It seems that the French authorities are going to prosecute the members of their national soccer team who were shagging underage prostitutes after all.
Three of their top players admitted to paying tens of thousands of euro to bang teen hookers, which is a child abuse offence in France.
Yet somehow, they were not only not prosecuted on the spot, but two of them even made it onto the plane to South Africa and ended up shaming their nation all over again with dismal performances and that hilarious Gallic strop where they refused to train.
We're well used, via exposure to the England wags, to the ignominious sight of an overly made-up professional shopper standing by her man after he's been caught knocking off pay-to-play pussy.
But it's a bit of a new experience for the French. I wonder whether this case would ever have reached court if Ribery and Govou had helped their team to the title, or at least made the semi-finals? Perhaps it is not their disgraceful sexual shenanigans which are being punished so much as their failure at football.
As a coda to all of that, the cheat Henry has gone to the graveyard of ageing footballers, America, for one last payday. Unfortunately, he chose to play for New York Red Bulls - one of the two franchises in the MLS with as many Irish-American fans as Hispanic ones. There already have been calls for a boycott.
Much as I loathe what Henry did, and galling as it was to think of how much better Ireland's hungry young Turks under Trap might have done in place of the French in South Africa, I think it is appalling that it is Thierry who faces the shame and the boycott and not those who thought it legitimate to hire children for sex.
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The grumpy parent's Q+A
BBC's online magazine asked readers to answer ten of the most common difficult questions that children ask. They didn't publish my suggested answers for some strange reason, so I reproduce them here instead:
1) Why don't all the fish die when lightning hits the sea?
Why don't you go swimming during the next thunderstorm and ask them?
2) How much does the sky weigh?
Who fucking cares? Do your homework! That is one of your homework questions? Meh. I'm getting you moved into Ordinary Maths next term.
3) Why can't people leave other people alone?
Are we talking about kids in your school or strange smelly old men in grubby white vans?
4) Why are birds not electrocuted when they land on electricity wires?
They wear tiny wellies, obviously. Tiny invisible wellies.
5) What is time?
The thing you're never on.
6) Why is the Moon sometimes out in the day and sometimes at night?
Because it's not subject to my curfew. Now get your sorry ass back inside the house!
7) Why did God let my kitten die?
He hates you, of course. Actually, God didn't let your kitten die. There is no God. Must've been you who killed it. And no, you can't get a puppy to replace it.
8) Why do I like pink?
Because you're gay. Your mother's heart is broken, by the way.
9) Why is water wet?
It's not as wet as you, with your pink and your kittens and what not.
10) Why does my best friend have two dads?
He doesn't. He has a dad and a mum like anyone else. But his mum left when she found out his dad was a batty boy.
1) Why don't all the fish die when lightning hits the sea?
Why don't you go swimming during the next thunderstorm and ask them?
2) How much does the sky weigh?
Who fucking cares? Do your homework! That is one of your homework questions? Meh. I'm getting you moved into Ordinary Maths next term.
3) Why can't people leave other people alone?
Are we talking about kids in your school or strange smelly old men in grubby white vans?
4) Why are birds not electrocuted when they land on electricity wires?
They wear tiny wellies, obviously. Tiny invisible wellies.
5) What is time?
The thing you're never on.
6) Why is the Moon sometimes out in the day and sometimes at night?
Because it's not subject to my curfew. Now get your sorry ass back inside the house!
7) Why did God let my kitten die?
He hates you, of course. Actually, God didn't let your kitten die. There is no God. Must've been you who killed it. And no, you can't get a puppy to replace it.
8) Why do I like pink?
Because you're gay. Your mother's heart is broken, by the way.
9) Why is water wet?
It's not as wet as you, with your pink and your kittens and what not.
10) Why does my best friend have two dads?
He doesn't. He has a dad and a mum like anyone else. But his mum left when she found out his dad was a batty boy.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Poison Pens Six: Feminist columnist wants to ban men
No knee jerks with such predictable, goose-stepping precision as that of a feminist when men deign to comment on female health issues.
The not-so-hidden subtext of such reactions is generally that men should STFU about women's health issues entirely, the patriarchal scumbags.
In this context, one can of course understand that British hack Melanie Reid (medical qualification: X -X chromosomes) is infinitely more qualified than a certain Dr Denis Walsh (medical qualifications: associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University) to comment on childbirth (scroll to bottom, past the other shite she's written this week.)
Dr Walsh has opined that women are having too many epidurals these days. Not so controversial, you might have thought, to suggest that too many dangerous spinal injections for pregnant women during labour should perhaps be discouraged.
But that would be to disregard the righteous wrath of people like Melanie Reid, who, like Caroline Simons in a very different context, is apparently supremely qualified for everything by virtue of her possession of a functioning womb.
Let's start by reminding ourselves that Melanie is, first of all, a HUGE fan of medicalising pregnancy and birth as much as possible. Not for her the hippy nonsense of homebirths or that sort of delinquent behaviour. No, no. Mel wants hospitals, and caesareans, and drugs. And she wants everyone else to want that too.
Bear in mind, she's expressed some extremely strange opinions in the past. Probably the most bizarre before today was when she went on BBC Radio to talk about how caring for the elderly is bad for them and people should just let their elderly senile parents die alone of hypothermia like she did.
