This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
My Home Page. Email John Ray here. My other blogs: "Tongue Tied" , "Dissecting Leftism" , "Australian Politics" , "Education Watch International" , "Immigration Watch" , "Greenie Watch" , "The Psychologist" (A summary blog). Those blogs are also backed up. See here for details
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This page is a backup. The primary version of this blog is HERE
25 October 2024
Poll: Most Americans Support Requiring Photo ID, Proof of Citizenship to Vote
Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—support both early voting policies as well as photo ID and proof of citizenship requirements for elections, according to a new poll.
Despite the ongoing divide between elected Republicans and Democrats over requiring photo ID to vote, a whopping 86% of Americans support it.
The poll comes just days from the presidential election with voting underway across the country.
Support varied by political party, with 98% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 84% of independents supporting requiring photo ID to vote.
Another 83% of Americans support “requiring people who are registering to vote for the first time to provide proof of citizenship.” By party, 96% of Republicans, 66% of Democrats, and 84% of independents agree.
Voter ID hits at the intersection of Republican concerns about election integrity and illegal immigration, which has soared in recent years.
Many Republicans argue that illegal immigrant voting is a major issue and that those voters trend toward Democratic candidates.
Some Democrats have pushed back on voter ID efforts, saying they are an attempt to suppress or discourage certain groups from voting and that illegal immigrants are not allowed to vote. Republicans have pushed back saying Democrat officials have found workarounds to not enforce restrictions on illegal immigrants voting.
“Partisans’ views of most of the election law policies are generally stable; however, Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions have each shifted significantly on one of them,” Gallup said. “Democrats are now 14 points more likely than they were in 2022 to support requiring photo identification to vote, and Republicans’ current 57% support for early voting—while not significantly different from 2022—is down from 74% in a 2016 survey.”
The poll asked about other election policies as well:
“Smaller majorities of Americans—60% each—favor automatic voter registration, whereby citizens are registered when they do business with state agencies such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, and sending absentee ballot applications to all eligible voters,” Gallup said. “In contrast, majorities of Americans oppose removing people from voter registration lists if they haven’t voted in any elections in five years (64%) and limiting the number of drop boxes or locations for returning absentee ballots (58%).”
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"Free" Over-the-Counter Birth Control?
The Biden-Harris administration has proposed a rule implementing Obamacare’s controversial contraception mandate—again. Under the proposal announced Monday, certain health insurance plans would be required to cover over-the counter birth control.
The text of the law creating Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, doesn’t explicitly require that plans cover contraceptives, so how did we get here?
What’s the Contraception Mandate?
Obamacare, passed by Congress and signed into law in 2010 by President Barack Obama, requires health insurance companies to cover certain kinds of preventive services with no enrollee cost-sharing. It instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to specify the types of preventive services for women that insurance plans must cover.
In 2011, HHS issued guidelines that insurance plans must include coverage for all contraceptive methods and sterilization procedures approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Plans that already covered millions of women were “grandfathered” and exempted from the requirement to provide preventive services with no cost-sharing. Many of these plans are still in effect today.
The contraception mandate sparked more than a decade of litigation, including famous victories for religious liberty at the Supreme Court for companies such as Hobby Lobby and groups such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns.
Regulations for religious and moral exemptions to HHS’ contraception mandate were strengthened under Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump. Last year, the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a rule to weaken those exemptions again. That rule has not been finalized yet.
Like the original contraception mandate, this week’s proposal to cover over-the-counter contraception is possible because Congress didn’t actually lay out the nitty-gritty, specific requirements in the text of Obamacare. Policy details were left to the discretion of the executive branch.
Proposed Biden-Harris Change
A press release from the Department of Health and Human Services lays out the gist of the changes.
“[M]ost group health plans and health insurance issuers” must cover over-the-counter methods of birth control such as emergency contraception, condoms, and pills “without cost sharing or requiring a prescription.”
The proposal also requires insurance plans to cover “a broader array” of pills and intrauterine devices, or IUDs, the press release says. Right now, plans must cover only one drug in different categories of contraception methods.
Exactly how this change would be implemented remains to be seen. The Biden-Harris administration is seeking public comment during a 60-day countdown as soon as the proposed rule formally hits the Federal Register. If finalized, the rule would mark another major change for contraception coverage under Obamacare.
Birth Control
The new rule is significant for several reasons. The Food and Drug Administration only recently approved an over-the-counter birth control pill. It’s called OPill and is sold at retailers such as Walgreens, Costco, and Amazon for about $20 per month.
Additional brands will follow suit and seek FDA approval to be sold over the counter. Another brand already has started the process for its drug, Zena.
Not everyone is cheering over-the-counter pills, though.
Beyond altering a woman’s menstrual cycle, birth control pills significantly affect a woman’s hormones. They can have mild to severe side effects—both mentally and psychologically—that vary widely from person to person.
Some experts are understandably concerned that medication that could have such drastic effects on the body would be available without consultation with a doctor. It even would be available to minors without their parent’s knowledge or consent.
Emergency Contraception
The HHS mandate also includes coverage for emergency contraception such as Plan B (levonorgestrel) and Ella (ulipristal acetate).
Until 2022, the label on both medications warned that the drug could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. For those who believe human life begins at fertilization, this means that these drugs could induce an abortion.
In 2022, the FDA modified the Plan B label to remove this warning, but it remains the case for Ella.
Plan B is available over the counter, but Ella requires a prescription. Under current rules, both Plan B and Ella are covered under Obamacare only if the woman has a prescription.
Under the Biden-Harris proposal, Plan B would be covered if a person purchases it over the counter.
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Why Trump at McDonald’s Matters
This week, Donald Trump set the political world afire with an appearance at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
There, he donned the famous McDonald’s apron, cooked up some fries and served customers at a drive-thru window. All the while, he looked like he was enjoying himself thoroughly—which he certainly was. Trump has the momentum, and he knows it.
But it’s more than that.
Whatever Trump’s other failings, at his root, Trump likes people. And not just people of his class or who share his background. He likes dealing with human beings.
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to commemorate Oct. 7 with Trump, where he met with the family of an American hostage held by Hamas in Gaza. Trump connected with them on an emotional level. Whether it’s Jewish Americans from New Jersey dealing with the horror and tragedy of having their son held by the world’s most vicious terrorist group or Pennsylvania voters who just want to meet Trump and pick up a Happy Meal, Trump is comfortable with his fellow Americans because he’s unapologetically what he is.
That’s simply not true of Kamala Harris.
Off-script, Harris remains a disaster. Her “60 Minutes” interview with Bill Whitaker was filled with word slaw, spin, and platitudinous drivel. Her Fox News interview with Bret Baier flew completely off the rails, with Harris unable to defend even the most basic decisions by the Biden administration.
She took time off the campaign trail to prepare for an NBC News interview as well as a CNN town hall—events that, for a normal candidate, would require zero prep time in a hotel conference room. Then again, this is the same woman whose staff had to hold a “mock dinner” to prepare her for a dinner with Washington journalists and newsmakers. Axios reported, “Harris aides even considered including wine in the mock prep so Harris could practice with a glass or two.”
What’s more, Harris seems to be a permanent resident of the uncanny valley. She does a mildly credible job of appearing warm and human … but only just. Her interactions always reek of the staged and the manipulated. Every move is calculated—and transparently so. Twelve-time Best Actress nominee Katharine Hepburn once reportedly described Meryl Streep’s acting as too mechanical: “Click, click, click,” she reportedly told biographer Scott Berg, “referring to the wheels turning inside (Streep’s) head.”
That’s Harris with actual, real human beings. And it shows.
Which is why the media have gone apoplectic about Trump’s McDonald’s visit. Trump’s critics pointed out that the McDonald’s was actually formally closed for his visit and claimed that the event was “staged”—a peculiar critique, given that Trump has been the victim of two assassination attempts, and presidential campaigns require places of business to be secured before candidates enter.
The critics even went so far as to attack the local franchise for its health record years ago. The desperation comes from an obvious place: This was a Trump win.
And it was a Trump win because Trump wasn’t pretending. He didn’t don jeans and a T-shirt in order to cosplay as one of the boys, Tim Walz-style. Instead, he showed up in his traditional suit, put on an apron, and started handing out fries and chitchatting with the customers.
It was a moment of authenticity, and it showed as such, compared with the polyester joy presented by the Harris campaign.
Harris can’t shake the fundamental reality that she has been, for decades, a highly stylized political product. Kamala 1.0 was a progressive prosecutor; Kamala 2.0 was a hard-charging prosecutor; Kamala 3.0 was the furthest left member of the U.S. Senate; Kamala 4.0 was a moderate. And Kamala 5.0 is whatever she needs to be at any given moment.
But what she truly needs to be is human. And that’s the problem: She isn’t.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/24/why-trump-mcdonalds-matters/
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China accuses Australia of ‘systemic racism and hate crimes’ as Xi meets Putin in Russia
The Peace of Westphalia ended a long episode of war. It said that governments should not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. Regrettable that Australia has not followed that
China has accused Australia of “systemic racism and hate crimes” and “hypocrisy” after an Australian diplomat raised international concerns about human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet in the UN.
In some of the sharpest comments launched at Canberra by Beijing during the “stabilisation” era, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Li Jian on Wednesday evening denounced Australia for criticising China publicly.
“Out of their ideological bias, Australia, the US and a handful of other Western countries stoked confrontation at multilateral platforms for their selfish political interest,” said the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, in response to an apparent dorothy dixer by China’s national broadcaster CCTV.
“Australia, long plagued by systemic racism and hate crimes, have severely violated the rights of refugees and immigrants, and left Indigenous people with vulnerable living conditions,” the Chinese government spokesman continued.
“Australian soldiers have committed abhorrent crimes in Afghanistan and other countries during their military operations overseas.
“These Western countries turn a blind eye to their severe human rights issues at home but in the meantime point their fingers at other countries. This says a lot about their hypocrisy on human rights,” he said.
Anthony Albanese said Australia had been “clear and consistent” with China in its concerns over Beijing’s human rights abuses.
“We, of course, will always stand up for Australia’s interests. And when it comes to China, we’ve said we’ll cooperate where we can, we’ll disagree where we must, and we’ll engage in our national interest” Mr Albanese said at a press conference in Samoa on Thursday.
“And we’ve raised issues of human rights with China. We’ve done that in a consistent and clear way,” the PM said.
Opposition foreign Affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham said Australia’s ambassador to the UN had been “factual, balanced and considered”.
“Australia has acknowledged that none of us is perfect on human rights, yet that is what China pretends,” senator Birmingham said.
But he said the government’s words underscored that Foreign Minister Penny Wong had fallen “a long way short of delivering on the tough talk of sanctions” she made before the last election.
The diplomatic tussle comes as President Xi meets with Vladimir Putin at the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan, a key plank in their shared efforts to increase China and Russia’s voices in the international system and reduce the clout of America and its allies.
The group’s original members include countries with strategic ties with America, such as India, and countries that are openly hostile to Washington, such as Russia.
Chinese state media has hailed the grouping, which it argues is reshaping the international system to give more clout to marginalised non-Western countries.
China’s official newsagency Xinhua noted that Xi had compared the five original members of the BRICS group, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to the fingers of one hand.
“They are short and long if extended, but form a powerful fist if clenched together,” Xi reportedly said.
China’s fresh diplomatic fight with Australia — redolent of the near daily tirades it launched at the Morrison government for much of 2020 and 2021 — demonstrates the intense struggle that continues below the surface of “stabilisation”, the Albanese government’s euphemism for its modest expectations for relations with Beijing in the Xi era.
China’s president has ordered his diplomats to show “fighting spirit” when their country is criticised.
Earlier this week, Australia’s UN Ambassador James Larsen told the UN General Assembly’s human rights committee that Canberra, on behalf of its partners, had urged Beijing to implement all the recommendations made by a UN report into human rights abuses in Xinjiang, home to most of China’s Muslim Uighur population.
The Australian Ambassador noted that rather than meaningfully address the UN’s “well-founded concerns”, China had instead labelled the UN assessment “illegal and void”.
Mr Larsen called on Beijing to allow “unfettered and meaningful” access to Xinjiang and Tibet for independent observers, including from the UN, to evaluate the human rights situation.
“No country has a perfect human rights record, but no country is above fair scrutiny of its human rights obligations,” the Australian diplomat said.
“It is incumbent on all of us not to undermine international human rights commitments that benefit us all, and for which all states are accountable,” he said.
Chinese diplomats were able to blunt the criticism by rounding up countries — almost entirely members of its Belt and Road Initiative — to support its position or withhold support for the Australian motion.
Pakistan, a huge recipient of Chinese financial support, delivered a joint counter statement on behalf of 80 countries that said any issues related to Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet were internal matters for China.
Australia’s joint statement was supported by Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the US.
Benjamin Herscovitch, an expert on the bilateral relationship, at Australian National University, said despite the “diplomatic sparring”, both the Australian and Chinese governments would keep prioritising their respective trade and investment agendas.
“This is sharper rhetoric than we usually see from either Canberra or Beijing in the recent stabilisation era. But it’s unlikely to cause serious turbulence in bilateral ties.
“Disagreements over human rights are baked into the Australia-China relationship,” Dr Herscovitch told The Australian.
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22 October, 2024
23 October, 2024
Liz Cheney versus Uncle Donny
For years, I’ve suggested an essential method to deciding who to support for president would be based on who you trusted to run a McDonald’s for a day or watch your children for an afternoon. Perhaps intimidated by the former president’s success at the former measure, Cheney suggested at her event with Vice President Harris this weekend that the latter measure would disqualify Donald Trump — who she endorsed in 2020 — as an unacceptable giver of childcare. “If you wouldn’t hire someone to babysit your kids, don’t make them president,” she said to Harris’s laughter.
Among the valid complaints about Donald Trump, many of which I share, this one makes no sense to me at all. Obviously and to the man’s credit he has one of the best relationships any president in the modern era has had with their children and grandchildren, unmarked by any type of dysfunction except in the fever pitch of online leftists.
The Donald Trump babysitting experience only runs into the danger that he will spoil them to the nth degree, ordering them the giant box of McNuggets with all the sauces, teaching them how to hit wiffle balls off the back porch and giving them free reign to watch every Disney+ movie they want to their heart’s content. You’ll come home from the night out with the wife and find them on a sugar and Moana high demanding that Uncle Donny come back again as soon as possible.
An evening with Liz Cheney, on the other hand, is assured to result in them casting paranoid eyes at mommy and daddy, reversing their audio devices to spy on the other rooms and demanding to know if you’re all paid up on your camera-issued parking tickets. You know they’re important for maintaining roads and bridges, right? Just hope she doesn’t try to teach them how to shoot dart guns, or they’ll put your eye out.
The New York Times’s coverage of Trump’s McDonald’s escapade included throwing an unbelievable amount of shade at him throwing salt over his shoulder, suggesting it was an act of paranoia, waste and failure of efficiency. We’re entering the silly season of 2024 when Democrats and their fellow travelers just start to throw everything at the wall, attempting desperately to achieve some kind of stability as their candidate flails toward a likely loss. A winning campaign at this moment would be focused on the economy, security, stability and defending the rights of women. Instead they’re rolling out Liz Cheney, Usher and Lizzo. Given the choice of those three, I’m definitely going for a different sitter.
https://thespectator.com/topic/condition-let-liz-cheney-babysit-kids/
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CHOGM: UK Government rules out slavery reparations and apology
THE UK Government has ruled out paying reparations to countries affected by the slave trade or making a formal apology.
Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) in Samoa later this week, amid calls for reparations from Labour MPs and Caribbean governments.
At the summit, leaders will elect a new secretary general for the Commonwealth to replace Patricia Scotland, who held the position from 2016.
All three candidates in the running have called for reparations for countries which were plundered during the slave trade.
But the Prime Minister’s official spokesperson has ruled out compensatory payments and an apology from the Government.
A Downing Street spokesperson said: “Reparation’s not on the agenda for the Chogm meeting.
“The Government’s position on this has not changed, we do not pay reparations.
“The Prime Minister’s attending this week’s summit to discuss shared challenges and opportunities faced by the Commonwealth including driving growth across our economies.”
Asked about an apology, the spokesperson added: “The position on apology remains the same, we won’t be offering an apology at Chogm, but we will continue to engage with partners on the issues as we work with them to tackle the pressing challenges of today and indeed for the future generations.”
Five Labour MPs told The Guardian on Monday that the Government should at least be open to discussing reparations. Among others, Nadia Whittome (above) said the UK must open “up a dialogue with those countries whose wealth we extracted, about the impact of colonialism and slavery on their society and how the wrongs of the past can be righted”.
A Commonwealth spokesperson said: “The Commonwealth has historically facilitated frank conversations about difficult issues that have resulted in positive outcomes. Reparatory justice, which is more than just about reparations, may be discussed at Chogm, if any government proposes it. If so, the heads of government will decide how the discussions will proceed.’
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/uk-government-rules-slavery-reparations-124303778.html?guccounter=1
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Elon Musk's ex Grimes sparks debate by claiming she became 'way less gay' after getting pregnant
Elon Musk's ex-girlfriend Grimes sparked a debate on her X/Twitter account Tuesday, proclaiming she felt a shift in her sexuality after she became pregnant.
The Canadian singer-songwriter, 36, put out a statement and a follow-up question on the social media platform now owned by her ex.
'I became way less gay after I was pregnant' said the Flesh Without Blood artist, who shares three children with the Tesla CEO. 'My ability to focus on reading and writing went way up, as did my general creativity, but my ability to focus on technical things went *way* down.'
Grimes asked her 1.3 million followers, 'Is this all explained by hormones?'
The SpaceX CEO and Grimes are parents to four-year-old son X Æ A-12 Musk; three-year-old daughter Exa Dark Sideræl; and son Techno Mechanicus, whose exact age has not been publicly disclosed
The Vancouver native, whose full name is Claire Elise Boucher, answered questions from followers who responded to her initial inquiry.
When a follower said that her gay feelings hinged on 'being in a heterosexual relationship' with a less-agreeable partner, Grimes said in response, 'I feel like that [should] make me more gay tho.'
One user told Grimes that the platform owned and operated by Musk wasn't the best place to get good answers on the topic.
'Ask a doctor, X is not the best place, because you'll get 100 different theories,' the user told Grimes, who said she was 'kinda curious [about] the theories' floating around on the subject.
Grimes noted that she 'was reading [about] grey matter loss but improved neuroplasticity associated [with] pregnancy.'
Grimes said her 'testosterone is way down' after a user suggested she get her testosterone and DHEA levels checked, adding that she planned on following up with the doctor about it.
Asked for clarification on what she meant in saying 'by being less gay,' the musical artist said she was 'just less interested in dating girls.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13990243/elon-musk-ex-grimes-gay-pregnant.html
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Australian councillor says he was forced to fly back to Russia to speak freely
London: A regional West Australian councillor says he has travelled to Russia to speak openly about how free speech is suppressed in Australia and warned he has been persecuted for his views on Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Adrian McRae, a member of Port Hedland Council, doubled down on his praise for “Russian democracy” ahead of the three-day BRICS summit in Kazan, a city in south-west Russia, telling journalists he has been slurred as being “pro-Putin” for questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and for praising the Russian electoral system.
McRae, who contested the last federal election as a candidate for The Great Australian Party, founded by former WA senator and conspiracy theorist Rod Culleton, in the seat of Durack, previously travelled to Moscow in March to act as an independent observer for the presidential election.
“The reason we are at 11.59pm on the nuclear military conflict clock, it’s primarily because ... if the world understood what you know, those of us who dare to look outside the mainstream narrative for information,” McRae told journalists on Tuesday.
“If the world understood both sides of the conflict in Ukraine ... and they were able to talk openly and discuss it, then the decency of, I think people all over the world, would not allow their governments to get away with the nonsense narratives that were constantly being spoon-fed through our television sets.”
McRae, whose comments have previously been condemned by Australia’s Ukrainian community and WA Premier Roger Cook, said he had been turned into a villain by Australia’s mainstream media for airing his “informed” opinions, as well for his recent successful council motion, which urged authorities nationwide to immediately stop the use of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The motion passed by the town’s council, based around 1800 kilometres north of Perth, was centred on an unverified study from Canada in 2023 which found “high levels of residual plasmid DNA present in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 modified mRNA vaccine”.
“The fact that we no longer have any sort of semblance of free speech in our country – I have to come here to Russia to talk in a mainstream way because such a thing will never be permitted in Australia,” McRae said.
“Again, the usual smear is I’m pro-Putin, in the hope that this slur will be enough to make anything that I say across Australia be viewed as some sort of conspiracy or lie, which is quite frightening.”
He said he’d previously travelled to Russia with preconceived media-driven notions about the country and was embarrassed to say that everything he saw “left any democratic and election process that I’ve seen, certainly in my country or anywhere in the West, it in its wake”.
McRae’s latest comments were widely shared on several pro-Russian channels on social media following a weekend interview on Sputnik News, where he applauded Russian state-owned media organisations for “giving an alternate voice”.
Along with John Shipton, the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, McRae has travelled as a guest to the summit, the biggest gathering of foreign leaders in Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
BRICS is an alliance started by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The meeting comes 19 months after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on war crimes charges.
In the same weekend interview McRae quoted Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi political theorist, while attacking mainstream media reporting on the recent Russian election. The comments were first reported by the North West Telegraph.
“I think it was the German philosopher that said: ‘You have to have an enemy figure to create a cohesive society’. And of course, the enemy figure at the moment in the Australian media, in the Australian narrative is Russia,” he said.
In a social media post following his interview, McRae wrote that he was unsurprised the Australian media was acquainted with Schmitt’s work, since it had applied Schmitt’s “Friend & Foe” theories in “a desperate attempt to destroy my reputation”.
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22 October, 2024 London Police Officer Who Shot Dead Black Man Found Not Guilty of Murder. Why Was He Ever Charged?
A police officer who shot dead black man Chris Kaba in south London after he tried to ram his way out of a police roadblock has been cleared of his murder.
Martyn Blake, a Scotland Yard armed officer, fired a single shot through the windscreen of Chris Kaba’s Audi Q8 killing him, when he tried to escape after being stopped by police in Streatham on the evening of September 5th 2022.
While Kaba’s identity was not known at the time, the vehicle had been linked to two previous firearms incidents including a shooting outside a primary school the night before.
Despite this Mr. Blake, 40, who had an unblemished record with the Metropolitan Police, was charged with murder with prosecutors claiming his actions had not been “reasonably justified”.
The decision to charge him followed a lengthy investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) and consideration by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
However following a three week trial at the Old Bailey a jury took three hours to find him not guilty of murder.
The verdict was greeted with relief by Mr. Blake’s colleagues, friends and family, but will lead to inevitable questions about why he was ever charged in the first place.
Despite being cleared of the criminal charge, Mr. Blake could still have to face a gross misconduct hearing which could result in him being sacked.
Mr. Blake told jurors he genuinely feared for the lives of his colleagues, when Kaba attempted to ram his way through a roadblock in a residential street.
He also told jurors he had not intended to kill Kaba but had simply wanted to stop the car driving at his colleagues.
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Scotland Says There Are 24 Genders
Scotland’s SNP Government has said there are 24 genders in a list of options attached to official guidance for data collection bodies.
Scotland’s SNP Government has been branded “disconnected from the real world” after allowing people to choose their gender from a list with 24 options.
Trans people in the country can choose from options including some more mainstream options like “trans man”, “trans woman”, “genderfluid” and “androgynous”.
But among the two dozen options are other terms like “questioning”, where they do not yet know what gender they are, and “autigender” which is described as “an autistic person (who) thinks about and relates to their gender label… in the context of autism”.
The list was attached last week to guidance for public bodies in Scotland who collect data on sex and gender. It allows them to classify freehand answers given to questions about trans status.
But it comes after First Minister John Swinney in July confirmed there were only two genders.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/21/snp-says-there-are-24-genders/
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Australia: Big demand for State selective schools
More than 200 parents a year try to convince the Education Department their child deserves a place in a selective school despite failing to meet the increasingly high entry standard.
Analysts say the proliferation of tutoring and coaching colleges is giving parents false hope and misguided notions about how talented their child is.
The department does not accept appeals if they are based on grounds that should be made through the illness and misadventure process. They can, however, include “what happened to prevent your child from doing his or her best” in the test and supply evidence to support their bid. Parents can also pay $40 to have the writing section remarked, but appeals to remark multiple choice responses are not accepted by the department.
This year, 279 parents have so far requested a review of the outcome for the selective skills test, up from 246 results that were challenged by parents last year. Of those, only eight had their outcome changed.
Competition for selective schools has grown sharply, with more than 18,500 children applying for 4200 spots in fully or partially selective schools for entry next year.
Australian Tutoring Association chief executive Mohan Dhall said the promises made by coaching colleges were leaving parents with unrealistic expectations of gaining entry.
“You have parents who are vulnerable because there are a limited number of places in a highly competitive system and businesses who present themselves as authorities,” he said.
“They call themselves the selective school experts. They amplify it by saying things like: ‘90 per cent of our students got into these schools’. I can understand why vulnerable parents might think, ‘I trust these people more than the Department of Education’.
Coaching colleges target selective students and ‘undermine’ HSC
“With only 3 per cent of students successfully getting a variation in outcome – it says parents should accept the mark they’re given and not query the department. Instead, they should query the commercial coaching colleges.”
Unlike regular public high schools, selective high schools do not have catchments and some students travel two hours to get there. That includes students from Sydney catching the train to get to selective school Gosford High on the Central Coast.
Central Coast Council of P&Cs president Sharryn Brownlee said parents met earlier in the year to discuss the issue of local children being unable to go to Gosford High.
“The reason the meeting was held was because of the population growth on the Central Coast since the pandemic and that the local children are denied the opportunity to go there,” she said.
“We are calling for the Department of Education to have a realistic catchment so students do not spend their whole time commuting,” Brownlee said.
She also said travelling for hours on the train each day was not fair on students who were disconnected from the local school community.
University of NSW gifted education expert Professor Jae Jung said the department should consider adding more places in selective schools in some circumstances.
“If it is obvious that gifted students cannot access a selective school in some areas due to population growth, and this is reflected in a substantial increase to the number of applications to selective schools in these areas, the department should consider increasing the number of places at selective schools,” he said.
“I think that’s a responsible thing to do. There continues to be a huge demand for selective schools, and they play an important role in supporting many gifted students.”
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Katter's Australian Party candidates campaign for corporal punishment
The Katter's Australian Party (KAP) is calling for a return to physical discipline such as the cane as the party seeks to increase its vote share in Queensland Parliament.
The conservative-leaning party holds four seats in the north of the state and is campaigning on a tough-on-crime policy ahead of the October 26 election.
In a video posted to Facebook, KAP candidate for Townsville Margie Ryder asked followers if they knew anyone whose parents had disciplined them with a jug cord.
"Well, I do, and he turned out wonderful. So good I married him," Ms Ryder said. "The fact of the matter is parents have lost their rights to discipline their children. "Some kids need a smack, a kick up the arse, a ruler or even a hug."
The former Townsville City councillor, who lost her seat at the March 26 local election, went on to say she had met a mother who had been reported to the Department of Child Safety for giving her 14-year-old daughter "a kick up the arse".
Reuben Richardson, the KAP candidate for the seat of Thuringowa based in Townsville's northern suburbs, posted a video with a similar message.
"When I was young there was a healthy fear of doing the wrong thing. You never wanted to go to the principal's office as the cane was always in the back of your mind," Mr Richardson said.
"Did student behaviour deteriorate when we got rid of the cane?"
The cane, wooden spoon, belts, and other threats such as the cord from the kitchen jug were used against children in homes and schools last century.
Corporal punishment was abolished in Queensland state schools in 1995.
It remains lawful under the Criminal Code for Queensland parents to use "reasonable" physical punishment to discipline their children.
When asked if he condoned the use of the jug cord or the cane on children, party leader and Member for Traeger Robbie Katter said: "I condone parents doing whatever they have to do to discipline their kids."
"That can come in any form, you can throw all sorts of examples, you can say a samurai sword, look I don't know.
"I'm not prepared to say what is good and what is bad."
Mr Katter said the corporal punishment policy was borne out of youth crime issues and feedback from First Nations communities.
"Most of the elders in the community will tell you: 'We lost control a long time ago when we lost the right to smack our kids'," he said.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders have rejected claims the policy is coming from the grassroots community.
Townsville youth intervention program manager and elder Aunty Irene Leard said she worked with five traditional owner groups and rejected suggestions Indigenous communities wanted a return to corporal punishment.
"The cane, the jug cord, the belt, that is going to cause more issues because you're introducing violence to these young people," Aunty Irene said.
"Back in the day I got the belt, but we're a different society now. It is not going to work.
"You're actually setting the scene, again, for generations to hit kids whenever they feel frustration."
'Irresponsible' policy
University of Queensland associate professor in social sciences Renee Zahnow said videos promoting corporal punishment were irresponsible and could encourage a "small minority" of parents who take punishment too far.
"We have a responsibility to young people and it is not to teach them through physical abuse," Dr Zahnow said.
She said hurting children teaches them that violence is acceptable and it can cause long-term mental health issues.
KAP member for Mirani Stephen Andrew said he wanted the government to consider returning corporal punishment to Queensland state schools.
Candidates for Cook and Mulgrave, police officer Duane Amos and high school teacher Steven Lesina, also pledged their support for physical discipline.
What is allowed in Queensland?
Most non-government schools across Australia banned corporal punishment more than two decades ago.
Independent Schools Queensland said corporal punishment was not used in the sector.
Mr Katter said the government should not have any say in domestic discipline.
"With words like 'reasonableness' there is an element of subjectivity," he said.
"It's not for the government to prescribe how [parents] should be disciplining their kids.
"They don't need to be double-thinking that they could be reported to child safety."
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21 October, 2024
Good riddance to Sinwar. Now, we brace for what happens next
One of the most remarkable things about the elimination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is the somewhat unremarkable way in which he was found. After a year-long hunt for the October 7 mastermind involving advanced warfare technology, US intelligence and the deaths of thousands of civilians in Gaza, in the end, IDF troops seem to have accidentally stumbled on the terrorist kingpin sitting in a dust-covered armchair in a shelled building.
While Sinwar was suspected to be in the area, it seems the 828th Battalion was not aware of the identity of the man in the chair when they opened tank fire on the Rafah apartment block. It was only after the troops inspected the body, and DNA testing and dental record matching had taken place, that Israel was able to confirm that Sinwar had been killed in the strike.
This is cause for celebration in Israel, and around the world. No decent person will mourn his loss.
As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes today, it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of Sinwar’s demise. “It creates the possibility not only of ending the Israel-Hamas war, returning Israeli hostages and bringing relief to the people of the Gaza Strip,” Friedman says. “It creates the possibility for the biggest step toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians since Oslo, as well as normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia – which means pretty much the entire Muslim world.”
