Posts Tagged ‘Brave Young Adults’
2 from 2002 and the Kitchen Sink: Why Sociologists (are hired) to Rule America
Bifurcating Parenthood (Georgetown), 2-Pronged Fatherhood (Progressive Policythink), Ridiculous Rulings (in Kansas) and Who Rules America (UC sociologist)
Today’s post (extended and updated from yesterdays, which I published in short form) has 4 (FOUR) parts:
1,
2,
3,
4.
As is usual for me, the “juice” that inspired the post is in the middle, [2-3] the Intro, and the kicker [4] at the end, and the Intro [1] sometimes gets so extended, I never actually publish the middle. So we have:
1, Symbolizing Judicial Tyranny (dombrowski)
2, Parental Bifurcation (2002 Georgetown article)
3, The 2nd prong of Fatherhood (2002 Progressive Policy-think)
4. Jobs ain’t Wealth & Who Rules America (since we just saw how).
As is usual for me, the “juice” that inspired the post is in the middle, [2-3] the Intro, and the kicker [4] at the end, and the Intro [1] sometimes gets so extended, I never actually publish the middle.
4 was simply me mentioning the theme of “income v. wealth” that I know by now is critical in the social engine called these courts. It’s basically workforce development, and US/Them paradigm. There are several links and quotes. I could’ve chosen any. But it will hold together, I trust. At the top, I’m going to post a QUOTE from a Professor Dumoff, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz. It’s from his site “WHO RULES AMERICA?” which is a good question. More below, at the banner.
In my last year of research and reflection (including on my own experience) of who’s doing WHAT in the courts an WHY those dang nonprofits have been useless, basically, I had to get to foundations, who support the nonprofits doing nothing. Then I began to understand the forces that are driving America into materialistic chaos, to sustain a global economy based on permanent debt. I feel this ain’t too bad work, considering what have also been through in the “decade of the courts” in my adult life.
I suggest we read this site THROUGH.
I am burnt out on reporting on outrageous family law cases, also beseeching noncustodial parents I know to take a little more critical look at organizations — not just good/cop bad/cop individuals. I have . . . . . I also have repeatedly encouraged people to take a very illuminating glance at some of the IRS 990s on some of the “helkping” organizations who continue to pay CEOs over $100,000 year to report on the carnage or insults to personhood.
Losers in the family law situation who don’t end up physically and emotionally dysfunctional might definitely end up homeless may definitely end up homeless, male or female. Yet there’s a real reluctance among litigants to not just look at the role of the child support system (federal) as a planned move to socialism for most of us based on policies set by the foundations hiring the nonprofits selecting what will (and will not) get talked about in the arena. They may blog or acknowledge it briefly, then go back to collaborating with the closest nonprofit that makes a big noise.
Battered women who’ve gone into the family law court after leaving the relationship are in a UNIQUE position to understand and speak to the power structure from underneath, analytically and as to attitude.
Once I began looking at organizational structures (it helps to have a model of a virtual “gang” in one’s own family for reference) I never stopped looking. Here’s a diagram for the more visually organized:
This is how such an inane policy as “fatherhood” could actually go through Congress, and get enacted. It’s a form of psychological warfare, basically, to frame the conversation nationally, yet fail to inform have the litigants in court that the conversation is taking place.
ANYHOW, this represents my post for today, and welcome to it. Do your own homework!
Here’s from Part 4, to think about in 1, 2, and 3:
- “The rich” coalesce into a social upper class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview, and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
- Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for upwards of 150 years now.
- There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper class shape policy debates in the United States.
This I can attest to. See (for a starter) “shady shaky foundations of family law” and some of the organizational geneaology. IN good part, that’s what this blog is for — to show the connections. This tells me also why the “Coalitions Against Domestic Violence” simply “cannot” hear our truths.
- Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington.
- The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
- Working people have less power than in many other democratic countries.
1, Symbolizing Judicial Tyranny (dombrowski)
If I don’t post something more “detached” today, I’m going to post the entire docket for Hal Richardson v. Claudine Dombrowski in the “Third Judicial Court of Public Access,” Kansas. Claudine has been in this system for 14 + years, and isn’t broken yet, though it’s making a good effort to do so to her. Her case also illustrates the cognitive dissonance between criminal and family law, and between family law as stated and as practiced. Not to mention what the U.S. is doing to the half of parenthood in the United States who are female. We are still fighting for recognition as human beings and thus covered under civil rights, due process, etc.
Even though I know so much about this case, it’s still possible to be entirely shocked at the behavior of the court and court personnel in it.
As summarized in a blog, August 1, this year
Judge James P. Buchele, who refused to permit adequate testimony at trial, shortening it to benefit his docket, and also ordered Claudine to move back to Topeka to live near Richardson, for the sake of their “co-parenting.” WHAT?! Richardson is a man with multiple criminal convictions for violent behavior (Battery, Attempted Battery, Battery of a Law Enforcement Officer, Obstruction of Legal Process, Possession of Marijuana and violation of Open Container law), a man who has beaten and raped Claudine multiple times before and after her divorce from him, a man who has threatened to kill her and her child.
Worse, Judge Buchele also ordered Claudine not to call the police any more without the permission of her case manager. When Judge James Buchele retired, Judge Richard D. Anderson affirmed Buchele’s previous orders, including the illegal prohibition on Claudine’s being able to call the police.As reported in Manhattan (KS) Free press, July 9 years ago (also see blog):
The divorce proceedings were extended for eighteen months. Throughout the proceedings Claudine’s attorneys filed numerous reports claiming violations of the restraining order and requesting an order to sever contact between Hal, Claudine and daughter Rikki.
The first involved an incident that both parties agreed in court happened, they just could not agree what happened. Claudine said she was hit in the head with a crow bar and Hal said it was a piece of wood. What ever he hit her with it took 24 stitches to close the head wounds.
At a hearing on June 17, 1996 Shawnee County District Court Judge Jan W. Leuenberger signed order giving custody of Rikki to Claudine and authorizing her to move to the Great Bend area so that “Ms. Dombrowski could avoid the history of physical and verbal abuse she had suffered from Mr. Richardson.”
In other words, were she not a mother, she would have the right to flee to protect her unalienable right to LIFE. However, unknown to her, other things had already been cooking in Congress around this time, which are mentioned below. In 1994 a little National Fatherhood Initiative had been formed. In 1995, then-President Clinton had issued his (in)famous Executive Order about Fathers. In 1996, we have Welfare Reform, some of the Congressional Testimony of which I posted recently and which is summarized below on a site calling itself “Progressive Policy.” I call it Regressive, because it results in cases like this. You can track the REgression in individual cases, and how it happened, through adding personnel besides the judge.
Hal was given supervised visitation
Why this Supervision shouldn’t have been done with him inside a jail cell, I just don’t “get.” Rikki must’ve seen her mother’s stitches — what message does that send to a young girl? It’s OK for fathers to beat up mothers, right? A family court judge will sweep up the evidence . Whistleblowers will be punished.
Reading on in the case, he WILL get even for even that restriction. A GAL will help, Scott MacKenzie (if I can keep the narrative straight who did what when….) In time — that’s how these things go — Supervised visitation will be switched to the mother. Then, her fight will be to get that UNsupervised. She will win that “privilege,” but apparently wasn’t docile enough, because she then loses all contact entirely for a while. It’s all in the record. Meanwhile, the various parties are REAL serious about getting the money she owes absolutely everyone for these types of “services.”
In Judge Buchele’s Orders after the trial he made it clear that he wanted more from this couple than what was possible. Here is what he wrote: “Mutual parental involvement with this child has been made worse by Ms. Dombrowski’s unilateral decision to move to Larned, Kansas in May of 1996. The distance between Topeka and Larned makes it virtually impossible for an individual treater to work with the family; for Mr. Richardson to have regular and frequent contact with this child; to establish any reasonable dialogue between the parents toward resolving their conflicts. The move from Topeka to Larned, due to the proximity of the parties, has lessened the physical violence. It has, however, done violence to the relationship of Rikki and her father. If long distance visitation is continued, in the Court’s view, will take its toll not only on Rikki but each of the parties. The Court specifically finds that separation of the child from either parent for long periods of time is harmful for a child of about three years of age.”
And THERE, “in a nutshell,” you have how a family law judge skillfully Re-frames the conversation and Re-Prioritizes it from safety to reconciliation. Better Claudine maybe die the next time than a father’s rights be conditioned upon not abusing them — or her. Sounds “squirrelly” to me. A woman gets temporary reprieve and safety, then this is reversed, and made worse. The decisions become more and more authoritative.
He then went on to require Claudine to move back to the Topeka area.
And then Judge Buchele made a judgment that some Manhattan attorneys say is not legal. Judge Buchele ordered: “Further, respondent (Claudine) is directed to not call law enforcement authorities to investigate the petitioner (Hal) without first consulting with the case manager.”
On December 14, 2000 after returning her daughter to her fathers home Claudine alleges that she was battered and raped by Hal. Under order not to call law enforcement authorities and with bleeding that would not stop, she drove to St. Marys, Kansas to get treatment. Claudine knew that if she had gone to a Topeka Hospital they would have called the police.
In St. Marys hospital officials did contact the Pottawatomie Sheriff and a report was made. She was advised that because the alleged event occurred in Shawnee County she would have to file there.
RIGHT THERE — is a typical “between a rock and a hard place” situation. I have experienced a modified situation, where I was so frightened, I drove, fast, to a police station in another city. They told me to go back to practically the scene of a stalking incident that had terrified me. There, I was treated abominably by officers, who refused to report, though dispatched to do so by the intake person who heard my voice; the incident was also witnessed by others, and signed letters are in the file.
Claudine had a choice of, NOT REPORTING, saving her own skin (to hell with her daughter) and just dealing with it. Supposed the injuries had been different and the bleeding faster, and she didn’t TRY to appease an outright vicious court order, but reported right in Topeka at first, and going straight from having wounds tended to, to jail (or soon thereafter) in contempt. She did what any mother would in a crisis — stop the bleeding, let the mandatory reporters (probably ) report, and go save her daughter.
Claudine said that because of the battery and rape she picked up Rikki the next day and did not return her.
Now, does that “revise” your opinion of what Sherriff’s Departments are in the business of?
The Shawnee County Sheriff’s Department was called and took Rikki back to Topeka. The court gave Hal custody and orders for her to attend Topeka schools.
As it stands now, [2001] Rikki is with her father in Topeka. Claudine gets two one-hour visits per week
Here is a link to that ex parte, JUDGE-initiated order (Neither party initiated it. The judge in this matter totally redefined his own role in the courtroom. This judge ain’t the only one around doing this.). Can you read it? The link is “scribd” and take a while to load. My computer is too slow today to load its 11 pp. Also, I’m curtailing my own commentary because even keystrokes are coming out one at a time, slowly. I can only fill up a short “buffer” zone, about 4 words, and then have to just wait for it to catch up.
Shawnee County District Court– Topeka, Kansas, 200 SE 7th Street 66603 Div 2 – Hon. Richard D. Anderson (785) 233-8200 Ext. 4350
Order without motion from either party WITHOUT Hearing on his OWN—I REPEAT on his own
Took my daughter and gave her to a KNOWN AND convicted Batterer and drug abuser AND CHILD RAPIST
Fast-forward 9 years or so. ..
By way of a 2007 Petition before the “Inter American Commission on HUMAN Rights” On Item 17 Courageous Kids personal stories, please read “Letter to IACHR by siblings” (#3 )here. These are 4 siblings now aged out of the system, detailing what happened when they called the cops, or ran away, what happened to their mother; how one girl was thrown out by her father and forced to live in a car for a while in retaliation. It’s only 3 pages. These are the types of fathers getting custody in this system.
THIS site has links to more details:
People are outraged everywhere. The last time 15 year old Rikki called to cancel her two hour Sunday visit she is allowed each week with her mother, she was crying on the phone and said she couldn’t come. Abuser WOS (waste of skin) Hal Richardson was yelling in the background, and Rikki cried more. Dear Claudine told her daughter it was okay, that everything would be okay. That was it. After that, not even a phone call to cancel, Hal Richardson failed to produce Rikki at the Topeka Police Station as he was ordered to do. Nothing. And the court let him get away with all 67 violations of this court order on August 20th when they went to court.
(the woman who writes this, above, herself lost contact with her own mother, a generation earlier).
(Compare, above, when Claudine “messed up” by going to a hospital, even though she attempted to go to the politically correct one, in 2000. I believe this was when she was punished for bleeding and trying to regain her child, by losing custody of her child then about-5-year-old daughter.)
Contrast this case history and pattern of bad ethics and decision-making with the more detached narratives, below.
2, Parental Bifurcation (2002 Georgetown article)
I decided to post two pieces (first — long / second – short) that talk openly about the social agenda in the family court/ family law arena. That SOCIAL AGENDA is what most offends me about the Family Law Process. Not its equally destructive consequences. What’s most offensive is how the process eradicates precious civil rights, that are encased in the documents foundational to our country. An elitist attitude and practice, that disdains these, needs to be dismantled. Instead, they have become increasingly blatant and oppressive (similar case, CA 2000/StopFamilyViolence.org site reporting).
[Criminal jury exonerates mother, after she was jailed, fleeing to protect her children. Ignoring this family law judge STILL leaves custody with the abusers, and mother has to pay to see her own children. This is how “supervised visitation” — marketed and sold to the public as protecting children from violent FATHERS, is being used to punish protective MOTHERS),]
even after people are dying as a consequence of bad custody calls (2 women and a man dead, Maricopa Co., AZ, 2009/StopFamilyViolence.org site reporting).
I hope the people I network with as well as visitors will download and read these. The first one may explain why so many of us are being treated dismissively and as silly putty to be stretched, bounced, and reformed in amusing or comical distortions that please the manipulators rather than acknowledging that they are of the same substance as us, as human beings, just occupying different seats in the room.
(1) BIFURCATION
in the Legal Regulation of Parenthood
This is 44+ screens long and from GeorgetownLaw; popped up under a search for “The Origin of Family Law.”
I look forward to reading the rest of it. The “bifurcation” around gender. You will see…
There are some misspellings on the website. Font changes are (most likely) mine. I am not indenting for the quote, and will put any comments in bullet form
Parenthood divided: A legal history of the bifurcated law of parental relations
INTRODUCTION
The American law of parent and child is conventionally understood to be extremely deferential to parental prerogatives and highly reluctant to intervene.1 But this picture, endorsed by legal authorities and popular commentators from the nineteenth century to the present day, reflects only one tradition in the law’s regulation of parenthood. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, {{1875-1900}}there has also been massive legal intervention into the parental relation. This second legal tradition, moreover, has been guided by norms wholly different from those conventionally associated with family law, often evincing a radical suspicion of parental autonomy and an eager willingness to reshape family relations.
.
A STARK DIVIDE IN THE LEGAL REGUALTION OF PARENTHOOD EMERGES IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
The founding of the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children marks a pivotal moment in the bifurcation of the law’s treatment of parental relations. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was established in New York City in 1874 by two elite reformers, Henry Bergh and Elbridge Gerry, who used the occasion of a celebrated case of physical violence against a child to create the first organization designed to combat “child cruelty” in the United States.7 Common law courts of the period staunchly protected the rights that parents in general and fathers in particular exercised over the custody and control of their children.
- SPCC formed by two elite reformers
- “the rights that parents in general and fathers in particular exercised. . . .”
8 But the New York society accorded almost no weight to the prerogatives of the parents it was concerned about, characterizing their connection to their children as little stronger than the ties of happenstance. Gerry explained at an organizational meeting in December 1874, for instance, that the society would “seek out and rescue from the dens and slums of the City the little unfortunates whose lives were rendered miserable by the system of cruelty and abuse which was constantly practiced upon them by the human brutes [their parents] who happened to possess the custody or control of them.”9 Describing the homes of cruel parents as “dens and slums” offered a key clue, of course, to the limits the New York society placed on its jurisdiction. From the start, it focused on families that had not been successful in the wage labor economy, operating on the principle that this economic failure had been caused by some crucial moral or character flaw.10
3, The 2nd prong of Fatherhood (2002 Progressive Policy-think)
(2) COMPLETION
of the Critical Job of Welfare Reform
And — what else — “promoting responsible fatherhood“
AND THIS from Progressive Policy Institute. BOTH of them let us know clearly that family law is a social engineering project. Too bad it says “law” on the outside which has other connotations to the unwary.
PPI | Policy Report | March 19, 2002
Promoting Responsible Fatherhood
Some Promising Strategies
By Megan Burns
One of the key successes of welfare reform has been in the increase of low-income single mothers in the labor force. Due in part to a strong economy and the 1996 welfare reform law, 16 percent more poor moms entered the labor force over the past six years. However, evidence suggests poor men did not fare as well. Because the first round of welfare reform required mothers to work, this next round should issue a similar challenge to fathers in order to help them become current and continue to pay child support.According to the Urban Institute, about two-thirds of the nearly 11 million American fathers who do not live with their children fail to pay child support.1 Therefore it is no surprise that children who grow up fatherless are five times more likely to be poor.2
This reasoning assumes that women who have left an abuser (which are among those numbers) cannot do better financially afterwards, or that women in general cannot do well alone — in short, it assumes a stable working wage. In 2002, I had tripled my working wage, and was doing better. But I had to use a nontraditional model of employment. This was not the model that welfare funnels women onto.
This 2002 report was also six years into welfare reform, and fails to account for cases like Dombrowski/Richardson, above, where (thanks go fathers’ rights movements and encouragements) cases STAY in the family law venue for years, impoverishing the family through ongoing litigation, and removing protection for the protective parents.
Social researchers also note that while women flooded the labor market, poor men did not. For example, during the 1990s, the labor force participation of young black women rose 18 percent, whereas the participation rate among low-income, non-college-educated black men actually fell by almost 10 percent.3
Well, now we have it clearly who welfare policies affecting all populations are aimed at. Supposedly.
In recent months, policymakers have increasingly begun to recognize that bringing fathers into the work-based system created by the 1996 law will be the next critical step in finishing the job of welfare reform. While “responsible fatherhood” programs have sprouted across the country, fatherhood and family formation promise to be central issues in the reauthorization of welfare reform legislation this year.
This type of discussion defines where income comes from — labor. However, that’s not at all where it comes from all the time. People who set policies KNOW this and they are not the chief laborers in question.
4. Jobs ain’t Wealth & Who Rules America (since we just saw how).
MOST people can find out the difference between wealth and income, or understand it (I believe) if someone engages in a discussion of it. The policymakers and the child support enforcement system are here to make sure that discussion never happens in any significant way. Here are a few links:
2003
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03interviewswolff.html
May 2003 – VOLUME 24 – NUMBER 5
The Wealth Divide
The Growing Gap in the United States
Between the Rich and the Rest
An Interview with Edward Wolff
Edward Wolff is a professor of economics at New York University. He is the author of Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, as well as many other books and articles on economic and tax policy. He is managing editor of the Review of Income and Wealth.
In the United States, the richest 1 percent of households owns 38 percent of all wealth. Multinational Monitor: What is wealth?
Edward Wolff: Wealth is the stuff that people own. The main items are your home, other real estate, any small business you own, liquid assets like savings accounts, CDs and money market funds, bonds, other securities, stocks, and the cash surrender value of any life insurance you have. Those are the total assets someone owns. From that, you subtract debts. The main debt is mortgage debt on your home. Other kinds of debt include consumer loans, auto debt and the like. That difference is referred to as net worth, or just wealth.MM: Why is it important to think about wealth, as opposed just to income?
Wolff: Wealth provides another dimension of well-being. Two people who have the same income may not be as well off if one person has more wealth. If one person owns his home, for example, and the other person doesn’t, then he is better off.
2005
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/class_domination.html
Wealth, Income, and Power
by G. William Domhoff
September 2005 (updated July 2010)
This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators.
This sociologist actually quotes Wolff, above.
The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).
http://www.halfsigma.com/2005/05/class_vs_income.html
May 17, 2005
Class vs. income vs. wealth
Wealth is how much money you have, income is how much you earn, and class is how much other people think you have based on how you behave.
People often don’t realize class exists because most people only associate with people of their own class. They don’t comprehend that people from other classes behave and think in ways totally alien to them.
If people are aware of class, it’s only of the class directly below them whom they feel superior to. Yes, class has a lot to do with looking down at people, which is why it’s a topic that’s seldom talked about. It’s not politically correct to admit that you look down at people.
2008
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9611
Confusing Wealth and Income
by Richard W. Rahn
Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.
Added to cato.org on August 27, 2008
This article appeared in the Washington Times on August 27, 2008.
