anti-family, but the show is not worth it. It is stupid and not funny. It follows another equally stupid and unfunny sitcom called Go On.

The show does spend most of its time promoting gay male relationships, single motherhood, and interracial reproduction. The token conservative is repeatedly mocked. There is no real dad on the scene. But you cannot help feeling that they are embarking on a monstrous experiment that will turn out badly for everyone involved.

A famous gay actor says:

Gay actor Rupert Everett has caused an outcry with his comment that he "can't think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads". ...

Everett made the statement in an interview with Britain's Sunday Times Magazine, where he also pointed out the comment was "just my opinion", and suggested there were too many children on the planet anyway.

The gay couple wants a test-tube baby. Most people would probably be surprised that their foolish venture is even legal. Yes, it is legal. It is currently illegal in Costa Rica, but an international court is about to force them to legalize it.

The show is made by gays who say that they are educating the public about gays. The gay man who plays the role of the wife in the relationship is an actor who is gay in real life, and the role is that of a stereotypical effeminate gay man. I would expect the gays to complain about stereotyping. The actor's main claim to fame is that he starred in a role making fun of Mormons in a Broadway NY play.

One of the funnier jokes was that the bigoted grandma makes a wisecrack about what appears to be two gay men walking a baby. The enlightened single mom points out that it is a lesbian couple. The liberal lesson is that in the new normal families, you cannot tell who is a man or a woman anymore.

If you want to see it, watch it tonight. It may be canceled soon.

Another new TV sitcom, Guys with Kids, addresses fatherhood. One of the dads is sharing child custody with a crazy controlling ex-wife. The first episode did have some funny scenes.

End of Western Civilization

Reader Zorro writes:

1. The male of all higher species does not give birth.
2. The female of all higher species mates hypergamously.

These are the only two reasons patriarchies survive. Everything else is a variable.

This is not the end of men. This is the end of Western Civilization.

All matriarchies implode. Read a history book. Feminism is doing more to destroy Western Civilization than the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, all the Mafias, street gangs, serial killers, COMBINED! The Klan does not sit on Senate subcommittees. Fembots do. The neo-Nazis are not invited to address Congress. Fembots are. The Sicilian Mafia does not have private meetings with the President. Feminists do.

People, we are going away. The future is not female. It's male, and his name is Abdullah.

I don't know about the Abdullah part, but he is onto something. Leftist-feminist-egalitarians are changing our society, but basic human nature is not changing. They are undermining Western Civilization as we know it. Most people will not see the damage until it is too late to do anything about it.

I am pessimistic about political change for the better. People will have to see by bitter experience that matriarchies do not work.

Essay on who needs men

A reader asks about this Greg Hampikian article in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago:

Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species. ...

With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.

That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. ...

Greg Hampikian is a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University and the director of the Idaho Innocence Project.

I did cite this article when I posted a letter by McLanahan denying that her work ever showed that fathers were unnecessary.

While these articles are annoying, I do think that there is something to what they say. Changes in laws, culture, and social policy are marginalizing boys and men.

I noticed this when my kids were in elementary school. Almost everything the school did was oriented for girls, not boys. I did not mind because I had girls. But our society needs men also.

Here is a current example of parents being punished for letting boys be boys:

A Virginia mother was recently interrogated four times by police, and visited twice by social services, after neighbors spotted the mother's children playing in their own yard unsupervised, and decided to report the non-incident to local authorities. ...

Just a few days ago, for instance, Tammy Cooper of La Porte, Texas, was actually handcuffed and arrested for allowing her children to play outside on their motorized scooters in the family's cul-de-sac. Cooper was forced to spend the night in jail for this non-crime, despite the fact that she had been outside with her two children watching them the entire time.

While most new technologies do favor women, not all do. DNA paternity testing means that moms can no longer lie about who the dad is. Drug testing can be used against women who damage their babies by taking drugs during pregnancy. Other technologies like birth control and abortion favor women, but they also favor men by allowing more sexual relations without consequences.

To show how far we've come, the Democrat Convention had a 30yo privileged single woman whining about she wanted someone else to pay for her birth control pills, and praising Pres. Obama for sticking up for her when people made fun of her. We have a whole political party oriented towards feminist goals.

The Atlantic magazine, publisher of that end-of-men article below, has this followup article:

There are lots of statistics you could break out to illustrate the growing power of women in the economy. But if numbers don't do it for you, then just look at what's going on at Hooters.

