AVfM has just published a video of the first day’s speeches. They run into one another, here’s the sequence, with the durations:

1. Attila Vinczer and Paul Elam, and the introduction to Anne Cools (13:02)
2. Senator Anne Cools (48:32)
3. Erin Pizzey (19:11)
4. Dr Tara Palmatier (27:30)
5. Mike Buchanan (21:13)
6. Fred Jones (16:00)
7. Barbara Kay (44:50)
8. Tom Golden (25:12)
9. Paul Elam (26:38)
10. Bob O’Hara just before dinner (00:00 – 4:25), Paul Elam thanking the Commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post (4:26 – 5:55), presentation of Lifetime Achievement Award to Erin Pizzey (5:56 – 14:31)

Give me strength. Will someone please remind me of the point of having women in the military? Our nuclear submarines are being adapted at a cost of over £5 million each to accommodate female sailors. How long will it be before we have the first underwater immaculate conception, requiring the submarine to take the woman bearing the miracle foetus to shore? This country’s enemies must surely be crying with laughter at what’s going on in the military in the UK.

Dr Palmatier is a well-known psychologist who often works with men coping with abusive partners or ex-partners. Her speech in Detroit was excellent, I thought. Enjoy.

In early 2012 I was delighted when the veteran domestic violence campaigner Erin Pizzey agreed to write a Foreword for my book Feminism: the ugly truth. It was wonderful to finally meet Erin Pizzey for the first time, at the Detroit conference, and to have a number of discussions. It would be impossible to exaggerate the esteem with which this remarkable woman is held across the MHRM. AVfM presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award during the dinner later in the day when she gave her speech, and of course she received a standing ovation from the assembled delegates. Her speech to the conference is here. Enjoy.

My thanks again to supporters who’ve been kind enough to send me items published online or in the press during my recent absence. The first item refers to a study conducted by psychologists at the University of Cumbria. The item starts with this:

Convention has it that women are the gentler sex. But when it comes to relationships they are more likely to be controlling and aggressive, a study claims. Increasing numbers of women can now be classed as ‘intimate terrorists’ in which they are more verbally and physically violent towards a partner.

Psychologists at the University of Cumbria questioned 1,104 young men and women using a scale of behaviour which ranged from shouting and insulting to pushing, beating and using weapons. And they discovered that women were ‘significantly’ more likely to be verbally and physically aggressive to men than vice versa.

As a teenage female relative is fond of remarking, ‘No shit, Sherlock!’ The study’s conclusions simply echo the consensus of a vast number of earlier studies, but the media always present such findings as astonishing news, as if the findings were controversial, and such studies therefore probably suspect.

The second item is an article written by Shona Sibary, Confessions of an intimate terrorist. It’s refreshing to see a woman being so honest about her behaviour towards an intimate partner.

I’m still going through the emails sent to me whilst I was away in Detroit, so I was interested to read this perceptive piece written by Paul Elam and published before my return to the UK. It contains some material on the article he expected from Jessica Roy, a Time journalist, in the light of her tweets during the conference. We put up a link to the piece a few hours ago. I’ve just read it for a second time. I don’t think I’ve ever read an article packed with so many misrepresentations and unwarranted assertions. If I hadn’t personally met the woman, I’d swear she hadn’t attended the event, but picked up a few morsels from a particularly vile feminist infiltrator at the conference.

It has to be said we’re not fans of Penelope Leach, but in this article we think she hits the nail squarely on the head.

Anne Cools is a highly regarded Canadian Senator of 30 years’ standing. We had a lengthy 1:1 discussion, and she was very encouraging about our efforts to find political solutions to end the state’s assaults on the human rights of men and boys. Her conference speech is well worth catching, and it’s here.

One of the most stupid taxpayer-funded initiatives we know of in the education sector is the initiative to drive up the proportion of engineering students who are women. For decades long-suffering taxpayers have financed initiatives designed to drive up the proportion of women in STEM subjects, and in the case of engineering the results have been woeful. Even today, women take up fewer than 10% of university places on engineering courses. This is in stark contrast to medicine, where 70% of students today are women. The small proportion of men studying medicine is not, of course, seen as a problem to be fixed by government initiatives. The reasons women are drawn to medicine rather than engineering are perfectly well understood, yet ignored. They include:

– women’s preference for people-centred work
– choice of specialism (women are inclined to become GPs rather than work in A&E, for example)
– appreciation from patients
– high status
– high job security
– high pay (the average GP earns about £110,000 p.a.)
– work is close to home
– pleasant working environment
– flexible working hours

It’s known that a lower proportion of female graduates than male graduates take up careers in engineering, and if they do enter the profession, they’re more likely to leave it at some point. Few female engineers return to the profession after having children. So the taxpayer is funding initiatives to train women who will (on average) make a poorer use of taxpayers’ investment. We don’t have figures on engineers, but it’s known the average female doctor will work half the hours over a career compared with the average male doctor – which, along with the specialisms chosen by female doctors, are prime causes of many of the crises facing the NHS. We’d expect the hours worked over their careers by female engineering graduates to be well under half those of their male colleagues.

The state’s response to few women wishing to study engineering is predictable, it’s spending yet more money trying to push water uphill with a stick. The state is going to bribe women with taxpayers’ money to do a course they presumably wouldn’t otherwise do. Let’s remind ourselves who’s paying for this initiative. 72% of the incomes tax collected in the UK is paid by men, and only 28% by women.

Brunel University has been advertising a Women in Engineering programme. The ‘overview’ on the website:

The Women in Engineering programme at Brunel University aims to support female graduates attain their full potential in the engineering profession. The programme consists of personal professional development training, visits to industry and a mentoring scheme, which will provide opportunity for contact between students and senior women and men in the sector where you wish to develop your career. This programme aims to help you promote yourself as an engineer, have a better understanding of the career paths and opportunities available to you, and develop a network of key contacts to help you rise to the top of your profession.
For the academic year starting in September 2014, the Women in Engineering programme at Brunel University has 40 scholarships for Home/EU applicants, covering both the MSc course fees of £7,750 and a living allowance of £15,000.

These MSc courses are of one year’s duration. Each female student will receive £22,750 that her male colleagues won’t. The total cost to the taxpayer of this insane programme could be as high as £910,000. The lunatics truly have taken over the asylum.

As we learned from our FoI request some months ago, there’s only one way for male students to be eligible for these scholarships. They have to have had gender reassignment surgery, or be in the process of ‘transitioning’.

I met a number of reporters at last week’s conference near Detroit, and had a lengthy conversation with Jessica Roy of Time magazine. My thanks to Ray for pointing me to her article which is everything you’d expect from a woman who describes herself as ‘a journalist who thinks and writes frequently about women’s issues’. She clearly doesn’t think and write frequently about men’s issues, and the article is a travesty on many levels. But it’s publicity, and at this stage in the war against the enemies of men and boys, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.