But, Friedman argues, there’s a catch.
“The death of Sinwar alone is not the sufficient condition to end this war and put Israelis and Palestinians on a pathway to a better future,” he writes. “Yes, Sinwar and Hamas always rejected a two-state solution and were committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish state. No one paid a bigger price for that than the Palestinians living in Gaza. But while his death was necessary for a next step to be possible, it was never going to be everything.
“The sufficient condition is that Israel has a leader and a governing coalition ready to step up to the opportunity Sinwar’s death has created.”
US President Joe Biden certainly agrees this should represent a before-and-after moment. “Now’s the time to move on,” he told reporters. “Move on, move towards a ceasefire in Gaza, make sure that we are moving in a direction that we’re going to be able to make things better for the whole world. It’s time for this war to end and bring these hostages home.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was singing from the same song sheet, calling Sinwar an enemy of peace-loving people everywhere. “His death is a significant moment and can be a vital turning point in this devastating conflict.”
I’m not so sure whether any of this will change the trajectory of the war in the Middle East, at least in the short term. Israel is yet to launch a retaliatory strike for Tehran’s firing of 200 ballistic missiles at the start of this month; IDF troops and Hezbollah terrorists are still fighting in southern Lebanon; and the Sinwar killing shows that Hamas operatives continue to hide out in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave no indication that the war would end. “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow but our task has still not been completed,” he said in a recorded video statement. “To the dear hostage families, I say: this is an important moment in the war. We will continue full force until all your loved ones, our loved ones, are home.”
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Texas Attorney General Charges Doctor With Violating Law Against Irreversible Transgender Procedures for Kids
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a doctor for allegedly providing irreversible transgender medical procedures to 21 minors.
A Texas law, which took effect in September 2023, prohibits experimental transgender medical interventions for children, including such as surgeries, puberty blockers, and hormone replacement therapy.
The Office of the Attorney General of Texas says it obtained evidence revealing that Dr. May Chi Lau illegally provided sex-change hormones to 21 minors for the purpose of “transitioning” the children. The doctor allegedly used false diagnoses and billing codes to mask these unlawful prescriptions, according to Paxton’s news release.
Lau is the medical director of the adolescent and young adult clinic at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. She is also an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Paxton’s lawsuit, filed Thursday, marks the first time a state attorney general has sued an individual doctor over transgender procedures for minors, NBC News reported.
“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous, unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Children’s Medical Center Dallas is one of 225 hospitals and health care facilities that have provided irreversible transgender procedures to children, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s database.
Children’s Medical Center Dallas, where Lau practices, had 49 sex-change patients and wrote 361 prescriptions for hormones and puberty blockers before the Texas law banning transgender procedures for children passed.
An adolescent medicine specialist, Lau is a co-author of several papers on child gender dysphoria, including “Transition from Pediatric to Adult Care for Transgender Youth: A Qualitative Study of Patient, Parent, and Provider Perspectives”; “Developing a Curriculum on Transgender Health Care for Physician Assistant Students”; and “Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy in Cystic Fibrosis: A Case of New Pseudomonas Infection.”
Lau’s profile on the Children’s Medical Center Dallas website said she “particularly enjoys” helping patients though “various adolescent issues.”
“Adolescents have their parents to guide them during these sometimes-tough years, and as an adolescent medicine physician, Dr. Lau endeavors to assist parents in this process as adolescents and parents face the most difficult issues,” her biography says.
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UK: New teachers plan to give children as young as five lessons on colonialism, slavery and the 'lasting impact of imperialism'
Trainee teachers plan to give lessons to children as young as five on 'colonialism, slavery and the lasting impact of imperialism' – as the woke agenda spreads from universities to schools.
The new generation shows strong support for teaching which 'challenges the long-standing dominance of Eurocentric and colonialist perspectives'.
They also believe that Christianity should not be the priority in RE, according to a survey.
Nearly 250 trainees were questioned about their understanding of and backing for decolonising the primary curriculum.
In history lessons – which generally consist of the Egyptians, The Great Fire of London and the Ancient Romans – 97 per cent of trainees supported a move 'beyond a Western-centric focus' which breaks down the 'Eurocentric biases' and covers 'historically oppressed groups'.
In geography lessons, traditionally taken up with weather patterns, volcanoes, continents and capitals, the new view is to highlight the complexities of societies beyond Europe.
Just 34 per cent agreed with putting the highest priority in RE on Christianity, but 84 per cent prefer the diversity of religious expression and resisting norms.
The research, by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, was published in the latest edition of the International Journal of Social Policy & Education.
In contrast, a poll by the Policy Exchange think-tank suggests most communities, whatever their racial makeup, do not support decolonising of the curriculum.
Its survey of 3,400 adults revealed that all ethnic minority groups view Britain as a positive force throughout history and 'emphatically reject the view of some white progressives that it is wrong or racist' to be taught to be proud of British history.
Ethnic minorities polled were as proud as any other demographic of Britain's role in the world wars, Magna Carta, the industrial revolution and the abolition of the slave trade.
A minority of trainee teachers were concerned that it could destabilise pupils' understanding of their cultural heritage.
But critics said children were being indoctrinated by an agenda that reduces complex and nuanced humanities topics to 'goodie and baddies'. Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'It is no wonder that there is a teacher shortage.
'Education "thought police" are the new witch-finder-generals, silencing those who do not conform to a woke ideology that labels
Britain as forever stained by the original sin of colonialism and general wickedness.'
Professor Dennis Hayes, of Academics for Academic Freedom, said: 'Decolonisation is a codeword for an elite attack on contemporary British culture and values by waging a war on the past. It shows contempt for ordinary people's loyalty to family, community and country.'
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Australia: Methodist Ladies College students forced to remove their 'cross' over fears they will offend
Girls at a prestigious church-founded private school claim they've been ordered to take off Christian crosses because they offend classmates.
Year 12 students at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in the affluent eastern suburb of Kew claim that students are allowed to wear furry ears, tails and rainbow-themed pride items but not crosses signalling their Christian faith.
An unnamed student told the Herald Sun that the school was practising 'religious discrimination' because teachers were asking those who had them as jewellery to take them off when other students complain they are offensive to non-Christians'.
'My friend was wearing a cross and there was another girl in our class who said she found the cross really offensive and so the teacher told her to take it off,' she told the publication.
'My friend's parents, who are very religious, tried to get answers from the school and were told 'it's not a good look for the school'.
'This is supposed to be a religious school but they are listening to minority opinion rather than mainstream religious students.'
Students who wear Christian crosses have reportedly asked put them on longer chain so they are not visible, but students says they are being told to take them off.
Methodist Ladies College, which charges close to $39,000 in fees for a Year 12 student and an extra 36,000 to board, has strict uniform requirements and does not allow make-up, jewellery or untied long hair.
The school is also very strict on inappropriate dress lengths and non-approved clothing.
A school spokesperson told the Herald Sun they were 'deeply committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, respect, and diversity'.
'Our Christian heritage serves as a foundation for welcoming individuals of all faiths, cultures, and backgrounds, fostering an environment where every student is supported in expressing their identity and beliefs,' the spokesperson said.
'Regarding religious jewellery, such as cross necklaces, the College's uniform policy supports consistent presentation among students while respecting individual beliefs.
Parents pay thousands in school fees for their daughters to attend Methodist Ladies College
'We apply all policies with care and sensitivity, ensuring that individual beliefs are respected while supporting our shared identity through the MLC uniform.'
In August 2022, it was reported a year eight student attending a private girls' school in Melbourne was being allowed to 'identify as a cat'.
'No one seems to have a protocol for students identifying as animals, but the approach has been that if it doesn't disrupt the school, everyone is being supportive,' a source close to the family told the Herald Sun.
The school did not confirm this but said they were 'dealing with a range of psychological issues'.
In a statement, the school said students were presenting 'with a range of issues, from mental health, anxiety or identity issues'.
'As a non-denominational and multicultural college, we value diversity and broad expressions of achievement,' the school website states.
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20 October, 2024
DOJ Tells Four Police, Fire Departments That It’s Racist To Expect Employees To Know Basic Math
The Biden-Harris Department of Justice has undertaken a slew of lawsuits against local police and fire departments alleging that it is racist to require hires entrusted with public safety to know basic math.
The lawsuits undermine Kamala Harris’s attempts to brand herself as a moderate in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, with the suits both suggesting a dim view of blacks by the administration, and employing the theory of “disparate impact,” the radical theory that holds that anytime there are statistical racial disparities, racism must be the cause — even if no one can explain how.
On Friday, the DOJ’s civil rights unit filed a lawsuit against South Bend, Indiana, saying “South Bend uses a written examination that discriminates against Black applicants and a physical fitness test that discriminates against female applicants,” The Daily Wire previously reported.
But that was just one of the lawsuits, which claim that tests are racist because blacks fail them at a higher percentage than whites, and require cash awards to be paid to those blacks who failed them. Most blacks generally pass the tests, and the lawsuits do not explain how the tests can be racist against only some blacks. Blacks who passed the tests are excluded from the financial payouts.
Last week, Durham, North Carolina settled with the DOJ, saying blacks failed the tests required to become a firefighter more often, and “Employers should identify and eliminate practices that have a disparate impact based on race.” It said the Durham Fire Department must pay nearly a million dollars to people who failed the test, and hire up to 16 of them.
While the DOJ said the tests were not relevant to actually being a good firefighter, an online practice test suggests that it is directly relevant, that people could die if such firefighters were hired. One question asks if a building is 350 feet away, how many 60-foot hoses would be needed.
In May, the DOJ entered into a similar settlement with Cobb County, Georgia. “The County’s use of these employment practices disproportionately removed qualified African Americans from consideration for a firefighter position. The complaint further alleges that the credit check and the use of the written exam to rank applicants do not lawfully identify the best qualified candidates for the firefighter position,” the DOJ said.
Also this month, the DOJ forced Maryland State Police to pay $2.75 million to women who were barred from being officers because they couldn’t pass physical fitness exams testing, for example the ability to run quickly, and blacks who couldn’t pass a written test.
The test that the DOJ says is racist is designed to ensure that cops are at least as smart as an elementary school student and can serve residents by, for example, adding up the total value of stolen property when items were stolen valued at $400, $40, $1,500, and $100.
When police officers who don’t meet basic standards are hired, they sometimes abuse members of the public, sometimes resulting in still more accusations of racism if those members of the public are black. Last year, the media pointed to Memphis police allegedly repeatedly beating people as an example of police brutality — but it turned out that the police were all black and were hired despite not meeting the usual standards required for the position.
After D.C. Mayor Marion Barry made firehouses in the nation’s capital a racial spoils program, firefighters repeatedly turned out to be gun-toting, violent criminals. Public outrage over the hiring program culminated in 2014 after a 77-year old man had a heart attack directly in front of a fire station and begged for help, but none of the firefighters ran to his aid. His family sued for $7 million.
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What Are We Doing to Children? The U.K. finally puts the brakes on gender medicine
A few years before the Covid pandemic, the Irish state television network (RTÉ) asked me to appear in a documentary about the sudden increase of transsexualism in the Western world. Why me, I asked? I had written nothing on the subject and was neither an expert on, nor particularly interested in, the whole question. I soon learned that I was not their first choice. In fact, they were desperate for someone to voice an opinion different from what had become an orthodoxy, at least in public: that transsexualism (I prefer this more accurate, older term to “transgenderism”) was both a medical condition and a perfectly good way to be in the world and that, having experienced oppression through the ages, transsexuals should now be added to the growing list of certified victims.
Once, in what might be called the pre-ideology days of transsexualism, a young male-to-female transsexual was admitted to my hospital ward after taking an overdose following a quarrel with a boyfriend. The boyfriend turned up for a reconciliation; he was a female-to-male transsexual. Not even Joseph Stalin, no slouch in altering historical records, would have thought of changing a person’s sex on his birth certificate years later, as is now possible in Britain.
Fashions run through psychopathology: we rarely see hysterical paralyses these days, for example, though they once were common, not least during and after World War I. In the 1980s and 1990s, multiple personality disorder (as in The Three Faces of Eve) was suddenly prominent, with the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association quoting a community survey concluding that one in 60 adults suffered from it. That diagnosis is now deeply unfashionable.
The suddenness with which an infrequent diagnosis became first common, and then the object of an entire ideology and social cause, is astonishing and surely requires an explanation. When I think of the rapid increase in gender dysphoria and trans identification, a line from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Road to Mandalay” comes to mind: “An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!”
Who would have foreseen the dawn of such a worldview coming up like thunder—such that people are denounced and attacked for suggesting in public that a person’s sex is immutable, and that neither surgery nor hormonal treatment and neither voice and deportment training nor makeup and other externals, will turn a man into a woman? Who would have foreseen that a political party in Western Europe, the Scottish Greens, would expel 13 of its prominent members for stating publicly that “sex is a biological reality,” because to do so supposedly threatens the safety of transsexuals? Who would have thought that the world’s most financially successful author, J. K. Rowling, could now “paper her walls,” as she put it, with the death threats she has received (the anonymous death threat having become, alas, the highest form of argument) after she said something that only a few years ago would not have been thought worth saying—namely, that a female is born, not made?
Who would have thought that a democratically elected Scottish government would pass a law (since struck down) stipulating that anyone over 16 could change legal “gender” (a stand-in for sex) more or less at will? And who would have believed that, according to one poll, a third of Britons would agree with the proposition that transgender women are women (that is to say, women in all senses of the word)—the same proportion as those disagreeing (the other third not knowing)?
The utter confusion that gender ideology has sown is reflected by the fact that more than 60 percent of people, when polled about whether “transgender” women should be allowed to participate in women’s competitive sports, say that they should not. Why not, though, if they were truly women? But a sign of the rapid success of the ideology is that 22 percent say that transgender women should be allowed to play, answering in the affirmative a question that a few years ago would have led people to doubt the sanity of the person asking it.
Further illustrating the confusion: no one asks whether transgender men—women who have changed into the simulacra of men—should be allowed to compete in men’s sports. The question doesn’t arise for obvious reasons, but that the reasons are obvious is itself a powerful indictment of the strange state of mind of those who excoriate and threaten the likes of Rowling, a state of mind in which they furiously defend something that they know is false.
Future historians, if we have any and if they enjoy sufficient freedom to do so, will wonder at this extraordinary efflorescence of intellectual absurdity and seek the reasons for it. This sexual tulipomania would be worthy of a new chapter of Charles Mackay’s book of 1843, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. “Whatever got into them?” the historians will ask. No definitive answer will be forthcoming.
Faint signs of resistance have emerged, however, to the advance of the transgender ideology—in Britain, of all somnolent, pusillanimous countries. In the wake of revelations about the careless, almost cavalier way in which the Tavistock Clinic, the country’s premier clinic for transgenderism, treated children and adolescents, often under the bullying of transgender pressure groups, the country’s centralized National Health Service commissioned a report from independent pediatrician Hilary Cass about the treatment of gender-dysphoric children and adolescents, which, though it strained to be open-minded and evenhanded, sounded a tocsin. Thousands of children and adolescents were being treated in life-changing ways in the absence of evidence about the long-term effects of that treatment.
The Cass Review, no literary masterpiece, tackled the vital question of why the number of children and adolescents suffering from uncertainty about their gender has increased so dramatically. The figures are startling. A Gender Identity Development Service for the country was founded in 1989, initially seeing fewer than ten young patients yearly. From 2009, the numbers exploded. In that year, 15 adolescent females and two female children were referred to the service, along with 24 adolescent males and ten male children. In 2016, the figures were, respectively, 1,071 and 426, and 138 and 131. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, the numbers more than doubled, from 314 to 689 for female adolescents and from 125 to 293 for female children. Incidentally, these rises were paralleled in other Western countries. By 2023, 3,115 or more children and adolescents were being referred annually to the gender identity clinics in Britain.
What accounted for this vertiginous rise? Cass’s report tries to answer it with scrupulous care. One possible explanation is that no real rise in incidence occurred, only in recognition and ascertainment. This, however, is unlikely, for we can chart a similar rise in all other manifestations of child and adolescent distress. I was startled to read in the report, for example, that between 2017 and 2021, the incidence of eating disorders among young women aged 17 to 19 rose from 1.6 percent to 20.8 percent and among men from 0 percent to 5.1 percent. Figures for other conditions are similar.
Transsexualism is not new, but it has been rare; where it occurred, it was overwhelmingly of the male-to-female variety, whereas the reverse is now the case. Cass considers the possible biological contribution to the condition, finding no evidence of genetic predisposition, though in a few cases, hormonal influences in the womb may have played a part. It is extremely unlikely, though, that any biological change took place in the population between 2000 and 2023 that accounts for the rise in prevalence.
Other figures given in the report paint a horrific picture of childhood and adolescence in modern Britain, and no doubt in other countries, too. For example, 27 percent of 11-year-olds have been exposed to pornography on the Internet; for the 16–21 age group, 42 percent of females and 58 percent of males actively seek it out. Forty-seven percent of adolescents (both sexes) believe that women expect to be slapped or strangled during sexual intercourse. This might, I suppose, help to explain why transsexualism has changed from being predominantly male-to-female to being predominantly female-to-male. It is more blessed to strangle than to be strangled.
Cass avoids attributing the increase in gender dysphoria to social contagion, but this, it seems to me, must be the greater part of the explanation. She mentions a survey in the United States of Generation Z, those born after 1997, showing that the proportion of members who believe that more than two genders exist rose from 39 percent in late 2019 to 51 percent by late 2021 or early 2022. This suggests considerable effort at indoctrination of young people, be it formal or informal and spontaneous, whether by what is found on the Internet and social media or by conversations held among themselves.
Cass illustrates the power of social media. She takes the case of “Functional Tic-Like Behaviours,” that is, tics with no organic basis. These “are found to occur in young females with complex, disabling and tic-lookalike patterns, usually triggered by videos portraying tic-like behaviour on social media.” According to one survey, 41 percent of people with these tics have gender dysphoria. A conference of specialists on Tourette syndrome who had noticed a great increase in such tics during the Covid pandemic reported:
Over the past few years, tics and tic-like symptoms have gained visibility, especially on social media. Young people who watch others with tic-like symptoms on social media may develop symptoms similar to those in the video. Social distancing during Covid-19 has increased time spent on social media, which has greatly exposed people to this content on a global scale.
If, in addition, an active, vocal, and ideologically motivated pressure group was advocating for tic-dom, one could well imagine the result.
One unidentified person interviewed for the report said, “A lot of trans people make YouTube videos which I think is a major informational source for a lot of people, and that’s mainly where I get my information from.” One anonymous informant does not make an encyclopedia, but it is hard to believe that he was the only one of his ilk. And what he, and others, see on YouTube is probably an encouragement of, and propagandistic for, transsexualism.
Cass explains the more than doubling of referrals to the Tavistock Clinic for gender dysphoria between 2014 and 2015 by the fact that, in 2014, the clinic uncritically adopted the so-called Dutch Protocol. This was based on a single experiment conducted by Dutch pediatricians on 70 youngsters, of an initial sample of 111, who had suffered long-term gender dysphoria and were free of confounding serious mental conditions and had family support. They were given puberty-blocking drugs and supposedly felt better as a result, though the study was of very poor quality: only participants who had “positive” experiences with the drug were selected to participate; there were no controls (not even by the 41 excluded from the sample); psychologists carefully attended the patients while they were taking the drugs; and the follow-up was far from complete.
In fact, with an almost criminal frivolity, the Tavistock Clinic had begun handing out puberty blockers as routine care before the results of its own experimental study, begun in 2011, were in. Word soon got around. Even if Cass is mistaken in thinking that this accounts for the sudden surge in dysphoria referrals (the increase over the years actually fits an exponential curve), it reminds me of the start of the epidemic of deaths from opioids in the United States, which began with the willful misinterpretation of research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The research had found that those given strong analgesics in the hospital did not become addicts; from this correct observation, doctors, heavily influenced by drug-company propaganda, thoughtlessly concluded that it was safe to give strong analgesics to anybody with any kind of pain at any time. A million deaths later, we now know differently.
Cass’s attempt, which cannot be definitive, to explain the rise of transsexualism has the merit of making it impossible to view the condition in a purely medical, or even psychopathological, light. But she also examines (with the help of a team) the evidence that the use of puberty blockers is justified in the treatment of gender dysphoria of pubertal children, as well as the justifications for use of masculinizing or feminizing hormones in adolescents with gender dysphoria.
The evidence favoring puberty blockers is lacking, and therefore the use of them is unethical. Moreover, the so-called Dutch Protocol was admittedly experimental, and the ethical propriety of experimenting on pubertal children with potentially life-changing drugs thus should be questioned. Indeed, it recalls, admittedly on a much smaller scale and with much less malign intentions, the experiments conducted on children by Josef Mengele. Not only is the evidence lacking; it should remain lacking and should not be gathered or gatherable in the first place. The condition is variable, changeable, and nonfatal; it is by no means simply a medical one. In fact, Cass asks the ethical question as to how far doctors should go in treating with medication and later with surgery a condition that is only marginally medical:
The nature and causes of gender dysphoria/incongruence are complex and poorly understood, and there is very limited understanding of the currently presenting population of predominantly birth-registered adolescent females. Each individual will have a different mix of biopsychosocial factors, but if potentially dynamic psychosocial or sociocultural factors predominate in a significant proportion of people, one of the most challenging ethical questions is whether and/or when medical intervention is the correct response.
Furthermore:
The University of York’s systematic reviews [of the evidence concerning treatment, the University of York being one of the world’s centers for examining the quality of medical evidence] demonstrated poor study design, inadequate follow-up periods and a lack of objectivity in reporting of results. As a result, the evidence for the indicated uses of puberty blockers and masculinising/feminising hormones in adolescents [is] unproven and benefits/harms are unknown.
The problems are legion:
Once on puberty blockers, they [young patients] will enter a period when peers are developing physically and sexually whilst they will not be, and they may be experiencing the side effects of the blocker. There are no good studies on the psychological, psychosexual and developmental impact of this period of divergence from peers.
No informed consent to treatment can be given, either—first, because the children involved are not capable of giving it; and second, because the information necessary for informed consent is lacking anyway, and probably will remain so.
The Cass Review, which doubtless has its defects, has nonetheless played a role in effecting significant change, at least in the U.K. Parliament has banned puberty blockers from private clinics, the National Health Service has decommissioned them, and Scotland has paused their prescription. In the United States, however, such treatments are going ahead unchecked, at least for the time being. The entire phenomenon over the last decade or so should lead us to two large questions: Have we gone mad? And what, as a society, are we doing to children?
https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-are-we-doing-to-children
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The Culture of Moral Relativism Is Destroying Our Kids’ Education
What issue could be more important to a nation’s future than education? A country is about people. How Americans act, work, think, choose—and live—reflects their values.
K-12 education, of course, is about learning to read and do math. This is what we measure in test scores.
But education is a lot more than acquisition of technical skills. It is about transmission of values and our sense of meaning of what life is about.
It’s these values that determine how we act, behave, work, and deal with life’s many challenges.
Polling tells us that Americans are generally unhappy about education in our country.
In a recent Gallup poll, 53% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, and 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, said they are “completely/somewhat satisfied with the quality of K-12 education.”
Dissatisfaction with education in our country is not limited to those on the receiving end. A recent Pew Research survey shows there is also considerable dissatisfaction with those providing it—the teachers themselves.
Per the Pew survey, among all U.S. workers, 51% say they are “extremely/very satisfied with their job.” But among K-12 public schoolteachers, only 33% say they are “extremely/vary satisfied” with their job.
When the teachers were asked to rate academic performance of students at their school, 48% rated it “fair/poor” and only 17% rated it “excellent/very good.”
When teachers rated behavior of the students at their school, 49% rated it “fair/poor” and 13% rated it “excellent/very good.”
When teachers were asked about the problems they see in the students they are trying to teach, these are overwhelmingly behavioral problems. Forty-seven percent say students show “little or no interest” in learning. In high schools, the percentage increases to 58%.
The bottom line, as I see it, is students learn when they are motivated to learn. Students don’t learn when they are not.
Motivation comes from meaning, that life matters. This takes us back to the issue of values.
The culture of meaninglessness and moral relativism, and the absence of absolutes in right and wrong, are destroying our kids and their education as it is our whole country.
We have to change. But the great obstacle to change in K-12 education is the control of government in education and the control of teachers unions.
It is crazy that in a country that is allegedly about freedom, we have so little of it in something so vitally important as education.
The good news is school choice programs are growing around the country. But it is far too slow.
According to EdChoice, in the 2023-2024 school year, more than 1 million children are learning in school choice programs. That’s up from almost zero 25 years ago.
But this is 1 million out of more than 50 million youths in K-12 learning across the nation.
According to the Freedom Foundation, the National Education Association—the nation’s largest teachers union—allocated 34% of its total 2022-2023 budget—$176,505,592 of a budget total $520,208,114—to “political activism and contributions.”
Our nation’s largest teachers union is basically about politics, not education. And the political agenda is left-wing moral relativism.
According to opensecrets.org, the NEA’s super PAC, NEA Advocacy Fund, in the 2023-2024 cycle, contributed $18,833,477 to liberal groups and not one cent to conservative groups.
In their political contributions, $2,525,652 went to Democrats and $47,144 to Republicans.
The NEA defines its mission, on its website, as “ending racism, sexism, homophobia, and other systemic injustices in schools.”
How about the systemic injustice that parents, who go to church every Sunday, can’t free their child from the failing public school that is forced on them and cannot send their child to a Christian school to learn values that they see as truth?
School choice is on the ballot this November in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska.
Parents must be free to educate their child as they choose.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/17/why-our-free-country-do-we-lack-education-freedom/
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Pay No Attention to the Gender Activist Behind the Public School Curtain
As if Nevada parents didn’t already have their hands full, including helping their children navigate the waters of adolescent sexuality. Now gender activists increasingly are using the public schools to lead students down a path their parents may know nothing about.
And the Biden-Harris administration is making it worse.
Nevada is hardly alone. Nearly 20,000 public schools across the country, attended by 11.5 million students, now have policies that cater to kids’ current sense of “gender identity” but that deliberately keep parents in the dark about that same thing.
The Elko County School District’s gender policy, like many others, defines “gender identity” as “a student’s inner sense of being male or female.” That sense might be nothing more than a fleeting feeling, prompted by a suggestion on social media, or a clinically significant diagnosis of gender dysphoria requiring medical intervention.
These policies not only don’t distinguish between these radically different situations, they actually prohibit anything beyond taking a student’s self-perception at face value. And by shutting out parents, the schools exclude the very people who are the best source of information about that student’s health and well-being.
There’s little dispute that, in general, schools should take the lead on matters such as curriculum or school administration. Sex and gender identity, however, fall in a different category. A federal judge in Pennsylvania put it this way: “[T]eaching a child how to determine one’s gender identity” strikes “at the heart of parental decision making in a matter of greatest importance in their relationship with their children.”
But Nevada public schools don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Instead, they are imposing their own opinions, theories, and ideology about this volatile and controversial subject and establishing a significant range of policies based on nothing more than a youngster’s current feelings.
The Washoe County School District policy, for example, defines gender identity as “an individual’s understanding, outlook, feelings, and sense of being masculine, feminine, both or neither.” While such things can change at any time, for any reason, school policies dictate that a child’s latest “outlook” will dictate how a school responds.
That school’s policy also states that students “have the right to be addressed by the names and pronouns that correspond to their gender identity.” They may use any restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities, as well as participate in physical education classes and intramural sports for the same reason.
Needless to say, implementing school policies that cater to a student’s current “sense” of his or her sexuality tells the student to expect that others will conform to his or her feelings. Parents may have a very different idea about how to develop their child’s character, but these policies deliberately shut parents out.
The Washoe County policy, for example, prohibits school personnel from disclosing any information related to a student’s gender identity “to others, including parents/guardians … [unless] the student has authorized such disclosure.”
These same schools, however, handle far less significant matters very differently. Washoe County School District has a 51-page manual dictating procedures for field and activity trips, requiring both parental permission and a liability waiver. The district requires both parental consent and health-care provider authorization for any medication, including over-the-counter medication such as Tylenol.
The upshot is that Johnny needs his parents’ permission to go to the zoo, but his parents need his permission to know that he’s undressing in the girls’ locker room.
The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education just issued a sweeping rule that will push more public school districts in this direction. It reworks Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funds.
The administration’s rule redefines “sex” to include “gender identity”—something Congress certainly didn’t intend when it passed the law in 1972—and redefines “harassment” so that staff and teachers could face disciplinary action if they “misgender” a student.
This massive federal mandate carries the implied threat that billions of dollars in federal funds could be revoked if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce it.
Parents might not agree that their child’s latest feelings always deserve indulgence. They might have a well-considered idea of how to guide their children through the challenges of adolescence and establish their own identity. The bottom line is that this is the parents’ decision to make.
But by pushing parents aside and imposing the government’s preferred gender ideology, these policies violate the parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. The Supreme Court has called this “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” it has ever recognized.
It’s time for parents to fight back against policies in local schools, state laws that allow those policies, and federal rules that promote this agenda at their expense.
Related posts:
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17 October, 2024
This girl lives in Bonkle
I kid you not. It is a place in Scotland
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Welsh Council Rewrites History To Turn King Arthur Into An LGBT Icon
First, they came for Abraham Lincoln. Now, the Alphabet Mafia is trying to make King Arthur into a gay icon. Slay, King?
Thankfully, at least this one isn’t in America.
A Welsh Council recently included the 5th Century Welsh ruler in their “LGBTQ+ timeline,” British media reported. The move is part of an “Action Plan” to raise “awareness and understanding” of the alphabet community that also teaches LGBT history in local libraries, museums and archives.
But the basis of King Arthur’s inclusion is even more ridiculous than Lincoln’s. The nasty documentary that came out about Lincoln in September at least had a well-documented history of the former president’s close male friendships to point to. Yet King Arthur is said to be gay now because he once “wore women’s clothing,” maybe.
Obviously, this is insane. King Arthur wasn’t a drag queen — a concept and identity that didn’t exist until the very recent past. By this standard, you could call countless generations of men in Europe and America gay. “Drag” was the norm among men historically because women couldn’t entertain outside of brothels. Watch the 90s hit “Shakespeare in Love” if you need a refresher on who played the female roles in medieval England.
Like the Lincoln documentary, the goal is always to rewrite history. King Arthur united his people to fight off foreign invaders, searched for the Holy Grail, established his court at Camelot and, as the legend goes, vanquished the monsters and magic that would destroy his kingdom. King Arthur is as close a figure the Welsh people have to Lincoln in their history, a man whose heroic deeds crystallized into legend and shaped the Welsh identity.
The point of this exercise is to mainline “gay identity” even further into the mainstream psyche, “proving” that the spectrum of LGBT insanity isn’t just some new fad, social contagion or life choice, but the permanent way of the world. With this, the left aims to form a new generation in the mold of LGBT ideology. Perhaps more importantly, they want you to subordinate all the pride you have in your country’s history to the new religion of queerness.
