Harden Up!

Never much in the Sunday rags, usually just personalised opinionated spin on lukewarm regurgitated topics from earlier in the week, but one immediately caught my eye as I scanned the online offerings whilst kick starting the brain with a coffee hit this morning.

After the first good night's sleep in a week. Am on the lookout for the bastard who gave me the man flu, but the local apothecary did manage to find some very effective product with precursors in it. I digress, onto the subject of this post.

People often blame losing control on lack of money and stress. We say everyone can control themselves, it's a choice they make.

Granny notes there has been an noticeable increase in soft cock couples racing off to tell all to their counsellors about their money and stress woes.

there is an incentive to stay together - it's cheaper than setting up two new households

From one who is well into his third life sentence, I say harden up! And for the government, one could also suggest that there are huuuuge savings be had in this arena. Cut all the funding to agencies offering such counselling services. Let the would be ferals get on with life, FFS you do not need therapy with a counsellor!

ps 14 years is a life sentence in this country what with soft cock judiciary and early parole. The whole place has gone to the dogs.

Update:

CK sings from the same song sheet.

Grandparents are learning fast

Almost 5 grandson down for a week for first time by himself. Was helping Grandma potting up flowers for Great-Grandma, till Granddad said "Come on lad, we are off to Mitre 10 now". The reply was "Bye Grandma, I do not want to do flowers anymore, its a boy thing". Well trained!

Then tonight. Ate all his dinner, including veges, so suggested he could have ice cream. "In a cone too, Grandma."

Bugger. Must remember cones next time. Takes time to train grandparents.

A woman's place is in the home

Indeed, a touchy subject at the best of times

A report from Cambridge University has revealed "mounting concern" that women who work do so at the expense of family life.

Can women have it all? A career and family?

The anxiety surrounding women's roles is bordering on panic. The question is never asked of men, and the answer given to women is unvarying. No.

A sea change is afoot.

This report just confirms what many of us have recognised for some time, that we are witnessing a sharp reversal in attitudes toward professional women. We are a culture in retreat, clutching at the security blanket of archaic ideas about what women want.

"both men and women in Britain are having second thoughts about whether women should try to pursue both a career and a family life"

A post-feminist backlash is occurring.

Welcome to the wonderful world of post-feminism – otherwise known as the backlash – where double standards and double binds continue to reign supreme.

The developing message is that domesticity is the natural choice and not to get above your station.

We are free to choose in our brave new world: it's simply natural for women to choose domesticity.

The alternatives to domesticity play to their worst fears.

any other choice would be unnatural, unattractive, unbecoming, self-betraying, rendering us shrill, strident, cold and sterile

"Women and Power: How Much Do You Really Want?" The answer was implied in the question: not all that much, really. This is the post-feminist manoeuvre par excellence, insisting to women that – although they are free to choose! – they don't really want to be powerful.

applauded "career women" who rated their families as their greatest success ("I think all women need that"), and whose greatest fear was becoming "the ballsy Apprentice ... businesswoman, living life by some blokeish code".

The point is clear, and incessant: a happy woman is a wife and mother, and anatomy remains destiny.

The summary.

There's a recipe for contentment:

either you're unfulfilled but abnormal because you enjoy your career but are neglecting your children,

or you're unfulfilled and normal because you hate working but are neglecting your children.

(Women without a family don't, of course, exist. Never have.)

Some ensuing commentary wouldn't get any feminist votes on the matter.

There is only so much work. 600,000 vacancies and 5.1 million on benefits.

Women have neglected their role as homemakers and now we have the unhappiest kids in the Western world.

There's plenty of work to do at home. A lot of people could give up on some of lifes luxuries and trade the immoral, yes immoral, lifestyle of two parents working for one.

When two are working the kids lose out on attention and another family is left completely workless in poverty.

People need to reduce their expectations, share the limited work available in a equitable manner between families. If this makes feminists irate I'm sorry but the traditional is not always wrong.

My grandmother could teach the young ones of today how to survive a real economic depression because she did.

How are you planning to survive the coming slump feminists?

Yes indeed.

'Family Meltdown' has wrecked our society

Things like legalising prostitution, civil unions and homosexuality have all dramatically made their mark on our local and global societies, but none so much as the breakdown of families.