So let's ignore her prescriptive preaching, since it actually serves to strip pregnant women of choice. Let's ignore also her nonsense about what nasty people medics are for encouraging women to breastfeed. Let's instead focus on her latest bout of uterus-focused lunacy - men can't talk about pregnancy or childbirth because men don't have wombs.
Dr Denis Walsh is a midwife. Not just any old midwife, though. He teaches other midwives. He teaches them so well that he is now a professor of midwifery. He's been in the childbirth game for decades, and has seen the rates of epidurals rising rapidly, and he's concerned.
He's concerned because epidurals are risky, and because they lead to women needing hormones to boost their contractions, which has god knows what effect on the children. As the good doc says, we've no idea what the long-term effects of this will be.
He also reckons that there are a load of other pain relief options for women in labour. And he'd know, because he's a professor of midwifery and this is his subject of expertise.
But that's not good enough for Mel. She's got a womb, so clearly she is way more qualified to discuss such matters than Dr Walsh. In fact, she reckons that he should be sacked from his job for the sole crime of being a man - him and every other male midwife.
Let's imagine for a moment that I said: "Look here, this Melanie Reid is a pretty piss-poor journalist. Here she is criticising experts who know way more than she does. She's clearly not qualified to be doing her job. In fact, it's unnatural for her to be doing it at all. For centuries we relied on men to be journalists. All women should be banned from journalism because it's unnatural."
I take it the flaws in that argument would be evident to all. So now let's look at what Melanie has to say about Dr Walsh. (You might want to settle down and get the popcorn out for this - such spectacular nonsense rarely gets a public outing):
I have a little suggestion of my own, if we're in the business of proposing that people be banned from stuff. Melanie Reid should be banned from writing about childbirth, or medicine, or health, or men ever again, since she clearly has only frothing-mouthed feminist cant to contribute.
In fact, perhaps we should consider a breeding ban for Mel too. After all, she clearly doesn't like the way women are given options and advice and care when giving birth in Britain, and she clearly hates the fact that men are allowed to perform some of these tasks. And do we really want someone with such bizarre opinions in control of kids, even her own?
If she falls pregnant accidentally, we could of course refer her to the Afghani health service and those Taliban midwives - you know the ones, all dressed in black with zero education, living in squalor and under genuine male oppression - that she rates so highly.
Melanie Reid, take a bow for being the stupidest cow in British newspapers this week.
The not-so-hidden subtext of such reactions is generally that men should STFU about women's health issues entirely, the patriarchal scumbags.
In this context, one can of course understand that British hack Melanie Reid (medical qualification: X -X chromosomes) is infinitely more qualified than a certain Dr Denis Walsh (medical qualifications: associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University) to comment on childbirth (scroll to bottom, past the other shite she's written this week.)
Dr Walsh has opined that women are having too many epidurals these days. Not so controversial, you might have thought, to suggest that too many dangerous spinal injections for pregnant women during labour should perhaps be discouraged.
But that would be to disregard the righteous wrath of people like Melanie Reid, who, like Caroline Simons in a very different context, is apparently supremely qualified for everything by virtue of her possession of a functioning womb.
Let's start by reminding ourselves that Melanie is, first of all, a HUGE fan of medicalising pregnancy and birth as much as possible. Not for her the hippy nonsense of homebirths or that sort of delinquent behaviour. No, no. Mel wants hospitals, and caesareans, and drugs. And she wants everyone else to want that too.
Bear in mind, she's expressed some extremely strange opinions in the past. Probably the most bizarre before today was when she went on BBC Radio to talk about how caring for the elderly is bad for them and people should just let their elderly senile parents die alone of hypothermia like she did.
So let's ignore her prescriptive preaching, since it actually serves to strip pregnant women of choice. Let's ignore also her nonsense about what nasty people medics are for encouraging women to breastfeed. Let's instead focus on her latest bout of uterus-focused lunacy - men can't talk about pregnancy or childbirth because men don't have wombs.
Dr Denis Walsh is a midwife. Not just any old midwife, though. He teaches other midwives. He teaches them so well that he is now a professor of midwifery. He's been in the childbirth game for decades, and has seen the rates of epidurals rising rapidly, and he's concerned.
He's concerned because epidurals are risky, and because they lead to women needing hormones to boost their contractions, which has god knows what effect on the children. As the good doc says, we've no idea what the long-term effects of this will be.
He also reckons that there are a load of other pain relief options for women in labour. And he'd know, because he's a professor of midwifery and this is his subject of expertise.
But that's not good enough for Mel. She's got a womb, so clearly she is way more qualified to discuss such matters than Dr Walsh. In fact, she reckons that he should be sacked from his job for the sole crime of being a man - him and every other male midwife.
Let's imagine for a moment that I said: "Look here, this Melanie Reid is a pretty piss-poor journalist. Here she is criticising experts who know way more than she does. She's clearly not qualified to be doing her job. In fact, it's unnatural for her to be doing it at all. For centuries we relied on men to be journalists. All women should be banned from journalism because it's unnatural."
I take it the flaws in that argument would be evident to all. So now let's look at what Melanie has to say about Dr Walsh. (You might want to settle down and get the popcorn out for this - such spectacular nonsense rarely gets a public outing):
"There’s simply no point trying to be reasonable about this. Dr Walsh either wants women to suffer or he thinks being controversial is a good career move. Either way, this is the midwifery equivalent of bombing women back to the Stone Age. Personally speaking, I’d rather take my chances with the Taleban [sic] than inhabit a system run by Dr Walsh and his kind.
