Romance - meet Recession.

12 Step Recovery Program for Women dating Wall Street Financiers (aka FBF's or Financial Boy Friends). The financial meltdown is hurting everyone - even Cupid has had to downsize. Gold diggers and others are finding it hard to stay around for Act II of that "for richer or poorer" shtick. The solution? Get together with your girlfriends and talk about how the schmuck isn't taking out to dinner or on those intimate weekend getaways anymore.

One woman wrote after recounting a breakup. “This recession just bought everyone an extra two years of the single life.” Another, seemed chagrined, after her boyfriend told her to “grow up” and stop “complaining about vacations and dinner” since he had to “fire 20 people by the end of the week.”

Uber RadFem - Ms. Germaine GREER

I tripped across this blog-piece purely by accident - but it was a pleasure to read. Having not read read anything since The Female Eunuch, which established the first beach-head for academic radical feminism, I was intrigued with her most recent effort "Shakespeare's Wife". The article is a profile of Ms. GREER at a 2008 lecture/book signing in England for this book attended by this doyenne of the local (Oxford?) intelligentsia. After dragging her young daughters to attend a lecture by this icon of modern feminism, they witnesses GREER's casual humiliation of another young teen girl ahead of them in line. Barbie 2 - RadFems 0.

The incident perfectly encapsulates GREER as a "equal-opportunity" misanthrope, still comforted by her victimization and smug about her superior choices. Not having children is so liberating that way!

J.E - RIP Jan 19, 1999

This is a memorial to a friend of mine - J.E. (Jim, but initialized to protect his family. I may open this up a a future time.) who took his own life on Jan 19, 1999.   We had been good pals in High School (Gr 9-11) and he was a very smart fellow.  He left to attend an enriched program in UTS (University of Toronto Schools) at that time and we did not reconnect until I had finished University and he was entering a Master of Law Program.  We continued to keep in touch on and off but managed a closer connection about 10 years later about the time thing began to unravel for him.

He had lost his licence to practice law after he was charged and found guilty of Sexual Harassment from a complaint by a female law colleague.    It also concurred with treatment for a supposed bi-polar disorder.  The drugs proscribed were powerful and seemed more of a problem than the diagnosis - which to me seemed misdirected although I am not a psychiatric professional.  His family had similar concerns but seemed just as lost in finding any medical professional they could trust.

At the outset it seemed incredible that a female lawyer would resort in such a heavy-handed manner to such a minor concern - perhaps over-zealous phone-calling and emailing the object of his attention - but the law was still fairly new and untested.  But it also appeared the Crown relished making an example of one of its own.  The supposed diagnosis and treatment appeared to be inculpable to the decision rather than the opposite - although I am not certain it was ever even mentioned in court.

After that, Jim had trouble getting work and although he tried to put a good face on it - definitely fell into despair.  After a few years he tried to get retraining as a seniors LPN - but even that seemed tarnished by his supposedly confidential mental diagnosis and criminal charge.  Social ostracism alone was harsher in those days as we were all still new to this form of feminist orthodoxy but he was definitely in a personal crisis.

He called me in the New Year of 1999 to chat - something he did not do very often - and we had a broad ranging talk about nothing I recall in particular.   I was working hard and supporting my wife with young child at the time - and I was probably unable to talk of much else.

A few weeks later I got a call from his sister - asking what we talked about as she broke the news that he had suddenly disappeared and she was following up with his last known calls.  Even though I racked my brains - I could think of nothing to tell her.  About a month later she emailed me his obituary and funeral notice.  I called and got the lowdown on his grim end.

He had visited a lake near his home that we used to play hockey upon as kids in winter - but only after his Dad had demonstrated the ice was good with a long tree kept especially for this annual "lake safety test".  Late some evening/early some morning Jim ventured out on to the frozen, snowy lake, used an axe to cut a hole in the ice - and jumped in.  They found his body about a week later.

I think of him often - and wish I was able to stop the inevitable - somehow.

How to neutralize a "frothing at the mouth" opponent

One never knows when you will called upon to face a hostile opponent or interviewer. Most of us are not well versed in such encounters and do poorly. Often these ideologues started in the media or have much more media experience/training. This segment provides an interesting example of how to effectively spar in such an encounter.

Some things to remember:

1) Show, don't explain
2) Research opponent - they will frequently "telegraph" their message in advance
3) A microphone will more often catch a clear, uninterrupted, calm and evenly delivered voice over a ranting, interjected tirade.
4) Keep message short, punchy, stay on it and close the circle at the finish. (i.e And so we will always support the safety for our children!)

