Why should an ex-wife care

Here's an article in which the ex-wife of Karl Stefanovic has spoken about how she's not happy that her ex-husband is seeking to get his vasectomy reversed so he can have children with his new partner.

Why would she care?

Could it be that she wanted more children and he wanted to stop at three, so him going on to have more children with another woman is a slap in the face?  Possibly.

Or, could it be that the child support payments to her would go down with every child he has with a new partner?  Probably more likely.

Having seen women get angry that their ex-partner "only had children to pay less child support" (yes, that's what's going through every man's head when he has children), it doesn't surprise me that the level of entitlement of some women will never cease.

It doesn't matter if his new partner is pushing him to have more children, all that matters is that this is a scorned woman who thought she'd locked in her now ex-husband into only being a provider for her children.

Having seen adult children left out of the will of their parents estate by new partners, I'm surprised the media doesn't make a bigger deal about this, but of course they won't, primarily because it's usually women making off with the money since it's usually a younger woman than it is the man and women usually live longer.  Those two factors alone mean that, excluding divorce, when two people get married, it's usually the husband who dies first, leaving everything to his wife.

I previously wrote about how it was reported that supposedly Karl was paying through the nose to have access to his children, so it's not surprising that it's never enough.

Male rape victim, 4th paragraph again

So, here's a case of three men who put a bottle up another male's back side being reported in the news.

As per my usual statement of the 4th paragraph, the term 'rape' is thrown around a lot, the fact that all the perpetrators are male is introduced very early on (opening sentence even), however true to form for the media, the simple fact that the victim was also male doesn't appear in the article until the 3rd paragraph.

• 1st paragraph - "unconscious teenager"
• 2nd paragraph - "a 19-year-old"
• 3rd paragraph - "the man"

I know it's not technically four paragraphs, but come on, they could have mentioned that the victim was male very easily in every paragraph, but chose to withhold that because the media likes to only report when women or minorities are victims and when men and whites (or both) are the perpetrators.

Channel Seven lawsuit outcome

So the woman at who claimed a great many things after her two year affair ended with a Channel Seven heavy, is reportedly dropping the case and is expected to pay Channel Seven's legal fees.

Well, she did try to play the media (not a great idea when you're trying to play the media against the media), by all accounts took far more than any reasonable person could have expected to get in settlement and then, despite having been paid off with non-disclosure agreements in place, disclosed company information, presumably in the hopes of gaining support for her case.

Of course, whilst her initial case was given all the coverage of a visiting Royal, something tells me that now things haven't been found in her favour (possibly due to her actions) the whole thing will be swept under away quietly.

If reports of her having to pay Seven's legal fees are true, I'll bet she'll be wishing she'd quit whilst she was ahead.

Men robbing shops in groups - no mention of background

So, here's one of those stories about an Asian man who has taken to defending his store after being robbed by several men a number of times.

Of course, despite the clear as day pictures, there's no mention at all about the backgrounds of these men.

It must just be men in general.

If only there were another way to describe these men that might help us to identify some linking pattern from where all of this crime is coming.

Outrage when a man uses the system against a woman

So here's an interesting (and sad) story about a woman who isn't able to travel outside Australia because her ex put her on a family flight watch list.

The watch list is designed to prevent divorced partners leaving the country in custody disputes, yet there's outrage when a man uses it to prevent his ex taking their children overseas.

The reality is that women leaving the country with children and never coming back (otherwise known as 'International Child Abduction') make up the majority of cases, which is why I think this isn't considered a crime (it's usually a breach of court ordered visitation rights, but not a crime).  Many sites like to claim that every one of those women are doing so to flee domestic violence, but that isn't always the case, and they rarely have anything more than anecdotal evidence to back it up.  But if a man does the same thing, he's portrayed as an evil man.

I paid particular notice when they go into the details that she's spending thousands of dollars on legal fees to fight this, but "he's getting legal aid".  How many men have to pay thousands of dollars on legal fees in custody battles when their former partners get legal aid?  Apparently there's outrage when the genders are reversed.  Maybe she's got lots of money (maybe she got the lot in the divorce) and he's left broke.  Legal aid isn't available to people who have money, so stating that he's using it when she has to pay is indicative that she has money and he doesn't.