Which of the following families is “richer”? The first family consists of a wife who has recently become a medical doctor, and she makes $160,000 per year. Her husband is a small business entrepreneur who makes $110,000 per year, giving them a total family income of $270,000 per year. However, they are still paying off the loans the wife took out for medical school and the loans the husband took out to start his business, amounting to debts of $300,000. Their total assets are valued at $450,000; hence, their real net worth or wealth (the difference between gross assets and liabilities) is only $150,000.
The second family consists of a trial lawyer who took early retirement and his non-working wife. They have an annual income of $230,000, all of it derived from interest on tax-free municipal bonds they own. However, their net worth is $7 million, consisting of $5 million in bonds, a million-dollar home with no mortgage, and a million dollars in art work, home furnishings, automobiles and personal items
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Give us your huddled masses, your underage daughters: Oconto Co Wisconsin locks up Lorraine, . . .
Earlier, I (and colleagues — see those buttons on my blogroll!) posted on the 30-plus individuals involved in ONE mother reporting sexual molestation (and more) of her little girl in Wisconsin, after CPS workers in 2 counties confirmed it.
As reported Oct. 17th (DV awareness month, much?) on another blog (calling her a “teen” daughter was inaccurate. Though the abuse started earlier, my understanding is, she is 11). You should click on this link also — someone’s comment (wife of a police officer) is relating another account.
Wisconsin Mom Lorraine Tipton (Oconto County) is under fire because her teen daughter refuses to go on visitation with her abuser father, who makes her sleep on the floor and drives with her drunk in the car. The father, Craig Hensberger, managed to convince the father’s rights judge, Judge David Miron, in power there, to threaten Lorraine with jail if her daughter does not go. Her daughter was in the emergency room this past Thursday night, sick and frantic, and is currently home with her mom, medicated and scared. The abuser’s mommy has not picked her up as she threatened to do. So Lorraine faces jail on Monday. Please say a prayer for her.
Here’s a StopFamilyViolence release on it at “RandiJames.com” File it under “a Thanksgiving to remember…” I guess…
Daughter Won’t Visit Father? Jail Mommy!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 19, 2009
Contact:
Irene Weiser
Stop Family Violence
iw@stopfamilyviolence.org
WHY IS THIS MOTHER IN JAIL?
(Oconto Falls, WI) Today an Oconto County family court judge sentenced a mother to jail because she was unable to force her daughter to court mandated visitation with her abusive father. The daughter will be sent to foster care if she refuses to live with her father while the mother serves her sentence.Circuit Judge David Miron sentenced Lorraine Tipton to 30 days in county jail for contempt of court, for her failure to follow the custody order requiring her daughter to live every other week with her father, Craig Hensberger.
NOTE: Anyone see this work in reverse, father jailed for refusing visitation to mother? If so, let me know — it’s my situation. I miss my (daughters) too! And if I file for a contempt (further upsetting someone) knowing the courts or enforcement will do nothing, leaving an angry male on the loose. Same deal with “certifiably insane restraining orders.” But there’s not a single qualm about restraining protective mothers. Fork them little girls over, we want a fresh supply of young flesh, plus that adrenaline rush that comes from dominating a woman, for those who feel entitled, or have become addicted to this need.
These are country-wide, generational nightmares. When’s the wakeup call? What will it take to stop it?
“She’s terrified of going; she has night terrors and severe anxiety” says Tipton, who admits her daughter hasn’t visited with her father since August.“I thought the court was supposed to look out for the best interests of the child, not the best interest of the father,” Tipton continued. “I thought once I got out of the abusive relationship everything would be fine. Instead, my abuser is continuing his abuse of me and my daughter with the help of the court.”Over the course of their on and off 8 year relationship Hensberger was arrested three times for domestic violence and once for child abuse. Since their separation in 2005, Hensberger has been arrested twice for DWI, including once while the daughter was in the car.
Although the court has ordered Hensberger into alcohol treatment and ordered “absolute sobriety” when having visitation, the daughter claims he continues to drink to excess when she is visiting. The father told the court he had stopped drinking completely. The mother recently had a private investigator follow the father, who found that the father drank heavily on a night he was scheduled to have visitation. In court today the father admitted to his continued drinking; nonetheless the judge still sentenced the mother to jail.
Clearly this judge marches to the beat of a different drummer, or is it $$? One wonders…
Hensberger achieved his local 15 minutes of fame in Oconto in March of this year, when he forced his daughter to enter 3 different fishing tournaments using the same fish so that he could collect the money – a story covered widely by local news. While the local media angle related to his transportation of fish against DNR regulations, Ms. Tipton’s concerns were for the well-being of her daughter, who was being taught to lie, cheat and steal by her father. Since this incident, the daughter’s relationship with the father has deteriorated, Tipton claims.Additionally, the father’s employment is irregular, his house is in foreclosure and he currently resides with his mother. The daughter claims she is forced to sleep on the floor in the living room or in the unfinished basement since there is no bed or private space for her in the small 2 bedroom house.“Sadly, this case typifies the problems we are seeing in Family Courts nationwide,” says Irene Weiser, executive director of StopFamilyViolence. org. “Family court judges are failing to recognize signs of abuse, and are placing children in harms way. {{I DISAGREE. THEY SEE IT, BUT CHOOSE TO IGNORE IT. The KEY TO THIS PROBLEM IS WHAT ARE THESE JUDGES PAYING GREATER HEED TO THAN THEIR JUDICIAL MANDATE HERE?}} Even worse, instead of investigating the abuse allegations, they accuse the parent making the allegations of being vindictive and punish them for taking actions to protect their children. Often judges seem more concerned with maintaining the child’s relationship with the father than ensuring the child’s safety.”
Apparently this mother is now out of jail, and her daughter is back in a different kind of jail sentence, and we will just have to figure out how to grow up around all this. And the reporters will continue wondering why we have so much rape, violence, and substance abuse, let alone, mental health problems in our country. Gee, let’s take a wild, educated, guess…
Again, folks, this is not anomaly, some aberration, some weird exception in upstate (or wherever) Midwestern Dairy State (?) . No, this is the pattern, this is the intent, and this is the practice in the family courts. You are watching it. Watch your headlines….
At the risk of hammering in this point of HOW it happens, and why (i.e., pointing to probable cause, not just effects), here’s an excerpt from the NAFCJ.net website as to this practice.
Further down on this link the “Center for Policy Research” group is mentioned. Check it out — it’s a key player, and sets a pattern for similar groups…
Meanwhile, I am saying my prayers for the Tipton family (and mine).
Child Support role is often a key factor. Don’t know if it was this time, but t ypically it is. A broke Mom can’t stick up so well for her rights.
ANYTHING below this line is a quote from that NAFCJ site, though not so formatted, which ends my post today.
One reason I understand this pattern to make sense is watching the pattern of abuse, individually, between the family of origin and my ex, and the role of finances, etc., develop over the years, and a progression to the careful vocabulary / jargon used to justify it.
There is most definitely a system to the chaos. In fact, chaos is the desired status, from what I can see. (See also Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine,” referring to continental lockdown, etc.) When people, or a nation, is in shock, it is vulnerable to dictatorship. That’s why we must FIGHT LIKE HELL for Constitutional rights for all citizens: male/female, young or old. This is a language issue, and then practicing what the Constitution says, eliminating something else in one’s life, and forcing legislators, judges, attorneys, and lawyers to practice what they swore an oath to. It requires checking public records and trying to stop kickbacks, racketeering, double-dipping, and so forth. This is the price of freedom — vigilance. And yes, it matters, if it’s not your immediate neighbor!
—————————————————————————
Read about Meyer Elkin’s role in the AFCC is discussed toward the bottom of their site AFCC: History page .
Completely omitted from this AFCC history is the very relevant fact that Meyer Elkin also co-founded in 1985, the leading fathers rights group – Children’s Rights Council. Study these people and their site carefully because it is the “blueprint” of how the courts are organized to rig cases for their paid-up allies. Nobody has to slip an envelope full of cash into the pocket of a co-conspirators to rig court cases for these people. It is all done for them by the government. They get their bribes paid for them !
The AFCC never mentions the multiple cross-affiliations between AFCC officials and the fathers rights group including Children’s Rights Council (CRC), founded by David Levy in 1985, along with several other key AFCC people. While this vital fact is no where to be found on any of their recent literature, it did appear in the early (pre-Interent) CRC hardcopy newsletters, which NAFCJ possesses, and uses to discredit this group and the judges who collude with them. Also in these older CRC newsletters was discussion of grants they received from HHS and the people who worked with them on those grants – people like incest promoters Richard Gardner and Warren Farrell. CRC allies were put into high-level HHS-ACF position such David Gray Ross, as Commission for Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) -starting in 1993 through approx 1999.. Ross was a Maryland Judge, who people who knew him say was a dead-beat dad himself. He spent his time as OCSE commissioner instituting regulations, programs and policies favorable to fathers and CRC. He essentially set up OCSE to be a fathers rights child support avoidance and custody switching agency. This perversion of OCSE’s agency’s original legislative mission continues to-date. This is the reason why so many custodial mothers can’t collect on their child support arrears, while non-custodial mothers are hounded incessantly and even jailed for support obligations assessed beyond standard guide-lines and beyond their ability to pay. Other evidence taken from HHS Inspector General Web site reveals even worse corruption at HHS-ACF/OCSE.
The AFCC claims their focus is on training judges, custody evaluators and mediators about custody and divorce issues. But in reality they are a father focused organization and promoting alienation theories to explain away family violence by men. In reality they act as a “clearinghouse” for organized case rigging. They hold conferences about parental alienation but never mention the many professional experts who have condemned it as harmful to children or the link to incest promoter Richard Gardner. Their scheme involves “recruiting” male litigants through fathers groups and federal HHS programs managed by the local child support agencies for program “services” which are ostensibly for helping non-custodial fathers get their visitation rights so they would have less incentive to default on child support obligations.
{{COMMENT: This has absolutely been my experience, and the Center for Policy Research link, and many others, tend to verify it. I pressed for child support, my kids were STOLEN, and this was rubberstamped. Have barely seen them for dust since….}}
Instead the fathers get deals to have their support obligations closed and sent to a program paid attorney to litigant [“litigate”] for custody. The judge hearing these cases proves [“provides”?] payments to the court-colluding fathers attorney and other supposedly “neutral” court evaluators. None of this is disclosed to the targeted female litigant who sometimes is also ordered to pay the fees of these court professionals (e.g. illegal double billing)..
The father is encouraged to file repeated motions (usually on frivolous claims of visitation denial or alienation) so the co-conspiring court professionals can get a steady stream of government payments. {{GOT THAT??}} It appears the judge handling these cases gets a kickback from those being paid (with his approval) based on a few exposed examples. This is what keeps their litigation game going and going. They label it high-conflict bitter custody litigation to hide their own fraud. The blame the mother for everything and keep her away from her children so she will be desperate to go back to court and get a chance to convince them of the truth (which of course they already know, and are exploiting perversely against her).
Basic Judicial ethics prohibits judges from belonging to organizations with people who appear before them in the court cases. However, this doesn’t stop the crooked AFCC affiliated judges from appointing Guardian at Litem (child’s attorneys) or court psychological evaluators who are AFCC members to the same cases which the AFCC member judge is handling. Also the AFCC conducts joint conferences with the CRC – fathers rights group – usually on the subject of Parental Alienation – which they all know has been discredited as being not a valid method for use in court evaluations.
{{NOTE: Like other organizations (me talking, again), AFCC may have some fine members. I know some. However, like our educational system, this system’s history and intent of the organization stands, and I stand by the above summary of it.}}
Other people on AFCC’s Board of Directors are many people closely associated with the Children’s Rights Council. Their favorite researcher — Sanford L. Braver, Ph.D. — was a recipient of a $10M federal grant. Braver, found, astoundingly, as a result of his study that after divorce, women do as well financially as men! Bradford and many other purported “neutral” expert evaluators all work in concert behind the scenes to issue rubber-stamp anti-woman, pro-abusive father evaluations for the primary intent of deliberately covering up for abusive fathers (as a protection racket fueled by federal program graft).
{{YOU WANT TO HELP KIDS? TRACK THEM THAR FUNDS AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT….}}
Left from previous news release above…
StopFamilyViolence. org is a national activist organization that works to ensure safety, justice, accountability and healing for victims of family violence. Irene Weiser coordinates the Family Court Reform Coalition, a coalition of advocates, professionals and organizations formed in response to the national crisis in the custody court system, where all too often, judge’s order children to live with abusers and punish, silence, or jail the parent who tries to protect the children from harm.
Irene Weiser
Executive Director
StopFamilyViolence.org
331 W. 57th St #518
New York, NY 10019
iw@stopfamilyviolence.org
OK, my commentary again. See next post (11-17-09) for next installment in this fiasco (or, business as usual, depending on one’s perspective)….
This mother eventually DID go to jail for failing to force her underaged daughter to allow her father to force himself on her, drive drunk, and other forms of child abuse. What a few judges with an agenda can do in a system that allows this . . . . We were pissed off, appropriately. I’m tired of that! This mother was sentenced to jail, in 30-day stints, until her girl went back for more of the same (as I heard it).
When the girl caved in, her mother was released. This story is still unfolding.
USA, folks, this is not Guantanamo, this is motherhood, USA. And she wasn’t even a single parent, this time. How’d you like to marry into that situation?
Unjustice and abuse affects EVERYONE….
It affects the next generation, assuming they live that long.
Over the past decade or so, researchers at McGill University in Montreal, led by Michael Meaney, have shown that affectionate mothering alters the expression of genes in animals, allowing them to dampen their physiological response to stress. These biological buffers are then passed on to the next generation: rodents and nonhuman primates biologically primed to handle stress tend to be more nurturing to their own offspring, Dr. Meaney and other researchers have found.
Now, for the first time, they have direct evidence that the same system is at work in humans. In a study of people who committed suicide published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers in Montreal report that people who were abused or neglected as children showed genetic alterations that likely made them more biologically sensitive to stress.
[After Abuse, Changes in the Brain by BENEDICT CAREY
StopFamilyViolence.org, Feb. 23, 2009]
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How can we analyze policy inbetween these leading, bleeding headlines?
Maybe if I intersperse headlines, policy talk, and commentary I can get through another day without mourning evidence of national return to stupidity day.
Man, then about 19, begets child; mother (now in other state) age not mentioned
Separation happens; Dad gets custody, Dad remarries (in which order?)
Dad has two more children and, now 34 himself, is accused of molesting his first one, now 15.
DCFS removes daughter he is allegedly molesting from his custody — SORT of, not quite!
Pissed off, or coldly determined, Dad obtains gun — or grabs one he already owns.
Before much of anything is discovered (LEST it be discovered?)
He simply heads two doors down, kills foster Dad, attempts to kill foster mother, DOES kill his own daughter,
What a life she led with her FATHER, a STEPMOTHER, two stepsiblings, and being molested, ALLEGEDLY.
SOMEONE TALKS. She gets out, but not safe. Now she’s dead.
Oh yeah, and not one to go to prison, her father also shoots himself, fatally.
Her MOM was in another state — WHY?
Just another small, friendly, Tennessee Town.
Does anyone know her brief life well enough to tell its brief story? Because when these things happen
at home, the theme is NOT telling anyone outside the family; collusion is the order of the day.
THIS ARTICLE IS FROM TODAY — August 4, 2009
QUIZ — from what YEAR are the orange quotes mid-article?
ANSWER BELOW.
Color Code:
- light blue — quotes the article
- black — my comments
- orange — quotes from a different article (speech, to be precise).
Police: Dad fatally shoots daughter, foster dad
(AND, SELF) (AND TRIES TO KILL FOSTER MOTHER, too)
DYERSBURG, Tenn. – Neighbors in Tennessee are asking why a teenage girl
fatally shot by her father was placed with a foster family just two doors down
after he was accused of abusing her.
Omitted from this lead sentence — ONE WEEK after . . . . .
I believe one of the tags on this one might be “AFTER SHE SPEAKS UP” (if it was the daughter, or her mother, or her stepmother)
This puts a CHILL on reporting abuse…
As dads disappear, the American family is becoming significantly weaker and less capable of fulfilling
its fundamental responsibility
of nurturing and socializing children and conveying values to them.
In turn, the risks to the health and well-being of America’s children
are becoming significantly higher.
Christopher Milburn, 34, killed the 15-year-old and her foster father and
wounded her foster mother before taking his own life Sunday, authorities said.
Sounds like a virtual honor-killing of some sort..
Children growing up without fathers, research shows, are far more likely to live in poverty,
to fail in school, to experience behavioral and emotional problems,
to develop drug and alcohol problems,
to be victims of physical abuse and neglect and, tragically, to commit suicide.
{{THis being a case in point, I suppose?}}
{{The order of events is reversed. Victims of physical (and sexual) abuse are often
turning to drugs, alcohol, and other risky behaviors as a result, per a decade-long
(and basically ignored by the fatherhood movement) Kaiser/CDC study (see blogroll to right), completed the
year before THIS quote I am inserting to this recent Tennessee tragedy.}}
Neighbor Frank Hipps said Milburn was good friends with Todd Randolph, the 46-year-old foster father,
and had worked for him in the past. Hipps, who had known both men for about eight years, said he didn’t know
the details of the abuse allegations but questioned why the girl had been placed so close.
Maybe he didn’t know them so well as he thought.
Who paid WHOM to get this daughter switched only 2 doors down, instead of the Dad switched out of the neighborhood?
Dad used to work for the foster father? Just HOW inbred was this town, exactly?
A mature 46 year old man, foster father, married, and a daughter in the home.
Let’s do the Father/Daughter math: 34 – 15 is HOW old was he when he got a woman pregnant?
Legally old enough: 19. Probably just out of high school.
“That kid shouldn’t have been in that house,” he said.
I agree. I think she should’ve been with her mother.
“This might have been preventable if she had been placed with foster parents out of the community.”
MIGHT is true, especially if he still knew where she was ….
OR for SURE if the man had been in jail for molesting his daughters, which is where child-molesters belong, at least to start.
Neither police in Dyersburg, in northwestern Tennessee, nor child services agency spokesman Rob Johnson
would elaborate on the abuse allegations other than to say the investigation began last week.
The girl, whose name was not released, had been staying with Todd and Susan Randolph
while the state Department of Children’s Services investigated, Dyersburg Police Capt. Steve Isbell said.
WHo paid WHOM to put her there? Come’ ON! !!! Give the girl a fresh start!
Susan Randolph, the girl’s foster mother, was released from a Memphis hospital Monday.
Frank Hipps’ wife, Tammy, said the 15-year-old was Milburn’s daughter by a previous relationship.
He was married and the couple had two younger daughters.
The court probably saw a stable TWO-parent family, it probably had at least HEARD about
the great crisis of fatherlessness we’ve been plagued with as a nation for the past about 15 years
(This girl was born right around the time this doctrine took nationalized, Congressionally recognized wings..
She must’ve been born around 1994. See below. Gee, by then, my In-the-home husband had already
started assaulting me, between babies. WHat a coincidence that, unbeknownst to me, my government
was aware of the crisis and addressing it. . . . . Oh, excuse me, not the crisis of child molestation or
domestic violence, but of FATHERLESSNESS.
The girl’s mother was living out of state
{{HOW COME SHE LOST CUSTODY?}}
and police were waiting for her to arrive before releasing the girl’s name, Isbell said.
Police found the teenager and Todd Randolph dead at the Randolph home and Milburn about a block away,
dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
One less child molester, allegedly, OR man who didn’t trust the legal system to get the truth out of his innocence.
Guess they must do things different in Family Court in Tennessee; he’d have been FINE if he could just connect
with some PAS-theory court professional and discredit whoever was alleging the abuse. Unless it was the girl…
Charles Wootton, 71, who lives across the street from the Randolphs, said he heard five pops. He looked out the window
and saw Randolph on the ground near the mailbox.
“My wife opened the door and walked out and seen the blood. That’s when I called 911,” he said.
Wootton said neighbors started to gather at the Randolphs’ house and a nurse performed CPR on Todd Randolph,
who had been shot through the neck. {{FOR THE CRIME OF . . . . . . . ??}}
Wootton said when he first looked at Susan Randolph, he thought she was dead, too.
“She told me who did it,” Wootton said.
The Randolphs have two young children who were at their grandparents’ house during the shootings, Wootton said.
Wootton had moved to the neighborhood about two weeks ago, and Todd Randolph had mowed his yard several times.
“The people around here are just about the friendliest you’ve ever met,” said Wootton. “I don’t know what happened to that guy.”
MORAL OF THE STORY: FRIENDLY PEOPLE CAN STILL MOLEST THEIR CHILDREN. WHO REPORTED? THE DAUGHTER?
THE NEW WOMAN? ONE OF HER MANDATED REPORTERS.
