August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

During the last little while, a considerable number of years, decades, in fact, murder-suicides by women were rarely reported (for one thing, the female suicide part of those incidents was most often a token attempt), and female-perpetrated murders were, if ever, shown with a couple or so paragraphs on the back pages in our newspapers. That, as also shown in the article indicated here, has seen a dramatic reversal during the past few days.

“Some suicides require coverage [by implication, others do not - F4L], but always with sensitivity.” So says Jim Slusher, Daily Herald Columnist. He states in the conclusion of his article:

Any violent or unexpected death is a terrible thing, and must be carefully reported. Reporting on murder does not necessarily lead to more murder; reporting on suicide might lead to more suicide. With that in mind, we take care — and sometimes should take still more — to ensure that our reporting is not just sensitive to victims and their families, but also will not give ideas or inspiration to troubled people who may be entirely unrelated….(Full Story)

_______________
Comment by F4L: Right! Therefore, in general and universally, the media report carefully on male-perpetrated murders and violence (on the front pages) and sweep female-perpetrated murders and violence under the rug.

However, when it comes to reporting suicides, the priorities are reversed, female ones make the front pages and males ones are swept under the carpet.

Ostensibly, that makes for balanced reporting that is “not just sensitive to victims and their families, but also will not give ideas or inspiration to troubled people who may be entirely unrelated.” In reality such reporting will most certainly have the required politically-correct spin. It bashes men and makes women’s suffering (but not female crimes) a thing to behold.

Believe it or not, but the practice described by Jim Slusher, because it so enormously wide-spread in the media, is clear and unadulterated censorship.

Don’t trust the media to give you the truth, all of the truth and nothing but the truth. (See also a description of the role of news-wire services in all of that.)

Posted in Censorship, Men's Issues, Women's Violence | Print | No Comments »

August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

News from Sweden

The foundation Daddy-Child (Pappa-Barn) says that The Father Rights Group “PappaRättsGruppen” is extremist.

Last Friday, The Father Rights Group from Växjö proclaimed a manifesto outside the lower court of Växjö. They had plaques stating that they are “sperm machines”.

- You can´t fight extremists with extreme methods, says Kim Möller, co-ordinater for south of Sweden in the foundation Pappa-Barn (Daddy-Child).

I get scared when I visit their homepage.  Their way to success is to co-operate with women’s shelters.

PappaRättsGruppen tend to focus on dads and not on children, says Kim.

The statements above will be published in the newspaper Växjöbladet-Kronobergaren (VK) - printed in 30,000 copies on Friday. The paper is only published on Fridays.

Please, for the sake of God - anyone at all, comment on the territorial pissing contests by Swedish “father groups”!

All the best,

Ulf Andersson,
Founder of and Spokesman for PappaRättsGruppen
http://www.dads-r-us.org

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August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Chicago Sun-Times

Deadly fight over girl
CRYSTAL LAKE | Mom apparently kills 7-year-old, walks in front of train

August 30, 2007
BY DAN ROZEK AND LISA DONOVAN Staff Reporters/drozek@suntimes.com ldonovan@suntimes.com

A young Crystal Lake mother apparently suffocated her 7-year-old daughter, then killed herself by stepping in front of a speeding Metra train, McHenry County authorities said Wednesday.

The deaths happened Tuesday in the midst of a legal fight 28-year-old Magdalene Kamysz was waging over the daughter police suspect she killed….(Full Story)

Posted in Divorce, Child Murder, Women's Violence | Print | No Comments »

August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Chicago Tribune, 27 August 2007

Two weeks after his children and wife were killed in a Naperville fire, Anand Tiwari exists somewhere between the past, present

By Sara Olkon, Tribune staff reporter

For Anand Tiwari, time stopped on Aug. 11.

That Saturday afternoon, police would later tell him, his wife murdered their two young children and killed herself by igniting a fire that engulfed the three in flames inside the family’s Naperville home. (Full Story)
__________
Note by F4L: Apparently it does not happen very often that a mother kills her children and then herself.  More often it happens that the mother appears to pretend to have made an unsuccessful suicide attempt after she killed her children.  Still, I wonder how many such stories we never hear about because they hardly ever make it into the national wire services? The circumstances of that are described in the following article:

February 28, 2000, p. 36
More deadly than the male: Media hide the fact women are far likelier to kill their children than are men

by Walter H. Schneider and Candis Mclean

Posted in Divorce, Women's Violence | Print | No Comments »

August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Strauss called police on spouse in 2005; she reported threats

By Christine Reid (Contact)
Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Homicide suspect Alfred Michael Strauss listens during his bond hearing Tuesday at the Boulder County Jail.