After five years of falling sales, the restaurant chain is trying to revamp its fortunes by easing up on its unreconstructed frat-boy image and appealing more to female customers, all without ditching the waitresses parading around in skimpy t-shirts and shorts. Sound like a tough sell? I think so.

But according to Bloomberg Businessweek, CEO Terry Marks believes that by tweaking the menu with more salads and fresher ingredients, lightening up the beach shack decor, and adding space for a bit of nightlife, the company can at least make its franchises an acceptable destination for more wives and girlfriends. As of now, about two-thirds of their patrons are guys.

Not sure whether to laugh or to cry.

The End of Men

NY Times columnist (and Obama supporter) David Brooks writes Why Men Fail

Over the years, many of us have embraced a certain theory to explain men’s economic decline. It is that the information-age economy rewards traits that, for neurological and cultural reasons, women are more likely to possess.

To succeed today, you have to be able to sit still and focus attention in school at an early age. You have to be emotionally sensitive and aware of context. You have to communicate smoothly. For genetic and cultural reasons, many men stink at these tasks. ...

There’s even evidence that women are better able to adjust to divorce. Today, more women than men see their incomes rise by 25 percent after a marital breakup.

He refers to a Hanna Rosin article:

What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. ...

It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.

I commented on the article back in 2010, and you can also watch her TED talk on the subject. Her article has now been expanded to a book, and reviewed:

But Rosin’s real focus is the United States, and here she delivers a blizzard of numbers, studies, statistics. Consider: By 2009 there were as many women as men in the work force, and today the average wife contributes some 42.2 percent of her family’s income — up sharply from the 2 percent to 6 percent that women contributed in 1970. The future, Rosin says, looks brighter for women still. For every two men who will get a bachelor’s degree this year, there will be three women graduates. And even if they remain underrepresented at the top of just about everything, they have “started to dominate” in lower-profile professions like accounting, financial management, optometry, dermatology, forensic pathology and veterinary practices, among “hundreds of others.” ...

And so, a new matriarchy is emerging, run by young, ambitious, capable women who — faced with men who can’t or won’t be full partners — are taking matters into their own hands. For the poor, things are especially tough. One single mother Rosin interviewed fell asleep standing in the elevator of the community college where she was studying to get her degree — between caring for three children and working a night job. No wonder these women don’t want to get or stay married: unless a man can pull his weight, he is just another mouth to feed. But as Rosin herself points out, the new matriarchy is no feminist paradise. To the contrary: we have been here before with African-American women, and it is not a happy story.

Someday girls will be asking why their feminist grandmothers destroyed marriage as it had been known for generations.

California law on multiple mommies

I posted below about a new California law with Heather will soon have 5 mommies and How lesbians cheat dads. Jennifer Roback Morse writes:

A California bill allowing children to have three legal parents will not help children, but instead will unnecessarily complicate their lives. The supposed need for California’s SB 1476 flowed directly from the drive to normalize same sex parenting and recognize same sex unions. ...

It all sounds very nice and agreeable to allow people to make any parenting agreements they want on the front end of their relationships. But when a relationship breaks down, the long arm of the law will end up involved in the life of the family, on the back end, to resolve disputes. We are replacing the natural pre-political concept of biological parenthood with an artificial, government-created concept of parenthood that is entirely socially constructed. Instead of the government simply recognizing and recording the pre-political reality of biological parenthood, we are giving agents of the state the authority to construct parenthood, all in the best interests of the child, of course. ...

Triple-parenting and genderless marriage are destructive policies. They must be stopped. SB 1476 has passed both houses of the California Assembly. Governor Brown has the power to veto or to sign this ill-conceived law. He must decide, one way or the other, by September 30.

She is right. Brown is likely to sign this disaster.

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that the gay lobby is pushing for some sort of libertarian movement to keep govt busybodies out of the bedroom. If that were true, they would not get any opposition from me. It is not.

They gay lobby is bringing us one of the most anti-libertarian anti-family laws California has ever passed. This law gives judges the power to redefine families as they see fit. Not even the Commies attempted anything like this.

Judge takes joint custody seriously

A Hollywood TV actress got mad at her German husband, refused to put his name on their second kid's birth certificate, filed for divorce, and schemed to get him deported so that she would not have to share joint custody with him. So now the LA family court judge ruled for joint custody anyway. ABC News reports:

Enter Judge Theresa Beaudet of California Superior Court, Los Angeles County who, as it turns out, presided over a similar type of case before. Judge Beaudet was left to determine with which parent the children should reside. Custody would be “joint,” but that’s somewhat moot when one parent lives across the Atlantic.

