Tuesday, June 22, 2010


How to Father Faithful and Fearsome Kids

by Doug Giles

There is undoubtedly much truth in what Doug says below but I think the biggest favour he did his daughters was to give them his genes. He is a much-read pastor and obviously a man of exceptionally good humour and intelligence.

And his pride in his daughter Hannah is certainly amply justified. Despite his own considerable eminence, I gather that he was for a time known not as Doug Giles but as "Hannah Giles' father"!

Another factor in rearing daughters is the "Daddy's girl" syndrome. It's not a universal relationship between father and daughter but very influential where it happens. Regardless of what the father teaches his daughter in such a case, the fact that she has had in her life the experience of being unreservedly adored gives her great confidence in her own worth in later life

I never had a daughter but I had a very good relationship with one of my stepdaughters while she was a kid and she is now a very confident young woman in her own quiet way. She even got rich the way I did. And she is one of the happiest people I know


I have two daughters. One irreparably crushed ACORN’s nuts (how ya’ doing, Bertha Lewis?), and the other, at the ripe old age of eighteen, writes for the NRA. When these female charges popped out of their mommy’s womb years ago, this thing called “responsibility for their upbringing” hit me like a nunchuck.

I didn’t slough off my role in their lives onto my wife, my church, public school, daycare, relatives, TV, or “the village.” I didn’t expect any of them to fill my boots. I, along with my lovely wife, got my daughters here, and dammit, it’s our job—especially my job as alpha male of the Giles castle—to prepare them internally and externally for greatness.

Living in Miami, I knew I would have to pony up and be a major player in my little ones’ lives if I wanted them to escape being part of the local teen fart cloud. I knew I’d have to pay attention to them and spend time with them to instill solid values and principles. In other words, I was going to have to be a dad in the traditional sense of the word. Isn’t that weird?

Call me goofy, but I don’t want my nippers being inept, stressed-out, unconfident young women who hate their bodies, get easily depressed, have no self-esteem, and will likely have issues with their weight. Also, I want to diminish the chances that my girls bail out of school or bow and kiss the ring of some abusive boyfriend or husband.

In addition, I’d like to make certain that my daughters never flaunt themselves to get the attention of some Darwinian-throwback-gold-toothed-rapping-thug just so they can be the chief hoochie in his stupid booty video.

Furthermore, as my daughters’ dad, I’d like to reduce the possibility that they’ll ever become sex objects—or pregnant teens. I do not want my chicas becoming STD wagons or teens who do dope and abuse booze. I’d like to make certain that they’ve got a snowball’s chance in Miami of ever seeing that junk occur in their lives.

What about you, Papasan? Would you like to guarantee your girl doesn’t end up being Anna Nicole Smith? You would? Good for you. Then keep reading.

Padre, I’ve got some advice for you. Mind if I share it? Great, here it is: Do not disengage from your daughter. Hang around your home and let your girl know (by your actions) that you really care about her while showing her maximum affection.

That’s right, you must cherish, coach, and guard your niña. Got it?

A lack of mental, physical, and spiritual input from you, Daddy-o, will exponentially boost the odds that your youngster will grow up to be more lost than Jenna Jameson sitting in on a Knox Seminary class discussing the symbolism in Revelation 18.

If you do not want your daughter to end up like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears and would, instead, like to raise a sharp, solid, and smart señorita, then you, Dad, must get off your butt and get caught up in your girl’s life.

Your lady cannot raise your daughter alone—and even if she could, she doesn’t bring to the table what a man does. Period. I don’t care what any lesbian sociology teacher at Columbia says or what rancid Rosie propagates. Single moms, as great as some of them are, or lesbians (no matter how masculine they look and act) do not give your daughter what an involved father does.

Feminists would love for all of us to believe that the dad’s role in his daughter’s life really isn’t that important and that a dad can be easily replaced by lesbians, public school, or Hillary’s “village.” This is the Kool-Aid being served to postmodern society, and, unfortunately, many people are drinking this poison and asking for seconds.