A Boulder man arrested on suspicion of fatally stabbing his former wife Monday told police he was acting in self defense.

Alfred Michael Strauss, 45, is facing a possible charge of first-degree murder in the slaying of 36-year-old Laura Swan, who went by the name Laura Strauss when the two were married.

In 2005, Strauss called police to report Swan was trying to provoke a fight while they were going through a divorce. Swan reported then that her husband had threatened to kill her…. (Full Story)

Posted in Divorce | Print | No Comments »

August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

The Associated Press, Posted August 29, 2007

WAUSAU — A 31-year-old man fatally stabbed his 25-year-old wife and hours later killed himself with a 12-inch ceremonial knife as he fled from a sheriff’s deputy, police said today. (Full Story)

Posted in Divorce | Print | No Comments »

August 30, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Two young girls in Elkhart County said goodbye Tuesday to their mother and father.

Police say their mother, 33 year-old Karla Fernandez, was shot and killed by their father, 31 year-old Omar Fernandez, who later shot himself in the head….(Full Story)
_____________
Notice that the story is by the YWCA and that the views of the fathers are not mentioned, namely: “Newscenter 16 had a chance to talk to some of Karla’s friends both on the scene and over the phone.” Objective reporting would have included the results of talking to some of Omar’s friends, right?

Posted in Divorce | Print | No Comments »

August 27, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

The Innocent Third Party: Victims of Paternity Fraud (110 kB PDF file)
BY RONALD K. HENRY; Family Law Quarterly, Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2006

This is the best overview yet written by anyone I saw on the scope and nature of paternity fraud and related issues. — WHS
From the article:

The bottom line in the drive to find some man, any man, to drive up the paternity establishment rate is that “fairness was not a high concern.”….

In Los Angeles County, eighty percent of paternity establishments are entered by default judgment, whereas for the State of California as a whole, the number is sixty-eight percent.  California is not alone. The United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS/IG report) reported that “seven states’ child support agencies report half or more of paternities established in their states occur through defaults.” The inspector general further reported that “[t]wentyfour percent of local offices in focus states report half or more of paternities in their caseloads are established by default.”
(Full Story)

Posted in Men's Issues, Family, Feminist Jurisprudence, Paternity Fraud | Print | No Comments »

August 25, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

The survey report, Final Report – Maintenance Enforcement Program Client Survey 2006 was prepared by Burke & Associates Inc., November 28, 2006, based on a client survey undertaken in June 2006.The results of the survey were published via the website of the Maintenance Enforcement Program (MEP) of Alberta Justice.

The survey report is prominently mentioned on the Alberta MEP home page, with Alberta MEP implying thereby that they not only fully endorse what the survey report contains, but that they will base forthcoming changes to MEP policies and work processes relating to its interactions with it clients (a.k.a. “creditors” and “debtors”) on the recommendations made in the report. (See the full survey report, 1.12 MB PDF file, notice that the survey report is not located at the Alberta MEP’s website but at the website of the Alberta Department of Justice.)

The survey report is a summary of a self-serving opinion survey using a self-selected sample. It does not permit to draw valid conclusion about child-support-payers, -recipients or the related enforcement system.

Detailed comments on the Alberta MEP’s 2006 client survey report

–Walter

Posted in Divorce, Child-Custody Awards, Feminist Jurisprudence, Propaganda Exposed | Print | No Comments »

August 20, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

George wrote and complained about the lack of a unified men’s movement. He also alluded that I fairly frequently mention “the movement.”
My response to George follows.

George:

The reason why I keep mentioning “the movement” is mainly that you keep mentioning it in disparaging terms.

On a local, national and international level, I was involved in a number of failed attempts to establish a movement or chapters of movements. Three of those attempts looked promising and were very time-consuming; but not only that, they were also very exhausting. Richard Doyle, the author of Save the Males, and others were involved for far longer and far more often in trying to get such attempts to succeed.

It would be better if we could meet face-to-face to discuss and debate what is required to get a viable movement off the ground and into existence. It is not practical to hope that will happen, except if an opportunity presents itself by accident. Far more than that is required to make things happen and to make them happen according to plan, continuously and constructively.

Some of the problems encountered in trying to launch or vitalize a unified men’s movement demonstrate that the vast majority of promising and eligible players is too far separated - ideologically, geographically, and logistically (with respect to time-zone differences). Real-time meetings, even by electronic means, appear simply too hard to achieve to sustain constructive discussions and dialogs. A practical solution to that would be for men to reclaim at least a portion of the dominance of control they once had in the education curriculum. As of now it appears that the predominant prevalence of feminist men at universities will prevent that from happening for as long as it takes for civilization to collapse and to emerge once again from the ruins of its self-destruction.

