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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
30 September, 2024
The DEI tyranny
As a recent university graduate entering the world of work, it’s almost impossible to find a job or career pathway that’s not infected by corporate wokery.
By corporate woke, I mean the professional obsession with ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) initiatives, that essentially demonstrate a workplace’s ‘commitment’ to everybody other than straight white men.
Having started to apply for various private or public sector graduate trainee schemes, every single one involves me filling out a ‘monitoring form’.
Quite how my sexuality is relevant to my application to become a corporate legal secretary is beyond me.
And why should my race be a factor in my application to join the Civil Service Fast Stream?
I had thought that the obsession with the DEI agenda was finally being revealed for what it is - a corporate virtue signalling exercise that does more harm than good.
After all, it is riddled with problems.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda divides people on the basis of their fixed group identities at the expense of their individual rights.
It separates them off into one of the ‘oppressed’ (i.e., racial, sexual, or gender minority) groups, or ‘oppressor’ (i.e. white, straight, men, Jewish) groups, pitting people against one another on the basis of nothing more than their group identity.
It prioritises this identity dogma over meritocracy, forcing entire organisations to focus on “equal outcomes” rather than “equality of opportunity”.
It is instinctively suspicious of any evidence or research that challenges its core claim that Western nations and white majorities are inherently ‘racist’.
It imposes speech codes and restrictions to stifle free speech, free expression, and a genuine diversity of opinions and beliefs in the workplace.
And, on top of all this, it has been shown in a growing number of studies to make people MORE likely to discriminate, or to breed resentment.
Training people about the highly contested and dubious concept of ‘white privilege’, for example, which is directly drawn from Critical Race Theory, has been shown to make elite white liberals LESS sympathetic toward struggling, working-class whites.
However, far from fading from view, my recent experience on the job market suggests this agenda remains completely dominant.
And as support for the kind of luxury beliefs like those spotlighted by DEI increases, standards are slipping through the floor, often at vast expense on the public purse.
The following examples across different workplaces and within the health and education sectors make this point.
It’s become easier than ever to be successful in getting on the Civil Service Fast Stream –mainly due to applications dropping by 45% in the last three years.
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Training is no longer the gold standard and has collapsed. Today, you don’t need more than a 2.2 degree to get onto certain parts of the scheme.
This is rather worrying alongside the recent finding that nearly-half of all first-class degrees in Britain cannot be explained, or that nearly one-quarter of students with three D-grades at A-level are now getting first-class degrees at university.
Nonetheless, it’s in this time that the Civil Service has become infamous for being completely ideologically captured by the most egregious and DEI initiatives there are.
Such as the fact that civil servants are allowed to spend their working time promoting politically activist staff networks, with one such network recently being given £200,000 of taxpayers’ money to spend on the LGBT organisation “a:gender” – who compare gender critical activists to the Ku Klux Klan!
This is insane.
If central government is bad, then local government is no better, spending millions on promoting luxury beliefs for the elite class at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.
Lambeth Council, where I live, just spent more than £25 million on climate and active travel projects since 2019, but is ranked worse than 90 per cent of all councils for failing to deliver basic public services, such as safeguarding vulnerable children and ensuring social housing is fit for purpose.
My bins haven’t been collected on time once since I moved here but, don’t worry, the council has still found the time to campaign on ‘the climate emergency’.
Or consider the education system, such as maths in Scotland. The Pisa report measures education standards among 15-year-old students worldwide, and the latest report reported ‘an unprecedented drop’ in performance, and shows a long term decline in Scotland in maths and science.
Rather than focusing on getting standards up, at a recent conference in Scotland, in 2023, education leaders were told the education system is ‘institutionally racist’.
And if you’re an ambitious teacher who wants to raise the standard of education in Scotland, don’t think of getting a job there unless you’re non-white.
A job advert for non-whites was posted recently in Glasgow advertising to non-white people only. Bear in mind Scotland is 95% white…
Yes, it is common for many DEI projects to actively endorse discrimination – against white men, the apparently acceptable kind of discrimination.
In 2017, the BBC opened an internship that was exclusively for non-whites. While making headlines then, it appears this kind of discrimination is mainstream today.
A recent tribunal, for example, found that an employer did NOT discriminate when they hired a woman over a man because they wanted to hire ‘fewer white men’.
Or take the NHS.
Clearly one sector worth exploring as a university graduate is DEI roles themselves (a starting salary of around £39,000, after all, is not to be sniffed at).
In 2022, the NHS advertised £700,000’s worth of diversity officers in just one month, despite waiting lists for operations being at a record high of seven million.
The same cash could have paid for six GPs, 19 nurses, and 20 paramedics, much like the amount of money we are squandering on our broken asylum system, estimated to be upwards of £7 billion each year, could fund yearly salaries for 200,000 nurses.
The DEI agenda is now a multi-million, if not multi-BILLION pound industry, fuelled by endless training courses on “anti-racism” and “allyship” which don’t work.
The most important thing a diversity officer must do is justify their own existence by pointing to “systemic racism” and sexism in the workplace.
Back in March, then chancellor Jeremy Hunt urged local councils to spend less on these diversity schemes, given many of them are effectively bankrupt.
An FOI project identified that around £30m was being spent across nearly 400 councils, or about £75,000 each on average.
Given the well-documented financial pressures local councils have been under for years, how can the sheer scale of this spending on the DEI agenda be justified?
These are just a few examples within the public sector of how the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda has gone COMPLETELY mad.
With private sector firms like Google and Meta downsizing DEI programmes in the last year, and universities in America finally doing likewise, there is a glimmer of hope that things might be starting to change.
But then, look at my own generation, Gen-Z, the members of whom were born in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.
No less than 88% of today’s students say they consider a company’s commitment to DEI before deciding whether to apply to the grad scheme.
I wonder how that statistic will change when half the companies recruiting go bust because of DEI, or its internal contradictions become impossible to ignore.
As an ambitious and hard working young professional, I should be recruited on merit and my ability to do the job, nothing more or less.
This is what people like my parents and grandparents used to believe —that meritocracy not political dogma should guide the labour market.
I only hope that those ideas come back into fashion before it’s too late.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/anonymous-zoomer-its-impossible-to ?
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Sexist judge quashes Mona Ladies Lounge tribunal decision that saw it shut down
Strange reasoning
In March, New South Wales' man Jason Lau brought an anti-discrimination case against Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) after being denied entry to the lounge last year, and initially won in Tasmania's appeals tribunal.
But that decision has been quashed by Acting Justice Shane Marshall, and sent back to the tribunal for reconsideration.
He found the lounge was designed to promote equal opportunity for women generally, and so it could lawfully exclude men.
Acting Justice Marshall found the discrimination experienced by women was not just confined to the past, but occurs today as well, and so women should be able to create an "exclusive space" to create a "flipped universe".
"The correct approach … is to ask first whether the arrangement's purpose was to promote equal opportunity," he wrote.
"On the evidence, the unequivocal answer is 'yes' because the Ladies' Lounge was designed to provide women with an exclusive space where they receive positive advantage as distinct from the general societal disadvantage they experience."
'Celebration certainly due', curator says
Artist and Ladies' Lounge creator Kirsha Kaechele described it as a win for women.
"I'm very inspired by the occurrences in the courtroom today. In 30 seconds the patriarchy was smashed," she said.
"The verdict demonstrates a simple truth: Women are better than men."
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Duke Health Fires ER Doctor Who Questioned Racism Pledge
Duke University Health System fired Dr. Kendall Conger, an emergency room physician in its Raleigh, North Carolina hospital, for questioning Duke’s 2021 “pledge” against racism in medicine.
Conger stated his views in a May 2023 Martin Center article, “Duke Health’s Antiracist ‘Pledge’ is Not Guided by Science.”
Conger, a respected member of the medical community, did not object to standing against racism or treating people with decency and respect, primary tenets of the pledge. Conger questioned whether racism in medicine was as significant a problem as Duke claimed it to be and whether there was legitimate scientific evidence to support that belief.
In 2020, for example, Duke Health had gone so far as to declare racism “a public health crisis.”
Going Public a No-No
After years of being ignored and receiving information from Duke that was long on ideology and short on science and clinical data, Conger exceeded his employer’s tolerance.
In December 2023, Conger’s supervisor told him that the reason the institution was typically reluctant to engage him on its stances was his tendency to discuss those matters outside of the workplace. Conger was understandably puzzled that a prominent institution would take issue with challengers after it released its statement publicly and strongly defended it.
Conger immediately sent a letter to several of his colleagues informing them of the message he had received from his supervisor.
Duke Health notified Conger of his termination a few weeks later. Under the terms of his employment, Duke was not required to provide a reason. Duke, however, stated in a letter to Conger, “We believe your behavior is negatively impacting the emergency physician team, which could jeopardize the care of patients. Given this, we are choosing not to renew your contract for employment.”
Accused of Harming Patients
While failing to offer any specifics, Duke Health appeared to suggest Conger’s commitment to treating patients as individuals and rejecting the dynamics of collectivism could put patients in harm’s way, as could his observation of the lack of scientific evidence for Duke’s ominous claims about racism in medicine.
In his article, Conger said Duke is “guided by science” but its 2021 “antiracist pledge,” while well-meaning, was an unnecessary response to a popular political movement.
Duke employees had been briefed on the pledge before it was released publicly and were invited to contact their superiors with any questions or concerns. Conger’s trouble began when he decided to take his employer up on that offer.
Up the Chain of Command
Conger reached out to Duke Raleigh Hospital President Dr. Barbara Griffith and met with her in person. Also present at that meeting was a representative from the human resources department. Conger’s specific question was “Why is equity a better goal than equality?” Griffith did not respond to Conger’s follow-up emails related to that meeting.
Conger wanted to be sure he wasn’t being personally roped into a political position held by his employer. Duke never offered any scientific or clinical justification for the idea that racism is a significant problem in medicine.
That concerned Conger, who wanted to perform his job free from the shadow of politics or well-meaning but false social narratives. Conger specifically asked Duke brass why they believed it was beneficial to view patients as members of ethnic groups more than as individuals requiring care.
As a respected physician, Conger was particularly concerned about any ideas being presented as absolutes without accompanying clinical data or scientific proof. A Duke-employed doctor for 12 years, Conger had everyday professional experiences in the intense field of emergency medicine that were at odds with Duke’s claims about racism.
‘Implicit’ Bias Claimed
Duke’s antiracism pledge states, “We recognize our own implicit biases.” Ironically, by definition, one cannot recognize his or her own implicit biases as that phrase is traditionally defined. Before his notice of termination, Conger did at one point receive an email from a Duke official who said, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.”
Conger was astounded that the Duke official admitted to searching for supporting data after the institution created and publicly released its pledge.
The Duke official who corresponded with Conger mentioned “ample causal inference data in the social sciences.” Conger believes a medical institution should rely on evidence-based clinical data. Social science data are known to be easily manipulable and are generally viewed as inappropriate and insufficient for forming conclusions or driving actions in the field of medicine.
White Males Singled Out
Conger also recalls being shown an illustration during a Duke-sponsored function, that depicted white males as agents of oppression and exploitation while ominously labeling members of other demographics as “targets.” Again, no scientific or clinical data were offered to justify or explain why a major health care provider espoused such darkly generalized views of people.
While Conger is left to plan his next professional move, Duke Health—an arm of a Tier 1 research university and so-called Southern Ivy—has yet to explain its ominous claim that racism is “a public health crisis.”
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Australia: Why the ABC has come under fire after chilling detail emerged at pro-Palestine rally in Australia
The ABC has been slammed after failing to call out pro-Palestine demonstrators who were mourning the death of a leader of a listed terrorist organisation.
Thousands took to the streets in Sydney and Melbourne on Sunday to walk in support of Palestine and Lebanon, amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Small groups of young men, many masked, were seen at the rallies in each city waving the red and green flags of Hezbollah, a militant and political group hailing from Lebanon, which has been listed as a terrorist organisation in Australia.
Others, including both adults and children, held framed photos of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli air strike in Beirut on Friday.
The ABC covered the pro-Palestine rally in Sydney and released a two-minute report that included demonstrators mourning the death of Nasrallah.
The segment failed to mention how Hezbollah was listed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government.
'He was the mother, he was the father of Lebanon,' one woman, who was wearing a hijab, said.
'He brought comfort, he brought security, when we really wanted answers we turned to him.’
Drew Pavlou, a political activist and prominent critic of China, accused the ABC on X of being 'embarrassingly biased' claiming the segment was filled with 'uncritical interviews'.
One social media user added: 'A new low'.
'We’ve been saying defund the ABC for ages,' a second chimed in.
'This is disgraceful!' a third wrote.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke blasted those showing 'any indication of support' for a terrorist organisation, and threatened to cancel their visas.
'It draws the immediate attention of our security agencies,' Mr Burke said.
'There is a higher level of scrutiny if anyone is on a visa. I have made clear from day one, that I will consider refusing and cancelling visas for anyone who seeks to incite discord in Australia,' he said.
Victoria Police told Daily Mail Australia they were 'aware prohibited flags were seen at a demonstration in the Melbourne CBD' on Sunday.
'Appropriate referrals will be made to Australian Federal Police as the lead agency concerning prohibited symbols,' a spokesperson said.
The group supporting Hezbollah were also heard chanting 'labayka ya Nasrallah' in Arabic, which translates roughly to 'at your service, Nasrallah'.
Rally organisers in Melbourne told AAP the group carrying Hezbollah flags was not affiliated with those running the demonstration.
Islamic community leaders also said this group was not representative of the Muslim community in Australia or the protest, which was calling for Israel to stop military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, where they are fighting Hezbollah.
'They are definitely a minority. An absolute, tiny minority,' Islamic Council of Victoria's president Adel Salman told The Australian.
'For my own experience, my knowledge of the community, there is no support of Hezbollah, no love of Hezbollah, right now, this is all about support for the Lebanese people.
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed political party and paramilitary group in Lebanon, was listed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government in 2021.
It acknowledges that there are 'no known specific threats to Australia or Australian interests' posed by Hezbollah.
'However, it is possible that Australian interests could be harmed by future attacks,' the Australian government website states.
On Saturday, Israeli forces said Nasrallah had been killed during a massive air strike on Beirut, reportedly using 5,000-pound bunker-busting bombs.
Israel is currently fighting on two fronts, with the Hamas fighters in Gaza and the Iranian backed militia Hezbollah in Lebanon
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13905579/ABC-protest-coverage-pro-palestine-Hezbollah.html
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Austria's Freedom Party secures first national election win for far-right since World War II
Austria's Freedom Party has secured the first national parliamentary election victory for the country's far right since World War II, finishing ahead of the governing conservatives in the Austrian election race on Sunday.
Preliminary official results showed the Freedom Party finishing first with 29.2 per cent of the vote.
Chancellor Karl Nehammer's Austrian People's Party was second with 26.5 per cent. The centre-left Social Democrats were in third place with 21 per cent.
The outgoing government — a coalition of Chancellor Nehammer's party and the environmentalist Greens — lost its majority in the lower house of parliament.
Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and longtime campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, wants to be chancellor.
"I am a mountain climber, but the bag that I have been given is not light," he told supporters.
But to become Austria's new leader, he would need a coalition partner to command a parliamentary majority. Rivals have said they will not work with Mr Kickl in government.
Opposition should 'sleep on the result' after far-right win, Kickl says
The far right has benefited from frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also built on worries about migration.
Austrian far right party was projected to take the historic election win.
In its election program — titled Fortress Austria — the Freedom Party called for "remigration of uninvited foreigners", for achieving a more "homogeneous" nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.
The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine, and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defence project launched by Germany.
Mr Kickl has criticised "elites" in Brussels and called for some powers to be brought back from the European Union to Austria.
"We don't need to change our position because we have always said that we're ready to lead a government, we're ready to push forward this change in Austria side by side with the people," Mr Kickl said in an appearance alongside other party leaders on ORF public television.
"The other parties should ask themselves where they stand on democracy," he added, arguing that they should "sleep on the result".
Mr Nehammer said it was "bitter" that his party missed out on first place, but noted he brought it back from lower poll ratings.
He has often said he would not form a coalition with Mr Kickl. After the poll he confirmed: "What I said before the election, I also say after the election."
More than 6.3 million people were eligible to vote for the new parliament in Austria, an EU member that has a policy of military neutrality.
Mr Kickl has achieved a turnaround since Austria's last parliamentary election in 2019. The Freedom Party narrowly won a nationwide vote for the first time in the European Parliament election in June, which also brought gains for other European far-right parties.
Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose party dominates the Netherlands' new government, took to X to congratulate the Freedom Party on Sunday. So did Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the Alternative for Germany Party.
The Freedom Party is a long-established force but Sunday's result was its best yet in a national parliamentary election, beating the 26.9 per cent it scored in 1999.
In 2019, its support slumped to 16.2 per cent after a scandal brought down a government in which it was the junior partner.
Then-vice chancellor and Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned following the publication of a secretly recorded video in which he appeared to offer favours to a purported Russian investor.
While the Freedom Party has recovered, the popularity of Mr Nehammer's People's Party declined sharply compared with 2019. Support for the Greens, their coalition partner, also dropped to 8 per cent.
During the election campaign, Mr Nehammer portrayed his party, which has taken a tough line on immigration in recent years, as "the strong centre" that would guarantee stability amid multiple crises.
But crises ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and resulting rising energy prices and inflation also cost it support. The government also angered many Austrians in 2022 with a short-lived COVID-19 vaccine mandate, the first in Europe.
But the recent flooding caused by Storm Boris that hit Austria and other countries might have helped Mr Nehammer slightly narrow the gap as a crisis manager.
Coalition plans still undecided
The Freedom Party would need to form a coalition with one or more parties to secure a parliamentary majority and build a stable government, but when party leaders held a discussion on Sunday evening, no potential partners were forthcoming.
Mr Nehammer repeatedly rejected joining a government led by Mr Kickl, describing him as a "security risk" for the country, but did not rule out a coalition with the Freedom Party itself — which would imply Mr Kickl renouncing a position in government.
But that looks very unlikely with the Freedom Party in first place.
The other three parties have long ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party altogether — whether Mr Kickl led it or not.
Liberal NEOS leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger said: "I don't want you in government and I stand by that."
"I simply believe it would not be good for our country."
Social Democrats leader Andreas Babler ruled out governing with the far right and labelled Mr Kickl "a threat to democracy".
The alternative would be an alliance between the People's Party and the Social Democrats — with or without the liberal NEOS, who took 9 per cent of the vote.
A final official result will be published later in the week after a small number of remaining postal ballots have been counted, but those will not change the outcome substantially.
About 300 protesters gathered outside the parliament building in Vienna on Sunday evening, holding placards with slogans including "Kickl is a Nazi".
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Lawyer Lana Collaris faces heavy backlash after refusing to take part in Acknowledgement to Country
It's fundamentally racist
A top lawyer has hit back after being accused of racism for refusing to participate in an Acknowledgement to Country procedure at the Victorian Bar Council.
At meetings of the Victorian Bar Council, the president Georgina Schoff precedes matters with an acknowledgement of the Aboriginal group associated with the land on which it is held.
At a recent such meeting, barrister Lana Collaris instead acknowledged all Australians and then posted the minutes of the meeting on social media.
She was quickly met with a barrage of criticism, including being called a 'racist', a 'visitor' and an 'introduced species'.
Ms Collaris was also attacked by two Bar Council colleagues and was told by the Indigenous Justice Committee that she had brought the Victorian Bar into disrepute.
The under fire lawyer stood by her actions and told Sky News she could not tolerate the ubiquity of the Welcome to Country ceremonies.
'The reason why I decided to acknowledge all Australians that day is because I'd had enough of this implicit ceding of sovereignty before every meeting, before every Zoom meeting, before every time we land on a Qantas flight,' Ms Collaris said.
'I'd had enough and just wanted to take a stand against it.'
She said the implication of the welcome messages was that non-Aboriginal people are of a lesser status, and to say so was at odds with the law she had sworn to uphold.
'It's the constant repetition of this message that's being given to us, that sovereignty does not exist within the Crown in some way, and that's what I've got an issue with.
'It's wrong in law and it's wrong in fact as well and that's why I decided to make a stand.'
Ms Collaris said the response she got online was no surprise.
'I got fairly predictable personal attacks levelled towards me.
'And that's what made me think "I'm going to sit down and I'm going to express my views clearly in writing", and that's what I did.'
In that article, published by The Australian, she wrote that 'acknowledgments of country are not about respect but were part of a political agenda.
'We show respect to Indigenous Australians by celebrating their culture and language, by valuing their historical knowledge, and by holding them to the same standards as all other Australians, not by making ubiquitous acknowledgments of country.'
The barrister said Welcome to Country ceremonies go against 'the fundamental guiding principle of our constitution today (which) is the quality of citizenship.
'If you're going to take a stand that's different to that by making these repeated acknowledgements of country, which repeatedly chip away at that sovereignty, then I think Australians have an instinct and they know that something is not quite right and they understand that there is a political push behind this.
'For as long as people continue to make political statements by way of acknowledgments of country, I will continue to acknowledge all Australians, signalling my support for an Australia where we are all equal and subject to the same laws regardless of our race.'
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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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29 September, 2024
Are conservatives happier?
As the aricle below rightly notes, there is a long history of survey findings which show conservatives to be hapier than Leftists. It would be surprising otherwise. Leftism is almost by definition dissatisfaction with the world about the Leftist so that should show up in characteristic mood. Leftists are the miserable people politically so one might expect that description to be generally true
And the article below does deliver that expected conclusion.
I am going to be a spoilsport, however, and say that while I do agree with their concluson and am myself a happy conservative, their findings in fact show something quite different from what they claim.
The big problem with their research is that it used as data that old standby of lazy psychologists: The responses of college students. Such subjects can be very different from what you find among general population studies. During my long career as a survey researcher, I used almost entirely general population samples and what I found might as well have been from another planet when compared with student "samples".
It compounds the difficulty that most of the student samples in the literature were not in fact samples in any sense, They were just available groups.
The nature of the "samples" used by the authors below makes their findings very easy to understand. If you look at the tables of correlations their report, the correlations between conservatism and happiness were very weak, quite marginal. They were generally in the right direction but that is about all you can say
The fact of the matter is that happiness was by far best predicted by richness of experience. Young people like to be out and about doing and experiencing different things. That is what explains the findngs below. Their findings tell us nothing more than that.
Sad that such an extensive body of work yields such an unremarkable conclusion
Title and abstract only below:
Differing worldviews: The politics of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness
Abstract
Objective/Background
Conservative ideology, broadly speaking, has been widely linked to greater happiness and meaning in life. Is that true of all forms of a good life? We examined whether a psychologically rich life is associated with political orientation, system justification, and Protestant work ethic, independent of two other traditional forms of a good life: a happy life and a meaningful life.
Method
Participants completed a questionnaire that assessed conservative worldviews and three aspects of well-being (N = 583 in Study 1; N = 348 in Study 2; N = 436 in Study 3; N = 1,217 in Study 4; N = 2,176 in Study 5; N = 516 in Study 6).
Results
Happiness was associated with political conservatism and system justification, and meaning in life was associated with Protestant work ethic. In contrast, zero-order correlations showed that psychological richness was not associated with conservative worldviews. However, when happiness and meaning in life were included in multiple regression models, the nature of the association shifted: Psychological richness was consistently inversely associated with system justification and on average less political conservatism, suggesting that happiness and meaning in life were suppressor variables.
Conclusions
These findings suggest that happiness and meaning in life are associated with conservative ideology, whereas psychological richness is not.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12959
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The American Economic Association Leaves Out the Free Market
Loaded political jargon populates the program for its annual conference.
Mark Skousen’s op-ed “The American Economic Association Snubs Hayek” (Sept. 16) calls attention to political bias at the American Economic Association’s annual conference. While I have not seen Mr. Skousen’s rejected proposal on economist F.A. Hayek, several accepted proposals on the AEA’s program point to a leftward drift in the organization.
The coming conference will feature seven papers on Karl Marx and Marxian economics, a fringe school that almost all professional economists reject. Loaded political jargon similarly populates the program. It features six papers on the critical-race-theory concept of “intersectionality” and 16 papers on “neoliberalism,” a pejorative term used by left-wing activists to attack free-market thinkers. The far-left Union for Radical Political Economics has 16 dedicated panels and lectures on the program. Progressive economist John Maynard Keynes appears to be the dominant lens at the conference, with 32 abstracts mentioning Keynes and various Keynesian schools of thought.
By contrast, free-market perspectives are rare at the AEA. Only two accepted papers mention Hayek, with another two mentioning Milton Friedman. The monetarist school appears twice, and the public-choice tradition appears only once. I make no claim of knowing the optimal balance between these competing perspectives, but the AEA’s current ideological filter is proving to be a poor mechanism for rationing scarce conference space.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/aea-economics-leaves-out-the-free-market-398aeb0b
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Taxpayer-funded Minneapolis food pantry bans white people - as boss' astonishing outburst at local who complained is revealed
The boss of a Minneapolis food pantry, funded by city taxpayers, has banned white people from taking advantage of the resource.
Mykela 'Keiko' Jackson used a Minnesota State grant to launch the Food Trap Project Bodega designed to help poor and hungry residents living close to the Sanctuary Covenant Church in the north of the city.
The pantry only opened up on July 27 but within months it has been forced to close and relocate away from church grounds after Jackson attempted to block white people from accessing the service, including a local chaplain who complained.
A sign that on the door to the pantry reads how the food inside was specifically for 'Black and Indigenous Folx' only. After a civil rights complaint was made against the pantry by a local, Mykela accused the complainant of 'political violence.'
'The resources found in here are for Black & Indigenous Folx. Please refrain from taking anything if you're not,' it stated.
Jackson used a Paths to Black Health grant which aims to reduce health disparities among African Americans while fostering a 'vibrant and thriving' community.
The last census showed Minneapolis to be 58 percent white with 18 percent of the population African-American.
But a number of reports have emerged suggesting how non-black residents are being denied access to the pantry, sowing the seeds of racial discrimination in an area considered to be an ethnically diverse.
The grant's description states how the 'funds are specifically designed to support organizations that work with U.S.-born African Americans... for whom studies indicate that health has been impacted as the result of historical trauma. This trauma includes post-traumatic slave syndrome (PTSS) and epigenetic inheritance.'
Chaplain Howard Dotson, 54, went to take a look at the pantry for himself, but claims how as a white man was refused service.
'This is not building community, it's destroying it,' Dotson said to Alpha News. 'I went over there and confronted her. I told her that I saw the sign and I asked if she really thought she could take grant money from the state and discriminate against poor white people.'
Dotson then filed a complaint with the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission.
He claims that Jackson told him in person how the food pantry was set up to serve black and indigenous people and was told how he should go across the road to the church's free pantry should he needed it.
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What The Left Is Getting Wrong About The GOP’s Health Ideas/b>
In an interview the other day, J.D. Vance said that Donald Trump will “promote more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of the same people into the same insurance pools.”
In no time at all, left-wing critics pounced.
Trump and Vance would “permit insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions,” wrote Jonathan Chait. They would allow insurers to “charge less to the healthy and more (much more) to the sick,” added Josh Barro. “That’s exactly how health insurance worked before Obamacare,” said Paul Krugman.
Yet it is the critics who don’t understand how Obamacare is working and how it needs to be reformed. When insurers are forced to sell to everyone at the same price, they have strong incentives to attract the healthy (on whom they make a profit) and avoid the sick (on whom they incur losses). That is what is happening today.
Obamacare didn’t solve a problem; it merely changed the nature of the problem. In the old days, some chronic patients couldn’t get health insurance. As I show below, today they can get insurance, but they may not be able to get health care.
So, what’s the answer? It begins by recognizing that almost everyone in America today who buys private health insurance is getting a tax subsidy for their purchase. People who get insurance from an employer have that benefit excluded from their taxable income. People who buy in the (Obamacare) exchange are getting tax credits, which are transferred to the insurers along with the buyer’s payment.
Part of the premium we pay is coming out of our pockets, and the rest is picked up by government. Even if our part of the premium is community-rated (that is, the same price regardless of health status), there is no reason why the government’s share has to be restricted in that way.
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New Jersey Moves to Deregulate Home-Based Businesses
The New Jersey state legislature advanced legislation this June that would give entrepreneurs more freedom to open a business cheaply. As South Jersey-focused publication 70 and 73 reports, the Home Business Job Creation Act, which still awaits state senate approval, would allow homeowners to operate a business from their own home by-right, without approval from municipal zoning authorities. The change mirrors a trend towards online commerce and is a welcome reexamination of strict use separation rules that prevent entrepreneurship nationwide.
Allowing business owners to operate from their homes would help save money and lower entry barriers. In Jersey City, Class C retail space rents are in the ballpark of $40 per square foot annually, based on LoopNet listings. This works out to at least $40,000 (and often much more) in yearly rent for ground-level storefronts in the state’s many urban neighborhoods.
Nationally, prices for Class C retail tend to be much lower (in the $10-20 per square foot annual range). But the point still stands: if you’re an upstart entrepreneur who can’t afford 5-figure rent and live in a city that bans home-based businesses, you’re out of luck.
The proposed New Jersey reform would not only help entrepreneurs, but could also make neighborhoods more walkable and mixed-use, serving much of the same need as accessory commercial units. In New Jersey itself, the format harkens back to older land-use styles, where the state’s charming urban cores, such as Union City and Hoboken, are replete with apartments near businesses.
The law’s authors, Assembly members Jay Weber, Robert Auth, John DiMaio, and Dawn Fantasia, point out that numerous businesses in the state would be forbidden under strict enforcement of current laws. Carveouts exist for businesses like doctor’s offices and accounting services, but the more workaday enterprises are beholden to municipal regulations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the New Jersey State League of Municipalities is fighting the law on the grounds that it undermines local control.
Many jurisdictions heavily regulate or outright ban home-based businesses on the premise that they create externalities such as traffic congestion or are difficult to regulate safety-wise. According to 70 and 73, New Jersey’s bill will include similar stipulations.
Such criticisms often do not pass muster. Home-based businesses have become more logistically easy with the rise of service-based apps and websites that allow small-scale businesses to connect with a broader customer base. For example, Etsy, a crafts sales platform, saw its membership increase by over 4 million from 2019 to 2021. Rather than drawing customers to their homes, Etsy merchants ship their products outward (or often drop-ship from a 3rd-party location). So the traffic caused is minimal compared to what craftsmen would’ve drawn 20 years ago.
Since the pandemic, food businesses have also emerged. Readers might be familiar with “ghost kitchens,” a franchise-like business model where a distributor like WoodSpoon and Shef allow users to sell meals directly to consumers. Its membership has also grown significantly.
But New York and other states forbid its use for hot food delivery. Generally, according to the Institute for Justice, hot food businesses operating from people’s homes are tightly regulated, if not banned, on safety grounds. Even pre-prepared food is scrutinized: Rhode Island made barely any allowance for home food sales until late 2022. Georgia had similar restrictions, requiring anyone who wanted to sell food to do so in a certified commercial kitchen.
The Institute for Justice conducted a review of the states with the most permissive home-based food rules, including Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, which do not require special permitting for such business, and found that “not a single state had a confirmed case of a foodborne illness caused by food sold under its homemade food law.”