When the media starts reporting on all the divorced fathers who can't afford to mount a challenge to visitation rights because their ex is using legal aid but they have to find thousands just to appeal what they consider unfair access, then I'll feel sorry for this woman.

In closing, I'm not saying that this particular guy is or isn't guilty, but if there's one thing we've learned in the last year, it's that the media chooses which stories to report and which ones to hold back, which stories to beef up the details and which stories to leave out what they consider 'unimportant details' and which groups to hold up as the 'usual suspects and bad guys' and which groups should be given a free pass.

Given my recently acquired (in the last couple of years) skepticism of the media, I'm not inclined to take any case at face value until they start reporting crimes between men and women equally.  They can pretend all women are great and all men are evil all they like, but those of us who live in the real world know that both men and women exist at all ends of the good/evil spectrum.

Police searching for woman who abducted 6 year old girl

I guess it's hard to hide that a woman was involved in a serious crime like abducting a child when the only person (of three) who is known is a woman.

Notice how it's not until the 3rd paragraph that it's identified that they're looking for a woman primarily.

Not much is known about the situation, but given that someone knew the name of the woman, but not the men, suggests that the woman was known to the family, but the men might have been hired muscle.

Personally, I would have lead with "a X-year-old woman named Y and two men are wanted for the abduction of a 6 year old girl", not this pussy-footing around about "we're searching for a girl... she may be at significant risk... oh, and the main person we're looking for is...".

A little girls safety (and possibly life) is at stake here.  Can the media put down their PC agenda for ONE FREAKING MINUTE and get the message out there NOW.  As it stands, a person has to actually click on the link to the article to get the photo and name of the woman in question.

AFL Diversity Manager coward punch

Only time will tell if the AFL does anything to their Diversity Manager because of violence.

I guess like his brother, the former CEO of Australia Post, there aren't going to be as much scrutiny as there would be if a white person had done the exact same thing.

By the way, in my opinion what the CEO of Australia Post got away with in terms of being able to get a 'donation' paid to a foundation run by his family is far worse than hitting someone.  Although, hitting someone when you're supposed to be setting an example is always worse than if you're just some guy.

A bit like how the media holds up Right-wing politicians to higher standards to Left-wing politicians.  It's almost like having standards means you are going to be held to them.

Maybe that's the problem here: nobody has any standards and, therefore, they can't be held to anything.

North Korea's mineral reserves

Here's an interesting article detailing the vast amounts of valuable raw minerals that North Korea is sitting on although I disagree with the term stockpile.  A stockpile is usually used in the sense that they've mined the minerals and is holding them somewhere ready to offload.

North Korea isn't holding them anywhere, they just can't (or maybe isn't willing) afford the infrastructure needed to mine the various minerals.

Even if they could, they'd have trouble selling the minerals on the open market at their true value.

The biggest thing I take away from the article is not what the author is trying to relay, rather it's the arrogance that minerals in the ground somehow 'belong' on the open market and North Korea is somehow depriving the world of a valuable minerals.

Like it or not, North Korea (or at least it's leader) are choosing what to do with the country and are choosing not to pursue mining.  Perhaps if the country were desperate enough, they'd come to the world table and broker a deal, but right now it is their RIGHT to choose not to tap into those resources.

Let me put this another way.  Uluru (Ayers Rock) is predominately made up of iron ore.  As it currently stands, it brings in more money as a tourist destination than it would being mined for it's contents.  You can only mine it once for what would be a pretty small payday, but tourists could probably come for another 100 years just to see it.  More important than the tourist element, Uluru has a cultural significance to the Indigenous population of the country, so any business case to mine it would be very quickly shut down for both Cultural and Tourism reasons.

Let's imagine, for a minute, that those mountains in North Korea aren't just a resource parking lot, that they have been part of the country as long as time and there's possibly even ancient stories about them passed on from generation to generation.  We don't really know because we're only being told one angle.