My background as a work-systems analyst makes it obvious to me that another essential ingredient for the creation of a successful and thriving men’s movement is the existence of an understanding of the fundamental role of men in society within the context of families, communities, business and industry, organizations, states or provinces, nations and civilization. No men’s rights activists have come to grips with that, and virtually no men’s rights activists have even begun to see the need for that. It does not suffice to state that that is caused by people not being able to see the forest for the trees. It requires one to understand what a healthy forest consists of and which trees are more in need of a cure than others.

I will use a few analogies that may help to illustrate what I am getting at. The first of those is “clean energy”.

For the past few weeks our local daily newspaper, the Edmonton Journal, has been intensifying the publishing of articles relating to energy issues and yet failed to illustrate in even a single article what role energy plays in society and in the global civilization. Yet, the availability of energy, especially clean energy, is as important to the continued existence and evolution of civilization as are men, money and families.

There were articles that discussed seismic exploration in a pristine natural area, Marie Lake, Alberta, to assess the volume, depth and location of bitumen deposits (a.k.a. tar-sands oil) for recovery and conversion to synthetic crude oil.

There were articles on wind power generation (not feasible when and where there is no wind), solar energy (not feasible on a large scale, and not when and where the sun doesn’t shine), both requiring standby generating capacity using conventional energy production methods, and requiring - when produced on a small scale and for total independence from commercial sources - energy storage in batteries. Energy storage in batteries is not feasible on a large scale, although to some extent energy can be stored on a medium scale, for example, by using excess energy to pump water into hydro-electric reservoirs. Another means of equalizing energy supply and demand is by creating and using geographically larger and larger collection- and distribution-networks.

There was an article on the construction of a liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal in Quebec (with imported LNG to be injected into the existing gas distribution network), for which the start-up costs of close to $800 million would be paid through a surcharge of about 3¢ per GigaJoule (GJ) to all Canadian end consumers (the article said nothing about US consumers of Canadian-delivered gas). The scheme is intended to alleviate a developing shortage of natural gas production in Alberta. It would amount to a competitive handicap of about $1.10 per GJ for Alberta natural gas producers, whose fate the article bemoans without discussing the developing shortage and another project intended to address that shortage. There is a project in the making (without a doubt just one of many such projects to come) to produce synthetic gas through the gasification of coal (Alberta has enough coal to last for more than 1,500 years at current rates of mining), and to inject the gas produced in Alberta into the gas distribution network.

There was an article on clean and environmentally-friendly electric cars, of whom a popular model will run at a maximum speed of 80 kmh and permit the operator to run the car for a distance of 80 km at a cost of energy of 1¢ per km on a single charge.

The electric-car article mentioned pollution issues, for instance that electric cars are an absolute necessity because (in India) even “a non-smoker ends up inhaling the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes by breathing the air of India’s cities”, without mentioning an essential rate of breathing the equivalent of the smoke from that pack, namely whether that relates to the smoke breathed in during an hour, a day, a month, a year or a life time. A very important omission in the article was the lack of any discussion of what will be put into place for a system for collecting and recycling the worn-out batteries produced by such cars.

An even more important omission in the article is any discussion of how the energy used by the car will be produced and at what rate of overall efficiency. There are losses of energy in the conversion of chemical energy to hot steam used to drive turbines. About 60 percent of the energy contained in steam is lost as heat when heat energy contained in high-temperature steam is converted to kinetic energy. There are more losses in the transmission network (about 10 to 20 percent) when electric energy is being transported to the distribution networks. About seven percent of the energy delivered into the distribution networks is lost between the point of delivery and the point of use by the end consumer. More energy is lost when the car battery is being charged. Far more will be lost when converting electric energy to kinetic energy for putting and keeping the car in motion, so that in the end only a relatively small fraction of the energy generated at the source will actually be converted into the energy consumed by moving the car from one point to another.

The interesting point of greatest concern is that, for instance in China (where an enormous amount of local and even global air pollution is being produced by coal-fired power generating plants), the large-scale use of electric cars to reduce pollution will ultimately be the cause of ever-increasing, large-scale escalation of environmental pollution.