Isbell said Milburn had no criminal record in Dyersburg, a city of approximately 18,000 people about 70 miles northeast of Memphis.
Tammy Hipps said Milburn worked as a counselor at the McDowell Center for Children,
which helps at-risk and troubled children.
Well, was he falsely accused or properly accused?
If properly, then again, let’s note here: PERPS like places that give them access to CHILDREN, esp. troubled ones.
The shootings came just over two weeks after Jacob Levi Shaffer of Fayetteville, a small Tennessee town
near the Alabama border about.
70 miles west of Chattanooga, was accused of fatally stabbing his estranged wife,
three members of her family and a neighbor boy to death on July 18.
He also is accused of beating an acquaintance to death in nearby Huntsville, Ala.
BEFORE or AFTER she became “inexplicably” “estranged”??
Perhaps stories like these are why the word “RESPONSIBLE” was added to things like, “National Fathers Return Day?”
One Congressional discussion of which I give, below:
FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD:
| Lieberman, Joseph[D-CT] | ||
| Begin | 1999-06-17 | 10:13:34 |
| End | 10:21:48 | |
| Length | 00:08:14 | |
Leading off with African Americans and teen pregnancies, he relates:
Mr. LIEBERMAN.
Mr. President, I want to say just a few words on the jarring statistics from that report and column for my colleagues.
Of African American children born in 1996, 70 percent were born to unmarried mothers. At least 80 percent, according to the report,
can expect to spend a significant part of their childhood apart from their fathers.
We can take some comfort and encouragement from the fact that the teen pregnancy rate has dropped in the last few years. But the numbers cited in Mr. Kelly’s column and in the report are nonetheless profoundly unsettling, especially given what we know about the impact of fatherlessness, and indicate we are in the midst of what Kelly aptly terms a “national calamity.”
It is a calamity. Of course, it is not limited to the African American community. On any given night, 4 out of 10 children in
this country are sleeping in homes without fathers.
COMMENTARY:
(THis mental image appears to be far less vivid than the ones of SOME fathers doing horrible things when they DID or DO live
with their children..
Like beating them. Or having sex with them. Or beating their mothers. Or simply refusing to work OR help around the home. Or,
engaging in multiple sexual relationships with other women while married. Or verbally berating a mother in front of the children.
SOME Dads are great Dads and SOME Dads are a terror. Likewise, SOME Moms are great Moms, and SOME Moms are negligent
or bad Moms. It is also harder for a mother to care properly for her children, or in the best manner, which she is afraid of being assaulted
over a minor issue by the Dad when he comes home. If he does that day. Are these senators thinking about these images when they
shudder and are aghast at a home without a Dad).
Many homes were without Dads during the World Wars I, II, Korean War, Viet Nam War, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places
men (and women) have been sent because men decided to make war with each other, in the name of peace and democracy and self-protection.
Some homes of law enforcement officers are now without Dads in them because their Dad responded to a domestic violence dispute, and
caught a bullet, generally also taking out the attacking father as well.
MY Dad’s home, growing up between two of the abovementioned wars was without a Dad in it because, guess what: His Dad (a fireman),
got tired of beating his German immigrant wife and abandoned her with three children. He witnessed this growing up.
He went on to become a successful scientist, raise children he did NOT beat (at least I wasn’t and I never saw my siblings taking this),
studied hard, worked hard, sent ALL children not just to, but also through college also, and left an inheritance. And provide for, from what
I am told/understand, not only his own mother, but also a younger brother who never quite got it together, possibly related to something that
happened when he WAS with that abusive Dad, or what, I was never told. That brother also served his country as a soldier, and died before his time,
never having married or had children.
My Dad NEVER put his children (all daughters) in contact with the abusing/beating/abandoning father, ever, in his lifetime.
I never regretted this, that I can recall. How can you regret something you never saw, where the only thing you knew about him was,
he beat the grandmother that I DID know (a little bit).
However, while Sen. Lieberman was making this speech, about a decade ago, I was for the first time in a full decade of substantial
domestic violence in MY daughters’ lives, with them at an overnight, stay-away camp, a music camp, which we had managed to get
to no thinks from the father who never left. For two weeks, I was not going to be abused at night and was around people who actually
treated me respectfully, and I worked along side them in my profession. We had had a real push getting up there, and were punished
soundly for having left, but during that week and seeing the response to us getting free from abuse for only (and not entirely; there was
a dour-faced, rules-of-camp breaking midweek visit, where $20 was casually tossed at me so I might have enough gas to get back home)
I MADE UP MY MIND that this domestic violence restraining order was GOING to be filed, and I’m “out of here.”
How ironic that i didn’t know what was being prated and pronounced in Washington, D.C. at this time.
Here’s the rest of this little 8 minute speech, in case you WOULD like the names of some of the prominent thinkers behind this
June 1999 presentation to the President of the United States, and get a glimpse inside the working of great, Constitution-respecting, minds
when left unsupervised in the Capital of our beloved country:
We can take some comfort and encouragement from the fact that the teen pregnancy rate has dropped
in the last few years. But the numbers cited in Mr. Kelly’s column and in the report are nonetheless
profoundly unsettling, especially given what we know about the impact of fatherlessness,
{{Gee, that must have been a grass-roots appeal from the teen mothers for help, or their mothers, or
theirs sisters. WHERE did this knowledge about the impact of fatherless come from, given the
establishment in 1994 of: (A) The Violence Against Women Act (help some women leave, rather than
stay, in abusive, dangerous relationships) and (B) Also in 1994, the National Fatherhood Initiative.
(Should I compare months of incorporation as nonprofit with the passage of the law?)}}
and indicate we are
in the midst of what Kelly aptly terms a “national calamity.” It is a calamity. Of course, it is not limited to
the African American community. On any given night, 4 out of 10 children in this country are sleeping in homes without fathers.
(CONTINUED QUOTE, in different format..):
At the end of this column, Michael Kelly asks: How could this happen
in a Nation like ours? And he wonders if anyone is paying attention.
Well, the fact is that people are beginning to pay attention, although
it tends to be more people at the grassroots level who are actively
seeking solutions neighborhood by neighborhood.
{{Evidence being….. WHO?? Time frame? Organizations? Written declarations by any of these?}}
The best known of these groups {{in fact the ONLY one named here..}}
is called the National Fatherhood Initiative.
{{Possibly because of its funding? and prominence of who’s in it?}}
I think it has made tremendous progress in recent years {{CONTEXT 1994-1999}}
in raising awareness of father absence and its impact on our society and in mobilizing a
national effort to promote responsible fatherhood.
Per the HHS TAGGS search on its name:
| Fiscal Year | Grantee Name | State | Award Number | Award Title | CFDA Number | Sum of Actions |
| 2008 | NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE | MD | 90FB0001 | NATIONAL FATERHOOD CAPACITY BUILDING INITIATIVE | 93086 | $ 999,534 |
| 2007 | NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE | MD | 90FB0001 | NATIONAL FATERHOOD CAPACITY BUILDING INITIATIVE | 93086 | $ 999,534 |
| 2006 | NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE | MD | 90FB0001 | NATIONAL FATERHOOD CAPACITY BUILDING INITIATIVE | 93086 | $ 999,534 |
| 2001 | NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE | MD | 90XP0023 | THE RESPONSIBILE FATHERHOOD PUABLIC EDUCATION PROGRAM | 93647 | $ 500,000 |
And for column width, same search (common field: Award# / CFDA Code)
| Fiscal Year | Award Number | Action Issue Date | CFDA Number | CFDA Program Name | Award Activity Type | Award Action Type | Principal Investigator | Sum of Actions |
| 2008 | 90FB0001 | 09/25/2008 | 93086 | Healthy marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grants | DEMONSTRATION | NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION | CHRISTHOPHER BEARD | $ 999,534 |
| 2007 | 90FB0001 | 09/21/2007 | 93086 | Healthy marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grants | DEMONSTRATION | NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION | CHRISTHOPHER BROWN | $ 999,534 |
| 2006 | 90FB0001 | 09/25/2006 | 93086 | Healthy marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grants | DEMONSTRATION | NEW | CHRISTHOPHER BROWN | $ 999,534 |
| 2001 | 90XP0023 | 04/09/2001 | 93647 | Social Services Research and Demonstration | SOCIAL SERVICES | NEW | HEATHER THURMAN | $ 500,000 |
I’d DONE data entry before, and typing. Do you know what the odds of someone even on no sleep, and having a sugar buzz, making THAT many
mistakes in 4 entries (fatherhood, responsible, and public, plus “Christopher” spelled wrong. Same grant, 3rd year, “Christhopher Brown” entered a
samesex marriage, apparently and changed last name “Brown” to his partner’s name “Beard”?
This database exists so the public can search on it. Hmmm…… I wonder if they know to search for misspelled names…. and key terms.
AND SINCE 2000– seen below:
Funding for the “Father Organization” in this “national effort”
| 93.086: Healthy Marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grants | $1,999,068 |
However the funding for the wild oats it sowed, under this # 93.086:
(I JUST LEARNED) I believe that this code only arose (emerged naturally of course) in about 2006. However, as of 2009,
it is still not a searchable agency code on the USASPENDING.gov. Either in listing “all” programs, or under the agency it belongs under
Hmmm — $2 million less in California for our shelters? (yes, yes, I realize this is federal, not state, spending).
2000-2009 NFI Funding: (See bar chart): Well, I guessed this may not be responsible “Spelling” on whoever entered the data,
but . . . .
When we simply search only the word
“fatherhood” under “recipient” for FY2000-2009,
we get an entirely different picture (also diff’t database):
Top 5 Known Congressional Districts where Recipients are Located 
| District of Columbia nonvoting (Eleanor Holmes Norton) | $6,942,352 |
| Maryland 08 (Constance A. Morella / Chris Van Hollen) | $2,625,112 |
Yes this is definitely an “up from the people” grassroots movement,
and not a DC.-down
initiative, surely. They are just responding to (a certain sector) of their constitutents, and from Washington, acting on it. I know straight out of
getting out of my house safe, the FIRST thing on my mind was telling Washington, I needed (well, another) father in the home, since now
I was a “female-headed” household and my children, while this Domestic Violence Restraining order was in effect, were sleeping in a fatherless
home and in danger of (NOT) learning the rights values. They were learning that that stuff they witnessed growing up was illegal. And how to
leave a dangerous relationship and start to recover.
Of course, family court was there waiting for them to go UNlearn those values, fast, and that the 14th Amendment is just a theory.
Top 10 Recipients
| NATIONAL FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE | $11,067,190 |
| FATHERHOOD INITIATIVE | $8,673,900 |
| INSTITUTE RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD | $6,557,520 |
| INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM RE | $1,500,000 |
| INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM. REVITA | $300,000 |
| INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM. RE | $99,350 |
| INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAMILY REVI | $-14,518 ** |
93647 word “fatherhood”
Was that misspelling intentional? I mean, it WOULD complicate a search by Award Title
Searching, CFDA 93647 (Not the CFDA actually assigned the word “fatherhood” in its description) & word “fatherhood” (“keyword in award title”):
Exact same search, different fields, so you can see grantee, principal investigators….
i.e.,
“It did this ALL on its own altruistic self, and I’m just reporting on it here.”
The President (is this the same one that signed that 1995 proclamation? about fatherhood?)
SEARCH ON ALL grants, with only the word “fatherhood” in the grant (not grantee) title, produced
358 records, of which here are the 1995-1999 ones:
| 1999 | INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM. REVITALIZATION | WASHINGTON | DC | Non-Profit Private Non-Government Organizations | 90XA0005 | REPLICATION & REVITALIZATION FATHERHOOD MODEL | 93670 | OTHER | NEW | $ 300,000 |
| 1999 | INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM. REVITALIZATION | WASHINGTON | DC | Non-Profit Private Non-Government Organizations | 90XP0014 | EVALUATION OF THE INSTITUTE FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD | 93647 | SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NEW | $ 180,000 |
| 1999 | OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, RESEARCH FOUNDATION | COLUMBUS | OH | State Government | R01HD035702 | IMPROVING AND EVALUATING NLSY FATHERHOOD DATA | 93864 | SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION | $ 139,665 |
| 1999 | UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH | MINNEAPOLIS | MN | State Government | R40MC00141 | AN INTERVENTION FOR THE TRANSITION TO FATHERHOOD | 93110 | SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NEW | $ 344,470 |
| 1999 | UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA NORMAN CAMPUS | NORMAN | OK | State Government | R40MC00110 | AMERICAN INDIAN FATHERHOOD IN TWO OKLAHOMA COMMUNITIES | 93110 | SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION | $ 149,507 |
| 1998 | OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, RESEARCH FOUNDATION | COLUMBUS | OH | State Government | R01HD035702 | IMPROVING AND EVALUATING NLSY FATHERHOOD DATA | 93864 | SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NON-COMPETING CONTINUATION | $ 104,927 |
| 1998 | UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA NORMAN CAMPUS | NORMAN | OK | State Government | 1R40MC0011001 | AMERICAN INDIAN FATHERHOOD IN TWO OKLAHOMA COMMUNITIES | 93110 | SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NEW | $ 154,395 |
| 1997 | OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY | COLUMBUS | OH | State Government | R01HD35702 | IMPROVING AND EVALUATING NLSY FATHERHOOD DATA | 93864 | SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS) | NEW | $ 119,899 |
| 1995 | ADDISON COUNTY PARENT & CHILD CENTER | MIDDLEBURY | VT | County Government | 90PR0005 | RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD PROJECTS | 93647 | DEMONSTRATION | NEW | $ 85,000 |
| 1995 | INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM. REVITALIZATION | WASHINGTON | DC | Non-Profit Private Non-Government Organizations | 90PR0003 | RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD PROJECTS | 93647 | DEMONSTRATION | NEW | $ 85,000 |
| 1995 | INST FOR RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD & FAM. REVITALIZATION | WASHINGTON | DC | Non-Profit Private Non-Government Organizations | 90PR0004 | RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD PROJECTS | 93647 | DEMONSTRATION | NEW | $ 85,000 |
| 1995 | ST. BERNANDINE’S HEAD START | BALTIMORE | MD | Non-Profit Public Non-Government Organizations | 90PR0002 | RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD PROJECTS | 93647 | DEMONSTRATION | NEW | $ 85,000 |
| 1995 | WISHARD MEMORIAL HOSPITAL | INDIANAPOLIS | IN | County Government | 90PR0001 | RESPONSIBLE FATHERHOOD PROJECTS | 93647 | DEMONSTRATION | NEW | $ 85,000 |
Notice the variety of recipients, including Universities (this will be useful for later “evidence-based data” resulting from grants to study the topic.
Notice that the TYPE of grants appears to be either “new” or “noncompeting.” Hmmm.
AND NOW Sen Lieberman is reporting on this grassroots movement.
Along with a group of allies, the National Fatherhood Initiative has
been establishing educational programs in hundreds of cities and
towns across America.
It has pulled together bipartisan task forces in
the Senate, the House, and among the Nation’s Governors and
mayors.
YES< there’s ONE thing that a bipartisan majority male Congress and the Nation’s (also primarily male,
if I’m not mistaken??) can unite on, and that the problem with the nation
relates to a lack of male (father) influence on young children throughout the land.
Presumably, these children that are spending, probably, the majority of their waking hours
in school, are not connecting with any decent father figures or adult males and learning from them
good values.
I wonder what the male/female ratio of teachers is in the nation’s elementary and high schools….
It has worked with us to explore public policies that
encourage and support the efforts of fathers to become more involved
in the lives of their children.
Last Monday, the National Fatherhood Initiative held its annual
(FIFTH?) national fatherhood summit here in Washington. At that summit, Gen.
Colin Powell, and an impressive and wide-ranging group of experts
and advocates, talked in depth about the father absence crisis in our
cities and towns and brainstormed about what we can do to turn this
troubling situation around.
And Last June, 2009 President OBAMA, had a “town hall on fatherhood”
which was visited by a major representative in the Violence Against Women movement
(see last post). 15 years later, these articles are still leading, suicides (NOT by the troubled
teens, bu tby at times the fathers who troubled them….) are still happening. Well, the
doctrine’s NOT about to change, it must because THAT murderous, suicide-committing father
HIMSELF had no father model in his life.
There are limits to what we in Government can do to meet this
challenge and advance the cause of responsible fatherhood because,
Because — Because — Because, “regretfully” I supposed according to this point of view,
the FOUNDING Fathers put LIMITS to government into the U.S. Constitution,** and a few
MORE also made their way into the Bill of Rights as Amendments.
(**To appreciate the link — or be tempted to read it, hover cursor over it)
I can’t WAIT til the “Equal Rights” Amendment makes it in, if it ever will.
Of course I would settle for an enforced and respected 14th Amendment:
after all, it is hard to change people’s attitudes and behaviors and
values through legislation.
Possibly because the purpose of legislation is to express THEIR attitudes, by laws they voted on,
or their elected representatives did. Possibly because the purpose of government is to PROTECT
the inalienable rights of citizens….
But that doesn’t mean we are powerless,
Yes, time has shown that the federal grants systems, and initiatives, and private deliberations IS a
way to get around the danged legislation that has made “us” (Who all agree about this fatherhood crisis)
so “powerless.”
nor does it mean we can afford not to try to lessen the impact of a
problem that is literally eating away at our country.
How do you know it’s a PROBLEM and not a SYMPTOM of another problem?
In recent times, we have had a great commonality of concern
expressed in the ideological breadth of the fatherhood promotion
effort both here in the Senate and our task force, but underscored by
statements that the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary
of Health and Human Services have made on this subject in recent
years. Indeed, I think President Clinton most succinctly expressed the
importance of this problem when he said: {{in 1995….?}}}
The single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing
absence of fathers from their children’s homes because it contributes
to so many other social problems.
Again, in your opinion, supported by government-funded research with the premise already supposed.
AS WE CAN SEE BY THE ABOVE NEWS ARTICLE. THE REAL PROBLEM WITH THE SITUATION, AND
WHAT CAUSED THE MAN TO KILL 2 (NOT INCLUDING HIMSELF, AND THE FOSTER MOTHER HE TRIED TO KILL)
was HIS INDIGNANT FEELINGS ABOUT, WELL THE FATHER-ABSENCE IN HIS ADOLESCENT DAUGHTER’S LIFE.
IT WAS, REALLY, LOVE IN ACTION.
(FOR REFERENCE: This was the Monica Lewinsky president, right?
Well, I guess we can overlook that because he has just flown to North Korea,
with a shock of white hair and looking dignified (and leaner) to attempt to retrieve
two FEMALE journalists sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. I hope he succeeds.
However, his signing of that 1995 Memo sentenced women here locally to some unbelievable
long-term trauma, because of its chilling effect on the 14th Amendment (and others)
and the placement of daughters and sons in the household of men who abused (or are
abusing) either them, OR previously their mothers) (case in point).
So there are some things we can and should be trying to do. I am
pleased to note our colleagues, Senators BAYH, DOMENICI, and
others have been working to develop a legislative proposal, which I
think contains some very constructive and creative approaches
Yup, parTICULARLY creative with the laws, due process, and the titling of the
various grants involved. Let alone the use of them, or the monitoring of their use
if any indeed actually takes place.
in which the Federal Government would support financially, with
resources, some of these very promising grassroots father-promotion
efforts,
WOULD support? WOULD support?
Check HHS’s CFDA# 93.086, “promoting responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage” for yourself on THIS site:
http://usaspending.gov (under “SPENDING” “GRANTS”)
and also encourage and enact the removal of some of the
legal and policy barriers that deter men from an active presence in their children’s lives.
A “LEGAL BARRIER” MUST REFER TO A LAW, RIGHT?
Another thing I think we can do to help is to use the platform we
have on the Senate floor–this people’s forum –to elevate this
problem on the national agenda. That is why Senator GREGG and I
have come to the floor today. I am particularly grateful for the
cosponsorship of the Senator from New Hampshire, because he is the
chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families.
YES, I AM SURE WE ARE REALLY, REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT CHILDREN AND FAMILIES
MORE THAN CHARACTER, OR LEGAL RIGHTS OF MEN AND WOMEN BOTH….
We are joined by a very broad and bipartisan group of cosponsors which
includes Senators BAYH,
BROWNBACK, MACK, DODD, DOMENICI, JEFFORDS, ALLARD,
COCHRAN, LANDRIEU, BUNNING, ROBB, DORGAN, DASCHLE, and
AKAKA. I thank them all for joining in the introduction of this special
resolution this morning, which is to honor Father’s Day coming this
Sunday,
but also to raise our discussion of the problem of absent fathers in
our hopes for the promotion of responsible fatherhood.