In all custody cases, the court must look to what is in the “best interest” of the children, a squishy standard that dictates that the children’s welfare must come first. There was no suggestion that Giersch was a better parent, just an exiled one. The two choices before the court: New York, where the kids had lived for much of their lives, made friends and had doctors, or the small town of Mougins, France, where Giersch’s mother apparently has a home.

Put aside the fact that neither of the parents are French citizens, both of these children were born and raised in the United States. Amazingly, the legal question was whether the children of a loving American mother should be forced to live in a country where neither parent has citizenship because their father had done something that made him illegible to remain in the United States. Not surprisingly, an independent lawyer retained to represent the children’s interests sided with Rutherford, arguing that the best interest of the children would be served by remaining in New York.

However, Judge Beaudet disagreed and ordered the move: “The best interests of the children will be served because the relocation plan for France is the only plan that offers the possibility of nearly equal parenting time while Giersch can not return to the U.S.”

Lockyer in drug trouble again

The LA Times reports:

Nadia Lockyer, the former Bay Area supervisor and estranged wife of California's state treasurer, will be allowed to visit her 9-year-old following her drug arrest in Orange County last month.

An Orange County Superior Court judge granted Lockyer visitation rights following a brief court hearing Monday.

Lockyer, a former Alameda County supervisor, was arrested by Orange police on Aug. 28 after a tipster told authorities that the 41-year-old woman was in possession of drugs, prosecutors said.

At the time, Lockyer was living with her son at a relative’s home in Orange. When police arrived, they found drug paraphernalia and observed that Lockyer appeared to be under the influence of methamphetamine, prosecutors said.

On Monday, a judge granted a modified protective order allowing Lockyer to call her son and also to visit with him as long as the boy’s father is present, said deputy district attorney Andrew Katz.

Bill Lockyer is the Democrat California state Treasurer, and former state attorney general. I posted on them back in Feb. and March, when Mrs. Lockyer ran off with a meth addict, made sex tapes with him, and then accused him of beating her up.

Nadia Lockyer is also a Democrat, lawyer, and feminist. She accused her husband of setting her up on the drug charges, but withdrew the accusation.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports:

Bill Lockyer filed for divorce in July, citing "irreconcilable differences" and seeking joint physical and legal custody of their son. His spokesman, Tom Dresslar, last week said that "Bill hopes Nadia has a successful recovery, and he also wants to make clear that Diego is living with him in the Bay Area and he's safe and sound."

Dresslar said Monday that Bill Lockyer agrees with the court's decision allowing his estranged wife to talk to and see their son.

He seems quite tolerant of the woman who betrayed him over and over again.

I not posting this just because it is a scandal. These are politicians who helped bring us the screwed up anti-family policies California has. Here is a 2010 story:

Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 2 candidate Nadia Lockyer today announced she has the endorsement of Deborah Roderick Stark, whom she described as “a nationally recognized expert in child and family policy” and a First Five Alameda County Commission member.

“As a mother, former adult caregiver, and someone who deals with families everyday as the Executive Director of the Alameda County Family Justice Center, Nadia understands the needs of families and what it takes to keep communities healthy. Nadia Lockyer will be a voice for the children and families of Alameda County when she will serve on the Board of Supervisors, representing the people of District 2,” Stark said in the news release.

The news release delves deeper into both women’s professional bona fides, but doesn’t mention that Lockyer, 38, is the wife of state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, 68, or that Stark, 43, is the wife of Rep. Pete Stark, 78.

So Mrs. Lockyer was running a "Family Justice Center" where she helped women make phony domestic violence accusations in order to win child custody. These people are evil.

Psychology professor punished

There is a new report on a Harvard psychologist found guilty of academic fraud:

Among the finding were that Hauser:

Fabricated data and also misrepresented data in graphs
Falsified the coding of monkey behavior observed in trials
Misrepresented how data were coded in a paper ...

What amazes me is the leniency of the “punishment.” Making data up is the primary sin that a scientist can commit. I expected that, at the least, Hauser would be banned from ever receiving federal grant money. He also ran the chance of going to jail. But what did the ORI do? Virtually nothing: a slap on the wrist.

I have criticized professor Hauser before, along with other academic misconduct, but I don't want to pile on here. He has been punished enough.