There was an article on the advantages of fluorescent lights to be used in place of incandescent lights, so as to make better use of solar panels that can, when the sun shines, produce - for a $900 investment - enough energy to light one 100 Watt incandescent light bulb but can supply 6.7 fluorescent lights at 15 Watt each (implying that the resulting light output would be the same). The article did not mention that anyone replacing incandescent with fluorescent lights will lose the advantage of the large amount of heat produced by incandescent bulbs, heat that will help to keep the heating bill down during the winter months when increased heat demand (on account of cold temperatures) and increased heat production (on account of increased use of incandescent light bulbs during much longer winter nights) coincide.

Twenty percent of the energy used by an incandescent light bulb is converted into visible light. The remaining 80 percent of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted into infrared radiation, providing a substantial addition to the heat energy input used by a building. I doubt it that the calculation of the break-even interval of 40 to 50 years on the capital investment for a photovoltaic system took into account the advantage of waste heat produced by incandescent lights. Furthermore, it was quite obvious that the results of the cost calculations did not consider the costs of energy storage in batteries, the cost of the batteries, of the batteries’ replacement, their disposal, recycling and the environmental pollution that will cause. The article most definitely did not address the cost of stand-by energy production from conventional sources necessary to cover energy demand when the sun doesn’t shine.

Not one of the articles addressed any of the fundamental issues faced by a world economy that cannot function without energy. Not one of the articles mentioned, for instance, that money could well be backed not by gold or any other metal but by units of energy. At the very least some of the articles or even a single related one should have addressed the feasibility of replacing the backing of money with gold (a non-renewable commodity that can be stored indefinitely but otherwise serves hardly any practical purpose) with energy (a non-renewable commodity that for all intents and purposes cannot be stored at all in its electrical form and is a constantly-consumed vital ingredient for life and industry).

As with energy, modern civilization cannot exist or continue to exist without money, a universal standard used in the interactions associated with the exchange of goods and services between individuals, organizations, enterprises and nations. The history of money shows that money would not have come into existence be functioning well without men, from the work done to create its basis (the gold and other metals mined by men) to the creation, maintenance and administration of its modern abstract forms: banknotes, drafts, cheques, stocks, loans, double-entry book keeping, taxes, transfer payments in the form of debit and credit entries, clearing houses and much more along those lines. All of those practices and concepts, without exception, were invented and refined by men, from since before Aristotle until today.

Men played comparable roles as creators, organizers and administrators of physical and intellectual wealth. Those were their roles as creators and administrators of families and their roles in societies and civilization.

The “family” in all ages and in all corners of the globe can be defined as a man and a woman bonded together through a socially approved covenant of marriage to regulate sexuality, to bear, raise, and protect children, to provide mutual care and protection, to create a small home economy, and to maintain continuity between the generations, those going before and those coming after.

It is out of the reciprocal, naturally recreated relations of the family that the broader communities—such as tribes, villages, peoples, and nations—grow.

— Dale O’Leary, The Gender Agenda, p. 24,
original source: Allan Carlson, in
What’s Wrong With the United Nations Definition of ‘Family’?
The Family in America (August 1994), p. 3

Camille Paglia is quite correct with the statement (in Sexual Personae): “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

If it hadn’t been for men, science, engineering, manufacturing and construction would not have become what they are now, if indeed they would even have come into existence.

The feminists almost totally succeeded to remove from our social consciousness all of our recognition of men’s vital contributions to the construction, evolution and maintenance of society.

One can pretend that in the absence of anything better:

• Cars don’t need to run on petrochemical fuel;
• Communities, nations and civilization will function without money;
• Electric energy isn’t necessary in anyone’s life and for the wellbeing of a modern economy;
• Men are not necessary in families; and that
• Men are not necessary at all.

However, anyone who manages to convince a sufficient number of people to firmly believe any of that will soon find that he will be forced, along with everyone else who survived the consequences, to live once more in grass huts.

You wish to have a men’s movement that will help to solve legal inequities that affect property and child-custody issues after divorce and separation. That goal falls as far short from being helpful in creating a universal solution for pressing social issues as does discussing, in isolation from all other related issues, the need for a better electric car.

Nevertheless, whether you like that or not, both discussions require the cooperation of men and women who both have to accept that although men and women are vital for any functioning and required social unit, be it family, community, province or state, nation and civilization, not every man or woman can contribute equally in all respects.

That returns us to the starting point of the discussion, your complaint that there isn’t a functioning men’s movement. Right, there isn’t, and there won’t be until men, for starters, recognize how important they really are, in society, in industry and commerce, and in families. No men and most definitely no men’s movement will succeed with promoting the image of men for as long as men do not respect themselves and men’s roles in a functioning society.

–Walter Schneider
http://fathersforlife.org

Posted in Education, Men's Issues, Family, Feminism | Print | No Comments »