These gender monsters today are even scarier than they were in Arthur’s day. Will the Welsh people once again rise to vanquish them?
https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/welsh-council-rewrite-history-king-arthur-lgbt/
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Red State Universities Purge Gen Ed Courses Following Order To Step Away From ‘Woke Ideologies’
Florida’s public universities are purging general education courses that include “woke ideologies,” following a state law enacted by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Politico reported Monday.
Hundreds of courses previously required for graduation will now either be offered as electives or removed, following a GOP-led 2023 law that forced universities to review required courses to avoid “identity politics,” Politico reported. The once-required courses that are being changed to electives or cut include sociology classes and “gender studies,” following the state law targeting “woke ideologies.”
“Under the leadership of Governor DeSantis, Florida refocused its higher education system on the classical mission of universities: pursuing truth and preparing students to be citizens of this republic,” Julia Friedman, deputy press secretary for DeSantis, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Courses on ‘Humanities Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality[sic]’ and ‘Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion’ do not fulfill the mission of higher education.”
Republicans in Florida passed the higher education law in 2023, which specified that general education college courses were to not warp major historical events or teach a curriculum proposing “identity politics,” according to Politico. However, Democrats fought against the bill, claiming that the Florida Board of Governors was making the state’s higher education political and that the Board has too much power.
“This sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,” Katie Blankenship, leader of a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America, told Politico.
“If their subject matter is prohibited by statute but is compelling, then students are going to elect to take it,” university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said in an interview, according to Politico. “But what is not going to happen in Florida — the students are not going to be forced to take courses that have these prohibited concepts in order to fulfill their general education requirements.”
Florida’s Board of Governors along with the different schools looked at removing any courses that were “too narrowly focused,” making it difficult to be considered a “general” education class, Rodrigues told Politico.
The Board of Governors removed sociology, which was replaced with a history class, Politico reported. The University of Florida is one university changing core courses in compliance to the law, Politico reported. The University of Florida proposed removing some gender studies-related courses like “Humanities Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality” and “Social Geography.” (RELATED: Gov. DeSantis Signs Law Requiring Schools To Teach ‘Evils Of Communism’)
Higher education institutions that defy the Board of Governor’s requests, keeping certain core courses against recommendations, can potentially risk losing serious funding from the state, according to Politico. However, some universities like Florida Gulf Coast University have welcomed the new changes.
“An infringement on academic freedom would be to say this course can’t be offered at the university,” Rodrigues told Politico. “No one has said that in any of these scenarios. What we are saying is, we define what is general education. We define that based upon what the state statutes have laid out and we’re being compliant with that. And I think the courts have held that what gets designated as general education curriculum is up to the legislature who funds it.”
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Former UK schools minister: Reforms needed to change ‘hearts and minds’ of teachers
One of Britain’s longest-serving education ministers, who introduced phonics nationally into the English school system, said the extensive decade-long reforms that rejected “progressivist” ideologies required not just a change to the curriculum but also changes to “the hearts and minds of a whole profession”.
Ex-Tory minister Nick Gibb said the “movement of teachers” since the reforms began in 2010 had come a long way but was still a “work in progress”. Teaching phonics – helping children learn to read by sounding out the letters of words – was only the baseline.
“The evidence is so overwhelming that phonics in the teaching of reading is the most effective way. And this debate has gone to Australia, it’s gone to America, it’s gone to New Zealand, they’re all now moving step by step towards phonics,” the minister of state for schools and education from 2014 to 2023 said ahead of the Australian School Improvement Summit in Melbourne on Thursday.
“Although we have introduced phonics, and every school is teaching phonics to children, that’s the starting point for reading. It’s a necessary condition for reading; you have to be able to decode words but you also need to develop a love of reading for pleasure as well … so there’s more work to do there.”
England was ranked fourth in the 2022 international literacy rankings. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment, Australia scored higher than the UK in reading but on par in maths.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has made an extra $16bn in funding for public schools in each state and territory over the next decade conditional upon the introduction of evidence-based teaching reforms, such as phonics-based reading methods, and explicit instruction techniques. Western Australia, Tasmania and the NT have signed on. Public schools in South Australia, NSW and WA have already adopted phonics and explicit instruction.
Progressive ideology, inquiry-based learning that sets tasks for students to discover facts and skills using their own initiative, failed the most vulnerable in society, Mr Gibb said, warning that it still persisted today.
“What we had to do wasn’t just put more money here, or close this, or open that. We had to change the whole Zeitgeist, the whole philosophy of education that had dominated our education system in England for decades,” he said.
“And that was the challenge. We set out to change the whole way the education sector – 450,000 teachers – thought about education, and the teacher training that goes into that as well.
“But we had evidence on our side … the evidence was so compelling that progressivist education was damaging the life chances of the most disadvantaged … (they) really did suffer from this ideological approach.”
Mr Gibb said while it was “not finished”, the conservative government reforms had started a movement. “There is a big movement of teachers in England who strongly believe in what we believe in … We’ve unleashed the profession to take control of their own thinking, their own pedagogy and curriculum.”
Mr Gibb said his government also changed the curriculum to be much more “knowledge based”.
“There are people whose whole careers are based on the idea that you don’t need to teach knowledge because they can look it up … and this view still prevails particularly with Google and AI.”
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Colonial history and the past’s new moral reckoning
A relentless feature of public debate is the demonisation of the past – from denigration of the British Empire to the discrediting of Australia’s past as a project in colonialism, racism and violence – a lens used to argue for the nation’s guilt and the case for restitution.
History is now seminal to the cultural and strategic challenges facing the West. The goal of Marxist, anti-colonial and progressive analysts is to achieve historical justice for victimised minorities by demonstrating the moral failure, past and present, of Western nations.
It is because much historiography is motivated by the politics of the present that it is filled with factual misrepresentation and ideological bias. One of the most prominent authors of the salutary corrective is Nigel Biggar, Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, whose 2023 book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, is an exercise in audacity – a moral judgment on the British Empire and on colonialism generally.
Biggar, an ethicist with a vast grasp of history, is about to visit Australia for a series of speaking engagements. His book covering four centuries of the British Empire from 1550 constitutes a direct challenge to the anti-colonialists and their gospel that colonialism is solely a story of profits, killing and invasion.
Sound familiar?
His scholarship is based not on a defence of empire as such but on a balanced, accurate and fairer reading of history. His targets are unscrupulous history and distorted morality.
“On the colonial front, the politically driven, unhistorical, wholesale denigration of the British Empire not only trashes the record of the West but corrodes faith in it,” Biggar says. Indeed, that is its entire point.
He provides a long list of the “evils” of British colonialism but then provides a long list of its beneficial legacies. He says advocates claiming the evil outweighs the good cannot mount a persuasive case because the bad and the good are so different that they are “incommensurable”. Biggar asks: How many unjustly killed people are worth the blessings of imperially imposed peace?
He knows the stakes are high – nothing less than the moral foundations of our current society. Do we have a civilisation worth supporting or are we doomed to perpetual self-loathing because of irremediable moral flaws? Biggar said the judgment of history goes to “the very integrity of the United Kingdom and the security of the West”, and “that is why I have written this book”.
The issue of slavery is central to the debate. Campaigners from Black Lives Matter to Rhodes Must Fall say white Britons in the third decade of the 21st century are possessed by an anti-black racism derived from the early 18th-century racist slavery.
How valid is this widely accepted proposition?
Biggar says slavery was varied, ancient and universal. It existed in every ancient Mesopotamian civilisation starting with Egypt in the third millennium BC followed by the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Chinese, the Incas and Aztecs, and was practised after Muhammad throughout the Islamic world until around 1920, with the Muslim slave trade out of Africa far exceeding that of European powers across the Atlantic. It was rife in Africa long before European colonisation.
The British were estimated to have shipped 3.3 million slaves from Africa between 1660 and 1807, second behind the Portuguese. After a campaign run by Christian leaders, the efforts of William Wilberforce and agitation inside and outside parliament, the slave trade was abolished in 1807, and in 1834 slaves across the British Empire were formally emancipated.
These events were merely the start of one of the most intense international humanitarian campaigns in history. Partly driven by abolitionist demands in Britain post-1807, Biggar said the imperial government adopted “a permanent policy of trying to suppress both the trade and the institution worldwide”. This involved the creation of a new slave trade department in the Foreign Office to pursue the abolition, Britain’s unsuccessful diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna to secure an abolition treaty with all major European powers, and deployment of Royal Navy ships off the west coast of Africa to disrupt the export of slaves, with the number of ships seldom below 20 during the 1844-65 period and at its height this represented 13 per cent of the navy’s resources
The fleet engaged in confrontation with Brazil, authorised by the parliament, trespassing into Brazilian territorial waters to accost slave ships after which the British attacked Lagos to destroy its slave facilities. Lord Palmerston, twice PM, said the achievement that gave him the greatest pleasure was “forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade”.
Biggar said the “humanitarian motive” to suppress slavery was a “common reason” for British imperialism in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Meanwhile in Asia, Sir Stamford Raffles abolished the import of slaves on the island of Penang and then in Java.
Biggar quotes estimates made of the cost of the British suppression campaign on land and sea worldwide over a century and a half, one conclusion being that “the 19th-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the 18th-century benefits”. He references the work of Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, who evaluate the total economic cost and conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone was “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history”.
Biggar said the British could not undo the evil of the slave trade but they did the next best thing: they repented of it and liberated the living. But only one side of the history is told today and, to a large extent, that is because the motive is to drive contemporary politics by a misleading historical narrative. The lesson: the only justification for truth-telling is being truthful.
“For the second half of its life, anti-slavery, not slavery, was at the heart of imperial policy,” Biggar wrote. “The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.”
Yet this is a contentious view because the near exclusively hostile story of Western history holds sway in the media, academia and schools.
Biggar confronts the moral arguments for compensation and reparations for past racism and slavery. Claims to compensation must show continuing loss or harm from past injury, not an easy task over hundreds of years. The 21st-century descendants of these cruelties find their lives owing much to events in the 200 years since their emancipation.
He asks: Can we be sure people would have been better off had their ancestors remained in West Africa? A similar question could be posed in Australia: Can we be sure Indigenous people would have been better off if the British colonisation of Australia had never occurred?
Biggar recounts a conversation between a British diplomat and one of Nigeria’s rulers. The Nigerian was pressing the cause for compensation after Britain’s colonial rule. The diplomat replied: “I entirely agree. And you shall have your compensation – just as soon as we get ours from the Romans.”
As Biggar said, colonisation and empire was the standard form of political organisation for the last 4000 years to 1945. It extended through the Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Ottomans and the Dutch, French and English, among others. Most empires had a positive as well as a negative dimension, though many current histories discount this.
Australia is lucky – its colonialisation by the British meant a generation of British liberals believing in the rights of man and repudiating slavery laid the political foundations for what became one of the world’s early and entrenched democracies. Australia’s colonial experience, reflecting Biggar’s thesis, is a mixture of the good and the bad. We need to hold both truths in our mind and not succumb to polemical narratives of either the all-good or all-bad history.
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16 October, 2024
SpaceX has put Europe to shame
One American company can do what the vast EU bureaucracy cannot
The flawless launch of SpaceX’s 5,000-ton Starship and its Super Heavy Booster, and the precision recovery of the booster on its launch pad, has opened the way to a manned mission to the moon next year and perhaps to Mars as soon as 2030. One giant leap for Elon Musk’s company on Sunday was one more reminder that Europe’s space programme is a colossal failure.
Europe is currently unable to launch even its own weather satellites, and India, which managed a soft landing on the Moon last year, now has a more credible space program. Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’
Elon’s Musk’s dream has become Europe’s nightmare. France’s Arianespace has this year managed to launch just one of the new Ariane 6 rockets made by its ArianeGroup umbrella company. It came four years late and hundreds of millions of euros over budget. SpaceX has already completed 96 launches this year, recovered and reused almost all of them, and expects to reach 148 launches by the end of December. Even if Arianespace can get the new rocket to work properly, it has planned to launch no more than nine missions a year, of which four will be institutional missions, such as reconnaissance satellites, and only five commercial missions.
European failure to embrace reusable rockets has made it completely uncompetitive. The estimated cost of a launch using the already obsolete Ariane 6, when it becomes operational, perhaps next year, is more than £83 million. The cost of a comparable launch on SpaceX is around £54 million. And Europe has nothing in the pipeline to match the SpaceX Starship, which will be able to launch payloads of 100 tons or more.
Access to space is the sine qua non of a credible space program. Without it, the scientific and commercial applications of space technology are impossible.
The Galileo global satellite system created by the European Union through the European Space Agency to compete with the Americans has so far launched 32 satellites and has failed to deliver a robust system. Many the satellites were launched using Russian rockets, no longer available due to the war in Ukraine. Further launches are on hold, pending the availability of Ariane 6.
OneWeb, the private European communications satellite project designed to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, has launched its own limited constellation using SpaceX and Indian rockets. Even the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) is now buying launches from SpaceX.
‘This decision was driven by exceptional circumstances’ said EUMETSAT’s Director General Phil Evans. The exceptional circumstance being that Arianespace had no capability. SpaceX has meanwhile launched 7,000 Starlink communications satellites offering high-speed internet access and text messaging to mobile phones.
Europe’s space agency (the UK remains a member) is an example of European hubris at its absolute worst, its failures a masterclass in how not to be globally competitive, while spending billions on institutional grandiosity. The European Space Agency, which presides over Europe’s failed efforts, has a budget of €7.8 billion and a staff of around 2,500. ArianeGroup, which is subsidised by ESA, employs 8,300 people. Between them, they are unlikely to produce a reusable rocket before 2030.
It’s been a while since I was at the European launch base in Kourou, French Guiana, but I’m not missing much because nothing is happening there. The last launch of the small European Vega rocket was last month. Perhaps four launches of the new Vega C rocket might be attempted next year. Fewer missions in a year than SpaceX completes in a fortnight. Europe’s space programme is all show and no-go.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/spacex-has-put-europe-to-shame/
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Buying the News: How Leftwing Donors Are Taking Over Local Journalism
American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20% in one year from 2021 to 2022.
At the same time, the remaining readership expresses a historically low level of faith that the news they are getting is accurate. Just 32% of Americans say they have a “great deal or a fair amount of trust” in the media, according to polling from Gallup.
If there is a bright spot here, polling has long shown that American consumers trust local media more than the national press. “In 2021, Americans were 17 points more likely to say they trust reporting by local news organizations ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ than to trust reporting by national news organizations,” notes a survey done by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. But the rapid consolidation of the news industry has adversely affected the level of trust in the news Americans are consuming.
Local news organizations, however, have been hit especially hard by the decline in readers. Many have folded, cut staff, been purchased by private equity firms, or absorbed by national news organizations, which has diminished their editorial independence.
In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment poured into local media in what appears to be a salutary injection of faith in the power of the community or regional press. However, the lion’s share of these investments is coming from sources some worry will further undermine trust in the media – progressive foundations and left-leaning activists who have overtly ideological and partisan agendas. While conservative donors also support news outlets (including RealClearInvestigations), their contributions are far smaller than those coming from the left – contributions large enough to radically remake the local news landscape. Significant examples of that largesse include:
The MacArthur Foundation’s launch of its “Press Forward” initiative last fall, which committed to spending $500 million over the next five years to “enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.”
The National Trust for Local News’ 2021 announcement of its goal of amassing $300 million for a “non-profit newspaper company dedicated to protecting and sustaining community news … [to] publish sustainable community newspapers that safeguard the public trust, elevate the facts, empower communities with solutions, and foster a strong sense of place.” Last year, the National Trust for Local News quietly acquired Maine’s largest paper, The Portland Press-Herald, along with 22 other newspapers in the state.
The creation of States Newsroom, which was founded just six years ago with the goal of “nonpartisan coverage of state policy,” and has already formed partnerships with local outlets in all 50 states. Its stated mission is “hard-hitting reporting and commentary to change the political debate.”
The creation of The American Journalism Project, which describes its mission as “venture philanthropy,” has committed $55 million to “rebuilding local news.”
RealClearInvestigations reached out to States Newsroom, National Trust For Local News, American Journalism Project, and Courier Newsroom. None of them responded to a request for comment.
Meet the Funders
While not all the funding sources for these projects are expressly partisan, to the extent the funding of these new local journalism initiatives is publicly known, some of the biggest donors and foundations on the progressive left are closely associated with them. These donors had little previous interest in local journalism and have a track record of supporting initiatives that are ideological or partisan – or both.
The MacArthur Foundation, for instance, in addition to its $500 million Press Forward initiative, also provided funding for the National Trust for Local News and The American Journalism Project. Long known for funding left-wing causes, MacArthur endorsed one of the most politically controversial works of advocacy journalism in the last decade. The foundation awarded one of its generous $800,000 “Genius Grants” to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which claimed that the year enslaved people were first brought to Virginia was the “true founding [date] of America,” not 1776. The 1619 Project received scathing criticism from some of America’s most eminent historians and one of the 1619 Project’s own fact-checkers, and entire essays in the project were so factually incorrect that there were calls for them to be retracted entirely.
The MacArthur Foundation also supports the National Trust for Local News, which has also received financial support from two of the largest sources of left-wing political funding – the Tides Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.
The Tides Foundation, a “donor-advised” fund, allows contributors to direct where the money goes. By acting as an intermediary, Tides obscures the original source of the funds, making it what transparency advocates call a “dark money” group. Tides is one of the largest dark money operations and spent $854 million in 2022 alone. It donates millions in grants to pro-Democrat get-out-the-vote operations, abolishing pre-trial bail even for defendants charged with violent crimes, and pro-Hamas demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel.
The Open Society Foundations network was created by leftist billionaire megadonor George Soros. According to NBC News, between 2020 and 2023, “Soros’ contributions to political campaigns and causes since January 2020 [amount] to roughly half a billion dollars – at the least – most of it steered through dark money nonprofit groups and going largely toward political causes aligned with the Democratic Party.” In addition to funding the National Trust for Local News, Soros also has the power to influence local news consumption after his family office recently purchased a large stake in 227 radio stations across the U.S.
Both the National Trust for Local News and States Newsroom have received funding from controversial Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has spent nearly half a billion dollars on American left-wing causes. Between 1990 and 2006, Wyss gave almost $120,000 to candidates and political committees despite it being illegal for foreign nationals to spend money on U.S. elections. Wyss was never punished because the statute of limitations had passed by the time the Federal Elections Commission investigated his illegal donations.
In 2021, Wyss partnered with another influential Democratic donor, hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr., in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase Tribune Publishing, which then owned the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and the Baltimore Sun among other newspapers and media properties.
In addition, some of the largest donations to The American Journalism Project are from the foundations of high-profile Democratic megadonors. The Emerson Collective, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of The Atlantic and one of the largest shareholders in Disney/ABC, has given in excess of $5 million. Also, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s The Democracy Fund and the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund of the eponymous Craigslist founder have given The American Journalism project donations somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.
For her part, Powell Jobs has built out a well-funded network designed to explicitly advance the policy goals of the Democratic Party.
In addition to numerous political causes, Omidyar has long funded journalism efforts – he provided the seed money for the left-wing news site The Intercept, and Democracy Fund has given sizable grants to the Defending Democracy Together Institute, which is closely associated with the online anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark.
In 2020, Newmark publicly committed to a $200 million media campaign aimed at swaying the presidential election while alleging that “foreign adversaries” were controlling the Trump White House. Relatedly, Google and Facebook are also major donors to The American Journalism Project, and both companies have received heavy criticism for election meddling and censoring information on COVID and various political topics that later turned out to be accurate.
Ironically, perhaps no single man is more responsible for the death of local media than Newmark, as it was Craigslist that destroyed classified advertising, a major source of revenue for newspapers. “I’m very concerned about jobs for journalists, and the future of local journalism, and had always guessed that Craigslist might have an effect,” Newmark told the Press-Gazette in 2021.
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School did not discriminate against student by forcing her to wear a skirt, Queensland tribunal finds
A Queensland school did not discriminate against a female student by forcing her to wear a skirt on formal occasions, a tribunal has found.
The student, who cannot be named for legal reasons, made the complaint to the state’s Human Rights Commissioner, arguing she suffered discrimination by the new uniform policy which requires female students between years 7 and 12 to wear a skirt on formal occasions including outings, ceremonies, events and photographs.
Females are allowed to wear shorts and pants on other days, while male students wear them every day.
The father of the student argued in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal that his daughter suffered a greater financial burden because she had to buy two school uniforms and that greater care was needed to maintain her modesty in a skirt compared with male students.
The initial complaint also said she had suffered negative psychological effects from “negative gender stereotypes and gendered power relations” but this was not raised at the hearing.
“If the complainant failed to comply with the formal occasion skirt requirement she could face negative consequences of exclusion or suspension or other lesser consequences not faced by a male student,” the decision read.
In a statement the student said when wearing a skirt, “there is an extra level of thinking required about the way I move and sit, as to not expose myself”.
Her father said she had experienced “stress and anxiety” about having to wear a skirt with a large number of people around.
After the complaint was first raised with the school, the student was told she could apply for a formal exemption, but the student argued this was also discriminatory because male students did not need to.
Lawyers for the school argued that there had been no concerns expressed by other parents about any extra expense and they had skirts available on loan. They said the skirts are long enough to touch the ground when kneeling, so there is a low risk of exposure and female students were allowed to wear bike shorts, which would remove the modesty issue.
QCAT member Jeremy Gordon said the school had shown that other schoolgirls were happy to wear skirts.
“If, for one reason or another, the complainant did not want to wear a skirt on formal occasions, this view was not shared by other female students,” he wrote.
He found that the policy did not discriminate against the student.
“The evidence is insufficient to show that the formal occasion uniform policy resulted in, or would have resulted in, less favourable treatment of the complainant as a female student over male students,” he wrote.
“To put this another way, there was different treatment between the sexes, but the evidence does not show that the different treatment was unfavourable to the complainant.”
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Australia is a monarchy -- and it's popular
Australia, where King Charles will return to on Friday, is where the monarch became a man. In 1966, Charles had a memorable half-year at the Timbertop bush campus of Victoria’s Geelong grammar school, where, he once said, he ‘had the Pommy (metaphorically) bits bashed off me’. The following year, his first major adult engagement was representing his mother Queen Elizabeth at the memorial service for the drowned Australian prime minister Harold Holt. Since then, the now King has returned to Australia another 14 times, most recently in 2018. It’s clear that Charles has great affection for the country of which he once almost became governor-general.
This week, the bags are being packed in Clarence House for the King and Queen’s first tour of Australia as head of state, en route to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Samoa. It’s not really a tour: it’s more a two-stop visit to Sydney and Canberra, a scaled-down itinerary reflecting concern for the King’s health and stamina as he battles cancer. While his doctors agreed to pause his cancer treatment for the trip, the Times reported that two members of his medical team and a supply of the King’s own blood will be on hand, just in case.
Republicans aren’t being subtle in snubbing the royal couple
The King and Queen arrive in Australia on Friday. But if you think there will be enthusiasm for the royal visit on a scale of the late Queen’s first tour in 1954 – when it’s been estimated three-quarters of the then Australian population turned out to see her – think again.
Consistent with the low-key visit, and limited ‘opportunities to meet the public’ – known as ‘walkabouts’ until Australian political correctness kicked in for this tour – there simply won’t be that sort of mass enthusiasm. Indeed, the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) pressure group, known for PR savvy rather than achieving results, has been talking up the visit as ‘reigniting the republic debate’. The group even caught the attention of the British media when it released a private secretary’s standard reply to their letter to the King on the issue, saying that becoming a republic is solely a matter for the Australian public. The ARM is reinforced by a British republican nobody in Australia has heard of, Graham Smith of Republic UK, who plans to photobomb the King’s public events with his group’s yellow placards.
Republicans aren’t being subtle in snubbing the royal couple. ARM’s co-president, former Crystal Palace footballer turned left-wing activist Craig Foster, was invited to the official New South Wales government’s royal reception, but ostentatiously and crassly declined, tweeting: ‘Thanks…but no thanks. I look forward to being “in the presence of” our first Aussie Head of State. When we put our big pants on, as a country.’
Such puerile behaviour is typical of activists, but similar refusals by our state premiers is simply appalling manners. Heads of government of each state and territory were invited to the Australian government’s official reception for the King and Queen in Canberra. Not one accepted. Each of had some ‘I’m washing my hair that night’ excuse of other commitments.
The worst offender was Victoria’s premier Jacinta Allan. It was she who this year appointed a minister for men’s behaviour, and she who last year was the minister responsible for cancelling the hosting of the 2026 Commonwealth Games. Not only has she said she is too busy to meet the King, but she has added insult to injury by sending a junior parliamentary secretary in her stead. She should look to her own behaviour.
Yes, all but one are Labor party premiers, and instinctively republican. But given the equally Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese has the grace and courtesy to welcome Australia’s constitutional head of state, the provincial leaders, whose constitutions also include the Crown as the fount of government, should have done the same.
It appears, however, that left-wing politicians’ indifference to the King and Queen runs against the tide of public opinion. A pre-visit opinion poll, published in Australia’s News Corporation newspapers last weekend, found that support for the Australian monarchy actually has increased since the late Queen’s death two years ago. Almost half of respondents supported the monarchy, with just one third wanting a republic. Even fewer thought Australia ever would become a republic. It also showed approval for Charles and Camilla increasing since the King’s coronation, perhaps reflecting goodwill as the King confronts his cancer.
The survey indicates great interest in, and regard for, the Prince and Princess of Wales too, suggesting the monarchy is safe in Australia for at least another generation. But Australian love doesn’t extend to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, to the point most respondents thought the King need not strive to reconcile with his wayward second son.
The results of this poll are not contradicted by the low-key reception of the King and Queen’s visit. Rather than apparent apathy, it suggests how most Australians accept and are comfortable with the monarchy’s ongoing presence in Australia, and see no need to change anything. Like a successful long marriage, the Elizabeth-mania of 1954 has, over the last 70 years, mellowed into a relationship of easy familiarity between the Crown and the Australian people, making this a quiet family visit rather than a state visit full of Ruritanian pomp and circumstance. No wonder Albanese has quietly dropped his government’s junior minister for the republic.
In fact, the biggest local controversy of the tour is that they won’t be going anywhere other than Sydney and Canberra: the sort of interstate jealousy that gainsays the posturing of state political leaders. Most Australians will make the King and Queen very welcome here, and hope sincerely that their short visit will be happy and, in its own quiet way, glorious.
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15 October, 2024
Nottingham University Puts Trigger Warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – Because They Contain “Expressions of Christian Faith”
The greatest narrative poem in the English language. On a par with Homer or Virgil. It's actually a very irreverent poem
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the 14th Century masterpiece which tell the stories of a host of characters on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, has been given a trigger warning by Nottingham University because they contained “expressions of Christian faith”. The Mail has more.
Nottingham University has now been accused of “demeaning education” for warning students about the religious elements of Chaucer’s stories – saying that anyone studying one of the most famous works in English literature would hardly have to have the Christian references pointed out.
The Mail on Sunday has obtained details of the notice issued to students studying a module called ‘Chaucer and His Contemporaries’ under Freedom of Information laws. It alerts them to incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith in the works of Chaucer and fellow medieval writers William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve.
The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, is a collection of stories about characters on a pilgrimage from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
They include the promiscuous Wife of Bath, the drunken miller and the thieving reeve, who delight and shock each other with stories containing explicit references to rape, lust and even anti-Semitism.
However, the university’s warning makes no reference to the anti-Semitism or sexually explicit themes.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, said: “Warning students of Chaucer about Christian expressions of faith is weird. Since all characters in the stories are immersed in a Christian experience there is bound to be a lot of expressions of faith. The problem is not would-be student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signalling, ignorant academics.”
Historian Jeremy Black added: “Presumably, this Nottingham nonsense is a product of the need to validate courses in accordance with tick-box criteria. It is simultaneously sad, funny and a demeaning of education.”
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Billionaires back a new ‘anti-woke’ university
Billionaires frustrated with elite colleges are banding behind a fledgling school in Texas that boasts 92 students.
Trader Jeff Yass, real-estate developer Harlan Crow and investor Len Blavatnik are among the high-profile people donating to the University of Austin, or UATX. The new school has raised roughly (AU$297 million) $200 million so far -- including (AU$52 million) $35 million from Yass -- a huge sum for a tiny school without any alumni to tap.
Crow, a major GOP donor, was an early backer. “Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilizations in their entirety,” he said. “Many people think that’s a bad idea.” Crow said he expects UATX to encourage ideological diversity.
Crow and his wife, Kathy, have hosted several events for the school at their Dallas home and let the school use space in an office park he owns for its summer program, provocatively called Forbidden Courses. Crow has been a controversial benefactor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He has said he has never discussed pending cases with Thomas.
Frustration with the state of debate and levels of unrest at prestigious universities has spurred some of the richest Americans to flex their financial muscle.
Billionaires like Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman led campaigns to oust Ivy League presidents they viewed as being too soft on antisemitism on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. Many wealthy donors believe elite colleges are overwhelmingly progressive -- and are attracted to the idea of an alternative school that says it encourages meritocratic achievement and myriad viewpoints.
Enter UATX, which welcomed its initial class of first-years last month in a former department store near the Texas Capitol. The school says it is nonpartisan and refers to its mission as the “fearless pursuit of truth.” Its foundational curriculum marries classical texts -- students were given a copy of Homer’s Odyssey upon enrollment -- with an emphasis on entrepreneurship.
A video posted to the school’s YouTube page contrasts scenes of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments at other schools with a civil UATX seminar. The video ends with the message, “They burn, we build.” Officials talk about UATX in lofty terms. Some cite the University of Chicago as an aspirational role model.
President Pano Kanelos called students and faculty “pioneers” and “heroes” in his convocation address. “What is truly historic is that which sends the trajectory of history, and lives lived within the stream of history, shooting in a direction other than that towards which they were tending,” Kanelos said.
The effort to launch the school was announced in fall 2021. Founders include venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a conservative who is donating to Donald Trump, and journalist Bari Weiss, who has described her news startup, the Free Press, as a check to mainstream media’s liberal orthodoxy.
Yass, who has long pushed for school choice and is UATX’s biggest donor, said in a statement, “Higher education needs competition. It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.” PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has long known Lonsdale and has separately been paying students to skip college, made a small gift. Former energy trader John Arnold and his wife, Laura, who are advocates of criminal-justice reform and open debate on campus, are major donors. Alex Magaro, co-president of investment firm Meritage Group, gave $10 million last month.
The campus turmoil over the war in Gaza accelerated fundraising, school administrators said, including from those who felt universities selectively applied free-speech principles. Blavatnik, who is Jewish, gave $1 million through his family foundation in the days after Hamas attacked Israel. He later paused his giving to Harvard University, his alma mater.
