I done. Check me back when you can pass a basic comprehension test - read a passage and answer a few questions on the passage. We talking Std 5 literacy.

How do you know who is innocent and who is not? Trinidad is far more corrupt than the US. In the US - 2014 data shows that 4% of those people on death penalty are wrongfully there. You really have no ideas about who is innocent and who is not. There are different rules for the different layers of society. Justice in TT is for the rich you have no idea who is innocent and who is not! We do know that the police beat the crap out of accused to admit and sign statements - it happens everyday. It is more expensive to execute those on death row than to house them in prison. What about having a better education system??? We don't want it - Trinidadians overwhelmingly prefer a system where the smarter children go to the 'brite' schools which is one of the reasons why the state schools are breeding grounds for criminals, you cannot have one without the other, so Trinidadians WANT to have breeding grounds for criminals. You statement about "Children's Health Fund" is revealing that you are an apologist for the current party in government. You don't want to solve any problems - its not in your interest, mayhem and corruption is in your interest.

The police is one of the fundamental problems in the lives of the ordinary person and there seem to be no end to this. Smart people will stay the hell away from police and have nothing to do with them. Even if you are a witness to a crime and have valuable information the risks are TOO high in dealing with the police. This risk and issue also extends to the judiciary. We need to keep clear of these institutions if we want to live long. This is not a Trinidad problem but a problem you will find in many countries - especially the US. There are more and more stories of police brutality and unnecessary use of force by police. They attract the WRONG people (the Judiciary also attracts the WRONG people). People who are insecure and need to beat up and violate the rights of others. In the US, they arrest the wrong people, beat confessions out of them and now in the US almost 7 million people are locked up. If you are a black male in the US there is a 1/3 chance that you will end up in jail - and more often than no unjustifiably so. They also kill innocent people on death penalty. Stupid Trinis are clamoring for the death penalty - but you may not like it when your innocent friend gets the rap for something he didn't do. There was a case recently in the US where parents called the police to teach their teenaged son a lesson for taking their car without permission. The cops chased the guy and shot him dead. Countless other cases where police kill homeless and unarmed people. People like to blame drugs and gangs for crime but the REAL PROBLEM ARE THE POLITICIANS, THE POLICE AND THE JUDICIARY.

You are fundamentally right and the notion that wider society should be sympathetic or even willing to fund these wasteful ventures is destructive to our existence.

The change in the role of women in western culture is going to be the pitfall of modern civilization that will bring the end of this era. Men and women evolved with certain key roles and have specific needs that are in balance. Men evolved to protect and provide for women and even risk their lives for them and family, even treating women as property. Women had the extremely important role for managing and caring for children. Those roles are now completely upset and men are being marginalized and are disinterested in education and even relationships. As a well know author put it men rowed the boat from the left and women from the right. Now that women prefer to row that boat from the left we have two people rowing the boat from the left and no one is rowing from the right. So the boat can only go in circles! Men are scoffed at when they take an interest in children - they are no longer teachers, and THE Family Court see them as ATMs. No wonder our children are are being neglected from all angles. This is the product of feminism.

Men are wising up one by one as they hear about what happens to other men in divorce. Eventually men will refuse to have long term relationships and even children with women. This is happening in the most industrialized countries in the world.

The other major causation is industrialization, which has made the work place friendly to women where strength and the risk of limb is no longer there so women infiltrate the work place displacing men.

Civilization was not prepared to deal with these changes over such a short period and there will be a high price for this and we are already paying for it in terms of crime and antisocial behaviors we are seeing out there. There are more important things than the rights of women and that is the right of society to survive.

I recall when this was first published, I read it long after and I wanted to comment but I did not. So, I am glad the express republished this.

I am going to presume that your “simple facts” are based on your anecdotal cases from whence you sat, not scientific findings but just your experience – fair enough.
Dana, some of your ideas are flawed and I cannot say if its because you have embedded feminist principles that drive your position. I would like to point out why. You seem to be of the view that fathers are to blame for a lot of the problems faced by single mothers bringing up problem children. First, it is wrong to lump all fathers in one bucket. Fatherhood, unlike motherhood is often not an elective choice. There are many men out there that have been trapped into being a father when all they wanted (just like the mother) wassex. Prospective mothers have a lot of choices available from aborting the child (whether illegal or immoral or not) to abandoning the child to the state and even giving up the child for adoption. Some of these options may or may not apply depending on the local law but they generally do throughout the western world. We know that many single mothers get pregnant against the wishes of their male partners – its just a ‘simple fact’. Men on the other hand have no choices – if they tried to encourage the woman to have an abortion its frowned upon and they can even get charged with murder – it’s a ‘simple fact’. Men are viewed solely from the perspective that they contributed to the making of the child and they must pay up – even when an adult woman rapes an under aged boy and gets pregnant, in the US he is liable for child support payments. As a matter of fact if a man want to have a child without the ‘burden’ of a wife – there are almost no legally sound options and women have all the options – it’s a ‘simple fact’.
My point is that its fallacious to lump these men (who society calls dead beat dads) with men that actually pursue and become fathers. Quite often these men will WANT to fight for custody, but when they ask around for advice they realize that the LAW and especially the machinery of the FAMILY COURT OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO and family courts in general are against men – it’s a ‘simple fact’ that changes their mind. And of the few that fight are usually well resourced and can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have the resources to properly care for his children etc, still stand a very high chance of loosing to the wife who now has the entire machinery of the law and the state behind her. I know of cases where people working for family court of TT actually work with the mother to prepare a collage of social service reports complete with false accusations of abuse and sexual molestation so that the father don’t stand a chance in court. In the end it’s the children that suffer. The mother gets the children and then complains that she cannot manage - – it’s a ‘simple fact’. There are several other factors that make fathers better parents when they fight for custody but I cannot get into it here – from The Cinderella Syndrome (step father abuse) to the fact that single mothers are less resourced and will stop at nothing to block relationships with the children’s father while the converse is not generally true to the fact that these fathers can provide a better environment and window to a child as he/she grows up in an ever more complex world. And these Dana, are not based on ‘simple facts’ but thoroughly researched, published, replicated and peer reviewed journals worldwide. It’s a fact – not just a simple one – that mothers are more responsible for harm to their children than men. From evolutionary standpoint, if there is one person that is MOST capable and actually have a reason to ensure the safety and protection of a child, IT IS THAT CHILDS biological father it is embedded in his DNA. When mother go to their next male partner the science says that those males are going to push for the marginalization of that unrelated offspring, not just in humans but in most mammalian species.

