Some Interesting Articles (2)

McCartney Divorce Becoming Troublesome The divorce lawyers for the Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, have been hired by Sir Paul McCartney and his estranged wife in what is shaping up to be one of the most expensive and high- profile partings since the collapse of the royal marriage.

How Many Gay MPs Are There? The answer to the question of how many gay MPs there are is “between five and two hundred, depending on what you mean”. Matthew Parris

Women Want Easy Life And Luxury A new survey has revealed that a generation of young women are rejecting high-flying careers in favour of a life of ease and luxury.

Yep: They want to get themselves impregnated by wealthy men and then sit back and reap the benefits - courtesy of our corrupt and unjust legal systems which allow women to rip men off with ease.

And the following is a true anecdote, ...

Four days ago I was chatting to an extremely plesant young lady who is going off to University next term. She is a hard-working girl who is well-behaved and decent.

"And what are you hoping to do with your degree?" I asked her.

"To marry someone rich," she laughed.

"You don't really mean that," I said.

"Oh yes I do", she replied. "I'm not going to work for thirty years."

Liberty Vs The Prospect Of Terrorism There is a mortal danger aimed at the heart of Britain. Or so says Home Secretary Charles Clarke. My reaction? So what? Frederick Forsyth

The Lord Chancellor has defended government plans to introduce control orders to keep foreign and British terrorist suspects under house arrest, where there isn't enough evidence to put them on trial.

Of particular interest to me is that, at the time of writing, out of the 48 comments posted after the article by the BBC about this issue, only ONE comes from a woman. And this, I think, reveals something of significance!

Call For Women's Prison Closures The group favours community programmes over prison sentencesA programme of women's prison closures should begin in an attempt to reduce re-offending, a lobby group has said.

Aussie Prime Minister Leads The Way John Howard is squaring up to this cultural ultra-Leftism — more commonly known as political correctness — and facing it down. His counterparts in Britain, by contrast, queue up to abase themselves before it. Melanie Phillips

Single Households Waste Energy Sole occupancy households in England and Wales are said to use the most space and power per capita.

And who is to blame? Ah yes, ...

... with males aged 35-45 being the worst offenders.

And one proposed solution is to, ...

... encourage people to live more space-efficiently with the introduction of an occupancy tax.

But, as Leslie points out, this is just ... "More anti male propaganda - as a visit to any woman's bathroom will illustrate - the oil used to produce the bottles for her cosmetics alone uses a ton of energy. And women, of course, have the god given right to 'shop'. Further, no comparisons are made with women's consumption - how about all those single mothers? And obviously a single young man will use more than a 60 year old!"

Hungry Men Prefer Fatter Women The hungry men also paid much less attention to a woman's body shape and they regarded less curvy figures as more attractive.

The hungry men rated more of the heavier women as attractive than the men who were full up.

Maybe they wanted to eat them!

How To Get Rich If you cannot face up to your fear of failure, you will never be rich.

Beautiful Parents Have Girls “Beautiful parents have more daughters than ugly parents, because physical attractiveness is heritable and because daughters benefit from attractiveness more than sons."

Girl Arrested For Pinging A Bra She was fingerprinted, subjected to DNA testing, bailed and finally hauled before magistrates at Huntingdon Youth Court.

Duke University Fiasco If the government’s players were honest, decent people, this case would be non-existent. William Anderson

Tougher Sentences - For Men Only Sweeping changes to the criminal justice system, including scrapping "soft" sentences introduced only last year, were announced yesterday by John Reid, the Home Secretary, in the latest attempt to restore public confidence in his embattled department.

At the same time, he suggested that other prisoners, particularly women, foreign nationals and the mentally ill, should not be in jail and that measures would be taken to reduce their number.

Boys Unable And Unwilling To Read Studies have long shown that boys in the United States and around the world do not read or write as well as girls. There are several reasons. Robert Roy Britt

"There is no literacy gap in home-schooled boys and girls."

For a more detailed exposition of this problem see my piece Well Done The Girls?