The current leader may be thinking that in 50 years time his country will be the only untouched region of the world with such untouched beauty, which would make a much better tourist attraction than lining the vaults of the country with money for a finite time.  Maybe North Korea's Great Leader has a longer-term vision than most Westerners, who only think as far as next year (some only as far as next weekend).

The leaders of North Korea might really want to tap into them, but feel that they'd compromise on their personal beliefs, either culturally or simply because they don't trust big world governments not to take advantage of them.  In this regard, can we blame them after all the accusations against the Clinton Foundation for helping to set up the fleecing of Haiti's gold (and possible child trafficking) whilst on a supposed mercy mission after a major earthquake.

I'm not a Greenie, but if a mining site on a potentially culturally significant site were being pushed on a region for profit anywhere else in the world, there'd be outrage, but since it's from a country people deem as despotic, it's apparently ok?

I say if the leaders of North Korea choose not to tap into those minerals FOR ANY REASON, then that's their decision and it should be respected.

Media claims we should be grateful for foreign buyers

So here we have the media actually acknowledging the existence of wealthy foreign buyers in the Australian Real Estate market, however one author writes that we should be grateful for them.

Now, the author might be correct, had the glut of apartments not been built specifically to cater to the demand of foreign buyers and only if foreign buyers were ONLY buying apartments.

In any economy there are multiple cycles going up and down at any given time.  In engineering, the perfect storm with salaries occurred just before the GFC when many industries were all peaking at the same time, putting a premium on engineers which, when the various industry cycles bottomed out at about the same time, ended with heaps of engineers all looking for work at the same time.

The same is true of property.  Of residential property, there are many sectors and sub-sectors.  Just because you've got a great 1-bedroom apartment in Newport isn't going to mean a thing if what's booming are 3-bedroom houses.

So the housing prices are in a completely different cycle to apartments, which are usually home to singles or couples without children.  Apartments don't come with a lot of land, making them less attractive to speculators due to the need for high returns and the risk that another 300 apartment block opening up next door that will compete for the relatively few tenants.

Claims that we should be grateful that foreign buyers are keeping the prices of apartments from collapsing (something that only the developers would really worry about and would normally stop creating more supply if they're unable to unload the last lot of apartments they built) are pretty stupid when it's the price of housing the average Australia cares about, NOT the price and vacancy rates of apartments.

The people already living in houses want them to only go up, the people trying to buy them would like to see them come down (at least long enough to get into the market).

Ultimately I think what the Media and the Politicians all ignore or avoid is that young people don't want any sort of unfair advantage, they simply want a level playing field, but the media is so bent on trying to remain positive about immigration that it's ignoring the fact that it's selling out locals for the security that higher house prices brings people who own their own home.

When a young couple from China in the 20's is able to buy a house in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne for over $1 million IN CASH, when they haven't got the sort of income needed to service a loan of that size, then we're not playing on a level playing field.  Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying to themselves or just to you.

Lindt siege psychiatrist stood down

So the disgraced psychiatrist who was advising police during the Lindt siege in Sydney is now claiming that it's the escapees fault that Monis killed people.

Like a true little liar, he's putting responsibility anywhere but himself.

He's quoted as saying (in other articles) that he wasn't aware that IS had put a callout for Lone Wolf attacks at the time the siege took place.

So, I guess he's blaming:

• The people who escaped, to save themselves;
• The lack of knowledge of the overall situation; and
• Anyone but himself.

Now, most normal people would feel guilty for how this whole thing played out and would have to live with it for the rest of their lives.

Not this guy.  No, he's absolved himself of any responsibility because the events weren't allowed to play out how he thought they should and that he wasn't aware of the bigger picture.

In my line of work, if I'm making calls without considering ALL the information, including LOOKING UP information that may be applicable, I'm still liable if things go wrong.  Legally if someone dies, professionally if it costs my organisation money (no pay rise for the guy who blew our profit margins when he forgot to allow for a $1 million piece of equipment in the tender!).

I guess psychiatry is a bit like being weather forecasting: there's no accountability if you're wrong because you missed an important variable in the equation.

Except this time the psychiatrist made calls that got people killed, which is why I applaud him being stood down.

I also note that nowhere do they mention the radicalisation of Islam as a cause.  I guess this "non-terror attack" has found its scapegoat and the gods of public opinion have been appeased.

Another car jacking, no description of perpetrators

So here we have yet another case of a violent crime in which the description of the suspects is deliberately withheld.

Is that because they're trying to be sensitive?  Or is it simply assumed that from here on out all violent crimes are to be assumed to be by people "of African appearance" unless otherwise advised?

Selling ones virtue has a price

So the founder of Roxy has come out and told all about being a 'pleasure wife' of a Saudi arms dealer.

What's interesting to note is that she's on her 3rd (and hopefully last) marriage, so clearly living that lifestyle had taken a toll on her in more ways than just taking up her time.

I do give her full marks for telling her story.  Hopefully it will dissuade women in a similar situation to her from doing the same thing.  That is unless women today are more likely to treat relationships like this as transactions and attach less emotion to it.

A bit like prostitution.

The moral code wasn't dreamed up by a bunch of old men just looking to ruin the fun of everyone, it was developed over a long period of time by people who worked out that it works out better, in general, for people who follow it.

Yes, there will always be people who follow the code who don't do well and vice versa, but the moral code increasing the probability of success.  If wearing a seat belt increases the probability of you surviving a car accident, aren't you more likely to want to wear one?

Autistic boy attacked again by gang

So, here's a couple of articles that have appeared over the weeks that follow the usual 4th paragraph shenanigans:

So an autistic boy has been attacked by a gang again.

A bakery has be broken into, with the baker attacked.

No mention of the background of the gang members, despite the photos clearly showing a group who are anything other than white.

Par for the course, really.

I'm just waiting for a vigilante culture to spring up to take these thugs on.  It only takes a few hard men from Eastern European countries to band together to decide enough is enough.

Remember, Eastern Europeans don't care about being called racist.  They care about themselves more than that.

A penny saved is a penny earned - Benjamin Franklin

I thought I'd take some time off from writing about the onslaught of Marxism in our current society to focus on a few financial matters that I think everyone should know about to help them in the current world.

A lot of the things I write about may not apply in countries other than Australia, but a lot of the concepts are the same, regardless of where you live.

I'd like to start with the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin: "A penny saved is a penny earned".

I believe that statement is actually no longer true in this modern day.  His statement was true in his day and age when income tax rates were zero (and the money supply was governed by the government, not a private organisation, but that's a whole other kettle of fish) but a penny saved is actually less than a penny earned.

With income tax being what it is, the average salary for a male is $83,902 p.a. which falls in the 32.5% tax bracket in Australia.  So that means that for every dollar I spend (over the $37k income), I have to earn $1.48.  It may not seem like much but consider if I'm able to save myself $40 a week on something, say transport expenses.

Assuming I'm only working 48 weeks of the year (we have four weeks annual leave a year) and ignoring public holidays (because when you're buying monthly tickets, it doesn't always work out to have monthly tickets start & finish around those dates) that's $1,920 per year AFTER tax.

The BEFORE tax amount on this is $2,844 (rounded off to the nearest dollar).

For a person living on the median salary, that $2,844 is the equivalent to a 3.4% pay rise.  Given this current economic climate, I know heaps of people who don't even get that.

Think about that for a minute: small things we can do every day, that might save $5 here and $10 there add up very quickly and, when you start to think about money you're spending in terms of how much you had to earn rather than what you're paying, it becomes very different.

$4 per drink for morning tea and afternoon tea (which is more like about $4.50 for a bottle of soft drink in the cafeteria in my building)?  That's $8 a day or $40 per week right there!

The same also applies for big purchases too.  People who are upgrading their phones every couple of years (many of them unnecessarily so) may spend about $1,200 on the new iPhone or Samsung phone (not including the case or cover that a person should buy to protect their expensive new piece of equipment).  That's about $1,800 in pre-tax money.  Or the equivalent of 2.1% of the median salary.  So, putting off replacing an otherwise working mobile phone until the old one actually stops working (or becomes obsolete) is like giving yourself a pay rise.

People who kid themselves into thinking they've avoided that cost by opting to buy the phone on a 24 month plan, are just paying the same price (or higher!), with the spend just spread out over 2 years.

I'm not suggesting we should all live like monks and not enjoy living in our country, but the lifestyle we lead may be more expensive than we think it is and, with intelligent decisions on where to cut, where to substitute and where to find cheaper alternatives, we'll be far better off than arguing or begging for that pay rise to be 4% rather than 2%.

The money we save will go a whole lot further than incremental pay rises.  We may not have a latte with every morning tea or the latest mobile phone, but we'll be financially better off in the years ahead.

Remember how many people you know who say "I wish I'd drank more coffees over the years" vs the number of people who say "I should have started saving more money years ago".

Anti-vaccination people forced underground

One really does have to wonder why, if we actually have freedom of speech, that people who want to see a documentary on the 'dangers of vaccinations' have to do so in secret.

Now, I'm all for vaccinations (my daughter has had all of them, but I'm so sick of people trying to make out that people who CHOOSE not to vaccinate their children are evil.

Much like how Medical companies have big funds set aside for compensation claims for people whose children have negative effects (why would they do that if the vaccinations were 100% safe?), the people who don't vaccinate are choosing to play the lottery the other way.

Are they putting other people's children at risk?  Maybe.  Are they putting their own children at risk?  Maybe.

Does the medical industry pretend like there's no risk?  Surprisingly, especially given how parents are expected to sign a waiver prior to being given the vaccination for every set of them.

I guess that's where the compensation fund comes in.  You're only signing away for mild side-effects like fever and illness.  If side-effects like death, disability or Autism were on the list, then you can bet your bottom dollar that:

• People wouldn't choose to vaccinate
• People who did vaccinate wouldn't have a right to compensation ("you signed it!")

Remember, you can only sign away your right to compensation for side effects they tell you about.  Anything else is fair game.  The difficulty is proving that your otherwise healthy and active child changed after the vaccination.

I was particularly annoyed when medical staff tried to claim my daughter's reaction "must have been something she ate", even though the rota-virus vaccine was THE ONLY common factor in her short term (as far as we know) symptoms.

Famous person pays through the nose to see his children, media doesn't care

So Karl Stefanovic is no saint and I'm certainly not a fan, but when he walks away from his marriage with less than 10% of the assets, on the condition that he can see his children whenever he wants, you know the Family Courts system isn't fair.

But notice how the media chooses to focus on how Karl liked getting drunk, rather than asking WHY he liked getting drunk.

That being said, the man makes $3 million a year, so it'll only take him a few years to recover from the hit (assuming his career doesn't drop off), but he'd never get that time back with his kids if his ex-wife had chosen to withhold access.

I'm hoping that someone in the media talks a bit about this, but I seriously doubt it.

Woman who killed eight children probably not going to be punished

So Raina Thaiday, the woman who killed seven of her own children and one child of another family, probably won't be punished because she thought she was saving them.

But don't worry, she's being treated now and is allowed out into the hospital grounds despite having two relapses since being taking into custody.

Her schizophrenia, brought on by excessive cannabis use, was to blame, she's just an innocent victim in all of this.

Don't worry though, she's being treated.

Just forget about any kind of punishment of any kind because it's not like cannabis is illegal or that it's not her fault that she used to smoke more of it in a day than most people see in a lifetime.

It's also not like we force schizophrenic people from being treated, so I guess that's 'punishment' enough.

So I guess our benevolent lawmakers are happy to chalk all of these deaths up to mental illness and not Domestic Violence.  Because it's not socially acceptable to show a woman committing Domestic Violence.

I wonder how many cases of man on woman Domestic Violence could be discounted if they were allowed to do the same.  But we all know that the anti-male establishment wouldn't allow that.

I'll put money on her ending up with a lucrative government position as a spokesperson for mental illness and wind up as Australian of the Year, a bit like Rosie Batty.  Ironically, if they don't count Thaiday's victims deaths as Domestic Violence, then we can't count Luke Batty's death either, since his father had a history of mental illness.  There surely can't be one rule for men and another for women, can there?

I don't know what makes me more sick, the media excusing some of the most inexcusable actions of women (not one word of the article does anything other than try to explain how it wasn't her fault) or the legal system being 'compassionate' to women, deciding that she shouldn't receive any kind of punishment, not even for endangering children when she was smoking the excessive amount of cannabis that resulted in the condition that contributed to eight deaths!

The simple fact is that the media has an agenda, that gender is to paint men as violent and women as victims.  But if we're comparing Greg Anderson to Raina Thaiday, the score is 1-8, but I don't see a SINGLE MAN being promoted to the level Rosie Batty is for what Raina did.  But I guess Greg is an easier target for allegations for what transpired in the lead up to that fateful date, since dead men tell no tales.

New proposed hiring quotas for men and women

So someone is now pushing for hiring quotas to achieve 40% women AND men in companies - this should be fun!.

So this means that companies will need to show that they are at least taking steps to try to achieve quotas.  I say they should start with government organisations first, you know, just to set the example.

Given that there are far more women than men in most government jobs (except at the top, as we're always told), this should mean that men would be given preferential treatment for the following government jobs including, but not limited to:

• Teaching
• Nursing
• Admin
• Department of Justice
• Department of Health and Human Services

Remember, there can't be one rule for men and a different rule for women!

United Airlines vs Emirates

So Emirates have decided to take a swing at United Airlines whilst United is under siege for dragging a man off an overbooked flight.  I somehow doubt that they'd have dragged a woman off a plane in the same manner.

Personally, I don't like either airline.

United Airlines treated my friends and I like suspected terrorists on every single internal flight we took whilst travelling around the USA.  This meant that they took everything out of our bag, felt us up and then ordered us on our way.  This system only worked to our benefit in Las Vegas, where we didn't have to wait the whole line to then wait in a second line, we just got felt up straight away.

Once I got on the flights, they were actually ok.

Also, on my flight back to Melbourne they announced that the flight had been overbooked and offered to put up anyone who was prepared to stay in a hotel overnight and fly them business class the next day.  There were people LINING UP to volunteer!  I would have taken them up on the offer, had I not been due back in Melbourne for work two days later.

Emirates, however, treated me like crap on connecting flights from London to Melbourne via Dubai.

The reason?  Because I was a single male travelling on his own, which meant that I was a 3rd class citizen, that I should move when told to, that I could be yelled at by passengers and staff who weren't aware that my moving was because I'd been told to and even that they refused to take away my food tray (and the trays of my fellow single men) well after meal time was over and the lights had gone out.

Given that my crappy flight with Emirates was around the time airlines were flexing their muscle on flying bans, I wasn't about to kick up a big stick about how I was treated, since I still wanted to travel and didn't want to find myself stuck somewhere unable to fly.

If you ask me, I wouldn't want to fly with either, but United Airlines treatment of me was due to over-the-top security.  Emirates were just being horrible people.

Waleed makes fun of Pauline Hansen, misses the point

So Waleed Aly is making fun of Pauline Hansen for asking Australians to buy non-Halal certified chocolate to not support the Islamisation of Australia.

However, anyone who knows what she's complaining about isn't whether it's Halal by virtue of what it is, it's whether the company that manufactured it has paid extortion money to Islamic groups and passed that cost onto consumers who don't care.

The concern is that it's a covert Jizya (a Muslim tax on non-Muslims).  We shouldn't pay any price for companies to be extorted for the religious beliefs of others.  Do we pay for foods to be Kosher certified too?

That is THEIR belief and, as Waleed has quite rightly pointed out, if the chocolate is vegan anyway, paying someone to certify something that is already Halal is like paying PETA to certify that peas and carrots are vegan: it's obvious to the people who know, it's irrelevant to people who don't care and people who don't care shouldn't be forced to pay ANY money to a religion to which they don't belong.

But don't worry, the media has Waleed's back: they'll continue to mock Hansen on his behalf.