The Daddy State

Hilary White posted a few days ago something that I had started thinking myself... that the rise of socialism was due, at least in part, to the female vote:

... I mentioned that one of the triumphs of feminism is to teach women that they should not get married to an individual man. Marriage, so the legend goes, is slavery, particularly after the kids come. Feminism reveals its Marxist origins when it says that women should instead marry the State. Men leave, we are told, and leave us holding the child-rearing bag alone. Much better to be married to the state. The state will never abandon you.

Indeed, women who divorce are often encouraged by social workers to either take up welfare as a replacement marriage, or send their ex-men taken through the various government-sponsored wringers like Ontario's Family Responsibility Office. Institutions like the FRO are designed for a two-fold purpose. They enslave the woman to the state, make sure she depends on the FRO and the welfare office for all the defence and support we once expected a husband to provide, and to punish, impoverish and disempower men.

And when did such structures start being put into place? About the same time women got the vote and started taking over the driver's seat in politics. Socialism is woman's politics. Indeed, we call it the nanny state because it tends to infantilise entire societies. But really, the new state that the woman's vote has created should more properly be called the Daddy State...

Online safety for 5-year-olds?

From BBC News:

Children as young as five are being targeted in a new online safety campaign by the UK body charged with protecting children from abuse.

The campaign uses cartoons to show five to seven-year-olds that people are not always what they seem.

It is thought 80% of children in this age group use the web and one-in-five parents of this age group worry about who their children contact online[bold font mine].

I'm all for anything that keeps kids from encountering harmful content on the Internet, but why are 5 to 7-year-olds being allowed to use the computer without their parents' direct supervision and guidance?

Just me, but a child of mine this age would not be on the Internet at all unless I was literally right there next to them. They wouldn't "surf" the net, much less receive contact from strangers on it (did you catch that?). They wouldn't be spending a great deal of time online, as a matter of fact.

For kids who were a little older, I'd pretty much pre-approve any sites they were allowed to go to and use parental controls to make sure they couldn't go anyplace else.

A big mistake a lot of parents make is allowing their kids to have computers in their rooms... uh-uh. That's when they can meet either pedophiles pretending to be other kids or some Arab dudes and then run away to Jordan to marry them.

A lot of trouble could be headed off if they only made kids (teens included) use only computers in high-traffic areas of the home, where the monitor is easily and frequently visible to others. Very young children shouldn't be on the Internet by themselves at all, imo. There's no need for them to be.

The real problem is basically parents who are clueless about both their kids and about computers. There are parental controls. You can also check the browsing history of computers. You can even lock the computer so that it can't be used when you're not home.

A former coworker of mine makes her teenage kids give her their MySpace passwords, and regularly checks their pages. If she couldn't log in, or if they were to erase browsing history, she would take their computer privileges away. She knows how to see chat transcripts and find hidden files.

So, there is a lot more we can do besides try to hope that 5-year-olds have enough sense to not talk to strangers online. It takes time and effort though, which is probably why so many parents rely on little cartoon safety videos instead.

Russian choral singing

My parish's small choir is made up of four women, including myself, and one man. One of the women is a soprano, and the remaining three of us are mezzo-sopranos (the vocal range between soprano and contralto, which most women fall into). The man is a tenor, the highest and most common of the male ranges.

We sound pretty decent, but I can't help but long for some nice Russian bass voices. Think maybe we could get these guys to move to Florida and join us?

The U.N. is useless and corrupt

As I've been saying all along.

Their World Food Program is no different:

The United Nations’ World Food Program, or WFP, is preparing to launch a mammoth, three-year relief operation in Afghanistan this year for 7.4 million people at a cost of $1.2 billion — but less than half of that amount will actually go to purchasing food for the war-ravaged country. The majority of the money — nearly $730 million — is being spent on shipping, land transportation, handling, office construction and U.N. staffing and administration costs, according to program documents obtained by Fox News. Outside experts consulted by Fox News say that some of the costs are more than 100 percent higher than they need to be.

And who's picking up the majority of the bloated tab for this little Feed The Afghans relief operation?

Why, the United States, of course.

The Great Satan is once again wasting spending money trying to help people in need, who will no doubt continue to revile us.

Someone please give me a reason why we should give the U.N. anything except upraised middle fingers.

Anyone... anyone?

Friday Fun: Bring back the cranky clergy!

More Mitchell & Webb, by popular demand. Posted this a long time ago, but it's such a classic that it deserves an encore.

Don't try to "pop in and say hi" to this vicar...