What’s more, the proscription of such businesses does not guarantee that food sales will be safer, as banning them may just drive them onto the illegal market, where no oversight exists. There isn’t any particular reason why appropriate health and safety regulations cannot apply to home-based businesses.
Beyond food, other businesses have faced scrutiny from regulators. In Nashville, a joint hair salon and recording studio was shut down because both businesses relied on in-person visits. Childcare services have often run afoul of zoning regulations, motivating reform in several states.
The inherent tradeoff here—if we’re to conclude that many of the “safety” concerns are just a disingenuous smokescreen—is about traffic. Even if home-based businesses are “online” now, they’ll still inevitably cause more parking and congestion than if homes were strictly residential. The upside is that more small-scale entrepreneurs can afford their shot at growing a successful business.
Hopefully, the New Jersey Senate will see the positives and pass the bill. It will only be an early step towards broader liberalization, but it will unlock opportunities for many people.
“My whole life, people told me, ‘You need to do something with your food,’ but I always shut myself down without even trying,” one user of WoodSpoon told the New York Times. “Now I have weekly income.”
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/09/16/nj-home-businesses/
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26 September, 2024
Why diplomacy won’t be enough in latest Mid-East escalation
Israel is once again under attack. The Hezbollah terror organisation escalated its aggression against Israel on September 21, launching a series of attacks that targeted civilian population centres deep inside Israel, leaving devastation in their wake.
In recent days, Hezbollah significantly expanded the range of its rocket attacks, reaching past Tel Aviv and putting more than half of Israeli citizens in danger. But that’s not all.
Last week, Hezbollah’s top commanders held a high-level meeting in which they planned a large-scale terror attack against Israeli communities, one that would mirror the horrific massacre of October 7. Israel acted to prevent this attack and protect its citizens from an imminent threat.
The current conflict initiated by Hezbollah began on October 8, without any provocation from Israel, with frequent attacks launched from southern Lebanon, a territory Israel fully withdrew from in 2000. This aggression follows more than 11 months of rocket fire, which has claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis, including 12 innocent children murdered during a soccer game. These attacks have turned the northern border regions of Israel into a death zone, displacing some 70,000 Israelis from their homes, and creating a humanitarian and security crisis that cannot be ignored.
In the face of Hezbollah’s onslaught, Israel is doing what any sovereign nation would: defend the safety and security of all its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. Every state has the duty to protect its people from assaults originating from enemies beyond its borders. Israel is fulfilling this obligation within the framework of international law and will continue to do whatever is necessary to ensure its citizens can return safely to their homes.
The international community is increasingly aware of Hezbollah’s destabilising role in the region. Designated as a terrorist organisation by numerous countries including Australia, the United States, member states of the Arab League, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Hezbollah took an active part in the massacres committed by the Syrian regime and is a focal factor of chaos in the region.
Hezbollah’s relentless offensive is, of course, driven by Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s fingerprints can be found not only on Hezbollah but also on Hamas, the Houthis, and a network of Shia militias across the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Iraq. Iran’s proxies are actively working to spread violence and mayhem. The Iranian regime has long sought to destabilise the region, imposing its radical ideology through violence to control the Middle East.
However, Iran’s ambitions go far beyond. Its influence extends into Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It threatens global security, including by providing drones and missiles to attack Ukraine, as it supports efforts that undermine peace and stability worldwide.
There is still a possibility to stop Hezbollah’s aggression and restore regional stability through diplomacy. This is how:
First, the international community must designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation. The world must increase sanctions on Iran, target the Ayatollah regime’s financial, military and terror networks. The IRGC is the nerve centre of Iran’s global terrorism operations. By sanctioning and isolating this entity, the international community can cripple its ability to finance and direct groups like Hezbollah.
Without this crucial step, Iran will continue to evade accountability, enabling it to pursue its destabilising goals unchecked.
Second, the UN Security Council must enforce Resolution 1701, which mandates the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon to the north of the Litani River. This resolution was passed to end Hezbollah’s stranglehold on southern Lebanon and prevent its attacks on Israel, yet Hezbollah continues to operate freely in that area, with Iran’s full support.
Hezbollah’s domination of Lebanon, its occupation of southern Lebanon, its reign of terror against Israeli civilians, and Iran’s unrelenting support for this terrorist organisation and its malevolent activities must be confronted. Israel stands at the forefront of this battle, defending not just its citizens but the security and values of the free world.
As a career diplomat, I truly believe in the importance of diplomacy and the role it can play in bringing Hezbollah’s aggression to a halt. But we must act now. Those truly committed to peace and stability in the region must designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation and push for the immediate implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, before it’s too late.
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Javier Milei Slams the UN for ditching freedom for socialism
Milei’s first speech before the General Assembly held little back.
The chainsaw-wielding Libertarian took a proverbial axe to the ideological weeds choking the life out of the UN’s original mandate. Castigating the UN for abandoning freedom in favour of socialism, Milei rejected Project 2030, stating that Argentina will not participate in the UN’s promotion of collectivism.
This once liberty-centric organisation, Milei asserted, has replaced the cooperation of Nation States protecting God-given freedoms and the right to life with:
‘…a model of supranational government of international bureaucrats who seek to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world.’
Project 2030, and The Summit of the Future, he added, ‘…is nothing other than the deepening of this tragic course the UN has adopted.’
Such as the UN’s plan to ‘define a new social contract on a global scale, redoubling the commitments of the 2030 Agenda’.
The project is socialist in nature, Milei argued.
He also said that Project 2030 undermines the sovereignty of nation states and violate people’s right to life, liberty, and property. Applying more socialism to cure the consequences of socialism, only deepens the problem, he protested. ‘World history,’ the Argentine President declared, ‘shows that the only way to guarantee prosperity is by limiting the power of the monarch.’
This coexists with ‘guaranteeing equality before the law, defending the right to life, liberty, and property of individuals’. Quoting Isaiah 2:4, Milei pointed to the Biblical foundations of the United Nations, stating that the UN’s early success was being negated by a mutating bureaucratic structure.
The UN, he continued, had stopped watching over the principles outlined in its founding declaration. What was once a ‘shield to protect the Kingdom of Men was transformed into a multi-tentacled Leviathan’. Milei argued that the UN no longer pursues peace but rather imposes an ideological agenda on its members.
As an example, he cited the adoption of the Agenda 2030 goals which he indicated were obeyed for privileged interests.
Milei then accused the UN of ditching the principles outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This, he said, had distorted the role of this institution, and put it on the wrong path.
‘The organisation born to defend human rights, has been one of the main promoters of the systematic violation of freedom.’
He also said that Covid lockdowns should be considered a crime against humanity and then took the UN to task for elevating murderous dictatorships to the Human Rights Council. ‘This house,’ Milei thundered, ‘put ’Cuba and Venezuela on the HRC without question. This is same house that claims to defend women’s rights, puts countries that punish their women for showing their skin, on the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.’
‘This same house,’ Milei continued, ‘that has systematically voted against the State of Israel, the only country in the Middle East defending liberal democracy. All while demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism.’
Then his speech turned to the issue of the UN promoting collectivist policies that turn countries into ’perpetual debtors’ enslaved to what he referred to as the agenda of global elites. Here Milei described the World Economic Forum’s tutelage as useless.
Milei called out what he said were ridiculous policies such as Net Zero and advocacy of Malthusian eugenics which harm, above all, poor countries.
Implying that high abortion rates announced a bleak future, the Argentine President scolded the General Assembly for advancing ‘sexual and reproductive rights, when the birth rate of Western countries is plummeting’.
The UN is failing, Milei concluded. ‘They’re losing credibility.’
‘It is powerless to provide solutions to the real global conflicts, such as the aberrant Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of facing these conflicts, the UN invests time and effort in imposing on poor countries the WEF’s agenda.’
The organisation, Milei argued, is too busy dictating to nations what they should produce and how they do it, whom they might associate with, what their citizens should eat, and the ideologies the should believe.
To this Milei warned, ‘We are at the end of a cycle.’
‘Collectivism and moral posturing, of the Woke agenda, have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the real problems of the world.’
In sum, the UN went woke, now it’s going broke.
‘We cannot persist in the error by doubling down on an agenda that has failed. We in Argentina have already seen with our own eyes what lies at the end of this path of envy and sad passions: poverty, brutalisation, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom. Argentina will not support any policy that involves the restriction of individual freedoms, or of trade. Nor any policy, that violates the natural rights of individuals, no matter who promotes it or how much consensus that institution has.
‘We invite all the nations of the free world to join us, not only in dissenting from this pact, but in creating a new agenda for this noble institution: the agenda of freedom.
‘May God bless the Argentines and all the citizens of the world, and may the forces of heaven be with us.’
Amen!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/javier-milei-slams-the-un-for-ditching-freedom-for-socialism/
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While Xi reigns, China’s economy is unreformable
It was presented as a bold stimulus to boost China’s ailing economy – but while it excited stock markets in Asia, Western economists were underwhelmed. At a rare press conference in Beijing on Tuesday, the usually gnomic governor of the People’s Bank of China, Pan Gongsheng, unveiled a range of measures designed to ‘support the stable growth of China’s economy’ and see that it hits this year’s target of five per cent growth.
There was a time when such measures, which included an interest rate cut and more funds to support the stock and property markets, would have quickened the pulse of investors. But this is unlikely to reverse their exodus. It merely confirms fears about China’s deep-seated problems and casts doubt over whether the Chinese communist party (CCP) is capable of meaningfully reforming an economic model that is no longer sustainable.
With the CCP increasingly in every lab and boardroom, the country’s start-up scene is on its knees
The measures ‘indicated policymakers’ growing concerns over growth headwinds,’ said Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. Liu Chang, macro economist at BNP Paribas Asset Management, meanwhile, said that though positive, ‘we think there is still a worrying lack of urgency behind their words around stimulus’.
The problem for Pan is that not only do few economists believe that five per cent growth can be achieved, but China is widely believed to be cooking the books. Analysts have long used alternative gauges for measuring China’s economic activity, such as electricity consumption or energy imports, but their scepticism has increased as the country’s economic problems have mounted. Growth in 2013 may have been as low as 1.5 per cent, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research organisation, as supposed to the 5.2 per claimed. This year has probably been tougher.
While president Xi Jinping has portrayed himself as China’s ‘supreme reformer’, the heir to Deng Xiaoping, his principal achievement since coming to power in 2012 is to put Deng’s reforms sharply into reverse. A property bubble continues to burst with slumping sales and prices, youth unemployment is soaring, and inward investment is plunging amid growing signs of social stress, including a spike in protests.
Beijing has reacted by restricting data about the economy and criminalising pessimism. The Ministry of State Security, China’s main spy agency, has declared that gloom about the economy is a foreign smear and that ‘false theories about “China’s deterioration” are being circulated to attack China’s unique socialist system’.
The announcement of these stimulus measures coincided with reports that Zhu Hengpeng, a prominent economist at one of China’s top think tanks has disappeared after criticizing Xi’s management of the economy in a private chat group. Zhu, who for the past decade has been deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been placed under investigation, detained and removed after making comments about the flagging economy and referring to Xi’s mortality, according to the Wall Street Journal.
An economic model that for four decades relied on cheap exports and massive, wasteful state-led investment in property and infrastructure is no longer sustainable. It produced dizzying rates of growth but has also led to soaring debt and diminishing returns, with China littered with ghost cities, containing 60 to 100 million empty or incomplete homes, while companies accounting for 40 per cent of China’s home sales have defaulted.
It is widely agreed that China needs to rebalance its economy and that consumers need to spend more, since private consumption accounts for just 39 per cent of the economy – extremely low by world standards (the figure in the US is 68 per cent). But there is no consumer confidence, with 80 per cent of family wealth tied up in property and no meaningful social safety net.
Xi hopes renewable energy technology can replace property as a new motor of growth, and mouth-watering subsidies have been thrown at industries ranging from solar panels to electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries. This has lead to massive over-capacity and vicious price wars. Yet the benign global environment that accompanied China’s earlier export splurges has gone: the world is much more wary.
Xi’s longer term goal is to build a world-beating ‘innovation’ economy driven by domestic tech, but the most effective way of achieving this – giving more sway to the market and to private companies – runs counter to everything he stands for. Xi has prioritised security and CCP control, even over the economy. He has hobbled China’s most innovative technology companies, which have faced tightening restrictions. With the CCP increasingly in every lab and boardroom, the country’s start-up scene is on its knees, with one executive recently telling the Financial Times, ‘The whole industry has just died before our eyes … The entrepreneurial spirit is dead’. Last year, China led the world in the number of millionaires leaving the country, according to the Henley Wealth Management Report.
This is the background against which Pan wheeled out his stimulus, hinting that further measures might be in the pipeline. It had more than a hint of desperation about it and came days after Beijing announced it was raising the retirement age – a measure that was also widely criticised as inadequate to fend off a fast-approaching demographic crisis.
The CCP has long cultivated the myth of the technocrat, claiming that its officials have risen through a meritocratic system and are superior to those in the West because they can plan rationally for the long term. That was always a highly tenuous claim and ignores the reality that even the most gifted technocrat can make little real difference in an autocratic system where ultimately the only thing that matters is the opinion of the leader. Indeed, such a system encourages fraud as underlings clammer to tell the emperor what he wants to hear or face the consequences of voicing unwelcome opinions – as the economist Zhu did.
Pan is perhaps the embodiment of that hapless technocrat. He is no doubt aware that China’s troubled economy has peaked and may go sharply into reverse, but unable to mutter the unspeakable – that it is unreformable as long as Xi Jinping remains in charge.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/while-xi-reigns-chinas-economy-is-unreformable/
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Not all masculinity is toxic: Hold the front page: men are different to women
Gender wars are a subset of culture wars. We risk raising a generation of boys who are emotionally damaged and mentally fragile amidst a sea of snowflake children who, terrified by multifront extremist alarmism, demand governments keep them safe from any unpleasantness and all life challenges. Indoctrinated into bearing the burden of collective guilt for past sins that isn’t really inheritable, how many white Christian boys will struggle with mental health issues?
The excesses of trans extremists have finally begun to attract serious pushback from some brave souls like popular writers, athletes, civil servants, police officers, school teachers, professors and a few politicians like Moira Deeming and Claire Chandler. When are men, with the support of women who believe in gender equality and need to consider the welfare of their sons, fathers, brothers and husbands, going to organise the fightback to restore equal rights for all regardless of racial, religious and gender identity? To fight that war and hope to win, an army must first be raised. An army of advocates, activists and even some metaphorical martyrs to the cause.
Instead, additional demands continue to come from women’s rights advocates. On 17 September, Chief Executive Women released its annual report showing that 91 per cent of CEOs are men. It called on companies to set real gender targets because ‘diverse voices are important and diverse leadership teams are good for business’. There are big problems with its tall claims. It pushes the interests of a narrow cultural elite, not of most women in their quotidian activities.
We never, but never, hear talk of equal gender outcomes in the dangerous, menial, physically demanding, family life-disrupting and geographically remote jobs. If the nation’s senior women executives are truly motivated by concern for group-based social justice and the belief that diversity in the senior executive leadership will ‘unlock substantial economic growth and productivity’, they should prioritise getting racial minorities ahead of women who are even more badly under-represented.
However, promoting people into senior positions based on chromosomes and race is not talent-scouting but virtue-signalling. And what if top women leaders were disproportionately represented in high profile leadership disasters? Would a male police chief have prioritised a visit to the hair stylist and going out to dinner during the Black Saturday bushfire that killed 173 people in 2009?
Of course there are many examples of female leaders acting with acumen, courage and integrity: Christina Holgate’s commercial success with Australia Post and Renée Leon (sacked by Scott Morrison as departmental secretary for terminating the unlawful Robodebt). But only recklessly courageous researchers would explore gender-based failures of leadership and so we are stuck with platitudes instead of empirical data.
The ubiquitous gender pay gap myth mostly reflects different occupational choices on work-lifestyle balance. How many women would choose to work 12-hour shifts in mines in remote locations for extended periods, for double what they might be earning? In full-time work in the US, men work on average two hours more per week. Among those working less than 35-hour weeks, women earn five per cent more. In countries that offer more job flexibility without imposing financial hardships on families, for example in Scandinavia, more women choose the lower paying but less stressful and more flexible professions that provide more job satisfaction.
Nataliya Ilyushina made a similar argument by noting that the report on the gender pay gap from Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency had accidentally measured women’s freedom of choice.
The increasingly radicalised and unhinged attacks on toxic masculinity culminated in the #MeToo moment when women had to be believed and men vilified, defenestrated and perhaps even incarcerated, no matter how thin the evidence and absurd the alleged victimisation and grievance narrative. In the process, longstanding pillars of Western jurisprudence and criminal justice systems have come under sustained assault with a weakened commitment to the key principles of equal protection under the law, due process and innocence until proven guilty. There’s a double standard at play, where the woman is effectively infantilised and denied responsible agency.
Being too intoxicated is an acceptable excuse to transfer the burden of proof and responsibility entirely to the male defendant. But being drunk is no excuse for him.
Judgmental remarks about a woman’s sexual behaviour and the choices she makes will unleash a social media pile-on demanding public censure and dismissal. Yet it is permissible to characterise men’s conduct in judgmental language.
The justice system downplays the reality that some women can act unwisely, succumb to temptation in the heat of the moment and change their stories subsequently either because they regret their ethical lapse, or because they fear the consequences for their marriage or relationship; and some are outright malicious or manipulative and use sex consciously as a weapon. Following public criticism of ‘lazy and perhaps politically expedient’ but unserious and unmeritorious prosecutions for alleged sexual assaults, New South Wales chief prosecutor Sally Dowling told a Senate hearing on 4 September, an audit was launched and 15 rape cases were discontinued.
The biggest victims of the culture wars have been whites, Christians and males. By a clever sleight of mind, ‘toxic masculinity’ has morphed into the charge that masculinity itself is toxic. Competition, bravery, honour, chivalry, gallantry are also hardwired traits of masculinity. The warrior-protector trait led a dad to jump to the tracks in a fatal effort to save his twin babies whose pram had rolled down from the platform while the mother screamed. Few would be surprised by that gender difference or judge the mother harshly.
Treating the accused perpetrators and victims of serious crime differently is anathema to the fair administration of justice. As in every aspect of public policy, sexual assault laws should balance the rights of complainants for justice and closure with the rights of the accused to a fair trial, due process and protection against malicious, extortionate and vengeful allegations. A particular category of crime should not have a lower threshold of evidence for prosecution than other serious crimes. The process itself as punishment and the cost of being found not guilty further undermine justice.
Lower life expectancy and higher suicide and incarceration rates for Aborigines in Australia and blacks in the US supposedly prove the reality of systemic and institutional racism. But do lower life expectancy and higher suicide (three-quarters of suicides in Australia and the UK are among males) and incarceration rates for men prove toxic and criminal masculinity? The death rate for American men on the job is twelve times higher and injuries are 50 per cent more than for women. In Australia, ABS data show that men comprise 70 per cent of those working over 60 hours per week and 96 per cent of those dying in the workplace. Which women’s lobby group highlights these job statistics?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/not-all-masculinity-is-toxic/
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25 September, 2024
Israel Derangement Syndrome
Julie Hartman, a 24-year-old woman with whom I do a weekly podcast (“Dennis & Julie”), described the anti-Israel world perfectly: A vast number of people suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome.
The description is, of course, based on the widely cited “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party deride as nonsense. Though I voted for former President Donald Trump and thought he was a very good, at times excellent, president, I never used that term during the four years of the Trump presidency. I did not regard opposition to Trump as necessarily an expression of psychological pathology.
Eventually, however, I changed my mind. I came to believe that much Trump hatred was rooted in psychology, not moral reasoning. This was particularly so regarding conservatives who became “Never Trumpers.” Given that the Left had taken over the once largely liberal Democratic Party, and given that the Left is the greatest threat to freedom and the entire American experiment since the Civil War, the only explanation for why a conservative would vote for a leftist rather than for Trump had to be a psychological one.
Whether or not one subscribes to the existence of a Trump Derangement Syndrome, “derangement syndrome” perfectly explains support for Hamas and the Palestinians (at this time, the two are largely the same, just as “Nazis” and “Germans” were largely the same, and therefore used interchangeably, during World War II).
On Sept. 21, The New York Times provided a perfect example of Israel Derangement Syndrome in a column written by Michael Walzer, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, titled “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War.”
As is well known, last week, pagers used by Hezbollah terrorists exploded, killing a handful of them and wounding hundreds more. Amazingly accurate, the exploding pagers killed very few noncombatants.
Hezbollah is the Shiite and Lebanese equivalent of the Gaza-based Sunni Hamas. Like Hamas, Hezbollah has one purpose: to kill as many Israelis as possible and eradicate the Jewish state. Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel in an attempt to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. Tens of thousands of Israelis have fled their homes in northern Israel and have not returned in nearly a year.
That Israel is being attacked for killing Hezbollah terrorists is proof that, according to the vast array of Israel-haters—the political, media and academic left, and Muslims in the Western world—Israel is not allowed to defend itself. It should now be obvious that the current hatred of Israel is not a result of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. When Israel targets Hezbollah terrorists—and only Hezbollah terrorists—it is equally condemned.
Which brings me to the Times column by Walzer.
Walzer writes: “The explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were very likely war crimes—terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.
“Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But the attacks … came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. … It is important for friends of Israel to say: This was not right.”
According to Walzer, terrorists can only be killed when they are “operating,” “mobilized,” or “militarily engaged.” If they are not doing so, it is a “war crime” to kill them. Furthermore, the mere fact that these members of Hezbollah had those pagers—devices the professor admits “probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes”—means these terrorists were “operating.” That’s why they had them: to plan and carry out operations against Israel.
That, dear reader, is derangement.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/24/israel-derangement-syndrome/
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Following Texas, Newsom signs bill requiring social media age verification
Like how?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a controversial new bill requiring social media companies to verify the age of users, and preventing non-verified users from accessing algorithm-driven social media feeds. While described as a bill to combat youth social media addiction, tech and free speech groups argue the bill could worsen cyberbullying and infringe on First Amendment rights. Other states' similar bans have been struck down in court, with a challenge to Texas' age verification law to be heard by the United States Supreme Court in the coming term.
SB 976 bans social media notifications to California minors during school hours and between 12:00 AM and 6:00 AM without parental consent, require chronological, not algorithmic social media feed presented to minors without parental consent, and only allow these features if a social media company has "reasonably determined" the user is not a minor, or if a parent has consented. The California Attorney General is empowered to define what the “reasonably determined” standard actually means, and the whole law goes into effect on January 1, 2027.
Tech groups argue barring access to algorithm-generated feeds will make products less useful and enjoyable for users — and could even increase the impact of cyber-bullying that current algorithms seek to limit, while First Amendment advocates say requiring individuals to verify their age by surrendering personal information — likely to be government identification — would have a chilling effect on online speech.
Pro-technology lobbying group Chamber of Progress filed several letters of opposition against the bill and focused its arguments on the loss of editorial control for social media companies with the mandate to not show weighted algorithmic content to non-verified users, and the security risks of what they believe will be government ID-based age verification systems.
“There’s no way to verify the age of minors without verifying the age of all users,” said Chamber of Progress technology policy director Todd O’Boyle in an interview with The Center Square. “Whether you ask individuals to manually verify government ID, or you say all right, online services are allowed to use a third-party verifier, you’ve got a huge cybersecurity concern.”
Earlier this year, lack of encryption by a third-party background check provider allowed hackers to steal a data package with the name, Social Security number, and phone number of every American. The file was first listed for $3.5 million then later leaked for free.
“However well-intentioned, it’s going to result in a world where the algorithmic tools the platforms use to make the internet safer for young people by downranking and removing content that is harassing or otherwise abusive — if platforms don’t have those algorithmic tools at their disposal, teens are going to be at risk of dogpiling,” continued O’Boyle.
With regards to taking away algorithmic feeds, called “addictive” by the bill, O’Boyle said, “From a First Amendment perspective, the courts have been quite clear you can’t regulate design without running into serious First Amendment issues, because ultimately, this is trying to regulate the core curatorial and editorial functions of social media platforms.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro-free speech legal nonprofit, also took issue with the bill’s restriction on access to legally protected First Amendment content.
“It … basically says that people have to show their papers at the door before they can get access to constitutionally protected speech,” said FIRE chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere in an interview with The Center Square. “It is worth noting that other states attempting similar things have found that efforts to restrict access to this medium are being scrutinized very carefully by the courts. We’re still in the process of going through that same scrutiny in California, so for the legislature to move forward with potential legislation that doubles down on unconstitutional violations strikes me as unwise.”
Arkansas and Utah have seen similar rules struck down in court, but a final ruling on Texas’ age verification law being heard in the United States Supreme Court could soon set national precedent on the matter.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_fc977136-7ac6-11ef-866b-6b8a4e0e6e2a.html
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German weakness against Vladimir Putin and Russia during the Ukraine war and the rise of AfD is dangerous for Europe, NATO, and the free world
By Niall Ferguson
It felt a little strange for a British historian to fly to Berlin to tell the Germans, of all people, to rearm. That’s not a role I ever imagined I’d play when I was a graduate student in the divided Berlin of the 1980s, where the buildings in the Soviet sector still bore the scars of World War II.
But times change. And so I recently found myself in the German capital addressing a hall full of conservative parliamentarians urging them to double their defense budget.
Urging Germans to rearm might seem a rather counterintuitive thing to do—and not just because of Germany’s past. This year, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has achieved a string of successes in regional elections, coming first in Thuringia and second in Saxony and Brandenburg.
Deutschland den deutschen, Ausländer raus!—“Germany for the Germans, foreigners out!”—is a popular chant in Germany these days, and not only amongst the disgruntled, underachieving inhabitants of the formerly East German states that are the AfD’s electoral strongholds. German media briefly went berserk back in May, when a viral video captured preppy partygoers at a club on the North Sea resort island of Sylt gleefully chanting the taboo five words. The young man leading the chorus even gave a mock Nazi salute, his left hand supplying a virtual Hitler mustache.
What would the American equivalent be? The members of a Harvard final club donning Ku Klux Klan hoods on Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps.
You may insist, “But it was ironic! They were chanting Deutschland den deutschen over the Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino’s track ‘L’amour Toujours’!” Still, I can see why the average American might be mildly freaked out by my arguing for German rearmament at a time like this. But, as I said, times change. Back in the ’80s, I didn’t expect to witness a Russian invasion of an independent Ukraine either.
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-germany-rearm-ukraine-russia-nato
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Dr Nick Coatsworth issues an urgent warning over Australian government's proposed speech law
One of Australia's most high-profile doctors has urged Australians to actively oppose the Albanese government's proposed misinformation laws saying they would have been potentially harmful during the pandemic.
Dr Nick Coatsworth, who was the nation's deputy chief medical officer during the pandemic period, feared the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill would be 'weaponised' to shut down debate.
He noted the legislation was in part aimed at stopping the spread of 'misinformation' that caused 'harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of preventative health measures'.
However, he said this was 'astonishing' after the Covid pandemic because the medical fraternity and general public became 'acutely aware' the 'facts' changed as the virus became better understood.
This means the new laws could brand 'legitimate concerns' about about public health policy as 'misinformation', according to the government of 'scientific orthodoxy of the moment'.
'Misinformation causes harm,' Dr Coatsworth said. This bill should be rejected in its entirety.
'The weaponisation of misinformation as a term to shut down debate causes even greater harm.
Dr Coatsworth said 'he shares the government's deep concern about the harms of social media to community trust and cohesion'.
'But misinformation is such a widely used accusation these days that I can't see how the law could work practically',' he said.
Dr Coatsworth said that while some things online are 'verifiably false' the 'only solution is to equip the community from a young age to recognise what they (falsehoods) are and to understand how social media works to manipulate debate'.
'Let's teach our kids critical thought and how to question and debate, not how to dismiss or reject other's opinions or ideas with random accusations of misinformation,' he explained.
'I'd strongly encourage Australians to do something they may never have done before and submit to the Senate Inquiry.
'Even if it's a short paragraph expressing deep concern about what this Bill represents.'
Dr Coatsworth has previously admitted Australian governments and health officials lost the trust and goodwill of the public over the pandemic.
He told Sydney radio station 2GB in February said draconian measures to contain the virus dragged on too long and caused people to tune out and grow resentful.
In a 10-page submission made in February to a special inquiry, Dr Coatsworth admitted imposing mandates was wrong.
Under the new laws beefed up watchdog Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would be able to order social media companies to crack down on repeated misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.
Should the companies fail to do so they face a range of penalties and whopping fines, which could include forfeiting five per cent of their global revenue.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has denied the laws would curb freedom of expression.
'We've been very clear as a government to take strong advice around this and to consult widely and to ensure that it aligns precisely with what we have under international law so as not to curb freedom of speech,' she told the ABC earlier this month.
Shadow communications minister David Coleman has accused the government of trying to shotgun the laws through parliament after an earlier version of them was withdrawn last year following substantial public opposition.
'How are people supposed to respond to this complicated law in just a week?,' Ms Coleman told The Daily Telegraph.
'Labor wants to ram this legislation through and is trying to stop the massive backlash we saw last time.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13887877/Dr-Nick-Coatsworth-warning-misinformation.html
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24 September, 2024
New post just up on "FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC"
See https://john-ray.blogspot.com/
Can an inert chemical be harmful?
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9th Circuit’s Characteristic Nuttiness on Gender Identity Again on Display
Women and girls seeking equal opportunity in scholastic athletics have notched a few significant wins this year against the Department of Education over its massive rewrite of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Title IX is the brief, 50-plus-year-old civil rights law that prevents sex discrimination in any publicly funded education program. The Biden-Harris administration, however, has expanded the meaning of “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity or expression.” But based on a plain reading of the text of Title IX, and with an eye toward the congressional history of the law as geared toward ensuring women’s equality in education, the rewrite is more than a little illegal.
At least three federal appellate courts have agreed.
Not so, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, however. It brought that streak of victories to a halt recently when it determined that the state of Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act was both unconstitutional and a violation of Title IX.
This isn’t the first time that the 9th Circuit has botched its analysis on “gender identity.” And once again, its reasoning left court-watchers scratching their heads.
Last year, the 9th Circuit reached an identical conclusion in striking down Idaho’s women’s sports fairness law in Hecox v. Little. Legal scholars have called the court’s opinion in that case “full of deceptions and irrelevancies.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, that case is now pending on a petition for review at the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Doe v. Horne, the court followed its flawed reasoning in Hecox to affirm the trial court’s finding that two biological boys (referenced in the court’s opinion as “transgender girls”) were entitled to a preliminary injunction against the state of Arizona—something that prevented the state from enforcing its Save Women’s Sport Act.
While the underlying litigation proceeds, the court ruled that both boys must be allowed to play on girls’ sports teams at their respective Arizona schools.
So, how did the court reach such a hackneyed conclusion? Its twisted reasoning went something like this: It began with blind acceptance of the Left’s talking points on “gender identity” as something distinct from sex “assigned” at birth, including the fact that there is “a consensus among medical organizations that gender identity is innate and cannot be changed through psychological or medical treatments.”