Pregnancy Is A 'Career Move' For Teenagers

By Sophie Goodchild and Jonathan Owen Published: 16 July 2006

Teenage girls who get pregnant are deliberately "planning" to become mothers in the belief that a baby will improve the quality of their lives.

An extensive study published today reveals that girls as young as 13 are making a "career choice" by deciding to have children, since they see parenting as preferable to working in a dead-end job.

The findings from the Trust for the Study of Adolescence challenges the assumption that schoolgirl mothers are all irresponsible adolescents who are ignorant about using contraception. The revelation that teenage girls are actively choosing motherhood is backed up by official figures obtained by this paper which show that nearly a quarter of pregnancies to under 18s are second children.

The research will have huge implications for government policy, which gives little acknowledgement to the fact that some girls see motherhood as the right decision for them. Britain has highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, with an estimated cost to the Government of at least £63m a year. The parts of the country that have most teenage births are areas of poverty and high unemployment; girls from low-income families are 10 times more likely to become teenage mothers than those from affluent backgrounds.

The research, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was based on interviews with 13- to 22-year-old mothers living in six deprived parts of Britain who had either taken a fatalistic attitude to getting pregnant by stopping taking contraception or who had actively planned to have a child with the support of their partners.

All the interviewees were well aware how to protect against pregnancy and were strongly anti-abortion. Nearly three-quarters were in steady relationships with the father of their child. Only a handful of girls said they regretted getting pregnant. The vast majority said their lives had improved after having children, that having a baby had "corrected" their deprived childhoods and turned them away from destructive behaviour such as drink and drug abuse.

Experts say that the truth about planned teenage pregnancies has been masked until now because health workers often assume they happen accidentally and because young girls tend to keep their true motives secret.

The study's authors are calling on ministers to use sex education classes to highlight the fact that fertility is at its highest in adolescence. They hope to target girls who leave pregnancy to chance by offering them alternatives and to use those who have had negative experiences to educate others about the downsides. But they also pose the question whether teenage pregnancy should always be avoided, given the positive experiences of the girls surveyed.

Aimee Marsh did not intend to get pregnant at the age of 15 but had discussed the possibility with her 18-year-old boyfriend, Lee. Their baby daughter, Demi-Leigh, was born 13 days ago and Ms Marsh, now 16, is planning to have three children in total, though she intends to wait until she is 25.

"It is not as hard as I thought it would be," says Ms Marsh, from Plymouth, who hopes to go to college to do a hair and beauty course.

"There is still some prejudice around young mums, but you can have kids at any age as long as you enjoy life and it brings you happiness."

However, ministers have rejected the report's suggestion that teenage pregnancy can be a positive option, saying it invariably leads to "negative consequences for all concerned".

No Sperm Needed

No Sperm Needed Karim Nayernia, has succeeded in using artificially produced sperm to fertilise mouse eggs. Melanie Phillips

Sorry to tell you, men, but you are shortly to be declared redundant, superfluous to the requirements of the human race, written out of the reproductive script. Cheerio and please close the door behind you on your way out of history.

In my view, Melanie Phillips has got this wrong in a number of areas.

1. It is women who will lose out the most as 'breeding' technologies develop further; quite simply, because it is through their reproductive capabilities that women are, indeed, 'superior' to men. However, once these capabilities have been taken over by various medical technologies such as artificial wombs - which will happen - the relative importance of women both to society and to men will diminish very significantly; e.g. see Are Women Becoming Redundant?

2. How would a child feel about the fact that one or both of his parents was merely a cluster of randomly selected cells grown artificially in a laboratory? How would he feel, indeed, to know that his parent was a discarded human embryo?

Well, I suspect that people would soon get used to the idea that they had no biological parents. I am not suggesting that there is no special attachment to one's own biological parents. Of course, there is. But this attachment is only partly related to biology. Most of this attachment derives from many long years of familiarity, care-giving behaviour and the intensity of the interactions that took place in that time.