Okay, he miscoded some monkey behavior. Has he taken anyone's kids away? I believe that this man is still better than 99% of the psychologists out there.

Essay on why fathers matter

Judith Shulevitz writes a NY Times essay trying to figure out why fathers matter:

I visited the Mount Sinai Medical Center laboratory of Dr. Eric Nestler, a psychiatrist who did a discomfiting study on male mice and what he calls “social defeat.” His researchers put small normal field mice in cages with big, nasty retired breeders, and let the big mice attack the smaller mice for about five minutes a day. If a mean mouse and a little mouse were pried apart by means of a screen, the torturer would claw at the screen, trying to get at his victim. All this subjected the field mouse to “a horrendous level of stress,” Dr. Nestler told me. This process was repeated for 10 days, with a different tormentor placed in each cage every day. By the time the torture stopped, about two-thirds of the field mice exhibited permanent and quantifiable symptoms of the mouse equivalents of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The researchers then bred these unhappy mice with normal females. When their pups grew up, they tended to overreact to social stress, becoming so anxious and depressed that they wouldn’t even drink sugar water. They avoided other mice as much as they could.

Dr. Nestler is not sure exactly how the mouse fathers’ trauma communicates itself to their offspring. It may be via sperm, or it may be through some more complicated dance of nature and nurture that involves sperm but also other factors. When instead of letting the “defeated” mice mate, Dr. Nestler’s researchers killed them, harvested their sperm and impregnated the female mice through artificial means, the offspring were largely normal.

Weird experiment. So the tortured male mice still have good sperm, but if the females sense that they are losers, then the offspring will be all screwed up somehow.

So dads matter because bad things happening to dads can affect their kids. The essay gives some other evidence, but for such things, the much more common harms come from the mom. For example, if the mom smokes and drinks during the pregnancy, there is a much more direct harm caused.

Reached my empathy limit

Yeah, I reached my empathy limit a long time ago. From Non Sequitur.

Sailboat rescue on news

The top local news story last evening was this:

(CNN) -- Authorities say they have rescued two young children who were allegedly abducted from their California home and taken by their father on a stolen sailboat.

The stolen sailboat was spotted sailing off the Monterey Peninsula on Friday, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The father, Christopher Maffei, was taken into custody, the Coast Guard said.

Earlier Friday, authorities said the 41-foot sailboat, dubbed the Unleashed, was spotted between Pillar Point and Monterey and was being followed by Coast Guard aircraft.

Maffei, 43, is accused of abducting his 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son from the South San Francisco home of the mother, Jennifer Hipon, on Tuesday, according to police.

The children's parents had been involved in some type of custody situation, according to South San Francisco Police Department Sgt. Bruce McPhillips, but he said he did know the specifics. Maffei did not live with the children.

It should not be a crime for a dad to take his kids out on a boat. I don't know the full story here, but the news media treated this as if the police and Coast Guard had rescued the kids from a life-threatening stranger abduction. They were just sailing with their dad, against the wishes of a bitter and possessive ex-wife.

Update: A reader questions whether there is a custody dispute that is part of this story. Of course there is. A guy going for an unauthorized joy ride on a yacht does not make national news. This even make a UK story:

She told reporters that she was at a courthouse filing custody documents on Tuesday when Maffei went to her house and took the children from her elderly mother.

MSNBC reports:

The children's mother, Jennifer Hipon, was anxiously awaiting her childrens' safe return at her South San Francisco home. She said that Maffei, whom she had dated in the past, had recently returned from Thailand, and had wanted to see his children.

She agreed, but added that he had seemed increasingly anxious to be near the kids. His zeal to see the children scared her enough to seek a restraining order against him, she told NBC Bay Area on Friday. She was at the courthouse in Redwood City on Tuesday seeking that order, when she said Maffei went to her home on James Court about 3 p.m.

So this whole story started when the dad wanted to see his kids, and the mom gave him the run-around. He went to see his kids while the mom ran off to court to get an order preventing him from seeing his kids.

The core problem is family courts that issue orders preventing dads from seeing their kids. If the mom understood in the first place that she had a legal obligation to let the dad see their kids, then none of this would have happened.

Update: One of the San Fran TV stations had this story again leading the 11pm news. They treated it as a huge rescue story. There was no rescue. The kids were safe with their dad on a yacht, even if the dad had not done the paperwork for renting the yacht.