I beg to differ with these delirious dames and the dullards who parrot their opinions. No person is more important to a girl’s well-modulated existence than a dad who’s got his act together. A father who exhibits the God-given features of the alpha male is an irreplaceable ingredient in the recipe for a truly lovely and lively lady.

*For more 411 regarding raising righteous and rowdy kids, check out my book How to Keep Jackasses Away From Daddy’s Girl.

SOURCE





Daddy Was Only a Donor

A new study paints a troubling portrait of children conceived by single mothers who chose insemination by an anonymous donor. There have been quite a few articles in the press in recent times by women who have done that and they come across as women with strong maternal urges who have nonetheless been too uncompromising in finding a man who suits them.

And as we see below, their fussiness has hurt not only them but their children also. A lot of blame for that has to fall on feminism and modern culture generally -- which gives women expectations ranging from the unrealistic to the absurd. A wiser message would be that all relationships require compromise and that relationships are worth that compromise


In "The Switch," coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, "The Back-up Plan" and next month's "The Kids Are All Right." Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out "all right" with donor dads.

Hollywood is not the only industry peddling the story line that flesh-and-blood fathers are an optional accessory in today's families. Plenty of academics—from New York University sociologist Judith Stacey to Cornell psychologist Peggy Drexler—also have been arguing that mothers can do just as well raising children with donor fathers as they can with real ones.

In her book, "Raising Boys Without Men," for instance, Ms. Drexler claims that "maverick moms," including single women who rely on donor insemination, are just as successful raising boys as mothers who opt for the older model of marriage and motherhood. All that is needed for parental success, according to Ms. Drexler, is a "caring and supportive" model of mothering.

Until recently, there was one primary challenge to the intellectually fashionable view that fathers are fungible. It came from scholarship showing that children did better —e.g., were much more likely to finish school, avoid teen pregnancy and stay out of prison— in intact, married families than in homes headed by a single parent, most of whom are women.

Yet scholars such as Ms. Drexler were able to retort that much of the research relies on a comparison of middle-class married families with poor single mothers, so that differences in how children fare might be largely the result of socioeconomic differences. In their view, middle-class women who have a decent income and a good education can do just as good a job as a middle-class married mother and father.

That view ran into some major trouble this month, with the release of the report, "My Daddy's Name is Donor," by the Commission on Parenthood's Future (of which I am a member). The report is the first study to compare a large random sample of 485 young adults (18-45) conceived through donor insemination to 563 young adults conceived the old-fashioned way.

Significantly, the single women who chose to have a child by donor insemination were better-educated and slightly better off than the parents who had biological children together. So the study's results cannot be dismissed on the grounds that affluent marrieds were being compared to poor single mothers.

The study, which was co-authored by Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn and Karen Clark, paints a troubling portrait of the children conceived by single mothers who chose donor insemination. Young adults with maverick moms and donor dads report a sense of confusion, loss and distress about their origins and identity, and about their inability to relate to their biological father and to his kin.

Seventy-one percent of the adult offspring of these single mothers agree that: "My sperm donor is half of who I am," and 78% wonder "what my sperm donor's family is like." Half report that they "feel sad" when they see "friends with their biological fathers and mothers." Donor offspring with single mothers also are much less likely to report that they can rely on their family. Fifty-six percent of these offspring said they depend more on friends than on family, compared to just 29% of young adults born to two biological parents.

The study's findings echo recent commentary from young adults conceived through donor insemination. Writing in the Washington Post a few years ago, Katrina Clark reported that she envied friends who had both a mother and a father. "That was when the emptiness came over me. I realized that I am, in a sense, a freak. I really, truly would never have a dad. I finally understood what it meant to be donor-conceived, and I hated it."

In the U.K., Tom Ellis recently decided to try to find his donor dad through a registry that attempts to connect children to their biological fathers. Without him, he told a reporter, "I will never feel whole."

