January 10, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

My aplogies for not posting this earlier, but here, one month after the fact, is a message by Stephen Baskerville that requires you to follow its links.

 My new article, “From Welfare State to Police State,” has just been published in The Independent Review. This is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the Title IV-D federal child support enforcement funding system. It documents how federal funding is tearing apart families, driving divorce and single-parent homes, creating fatherless children, demanding patently impossible child support levels, encouraging paternity fraud, and criminalizing innocent parents.

TIR is not an esoteric academic journal. It is highly influential in public policy debates. Please circulate this to your lawmakers, the media, and anyone else involved in the child custody and child support machinery. Glossy offprints of the article are available from the Independent Institute and make very impressive pamphlets to give to legislators.

Stephen Baskerville, “From Welfare State to Police State,” The Independent Review, vol. 12, no 3 (Winter 2008 ).
[Link to Article]

This subject is also treated extensively in Chapter 3 of my book, Taken Into Custody.

Stephen

A 22-page article may seem a lot of reading to some, but no one will understand the intricacies and complexities of the evolution and cancerous growth of the child support system unless he does.  Let there be no mistake.  There is a unifying ideology and much networking amongst bureaucrats and  judiciary activists in the developed nations that makes the problems described by Stephen Baskerville generic and universal.  Here are a few quotes from Stephen Baskerville’s article:

•  Following ten years of welfare reform that was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing and encourage marriage and two-parent families, these reports are perplexing news, indeed. Whatever the budgetary savings, welfare reform has failed from the standpoint of the family. The figures “clearly show that the impact of welfare reform is now virtually zero,” says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, “and
  we are going back to the way things were before welfare reform” (qtd. in Wetzstein 2006).
  It has been well known since at least the Moynihan report in 1965 that welfare serves as a disincentive to marriage and an incentive to divorce and unwed childbearing. Yet no explanation has been forthcoming for why cutting back on welfare has failed to reverse the trend.
• Ignored thus far is how expanding welfare-originated entitlement programs have extended the subsidy on single-parent homes to the affluent. Moreover, the perverse incentives create perverse behaviors not only among the population, but also by governments.
• The welfare subsidy on single-mother homes was never really ended so much as it was shifted. Reformers essentially replaced welfare with child support, on the reasonable but largely irrelevant principle that fathers rather than taxpayers should be supporting their children (which is irrelevant for reasons we will see).
• Child support thus transformed welfare from public assistance into law enforcement, creating a federal plainclothes police force with no clear constitutional authority.
• In Maryland, government billboards announced, “We’re Looking for You, Child Support Violators.” Officials do not warn bank robbers or drug dealers that they are being targeted.
• Perhaps the most striking aspect of this mobilization is that the initiative came entirely from government officials. No public outcry ever preceded these measures, nor did any public perception of such a problem even exist until officials began to say that it does. The public never demanded that government take action, nor was any public discussion of this alleged problem ever conducted in the national or local media. No government or academic study ever documented a nonpayment problem.
• Perhaps the most fundamental disconnect between public perceptions and present reality is that whereas child support is invariably presented as a method for requiring men to take responsibility for offspring they have sired and then abandoned, it now functions primarily as a means by which “a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children” (Abraham 1999, 151).
• Data and the research assembled by independent scholars indicate that the problem [of child support arrears] is not entirely what officials and the media claim it to be. In the largest federally funded study ever undertaken on the subject, Sanford Braver demonstrated that little scientific basis exists for claims that large numbers of fathers fail to pay child support. Braver found that government claims of nonpayment were derived not from any compiled database or other hard figures, but entirely from surveys of custodial parents (1998, 21–22 and chap. 2). The Census Bureau simply asked mothers what they were receiving. No corroborative data were produced because none exists.
• Scholars largely agree that unemployment is “the single most important factor relating to nonpayment” (Braver 1998, 33; see all of chap. 4). One study team (Bartfeld and Mayer 1994) found that 95 percent of fathers with no employment problems for the previous five years paid their ordered support regularly and that 81 percent paid in full and on time. A federal pilot study commissioned by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) itself also found no serious problem of nonpayment. A full-scale government-sponsored study was planned to follow up the pilot, but OCSE cancelled it when the pilot study’s findings threatened the justification for the agency’s existence by demonstrating that nonpayment was not a serious problem.

Those excerpts are only from the first six pages of the article.  If you are not yet interested to read more, then there is no point in quoting more, but if by now you are interested and concerned about the issue, it would not do justice to the article to quote more excerpts.  Read the whole article (241 kB PDF file)

Posted in Child-Custody Awards, Media Bias, Family, Feminist Jurisprudence, Propaganda Exposed, The New World Order | Print | No Comments »

January 10, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

Brisbane Times (Australia)
9 January 2008

Woman kills husband, flushes him down the toilet
Reuters

Berlin - A woman in Germany put an end to her troubled marriage by chopping up her husband and flushing parts of him down the toilet, authorities said today.

“‘You won’t find him, I’ve flushed him down the toilet’, is what she told (her children),” said Andre Hartwich, a spokesman for police in the western city of Duesseldorf…. (Full Story)
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Comments:

That story apparently did not make the big news anywhere, while the killing of a cat by putting her in a microwave oven did (Canada, Jan. 5, 2008). Some of the preferential treatment of what is news-worthy and what is not is probably due to the maxim that “Dog Bites Man” is not news but “Man Bites Dog” is.