That ignores the increasing body of clinical evidence that most prepubescent and pubescent children will—if left alone to experience normal pubertal development—grow out of any purported expression of a “transgender” identity.
The court continued that the state law, which separated scholastic sports teams by males, females, and coed or mixed teams, was discriminatory. That was so because the classifications based on biological sex discriminated against students who were biologically of one sex but expressed a different gender identity, by preventing them from playing on sports teams in accordance with that gender identity.
In the words of Judge Morgan Christen, an appointee of President Barack Obama, who wrote the opinion for the unanimous three-judge panel that included Judges Mary Margaret McKeown and David A. Ezra, appointees of Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, respectively: “[T]he ban turns entirely on a student’s transgender or cisgender status.”
Not so. The ban turns entirely on a student’s sex—regardless of whether that student’s sex is male or female.
The court’s opinion ignored one very glaring weakness in its own arguments: the U.S. Supreme Court has never held that “sex” and “transgender status” are one in the same.
Classifications based on sex are just that. And in Arizona’s case, whether the students were transgender “girls” or “boys” resulted in the same outcome: All students, regardless of gender identity, were required to compete on teams that matched their underlying biological sex.
The court’s opinion also clung to the fact that, in its view (and the view of the trial court):
[t]ransgender girls who receive puberty-blocking medication do not have an athletic advantage over other girls because they do not undergo male puberty and do not experience the physiological changes caused by the increased production of testosterone associated with male puberty.
However, medical evidence now indicates that regardless of the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, males begin to distinguish themselves athletically from their female counterparts around the age of 11.
Hormones have limited or no impact on wingspan, muscle mass, height, or bone density—all critical physiological advantages in competitive sports.
The court went on to rationalize that laws that discriminate based on “transgender status” are subject to heightened scrutiny under the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
That meant that the state of Arizona bore the burden of proving that its law served an important government objective, and that the law was substantially related to achieving the objective.
The appellate court wrote that the state had not met its burden. In the court’s view, the act had been adopted for the sole purpose of excluding “transgender girls” from playing on girls’ sports team. This was not, the court wrote, a law substantially related to achieving an “important government objective,” nor could the state bear the burden of demonstrating an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for what it viewed as a discriminatory classification.
Turning to the Title IX discrimination claims, the 9th Circuit panel was influenced mightily by the Department of Education’s expansive rewrite of Title IX to include “gender identity or expression” as commensurate with biological sex.
Christen wrote that the law “does not afford transgender women and girls equal athletic opportunities … [and] the record does not demonstrate that transgender females would displace cisgender females to a substantial extent if transgender females were allowed to play on female teams.”
In the end, the court determined that in addition to the foregoing, the “public interest” was served by preventing “the violation of a party’s [i.e., the transgender student’s] constitutional rights.”
Despite the court’s ongoing delirium about transgender discrimination, Arizona’s then-governor, Doug Ducey, when signing the women’s sports bill into law, noted perhaps the simplest and clearest aim of the legislation:
This legislation simply ensures that the girls and young women who have dedicated themselves to their sport do not miss out on hard-earned opportunities, including their titles, standings, and scholarships due to unfair competition.
This bill strikes the right balance of respecting all students while still acknowledging that there are inherent biological distinctions that merit separate categories to ensure fairness for all.
The simple, nondiscriminatory mission of the Save Women’s Sports Act, however, was utterly lost on the 9th Circuit.
Perhaps, in time, sanity will prevail at the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Class Action Scams Enrich Lawyers, the Left
John Stossel
Have you gotten a letter that says, “You may be entitled to compensation”?
I get a bunch. One claimed my union (New York state forced me to join) probably cheated me on medical insurance. I didn’t think they did, but I filled out the forms.
I got a check for $557. Great!
Except … my lawyers pocketed $7 million.
How is that fair?
Likewise, lawyers accused the Boston Globe of illegally sharing my clicking habits with Facebook.
I don’t really care. Facebook already knows my clicking habits. Anyway, I’d only briefly subscribed. I canceled as soon as I realized that much of the Globe is insipid leftist drivel rerun from The New York Times.
Still, I got a check for $158.
My new video looks at those class action lawsuits.
In theory, they protect consumers, but many of these lawsuits resemble anti-consumer scams.
First, lawsuits make most everything cost a little more.
Second, they deprive us of good products. Bendectin, a morning-sickness pill, was pulled from the market after hundreds of lawsuits claimed side effects. But the Food and Drug Administration says the drug was safe.
Lawsuits helped kill three-wheeled ATVs, too. Lawyers I confront say losing risky products is a good thing: “If they’re scared of someone like me,” one told me, “I’m happy about that.”
We pay for his happiness.
Of course, if companies do wrong, they should be punished.
When Google was caught sleazily collecting location data from users who turned off location history, it wouldn’t have been worth any single user’s time, or money, to sue. A lawsuit would cost more than anyone might win. Hence class actions.
But the lawyers create their own scam. When Google paid $62 million to settle that lawsuit, the class action lawyers gave themselves $18 million and then gave $43 million to their favorite nonprofits. That included left-wing advocacy groups like the ACLU (after it promised to use the money to help “people of color,” “activists” and “people seeking … transgender health care”). They gave victimized class members nothing.
Why would a judge approve such a deal? Because judges are just lawyers in robes, and most lean left politically. They love donating other people’s money to their favorite causes.
“It’s a huge conflict of interest,” says Anna St. John, whose law firm challenges such settlements.
“You have this slush fund of tens of millions of dollars, and the parties and judge are allowed to decide who should get this money. When they have a choice between distributing that money to millions of class members who are not going to say ‘thank you,’ versus directing millions of dollars to their alma maters, to organizations where they sit on the board, the choice is clear what they’re going to do. Six of the attorneys or Google employees involved in the case sit … or sat on the boards of the recipients getting millions of dollars.”
“The guys who did bad get to reward their friends?” I ask.
“Yes. Google’s giving money to organizations it already donates to,” she notes. “It’s unclear how it can be a benefit to the class when the defendant’s just doing what it already does.”
“This is a left-wing money raiser,” I observe.
“It is. This is a settlement class of millions of Americans with diverse viewpoints, and yet the money goes to very extreme, left-wing causes favored by the attorneys and by the defendant.”
I asked the attorneys and judge who approved the deal to explain why it isn’t a scam. They didn’t answer.
America needs lawyers to protect our rights and our freedom, just like we need missiles and bombs. But lawsuits, like missiles and bombs, are tremendously destructive.
We try not to use our missiles. We should do the same with lawyers.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/21/class-action-scams-john-stossel/
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New Docs Shed Light on Air Force’s ‘Goal’ to Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks
The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown—at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force—issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.”
Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps officer’s applicant program.
The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retention shortfalls, and low pay.
“The American people are rightly concerned that, at a time when our country is facing dangerous and increasing threats throughout the world, the Air Force is focused on recruitment efforts based on arbitrary racial diversity goals—not merit or increasing the force’s lethality,” James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America requested records regarding the Air Force’s new officer applicant standards through a federal transparency request in 2023. At the time, the Air Force said it couldn’t find any records, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America then sued the Air Force for the records in April 2024 and received hundreds of documents and slides in response, which the Daily Caller News Foundation subsequently obtained.
A spokesperson for the Air Force told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “The FOIA request was being processed at multiple levels within the Air Force.”
“One of the units responded to the FOIA request with a ‘no responsive records’ response after conducting their own local search, while the remainder of the units continued to process the responsive documents that were ultimately provided,” the spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
One of the slides in question, labeled “AFROTC White,” depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023. The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029, denoted by a star with the label “achieve(d) goal.”
“White male population will decline as other demographics increase,” the slide reads.
The respective slides in question also explain that the Air Force is either on track or needs to do more to hit racial and gender quotas in the ROTC’s officer applicant pool.
For example, with the African American population, the slideshow suggests the Air Force “target [the] male population through ongoing programs and marketing” and notes it has already met its “female goal” for ROTC officer applicants. For the American Indian, Asian, and Hispanic applicants, the slideshow says the Air Force is “on track to grow diversity.”
“These documents show us that the Air Force has taken steps toward implementing their new directive of specific racial quotas for officer recruitment and enrollment throughout the branch,” Fitzpatrick told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Included in the slide deck are funding requests for diversity recruiting initiatives, including $500,000 for “diversity advertising campaigns” and $250,000 for “influencer engagements.”
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A Wittgensteinian Defence of Robert Jenrick
It’s difficult to decide which is worse: that a Conservative MP with leadership aspirations should be thought of as brave for talking fondly of “English identity”; or that the Left establishment via its media outriders should be so predictably sniffy about the possibility of there even being such a thing. “Englishness”, for the Left, is like Australian wine or the success of Clarkson’s Farm: tolerable only to the extent that it’s not discussed.
Robert Jenrick MP has an inexplicable aspiration to lead the post-election wrecking yard still bafflingly known as the “Conservative Party”. He has written this, for the Daily Mail:
The combination of unprecedented migration alongside the dismantling of our national culture, non-integrating multiculturalism and the denigration of our identity have presented huge problems.
Cue the inevitable “gotcha” ambush, this time from a house mediocrity on Sky News, who demanded from Jenrick a definition of this curious relic he calls English identity. Jenrick’s reply was sensible enough, as far as it went: that he was unable to condense in soundbite form a set of cultural, historical and legal phenomena which make for a collective of quantum complexity is hardly surprising (I’m helping him out a bit here, but that’s the gist).
The journalist’s question amounted to a crude, tedious and very voguish reiteration of the Socratic strategy. The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, talented though he undoubtedly was, was also a nuisance who spent his days walking the streets of Athens in search of likely marks on whom he could lay down his own “gotcha” schtick. This would involve asking them to provide a definition of an abstract concept (such as “justice”) and then explaining to the victim why his response was deficient.
Most of us know how that ended: a speedy trial followed by an invitation to down the cup of hemlock – cancellation being of a less reversible (and arguably less deserving) form in those days.
A “gotcha” of this sort is philosophically in error. It assumes that for a thing to have an identity then it must have an essence, one which is definable in non-vague terms. But the world is not constructed like that. There are logical systems which are constructed in acknowledgement of the fact that vagueness is an intrinsic feature of the universe. It would be absurd to think, for example, that a person is not bald when he has n hairs but becomes so when that number declines to n-1. There is hirsute, there is comb over, and there is bald – and the details of that journey are not conducive to a strictly arithmetical formalisation. Certain parts of that map are of necessity impossible to read.
What is it we want from a definition? Wittgenstein, whose competence as a philosopher of language arguably exceeds that of even the most intellectually agile news anchor, has some persuasive things to say here. In his later writings he suggests that it is strange to think that the meaning of a concept is reducible to a list of necessary and sufficient conditions which determine its application:
The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language.
The example Wittgenstein uses is that of a “game”. There are all manner of games. Some of these require a ball others do not; some are played as a team while others are not, etc. These things we call “games” admit of no single unifying definition but share in a common resemblance. As with games so with “English identity” – perhaps its resistance to an easy classification is evidence of the strength, rather than the weakness, of the concept.
We do not need a theory of Englishness to be able to know it when we see it, any more than a Catholic communicant is required to fully understand the concept of transubstantiation before she receives the Host. An account of English identity might refer to the Common Law, make mention of the complicated history of the Anglican church, or valorise the peculiar nature of English traditions (including the tradition of being sceptical about the nature of Englishness). Or it might prefer to point at the perverse pleasure we take in an England batting collapse, or the Pavlovian and very English default to apology when somebody bumps into us.
These are, of course, all things which exercised the wonderful mind of Sir Roger Scruton, whose explication and defence of English culture and identity is distributed throughout many articles and books. Sir Roger was famously ostracised by the Tory parliamentary party for “unacceptable” remarks he made during a New Statesman set-up job a year or two prior to his death. Remarks which, it almost goes without saying, his accusers had not bothered to contextualise. Perhaps the current crop of Tory leadership contenders would find it useful to look at what Scruton had to say about our shared culture and the increasingly acute threats to it? (An appreciation of irony is, of course, also a very English thing.)
Sky’s question to Jenrick was not worthy of serious consideration. And to his credit Jenrick displayed a very English embarrassment at being expected to answer it. I’d have been more robust. If asked the same question I’d have said that English identity includes an affection for eccentricity and a love of queueing. If further pressed I’d have pointed out that Englishness is a bit like crap journalism: we can’t define it, but we know when we are in its presence.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/09/24/a-wittgensteinian-defence-of-robert-jenrick/
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23 September, 2024
‘ANTIFA-STYLE’ HARASSMENT: Pro-Abortion Activists Were ‘Verbally Abusive,’ ‘Physically Threatening’ to Pro-Lifers
South Dakota pro-lifers say they experienced physical threats, verbal abuse, doxing, and stalking from a pro-abortion group collecting signatures for its radical referendum ballot measure.
Dakotans for Health “used antifa-style actions, lies, and abuse to illegally get Amendment G on the ballot,” according to Chris David, a South Dakota resident and volunteer with the pro-life organization Life Defense Fund.
State constitutional Amendment G, or the Right to Abortion Initiative, allows abortion right up until birth for nearly any reason that a doctor thinks is a “health” risk to the mother.
Because the amendment overrides existing state laws, opponents say it would remove parental consent requirements for a minor to get an abortion and would force doctors and nurses to perform abortions without exemptions from conscience protections.
South-Dakota-Abortion-Rights-Amendment-G-2024Download
To get the amendment on the ballot, Dakotans for Health gathered 55,000 signatures, many of which Life Defense Fund contends are likely invalid.
The petition circulators were “verbally abusive and even physically threatening,” David said in a statement to Life Defense Fund that was shared with The Daily Signal.
“Circulators doxed us online with lies and vulgarities, asking their followers to identify us, asking where we worked, and who family members were by name, including asking for my children’s names,” David said. Doxing refers to publicly identifying or publishing private information about someone against their will.
The pro-life volunteer claimed he saw Dakotans for Health lying to voters to get petition signatures while he volunteered with Life Defense Fund urging people not to sign the petition.
“They purposefully misled South Dakotans, downright lied to petition signers to get signatures, and they broke election law doing it,” David contended.
Life Defense Fund is suing Dakotans for Health, claiming it deceived voters about what the amendment does, allowing signatures of people who aren’t registered to vote, and failing to pass out petition-circulator handouts, which are required in South Dakota to explain what people are signing.
“Dakotans for Health did their very best to keep potential signers of the petition from knowing exactly what it was about,” Life Defense Fund attorney Sara Frankenstein told The Daily Signal.
Dakotans for Health denied Life Defense Fund’s claims.
“This is utter nonsense and an obvious attempt to distract from their failed campaign to stop the people of South Dakota from even having a vote on their radical abortion ban—one that forces victims of rape and incest, even children, to carry to term,” the organization told The Daily Signal. “Our petitioners are thoroughly trained and dedicated to ensuring that South Dakotans have accurate information about Amendment G, which simply restores the reproductive rights women had for 50 years under Roe v. Wade.”
An anonymous South Dakota Democrat said Dakotans for Health petition circulators used that claim to deceive her about the scope of the amendment.
“I was approached to sign this petition outside of work,” the unidentified woman said in a statement to Life Defense Fund that was shared with The Daily Signal. “It was conveyed to be as a ‘pro-Roe v Wade petition’ to reinstate the original Roe v Wade abortion conditions. Had I known that this petition was for the purpose of allowing full-term abortions, I never would have signed.”
“The means with which the petitioners got signatures is nothing short of a gross misrepresentation of information,” the registered Democrat continued.
Life Defense Fund’s case against Dakotans for Health claims that it violated a number of election laws. The circuit court has not yet set a date for the trial, though a signed order from a judge said the trial would begin the week of Sept. 23.
If Life Defense Fund wins the case, the amendment would be disqualified from the ballot and invalidated, and Dakotans for Health would not be allowed to serve as a ballot committee again.
Mary, another Life Defense Fund volunteer who asked to keep her last name private, said in an affidavit shared with The Daily Signal that Dakotans for Health circulators prevented her from talking to voters about the extreme nature of the abortion amendment.
“During those days, I was physically blocked from sharing my handout, stepped on, sworn at, mocked, and called names,” Mary said. “One of my first days out, the petition circulators called the police on me because I pulled out my cellphone to record, and [they] told lies about me.”
Mary said she never saw a petitioner give a circulator handout to a signer.
Last October, Mary said, an abortion petition circulator stepped in front of her and blocked her attempt to share information with a woman considering signing the pro-abortion petition.
Another petitioner then told the woman the amendment would just restore pre-Roe v. Wade abortion law, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2022.
“Restore just how it was before,” the circulator stated, according to Mary. “It’s the original Roe v. Wade, and that’s the language we want in the amendment.”
When Mary corrected the woman that the amendment would provide for abortion for all nine months of pregnancy, the circulator told the woman interested in signing that was a lie. After that, a male petitioner followed Mary home in her car, switching lanes whenever she did, until she was able to lose him in a school zone. Marry reported the incident to the police.
Police told her she could file charges if it happened a second time.
“I just hope that voters read the entirety of the initiated measure and think carefully before they vote,” Life Defense Fund’s Frankenstein said. “But better yet, I hope the court disqualifies the measure because cheating should not be allowed to get you on the ballot when we have election laws that should have meaning that should be enforced.”
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Reasons Young Women Embrace the Left Don’t Reflect Well on These Women
Last week, The New York Times featured an article headlined “How the Last Eight Years Made Young Women More Liberal.”
According to every poll, since 2016 there has been an unprecedented political/social gender gap between young American women and men.
Here is how the Times reported it:
In 2001, young men and women had similar political ideologies. … Then, around 2016, something shifted, a new analysis shows. Women ages 18 to 29 became significantly more liberal than the previous generation of young women. Today, around 40% identify as liberal, compared with just 19% who say they’re conservative. The views of young men—who are more likely to be conservative than liberal — have changed little. …
Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men. Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.
And why did this massive leftward shift of young women occur?
[Because] the race became in part a referendum on gender—[Hillary] Clinton running to be the first female president, Mr. Trump calling her a ‘nasty woman’ and bragging about sexual assault on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape. … Seeing someone like yourself in office can spur political involvement, political scientists have found, especially for young women.
If these reasons for young women moving to the left beginning in 2016 are correct (abortion is not mentioned; this was six years before Roe v. Wade was overturned), America has a generation of many unimpressive young women.
Let’s analyze the three big reasons:
1. “Seeing someone like yourself”—meaning women seeing a woman running for president and then seeing her defeated.
It is hard to imagine a more primitive reason to support a candidate for president (or any other office) than the importance of their looking like oneself. Yet this is one of the most frequently offered left-wing arguments for the need to elect more women and blacks.
To begin with, it is simply dishonest. Does any woman on the left prefer a woman with conservative views to man with left-wing views? Does any black person on the left prefer a black with conservative views to a white with left-wing views?
So, then, if values and positions are far more important to women and blacks than whether a person is a man or woman, a white or a black, what does it all mean?
It means nothing. All it means is that emotions dictate left-wing women’s and left-wing blacks’ votes. It means that the left-wing argument for having people in political—or corporate board or any other— positions who “look like America” is pure emotion.
Is “looking like America” important in sports? Do white fans care whether the players on their favorite basketball or football team look like them?
Have we seen any diminution in fan support for the NFL, given that more than half of NFL players are black and only a quarter are white? Have we seen any diminution in fan support of NBA teams given that three-quarters of NBA players are black, and only 17% are white?
Is it important in movies? Are blacks more likely to watch a film with a black lead actor, or whites more likely to watch a film with a white lead actor? Or do both groups want to see stars—whether it’s a white Tom Hanks or a black Denzel Washington? In fact, according to YouGov, three of the five “most popular all-time actors/actresses” are black: Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Denzel Washington. Do whites care?
Is it important in medicine? How many patients needing surgery ask for a surgeon of their own sex or race?
There is one other fact of life worth noting. Having more of your own group—blacks or women—in politically powerful positions has no positive effect whatsoever on your group. None of the black governors, senators, representatives, or mayors have done anything that has specifically benefited black Americans.
And the same holds for women in power with regard to helping women. Meanwhile, Asian Americans have become the most successful ethnic group in America with virtually no Asian Americans in positions of power.
2. Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.”
That this is one of the three major reasons for the 2016 left-wing shift of young American women is truly pathetic. It is further proof of the title of a column I wrote two years ago, “Feminism Has Weakened Women.”
One suspects that women of my mother’s—pre-feminism—generation would have been able to handle a male politician calling a female opponent a “nasty woman” far better than the current generation of young women, the products of three generations of feminism. They were also less traumatized by men’s boorish sexist comments.
There’s a wild inconsistency here as well: The whole point of feminism, according to feminists, is to have society treat men and women as equals, and equally. Yet feminists simultaneously insist that men treat women with a dose of chivalry or they’re “sexist.”
That same year, 2016, Trump called Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., “Little Marco.” Did any short men become leftists as a result? Apparently, short men are considerably stronger than feminized women. For that matter, who isn’t?
3. Trump “bragging about sexual assault on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.”
The third reason given for young women’s embracing leftism in 2016 was a recording made in 2005 that came out in 2016. In a private conversation with “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush, Trump said: “When you’re a star … you can do anything. Grab ’em by the p—y. You can do anything.”
Those comments were made 11 years earlier and in a private conversation with one person. Trump did not say them publicly.
Here is a moral rule of life: You cannot judge a person by comments made in private. We are to judge people by comments made in public, and by actions, whether done in private or public. Virtually every person has said awful things in private. It doesn’t matter. One purpose of private conversations is to let off steam.
It is a testament to the lack of wisdom of our age that we think we can know people—let alone judge them—by what they say in private.
And it is a testament to the lack of wisdom among a majority of America’s young women that these three foolish reasons propelled them to vote for the ideology that is destroying our country.
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Senate Democrats Want Women to Enter the Draft, but Republican Representatives Are Fighting Back
Senate Democrats are attempting to require women to register for the draft. But a group of Republican lawmakers are aiming to stop them.
Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Mary Miller, R-Ill., led a group of 22 Republican lawmakers in opposition to efforts that would force women to register for Selective Service.
The group wrote a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Thursday.
They wrote, “Forcing young women to register for the Selective Service is an affront to our nation’s values and does not enhance military readiness – the only metric by which Congress should measure an [National Defense Authorization Act]. This is yet another blatant attempt to advance a divisive agenda that seeks to eliminate all distinctions between males and females.”
The lawmakers addressed the effect this change to Selective Service would have on American families.
“Under no circumstances should the House of Representatives greenlight a future that cripples the American family by sending mothers and daughters to the frontlines – drafted to be combat replacements for casualties on the battlefield – while fathers and sons stay home,” the Republican lawmakers said. “A country that pursues radical social ideology over basic principles will not remain a strong, resilient nation.”
The group called on Johnson to oppose the provision.
“This radical proposal has been defeated in the past and must be defeated once again,” the Republican lawmakers said.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jack Reed, D-R.I., defended the Selective Service proposal.
“Women are doing a remarkable job in our forces today, and if we were in a situation requiring a draft, I think we would need all able-bodied citizens 18 and above,” Reed told The Hill.
The National Defense Authorization Act approves funding and delegates resources for the U.S. military and other critical defense priorities every year. On June 13, The Senate Armed Services Committee voted 22-3 to advance the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2025 to the Senate floor.
Although this Act is critical in equipping U.S. servicemembers, the group of Republican lawmakers said it does not agree with the provision that would require women to register for Selective Service.
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How common sense has gone walkabout in woke Australia:
I had my first glimpse of King Charles back in 1970, when he, the late Queen, the late Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne came to Botany Bay in Sydney to celebrate the landing there, 200 years before, of Captain James Cook, who paved the way for the British settlement of Australia.
Along with 100,000 onlookers, including me as a child of seven, the Royals watched a re-enactment of Cook’s arrival, which even included a token challenge by a couple of Aboriginal warriors. It was a very happy day, bursting with national pride.
This was the tour during which the tradition of the royal ‘walkabout’ was born when Daily Mail reporter, Vincent Mulchrone, used the word to describe how the Queen and Philip interacted casually with crowds.
I revisited Botany Bay earlier this year, and it is now overgrown and neglected. The 250th anniversary passed in 2020 with barely any public acknowledgment. Any mentions of it were mostly hostile and shame-faced.
Cook’s landing place is a sad symbol of how Australia has changed so totally, in not so many years, from a nation proud and comfortable with its history since the British arrived, to one taught to be ashamed of that past and to see only the darkness in it.
Although royal walkabouts began on that tour, it is no surprise that, in 2024, Buckingham Palace dropped the term for next month’s royal visit to Australia and replaced it with the anodyne ‘opportunity to meet the public’. Apparently, the King does not want to offend Aboriginal Australians who, we are told, associate the word ‘walkabout’ with personal journeys of grief or self-discovery.
The Palace wouldn’t have changed its language nor agreed to the strongly Indigenous-slanted Australian itinerary of King Charles and Queen Camilla, without the approval of our left-wing prime minister Anthony Albanese.
He is the ultra-woke leader of the Australian Labor Party who, last year, held a disastrous referendum over a change to the Australian constitution which would have given a greater political voice to Aboriginal Australians. The proposal was crushingly defeated by voters.
You might imagine Down Under as a sunny larrikin paradise of Foster’s, Sheilas and Bruces, a land untouched by the wokery and cancel culture infecting the UK.
Far from it.
Since the turn of this century, Australia’s political and social elites have endeavoured to import ‘progressive values’, bound up in all manner of nanny state rules.
By far the most pernicious wokery relates to our history and Australia’s indigenous peoples. I say ‘peoples’ deliberately, as it’s now politically incorrect to talk of Aboriginal Australians as one group.
As some consider the term ‘Aboriginal’ to be a label invented by colonisers, we are now instructed to use the appropriated Canadian label, ‘First Nations’.
Of course, the struggles of indigenous people deserve recognition and Australia’s treatment of its original inhabitants since settlers first arrived in 1788 has been far from perfect. And the culture and heritage of Aboriginal people, who make up just 3 per cent of the population, enriches our country.
But increasingly, Australians can no longer speak about their cities without referring to their Aboriginal origins.
We are reminded constantly that Australia’s original settlement, Sydney, is on ‘Gadigal’ country, Melbourne on ‘Kulin’ country, and so on. There’s also a push to give major cities and towns dual names – my city of Melbourne apparently is called Narrm, and Brisbane is Meanjin – and there’s a raging debate over what Aboriginal name Sydney should be given.
In an Australian newspaper, an Aboriginal person when named, is also labelled by their ancestral tribal affiliations, such as a ‘proud Gadigal-Wiradjuri-Yorta Yorta person’. (The ‘proud’ is always in there perfunctorily, as the word is taken to symbolise the person’s not being ashamed of their ancestry in an Anglo-centric world.)
The woke obeisance goes further than that, though. There’s now an obsession with making ‘acknowledgements of country’ in just about any public sphere.
Fans of cult Aussie comedy series Colin From Accounts –whose second series has just landed in the UK – will have noticed the ludicrous announcement at the start of each episode: ‘Binge [the Australian streaming service] acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which this programme was produced.’
This is standard practice here for corporate meetings, announcements on planes landing in Australia, or even coach drivers picking up tourists.
They go like this: ‘We meet on the lands of the (tribal group) people, and acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.’ The more zealous add the lands were ‘never ceded’. Even government offices and commercial businesses plaster the words prominently on their doors and walls to demonstrate how with-it and woke they are.
It’s reached the point of such tokenistic absurdity that an online parent-teacher meeting of my child’s primary school, called to discuss school uniforms and books, was prefaced by the headmistress with a mandatory acknowledgment of country.
This homage is now mandatory at school assemblies, often in a mystic recitation, inculcating our youngest Australians into the new received wisdom about oppressed Aboriginal people and the evils of European settlement.
A mini-industry has sprung up in which Aboriginal people perform ‘traditional smoking ceremonies’ before government, sporting and corporate events, to ‘cleanse’ the meeting spaces of evil spirits with smoke, music and chanting.
Of course, the acknowledgments and these ‘ceremonies’ merely give the – mainly white – audiences the opportunity to engage in ritual self-flagellation.
National pride is disparaged. Thanks to Prime Minister Albanese’s useful idiots, Australia Day on January 26 is targeted by hardliners, who noisily protest, vandalise Captain Cook’s statues, calling it ‘Invasion Day’.
Originally a celebration of the day the Union Flag was first raised in Australia in 1788, now it is an annual excuse for the media to be convulsed with debate all January over whether we should abolish it.
Then there’s our beautiful Australian flag. It’s no longer acceptable to fly it alone. It always has to be alongside the flags of the Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders – Australia’s other main indigenous group.
You’ll never see a Left-wing politician like Albanese without at least those three flags behind him, usually with the Aboriginal flag most prominent.
Far-Left Green leader, Adam Bandt, was once so angry to be seen with the Australian flag at a press conference that he flung it in horror from his podium. And our national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, routinely plays Aboriginal music like the didgeridoo – treating it as equal to the works of Beethoven and Mozart. The didgeridoo has its place, but I fear this ‘celebration’ of Aboriginal culture often looks patronising.
The same is true of our national sporting strips, like the rugby Wallabies and Olympic team kits, which feature obligatory Aboriginal-style patterns in their otherwise traditional designs. Why? Because it’s expected.
Australia’s wokeness is demonstrated well beyond Indigenous causes.
For one, our elites have fully embraced the trans agenda. And thanks to a Federal Court of Australia ruling, the Tickle v Giggle – a name as absurd as its implications are serious – biological sex is now considered in law to be ‘changeable’, whatever you decide it is on any given day.
In my state of Victoria, as in most others, if a child wants to transition they can be prescribed puberty blockers by a doctor, and their school will treat them as their preferred gender without the need for Mum or Dad to be alerted.
Even Britain’s sobering Cass report, which showed in devastating detail how ‘gender re-affirming’ treatments can do much more harm than good to young people, has not stopped the march of trans and gender-fluid ideology in Australian schools, institutions and even the media.
Drag queens read LGBT stories to children in public libraries. Pre-school children are introduced to woke concepts of gender from age three, and such teaching goes on through their school lives. To query this is to risk being labelled homophobic, transphobic and bigoted. Parents who do, or question other woke shibboleths, can even be banned from teacher-parent meetings, or supervised in them as if they’re social deviants.
Australia is one of the biggest nanny states in the world, utterly tied up in rules and regulations designed to protect us from ourselves. We’re particularly good at banning things: last week, the government, backed by the conservative Liberal opposition, announced that it will ban underage children’s access to social media.
Before that, they put a ban on e-cigarettes and vapes being sold anywhere but in pharmacies.
Well-meaning, maybe, but these bans are unenforceable or have worse consequences: the vape ban has led to a thriving criminal black market.
And who can forget the pandemic? Melbourne was, notoriously, the world’s most locked-down city. With varying degrees of willingness, most of us here submitted to curfews, mask and vaccine mandates, and a harrowing loss of liberty. We meekly carried out the orders of political and medical authority figures, even though they rarely had a clue what they were doing.
When protests did occur, they were ruthlessly suppressed by the police – unless for Black Lives Matter. We might largely have kept back Covid, but the legacy of social damage is irreparable.
Let’s be honest. In the past 20 years, particularly since the conservative John Howard lost office as Prime Minister in 2007, Australia has surrendered to the Left’s culture war, more so even than Britain.