Reducing male testosterone

Here is some new anti-male science propaganda:

Researchers studied 362 Filipino fathers of the same age. They took testosterone samples in 2005 and 2009. And they found that dads who slept next to junior had a third less testosterone than before, compared to dads who dozed alone.

The researchers can't be sure that sleeping next to the baby actually causes that decline. Could be that dads with less testosterone are just more likely to cuddle with the kid. But they say disruptions in a man's sleep—a baby's cry, for example—are known to cut testosterone production.

Either way, the authors say, less testosterone is probably better for baby.

Huhh? They suggest that only de-masculinized men should be dads.

If sleeping with a baby really reduces testosterone, and less testosterone is really better for the baby, then we should tell dads to sleep with their babies. That would be the logical conclusion. But that is absurd, and no one is saying that. So the premises must be wrong.

On the other hand, I do feel as if my testosterone has dropped after watching the Democrat Convention all week. It was the adult equivalent of crying babies. They had speeches from Lilly Ledbetter and Sandra Fluke. The most ridiculous complaint from my 2yo daughter made more sense than the whining from these women.

The Democrats have become the party of lawyers and whiny bitches. They are also the party of gays, Jews, psychologists, and food stamp collectors, but the party had the good sense to keep them off the main stage.

College hockey players apparently have high testosterone. ABC News reports:

Boston University's men's ice hockey team has come under scathing criticism for an alleged culture of "sexual entitlement" and alcohol abuse. ...

But the task force found that the team's "elevated social status" on campus led to "frequent sexual encounters with women absent an emotional relationship or ongoing commitment."

Yeah, that's what happens when girls throw themselves at high-testosterone boys. What are they going to do -- make the boys sleep with crying babies to lower their testosterone levels? I am afraid that they would lose too many hockey games, and that is more important than the emotional relationship.

UK men have lost their rights

English men are lucky that they are still allowed to have testicles. The UK MailOnline newspaper reports:

A British woman is campaigning for the legal right to veto her husband's choice to donate sperm, it has emerged.

The unidentified complainant says her partner volunteered samples of his semen to a registered clinic after becoming stressed by the birth of their child, reported MailOnline.

Disgruntled, the mother-of-one from Surrey has contacted the Human Fertilisation And Embryology Authority, arguing that women across the UK should be able to deny their spouse's free will on the matter - because sperm is a 'marital asset'. ...

Personally, I suspect this woman is angry because she cannot trap her partner. Forever, getting pregnant has been a trump card used by some women in the so-called gender war. But suddenly there's a loophole.

I'm sorry, this is not a reason to change the law; to compromise a patient's right to confidentiality or to deny infertile couples the opportunity to have a family.

Not least because men already suffer from insufficient rights when it comes to paternity.

Men are regularly denied access to their children (but forced to financially support them), yet - even when they obtain visitation orders via the courts - they rarely get them enforced.

Likewise, look at the scores of men who are victims of paternity fraud. The same men who request DNA testing for a newborn, only to be denied it unless the mother consents. Where is there fairness in that? ...

Last year, in Australia, a man's name was taken off the birth certificate of his daughter - simply because the mother and her female partner wanted to erase any trace of his (crucial) involvement.

Stripping men of any more paternal rights would be inhumane.

This is where we are headed, I'm afraid. Just listen to the feminized politicians at the Democrat Convention.

What family autonomy means

The NY Times has a science article that reminded me of a basic liberty principle:

Founded in 1660, the Royal Society is the world’s oldest continuous scientific society. Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and many more came together in a spirit of revolutionary if at times eccentric inquiry. Magic and alchemy greatly fascinated the society’s founders.

King Charles II granted the society a royal charter in 1662, and for centuries it hitched a ride on the back of Britain’s imperial ambitions.

It is funny how Europeans think that rights and authority comes from royalty, so even these rationalist scientists needed the king's blessing on their society.

Americans can be just as blind when it comes to family court and parental rights. They just cannot grasp the concept of parents having rights to direct the upbringing of their kids, even if divorced. They seem to think that any such family must be under the supervision of a governmental authority, analogously to the Europeans feel they need the authority of a king.

An example of this narrow-minded thinking was the British baptism case I posted a month ago. I expect the royalty-loving British to want a judge to decide whether their child gets baptized. But to my shock, even the American libertarian lawyers could not understand that the question is none of the business of any judge or any other govt authority. The parents should have autonomy over such decisions, even if they disagree.

Disputed child dies

I received this sad news:

Hello,

I am very sad to inform you that my great loving intelligent 10 year-old son Misha Byrne passed away on August 22nd at 11.10 pm. Misha succumbed to Acute Lymphoid Leukemia with Philadelphia Chromosome.

A wake ("Panihida" in Russian) will be held at All Saints Russian Christian Orthodox church in Burlingame on Tuesday September 4th at 6:00 p.m. The funeral service will follow the next day, Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. at the same church, where Misha was baptized. The Church is located at: 744 El Camino Real, Burlingame, CA 94010, phone: 650-343-7935 or 650-430-9805.

Internment will be at the Serbian Cemetery near San Francisco following the funeral. This is the same cemetery that my Godfather Boris Bogart and the parents of Misha's Godfather are buried. The address is: 1801 Hillside Blvd., Colma, CA 94014, Phone: 650-755-2453.

We would love for you to attend any and all services.

Instead of flowers, we really would appreciate a donation towards the considerable costs of laying Misha to rest in the manner prescribed by his favorite Church and wonderful Russian culture and traditions Misha loved without limits. I have set up for PayPal account to receive donations for this purpose via the internet, at https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/send-money-online, my email: olgacherry@yahoo.com, or to the following address: 262 Meadow Pine Place, San Jose, CA 95125, USA.

Thank you very much.
Sincerely, Olga Chervyakova, Misha's mama.

My special thanks to:

Misha's babushka, Valentina Chervyakova who he grow up with and she always stayed by his side,
all support from Russian side of Misha's family, who couldn't make to USA yet,
All Saints church which has never stopped helping Misha, babushka and I with many details, logistics, support and much needed services donated by Archpriest Stefan Pavlenko and his staff,
Misha's Godfather Boris Parr who continues to help all of us, as does my Godmother Olga Parr,
Father Hermagen and Nativity of the Holy Virgin Russian Christian Orthodox Church from Menlo Park, CA
Misha's Godmother Anya Richter and her family continue helping us,
Father Vasily and St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Saratoga, CA,
Holy Virgin Cathedral, Joy of all Who Sorrow, San Francisco, CA,
Brookside Convalescent Center, San Mateo, CA,
Serbian cemetery, Colma, CA.

Thank you to all who never stopped being with us in our best and worse times in our lives. Thank you for your love and true care for Misha.

Sincerely, mama Olga.

This boy's story has been in the newspaper and on this blog. It is a sad story. He was taken away from his mom because of bruises that were later diagnosed as leukemia. Her mom spent all her time and money for about 5 years trying to get the boy back, but was limited to supervised visits.

I want to mention the role played by psychologist and lawyer Faren R. Akins. He is on his own personal campaign to destroy the family.

(For my readers who like to ask, Akins is not gay or Jewish, as far as I know.)

As Misha was dying of leukemia, Akins filed an affidavit to oppose him seeing his mom. Without examining the mom, he declared that she might have a personality disorder such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or Dependent Personality Disorder.

I posted below that there is no definition of a mental disorder. More importantly, there is no evidence that interventions by someone like Akins do anyone any good.

Akins has weird personal prejudices about parenting. He is ideologically opposed to spanking. Worse, he is opposed to parental rights and believes that the most trivial complaints justify court micro-management and even termination of parental rights.

I do believe that court experts should be publicly accountable when they present bogus testimony in court. He personally, dishonestly, and maliciously used his reputation to try to prevent this poor sick dying boy from seeing his mom for the last several years of his life.

No definition of a mental disorder

Psychiatrists and psychologists act as if there is something scientific about their diagnosis, but read this Natural News rant:

The medical cartel, one of a handful of evolving super-cartels that strive for more power every day, is rife with so much fraud it's astounding. In the psychiatric arena, for example, an open secret has been bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of "research."

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these "disorders," are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for 2 years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: "Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness." (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, "Scientist At Work," Daniel Goleman called Frances "Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment..."

Well, sure. If you're sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you're right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired's Greenberg and said the following:

"There is no definition of a mental disorder. It's bullshit. I mean, you just can't define it."

Here is the 2010 Wired article, if you want to check the context of the quote.

Attacking hate groups

Readers have asked for evidence that gays and Jews promote anti-family policies. Wash. Post columnist Dana Milbank writes:

Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

The day after the gay rights group’s alert went out, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters and, according to an FBI affidavit, proclaimed words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” — and shot the security guard. Corkins, who had recently volunteered at a gay community center, was carrying a 9mm handgun, a box of ammunition and a backpack full of Chick-fil-A — the company whose president recently spoke out against gay marriage. ...

Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. But both are reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions, on issues from stem cells to euthanasia.

I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church. The center says the FRC “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science.” Exhibit A in its dossier is a quote by an FRC official from 1999 (!) saying that “gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”

Offensive, certainly. But in the same category as the KKK? ...

The National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, is right to say that the attack “is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end.”

He is right. The FRC is not a hate group. Even if it made a mischaracterization of a movement back in 1999, so what? There are liberal groups who lie all the time.

There are feminist groups who often devalue fathers and other men. They deny the facts and promote policies harmful to children. Why aren't they hate groups?

There is currently an edit war over the Wikipedia articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Family Research Council. They want to say that the SPLC has the endorsement of the FBI, that it conducts spying for the FBI, and that the FRC is a hate group.

This is crazy. The SPLC is the hate group. It is run by Jews who hate Christians and promote ethnic animosity. They are also racist and anti-American.

Steve Sailer comments on this quote:

"To be against gay marriage, at least in the views of most liberals ..., is to disqualify oneself from society as a hateful bigot."

I think that exemplifies the main driving force of modern liberalism. It's not intellectual. ...

Gay marriage, for instance, is a trivial issue in real world terms, but it has become incredibly important to liberals precisely because it brands huge numbers of their fellow citizens as Dalits for them to hate and feel morally superior to.

Dalits are low-caste Indians.

Again, gays and Jews are only about 2% each of the population, and they are not all anti-family. But most of them are liberals, and their leaders are carrying out a hate campaign against the family.

I would not care about same-sex marriage if it only involved what 2% of the population does in private. But the movement is out to destroy the idea that kids have a right to a mom and a dad, and they will conduct a hate campaign against anyone who disagrees.

An atheist site

Welcome to the sixteenth installment in my series where I ask the men who are leaders in the secular communities to speak out against the hate we have seen primarily directed at women. ... Phil speaks to us about the recent uptick in the amount and intensity of online sexism and thuggery and explains how and why each individual must fight to stop it.

Really? Atheists hate women? I doubt it.

If you chase down the complaints, you will find a little anecdote about how a nerdy atheist guy clumsily asked a nerdy atheist woman out on an elevator, and the woman did not know what to say, and later threw a feminist tantrum about it. Atheists conferences have been filled with discussions about whether someone acted with bad manners.

These stories are much too trivial to be called hate. Meanwhile, there are organized groups of feminists, leftists, lawyers, psychologists, and others who are systematically putting men in jail, taking their kids away, and destroying the family. Those are the hate groups.

If the Christian pro-family groups are hate groups, then surely the NY Times is a much bigger hate group. It recently published two anti-dad articles that misrepresented the research to draw anti-dad conclusions. I criticized one of the articles here. Here is the letter to the editor from the researcher:

The Importance of Dads
Published: August 29, 2012
To the Editor:

Two recent opinion articles cite my research to support their claims that fathers aren’t necessary for a thriving household (“In Defense of Single Motherhood,” by Katie Roiphe, Aug. 12, and “Men, Who Needs Them?,” by Greg Hampikian, Aug. 25). That does not fairly describe my work.

Income security is very important. But fathers in most cases are critical contributors to family income. And income security is only half the story.

Emotional security — which children develop from living in stable families where they can form lasting relationships with adults who stick around for the long run — is also important. Stable homes with one parent are rare. More often in single-mother households, children meet, attach and then say goodbye to men who are only temporarily connected to the family.

Two parents committed to each other and to raising a child together are more likely to provide the economic and emotional security children need. That large numbers of fathers cannot provide economic and emotional security constitutes a serious social problem.

SARA McLANAHAN
Princeton, N.J., Aug. 28, 2012

The writer is a professor of sociology and public affairs and director of the Center for Research on Child Well-Being at Princeton University.

Of course this feminist professor ends up trashing dads in the last sentence anyway. She has spent most of her career publishing bogus attacks on dads.

Notice also how her letter is carefully worded to be acceptable to the gay lobby. She says, "Two parents committed to each other and to raising a child together". The research actually favors two parents raising their own child.

McLanahan refuses to put any of her papers on her web site, but I found one of her papers:

To summarize briefly, we find that children who grow up apart from their biological fathers do less well, on average, than children who grow up with both natural parents. They are less likely to finish high school and attend college, less likely to find and keep a steady job, and more likely to become teen mothers.