I will leave at this point as I don’t want this post to be too long. But none of these problems will be solved if Trinidad and especially THE LAW AND COURTS continue to marginalize men and fathers. Divorced men commit suicide more than 5X that of women in Trinidad. The horror that men have to go through to access their children, the scorn of feminist ideology that is embedded in our courts and in folk psychology that is practiced by most of the evaluators – even psychiatrists hired by the court and the sheer bias that they have to go through is a good reason for them to give up fatherhood all together. Men are in fact seen as the enemy in Family Court and he is presumed an abuser of both the woman and children. I am sorry to say that mothers especially single mothers have MORE than an equal responsibility for this problem and as with everything else we hold them blameless. Most of the rest of the blame lie with the courts and the people who work there.

Goodbye!

You really need to change this picture - it makes me laugh every time i glance your articles.

WOW!!!

Congratulations. A very well written article. Lets see what your feminist compatriots will say about you blaming the victim!! You know that is a heresy in the feminist denomination.

Sure they are different today - especially in the past 10 yrs. Today they rub shoulders with the private sector, drink their champagne and lime with them where ever. And look forward to lucrative jobs in the private sector.

Bottom line - they have changed - decades ago they would have shut down a delinquent institution long before it destabilized the economy. Today - they wouldn't for various reasons from personal interests, ethics, politics or just scared of legal implications and the power of these corrupt businessmen. BUT its not due to "unreasonable expectations" OR "deeper structural problems" OR coinciding with global events. They were breaking laws and action had to be taken they needed to be shut down very early and they never acted. OR they needed to raise alarms if their hands were tied. They must take responsibility MR Rambaran. There is NO testing going on - The test is over and the Central Bank FAILED! Its the people now that have to take up the tab for Central Banks incompetence. AND you will probably have to relive this event because you are unwilling to admit failure.

This incompetence in managing the financial does not end with the Clico matter. Central bank allow all the banks to have an unreasonable spread between borrowing and deposit rates that is unprecedented worldwide. The allows the banks to take the public's money and give them nothing, keeping all the profits for themselves. There is also Association of Banks that should be disallowed - at least from the point of view of anything the controls anti competitive behaviors. And then there are the problems in other financial areas - the Stock Market and the SEC which is powerless. It tollerates a wide set of unethical behaviors in the trading of shares. If i got a list of all the trades on the stock market for the past 20 years and plotted all the news making events for business - I can identify who where the insiders - I am sure the SEC knows who they are - but the ignore the problem until something big happens - the WISE/TCL/CEMEX fiasco a few years ago and now the FCB matter. No one pays and your friends get rich and I am sure one day it will be your turn. But the small man pays. Just like on Wall Street, the gaps keep getting wider between the rich and poor. If you get caught with a few grams of marijuana you will get locked up but you can steal millions of dollars through illicit schemes and NO one pays.

Does not make sense - The headline says "Broadband Technology far behind" - and the article is comparing a set of other factors like public policy, knowledge, vision etc. FAIL.

Almost anywhere in Trinidad you can get first world broadband at reasonable prices thanks to Flow, sorry Tobago they forgot about you, but say what you get more of the public pie and voting power/capita than anybody else in Trinidad so that's fair. You can always rely on TSTTs Blink in true third world style. As for mobile networks - a lot could be improved in terms of how expensive and how much adopters there are - but I don't know if they were covering that - we still have two reasonable competitors in that department.

I was merely pointing out the pitfalls in such an expectation. It would be nice if you can make an example of these practitioners of misandry. But there are laws and procedures and they are worded in a way that would put this judge/magistrate in the right because it gives her leeway. In the Family Court there are much better examples and it happens as a matter of rule. The other hurdle is that almost no one in the system will stand up against the oppression of men. Feminism is too rooted in our education and culture to the point where this form of bigotry is legitimized. Too many men think feminism is about equality so every civilized person stands with this. Also the CJ (or anyone in his position) will support the feminist viewpoint while playing tokenism toward men rights. The best way to deal with this is by making it a point when elections comes about. Dont accept the Ministry of Gender affairs as a valid institution when it is merely there to promote misandry. Let them know these things. Be vocal about these issues and let others know that this form of bigotry is unacceptable. Start online debates when ever there is the opportunity. Go to Trinidadian and Caribbean feminists blogs (esp those in the newspapers) and point out the flaws in their arguments, it really throws them off. Feminists' ideology stand on exceedingly weak ground. They even have their own definitions of epistemological concepts (which is a scientific heresy). Understand the history of feminism and the actions of its core followers and even criminal and unethical ideas of its protagonists, and you will find much of their weaknesses.