The easygoing Australia of 1970 I remember fondly has long gone. In 2024 Australia, it’s common sense that has gone walkabout.
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22 September, 2024
UK: 80,000 could be forced to leave private schools over Labour's VAT raid
Some 80,000 children could be forced to leave private schools due to Labour’s tax raid on fees, according to a survey of parents.
From January, parents of the UK’s 620,000 private school pupils face a 20 per cent hike when the Government imposes VAT on fees.
While the Government predicts the increase will see between 18,000 and 40,000 children shift from private education into state schools – between 3 and 7 per cent – a report released this week will warn that 13 per cent – more than 80,000 pupils – could leave by January.
The Government claims that it stands to raise £1.5 billion by levying 20 per cent VAT on fees. But the findings in a new Wealth Index Report by financial planners Saltus, based on a survey of 2,000 affluent parents, will pile pressure on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to axe the tax raid.
The bombshell report follows calls from a leading think-tank, the Adam Smith Institute, for the Government to ‘rethink the policy’ because it could end up costing more than it raises in tax, as overwhelmed state schools are forced to find thousands more spaces.
Labour’s sums come from a disputed Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) policy paper which claimed as few as 3 per cent of pupils would leave private schools if VAT was introduced.
Some independent schools – including Eton – have said parents will have to stump up the full 20 per cent rise, but other schools will try to freeze or reduce fees to help families.
Head teachers of private schools across the country say they are already experiencing worrying falls in pupil numbers, while the Government is facing legal challenges on the policy, including from parents of special needs
Christine Cunniffe, the principal of LVS Ascot in Berkshire, had already seen pupils dropping out ahead of this school year, with at least one in ten expected to be gone by January and a fifth by next September.
She said: ‘So far I have received notice for a further 15 pupils going in January, stating the VAT charge is the reason.
‘We are estimating we will lose 20 per cent of our pupils by September 2025, but it could be a lot worse – we just don’t know what we are dealing with. It will not be a positive story for us.’
At Bradford Grammar School, headmaster Simon Hinchliffe said that ‘despite record interest in the school at open days’, there were 10 per cent fewer pupils than last year coming into Year 7.
He added: ‘We have seen a cumulative growth in anxiety about what this Labour Government is going to do to fees.’
Headmaster Nick Pietrek at Stafford Grammar School said: ‘I have heard estimates there could be a 40 per cent decline in school numbers over the next five years – these are not wide of the mark.’
Loveena Tandon, from the Education Not Taxation campaign group, said they were ‘not surprised’ by the figures while claiming the Government had still failed to meet them for talks despite their recent petition with 200,000 signatures calling on Labour to halt its plan.
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This is calculated: Israel ‘looking to take out people who matter’
Israel’s airstrike on a building in southern Beirut didn’t just kill a top Hezbollah commander - it took out an entire class of senior leaders of the militant group’s most elite fighting force, as the two foes lurch closer to all-out war.
Hezbollah on Saturday raised the death toll among its fighters from Friday’s airstrike to 16, including top military commander Ibrahim Aqil and many of the senior commanders of the elite Radwan force. The strike on top leadership followed a pair of broad attacks on the group’s rank and file, when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been rigged with explosives blew up roughly simultaneously across the country.
According to the group’s own death announcements, the week’s attacks accounted for about 10% of the 500 Hezbollah fighters to have been killed since the group started firing rockets across the border shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, said Israel’s string of attacks is aimed at killing the militants who underpin Hezbollah’s ability to fight a war.
“They’re looking to take out people who matter,” he said. “So this is calculated.” The week has taken an enormous toll. Lebanon’s minister of health said Saturday that doctors had performed more than 2,000 surgeries on people injured in the attacks, primarily from the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah members. Friday’s airstrike left 31 dead, including women and children, he said. The total includes the fighters. More than a dozen people were still missing Saturday morning, municipal official Ali al-Haraka said at the blast site.
The attacks have also sharpened the already high levels of concern that Israel and Hezbollah were spiraling toward a wider war. Top U.S. military officials are increasingly worried that Israel could launch a major offensive in Lebanon.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled plans for a trip beginning this weekend to Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon announced Friday that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman would head to the eastern Mediterranean on Monday amid the rising tensions. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group is already in the region.
Many of Washington’s closest Arab allies and partners in the Middle East fear a possible Israeli invasion of Lebanon, according to Arab officials, who said it could trigger unrest across the region and an opportunity for extremist groups to harness that anger and regroup.
Israel has been linked to several strikes on high-profile militants in Beirut. In late July, Israel killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike on a building in a southern neighborhood of the city. Earlier in the year, Saleh al-Arouri, a founding member of Hamas, was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in the same area.
The Radwan force has trained for infiltration operations and gives Hezbollah additional offensive capabilities, making it a major target for Israel.
Nicholas Blanford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, said Aqil was one of the early military founders of Hezbollah with roots in other militant groups allegedly responsible for suicide bombings and attacks dating back four decades. The U.S. has linked him to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut and the kidnapping of Americans in the 1980s.
About 25 years ago, Aqil survived an Israeli helicopter attack on his car as he drove through southern Lebanon. This time, Israel attacked Aqil and the other senior commanders with four blasts, one of which destroyed a neighboring nine-story apartment building while the other three came in at angles and hit the basement where the group was meeting, municipal official al-Haraka said.
Rescuers sift through the rubble at the scene of an Israeli strike that targeted Beirut's southern suburbs, as search and rescue operations continue, Lebanon's Hezbollah said that a second senior commander was among 16 fighters killed in an Israeli air strike on its Beirut stronghold.
Rescuers sift through the rubble at the scene of an Israeli strike that targeted Beirut's southern suburbs, as search and rescue operations continue, Lebanon's Hezbollah said that a second senior commander was among 16 fighters killed in an Israeli air strike on its Beirut stronghold.
The street where the attack occurred is lined with low-rise residential buildings and home to businesses including a money-transfer service, a chicken restaurant, a pharmacy and a barber shop. The area had been cordoned off by Hezbollah and Lebanon’s army, and emergency responders were pulling limbs out of the rubble and repairing downed electrical lines.
Ali Daher, 55, who works in a real-estate office 100 yards away, said he went to the site after hearing a loud blast and found injured people and burned-out motorcycles scattered on the ground. The strike was much bigger than the one that killed Hezbollah commander Shukr over the summer.
“We have grown accustomed,” he said, expecting more attacks. “The fear is gone from me.” Hezbollah is now struggling to recover from a week of heavy blows and plug deep security breaches, while restoring morale and order among its cadres. It also faces the prospect of further strikes as Israel steps up its military pressure and shifts its focus from Gaza to the north.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant warned late Thursday that “the sequence of military actions will continue.”
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New Docs Shed Light on Air Force’s ‘Goal’ to Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks
The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown—at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force—issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.”
Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps officer’s applicant program.
The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retention shortfalls, and low pay.
“The American people are rightly concerned that, at a time when our country is facing dangerous and increasing threats throughout the world, the Air Force is focused on recruitment efforts based on arbitrary racial diversity goals—not merit or increasing the force’s lethality,” James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America requested records regarding the Air Force’s new officer applicant standards through a federal transparency request in 2023. At the time, the Air Force said it couldn’t find any records, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America then sued the Air Force for the records in April 2024 and received hundreds of documents and slides in response, which the Daily Caller News Foundation subsequently obtained.
A spokesperson for the Air Force told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “The FOIA request was being processed at multiple levels within the Air Force.”
“One of the units responded to the FOIA request with a ‘no responsive records’ response after conducting their own local search, while the remainder of the units continued to process the responsive documents that were ultimately provided,” the spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
One of the slides in question, labeled “AFROTC White,” depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023. The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029, denoted by a star with the label “achieve(d) goal.”
“White male population will decline as other demographics increase,” the slide reads.
The respective slides in question also explain that the Air Force is either on track or needs to do more to hit racial and gender quotas in the ROTC’s officer applicant pool.
For example, with the African American population, the slideshow suggests the Air Force “target [the] male population through ongoing programs and marketing” and notes it has already met its “female goal” for ROTC officer applicants. For the American Indian, Asian, and Hispanic applicants, the slideshow says the Air Force is “on track to grow diversity.”
“These documents show us that the Air Force has taken steps toward implementing their new directive of specific racial quotas for officer recruitment and enrollment throughout the branch,” Fitzpatrick told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Included in the slide deck are funding requests for diversity recruiting initiatives, including $500,000 for “diversity advertising campaigns” and $250,000 for “influencer engagements.”
In a separate set of documents from as early as 2022, the Air Force outlines its efforts to modify ROTC scholarship programs, which “play an important role in accession and diversity goals.” The Air Force suggests modifying the scholarship models could remove certain “testing barriers” to entry for underrepresented groups.
The diversity plans extend to the Air Force’s Aim High Flight Academy, an aviation scholarship program for high school, ROTC, and Air Force Academy students, according to the documents. The Air Force notes that the Aim High Flight Academy applicant pool should be made up of a “minimum” of 60% underrepresented groups, further noting that it must be at least 35% minorities.
Like other branches of the military, the Air Force has struggled to keep up with recruiting and retention targets in recent years. The Navy is expected to miss its recruiting goals in 2024; the Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force are on track to meet their goals, although the latter two branches missed their targets in 2022 and 2023, according to Military Times.
Only approximately 57% of servicemembers or military families polled by the Military Family Advisory Network in 2023 said they’d recommend joining the service, compared to 74% in 2019. Among some of the reasons the respondents wouldn’t recommend service were the politically charged nature of the military, differences and divisions, and low pay, among others.
A yearlong study from the Arizona State University Center for American Institutions found that the Pentagon has turned into a “vast DEI bureaucracy” in the last four decades, a challenge that has been exacerbated by the Biden-Harris administration.
“It’s no surprise that young people are turning away from military service in record numbers … DEI indoctrination has become a core component of military training that begins for officers even at the service academies,” Matt Lohmeier, former Space Force commander, said in a statement in June.
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More black on black domestic violence in Australia
It happens all the time but it is only when the woman dies that it comes to attention/i>
A killer who claimed a knife accidentally impaled his girlfriend in the neck had a history of violence against women, including pushing another partner while in her wheelchair into oncoming traffic, the WA Supreme Court has been told.
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find confronting and the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.
Christopher Thomas Dimer has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 20 years for murdering his partner Shauna Lee Rose Headland at a townhouse in the Perth suburb of Nollamara in March 2022.
Ms Headland's mother Janis told the court her daughter's murder had reverberated through the whole family. (Supplied)
Dimer had claimed a knife fell from where it was wedged into a window frame to hold up a curtain and went straight into Ms Headland's neck, telling police he had tried and failed to catch it as it fell.
He was found guilty of murdering Ms Headland in a jury trial earlier this year.
In sentencing, Justice Joseph McGrath, rejected Dimer's explanation of events, finding he instead had picked up the knife and stabbed Ms Headland during an argument which turned violent.
Ms Headland, a Yamatji-Noongar woman, was only 22-years-old when she and Dimer, now 42, began dating.
The court heard she had previously suffered domestic violence at his hands, including one instance where he drank a bottle of whisky and punched her repeatedly in the face at a Perth train station in 2020.
Dimer's history of violence against women
It was revealed in the WA Supreme Court today that Dimer had a more extensive history of violence against two other former partners, including an attack on another woman in 2020 and an instance in 2015 when he pushed his then partner into oncoming traffic while she was in her wheelchair.
He then claimed that woman had made the allegation up but ultimately pleaded guilty.
Dimer was sentenced in the WA Supreme Court on Friday after being found guilty of murder earlier this year. (ABC News: David Weber)
Ms Headland's mother and brother gave victim impact statements to the court describing the loss of Ms Headland as devastating and heartbreaking, saying loss had reverberated through their whole family.
Shauna's mother, Janis Headland, told the court since her daughter was killed she suffered from anxiety attacks, at times breaking down crying as she described her love for her daughter.
"If you had known my big girl, loving, caring, kind, put everyone before herself," Mrs Headland said.
"My baby deserved everything. She was only 26, she was only a baby, still growing up.
"She didn't have the chance to be a mother, see the world, have a career."
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19 September, 2024
Israel’s message to terrorists is simple: ‘Just stop attacking us’
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah via exploding pagers and now walkie talkies are one of the most extraordinary, if not deadly, feats of arms in the modern Middle East.
The technical proficiency, and what it says about how deeply Israeli intelligence has penetrated both Hezbollah and Iran, are powerful dynamics in their own right.
But first, at the conventional level, the attack serves several straightforward purposes.
It significantly disrupts Hezbollah. A few of its operatives are dead, but thousands of Hezbollah’s key personnel are injured in a way which means they won’t be taking part in military operations for a long time, or perhaps ever.
It also forces Hezbollah to create a new communications system for its internal use. It had moved away from mobile phones because Israel’s hi-tech capabilities meant it was able to spot and follow every senior Hezbollah leader who used a phone, as well as intercepting many of the communications on those phones, whether text, voice or email.
Most people would hardly be aware that pagers still exit. They’re a relic of a bygone age.
Former CIA Middle East official Norman Roule how the loss of Hezbollah's pager network has affected the group's ability to communicate covertly.
Hezbollah has been the best organised of the terrorist groups and its internal communications are an important part of that. They will be severely disrupted now for some time.
Secondly, Israel is once again sending a message of deterrence and making deterrence a reality.
Every group in the Middle East now, from Hezbollah to Iran and all their allies, knows that Israel will reach out and hurt any entity that attacks Israelis.
The lesson is simple: the best way to avoid such harms is by not attacking Israel.
The move also reinforces the mystique of Israeli intelligence, which has been itself a significant factor in Middle East politics for decades.
Then there is the perplexing question of timing. Why did Israel do this now? Israel’s war cabinet recently added to its war aims the objective of moving back the more than 60,000 evacuated Israelis who normally live in northern towns and villages of Israel near the Lebanese border.
They have been evacuated since Hezbollah began its accelerated program of rocket attacks on Israel, following the Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7 last year.
Israel has now made it clear that it won’t tolerate the indefinite rocket attacks on its northern territory.
This particular attack, via the pagers, may also be designed as a way to encourage other Lebanese to put pressure on Hezbollah to pull back. A big war between Israel and Hezbollah would be damaging for everyone. It would be utterly devastating for Lebanon, an extremely fragile economy these days, most of whose people have no truck with Hezbollah. But the Lebanese government is completely unable to control Hezbollah.
One central question, then, is this: do the device attacks signal that Israel is about to take much more decisive action against Hezbollah to push its effective operations further back from the border, or is it a complete episode in itself, designed to have specific operational and political consequences?
The attacks would seem to combine both technical intelligence and human intelligence on Israel’s part.
That Israel was able to assassinate the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was a guest of Iran in Tehran, and did so using Iranian agents, similarly demonstrated both technical competence and deep human penetration of internal Iranian security procedures and decision making.
The same is true of this latest operation in relation to Hezbollah.
The Israelis not only pulled off the frankly astonishing trick of somehow getting access to these pagers before Hezbollah did, and inserting triggered explosives into them, it also plainly knew a great deal about what Hezbollah was doing, when and where.
These explosions were co-ordinated from southern Lebanon to Beirut to Damascus.
Penetrating mobile phone networks has been at the core of Western counterterrorist success. This has certainly been true of the Australian Federal Police and has been the heart of the effective technical assistance Canberra has given to Indonesia over many years now in its battle against terrorists.
The terrorists are aware of this and have many ways of responding, including by going to lower-tech communications systems such as pagers. But the Israelis may well have been able to penetrate even the radio frequencies that pagers use.
Pen and paper are still the safest and most secure form of communications for terrorists, but resort to such methods slows terrorists down greatly.
Hezbollah has vowed to respond. The better response, and one their countrymen would dearly wish for, would be to stop attacking Israel so that Israelis and Lebanese alike can live normally and in peace.
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The SHOCKING Story of Thomas Roberts
In the early hours of March 12, 2022, Thomas Roberts, a 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine, was stabbed twice in the chest. One incursion sliced through his heart and he was soon dead.
The man who murdered him in cold blood was Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai —an Afghan asylum seeker who had illegally entered Britain a few years earlier.
Thomas Roberts will never fulfil his dream to serve his nation. He will never grow up to start a family, or drink another pint with his friends. He will never see his parents again, or laugh, or cry, or love.
And while the blame for the tragedy of Thomas Roberts’ murder lies with Abdulrahimzai, he is not the only person with blood on his hands.
Why do I want to write about this case? Because at every stage the British state and the elite class, through their policy of open borders and a series of truly shocking failures, let Thomas Roberts and his family down. And somebody needs to call this out.
This week, Rachael Griffin, a coroner in Dorset ruled that a full inquest into the circumstances surrounding Roberts’s death was not required, thereby sparing the Home Office from proper scrutiny.
While Griffin admitted there had been “individual errors” from the State, she said, quite unbelievably, they “do not amount to a systemic failure”.
If the following series of events is not systemic failure, then I do not know what is.
This is the appalling story of how Thomas Roberts’ attacker, who had already murdered two people in Europe, gained entry to Britain, and how the authorities failed at every stage to do their basic duty: to protect the British people.
The first failure of the British state occurred on Boxing Day in 2019, when Abdulrahimzai smuggled himself in a vehicle on a ferry from Cherbourg.
As soon as Abdulrahimzai entered Britain illegally he should have been detained and deported.
Instead, he told Home Office officials he was a 14-year-old from Afghanistan and they simply believed him.
No age assessment was carried out, and the authorities sent Abdulrahimzai to a secondary school in Dorset.
But who is Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai?
If the state had been more curious as to who they were sending to study alongside Year 9 pupils, they would have found out that Abdulrahimzai was not 14, but 19.
A few weeks after his entry into Britain his fingerprints were taken, and it was discovered he had links to Norway and Italy, but no further inquiries were made.
If they had been, the Home Office would have found out that he was lying about his age, and if the British state had really been thorough they would have found out something even more damning: Abdulrahimzai had already murdered two people just eighteen months before.
At the end of July 2018, the illegal migrant teenager shot two Afghan men where a group of refugees and migrants were staying in a shed in Serbia.
But it was too late, and the brutal murderer was now sitting alongside young English teenagers studying for their GCSEs.
Abdulrahimzai was also given foster care, and in January 2020 his foster parent reported that a dentist had raised concerns that the migrant was lying about his age, but the Home Office still did not do an age assessment.
Abdulrahimzai was kicked out of his first school within months of his arrival in December 2020 after various concerns were raised that he was carrying knives.
It was even alleged that he had chased a student with a knife, which he denied.
A few months before Abdulrahimzai murdered Roberts he would post images of himself on TikTok with ten-inch blade knives, which he said he uploaded to gain followers.
At his second school in Dorset he assaulted another pupil, resulting in injury.
At around the same time the illegal migrant assaulted his foster mother, who had unwittingly volunteered to host a murderer in her house.
The foster mother said that Abdulrahimzai was spoken to by the police while he was in her care for carrying knives, which she says he believed he could carry to defend himself.
Then in January 2022, the British state finally began to act.
It was decided an age assessment would be carried out, two years after the Afghan had smuggled himself into the country.
The decision had been made because Abdulrahimzai was refusing to attend school and was bringing women back to his accommodation.
The last chance the British state had to save Roberts from his murder occurred on 10 March 2022, less than two days before the stabbing.
The police received a call about Abdulrahimzai carrying a machete, but they failed to take further action after they were unable to gain access to his residence as the front gate was locked.
By now it was 12 March and Roberts’ fate was sealed. After a drunken night out Roberts’s friend decided to take an e-scooter home, which angered Abdulrahimzai who got into an argument with Roberts. Within 30 seconds the young aspiring marine was dead.
It was only after his death, and Abdulrahimzai’s third murder, that the Afghan’s fingerprints were shared with Interpol, which revealed in September 2022 that he was on the run from a double homicide in Serbia.
A young Brit was murdered, several school children were terrorised, and an innocent foster mother who was trying her best to help a man she believed was a child whose parents had been killed by the Taliban was assaulted. All because the British state failed to keep them safe.
The words of Roberts’ family are equally devastating as they are concerning.
Peter Wallace, his step-father, said: “There were so many warning signs that he should not be here yet the Home Office did nothing about it.”
“We will never be able to bring Tommy back but they still let in thousands of people without proper checks and this will keep happening.”
Meanwhile Roberts’ mother, Dolores, slammed the Border Force, the Home Office, Dorset Police and Bournemouth Council for failing her son.
“Everything is wrong in this country and it will continue to happen again,” she said.
The immigration debate can sometimes seem abstract. Discussions can focus on macroeconomic data around GDP, or vague notions of “cultural enhancement”.
London liberals like Sadiq Khan laud the Notting Hill Carnival as a great example of how immigration has benefited Britain while downplaying the two murders that resulted from the festival, a series of stabbings and injured police officers.
However, mass migration, both legal and illegal, is not an abstract issue. It has real world consequences. It directly led to the murder of not just Thomas Roberts, but countless others who have been killed by immigrants, both legal and illegal.
And it led to the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of young white English girls, which yet another court case in Rotherham this week, which saw many Muslim men sentenced after abusing two young girls, once again underlines.
Consistently, what evidence we have from places like Germany, Sweden, and Denmark shows that illegal and legal migrants are disproportionately more likely to commit these kinds of hideous crimes.
In the UK, however, the establishment and the state simply refuse to collect or even publish what little data they have on crime by nationality and immigration status, so we don’t really know what is going on in the country.
As I wrote last week, the elite class blame the masses for “misinformation” while consistently refusing to make this basic information available to them. If the elite class is confident that this radical political experiment is not putting many British people at disproportionate risk then why don’t they just release the data?
For all of the “cultural enrichment” we supposedly gain from having access to more foreign restaurants and diversity festivals, it is young innocent English men like Thomas Roberts who end up being sacrificed on the altar of liberal progressivism.
I don’t think anybody who is part of this Substack community would have a problem with a small amount of legal immigration that is properly controlled and contributes to our national economy and society —myself included.
But I do think all of us share a deep unease and instinctive opposition to the kind of mass, illegal and uncontrolled immigration that is now flowing through Western states, ushering in outsiders who have completely different values, ways of life, and attitudes and who often seem to hate who we are.
Any serious government, any serious and decent society which cares for its citizens, would have launched a full scale public inquiry into the death of Thomas Roberts.
The name of Thomas Roberts would be known just as widely as the names George Floyd and Stephen Lawrence.
But it is not, hence why I am writing about Thomas Roberts with no paywall. I want people to know about this case. And I want you to tell others about this case.
Because the blunt reality is that Thomas Roberts is an inconvenience for the British establishment, who will not be held accountable for their part in allowing his murderer to enter the country.
I hope there will be no other cases like Thomas Roberts’. But the fact of the matter is that since 2018 more than 135,000 illegal migrants have entered Britain to join some 1.2 million who are already in the country, many of whom we know nothing about.
Mass migration is not inevitable, but I fear another case like Thomas Roberts’ is.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-shocking-story-of-thomas-roberts ?
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100 dignitaries sign open letter condemning Brazil
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADL) have launched an open letter, condemning Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes’ attacks on X.
More than 100 professionals in the fields of journalism, theology, medicine, politics, and government have ‘urged’ Brazil’s government to an end their assault on free speech via ‘judicial overreach’.
Megan Basham, Seth Dillon, Riley Gaines, Wayne Grudem, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, were among the line-up of dignitaries taking point on the issue.
Also listed are Ezra Levant, Albert Mohler, Jnr., Samuel Sey, Michael Shellenberger, Liz Truss, and Tammy Peterson.
Requesting Brazil’s far-left government repeal its regressive lockout of the social media company, the open letter called for the restoration of ‘the free flow of information’.
This included a call to ‘respect the rights of its citizens to express their views without fear of retribution’.
Condemning Alexandre de Moraes’ late August ban, ADL said:
‘We, the undersigned, condemn the recent attack on free speech in Brazil.’
The letter then described the shutdown of X as ‘a dangerous escalation in the troubling global trend censoring speech’.
Singling out government retribution for any Brazilian not complying with the virtual lockdown, the ADL added:
‘On 30 August, the judge ordered the immediate nationwide blocking of X and threatened fines of around $9,000 USD per day for anyone using a VPN to access the platform.’
This, the group of 100 agreed, was an illegal act.
This alleged judicial overreach, they explained, ‘…punishes, both the platform and its users, stifling free discourse, and violating Brazil’s own constitution, which prohibits ‘[a]ny and all censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature.’
‘The decision also violates international agreements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.’
ADL’s open letter also warned about the dangers of gagging freedom of speech for political convenience, stating:
‘This situation extends far beyond Brazil, serving as a striking example of a growing trend of censorship by government officials, who are becoming increasingly aggressive in suppressing speech they find objectionable.
‘If this censorship in Brazil is allowed to persist, it could set a dangerous precedent that quickly spreads.’
ADL’s protest also targeted the largely left-wing push to control the flow of information by letting bureaucrats decide who gets to speak, what they get to speak about, and when they get to say it.
Indirectly referring to the Australian government, ADL’s Open Letter On the Free Speech Crisis in Brazil, explained:
‘Recently, other world leaders have expressed pro-censorship sentiments, and there is no quicker path to the demise of democracy than the erosion of free speech.
‘Freedom of expression is not negotiable, nor is it a privilege – it is the cornerstone of every democratic society.
‘We must,’ the group concluded,’ defend it whenever it is under threat, whether in Brazil or anywhere else in the world.’
ADL’s concerns are justified.
Regimes in Russia, Iran, and China – Brazil’s key partners in the economic alliance known as BRICS – have bans in place, stopping ordinary citizens from using X.
Egypt, another BRICS member, banned the platform in 2011 for political reasons. Uzbekistan did the same in 2021.
Both of these countries banned X during, close to, or after elections.
They are an example of politicians banning free speech platforms because those democratic platforms are a threat to those who want to stay in, or take, power.
There is a growing concern that factual events may be censored for political reasons by governments.
Additionally, if the tone of the last week is indicative of what the Australian government’s regime socialists have planned, X could be banned here too.
Elon Musk slammed Albanese’s revised, draconian ‘misinformation and disinformation’ bill as ‘fascist’.
The X boss took issue with Labor legislating fines of up to ‘5 per cent of its revenue’ for any social media company failing to fall in, salute, and goose-step in unison with Labor’s ‘can say this, can’t say that’ thought police.
Aided by Australia’s legacy media, who considered the one-word response juvenile, Albanese fired back, saying, ‘Musk has a social responsibility.’
Not overlooking Albanese’s own salute to the collective hive mind, instead of retreat, Musk doubled down, stating:
‘Far left fascists love censorship.’
Like Brazil, if socialists running the Australian government want Musk shut down they will create a law to do so.
As ADL have reminded us, in this sense the fight for freedom of speech isn’t even close to being won, it’s only just beginning.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/100-dignitaries-sign-open-letter-condemning-brazil/
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Don’t Jail Parents for School Shootings. Arm Teachers
Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people Sept. 5 at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt, and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas.
But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This isn’t the first time that parents have been held liable for their children’s actions.
Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.
The problem here is that there are a lot of mistakes to go around, and all too frequently, many fail to identify these murderers before they commit their crimes. As I will discuss later, the question is, what policies do you put in place when you know that we won’t identify these killers before they strike?
Georgia police interviewed the boy in May 2023 after he used the Discord communication platform to threaten to shoot up a school. Making a threat to murder people is a crime. But police concluded they didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest. The boy claimed he had stopped using the platform months earlier and “promised I would never say something [like that].”
Because the police couldn’t directly tie the boy to the messages, the bodycam footage of the interview reveals an officer saying: “I gotta take you at your word.” But why he says that is a mystery. The police knew the IP (internet protocol) address of the home where someone made the posts, which is how they found the boy.
And although the boy and his father had recently moved from there, all the police needed to know was the posts’ dates to see if the boy lived in the house at the time.
The officers didn’t even need the level of proof required in a criminal case. If a judge finds that someone is a danger to himself or others, there is a range of options, including outpatient mental health care. Gun confiscation or involuntary commitment may also be options.
If law enforcement officers took the Georgia boy at his word, how can we blame the father for doing the same?
If anything, the boy’s mother should be commended. Thirty minutes before the attack, she called her son’s school to warn of an “impending disaster.”
“I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him,” the mother said in a screenshot of the message that she sent to the boy’s aunt.
But the high school didn’t act. Isn’t the school mainly at fault for that?
Red flags are always easier to notice in hindsight. Indeed, since 1998, 51% of mass public shooters were seeing mental health professionals before their attacks. But none of the mental health professionals ever identified these murderers as a danger to themselves or others.
In many cases, people had raised concerns about these killers before they carried out their attacks, but the professionals never recognized the threat. If experts miss the danger signs, how can we blame a parent for not seeing them?
Should the families lock up their guns so only adults have access? Not surprisingly, crime rates rise when governments prevent people from defending themselves. When people are required to lock up their guns, criminals more frequently invade people’s homes and then are more successful in murdering or otherwise harming their victims.
If locking up guns could have prevented all five of the mass shootings committed by minors since 2000, including this latest shooting, there would have been 25 fewer deaths and 19 fewer people wounded. Of course, these killers may very well have obtained weapons in other ways.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that all those attacks simply would not have occurred. The number of lives saved would still be only about one-fourteenth of the number of lives lost in just a single year because mandatory locks kept people from getting to their guns in time.
The horrific deaths and injuries from school shootings rightly get a lot of attention. But we don’t hear about the deaths that occur because people can’t readily access guns to protect themselves and their families. Those deaths are no less horrific.
The national media rarely mention defensive gun uses, even when young children use guns to save lives. But dozens of recent cases have been reported by local news outlets.
>>> Related: Defensive Gun Use Shows Second Amendment Remains Necessary, Even After Tragedies
Fortunately, there was a security officer at the school, though Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presidential nominee, has argued for banning all guns from schools, even for law enforcement.
But even when school resource officers are in the right place at the right time, they have a tough job. Uniformed guards may as well be holding neon signs saying, “Shoot me first.” Attackers know that once they kill the security officer, who is the only person with a gun, no one else can stop them.
Having armed teachers carrying concealed firearms takes away that tactical advantage.
Twenty states allow this under a variety of rules. Outside of suicides or gang violence in the middle of the night, there has not been one instance of a death or injury from an attack at a school that has armed teachers.
Not surprisingly, the attacks in Georgia and Michigan both occurred in schools that banned teachers and staff from having guns. Other schools in Georgia have armed teachers, but not Apalachee High School.
We could blame law enforcement, schools, mental health experts and the parents. But, politically, it seems to be easier to blame the parents instead of the “experts.” The bottom line is that if we keep failing to identify these murderers, what is the backup plan? Let’s take real action to protect our schools and arm teachers.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/17/dont-jail-parents-for-school-shootings-arm-teachers/
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18 September, 2024
The rise of the Keffiyeh Karen
When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps also in the middle-aged part. In short, the Karen was a racist, sexist, ageist construct, and as a middle-aged white woman myself, who makes her dissatisfaction known from time to time, I felt extra defensive.
But if that original Karen caricatured the wrong person, then there are some modern female types that deserve closer scrutiny. There is the person I like to call the Keffiyeh Karen — the female student with a bare midriff and her head wrapped in the black or red and white patterning of Palestinian liberation, yelling anti-Zionist slogans with manic passion on elite college campus quadrangles and lawns.
The Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl
In her ready and confident fury, her rudeness, her iron-fisted appetite for confrontation over infractions of what she deems political and moral gospel, the Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl. These Mean Girls have graduated from running the schoolyard to terrorizing the workplace. If there is one type to be afraid of in modern offices, it isn’t the lech or the shouty, hungover male middle manager. It’s the twenty-three-year-old gluten-free vegan graduate, wet behind the ears. We know what these misanthropic misses are capable of — we’ve seen the Phoebes and Annas of Just Stop Oil chuck soup on Van Gogh.
Several good friends of mine who work in corporate settings have told me tales to chill the blood — women in their early twenties conducting bullying campaigns, being proudly insubordinate to their bosses. They never face consequences.
I’ve noticed their boldly aggressive style myself in the astonishingly disrespectful tones in which they harangue those they disagree with on social media. At recent talks I’ve given, the only rude, confrontational questions I’ve fielded have come from a nose-ringed, tattooed, bespectacled Mean Girl.
This uptick in righteous aggression appears to have two main causes. One is #MeToo, which did sterling work in illuminating the sheer scale of predatory sexual behavior facing women. But in setting up a “guilty because I say so” system, turning Twitter into an open-air arena in which slander and accusation took on rapid real-life consequences and gave the accuser instant power and fame, #MeToo armed young women with new and magnificent powers to accuse and destroy.
The other cause is the massive shift leftwards of young women. Forty percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-nine identify as “liberal” (which often means anything but) — opening a sizable gap with men of the same age, according to Gallup data. That gap is five times larger than it was in 2000. It’s not that right-wing ladies can’t be aggressive — see Ann Coulter, Katie Hopkins, Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen. But there is something particularly humorless and stern about the self-styled progressive Lefty Lass — nothing is ever proper enough for her, or miserable enough, or righteous enough. Even when racism and transphobia have been stamped out in her sight, and microaggressions and misgendering slips of the tongue properly punished, she’ll mock you for forgetting for even a moment that the world is ending because of your climate profligacy. The revolution must come. Net zero needs to be achieved yesterday.
If the majority of these youthful political vigilantes are young women, is it any wonder that they not only act like they run the show, but actually run it? After all, the terror of being caught committing a microaggression, an act of trans hate, racism, fatphobia or god forbid sexual indiscretion makes plenty of decent people, higher up the professional pecking order or not, quake and submit.
Which is how these Miserable Misses took over, spreading their Mean Girl power, and making life unpleasant for workers or students trying to go about their business. It takes an old-school Karen to spot them at work, and an old-school Karen to stand up to them.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-rise-of-the-keffiyeh-karen/
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Is Thierry Breton’s resignation a win for Elon Musk?
Described as ‘France’s powerful European Commissioner’, the EU bureaucrat who lectured Elon Musk about online censorship has resigned suddenly.
Thierry Breton ironically posted the notice on X.
‘…in light of these latest developments – further testimony to questionable governance – I have to conclude that I can no longer exercise my duties in the College.’
They are not memorable words likely to creep into a Hollywood script.
According to reports, his departure relates to a disagreement with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
Despite serving as the EU internal market chief, Breton has been critical of the new President.
Breton’s name was put forward by French President Macron for the new EU team, but it seems Ursula von der Leyen wasn’t keen on the idea and asked for France to rethink their submission.
‘…you asked France to withdraw my name…’ Breton wrote in his letter.
Breton served between 2019-24 during which time he oversaw the single market, ‘led the green and digital transition’, ensured ‘climate neutrality by 2050’, enhanced Europe’s ‘digital sovereignty’, led the ‘Digital Services Act’, strengthened EU tools to ‘counter disinformation and fake information online while preserving freedom of expression, freedom of press, and media pluralism’, and implemented the ‘European Defence Fund’ and ‘Action Plan on Military Mobility’ – among other things.
Keep in mind that he has been one of the most influential people in Brussels and a household name in the debate over free speech on digital platforms such as Facebook and X.
Time even put him on their top 100 people working in the field of AI.
His loss is likely to be social media’s gain, with many wondering if this is a sign that attitudes toward digital platforms like X might be changing.
In July, this publication covered the online antagonism between Elon Musk and Thierry Breton.
Musk made headlines when he accused the European Commission of offering X a ‘secret deal’ regarding censorship (denied by the Commission). He then referred to the EU’s Digital Services Act as ‘misinformation’.
This disagreement has been brewing for a long time and before either man entered the scene.
The EU, among other bureaucracies and government entities, has been rapidly losing control of political communication with the rise of citizen journalism and unbound speech on a range of social media platforms. This has replaced the more tightly controlled mainstream media outlets in radio, television, and print.
Not only has social media elevated billions of voices, empowering them to speak directly to their elected officials, it has seen the largest and fastest rise of citizen journalism in history. These are skilled individuals working outside of the ideological umbrella provided by news organisations meaning that governments cannot coerce or silence these individuals by doing deals with their editors. They do not have editors. For those entities that value order and control, this is an unmitigated nightmare.
Silicon Valley was, for a time, softly controlled by the personal left-leanings of its various owners until Elon Musk bought Twitter and broke ideological ranks. At this point, the veil of subtle control shifted to rapid legislative controls which are ongoing to this day.
In the case of Thierry Breton, there was a very public disagreement about X’s use of ‘blue checkmarks’.
In response, Musk wrote: ‘We look forward to the very public battle in court, so that the people of Europe can know the truth.’
Breton replied, ‘Be our guest, Elon Musk.’
It is more likely that the European Commissioner will be remembered for the (above) letter sent to Elon Musk regarding the live broadcast of Donald Trump’s interview.
His letter is worth remembering as it effectively documented the EU having an opinion about the free and live transmission of US politics. The world now waits to see what the next governance of the EU will look like and which way it decides to lean
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/is-thierry-bretons-resignation-a-win-for-elon-musk/
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Pope Francis and the ‘lesser evil’: abortion over borders?
At least the cat-eating memes made sense. Over the weekend, American politics has taken a bizarre turn with Pope Francis weighing in on his flight back to Rome, implying that Kamala Harris is the ‘lesser evil’ of the presidential race – apparently snubbing the ‘man saved by God’.
Clarifying that both candidates are ‘anti-life’, the Pope hinted that America’s 72 million Catholics might want to vote for the lesser evil between a baby killer and an anti-migrant sinner without naming either party.
Yes, this is how the choice is being phrased and yes, the Pope has indicated a preference for abortion over borders.
The Pope has previously described those who build walls to stop illegal migration as ‘not Christian’ and committing a ‘grave sin’. These remarks surfaced while the Pope was discussing Trump’s famous (and celebrated) attempt to secure the southern border.
‘Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies,’ said Pope Francis.
‘Not voting is ugly. It is not good. You must vote. You must choose the lesser evil. Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don’t know. Everyone, in conscience, think and do this.’
Catholics online have flocked to social media, calling the Pope’s comments a ‘gross false equivalence’ that compares ending the life of a child to enforcing a nation’s borders.
At roughly 21 per cent of the population, American Catholics should be a powerful voting bloc. If they followed the letter of the Faith, the majority would fall into the Republican camp and make them difficult to beat. Except, Catholics remain a difficult cohort to court.
Described as the ‘most maddening electoral group in American politics’ by Notre Dame political scientist David Leege – American Catholics are about as politically predictable as a herd of cats.
Ideologically, they are undisciplined and motivated more strongly by cultural and economic forces than by what their Faith has to say about policy. Detailed studies show Catholics change their vote as they move up the economic ladder and enter new social circles – shifting from conservative to progressive. Race also serves as a larger indicator for voting preference, with Black and Hispanic Catholics leaning left and White Catholics preferring Republican candidates. However, all Catholics have demonstrated a willingness to shift their vote on matters of the economy and broader cultural prosperity.
While plenty of American Catholics are planning to vote for the Democrats, it is difficult to find anything within the Kamala Harris platform that appeals to the stated values of the Catholic church.
Celebration of radical abortion policies, extreme LGBTQ+ agendas, and communist-style social programs may explain why the Pope has instead focused on the re-worked ‘saviour’ complex of green politics and migration. Here the Catholic church can pretend it is using its power and influence to ‘rescue the world’s poor’ from the evils of modernity. In this, it provides a spiritual sanctuary for the university lectures of capitalist sin and race guilt preached in every corner of the nation.
Green politics gives Catholic leaders a clear divide between the Republican and Democrat policy platforms without outright contradicting crucial pieces of the Faith.
Still, it is interesting to note that when polls in America are conducted on Catholics, they found respondents stubbornly split. On abortion, for instance, a 2013 combined poll showed that around 52 per cent of white Catholics believed it should be ‘legal in most cases’ compared to 43 per cent of Hispanics. It is a similar story on birth control which is opposed by Rome but supported by three-quarters of American Catholics.
The Catholic faith is growing, as are other religions, as uncertainty and fear increases. The globe is getting more religious, not less, and there is a particular interest from the youth in ultra-conservative and orthodox versions of faith.
Western politics has recently become the plaything of religious influence, with Islam making significant gains in the recent UK elections – fielding candidates in majority Labour areas and winning them on foreign interests rather than domestic concerns.
Even so, some of the more cynical among us may wonder if the Pope’s comments are more about aligning the Church with a new base of Democrat followers rather than providing spiritual guidance for the most powerful nation on Earth. The Pope has very little influence over the presidential race, but he does have an opportunity to use the election to grow the flock. On that, we can only speculate.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/pope-francis-and-the-lesser-evil-abortion-over-borders/
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Australia: Indigenous jury plan an insult to justice
If you’re waiting for sensible analysis from law societies and bar associations about recent suggestions that Indigenous defendants should be heard by a jury that includes some – and possibly half – Indigenous members, take a seat in a very crowded waiting room.
Or read on, and we’ll do it. In a speech late last month former Queensland Supreme Court judge Roslyn Atkinson echoed findings of a 2023 report by the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration to overhaul who sits on juries.
It’s sensible to encourage more Indigenous people to sit on juries. In fact, we ought to find better ways to encourage all Australians to do so, because currently it’s easier to find someone who has escaped jury duty than someone who has taken on that onerous civic responsibility, often at great cost to themselves.
What’s not sensible is Atkinson’s implied endorsement of AIJA’s suggestion that jury selection be altered to “affirmatively include First Nations jurors”. AIJA researchers focus on a model called “juries de meditate linguae” – where a minority defendant is granted the right to be tried by a jury comprising half of people from that same minority. The report notes that this model originally entitled Jews in medieval England to special mixed juries, made up of half Jews and half Gentiles.
While justice in the United Kingdom has progressed from this Middle Ages model of special rights for certain minorities, these legal researchers under the auspices of senior Australian judges want to go backwards.
They draw comparisons with how women were once excluded from juries, so why not advance the jury system some more by including Indigenous people? Hold on a second while I find my trucker’s licence to drive through the hole in this argument.
It was, of course, wrong to deny women – and Indigenous people – the right to be jurors. But we don’t currently exclude Indigenous people from sitting on juries. Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, encouraging universal participation on juries and, on the other hand, mandating quotas for one group, in this case Indigenous people.
The suggestion that justice won’t be done, or be seen to be done, for an Indigenous defendant unless a jury includes some (unspecified) number of Indigenous jurors is impractical and offensive.
Impractical because it may be hard or even impossible to ensure the right number of people with the right racial characteristics are available for every single trial at every single venue, or even most of them.
Offensive because it suggests that a jury without the correct racial makeup won’t make the right decision. In other words, the real gripe with the current model is with the decisions by current juries.
If AIJA has the imprimatur of the nation’s judges, we should be very concerned. The output from this body reads like a Greens manifesto. Last year AIJA proposed juryless trials for sex offences – presumably to increase convictions. Its suggestion that we mandate Indigenous jury members for Indigenous defendants appears to come from a place of wanting fewer convictions.
If so, where are the empirical studies linking correctness of jury decisions with the racial makeup of jury members? That would be important news. Without rigorous evidence in support, AIJA’s attack on the current jury system is misguided, or worse.
There is a significant risk that even proposing these changes will encourage Indigenous defendants, who include violent men who maim and kill Indigenous women, to regard themselves, without any evidence, as victims of an oppressive justice system because the makeup of the jury didn’t match their race.
Uncovering other flaws is child’s play. Does this new jury structure imply some test of racial purity? If so, what percentage of Indigenous blood is enough to be fair to an Indigenous defendant?
At a wider level, the proposal to mandate racially composed juries is an example of the now ubiquitous – and completely bogus – notion that people of one background won’t sufficiently understand or treat fairly people from different backgrounds. This proposal is little more than a form of special pleading for your favourite minority.
Given that nobody can sensibly suggest a jury can reflect all groups in line with their percentage in society, some selection is required. How is that to be done? And for whom? If we ensure that groups A and B are included to reflect their numbers in society, or something close to it, but not groups C, D, E through to Z, is that an admission that only groups A and B will be fairly treated?
Should a jury be stacked to represent racial groups, women, and the indigent – but not the disabled, the sick or the neurologically diverse? Who chooses? Should some groups not be represented, and if so, why?
Indeed, the one attribute ignored by the legal activists behind the “representation theory” is good old-fashioned merit. Otherwise known as good judgment and sound intellect. Perhaps fans of representation theory think people in this group have been so historically overrepresented they need to be culled from juries.
Representation theory is a variant of two modern fads – critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion. Both emanate from the US and while openly contested in that country, we in Australia have been woefully slow to ask even basic questions.
Critical race theory holds that every aspect of society can only be understood through the lens of race, and more particularly racial oppression. Ergo we must reshape society from top to bottom to eliminate that oppression in ways demanded by the victims because who are the oppressors to judge their demands. This theory pollutes modern discourse to the point where so called “colour-blindness” – the notion we treat people according to their inherent merits rather than their race – is regarded as itself oppressive.
CRT wilts under the most cursory analysis because victim and oppressor labels don’t fit neatly to blacks or whites, respectively. Human nature is more nuanced than that, and laws and policies that ignore this glorious complexity do a disservice to all people, regardless of skin colour.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is also in retreat across America – on university campuses and within corporations. The US Supreme Court delivered the official rebuke in a 2023 judgment, informing the DEI-rich university sector that affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina breached the US constitution. The asserted rationales for discrimination by these universities – “training future leaders in the public and private sectors” and “producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks” – sounded lovely. But the court found they were not “sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny”.
In other words, bah humbug to a DEI policy that is divisive and easily debunked by common sense. Mandating certain numbers of Indigenous people on a jury falls into the same category.
While most Australians said no at last year’s voice referendum to special legal rights for some groups, some legal elites just won’t give up.
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17 September, 2024
The Roots of American Prosperity
Do native-born Americans have higher household incomes than naturalized citizens? It is a simple question the Census Bureau answered this week. The answer? No.
Do native-born Americans have higher household incomes than noncitizens? Yes.
In fact, when it comes to ranking household incomes by the nativity of the householder, according to the Census Bureau, households headed by naturalized citizens are at the top and those headed by noncitizens are at the bottom.
“Foreign-born householders can be classified into two categories: those who are naturalized U.S. citizens and those who are not U.S. citizens,” says the Census Bureau’s newly released report on income in the United States in 2023.
“Households maintained by naturalized citizens ($86,060) had the highest median incomes in 2023, followed by native-born individuals ($81,700),” the report says.
“Households maintained by noncitizens had the lowest median household income ($61,440),” it says.
The Census Bureau report also indicates that by 2023 the household income of Americans had recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic that struck the nation in 2020.
“Median household income was $80,610 in 2023, 4% higher than the 2022 estimate of $77,540,” says the report. “This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The 2023 median household income is not statistically different from the 2019 median household income of $81,210. Household income in 2019 was the highest since 1967, the highest ever recorded in this report.”
In fact, the historical data in the Census Bureau’s report shows that the median household income in the U.S. increased significantly in the years leading up to the pandemic. In 2016, the median household income was $73,520 in constant 2023 dollars. By 2019, that had grown by approximately 10.5% to $81,210.
In 2016, according to the report, 36.4% of American households had incomes that were $100,000 or greater. By 2019, that percentage had risen to 41.1%. By 2022, it had dropped to 38.9%. But in 2023, it rose again to 40.9%.
As this column has noted before, the Census Bureau’s annual income data demonstrates that certain characteristics correlate with higher household incomes—and with lower household incomes.
Maintaining a traditional family structure matters. Among married-couple families in the U.S., the median household income was $119,400 in 2023. When the family household was headed by a man without a spouse, the median income was $81,890. When it was headed by a woman without a spouse, the median income was $59,470.
Male householders without a family had a median income of $57,200. Female householders without a family had a median income of $42,140.
In other words, the median household income of a married-couple family ($119,400) in 2023 was more than twice the median income of nonfamily households headed by a man ($57,200) or woman ($42,140).
Earning a diploma also continued to matter in America.
“Householders with more education had higher income,” the Census Bureau says. “In 2023, households maintained by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree had the highest median income ($126,800), followed by those with some college ($73,610) and those with a high school diploma ($55,810).”
“Householders aged 25 and over with no high school diploma had the lowest median household income ($36,620),” says the report.
Thus, the median annual income of a householder who had earned a college degree or higher ($126,800) was more than twice as much as the median income of someone who had only earned a high school degree ($55,810).
In fact, the $70,990 difference between the median household income of someone who had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher and someone who had only graduated from high school would go a long way toward paying the $82,866 in charges that Harvard, according to its website, will levy this year for tuition ($56,550), fees ($5,126), housing ($12,922), and food ($8,268).
Another obvious factor that affects someone’s income is how much they work.
“Total workers (also referred to as ‘all workers’) include both part-time and full-time workers,” says the Census Bureau report. “A full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked at least 35 hours per week (full-time) and at least 50 weeks per year (year-round).”
In 2023, the Census Bureau reports, total workers had $50,310 in median earnings. Full-time, year-round workers, by contrast, had $61,440 in median earnings.
This Census Bureau’s new income report reinforces the lessons this column has noted before about the the agency’s income data. This nation’s prosperity is rooted in traditional families and hard work.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/12/the-roots-of-american-prosperity/
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Reports of Missing Pets True or Not, Ohio City Suffers From Huge Haitian Migrant Influx
A small city in western Ohio has become a focal point of discussions about the mass immigration policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
At Tuesday night’s presidential debate on ABC, former President Donald Trump mentioned how the city of Springfield, Ohio, was being overrun by Haitian migrants and that people have reported their dogs, cats, ducks, geese, and all kinds of other animals being eaten by the new arrivals.
“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump claimed.
The line about the dogs was widely ridiculed as an absurd exaggeration, but there’s no question that Springfield is in turmoil due to the massive surge in Haitian migrants, estimated at 20,000 in a city with a population of about 58,000.
The Biden administration has granted “temporary protected status” to hundreds of thousands of Haitians, and there will likely be many more people coming from that troubled Caribbean island nation.
Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be enthusiastic about the temporary status program for Haitians, too.
That policy is part of this administration’s larger, general policy of just letting people from all over the world flood into the United States—legal or not, beneficial to the U.S. or not.
The temporary protected status for Haitians has been renewed to extend into 2026, so many more will likely come to America and to Springfield.
The border and immigration catastrophe often gets the most attention in big, blue sanctuary cities like New York. But this issue is hitting countless smaller towns and cities at the border and around the country that never chose to be sanctuary cities, but nevertheless are forced to deal with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies.
The burden for inundated smaller cities is often far worse. The arrival of tens of thousands of people can be transformative in a way it wouldn’t be in a city of millions. It’s awfully hard to assimilate a population of new arrivals whose numbers may soon rival the number of native residents.
And at the end of the day, why is it that these small towns—or really any American city—must bear the burden of another nation’s failure to create a livable place for their citizens?
Haiti has been in a state of crisis since its president was assassinated in 2021, but its problems extend back for centuries. Violent gangs have taken control of large parts of the country and its government teeters on the edge of oblivion. It has consistently rated as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is quite stable and functional by comparison.
This isn’t a new situation for Haiti, once called the “Pearl of the Caribbean.” A violent, lawless founding launched in 1791—more like the bloody and vicious French Revolution than the American Revolution—set the country on a course to becoming a long-term basket case.
Haiti famously threw off the shackles of slavery, but it never sustained the conditions to create a truly free, prosperous society. It’s a tragic story.
Many on the Left, and certainly many of Haiti’s politicians, blame Haiti’s problems on European colonization and the legacy of slavery. They demand reparations. Yet, it’s been given tens of billions of dollars in aid over the course of half a century and conditions have hardly improved. The problem isn’t just one bad regime; it’s been caused by systemic failure to create good governance.
From 2011 to 2021, the U.S. alone gave the country $13 billion. We’ve been shoveling money to the island nation for more than half a century. The Clinton Foundation has been busily making a bigger mess of things there, too. What are we getting in return for this massive public investment? What we are getting is an endless set of bills and now importation of Haiti’s problems.
The “solution” of the Biden-Harris administration is apparently to let them mass migrate to the U.S.
For little Springfield, Ohio, the city’s resources have been taxed to the limit, housing prices have skyrocketed, housing availability has crashed, and many of the residents are deeply troubled by the changes they see around them.
In the days before the Trump-Harris presidential debate on Tuesday night, videos from the Springfield City Commission meetings emerged showing residents livid about the changes they’ve seen occurring around them.
Here’s one Springfield resident saying at a commission meeting that he’s tired of seeing the Haitian migrants “grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them and eating them.”
Here is a woman explaining how her town is being “invaded,” and transformed. She says at a commission meeting that the migrants have been “stealing animals from farmers and leaving their severed heads at the site of an old school where children play.” She listed other disturbing behaviors, too.
Here’s a woman saying at a hearing that she has men who don’t speak English “screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard.” She further says that the danger is making it difficult to remain in Springfield.
Here’s yet another woman explaining how Haitian migrants are behaving badly in grocery stores and how city services are stressed to the breaking point.
Worst of all is the testimony of a woman who said her mother-in-law was killed by a Haitian migrant who was driving recklessly. As she rightly said, this is a far bigger problem than what’s possibly happening to dogs and cats.
Some local authorities are saying that they haven’t had significant reports of animal cruelty, but are we really supposed to discount the testimony from all these people saying otherwise?
You won’t be surprised to learn that most corporate media outlets are uninterested in covering this story except to repeat the “no problems here” mantra from local bureaucrats. With scant investigation, they insist that cats, dogs, and ducks aren’t being roasted in the parks; it’s all fake news.
The insinuation is that you should assume this is all just rube-ish American bigotry and nothing more.
But it’s quite disturbing that most media outlets are dedicated to just reporting what government agencies tell them.
Were some online memes and videos about Haitians devouring cats inaccurate? It looks like it. But it’s hard to discount what locals in Springfield are saying about their problems and what the numbers show.
The strain on local resources is real, and there is no question that the recent Haitian arrivals bring some drastically different cultural assumptions with them.
The issue has obviously become large enough that it’s caused significant turmoil in Springfield. Why are distressed locals simply being dismissed?
Whatever one can say about Trump’s comment about people eating dogs, at least it’s finally provoking a response. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, announced Wednesday that he is sending in state troopers and financial aid to help beleaguered Springfield.
That’s a better response than dismissal. But this issue can only be resolved by a federal government willing to put the interests of our citizens and communities first instead of just joining with the media and telling residents they are imagining their problems and should just shut up about it.
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Lack of Opt-Out Option Spurs Maryland Parents to File Suit Against K-5 Gender, Sexuality Indoctrination
A group of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish parents in Maryland petitioned the Supreme Court on Thursday to ask it to take up a case regarding school board policies that keep parents in the dark on books with themes about “gender” and “sexuality” being taught to children.
The case originates from the Montgomery County Board of Education instituting an “inclusive” storybook program in 2022 for students in grades pre-K through 5th grad, initially informing parents of when they would be read until changing that policy in March 2023, also restricting parents’ ability to opt their kids out, according to a press release from the Becket Fund, a nonprofit law firm representing the parents.
Shortly after the Montgomery Board of Education announced the change in policy, the group of parents filed a lawsuit against the board in May 2023 and lost, and were denied again in May 2024 when they appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The storybooks include topics on gender transitioning, pride parades and preferred pronouns, according to the press release. One book includes terms like “intersex flag” and “drag queen.”
One book mentioned in the lawsuit, “Jacob’s Room to Choose,” includes two transgender children and a teacher who use a game to persuade their class to be “supportive of gender-free bathrooms,” court documents states. Another book, “Pride Puppy,” directed at 3- and 4-year-olds, describes a pride parade and has students identify images including “leather” and “underwear.”
“Most fundamentally, it violates the First Amendment, which guarantees the right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children,” Will Haun, an attorney for the Becket Fund, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The parents allege that the Board of Education is targeting them and their kids based on their religious beliefs towards gender and sexuality and is driving a wedge between parents and their children, according to a case summary. The parents argue that the initial change in policy violates Maryland’s law, the board’s policies, and the U.S. Constitution.
“Parents shouldn’t have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to introducing their children to complex and sensitive issues around gender and sexuality,” Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund, said in the press release.
“Nearly every state requires parental consent before high schoolers can attend sex-ed. Parents should have the right to excuse their elementary-school children when related instruction is introduced during story hour.”
Despite parents not having the option to opt their children out of learning about the storybooks, the option is given for high schoolers regarding similar lessons that are taught during the sex-education unit for health classes that are state-mandated, according to the court documents.
The Supreme Court will consider deciding on the case in the fall, according to the press release.
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Angel Moms to Texas Democrat: ‘Insulting’ to Say We’re Politically Exploited
A Texas congresswoman is under fire after saying Angel Moms who testified about how their children were brutally murdered by criminal illegal border crossers released into the U.S. are “being exploited for political purposes.”
Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, Texas, made the remarks Tuesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing after mothers described how their children were murdered because of Biden-Harris administration border policies.
Escobar initially expressed her condolences as a mother of two children.
“I cannot imagine the grief of losing a loved one in such a tragic way,” the Texas Democrat said. “I want you to know how much I respect the courage that it took for you to be here today, to share your grief and your pain.”
Escobar also said she, as a third-generation border resident, is “the only member of this committee who actually lives on the border, raised her kids on the border.” Other committee members are border residents of Arizona, California, and Texas.
Escobar next accused her Republican colleagues of “exploiting people’s pain for political purposes.”
“Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening today,” she said. “The finger-pointing at the administration by members of Congress is frustrating … because we are the ones who write the laws.”
Escobar’s Republican colleagues, and at least half of U.S. attorneys general who’ve sued the administration, argue the border crisis was created by the Biden-Harris administration’s breaking laws established by Congress. If existing federal laws were followed, they say, millions of illegal border crossers wouldn’t have been released into the U.S. but would have been deported.
April Aguirre, a victim’s advocate in Houston and an Air Force veteran, lashed out, pointing to Escobar and saying: “It’s insulting that you would say that to these families, that you would make an assumption that they’re being used or exploited anyway.”
“I’d like a phone call from you to see what you can do to help these families because every single week I get bombarded with calls from victims all over the United States,” Aguirre said.
While she was helping victims’ families “navigate the criminal justice system,” she said, “not one Democrat called me to offer their assistance. It was only Republicans.”
She is an independent and votes “both ways,” Aguirre said. “So, it’s insulting,” she continued but got cut off by Escobar, who interrupted.
“Please don’t speak over me. I’m still talking. I have the floor,” Aguirre said.
Escobar kept talking.
“If you want to answer me, you ask for time,” Aguirre said, pointing to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who intervened.
Pointing to Escobar, Aguirre said: “It’s insulting; these people lost loved ones. They lost children. I assure you that we’re not being used in any way.”
Other Angel Moms said they “do not feel exploited” and criticized Democrats for not asking them a single question.
Angel Mom Anne Fundner said, “I’m getting tired of hearing about the most comprehensive border bill.”
Fundner was referring to Democrats who claim a Senate border bill would have solved the border crisis. Senate Republicans didn’t support it, and the bill doesn’t do what it purports to do, The Center Square reported.
“The bill did zero for American citizens,” Fundner said. “I would love for somebody to [to tell] me what it actually did for American citizens.”
Several of the Angel Moms’ children were killed by Venezuelans after they illegally entered the country and were released by federal agents under Biden-Harris administration policies. The illegal aliens went on to rape and strangle to death teenagers and young adult women in Texas, Maryland, and other states, The Center Square reported.
Many illegal border crossers from Venezuela who’ve been arrested for committing violent crimes are directly linked to a parole program created by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They include members of the violent prison gang Tren De Aragua, who are taking over apartment complexes and hotels nationwide.
Multiple state attorneys general sued to stop the parole program; House Republicans impeached Mayorkas, arguing that it and other programs he created to usher in millions of illegal border crossers are illegal.
Escobar’s remarks were no surprise to El Paso native Irene Armendariz-Jackson, a Republican who is challenging her in Texas’s 16th Congressional District.
“Escobar’s comments to the Angel Moms were degrading and lacked empathy for the American mothers who have had to bury their children because an illegal alien has murdered them,” Armendariz-Jackson told The Center Square.
Escobar, first elected in 2018, has championed Biden-Harris border policies.
“She has continuously expressed her support for illegal aliens no matter what the American human cost is,” Armendariz-Jackson said. “I sounded the alarm over four years ago, warning America that these illegals coming in through El Paso were not going to stay here and we would start hearing of Americans being killed by illegals.”
“As the wife of a retired Border Patrol agent, I know the devastation and danger that comes from open borders and as a native of El Paso, I see what our city has turned into,” she said. “I’m running to unseat the most radical and dangerous member of Congress.”
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16 September, 2024
Gender identity and transgender issues continue to haunt U.S. schools as parents and teachers sue districts
A conservative law firm is highlighting gender ideology in schools around the U.S. by taking action against many districts they claim are overstepping their boundaries with parents.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group, held a press call Thursday with clients they represent from around the country who are embroiled in legal action against their local school districts.
They are backing a Colorado couple whose 11-year-old daughter was assigned to room with a boy who identified as a girl on a school trip to Washington, D.C.
They represent Michigan parents who sued their local school district for using male pronouns for their eighth-grader without their knowledge.
And they are representing a Virginia teacher who claims her district instructed her to hide student's gender identity information from their parents, among others.
'The government is taking decision making authority from parents,' Kate Anderson, an attorney on the aforementioned cases warned on the call.
'They're shifting decisions that should be in the hands of parents to themselves, and then they're hiding that information from parents, so they don't know that the school is making decisions behind their back, and that's dangerous.'
'You're hearing from each of these clients that they're experiencing really dangerous policies that are hurting kids in their districts,' she continued.
Serena Wailes, the mother who is suing Colorado's Jefferson County Public Schools for putting a biological male in the same sleeping arrangements as her 11-year-old daughter, stressed how she felt betrayed by her school district.
'We trusted these people,' Serena Wailes told reporters on a call.
'They told us throughout the whole process that boys were going to be on one floor and girls were going to be on another, and at no point during this process did they ever say that that was going to be based on gender identity, and so we trusted that.'
'We trust our school district with our kids, and they have, they have failed us.'
'It was really shocking, because I'm downstairs in the lobby with the other moms, and I get this call from our daughter, who's upstairs and she's hiding in the bathroom.'
'Her voice is quivering, and she doesn't want to hurt the feelings of all the other kids in her room, but she's like, 'Mom, I don't feel good about this.''
'So I had her come down and we went, we talked through it and had the chaperone come over, talk through it, and then found out it was true. And honestly, what I have to say is I feel deceived.'
Then Michigan parents Dan and Jennifer Mead spoke up.
They filed a lawsuit against the Rockford Public School District after discovering the school had been referring to their child using 'he/him' pronouns last year.
Jennifer described how they sought academic help for their daughter through her school counselor, and they began sharing intimate details about he student and her academic and personal life.
'And all this time, they were lying to us, changing records. They were calling her by a male name, a masculine pronoun at school, and then when they would talk to us or send anything home, it was always her, you know, are given her given name.'
'It was shocking because we felt like we were deceived as well,' the mother said.
They claim the school secretly 'socially transitioned' her before the parents caught on.
The parents found out in October 2022 when a school psychologist inadvertently included the child's masculine name in one section of a report that was sent home.
The eight-grader's name had been changed back to the birth name in the rest of the document, according to the lawsuit.
Finally a teacher spoke up to address how she is taking action against Harrisonburg City Public School Board in Virginia for allegedly muzzling her ability to talk to parents about their kids' gender identities.
She resonated with the parents' stories, and said she is victim to similar policies as an educator.
'This policy that I'm working under deceives parents and it hurts kids,' middle school teacher Deb Figliola said. 'It also requires me to lie.'
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It's not just populists STOKING "misinformation" --it's the elite class
There was a truly REMARKABLE revelation in the UK parliament this week and one you probably missed. But before I tell you about it let’s first remember what is happening right now across the West.
A radicalising elite class —an elite class that’s moved sharply to the cultural left over the last fifteen years, partly in response to things like Brexit and Trump— is blaming any outcome it doesn’t like on so-called “misinformation”.
The narrative goes like this. Ordinary people could not REALLY want to vote for political party and politician X. They could not REALLY want to support policy Y. They could not REALLY want to protest about issue Z. They are just “misinformed”.
They read a “misinformed” tweet. They listened to a “misinformed” populist. They watched a “misinformed” video. They rely too much on “misinformed” social media.
In short, rather than accept that millions of people might not want to live in the kind of society that’s now being imposed on them from above by an out-of-touch, insular, and hyper-liberal if not radically progressive elite class, the members of this ruling class are now smothering themselves in a comfort blanket by portraying voters as irrational, ignorant, “misinformed” lemmings, who are being pushed around by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin … [insert your preferred villain here].
It’s the populists, in short, who are stoking political chaos and carnage by cultivating and spreading “misinformation” around Western societies. Hence why the elite class is investing so heavily in politically-motivated “fact-checking”, “verifying”, and, as we now see in the UK, a growing clampdown on free speech and free expression. If you can’t change people’s minds, you can at least control the supply of information.
And nowhere is this strategy more visible than on the issue of immigration, where time and time again we are told by politically-motivated journalists, fact-checkers, and the so-called “expert class” that ordinary people expressing concern about this issue simply do not understand the facts and figures. They too are suffering from an outbreak of what we might call “misinformationitis”.
Think mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis? “Misinformed!” Think it’s driving up crime? “Misinformed!” Think it’s weakening the economy? “Misinformed!” Think it’s costing the taxpayer billions in welfare payments? “Misinformed!”
Which brings me back to that REMARKABLE revelation in parliament, which was quietly made by a renegade Conservative Member of Parliament during a committee discussion about immigration, with Nigel Farage and Reform MPs looking on. What was the revelation? Well, brace yourself because there wasn’t one but a series of bombshells, each one more mind-boggling than the last and each one underlining how it’s not populists who are stoking misinformation —it’s the elite class.
The revelations—by the respected and rigorous Neil O’Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby, and Wigston—really are devastating.
He pointed to not just a government but an entire political system that is either deliberately concealing masses of information from voters about the impact of immigration, or is doing so through sheer incompetence.
Just look at what he revealed:
The department for Work and Pensions has STOPPED publishing data on welfare claims by nationality, making it impossible for anybody to ascertain the impact of immigration on the welfare system (and the cost)
HMRC have STOPPED publishing information on the tax paid and tax credits received by nationality, again making it impossible to build up an accurate picture of how immigration is impacting on the national economy
the Home Office is now REFUSING to answer detailed questions about the immigration status of people who are imprisoned in UK prisons, making it impossible to gather information on how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime rates and imprisonment
even worse, the Home Office actually have these data but they are deliberately REFUSING to publish them
the Home Office does NOT collect either nationality or immigration data on those people who are arrested on these islands, again making it impossible for us to know how, if at all, immigration is impacting on crime and social order
the Home Office does NOT reveal, in detail, what it is spending on hotel rooms and accommodation for illegal migrants in the asylum system, once again making it impossible to verify, dispute, or support claims being made
the Home Office says it DOES NOT KNOW how much it is spending on loans to refugees which is, once again, taxpayer money
As I pointed out on Twitter/X, in a tweet which has now been viewed by nearly 400,000 people, this, not populism, is what is breeding distrust among voters.
Either the elite class is completely incompetent, or it is deliberately concealing this information from you, the taxpayer, knowing full well that if this information was collected and released then it would likely confirm people’s suspicions about the damaging effects of illegal and legal immigration on their society –as data in other countries is already doing, including Germany, which I discuss in the piece below.
What we have then is an out-of-touch elite class that is simultaneously accusing voters of suffering “misinformation” while concealing this very information from them! How can ordinary people be misinformed when the state refuses to make critical information like this available to all? What are elites scared of?
If they are so confident in their policy decisions, in their political choices, in their continual assertion that things like immigration are an unalloyed positive for our society then why don’t they just release all the data and let us see it for ourselves?
I think we all know why. Which is why I and others will not stop drawing attention to this glaring hole in the national debate until we get the information, the transparency, and the assessments that the British people, that TAXPAYERS, deserve.
So, what can you do? Well, you could write to your local Member of Parliament and ask them why the above information is not being made public. And you could also explore submitting Freedom of Information requests. Because the status-quo, with the elite class portraying much of the rest of the country as misinformed thickoes while keeping this data and information hidden from them is, clearly, unsustainable.
But this is also bigger than one issue. As I argue in my forthcoming short film, it’s high time that the people who run our country start treating the people who live in our country and are forced to pay the costs of the elite’s disastrous decisions with the respect and decency they deserve. Too many ordinary people are being asked (no, forced) to pay the costs of radical political experiments they neither voted for nor support. The very least the elite class could do is make this information available so we can assess the impact of the decisions that are being forced on the rest of us.
Because, look, if leaders across the West do not want to continue fanning the flames of populism, polarisation, and protest then they urgently need to start treating voters with the respect they deserve —and they could start by making this information available so that we can all have an “informed” debate about what is really happening to our country. Because until they do one point will remain inescapable. It’s not just populists who are stoking “misinformation” —it’s the elite class.
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Melania Trump blasts FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, says it serves as ‘warning to all Americans’
Melania Trump shared a video on her X account Saturday morning blasting the FBI for the raid on her Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, and said it should be a “warning to all Americans”.
“I never imagined my privacy would be invaded by the government here in America,” the former First Lady recalled in the video.
“The FBI raided my home in Florida and searched through my personal belongings. This is not just my story, it serves as a warning to all Americans, a reminder that our freedom and rights must be respected.”
Her husband, former President Donald Trump, is set to sue the Justice Department for $US100 million ($149 million) in damages over the government’s unprecedented 2022 raid on his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, with lawyers arguing it was done with “clear intent to engage in political persecution”.
Mr Trump and his legal team intend to sue the Justice Department for its conduct during the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, amid the federal investigation into his alleged improper retention of classified records.
“What President Trump is doing here is not just standing up for himself — he is standing up for all Americans who believe in the rule of law and believe that you should hold the government accountable when it wrongs you,” Trump attorney Daniel Epstein told Fox Business’ Lydia Hu.
Mr Epstein added that the decisions made by the DOJ and FBI regarding that raid were “inconsistent with protocols requiring the consent of an investigative target, disclosure to that individual’s attorneys, and the use of the local US Attorney’s Office”.
Mr Trump’s attorney also argues the decisions made by Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray were not grounded in “social, economic, and political policy” but instead, in “clear dereliction of constitutional principles, inconsistent standards as applied to” Mr Trump and a “clear intent to engage in political persecution — not to advance good law enforcement practices”.
“The FBI’s demonstrated activity was inconsistent with protocols used in routine searches of an investigative target’s premises,” Mr Epstein wrote, adding that Mr Trump “had a clear expectation of privacy at Mar-a-Lago”.
“Worse, the FBI’s conduct in the raid — where established protocol was violated — constitutes a severe and unacceptable intrusion that is highly offensive to a reasonable person,” he added.
Mr Epstein is also planning to sue for punitive damages.
“For these harms to President Trump, the respondents must pay punitive damages of $US100 million,” Mr Epstein wrote.
This is the second recently released video the former First Lady has posted as she is promoting her memoir, Melania.
Her book will detail “the powerful and inspiring story of a woman who has defined personal excellence, overcome adversity, and carved her own path”, according to the description. It is currently available for pre-order ahead of its October 1 release date.
“The former First Lady invites readers into her world, offering an intimate portrait of a woman who has lived an extraordinary life,” the description reads. “Melania includes stories and images never before shared with the public.”
She posted her first video on Tuesday, raising questions about the July 13 assassination attempt on the former President.
“The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” Mrs Trump said in a video statement on X.
“Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech? There is definitely more to the story and we need to uncover the truth.”
Following the assassination attempt in July, Mrs Trump called for the country to “reunite”, calling for courage and common sense to “bring us back together as one”.
She said the gunman was “a monster who recognised my husband as an inhuman political machine” who attempted to “ring out Donald’s passion — his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration”.
“When I watched that violent bullet strike my husband, Donald, I realised my life, and Barron’s life, were on the brink of devastating change,” she wrote, adding that her husband is a generous and caring man.
“Writing my memoir has been an amazing journey filled with emotional highs and lows,” the former First Lady previously told Fox News Digital. “Each story shaped me into who I am today.”
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US media needs to step outside big-city bubble
The records of the Trump and Biden presidencies are better than Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were prepared to concede during last week’s debate about each other’s time in office.
Yet it remains accurate, if cliched, to say it is astounding that the richest, most powerful nation on the planet could not produce two better candidates.
Trump, as his debate performance showed, is a deeply self-centred person with an unfocused, undisciplined mind. He could not prosecute a simple case against Harris.
She, on the other hand, has changed her most fundamental political positions on important issues facing the US since she was a candidate for the presidency in 2020. And she has failed the main task President Joe Biden gave her as Vice-President almost four years ago: the role of border tsar.
Trump’s lack of preparation showed. Harris spent a lot of time prepping and that showed too – especially in the way she was able to bait her opponent about the size of the crowds at his rallies or suggestions the former president was an object of ridicule among military leaders and foreign heads of government.
But will it matter on the first Tuesday in November?
This column twice wrote that Trump could win in 2016 in the weeks leading up to that election. It pointed to concerns in Middle America about unchecked illegal immigration. Such concerns are even more evident in the US today.
This column also referred to the likelihood at the time that published polling was underestimating the Trump vote because of the so-called “shy conservative’’ factor.
Polling before the 2016 election underestimated Trump’s vote by 2.2 per cent, and in 2020 by 3.3 per cent.
Remember, too, Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate in 2016. She foolishly berated some of her own blue-collar voters as the usual “basket of deplorables”.
If the press underestimated Trump in 2016, it took him much more seriously during his presidency and at the 2020 election.
Republican presidential nominee, former US president Donald Trump, gestures at a press conference at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles on September 13. Picture: Getty Images
Republican presidential nominee, former US president Donald Trump, gestures at a press conference at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles on September 13. Picture: Getty Images
The establishment liberal media poured millions of words into the false Russiagate conspiracy story, trying to destroy Trump. It happened again in the weeks before the 2020 election as Obama-era intelligence experts claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post, since found to be true, was just more Russian disinformation.
Mainstream media business models, left and right, benefited from the flow of consumers to sources of Trump information they agreed with. The New York Times used Russiagate to build its subscriber base to all-time highs, while conservative sources such as Fox News benefited from being seen to be more open to Trump.
Yet, much journalistic wisdom about Trump is wrong.
His use of race politics against Harris and Barack Obama may have been crude, but economic history shows Trump was good for the prosperity of African-Americans. Before the pandemic hit, unemployment in black America was at its lowest point since World War II.
Trump’s claims on Wednesday about his economic success as president are also partly true – at least before the pandemic. His January 1, 2018, tax cuts did supercharge growth and employment.
But Trump’s claims the US economy is now in the worst shape in history are silly. US inflation on Thursday last week fell to 2.5 per cent; the Conference Board on August 19 said its leading indicators do not suggest recession is coming; the sharemarket is near its all-time record; and unemployment sits at 4.2 per cent, compared with a long-term average of 5.7 per cent.
Trump is on firmer ground discussing the failures of Biden and Harris in foreign policy. This column accepts Trump’s claim that both Russia and Iran have been emboldened by the weakness of the Biden presidency.
While legitimate doubts exist about whether Trump would support Ukraine, as Australia does, there is plenty of reason to believe Trump is correct to suggest that Putin would not have invaded in 2022 had Trump been president. Chinese President Xi Jinping would not have acquiesced when told by Putin of his plan at the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics had Biden not been president.
Similarly, Trump’s tough stands on sanctions against Iran and support for Israel probably would have prevented an attack like Hamas’s in Israel on October 7.
Polling by The New York Times at the start of last week had Trump ahead of Harris by a point. This suggests that despite the Democrats’ focus on Trump’s various prosecutions and the January 6, 2020, Capitol riots, many voters accept his claim that he has been the victim of “weaponised lawfare” from state and local Democrat administrations.
It’s an issue Harris, as a former professional prosecutor, used deftly in the debate to establish herself as a strong leader able to take on Trump face-to-face.
Harris is on much more dangerous ground on border control and her covering up, with Democrat-aligned media, of Biden’s mental decline, which became impossible to hide during the debate between Biden and Trump eight weeks ago.
While Trump returned to the border issue several times during the Harris debate, he let the Vice-President off the hook for hiding Biden’s mental state.
This column on July 7 quoted Pulitzer Prize-winner Glenn Greenwald on the number of people who had belled the cat about Biden’s mental decline in the 18 months before the 2020 election. Covid allowed Biden to escape scrutiny then, and the press, Harris and Biden’s Cabinet shielded him right up until June 28 when the Trump-Biden debate exposed the President’s decline.
Yet Trump’s decision to accept that debate was probably his biggest mistake, as election statistician Nate Silver pointed out on X shortly after the Harris debate. It was Biden’s failure then that gave the Democrats time to move Harris into the presidential nomination.
Silver rated Trump’s other big mistakes as the appointment of JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick; his meandering speech at the Republican Convention on July 19 after the assassination attempt; his failure to anticipate Harris would receive the Democrat nomination; and his failure to prepare for the Harris debate.
Perhaps the harshest assessment of Trump’s performance last week came from former Republican strategist Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal.
Rove wrote: “There’s no putting lipstick on this pig. Mr Trump was crushed by a woman he previously dismissed as ‘dumb as a rock’. Which raises the question: what does that make him?”
Democrats commentators argue that the public’s disillusionment with the political process took Trump to the presidency in 2016, but has dissipated today. That is wishful thinking. Americans this year have seen a political and media conspiracy to hide the mental state of their president.
David Brooks in The New York Times last week reported Gallup polling showing Americans remain disenchanted with politics: only 25 per cent are satisfied with the way the country is going. Ipsos polling shows 60 per cent of Americans believe the country is in decline – Trump’s core message.
Harris, mocked by conservative media for her giggling and “word salads”, has shown she will be no pushover. Her messages of hope for the voters sound better than Trump’s focus on himself.
Harris has been treated like a rock star by much of the media since she received the nomination. That intensified in major-city media after the debate.
Yet presidential elections are not won inside the largely Democrat bubbles of big-city America.
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September 15, 2024
Keir Starmer takes on ‘broken’ NHS and warns: no more money without reforms
This is surprisingly sane for a Leftist leader. Heavy reliance on locums is absurd. There should be sufficient staff. Big tax incentives could be used to bring in the needed staff and nursing homes. And the "Trusts" should be abolished. They just add a layer of needless bureaucracy
Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to “take on” any opposition to radical changes in the NHS, saying difficult and unpopular changes are needed before it receives a penny more from the government.
The prime minister said the health service required “major surgery, not sticking plasters” and that fixing it could take a decade or more.
Risking anger from unions, he said he was not prepared to spend more money while the system was paying huge sums to agency workers, adding: “We have to fix the plumbing before we turn on the taps.”
“I’m not prepared to see even more of your money spent on agency staff who cost £5,000 a shift, on appointment letters which arrive after the appointment, or on paying for people to be stuck in hospital just because they can’t get the care they need in the community,” he said.
As he was speaking, ministers announced a clampdown on junk food advertising in a bid to cut obesity rates and reduce the burden on the NHS. From October next year, online adverts will be banned altogether while TV ads will be shown only after the 9pm watershed.
But critics questioned how far Labour was prepared to go. Former Tory health minister Lord Bethell told The Independent: “You cannot be serious about prevention and rule out a sugar tax on the same day.”
Sir Keir’s comments, in a speech to the King’s Fund think tank, following a damning independent review that found the NHS in “critical condition” with some of the worst cancer survival rates in the Western world.
Completed in nine weeks by Ara Darzi, a surgeon and an independent peer, it blamed choices made by the last Conservative government and warned the health service would take years to fix.
Government sources denied the reforms would mean more privatisation, saying the Darzi report was clear about the amount of money the NHS is currently spending badly and in the wrong places.
Health secretary Wes Streeting has previously announced plans to use the private sector to help cut NHS backlogs, and hit out at “middle-class lefties” who oppose the move, saying they risk putting ideological purity ahead of patient care.
Earlier on Thursday, Mr Streeting said the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), should stop “sabre-rattling” and work with ministers.
An “unnecessary threat” of action from the organisation’s GPs “would harm patients”, he said.
Leading scientist Professor Sir John Bell also hit out at doctors in the BMA, saying they had “been a major drag on reform of healthcare”.
Setting out a broad vision for reform, Sir Keir said his 10-year plan would include changing the NHS to a “neighbourhood health service”.
This would mean “more tests, scans, healthcare offered on high streets and town centres, improved GP access, bringing back the family doctor, offering digital consultations for those that want them, virtual wards and more patients safely looked after in their own homes where we can deal with problems early before they are off work sick and before they need to go to hospital”.
He also pledged to drive up productivity in hospitals, giving them more of a role in preventing sickness.
He said that increased use of technology, including to speed up test results in A&E, was one area where improving service was not about piling in more money year after year.
He also pledged to continue the last Tory government’s hospital-building programme.
But while he warned it was not possible to build an NHS for the future without fixing social care, there was little detail on how that could be achieved.
He said: “Reform does not mean just putting more money in… so, hear me when I say this, no more money without reform.”
He said he was "genuinely shocked" when he learned how many young children are admitted to hospital every year to have rotten teeth removed – something that is preventable.
“I know some prevention measures will be controversial but I’m prepared to be bold even in the face of opposition,” he said.
Former Tory minister Dame Harriett Baldwin criticised Sir Keir’s comments in the wake of his cuts to winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, saying the move would hurt “bed capacity over the winter to come in our NHS”.
And Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Daisy Cooper warned that “the elephant in the room is that we cannot reform our NHS without reforming social care”.
But Sir Julian Hartley, the chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents trusts, said the NHS was “down but not out”.
“As the prime minister said today, we can’t go on like this. To build an NHS fit for the future, the NHS needs to work differently and go further and faster to improve care for patients.”
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of King’s Fund, said the government “now needs to develop a detailed strategy for reform. That plan will need to model how greater investment to primary and community services will be implemented.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-nhs-money-reform-b2611670.html
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Harris’s ‘Joy’ Would Cost US Dearly
American progressives are out of ideas. Instead of a bold economic agenda, all they have to offer is reruns of policy failures. Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent proposals are notable examples. Behind the facade of joy hides an alarming indifference to the immense costs her schemes would create if she wins the presidency. Economists have a duty to point out just how destructive these proposals are.
Exhibit A is her call for price controls on groceries. Ignore the rhetorical sleight-of-hand from the campaign and its defenders, who insist they only want to clamp down on “price gouging.” This is clearly a call for the government to crack down on retailers who are selling food at any price Harris and other progressive elites deem excessive.
Perhaps no policy has a record as consistently bad as mandatory price caps. While Econ 101 doesn’t always tell the full story, it does an admirable job in this case. Expect shortages, portion shrinkages, and discriminatory sales practices if Harris gets her way. Price controls are such bad policy that other prominent Democrats almost immediately promised that they will never happen. Yet the very fact Harris proposed them is appalling. It is too dangerous to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Next is her growth-killing tax plan. Harris is among those calling for the rich to “pay their fair share.” For starters, the rich tax skimps narrative is ridiculous. The top one percent of income earners already pay more than 40 percent of all federal income taxes. Yet she wants to raise rates anyway. This will dampen incentives to produce and innovate.
The same is true for corporate taxes. Raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent would inhibit capital formation, resulting in smaller returns for owners, higher prices for consumers, and lower wages for workers. This last point should dispel the myth that Harris and the progressive elite are concerned about economic opportunity.
Perhaps most egregious is her endorsement of President Biden’s plan to tax unrealized capital gains. Just look at the awful incentives this policy would create. Instead of keeping their wealth in capital markets, bearing risk and facilitating growth, those experiencing unrealized capital gains would likely have to divest their position to discharge their tax liability. This policy seems designed to dry up capital markets, or else provide a beachhead for future direct wealth seizures by the government.
Those objecting that the policy only applies to the hyper-rich (those with a net worth of more than $100 million) are clearly unfamiliar with the history of the income tax. Once upon a time, only high income earners paid any tax at all. Now the IRS has its tendrils everywhere. The same will eventually be true with unrealized capital gains, unless we root out this weed right away.
Lastly, her so-called home affordability plan is rubbish. Harris wants to give new homebuyers up to $25,000 in “down payment assistance.” I’m sure that phrase poll-tested well, but a subsidy by any other name is still a subsidy. If you give a family $25,000 to help purchase a home, they’ll be much better off. But the gains are much smaller if you give it to many families.
Harris’s proposal would boost market demand, further driving up housing prices. Keep in mind that housing supply is generally much less responsive to price changes than housing demand. New home construction is subject to high fixed costs, significant time to build, and zoning laws and other local restrictions. The implication is that homebuyers won’t get much of the benefit of the subsidy, since prices will go up by much more than the quantity of homes. If your goal is transferring wealth to homebuilders and existing homeowners, Harris’s plan is great. But if your goal is making housing more affordable, it’s terrible.
She keeps piling on examples. Her stated desire to throw 180 million Americans off their private health insurance plans, her eagerness to impose massive regulatory costs on energy producers, and her enthusiasm for hamstringing law enforcement come easily to mind. The result is a political-economic model guaranteed to induce malaise. Vice President Harris’s ongoing audition for Enfeebler-in-Chief proves the American left needs a hard reset. Otherwise, the “opportunity economy” they claim to want will never materialize.
https://www.aier.org/article/harris-joy-unabashedly-cynical/
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David Gerard, the tyrant of Wikipedia
Wikipedia administrator David Gerard cares a great deal about Reliable Sources. For the past half-decade, he has torn through the website with dozens of daily edits—upwards of fifty thousand, all told—aimed at slashing and burning lines on the site that reference sources deemed unreliable by Wikipedia. He has stepped into dozens of official discussions determining which sources the site should allow people to use, opining on which are Reliable and which are not. He cares so much about Reliable Sources, in fact, that he goes out of his way to provide interviews to journalists who may write about topics he’s passionate about, then returns to the site to ensure someone adds just the right quotes from those sources to Wikipedia articles about those topics and to protect those additions from all who might question them.
While by Wikipedia’s nature, nobody can precisely claim to speak or act on behalf of the site as a whole, Gerard comes about as close as anyone really could. He’s been a volunteer Wikipedia administrator since 2004, has edited the site more than 200,000 times, and even served off and on as the site’s UK spokesman. Few people have had more of a hand than him in shaping the site, and few have a more encyclopedic understanding of its rules, written and unwritten.
Reliable sources, a ban on original research, and an aspiration towards a neutral point of view have long been at the heart of Wikipedia’s approach. Have an argument, editors say? Back it up with a citation. Articles should cover “all majority and significant minority views” from Reliable Sources (WP:RS) on the topic “fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias” (WP:NPOV). The site has a color-coding system for frequently discussed sources: green for reliable, yellow for unclear, red for unreliable, and dark red for “deprecated” sources that can only be used in exceptional situations.
The minutiae of Wikipedia administration, as with the inner workings of any bureaucracy, is an inherently dry subject. On the site as a whole, users sometimes edit pages directly with terse comments, other times engage in elaborate arguments on “Talk” pages to settle disputes about what should be added. Each edit is added to a permanent history page. To understand any given decision, onlookers must trawl through page after page of archives and discussions replete with tidily packaged references to one policy or another. Where most see boredom behind the scenes and are simply glad for mostly functional overviews of topics they know nothing about, though, a few see opportunity. Those who master the bureaucracy in behind-the-scenes janitorial battles, after all, define the public’s first impressions of whatever they care about.
Since 2017, when Wikipedia made the decision to ban citations to the Daily Mail due to “poor fact-checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication,” editors have waged an intense, quiet war over which sources to ban, which to give strict scrutiny to, and which to crown as Reliable. Based on the site’s policy, it’s easy to understand why: while editors with a stake in the frame of an article have to acquiese to determined opponents bearing Reliable Sources—or at least must have long, grinding disputes about what should be emphasized and why—if they can whip a consensus to declare the sources opponents would use unreliable, they can win edit wars before they happen. This extends well beyond simple factual coverage: cite an opinion or even a movie review from one of those sources, and Gerard or other editors sweep in to remove it as having undue weight.
The battle over the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online newspaper that alternates between tabloid-style sensationalism and serious, in-depth investigative journalism provides a good example of how this works in practice: in three sparse discussions (one, two, three), a dozen or so editors opined, for example, that it “doesn’t particularly have a reputation for journalistic credibility,” with one citing two Snopes articles in support but most presenting bare opinions. As a result of those sparse discussions, Wikipedia editors treat the site as generally unreliable. Every citation to it is presumed suspect, and rather than spending time and effort haggling over each, editors are broadly free to remove them en masse after cursory examination. In practice, this means Gerard scanning through dozens of articles in the span of a few minutes, tearing out all information cited to the Free Beacon as presumptively unreliable.
Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia. Editors who object to his indiscriminate removals have raised the issue multiple times to Wikipedia administrators, on talk pages, and elsewhere around the site. Each time, Gerard defends the approach of indiscriminately removing everything from Unreliable Sources, generally carrying on with removals as the disputes carry on. Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.
In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed.
Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.
Most interesting to me is the case of Huffington Post. See, in addition to volunteering as a Wikipedia administrator, Gerard is the system administrator and owner of the Twitter account for RationalWiki, a left-liberal wiki focused on directing snark and critique towards groups and concepts the authors dislike, from effective altruists to right-wingers to woo. Gerard has edited RationalWiki upwards of 30,000 times. He updated the site’s harshly critical article on the Huffington Post occasionally, one time adding one of its most scathing critiques: “The truth is not in them.”
When it came time to comment about them on Wikipedia, though, he was rather more enthusiastic, calling the site “a perfectly normal [news organization] on this level” and raising an eyebrow when people wanted to rate its politics section as less than reliable.2
As of today, Wikipedia treats the Huffington Post as wholly reliable for non-politics content and unclear for political content.
During discussions of PinkNews, an LGBT-focused news outlet, the user gnu57 provided several examples of journalistic misconduct:
The site defamed lesbian Scottish politician Joanna Cherry, falsely claiming she was being investigated for homophobia, retracting only after Cherry pursued legal options against them.
The site falsely claimed the Israeli health minister had called coronavirus a “divine punishment for homosexuality.”
The site made salacious, misleading claims about Bill O’Reilly.
The site has a history of tabloid-esque sensationalism, clickbait, and photoshops about celebrities
Gerard, examining the outlet when it came up for comment, lauded it as highly reliable, emphasizing that “claims of journalistic malfeasance on their part didn't check out at all when we looked into them and discovered they'd actually handled them in an exemplary fashion.” Later, he pushed successfully for it to be treated as a fully reliable source despite a note from the discussion that caution should be used.
Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source.
He regularly makes similar nudges around sites like The Daily Beast (“Generally reliable - not perfect, but a normal news source, editorial processes, etc - no reason not to use it as a source") and Teen Vogue (“Their news coverage is solid - surprising for a fashion magazine, but it's like the surprise when Buzzfeed News turned out to be a good solid RS too”), as well as supporting the removal of any notes of partisanship from Vox.
What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly and not unreasonably, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn't be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.
He would prefer to see Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess, banned from the site entirely: “unreliable, editorially incompetent, repeatedly caught publishing false information, conspiracy theories and hoaxes, [undue weight] for opinions.”
What about The Free Press, created by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss to cover investigative stories and provide commentary she felt was being stifled at the Times? To ask is to know the answer: “It was created not to be "reliable" in any Wikipedia sense, but to feed the opinions of the sort of conspiracy theorist who uses large words spelt correctly. If TheFP ran that the sky was blue, I'd see if I could find an actually-reliable source and cite that instead.”
While he has not yet succeeded in getting either source formally deprecated, Wikipedia considers both unreliable and he prioritizes removing citations to them in his edits.
His treatment of the libertarian flagship publication Reason Magazine (which, despite him, remains a Reliable Source even on Wikipedia) stands out the most: based solely on tendentious readings of issues from nearly fifty years ago, he warns people to “apply extreme caution,” saying he “wouldn't use it at all except where unavoidable.”
In each instance, he is backed up by a vocal contingent of equally opinionated like-minded editors, who go by pseudonyms such as Aquillion, XOR’Easter, or NorthBySouthBaranof. This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on—just the natural outgrowth of common traits within the set of people whose Special Interest is arguing about sources deep in the bowels of an online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable. The debate, to be clear, is not between tabloids and the New York Times, a battle the Times cleanly wins. In Gerard’s world, scientists and academics who publish in Quillette or Reason are to have even their opinions discarded entirely, while to cast any doubt on the reliability of the word of Huffington “the truth is not in them” Post and PinkNews is absurd.
From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.
As I mentioned to Substack’s Chris Best recently, I am not a blind cynic about institutions or a blind supporter of those who sing the counter-melody. Whatever the faults of, say, the New York Times, and there are many, its resources and will to remain as the paper of record remain unmatched. Outlets like The Free Press and Quillette are at their best when they act as competition and correction mechanisms for these institutions, covering areas legacy outlets overlook, and they cannot hope to compete in scope or depth. Giving the Times more weight than The Free Press makes perfect sense for an encyclopedia, but what actually goes on at Wikipedia is something else entirely.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
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Truths that may not be mentioned
It has been known for over a century that there are fewer women than men in the top echelons of IQ -- and in mathematics even more so. But we live in an era of such heavy censorship that any mention of that must be fiercely suppressed
In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.
Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.
Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation. My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason that could help explain how gender differences in variability might naturally arise in the same species.
I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model. When I posted a preprint on the open-access mathematics archives in May of last year, a variability researcher at Durham University in the UK got in touch by email. He described our joint paper as “an excellent summary of the research to date in this field,” adding that “it certainly underpins my earlier work on impulsivity, aggression and general evolutionary theory and it is nice to see an actual theoretical model that can be drawn upon in discussion (which I think the literature, particularly in education, has lacked to date). I think this is a welcome addition to the field.”
So far, so good.
Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics. The Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief is Marjorie Wikler Senechal, Professor Emerita of Mathematics and the History of Science at Smith College. She liked our draft, and declared herself to be untroubled by the prospect of controversy. “In principle,” she told Sergei in an email, “I am happy to stir up controversy and few topics generate more than this one. After the Middlebury fracas, in which none of the protestors had read the book they were protesting, we could make a real contribution here by insisting that all views be heard, and providing links to them.”
Professor Senechal suggested that we might enliven our paper by mentioning Harvard President Larry Summers, who was swiftly defenestrated in 2005 for saying that the GMVH might be a contributing factor to the dearth of women in physics and mathematics departments at top universities. With her editorial guidance, our paper underwent several further revisions until, on April 3, 2017, our manuscript was officially accepted for publication. The paper was typeset in India, and proofread by an assistant editor who is also a mathematics professor in Kansas. It was scheduled to appear in the international journal’s first issue of 2018, with an acknowledgement of funding support to my co-author from the National Science Foundation. All normal academic procedure.
Coincidentally, at about the same time, anxiety about gender-parity erupted in Silicon Valley. The same anti-variability argument used to justify the sacking of President Summers resurfaced when Google engineer James Damore suggested that several innate biological factors, including gender differences in variability, might help explain gender disparities in Silicon Valley hi-tech jobs. For sending out an internal memo to that effect, he too was summarily fired.
No sooner had Sergei posted a preprint of our accepted article on his website than we began to encounter problems. On August 16, a representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State contacted him to warn that the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women. “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.” While she was obviously able to debate the merits of our paper, she worried that other, presumably less sophisticated, readers “will just see someone wielding the authority of mathematics to support a very controversial, and potentially sexist, set of ideas…”
A few days later, she again contacted Sergei on behalf of WIM and invited him to attend a lunch that had been organized for a “frank and open discussion” about our paper. He would be allowed 15 minutes to describe and explain our results, and this short presentation would be followed by readings of prepared statements by WIM members and then an open discussion. “We promise to be friendly,” she announced, “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.”
On September 4, Sergei sent me a weary email. “The scandal at our department,” he wrote, “shows no signs of receding.” At a faculty meeting the week before, the Department Head had explained that sometimes values such as academic freedom and free speech come into conflict with other values to which Penn State was committed. A female colleague had then instructed Sergei that he needed to admit and fight bias, adding that the belief that “women have a lesser chance to succeed in mathematics at the very top end is bias.” Sergei said he had spent “endless hours” talking to people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful” and tried to convince him to “withdraw my name to restore peace at the department and to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.” Ominously, “analogies with scientific racism were made by some; I am afraid, we are likely to hear more of it in the future.”
The following day, I wrote to the three organisers of the WIM lunch and offered to address any concrete concerns they might have with our logic or conclusions or any other content. I explained that, since I was the paper’s lead author, it was not fair that my colleague should be expected to take all the heat for our findings. I added that it would still be possible to revise our article before publication. I never received a response.
Instead, on September 8, Sergei and I were ambushed by two unexpected developments.
First, the National Science Foundation wrote to Sergei requesting that acknowledgment of NSF funding be removed from our paper with immediate effect. I was astonished. I had never before heard of the NSF requesting removal of acknowledgement of funding for any reason. On the contrary, they are usually delighted to have public recognition of their support for science.
The ostensible reason for this request was that our paper was unrelated to Sergei’s funded proposal. However, a Freedom of Information request subsequently revealed that Penn State WIM administrator Diane Henderson (“Professor and Chair of the Climate and Diversity Committee”) and Nate Brown (“Professor and Associate Head for Diversity and Equity”) had secretly co-signed a letter to the NSF that same morning. “Our concern,” they explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.” Unaware of this at the time, and eager to err on the side of compromise, Sergei and I agreed to remove the acknowledgement as requested. At least, we thought, the paper was still on track to be published.
But, that same day, the Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal notified us that, with “deep regret,” she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper. “Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” For the second time in a single day I was left flabbergasted. Working mathematicians are usually thrilled if even five people in the world read our latest article. Now some progressive faction was worried that a fairly straightforward logical argument about male variability might encourage the conservative press to actually read and cite a science paper?
In my 40 years of publishing research papers I had never heard of the rejection of an already-accepted paper.
https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/
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12 September, 2024
Australia: Wild moment ABC reporter is swarmed by anti-war protesters as chaos grips Melbourne for the second day in a row
Being "anti-war" is childish. These "anti-war" protestors are just egotists doing self display under the pretence that they are saying something original. As a former army psychologist, I think I can can assure everyone that soldiers are anti-war too. They get shot at in wars. But like most people they can see that wars and preparations for war can be needed for defence and are prepared to do something about that instead of closing their eyes to reality
Protesters gathered for the second straight day on Thursday morning to rally against the Land Forces Defence Expo being held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
After wild scenes on Wednesday, which saw protesters clashing with police, throwing horse manure and rocks, while officers made arrests and swung batons, tensions were high on day two.
Violence was sparked when ABC reporter Stephanie Ferrier and multiple security guards were interrupted by protestors during a live cross.
It marks the latest instance a journalist has been caught up in the protests after a Daily Mail Australia journalist was shot with rubber bullets by police.
During the ABC live cross, a protester walked in front of the camera and was pushed aside by a security guard.
The protester then appeared to swing a punch at the security guard.
A second security guard then stepped in and appeared to shove the protesters.
Another attendee at the rally could be seen breaking up the fight and urging the pair to 'calm down'.
'At the moment, we're obviously trying to report on this and we're getting a little bit of difficulty here,' the reporter says.
As the reporter attempted to move away from the crowd, more people follow her.
The tense scenes come after Channel 7 Sunrise reporter Teegan Dolling was swarmed by protesters on Wednesday.
One female protester put her hand over the camera lens, Dolling pushed her arm away and what appeared to be private security guarding the reporter stepped in, but the protester managed to put hands on the camera at least one more time.
'That's not on if people are actually mishandling our reporter,' host Natalia Barr said from the studio.
In the hours after the protest, she penned a piece for 7News where she described the protest as 'vile and violent'.
'First there was the stench of OC spray in the air, then came the overwhelming smell of vomit, as protesters threw water balloons filled with sick at police, delegates and media,' Dolling wrote.
'Ducking for cover as padlocks, apples, chairs and horse manure were hurled towards anyone the activists assume held different views.'
She said Melbourne had once been the most liveable country in the world and has seen many protests, but 'none this vile and violent'.
'The aggression came in waves, as police surged towards the 2000-strong group to remove them from the road, escort members of the public to safety, or to extinguish flames,' she wrote.
Ms Dolling said protesters did not heed directions to move and reacted with attacks on police and cruelty towards horses.
It was the city's largest protest in 24 years and resulted in 42 people being arrested.
Disrupt Land Forces say they will continue to protest during the remainder of the conference this week.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13840671/ABC-reporter-anti-war-protest-Melbourne.html
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Upheaval in hate group
The Left eats its own, and it seems the Southern Poverty Law Center is no exception.
The SPLC—a far-left smear factory notorious for demonizing conservatives and Christians as being as hateful as the KKK and for spreading woke dogma in schools—has its own labor union, and members of that union overwhelmingly cast a vote of “no confidence” in SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang.
The vast majority of the SPLC Union’s voting members (141 of 156, or 90.4%) cast ballots urging the SPLC to find a new CEO. The union presented this demand to the SPLC Board of Directors on Aug. 30, and one week later, SPLC Board Chair Karen Baynes-Dunning denied the request.
According to a union press release, its members expressed a “lack of confidence in Margaret Huang and want SPLC to find a new CEO.”
The move comes two months after the SPLC Union broke the news of mass layoffs at the SPLC in June. The SPLC “gutted its staff by a quarter,” laying off more than 60 union members, including five union stewards and the union’s chair.
The union also claimed the layoffs will substantially affect various departments, including Learning for Justice (SPLC’s education arm); support staff in the fundraising, media, and legal departments; and “immigrant justice legal teams.”
What the Union Says
“From the start, the board’s lack of engagement with our union has made them complacent and complicit in all harm Huang and her leadership team create,” Lisa Wright, the SPLC Union chair who was laid off after more than 23 years at the organization, said in the news release Monday. “We believe Baynes-Dunning hired Huang in 2020 to bust our union. Huang has a proven track record of hostility toward unionization.”
“The layoffs have been riddled with inconsistencies, errors, and confusion,” Wright added. “We’ve filed multiple grievances regarding contract violations, some of which we expect to progress to arbitration and possibly litigation.”
Wright claimed that the SPLC failed to present a plan for transitioning the casework of laid-off lawyers, and that Huang gave conflicting messages about the reasons for the layoffs.
The SPLC consists of two entities: a nonprofit under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code that can’t lobby for bills or political candidates and another nonprofit under Section 501(c)(4) of the code that can engage in lobbying. Huang reportedly told the (c)(4) board that SPLC made the layoffs due to a “$13 million deficit” in the (c)(3) organization’s budget, while she told the (c)(3) board and the union that SPLC made the layoffs for strategic reasons, not financial ones.
Baynes-Dunning told the union that board members “unanimously reaffirm our approval of this strategic direction and unanimously support Margaret Huang’s ongoing leadership as president & CEO.”
According to the union, SPLC staff had expressed “alarmingly low confidence and trust in SPLC leadership in multiple organization-wide surveys.” In 2022, only 49% of staff expressed confidence in leadership; that number had fallen to 44% shortly before the layoffs.
The SPLC’s Response
“We respect the bargaining unit’s right to oppose the changes to the SPLC programs and activities, and we empathize with all employees who were impacted by the staff restructure,” the SPLC told The Alabama Reflector, an independent news website.
“These decisions are never easy, but necessary to strengthen our strategic framework and focus so that we can meet the challenges of this decade and beyond,” the organization said.
The News Guild, the umbrella union organization of which the SPLC Union is a part, urged members of other unions to sign a letter demanding that SPLC’s board remove Huang, bargain with the union to reverse layoffs, and “meaningfully involve the SPLC Union in finding, interviewing, and hiring a new CEO.”
As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 people had signed the letter.
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DeSantis Stands Firm Against Satanists’ Desire to Counsel Students
I think Satanism is just a confection but it might mislead some
It seems that the English language is somewhat difficult to learn for those who don’t apprehend it as their native tongue. One of the reasons: English has significant built-in complexities that tend to cause a great deal of confusion.
At the risk of creating an additional brushfire in the realm of political correctness, consider the use of homophones, one of the odder characteristics of English. Before you get your feathers ruffled, this phenomenon has nothing to do with sexual preferences or even the devilish cellphone.
The concept of homophones entails two or more words with the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spellings. Not only are these words difficult for beginners, but they also can cause great consternation even for those who have spoken English for their entire lifetime.
Consider, if you will, words such as flower and flour, plain and plane, male and mail, pray and prey, and so forth. There is little wonder that the myriad examples of this oddity of speech often confound even language scholars.
One of the more interesting examples of homophones came to mind just the other day while I was reading a news article from the Daily Caller related to a new Florida law allowing volunteer chaplains to be placed into the statewide school system.
Mind you, the new law calls not only for the chaplains to be volunteers at public schools, but a student may consult a chaplain only voluntarily and only with parental consent. Sounds simple enough, and the move certainly is needed based on the unrest and confusion often incurred by students in classrooms.
Nevertheless, a problem arose in the “model policy” set forth by Manny Diaz, Florida’s commissioner of education. According to that document, “religion” is defined as a group that “acknowledges the existence of and worships a supernatural entity or entities that possesses power over the natural world.” It goes on to say that “the chaplain must be recognized by their religion’s leadership and vetted by the participating school’s principal.”
Of course, this kind of “hateful” language got the panties of atheists and satanic worshippers all in a wad.
Devon Graham of the Florida chapter of American Atheists proclaimed that the definition is exclusionary because it prohibits The Satanic Temple from participating. Almost immediately, The Satanic Temple took to the social media site X with a call to its followers “to stand with us and raise hell” over the measure.
In response, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said during an April press conference that students should have the right to pursue advice from chaplain leaders if they wish. DeSantis noted that satanist groups aren’t a religion and they’re not eligible for chaplain programs.
“We’re not playing those games in Florida,” DeSantis said. “That is not a religion. That is not qualifying to be able to participate in this. We’re going to be using common sense. … You do not have to worry about that.”
DeSantis is correct in his assessment of this illegitimate, godless claim—commonly pushed by worshippers of Satan and God-haters in general. The Founders of our great nation would agree as well. In fact, they would be appalled at the very thought that the antithesis of religion would ever be considered on equal footing in defining religious freedom.
There is nothing in our U.S. Constitution that provides a freedom from religion or in any way prohibits the voluntary promulgation of religious thought in the marketplace. To suggest otherwise is in direct contradiction to the Framers’ intent and to plain English.
Even as the atheists and satanists are bent on degrading, and even destroying, the very basis of our freedoms, we at Southern Evangelical Seminary stand with DeSantis and the good people of Florida.
Now is the time for Americans to rise up against the hordes of hell and join together with the leaders of that great state to declare an end to the foolishness that has engulfed our nation. The continued existence of our nation, or any other democratic form of government, depends upon the foundation of God-given moral standards that ought to beat in the hearts of the faithful.
Those of us who are followers of the one true Christ have an additional promise of victory. We are reminded by Jesus as he told Peter and the other disciples in Matthew 16:18: “On this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
Going back to our basic English language lesson, here is another prime example of homophones being used in one sentence: While the foes of basic morality, common sense, and God may be intent on “raising hell,” Christ’s church was born for the purpose of “razing hell.”
The time for timidity on the part of Christ followers in America has long since passed if our nation is to survive the onslaught of evil and confusion now assailing our shores. We no longer can enjoy the luxury of sitting on the sidelines waiting silently for the inevitable demise of everything we hold dear. Strong winds demand bold action.
That is why we need to be ever-vigilant in the battle for truth. So with this in mind, all of us at Southern Evangelical Seminary will remain steadfast in the truth of the Gospel. Because it is the only truth that matters.
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Trump’s faith advisor and emissary for freedom
Dr Ben Carson is stepping out of retirement and into a religious freedom advisory role for Donald Trump’s 2024 re-run.
As a key member of Trump’s former administration, Dr Carson will work alongside Trump as the campaign’s National Faith Chairman.
The aim of the role is to fortify against the erosion of religious liberty and to assist Trump in his – now public – commitment to protect freedom of speech.
Dr Carson isn’t new to the Left’s habit of pushing mass censorship or engaging in manipulative propaganda, lawfare, and cancel culture.
Accepting the ambassadorial National Faith Chairman advisory role, Dr Carson, explained:
‘Today in 1987, along with a very talented team at Johns Hopkins, I performed the historic operation separating twins who were joined at the back of the head.
‘Since then, God has used me to help save the lives of many children through medicine.’
To this he dedicated himself to the role, stating:
‘All my efforts are now focused on saving our country so that future generations can grow up in an America where anything is possible.’
Alluding to the MAGA vs. Marxism character of the 2024 US election, Dr Carson said that Donald Trump has to win in November because the future of the republic depends upon it. Dr Carson then said he was honoured to serve alongside the President, tweeting:
In a shared press release posted on Friday, both President Trump and Dr Carson officially announced their support for the initiative.
Calling him a ‘man of unwavering faith’, Trump said:
‘Dr Carson is the perfect person to work with leaders of the faith community on behalf of the campaign; to promote the protection of religious freedom and prosperity in our country.
‘Kamala Harris and the radical left have waged war on America’s faith community since the day they took office.
‘Her selection of Governor Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential nominee solidifies their commitment to intensifying those efforts.’
‘Nobody,’ Trump added, ‘was a bigger champion for the faith community than me. I look forward to working with Ben Carson to fight back against Kamala Harris’ war on faith.’
Dr Carson reasserted his public comments, remarking:
‘Since America’s founding nearly 250 years ago, our country has served as a beacon of freedom, hope, and prosperity for the world.
‘President Trump believes America’s best days are ahead, and in order to reestablish ourselves as that shining city upon a hill, we must acknowledge we are One Nation Under God.’
Consistently backing Trump as President, and him running again for President, Dr Carson said:
‘There is only one candidate in this race that has defended religious liberty and supported Americans of faith. That candidate is Donald J. Trump.’
Dr Carson isn’t just an American hero, he’s a true statesman.
An outspoken Christian and retired neurosurgeon, he understands the need to preserve classical liberal freedoms, and the Christian basis for those freedoms.
This election marks the difference between a house of freedom, and a house of slavery.
As Reagan said in 1964, ‘You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children, this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/trumps-faith-advisor-and-emissary-for-freedom/
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11 September, 2024
Victor Davis Hanson Rips Goldman Sachs For Propping Up Harris
Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson called out Goldman Sachs on Tuesday for suggesting the economy under Vice President Kamala Harris could be more beneficial, arguing the group and others like it are pushing an agenda that could “destroy” middle-class Americans.
Last week, Goldman Sachs economists released a note suggesting Harris’ policies might provide a “very slight boost” to gross domestic product investment, while former President Donald Trump’s plans could negatively impact growth due to “tariffs and tighter immigration policy.” On his podcast, “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” Hanson questioned why voters should heed Goldman Sachs when the firm won’t face the consequences of “whatever disastrous policies” could come from a potential Harris administration.
“Why would we listen to someone who makes so much money that will be immune from whatever disastrous policies that will destroy the rest of us? And then they can afford the luxury for social or cultural reasons of supporting a neo-socialist, and that’s what we’re talking about. We really are,” Hanson said. “Reminds me of the aristocrats during the Bolshevik Warsaw revolution, who all thought that Lenin was kind of cute and neat. But that they had so much land and so much money that he would never go after them, and even if he did, it wouldn’t hurt them.”
“I don’t listen to anything Goldman Sachs says, I’m not — I have no animus toward them, but they’re just, they live in a different world, all those people,” Hanson continued.
Hanson then called out former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent endorsement of Harris, expressing concern that Cheney’s approval of the vice president also implies approval of her potential attorney general choices, such as Keith Ellison, who has received donations from left-wing billionaire George Soros.
“Dick Cheney is endorsing the Soros attorney generals, and I don’t understand the ‘Never Trumpers’ or the Goldman Sachs people, that’s what they endorse. They don’t just endorse being kind of liked by the left and kind of having better press coverage … But what they’re really doing to the middle class is they are promoting an agenda that will destroy the middle class,” Hanson said.
The senior fellow continued to slam Democrats as he stated they “lie” about wanting to push policies that secure borders, have a “low tax deregulated economy to spur investment and entrepreneurship” and are “tough” on “deterrent foreign policy.”
“The fact is, there’s two different agendas, and they’re antithetical. One agenda is 90% similar to all of the people’s, all of these characters that I mentioned to their lifelong advocacies,” Hanson continued. “So why are they rejecting 90% of what they told us was essential to give them money or to give them votes or to give them support?”
“And the answer is they got their feelings hurt. They lost their magazine, they lost their speaking fees, they lost their TV billets, they lost their authorities. No one listens to them. They’re has beens, they destroyed their careers. They committed career suicide. And they’re angry, and they blame it all on the orange man,” Hanson said.
After unveiling her economic policies in mid-August, Harris faced backlash from political pundits on both sides of the aisle, particularly over her proposal to place a federal ban on “corporate price gouging” in order to lower high grocery store prices. Critics stated that not only would the proposal potentially drive up prices but also create black markets.
Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Attending Church Regularly Will Lengthen Your Life More Than Diet, Exercise, Longevity Expert Says
Attending church services may open the door to eternal life—but it will also extend your life on Earth more than diet or exercise, according to the foremost expert on global longevity.
Dan Buettner, who won three Emmy Awards for his groundbreaking 2023 documentary “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones,” revealed the deep benefits that faith in God renders to those who want to live a long and prosperous life. Although America faces an epidemic of chronic diseases, “only about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes,” he told “Mornings with Maria” on Aug. 30. A healthy lifestyle incorporating diet, exercise, and stress management means the average person can live “12 more years in good health.”
But the statistics he shared proved that an active faith in God, including weekly church attendance, had potentially the biggest impact on extending earthly life.
Buettner’s documentary investigated regions in the world known for having the longest average lifespan. Researchers interviewed 263 centenarians—people who had lived to the age of 100—and found all but five “belonged to some faith-based community.”
The healthiest elderly had a common characteristic: “having a faith. We know people who go to church—or temple, or even mosque—and show up four times per month are living four to 14 years longer than people who aren’t.” The figure may come from a study finding regular church attendance lengthened the average American’s life by seven years—and 14 years for African Americans.
That number dwarfed other, more intuitive lifehacks, including regular exercise and diet. “For a 20-year-old, if you move away from the standard American diet towards a Blue Zone diet—which is to say whole food, plant-based—it’s worth about 10 years of extra life expectancy, and for a 60-year-old, it’s still worth about six years,” he said.
One food, particularly, stood out above others: beans. “If you’re eating a cup of beans a day, it’s worth about four extra years of life expectancy over getting your protein from less healthy sources,” Buettner said, as he raved about minestrone soup. “Every time that you mix a grain with a bean, they come together, they make a whole protein. … These are cheap foods, they’re shelf stable, and every American can afford them.”
Those in the healthiest lifestyle moved organically, about every 20 minutes, without sitting for long periods of time. But anyone can benefit from simple exercise, such as walking. “If you have zero physical activity in your life, you can raise your life expectancy three years if you just walk 20 minutes a day,” Buettner told Bartiromo.
Strong family relationships also put years in your life. Centenaries agree on “putting family first, keeping your aging parents nearby, investing in your partner, investing in your children,” he continued. “People who are in a committed relationship are living anywhere from two to six years longer than people who are alone in life.”
If you’re keeping track, you can add three years to your life with exercise, four years by eating beans, six years by being in a committed relationship, six to 10 years by eating a whole foods and plant-based diet, and seven to 14 years by going to church every week.
Another aspect of church life that may lengthen your life is stress management. A key factor in living to 100 is “downshifting: either through prayer, meditation, simply expressing gratitude before a meal.” Regular prayer incorporates “making sure our day has certain times where we lower the stress of the human condition, lower inflammation,” said Buettner, a 2011 fellow at National Geographic and muti-time grant awardee.
Environmental factors—including the people and businesses around you—also play a role. “If you live in a neighborhood with more than five fast food restaurants within half a mile of your home, you’re about 35% more likely to be obese than if there are fewer than three,” Buettner added. “If your three best friends are obese and unhealthy, you are 150% more likely to be overweight yourself.”
The study is but one of many that have found physical, mental, and psychological benefits of faith, Bible reading, and church attendance:
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report in March 2023 stating that an epidemic of loneliness has produced health impacts “even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” Americans’ “health may be undermined” by their declining participation in “[r]eligious or faith-based groups.”
Regular “religious practice has significant effects” in reducing the faithful’s odds of dying from suicides, drug poisonings, and alcoholic liver disease, according to a 2023 study.
The Blue Zones commend cultures that promote a sense of purpose. “[R]eligious Americans tend to believe their life is meaningful more often than do those who are not religious,” found a 2023 study.
Americans who believe in God and value marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than isolated secularists, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll taken last March. While only a thin sliver of Americans (12%) consider themselves “very happy,” 68% of the happiest people surveyed say they believe in God.
An overwhelming 82% of Christians describe their outlook as optimistic and take pride in their church, according to a 2023 study.
Christians who regularly read the Bible report a higher score on the Human Flourishing Index—which measures “happiness & life satisfaction,” “mental & physical health,” “meaning & purpose,” “character & virtue,” “close societal relationships” and “financial & material stability”—than nonpracticing Christians or the Nones/religiously unaffiliated, a 2023 study found.
“Young-adult Gen-Xers in the strongly religious class across the three measurements generally reported better mental health when they reached established adulthood than those in the nonreligious class,” reported a 2022 Syracuse University study.
Women who attend church at least once a week had a 68% lower chance of dying a death of despair than non-churchgoers; men who go to church frequently lower their risk by one-third, according to a 2020 Harvard study.
Americans who attended religious services regularly were 44% more likely to say they were “very happy” than the religiously inactive, concluded a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.
A 2019 study found “robust effects of religiosity on depression that are stronger for the most depressed.”
Even if they leave behind religious practices, “people who attended weekly religious services or practiced daily prayer or meditation in their youth reported greater life satisfaction and positivity in their 20s—and were less likely to subsequently have depressive symptoms, smoke, use illicit drugs, or have a sexually transmitted infection—than people raised with less regular spiritual habits,” discovered a 2018 study from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
A 2017 study found church attendance significantly lowers the body’s reaction to stress and cuts the worshiper’s chance of dying in half. “More frequent churchgoers (more than once a week) had a 55% reduction of all-cause mortality risk compared with non-churchgoers,” reported the study.
Attending church more than once a week reduced a woman’s likelihood of dying by 33%, a 2016 Harvard study concluded.
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‘We Will bring back abortion freedom by ‘Fixing’ the Filibuster, Cruz’s Senate Rival Says
Rep. Colin Allred, the Texas Democrat challenging Sen. Ted Cruz in November, said he would support “fixing” the filibuster in part so that a hypothetical Democratic-majority Senate could pass an abortion bill that he claims would codify the Supreme Court’s 1971 Roe v. Wade abortion decision.
Tim Miller, a former Republican and podcast host for The Bulwark, interviewed Allred, a former NFL linebacker and member of the House of Representatives, at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Saturday. Miller asked a softball question, suggesting that Allred (along with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris) is not as liberal as his critics suggest, but Allred took the opportunity to pledge to “fix” the filibuster.
“If Kamala Harris gets in there, and if the Democrats hold on to the Senate, if Colin Allred gets in there and there’s 50 Democratic senators, they’re going to kill the filibuster, they’re going to pass the Green New Deal, they’re going to socialize health care, they’re going to expand the Supreme Court to 19 people … is that realistic?” Miller asked, suggesting that anyone who predicts these radical moves from Allred would be mistaken.
Rather than taking the bait, Allred pledged to change the filibuster, a Senate rule that currently requires a 60-vote majority to pass certain forms of legislation.
“The filibuster has to change because it’s broken,” the Democrat replied. “The history of the filibuster, as many Senate observers will know, is that it was used almost exclusively to block civil rights legislation, to block anti-lynching legislation. I’m a civil rights lawyer by training. This is personal for me.”
(While opponents of civil rights legislation did use the filibuster, many others have employed the filibuster, as well, to kill countless other bills. It is no more than a legislative mechanism that can be used for good or bad purposes.)
Allred noted that a previous version of the filibuster would hold up Senate business, while the new version of the filibuster applies “to every single bill, and you have a dual track,” where the Senate can pass other legislation while senators block specific bills through the filibuster.
“It has contributed to hyperpartisanship and has actually made the Senate less functional,” he argued.
Supporters of the current filibuster, such as outgoing Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., argue that the 60-vote threshold prevents radical bills from passing the chamber and contributes to friendliness in the upper body of the legislature.
“The whole point of the filibuster, like the whole point of the Senate itself, is to provide for a place where we can have considered, deliberative debate, and can forge compromise and consensus among our diverse and currently divided populace,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said in 2021.
Allred noted that in the House of Representatives, where he currently serves, the majority rules. “If you’re not in the majority, you have nothing,” he said. “The Senate doesn’t operate that way, and I don’t want to see it become like the House, but the current filibuster doesn’t work.”
The Texas Democrat insisted, “I want to maintain the bipartisan nature of the Senate,” but he called for altering the filibuster in a way that would enable Democrats to “codify Roe v. Wade.”
“And so, to me, we do have to reform it. We have to fix it. We have to go back to the original formulation for it,” he said. “That is also why we will codify Roe v. Wade and make it the law of the land.”
But the Democrat did not explain how “fixing” the filibuster would help Democrats pass legislation to “codify Roe v. Wade.”
In September 2021, Allred voted with most of his fellow Democrats to pass HR 3755, the Women’s Health Protection Act. He has co-sponsored the legislation, claiming that it “would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.”
Yet the bill goes further than Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision in which the Supreme Court reinterpreted the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to include a right to abortion. The court ruled that states could not ban abortion before the term of “fetal viability,” the point at which an infant can survive outside the womb. The court overturned that decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), returning the issue of abortion to the states.
While some states have restricted abortion to early in pregnancy before babies can feel pain, others have extended abortion up until the moment of birth.
The Women’s Health Protection Act specifically states that the right to abortion “shall not be limited or otherwise infringed.” It would have allowed abortion providers to determine whether a pregnancy is considered “viable” or not, effectively enabling abortions at any point.
“Make no mistake. It is not Roe v. Wade codification,” Manchin, who broke from his party and voted against the legislation, said in 2022. “It wipes 500 state laws off the books. It expands abortion.”
Allred went on to suggest that banning abortion involves forbidding the removal of a nonviable fetus in an ectopic pregnancy (where the embryo lodges outside the uterus, usually in a fallopian tube). He noted that two Texas women sued hospitals, claiming the hospitals refused to treat their ectopic pregnancies for fear of Texas’ abortion law, yet he did not note that Texas law does not forbid treating ectopic pregnancy and that those procedures are not abortions.
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Australia: Violent turn by pro-Palestinian movement a strategic mistake as police crush strong-arm tactics
Victoria Police has sent the clearest possible message to pro-Palestinian and anti-war protesters, with a series of deafening blasts and front-foot policing designed to contain violent extremism.
For the first time since the pandemic unrest, police have pulled out the rubber bullets, batons, teargas and stun grenades to put protesters back in their collective box.
By doing so, police are flagging to protesters that violence against officers and their horses will not be tolerated, regardless of the cause.
While the Land Forces 24 conference was the purported target of the protesters, the 2000 or so people who marched were united under the banner of supporting Gaza.
However, the strategy, fuelled by hard core socialists, relied heavily on violent resistance. This was a mistake.
Throwing acid, tearing down security walls, hurling stones and horse manure at police and their horses triggered the firmest anti-riot response in years.
The decision to adopt violent protest tactics was a sharp shift from the past 11 months, when most of the public pro-Palestine rallies have erred on the side of peace.
Wednesday’s rally changes this dynamic.
For much of the battle in the late morning, protesters gave the police the moral authority to strike back with force.
The protesters also lost the strategic war.
While they were hurling projectiles at police, the delegates to the conference were quietly walking into the Melbourne convention centre through a front door 150m away.