Senator GREGG indicated this resolution would declare this Sunday’s
holiday as National Fathers Return Day and call on dads around the
country to use this day, particularly if they are absent, to reconnect
and rededicate themselves to their children’s lives, to understand and
have the self-confidence to appreciate how powerful a contribution
they can make to the well-being of the children that they have helped
to create, and to start by spending this Fathers’ Day returning for
part of
the day to their children and expressing to their children the love they
have for them and their willingness to support them. [Page: S7164]
The statement we hope to make this morning in this resolution
obviously will not change the hearts and minds of distant or
disengaged fathers, but those of us who are sponsoring the resolution
hope it will help to spur a larger national conversation about the
importance of fatherhood and help remind those absent fathers of
their responsibilities, yes, but also of the opportunity they have to
change the life of their child, about the importance of their
fatherhood, and also help remind these absent
fathers of the value of their involvement.
We ask our colleagues to join us in supporting this resolution, and
adopting it perhaps today but certainly before this week is out to
make as strong a statement as possible and to move us one step
closer to the day when every American child has the opportunity to
have a truly happy Father’s Day because he or she will be spending it
with their father.
I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.
Just for a reminder:
– Slavery Abolished. Ratified 12/6/1865. History
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
– Citizenship Rights. Ratified 7/9/1868. Note History
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States
and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens
of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
WELL, wordcount 5216, enough for today.
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An Oral Fixation on Fatherhood as it relates to Bovine Growth Hormone?
Family Law Adjudications affecting infant health. . . . .
This is an extension of the previous post on the poor Australian kids that had to adjust weekly from cow’s to human milk because of a 2006 law about Shared Parenting. That’s not sharing, that’s kid-kickball. That’s jug-juggling. What set of men (and 2nd wives) dreamed that one up?
Inspired originally by Daniel Slack, whose Newsvine seed said this:
I do not understand why it would be OK to drink from a cow Teat, but not from a human Teat. I have found evidence to the detrimental effect of cow’s milk with Bovine Growth Hormone. One study not only shows evidence that it leads to obesity and excessive male breast development, but suggests that drinking nonorganic milk will give women a 42% higher chance, and men a 20% higher chance of developing Breast cancer.
Mostly, I wrote the article so that people will start questioning why we believe what we believe is OK. Society says it is OK to drink cow milk. Society also says we should expect politicians to lie, judges to take bribes, and car dealers to try to rip us off. How far back are we personally willing to push the boundaries of what society says is acceptable? Is it worth it, to improve your health?
If the government could so intervene in and screw up one of the most basic human instincts, other than making babies (or trying to, or trying NOt to, but still going through the motions), such as eating, specifically sucking it down (“raw,”) perhaps we can learn, individually and communally to stop sucking down the dialectic straight from the government teat, grow out incisors, molars, and wisdom teeth, and chew our own data.
And nurse and educate our own kids, too.
(I promise to stop milking this analogy — in the next post. Not this one. It’s just SO appropriate. . . . )
In this post, we progress (discursively, that is), from Human Milk to Cow’s milk (raw), through pasteurization, the regulation of the stalwart “we want it raw” farmers (by the federal government, who else? Protecting the rest of us from Common Sense, or Independence) and then through the natural battle some people, and farmers, go through to SELL it, Raw, and eventually will land back to the topic of how can a separating couple in Australia navigate these treacherous, debate-ridden waters of whose milk to feed, or express, for their growing offspring, after they grew emotionally apart as adults? Mom’s or Cow’s?
I got to remembering this book, “The Milk of Human Kindness (Is not Pasteurized).” One benefit of homeschooling, I forgot to mention, is that time to read and browse bookstores (half-priced ones especially) and libraries, helped improve my own literacy level, as well, and that was coming in with two college degrees and professional experience itself pretty varied. But what about LIFE experience, and then reading up on that?
Sometimes things I read years ago leap alongside my thinking to contribute to the present dialogue. When thought is actually processed, this happens more and more.
WHAT does this have to do with Fatherhood (proclamations) and oral fixations?
Well, I think that SOME fathers and men, have a fixation on orating about things of which they have insufficient personal experience.
And it shows in this topic of one basic human nutrient — not Dad, but food.
Paternal Pro/Efficiency (expertise, regulation) vs. Maternal Nurture
I think that ideally the world should be ruled — in small sections only, and somewhat fluid ones — by a balanced partnership between men and women. I do not think women should rule the world. I do not think ALL men are tunnel-vision, efficiency-obsessed, better at getting things done (and more callous about who gets hurt in the process), and we already explored that maybe their Corpus Callosus is NOT skinner than ours (and if so, it may or may not be relevant). I think that the idealized, ritualized, stereotyped MYTHs of MANHOOD (as opposed to manliness, or masculinity which, believe it or not, I DO appreciate, so long as choice is involved and gender stereotypes (his, and mine) is not rammed down my throat, allegorically speaking) (and which would be a pretty comprehensive description of the previous “marriage”) are deleterious to us all. The widespread acceptance of these myths (added to pornography), and now enshrined in government declarations, resolutions, policies, and initiatives, show us that the genuine article is probably in short supply. (Or, is otherwise, and more productively, occupied).
OK< . . . .
“John Stoltenberg (1945[1]-) is an American radical feminist activist, scholar, author, and magazine editor.[2] He is the managing editor of AARP the Magazine, a bimonthlypublication of the United States-based interest group AARP (formerly American Association of Retired Persons), a position he has held since 2004. Although he formed a relationship with and eventually married Andrea Dworkin, he considers himself gay.[1]
Hmmm. I’ll have to think about this a little more. I know the book “The End of Manhood” (as a virtual concept) spokes sense to me, a woman whose humanity had to disappear while her sole defining characteristic, allowable in marriage, was my gender, thereby I gather helping bolster a husband that was less secure of himself than he appeared initially. I will put it together with this one (whose author has actually been decorated by the Fatherhood promoters, like the above book, the title to this one is also misleading: “Hating Women.” My copy is dogeared and underlined.
Review excerpt:
Boteach’s book is primarily a discussion of image and perception, which he sums up in eight archetypes, four female and four male. He then gives examples of his stereotypes via the media and through his experiences working as a rabbi and counseling. Anecdotal as some of this stuff may be, it’s still powerful.
(SToltenberg) He holds degrees in divinity and fine arts. He is well known as a feminist activist and author. He has written a series of books and articles criticizing traditional concepts of manhood or maleness, such as “Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice” (Meridian, 1990), “Why I Stopped Trying to be a Real Man,” [1] and “The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience” (Penguin USA/Plume, 1994).
He created “the Pose Workshop,” which entailed men adopting the poses that women strike in pornographic shots (intended partly for men attending Christian retreats), a version of which was broadcast on BBC television. He was Andrea Dworkin‘s life partner for thirty-one years. They began living together in 1974; in 1998 they married. He was a founder of the group ‘Men Can Stop Rape’ [2] and conceived and creative directs the group’s ‘My Strength’ [3] campaign which aims to educate young men on sexual relationships, consent and rape.
Stoltenberg is credited with the quote “Pornography tells lies about women. But pornography tells the truth about men.” The quote is from the essay The Forbidden Language of Sex in his book “Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice” (Meridian, 1990).
SUFFICE IT TO SAY (don’t laugh!), I am much more interested in relating to genuine human beings with more than the stereotyped posturing to offer in their dealings with me. These could be (and have historically been) either male or female. The topic of Me Tarzan, You Jane is temporarily interesting only, and in certain contexts only, and cannot sufficiently handle all that life requires of all of us these days. While our sexuality certainly affects and influences the rest of us, JUSTICE should not be tied to GENDER. And one gender should not have a national totalitarian power to define ITself, the OTHer gender, Childhood, or for that matter, parenting. Or, as today’s topic is, nutrition, either. The more I look at the major institutions in this country, the more inhuman they seem to be in origin.
They are like false idols, bending reality to fit theory, even when it comes to infants, and like the bed of Procrustes, that fits EVERYONE (he says, to potential guests). “Come on in.“
I will say that some are, and too many of these orally fixated on making pronouncements folks happen to have found an outlet, if not calling in religion, and from there to politics, and from there to regulatory agencies coaching government. All along the way they are pronouncing esoteric truths, some of which a lowly MD or so will later then expose as, well, not waterproof.
Format of this post: MOST of it is quotes, generally the titles are the URL, with chronology (years) as headings. Generally speaking, any emphasis (italic, bold, color) is mine. Summary comment at the bottom, as usual. This first, blue, segment, is me, though:
MILK, CONSIDERED
Milk is so basic as to be considered essential to the beginning of life. It is a noun, literal and figurative, and the verb is also literal, for some involving human contact, and for others, mass-produced mechanical teat-receptors. The figurative use, “milking the moment” (which I am, in this topic) relates back to the basic format, person milking cow. By hand. So let’s consider how this plays into what type of THINKING permeates (or is that saturates) the family law field?
I am old enough (or was raised rural enough?) to remember a milk truck, with cold bottles delivered early, and cream at the top, and old ones turned back in. Now, homogenization is the rule, in education as well as in milk, as well as in legislation.
The Exodus of Insight:
For example, in California, it used to be possible to get raw cow’s milk. There was a concerted effort to outlaw it. This had nothing to do with health and everything to do with politics. Pasteurization may clean things up, but it also (due to heat) destroys enzymes, which we NEED. And the presence of pasteurization, this book asserts, ended up covering up some pretty squalid additions to cow’s milk, on the basis it was all sterilized to s start with.
Nursing, then has (d)evolved in this country, I gather, from Mom’s mammaries, raw (although I’m sure the word “raw” dated closer to pasteurization, to Cow mammaries, RAW, to Cow mammaries, Pastuerized, and then sooner or later we have Dr. McDougall, among others probably, being an M.D., noticing a few things about pasteurized milk.
And we then have…
1985
The Milk of Human Kindness, even if Bovine, is Raw, not Pasteurized, and here’s why:
According to “TheMilkBook.com
(Review:) The Milk Book – The Milk Of Human Kindness Is Not Pasteurized –
The Milk Book – How Science Is Destroying Nature’s Neatly Perfect Food. Children are denied whole milk because pediatricians are obsessed with the cholesterol myth. These same gutless wonders don’t say anything about children drinking half-a-dozen bottles of Coca-Cola a day, stating before breakfast! But kids can’t get a decent glass of milk. Adding vitamin D to milk is a risky business. The New England Journal of Medicine reported many cases of vitamin D intoxication resulting from excessive fortification of commercial milk. Today, you can’t get a decent glass of milk. Even if you buy whole milk, thinking it is better than that sickly blue stuff called skim, you can’t win, because all of the commercial milk is homogenized. I am convinced that homogenization is even more detrimental to the nutritional quality of milk than the heat processing called pasteurization.
– William Campbell Douglass II, MD (I believe this book,which I have read, came out about 1985.)
What is the logical thing to do then? Outlaw raw (cow’s) milk, naturally. Dirty, natural, dangerous stuff, just a step above, say, breastfeeding from a human. Disgusting! In Mad Cow Loco mood, the Federal Government squirts some sense into the populace:
NOT TO BE OUTDONE,
1986
“In 1986, the federal government banned all interstate shipments of raw milk, cream and butter.”
1989
- ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2005)— An analysis of 21 studies that have investigated the link between ovarian cancer and the consumption of milk products and lactose has found some support for the hypothesis that high intake is associated with increased cancer risk. The results of this analysis, published online August 5, 2005 in the International Journal of Cancer, the official journal of the International Union Against Cancer (UICC), found that support was stronger in cohort studies, compared to case-control studies, which offered varying results. The article is available via Wiley InterScience at http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ijc
- Since a positive correlation between ovarian cancer risk and the consumption of milk products and lactose was first reported in 1989 , many epidemiological studies have further examined the relationship. However, these studies have yielded conflicting conclusions.
- To better understand the uncertain relationship, researchers led by Susanna C. Larsson of the National Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, conducted a meta-analysis of relevant case-control and cohort studies., many epidemiological studies have further examined the relationship. However, these studies have yielded conflicting conclusions. To better understand the uncertain relationship, researchers led by Susanna C. Larsson of the National Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, conducted a meta-analysis of relevant case-control and cohort studies.
2003 (URL):
Ron Shmid, ND, a naturopathic physician, outlined the laws governing sales of raw milk in his 2003 book The Untold Story of Milk:
“Twenty-five states technically allow on-farm sales of raw milk, but nearly all place restrictions on the farmer by limiting the amount he may sell, banning advertising, imposing excessive fees or regulations, or allowing local town Boards of Health to ban sales. Two of those 25 states limit sales to raw goat milk… Eleven of these 25 states have provisions allowing for some retail sales, but in most such sales are limited by many of the same restrictions… In practice, however, raw milk is available in stores only in Arizona, California, Connecticut, and Maine…
Six states allow sales of raw milk for animal consumption only, without requiring the addition of dyes… Two states make all sales of raw milk illegal with the exception of raw goat milk when prescribed in writing by a licensed physician… In two states, Montana and Washington, the situation is murky. Regulations could be interpreted to allow sales of raw milk but state officials do not follow these interpretations… Sixteen additional states and the District of Columbia make all sales of raw milk illegal…
In 1986, the federal government banned all interstate shipments of raw milk, cream and butter.”
[Editor’s Note: ProCon.org received an e-mail from the Weston A. Price Foundation on Sep. 27, 2007, alerting us to the fact that as of Dec. 1, 2004, the states of Washington, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina also began allowing the sale of raw milk in stores. That brings the total to eight states that allow in store sales of raw milk (This information was confirmed by ProCon.org through additional research in Sep. 2007 and again in Sep. 2008). For a listing of all state laws pertaining to raw milk please see (etc.)
2004, Dr. Mercola:
Joseph Mercola, DO, an osteopathic physician, stated in his April 24, 2004 article “The Real Reasons Why Raw Milk Is Becoming More Popular,” published on his website:
“Raw {COW’s} milk is a highly health-promoting food… While it is certainly possible to become sick from drinking contaminated raw milk, it is also possible to become sick from almost any food source. But it seems that raw milk has been unfairly singled out as a risk, when only a very small risk exists…
Raw milk is an outstanding source of nutrients including beneficial bacteria such as lactobacillus acidophilus, vitamins and enzymes, and it is, in my estimation, the finest source of calcium available…
People who have been allergic to pasteurized milk for many years can typically tolerate and even thrive on raw milk. Raw milk is truly one of the most profoundly healthy foods you can consume, and you’ll feel the difference once you start to drink it.”
2005
Well, 20 years later, the local yokels are fighting back, some. Here’s commentary:
(TOM PHILPOTT, 11/28/2005)
RAW MILK, HOT COMMODITY
Despite a recent crackdown, Washington State’s raw-milk policy might point way forward.
In a nation riddled with diet-related maladies like obesity and diabetes, the official fear that greets raw milk is impressive.
You can waltz into any convenience store and snap up foods pumped liberally with government-subsidized high-fructose corn sweetener, deep-fried in government-subsidized partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Yet in many states, teams of bureaucrats devote themselves to “protecting” us from raw milk — and imposing onerous fines on farmers who dare sell it.
Some states ban raw milk outright; others have erected elaborate barriers between farmer and consumer. Here in North Carolina, for example, I have to pretend I’m buying animal fodder when I visit a nearby dairy farm to pick up a gallon or two of raw milk.
Even so, consumers are increasingly demanding it, banding together with farmers to form Prohibition-like cells from New York City to Portland. To me, it tastes better, more alive, than even the best pasteurized milk; and I tend to believe the health claims made for it.
According to this AP article, Washington State is stepping up enforcement of its raw-milk restrictions, which are actually relatively enlightened. The article says that in Washington, farms that sell raw milk must be “licensed through the state, which requires monthly testing of the milk and inspection of the farm and milk bottling room.” Further, “each bottle must contain a warning label saying it may contain harmful bacteria.”
However, a law that went into effect July 1 allows the milk to be hand-bottled. That means farms don’t have to lay out large investments in bottling equipment — a requirement that would eliminate milk sales as a potential revenue source for many small operations.
As long as compliance costs are low, Washington’s raw-milk code could actually help build the market for the product. While I think that consumers are their own best health inspectors — I wouldn’t buy raw milk from a farm I hadn’t inspected myself, or whose operator didn’t have a top-notch reputation in his or her community — many people don’t feel comfortable consuming something as potentially dangerous as raw milk without government oversight.
(There is of course a bitter irony here: The government has long shown itself to be more responsive to corporate dictates than public-health concerns. To cite just one example: The FDA continues to countenance the use of hydrogenated oil, despite decades of evidence of its deadly effects.)
Direct-marketed raw milk is a potential boon to dairy farms that have languished for years under the heel of rising costs and stagnant prices for their goods. Consolidation in the dairy-processing industry means that in most places, a single buyer exists for a farm’s milk output. By selling direct to consumers, farmers have more leverage to get a decent price.
2006
California, too!
(Sept. 2006)
First, bags of spinach were found to be contaminated with E Coli, which made people sick. The strain of E Coli in the spinach (0157:H7) was the same strain found in those people who were sick. Now four children who consumed raw dairy products from Organic Pastures dairy have become ill with E Coli as well. At least one of these children had the strain 0157:H7 confirmed on lab tests, the same strain present in the contaminated spinach. However, tests of the raw dairy products have failed to detect any E Coli in samples.
Nonetheless, the California State Veterinarian, Dr. Richard Breitmeyer, has placed a temporary ban and recall of all raw milk products from Organic Pastures as a precautionary measure
Like most foods, the less processing that dairy products undergo, the more nutritious it is. Although pasteurization will kill potentially harmful bacteria in milk, it also destroys bacteria and enzymes that help people digest and absorb nutrients in milk. The benefits of consuming raw milk have been advocated by many groups. The website www.realmilk.com (operated by the Weston A. Price Foundation) describes these many benefits (www.westonaprice.org). Others are critical of dairy product consumption by humans in any form (www.notmilk.com).
An alternative to raw milk is organic, non-homogenized (cream top) pasteurized milk. Homogenization distributes the fat in milk throughout the solution, but also makes the fat unavailable. The fat is needed for calcium absorption and is a good source of saturated fat for children.
Parents who have found that switching to raw milk products solves the problems associated with processed milk, may have more difficulty now obtaining raw milk, and will get more pressure to use pasteurized dairy products. And the whole issue of dairy product consumption is a hotbed of controversy.
It is illegal for dairies to produce and sell raw milk in 23 states. Consumers have found ways to get around these laws by buying milk directly from farmers. And in California and other states where raw milk is legal, dairies have been able to supply consumers with their products through health food stores. But state health departments frown on raw milk production and often go after dairies.
In California the health department has forced the Organic Pastures dairy to indefinitely stop all distribution and recall all raw dairy products from stores because of an alleged connection to four children who have E Coli illnesses.
So far, this is still about the condition/quality of COW’s milk (just a reminder)
2008
From: , Organic Consumers Association, More from this Affiliate
Published April 7, 2008 08:22 AMCalifornia Threatens to Outlaw Sales of Raw Milk
California raw milk producers warn that a new law to impose strict requirements on raw milk, will outlaw and require the disposal of perfectly safe milk. AB 1735 requires that all raw milk sold in California be tested for 10 coliform bacteria per milliliter or less. But raw milk producers and activists say that most coliform bacteria is perfectly safe, and that tests are already carried out for a handful of such bacteria, including E. coli 0157:h7 and Listeria monocytogenes, that can cause disease in humans. The new law does not require testing for those bacteria.
“My customers’ choices are now being limited by a law that makes no sense,” said Mark McAfee, owner of the country’s largest raw dairy, Organic Pastures. “Why test for coliform bacteria when you can test for pathogenic bacteria directly?”
“Officials cite health risks to raw milk, but once milk has been pasteurized, all the anti-microbial and immune-supporting components are reduced or destroyed,” said Sally Fallon, founder of “A Campaign for Real Milk.”
. . .
And here’s an interesting discussion, pro, con, complete with testimony and statements from propononents and opponents:
Is raw (cow’s) milk more healthful than pasteurized milk?
(A few links above led here also):
Now, back to Mama and MOTHER’s MILK (NB: I think you need to have been a mother, or at least pregnant, before you can produce, although not having tried myself before I became pregnant, I can’t say for sure.) Anyhow, for the sake of consistency, I prefer “Mother’s” to “Human” milk.
2009
The Milk of Human Kindness – Uses for Human Breast Milk
News Type: Event — Sun Apr 26, 2009 12:19 AM PDT
Every year, the citizens of the United States drink on average 21 gallons of milk. Most of this milk is from cows. Ever since I heard that PETA wanted Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to use human milk, {{For the record, yes, I DO object, women are not cows! We are already being treated as surrogate mothers in the courts, and sometimes functioning as them in life. Let’s keep it to the first part of life, and OK? STOP the ObamaInterventionProgram to get them babies away from them Mamas and into child care (and her into WalMart or somewhere else) and put them back with their Moms. It’s better for Moms, too. Let’s learn how to take care of our relationships, for once in our life!}}{{There are already ads enough for women and men of a certain age to sell their eggs and sperm;DNK if blood; too bad I missed them while trying to collect child support arrears}}
I {author, not blog author} have been researching about the advantages and uses of it. Here is what I have come up with.
)Human Breast Milk has been used as a medication for thousands of years. In the ancient world, breast milk was sometimes consumed as Medicine, in Fertility Rituals, and in other religious ceremonies. The Ancient Egyptians used are honey and human breast milk as medicine. Not only did they have medicinal values, they also are believed to have been used to ward off evil spirits and demons. It is even theorized that our ancestors not only breast fed their children during long migrations, but also breast fed their men too!
7) It helps fight off long term health problems. Breast milk can help prevent ear infections. People who drink it are less likely to develop asthma, Multiple Sclerosis, and help prevent some food allergies. It is said that Breastfeeding protects against cancer, helps prevent heart disease and even relaxes tension caused by stress . People with GI disorders and organ donation recipients also benefit from the immunologic powers of human breast milk. Talk about a health drink!!
Antibodies (also called Immunoglobulins) are made by the body’s immune system in an attempt to protect it from harmful substances such as bacteria, viruses, fungus, or animal dander. The antibodies work by attaching to these substances so that the immune system can destroy them.
There are five major types of antibodies: IgA, IgG, IgM, IgE, and IgD. All are found in breast milk. IgA antibodies protect body surfaces that are exposed to outside foreign substances. They are found primarily in the nose, breathing passages, digestive tract, ears, eyes, vagina, saliva and tears. This makes IgA particularly important for babies who are always putting things in their mouths.
In patients that are suffering from immunilogical diseases, such as AIDS, Leukemia, or Hepatitis, or patients recieving a therapy that deteriorates the immune system, such as chemo or radiation therapy, have shown the benefit when supplimenting their diets with human breast milk.
For more information:
http://www.breastfeeding.com/allabout.html6) People are always complaining in the USA, about stupid people doing stupid things. People cutting us off, insulting us, and even lacking common sense. Well, turns out that Human Breast Milk may actually increase intelligence. Studies show breastfed infants have higher IQ s than bottle fed infants.
For more information:
http://www.breastfeeding.com/all_about/all_about_iq.html5) Breastfed babies grow up to be leaner than bottle fed babies. Maybe it has to do with the fact that babies digestive systems are still in development. Then again, it maybe just that babies are trying to fill a psychological need with food. When a baby nurses with its mother, he is learning the basics of relationships. He is learning the recognize boundaries for good behavior, and what is not acceptable. The closeness that develops during breast feeding carries over to any relationships later in life. We, as Humans, learn by example.
Read more at:
http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/004125.html
{{NOTE: this is a MAN speaking! He’d never qualify for a government post….}}
There are more and more people considering the advantages of breast milk not just for the treatment of illness.
4) PETA wants Ben and Jerry’s ice cream made from Human Milk. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co founders of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow’s milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.
http://www.wptz.com/news/17539127/detail.html3) Swiss restaurant to serve meals cooked with human breast milk . The owner of the Storchen restaurant in the exclusive Winterthur resort will improve his menu with local specialties such as meat stew and various soups and sauces containing at least 75 per cent of mother’s milk.
2) In France, a “dairy” produces Human Milk Cheese. Founded in 1947, the cheese Cosma was able to recover the wealth of a farmer ancestral tradition Ardennaise forgotten until then. Indeed, the Petit Singly, the only cheese with woman’s milk , has long remained in the shadow of specialty cheeses, ordinarily milk cow, goat or sheep.
In France, no other product of this quality is listed, the Petit Singly has managed over time refining its taste thanks to the expertise of the master cheese maker, Patrice Cosma. Tinged with a touch of hazelnut and a subtle caramel color, sweetness and its basis will only tempt you.
For more information on this:
http://membres.lycos.fr/petitsingly/1) A Business in Miami, FL wants to promote the virtues of Human Breast Milk Ice cream. U.S. citizens consumed an average of 23 gallons of bovine milk in 2001. Quite an astonishing amount when you consider that Homosapiens are the only organisms known to consume milk beyond infancy. Even more extraordinary is the fact that humans are the only organisms that consume the milk of other animals!
Female mothers in the Class Mammalia produce nutrient-rich milk for consumption by their own newborn babies. Humans have attained the unique (and bizarre) position in the food web from which they exploit the reproductive cycle of other animals (particularly Bovidae) for food. Adding to the cultural mystique of milk consumption is the widely held taboo against consumption of human breast milk either by unrelated individuals or persons beyond some generally unspecified age.
It is the mission of MMICCo. to challenge the traditional paradigm that there is nothing abnormal about conversion of mammalian milk into luxury food items. Mother’s milk is a natural creation that we should celebrate, but is the milk of other species truly fair game for human consumption? If so, why isn’t human milk? Our hope is to provide a delicious frozen product while framing this conversation in a way that leads to fruitful progress in consideration of the ecological niche of Homosapiens.
For more information on this:
http://www.bio.miami.edu/muscarella/mothersmilkicecream.htmlI do not understand why it would be OK to drink from a cow Teat, but not from a human Teat. I have found evidence to the detrimental effect of cow’s milk with Bovine Growth Hormone. One study not only shows evidence that it leads to obesity and excessive male breast development, but suggests that drinking nonorganic milk will give women a 42% higher chance, and men a 20% higher chance of developing Breast cancer.
Mostly, I wrote the article so that people will start questioning why we believe what we believe is OK. Society says it is OK to drink cow milk. Society also says we should expect politicians to lie, judges to take bribes, and car dealers to try to rip us off. How far back are we personally willing to push the boundaries of what society says is acceptable? Is it worth it, to improve your health?
Here are some more informative sites for further information:
This one is the world famous La Leche League, promoting Worldwide Awareness to the benefits of Brestfeeding
Legislative records show that raw milk dairies were specifically discussed during the debate on AB 1735, but neither raw milk producers nor consumers were consulted on the legislation
Hmm, there is a certain parallel to the low-income parents who were being randomly studied, categorized, and legislated about when it comes to family law, as well. Not to mention, I do not recall a NATIONAL poll at any time on the wisdom of fatherhood becoming the new state religion, moreso than, say, motherhood. I wonder how many of the about 50% of the US population (women, i.e.) were indeed consulted by the legislators (primarily male), governors (I believe ditto), and pastors (probably still so), etc. promoting these policies.
Finally, my last “find” on the issue of, at least, cow’s milk. Be sure to check out the study on link to cancer:
http://www.milksucks.com/index2.asp
A question comes up, as to pushing milk in the school cafeterias. I have worked in an urban area (more than one, actually), where it could be sarcastically but with some relevance said, the major health risks were homicide and diabetes. Some people, and populations, have allergies to cow’s milk. The aspect of the public schools as a dairy-dumping ground comes to mind.
Just because it can be mass-produced doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I think this commentary goes for almost any primary aspect of life, including parenting, education, families, fatherhood, and nursing.
I think trying to indoctrinate an entire country from the top-down is an oppressive, fat burdensome Big Brother. Or is that, “Mama”?
Only, it ain’t motherhood, these days, it’s fatherhood. Time to let go of the oral fixation on making pronouncements, in private, and enforcing them upon the general public. And when they don’t work out as planned, making more pronouncements, and telling the general public, we’re out of funding.
Let’s get off that virtual teat, OK?
And create (how?) a brave, new, world than this one.
On reflection, I omitted an important year, in my chronology of human food, above:
1984
Like George Orwell’s 1984, this novel (Brave New World) depicts a dystopia in which an all-powerful state controls the behaviors and actions of its people in order to preserve its own stability and power. But a major difference between the two is that, whereas in 1984 control is maintained by constant government surveillance, secret police, and torture, power in Brave New World is maintained through technological interventions that start before birth and last until death, and that actually change what people want. The government of 1984 maintains power through force and intimidation. The government of Brave New World retains control by making its citizens so happy and superficially fulfilled that they don’t care about their personal freedom. In Brave New World the consequences of state control are a loss of dignity, morals, values, and emotions—in short, a loss of humanity.
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A Toxic Mixture – Survival Instinct diluted by Submission to Custody Orders (UK/Australia)
Cassandra Hasonovic…convinced she was going to die at the hands of her husband.
WHAT FATHERS’ RIGHTS PEOPLE DON’T TELL ABOUT WHY “MOTHER-HEADED HOUSEHOLDS” CAN BE SUCH A RISKY BUSINESS. . .
AND IT’S NOT THE MOTHERS….
I pause from mocking the “Fatherhood” resolutions of the US Congress to demonstrate that while they are laughable in premises, these resolutions are no laughing matter; to demonstrate again that men in positions of power worshipping abstract theories/myths/idols (or their images of themselves as a class) can put a woman face down dead and bloody on a slab of concrete, and just did. Again.
Another myth is that deadly consequences like this will cause deter the same men in power (I’m talking governmental representatives) from initiating, more, similar, and more costly mythology at a governmental level from continuing along the same path, gaining momentum and funding as they go:
NFI asked some** of our nation’s elected leaders about their views on the future of fatherhood in public policy.
(**more specificaly, The National Fatherhood Instititute (ca. 1994) chose to interview select policy makers who just happened also to be members of the “National Fatherhood Initiative’s Senate Task Force on Responsible Fatherhood” (origins at least pre-1998) what they thought of Fatherhood. Calling this “policymakers” is both true — they are PUSHing this policy through — and deceptive, as though it was representative of the entire Congress, prior to being pushed by these folks on this initiative. At least I HOPE there are some in Congress still that can see that this is costing women’s lives, and children’s in the long run….) Perhaps these fathers are upstanding in their own marriages and have a family life to be envied (although it could hardly be called a representative lifestyle, being a Congressperson).
What about the carte blanche, the clear endorsement such proclamations are giving men at the bottom of the economic spectrum, or of the behavioral spectrum, who may already have a chip on their shoulders and be looking for an excuse to dominate another woman?
We already have religions that do this. There are already honor killings, beheadings, in our country (USA). There are already family wipeouts in this country. There are horrific practices upon women in certain countries, still — stonings, genital circumcison, retaliation for attending school, rapes as a form of warfare, or when leaving a refugee camp to seek firewood. I am sorry to say this, but do we REALLY need a Congress of primarily (but not only) white men to say, with other (primarily) men of other color, and a woman or two, that it’s time to go back and reclaim your biological property, eradicate single motherhood that happened because a woman chose to leave abuse, or, you failed to use a condom or proper protection?
I would love to see a survey of every Congressperson, and see which marriage they are on, and how faithful they have been to their wives or, as it may be, husbands. If women, I would like to see how their grown children are behaving in THEIR marriages. When they divorce, do they pay child support? Do they engage in bankrupting and badmouthing a former partner?
To me, this is nothing less than Congress choosing to violate the First Amendment, in the U.S. It is the establishment of a state religion. How it relates to other continents and cultures? Similar doctrines, similar family law theories and practice.
Here is what some policymakers** are saying:
“The American family is the foundation of our society, and we must do all we can to help fathers do the right thing for their children. Today, too many men leave mothers to bear the brunt of being both mom and dad**, forcing them to face the challenges of raising a child and providing for the family on their own. I know President Obama shares my commitment to helping fathers become the best dads they can be; we worked together on these initiatives in the Senate. With the new administration on our side, we can make healthy families and responsible fatherhood a priority together.”
– Senator Evan Bayh*** (D-IN); co-chair of National Fatherhood Initiative’s Senate Task Force on Responsible Fatherhood
**Hypocrite!! The entire thrust of this movement (pun intended), as far as I can see in hindsight, was to prevent women from throwing abusive men (not ALL men) out on their asses for their abuse. The premise behind it, and the practices, and some of the groups, show the reality — allegations of domestic violence and child abuse are false, mostly, and highly exaggerated. Women do not have a right to leave with their children, and so must be re-programmed how to get along with fathers. The organizations funded, and subsidized (federally / state/ local) then go into prisons and other places where substantially suspect fathers may be found, and — in order to reduce the welfare tax load, and by reducing child support arrears in exchange for more contact with their kids, thereby burden the rest of society with the results. The NFI (this initiative) almost exactly coincides with the VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) and was heavily funded from the start.
Did I know this before working closely a few years with the local child support agency and finding out how “opaque” they truly were? No. Not til I started actually reading the programs, and comparing the programs with the rhetoric.
***Of note: Senator Bayh’s personal acquaintance with fatherhood includes having a father who was a U.S. Senator
From the time he was about 8 through majority, his Dad was a Senator.
Evan Bayh graduated with honors in business, economics and public policy from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business in 1978, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi, and received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Virginia in 1981. After clerking for a federal court judge and entering private law practice in Indianapolis, he was elected Indiana’s Secretary of State in 1986.
Bayh was elected Governor of Indiana in 1988 and re-elected in 1992 with the highest percentage of the vote in a statewide election in modern Indiana history.
While this stellar college performance and work history is commendable, I do not think it provides an experiential understanding of the situations that lower-income brackets face in their families. I think that a little failure would have perhaps been helpful (Lincoln had some, right?) along the way, perhaps.
As Such, What THESE Policy Makers are Saying. . .
. . . is kind of like the Foxes quoting other Foxes (from the Fox Initiative) on how “difficult’ the Hens must find life without a resident Fox in the house. I am not referring to all men — I personally like men, and am heterosexual, and don’t think they all think like this. At least, I know at least one or two who do not, and hope to find more, as they are good company.
FINANCIALLY SUPPORTING A FAMILY IS ONE OF THE LEAST WORRIES TO SOME SINGLE MOTHERS…
Here’s the summary, and the story is below:
Despite History and Threats of Further Domestic Violence, British Wife Who Fled to Australia Seeking Safety is Ordered to Return Children to England for Custody Determination
(NOTE: This is why I like Jack Straton’s article on Custody Rights to Men Who Batter).
- Husband is convicted of sexually assaulting Wife.
- Wife is terrified that Husband will kill her.
- Husband allegedly threatens to dismember her.
- Wife flees to Australia with their two Children.
- But the Australian courts rule that England has child custody jurisdiction under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.
- Wife returns to England with Children.
- Police are summoned to intervene in domestic clashes several times.
- Police give Wife a “panic alarm”. {{SHE’s ALREADY Panicked & Alarmed? How about Pepper Spray? A self-defense course? A “right to carry?” (I guess UK doesn’t do that). Or a KNIFE , and training in how to use it?– he killed her with a knife…}}{{So much for “panic alarms.” Oh, she was just exaggerating, the police will protect her. TELL ME — has practice changed since THIS murder?}}
- About a year after Wife’s return, Husband allegedly drags her from a car and stabs her to death … in front of her own mother and their Children.
- Just a few hours after she begged British police for protection.
- While she was in the midst of trying to flee from Husband again.
- Husband is convicted of murder.
- He will serve at least eighteen years in confinement.
- (I add: Her sons will serve a lifetime, with this memory, plus their grandmother, plus all acquaintances.)
WHATEVER PRINCIPLES AND PREMISES LED TO THESE COURT DECISIONS — FOR WHOSE GOOD?
THEY WERE Speculation. That’s a Risky Business, and I feel that the indicators that this is straight mythology, at some level. This type of decision is driven by “fatherhood” as an ideal, and premises that a man without his children is a man without an identity, as is a woman telling the truth — this is a dangerous situation. A man’s rights, even if he’s already been proven criminal, are more important than a woman’s rights — to self-defense by fleeing. A mother’s words are less valid than a father’s. Women as a class are to obey. Men as a class, if forced to subject themselves to the same laws, are prone to killing for the humiliation, and yet still, the NEXT set of women (with kids) are also told, they must obey or go to jail.
In the last post (U.S. Congress Resolution of 1999, a National Fathers Return Day) it was said that “mother-headed-households” fare worse, as a class. Whether or not the data was true, THIS is partly why, and was not reported. Because they are taking heat already for being single. Perhaps a second husband (Women, would YOU remarry quickly after her experience? Men, would YOU marry a woman with kids who was in the process of fleeing her first one? Unless this answer is YES, and some man is brave enough to step in the gap (and being armed, probably), that is going to be a mother-headed household. Put this in your pipe and smoke it when you read the NEXT proclamation I post, US House of Reps, saying the same thing, and voting unanimously as to its truth. Yeah, well, some truths are created, others are self-evident without that extra self-propagating “creation” of a risky, dangerous situation, that of being a single mother when the climate is globally cooling towards permission of this state of affairs. And in ONE country from which some of the laws in the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave.
That’s ridiculous. I am so at a loss for words, I would like to quote some scripture here, but I’m talking about Family Law, if you will bear with me:
(Bible: Eccles. 3, ERV)
This, from the same guy that said, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity…, and the same one who, one time, when judging between two women who argued over one baby, after one had just been rolled over and smothered to death, was able to discern by a simple test – and his test, though with a sword, has some resemblances to the co-parenting, 50/50 talk of today. The woman who did NOT want her kid chopped in half (this time, physically) was the true one. Nowadays, this dude (who went down the tube, eventually, the record states) ain’t around, or anyone with close to the amount of discernment shown below:
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; {{like a dangerous marriage…}}
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down{{ibid}}, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7. a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
{{This woman saw fit to “rend” her marriage. She was not permitted to. Why??}}
8 a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
Human sacrifice has ALWAYS been the trademark of religion. Some faiths would say, a false religion. True adherents of any religion are typically willing to kill others, not just themselves, for its sake.
It is right to hate placing onesself and one’s offspring (and others) in the path of danger. That’s a “time to hate.” Not people, but the situation. Sacrificing others may come easily, but sacrificing one’s own offspring is NOT a natural act. Forcing someone to do this is to do violence against her integrity, and one of the primary functions of “MOTHERHOOD” in the name of “FATHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!” – — yes they do, but this one, in particular, should not have. You will say, but what about due process?
What about due haste when life is at risk?
Young Mother Fled to Sydney to Save Her Life. UK forces her back, where she is stabbed to death in front of her two boys, and mother, by the man she fled.
Paola Totaro Herald Correspondent in London
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
May 2, 2009
CASSANDRA HASANOVIC was convinced she was going to die at the hands of her husband but her pleas for help – in Australia and Britain – fell on deaf ears.
“He said he was going to chop me up in little pieces and post me piece by piece to my family,” she told police more than a year before her death.
The nightmare tale of the mother, 24, who was dragged out of a car and stabbed to death by her husband in front of her mother and two young sons in July, neared its climax in a British court yesterday.
Mrs Hasanovic died hours after begging British police to drive her to a safe house: “I live in fear for my safety. I am so scared of him.”
{{THERE IS A MORAL TO THIS STORY, IN ASKING POLICE FOR PROTECTION….}}
Her story was recounted this week during the trial of Hajrudin Hasanovic, 33, who was last night found guilty of murder and sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in jail.
The jury learned how he was to have been deported to his native Serbia after losing custody of his children, following his conviction for sexually assaulting his wife.
They heard a damning story of a woman whose fears were ignored by authorities in two hemispheres for more than 12 months.
The five-year marriage ended in May 2007 after the sexual assault and Mrs Hasanovic fled to Australia, where she had relatives. She lived in the safety of Sydney’s western suburbs in the fervent hope of seeking custody of her sons.
But Lewes Crown Court, in West Sussex, heard that Australian authorities insisted she return to Britain, arguing the case had to be pursued there.
Philippa McAtasney, QC, who opened the case for the prosecution, told the court that she returned to Britain at the cost of her life.
In the months that followed her return, police were called to several violent confrontations between the couple, and officers equipped the young mother with a panic alarm.
{{Why didn’t they arrest and incarcerate the attacker?? ??? ???? She was already panicked and had already sounded the alarm, by fleeing the continent — but was not heard…..}}
Mrs Hasanovic’s mother, Sharon De Souza, broke down as she described the terror inside the car on July 29, when her son-in-law appeared from nowhere and lunged at the car as she prepared to drive her daughter and grandsons to a refuge.
{{WHEN WILL WE — WORLDWIDE – – STOP FOCUSING ON REFORMING BATTERERS (WHICH DOES NOT HAVE A TRACK RECORD OF SUCCESS — AND TEACH WOMEN TO DEFEND THEMSELVES, FOR A DETERRENT? IT TAKES A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF COWARDICE TO ATTACK AN UNARMED WOMEN, WITH KIDS NEARBY. PERHAPS THESE COWARDS HOW PICK ON THEIR WIVES, IN FRONT OF THEIR SONS AND DAUGHTERS, CAN BE DETERRED WHEN THEY REALIZE, THAT THEY ARE NOT GOING TO GET AWAY WITH EVEN THE 2ND SUCH ASSAULT. THERE IS NOTHING UN-FEMININE, REALLY, ABOUT SELF-DEFENSE. WE HAVE TO TEACH WOMEN THIS. NOT GANG-STYLE, BUT INDIVIDUALLY, TEACHING US TO DEFEND OUR PERSONAL BOUNDARIES, PHYSICALLY IF NECESSARY.}}
In the panic, the car’s central locking was de-activated, allowing Hasanovic to reach into the back seat, where his wife was sitting between the boys.
“I just remember trying to start the car and the alarm went off and I could not get the car started … I could see a figure coming towards me in the shade …” Mrs De Souza said.
“I looked up again and he was staring towards me. … I just thought: ‘Oh, my God.”‘
She then saw Hasanovic drag her daughter from the car, leaving her face down on the pavement.
“She was lying on the ground. Her eyes were open and she was not moving at all.
“I didn’t realise she was dead. I said: ‘Come on, hold on, you’re going to be OK.’ I could see the blood [but] I could not take it in and I remember hearing the boys screaming.”
“Cassie was devastated when under the Hague convention she was ordered to return the boys to England,” Mrs De Souza said.
“This brutal, cruel and senseless act has torn our lives apart”.
AND — IT WAS NEEDLESS.
I hope, pray, blog, and ask people who are in “intact” marriages (not marked by violence, or even bitter divorce) to wake up and participate, not in indignation that women are indignant, or fleeing, but in studying WHAT your governments are doing (worldwide) and the NGOs that are running the place. Thank you. Take time off from barbecuing, or soccer teams for a month, or a season. I’m talking to what remains of “middle class” people, who perhaps are employed and housed, and panicked about losing work or housing. How does that compare with women like this one, above? Your governments, at least I can speak for mine, ARE wasting money and time in policies that kill.
IN HER PURSUIT OF LIFE (LET ALONE, LIBERTY AND PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS), THIS WOMAN FLED TO AUSTRALIA, LISTENING TO THE OBVIOUS, AND HER INSTINCTS. BEING A MOTHER, AND HAVING HAD CHILDREN (a.k.a. property), SHE WAS SPIT OUT FROM AUSTRALIA BACK TO UK, AND THERE MURDERED. IN FRONT OF HER SONS, AND HER MOTHER, WHILE FLEEING.
More Sardonic Commentary
Meanwhile, in family courts around the world, women (and some men) are told that expressing outrage at indignation and crime is itself a crime, and should be punished by paying for “parenting classes” until they (as adults) realize that the police, the judge, the psychologist, the evaluator, the Guardian at Litem, the Child Protective Services worker, the District Attorney, the Mediators, the educators, and the government know more ab out their own lives, and what’s best for them, than they themselves do.
This is called the Artificial Womb.
(GOOD GRIEF — I just Googled that term, and found this:
Why Not Artificial Wombs?
In 1924, the British scientist {{PROBABLY MALE!!}} J. B. S. Haldane coined the term “ectogenesis” to describe how human pregnancy would one day give way to artificial wombs. “It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenic child,” Haldane wrote, imagining how an earnest college student of the future would describe the phenomenon. “Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.”
I mean this METAPHORICALLY, and I guess now have another post….THIS one is about how worshipping fatherhood has cost real mothers their lives. I had not realized (yet) how long ago it entered into men’s imagination to eliminate pregnancy and childbirth, which I suppose interrupts for nine months some of their other wished-for biological functions, that is in men not mature enough to understand what the whole wonder, relationship, and process is actually about. I predict, that if this becomes successful — that motherhood as a relationship reality is eradicated, AND as a biological one — that the entirety of the human race will become so theoretically smart, and practially stupid, that we (so to speak — count me out!) will destroy ALL of each other, sooner, rather than later. Which of course, some of the human race is currently engaged in, and at least two world religions I am aware of predict. That’s probably less “myth” than an accurate reading of human nature, which this “fatherhood” stuff is not. It’s an “ism” not a reality. The REALITY is that men and women vary in behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and levels of responsibility to which they have risen.
BACK TO THIS POST:
Good “parenting” teaches one’s children’ how to recognize danger (and when to flee it), that it’s OK to express indignation and anger in order to protect personal boundaries (i.e., send a warning message to whoever is violating them), and if necessary after that, fight back.
Parenting classes, as I understand them, exist to prevent fathers and mothers from doing this, and to create a numbed down (or, bipolar) set of behaviors — one for the teachers, and one when the teachers are not watching. This is a recipe for destruction.
Men around the world are whining, publically and in on-line groups, and promoting studies, that women are just as violent and dangerous as they are. Well, if that WERE so, it appears to me that nonviolent self-preservation techniques (like FLIGHT) aren’t working, so what shall we then do?
Where are all the men killed by angry ex-wives? They aren’t there because our cultures (exception: TV media, popular films), and primary institutions coach women to be passive and submissive — or they will be punished. We are told to obey rules, and we do.
Perhaps it would be better if it was understood that it IS dangerous to confront a woman physically. Perhaps this might be a deterrent. If men are going to reject, as partners, women who stand up to them, then let them propagate with the passive ones, and perhaps — just perhaps, some of the non-passive surviving women may be a role model, should this get to the point of violence.
The last time I had personal contact with a woman who lost a child to a man she’d divorced who had already been convicted of molesting her other child, was only yesterday. This is distressing. As is typical, she has to pay for supervised visitation to see the pre-adolescent son that was removed from her custody for reporting child abuse.
It’s also an unfair choice to any woman –become a criminal and fugitive, or risk your life,
and your children’s lives and sense of sanity and safety in this world, til they mature.
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Profile in Courage — India, Age 12
We had a “just say no” to drugs, and “There’s no excuse for abuse.”
Also, our administration is still paying top dollar to promote “Healthy Marriage” (whatever that is, but roughly translated it means, we want people off welfare) and even had “just say no to sex outside marriage” (abstinence education), which some religions at least say they endorse, and trying to get the young men (this was the initial rationale for the movement) who have been, many of them, through our educational system, to become “responsible fathers.” And paying top dollars, including dollars earned by single mothers and other women, for this.
Meanwhile, in India, a fairly recent law says no marriage before 18 (girls) or 21 (boys). 
Her story from the CS Monitor is below.
Rekha Kalindi, a 12-year-old girl living in Bararola, India,refused to get married when her parents tried to arrange one; she wanted to stay in school. Her revolt, and those of two other girls in the region, have halted new child marriages in their rural region of West Bengal, India. The legal age for marriage in India is 18 for girls and 21 for boys. But arecent study published in the Lancet found 44.5 percent of Indian women in their early 20s had been wed by the time they were 18. Of those, 22.6 percent had been married before age 16, 2.6 percent before age 13.
This is what I think, on the topic in USA:
(1st half blog: me blogging. 2nd half. The story which so inspired today, perhaps there is still hope.)
Education and cultural values – USA style.
- Thankfully no one married me off at 12. Thankfully, I was allowed to complete not only high school, but also, college, twice. I was not dealing with substantial gender issues, that I recall, in my work life. Sometimes, but not primarily. I also got my B.Th. from an organization that ordained women, and we worked alongside me in many fields. I continued to also do music during these years, which were exciting and adventurous also.
- It was after marriage – mid-30s (not that late, really, for our culture) — as a fully adult, functional, working, contributing member of society that the infantilization of me (by virtue of gender and the pro-forma definition of marriage in this person’s mind, which I didn’t know in advance) became, and was enforced for many years, with a vengeance. I have come to realize that while I was taught to work, my family in particular taught me nothing (by example, or discussion) about marriage, but their actions indicated that having a man (live-in) was mature, and supposedly not, wasn’t. When I finally threw him out, someone somewhere, relegated me back to immature status, and this is how I became exposed more fully to the dysfunctional segmentation of the college-educated liberal/progressive (childless) mindset, along with others in my family who did have children, but did the routine, farm them out, and get the high-paying job means of balancing the family budget.
- This has been a painful process, and I recently began to appreciate much more my faith (which incorporates at least a coherent system of reference) and music (which, we’re told, DOES affect how one things and reacts and sees things in life). It’s dynamic, and puts you in dynamic relationship with LOTS of people. So, for better or for worse, does evangelism (although that was always the weaker aspect of my involvement, I didn’t LIKE it).
- Anyhow, this young woman got a hold of a 2nd point of view (perspective) on herself. This is invaluable, an actual conflict of values, and then hopefully working out the differences. We CANNOT avoid this in the global situation, it is necessary to hash it through logically, legally, and personally. I h
- I said, and say, “just say no” to domestic violence, and that the family court system, which ignores its own laws in order to satisfy other priorities, and support other professions, should not be dealing with these cases, at all. And my thinking so is based on solid experience, a decade of it coming up soon here. I know what a difference it made, financially, and as to safety, and as to what my daughters are being taught now which is the exact opposite of what my filing for a restraining order and LEAVING told them about limits between a man and a woman in marriage. My state, California, has in practice undermined that standard (and our mutual standards of living, of civil rights, and many more urgent things that are not fully on the new administration’s scope, as examined by funding and relative rhetoric in the matter. STILL, women are seen as channels to provide kids, who are the cash (and, too often, sex) commodity, and THIS HAS TO STOP!
Here, women who put the priority on mothering, working their fields around it, are also not as popular (these days) with feminist organizations. These organizations address multiple issues regarding women.
But my issue (this blog), right now, is topic-specific, and venue-specific, i.e., the courts and the organizations that are working to undermine due process, many of which are outside the courts. And that these “outside the courts” situations sometimes have body counts.
If “women of faith” leave their man for due legal cause (having finally discovered the law, which I just about guarantee you will not be shared in those venues), they are often abandoned by that church for doing so (after all, the abuse happened while they were involved, $$, tithes, etc., are involved). Thereafter, though charity can and occasionally refuge sometimes do (sometimes do NOT) trickle down from that tax-exempt source, that charity, or temporary refuge does not replace or fix what was broken. Generally speaking, the tragedy doesn’t even cause the doctrine or practices of the church to even miss a beat. They continue downplaying abuse, continue putting out ridiculous (no reference to the law) pamphlets about how to help someone caught up in it. In this manner, the religious organizations (i’m talking Christian, which is my primary exposure) continue to set themselves above and apart / ‘special’ from the laws in place to protect women and children from violence — or, in the case of child support, from simply being robbed, which is another way to end up on charity (and how I was).
It takes money to run a church. If violent men were properly confronted (and properly includes PUBLICALLY) and admonished, for an example to others, chances are THAT church at least would make it clear that within its ranks, this is unacceptable. Oddly enough, I’ve found the ones that are real strong on no sex outside marriage (from the pulpit and printed materials) are quite weak on this issue. I was recently in a prominent one here that was made fully aware (by me) of the situation: child support arrears, children stolen, court orders violated, profession wrecked, I am on charity (again). I had some hope they might put their regal authority (as pastors) and go down to the other place and simply let the other pastor/outfit know that those cute kids’ Dad was in violation of the law, will you please support and encourage him to get on the proper side of it? In other words, I as a person in this place was respecting authority (and they had some) and clearly asking that it be wielded to help a single woman who had lost her children to a batterer Nope. But they did say something about going down to confront him on adultery. Good grief!
So, it was made clear that there is a professional, I guess, no-competition law between these outfits. Which is how I again deduced that “what it’s about” is something other than actual “righteousness,” but like any other business, profitability.
We are OK to be recipients of charity, but not equal partners in crime, or as it may be “faith.” When it comes to speaking, teaching, or almost any of the venues. This is personally reducing a woman to her gender, but in all the other areas of life. It is not ‘protective,’ but socially and spiritually eroding. This is how it should go, in the courts (and also what the law says):
How hard is this? Violence verified? Then
NO contact with abuser. No joint custody, no regular vistation. We are raising generations of children to accept a discrepancy between law and law enforcement, between crime and consequences. This is basically re-writing the English language, and endorsing “double-speak.”
Sometimes years go by, in which a woman has to rebuild her relationships (social, work, etc.) often enough, and also heal, rediscover the non-abused, non-degraded, intelligent resourceful self. During these years, sometimes child support is ordered, and that becomes another lever of control, as do the visitation exchanges (and mine were WEEKLY with my batterer, from the very start, practically.) In my case, the family of origin, I suppose aghast that I’d gotten divorced (Which is odd, as we’re liberal, atheist, supposedly, and both my relatives married a man on his second wife, as did my own mother), and perhaps their oversight had been exposed. Or, perhaps, it was that I didn’t take orders from them, after ahving stated clearly I wasn’t takeing them (in fact, giving a few) from my husband any more.
When as she is rebuilding, he is, with support, continuing to tear down, this is extremely destructive. Eventually, this can get to a family law venue, where she is told to “get along” with this clearly destructive (as measured by compliance with court orders, is one way, another is compliance with the law in general) personality, a literal impossibility.
I say, and when a woman (or, OK, man?) is just coming out of that high-risk, potentially lethal situation, if there are children, they are taught by this state that it is NOT excusable to beat on a woman.
This is not going to happen if the legislatures, law enforcement, judges, and (when they ARE necessary) custody evaluators do not get on the same page. What is happening instead is that these personnel are getting together, out of real-time involvement with the public and people served, and gettting together on an entirely different page than what the law says. They are on the “therapy” page. Uninformed us, we read the literal law (and even case histories) and think that in this venue, it should have weight.
So I THINK:
If a domestic violence restraining order is granted — we hope, properly — then he loses custody, PERIOD. Visitation, maybe later. No Joint Nothing. No more high-conflict custody, and everyone get back to work. Men are still paid more per $$ anyhow. And IF he physically abused her, financial abuse is also probably (although I’ve known cases where it isn’t).
They are respected in light of their work and expected to succeed in it, this is what men in this culture have been rewarded for, and what supposedly “manhood,” culturally and religiously (see recent post). Simultaneously, in the courts, and in divorce, there is a call to Have one’s cake and eat it too, and its not called p_ _ _ _ envy, but rather the other part, that we have, and that is a natural bond we sometimes have with children we have raised. If you don’t believe me, then go back and read the 1984 Surgeon General’s declaration that breastfeeding is healthy. (I have personally been attacked on this part, right after nursing, good grief!).
Many times the violence is a matter of her “womanhood” to start with, and an entitlement to hit. Why should it be part of “childhood” to see this at home? Or to experience a protective parent (largely female, but that’s the term) thereafter being browbeaten in court, or even go homeless as a result of it (yes, it happens).
DV = No Custody would at least, he would not prevent HER from getting back to work if he’s kept distance. This is a punitive effect, and intended to be seen as so. I am sick of the family court trying to “even the score” artificially in these situations. This is called “lying,” with evasive, euphemistic jargon, and if there is anywhere it’s important not to lie, it’s in pursuit of “justice.” There’s no excuse anymore for beating each other up. Yet, we saw a case the other day (last post, Rosenberg article) where police arrived just in time to see a young man, blaming circumstances, decapitate his little sister, after having already killed another. SOMETHING ain’t spiritually right in USA-land…). I think we should teach women and girls self-defense, for real ! ALL of them….
As over here, in India,
having a law as to safety of young girls (& boys) & women doesn’t get it enforced or culture changed.
Thus, this article is not really “off-topic.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
She just said “No!” to marriage. At 12.
And was heard, and the ripple effect continued, helping others.
(In our country, we still have children saying “No!” to being sent to live with convicted child abusers, or women-batterers, and they are NOT heard. Women who protect their children from this by failing to comply with court orders that violate existing laws have been jailed, and have had to figure it out).
The story is self-explanatory and is below.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0424/p06s07-wosc.html
India listens after a child bride says ‘I won’t.’
The girl’s courage has prompted India, where nearly half of all females wed before age 18, to consider the consequences of marrying young.
By Ben Arnoldy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 24, 2009 edition
BARAROLA, INDIA – When Rekha Kalinda was nearing age 12, her parents told her they were planning to marry her off. Rekha’s response would reverberate all the way up to the president of India: “No.”
Nearly half of all Indian females get married before turning the legal minimum age of 18. The requirement has been in place for more than three decades, but centuries of custom don’t change overnight – and that’s especially true in Bararola, a land carved up into small farm plots and crisscrossed by dirt paths that takes at least a day’s journey to reach from Calcutta. But even here, some people are taking a stand.
Many locals eke out a living making beedis, a leaf-wrapped Indian cigarette. Rekha was rollingbeedis with her parents inside their mud-hut home when they broached her nuptials.
“I was very angry,” says Rekha. “I told my father very clearly that this is my age of studying in school, and I didn’t want to marry.”
With the help of friends, teachers, and administrators, Rekha accomplished what the law alone has not. No child marriages have taken place in the surrounding villages where she and two other girls refused to marry last summer, and similar approaches are meeting some success in other regions.
“We have a strong law and we need to find the people who can advocate for [it],” says Sunayana Walia, a senior researcher at the Delhi office of the International Center for Research on Women. “All the [successful] interventions are tapping the girls … so they are able to campaign on this issue, along with community participation.”
DETERMINED NOT TO FOLLOW HER SISTER’S PATH
South Asia has the world’s highest levels of child marriage. A paper published in the Lancet,a British medical journal, in March found that 44.5 percent of Indian women who recently reached 20 to 24 years of age had been married by the time they were 18. Of these, 22.6 percent were wed before age 16 – and 2.6 percent before 13.
Child brides face greater health risks and their babies tend to be sicker, weaker, and less likely to survive childhood, according to UNICEF. The child-welfare agency also cites research from Harvard University that found that even a one-year postponement of marriage increases these girls’ schooling level by a third of a year, and their literacy by 5 percent to 10 percent.
Rekha learned about the dangers of child marriage firsthand when her older sister got married at age 11. She is now illiterate, and lost all four of her children within one year of birth.
“I had a talk with my sister,” Rekha says. “She said, ‘You have seen me, I’ve lost my children…. It’s good you stood against child marriage.’ “
Rekha had other motivations as well. Like many children here, she had to leave school to work for her family. But she was granted a rare second chance to improve her education through a goverment program called the National Child Labour Project, which, in her district of Purulia, offers remedial education to 4,500 children. Rekha says she did not want to stop school again on account of marriage.
“They love to come to school,” says Prosenjit Kundu, the district project director. “These schools are the only place where they are treated as children. Otherwise, they are workers.”
Yet they aren’t entirely sheltered from the adult world. Five children from each school are bused to extra lessons in the nearby city through the Child Activist Initiative, which is partly funded and supported by UNICEF. The kids, including Rekha, are given leadership training and informed of their rights on a range of issues from forced labor to the legal age for marriage. The girls think up solutions and teach others back in the village.
{{SCHOOLS TEACH VALUES. WHAT HAPPENS IN THEM IS IMPORTANT!}}
The Purulia program is new, but has already helped Rekha and two other girls refuse to marry under age – saving, by example, many of their friends from the same situation. Similar child rights programs backed by UNICEF operate across India and involve more than 60,000 children in Bangladesh. The programs are also credited with recently helping another girl in Nepal refuse early marriage.
EVEN THE PRESIDENT IS LISTENING
In Rekha’s case, her parents initially did not listen to her. But she soon went to friends and teachers. They all came to talk with Rekha’s parents, including Mr. Kundu, the government official. That collective support for her and work with her parents was crucial, says Kundu. {footnote1}
“Children are not taken seriously in families,” he says. “A girl of 11.5 years who takes a decision for her own against the family members’ will – this is an enormous, courageous act.”
During a visit from two foreign journalists, the barefoot Rehka, dressed in bright purple and yellow, fielded questions confidently, despite the crowd the interview attracted. In February, she addressed a gathering of 6,000 beedi workers, asking them to allow their children to stay in school and delay marriage. Her best friend, Budhamani Kalindi, says she hasn’t gotten any pressure to marry now that Rekha has become such a role model.
“It’s terrific how you get that ripple effect of one being brave, sticking her neck out … and then others following,” says Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for UNICEF in Delhi.
Those ripples extend all the way to the president of India, Shrimati Pratibha Devisingh Patil, who, after reading about Rekha in the Hindustan Times newspaper, has requested to meet her. That makes her father happy, and he says he supports her staying in school.
The custom has proved hard to change, says Ms. Crowe, partly because it’s often embedded in poverty. Sometimes parents marry off a daugter to lighten their economic burden, though the problem extends into the middle and upper classes too, she adds. It’s also incorrectly assumed that an early marriage will protect the girl from violence and sexual abuse from men.
Enforcement of age laws, meanwhile, is hampered by the lack of birth records. Only 40 percent of births in India are registered; in Bangladesh, the number is just 10 percent.