Daniel Lubetzky, founder of snack-bar maker Kind Snacks and a son of a Holocaust survivor, donated early on and continued to give after the attacks. He became increasingly alarmed at the rise of ” us vs. them” thinking on campuses. Active discussions are ongoing with others, including Ackman, who was harshly critical of elite colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and their handling of antisemitism on campus.
“It took what happened in the wake of Oct. 7 on the major campuses to convince Wall Street, to convince people in Silicon Valley, that there really was a problem” with higher education, said historian Niall Ferguson, another school founder.
A larger fundraising campaign is expected to start in January. Whether prospective students find UATX as attractive as donors remains to be seen. UATX currently lacks accreditation and can receive it only after its first class graduates. As a way to offset the risk students are taking, the first class of students is receiving full-tuition scholarships worth about $130,000. More than 40% of the students in the class hail from Texas and a third are female.
Executives from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boring Company are helping to develop the school’s engineering curriculum. Lonsdale, the school’s board chair, is gifting a few acres of land outside Austin, adjacent to SpaceX and Boring, for a science and technology center. UATX is also searching for a main campus.
While UATX says it isn’t an explicitly political school, some of its most prominent backers are big donors to Republican candidates and causes, including Yass and Crow. Yass co-founded trading giant Susquehanna International Group, which has a big stake in TikTok.
Kanelos, the University of Austin’s president, said the school’s top 10 donors vary in political ideology but that, “Everyone who gives to us is a critic of higher education.”
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The British Left drifts Right
In the once vibrant landscape of British politics, the Labour Party stood as a defiant force of opposition – loud, principled, and occasionally even radical. Enter Keir Starmer, the man who promised to rescue Labour from the clutches of ‘Corbynceps’ (the ideological fungus that some believed had infected the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership). With impeccable suits and measured tones, Starmer vowed to restore order and respectability. A harmless reformer, right?
But like any good parasite, the danger lay in his quiet persistence.
First, Starmer neutralised the ideological immune system by purging the most vocal members of Labour’s left wing. It wasn’t long before the party started behaving differently. The infection took root when he announced that Labour was backing away from nationalising public utilities – policies once central to its DNA. Electricity, railways, water? Nah, too ‘1990s’. Like an infected insect abandoning its instincts, Labour now began parroting lines that wouldn’t be out of place at a Conservative Party conference: ‘We have to make tough decisions…’ (Because, apparently, billionaires are on the verge of poverty if we tax them fairly.)
Next came the retreat on welfare spending. Universal Credit? Reforms to benefit the poorest? Starmer’s Labour would ‘look at’ these things but won’t make any promises. The host, still clutching onto the hope that this is all for the greater good, began climbing higher and higher under the influence of its new master, ready to eject policies that are more palatable to the center-right media than the voters who once believed in radical change.
Starmer’s crowning infection is a U-turn on climate pledges. The party that once promised to spearhead a Green New Deal is now backing away from Net Zero targets and clean energy investment. Labour is scaling back plans for a greener economy, all while the planet burns. In true Cordyceps fashion, Starmer’s party is marching toward its doom, happily parroting platitudes about ‘balancing priorities’ while the environment takes a back seat. We wouldn’t want to upset the fossil fuel lobby, now would we?
And in perhaps the boldest betrayal, Starmer announced tougher immigration controls, further infecting the very soul of Labour with rhetoric once reserved for the likes of Nigel Farage. ‘Tough on crime, tough on immigration, and tougher on anyone who thought socialism was still in the room!’ Labour, by this point, is no longer recognisable, now fully under the control of the Starmer Fungus, nodding along as if austerity cuts and limited housing plans were exactly what the people had asked for.
Then there’s Brexit, or rather, the absence of any meaningful stance on it. You’d think the party that once championed Europe might say something about reversing the damage. But no, Starmer has convinced the host to forget its pro-European roots entirely. Like an insect zombified by Cordyceps, Labour now stumbles along, muttering, ‘We need to move on…’ while blindly avoiding any discussion of rejoining the EU or repairing our international standing.
Just when you thought Starmer’s parasitic takeover was complete, another curious incident emerged: the Chagos Islands controversy. In a move that even some of his own supporters might find bewildering, Starmer quietly backed the decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a questionable choice amid uncertain geopolitical times. The islands, once a strategic military base for the UK and the US, are being surrendered like a trinket in a pawn shop, with little regard for their significance in the Indian Ocean as a key point of influence between East and West. Starmer’s Labour, keen to avoid any friction, accepted this development with a shrug, sacrificing national security for the sake of international optics.
As if to distract from this grand misstep, Starmer dangled his ambitious vision for the nation: The Five Missions. Labour, now thoroughly hollowed out by its fungal overlord, eagerly embraced these as if they were bold new ideas. Starmer announced missions to grow the economy, fix the NHS, improve education, tackle crime, and address climate change. But in true parasitic style, these are empty promises – vague enough to sound inspiring but lacking any commitment to the radical reforms needed. ‘Grow the economy,’ Labour mumbles as it stumbles forward, protecting the wealthy instead of taxing them. ‘Fix the NHS,’ it chants, even as Starmer avoids discussing how it will be funded.
Public polling reflects this internal turmoil. Voters, once loyal to Labour’s cause, are increasingly disillusioned, with many expressing that they feel betrayed by Starmer’s shifts away from core party values. Some polls suggest that a growing number of traditional Labour supporters are contemplating alternatives, revealing just how far the party has drifted from its roots.
Tensions within Labour only add to the chaos. Discontent is brewing among the party’s left faction, who see Starmer as the embodiment of a hollowed-out, centrist machine. The voices of grassroots activists and former Corbyn supporters are growing louder, questioning whether the party can ever regain its revolutionary spirit or if it’s simply become a pale imitation of its former self.
And while the public stirs with frustration, the spectre of history looms large. Once, Labour was synonymous with the fight against injustice and colonialism, yet now, under Starmer’s rule, it seems more concerned with political survival than moral integrity. The ghosts of Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ and Margaret Thatcher’s reshaping of the Conservative Party haunt the current leadership, hinting at the perils of sacrificing principles for power.
But just when you thought the infection was complete, the final punchline arrives. In this madcap world of Labour under Starmer, one can only wonder: what’s next? Perhaps a radical pivot toward embracing the monarchy or a manifesto to build a luxury housing estate on the remnants of the NHS?
Labour, once the champion of public ownership, social justice, and geopolitical awareness, has now climbed to a platform indistinguishable from that of its once sworn enemies. The spores of center-right policy drift out into the world, infecting the broader political discourse, with Starmer as the grim puppet master smiling quietly in the background, promising a new dawn.
But when the dust settles, one must ask – what happens to the host when it has served its purpose? Does Starmer move on to infect the broader electorate next, convincing them that voting for Labour is a vote for change when, in fact, they’re simply climbing higher to a precipice of political sameness? The answer, like any parasitic infection, remains to be seen.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/keir-starmer-labours-cordyceps-fungus/
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Try a Little Honesty About Israel
Victor Davis Hanson
Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.
A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] should remember that.”
Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: This current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.
Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”
Election interference?
Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into swing-state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance to a left-wing magazine.
Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.
Her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.
Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a b—-, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f–king guy!”
What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?
It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his would-be successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.
Yet they feel they must also pander to anti-Israel, Muslim-American voters who may determine the Electoral College votes of critical swing-state Michigan.
Democratic politicos square that circle by claiming they support Israel—despite damning the conservative Netanyahu. That way they seek to blame Netanyahu for alienating Arab and Muslim-American voters, while they do not alienate left-wing Jewish and pro-Israeli Democrats.
For all the invective, a demonized Netanyahu is now regaining public support in Israel. The Israeli public approves of his near-destruction of Hamas, the ongoing brilliant Israeli emasculation of Hezbollah, and Israel’s revelations that the once widely feared terrorist regime in Iran may in fact well prove to be a paper tiger.
Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan admitted just eight days before the Oct. 7 massacres that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
His boast was an admission that Biden and Harris had inherited from the prior Trump administration a stable Middle East.
So, what blew up Sullivan’s quietude?
Certainly not Netanyahu or Israel in general.
It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise-attacked and killed 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and a Jewish holiday.
Their slaughtering, torturing, raping, and hostage-taking revealed a level of precivilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.
Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number more than 20,000.
It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until Oct. 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.
During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both U.S. Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.
For over three years, the Biden administration had signaled Israel’s enemies that it no longer acted like a close ally of the past.
After it all, Biden-Harris lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders. It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.
Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: Attack the Jewish state, and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much.
And so they did, in unison.
Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.
The final irony?
Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic and endanger its very survival—and so, will not agree to its own suicide.
Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek. And one of whose beneficiaries from Israeli blood and treasure will be the U.S. itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/11/try-little-honesty-about-israel-2/
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14 October, 2024
Has Britain really entered its ‘first atheist age’?
Some sociology academics have, after a three-year research project called ‘Exploring Atheism’, unveiled a startling discovery: there are a lot of people in Britain who don’t believe in God. I know, it’s quite a gut-punch.
They do not quite claim to have found that most Britons are atheists. But they do claim that there are now more atheists than religious believers. By collating various social attitudes surveys from 2008 to 2018 they found a strong upward trend in those saying that they did not believe in God, from 35 per cent to 43 per cent. During this time, believers in God dropped from 42 per cent to 37 per cent. This has led the academics to claim that Britain has now entered its ‘first atheist age’.
Many of us are complacent, assuming that religion will always be there in our culture as an option
It’s an inflated claim. For one thing, the Census of England and Wales of 2021 found that 37 per cent said that they have no religion, which suggests that the majority have some sort of religious allegiance. Presenting their findings on 2 October, the authors of the report said this includes allegiance that is more cultural than sincere.
It is doubtless true-ish that believers in God are now a minority. I say ‘true-ish’ because these things are so vague. My hunch is that there is a large sector, maybe even about half of the population, who are hard to pin down. If pressed, they probably say that they don’t believe in God, and are not religious, but they have respect for religion, and sometimes participate, and are wary of the sort of atheism that is hostile to it.
As these academics are doubtless privately aware, it’s pretty meaningless to say that Britain has embarked upon an ‘atheist age’, for the meaning of ‘atheism’ is unclear. The strong atheism of Richard Dawkins and co. is a particular modern ideology, a belief that rational humanism can save us. And, rather paradoxically, its hostility to religion is shaped by Protestant reformist zeal: it is a secular version of it. This creed is obviously a minority thing: it had a sort of comeback twenty years ago, in response to 9/11, but it lacks mass appeal.
As well as totting up the numbers, the Exploring Atheism research project attempts to tackle the question of why some of us believe, and others don’t. With impressive honesty, it admits that it is largely impossible to say. It discounts certain received ideas, for example that believers are less intelligent, less well off, less emotionally stable, more fearful of death. What it does say is that the only sure factor is parental influence. Seeing your parents participating in religion makes it more likely that you will go in that direction. And hearing your parents mock or disparage religion makes it likely that you’ll follow suit. Obvious enough, but still worth reflecting on.
It’s a healthy reminder to those of us who are religious, or semi-religious. If one doesn’t bother exposing one’s children to religion, they are unlikely ever to know of its dark depths and difficult delights. Letting them decide for themselves means trusting them to the shallow drift of the culture. Too many of us are complacent, assuming that religion will always be there in our culture as an option. We should take responsibility for its continued existence, which takes real cultural effort. In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, in his novel Here I Am: ‘You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/has-britain-really-entered-its-first-atheist-age/
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Canada’s DEI doctors
Canada, like other countries, has had a long-standing problem with doctor shortages. Rural and northern communities struggle to find doctors who want to stay in remote regions after their mandatory medical placements have ended. Finding a family doctor or paediatrician has become a massive struggle, too. ‘Fewer medical students [are] choosing to specialise in family medicine,’ the Canadian Medical Association noted in March, with ‘younger physicians not wanting to take over traditional clinical practices.’
‘It is expected that 25 per cent of students will be admitted through the General Admissions Stream and 75 per cent collectively through the Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways’
That’s why there was a great deal of excitement when Toronto Metropolitan University was recently granted preliminary accreditation for a four-year MD programme. With this important approval from the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools, TMU’s September announcement stated, ‘the School of Medicine can now begin recruiting prospective students for its first cohort in September 2025.’ It will become Canada’s 18th accredited medical school.
The premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, of the Progressive Conservative party, posted on Twitter on 27 September: ‘I’m thrilled to see that TMU’s medical school has officially been accredited.’ ‘This final hurdle paves the way for the first new medical school in the Greater Toronto Area in over 175 years, with new doctors set to graduate by spring 2026 to help connect more people to care in Ontario.’
Ford’s initial reaction was understandable. But I wonder if his enthusiasm became more tempered when it was revealed that Canada’s newest medical school will be a sanctuary for left-wing, backward-thinking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Looking more closely at TMU’s announcement, some red flags appear immediately.
‘The four-year MD curriculum is rooted in community-driven care and cultural respect and safety, with equity, diversity and inclusion, decolonisation and Reconciliation woven throughout,’ one paragraph outlined. ‘Through active, inquiry-based learning, the school will help train innovative, well-rounded physicians who are responsive to societal and community needs.’
What do things like ‘decolonisation and Reconciliation’ have to do with becoming a doctor, you might reasonably ask?
Things get worse though when it comes to the admissions criteria for the new school. According to TMU, ‘the admissions process will also purposefully admit equity-deserving students and identify applicants interested in primary care practice, particularly in medically underserved areas.’
Hold on. A medical school is actually acknowledging that it is putting in place a discriminatory acceptance policy – and not even being coy about it? Yes, indeed. The announcement notes there will be ‘three dedicated admissions pathways in addition to the General Admissions Stream.’ The pathways will be for ‘Indigenous Admissions,’ ‘Black Admissions’ and ‘Equity-Deserving Admissions.’
If this wasn’t bad enough, here comes the clincher.
TMU’s School of Medicine has revealed its selection process for the MD programme on its website. ‘For the 2025 admissions cycle, a total of 94 seats are available,’ the university notes. ‘It is expected that 25 per cent of students will be admitted through the General Admissions Stream and 75 per cent collectively through the Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways.’
That’s right. Three-quarters of the places in Canada’s newest medical school will be determined by TMU’s strict DEI standards. Grades, extracurricular activities, volunteering, work experience, and other assessments won’t be the main criteria for deciding who becomes a practising doctor. TMU even make clear that they are willing to relax academic standards for DEI candidates, saying that:
‘In exceptional circumstances, applicants in the three admissions pathways (Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving) with a GPA below the minimum requirement of 3.3 may have their application considered for admission by the relevant pathway subcommittee.’
This is a perfect example of reverse discrimination – the kind which was struck down in the US by the Supreme Court last year. TMU’s administration have clearly chosen against accepting the best and brightest medical school applicants from all walks of life. They probably didn’t even think about the discriminatory nature of their selection process and DEI policies.
They should have, however. While it’s not illegal in Canada to do something like this, it’s definitely unwise. TMU’s decision reeks of the racism we’ve seen in the past – and is the kind of policy that repels most ordinary people.
What can be done? For starters, Canadians and political leaders like Ford should speak out against TMU’s intolerant selection policy. It would also be wise for the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools to pull back its preliminary accreditation for TMU’s School of Medicine until it ensures that all student applicants will be treated in a fair, equal and merit-based fashion. If it doesn’t, it’s inevitable that confidence in the medical profession will be shaken.
There’s an old joke which highlights society’s concerns about academic standards and medicine: ‘What do you call someone who finishes last in medical school? Doctor.’ I fear that joke will become very relevant again if TMU moves ahead with this irresponsible strategy for its new medical school.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/canadas-dei-doctors/
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Navigating disastrous DEI
So impressed with the Samoans’ numerous canoes and their great skills in handling them, French Admiral Louis de Bougainville named their homeland in 1768 the Navigator Islands.
256 years later, on a Saturday afternoon earlier this month, my Samoan friends were on the south coast beach having a dress rehearsal barbecue for the imminent visit by King Charles, Queen Camilla, and all the heads of the Commonwealth for the CHOGM meeting.
Like most Samoans, my friends have more than a passing knowledge of things maritime and they observed this high-sided ship, very close to the ‘lee’ shore with a strong breeze, slowly moving as is required for hydrographic duties. A ‘lee’ shore is where the wind is blowing the ship towards the shore. Experienced sailors, from small yachts to big ships, know that you stay well clear of a lee shore. Boating 1.0.1!
In my four years training at sea, navigation and seamanship were two key elements of ship safety and the particular ship that I was on, a passenger-cargo ship trading between Australia and the South Pacific, we had to keep two miles off the land, rocks, or small outcrops. If it was a ‘lee shore’, the captain would make it three miles. In case there was a power failure, this would give the engineers time to restart the engine as we had backup fuel pumps, air starts, cooling systems etc.
Avalanched with calls from friends and media to give commentary on this New Zealand ship grounding, I kept my opinion to myself until I found out the facts. Brace yourselves readers.
Did it run aground because of a female skipper? My answer is no, and being from a merchant navy background I can tell you that as far back as the 60s, the Russians had the first female officers and female captains on many of their cargo and passenger ships. Mind you, they were more Georgian than gorgeous, but they were highly competent and were, appointed on merit, as are all merchant navy captains, male or female. My friend Inger Thorhauge, who is Captain of Cunard’s latest liner Queen Anne, started her seagoing career at 16, as I did, and she achieved this prestigious position purely on merit, experience, and current Certificates of Competence.
In just over seven years at sea, off watch, I could sleep well knowing that other watchkeepers were experienced and capable of navigating in busy waterways, reduced visibility or close quarters. The Master would mostly be on the bridge during these times.
My experience with Naval ships was winning the National Service lottery where I could get shot at in Vietnam or go on board Royal Australian Navy (RAN) ships as I was already a qualified navigator with five years of sea experience. I chose the RAN because it would get me the sea time necessary to sit my Masters foreign going certificate. The RAN was an eye opener and due to budget constraints and crew shortages, subsequently the ships actually seldom went to sea and crew experience and competence at that time was, in my opinion, very limited. Junior officers were not allowed any decision-making even on watch and I didn’t sleep well in the broom cupboard cabin I was sharing with three other guys down in the bowels of the HMAS Melbourne and the HMAS Supply when we were at sea. I recorded my experiences in Baird Maritime columns at the time, mostly to the disbelief of my merchant navy colleagues.
All of this leads me to ask, why was the New Zealand vessel skirting so close to an island with a lee shore under the watch of Captain Yvonne Grey? Boating 1.0.1, remember?
Was the ship suitable for the task? Having been involved in the design of hydrographic ships, to choose a second-hand ship with a 26m air draft (height of windage above the waterline) for slow steaming operations in windy conditions was not an optimal choice for the task, but typical of the defence procurement bungling bureaucratic process as highlighted frequently by Greg Sheridan of The Australian.
Would the combination of, in my opinion, an inexperienced Captain and a sub-optimal vessel be a recipe for a disaster? Yes! Now you have a clearer picture.
Another New Zealand commander crashed another Navy vessel earlier this year in Auckland to the tune of $220,000 in repairs.
Setting aside the cause of these accidents, which remain under investigation, the discussion of DEI within the Navy is a proud feature of their website which is why it is being discussed. It is a legacy possibly left over from former Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern who not only stuffed the New Zealand economy but was foisting such DEI policies into unsuspecting government bureaucracies such as the Navy. DEI policies for onshore establishments may be unpleasant but are workable, however, bosses there won’t put your life at risk. At sea, it is an entirely different matter, and such policies should be unacceptable and certainly not boasted about.
DEI policies, proudly printed on recruitment sites, would be a deterrent to any potential navy applicant, even female ones, who know full well this imbalanced system could see an individual treated differently due to their gender, sexuality, or race.
Was the evacuation and sinking of a very expensive ship a ‘triumph’ as described by New Zealand’s Defence Minister and Navy Chief Judith Collins? What puerile nonsense from Collins in her weak response to a shameful incident!
On a happier note, a previous CEO of a South Pacific Island Ferry informed me several years ago he had been instructed by his government to take at least 50 per cent female trainees, in-line with DEI suggestions from matriarchal New Zealand.
‘Was it a success?’ I asked him.
‘It was a 100 per cent success,’ he responded.
‘How do you mean?’
‘All of them were pregnant within six months,’ he happily replied, ‘so we are back to normal, taking applicants on merit, male or female.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/navigating-disastrous-dei/
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Australia: The Christian vote swings against Labor
When planning for the next federal election, due by September 2025 with some pundits suggesting as early as March, Prime Minister Albanese (aka one-term Albo) cannot ignore the Christian vote, the majority of which is Catholic.
Approximately 44 per cent of Australians identify as Christian and, proven by the 2019 election when Scott Morrison was unexpectedly re-elected as Prime Minister, a significant number of such voters appear to be swayed by their religious beliefs.
Such was the impact of the Christian vote that the review commissioned by the ALP after its electoral defeat recommends the party do more to ensure its polices gain the support of faith-based voters, instead of alienating what is a key constituency.
The report concludes that in outer urban and regional electorates, especially in Queensland, ‘When all other variables are controlled for, it is estimated that identifying as Christian was associated with a swing against Labor.’
While inner-city electorates, now dominated by the Teals and Greens, champion Woke causes including Indigenous reconciliation, multiculturalism, gender diversity, and climate change – there are millions of voters who are more conservatively minded.
One only needs to look at the 60/40 vote against the Voice to Parliament to realise, as argued by the cultural critic Roger Scruton, that most people, unlike the cosmopolitan, inner-city elites, centre their lives on family, local community, and the need for social cohesion and stability.
It’s obvious that if Albanese and the Labor government are keen to attract the millions of Christian voters who will decide the electoral outcome in marginal seats across Australia, they are going about it the wrong way.
Based on existing policies, and what the government plans to do if re-elected, it’s clear the ALP government has turned its back on Christian and Catholic voters when it comes to issues like religious freedom and freedom of conscience as well as school funding.
The Albanese government’s failure to introduce its Religious Discrimination Bill to Parliament, even though the draft bill was made public in 2021, represents a serious threat to the millions of voters identifying as Christian.
Whereas current anti-discrimination legislation makes it illegal to unfairly discriminate against someone on the basis of age, sex, gender identity, race, and disability the same protection is not afforded to people of religious beliefs and faith.
While those of Jewish faith are facing a rising flood of antisemitism in Australia where they are vilified and attacked on a daily basis by those seeking Israel’s destruction, it’s also true, though less violent and less extreme, that Christians face hostility and prejudice in Australia.
Examples include Victoria’s legislation to fine and imprison priests and Christian parents for daring to counsel children about the dangers of gender transitioning. Tasmania’s Archbishop Porteous has also been punished for advocating church teachings. To this we add the ACT government’s compulsory acquisition of the Catholic-owned Calvary Hospital, public figures like Israel Folau and Margaret Court being attacked for their religious beliefs, and the head of Brisbane’s Citipointe Christian College being pressured to resign over the school’s enrolment policies.
In an increasingly extreme secular world where human rights activists and elected representatives of various left-wing political parties argue Christians must be banished from the public square, it’s obvious more must be done to protect religious freedom.
Currently, faith-based schools are exempt from anti-discrimination legislation regarding who they employ and who they enrol. Religious schools, given their primary purpose is to remain true to their faith, must have control over staffing and enrolments.
The Albanese government’s failure to ensure such rights are protected represents another reason why parents who send their children to religious schools have every reason to fear what happens next year if the ALP government is re-elected. Especially if the Greens hold the balance of power.
Education Minister Jason Clare has stated a number of times that government schools deserve greater funding while one of the ALP’s long-term supporters, the Australian Education Union, opposes funding Catholic and Independent schools.
To financially penalise parents by reducing Commonwealth funding to non-government schools threatens parental choice as well as being financially counter-productive. Catholic schools enrol 19.7 per cent of students while Independent schools, the majority of which have a religious affiliation, enrol 16.3 per cent.
The cost to government, and taxpayers, of educating students in religious schools is significantly less than the cost of educating students in government schools as non-government school parents contribute billions of dollars annually to educate their children.
Catholic school parents contribute approximately 23.6 per cent of their children’s school income while Independent school parents contribute 46.9 per cent. If such students were enrolled in government schools the cost to government and taxpayers would increase dramatically.
There’s no doubt cost of living will be the main issue at the next election but, at the same time and proven by Scott Morrison’s win in 2019, the Christian vote will also be a deciding factor.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-christian-vote-swings-against-labor/
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13 October, 2024
IT HAPPENED: Norway just REJECTED cashless agenda: Shops are now required by law to accept cash as a form of payment
They have now rejected the cashless agenda. From the 1st of October, all shops are required by law to accept real physical cash as a form of payment.
As long as payments are under NOK 20.000 ($1871), shops cannot refuse cash payments. Those that do so will risk being fined.
The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection even recommends people to have some amounts of cash at all times in case digital forms of payment stop working.
Just recently that was the case, after a software update caused computers all over the world to crash, affecting banks, airports, supermarkets and more.
As many as 600.000 Norwegians are not digital, especially many elderly people.
With the World Economic Forum having pushed a cashless agenda, Norway is going the opposite way.
It is important to have cash. Because in a cashless society, it would be very easy for a tyrannical government to control who can buy and sell, monitoring every transaction.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149888588
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Spare us the cringeworthy back story
Judith Sloan
I’m in charge of streaming in our household – someone must be. Luckily, there is a joint preference for contemporary crime dramas, even if they involve solving cold cases. It’s one thing the BBC still does well, by and large. We also love a bit of Nordic noir.
Almost without exception, however, the makers of these series can’t resist the temptation to include some cringeworthy back story about one or more of the detectives solving the case. Do we really care that they are having marital difficulties? Do we really care that one of the kids has gone off the rails? Get on with solving the crime, I say. It just looks like unnecessary padding.
Sadly, far too many politicians have entered the field of recounting their tragic/uplifting/moving back story. Mind you, Kamala Harris, current US presidential candidate, moves her back story around depending on her audience. Some days she is just a middle-class kid; the next, she is a working-class kid. (Her mother was a medical research scientist, her father an economics professor – sounds solidly middle-class.)
She also has some bizarre story about the woman who looked after her and her sister while her mother went to work. Evidently, this woman also ran a small business – I’m not sure when she had the time – which means that Kamala understands small business. Sure.
The back story has become a part of the kitbag of too many politicians here. How many times have we heard about Albo living in public housing as his single mother struggled to make ends meet?
The messages are twofold: with grit, determination, a loving mother and a supportive state, even a boy like Albo can make good. Secondly, public housing is a plus rather than a minus, notwithstanding the evidence that public housing estates are far too often hubs for crime and drug-dealing and the employment rate among tenants is very low.
Of course, everyone has a right to bang on about their background if they want to. But the real problem for politicians is that they too often use their very narrow, individual circumstances to inform themselves about policy, ignoring wide consultation, research and the consideration of all options.
One of the most egregious examples of the tedious and irksome back story is from federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, who comes from western Sydney. He is very proud of the fact that he is the first member of his family to attend university. He undertook a double degree at the University of New South Wales in arts and law before he became an advisor to Bob Carr, Labor premier of NSW. So, well done, Jase. But what he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that university is not for everyone. Many young people, including those who live in his electorate in western Sydney, would be much better served by pursuing a trade, particularly one in the construction industry. Jase is also very big on equity of access, irrespective of the record of the applicants or their capacity to pass the required subjects.
Jase commissioned the Australian Universities Accord which unsurprisingly recommended, in view of the minister’s circumstances, that the participation of those aged 25 to 34 years of age in university education be lifted from the current rate of 45 per cent – which seems extremely high – to 55 per cent by the middle of the century. In addition, those groups currently most under-represented in higher education should increase ‘to achieve parity across the Australian population’. So much for universities being centres of excellence.
It doesn’t seem to occur to our hero from western Sydney that the country will not be well served by having more graduates in Sociology, Cultural Studies or Chinese Medicine. Give us more plumbers, electricians, carpenters and brickies any day.
It’s worth observing here that many jobs that now require a university degree were once done by school-leavers. This is the case, for example, in accounting and bookkeeping. There was generally a lot of training given on the job and the holders of these positions often progressed quickly. Interestingly, the accounting profession is currently considering reverting to this model, at least partially, much to the chagrin of university accounting departments.
The real message that Jase should be giving young people is that university is not for everyone and that there are great futures in a range of occupations, particularly in the trades. But this just doesn’t fit with his back story.
If that anecdote doesn’t make you recoil, let me recount another aspect of Jason Clare’s back story. Evidently, his son Jack was thrilled to learn that his parents were presenting him with a new brother named Atticus. Now, Jack is a childcare centre attendee and his response to the news was that he must tell his favourite childcare worker, Kellie, about the new arrival.
The reaction of Jase was quite heart-warming. This incident had made him appreciate the sense of community that childcare imparts as well as clearly demonstrating the benefits of childcare on children. (Sample size = 1).
Now I don’t know about you, but this is not my experience of childcare. In many inner-city childcare centres, most of the staff don’t really speak English. No doubt they would have nodded politely when hearing Jack’s news, but that’s about it. There is also a rapid turnover of staff such that, half the time, the children never get to know any of the carers.
But this is not in keeping with Jase’s (or Labor’s) political position on the topic. Parents must be highly subsidised to dump their children in childcare centres, the more hours each week the better. This is so the women can work and help the economy. But it’s also good for the children – or so the ‘experts’ tell us who refuse to accept the fact correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
The fact that the best studies around tell a completely different story is ignored. There has been close to free universal childcare in Quebec, Canada for many years. The quality of the care does vary, and all the best options are snaffled by high-income earners. (You probably get the drift of the key problem with many studies: the children of high-income earners do better in life, the children go to high-quality childcare centres. It’s just a pity about the others.)
It’s clear that long day care is statistically associated with a range of social problems for many of the children attending and that these problems persist into the teenage years. They include anxiety, hyperactivity and aggression. Jase might want to talk to Kellie about these findings.
Politicians really shouldn’t use their (mostly uninteresting) back stories as a prime determinant of policy positions, particularly as these positions generally include spending great dollops of taxpayer dollars. File the stories in the bottom drawer and get on with using best practice means of settling on policies, including the option of leaving well enough alone.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/spare-us-the-cringeworthy-back-story/
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Gavin Newsom Does Something Conservatives May Like
The California governor signs a bill banning legacy preferences at private colleges and universities.
The Supreme Court began a new term this week, but its landmark 2023 decision on racial preferences in college admissions continues to reverberate.
Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that bans private universities in California from favoring “legacy” applicants, those whose parents are alumni or whose families have donated to the school. It was California’s response to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the ruling that outlawed preferences based on race and ethnicity. Conservatives often want progressive policies that emanate from the Golden State to stay there. This may be an exception.