So far, so good. That is what all the studies show. Kids who are reared by single moms or step-fathers do not do as well.

The problem occurs when she injects her own feminist theorizing. Instead of simply arguing that dads should have better child custody decisions, she argued that dads should pay more money and be jailed more if they don't:

Why would this be so? Why would the loss of a biological father reduce a child's chances of success? We argue that when fathers live apart from their child, they are less likely to share their incomes with the child, and, consequently, mothers and children usually experience a substantial decline in their standard of living when the father moves out. ...

Stronger child support enforcement may also redress the other two factors that determine children's resilience in the face of family disruption: the loss of parental resources and the loss of community. Fathers who are required to pay child support are likely to demand more time with their children and a greater say in how they are raised. Such demands should lead to more social capital between the father and child. Similarly, greater father involvement is likely to lead to less residential mobility, retarding the loss of social capital in the community.

This is crazy. The whole child support enforcement scheme is designed so that the more the dads pay, the less they see their kids.

If it is really fair for the SPLC to call the FRC a hate group, then it is also fair to call the NY Times, McLanahan, and others purveyors of hate speech. They are advocating policies that put good dads in jail, to the detriment of their kids. The FRC is not advocating harm to anyone.

Overzealous child porn prosecution

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on a prosecution of a local Norwegian physics grad student:

A man will stand trial on felony charges that he took sexually explicit photographs of his young daughter, a judge ruled Thursday.

Alexander Morisse, 34, was arrested after the girl's mother found photographs of the then 4-year-old girl in a trash bin on a laptop computer he'd given to his daughter.

The mother, who is separated from Morisse, reported the images to Berkeley police in April but because the photos were taken while the family was living in Santa Cruz, it's being prosecuted here.

Morrise and his attorney, Kellin Cooper, argued Morrise took the photos because the child had been extremely curious about her body. Morisse told police he took the photos because "I was trying to facilitate her curiosity about her body in the best way I knew at the time."

Friends described him in testimony this week as a loving and devoted father, and told Judge Rebecca Connolly that they didn't believe he had any sort of sexual intent or purpose in taking the pictures. Cooper said both Morisse and the girl's mother were very open people and nudity was common in the household.

I don't know about Norway, but lots of people think nothing of letting a 4yo kid run around the house nude and taking private pictures. These pictures were not posted or distributed in any way. So how did the cops get involved? You guessed, a child custody dispute.

Taking a photograph of one's own child naked is not necessarily illegal, but rather, is based on several factors including the image's focal point and whether the image is intended to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.

Prosecutor Michael Gilman argued the photographs clearly constituted child pornography.

"I'll submit this is a unique household and this is a unique case," he said, but maintained the images were "objectively pornographic."

Cooper contended the girl's mother reported the photographs to police to assist her pending custody battle with Morisse. The mother denied that in testimony Thursday, and said she believed Morisse posed a threat to her daughter and that was why she reported it.

No, it is not a unique household, not a unique case, and the images were not objectively pornographic. As the article explains, there is no objective standard for child porn. It depends on the intended response in the viewer, and that is subjective by definition, and not objective.

The paper also had another story about a local man facing child porn charges based on some images found in his browser. He also had no idea that he was doing anything wrong.

Traditionally, a criminal prosecution requires mens rea, meaning that the accused has to understand that he was doing something wrong.

I have not see the images at issue here, but my gut tells me that both me are completely innocent. No one has any control over the browser cache. I look at mine, and there are all sorts of pictures that I have never seen. The browser puts them there as its algorithms try to anticipate the user.

There is nothing wrong with taking a picture of your own nude 4yo kid. I never did, just because I heard horror stories like this.

Apparently we have a sick and overzealous prosecutor who cannot look at a toddler picture without thinking perverted things. He is the one who should be in prison.

Joint equal child custody should be automatic, so parents do not have incentives to make these sorts of allegations. The destructive nature of these allegations is far worse than the actual images, even if the lewd do have some sort of lewd interpretation.

Someday this poor soul will go back to Norway, and this will be his story: I came to America to get a doctoral degree in physics. My wife hung out with a bunch a Santa Cruz Berkeley lesbians, became a feminist, and filed for divorce. To get sole custody of our daughter, she reported some innocent toddler pictures that were on an old computer. I served 2 years in prison and had to register for the rest of my life as a sex offender. I never got my PhD and was deported. America is not the land of the free.