Such a sense of loss may help explain why the study found that adult offspring of single-mothers-by-choice were 177% more likely to report having had trouble with drugs and alcohol than children born to two biological parents. Perhaps in part because they did not enjoy the love, discipline and example of a flesh-and-blood father, young adults conceived through donor insemination to a single mother were also 146% more likely to report having been "in trouble with the law" before age 25.

So, despite the latest propaganda in favor of a father-optional future, this study suggests two stubborn truths: Children long to know and be known by their biological fathers, and they are much more likely to thrive when they have their own father in their lives.

Men who have managed to be good flesh-and-blood fathers to their children should take some satisfaction from the findings found in "My Daddy's Name is Donor." Even if the Big Screen portrays them as superfluous, in the real world, their kids are much more likely to turn out "all right" than kids who only know their daddy as Donor.

SOURCE






Israel is salt in the eye to Islamic imperialism

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community.

Odd. But why?

Because Israel is supposed to be up for grabs in a way that the Congo, Sudan or even North Korea aren’t. Only the Jewish state attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence, and insisting that, after 62 years of independence, that issue is still not resolved. Let’s take a nation that came into existence at precisely the same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of postwar British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift, and in Canada a “human rights” complaint or three.

The “Palestinian question” is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you’re in the Dar al-Islam, that’s it; there’s no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.

That’s why, in his first post-9/11 message to the troops, Osama droned on about the fall of Andalusia: it’s been half a millennium, but he still hasn’t gotten over it, and so, a couple of years ago, when I was at the Pentagon being shown some of the maps found in al-Qaeda safe houses, “the new caliphate” had Spain and India being re-incorporated within the Muslim world. If that’s how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel’s “right to exist” would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople.

To this fierce Islamic imperialism, the new Europeans, post-Christian, post-nationalist and postmodern as they are, nevertheless bring one of their oldest prejudices—that in the modern world as much as in medieval Christendom Jews can never be accorded full property rights. On a patch of the Holy Land, they are certainly the current leaseholders, but they will never have recognized legal title. To be sure, there are a lot of them there right now. But then there were a lot of them in Tangiers and Baghdad and the Bukovina and Germany and Poland, for a while. Why shouldn’t Tel Aviv one day be just another city with some crumbling cemeteries and a few elderly Jews?

That’s the reason the “Palestinian question” is never settled. Because, as long as it’s unresolved, then Israel’s legitimacy is unsettled, too.

Still, the impatience of the new globalized Judenhass is now palpable. I used to think that, when Iran got the bomb, it wouldn’t use it. I wouldn’t take that bet now. The new anti-Semitism is a Euro-Islamic fusion so universal, so irrational and so fevered that it’s foolish to assume any limits.

SOURCE






BOOK REVIEW of The World Turned Upside Down by Melanie Phillips. Reviewed by Prof. Richard S. Lindzen

In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. More and more people are signing up to weird and wacky cults, para-psychology, seances, paganism and witch- craft. There is widespread belief in ludicrous conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack being an American plot.

The basic cause of all this unreason is the erosion of the building blocks of western civilisation. We tell ourselves that religion and reason are incompatible, but in fact the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world-the foundations of science and modernity.

The loss of religious belief has meant the West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice, which it enforces in the manner of a secular inquisition. The result has been a kind of mass derangement, as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. In medieval-style witch- hunts, scientists who are skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts; Israel is ferociously demonized; and the United States is vilified over the war on terror-all on the basis of falsehoods and propaganda that are believed as truth.

Thus the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. It is succumbing to a "soft totalitarianism," which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. While the Islamists are intent on returning the free world to the seventh century, the West no longer seems willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it brought into being.

"One is disturbed each day by verifiably untrue statements touted as incontrovertible facts about hot-button issues. With cold, perceptive, exhaustive and persistent passion, Melanie Phillips dissects the phenomenon among disparate movements, to reach disturbing but compelling conclusions about the erosion of modern liberal society by ideologies whose surprising interconnections are meticulously identified. One can only hope that her book will penetrate the information cocoon into which many of our intelligentsia have sealed themselves."

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

No comments: