Category: Serious

I’d Like to Buy the World a Clue

Warning: do not watch this with children around.

I compiled the “Be the Change� montage after happening to hear a version of I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (done by the Veggie Tales, of all things).

It was the same day that I was already feeling that the whole world was headed towards falling apart again, what with Iraq, Israel and Lebanon, Korea, Iran, and where-the-heck-do-we-fit-in-with-all-of-this?

Please go here for more information about my Be the Change montage, and information about downloading, emailing, and otherwise sharing it.

Eminent Domain Taking Denied in City of Norwood v. Horney and City of Norwood v. Gamble – I’m Proud to Know Them!

The Ohio Supreme Court just handed down its decision in the cases of City of Norwood v. Horney and City of Norwood v. Gamble. These are twin eminent domain cases, in which the City of Norwood, in Ohio, decided that it wanted to take property belonging to several families (among them the Horney and Gamble families), in order to use their property to create something of vital importance: two new city-owned parking garages,and a privately-owned mall.

Yes, you read that right. The city planners decided that putting up two city-controlled garages, and letting a developer put in a mall, were important enough to force these people out of their homes – to make them uproot and relocate their families – so that they could knock down their homes and put up their garages and mall.

Oh sure, they would be “justly compensated”, as the law of eminent domain requires, but that is hardly the point, is it?

When the private developer was unable to convince the Gambles, the Horneys, and a few other families – including the Dr. David Dahlmans – to sell out, the City of Norwood went another route. According to the Court, the City of Norwood “hired a consultant to conduct an urban renewal study to determine if current conditions in the Edwards Road Corridor qualified it as a “slum, blighted or deteriorated areaâ€? or as a “deterioratingâ€? area in danger of becoming blighted.”

Because, you see, if they could get the area where the Horney, Gamble and Dahlman homes were situated to be declared deteriorated or deteriorating, then they could take the properties under the doctrine of eminent domain – forcing the families out of their homes whether they wanted to go or not.

The consultant wrote a report in which they found that “while most structures in the target area were sound, other conditions including the neighborhood’s growing isolation from nearby residential areas, traffic safety issues and susceptibility to “piecemealâ€? conversion from residential to commercial uses in the future merited a classification of the area as “deteriorating.â€?

Handy, eh?

Then, the Court explains, “The city planning commission reviewed the consultant’s report and Rookwood’s redevelopment plan, and recommended that Norwood City Council adopt the finding that the area was “deterioratingâ€? and move forward with the Rookwood plan.”

Big surprise, eh? And here’s another big surprise:

The City Council then “held a public hearing at which comment was received from proponents and opponents of the plan. Council members then voted unanimously to adopt the Rookwood plan, and subsequently invoked the city’s eminent domain power to acquire the remaining hold-out properties.”

Uh huh.

Only the “hold outs”, well, held out. And took it to court. And, in fact, took it all the way up to the Ohio Supreme Court. Which overturned a lower court ruling, and stated inequivocally that “an economic benefit to the community alone does not justify government taking of private property.”

Good on ya.

And, in this tiny place called the Internet, through the most amazing of coincidences, I am proud to say that I heard about this from my friend, Dr. David Dahlman.

One of the hold-outs.

David, I am so proud to know you, and of you.

And to you, and anyone who wants to watch a great, heartwarming and funny movie about this very issue, I highly recommend “The Castle”:

Click picture for details:

The Castle

A Rant about Operation Amber Alert

This is a rant which has been a long time in coming.

That’s because I see it nearly every day. You see, I subscribe to the Operation Amber mailing list, and so I see each and every one of the Amber Alerts which go out.

That’s pretty amazing to think about, isn’t it? That there are Amber Alerts every single day.

And that’s the issue. And that’s what this rant is about.

Perhaps even the average citizen could notice it, but being a former father’s rights attorney, I particularly recognize it.

The vast majority..I mean the VAST majority of “abductions” being announced by Amber Alerts aren’t even “abductions” at all. Not in the sense that most people think. Heck, not in the sense that most people assume when they see those Amber Alerts.

No.

The vast vast majority of Amber Alerts are about…

[Continued here]

Scott Peterson Found Guilty

This just in: the jury in the Scott Peterson double murder trial has found Peterson guilty of both the murder of his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child.