Here is an example.

Newborn child found in barn - Police and CPS investigate

What a great Xmas article! Good for a laugh, and a cry were it not so plausible.

My thanks really goes out to Walter for this piece and all the other work he does throughout the year - on his blog and keeping up-to-date his massive website www.Fathersforlife.org on Men's Issues and Rights. It is a most valuable resource and I am very grateful for it (and him).

I wish him and everyone a Merry Xmas.

The Boys Project

I came across this very interesting via Glenn Sacks blog. Dr. Judith KLEINFELD is the director of The Boys Project, whose mission is to help young males develop their capabilities and reach the potential that their families and teachers know they have. It has resources for teachers.

A large, sullen, poorly educated group of men will not keep the nation vital in the twenty-first century. The nation needs the energy, initiative, and ambition of its young men as well as its young women.

Dr KLEINFELD, a psychologist is a author of popular article "The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls" and an critic of a legislation changing report published in 1992 titled "How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education" by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She insists that the idea that girls are shortchanged by schools has become the common wisdom-what people take for granted, without a thought concerning whether or not it is true. As evidence of this fallacy, she quotes a nationally representative longitudinal study of the high school class of 1992, discussed by Dwyer and Johnson. It was found that high-school girls outdistanced boys in making the honor roll, in getting elected to a class office, and in receiving writing awards and other academic honors.

But 1992 was a long time ago, and the holes in this diatribe have been growing wider each year.
So it is perhaps not a surprise that in May 2008, the AAUW revisited the state of gender education and guess what - we have made great strides! The crisis is over! For everyone!

However, this article by Leonard SAX points out that women enrollment in Science Technololgy Engineering and Math (STEM) has actually declined over the past 20 years. He believes that the real gender crisis is not ability but motivation. Women remain more likely than men to major in art history and journalism; men are more likely than women to major in computer science, physics, and engineering. That is the reason for differences in earnings - utility.

The issue is that AAUA wants to force girls (and boys) into stereotypical roles that they do not aspire to. Gender differences do exist and they matter.

Do Judges make justice unaffordable or not?

Family Law is a mess. Only the courts do not recognize it.

On Nov 18, Karen SELICK wrote this op-ed piece critical of a recent Supreme Court refusal to hear an appeal of a Ontario Family Court decision that over-rode a pre-nuptial contract because of inaccurate property values.

On Nov 24, John T. SIRTASH, counsel to Bnai B'rith Canada Family Law responded with "Don't blame the judges" - which I took as an odd instance of flattery except he has been a lawyer for 27 years and so is clearly angling for his appointment to the bench.

I fully support Karen's points. It was irrelevant that the husband-to-be misrepresented in good faith the "true value"1 of his assets/property owned before he agreed to marry his wife-to-be (the gold-digger) as she signed a pre-nup disavowing any claim to such assets/property. Further he made it clear that he would not have made a marriage proposal otherwise.

Mr. LeVan was happy to remain in a committed common-law relationship with this women. However in a common-law relationship - unlike formal matrimony2 - she could not have gained any rights to any of his assets/property owned before they began their relationship.

Comments in both are worth reading, especially Karen SELICK's rejoinder to SIRTASH on these points in following the "Comment" section.


Footnotes:
1) Partially due to cost (estimated at $10,000) the husband did not bother to provide an "official" valuation of his personal business interests. Eventually these assets were proven to be worth $5.3 million and so obviously he was a wealthy man. His failure to provide an accurate valuation was construed as a "material" misrepresentation in the pre-nuptial contract. As the final indignity the husband was charged $500,000+ and the wife $244,753 for appraisals of both parties assets.

2) Common Law relationships are governed by Provincial Statutes that intentionally adopt lower social obligations (which itself is a highly debated subject depending on your gender) for the parties involved. A formal marriage must be registered under Federal Statute and holds to established traditions.

Childhood's End - the Decline of the British Family

This 15 year old girl, Scarlett KEELING - precocious by necessity due to her mother's irresponsible parenting - was found murdered on a beach in Goa INDIA on Feb 18, 2008. She has become a poster child of the recognition in England that childhood is under serious siege from a breakdown of the family - never a strong point for the Brits - because of willful state intervention.

Theodore Dalrymple's writes:

Scarlett's mother, Fiona MacKeown, brought 8 of her 9 children on a six-month vacation to India with her boyfriend in November 2007. (The one left behind—her eldest, at 19—was a drug addict.) Her nine children were fathered by 5 different men. She had received $50,000 in welfare benefits a year, and doubtless decided—quite rationally, under the circumstances—that the money would go further, and that life would thus be more agreeable, in Goa than in her native Devon.