A senior judge launched an astonishing attack on the Government today over the fracturing of society.

During a conference speech the judge warned the breakdown of the family would, within 20 years, “be as marked and as destructive as global warming”.

The judge, said that in urban areas family life was “in meltdown or completely unrecognisable”.

He said children born into broken homes were increasingly turning to drink, drugs and crime, and the results were affecting the mental health of parents and children across the country.

Venting his personal views, which he maintained many in the family law profession supported, he added: “In some of the more heavily-populated urban areas of the country family life is, quite frankly, in meltdown or completely unrecognisable.”

“In some areas of the country even including the more urban parts of the sleepy area in which I operate, family life in the old sense no longer exists.

“So I suggest the general collapse of ordinary family life, because of the breakdown of families, in this country is on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even a decade ago.”

“What is certain is that almost all of society’s social ills can be traced directly to the collapse of the family life.”

He said he was not criticising single parents and praised some of them.

A telling note confirming what we already see from one apparently in the know.

Law of common sense to be applied

Following on in the vein of Full Moon King and her cohorts in constructing shoddy legislature of late, today's editorial from the region she loves to hate examines what could be the common sense outcome a newly proposed piece of legislation.

Seems that while most Kiwis were attending church celebrating things religious and some enjoyed a well deserved break, those charged with absolute power were busy little secular beavers, releasing all sorts of propaganda on Easter Sunday of all days.

In a move to stave off any cause celebre mothers having to feed wee Johnny in scruffy loos, there is yet another Liarbour tax to be foisted upon businesses in providing rooms of a suitable nature via uncosted legislation.

Forgive me, I always thought a workplace was for work and core parenting was always done at home? Parents get already paid heaps with parenting leave.

But the editor examines the topic more closely and sums up well.

How does the prescriptive obligation affect small businesses which may have to provide crèche facilities for perhaps just a single staff member? Will the law of unintended consequences mean such an attempt to legislate for compassion will make ``potentially pregnant' job applicants liabilities for employers?

This is a time when a Government on the ebb might more usefully have shown it had a better grasp of the practical issues that face those in the small business community. Instead, the gesture shows that it is much easier to capitalise on the proven benefits of breastfeeding than to acknowledge (and to promote the view) that raising a baby ought to be a fulltime job.

Now there is an unintended consequence, if you can get pregnant you are a liability. Same thing I have been trying to drill into the better half for years, which side of a balance sheet she resides on. What a future our workplaces will enjoy, a workplace without the distraction of females.

The real world

kg over at CR has had a long night shift tending to those ambo patients in dire and timely need of treatment for ingrown toe nails and headaches in the early hours.

In a re-served old post, he discusses the need for real men in a real world vs the drivel of teamwork and sensitivity. Predictably a few have bitten hard, and garnered the similarly predictable response from one suffering from post-night shift rats:

Yeah, I'm a "bit touchy" all right.

I'm bloody sick of being told by women all that we men do wrong, sick to death of women lecturing us about health and safety, women deciding what constitutes acceptable family life, women denying small boys outlets for their masculine instincts, women fucking the quality of life by placing safety above all else to the point where life for a man is supposed to be some kind of bland supplier-role for mommy and the kids.

Men are more than just providers and robots to do some woman's bidding.

Thank God I know some real women who don't do those things, women such as my own wife and Diamond Mair (for example) who realize that men have a right to be men.

Take your half-baked, purse-lipped, ignorant disapproval elsewhere.

Or--in case you misunderstand me--piss off.

Well said kg, as Oswald suggests, tell us how you really feel.

Now, if only there some real world men like kg in the National Party or any party for that matter. Then we would have points of difference to discuss and vote for.

The wait is over

At last the wait is over.

Number 2 grandchild has safely arrived just over a couple of hours ago at around 7lb 10z.

Mother and child both well and resting, slightly overdue, after the barely 6 hour last lap.

Son bouncing off the wall, texting and calling everyone in his mobile contact list in the middle of the night.

Grandson asleep, in care of maternal grandparents, rightly conserving energy to beat up his new sister.

Paternal grandparents now up and wide awake, primed with coffee and not likely to get to sleep for the rest of the night. Her indoors ready to start 600K trip to Jafaland at 0200, looking for a flight, but that is another story.

Suddenly my credit card has turned a shade of deep pink...