20150923

Getting married

One of the best  pieces if advice I've heard about marriage, and I mean actual real marriage, not sham marriage, is 'don't take turns' at  housekeeping jobs; if something is to be done, just do it without fuss, point scoring or recrimination. And that goes for both parties.

Another basic piece of advice: when you marry, you do not marry one person, you marry a family. Unless your spouse to be is adamantly cut off from their family, then they will be your family too. So if it contains members who you cannot respect, let alone love and sacrifice for; the marriage will bring more misery than joy.


20150921

Where wives came from...

From the book "The Year 1000"

Showing the link between marriage, the protection for the weaker and good social order (irrelevant, that is, to people of the same sex who want to live together).


20150903

What means...'normal'?

I heard that the Premier of NSW was asked in parliament by an MP who with her female companion (ah, remember that phrase?) is raising children, if he thought that arrangement was not 'normal'.

I didn't need to hear the fluffy talk that would follow, but here's how it should have gone:

Premier: Normal? What do you mean by 'normal' (a rhetorical technique pioneered by Bill Clinton)?

MP: [pauses, slightly flumoxed] Well, ordinary, everyday, the sort of thing that normal people do?

Premier: Oh, when I heard the word 'normal' I immediately thought of the normal distribution. I would have thought that two friends of the same sex raising children would be far off to one side of the distribution: a long way from most of the population. In other words, 'not  normal'.

MP: [flaring] Not normal! You bigot.

Premier: I'm sorry that you are surprised, but how is it 'normal'? I mean, think of the children you look after. Where did they come from? Did you and your friend have them...[chuckles] that would be the first sperm-free conception ever!

MP: [cranky, with a dopey look on her face] We love our children.

Premier: I am glad. One should always love children; and I expect you use the 'our' in the sense that you have parental responsibility for them, but only one of you could actually be the parent. Is not that so?

MP: [petulant] I don't see what you are getting at.

Premier: [with a kindly facial expression] What I am getting at is that the conception of children requires male and female, and unless the children in your care came from a prior relationship of one of you, then one of you had to step outside your friendship to conceive. And do the children know their father? I mean their real father? The man whose genes they have? Or are the cut off from the person who helped form them?

Do you know there is  a movement of people conceived by sperm donarship to find their fathers...they don't want to be dis-identified with their father, they want to know them?

MP: Bigot!

Now for the real world

One of my young relations recently had to do this school project: research solar energy and write a persuasive piece supporting it use.

I've got nothing against solar energy: it might be good base load one day; but until then?

I will write to the school to suggest that in the interests of even handedness, and critical thinking, the children be asked to do the following:

  • Research clean coal as a future energy source that is cheap and plentiful to support energy provision to the poor; write a persuasive piece supporting it.

  • Research packaged nuclear reactors as a safe, cheap and plentiful form of energy to meet the world's growing needs; write a persuasive piece supporting it.

  • Write a speech explaining the cost of wind power production and how those on the lowest incomes are supporting its inefficency.

  • Write a report explaining what would happen to our way of life, our cheap food, clean water, safe waste systems, convenient health care and public transport if we had to rely on so-called 'renewable' power sources. 
  • Research the safety of coal seam gas, and report on the consequences for our families' energy cost if we run out of gas. The starting point for that one is below.