Reaching Goa, MacKeown soon decided to travel with seven of her children to Kerala, leaving behind one of them, 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling, to live with a tour guide ten years her elder, whom the mother had known for only a short time. Scarlett reportedly claimed to have had sex with this man only because she needed a roof over her head. According to a witness, she was constantly on drugs; and one night, she went to a bar where she drank a lot and took several different illicit drugs, including LSD, cocaine, and pot. She was seen leaving the bar late, almost certainly intoxicated.

The next morning, Scarlett's body turned up on a beach. At first, the local police maintained that she had drowned while high, but further examination proved that someone had raped and then forcibly drowned her.

Scarlett’s mother, expressed surprise at the level of public vituperation aimed at her and her lifestyle in the aftermath of the murder. She agreed that she and her children lived on welfare, but “not by conscious choice,” and she couldn't see anything wrong with her actions. Apparently neither could many other parenting experts.

Dalrymple goes on to suggest:

This nonjudgmentalism surely helps explain why British youth are among the Western world’s leaders in such indicators of social pathology as teenage pregnancy, violence, criminality, underage drinking, and consumption of illicit drugs. Britain has the third-highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the industrialized world, according to the UNICEF report (only the United States and New Zealand are higher)—a startling case recently made headlines of 16-, 14-, and 12-year-old sisters, all of whom gave birth within a year of one another. British children have the earliest and highest consumption of cocaine of any young people in Europe, are ten times more likely to sniff solvents than are Greek children, and are six to seven times more likely to smoke pot than are Swedish children. Almost a third of British young people aged 11, 13, and 15 say they have been drunk at least twice.

The main consideration inhibiting elite criticism of MacKeown is that passing judgment would call into question the shibboleths of liberal social policy for the last 50 or 60 years—beliefs that give their proponents a strong sense of moral superiority. It would be to entertain the heretical thought that family structure might matter after all, along with such qualities as self-restraint and self-respect; and that welfare dependency is unjust to those who pay for it and disastrous for those who wind up trapped in it.

One day after Scarlett Keeling’s murder, a nine-year-old girl, Shannon Matthews, went missing from her home in Dewsbury, in northern England. Twenty-four days later, after an extensive police search, she was found alive, locked in a drawer under a bed in her stepfather’s uncle’s house. Shannon’s mother, Karen Matthews, 32, was also arrested, for child cruelty, neglect, and obstructing the police by lying during the search for her daughter. Ms Matthews also was a regular recipient of welfare payments of $40,000 a year, and had borne seven children to five different men. She has now became clear that Ms. Matthews engineered a kidnapping plot in order to win a newspaper award.

Here are some other points to consider:

• 4/10 British children are born out of wedlock and the unions of which they are the issue are notoriously unstable.
• Easy divorce means that a quarter of all marriages break up within a decade.
• Britain does have the highest rate of child poverty in the West (except the U.S) defined as the percentage of children in households with an income of less than 50 percent of the median. So after many years of various redistributive measures and billions spent to reduce child poverty - it is, if anything, more widespread.
• The British government thus pursues social welfare policies that encourage the creation of households like the Matthews’, and then via yet more welfare spending, to reduce the harm done to children in them.
• Both women lived free of rent and local taxes and received healthy subsides from the state and boasted three computers and a large plasma-screen television.

A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences has led to he state-encouraged breakdown of the family.

[Update: 2009Feb13 Recently, after news of a 13-year-old father there were calls for better sex education.]

Minority Report - *New* Massachusetts Child Support Guidelines

Dr. Ned HOLSTEIN - Executive Director of Massachusetts Fathers and Families (MAFF), was a member of the Massachusetts Child Support Guideline Task Force and put together a dissenting opinion. Background information can be found at www.fathersandfamilies.org

It is his position that Child Support Guidelines should require payments sufficient for both parents to equitably meet the important needs of their children. Above those levels of support, additional, excessive child support orders impair the payor’s parenting and thus have adverse consequences for children that far outweigh the benefits.1

At issue is the negative effects of excessive child support orders. They diminish the standard of living children enjoy in the payor’s2 household. They alienate payors, require them to work excessive hours, and may force them to live far from their children, making parenting time impractical and potentially isolating children from friends and activities during such times. Very excessive child support orders may present payors with the constant threat of incarceration despite the best of intentions.