And incidentally, don’t you think men should be banned from becoming midwives? If we’re talking tradition, after all, a male midwife is even more unnatural than a pain-free childbirth."
She has no intention of being reasonable.
She'd rather receive pregnancy and labour care from the Taliban than a professor of midwifery in one of the safest countries in the Western World to give birth.
She considers his sage advice that less epidurals be used as akin to being bombed into the stone age.
She wants men to be banned from a job that many do well, saving little lives each day, purely on the basis of their gender.
I have a little suggestion of my own, if we're in the business of proposing that people be banned from stuff. Melanie Reid should be banned from writing about childbirth, or medicine, or health, or men ever again, since she clearly has only frothing-mouthed feminist cant to contribute.
In fact, perhaps we should consider a breeding ban for Mel too. After all, she clearly doesn't like the way women are given options and advice and care when giving birth in Britain, and she clearly hates the fact that men are allowed to perform some of these tasks. And do we really want someone with such bizarre opinions in control of kids, even her own?
If she falls pregnant accidentally, we could of course refer her to the Afghani health service and those Taliban midwives - you know the ones, all dressed in black with zero education, living in squalor and under genuine male oppression - that she rates so highly.
Melanie Reid, take a bow for being the stupidest cow in British newspapers this week.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Truth
Congratulations to Michael O'Brien for telling the truth to the world last night.
A Fianna Fail minister was told in 1955 about the abuse in these schools and did nothing. And Fianna Fail kept assisting the church to cover it up and avoid its responsibilities for decades.
Even after the truth first emerged, they sent battalions of lawyers in to the Laffoy tribunal to browbeat victims of rape and sodomy. They obstructed Justice Laffoy to such an extent that she quit the tribunal in disgust. They indemnified the Church from paying compensation for their many crimes.
Fianna Fail are complicit in the mass rape and abuse of children for nearly half a century, and are still on the side of the rapists and not the victims.
Let's not forget the truth.
A Fianna Fail minister was told in 1955 about the abuse in these schools and did nothing. And Fianna Fail kept assisting the church to cover it up and avoid its responsibilities for decades.
Even after the truth first emerged, they sent battalions of lawyers in to the Laffoy tribunal to browbeat victims of rape and sodomy. They obstructed Justice Laffoy to such an extent that she quit the tribunal in disgust. They indemnified the Church from paying compensation for their many crimes.
Fianna Fail are complicit in the mass rape and abuse of children for nearly half a century, and are still on the side of the rapists and not the victims.
Let's not forget the truth.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Dermot Ahern and Fianna Fail still hate fathers
It appears that Justice Minister Dermot Ahern and his Fianna Fail cronies still hate fathers.
In a parliamentary question, Deputy PJ Sheehan asked the Minister to explain why unmarried fathers are still forced to go and queue with junkies in order to get their names on their child's birth certificate, and why they are still required, unlike married fathers, to apply to courts to be guardians of their own children.
Inevitably, the answer from the powers-that-be, petrified as they are of the single mummy mafia, is that no change is forthcoming.
In fact, according to our esteemed minister, the current situation is a 'comprehensive' solution, based on 'the welfare of the child'. Which is nonsense, clearly.
It is prehistoric to discriminate between fathers on the basis of their marital status in this manner, and I look forward to the day when someone challenges this in court or via equality legislation.
But I have little or no faith in the Irish legislature, which has a lengthy track record of ignoring the needs of fathers and their children for each other, in reforming itself.
Given the latest reiteration of hardened attitudes and ignorance from the Justice Minister, one can only conclude that they still hate fathers, and still fear the mommy mafia, who are entrenched in opposing rights for fathers despite their odious rhetoric about equality when it comes to demanding ever more state funding for child care, single mommy allowances, free education and back to work allowances and so on.
One day, likely at the insistence of the EU, we will eventually concede in Ireland the fact that fathers are immeasurably beneficial to the development of their children and that the status quo we have espoused for so long amounts to nothing short of human rights violations and child abuse.
In the meantime, we still have to put up with crap like lesbian lovers being granted parental rights over fathers, like fathers being accused slanderously of various crimes by bitter mothers in closed courts, and like children being denied equitable parenting from the moment of birth on the basis of their parents' marital status.
In the meantime, because Dermot Ahern and his cohort are so lazy and fearful of a feminist backlash, fathers will have to continue to queue up with the junkies to get on the birth cert, plead with courts to know how their children's health and education is proceeding and face ongoing denial of their and their children's rights to justice.
Fuck you, Dermot Ahern. I genuinely hope that you find yourself in a family law court one day, slackjawed with shock because the other half has accused you of sexually abusing your kids in order to get back at you for divorcing her, or because she simply doesn't want to have to deal with you at all.
I hope you enjoy the endless months of expensive legal applications, the monitored visits with social workers in tow, and then ultimately the success of paying half your wages in maintenance to live in a rented bedsit and see your kids in McDonalds every other Saturday.
It's not normally a prospect I'd wish on my worst enemy. But I wish it upon you, Minister for Injustice, because it is exactly that fate that you, in your ongoing refusal to reform Irish family laws, have condemned other fathers to indefinitely.
PQ and answer below:
In a parliamentary question, Deputy PJ Sheehan asked the Minister to explain why unmarried fathers are still forced to go and queue with junkies in order to get their names on their child's birth certificate, and why they are still required, unlike married fathers, to apply to courts to be guardians of their own children.
Inevitably, the answer from the powers-that-be, petrified as they are of the single mummy mafia, is that no change is forthcoming.
In fact, according to our esteemed minister, the current situation is a 'comprehensive' solution, based on 'the welfare of the child'. Which is nonsense, clearly.
It is prehistoric to discriminate between fathers on the basis of their marital status in this manner, and I look forward to the day when someone challenges this in court or via equality legislation.
But I have little or no faith in the Irish legislature, which has a lengthy track record of ignoring the needs of fathers and their children for each other, in reforming itself.
Given the latest reiteration of hardened attitudes and ignorance from the Justice Minister, one can only conclude that they still hate fathers, and still fear the mommy mafia, who are entrenched in opposing rights for fathers despite their odious rhetoric about equality when it comes to demanding ever more state funding for child care, single mommy allowances, free education and back to work allowances and so on.
One day, likely at the insistence of the EU, we will eventually concede in Ireland the fact that fathers are immeasurably beneficial to the development of their children and that the status quo we have espoused for so long amounts to nothing short of human rights violations and child abuse.
In the meantime, we still have to put up with crap like lesbian lovers being granted parental rights over fathers, like fathers being accused slanderously of various crimes by bitter mothers in closed courts, and like children being denied equitable parenting from the moment of birth on the basis of their parents' marital status.
In the meantime, because Dermot Ahern and his cohort are so lazy and fearful of a feminist backlash, fathers will have to continue to queue up with the junkies to get on the birth cert, plead with courts to know how their children's health and education is proceeding and face ongoing denial of their and their children's rights to justice.
Fuck you, Dermot Ahern. I genuinely hope that you find yourself in a family law court one day, slackjawed with shock because the other half has accused you of sexually abusing your kids in order to get back at you for divorcing her, or because she simply doesn't want to have to deal with you at all.
I hope you enjoy the endless months of expensive legal applications, the monitored visits with social workers in tow, and then ultimately the success of paying half your wages in maintenance to live in a rented bedsit and see your kids in McDonalds every other Saturday.
It's not normally a prospect I'd wish on my worst enemy. But I wish it upon you, Minister for Injustice, because it is exactly that fate that you, in your ongoing refusal to reform Irish family laws, have condemned other fathers to indefinitely.
PQ and answer below:
77. Deputy P. J. Sheehan
asked the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform
Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform (Deputy Dermot Ahern):
Under the law as it stands - section 6A of the Guardianship of Infants Act 1964, as inserted by section 12 of the Status of Children Act 1987 - an unmarried father may apply to the court to be appointed a guardian of his child. Alternatively, where there is agreement between the parents, they can make a statutory declaration under section 2(4) of the Guardianship of Infants Act, as inserted by section 4 of the Children Act 1997, conferring on the father the status of guardian.
Under section 11 of the 1964 Act, a guardian may apply to the court for its direction on any question affecting the welfare of the child, including directions as to custody and access. In addition, the section provides that the unmarried father of a child, even if he is not a guardian, may apply to the court for orders on custody and access. Section 3 of the Act provides that, in deciding on an application relating to the custody, guardianship or upbringing of a child, the court shall regard the welfare of the child as the first and paramount consideration.
These legislative provisions are comprehensive. They permit the court in cases of disagreement to decide on arrangements for the child’s care and upbringing having regard to the child’s best interests. The vast majority of applications by unmarried fathers for guardianship are granted by the court.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Dads have fewer rights than lesbian lovers
Irish fathers be warned.
According to a court ruling yesterday, the one third of you who are not married to the mothers of your children have fewer rights than a lesbian in a relationship with your child's mother.
In a preposterous ruling that has massive implications for 30% of Irish fathers, Mr 'Justice' John Hedigan ruled yesterday that a family of two women and a child was no less of a family than an unmarried man and woman with a child.
And then he ruled against permitting the father of a child guardianship of his own flesh and blood, because of the poisonous relationship between the father and the two lesbians.
Let's just tease this one out, because the implications are rather profound.
In Ireland, if you are not married, and you father a child, you have no de facto rights. You are obliged to seek those rights of guardianship, access and custody via the family law courts, which are held in camera, meaning that what is said in those courtrooms cannot be repeated, either in libel cases or in other formats like the media.
In other words, you could go to court to gain access to your child, only to be called for example a paedophile or a drug addict with no basis in reality, and be denied a relationship with your child.
And now, thanks to the most recent ruling yesterday, you can be denied a relationship with your child because the mother has shacked up with another woman and they don't want you involved!
This story will inevitably be spun as some sort of victory for equal rights for gay couples. It isn't. It's a defeat for fathers.
It's the story of a father denied a relationship with his son, a child he fathered, made up of half of his genes, because of the caprice of a lesbian couple and the blind stupidity of the Irish family law system, which favours everything and everyone over father's rights.
And it's the story of a little boy denied a relationship with his male parent because his mother is vindictive and because courts are shit-scared of doing anything that could remotely be spun as homophobic.
Conclusion: It's alright to deny human rights to people as long as they are children or fathers in Ireland.
According to a court ruling yesterday, the one third of you who are not married to the mothers of your children have fewer rights than a lesbian in a relationship with your child's mother.
In a preposterous ruling that has massive implications for 30% of Irish fathers, Mr 'Justice' John Hedigan ruled yesterday that a family of two women and a child was no less of a family than an unmarried man and woman with a child.
And then he ruled against permitting the father of a child guardianship of his own flesh and blood, because of the poisonous relationship between the father and the two lesbians.
Let's just tease this one out, because the implications are rather profound.
In Ireland, if you are not married, and you father a child, you have no de facto rights. You are obliged to seek those rights of guardianship, access and custody via the family law courts, which are held in camera, meaning that what is said in those courtrooms cannot be repeated, either in libel cases or in other formats like the media.
In other words, you could go to court to gain access to your child, only to be called for example a paedophile or a drug addict with no basis in reality, and be denied a relationship with your child.
And now, thanks to the most recent ruling yesterday, you can be denied a relationship with your child because the mother has shacked up with another woman and they don't want you involved!
This story will inevitably be spun as some sort of victory for equal rights for gay couples. It isn't. It's a defeat for fathers.
It's the story of a father denied a relationship with his son, a child he fathered, made up of half of his genes, because of the caprice of a lesbian couple and the blind stupidity of the Irish family law system, which favours everything and everyone over father's rights.
And it's the story of a little boy denied a relationship with his male parent because his mother is vindictive and because courts are shit-scared of doing anything that could remotely be spun as homophobic.
Conclusion: It's alright to deny human rights to people as long as they are children or fathers in Ireland.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Taste the Bright Lights
This is the most terrifying book I've ever read.
And it's for kids.
It's scary because it bleeds truth. Probably it's more useful for parents to read than kids. Kids already know what a feral jungle of self-immolation teenagedom is these days. But it's still frightening to see it put down, in print, so authentically, so viscerally.
It's available for download or from Lulu, but I understand it will be in shops throughout Ireland too some time soon.
Just as soon as Eason's can source some lead-lined bags to store it in.
Incendiary reading. Exemplary writing. I read it in one sitting and couldn't move for an hour afterwards. In fact, I'm still having nightmares about it.
And it's for kids.
It's scary because it bleeds truth. Probably it's more useful for parents to read than kids. Kids already know what a feral jungle of self-immolation teenagedom is these days. But it's still frightening to see it put down, in print, so authentically, so viscerally.
It's available for download or from Lulu, but I understand it will be in shops throughout Ireland too some time soon.
Just as soon as Eason's can source some lead-lined bags to store it in.
Incendiary reading. Exemplary writing. I read it in one sitting and couldn't move for an hour afterwards. In fact, I'm still having nightmares about it.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Get your kids off Myspace
It's now time to get your kids off Myspace.
After various US states forced the Rupert Murdoch-owned firm to identify convicted sex offenders with profiles on the social networking site, they were horrified to discover that nearly 30,000 perverts had profiles on the site, which is popular with teens and even younger kids.
This is after Myspace had already removed 7,000 profiles of convicted sex offenders from the site. And this figure only includes American sex offenders, not those from any other country.
What's even more concerning is that word about using Myspace to contact underage kids seems to have gone out among the pervert world. How else to explain the quadrupling of the number of sex offenders on the site in the past two months?
Its rival in Ireland and the UK, Bebo, seems to be somewhat more serious when it comes to online safety of the underage. They appointed Irishwoman Dr Rachel O'Connell as their safety officer some time ago, and this week they introduced a set of educational resources to promote the safe and responsible use of social networking across its user community.
Which is not to say that I'd recommend permitting your children to spend hours unattended on any social networking site. But kids will be kids, and if they must be on a site like this, then it's clearly safer that they use Bebo.
And of course, it's of the utmost importance that parents involve themselves in their children's online lives, and inform themselves about the risks involved. Nothing makes a child safer in any walk of life than their feeling able to speak to and confide in their parents about everything.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Press the freedom button
Some people are surprised at how little television I watch. I'm a bit like my local boozer, which has a telly in the corner, but it has a little sign underneath it that reads 'News and Sport Only.'
Basically, down the pub, the box goes on if there's a big game on, or for the Six-One news. All other times, it rests in blissful silence. I've adopted a similar policy.
This doesn't mean that no telly gets watched in our house. My other half is still an addict, and after a hard day's graft, like so many people, she likes to sprawl on the sofa and zone out in front of the goggle box.
I've long since learnt to either leave the room or ignore the prattle of the box in a zen-like fashion when she's watching.
This is not to say that there aren't things I might like to watch. But generally, those are few and far between. They tend to be documentaries about nature or history, or movies I haven't seen.
But the annoyance of having a programme broken up by hard-sell advertising, or on at an odd hour, simply doesn't suit me. So if I want to see those documentaries or movies, I simply go and rent them from the video store or download them (in an entirely legal manner, when available, of course!)
My objection to television is a scientific one - research has linked TV watching to everything from childhood obesity to attention deficit disorder and autism among kids. Leaving your child in front of the boobtube is not the easy alternative to childminding you might have thought it was.
And for adults, the effects of television are just as baleful. Television watching causes insomnia, stress, indolence, obesity, and it doesn't educate, despite what its makers might tell you.
So dangerous is television to health that doctors are now being advised to monitor their patients' viewing habits as part of a general health check-up.
Television is anti-social, ruins public gathering places and the art of conversation, and erodes children's ability to create their own playtimes. It is the ideal tool for advertisers, short of beaming ads onto the inside of your eyelids, as the audience will mindlessly sit in front of their sales pitches for hours upon hours without moving.
It's time to turn off the demon in the corner of the room. Time to reclaim your leisure time and do something useful with it.
When I was a nipper, there was a TV programme on BBC during school holidays called 'Why Don't You...?' It was aimed at encouraging slothful kids out of the couch and outside to do something with their time that was useful. That impulse seems to be too ironic and subversive for contemporary TV producers. The programme was dropped years ago.
There is an organisation aimed at encouraging more people to free themselves from TV slavery. They are called White Dot. Ironically enough, I came across them on the television. They once used the media format they abhor to broadcast a documentary about the evils of television watching.
One of the exercises they suggested to the viewing public was so potent it has stuck with me, affecting my own viewing patterns and indeed my life as a whole. I urge you to try it yourself.
Get a shaving or make-up mirror and position it on top of your television so that when you sit in your favourite chair or couch, you can see your own reflection.
Then turn on the telly and start watching.
Wait for a moment of high drama, the sort of screaming match in the pub that soap operas love to portray, and look up suddenly from the screen to the mirror. See what you're doing while these imaginary people are living life in top gear.
Or turn over to a nice holiday show. When Kathryn Thomas is skiiing down the alps or scuba-diving in the Seychelles, look up from the box to the mirror and take note of what you're up to.
After a day or two with the mirror on the TV, you'll soon realise that a small cohort of actors and presenters are living a wonderful life which your indolence is paying for. By sitting in front of the box immobile, you facilitate the adverts and the funding that pays for their fantastic careers and existence.
While you, meanwhile, are doing nothing more than vegetating on your couch as life passes you by.
When that sinks in fully, you'll start watching less television, becoming truly discerning about your viewing, and eventually you'll be only turning it on to catch up with the news.
And many hours of your day will open up to you suddenly. In this time-precious world, you'll have freed up more hours in the day than you know what to do with.
So use your life. Write a novel, dig the garden, go for a walk, meet some friends for a pint, take up a hobby, or go to evening classes and learn a new skill or language.
Just as no one yet said on their deathbed, "I wish I'd done more overtime at work", no one is recorded to have said "I wish I'd watched more telly" either.
Join White Dot. Press the freedom button to turn the goggle box off, and reclaim your life today.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Mama don't preach
I've been forced to remove the image from this page due to the phenomenally large number of sad perverts out there who are desperately seeking a view of Madonna's snatch.
Dear perverts, please leave this blog alone, zip up your trousers, go have a nice cold shower and then get a life, preferably one with a proper actual living woman in it. Thanks, JC.
The hypocrisy of some people is truly astounding. Michael McDowell lambasting other politicians over their dealings with the press, for example. Or Catholic clerics who condemned people as sinners for having sex outside of marriage while raping children themselves.
But among instances of spectacular contemporary hypocrisy above and beyond the call of duty, the biscuit has to go to Madonna, for banning her daughter from even seeing boys until she is 18 years old. (The child is currently only ten.)
She is worried that boys might lead her precious little Lourdes astray. Not half as astray as she herself has wandered in the past, I would suggest.
Let's remind ourselves of Madonna's own track record. She began her career as a nude photographic model in New York as a teenager, having gone through a number of schools due to her rebellious streak.
A trained dancer, she first got into music by shagging a musician with whom she formed a band. Then she formed another band with another 'boyfriend', and recorded some songs.
She got one of those songs released and got signed to a record label. She then recorded her debut album and got another 'boyfriend' to remix it for her. Since then she has shagged her way through Hollywood stars, basketball players and even women in an attempt to remain in the headlines.
She has made two soft-porn coffee table books featuring herself nude. She has children by two separate men, and one she dodgily adopted in Africa away from the child's own father.
Her eldest daughter, over whom she is now so concerned, is known as 'Lola' and 'Lolita' in the family home.
But now that she's a mumsy, huntin' and shootin' English lady of the manor who writes crappy children's books that are as risibly poor as her acting used to be, she's worried about the bad influence of boys on her daughter?
Wait till little Lola cops what you got up to, Madge. I can't think of a worse influence on an impressionable little girl than a tarty Mum who made a mint being a professional tramp, then turned into a hypocritical prude.
Dear perverts, please leave this blog alone, zip up your trousers, go have a nice cold shower and then get a life, preferably one with a proper actual living woman in it. Thanks, JC.
The hypocrisy of some people is truly astounding. Michael McDowell lambasting other politicians over their dealings with the press, for example. Or Catholic clerics who condemned people as sinners for having sex outside of marriage while raping children themselves.
But among instances of spectacular contemporary hypocrisy above and beyond the call of duty, the biscuit has to go to Madonna, for banning her daughter from even seeing boys until she is 18 years old. (The child is currently only ten.)
She is worried that boys might lead her precious little Lourdes astray. Not half as astray as she herself has wandered in the past, I would suggest.
Let's remind ourselves of Madonna's own track record. She began her career as a nude photographic model in New York as a teenager, having gone through a number of schools due to her rebellious streak.
A trained dancer, she first got into music by shagging a musician with whom she formed a band. Then she formed another band with another 'boyfriend', and recorded some songs.
She got one of those songs released and got signed to a record label. She then recorded her debut album and got another 'boyfriend' to remix it for her. Since then she has shagged her way through Hollywood stars, basketball players and even women in an attempt to remain in the headlines.
She has made two soft-porn coffee table books featuring herself nude. She has children by two separate men, and one she dodgily adopted in Africa away from the child's own father.
Her eldest daughter, over whom she is now so concerned, is known as 'Lola' and 'Lolita' in the family home.
But now that she's a mumsy, huntin' and shootin' English lady of the manor who writes crappy children's books that are as risibly poor as her acting used to be, she's worried about the bad influence of boys on her daughter?
Wait till little Lola cops what you got up to, Madge. I can't think of a worse influence on an impressionable little girl than a tarty Mum who made a mint being a professional tramp, then turned into a hypocritical prude.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Child-free aviation
As my first flight of the year approaches, I am filled with trepidation at hurling myself into the pit of contemporary human misery that is air travel today.
Nothing can ever habituate you to the squalid overcrowding of Dublin airport, the terrorist frisk-downs at destination airports on arrival and on return, or to the contemptible service standards of certain low-cost airlines, where everything has a price and the customer has no value whatsoever.
But I could, with the assistance of prescription pharmaceuticals, somehow manage to handle all of the above if only someone in the aviation industry would hear my plea and provide child-free flights.
There has been reports that a smoking airline might be about to set up in business. But frankly, and I speak as a smoker here, that idea is really pretty disgusting in the context of recycled air.
That's not what the customer wants or needs. We would like to be treated like human beings, and at least in my case, we would welcome the offer, even if we had to pay a little extra, to fly without the accompaniment of colicky newborns and their sleep-deprived, frazzled parents, especially on long-haul flights.
Next week, I have a short hop. Even if I get allocated next to a mewling, puking brat, I can flee their presence within a couple of hours.
But later in the year, I may be flying much further afield. And no amount of tranquilisers, airport bar gin and tonics, or over the counter sleeping tablets will be able to take the edge off the shrill caterwaul of someone else's infant for hours on end at 40,000 feet.
The O'Leary's and Willie Walshes of this world are supposedly innovating air travel daily, constantly seeking to open up new opportunities for diversifying airline income.
Well, if they value making an extra few quid, let someone speculate on raising prices on long-haul flights that are guaranteed over-twelves only?
I appreciate that sometimes people HAVE to travel. Granny's funeral and so on. But surely it is always possible not to mention preferable to leave a young infant behind? Even older children do not enjoy hours on end stuck in a seat in a cramped jet airliner.
So if it is Granny's funeral, and you can prove it, then alright, take the child with you. But won't someone give me the option of catching the next, child-free, flight too?
And if it's not Granny's funeral, then please, leave your rugrats at home with someone, or better still, holiday locally. It's better for the environment, better for your stress levels and better for the general sanity of the rest of us who didn't volunteer to bear witness to your offspring's marathon ability to tantrum.
Bill Hicks was right. But then again he usually is...
Friday, October 20, 2006
Chocolates, Sting Rays and Orla Barry
Via SluggerO'Toole, I notice that a Belfast Professor had his building society account emptied by tech-savvy thieves who spent the proceeds on Thornton's chocolates. That's £15,000 worth of Thornton's chocolates.
They also bought £5,000 worth of Tesco vouchers, because every little helps, I guess.
Now, while my usual concerns about online and telephone banking apply once again - ie it's a scam operated by the banks to keep their overheads down and actually makes your money much less safe that it was when they had branches and human beings overseeing it - I am also bamboozled as to why the thieves would need so many chocolates?
And from BBC, news of another stingray attack on a human. When Steve Irwin, the Aussie crocodile worrier, died, we all were told how stingrays were peaceable creatures that never seek to cause harm to humans.
Well, this latest attack involved a stingray leaping on board a boat to stab the 81 year old captain in the chest, just off the Florida coast.
"It was a freak accident," said the local fire chief. Hmmm. Didn't they say the same after Irwin's death? For peaceable creatures, they've got some blood on their stings. Maybe the loopers who went out and chopped the stings off rays after Irwin's 'accident' were right after all.
This morning, I was tuned into 'Life! with Orla Barry' on Newstalk 106. Not my normal morning listening, I'll freely admit. But it was certainly a revealing insight into the concerns of a modern female radio listenership.
We had what seemed to be a 40 minute discussion about childcare in Ireland, during which not once did anyone make the point that if parents find childcare costs too high, they should consider having less kids or staying at home with the brood they've already produced instead of expecting other taxpayers to stump up.
"Even after the thousand euros, parents still have to pay 91% of the cost of childcare," bleated one creche owner. Erm, what were you expecting? That single, gay and childless taxpayers should pay more tax to keep other people's children being raised by third parties?
This was followed by a slot with a sex therapist about married people not having sex. Apparently, loads of married people in Ireland are having no sex because they're living busy lives and have the kids to deal with too. Not because they're turned off each other.
Perhaps this is why they're really seeking ever more money for childcare, it seems to me. What they really want is an extra hour in bed to canoodle.
However, as Orla has now threatened to foist Irish Times hackette Roisin Ingle upon my delicate ears, I'm turning her off. Ingle's pointless self-obsessed column is indicative of all that's gone wrong in Irish journalism these days.
She was once wonderfully satirised on boards.ie, and how she has the gumption to show her face in public after that, never mind keep writing more of the same is beyond me. Her 'column' makes me so angry that I fear listening to her live would be more than I could bear.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
What is the law for?
I read in the Irish Daily Mirror a heart-rending tale of a Belfast mum who has been separated from her only child.
Her bloke took the child and legged it to his homeland of Algeria, whence there is no chance of his extradition.
Dawn Andrew's helplessness in the face of the fact that her child has been effectively abducted from her makes you wonder - what is the law for if it can't prevent things like this occurring, or at least fix them once they've happened?
Anyone who remembers the Chancery opening of 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens will recall the physical and metaphorical fog that surrounds it. The Nineteenth Century British law court was a cold, bewildering house for the common man to find himself in.
In those days, there was one law to protect the rich, and no law for the poor except the aforementioned 'Don't fuck with the money people' law.
Divorce, as another Dickens novel depicts it, was unknown for ordinary people. They had to stick together in shitty marriages even though it was hundreds of years since one of their kings had slaughtered his way through a series of wives, divorcing some of them and even founding his own religion accidentally as a result.
Of course, these days we can get a divorce in most civilised countries. It didn't come through some respect for the rights of the individual, though. It came through the feminist movement, which saw divorce, like contraception and the torching of lingerie, as part of the armoury required to establish the liberty of women.
Now, in many places, women are still no more than chattel. Try walking through Mogadishu or Tehran in a bikini and see what happens if you doubt that. But we don't often hear a lot from feminists about the legal rights of the sisterhood when the sisters happen to be dark-skinned, Muslim and from outside the Western World.
Instead, they're keener on tweaking the laws in Western Europe and North America to protect the rights they gained for themselves and to prevent the overhaul of antique laws here that give them an artificial advantage over menfolk.
As a singular example, I offer child custody. Four decades or more since the countercultural wave of feminism, I still hear no outcry from women about why men don't get to look after the children after divorce or separation.
I do hear them demanding ever more state funding for creche and kindergarten places, where working mommy can leave her little one in the care of a third party all day. And I hear them demanding the house from departed Dad to raise the kids in. Not to mention a stipend of his wages from here to eternity, no matter whose fault the separation was.
But I don't hear any calls for the radical overhaul of child custody and family laws from that quarter. Why? Because the old patriarchal assumption that raising kids is women's work suits them on this occasion.
Now, men moved over in the workplace to accommodate women in the last century. Sure, it took a few millennia. Sure, it probably only happened because women got to vote, then were needed to work in factories because men went to war yet again. Men are dumb, they like fighting and they kept women suppressed for a long, long time. We know this already.
But men love their children, and cannot understand why, after four decades, the feminist movement and women in general have decided to fail their kids by refusing to move over in the home and accommodate men who want to look after their kids.
I've met guys who separated from the mothers of their children and had to move into a one room flat or back with their parents in their Forties and even Fifties because Mom got the house in the separation, because they had kids, and well... kids should go with mom, don't they?
Not necessarily true. There are endless statistics to indicate that children raised by single mothers do worse at school, are more likely to become involved in delinquency, drugs, alcohol abuse and get in trouble with the law. This is not to say that there aren't great people raised by brave and steadfast women on their own. But the trends indicate that raising your kids in a one-parent atmosphere can be deleterious to their upbringing.
But it gets more interesting than that. Not many people realise that children are many, many times more likely to be sexually abused by the new partner of their mother than they are by their father. This fact gets lost in screaming tabloid tales of men who preyed on their offspring.
Even more interesting is that when children are raised with their father as sole parent, they tend to do better than average on all of the same indices that their peers raised by Mom do worse at. Like school performance, academic achievement, avoidance of substance abuse or lawbreaking.
Don't believe me? You don't have to. You should dip into Adrienne Burgess' book 'Fatherhood Reclaimed' and read her research for yourself. A lifelong feminist, she set out to do a number on deadbeat Dads who leave their partners and kids in the lurch to go drinking and whoring.
Instead, she happened across the biggest social scandal in our modern times - the inflicted divorce of children from their fathers by women and the antiquated legal system that still assumes Mom knows best.
Her book should have caused an outcry when it was first released a decade ago. Instead, it was ignored, and we raised a generation of ASBO-achieving hoodies.
And those deadbeat Dads - a term incidentally that is way past its sell-by-date now? Well, in Britain and Ireland many of them are trying and failing to get to see their children, unable to force the mother to facilitate their relationship with their kids even with a court order, because no judge wants to be seen in the press sending a Mommy to jail.
But dare he miss a maintenance payment, there's a court order on his property, and the relevant government agency will be docking cash from his payslip.
Other dads are unable to even establish where their children are, after their mothers skipped the country with them in tow. Thousands spent on detectives and trips to foreign countries looking in vain for their children, trying to guess their height, their look now they're older.
But the mainstream media would rather depict endless stories of distraught Mommies like the one above, who stupidly got involved with someone from a fundamentalist Muslim background and a dusty foreign land, then were gobsmacked when he didn't return to their council flat with the kids after a holiday in Dar al-Islam.
We are told that Mommies are the victims, not Daddies. Daddies are cash cows to be milked and ignored. Except when they are morons in superhero outfits getting in tabloid trouble.
And people wonder why the male suicide rate is through the roof.
We need a radical overhaul of our legal system in this regard or we need to rethink what civilisation means. We are involved in a massive and unprecedented experiment involving the mass deprivation of fathers for children. The early results are in, and it is not an experiment that we should continue.
If this mass shortchanging of the next generation is not sufficient to convince the powers that be to change the duplicitous, overbalanced and secretive legal system on the issue of childcare, then perhaps men should start converting to Islam and take their little ones on an extended holiday to Algeria.
If it doesn't rectify injustice, but institutionalises it instead, what's the law for anyway?
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