Perhaps we will gradually let go of the biological part of the attachment to our 'parents' in much the same way that we had to let go of the jungle, and all those lovely green trees.

Yes, something will be missing - but there will be plenty to be gained!

For example, the ability to manipulate genes in order to protect people from succumbing to various disabilities and diseases will bring numerous rewards to people. And so the pressures that will be brought to bear on the medical profession to engage in such procedures will be huge and irresistible; e.g. see my very short piece entitled We will soon be modifying our children genetically.

And, of course, the more genes that we manipulate, the less will parents be related biologically to their offspring. And so, bit by bit, this relationship will begin to disappear.

3. The truth is that having a mother and father is essential to our sense of identity. That’s why family disintegration is so harmful to children and why the stampede to produce and bring up children without a biological father around — through artificial insemination by donor, IVF or sperm banks — spells disaster for the future.

Of course, I agree with the notion that children need two parents - preferably one male and one female. And the statistics demonstrating the enormous negative consequences of fatherlessness - both for individuals and for society - can no longer be disputed.

However, I am not convinced at all by the notion that the biological relationship between parents and their children is of such crucial significance when it comes to the negative consequences. My guess is that the importance of biology - by those who do the research - is confounded with many other variables - such as the 'perceived authority' of the parents; both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the children.

I am not suggesting that biology is not significant, but my belief is that it is - and that it is increasingly going to be - of far less significance than is currently thought to be the case.

Oversimplifying, for my less able readers - of which there are many! - I suspect that the poor outcomes for children who do not have fathers in their homes is not so much that there is a lack of biology but, rather, a lack of authority.

Of course, for those of us who were brought up by our own biological parents, we cannot imagine being brought up by anyone else. But I suspect that the same is true for those who were brought up by parents to whom they were not genetically related - all other things being equal.

4. ... in their book The Ethics Of Human Cloning, the American thinkers James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass wrote: ‘Only sexual animals can seek and find complementary others with whom to pursue a goal that transcends their own existence.’ In other words, sexual reproduction produces the sense of generosity and concern for others on which our human society is
built.

Well, of course, this might be true but, once again, I suspect that this is a somewhat overblown claim. For example, I do not believe that people need to reproduce in order to feel concern for others. One only has to think of Mother Theresa and many other religious people (men mostly!) who seem to have had their hearts very much in the right places despite the fact that they never reproduced.

My guess, for what it is worth, is that dealing with children - rather than reproducing them - is what is far more likely to help to engender in people the sense of generosity and concern for others on which our human society is built.

Indeed, in my view, it is precisely because so many people are completely alienated from children - while others have precious little to do with them - largely thanks to the feminists, the NSPCC etc - that the beneficial effects of their humanising presence has been somewhat diminished in recent times.

(I can feel a most magnificent pontification coming upon me, but I shall refrain.)

Interestingly - for me, anyway - I had a very long conversation - in fact, stretching over a couple of days - with a veteran UK men's activist (of some 20 years) about a month ago. I will not divulge his name because he might not wish to be publicly associated with me - and who can blame him?

And I pontificated most eloquently about the way in which I saw the future unfolding; artificial wombs, increased longevity and health, jiggering the gender ratio, the spread of information, the downfall of the more powerful, the absolute death of traditional marriage, etc etc and, in a nutshell, while, just for the sake of argument, he accepted my most magnificent points of view, he saw no solution other than making the fathers the custodians of 'their' children - no matter how such children were produced, and no matter who it was who footed the bills for their youngster years.

Anything else will produce societal chaos, is what he said, more or less.

Well, I took him down all the pathways that I could think of in order to counter his point of view, but I ended up with the awful feeling that he might, indeed, be right!

However, my own view was that women will increasingly become tied to 'their' children and that men will increasingly opt out of the whole business of seeing any children as 'theirs'. And this, in fact, will not be much different - emotionally speaking - from what used to happen in the past.

"Destroy the family and you destroy society" – Lenin