Here is a summary of key points:

Improvements

• Under federal law, Massachusetts must review its Guidelines not less than every four years, and revise them if it seems appropriate. Here are the new ones effective Jan 1, 2009. They must be next reviewed again by January 1, 2013. Existing orders and judgments less than three years old as of date of these guidelines shall not be modified unless the income of one or both parties changes or new circumstance warrants.3

• Determining the Child Support Guidelines has been given to the Chief Justice for Administration and Management (“CJAM”) Robert A. Mulligan. Over two years ago, Chief Justice Mulligan appointed a Task Force to advise him on the revision. This process has been significantly improved to be more open and transparent as A) The twelve members who advised CJAM are no longer secret and included Dr. Ned HOLSTEIN to represent men and payors views (9 lawyers included 6 women and men until one member retired) and B) 13 public hearings were held across the state, hundreds of non-custodial parents and others testifying. C) In addition to a majority report by the Task Force, a minority report with Dissenting Viewpoints was presented. (www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport)

• Principle 3 which encouraged the courts “To provide the standard of living the child would have enjoyed had the family been intact” was dropped from the 2009 Guidelines. Despite being noble it was rarely achieved in practice without impoverishing the Payor, which is not in a child’s best interest. In the 2009 Guidelines it now reads "to meet the child’s survival needs in the first instance, but to the extent either parent enjoys a higher standard of living, to entitle the child to enjoy that higher standard."
  

• The $20,000 "head start" for custodial parents that disregarded the first $20,000 of income in child support calculations has been abandoned. This provision no longer exists. All income of the custodial parent now counts.

• The automatic 10% increase in the child support order for children age 13 or over has been eliminated.

• In the past it was extremely difficult to get a child support order modified by the court unless one's income varied by at least 20%. Any change in income is now sufficient to qualify one to be heard in court for a modification. [Editor: Obviously the burden of time/cost just to appear in court will disabuse frivolous cases.]
  

• As shared parenting is the best arrangement for children, the Guidelines should adjust child support orders when there is shared parenting. This principle will be adopted in the 2009 Guidelines for cases where parenting is equal or approximately equal.

• In the past, the child care credit was only available to the custodial parent, and the cost of child care could be deducted regardless of the reason for putting the child into care. MAFF won provisions that the deduction for child care expenses may be available to either party, and to qualify, child care must in most cases be for the purpose of gainful employment. [Editor: Quite similar to tax rules in Canada, this means existing child-care and health-care expenses can only be applied against employment income.]

• Under existing Guidelines, whomever pays for Health Insurance recovers half of that cost through an offsetting decrease in their child support order. Now that offset will only be in the range of about 20% to 25%. This will also be the case with child care expenses. [Editor: I like this alot as this is a rough approximation of the net after tax advantage of deducting such health-care expenses BUT more importantly, it introduces a co-sharing of responsibility for these expenses which may mitigates irresponsible "expense downloading".]
  

• A major issue for Payors has been the extreme financial distress that excessive child support orders can create. Under current legislation, if a payor took a second job or made overtime it became counted at the time of a subsequent modification of the child support order and he was no better off. Many payors found themselves unable to work their way out of an arrears situation. This has been relaxed somewhat under the new guidelines to allow a judge to exclude such temporary income if it is unlikely to continue in the future, or consider if the extra work is a requirement of the job, and the evaluate the impact of the overtime on a parenting plan at the time of the initial order. If however a payor or recipient obtains a secondary job or begins to work overtime after a child support order is entered, it shall not be considered in a future support order.
  

No Change

• For the very poorest payors there is no letup. For someone earning only $7,800 per year, already in poverty, must pay $1,638 in child support for one child, pushing him/her close to homelessness. [Editor: In his Minority Report Dr. HOLSTEIN goes into greater details about the negative effects on low income payors. The guidelines simply require desperately poor men to make token payments they cannot afford and that make little difference to the recipient when compared to the level of social assistance received.]

• There is no cap on child support for very wealthy Payors. They may still be paying for “three ponies” for the child by court order.

• The expenses of second families still cannot be used as a reason to decrease an existing child support order, although such expenses still can be used as a defense to a request to increase the child support order. Thus, the well-being of children of second families is often ignored by the Guidelines. A child of a second family is often raised in a household that is quite less well off than the household of the first child, to which child support is being paid.

• Massachusetts remains the only state other than Hawaii that allows child support to age 23. Except where there are circumstances like "special needs" it is discriminatory to insist divorced parents provide for the post-secondary education of their children when intact families do not have that legal duty. The Task Force declined to place "de minimus" rules for college expenses that can be ordered or recommend reasonable limitations on the payments.
  