“You can’t prove a child is a child if you’ve got no certificate,” Crowe says. The international community is working hard on birth registration, she says, but it’s a daunting task in a place like India that has more than 1 billion people.
Back in Bararola, one of those billions faces a brighter future. Rekha says she wants to be a teacher when she grows up.
Is she open to marriage eventually? “Anything after 18,” she says, “but not before 18 at all.”
{my “footnote1″} Yes, the collective support is important. While I do not mean to trivialize the differences, how is it that international organizations will support the law overseas, but within the U.S., when a variety of agencies sometimes come to judges and present evidence of abuse, this is discredited, or sometimes not even allowed to be considered, by a presiding judge? When judges are not ethical, a country is going to go down fast! I think that the U.S. needs to be more honest about what is going on within its own borders, and that includes mis-appropriation of federal funding to produce desired outcomes in court (vs. truthful/ just / due process ones). This collective effort involved the input of a young lady, and her friends.
(The link also leads to a video of the reporter discussing how this situation came to pass.)
…”Reporter Ben Arnoldy discusses Rehka Kalinda, her family, and potential reasons behind her self-awareness.”
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When she “Shows and Tells” — take it seriously. It takes courage.
We tell young people to speak up about abuse.
This one did.”
Our global village — it seems to me that approximately one a week, at least nationwide, is occurring. The police WILL respond, and will sometimes prevent or minimize the fall-out, but more likely (they are only human, they are not omnipresent) they will count and identify the bodies, and speak to reporters, and neighbors. This is too late for those speaking up. This can be true when it comes to domestic violence also.
Before you read this post — if you read fast, if you skim well, and if you could commit to read THREE (3) pages of single-spaced, narrative, print, you will understand more: Do NOT pass go. Click on the centered title “Brave Children Speak Up” Read the first page “intro”, to the bottom, hit “next” or “continued,” then the next page to the bottom, click on “next” and then the 3rd page, to the bottom (individual stories).
Brave Children Speak Up
Alanna’s story is well-known — she finally fled from Northern California to Southern (Los Angeles) and was able to get help.
How I Process (present tense) My Experience (past)
I did not experience abuse as a child. Mine didn’t start til I was almost 40 years old. Yet I will affirm — you are not the same afterwards — your understanding of the world is not the same either, and never will be. You can function, but you sprout antenna, learn to “deal,” test your systems of meaning (all, for the most part, remain suspect), and are much, much, MUCH more alert to the various signals and possible interpretations of almost every one. This is rough on people you wish to maintain friendships, let alone a romantic connection, with. I know that I “tested.’ When my friend passed the test, didn’t blow up, didn’t run away, it frightened me more. I lost so many job situations that (for a period), I began to self-sabotage work rather than experience the forced-out situation again. (Economic control is a primary means of control). I felt like I was another species for a while, and finally accepted that, in some respects, I was. And I was NOT sexually abused as a child. . . . Or beaten. . . . Or deprived.
Negotiating what for others is often an Average situation:
[Leaving home. Coming back home. Possibly reporting what happened at home — to be continued. . . ]
One dilemma still up for grabs is a difficult one. I have faith, but I do not trust churches. This affects support systems and for sure sociability. But, I will affirm — there ARE people (both genders) who target these areas, and this IS one area a vulnerable (to being dominated to excess) women can be found. They also take in divorced and needy women, at times, hence, a charming unscrupulous man will find ample fields there.
One has to constantly renegotiate meaning in life. I have come to believe this is an asset. Intuition comes in handy in many fields (particularly artistic ones or ones that deal with group dynamics).
When abuse happens mid-way, or later in life, it is difficult to know what goals to set, in exiting it. It is also VERY difficult to exit it, as by middle age, so many professions, communities, and connections have come. More schooling is not always the answer. What about relationships?
I cannot imagine being a child who has betrayed by an adult.
Mine were (I will testify and do). But I cannot imagine it still, how to callous onesself and just go deal with it.
Again:
Brave Children Speak Up
I cannot think too hard on this one today. I refuse to abuse substances to turn my mind away. Each day’s internal parasympathetic (?) wiring stands alone, how much it can handle, but because I know what it’s like to have people “unable to stomach” my truths, I try to process and stomach others’ I read about. Can you handle this one? Perhaps you can. Children in the situation HAVE to.
I would like to say: It’s not the gun, but the attitude in the person carrying the gun. If it was not a gun, it could be a knife, an ax, or as happened recently a sword.
It’s also another, more communal problem called “denial.”
February 25, 2009
14 year old Priscilla Amador did not want to have sex or interact sexually with a man 40 years her senior. Especially her father. About 8 years of this was too much. Finally she worked up courage to tell: The Miami Herald, 2-27-09Police respond to “shots fired” and find family dead in murder-suicide
Editor’s note: This tragic incident is one of several like it that have surfaced recently. Although the exact details are not yet known, the mass violence it reflects needs to be noted.
. . . “It’s important to remember that one of the most dangerous persons an officer can face is someone who feels they’ve got nothing to live for and nothing to lose. There are a growing number of those people and that’s a very real threat to officer safety and survival. Now, more than ever, officers need to be highly trained, highly focused and thoroughly prepared to deal with the threats and challenges of doing their jobs in a time of crisis.”
Stay alert, be trained—even if it means taking steps to seek your own training—and remember that even “regular people” who would otherwise seem harmless and unlikely to pose a deadly threat, like the man in this incident, may in fact be extremely dangerous.
— Scott Buhrmaster, PoliceOne Managing Editor
RE: “ someone who feels they’ve got nothing to live for “
My recommended reading: Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
There are choices, even in a concentration camp.
Another link that is not always explored, but should be, is the pharmaceutical connection. I speak as someone whose father in law was on medication (and committed suicide). Not smart to tinker too much with this chemistry. My policy is, don’t! Your body was designed smart: handle with care.
By Matt Sedensky
Associated PressMIAMI — A 53-year-old man fatally shot his wife and two daughters Wednesday before turning the gun on himself, and a 16-year-old son who survived the attack managed to call 911 as he escaped uninjured from the Miami home, authorities said. . . .
Sarit Betancourt, a 44-year-old school bus driver who lives near the family, said the father is a Cuban immigrant who gave piano lessons at a guitar shop and at his home. Betancourt’s two sons, ages 9 and 10, had been taking piano lessons from him once a week since 2006.
“He was a marvelous person and a tremendous professor,” she said. “People would enter the house, and you just breathed peace.”
[WELL, not for a little girl….]
PLEASE READ THE LINK (above) & THINK.
It cost her -- and her sister -- and her mother - their lives. I speculate that HE could not stand the shame or public exposure -- that task had been assigned (by him) for HER to carry. I'll say, assuming the charges were valid. One way to cut short THAT conversation, well, see headlines. "Be Prepared!" How? I don't know, but I know I must find out. So should you. I cannot editorialize much today. I am processing this one... I have teens. I also know that the issue is NOT primarily sex. It's about character, values, and entitlements. I do not think we should be suspecting all our neighbors of this (though clearly it's underreported). Perhaps we should all make sure that our kids have at least ONE other NON-family member they can confide in, and who know them. And we should all be informed of the overlap between wife abuse and child abuse. And that our young women are to value, and be able to hold, boundaries. Unfortunately, these boundaries are daily violated in so many contexts (including schools), that I'm at some loss to, as I posted elsewhere, safety a "place." I think that self-sufficiency has to be a THING you carry with you. As I said, today, there are limits to what can be processed. But I will not drop the topic. Are you, reader, aware that in Family Courts across the nation, custody of children, when contested, it being given to batterers in retaliation for reporting abuse of one form or another. If you don't believe me, believe the children who reported, and lived to tell:Related Articles:
Six die in L.A. family murder-suicide
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WHY Family Court (let’s get honest) “matters” to us all…
…Even if you’re not inside the doors. . .
…Even if you have your “act” together —
…Even if you’re not IN any marital or intimate partner act. Or relationship.
You are probably living with, next to, or in association with someone who has been. At least one of the people who go behind those doors into this family law / let’s mediate / co-parent / share custody / just get along (adversarial) system is going to be traumatized.
Another will be probably robbed. A third will be shocked. A fourth will be rewarded. A fifth will be back for more easy victories by hearsay accusations the next time he (or she) has a grudge. A sixth will be forced back to negotiate with the abusive partner she (OK, now you can argue: \”or he\”) was attempting to separate from — and will be lectured, after having worked up courage to do this — not to upset the children by showing anger, or conflict, because in this YOU-topia supposedly conflict never happens — or at LEAST never between parents.
This belief, along with Santa Claus, according to the same logic, is going to set your children on a good path for life.
A seventh will have been raised by one or more of the above. An eighth will be teaching (or in class next to) one of the above.
For a take on the intergenerational, societal transmission of trauma, see “www.sanctuaryweb.com“
Get real – – – and
Let’s Get Honest. Without hate.
Let’s look at the script (and playwrights) in family law.
Let’s look at the off-stage directions and who takes cues from whom. And let’s begin to understand that this is not a game, it is real people, real lives, and in some cases, physically “lost” in the drama.
Let’s ALL consider the profit/loss ratio in this endeavor, family law, family court services, custodyh evaluations, mediations, court-appointed guardians, and attempting to, through this process and under cover of “law”, force divorcing parties with enough anmosity they couldn’t work it out separately to come seeking a higher authority to punish the ex somehow, or extract children, or money from her or him, and on what basis. Personally, I (sarcastically) feel that both these words:
“FAMILY COURT“”
are accurate. The trick, like in any new culture, is to understand the idioms — usage — nuances. The “nuance” in this case is, assume the exact opposite is meant. Supposedly this is about “family,” and to help them. Supposedly courts, in the USA (and elsewhere) exist for the purpose of determining truth and dispensing justice. The words “public servant” possibly come to mind.
COURT: Go back a few hundred years, and think “court” again. Try Henry VIII or Louis XIV. Think about what takes place in the halls of a palace, and who gets to be there? How did one get an appointment at a palace? How did one, having obtained it, REtain it? There, that’s a little better, you’re getting warm… . . . Also, did you know that any attorney is considered an “officer of the court.” (not of you…) (I THINK).
FAMILY: The “Family” in question is less likely your own (which will be devastated, most likely, one way or another), but the true “FAMILY” here in are the professionals, and so-called experts that know they will be dealing with each other on an ongoing basis, referring business, exchanging pleasantries, and in some cases referring cases (translation: Jobs). “Good” for them actually could mean keeping a family IN the system. “Good” for the family biological generally means getting themselves OUT of the system and back to life as almost paranormal — or at least work, and sleep. Perhaps the words “fealty” or “feudal” are closer to the truth. I do not denigrate ethical, honest, overworked, and noble judges attorneys, or (well, I haven’t met such a mediator). I’m sure they exist, and among the approximately seven judges I’ve stood before in this case, some more than once, only the 3rd one would I characterize as ethical and having a reputation of actually having read the paperwork before him prior to ruling on it. Unfortunately, he quit family law, but I have been to date unable to.
The “COURT” does indeed hail back to royalty, and I think that is the most idealized among us that are going to lose in court. We have believed (prior to baptism by fire) that this system, while we weren’t in it, somehow existed, in ether, and would protect the innocent and help the falsely accused, if only the truth were at.
I tried that for many years with a man that, in about the 8th year of this “just trying to get along” (survive, from my standpoint), was offended, again, by a minor perceived provocation. I turned the music down, which was earsplitting and had just been turned up to make a point that the conversation was over. We had small children at this time. I reached over and turned a radio dial. Next thing you know, I had been grabbed, hurled, and landed on my chin in literally another room. Teeth were knocked loose.
I didn’t learn til many, MANY years later, that this was felony level domestic violence (serious injury caused) or that even a difference existed between the civil and criminal system existed. Why would I? I had prior to then inhabited churches, schools, parks (raising kids) with playgroups, and concert halls. I did not think that a DETAILED awareness of how our criminal, civil, and other justice system works, let alone knowing the laws of my state (and federal) were important to my safety and wellbeing. NOW, I think that at least the ability to navigate them, including what is the flowchart of a basic lawsuit (which is not that complicated…), should be required for high school graduation. Unfortunately, it appears that in too many US schools, we are still working on the ability to read. Period.
In other places, this may be called “DOMESTIC RELATIONS” or something similar. The same interpretions apply. Get your head out of the clouds and understand who is cozy with whom, and that it’s relationships, not evidence (in practice) that counts, in most arenas. THAT is the problem, and like the beginning of our country, principles count and are worth fighting to preserve, or restore. However one may bash “Dead White Males who owned slaves, or that it took women even longer to get the vote, the fact remains that that Constitution exists, as do the Bill of Rights. Like laws, muscles, or any other talent, they mean nothing without application towards the goal, and where these count is, they are that ideal. Or, should I yet say “were”? – – Use it or lose it. . . ..
Let’s consider
what kind of emotion drives people even showing up, via an Order to Show Cause requesting a Motion to MAKE THAT WOMAN (or MAN) stop, pay, or give me (back) my children. Think about it, and about the logic of any authority (which these courts are, in fact that is primarily what they are, order-makers) then telling both parties — when only one initiated the motion — (this is now the script) that “conflict” is bad for kids, so pretend you don’t have any, or no more contact with your kids. And let’s compare that with things such as, the state laws, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and so forth.. . . . MANY of these families, with kids, ended up there precisely because of out of court conflicts that had almost gotten lethal, or had hurt someone. The basic premise of any legal motion is that some “wrong” happened ( “tort” = “wrong” — and believe me, I didn’t learn that term even 3 years into the system), and therefore the court should redress it. However, in entering the halls, when kids are involved, thinking goes haywire, and despite the system of “tort” “redress” (etc.) on which law is based, the judges, and associated employees of the court, or an affiliate of it, then all communicate clearly that BOTH parties are wrong, since they couldn’t settle their own differences without court help. They are presumed needing a sound lecture of some sort, and of course therapy, if possible. The general idea of the process is DUE process. However, the general idea of the family law system as it now exists is virtual behavioral modification, and through this, I say, social engineering — mass scale. JUST REMEMBER “COURTS” // “ROYALTY.” Where do the allegiances typically lie? It often gets down to simply the character of the individual judges.
The desired result of a hearing in court is called and “order.” Contempt of it can (doesn’t often, but CAN) end one in jail. In the mythic interpretation of the process, which those of us without prior connections probably held going in, the order comes from a judge who is more noble and neutral than either of you, will hear EVIDENCE impartially, and in a manner coherent with the rules of court for the jurisdictions, and judicial ethics, as listening to attorneys (if any) who also abide by their professional codes of ethics, etc.
Like I just said above, about Santa Claus — ––
It being a stressed, fragmented world, in general, I imagine that you figure it’s “not your business.”
How about if I said, it’s your money, though, as a taxpayer?
How about if I said, it MAY just relate to the statistical probability of someone you know being a bystander of an irate spouse that took the law into his (and yes, it primarily IS “his” so, or the major news media AND USDOJ are both run by radical feminists, and censor mothers wiping out fathers, kids, bystander and a cop or two, and themselves because they were publicly humiliated, or just bitter, and couldn’t help themselves — and knew how to use a gun, or a knife, or a club, or tie a knot, etc.).
I’m WAY newer to blogging than to Family Court.
On the other hand, unlike FC, my blog doesn\’t imply that it\’s saving families, or even serving them (as in \”Family Court Services.\” Nor do I hope that somehow this will orchestrate a brave, new world. In fact years ago, when I was hauled in (no, it wasn\’t voluntary), my venues were limited to, and my focus on: my immediate family, profession(s), colleagues (when I still had them), and the communities I lived and worked in. I got on-line to email some friends from time to time. I wasn\’t fighting to find out where my rights went, and (because I wasn\’t in the habit of breaking laws or court orders to get my way in life) I wasn\’t desperately trying to search what my state code called that last despicable act. Or how come it only took 20 minutes to change my kid\’s futures, that had been set since an early age towards college, with scholarships, ANY college they set their sites on, within reason.
I would like to talk about what some of these myths do, that allow decent upstanding law-abiding, non-wife-beating, hard-working parents (and individuals) to keep clear of these halls and not trouble their sleep about what happens inside them . Let’s Get Honest about what the myth that justice is happening in behind these closed doors is costing the country, and your communities, overall.
Recently (Spring 2009), the US closed lots of schools in a panic over swine flu. Clearly someone understands the concept of “quarantine” for the general public safety. Then they decided to open them again. How about opening some of the closed doors in courtrooms? The people’s changes and humiliations / /wins / losses //responses to these (trauma, or as it sometimes, I”m sorry to say, turns out, kidnappings // femicides/homicide/suicides // poverty afterwards is already in public view.
So, “general public,” gentle readers, the family court leper colony is not working — for the family, or for the general public. However, it IS working quite well, thank you, for the type of personnel who designed it to start with (primarily, in the USA, in Southern California). And YOU (if you are Joe common bloke, Ann single working woman, or Mrs. Joe & Ann Smith, gainfully employed. Or (I hear now Maine is the 5th state in the US), Mr. & Mr. Joe and Harry Blow and Ms. & Ms. Ann and Sydney BestFriends. It may not really be about gender, only, in the courts either. I was a Mr. & Mrs., and prior to separation, we paid too, unaware of others’ trauma.
Any effort to reform it, should this be the goal, will have to address for whom this venue IS working just fine. To track this, try some of my links, or do your own research. I wouldn’t suggest calling all men bad (OR good) or all women, and the culture in general, a bunch of femininazi, male-bashing, sex-deprived (or sex-crazed, as case may be) misfits. That’s generally speaking not helpful.
What may be more helpful is to realize that large sectors of populace do actually believe those things. Some of them say it with Ph.D. language (“fatherlessness” — a.k.a. single mothers, case in point — are to blame for society’s ills.). Can you recognize the same talk, said in “expert” language and footnoted with a bunch of experts who believe the same thing? Then you’re getting a handle on the picture.
NOTE on TONE: “Related Blogs,” to left, some of them have a different tone than I want here. But they ALSO still have facts (news reports, laws, cases, etc.) there too. And they have a right to respond as expressively as they want to. Many or all of the bloggers there typically, lost custody of children to a batterer or a child-moleester, and sometimes as a direct consequence for having reported it. Some of them, as I heard, have been in jail for failing to be able, after that, come up with enough child support (we’re talking women). Some of the women I’ve met recently have gone to international courts for safety, and they/we are also aware of other groups going to the same international courts for different purposes.
So they have a right to be pissed off and say “forget you” or “I’m pissed off” or THIS (see image) is what I think of that group of demagogues. The point of my blog is dialogue (hopefully) and taking a close look at the players who are laughing the way to the bank (metaphorically) while the cats and dogs are spitting, hissing, biting, and scratching in the dust. I hope to keep the intensity level just enough to keep you (meaning “us”) VERY uncomfortable with inaction, but not so lit up that only discharging emotion action takes place.
Speaking up IS action, and particularly if one has been subject to violence already for doing so.
Identifiable causes, and identifiable solutions exist to the problems of familycourtmatters. These solutions are emotionally painful and would require some businesses that profit from our pain to find another source of referral, or another line of work. I suggest they be required to work with tangible production, who have manipulated people as if they were putty to accept the dysfunction — but let’s hope do not require bloodshed. And bloodshed IS already happening as a direct consequence of the hostility, lack of personal restraint, and level of frustration (BUT, it’s still the lack of restraint, I say) that is stirred up in these venues. So, see some of the “related blogs” to left. These women have been at it longer than me, and they have done their homework and I believe lived it too. I’m talking being stripped down naked when they went in for help. The problem is international in scope.
I was a hardworking (female, single mother) bloke, too, until I attempted to renew a standing domestic violence restraining order, simply in order to participate better in the “hard-working parent” part. I held no personal animosity against my children’s father, I just was unreconciled to the battering, abuse thing. Other than that, he was allowed to see his children quite frequently, just not continue to assault me, in front of them. I’m no criminal, and wasn’t a bitter, etc., etc. Mom. However, I had recently and VERY belatedly gotten some legal help setting boundaries, obviously an issue where there has been violence, and there was a major amount of cleanup and rebuilding. I needed my personal space for sure. This is a little hard to establish when one’s partner is more focused on his “manhood” than your “person-hood.”
Now I have been in the courts, shortly here, ALMOST as many years as I was in in-home, upfront abuse. I think this perspective should be discussed. I also want to speak to some of the noble people who have kept their noses clean by leaving justice to the experts, and mythically believing that, even if it DOESN’T happen, it’s not going to affect them personally.
It already has.
BUT — can we talk, blog, comment, post links, favorite books, and simply converse, without the skip the hate talk, pompous vague assertions, and ex-spurt** opinions, but
just see if (or is it \”whether\”)? there are still a few good men, women,
– – and children (children can blog, right?) —
who can skillfully toss out some metaphors, paradigms, puns, and maybe whimsical analogies
for me (and y\’all) to juggle around, look at them from underneath,
see if they have some weight, or bounce, or whether they dissipate into thin air under
their own hot, gaseous contents. This might even be fun.
Venom is not welcome. Biting sarcasm is fine. Insults too (it’s hard to be sarcastic without insulting SOMEone), but no threats, no advocacy to violence OR any illegal activity (I LIKE my blog, thank you!). Name-calling should be fleeting, at least skillful, and only, if a tall, as a lead in to something worthwhile to say. Remember, I moderate the comments.
Get personal — and speak for yourself: I FEEL, I\’VE NOTICED, I BELIEVE, but not personally nasty. Don\’t behind behind the curtain of plurals, vague assertions that can\’t be disproved, pronounced with a finality. This is not the place for the Wizard of Oz, but a bunch of Totos. We will bark back and expose your backside. Take credit for having a genuine personal experience apart from the gang you happen to belong to. I\’ll do the same.
**Ex-spurts are known by that action — spurting forth publications, opinions, pronouncements (DVDs, Conferences, and more). Did a conference save a life? Maybe. I’m generally a little wary when the people pronouncing on families can afford the DVDs and conferences, and the subject families, after having been “fixed” by the same bunch, can’t. Where’s the due process in THAT?
Forming organizations, alliances, and nonprofits to stop what the other nonprofits are doing wrong, or compensate for whatever government isn\’t doing to their pleasing.
The real experts have had the experiences BEFORE they start publishing, promoting, and starting branches of study that didn\’t exist before a pet pre-occupation became a profession. I\’d rather SEE an expert (at his or her work) than HEAR one any day.
And I do music. . . . . or Did. My music survived only XX years parallel to lawsuits, accusations, family rifts, threats, stalking etc. I’m here still at XX + about 2 years post-music, and still sweeping up. Like any Mom who has better things to do with (what remains of) her time, and always did, I am interested in stopping the mess-making at its source.
I plan to do plenty of spurting forth of words here — but unlike those in family court (I mean, the denizens, not the nomads passing through),
I am not trying to use these words to separate you from your children — or your money. Just maybe some of your time. I have no style sheet. Remember the advice of Tim Ferriss — you can get ex-spurt status on any number of things in under 4 weeks — it\’s more a matter of credibility. On the other hand, you can say the same thing for a decade or two,
I have no outline. I simply intend to talk, promote my links and books, and see what\’s around the bend here. Don\’t be too rigid except where it counts — (no, fellas, not that part!) — on civil rights. On matters of law, and fair play. And on the facts. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, but whose idea was that to start with?
There are also many ways to abuse – – very few, that I\’ve found, to stop it — but \”family court\” sure doesn\’t appear to be ONE of them.
Possibly removing the financial / emotional incentives for continued abuse.
What do you say?
Please make fun of some euphemisms. Speak in short words. Or long words. Just don\’t bore us with something we\’ve already been drenched in – – like \”alienation,\” or insult my intelligence by pronouncing a truth that is your personal truth only as if it were one of those universal ones, like (at least to date), water is essential to life. Having two parents in the home, I\’m sorry to say, is not, not always. I know plenty of very, very dysfunctional two-parent homes. I came from one, and so did my erst-while, ex-cohabitant spouse. I\’ll verify he\’s got some severe issues, and I\’ve read in my pleadings, this is also held to be true of me. So, one exception disproves a universal rule, let\’s get (real).
Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History 
“Strong Field Project” caters to DV industry’s networks, enabled by ?? “Three Cities that Rule the World”
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This post to be read alongside a page added to the other blog, which explains the “Strong Field Project” reference.
*What does doing THAT have to do with ending domestic violence, pray tell?
That article was posted at http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=106799.0 by user May 21, 2009.
We think in terms of within our state (or perhaps as far as the federal level) when seeking justice from the bottom up. However, the top down doesn’t think that way at all — and from what I can see these days, it doesn’t think in terms of the US Constitution either. Consider nonprofit associations that help run our justice system, including particularly the one I blog on….
International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution > Home
http://www.cpradr.org/ The CPR Institute is an independent, nonprofit think tank that promotes innovation in commercial dispute prevention and resolution. By harnessing the collective …
this nonprofit (founded 1979) is also listed on the New York State
. . .
The “Strong Field Project” is just another sapling off the DV as industry Tree, and not the main point here (see first link, above). My point is, were it not for centralized wealth — and alongside that wealth, centralized decision-making (taxation without representation) these things would not exist. And so long as our medium of exchange is “fiat money” owned by private bankers, who lend to the U.S. Treasury at interest dumped upon the entire US Population, while talks about “stimulating the economy” “balancing the budget” etc. continue to roil the electorate — they rule that world, and it’s true — they do.
Maybe Jesus was right, in the wilderness -it takes one to know one and maybe whoever wrote the gospels of Matthew and Luke, describing his temptation, were absolutely correct (Mark, probably earlier than either, skims over the time in the wilderness). As it goes in Matthew 4 (KJV), three temptations, which I’ll summarize as: Do Magic Tricks (Stones into bread) to satisfy his empty stomach; Suicide (jump off the temple to test God’s safety net), and finally, Sellout (bow down, and be receive the kingdoms (plural) of the world, with their glory).
Luke 4 has it in a different order (suicide last, after getting Jesus’ worship fails), and adds detail on how the devil got the power over the entire world:
“Power and Glory are mine,” boasts the devil. “I have the kingdoms of this world.” Well, were kingdoms around when this was written? “And I say who gets them, and who does not get them; I am the boss.”
It seems to hold true today, doesn’t it? Only different terminology is used. For example, the word “GRANT.” A grant is a gift, but with the gift goes a little piece of the recipient’s independence in the form of strings attached — does it serve a particular agenda set by the grantOR? Absolutely! This is basically the buying and selling of kingdoms, power, and etc. Whatever happens within them, that’s the umbrella over them.
Characterizing this as coming from “the devil” (invisible spiritual influence), i.e. bad — well, is this type of influence bad, and is it often exercised in hidden (invisible) ways? I’d say, yes…..
Looking at these “kingdoms of the world” (as opposed to looking at, for example, “Nature” and things that grow, against the zoology, biology, anatomy, astromony,etc. that show more and more amazing details) I have to agree, that the greater the power, the greater the damage. And that the lifeblood/energy is being sucked out of the some sectors of the world, along with money, and being centralized into who says who lives and dies; and who says who gets to keep their earnings and who doesn’t, however paltry they may be – and for what social good? For doing good?
No, not really — only good within limits of “I get to control what’s done with the world,” the song of the tax-exempt foundation run (or funded) by some great philanthropists, whose names are usally put on it too (good for PR), and in accompaniment with the corporations (businesses) that helped make that wealth. The tax-exempt foundation, by being tax-exempt, serves as a drainage ditch to reduce the taxes that would otherwise be paid on the FOR-profit.
Why else do we think so many of them are running around all over (look at the civic works, PBS shows, “Models for Change” programs calculating how to mobilize swift transformation of chosen areas of reform, such as “Juvenile Justice” or other areas. Go review MDRC again (I’ve blogged it) for an example of how inbred US Gov’t and Corporate wealth/tax-exempt foundations really are. Even AFCC is getting some help these days.
RATHER THAN WORK TO ELIMINATE THE VERY TAXATION SYSTEM WHICH PRODUCE THIS LEVEL OF WEALTH TO START WITH (ALONG WITH THE WISDOM TO KNOW HOW TO UTILIZE THAT LEVERAGE), INSTEAD, THE OWNERS OF THIS WEALTH FLY AROUND AND COLLABORATE ON A BETTER JUSTICE SYSTEM THAN THEIR LOWER COUNTERPARTS – WHO HAPPEN TO BE IN POSITIONS LIKE GOVERNORS, OF STATES, JUDGESHIPS, ATTORNEY GENERALS, ETC. — THE TRULY ALTRUISTIC BENEFICIAL COLLABORATION WOULD BE TO UNDO THIS INCOME TAX, SWITCH OFF THE “FIAT CURRENCY” AND DEFANG THE FEDERAL RESERVE. BUT HOW LIKELY IS THAT TO HAPPEN?
We’ve been hooked on it for 100 years next year (1913 – 2013) think about it. What an addiction.
The greatest goods would be protecting unalienable rights is LIFE, and LIBERTY and PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, and having enough self-respect and self-restraint to allow others to do the same — how many golden yachts does one really need? You can’t take it with you, even if you have a golden voice (like Whitney Houston, recently: global success, gone age 48, leaving one motherless child. Well, young adult. A wealthy one for sure, but one absent her mother).
So, here’s the Biblical worldview, at least in the book of Revelation. Followers are encouraged to keep it in mind that this kingdom is temporal and is going to be judged (by fire) — so choose your allegiances well. Without my interpreting whether that’s smart or not to endorse, here’s the description of that buying and selling of kingdoms, Revelations 18. As before, spiritual agents (angels, this time) are involved and judgment is swift, expressing indignation and vindication:
The kingdom that rules the world is characterized as “Babylon,” which was a kingdom, earlier. And, naturally, as a woman:
That is indeed what the traffic is in. It pretty much describes most areas of commerce, including transport of goods:
So many enterprises were hooked into the sales that took place in “the city;” but (she) was hell on the apostles and prophets, who were typically exiled, or killed in various gruesome ways, etc. ….there message wasn’t good for business. (Quite a contrast from some of today’s “apostles and prophets” –see recent post on the bankruptcy of the Crystal Cathedral (Garden Grove, CA) and its founding family’s squabbles with the board, i.e., Robert Schuller et al. I blogged it over at thefamilycourtmoneymachine.blogspot.com
It takes a caste of slaves to produce certain levels of wealth, and even the best of major constructions (The Hoover Dam, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station in NY) have been associated with human deaths of workers. What about the pyramids? What about the former practice of burying concubines and wives with the death of a ruler?
The lines have to be drawn and crowds have to be kept within their kind, and within their places. “The great men of the earth” are actually merchants, and there’s no question — is there? — that with slavery and slavehood comes untimely death, too often. So, look around — where are the deaths happening, where is the blood flowing, and then track the trail of money. Religion WILL be associated, and it’s not too hard to locate –except perhaps at the very top levels.
Whoever gave what to whom, and how (Adam, Eve, Israel in the Promised Land, whoever ….) there is no question that there is desire still circulating to rule the world, and that there are layers of collaborators — and the closer to the grants, and wealth (to fly, conference, buy and sell real estate under nonprofit umbrella, even “front groups” to launder the money at times) — the closer to the power, and the deafer the ears become to the cries of those they took the power to (allegedly) help, save, or whatever.
Anyone who’s lived with a certain level of abuse (and knew, by contrast, freedom) knows about this. Many times, supposedly there is some purpose to all the tyranny — but there never is. It’s just enforced because they can get away with doing this, and get off on it. Anything else is pretty much a lie.
WELL, let’s get down to the main show here:
I have been talking, briefly, about the analogy of “The Matrix’ (picked up from someone else who wrote about this) as an artificially created reality which, once you become aware of it, you have to either deal with (mentally, emotionally, psychologically) and determine where to stand regarding it — or take another sedative and go back to sleep.
The Internet is a great, addicting perhaps, but effective way to spread that net; it fishes and sets out bait both. But, it’s here, and must be dealt with, as a whole lotta money is traveling along that net (being tracked as it goes), and this technology, this tool — like many technological advances — is often used for warfare, to kill. The question is just, who.
To be read alongside a page added to the other blog:
More references for the curious, here (I haven’t reviewed, just put up one or two):http://www.bible.ca/b-canon-disputed-books.htm and (better narration here) http://freethought.mbdojo.com/canon.html
Wolverine/Michigan-ian:
Those who fight back — confronting illegal home invasions fraudulently ordered (NOT even legitimately court-ordered) for purposes of kidnapping, for purpose of institutionalizing, for the purpose of then administering dangerous drugs to minor children — can, and will, be treated as felons and stripped of their kids, and months/years of their lives in the fight. That’s the Michigan reference, above. Testimony (at the rally) of those on Risperdal:
Posted on 04/08/2011 by Diane Bukowski
Charges have been dropped, she has her daughter back, but they are considering re-instating. This story deserves follow-up: Voice of Detroit did good investigative reporting. The same CPS worker that did this in 2011 was, in 2010, facing a civil lawsuit for pulling a similar stunt to a related (married) couple, only five (5) children were nabbed and put into three different foster homes for 4o months; the amount of deceit involved is simply stunning. (Brent family, look it up at “justice4maryanne” site).
The community rallied, and it seems the family was targeted from a number of angles: single mother, intelligent and insisting on choice (not “the program”), she homeschooled, she was also African-American and in (I remember seeing, can’t find link) the community was poor. How dare this community not fork over their kids to the Title IV-driven systems for Rx profits?
While people like these have to fight — with whatever they got — to keep their kids, another one DID fall between the cracks, in N. California (I also have a page on this — to right), and at least one post; an alert UC Berkeley campus security guard (mother) was alert, and followed up, leading to the YOUNG mother below’s release, along with the two kids. After 18 years in captivity!
Jaycee Dugard Files Lawsuit Against U.S. Government
Rebecca Bailey, PhD – Psy 18732
ANYHOW . . . The Three Cities and Fiat Currency . . . .
The Moneylenders Take Over England
In the 19th century, the Rothchild banking family’s Nathan Rothchild said it well:
{{2012 is an election year. Americans (USA) would do well to keep this in mind also.}}
Centuries early, moneylender power was absent. But after the 1666 Coinage Act, money-issuing authority, once the sole right of kings, was transferred into private hands. “Bankers now had the power to cause inflations and depressions at will by issuing or withholding their gold coins.”
King William III (1672 – 1702), a Dutch aristocrat, financed his war against France by borrowing 1.2 million pounds in gold in a secret transaction with moneylenders, the arrangement being a permanent loan on which debt would be serviced and its principle [“principal”] never repaid. It came with other strings as well:
— lenders got a charter to establish the Bank of England (in 1694) with monopoly power to issue banknotes as national paper currency;
— it created them out of nothing, with only a fraction of them as reserves;
— loans to the government were to be backed by government IOUs to serve as reserves for creating additional loans to private borrowers; and
— lenders could consolidate the national debt on their government loan to secure payment through people-extracted taxes.
{{sound familiar yet?}}
It was a prescription for huge profits and “substantial political leverage. The Bank’s charter gave the force of law to the ‘fractional reserve’ banking scheme that put control of the country’s money” in private hands. It let the Bank of England create money out of nothing and charge interest for loans to the government and others – the same practice central banks now employ.
{{{“TALLIES”}}
For the next century, banknotes and tallies circulated interchangeably even though they weren’t a compatible means of exchange. Banker money expanded when “credit expanded and contracted when loans were canceled or ‘called,’ producing cycles of ‘tight’ money and depression alternating with ‘easy’ money and inflation.” In contrast, tallies were permanent, stable, fixed money, making banknotes look bad so they had to go.
For another reason as well – because of King William’s disputed throne and fear if he were deposed, moneylenders again might be banned. They used their influence to legalize banknotes as the money of the realm called “funded” debt with tallies referred to as “unfunded,” what historians see as the beginning of a “Financial Revolution.” In the end, “tallies met the same fate as witches – death by fire.”
{{ACTUALLY– SOUNDS LIKE THE REVERSE WAS TRUE. TALLIES WERE FUNDED, AND THE BANKNOTES, WERE NOT}}
They were money of the people competing with moneylending bankers. After 1834 monetary reform, “tally sticks went up in flames in a huge bonfire started in a House of Lords stove.” Ironically, it got out of control and burned down Westminster Palace and both Houses of Parliament, symbolically ending “an equitable era of trade (by transferring power) from the government to the” central bank.
{{simple explanation:on the terms, and this burning: terms “tally” “stocks” “broker” (Stockade) and “Exchequer”, Charles Dickens quoted}}
(MY INSERT — more on TALLY STICKS:
Original Wooden Tally Sticks (2)
[England, Westminster, c. 1250-1275]
hickory wood, the larger end cut diagonally, edges roughly squared off leaving traces of bark, each inscribed along one side with the name of the payer and the upper and lower edges cut with notches (“v”-shaped for pounds, broad grooves for shillings, sharp cuts for pence), each piece then split with a knife by cutting diagonally across the thicker end of the reverse side and pulling away a length which would be retained separately by the payer as proof of payment, written in thirteenth-century charter hands. c. 175-200 mm. long (each).
Rare survival of a medieval form of financial record-keeping, the tally stick provides the origin of many words used in modern money markets: stock, foil, stockholder, bank stock, and check. The vast majority were destroyed in the nineteenth century in the fire of the Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament.
INTERESTING:
Tallies provide the earliest form of bookkeeping. They were used in England by the Royal Exchequer from about the twelfth century onward. Since the notches for the sums were cut right through both pieces and since no stick splits in an even manner, the method was virtually foolproof against forgery. They were used by the sheriff to collect taxes and to remit them to the king. They were also used by private individuals and institutions, to register debts, record fines, collect rents, enter payments for services rendered, and so forth. By the thirteenth century, the financial market for tallies was sufficiently sophisticated that they could be bought, sold, or discounted.
“Tallies were … a sophisticated and practical record of numbers. They were more convenient to keep and store than parchments, less complex to make, and no easier to forge…. Of the millions of medieval tallies made, only a few hundred survive.” (Clanchy, p. 96; see also p. 95, n. 28, pl. VIII). In 1724, treasury officials commanded that tallies no longer be used, but it was not until 1834, with the reform acts and the abolition of the office of the Receipt of the Exchequer, that a huge bonfire of the then-obsolete medieval tally sticks was held. Started in a stove stuffed full of sticks in the House of Lords, the fire quickly got out of control, spreading to the paneling, and burning down both the Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament.
In 1911, Sir Hilary Jenkinson knew of only three Exchequer tally sticks in private hands (pp. 292-3, 330, and 350).
The evolution of money technologies originates with the tally stick. From tally stick comes the modern word “stock,” meaning a financial certificate and deriving from the use of the Middle English for the stick. The piece retained by the bank was called the “foil.” The holder of the stock was said to be the “stockholder” and owned “bank stock.” A written certificate presented for remittance and checked against its security later became a “check.”
According to legend, Wall Street was founded in its present location because of the presence there of an enormous chestnut tree, said to be plentiful enough to supply enough tally sticks for the emerging American stock market.
LITERATURE
Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, Cambridge, Mass., 1979.
Jenkinson, Hilary C. “Exchequer Tallies,” Archaeologia, second series, 12 (1911), pp. 292 ff.
ONLINE RESOURCES
Tallies and Technologies, by Dave Birch, Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce
http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/JIBC/9811-11.htm
The Origins of Mathematics
http://www.math.tamu.edu~don.allen/history/origins/origins.html
[[The other source cited is the link, above to definitions]]
forum.prisonplanet. . . cont’d….
Henceforth {{1834ff?}}, private bankers kept government in debt, never demanding the return of principle [“principal”], and profiting by extracting interest, a very lucrative system always paying off “like a slot machine” rigged to benefit its operators. It became the basis for modern central banking, lending its “own notes (printed paper money), which the government swaps for bonds (its promises to pay) and circulates as a national currency.”
{{BONDS — hold that thought}}
Government debt is never repaid. It’s continually rolled over and serviced, today with no gold in reserve to back it. Though gone, tallies left their mark. The word “stock” comes from the tally stick. Much of the original Bank of England stock was bought with these sticks. In addition, stock issuance began during the Middle Ages as a way to finance businesses when no interest-bearing loans were allowed.
This is not “archaic” information and irrelevant — it’s VERY current. I am still digesting — but it makes sense. Here’s a Brit (I gather) relating the Monarchy’s relationship to the Corporation of London (which holds the crown — the one you’ve seen on TV perhaps, loaned out for state occasions) and correlating to a May, 2011 meeting with the British Prime Minister Cameron with Eurozone personnel, re: ESM (Hey, it’s new term to me….). I just saw Cameron sitting next to President Obama watching a basketball game, on TV….
He is thinking in terms of the Corporation that holds the (moulah) versus the “State” which is subject to it. It’s a BIG deal!
That meeting, the ESM and the Crown – why Cameron said NO
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Written by Let's Get Honest|She Looks It Up
March 14, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Posted in Bush Influence & Appointees (Cat added 11/2011), Business Enterprise, Organizations, Foundations, Associations NGO Hybrids, Parenting Coordination promotion, PhDs in Psychology-Psychiatry etc (& AFCC), Vocabulary Lessons, warfare: strategic
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