What a sad, sad situation, no matter how you look at it.

What is interesting from a legal standpoint is the issue of what is considered murder of a fetus. Typically it is when the child is wanted, and someone intervenes and causes their death.

But, what if it were someone else who had actually murdered Laci, and what if Laci hadn’t wanted the baby, and Scott had?

And how is that different from a father having no say over the voluntary termination of the pregnancy of his child?

Very interesting legal issues ahead, I predict.

On Performing Weddings

This is a post I have been meaning to post for a few months, ever since I had the great honour of presiding at the wedding of my daughter’s best friend, whom I consider to be something of an “adopted” daughter.

My daughter’s friend – we’ll call her Judith, because, well, that’s her name – and her fiance had asked me if I would perform their wedding ceremony. They wanted me to because they wanted it to be someone they knew, who meant something to them. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and there were times I felt like perhaps I should have thought twice before saying “yes”, but I was so very honoured that they wanted me, and had asked, and because it was Judith, of course I would do it.

Well, let me tell you that any reservations I had were absolutely for naught.

Performing a wedding turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.

I had no idea.

It is such an incredible honour to share such an intimate moment between two people. Not just to share it, but to be a part of it. This is a view which the wedding guests – the wedding party – even the bride and groom themselves don’t get. To watch two people, looking into each other’s eyes, tears streaming down their faces, as they dedicate their lives to each other – creating a new life together – to be right there as it happens, and helping them to get there….wow. It is just an absolutely powerful, amazing moment, and is an incredible privelege.

Later, I asked a minister friend of mine, with whom I am quite close and have known for many years, “How come you never told me how amazing this was??”, to which he just smiled (I assume – it was in email) and agreed that it is an incredible experience and wonderful privilege.

So you can imagine how honoured and delighted I was when Judith’s sister, Rachel, asked me to perform her wedding a few months later. And she’d even seen me perform my first wedding, and still wanted me to do it!

So that is what I did yesterday. And it was every bit as amazing.

I had to smile each time when the bride and groom thanked me; I think that they really didn’t realize what an honour it was for me (despite my telling them so, of course).

I’m hooked.

If anyone out there is looking for someone to perform their wedding….

Truly Man’s Best Friend: Dogs Able to Detect Smell of Cancer

We’ve always known that dogs possess a super sense of smell, and that they are very protective of their owners.

Now here’s an interesting twist: researchers at Imperial College (my husband’s alma mater, by the way) have determined that dogs can sense cancer by smelling the proteins thrown by a patient with cancer. They first were let on to this by stories of dogs who started acting very strangely towards spots on their owners legs, which turned out to be cancer.

You can read more about this here.

Sick Toy of the Decade Award – Airplane Flying Into the World Trade Center

Nobody yet knows who the sick [ ] is that manufactured and distributed these “toys”, but the Associated Press is reporting that somehow 14,000 toys depicting an airplane flying in to the twin World Trade Towers, and with the product number “9011″, were unknowingly included in bags of candy distributed to small stores throughout the United States.

Unbelieveable, I realize, but you can read the full story here.

Don’t Let This Happen to You!

Having lost more than a few hours of work, on more than a few occasions, due to some catastrophic system failure in the middle of a drafting session during which I had failed to regularly back up the work, I’ve learned my lesson well, and now religiously back up documents as I am working on them.

But, it turns out, that is not always sufficient.

Today I learned the very hard way that if you open a document which you receive as an attachment in email, and edit it, to *not* just blindly hit “save”, but be *sure* to first do a “save as”, and give it a proper filename.

Because as I saved a total of several hours worth of work which I had done over the course of the day to this file which had come as an email attachment, it never once occurred to me to change the file name. The file name turned out to be a temporary file name assigned by my email program, and when I shut the email program down, sure enough…I lost all of my work, because the email program wiped the temporary file. Sob.

No warning, no “do you want to save all of your changes before they are lost in closing a temporary file”, no nothing. There I was blindly clicking “save” in Word every five or 10 minutes, and all that work was wiped in the blink of an eye.

(Yes, I know I can set word to do an autobackup -I *thought* that it was..but nope, it wasn’t.)