However, that a woman killed her husband and apparently flushed him down the drain ought to have been more newsworthy than the killing of a cat, unless the feminist domination of the media has become so biased that cats rank higher in the order of things than do men — once-upon-a-time the crown of creation.

One of the clues why the gruesome murder of the husband in Duesseldorf, Germany, did not make the big news is provided in this article — already in its title:

Spero News

Germany: Wife ‘flushed Muslim husband down toilet’

The woman had previously tried to poison her husband, and on one occasion she had seriously injured him with a hammer. Police were shocked that the long-suffering husband had never reported these incidents.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008
By Adrian Morgan

All too often, one encounters horrific tales of Muslim women suffering at the hands of conservative and patriarchal menfolk. A bizarre story from DPA via Expatica reports that a Muslim couple living in Dusseldorf appeared to have marital difficulties which ended in extreme violence…. (Full Story)

Posted in Media Bias, The New World Order, Women's Violence | Print | No Comments »

January 10, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

Professor offers new excuse - claims Hillary overturned a 13 point deficit because her name was higher on the ballot

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, January 10, 2008

The media has gone into overdrive trying to whitewash Hillary Clinton’s inexplicable defeat of Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary and sideline questions about vote fraud, with the latest excuse being that Clinton’s name appeared above Obama’s on the ballot paper.

In reality, Clinton’s reversal of a 10-13 point pre-polling deficit to Obama is highly suspicious and smacks of vote fraud, especially considering the fact that the New York Senator gained a crucial 7% swing thanks to provably vulnerable Diebold electronic voting machines…. (Full Story)

Posted in Media Bias, Propaganda Exposed, The New World Order | Print | No Comments »

January 10, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

Focus on the Family

January 9, 2008

Dads may be participating more than ever with moms in helping raise their children, but they are still not included in most studies of children and their families, Dalhousie University doctoral student Erin Moon has concluded.

“The research has not kept up with the changes in society, with fathers being more and more involved in children’s lives,” Moon, a clinical psychologist, told CanWest News Service. “Almost all the previous research has been conducted with mothers.”

Moon is researching the parental response to a child’s pain, specifically if fathers react differently based on whether a son or a daughter is suffering. She discovered that the questionnaires and tests previous researchers conducted all excluded the responses of fathers, presumably because it was thought that mothers were the primary caregivers….(Full Story)

_________
Comments:

The full article is well worth reading, as it uncovers much of the silence in Academe regarding the vital involvement of fathers in being part of the parenting that children receive. Yet, many or even most of the sentiments expressed in the article bring to light not much more than that fathers are parents, too, parents that are almost as good as mothers. In other words, “mothering” is an important thing, and fathers are almost as good at it as mothers are.

The reality is that the proportions of parenting done by fathers and mothers are equally important but different. They augment one another, and their combined effect becomes in the system of parenting in the traditional nuclear family greater than the sum of the parts contributed individually by mothers and fathers. The principle of synergy comes into play. That is far more prevalent in families in a general sense than it is within the narrow focus of the study done by Erin Moon, namely the comparable reactions of fathers and mothers to their children’s pain.

Two articles address the benefits of parenting by fathers and mothers within the family in a much wider sense.

1. Shacking UP and Breaking DOWN
   Common-law marriage and break-up are booming, and so is a host of related social ills. By Candis Mclean (Alberta Report, June 22, 1998, page 28)

   The Alberta Report is no longer being published, but a condensed version of the article is available at the website of Fathers for Life.The AR article concludes with a quote by columnist Charles Moore from an article in the Western Catholic Reporter:

   “Marriage is more than a private relationship between two individuals. The reason it has traditionally benefited from positive discrimination [special benefits, subsidies and rights] is recognition of the contribution to the common good by stable family units — specifically, the procreation and healthy upbringing of children….All other domestic arrangements — heterosexual or homosexual — must be deemed purely private relationships that society has no interest in subsidizing. It may take a political or even constitutional revolution to accomplish this, but the alternative is continued disintegration of our civilization.”

2. The sorry facts behind common-law marriage
   By Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal, 28.6.98 (that article is available in the same web page at the website of Fathers for Life)

But there is more yet behind the invisibility of fathers as far as the perspective of social researchers goes. For all intents and purposes, social research is a feminist-dominated and -controlled academic field in which it is not politically correct to illuminate the role of fathers in families or, for that matter, the constructive role of men in society. The invisibility of fathers and men in feminist social studies is not accidental, it is deliberate.

Feminist social “research” is advocacy research and does not live up to the standards against which respectable and reputable scientific inquiries must measure up to become objectively acceptable.
Advocacy research does not stand up to scientific standards, although many people make a good living doing it. Advocacy research could more accurately be called science fiction on account of collecting or manufacturing data that support a hypothesis, discarding or altering those data that do not support or do contradict the hypothesis the advocacy researchers set out to prove and then presenting its conclusions disguised in the cloak of science. Feminist “research” is almost entirely comprised of advocacy research.

Advocacy research uses selective study samples that are likely to produce the desired results. It does not use randomly selected study samples, as those are far more likely to produce objective answers that are contrary to the point the advocacy researcher wishes to promote. There is no objectivity in the reporting done by advocacy research. Without exception, advocacy research is seriously flawed.

Posted in Censorship, Health, Family, Feminism, Propaganda Exposed | Print | No Comments »