The left’s rebuttal to the Harvard decision has been to push against legacy preferences at selective schools on the grounds that they amount to affirmative action for affluent white people. That’s not an unreasonable argument on its face. Granting favorable treatment to the offspring of Stanford and University of Southern California graduates would tend to benefit white applicants more than their nonwhite counterparts. And if these schools are aiming to admit the most deserving students, as they claim, why should lineage but not race give certain applicants who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for admission a bump in the selection process?
Legacy admissions to the public University of California system were banned in the 1990s, and some elite private schools, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Amherst College in Massachusetts and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, voluntarily ended the practice. Virginia, Illinois and Colorado have proscribed it at public colleges and universities. But California now becomes only the second state after Maryland to pass a law that forbids consideration of legacy and donor status at private institutions.
Such bans at public schools are an easier call. It’s hard to justify why state taxpayers should subsidize a university that chooses its students based on factors that have nothing to do with merit. Still, some might argue that legacy prohibitions at private schools are another matter, and court challenges are a possibility. Even critics acknowledge that however unfair legacy considerations may be, they don’t violate the Constitution. Just as sororities, country clubs and other private groups can legally select some members and reject others—so long as they don’t discriminate on unlawful grounds—the right of association protected by the First Amendment arguably allows private-school administrators to give relatives of alumni and donors a leg up.
In an opinion that accompanied an earlier Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice Clarence Thomas, who is no fan of legacy preferences, nevertheless warned about comparing them to racial preferences. “The Equal Protection Clause does not . . . prohibit the use of unseemly legacy preferences or many other kinds of arbitrary admissions procedures,” Justice Thomas wrote. “What the Equal Protection Clause does prohibit are classifications made on the basis of race. So while legacy preferences can stand under the Constitution, racial discrimination cannot.”
The economist Richard Vedder, who also frowns on special treatment for the offspring of alumni and donors, has written that so much federal funding now flows to private institutions—either directly through research grants or indirectly through student loans and in other ways—that the public-private distinction no longer makes sense.
“The Ivy League, for example, gets more government support per student than most so-called state universities,” according to Mr. Vedder. “The notion that public monies should be used to subsidize preferential treatment to less qualified [legacy] students, most of whom come from wealthy white families, is abhorrent to the American belief that anyone, regardless of wealth, race, gender or other group attribute, can with hard work rise to the top in our society.”
Supporters of legacy admissions insist that schools depend on them for fundraising and recruitment, and that may be true at institutions that don’t have large endowments, including historically black colleges. But most donations from alumni are for smaller amounts and out of loyalty and appreciation, not because the donor wants or expects a relative to receive special consideration. An empirical analysis of alumni philanthropy at the nation’s top 100 colleges over a nine-year stretch found “no evidence that legacy-preference policies themselves exert an influence on giving behavior.”
Many of the nation’s most selective schools, including all eight Ivy League institutions, still consider the legacy status of applicants. But since 2015, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted legacy-blind policies, according to the Institute for Higher Education Policy. And in a nationwide Washington Post-Schar School survey from 2022, 75% of respondents said it was wrong for children of alumni to receive preferential treatment. Americans want public and private institutions to retire legacy admissions, and rightly so. Ideally, schools would act on their own, as some already have. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before others fall in line.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gavin-newsom-does-something-conservatives-may-like-f3ac60dd
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Soviet-style justice in the USA
Once the cops get a bee in their bonnets about you, you are in real strife
In 2019, several Hollywood notables and dozens of others were swept up in so-called Operation Varsity Blues. The FBI accused parents, college employees and their go-betweens in a bribery scheme to get nominally unqualified students admitted to top colleges.
What you might not have heard is John Wilson’s story. He’s the parent who drew the most charges, but fought them. And – after a grueling and expensive court battle – he finally came out on top.
Wilson: What the government did to me is something that's never happened to anyone in America. And what the prosecutors did to me once they put me in their crosshairs was so outrageous that if I hadn't experienced it firsthand, I wouldn't believe it in a million years.
If Wilson was known for anything, it was as a self-made rags-to-riches success story and president of Staples, International. But his story changed drastically in March of 2019 when he returned to the U.S. from a business trip.
Wilson: I got off the plane. I'm going through the normal customs and immigration security checks. They pulled me aside, say there's something wrong with my passport. I go into a back room. And then, two FBI agents pushed me against the wall, handcuffed me, shackled me and told me I'm under arrest. I was shocked. I had no warning. This came out of the blue like a lightning bolt.
Sharyl: You ever been arrested before?
Wilson: No, I'd never been arrested in my life. I'd never even been accused of a crime in my life. I've never been in a courthouse in my entire life.
Sharyl: What'd they tell you was wrong?
Wilson: They told me I was under arrest. I said, “You must have the wrong John Wilson.” I said, “There's 15,000 John Wilsons. I didn't do anything wrong.”
Sharyl: And you had no idea this was related to college or anything at the time?
Wilson: I had no idea what it was at all. Neither did they. They couldn't tell me what it was related to. They said “It's an unusual fraud charge we've never heard of. And that's all we know.”
The FBI took him to a federal prison in Houston.
Sharyl: And what'd they do with you from there?
Wilson: They stripped me down, put me in this big, I dunno, common area shower room. And the guards took a couple big hoses and started hosing me down like an animal in this large public shower. And still thinking to myself, "What did I do? How could this be happening? This can't be real." And the guard says to me, "You better watch your back in here. You know, you're the only old white guy,” he says, “and they're gonna assume you're a pedophile and they hate pedophiles here and one of 'em is likely to try to shiv you and stab you.” I was in shock. I said, “What? How can that be?” I asked, “Can you lock me in my cell so I don't get stabbed?” He says, “No, no. If they lock you in your cell, they're gonna think you're a p**** and they're really gonna f*** you up.” That's what he said, pardon my French, that’s what he said to me. I said, “Oh my god.”
The next morning he learned from his brother, an attorney, why he’d been locked up.
Wilson: I remember being handcuffed and shackled my feet and my hands shuffling down the hallway to this interview room where my brother was behind a plexiglass wall with another lawyer. I said, “What, what is this? What’s, what's going on?” And “They said something to do with Singer.” “I said, Singer?” He said, “Yeah, you bribed coaches and you did some fraud.” I said, “What? I didn't do that!” Again. I said, “They must have the wrong John Wilson.”
“Singer” was Rick Singer, considered the “mastermind” in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, nicknamed after the 1999 film about small town high schoolers looking for a way out – some through football scholarships.
Among the parents arrested were actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. They were accused of paying people to get their kids into top universities by bribing coaches, creating fake athletic photos, and cheating on tests. Both pleaded guilty in the case, in which 33 wealthy parents were charged.
Prosecutors claimed Wilson paid $220,000 to have his son, Johnny Wilson, recruited as a water polo athlete at the University of Southern California. And they said he spent $1 million to unfairly get his twin daughters into Harvard and Stanford.
Wilson admits he hired Singer and donated to colleges – like millions of parents have done – to increase odds their kids will get accepted in a fiercely competitive landscape.
But he says they were well qualified in their own right and there was no cheating, lying, or bribery. It was Wilson’s financial adviser at Goldman Sachs who introduced him to Singer as a consultant who could maximize a student’s chances.
Sharyl: I didn't even know that industry existed. So there are people you can hire to help your kid get in a good college?
Wilson: Yes. I didn't know it existed either until the Goldman Sachs person called me up. So whenever you asked Singer a question, he knew everything about every school, every high school, every college. So he was very knowledgeable. He was doing real charity work and he was doing real tutoring work. So I trusted him.
Sharyl: And your goal was ultimately what?
Wilson: To find the right fit for my son for school. To get him as prepared as he could for his tests, to help build his profile, to be as strong as it could and to get a school that'd be a good fit for him.
Wilson says Johnny legitimately won a spot on USC’s water polo team. He had impressive swim times, and a world record at age 9 as the youngest person to swim the frigid, choppy waters from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco.
The younger Wilson said on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" in 2006: "See that island over there, that is Alcatraz and I am going to swim from there all the way to shore there. It is 1.4 miles and I’m a little nervous."
Wilson broke the world record, the youngest ever to make this swim.
His dad was convinced he could prove, at trial, that his children’s admissions to prestigious colleges weren’t due to bribery.
Prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty.
Wilson: And then they proceeded to literally every three months add on more charges. And each time they did, they said, “We want you to plead guilty. If you don't, we're gonna add on more charges.” And they did that again and again, four additional times. They ended up charging me with nine felonies and 180 years of prison time, all for the same act. And they said, “We'll go for more.” And I said, “I'm not gonna plead guilty no matter how many charges you put on me. I didn't do anything wrong.”
Sharyl: But the jury convicted you?
Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. They ran an unfair trial that was just outrageous.
He argues he faced a prosecutor-friendly judge who stacked the deck.
Wilson: I’ll give you a couple of examples of things they blocked. My daughters’ perfect ACT score, and near perfect scores were inadmissible.
Sharyl: In other words, that would've shown that they deserved to get in college. Not that they were given a favor?
Wilson: Right. They earned their admissions. They were qualified on their own merits for admission, even at Harvard and Stanford. My son's certified swim times and his world record, the certified swim times proved he's one of the fastest on USC’s team. They wouldn't allow his own high school coach, who's his water polo coach, who testified, to bring in his swim time.
Sharyl: When you heard what the jury found, did you think to yourself, “Well, I can't blame 'em with what they heard?”
Wilson: Absolutely.
Sharyl: Or were you surprised?
Wilson: No, no. We were sunk. We knew we were sunk when they blocked our evidence. I remember my lawyers even talking about this is something they've never seen before. It was so extreme. They said, “The good news is you'll have a great appeals record,” but now I have to spend another two years fighting for the appeal.
Sharyl: What happened on appeal?
Wilson: On appeal, we got everything overturned except for this minor tax issue. So all the court convictions were overturned and the judges said, you know, “This is totally unfair.”
Wilson paid a fine for the tax charge: improperly deducting USC donations. All the charges related to getting his kids into college were thrown out. The official Justice Department statement is that in May 2023, an appellate court affirmed the tax conviction and vacated and remanded the remaining counts of conviction.
But the fight isn’t completely over. Today, Wilson is suing Netflix over a documentary that he says smeared him and poisoned the jury pool.
He says he sent Netflix a real photo of his son playing water polo. Yet the documentary depicted him pasting the head of his son, shown in the film as a scrawny boy, onto the body of an athlete, for a college application.
Wilson: And so he was really a water polo player at the national level. He was being recruited by other division one schools. And so we sent them pictures of that at a practice. And what Netflix used, was a kid standing in a pool in LA in the shallow end up to his waist with a water polo ball in his hand. And then they show a photographer taking a picture and then photoshopping that onto a body of a kid in the pool. They knew that was totally false and yet they used it anyway.
Wilson successfully fought back criminal charges that he’d bribed to get his kids into college. But in the end, he says he lost five years of his peak career earnings potential, and spent his life’s savings – more than $10 million – on legal bills.
Wilson: I think for me the scariest part of this, if the government puts you in his crosshairs for whatever reason, the power and the resource they have can be devastating. They've been able to weaponize the justice system against innocent people. And they can do that with impunity. And it's frightening. And I think of all those people who have less resources than I had and how they're forced to plead guilty and how they're railroaded through an unfair process. And it's outrageous and it should never happen again. And I'm gonna do what I can to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
Netflix says its documentary never implied Wilson photoshopped his son’s photo … it depicted a different parent and son – and was wholly accurate. A Massachusetts judge recently denied Netflix' motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist and managing editor of "Full Measure." Her most recent book is "Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."
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Australia: Landlords giving up in the face of government hostility: Victoria sees record fall in rental stock as investors leave the state
Victoria is experiencing the sharpest fall in rental stock since record keeping began in 1999, suggesting an investor sell-off is gaining pace.
The number of active rental bonds (a proxy for the number of rental properties in a market) fell from a little over 676,400 in June last year to 654,700 this year – suggesting there were 21,700 fewer rentals in the market.
The state has only ever recorded two quarters of rental bond falls, and both occurred in 2024.
The speed of rental stock loss also appeared to be increasing, with the total number of rental bonds dropping 1.3 per cent in the three months to May, and 3.2 per cent in the three months to June.
The new data, released by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, supports a trend identified in the recently-released Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) 2024 Annual Investor Sentiment Survey.
The survey described a "sell-off of investment properties around the nation" that was "continuing unabated" and "fuelling fears of an even tighter rental market".
The outlook may be grim for investors, but home owners appeared to be benefiting, snapping up 65 per cent of the properties investors sold, according to PIPA.
First homebuyers in Melbourne have also enjoyed months of falling prices, while most of the rest of the country has experienced continued increases.
However, the survey's 1288 respondents declared Victoria to be the "least accommodating state or territory for property investors", and Victoria and Melbourne were found to have some of the highest proportions of investors selling up.
In Melbourne, roughly 22 per cent of investors surveyed had sold at least one rental in the past year, the second highest after Brisbane.
When it came to investors selling in regional areas, Victoria also had the second highest rate, with just over 9 per cent of investors selling, just below NSW, where the figure sat at just over 10 per cent.
PIPA Victoria board director Cate Bakos said legislative changes around minimum rental standards and increased land taxes were driving investors from the state.
She said real estate agents were also reporting a higher percentage of sellers being investors.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-12/victoria-sharp-fall-in-rental-stock/104464504
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10 October, 2024
America’s Cutting-Edge Weaponry Is Dependent on Chinese Tech, Experts Warn
American defense startups are far too reliant on Chinese parts—and that poses a serious risk of exploitation by Beijing, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Business is booming as hundreds of defense startups have joined the growing U.S. military-industrial complex since 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal. But defense contractors are heavily dependent on China for parts for weapons systems, including motors, chips, and rare-earth minerals, which poses potential avenues for Beijing to exploit or hamper American technologies, experts said.
“This is a serious problem for two reasons,” said John Lee, senior defense expert at the Hudson Institute. “First, as we saw during the pandemic, overreliance on Chinese supply chains for components and inputs leaves countries and economies vulnerable to politically or policy-motivated restrictions being imposed by Beijing.”
“Second, components can have elements inserted into them without the knowledge of the end user. This could be spying equipment, channels for China to disable or damage the component from a distance, or even materials that can weaponize the component,” Lee said.
New defense contractors particularly rely on these parts because they don’t enjoy the same cash reserve that the industry giants do, and China makes and sells the parts for a cheaper price.
But these startups don’t want to be so reliant on China, given that the country is actively trying to undermine the U.S. and would likely be an adversary in a global war scenario, industry executives told The Wall Street Journal.
Decoupling from China-based entities proves difficult and expensive, defense startups told the Journal, though it’s the only option in the long term.
“There’s a lot of lip-flapping about national security resilience manufacturing. But there’s no money for us to do this,” Scott Colosimo, CEO of defense startup LAND Energy, told the newspaper. LAND has some funding grants from the Pentagon, but needs more support to thrive, Colosimo explained.
The rare-earth minerals that China provides U.S. defense contractors—including neodymium, yttrium, and samarium—are of particular value, given that they are essential for most high-tech military equipment, including laser and missile systems, jet engines, communications devices, and even nuclear propulsion systems.
“Critical minerals are the building blocks for many of the most sensitive products in our defense industry,” said Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Initiative. “China can abuse its dominant position in other critical mineral supply chains at any time.”
“The only long-term solution to this is to enact comprehensive permitting reform to approve domestic mining projects, and work with allied nations to develop new production when the U.S. lacks the relevant natural resources,” he said.
Savit’s warning that China can upset the supply chain of rare-earth minerals also invokes a broader problem: China can cut the supply line for any of the parts needed by U.S. defense contractors, for any time or reason it chooses.
“If your supply chain runs dry, you have nothing to sell,” Ryan Beall, founder of drone manufacturer TILT Autonomy, told the Journal.
The Hudson Institute’s Lee warned that the problem exposes the U.S.’ and West’s gaps in domestic supply chain capabilities for their respective defense industrial bases, which creates a vacuum that other actors such as China find ways to exploit.
China supplies more than 90% of the magnets used in motors for ships, missiles, satellites, and drones, according to the Journal. Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Rob Wittman of Virginia sent a letter to an Air Force official Sept. 25 and called the reliance on China “a serious national security threat,” pointing to an example in a report last year that found the Air Force increased its dependence on China for parts by 69%.
The idea to stop relying on China for resources became more popular after the COVID-19 pandemic, which created massive supply chain shortages in various sectors, including health care products. But in the defense capacity, it will take years to produce parts domestically, according to the Journal.
“There has been a hollowing out of manufacturing and industrial capabilities in the West, which provides China with an enormous advantage,” Lee told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the event of a crisis against a country such as China, this will become very dangerous for the U.S. and its allies.”
Unable to wait for domestic capabilities to improve and increasingly wary of buying from China, new defense contractors are turning to other alternatives for parts, according to the Journal. Sourcing components from Mexico and Southeast Asia, utilizing 3D printing, and buying parts in bulk have been some of the creative ways contractors are solving the problem.
Industry experts also expect that the U.S. government is likely to restrict some Chinese parts used by contractors in a bid to move toward domestic capabilities, according to the newspaper. Some restrictions on items used to produce cameras and radios already exist.
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Christian Mom Says She Was Blocked From Substitute Teaching Because of Her Faith
A conservative Christian mother of five who narrowly lost a contentious school board election in Virginia that involved transgender issues nonetheless decided she would apply to be a substitute teacher. After the school district ran a background check, approved her, and assigned her to a class, the school board denied her employment, and she suspects it did so for ideological and religious reasons.
“I was absolutely shocked when the school board violated its own policy by taking action in closed session to strike my name from the personnel list before coming out in open session to vote,” Lindsay Rich, the former candidate, told The Daily Signal on Monday.
Rich, 40, has three daughters currently in southwestern Virginia’s Montgomery County Public Schools in the area around Blacksburg, the city where Virginia Polytechnic and State University (commonly known as Virginia Tech) is located. Last November, she lost the Montgomery County School Board race to represent District E by a narrow margin. Derek Rountree, her former opponent, now sits on the school board.
“I believe the school board members removed me [as a substitute teacher] for the same reason many attacked me during my campaign,” Rich said.
During Rich’s campaign, a Virginia Tech official responsible for DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—attacked her and a fellow school board candidate for supporting “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students” championed by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.
These policies require parental involvement in any school encouragement of a child’s transgender identity and designate bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams by biological sex rather than claimed gender identity. Montgomery County’s school board previously adopted pro-transgender standards developed under Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Gov. Ralph Northam.
“I support Governor Youngkin’s commonsense policies that base bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports on biological sex—not gender identity—which is also tied to my religious beliefs that God created male and female,” Rich told The Daily Signal.
“I have sat at the last two [school board] meetings until close to midnight waiting on an explanation and will continue to do so until I get answers,” Rich added in a text. “I won’t be pushed out of my children’s schools; they say there is room for ALL in MCPS, which includes conservative Christians like me.”
Lindsay Rich’s Approval
Rich said she took a training course Sept. 11 and received an assignment to teach Sept. 19. She forwarded emails to The Daily Signal showing that Montgomery County Public Schools had given her access to the online portal and had put her on the schedule to teach.
On Sept. 11, after Rich had taken the substitute teacher training, Dawn LaPuasa, MCPS supervisor of personnel, sent an email to Superintendent Bernard Bragen with a list of substitute teachers for the school board to approve. The list, intended for a Sept. 17 board meeting, gave Rich and the other substitutes an “effective date” that coincided with their training.
Yet on Sept. 17, the school board approved a list of substitute teachers that did not include Rich’s name.
09.17.2024. Personnel Report – Total – 5 pagesDownload
Rich and her supporters say that the school board altered the list during a closed session to discuss personnel, part of the board meeting that is not public.
Daniel Rich, the would-be substitute teacher’s husband, filed a request for information under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act and obtained an email that shows Bragen, the superintendent of schools, took a personal interest in Rich’s employment.
On Sunday, Sept. 15, two days before the meeting, Bragen reached out to Amanda Weidner, director of human resources at MCPS.
“Is the Lindsay Rich on the personnel agenda for a substitute the same person who ran for the school board?” Bragen asked. Weidner confirmed that it was indeed her.
“Let’s review it tomorrow,” Bragen responded. “That is presenting a problem that we may need the attorney to discuss.”
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Postponing This Partisan Lecture Isn’t Enough
Radical political historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat was scheduled to speak at the U.S. Naval Academy on Oct. 10 as part of the Bancroft Lecture series, but according to a recent article from The Federalist, this lecture has been “postponed.”
In September, Ben-Ghiat announced that she would be speaking at the Naval Academy in a Substack post, yet in the same announcement she connected her topic of lecture, that of “militaries under authoritarian rule,” with former President Donald Trump and what she proclaims to be “his authoritarian character.”
Ben-Ghiat, in the same post, also suggested a voting preference, stating that several people, notable to the military audience she intended to reach, will be “voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November.”
It is troubling that the Naval Academy invited an explicit partisan to lecture future military officers at an authorized event on federal property, especially since Ben-Ghiat has deliberately denounced a current presidential nominee as an authoritarian akin to “Fascist Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, and the Russian military during the war on Ukraine.”
It is even more troubling that the only reason this lecture is publicly known is through Ben-Ghiat’s Substack post announcing her partisan intent. The Naval Academy never publicized this event, despite having recently publicized a Forrestal Lecture in which the speaker talked about the far more appropriate topic of command leadership.
The concern over this Bancroft Lecture was publicized in a recent Daily Signal article. Since then, the Naval Academy has apparently postponed Ben-Ghiat’s lecture. Nonetheless, concerns still remain. There has been no official statement from Naval Academy leadership disclosing the status of the lecture, nothing to explain the logic for hosting an event of this political nature in the first place, and no remorse over the apparent politicization of the institution.
The Defense Department’s Directive 1344.10 explicitly states that service members shall “not engage in partisan political activity.” With such proximity to an important election, it appears that the Naval Academy, by inviting a radical anti-Trump speaker, has been acting in a political fashion. It calls into question whether academy leadership violated the Defense Department’s directive.
The Naval Academy ought to publicly explain itself, or else it will have missed the point entirely. The point is not that the lecturer is an extreme partisan, or that due to optics the lecture ought not to occur. The point is also not that leadership should simply postpone a lecture as soon as it receives heat from the public eye.
The point is that this is one instance of what could be a very dangerous broader trend.
The Naval Academy should take note of the articles publicizing exactly what is wrong, the letters from members of Congress urging leadership to take a look, and Ben-Ghiat’s expressly political language in describing a nominee for the next commander in chief. These should all serve as warning signs calling for more institutional vigilance, procedural compliance, and integrity.
The lack of remorse, the denial of responsibility, and the absence of any acknowledgment of an internal review show a lack of accountability. They show a dangerous sense of complacency and a complete misunderstanding of what the Naval Academy ought to be—an apolitical, nonpartisan military institution.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/postponing-partisan-lecture-isnt-enough/
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Secret to long and healthy life more down to genes than diet – research
It is widely believed that eating fewer calories can lengthen life, with some studies suggesting cutting intake by as much as 25% can slow down ageing by up to 3%.
But new research on mice suggests genes may play a greater role in living longer than simply reducing food intake.
Scientists say this may be because these genes, which are yet to be identified, can make bodies more robust and stay resilient in the face of adversity.
The team found that mice that lived the longest were also the ones that lost the least weight while consuming less food, suggesting fasting helps some live longer but not others.
The team said further research is needed to explore whether restrictive diets such as intermittent fasting – an eating plan that alternates between periods of eating and fasting – and calorie restriction, which involves reducing the amount of calories consumed while still getting enough nutrients, can extend lifespan in humans.
They also added the findings could have implications on how diet studies are conducted on humans.
Gary Churchill, a professor at The Jackson Laboratory in the US, said: “Our study really points to the importance of resilience.
“The most robust animals keep their weight on even in the face of stress and caloric restriction, and they are the ones that live the longest.
“It also suggests that a more moderate level of calorie restriction might be the way to balance long-term health and lifespan.”
For the study, the researchers investigated the effects of intermittent fasting and calorie restriction on nearly 1,000 female mice.
The scientists said each mouse was selected to be genetically distinct, which “allowed the team to better represent the genetic diversity of the human population” and made the study “one of the most significant investigations into ageing and lifespan to date”.
The mice were randomly assigned to one of five different diets.
The first group was allowed to freely eat any food at any time, while in the second and third groups, the animals were provided with only 60% or 80% of their baseline calories each day.
In the final two groups, the mice were not given any food for either one or two consecutive days each week but could eat as much as they wanted on the other days.
The creatures were studied for the rest of their lives with regular blood tests looking at health markers such as body weight, body fat percentages, blood sugar levels and body temperature.
The team found that mice on unrestricted diets lived for an average of 25 months, those on the intermittent fasting diets lived for an average of 28 months, those eating 80% of baseline lived for an average of 30 months, and those eating 60% of baseline lived for 34 months.
They found animals that lost the most weight were likely to have low energy, compromised immune and reproductive systems, and shorter lives.
And mice that naturally maintained their body weight, body fat percentage and immune cell health during low food intake were found to survive the longest.
But the researchers said that within each group, they found the range of lifespans varied widely.
The team said that in the group where mice ate the fewest calories, the creatures had lifespans ranging from a few months to four and a half years.
Analysing data to try to explain this wide range, the researchers said they found genetic factors had a far greater impact on lifespan than diets.
They said this highlights how genes play “a major role in how these diets would affect an individual person’s health trajectory”.
Prof Churchill said: “If you want to live a long time, there are things you can control within your lifetime such as diet, but really what you want is a very old grandmother.”
He added: “While caloric restriction is generally good for lifespan, our data show that losing weight on caloric restriction is actually bad for lifespan.
“So when we look at human trials of longevity drugs and see that people are losing weight and have better metabolic profiles, it turns out that might not be a good marker of their future lifespan at all.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/churchill-b2626567.html
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9 October, 2024
Throw the term ‘gender’ in the dustbin of history
People of a certain age will remember a time when the word sex meant men and women and ipso facto their generalised sexed behaviour. This was the norm. A man or woman could simply look around and the truth of the term sex, both biologically and in relation to personality, was evident through observation. Sex-based personality manifested itself, from leisure to work, across the spectrum of human behaviour. For example, the heavy, dirty, dangerous jobs were done by men, while women, in contrast, were over-represented in the teaching, nursing, librarian, and secretarial professions. It was considered a given that the fashion and beauty industries, for example, were overwhelmingly patronised by women, or that men liked messing around with motorbikes and cars. Women, to point to another obvious truth, were better at looking after children. Even little boys, (those entitled patriarchs in waiting, according to feminists), if given a choice, ran to their mothers instead of their fathers for comfort. (None of this has changed.)
Then suddenly and mysteriously the word ‘gender’ became synonymous with sex. Sex and gender, on this view, were words that described the same phenomenon – the biological sex and the sex-based behaviour of women and men. A few years later, the term gender had entirely supplanted the term sex, except, by now, the biological basis for sex-based behaviour was removed and gender was defined by feminists, either negatively, as a socially constructed imposition, or positively, as a choice or as an identity. Biology, in other words, was entirely expunged from the equation and the genetic underpinnings of personality were forgotten.
Why is this important, gender identity adherents say, they’re just words? It matters because within the liberal-democratic West, ideologues are introducing ‘hate speech’ legislation that will curtail speech, and impel people, under the threat of losing their livelihoods, their reputations, and their freedom, to affirm ideas with which they disagree. And the entire virtue-signalling, follow-the-leader, yes-we-are-all-individuals-midwit circus is based on a chimera at best and a lie at worst. Gender does not exist. There is biological sex and there is sex-based behaviour, and that’s the complete alpha and omega of how men and women behave. Determining how many angels dance on the head of a pin is a fatuous question. And so is any attempt to count the number of genders conjured into pseudo-reality by Woke fools.
How did we arrive at the strange situation where gender nonsense became normalised? There are many strands to the story, but the ultimate cause rests with philosophers – in this case, the existentialists.
Existentialism is a philosophical school that is difficult to define, because most of the thinkers grouped under the umbrella term existentialism never heard of the name and disavowed membership of any philosophical tradition. The two most influential and original of the ‘existentialists’, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, believed that the core of being human is primarily determined by choice. Nietzsche said ‘become who you are’, while Heidegger claimed we are ‘thrown’ into a world and we have to stand against ‘the man’ or ‘the they’ to become, echoing Nietzsche, our ‘authentic’ selves. Both believed that only a small percentage of the population were capable of this endeavour.
Into this mix stepped two second-rate philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose main work Heidegger described as ‘dreck’ – dirt, to be exact – and his lover, the even-more second-rate Simone de Beauvoir. It was the latter who, after putting a feminist spin on Sartre’s bad reading of Heidegger, said ‘one is not born, but becomes a woman’. This was the moment when the idea, which had been known for millennia, that men and women are different – physically, psychologically, and biologically – was overthrown in a feminist attempt to reject material survival and biology as the primary reasons why sex roles have existed. Gender as an idea was reified from an intellectual concept into a concrete reality.
In other words, gender was created, sex was negated, and biology, that bête noir of feminists, was rejected as harmful. Ideology, through this lens, determined reality rather than the other way around. This was the beginning of a new world, the world we still inhabit, the feminist wonderland, where material reality can be negated by cancelling the sin of ‘essentialism’, in other words, logic, or, more likely, as can be gleaned by reading a newspaper or watching a movie, the unrelenting sweep of feminist propaganda.
Unfortunately for gender ideologues, though, their most hated enemy, biology, is proving what those of us not blinded by ideology already know, that men and women are different, not equal or unequal, but complementary.
Every human characteristic can be accurately depicted on a bell curve. Whether it’s intelligence, sporting prowess, physical strength, musical ability, beauty, cooking skills, Morris dancing, or even which demographic is most likely to love Taylor Swift.
In the middle of the bell curve are people who are average – nondescript dancers or guitar players, for example, or people who are neither beautiful nor ugly, tall or short, intelligent or stupid, etc. At the extremes, to the right and left of the curve, though, are those who are outside the norm in some way. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.
It’s the same in relation to sex-based behaviour. People outside the mainstream, on the tails of the bell curve, are not a different gender, they’re just unusual in their personalities, tendencies, and proclivities. But they are still definitively men and women. Long may they celebrate, but not impose, their difference on society. People, consequently, who live in a liberal democracy, shouldn’t be either punished or indulged because of their innate sex-based biological characteristics, eccentricities or personalities.
It’s time to put the term gender in the lexicon of discredited ideologies. Refuse to use the word gender. Form a movement which only uses the word sex to describe the realities of being male and female.
This simple move will make the world a better place, especially for women, who will, once again, have rights based on biological sex. Children, too, will not be mutilated in the cause of an anti-human cult.
Throw the term gender, like every nonsensical ideological term, in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/throw-the-term-gender-in-the-dustbin-of-history/
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British schools are ideologically CAPTURED
Last week, I was contacted by a grandfather of a child at Cranbrook School in Devon. While his grandchild attends secondary school, Cranbrook also has a primary school, as well as nursery and pre-school.
He told me that he was deeply concerned that children at Cranbrook were being poisoned with toxic gender ideology.
I took a look.
Immediately, red flags appeared.
The Head of Year 7 —for children as young as 11 years old—is Oliver Russell.
Far from focussing on educating his students in Maths or English, Russell appears keen to educate them in the world of radical gender ideology.
For you see, Russell identifies as “non-binary” and wants his students to know all about it. Sporting his full beard, he wears dresses and high heels in the classroom.
In official school communications, he signs off as “Mx (mux) Russell” and expects students to address him as such.
Whether Russell is playing out some sort of fetish or whether he is suffering from a mental health condition, the outcome is the exact same – forcing young, impressionable children to affirm his delusions.
Particularly concerning is the fact that, every Tuesday, during lunchbreak, Russell runs a “Rainbow Club” for “LGBTQIA+” students.
There appears to be no transparency whatsoever for parents regarding what is taking place during in these sessions. This is a form of ideological grooming.
Maybe these are just the actions of one rogue teacher? Think again.
The school itself has applied for a ‘Rainbow Flag Award’ to demonstrate its commitment to the “LGBT community”.
The school curriculum teaches children about “gender identity” and “transphobia”, including getting kids to draw “a big queer map of Devon”.
I’m told that teachers have gender pronouns on the outside of their office doors. And the school even disregards sex-based school uniforms altogether, allowing male pupils to wear female uniforms and vice versa.
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The consequences of such ideological indoctrination are plain to see.
It is well documented that young people, particularly girls, can fall prey to forms of ‘social contagion’ as regards mental ill-health. Historically, this has been witnessed in relation to self-harm and eating disorders. In more recent years, we have seen this take place with regard to children suddenly believing themselves to be ‘trans’.
I often hear stories from parents in which multiple students —particularly girls— within a single class are coming out as ‘trans’ within weeks of one another.
In one study, over 66% of young people questioning their gender belonged to a friendship group in which one or more of their friends had recently come out as ‘trans’.
Is this any wonder, when the adults who we are supposed to trust with our children’s wellbeing and education are shoving this ideology down their throats on a daily basis?
I wish I could say that Cranbrook are the only perpetrators. But they are not.
Here are just a few of the most egregious examples of ideological indoctrination that I have come across:
St Jude’s, a Church of England primary school in Southwark, has what it calls its “wider curriculum”, which involves forcing “inclusion”, “liberation” and “pride” into other subjects. For example, in History, children will be taught about “the history and meaning of the rainbow flag”.
In computing, children are instructed on “the spread of fake news and stereotypes relating to LGBT+ people”. In art, children are even expected to “study LGBT+ performance art and fashion, including drag queens and kings”. This can only be described as sneaking nefarious ideologies in through the back door.
Daubney Primary School in Hackney instructs their very young students to pose with pride flags and posters, before posting the photographs online. In one recent photograph, a young boy can even be seen holding a sign that reads “I can’t even think straight” (which is something you might expect to see on a stag or hen party but not in a classroom for primary school children).
This can only be described as sexualising children. When I called them out over social media, their Headmaster blocked me, before subsequently deleting their entire account. So much for transparency.
At Daubney’s sister school, Lauriston Primary School, children as young as five years old are asked by teachers to draw “asexual”, “polysexual” and “non binary” flags, before displaying them proudly on the walls. On what planet is it acceptable for such young children to be sexualised in this manner? Seriously?
Or take Westmeads Community Infant School in Kent. During Pride Month, their students —who are as young as four years old— were expected to spend their days surrounded by the Pride Flags plastered all over the railings to their playground.
Schools, remember, have a duty to be ideologically neutral. This is anything but. The only flag that should be flying from schools is the Union Jack. Once again, when I dared to call the school out and demand an explanation, I was blocked by them.
Dame Elizabeth Cadbury School in Birmingham teaches its students that “some people don’t feel that they are themselves in their own bodies and feel that they can’t be happy as they are. These people can have a sex change”. Is it any wonder that children have gone down pathways of irreversible medical harm when they have been promised a silver bullet in the form of ‘sex-reassignment’ to make them feel ‘happy’ again?
I’m afraid to say this only scratches the surface.
Where does the blame lie? Predominantly with the schools themselves, as they are choosing to inflict this upon their pupils.
Whether they do it because they genuinely think it’s the right thing to do, or to virtue signal, or because they are fearful of pushback if they don’t, I couldn’t care less, because the outcome is exactly the same – the emotional abuse and indoctrination of vulnerable children.
And all this has been allowed to happen under the watch of successive governments.
In the last Conservative government, we had, as our Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, who I dubbed the “Minister for Indoctrination”.
The fact she did nothing to stop this is perhaps unsurprising, given that she previously unequivocally declared that “transwomen are women”.
What’s worse, when she was grilled by the Department for Education Select Committee on this very issue, she was extremely dismissive.
And now, clearly, we little hope of things improving under the Labour government.
In fact, things will likely get worse.
Our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has worse knowledge of human biology than GCSE students, having previously claimed that 1 in 1000 women have a penis.
As I’ve previously written, Labour simply cannot be trusted on sex and gender, with many of their Cabinet posts now held by fervent ideologues.
Parents should be able to entrust their children to a school, safe in the knowledge that their sons and daughters will not be subject to political or ideological indoctrination.
Any schools that sexualise or indoctrinate children in the manners described above should be shut down altogether.
To parents out there - you have every right to interrogate your child’s school on what your children are being taught and exposed to and also what external agencies or companies are being brought in to promote some of these ideas.
It’s not common, for example, for schools to bring in very radical campaign groups who push radical gender ideology as though it is established fact when, in reality, it is a highly contested academic theory that, as the recent Cass Review underlined, lacks sufficient evidence and data in the scientific literature.
If you come across material that concerns you, consider complaining. There are many organisations out there that will help you to do this, including the Safe Schools Alliance, Sex Matters and Protect and Teach. In short, you are not alone.
To everyone else – we must continue to hold the government’s feet to the fire on this issue, as well as the schools that are often losing sight of the law, if not breaking it.
And I know that I for one will keep pushing and exposing this issue until everybody in Westminster and the country wake up to the reality of what is now taking place in schools and being imposed on our children before it’s too late.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/our-schools-are-ideologically-captured
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Transparency at State Universities
As state universities are partially financed with taxpayer money, one would hope that they have higher requirements for transparency than corporations. However, that is not the case at all.
Could corporations get away with having policies that require employees to hide any wrongdoing from their customers? I think not, but it seems that state universities can and do so when they want to. Could corporations get away with allowing their managers to tell employees that they cannot complain to senior management about manager misbehavior or inform other employees about such misbehavior? I hope not, but state universities do. Sometimes, universities are not even afraid to do this in writing, which provides clear evidence of such behavior.
Problems at state universities are common and are becoming worse, as the Prussian education system—the current education system in the United States—rewards bad behavior. (For a more detailed description of this education system, see my other articles: “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?”, “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, and “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”)
Some transparency problems at Illinois State University (ISU)—where I am a tenured professor—are especially easy to see. Thus, they provide good examples to help understand these issues.
First, a few years ago, I got an e-mail from our new department head saying that I should not e-mail the dean. This was a response to my polite e-mail to the dean—copying the department head—asking if he could help mitigate the consequences of poor class scheduling, considering our department head had very little administrative experience at the time. One of my classes was scheduled in such a way as to maximize the probability of it being cancelled. (For more details about this experience, see my earlier article: “Is American Education a Fraud?”)
I viewed the e-mail from the department head to be just as inappropriate as his scheduling of classes, and forwarded the e-mail to the dean. Given the clear evidence of inappropriate behavior, I expected such behavior to stop, but I was wrong. Forwarding any complaints to the provost’s office also did not lead to any positive results.
Later, as the problems in our department continued, I e-mailed the whole department about them. I wanted to inform the people working in the department and to give them a chance to respond in case I missed something important before I published articles about these problems at ISU. In addition to “Is American Education a Fraud?”, I also published “How Some Universities Are Destroying Education: Increasing Opportunities for Students to Take Classes in Any Order” and “Incentives for Choosing Faculty in State Universities: How Some State Universities Are Destroying Themselves,” which discussed problems at ISU.
The response to emailing the department was in my annual evaluations. The department head described informing faculty as not being collegial behavior. He claimed that I should discuss this with the Ombudsperson Council of Illinois State University instead. Before this suggestion, I had already talked with members of this council and found the conversation useful. However, they also explained to me that they had no power to implement or require any changes in the department. Thus, the department head wanted me to discuss these problems only with people who could not do anything about them.
One semester, I e-mailed the link to my article “Is American Education a Fraud?” to my students to help them understand that they needed to study if they wanted to pass my class. Simply telling students that they need to study does not work with a large percent of students. I did not expect the article to convince all students but, if it would convince a few, I thought it was worth trying. Moreover, I taught finance classes, and the article provided a good example of what happens when institutions (e.g., state universities) are not subject to the discipline of free financial markets.
I was told by the ISU administration—starting with the department head—that I violated university rules by e-mailing the link to students and that I could not do that again. The university has a rule that professors should not criticize their colleagues in front of students.
I think this is a strange rule. Science often advances by criticizing one’s colleagues. However, universities can write their own rules and adopt them by having the whole faculty or faculty committees “under the guidance” of administrators vote for those rules. My repeated requests for clarification about what exactly they did not like about my article were not answered.
As I recently learned, administrators have significant power to cause problems for faculty, and they use that power when they want to. There were problems with scheduling my classes every semester since the semester described in “Is American Education a Fraud?” Thus, when it comes to committee voting, “under the guidance” sometimes means under pressure from administrators. Moreover, the administration has significant control over hiring and retaining the faculty—thus, to some extent, they choose who votes. Given such freedom for abuse, it is not surprising that state universities adopt rules that reduce transparency and create even more opportunities for abuse.
At first, I was surprised that such things could happen in the United States. However, if I would have known the history of the current education system, which I learned only recently, I would not have been surprised. The current education system in the United States is not the same as the system from the country’s founding. The old system was much closer to the free-market system.
Unfortunately, the United States (like other countries) adopted the Prussian education system and created legal restrictions for the older U.S. system. Most communists, fascists, and other intellectual descendants of the new Prussians who created this education system were never punished for the crimes they committed, and many of them immigrated to the United States. Some of them came as university professors and administrators. As university degrees could be granted only by those who already had those degrees, the United States imported professors from abroad, giving them control over education here.
Transparency and other problems in state universities are not just problems for those who work or study there. These problems affect everybody, as universities prepare teachers and government experts who keep increasing their interference in our lives. Moreover, even so-called private universities currently have similar problems, as they are not fully private institutions. Rather, they are a part of the same Prussian education system, receive direct or indirect financing from government, and function in the same legal and regulatory system that distorts incentives.
It should not be surprising that spending more taxpayer money on education is not working. That money is just entrenching the Prussian system and making it harder for the private sector to develop and compete. Neither transparency nor other problems with the Prussian education system can be solved by government support of this system. Government does not need to get more involved with education. It needs to leave this industry to the truly private sector and the full discipline of free markets.
https://heartland.org/opinion/transparency-at-state-universities/
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‘Professional protester’: NSW Premier hits out at Marxist serial activist
Police could soon have the power to reject protests that stretch over months, as a clearly frustrated NSW Premier Chris Minns decried the more than $5m spent on controlling pro-Palestine rallies and attacked the leader of the protest movement as a “professional demonstrator”.
The move came after hundreds of police were deployed at rallies and vigils in Sydney on Sunday and Monday on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel.
The protests were largely peaceful after police issued strong warnings not to bring the flag of the Hezbollah terrorist group, but two men were arrested for displaying swastikas superimposed on the Israeli flag.
“The cost is huge … so I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing,” he said.
Police were burnt out and tired, he added, and other important work had had to be sidelined.
“I think taxpayers should be in a position to say we would prefer that money spent on roadside breath testing, domestic violence investigations, knife crimes, rather than the huge resources that’s going into the city and the community.”
“Our resources are being stretched; it costs millions of dollars to police and marshal these protests and it’s completely reasonable for the police to take that into consideration when Form 1 applications are lodged with the courts,” Mr Minns said.
“Ultimately, this is a huge drain on the public purse”.
The Premier hit out at Josh Lees, a leading member of the Palestine Action Group who has lodged weekly applications for the past year to march in Sydney since the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel, agreeing with the description of the activist as a “professional protester”.
Mr Lees writes for Red Flag, the outlet of Socialist Alternative, which declares itself “Australia’s largest Marxist group”, and regularly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.
He was also a leader of the Lockdown to Zero movement, demanding that the then- Berejiklian government maintain strict Covid-19 lockdowns and branding the loosening of restrictions as “an offensive against the working class” by “the rich and powerful”.
Mr Lees has also been spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition, organising protests at the 2011 ALP National Conference against then-prime minister Julia Gillard’s asylum-seeker policies.
The former University of Sydney tutor was arrested during the “Occupy Sydney” movement that camped outside the Reserve Bank in Martin Place in 2011, clashing with police during a Hyde Park rally and at the Martin Place encampment.
After police broke up the protest, Mr Lees claimed police brutality. “I woke to see about 200 riot police surrounding our protest camp … physically removing people, using painful wrist-locks, and occasionally throwing punches, one of which left a protester in front of me bleeding”, he said. Charges against Mr Lees and other protesters were later dropped.
Mr Minns emphasised he was not seeking changes that would affect union protests or industrial disputes, but police should be in a position to deny repeat applications for marches through Sydney if they didn’t have the resources to deal with it.
“If you were putting on a rock concert on the weekend, you would have to pay NSW police to keep the public safe – this all comes from NSW taxpayers’ back pockets.”
NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman called on Mr Minns to immediately implement a user-pays system for serial protesters, with a general rule against authorisation if organisers of repeat protests failed to meet the costs.
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8 October, 2024
UN expert: ‘males must not compete in female sports’ to prevent abuse and injury
Female sport categories should be exclusively accessible to biological females, with men who identify as trans women to compete in an open or male category, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls has found.
The United Nations General Assembly in New York will formally receive the explosive report on Tuesday which demands sports organisations – from the International Olympic Committee to grassroots organised events – “ensure that female categories in organised sport are exclusively accessible to persons whose biological sex is female”.
The UN special rapporteur Reem Alsalem has slapped down both the International Olympic Committee and the International Paralympic – witnessed recently in Paris – of allowing biological males and competitors with XY chromosomes to compete against females.
Imane Khelif and Lin-Yu-Ting both won Paris Olympic boxing gold medals despite being banned by the International Boxing Federation for having XY chromosomes. In the Paralympics the biologically male Italian runner Valentina Petrillo was allowed to compete in the women’s T12 400m and 200m.
The issue of biological males in female spaces and accumulating female records through self-identification has accelerated in recent years, even filtering down to silent protests about the by concerned females during the Saturday morning community event Park Run.
Ms Alsalem writes in her 24 page report that “in cases where the sex of an athlete is unknown or uncertain, a dignified, swift, non-invasive and accurate sex screening method (such as a cheek swab) or, where necessary for exceptional reasons, genetic testing should be applied to confirm the athlete’s sex.”
She says those competitors who do not wish to compete in the category of their biological sex can participate in sport through the creation of open categories where sports convert the male category into an open category.
Ms Alsalem said there was in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males.
“According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports,’’ she said.
Of utmost concern, Ms Alsalem’s report has found that females have been put at increased risk of sexual harassment, assault, voyeurism and physical and sexual attacks in unisex locker rooms and toilets where sports have removed single sex spaces.
She said the insistence on maintaining female-only spaces, along with safeguarding and risk management protocols, arises from empirical evidence demonstrating that sex offenders tend to be male and that persistent sex offenders go to great lengths to gain access to those they wish to abuse.
She also found that female athletes are also more vulnerable to sustaining serious physical injuries when female-only sports spaces are opened to males, citing examples in volleyball, basketball and soccer including instances of adult males playing in teams of underage girls resulting in concussions broken legs and skull fractures.
According to scientific studies, males have certain performance advantages in sports, she wrote. One study asserts that, even in non-elite sport, “the least powerful man produced more power than the most powerful woman” and states that, where men and women have roughly the same levels of fitness, males’ average punching power has been measured as 162 per cent greater than females.
She found that even where sports federations mandate testosterone suppression it doesn’t eliminate the comparative performance advantages biological males have already acquired and the testosterone levels are at best “not evidence-based, arbitrary and asymmetrically favour males”.
“To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,’’ she wrote.
Further in the report Ms Alsalam notes that women and girls in sports are rarely consulted on the sex-separation issue and they have faced negative repercussions when reclaiming their right to single-sex sport, “in efforts to silence them”.
Australia, along with Canada, is considered an outlier in the protection of women’s spaces, but the country was mentioned in the report for encouraging bystanders to prevent sexual assaults and Gymnastic Australia’s apology to athletes and families who had experienced abuse.
Ms Alsalam refers to various legal mechanisms underpinning her report: Articles 2 and 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; article 2 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 1 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Articles 1 and 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, Article 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
She also stressed that under international human rights law, differential treatment on prohibited grounds may not be discriminatory if it is based on reasonable and objective criteria; it pursues a legitimate aim its effects are appropriate and proportional to the legitimate aim pursued and it is the least intrusive option to achieve the intended result. “Maintaining separate-sex sports is a proportional action that corresponds to legitimate aims within the meaning of article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and does not automatically result in the exclusion of transgender persons from sports, nor does it require invasive sex screenings,’’ she wrote.
“When combined with other measures, such as open categories, fairness in sports can be maintained while ensuring the ability of all to participate – a course of action followed by several professional sports associations.”
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Monopolies in the labour market
See Saw Margery Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master;
Jacky shall earn but a penny a day,
Because he can’t work any faster.
The first reference to this rhyme is 1640. It describes an iron law that payment must be related to productivity. This is inevitably so for the economy as a whole, and is even conceded by many of the politicians and IR experts who foster legal machinery to boost workers’ earnings above those that would emerge in a competitive market.
The case rests on ‘market failure’.
The term is bandied about regularly by those who see imperfect outcomes and those who want to change the benefits different parties obtain from market transactions. But this fails to recognise the ‘government failures’ that emerge from alternative approaches.
In fact, labour market failure only truly occurs when there is a form of monopoly in place. Given the hundreds of thousands of different hirers and millions of workers there are very few areas of natural monopoly. These are confined to the labour supply where workers with highly specific skills or talents like rock stars, pipeline welders, and IT systems engineers, (all of whom generally command high remuneration levels). There are however areas where monopolies can be fashioned by preventing market entry, but this requires government policy or acquiescence.
The most notorious area of effective monopoly restraint is in building and construction where violence is used to prevent non-unionised workers offering their services and standover tactics are used against employers who seek to break the union-imposed monopoly. The elevated level of wages and other costs creates a 30 per cent cost premium, a premium that is absent from the non-unionised house building sector.
Under Australia’s IR system, thousands of ‘awards’ determine the remuneration of about 20 per cent of employees (30 years ago it was 80 per cent); registered collective agreements set the wages for a further 40 per cent with individual agreements covering the remaining 40 per cent. Although the average employee earns about a third more than the Award rates, in many areas the Award is the paid rate.
Political attention has focused on different payments for the same job. A union campaign pointed to some airline cabin staff doing the same job on the same plane as others but earning only half as much. Senator Roberts cited mining workers getting paid a $40,000-a-year difference depending on whether they were employed directly or through labour hire. Describing this as ‘wage theft’, he introduced the Fair Work Amendment in 2022 to bring labour hire workers pay levels to the same or greater than directly employed workers. His objective was to overcome ‘a failure of balanced market power’.
These are among countless other examples of apparently anomalous wage outcomes but in all cases the parties involved accepted the contracts willingly. Criticism is targeted at the employer paying some workers less than others – in no cases is there a suggestion that the higher earners are ripping off the employer!
The firm doing the hiring will seek to minimise its outlays. If it is cheaper to do so through contractors that will be the preferred route. In practice, most firms would want a balance between ‘permanent’ employees and workers hired under more flexible contracts. If the contractors do not obtain a premium wage to compensate for losing out on holiday pay loadings and other benefits this means the ‘permanent’ employees’ wages have been pushed above their market rate. Naturally, the workers getting lower remuneration will be envious of their more fortunate fellow workers
The government has now passed the two ‘Closing Loopholes’ Acts. Central to them is ‘same job, same pay’ for labour hire workers and enhanced workplace delegate rights including rights over prospective union members. Yielding to pressures, Qantas is levelling up its different wage settings at a reported annual cost to profits of $60 million.
Aside from loading the dice against employers, the Act introduces additional costs of complexity. In this respect, Freehills quips, ‘Make friends with a good IR lawyer – you will need them.’ The additional costs bring no corresponding economy-wide benefits.
And the ACTU is moving to its next agenda item: scrapping youth wages, illustrating a mindset that the level of wages has no effect on employment levels and no relationship to the productivity of those receiving them.
As the Closing Loopholes Act cannot conceivably have a positive effect on productivity, its goal of re-weighing the labour market outcomes can only be brought about by lowering profits. To the extent that this is successful, it would mean lower new investment levels and further reducing productivity.
For the ALP politicians and the unions, the key issue is to reverse the decline in union membership – down to about 8 per cent in the private sector – by forcing a de facto unionisation of the gig/contractor workforce. Union funding of the ALP, directly and indirectly, gives it a commanding advantage in terms of electoral marketing and one that is being eroded.
Labor’s IR policy adds to other productivity-suppressing economic policies put in place to foster support amongst sections of the economy. These include weaponising environmental regulations to prevent new mining, (while emasculating environmental protections in the case of wind and solar energy); subsidising wind, solar and green hydrogen; and squeezing irrigators’ water availability. The early outcome has been six quarters of declining national productivity.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/monopolies-in-the-labour-market/
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Biden-Harris Admin Raids FEMA Funds to Resettle Illegal Aliens
Federal spending is hard enough to keep track of at the best of times, but the Biden-Harris administration is highly adept at hiding how it funds its open-borders agenda.
In a cynical budget negotiation tactic, the White House is trying to push through a $40 billion “supplemental” funding bill that holds bailout money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency hostage to sending billions more to Ukraine with insufficient accountability.
It gets worse. If the White House tactic works, and Congress coughs up enough aid to Ukraine that rescue money for FEMA can get through, hundreds of millions of that funding won’t go to disaster-afflicted Americans.
Instead it will go to providing housing, food, health care, and transportation for illegal immigrants through grants to activist nongovernment organizations and “sanctuary” cities.
That’s right. Even though FEMA grants are meant to help taxpaying Americans prepare for and cope with hurricanes, fires, and floods, the Biden-Harris administration has used these same funds to pay activist NGOs to settle migrants illegally in the United States.
FEMA’s major disaster relief and flood insurance programs are already in debt and need to be refilled each year. The White House’s supplemental request uses that as a smokescreen to slip in grant money for their open-border operation.
FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program is already being siphoned for over $332 million “to assist communities receiving noncitizens released from custody,” which means housing migrants here illegally at the border, then transporting them to places such as New York City.
New York has been promised $104 million from this pot, though at a burn rate of $8 million a day, it won’t last long. Big city mayors gripe about a few buses carrying illegal aliens sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, but the main train delivering migrants to their sidewalks is driven by the Department of Homeland Security, using FEMA money.
And the Biden-Harris administration is getting even more brazen. FEMA grant money, unlike its Disaster Relief and Flood Insurance programs, doesn’t require the president to declare a federal disaster—which would at least highlight the self-defeating results of his policies.
So it should come as no surprise that DHS, in its fiscal 2024 budget, already asked for a directly appropriated $83.5 million for FEMA Shelter and Services Program grants to “nonprofits and local entities to provide support to noncitizens released from DHS custody.”
Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security asked for $800 million—$650 million more than the year before—“for communities to support migrants who have been released from DHS custody pending the outcome of their immigration proceedings.”
Bear in mind that with the asylum system backlogged as never before, this outcome would be far in the future in most cases. The money would come from a $4 billion “Southwest Border Contingency” fund in DHS’ proposed fiscal 2024 budget.
In plain English, this means that having created a giant magnet for illegal immigration, the Biden-Harris administration wants to continue to burn your tax dollars to sustain hundreds of thousands of people who entered the U.S. illegally, for an indefinite period. To be clear, not only did these people have no right to enter the country, but they stand little chance of getting asylum even after a due process lasting many years.
Naturally, Biden faces resistance in Congress. Republicans have seen DHS use appropriated money to facilitate mass illegal entry over the past two years, and they are wise to the White House’s attempt to ramp this up in the fiscal 2024 budget.
Hence the attempt to Trojan-horse the border-related funds into the Ukraine-FEMA bundle. In the supplemental request, DHS is asking not only for $203 million more for Customs and Border Protection’s industrial migrant processing machine—which includes tent housing, transportation, and medical care—but also $600 million more for the FEMA Shelter and Services Program grants.
In a recent hearing before Congress, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell tried to “clarify for the record that FEMA is not an immigration agency.” Yet she also proclaimed her support for Biden’s Southwest Border Contingency Fund, which would channel money to FEMA to spend on services to immigrants here illegally.
But as a firefighter for two decades, Criswell surely knows which arsonist set the dumpster fire on the border that her agency’s cash-hose is now being pointed at.
All this only adds to the reasons that Congress should oppose this corrupt deal. Tying a FEMA top-up to Ukraine aid—in the middle of hurricane season, and shortly after Hawaii’s deadly Maui fires—shows that the Biden-Harris administration will maintain open borders at any price.
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The Left’s Word-Shaming Can’t Conceal ‘Third World’ Effects of Open Borders
Politically incorrect words don’t kill, but Venezuelan gangs do.
On Saturday, former President Donald Trump warned rallygoers in a small Wisconsin town that if Vice President Kamala Harris “is reelected, your town and every town … will be transformed into a Third World hellhole. ”
Trump repeatedly warns that Biden-Harris open borders are turning New York into a “Third World nation” and America into a “Third World” disaster.
Left-wing elites are apoplectic over Trump’s use of “Third World.” Never mind the violence perpetrated by migrant gangs and the societal disorder caused by open borders. The Left‘s problem is with “Third World.”
NPR calls the term “offensive.” Foreign Policy columnist Howard French calls it “utterly racist rhetoric.” This is an intentional distraction.
People watching their neighborhoods being degraded know what they are seeing with their own eyes. They have no problem calling the conditions “Third World.”
New York City Council member Vickie Paladino, a Republican, says, “We’ve got a Third World country now here in New York City, with Third World crime.” She estimates that 60% of the arrests in her Queens district are “illegal aliens.”
Queens resident Ramses Frias, a Democrat-turned-Republican, complains that commercial streets are being turned into a “Third World market,” with illegal vendors hawking stolen merchandise, and half-naked sex workers strutting in plain sight of children walking to school. Roosevelt Avenue is so overrun with hookers that it’s dubbed the “Market of Sweethearts” and looks like Bangkok’s sordid Patpong market.
The Trump campaign is also getting backlash for posting a comparison of two images on X—one of a quiet, clean street lined with homes, and the other of hundreds of newly arrived migrants, eating and sleeping huddled on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.
The Trump War Room caption reads: “Import the Third World. Become the Third World.”
The NAACP said of the post, “They are showing all of us just how racist they are.”
That’s preposterous.
Bedlam is being imported to the area around the hotel, once a Manhattan landmark. Businesses are fleeing. The migrants pictured happen to be mostly black, but commuters—black as well as white—dread walking past the chaos to get to Grand Central Station.
Trump is also being bashed as “racist” for calling migrants who rape and murder “animals.” On Saturday, he said, “Just this month, right here in this beautiful town, police arrested an illegal alien member of a savage Venezuelan prison gang known as Tren de Aragua” for “holding a mother and daughter captive against their will and sexually assaulting them again, and again, and again.”
Trump called the alleged assailant “an animal.”
He also used “animal” to describe the Venezuelan illegal who raped, bludgeoned, and killed nursing student Laken Riley. But Reuters accused Trump of wrongdoing for “resorting to the degrading rhetoric he has employed time and again.”
Ridiculous. The issue isn’t Trump’s choice of words. It’s loss of life caused by Harris’ open border.
The Left elite also turn a blind eye to the impact of prostitution on business owners and families trapped in close proximity to the brothels.
Incredibly, most Democratic politicians—except New York City Mayor Eric Adams—align themselves with the sex workers. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose Queens district is overrun with street prostitution, has insisted in the past that “sex work is work” and generally supported decriminalization. Rep. Jerrold Nadler supports decriminalization, even as prostitution spreads in his Manhattan district.
A Democratic bill in Albany, N.Y., would decriminalize buying and selling sex, operating a brothel, and sex tourism—never mind the impact on neighborhoods. “This legislation would make NYC a major sex tourism destination,” warns Sonia Ossorio, of the National Organization for Women, who has documented the explosion of migrant prostitution.
Last week, The Washington Post accused Trump of alarming voters by depicting an “imaginary and frightening world.” Frightening, yes. But not imaginary.
Felonies are up 35% in New York City since 2019, and an estimated 75% of arrests in midtown Manhattan for assault and other crimes are illegal migrants. Street sex sells for $50 for fellatio, and $100 for vaginal penetration, according to NOW.
The situation is Third World, and you’ll get four more years of this mayhem if Harris is elected president.
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7 October, 2024
Making immigration controversial will be one of Trudeau’s greatest legacies
Immigration has finally become a topic of genuine debate in Canada, and that is a remarkable and sorely needed development in our discourse. This follows decades of it being an issue that political parties could only support while being permitted to argue about the nuances, lest they be accused of bigotry and xenophobia.
Amidst a brutal affordability crisis, three-quarters of Canadians want immigration levels lowered until that situation is at-least partially alleviated. Given the dismal number of housing starts in Canada, that will mean drastic reductions.
This is far from the only reason Canadians have become sceptical about immigration.
No policy issue should ever be above debate, least of all immigration and its economic benefits, as well as its social changes.
Under the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal party has held power since 2015, the number of immigrants coming into Canada has exploded. What was sold to Canadians as a noble, hopeful policy that would only be good for the economy has become an utter disaster.
Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, has pledged to lower immigration to the point that the annual growth of Canada’s housing stock outpaces the number of newcomers. If that sounds like an obvious policy any reasonable government should have already implemented, that’s because it is.
It is no surprise that, as the loudest voice opposing just about everything the Liberals stand for, Poilievre and the Conservatives are surging in the polls and projected to win a supermajority in the 2025 election. He is not on track to do so because he is an anti-immigrant demagogue, but because he is promising a return to sanity on immigration and a host of other policy issues.
The problem is that the Liberal government is not level-headed or pragmatic. Since forming a government nearly a decade ago, Trudeau and his ministers have ambitiously swung for the fences on as many issues as possible to bake left-wing ideas into Canada’s culture and economy.
During his successful election campaign in 2015, Trudeau promised Canadians ‘real change’, and he was not lying. One of those changes was dramatically expanding immigration, and another was pushing a post-nationalist agenda.
For those who do not know, post-nationalism in Canada means the country has no established mainstream culture or identity, which is how Trudeau himself described it in 2015. It was an ideology espoused by Life of Pi author Yann Martel, who labelled Canada as ‘the greatest hotel on Earth’.
Canada is not akin to a hotel, and it never has been. It is a country with an Anglo-American culture, distinguished by a unique history and its own set of beloved peculiarities. Even if Canada were a hotel, it would be terribly overbooked, as insulting as Martel’s comparison is.
Between January 1 and August 31, 2023, 692,760 temporary work permits were issued, compared to 274,690 in the same time period in 2022. Canada’s population now grows at a rate of over 3 per cent annually, rather than 1 per cent as it was for decades.
International student permits jumped from 354,784 in 2018 to 550,187 in 2022. In 2023, there were over a million such students present in Canada, mostly concentrated in the larger cities. Bear in mind, Canada is a country of less than 40 million people.
For international students, Canada offers the possibility of converting their student visas to work visas, with the hope of then converting those work visas into permanent residency permits.
A diploma mill boom industry emerged, with predatory entrepreneurs starting up ‘career colleges’, often located in rundown storefronts in shopping plazas and offering little more than a promise of eventual permanent residency. This was especially acute in the province of Ontario, which has very loose regulations on starting up educational institutions.
Meanwhile, established post-secondary schools with good reputations like Conestoga College in Toronto or Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia have seen the vast majority of their enrolments become international students. In Ontario’s case, the nominally centre-right provincial government froze university tuition fees in 2019, and many institutions opted to soak themselves on hefty international student fees.
There have been tremendous consequences for this open-door policy, which has become rampant with fraud as newcomers try to game the system for permanent resident permits.
The effects of such a policy of mass immigration have included an exacerbation of Canada’s housing crisis, which the federal government was warned about when they began ballooning Canada’s population.
For a government that pretends to follow the ‘evidence’, they shelved the warnings of their own public servants in favour of taking marching orders from the Century Initiative. The Century Initiative is a lobby group formed by ex-McKinsey employees and has petitioned the Canadian government to try and increase its population to 100 million by 2100.
One question that many Canadians are asking is, why? Why should Canada strive for such an arbitrary target? The evidence that it would be a good thing does not speak for itself.
One of the great myths pushed about mass immigration is that it is always good for economic growth, but Canada’s GDP per capita on the whole has declined for six years in a row. In 2023, GDP per capita in the United States was 43 per cent higher than in Canada, and now in 2024, economist Trevor Tombe estimates that gap could widen to 50 per cent.
In 2015, Canada’s standard of living was ranked ninth on the UN Human Development Index (HDI). By 2022, Canada’s ranking in the UN HDI had plummeted to 18th.
Housing is an economic issue that has gone off the rails due to the massive influx of newcomers, straining the already thin housing supply in both Canada’s major cities and smaller urban centres.
A house on the American side of Niagara Falls goes for $145,000 USD, while on the Canadian side it is $513,110 USD. Few, save for the wealthy, those who come from well-off families, or foreign investors, can afford to purchase property, to say nothing of monthly rental costs.
The monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto jumped 40 per cent between 2021 and 2023, now amounting to about $1,860 USD. Newly common are ramshackle houses hosting illegal numbers of international students per room, as slumlords make the most of their rare, valuable properties.
Canada’s housing supply has not kept up with the massive influx of immigration as a result of the sheer numbers and layers of regulations that stifle new builds. Whatever evidence the Liberals used to justify their immigration policy did not include supply and demand when it came to housing.
Unlike American states like Texas, which have few housing regulations, cities in provinces like BC still have some of the most onerous homebuilding fees in Canada.
In infamously unaffordable Vancouver, for example, extra fees paid to the municipal government account for 30 per cent of the costs of building a new home, which go for an average of $881,507 USD in a city where the average yearly salary is $45,816 USD. Unaffordability has dampened the spirit of young people, just half of whom believe they will ever own property and get the security that comes with it.
All of this has been accompanied by the spread of post-nationalism under the guise of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’, which has amounted to little else than scrubbing away anything reminiscent of Canada’s colonial past. Canada is a British-style Westminster democracy with King Charles III as head of state, Common Law, and a nominally liberal economy, yet post-nationalists would have all reminders of that erased.
One of the first moves Trudeau made after becoming Prime Minister was to remove portraits of Queen Elizabeth II from government buildings in Ottawa.
The Fort Calgary historic site was renamed The Confluence in an effort to ‘decolonise’ it, which, as one Canadian writer lamented, made the birthplace of the city of Calgary sound like a condominium development.
Likewise, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia retired the crest it held since 1886, resplendent with lions and the Crown. What replaced it in the name of ‘decolonisation’ was a bland, corporate-style logo consisting of three shades of blue and little else.
There are calls for provincial flags to be ripped up and replaced because they feature a Union Jack, while Victoria Day, named in honour of the former Queen, is scarcely acknowledged by the Prime Minister or left-wing provincial premiers.
It is little more than Anglophobia stitched up as ‘inclusion’. Canadians are not actually on board with this desecration of the national memory and have opposed the statue topplings and ‘decolonial’ efforts, though the progressive government has not done anything about it.
Another prong of post-nationalism, made possible by boosting immigration to a country whose government tells them contains no identity or history worth integrating into, has been Canada’s transformation into a stage for the old world’s blood feuds.
Jewish institutions have come under attack from anti-Israel activists, including coordinated bomb threats, shots fired at Jewish girls’ schools, and near-daily harassment of the community with calls to ‘globalise the Intifada’. Other conflicts are present too, such as pro-Hong Kong independence activists being violently harassed by pro-Beijing actors in the streets of cities like Vancouver.
An April poll suggested that two-thirds of Canadians believe immigrants should only be allowed to enter the country if they adopt its values, and those do not include brawling in the streets or making bomb threats over conflicts thousands of miles away. The poll also revealed that Canadians are almost evenly split between those who endorse a multicultural mosaic as the model for society, and those who prefer a melting pot where immigrants assimilate.
This is Canada as the ‘hotel of the world’. It is nothing more than a packed state devoid of a unique culture or history it is allowed to take pride in, where ethnic tensions drive the culture. Post-national Canada is also a future in which nobody can afford a home, in part due to an overcharged immigration system that is riddled with fraud, in a further blow to national dignity.
Still, it would be a mistake to say that Canadians have become an anti-immigrant society; they simply want a return to policies similar to the previous Conservative government that tailored immigration to Canada’s economic needs, such as addressing the lack of highly skilled workers.
The Conservative government’s immigration policy was not solely a cold economic calculation either, as there were also generous allowances under the Conservatives for spousal reunification and the admission of genuine refugees. By balancing selective, skills-based immigration with compassionate admissions, Canada had an economically-sound and family-oriented immigration system that looks like the gold standard in hindsight.
Under Trudeau’s mismanagement, however, immigration is nothing short of an embarrassment. Immigration is also now a topic that people in Canada are finally discussing comfortably, including its economic merits and what levels of integration should be demanded of newcomers.
That is a remarkable achievement in itself.
Even if Trudeau never intended it, making immigration controversial will be among the most important pieces of his legacy. Perhaps that is something we can all thank him for, though he will blush to hear it.
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Why so many students hate Israel
Oct. 7 marks the anniversary of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, an action that resulted in the deaths of some 1,200 Israelis and provoked a ferocious Israeli response that has produced thousands of casualties in Gaza.
Over the past year, some Americans have sought to celebrate this atrocity. We’ve seen numerous demonstrations demonizing Israel and demanding the destruction of both Israel and the United States. One extraordinary element of these demonstrations is that they have been joined by thousands of American college students who have no connection to the Middle East and know little or nothing about the region.
These students are entitled to their opinions. The problem is that their opinions are usually not based on knowledge. When it came to those students shouting “from the river to the sea,” for example, more than half could name neither the river nor the sea when asked to identify those locations in 2023. The particular foolishness of college groups, such as “Queers for Palestine,” a place where LGBTQ persons likely would be murdered by the locals, hardly needs discussion.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the naivete of our college students. American students are taught little about the history of their own country, much less the history of far-away places. In many of America’s public schools, history is poorly taught, and many U.S. colleges do not require a foundational course in history or government. In the classes they do take, most college students are asked to think critically and analytically. But, as every professor can attest, the average student’s capacity to think critically is hampered by a lack of knowledge. One colleague told me that his students hardly know anything about World War I or World War II other than which came first because they’re numbered.
Absent facts, students rely upon their feelings. This decoupling of opinion from knowledge is sometimes said to be characteristic of our contemporary “post-truth” polity, in which many citizens are no longer concerned with objective facts but simply accept what they believe or feel as true. A feeling requires no evidentiary foundation but, rather, creates its own reality.
What are the feelings students learn in America’s schools?
A recent report issued by the American Historical Association helps provide some answers to this question. Based upon a survey of 3,000 middle and high school teachers in nine states, the report found that curricular materials from left-liberal organizations were widely used in the nation’s classrooms. Forty-two percent of the respondents had used materials from “Learning for Justice,” produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. About 25% had used materials from the Zinn Education Project, an organization that valorizes leftist activism, and 17% used materials provided by the 1619 Project (see below). Only a small percentage reported ever having used materials from two of the more prominent conservative sources, the Ashbrook Center and Hillsdale College. The AHA report warned that some left-leaning school districts exhibited a trend of offering “moralistic cues … that seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an emotional manner, as a string of injustices.”
About 4,500 school systems have adopted the “1619 Project Curriculum,” material adapted from a series of New York Times Magazine essays designed to replace the conventional American historical narrative with one that places slavery at the center of the American story. According to this new history, the true date of America’s founding is 1619, when slavery was introduced in Virginia, rather than 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written. Crafted mainly to justify demands for the payment of reparations to the descendants of enslaved persons, the 1619 essays properly call attention to the role of slavery in American history. An untutored reader, however, namely a young student, might reach the rather erroneous conclusion that slavery was the actual centerpiece and driving force of American political and institutional development.
Such an interpretation, of course, delegitimates the U.S. as a nation. It transforms America from “the land of opportunity” into the “state of slavery.” The more widespread this belief, the more disruptive it is to Americans’ sense of identification with their nation.
“In extinguishing a kingdom of men,” observed 19th century Chinese poet Gong Zizhen, “the first step is to remove its history.”
It appears that at least some teachers view their mission as removing America’s history by presenting students, under the rubric of critical thinking, with an unfavorable view of their nation, its history, and its policies. Many of the same educators teach their students to equate Zionism with bigotry and racism. Negative feelings about Israel and the U.S. often go hand in hand precisely because they emanate from the same set of educational institutions.
In the interest of promoting a more knowledgeable discussion of the events that transpired on Oct. 7, 2023, I offer a few facts that might serve as counterweights to hostile feelings toward Israel:
Feeling 1: Israel is an ‘ethnostate’ in which the Jews monopolize political power
Fact: For better or worse, most of the world’s states, including all the Muslim states of the Middle East, are ethnostates. In most Muslim states, non-Muslims, if tolerated at all, face numerous handicaps. Israel, the so-called “Jewish state,” is quite multiethnic and multicultural. Israeli society includes Christians, Druze, Arabs, and others. Israel’s Muslim political party wields power in the parliament. Members of the Druze, an ancient Mideastern sect, hold prominent positions in the Israeli military and, as a result, exercise considerable influence over Israeli security policy.
Feeling 2: Israel is an illegitimate product of ‘settler colonialism’
Fact: The concept of settler colonialism has no real significance because it cannot distinguish one state from another. All states are products of settler colonialism. Every square inch of territory on the face of the earth previously belonged to someone else. When Europeans arrived in North America, they settled on land belonging to Native American nations that previously had seized the land from other Native American nations. Many of today’s Europeans are descendants of tribes that conquered pieces of Roman territory that the Romans, themselves, had stolen from the Etruscans, Dacians, Illyrians, and others. At worst, the Israelis are no different from anyone else.
The archeological record, moreover, suggests the Jews have a powerful historical claim to the land. The Temple of Solomon may have been built as long ago as the 10th century B.C., and the Second Temple was built in the 6th century B.C. Jews worshiped there continuously for the next 500 years. Muhammad was not born until 500 years after the destruction of the Second Temple. The Jews’ claim to what became modern-day Israel was recognized by the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. In fact, modern Israel was not created by conquest but by the U.N.
Feeling 3: Israel is guilty of brutality and oppression
Fact: Every government is capable of brutal and repressive conduct. Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century nihilist philosopher and social critic, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, had Zarathustra call the state “the coldest of all cold monsters.” Yet, if we were to rank states on the dimension of cruelty, Israel would rank well behind nearly all the states in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, where women are again being deprived of all rights.
By failing to teach history and political affairs in our schools, we have turned our children into what the Soviets used to call “polezniye durakie,” meaning useful idiots, unwitting stooges used by political activists to further their causes.
This is why American students can be trained to chant their demands for the destruction of not only Israel but the U.S. as well. The fault is not that of the credulous students. We are to blame for allowing this to happen.
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Harris’ Economic Plan Would Increase Federal Stranglehold on Economy
Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech last week to accompany the release of her 82-page economic planning document. While her words were intended to evoke optimism, the implications of the plan are troubling for America’s future.
To begin with, the plan must be placed in context.
The Biden-Harris administration has overseen the federal government since January 2021. President Joe Biden has faced broad public disapproval of his handling of the economy for most of that time, and Americans still view high prices and inflation as leading concerns.
Rather than breaking from the Biden-Harris record, the Harris economic plan wholeheartedly embraces it.
Harris’ plan praises a series of legislative packages passed in 2021 and 2022 that fueled inflationary deficit spending. Some of the bills even required tiebreaking votes by Harris herself in the role of presiding officer in the Senate as vice president.
Reading the economic plan makes it clear that Harris is proud of the Biden-Harris administration’s economic legacy.
In worrisome fashion, the plan would tighten Washington’s grip on the economy even further.
Rather than relying on businesses to create jobs with smart investments, the Harris vision involves the federal government using a combination of spending and tax credits to subsidize preferred industries.
Meanwhile, she proposes to raise taxes on businesses broadly, claiming they aren’t paying their “fair share.” With tax credits in one hand and tax hikes in the other, Harris would pick winners and losers across the entire economy.
The dismal track record of the Biden-Harris administration’s “investments” is plain to see. Billions of dollars in subsidies for electric vehicle charging infrastructure has yielded only a handful of stations, and a massive new broadband internet program has also had pitiful results.
There are good reasons for these failures.
The Biden-Harris administration loads federal programs with requirements for “equity,” “environmental justice,” and other left-wing ideological fads. That ensures that federal spending produces even less economic value than usual.
Another claim—that a Harris administration would “cut red tape”—is downright laughable.
Not only has the Biden-Harris administration made federal programs even more bureaucratic and complicated, but it has also unleashed a torrent of regulations that impose thousands of dollars in costs for every family.
Unless and until Harris is willing to repudiate that regulatory record, any “cut red tape” claims will be hard to take seriously.
Speaking of families, the Harris plan takes the same approach for households as it does for businesses; namely, subsidies and tax credits for some, higher taxes for others.
A prominent example is Harris calling for $25,000 in down payment support to offset the rising cost of housing. Yet this would lead to a massive increase in demand for houses, causing prices to rise even faster.
On the jobs front, the plan calls for both broad and targeted increases to the federal minimum wage. That would destroy jobs by reducing hiring and artificially accelerating automation, while also raising prices for consumers (which is to say, everyone).
In addition, reversing many (or all) of the tax cuts passed in 2017 under then-President Donald Trump would stifle job-creating private investment.
The Harris economic document also embraces the Biden-Harris administration’s many attempts to write off student loan debt. That’s not “forgiveness” as much as it is a transferal, since the burden is shifted from university attendees to taxpayers—who already have $35 trillion in federal debt to shoulder.
In sum, the Harris plan would make Washington the center of U.S. economic life, ensuring fewer jobs, less economic growth, and higher prices.
Rather than a “new way forward for the middle class,” the document is a recipe for economic stagnation and national decline. Harris’ plan would only create an “opportunity economy” for bureaucrats and her political allies.
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Democracy demands choice, not the appearance of choice
Senator Ralph Babet
Most Australians think we have a real choice when it comes to the government we elect, but many of us know that is not true. Unless of course you consider being given the opportunity to vote for socialism or socialism-lite a choice!
Imagine going to the ballot box and believing that the choice of authoritarianism on one hand and gentle authoritarianism on the other, meant you had real options.
Spare me.
The idea of a two-party political system is pure disinformation. Speaking of which, if you want proof that the two-party system is really a one-party system cleverly disguised as democracy, look no further than the Labor Party’s Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. The Bill now proposed by Prime Minister Albanese and his Communications Minister Michelle Rowlands is the same bill first proposed by Scott Morrison and his Communications Minister Paul Fletcher. Fancy that!
In the same way that cockroaches survive nuclear wars, globalist ideas survive federal elections and changes of government.
You need to understand that most government ministers are not especially smart or capable. Most MPs, if they had to find actual jobs in the actual economy, would be hard-pressed to find work as low-level middle managers. Think regional managers overseeing half a dozen 7-11 stores.
Actually, no. More like – and I’m stretching here – deputy assistant to the assistant night manager of a solitary, underperforming store in a rural town no one ever heard of. Yes, that’s your average high-ranking Labor minister had they not been voted into Parliament.
So the people sitting at the big desk in the ministerial office are not the brightest. They are good at talking, schmoozing, and politicking. But that is about it. The real smarts are to be found in the bureaucracy – the nameless, faceless, public servants who are more likely to be serving the globalist elites than the public who pay their wages.
These bureaucrats attend globalist functions where they enthuse over how idyllic the world could be if only the public could be massaged and moulded into the right kind of public. They then return to Canberra where they convince the deputy assistant to the assistant night manager of a poorly performing 7-11 – who by some fluke of the electoral system somehow end up as Australia’s Communicators Minister – that it is vitally important to censor the free thinking of free citizens online.
The Communications Minister – more suited to making a Slurpee than running a national portfolio let alone protecting civil rights – is quickly convinced by the bureaucrat’s fine-sounding words and high-minded ideals. The next thing you know, your Facebook posts are being suppressed and your X (Twitter) account has been suspended.
Labor and the Liberals exist only to echo one another. Liberal or Labor, Scomo or Albo – it’s all the same. Only the colour of the corflute changes. I can give you example after example to prove the point. Consider Australia’s self-sabotaging commitment to Net Zero emissions. Right now, Net Zero is considered a Chris Bowen fetish. But we should never forget that it was former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard who signed Australia up to the Kyoto Protocol that required us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as if human activity was the main cause of climate.
Today the Labor Party insists on wind turbines and solar panels while the Liberal Party insists on nuclear power plants. But both parties are in lock-step agreement that there is a climate catastrophe that can only be avoided by completely overhauling our energy policy.
Or what about the Indigenous Voice to Parliament? Prime Minister Albanese wanted it in the Australian Constitution; Mr Dutton wanted it legislated. Our major parties only disagreed on the instrument, not on the desirability to divide Australians by race.
Should we talk about Digital ID? It’s a Liberal Party idea that never quite got up. Labor succeeded where the Liberals failed and all Australians lost.
Think about the commitment to globalist entities who continually undermine our national sovereignty. Whether it’s the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, or the World Economic Forum – both major parties are beholden to them.
The WEF serves unelected corporate elites by giving them access to politicians worldwide, and subsequently, access to public money. Australia’s politicians and bureaucrats should be nowhere near any of it.
Both major parties love big government and big bureaucracy. No matter what they say before taking office, neither party ever reduces the size of government or repeals legislation. Both parties have put the nation into serious debt. And both parties have raised taxes and levies.
There was perhaps no more appalling proof that we actually live in a the one party state than during Covid when both Liberal and Labor politicians cheered the trashing of civil rights. Both parties – to their eternal shame – supported mandatory vaccinations, lockdowns, mask-wearing and school closures.
Democracy demands a choice, not just the illusion or appearance of choice. At present, we don’t have that. Slowly, Australians are starting to realise it, but we must all play a part and wake more people up.
The UAP exists outside of the two-party system because a real democracy demands that voters are given a real choice – a choice about where we are heading as a nation and about the kind of country we want to be.
When you support the United Australia Party you are doing more than supporting sensible policy positions, you are giving Australia the chance to exercise real choice and in so doing, strengthening democracy.
I am ever so grateful for your continued support.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/democracy-demands-choice-not-the-appearance-of-choice/
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6 October, 2024
An author changes sides
M. C. Armstrong
To @TheDemocrats:
This is my career suicide note, but it’s also a thank you from someone who is done with careerism. I’m a lifelong member of your party and I’m voting for Donald Trump. Why? It’s not just your industrial-scale censorship or your endless wars or the fact that you disenfranchised millions of Kennedy voters through lawfare. If that were all I had, it would be sufficient, in terms of conscience and rage, but there’s more to this story than anger. Your hatred and censorship has taught me to admire @realDonaldTrump and to love my fellow working-class Americans, and for that I thank you.
This vote is for all the traumatized people who have been canceled and banished just for saying no to the establishment. This vote is for the surveyor, the farmer, the HVAC man, the nurse, the hairstylist, the Deadhead, the veteran, and my fellow adjunct professors who have told me their stories about being bullied by the Democrats in their friends and family and their colleagues at work. This is for the young Black woman in my class last year who, on the day of Kamala Harris’s visit to campus, said, “You’re going to hate me, Dr. Armstrong, but I’m not going. I’m voting for Donald Trump.” Why would she think I would hate her for the way she votes? What has happened to our country?
Somehow, Donald Trump has changed my mind. Where I once saw a cartoon white supremacist, warmonger, and narcissist, I now see the man who renegotiated NAFTA and the only president in the twenty-first century not to start a new war. Where I once saw the pal of the neocons, I now see a man who has awoken from his slumber and disavowed Dick Cheney, George Bush, and John Bolton, even as my own party embraces these “men.”
Why has the greatest entrepreneur of my generation (@elonmusk) risked his career to side with Trump? Why has the most consequential grassroots environmentalist of my time (@RobertKennedyJr) sacrificed friends, family, and reputation to side with “The Orange Menace?” Why has the most courageous peace activist of the twenty-first century (@TulsiGabbard) left our party? Because Tulsi, Bobby, and Elon see what I see. Donald Trump is resilient and he’s risking his life to change the fate of our nation. Trump is transforming the Republican Party into the party of peace, free speech, and the working-class. He has converted George Bush’s billionaire boys club of Big War, Big Ag, and Big Pharma into a party that cares about public health and embraces regenerative agriculture.
Now I don’t think the GOP is all the way there yet, but they’re clearly the party that embraces dissent, and dissent—brave speech—is the fuel for evolution. So, for the first time in my life, I’m voting Republican. In the name of peace in Ukraine and free speech here at home, I’m casting my vote, as a Kennedy Democrat, for Donald Trump.
https://x.com/mcarmystrong/status/1842187462321561861
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IT CAN HAPPEN HERE: Free Speech Under Siege in Colorado as Well as in Brazil
The legendary rocker Joe Walsh once sang, “The Rocky Mountain way is better than the way we had.” But in Colorado, unfortunately, the Rocky Mountain way now more closely resembles censorship in Brazil than liberty in America.
More than 100 international free speech advocates, including five former U.S. attorneys general, joined an open letter to the Brazilian Congress last month condemning Brazil’s severe censorship, which includes suspension of the social media platform X.
While some may look on with mawkish curiosity at foreign intrigue they deem irrelevant to life in America, others may view Brazil’s authoritarian impulse through a lens of gratitude that it couldn’t happen here. Both are wrong.
One need only look to the state of Colorado to find an American example of governing authorities who seek to silence speech with which they disagree and compel reiteration of their preferred message.
More on that a bit later.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who owns X, has been engaged in a dispute with Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that stems from de Moraes’ demands that Musk’s social media platform censor messages he disfavors.
On Aug. 30, de Moraes officially suspended X nationwide in Brazil. He also froze the bank accounts of Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX that provides internet access via satellite.
In his order, de Moraes said X presents a “real danger” of “negatively influencing the electorate in 2024, with massive misinformation, with the aim of unbalancing the electoral result, based on hate campaigns in the digital age, to favor extremist populist groups.”
Besides the former attorneys general, signers of the Sept. 12 letter to Brazilian lawmakers include three members of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham, bestselling author Rod Dreher, podcaster Tammy Peterson, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, X “Spaces” host Mario Nawfal, former Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and leading academics such as Princeton University’s Robert P. George.
Sifting through de Moraes’ parade of red herrings reveals that he and others in power in Brazil fear that allowing access to certain speech on X might lead to an electoral result they wouldn’t like.
As international pressure builds against Brazil’s scurrilous attacks on Musk, X, and the fundamental human right to free speech, many Americans are awakening to the rising global tide of censorship at home.
Now, back to Colorado, where current state law invades the sanctity of the counselor-patient relationship. For patients who desire to live according to their true identity as image-bearers of God, created biologically male or female, the state has declared that any message other than so-called gender-affirming care will put a mental health care professional’s license at risk.
Colorado’s “pro-choice” legislators, who frequently pontificate that the issue of abortion should be left to women and their doctors, also banned doctors from offering women progesterone to counter the effects of the abortion pill.
Thankfully, legal challenges to this Colorado law are underway, but the chilling message from the Legislature is clear: The only state-approved choice once an abortion pill is taken is the one that results in the death of an unborn child. And that’s the only choice about which women can be trusted with information.
Government as gatekeeper to information in Colorado isn’t limited to the state. Local school officials decided that parents didn’t need to know their daughter would be required to share a room on an overnight field trip with a male who identified as female. Apparently, the parents couldn’t be trusted to make the “right” decision for their child. Much better to leave it to the “experts,” of course.
Colorado is also home to Lorie Smith and Jack Phillips.
Smith, who witnessed the now decadelong persecution of Phillips, a Christian baker and self-described cake artist, at the hands of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Smith took that body to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she won the most significant victory for free speech in many years.
Smith, a graphic artist, won for herself and other artists across the nation the Supreme Court’s recognition that coerced speech and censorship are two sides of the same unconstitutional coin. Phillips now waits to see if the Colorado Supreme Court will affirm this same principle for him.
At the heart of the matter in Brazil and Colorado is the widening gulf between the governing and the governed. It is a tempestuous sea of mistrust.
Government officials assume the role of arbiters of truth and the authority to decide what information the masses should have at their disposal. It is a story that has played out on the world stage many times and one that rarely has ended well for the common man or freedom.
America, owing to its extraordinary constitutional protections for the God-given rights of the individual, has been an exception to the general rule of history for nearly two and half centuries.
As Walsh would put it, “Life’s been good.” To remain so requires vigilance in defense of liberty at home as exemplary leadership for the world.
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After 5 years, teacher Wins $575K Settlement After Being Fired for Not Using Student’s Preferred Pronouns
Peter Vlaming, a longtime high school French teacher in Virginia, was fired in 2018 for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. On Monday, after years of litigation and a win for Vlaming at the Virginia Supreme Court, the school board finally capitulated and agreed to settle the case for $575,000.
But the West Point School Board’s refusal for five years to protect Vlaming’s free speech and religious freedom rights came with an exorbitant price tag.
In 2018, one of Vlaming’s female students at West Point High School began identifying as a transgender male. Although Vlaming consistently used the student’s preferred name, the French teacher carefully avoided using third-person pronouns so as not to violate his own religious beliefs.
That courtesy wasn’t good enough for West Point’s school board and school administrators. When Vlaming refused to use preferred pronouns, they fired the teacher for “creating a hostile learning environment.”
That’s right. Vlaming wasn’t fired for what he said. He was fired for what he didn’t—and couldn’t—say.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom and a local attorney, Vlaming sued in state court in 2019, asserting claims under Virginia law and the Virginia Constitution.
The school board didn’t flinch, but instead tried to move the case to federal court.
And no wonder. If the West Point School Board succeeded, it could invoke the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in another Virginia case called Grimm v. Gloucester School Board, which largely adopted gender ideology in its reasoning. That case—and its deeply flawed reasoning—would have mandated the use of preferred personal pronouns.
Thankfully, the school board failed in Vlaming’s case. But it took nearly two years of litigation simply to determine what court should hear it.
The school board then asked the state lower court to dismiss the case. The judge agreed and tossed Vlaming’s lawsuit, ruling from the bench without an opinion.
Vlaming appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in December 2023 and reinstated his lawsuit.
The majority decision, written by Justice D. Arthur Kelsey, was a landmark victory for religious freedom and free speech. The state Supreme Court held that the Virginia Constitution protects religious exercise—not just religious speech—unless it threatens the public’s safety or order.
In so ruling, the state’s highest court rejected U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s highly criticized majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. That decision gutted religious freedom when a challenged law could be considered both neutral and generally applicable to everyone.
Instead, Kelsey’s opinion for the state Supreme Court relied on the Virginia Constitution’s text and its framers’ views on religious freedom. The Virginia Constitution, the court explained, protects not just beliefs but also the right to act on those beliefs in every aspect of life.
The court also ruled for Vlaming on his claim of compelled speech. Merely “objectionable” or “hurtful” speech, it emphasized, poses no threat to public safety or order.
Vlaming’s refusal to use preferred personal pronouns based on his Christian religious beliefs thus was protected even if others subjectively took offense to his silence, Kelsey wrote in the opinion.
“[I]f liberty means anything at all,” Kelsey wrote, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. … All the more, it means the right to disagree without speaking at all.”
Seeing the writing on the wall, the West Point School Board finally relented. In a settlement finalized Monday, the board agreed to pay Vlaming $575,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. It also agreed to expunge Vlaming’s firing from his employment record.
And for good measure, the school board took the initiative and changed its policies to conform to new educational policies from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, which protect free speech and parental rights.
The school board fought for five years to avoid respecting Vlaming’s rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion. In the end, that fight cost the board (or, more likely, its insurance provider) more than half a million dollars.
That’s to say nothing of what the school board had to pay its own lawyers.
It turns out that compelling a teacher’s speech carries a hefty price tag and causes quite a lot of trouble.
In the end, Peter Vlaming’s courage in defending his right to remain silent is exemplary and achieved far more than money. His stand resulted in one of the clearest statements in history from the Virginia Supreme Court that religious exercise is robustly protected under the state Constitution.
This is a victory that we all can celebrate. Hopefully, it also serves as a stark reminder to school boards and school administrators that mandating the use of gender-based personal pronouns just isn’t worth it.
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Biden-Harris Inflation Wreaks Supply Chain Havoc With Dock Strike
On Monday, nearly 50,000 workers at 36 ports with the International Longshoremen’s Association began striking, the latest failure of Biden-Harris economic policies.
The workers are demanding higher pay, a backlash against the record 20% cumulative inflation under the failed leadership of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
This strike could have major inflationary effects as it affects a shocking half of the country’s goods. Depending on the severity of the strike, it could play a major role in November’s elections—an October surprise, of sorts.
A prolonged strike could create price spikes, even as inflation and elevated prices starting in 2021 are still hurting consumers. That would unfold as wholesalers and retailers are already expected to pass higher transportation and shipping costs to consumers.
It’s no secret that Biden and Harris’ White House has been an economic disaster for all Americans, especially for low-income and middle-class Americans, because inflation is essentially a tax. Poorer and working-class Americans are hit the hardest because they spend a greater proportion of their incomes on consumer goods.
Depending on how long this strike lasts, it could have a significant impact on family budgets. Under the strike, cargo stuck in ports doesn’t make it to store shelves, leaving fewer options and supply chain disruptions. Fresh and perishable foods could be lost.
Former President Donald Trump noted the contrast in a statement released after the strike began: “The situation should have never come to this and, had I been President, it would not have. This is only happening because of the inflation brought on by Kamala Harris’ two votes for massive, out-of-control spending, and her decision to cut off energy exploration.”
As economist Stephen Moore notes, during Biden’s nearly four years in office, inflation is up roughly 20%, but during Trump’s four-year term, inflation rose a much smaller 8%. As other observers noted, while protectionism can raise prices and should be avoided, Trump’s relentless focus on building American-made goods also protects against the shock of disruptions to foreign-produced supply chains. And protectionism is not the same as ensuring that foreign countries engaging in unfair trade practices are held directly accountable.
“Americans who thrived under President Trump can’t even get by because of Kamala Harris. This strike is a direct result of her actions,” Trump continued. “American workers should be able to negotiate for better wages, especially since the shipping companies are mostly foreign-flag vessels, including the largest consortium ONE.” (The Singapore-based ONE is the sixth-largest shipping company in the world, according to Politico.)
The strike could cause furloughs and job losses because jobs connected to ports could be affected, including truckers delivering goods, warehouse workers, manufacturers, and other workers dependent on the ports. These workers could be furloughed or let go if the strike is prolonged.
That’s why it’s not surprising we are witnessing generational shifts among blue-collar workers, including Teamsters union workers (breaking from their union leadership), trending toward Republicans like Trump. It’s because Harris’ policies–which are indistinguishable from Biden’s policies, according to the White House—are a disaster for working-class Americans, and the dock strike is a case in point.
This generational shift is a significant blow for Democrats, who have taken organized labor for granted for decades. Over the past 10 years, the Republican Party has shifted to the working-class party in many areas. This came following record household wealth and income gains seen under the Trump administration (prior to COVID-19 shocks) among women, black, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. These gains came thanks in part to the 2017 tax-reform bill passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Trump.
In the battleground state of Arizona, new polling from Suffolk University and USA Today found that 29% of black voters are going to vote for Donald Trump. That’s a significant shift away from Democrats for black voters, with Harris garnering only 67% of black support in that state. (Historically, nationally, black voters often break 90% or more for Democrats.)
Nationwide, including projections for all battleground states, RealClearPolitics’ estimates place Trump with 281 Electoral College votes and Harris with 257, with 270 needed to win. The dock strike could continue to shift those trends further toward Trump, what with Harris’ inflationary policies.
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2 October, 2024
Mexico wants Spain to apologise for conquering the Aztecs
When Claudia Sheinbaum becomes Mexico’s first female president later today, Felipe VI, the King of Spain, will not be present. He has, very pointedly, not been invited to the swearing-in ceremony because he hasn’t apologised for Spain’s invasion and conquest of the Aztec empire 500 years ago.
Spaniards are alert to the ‘emotional fraudulence’ of professing guilt for something that happened 20 generations ago
This diplomatic stand-off began in 2019 when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then president of Mexico, wrote to King Felipe inviting him to express his regret. Having described the conquest as ‘tremendously violent, painful and unjustifiable’, López Obrador said, ‘Mexico would like the Spanish state to recognise its historical responsibility for these offences and to offer the appropriate apologies or political reparations.’
Felipe didn’t reply to that letter. By 2022 López Obrador was suggesting that Spain needed to learn to respect Mexico rather than regarding it as an ex-colony. Then last Thursday at his daily press conference the out-going president read out the four-page letter he sent five years ago and claimed that Felipe’s failure to reply showed high-handed arrogance.
His successor sings from the same hymn sheet. Shortly after becoming president-elect of Mexico in July, Sheinbaum declared that ‘Spain should ask for forgiveness.’ Perhaps she has in mind something along the lines of Pope Francis’ apology in 2021 for the atrocities committed during the conquest and evangelisation of the Americas. She may well also be aware that there is a precedent: just nine years ago Spain recognised that the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was a cruel mistake. Now one of Sheinbaum’s ministers has proposed holding a ‘ceremony of atonement’ to normalise relations with Spain.
Felipe, first as prince and then as King, has in the past attended the swearing-in of Mexican presidents. On this occasion he has left it to Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s left-wing prime minister, to comment on Mexico’s decision not to invite him. Regretting that the relations between two ‘progressive’ governments have deteriorated to this point, Sánchez confirmed that due to ‘the unacceptable and inexplicable exclusion [of King Felipe]… there will be no representatives of the Spanish government at the ceremony.’
‘Spain,’ Sánchez explained, ‘regards Mexico as a brother country… We feel enormous frustration… that we cannot normalise our relations.’ Hinting that Mexico’s politicians are using a confected confrontation with Spain as a distraction from their country’s real problems, he recalled with gratitude that Mexico welcomed hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fleeing the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s repression: ‘I feel closer to those principles and values.’
Although there will be no representatives of the Spanish government, several of Spain’s anti-monarchical, left-wing politicians will attend the swearing-in ceremony. One suggested that if Spain is represented abroad by the head of state, then it should be a democratically elected head of state. Another described Felipe as ‘arrogant’ for not apologising to Mexico ‘for the excesses’ committed during the Spanish conquest and said that the king is now ‘paying a price’ for his ‘enormous diplomatic clumsiness’.
In fact the Spanish monarchy did once make an apology – of sorts. In 1990 during a visit to Mexico, Juan Carlos I, Felipe’s father, regretted the abuses that occurred during the conquest whilst pointing out that Spain’s monarchs sought from the very beginning to defend the dignity of the indigenous people. ‘Of course,’ Juan Carlos explained, ‘the prudence and equanimity of the monarchs was unfortunately often disregarded by… venal officials.’
Juan Carlos’ reluctance to shoulder the blame for events that took place half a millennium ago is shared by many Spaniards. They are alert to the ‘emotional fraudulence’ of professing guilt for something that happened 20 generations ago. Besides, many point out gleefully, López Obrador’s Spanish surnames suggest that he may himself be descended from a conquistador. The Partido Popular, Spain’s main right-wing opposition party, which rarely endorses anything the government does, has on this occasion enthusiastically supported Sánchez’s decision to lodge a formal protest with the Mexican authorities, calling the decision not to invite Felipe ‘an unacceptable provocation’.
Nor has it gone unnoticed in Spain that, while King Felipe was dropped from the guest list because he hasn’t apologised for what Hernán Cortés and his men did hundreds of years ago, Vladimir Putin, personally responsible for a far more recent invasion, was invited.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/mexico-wants-spain-to-apologise-for-conquering-the-aztecs/
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Federal government introduces online dating safety code
Aussies going online in the hopes of finding love, or at least a date, will now be protected by new rules designed to protect online daters from harm and abuse.
The Australia-first guidelines will require online dating platforms, including Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr, to have systems in place to detect potential incidents of online-enabled harm from taking place.
The code will also require dating apps to take actions against users who have violated a company’s online safety policies, provide prominent and transparent complaint and reporting mechanisms, offer more support resources on safe dating practices and online enabled harm, and remain proactively engaged with Australian law enforcement.
The dating platforms will also be required to supply regular transparency reports detailing the number of Australian accounts terminated and content moderation processes.
The code comes after the federal government sat down with both online dating platforms, including Bumble, Grindr, and Match Group – which owns the platforms, Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid and Plenty Of Fish.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the code, which has been given the tick of approval from the eSafety Commissioner, would offer online dating users better peace of mind knowing they’re safer online.
“Online dating is now the most common way to meet a partner in Australia, however the level of violence and abuse experienced by users of these platforms is deeply concerning,” Ms Rowland said.
“That is why we are taking the steps needed to ensure a safer experience for Australians using online dating platforms.
“The Australian government’s constructive engagement with industry means that the largest online dating services operating in Australia have made clear, public commitments to improve the safety of their services – including to crack down on abuse and remove dangerous users from platforms.
“Now that the code is operational, the government will be watching industry closely to ensure they take the steps needed to keep their users safe.”
Dating platforms will now have six months to implement changes, with strict enforcement to begin from 1 April next year.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said it is essential people feel protected from harm when interacting with potential dates.
“Dating app violence is a form of gender-based violence, and it has to end,” Ms Rishworth said.
“Our government is committed to ensuring Australians are safe from sexual violence and abuse in both online and physical spaces.
“We must create communities – both in the physical and online world – where everyone is treated equally and with respect.
“This world-leading industry code will improve safety for Australians using dating apps and help them make choices about the apps they use.
“Everyone deserves to live a life free of violence no matter where they are – and this includes online.”
After nine months of operation, the eSafety Commissioner will assess the effectiveness of the code and determine if it has helped reduce harm to Australians.
If the code has seemed to not live up to expectation, the Government will consider whether further action is needed, including regulation.
The dating apps that have signed up to participate in the code are Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, eHarmony, OK Cupid, Plenty Of Fish, RSVP, MeetMe, Zoosk, Badoo (part of Bumble), Tagged, Skout and Growlr.
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School Threatened to Arrest Parents for Wearing Pink Wristbands in ‘Protest’ of Boys in Girls Sports
A coalition of parents sued the Bow School District in New Hampshire on Monday after being punished and threatened over a “silent protest” standing up for women’s sports.
Multiple parents and one grandfather decided to wear pink wristbands during a soccer game to show support for protecting women’s sports, to which the school district threatened to have them arrested for trespassing, the complaint states. The New Hampshire Department of Education was preliminarily enjoined by the court in September from enforcing a state law that cracked down on biological males from participating in women’s sports.
The parents claim that the district “conspired” with a referee and police officer to intimidate and prevent the group from expressing their First Amendment rights, the lawsuit states. After the soccer game, the school banned anyone speaking out from being on school property and attending future games.
“Bow School District’s ban on demonstrations criticizing the decision to allow biological boys to play girls’ soccer—cloaked in the language of ‘disruption’ and ‘harassment’—is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination,” the lawsuit states. “The First Amendment does not allow state-operated schools to become ‘enclaves of totalitarianism.’”
The school district’s policy allows officials to monitor the behavior of anyone on school property or in attendance at a school event, which includes “any buildings, vehicles, property, land or facilities used for school purposes or school-sponsored events, whether public or private,” the complaint continues. The high school’s athletics handbook also states that it regulates the conduct and speech of individuals in attendance at games.
Days before the soccer game, Nicole Foote, a mother of one of the players on Bow’s team, met with the athletic director to express concern regarding the potential risks of allowing a biological man to compete in women’s sports, to which the director said the court prevented the school from doing anything, the lawsuit states. The athletic director sent an email the night before the game stating that following the handbook, they would “impose obligations” on any actions from the sideline, noting that any “inappropriate signs, references or language” would not be allowed.
The athletic director also claimed that some differentiating opinions regarding the game would be fine, according to the complaint.
Some individuals who wore the pink wristbands wrote “XX” on them to support female athletes, and no parents on the sidelines wore them in the first half of the game. Besides the wristbands, there were no other indications of parents outwardly protesting, but the athletic director told one parent that he had to take off the wristbands, to which he then argued that First Amendment rights protect the use of the wristbands.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a bill in 2023 that banned transgender individuals from participating in women’s collegiate sports. Similar to Texas, West Virginia passed a law banning biological men from partaking in women’s athletics, but a court blocked the law in April.
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Wyoming Doctor Booted From Medical Board for Opposing Transgender ‘Treatments’ Asks Court to Reinstate Him
Wyoming’s governor removed a doctor from the state’s board of medicine because the doctor supported a law banning “gender-affirming care” for minors. The doctor is suing, and his lawyers are filing a motion Tuesday asking the court to reinstate him on the medical board. His legal team also revealed that more than 5,000 Wyoming residents have signed a petition asking the governor to reinstate him.
“I was removed from the Wyoming State Board of Medicine because I took a stand to protect the children in our state,” Dr. Eric Cubin, a radiologist, told The Daily Signal on Tuesday. The nonprofit law firm Liberty Justice Center is representing him. The center is best known for representing Mark Janus in the 2018 Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME, in which the court protected government employees’ First Amendment right of free association to refuse to financially support a union they wouldn’t join.
“I am proud to stand with the Liberty Justice Center and fight this violation of my First Amendment rights,” Cubin added.
Chloe’s Law
Cubin supported Senate File 99, also known as “Chloe’s Law,” which Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, signed in March.
The law, named after detransitioner Chloe Cole, went into effect on July 1. As a minor, Cole had surgery to try to appear more like a boy, including having her breasts removed, and a few years later, detransitioned back to identifying as her actual sex. The law prohibits doctors from prescribing experimental “transgender” medical interventions for minors, specifically banning so-called puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that remove healthy breasts or sex organs.
Internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a pro-transgender activist group, revealed that WPATH leaders knew about various side effects of “gender-affirming care,” including cancer in teens and reduced sexual function, as well as the lack of informed consent for procedures with lifelong impacts. These medical professionals endorse the experimental treatments anyway.
But some doctors have gone on record opposing such treatments. Back in 2023 in Florida, many doctors testified in favor of a rule that would prevent Medicaid dollars from funding “gender-affirming care.” The doctors—including psychiatrists, endocrinologists, neurologists, and a former WPATH leader—testified that these interventions are experimental and may do more harm than good.
Cubin, a member of the Wyoming Medical Society, sent a letter in February to every member of Wyoming’s Legislature to set the record straight after the society (a voluntary association for medical professionals in the Cowboy State) had opposed Chloe’s Law. (The society’s magazine attacked Chloe’s Law in 2023 and its executive director testified against the law that year. Cubin claims the society also opposed Chloe’s Law in 2024.)
“I had been misrepresented by the Wyoming Medical Society and had no choice but to speak up for what I believe to be right,” the doctor told The Daily Signal. “I urged our legislators to be circumspect about the information they were being provided and cautious about what they allow physicians to do to kids in our state—something that is now the law across Wyoming.”
The Governor Fires Cubin
So why did Gordon, who signed Chloe’s Law, remove Cubin from the board of medicine? It seems unlikely someone who supported the legislation would move against a doctor for supporting the same bill.
First, Gordon only grudgingly signed Chloe’s Law.
“I signed SF 99 because I support the protections this bill includes for children; however, it is my belief that the government is straying into the personal affairs of families,” the governor said at the time. “Our legislature needs to sort out its intentions with regard to parental rights. While it inserts governmental prerogative in some places, it affirms parental rights in others.”
Gordon had also expressed disapproval for a bill preventing biological males from participating in girls sports in public schools. In March 2023, he allowed the bill, SF 133, to go into effect without his signature (refusing to veto it but also refusing to sign it). He said the bill “is overly draconian, is discriminatory without attention to individual circumstances or mitigating factors, and pays little attention to fundamental principles of equality.”
Gordon announced his intention to remove Cubin in an April 22 letter. While Gordon acknowledged the doctor’s free speech right to express his opinion, he insisted that the five-member board of medicine must remain impartial. The board is responsible for issuing and renewing licenses for physicians and other medical practitioners in the state, along with overseeing medical regulation, compliance, and discipline.
“I have been made aware of your email to the members of the House of Representatives during this last legislative session regarding SF0099, in which you strongly encouraged the members to pass this legislation and criticized the Wyoming Medical Society’s opposition to the bill,” Gordon wrote.
“I believe your comments on this particular legislation could give doctors, who are licensed by the board of medicine, a reason to be concerned that you might use your position to advocate for a particular position when considering matters that should be considered absent an agenda or prejudice,” the governor added.
“I am certain you would understand that while you certainly are entitled to your First Amendment right to free speech, as an individual member of the board, you would not be entitled to speak for the board unilaterally,” Gordon wrote. He suggested that Cubin had chosen to “express personal beliefs in a way that can be construed as speaking for the [board as a whole],” and therefore he was removing the doctor.
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1 October, 2024
Mother Warns Against Colorado Law Prohibiting Abortion Pill Reversal That Saved Daughter’s Life
This is the person that the grim Leftists of Colorado would have killed
When Mackenna Greene took the abortion pill to end the life of her unborn daughter, she immediately knew she had made the wrong choice.
“I’ll admit that in the days leading up to it, I was not excited,” Greene told The Daily Signal. “I was second-guessing myself. I found myself trying to convince myself that I was making the right decision.”
“Immediately after taking it, I felt regret,” she said of the abortion pill, “and I had a feeling that that was a very bad decision.”
Greene said she googled her options and found Chelsea Mynyk, a nurse-midwife at the life-affirming Catholic medical center Bella Health and Wellness in Englewood, Colorado. Mynyk prescribes abortion pill reversal medication to women who regret starting a chemical abortion.
Greene took progesterone to counteract the effects of the first chemical abortion pill. About a month ago, she gave birth to her daughter.
“I felt like I had worked my whole life to have her,” Greene said. “I’m the luckiest girl alive to be looking at this girl’s face. And thank goodness that the reversal was successful.”
“She’s got such a personality and sometimes when I look at her, I think of missing out on all of that, and it hurts,” Greene said. “I’m just so lucky, so blessed, to be able to look into her face every day.”
But Colorado, where Greene and Mynyk live, passed a law in April 2023 forbidding doctors and nurses from providing the abortion pill reversal. Under that law, Mynyk could be fined up to $20,000 each time she helps reverse the effects of an abortion pill.
That same month, Becket—previously the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—sued the state of Colorado on behalf of Bella Health and Wellness, securing a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of the law against the faith-based OB-GYN practice.
In January, an anonymous individual filed a complaint against Mynyk because she offers abortion pill reversal, and the Colorado Board of Nursing opened an investigation. In response, Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm, filed a motion to intervene on Mynyk’s behalf. It was granted in April.
“This is a law that restricts the ability of medical professionals like Chelsea [Mynyk] to save lives,” said Kevin Theriot, a senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom.
Theriot is representing Mynyk as she challenges the Colorado law so that she may continue saving babies such as Greene’s.
“It singles out those women that have regret, just like Mackenna, and decide that they don’t want to go through with the chemical abortion and doesn’t allow them to give to receive this progesterone, which is a drug that’s been used for over 50 years to stop miscarriage,” Theriot told The Daily Signal. “Chelsea herself has proven that it definitely increases the chances that moms like Mackenna can save their babies.”
Medical professionals should be able to talk about and prescribe the abortion pill, Theriot said.
The law “really doesn’t make any sense unless you see it from the perspective of this radical abortion lobby that says that we want women to have access to abortion, and we don’t think they should be able to change their minds,” Theriot said.
Theriot said he hopes the court will enter a permanent injunction putting the Colorado law on hold because it violates the rights of Mynyk and patients such as Greene.
“I think that would be very difficult to practice as a provider, not being able to offer this option to women, especially when they regret their abortion and they want something to take to reverse that, and especially because we know this is safe,” Mynyk said. “It’s natural progesterone. It’s not some sort of random pill we’re giving.”
Everyone should be concerned about laws such as this that violate religious liberty and freedom of speech, the lawyer said.
“The primary reason why this process is so important is because it saves lives, and Mackenna and her daughter are a perfect example of that,” Theriot said. “But it also is a treatment that medical professionals like Chelsea ought to be able to talk about, because it’s a viable option.”
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Stanford Marketing Course Requires DEI Statement Before Student Enrolls
Requiring students to make a DEi statement to qualify for a course is “inappropriate” and could cross the line of compelled speech, according to a Brookings Institution expert.
Stanford University is requiring that those applying to enroll in “Global Entrepreneurial Marketing,” a course offered by the Department of Management Science and Engineering, make a statement on diversity and inclusion.
“Diversity is an important part of the mission of the Stanford MS&E Department and this class,” text describing the required diversity and inclusion statement reads. “Please use this opportunity to describe how you will contribute to a culture of diversity and inclusion in this class.”
Brookings’ Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies, questioned the requirement in a post on his X account.
“Here’s what some @Stanford engineering instructors are requiring of prospective students for course enrollment,” Rauch wrote.
Rauch acquired the screenshot of the requirement from “a member of the Stanford community,” he told The Center Square.
Rauch has authored eight books and writes for The Atlantic, according to his Brookings bio.
“It is inappropriate to require students to make a statement about their commitment to diversity and inclusion in order to qualify for a course,” Rauch told The Center Square.
“While Stanford as a whole should expect students to conduct themselves in a civil, respective manner, conditioning participation in academic programs or activities on social or political commitments treads dangerously close to compelled speech, if it does not actually cross that line,” Rauch said.
“Moreover (and unfortunately), the term ‘diversity and inclusion,’ in today’s academic context, has acquired controversial political overtones which students may justifiably hesitate to endorse,” Rauch said. “A student could reasonably conclude that the teachers of this course intend to screen out students who disagree with them politically.”
“Stanford should tell these teachers to cut it out,” Rauch said.
The requirement is in place despite the university recently announcing an institutional neutrality policy.
The course description mentions “skills needed to market new technology-based products to customers around the world. Case method discussions. Cases include startups and global high tech firms.”
The course themes are listed as “marketing toolkit, targeting markets and customers, product marketing and management, partners and distribution, sales and negotiation, and outbound marketing.”
The course description states that enrollment is limited and admission is by application.
The Center Square sought comment twice each from the listed course instructors, professors Lynda Smith and Thomas Kosnik. Neither responded.
The Center Square also sought comment twice each from Stanford’s engineering dean, Jennifer Widom, and director of public relations, Jill Wu. Neither responded.
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Michigan’s Election Chief Faces Lawsuit for Refusing to Remove Dead People From Voter Rolls. She’s About to Get More Power
Michigan lawmakers are poised to empower Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson—a Democrat who has faced six separate court orders to enforce election laws—to have more control over elections.
A package of four bills dubbed the Michigan Voting Rights Act cleared the Democrat-controlled state Senate and awaits action by the Democrat-controlled state House of Representatives.
Critics say the legislation would strip the state Legislature and Michigan’s local governments of authority to regulate voting.
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“They are systematically moving power away from local election clerks—who are not partisan but are hard workers—and up to the state,” state Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican and former Michigan secretary of state, told The Daily Signal.
Under Benson, the state voter registration rolls have 106% of the voting-age population of Michigan, Johnson said, arguing that Benson is an “operative for the far Left.”
“She is the most partisan secretary of state in my lifetime,” Johnson said. “I prided myself on bringing both sides to the table in overseeing elections.”
Michigan—which Republican Donald Trump won in the 2016 election and Democrat Joe Biden won in the 2020 election—is one of the most hotly contested and closely watched states in the 2024 presidential race.
Benson formerly worked for the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center as well as the Democratic National Committee. She was the founder of an activist group called the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration.
Pure Integrity Michigan Elections, an elections watchdog group, points to six occasions over the past four years in which state and federal courts ruled against Benson in election law cases:
—In July, in the case of Republican National Committee v. Benson, Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher Yates ruled against the secretary of state’s policy of presuming voters’ signatures were valid. The RNC brought the case in March regarding Benson’s December 2023 instructions to election clerks to presume the validity of absentee voters’ signatures. The RNC argued that the instructions violated the Michigan Constitution, which requires verification of signatures.
—In October 2022, in the case of O’Halloran v. Benson, Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Brock Swartzle ordered Benson to revise her rules governing poll watchers’ guidelines to comply with Michigan election law. Benson’s rules limited when poll watchers could make a challenge and also banned electronic devices. Swartzle determined that Benson did not go through proper procedures. However, the Michigan Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling, last month sided with Benson and reversed lower court rulings.
—In March 2021, Benson lost in the case of Genetski v. Benson when a judge struck down her October 2020 guidance regarding standards for voter signatures. Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Christopher Murray’s ruling said Benson violated the Administrative Standards Act. Benson’s guidance was put in place before the November 2020 election. The court ruling only affected elections going forward.
—In October 2020, in the case of Davis v. Benson, Murray issued an injunction against Benson’s directive banning the open carry of firearms at polling places.
—In 2020, in the case of Carra v. Benson, Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Cynthia Stephens issued a preliminary injunction against Benson’s directive restricting poll watchers and election challengers. (Poll watchers observe voting; election challengers observe the count.) The litigation was related to requirements for social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Days before the 2020 election, Benson’s office settled the lawsuit, which was brought by state House candidate Steve Carra, a Republican, to allow poll watchers and election challengers to be within six feet of election workers.
—In the case of Johnson v. Benson in October 2020, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney ordered Benson to change her guidance on the time and manner of election processes to comply with state law on the deadline for the arrival of absentee ballots.
—On the most recent front, in a pending case, the Republican National Committee sued Benson over her instructions to local clerks and election inspectors to process and count ballots with numbers that don’t match those in the poll book or the return envelope. Republicans alleged that this procedure violated Michigan law requiring matching numbers on the ballot, poll book, and ballot return envelope to ensure that ballots were cast and counted properly.
Earlier this month, testifying with other secretaries of state before the House Administration Committee in Washington, Benson said unsubstantiated rhetoric can “harm those charged with protecting our election systems.”
However, Patrice Johnson, who chairs Pure Integrity Michigan Elections, said Benson hasn’t demonstrated evidence that election workers face threats of violence.
Benson also has tried to intimidate both election watchdogs and local election officials, said Johnson, who is not related to Ruth Johnson.
“Her behavior is reminiscent of Gestapo tactics, designed to intimidate and silence opposition,” PIME’s Johnson told The Daily Signal. “No one who values free speech and the Constitution of the United States—or who respects her constituents—would trample on individual rights in this arrogant and self-aggrandizing manner.”
The PIME chair pointed to Benson’s words during an online question-and-answer session last month.
“If someone were to violate the law, and not certify the election at the local level, we will come for you,” Benson said of local election officials. “So, any local certifier thinking of skirting the law and not certifying the vote, don’t even think about it, because we’ll get you.”
The legislative package touted by Benson as the Michigan Voting Rights Act is made up of four separate bills.
Senate Bill 401 would allow court-appointed monitors to oversee elections for up to 10 years. Critics say it would pave the way for the process known as ranked choice voting. SB 402 would establish a private “institute” outside a government entity for collecting election data.
SB 403 would mandate language assistance for elections, which critics say would create heavy costs for elections offices. Finally, SB 404 would legalize electioneering near voting locations, which critics say could jeopardize the secret ballot.
Benson’s office has argued that the legislative package would “prohibit voter denial, dilution, and suppression” and “enhance and clarify protections for voters with disabilities or others who need assistance to participate in elections.”
A spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this story. But in a public statement last week, Benson touted the Michigan Senate’s passage of the legislation
“Every Michigan voter deserves access to fair, secure elections and no citizen should be unfairly denied the right to vote,” Benson said. “The Michigan Voting Rights Act will not only build on the federal Voting Rights Act but will add new protections at the state level to shield us from future attacks on our democracy.”
The Public Interest Legal Foundation sued Michigan over Benson’s refusal to remove the names of 26,000 dead people from voter registration lists. Of those, almost 4,000 had been dead for over two decades; 17,479 were dead for more than a decade; 23,663 had been dead for at least five years.
The foundation, an election watchdog group, noted that Benson’s department mismanaged voter rolls. She publicly defended her office, however.
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Concerns over Gender Queer book dismissed by Australian classifications board as anti-LGBTQ+, court hears
OK to promote deviant sexuality to kids (?)
The Australian classifications board made a “broadbrush dismissal” of over 500 submissions calling for a ban of the book Gender Queer by labelling those submissions as anti-LGBTQ+, a court has heard.
In July last year, the Classification Board rejected calls to restrict access to a memoir about gender identity that was the target of conservative campaigns to have it banned in the US, and found the content was appropriate for its intended audience.
Activist Bernard Gaynor had applied to the board in early 2023 to review the classification of the graphic novel-style memoir about gender identity by writer Maia Kobabe.
Complaints about the book – which details Kobabe’s experience coming out as non-binary – are focused on the cartoon images of sex scenes, one of which has been described by critics seeking a ban as “pornographic” and “paedophilic”.
When the Australian Classification Board upheld its original decision to classify the book as unrestricted with the consumer advice of “M – not recommended for readers under 15 years”, Gaynor appealed against the ruling to the federal court.
In a hearing on Monday, Bret Walker SC, acting for Gaynor, said the overwhelming majority of submissions to the board on the review of the decision had called for the publication to be restricted or refused classification. He argued the classification board had erred by not taking these submissions into account, by broadly labelling them as “anti-LGBTQIA+”.
Walker said there was a “deliberately broadbrush dismissal” of those submissions, many of which he said objected to what they saw as depicting a man having sex with a minor – referring to an image portraying Plato’s Symposium. Walker said many of those objections did not refer to the gender of the image’s subjects, just that it appeared to depict paedophilia.
Justice Ian Jackman said that while by his count, about 600 submissions from among 9,000 people had been considered to be anti-LGBTQ+ by the board, on closer examination Jackman said just 52 of these expressed anti-LGBTQ+ views – less than 1% of submissions received.
Walker said the board gave little weight to the submissions, and had failed to engage with them in its review decision.
In response, the barrister for the minister for communications and the classification board, Houda Younan SC, said the law did not require the board to accept submissions as part of the review of its classification decision and that the invitation of submissions did not require the decision-maker to then consider them.
However, Younan said the board did consider the public submissions and did not dismiss them on the basis of being anti-LGBTQ+ but because they did not assist the board in its statutory task of a classifications decision.
“We say that in this case, every submission was received and considered,” Younan said.
Submissions in the decision were labelled to give their tenor, she said. Submissions were given weight based on whether they contained evidence the writer had read Gender Queer and understood its content within the context of the publication.
Those that did not demonstrate an engagement with the publication were given little weight, she said.
Younan indicated the board had considered whether a submission noted the context of the image being of Plato’s Symposium, or was a criticism of the image on its own, removed of context.
She later identified 14 additional examples of explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ submissions beyond those initially identified by Jackman.
Among the orders sought, Gaynor is seeking to have the decision remitted back to the classifications board.
Jackman reserved his decision.
In the US, Gender Queer is one of the most challenged books in libraries. Kobabe told the ABC in May that the US push to ban the book had been frustrating and that the depiction of Plato’s Symposium had been included as it was one of the few gay-themed texts Kobabe had encountered in college.
“It stuck in my mind, because it was the only one.”
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My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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