Steps Backward

• Overall child support levels remain too high. It is clear that Recipients usually have a substantially better standard of living than a Payor unless she/he has little or no earnings of her own. Here are some comparisons:

Table MR1: Low Income Groups - 2009 Guideline Increases
Low Income - A minimum wage payor earns $16,640 annually. If the recipient has no earnings, the proposed child support order will be $4,004. After paying income and payroll taxes, the payor will have $9,978 to live on for the year. At $832 per month rent, the payor will have no money left. The proposed child support order of $4,004 is 13% higher than the $3,546 currently required. (refer to Table MR1: Low Income Groups - 2009 Guideline Increases). Whereas the current guideline order is unpayable, the newly proposed guideline order is still more unpayable.

• The Guidelines simply require poor people to make payments they cannot afford and which make little difference to the recipient relative to the level of public support. Federal data bear this out as about 70% of the total child support arrears nationwide are owed
  by people earning less than $10,000 per year, and 96% is owed by those earning less than $40,000 per year. Child support debt is almost entirely a problem of poverty. Child support orders for the poor should be lowered, not raised.
  

Table MR2: Middle Income Groups - Relative Standards of Living

• Middle-Class - Even these payors will have difficulty remaining active parents to their children under the 2009 Guidelines. In above Table MR2: Middle Income Groups - Relative Standards of Living “Disposable Income” (DI) is the money left after paying Income and payroll taxes, and after paying (or receiving) child support. In the examples above in which the payor and recipient earn equal amounts, the payor will have only about half the disposable income of the recipient after taxes and child support transfers. Even a payor who earns three times as much as the recipient will have less disposable income than the recipient (85%). In addition, the proposed increases will be large - double and triple for many.
  

• Massachusetts is in the paradoxical situation that the 2009 Guidelines have adopted a number of principles and concepts for which MAFF has long fought to achieve, but the actual amounts of child support have made an inequitable situation worse in most cases.

Footnotes:
1) To some extent children of divorce who experience "asymmetric support" (child support that provides children proportional financial benefits without proportional responsibility) are denied important lesson in life that intact families still enjoy - those oldtime virtues of thrift, self-denial and placing needs of the collective family first.

2) Payors in Massachusetts are known as "debtors" in Alberta (and there is something not so subtle behind that).

3) Other relevant supporting information for The Massachusetts Child Support Guidelines can be found here, here, and here .

References:
Massachusetts Child Support Task Force - Majority Report
http://www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport/task-force-report.pdf
Massachusetts Child Support Task Force - Minority Report
http://www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport/minority-report.pdf
*New* 2009 Guidelines
http://www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport/guidelines.pdf
*New* 2009 Guidelines Worksheet
http://www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport/worksheet-child-support-guidelines.pdf
*New* 2009 Guidelines Reference Tables
http://www.mass.gov/courts/childsupport/child-support-guidelines-chart.pdf

Overlapping Parenting Conferences, Toronto

This story in the weekend's National Post was a surprise and juxtaposed two conferences - one entitled "12th ARM (Association for Research on Mothering) Conference: Mothering, Violence, Militarism, War, and Social Justice" against the "2008 (1st) Fatherhood Research Conference" unknown to each other.

The Association for Research on Mothering, at York University, Toronto, is home to ARM, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Demeter1 Press and Mother Outlaws. The Association’s mandate is to promote feminist maternal scholarship by building and sustaining a community of researchers interested in the topic of mothering-motherhood and its Directors is Dr. Andrea O'REILLY who also happens to be a professor of Women's Studies at York. She has recently completed a book entitled "Feminist Mothering" which was widely discussed at the conference.

Among some of the topics at the Fatherhood Conference was Dalhousie University, Halifax NS Dr. Wanda BERNARD's keynote address entitled "Exploring the role of Otherfathers in African Communities" which explored widely held misconceptions of black fatherhood stereotypes. Also of interest was Carleton University ON professor Dr. Andrea DOUCET with "I'm Still Their Mother: Fathers, Mothers and Maternal Gatekeepers" which focused on how past academics often judged men's performance according to their partners terms - often called the "deficit model of parenting".

The article found great humour in the fact each conference overlapped (at a different location) unknown to the organizers. Explanation given: "We are just like any busy couple and we didn't check in with each other."

Footnote:

1) Demeter you will recall was of course the greek goddess of grain and fertility, a nourisher of youth and the green earth, and preserver of marriage and the sacred law. She represented the health-giving cycle of life and death. With her daughter Persephone she was worshipped long before she was made one of the Olympians and predated the Olympian pantheon.