Anyways, don’t let this happen to you.

Thoughts on the State of Fathers’ Rights

I’m not dead yet, as they say. Even though my primary practice is no longer focused on fathers’ rights, I still provide referrals, pointers, and information. Perhaps even more importantly, I still teach, and while I now teach spam law, up until last year I taught a family law course, and even now still discuss family law with law students and new attorneys. I’m still keeping my hand in it. You don’t just leave completely behind something about which you feel so strong.

Recently I tripped through some of the fathers’ rights usenet groups (similar to bulletin boards, for the uninitiated). I hadn’t read them in a few years, although I used to post regularly to them, and be something of a known quantity there.

It made me really sad to note that nothing has changed. Men are still being denied access to their children, and women are still bleating the party line about how women do all the work, are always the primary caretakers, men are uninvolved and don’t want access to their children except to control the women, blah blah blah. You know – all men are abusive rapists, and all women are victims (which means that there is no violence in lesbian relationships, and no victims in gay relationships, right? Shyeah, right).

I’m amazed that in this country, in this day and age, women are still so indoctrinated and inculcated, and so unwilling to remove the blinders and see how what they spew is so contrary to the *true* best interests of the children, not to mention reality.

But perhaps I shouldn’t be. Like any group which has been kept down in the past, they have far more to gain by perpetuating the old historical data as current ‘fact’ than by admitting the truth.

And interesting truths they are:

The vast majority of men who are disunited from their families are kept from being involved with their children, by angry controlling women, or women who don’t feel angry but who have swallowed the party line about how it’s “supposed” to be, and by the court system.

In the overwhelming majority of custody cases, despite the feminist dogma, custody goes to the mother, no matter what the facts of the case are, and no matter who has the most money or the most expensive lawyers.

The vast majority of children of divorce are denied a positive relationship with their fathers. Oh sure, women wrap themselves in self-righteousness about how the fathers weren’t involved when they were together so don’t deserve to be involved after the divorce (neglecting that by agreement of the parents, the fathers worked more hours outside the home so that the mother could spend more time with their children, never dreaming that this would be turned against them during divorce to deny them time with the very children they had blindly worked so hard to support). More importantly, neglecting that this isn’t about them, it’s about the childrens’ need to be able to be involved with their fathers.

Very few men going through divorce ever ask for custody; all they want is an ongoing relationship with their children. Women always demand custody. Men go into divorce court expecting fairness, women go in expecting to get it all – and they do. The women get the kids, the men get to pay.

Nothing has changed. Especially the players.

It’s so sad.

Check out Dads Rights.org for more.

Give a little, mean a lot

Will Bontrager (http://www.willmaster.com) is someone whom I respect a great deal, for a number of reasons.

So when Will mentioned to me the plight of the Pine Ridge Reservation Lakota people (for those not familiar with this South Dakota reservation, the reservation boundaries and history include Wounded Knee), and urged me to visit the site which has been put together and is being maintained by volunteers in an effort to lend a hand, I of course did just that.

Now, I’ve been on the streets, been penniless, been a single mom, and had to rely on the kindness of strangers, but I have also been very fortunate, and never have I had to experience such bleak and abject, close-to-the bone poverty. And for that I am eternally grateful.

These are real people, real families, real children, real teenagers, for whom a few dollars can make all the difference in the world. As the website will tell you:

“Families live in overcrowded, substandard conditions–no insulation, no central heat. Some sleep on dirt floors. Fifty-nine percent of the homes are substandard. Many don’t have running water and occupants must carry water from the local rivers daily for their needs. Many don’t have sinks with piped-in water, stoves, refrigerators, or heating and plumbing.”

Where do your gifts go?

Well, that’s once of the nice things – one of the main organizers, Pat Perkins, keeps a running list of urgent needs – so that you can donate (they make it easy – donate through PayPal) directly for, say, the single mom who needs heating propane in this blistering cold region, or to the expectant mom who needs baby clothes, or to the senior meal center which needs a working stove so that the seniors can have a warm meal, for goodness sake. The urgent needs page is here:

http://www.pineridgerez.net/urgent.php

The main site is here:

http://www.pineridgerez.net

Go ahead. Make a difference.