Grouch, grouch!

As many readers of this blog will be aware, Mike has had a lot of battles to get this blog up and keep it running. It was originally just his personal blog but he decided to change focus and make it a group blog with a focus on male/female issues -- to be called "The Man Blog". Despite the tough image he often tries to project, however, I see Mike as a bit of a softie. He not only tries to be civil to Leftists but sometimes he actually trusts them! He did that with his new "Man Blog" by giving some Leftists full access to the relevant blogger.com account. And they promptly sabotaged the site and took it down! Nice guys! But not at all surprising for Leftist hate-merchants.

So Mike took a week or two to recover from that blow and restarted the blog as "A Western Heart" with a more limited group of contributors. What only contributors to the site know, however, is that Mike then ran into troubles with blogger.com. For some reason, the software would allow him access to only a limited amount of webspace -- meaning that he had to delete old posts before any new posts would come up. Mike harangued blogger.com about it but it seems that a bug is a bug is a bug.

So Mike has now moved the blog from his old address to the present one and at last all is going well. My minor grouch, however, is that all the old posts are no longer online. They have effectively been lost to the world. Mind you, they do still exist in highly compressed form in the bowels of a blogger.com database and anyone who posted them can still retrieve them but the general public has no access to them.

Does that matter? Not much I guess but I myself don't like being beaten so I am inclined to re-post at least some of the old posts here. Am I being stupid? Let me know in the comments box what you think. I reproduce below the first post I put up on Mike's blog.






BRITISH GALS NO LONGER LADIES

And it's no improvement

"The number of women who are seeking treatment at hospital casualty units after being injured in drunken catfights is rising sharply, consultants warn. Late-night brawls between women who have been binge-drinking are resulting in horrific injuries such as facial wounds caused by "glassing", broken jaws and bleeding scalps, where girls have had their hair pulled out.

Hospital staff, already under pressure from the rising numbers of emergency admissions, say that they are struggling to cope with a "disturbing" increase in the number of intoxicated women requiring treatment. In some areas, the number of admissions has tripled in five years.

Don MacKechnie, the chairman of the British Medical Association's accident and emergency committee and a consultant at Rochdale Infirmary in Lancashire, said that casualty units were being inundated with injured young women, particularly at weekends. "There has certainly been a big increase and some of the fights are really vicious," he said. "It is not just cuts and grazes, but fractured hands as a result of them punching other people, and broken cheekbones."

Amjid Muhammed, a consultant at Calderdale Royal Infirmary in Halifax, West Yorkshire, said that about 45 of the 300 patients seen in accident and emergency over a typical weekend were women wounded in drunken brawls. Five years ago, the typical figure was less than 15. He blamed the three-fold rise on the increasing tendency of groups of young women to binge-drink. "There are women who are intoxicated who are hurting themselves by toppling over or having an accident. Then there are women who are injured in fights. It used to be men but now women are turning up in this state - and even worse than the men in some cases," he said. Mr Muhammed said that one worrying new trend was "glassing" - women hitting other females with glasses or bottles. "That was something we never used to see, but I have seen a few cases recently," he said. "It causes quite serious injuries - a facial glassing can be very nasty."

Mr Muhammed said that drunken women were putting pressure on already stretched A & E departments. "They are adding to the growing numbers of people that are coming in that need to be seen. Every extra patient adds to the queue." The extent of the spiralling workload facing Britain's casualty units was underlined earlier this month by figures from the Department of Health showing that the number of admissions rose by up to a third in some hospitals in the second quarter of this year, compared with the same period last year.

The rising tide of female violence has been blamed on the growing "ladette" drinking culture, where women ape the worst excesses of loutish male behaviour. Recent Government statistics have revealed that almost a third of 18 to 24-year-old women binge drink. Last year, a report produced for the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit estimated that treating illness and injuries caused by alcohol cost the National Health Service o1.7 billion a year. According to doctors, an increasing amount is spent on treating women.

A study by the Schools Health Education Unit in Exeter published last month found that teenage girls were now drinking more alcohol than boys. Research by Lancaster University published this month will show that children as young as 13 are displaying such "ladette behaviour". Teachers interviewed in the study said that girls were drinking at earlier ages and had become aggressively assertive and arrogant. One teacher from a secondary school in the north of England said: "Their life is about going out and drinking, and it starts very early. I was shocked when I found out that some of the 13- and 14-year-olds quite regularly go out drinking at the weekend."

More here