Present at the protest was Nasser Mashni, president of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, who lent his support to the Gaza cause but had no involvement in the violence.
Free Palestine Melbourne banners were common, as was the Socialist Alternative, the Victorian Socialists and Students for Palestine.
At one point the protesters chanted “the people united, will never be defeated’’, a trusty old Trades Hall chant.
In other words, the protesters were an effective anti-war coalition that mirrored Melbourne’s weekly anti-Israel parades, with leaflets being distributed for Marxism Discussion Groups at Brunswick’s Red Flag Bookstore, hosted by the Socialist Alternative.
In some ways it makes you want to smile.
But there is a danger in what has happened.
The protest leaders have sharply raised the temperature on the Middle East in what is Australia’s protest capital.
It now means that when protesters step out, they will know how to maximise attention for their cause.
This is not something that police or the Victorian or Australian governments will be looking for.
The plan has been for nearly a year to encourage respectful dialogue.
That ended the moment the protesters chose anarchy over peace.
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10 September, 2024
Germany notifies the EU it will bring in controls on ALL land borders
Reality dawns in the wake of the recent big vote for the AFD
Germany will bring in controls on all its land borders to deal with the 'continuing burden' of migration and 'Islamist terrorism', the country's interior minister has told the EU.
Nancy Faeser of the struggling Social Democrat party (SPD) has finally accepted that Germany has no choice but to enforce proper border controls if it has any hope of coping with the staggering amount of unauthorised entries.
According to German newspaper Bild, the new rules will see 'harsh rejections of migrants at the borders'.
Faeser has reportedly already informed the EU Commission of the decision, which is fuelled by deep-rooted panic over Germany's current migrant situation and internal security threats.
It marks, however, a U-turn from her stance just last month when she refused to extend strict controls first introduced last year on Germany's borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
This policy has already seen more than 30,000 people turned back at the borders since mid-October last year amid concerns over the rise in first-time asylum requests.
Now the rules will be applied across the length of Germany's 2,300-mile land border with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland.
The latest action comes shortly after an 'emergency' migration meeting between the conservative CDU/CSU parliamentary group and regional representatives, where discussions focused on tightening immigration policies.
Austria, however has not welcomed the development, saying it would not accept any migrants turned away at the border.
'There's no room for manoeuvre there,' Austria's Foreign Minister Gerhard Karner told Bild. 'It's the law. I have directed the Head of the federal police to not allow any returns,' he added.
Concerns about immigration have already been pushed to the forefront of German politics, heightened by a series of attacks carried out by Islamists, most recently in Solingen.
The German government has also been facing increased pressure to respond to migration as support for right-wing party, the AfD has rapidly gathered pace.
And at the end of last month Germany's police union announced that Schengen was making Germany's security crisis even worse and must be abandoned immediately.
Manuel Ostermann, deputy federal chairman of the Federal Police Union, has launched a fierce condemnation of Schengen, the EU's hair-brained border-free scheme, in an interview with Focus magazine.
'The crisis in Germany's security is a direct consequence of Schengen's ineffective policies. Schengen's inability to manage migration effectively has put Germany's safety at stake.'
'Germany must realize the current failure of Schengen and either make a concerted effort to return to the current legal situation or terminate Schengen,'
Here he pointed to the rising crime rates in Germany, exacerbated by the migration crisis, as proof that Schengen is no longer viable.
He said Schengen's open borders have made it easier for criminals to operate across Europe, impacting Germany's safety.
'Schengen has failed to protect Germany from the influx of criminals, necessitating immediate action.'
'We must continue to notify our internal borders because border controls, whose effectiveness has been proven, are no longer maintained under Schengen.
'The failure of Schengen is evident in the increased crime rates, making it clear that changes are needed.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13830071/Germany-EU-border-controls-Islamic-extremism.html
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Why have we allowed the woke elites to declare war on history, our values - and on America itself, asks FRANK FUREDI
`It was almost 9pm in Portland, Oregon, when the police department warned that a mob was gathering on a corner of Southwest Park Avenue.
This was October 2020, and American streets were still ablaze from the Black Lives Matter rioting that followed the murder of George Floyd.
‘Some are trying to pull down a statue with a chain,’ said a tweet from the authorities. And quite a statue it proved to be.
Within an hour, the revered figure of Abraham Lincoln, the founding father of modern America, had been hauled from his plinth – assassinated for a second time.
A telling new low in the culture wars that today engulf America and the west, this mindless act of vandalism was, for me, the moment that crystalized the terrible danger we now face.
The past itself is under attack.
We are witnessing nothing short of a war on history, a moral crusade which seeks to make people ashamed of their origins and who they are.
Nowhere is this crusade more aggressively pursued than in the United States of America and nowhere are the consequences more wide-reaching and destructive. The tentacles have reached into every corner of education and public life, as I explain in my new book.
The importance of Lincoln in all this can hardly be overstated.
Born in a log cabin in Kentucky, he rose to become not just the 16th President but among the most consequential of all to hold that office.
It was Lincoln who invoked ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ in his Gettysburg address.
A prominent opponent of slavery (for which he was gunned down), Lincoln is a hero, surely, to all reasonable Americans who believe that black lives matter.
Yet not, it seems, to the rioters who desecrated his memory and not to their fellow travelers among the liberal elite.
Today, it’s these cultural commissars – those who dominate the seats of learning and the media – who drive this narrative of hate against America’s achievements and its legacy.
Often, they do so through the pages of their favorite mouthpiece, The New York Times.
It is the Times which sponsors, the 1619 Project, for example, a program instructing children that the American Revolution was not so much a war of independence as an act of great selfishness to preserve the racial oppression of exploited peoples.
Taking its name from the year the first recorded slave ship arrived in Virginia, the project is enthusiastically endorsed by online influencers, by the leaders of America’s cultural industry and by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.
The power of such people helps explain why so many children have been brainwashed through anti-American indoctrination.
Books that remind children of the positive features of history have been taken off school shelves. So have masterpieces including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Libraries have taken objection to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s depiction of native Americans in her Little House on the Prairie books. In 2018, the American Library Association retrospectively cancelled her lifetime achievement award.
These are no mere details. When books are cancelled by libraries, they are rendered invisible to future generations.
Instead, our past is relentlessly demonized as a story of shame. Inspiring human achievements are routinely downplayed or called into question – part of what the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has called the ‘Black Armband’ view of history, invoking a past haunted by abuse and exploitation. History, in this view, is malevolent and the hold it exerts perpetuates oppression and misery.
Academics such as Professor Robert Meister of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have stated it directly: the ‘past is evil’.
If attacking the memory of Lincoln was egregious, an official decision to smear the 1776 Declaration of Independence is bewildering.
Executives from Washington’s National Archives, where the document is displayed, are critical of the language used to describe the indigenous population of the time.
So, it’s been disfigured by a trigger warning telling visitors that views expressed in the Declaration are ‘outdated, biased and offensive’.
This might seem unnecessary, bizarre even, as almost anything produced in the 18th century is likely to be outdated. But it’s worse than that. This sour commentary is misleading and destructive.
The Declaration of Independence was way ahead of its time, a document that would inspire independence movements for centuries to come.
Written mainly by Thomas Jefferson and famous for its insistence that ‘all men are created equal and possess certain inalienable rights’, it is, arguably, the foundation document of America itself. A blow for liberty around the world. Far from being outdated, the Declaration retains its relevance today.
By treating its content as ‘biased and offensive’, America’s official National Archives imply that the very creation of the United States was flawed. Everything that has followed since must, presumably, bear the same sinister hallmark.
And, yes, that is very much the view of those now trying to tear down America and the West.
The harm done by vandalizing the past in this way is all too evident. Young people, the human casualties, are growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them.
We must remember how to learn from those whose footsteps we are following and embrace their achievements – if we are not to lose an entire generation to ignorance and falsehood.
We must counter this malevolent crusade, this war on history.
And we should take note of Winston Churchill’s prescient warning: ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13829883/woke-elites-declare-war-history-FRANK-FUREDI.html
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The BBC has been CAPTURED by radical gender ideology
“The BBC is committed to achieving due impartiality in all its output”. So says Section 4 of its Editorial Guidelines. If only this were true. Unfortunately, like the Financial Times, which I looked at last week, our national broadcaster, now also worships the cult-like religion that is radical gender ideology. And many of us have the privilege of paying £169.50 every year to watch the BBC embrace this dogma.
Don’t believe me?
Here are some of the most shocking examples of the BBC actively promoting radical gender ideology and throwing impartiality completely under the bus.
When looking at journalistic ethics, what better place to start than the BBC’s own editorial “style guide”, which instructs BBC staff how to present coverage.
Here, BBC journalists are told:
“a person born male who lives as a female would typically be described as a transgender woman … we generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question”.
This one line alone signifies that the BBC is clearly content to completely disregard factual reporting based on reality.
For example, just a few weeks ago, there was significant international coverage of the grooming allegations made against MrBeast’s co-host, Ava Kris Tyson.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with MrBeast, he is a social media celebrity, with one of the largest online followings in the world.
Now, let’s make one thing clear, Ava Kris Tyson is a man. He had a wife and fathered a child. Then, in 2023, he decided to ‘transition’.
Yet, in line with the ‘style guide’, the BBC chose to refer to Tyson as a woman, writing: “MrBeast’s YouTube co-host Ava Kris Tyson has quit the channel after grooming allegations, which she denies”.
Here is a man, who claims he is a woman, accused of sexually grooming a young child. Yet, the BBC appears more concerned with using his preferred pronouns.
We witnessed more of this gender madness at the recent Paris Olympics, not to mention many other shocking examples of how it is being embraced by the BBC.
During BBC coverage of the women’s shotput, the commentator introduced one of the competitors, Raven Saunders —donning a mask and rainbow-coloured hair— saying “it’s good to see her back”. However, he was promptly corrected by his co-host, who said: “they are actually non-binary”.
If they’re not a woman, why are they in the women’s competition? This is something that went unanswered by the BBC commentator who, again, was clearly more concerned with getting pronouns right.
Such an embarrassing approach to journalism has even culminated, on multiple occasions, in the BBC using the ‘preferred female pronouns’ of male rapists and on one occasion even changing a rape victim’s quotes to avoid ‘misgendering’ her rapist.
This is utterly disgraceful. But it gets worse —a lot worse.
Remarkably, the BBC’s obsession with ideological language has even infiltrated recruitment procedures.
For those who wish to apply for a job there, they are forced to answer questions, including: “What is your Gender Identity?” and “Do you identify as trans/transgender”?
What the BBC considers newsworthy is also extremely telling.
With significant division and unrest around the country, including a spate of recent fatal stabbings, the BBC still found the time to report on an ‘incident’ in which someone had covered a pavement Pride flag in Forest Gate with white paint, describing the incident as “traumatising”.
When it comes to BBC Dramas, we’ve also witnessed a phenomenon in which ‘LGBTQ+’ characters are shoe-horned into programmes for no reason other than mindless virtue-signalling.
For example, it was recently announced that BBC’s Sherwood would be getting a makeover and would now feature a “young, queer and female” Sheriff of Nottingham.
More concerning is when the BBC seeks to impose moral supremacy over its viewers
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-bbc-has-been-captured-by-radical ?
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Australia: NT plan to lower age of criminal responsibility to 10 could contribute to ‘child jail crisis’, advocate says
Behind this is the tremendous nuisance caused by Aboriginal [black] boys. They do a lot of breakins and car stealings and make streets in some important NT cities -- such as Alice Springs -- unsafe at night
The Country Liberal party’s plan to lower the age of criminal responsibility back to 10 in the Northern Territory is “really concerning” and part of a “tragic shift” towards more punitive policies nationwide, the head of Indigenous legal services has said.
Karly Warner, chair of National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, is warning that such policies will result in a “child jail crisis” and should be undone or at least accompanied by greater investment in proper prevention programs.
Warner, who is going to Canberra to lobby the Albanese government this week, said it was the responsibility of “all attorneys” to ensure that “really regressive law and order policies” that harm children do not get enacted.
After a landslide victory in the August Northern Territory election, Lia Finocchiaro has promised to overhaul justice policies with repeat and violent alleged offenders to be refused bail and the age of criminal responsibility lowered again to 10.
Warner told Guardian Australia: “Wherever we are around country, there are absolutely signs of a tragic shift back to these punitive policies that obviously lead to more children in jail and more dangerous communities.
“[But] the signal from the new NT government, particularly around abandoning what is set in legislation for the minimum age of criminal responsibility, is really concerning.”
She added: “Law and order posturing about punishment is absolutely not the thing that will create safer communities”.
“They can implement evidence-based policies that will actually make our communities safer … or they can implement policies, look tough in response and create an environment and Northern Territory where crime will thrive.”
Warner cited other examples including: the Queensland government suspending its Human Rights Act to imprison children in police watch houses for adults; the Victorian government backflipping on a commitment to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14; and New South Wales bail laws.
Warner said the “dangerous” NSW bail laws would see “more children locked up in jails rather than getting the supports they need” and instead facing an “apprenticeship of crime in youth prisons”.
“We fear the worst when it comes to children in custody. We are already seeing an increase, and recent history tells us that the outcomes will be unimaginable and tragic.
“We are extremely concerned that the proven programs that actually work to prevent crime – which have never been properly supported or funded – will now be even further deprioritised.”
After national cabinet on Friday, the Albanese government announced a five-year $3.9bn national legal assistance partnership, which is $800m more than the previous agreement.
Warner said the funding announcement was “incredibly appealing” but argued it amounted to $500m, or just $100m a year more than its predecessor, once the $300m for indexation and pay parity was accounted for.
“There is no way [that] goes even close to hitting the sides of the phenomenal demands of the legal assistance sector.”
In question time on Monday the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said the package was “the biggest single investment by the commonwealth in the legal assistance sector, ever”.
“Community legal centres, including women’s legal centres, are currently turning away up to 1,000 people per day,” he said. “This investment in legal assistance will ensure that those services can help more Australians.”
Dreyfus said it was “very significant” that the package included “a commitment to ongoing funding”, arguing this would give “confidence for the future” after “the Liberals oversaw a decade of chronic underfunding”.
The independent senator Lidia Thorpe noted the commitment “falls short” of the independent Mundy review call for an additional $459ma year to be provided as a floor from 2025 onwards.
Thorpe said the announcement was “smoke and mirrors” and “mostly a rebrand of existing funding arrangements”.
“Labor’s ongoing failure to properly fund these services will see First Peoples women, children and other vulnerable groups without access to life-saving legal services.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/10/nt-age-of-criminal-responsibility-lowered-10-impact#:~:text=After%20a%20landslide%20victory%20in,responsibility%20lowered%20again%20to%2010 .
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9 September, 2024
The Deadliest Crack In Kamala’s Campaign Just Burst Wide Open
Vice President Kamala Harris has around 60 days left in this election to win over the American voter, but her campaign’s biggest obstacle just blocked her path.
The latest job numbers expose her fraudulent border policies and reveal just how bad her administration has been for native-born Americans in both the economy and illegal immigration.
It’s not a secret that the economy and illegal immigration are the thorn in the side of Harris’s campaign. Both issues have consistently ranked at the top of the priority list among voters for almost a decade. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) admit that there have been around 10-11 million illegal immigrants entering the country without authorization in the last four years. That number is just an estimate and does not in any way account for the millions more who come in undetected.
Harris knows this is an issue, which is why her campaign has shifted to attempting to portray her as the candidate who will be strong on the border. Her recent ad shows her standing in front of the border wall (which ironically was built by former President Donald Trump), and her campaign speeches revolve around her supposed plans to attack illegal immigration. (Biden, CNN Revive Desperate Tactic To Help Kamala Win Election)
A recent St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank study isolated data of native-born female and male workers against that of foreign-born men and women. The graph is alarming. According to the St. Louis Fed, while native-born workers have seen a steady decline in employment rates, after a massive decrease in 2020, they never fully recovered to pre-pandemic numbers. On the other hand, male foreign-born workers have fully recovered and have employment rates well above native-born Americans.
An Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank analysis of Census Bureau survey data found that the majority of these immigrants are illegal immigrants who have recently arrived in the country. The Atlanta FRED goes on to say that illegal immigrants are indeed weakening the labor market and that it will continue to trend down for Americans as the large inflows of immigrants persist. (ROOKE: Trump’s Secret Weapon To Win Gen Z Out From Under Nose Of Political Establishment)
“The documented patterns by years of immigration have important implications for the labor market. First, they imply that ignoring the distinct labor-supply behavior between newly immigrated workers and natives overstates the true impact on the labor market of the recent increase in immigration flow,” the Atlanta FRED states. “Second, going forward, they imply that the large inflows of immigrants since the pandemic will continue to weaken the labor market in the next few years as these immigrants will likely increase their labor supply gradually after arriving.”
While the August jobs report showed the country gained over 168,000 employed workers in the last month, it’s not what it seems. Most of these jobs were part-time, with 527,000 gained in August, while Americans lost almost 500,000 full-time positions.
To dive in even further, over 1.2 million native-born Americans lost full-time positions in the past year. At the same time, foreign-born workers, who we now know are predominantly illegal immigrants, gained 1.2 million jobs during that same time
Under the Biden-Harris administration, our country is hemorrhaging high-paying full-time jobs with benefits like 401 (k) and medical. It’s a sign that our country is hurting. Our middle class is being depleted, and Harris’s idea of help is to talk about price gouging and communist-style price controls, which will only continue to erase the middle class and further the transfer of wealth to the top 1%.
When there is no hope of ever obtaining the American Dream, voters will look for change.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/06/rooke-foreign-workers-native-born-kamala-harris/
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Israel bears the brunt of false wartime claims
Much of the world’s media is judging Israel by standards no other country could meet.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial last Tuesday about the murder of six young Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the October 7 massacre said it all: “Hamas Murders Hostages, Israel Is Blamed”.
In Australia, the painfully politically correct Nine newspapers’ cartoonist Cathy Wilcox nailed – unintentionally – the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel left. Around Wilcox’s Israeli cabinet table drawing, which was published by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last week, one minister says: “The people are protesting in the streets! They want us to bring an end to the conflict before more hostages are killed.” Another minister responds: “What can we do?”
Benjamin Netanyahu asks: “Punish the Palestinians a little harder?”
The protesters, of course, are not demanding the end of the war at all, but are wanting Netanyahu to prioritise freeing the hostages by accepting Hamas’s demands.
In this world view, Israel is always in the wrong, even when six young hostages held in a tunnel under Rafah are shot in the back of the head because Israel’s troops are approaching. But before the bullets they are made to film statements for their loved ones to be released later by their captors.
Never mind Israel left Gaza in 2005, or that its sovereign territory was invaded on October 7, and 1200 of its innocent civilians were murdered – many sexually defiled, some burned alive, others having their heads cut off.
And let’s not forget that 240 more, many who were enjoying a music festival for peace, were taken as hostages into the tunnels of a terror organisation.
In the eyes of the left, Israel is wrong to retaliate. It is a colonial power even though Jews have always lived in Israel, and Palestine and Judaism predates the Islam of Hamas by 2000 years.
Israel’s critics never argue the moral point. Palestinian deaths in Gaza would end if Hamas – a terror organisation with similar origins to ISIS – surrendered.
Even US President Joe Biden last week reserved his public criticism for Netanyahu over his perceived reluctance to accept a ceasefire but said nothing about Hamas’s cold-blooded murders.
The day before the WSJ hostage editorial, the Israel Defence Forces killed eight terrorists hiding near the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City.
The Times of Israel reported one of the Hamas fighters was Ahmed Fawzi Nasser Muhammad Wadiyya, a Hamas company commander who led the invasion of the small community of Netiv Ha’asara on October 7.
This was the terrorist seen on film drinking Coke from the fridge of the Taasa family, “moments after killing Gil Taasa, 46, in front of his sons, Koren, 12, and Shay, 8”.
Gil died when he jumped on a Hamas grenade to save his boys by giving them time to flee to their safe room.
While protesters in Tel Aviv desperately want the return of their hostages, Netanyahu, the IDF and the secret services have larger duties: to protect Israel from further attacks.
This column last October 14 spoke about meeting Yitzhak Rabin and PLO deputy leader Faisal Husseini in 1992 as the PLO and the Labour PM worked on a two-state solution the Palestinians have been offered several times since but have never accepted.
That column predicted Israel would struggle most in the months to come with “not bowing to the blackmail of hostage-taking”. Israel, a home to holocaust survivors, has tried to rescue every captured Jew since the Entebbe mission led by Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan, in 1976.
Bret Stephens in The New York Times on September 3 described Israel’s hostage dilemma perfectly. Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Hamas and held in Gaza in 2006, was released five years later – in total exchange for 1000 Palestinian security prisoners held by Israel.
Netanyahu approved that deal. Among those released was Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of October 7 and now head of Hamas after Israel’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the previous Hamas leader, in Tehran on July 31.
Some in Israel’s government, the protesters in Tel Aviv and a few foreign policy analysts argue Israel should do whatever is necessary to achieve a truce to free its hostages, even withdrawing from the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt. This could allow the resupply of Gaza with weapons smuggled from the south.
Those pushing the ceasefire agenda argue Israel’s biggest success to date came with the release of 70 hostages during the previous ceasefire in November. While the IDF has freed some Hamas captives in targeted actions, the military has been less successful than diplomacy.
Yet not all is going as badly for Israel as some in the media suggest – too often taking their lines from Hamas’s backers at Al-Jazeera. In fact, Sinwar, who had hoped to precipitate a regional war, is almost certainly disappointed at the limited strike by Hezbollah on Israel a fortnight ago and Iran’s reticence to hit Israel directly after Haniyeh’s assassination.
The Jerusalem Post’s David Ben-Basat on August 27 wrote: “Sinwar … who is well aware his time is running out will not agree to any deal that does not involve significant withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor and Rafah Crossing along with assurances from the US and Israel that he will not be assassinated.”
Netanyahu will be cautious about giving Sinwar anything, given the IDF has killed 17,000 Hamas fighters but paid with the loss of 704 IDF personnel.
Ben-Basat continued: “The Palestinians, who have turned their self-victimisation into nationalism, use the Al-Jazeera news network to showcase the ruins of Gaza … to the world.”
The reliance of Western media on Al-Jazeera has allowed terrorists to pose as journalists, pumping out false claims about civilian starvation and total death numbers and creating the idea the only democracy in the Middle East is populated by evil racists while a medieval death cult committed to the subjugation of women, the murder of homosexuals and the destruction of Israel is a force of freedom fighters.
Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, has extracted some corrections and apologies from large US media groups in the past month.
The New York Times on August 12 corrected an opinion piece that claimed Israel had imposed “a blanket blockade on food entering Gaza”. Camera pointed out that on August 7, the day before the publication of the false blockade story, 158 aid trucks entered Gaza. On August 8, 271 trucks of humanitarian aid crossed into the city.
In July, 4629 trucks with 23,240 tonnes of food entered Gaza. In fact, as this column reported on April 7, food supplies have been higher than before the war, even using UN figures.
Camera said an average of 150 trucks a day of aid and food had entered Gaza since October 7, compared with 75.3 trucks a day in the nine months before October 7.
On casualties, Camera reported on August 21 that 80 separate US news outlets had published a correction in which Associated Press admitted claims of 40,000 Palestinian civilian deaths should have mentioned that this number, which the IDF does not accept, actually includes 17,000 dead Hamas fighters. The total figure is supplied by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health ministry.
Don’t expect our ABC to correct that, or false claims about starving Gazans.
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California Took Away a Widow’s Teenage Daughter to Transition Her
A mother in California lost her daughter to the foster care system in 2016 after she wouldn’t support the then-14-year-old girl identifying as a boy.
“I lost my husband, but this was worse than losing my husband, because I had my rights taken away,” the mother told The Daily Signal.
Years later, the daughter regrets attempting to transition, and her mother warns other parents against allowing minors to make irreversible changes to their bodies.
The mother of two, whose husband had died years earlier, was accused of emotional abuse for forbidding her teenage daughter from binding her chest and wearing male clothes. Her daughter was taken from the family and placed in a foster home for a few months.
“It was incredibly hard,” said the mom, who asked to remain anonymous to protect the privacy of her daughter. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
The Daily Signal reviewed Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services documentation in which a social worker, referring to the then-14-year-old with he/him pronouns and a male name, details the daughter’s time in foster care, her accusations of emotional abuse against her mother, and her later renunciation of the claims.
The mother had to hire lawyers to regain custody of her daughter and clear her name of the abuse charges. The charges would have disqualified her from continuing to pursue a career as a Christian counselor.
After a few months in a packed foster home in a dangerous neighborhood, the daughter asked to come home. She admitted to lying about the abuse, saying that she got the idea to accuse her mother of abuse from people online who said that was the ticket to getting away from her family.
“The process of getting her back, it was pretty difficult,” the mother said.
“She even admitted it to me later that she was influenced by people online who said you need to get out of your house if she’s not going to let you do what you want to do,” she continued.
The mother hired two attorneys to get her teenager back and clear her name. She said she felt like Child Protective Services was looking for reasons to tear her family apart.
“It was not about reunification,” she said. “It was more about, what can we do to this family to destroy them?”
After the daughter returned home, she called social workers on her mother a few more times, accusing her mom of abuse for refusing to buy her male clothing. The mother received a California Child Abuse Central Index (CACI) violation for declining to take her daughter to a program at the Los Angeles LGBT Center for LGBTQ+ youths ages 2-25 called Rise.
“I wasn’t feeling like that was really helping her, going to that center, because even when she was going to the center, I found that she was connecting with other kids, and her demeanor was even worse, even more rebellious, even more defiant,” the mother said. “I made the call. I’m not going to drive you there. And that’s when the social worker wanted to interview me, and because I didn’t do that, I immediately got a second hit for emotional abuse.”
“I just found it really crazy that they could deem that as emotionally abusive, just trying to discipline your child,” she continued.
At age 17, the daughter admitted to getting a prescription for testosterone from a therapist behind her mom’s back. She took it for a few days, but she told her mom she felt God was telling her to stop.
The mom said she couldn’t have gotten through the difficult time without her faith community. She left California a few years ago, partially because of how her parental rights were disrespected there.
“Once this was all resolved, I thought I had to get out of California, as much as it was home to me, and still is, to some point,” she said. “I didn’t feel safe there raising my daughter anymore.”
This is not the first time the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has taken a daughter away from her mother over transgender ideology. DCFS placed 16-year-old Yaeli Martinez in foster care after her devout Christian mother, Abby, expressed concerns over her daughter “transitioning” to a boy.
The government accused Abby Martinez of abuse and permitted her only brief meetings with her daughter weekly. Yaeli committed suicide three years later.
“My daughter was murdered by gender ideology,” Martinez said in a testimony before the California Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023.
The anonymous mother told The Daily Signal that in states like California and Minnesota, to which the family has since moved, “a parent does not have the rights to parent their kid or guide them from things that could be potentially harming.”
“It’s very concerning because parents’ role is to guide their children the best they can in a healthy manner,” she said, “and giving a 14-year-old those rights, it doesn’t make sense to me.”
The mother referred to a May 2023 bill signed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—currently running as the Democratic vice presidential nominee—that allows kids to travel to Minnesota and receive medical interventions without parental knowledge or consent and to a 2013 California law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” in schools.
In mid-July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed Assembly Bill 1955, which barred school districts from requiring that parents be informed of their child’s gender identity.
The mother told The Daily Signal she was very concerned about the health risks of chest binding. She told her daughter it could permanently damage her body. Chest binding can cause tissue and rib damage, hormone imbalances, and breathing issues.
According to the mother, social media played a huge role in her daughter’s decision to identify as a boy.
“I think if there wasn’t social media, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she said. “There’s just so many things that they can get into through social media and the internet.”
Although the road has not been easy, the mom and daughter—now 22 years old—have a good relationship now.
“She regrets it, what she put me through,” the mother said. “She’s sorry that she did.”
Now, the mother urges other parents in similar situations to limit their children’s phone usage, find support systems, and never give up on their families.
“Just keep fighting,” she said. “That’s what I did. I just kept fighting.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/08/taken-california-stole-widows-daughter-transition/
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‘Big trouble’: Australian Farmers to descend on Canberra to protest live sheep export ban
Federal pandering to "animal welfare" groups at work
Anthony Albanese has been accused of “kicking agriculture in the guts” as farmers prepare to descend on parliament house to protest Labor’s live sheep export ban.
The Prime Minister this week insisted the ban, which has sparked outrage from the farming industry but was welcomed by animal rights groups, would go ahead and would not be revisited.
The Export Control Amendment Bill 2024, presented to the public in May this year and passed overwhelmingly by the House and Senate, will phase out the live export of sheep over four years by May 1, 2028 and offer affected farmers a $107 million “transition package”.
Desperate farmers are now “having to make business decisions about their merino flock”, with backlogged abattoirs unable to process the animals, according to WA livestock truckie Ben Sutherland, vice president of the Livestock and Rural Transport Association of Western Australia and key spokesperson of the Keep the Sheep campaign.
“The merino job is in big trouble, they’re taking flock reductions here … [the financial impact] has been absolutely massive,” he said.
“They’ve been taking a hit for the last month, especially with lamb prices, mutton prices at some of their all-time lows. It’s really hard to get rid of sheep through abattoirs. Some people are overstocked by 10 to 15 per cent still and they’re needing to reduce sheep numbers. Things are not looking great.”
Nationals leader David Littleproud said in July, after the ban was passed by parliament, that there were already anecdotes of farmers shooting their sheep, which they believe will be rendered “worthless” by the bill.
“That’s at the feet of Anthony Albanese, RSPCA and Animals Australia – dead sheep in paddocks – from farmers who are desperate and can’t afford to [process them locally],” he said.
Mr Sutherland said the farming community was “disheartened” by the decision, which was already having ripple effects through the WA industry after a dry start to the year.
“As a transporter, 30 per cent of our annual bottom line is starting to happen now,” he said.
“At the moment I’d say we’re in the tightest margins we’ve ever seen. We’re only at 2 to 3 per cent, that’s likely to go to 1.2 to 2 per cent. It’s not good, especially with rising fuel prices, road user charges, insurance, it’s really looking a lot like it’s anti-agriculture.”
Mr Sutherland said in all his years “I’ve never seen people so disenchanted with the federal government”.
“There’s no competence in them at all,” he said. “Everywhere you turn they’re kicking agriculture in the guts, kicking us in the teeth.”
He accused Labor of “bowing down to animal activists” and endangering the food supply chain.
“I think it’s a combination of both ideology and incompetence,” he said.
“They never consulted the industry, they have not spoken to people in the supply chain and got our perspective.”
The National Farmers Federation has called on farmers and supporters to join a rally outside parliament house in Canberra on Tuesday, September 10, to oppose what it calls “anti-farming agendas” of the federal government.
The rally was initially organised by the Keep the Sheep campaign but has been broadened to highlight a range of other concerns, including new taxes, water buybacks and energy infrastructure.
“We’re seeing a growing number of decisions being driven by anti-farming activism, not evidence,” NFF president David Jochinke said in a statement.
“We’re being drowned out by the noisy minority who want to shut us down.”
A recent survey by the NFF found fewer than one in 10 farmers say the federal government was listening to their concerns or had a positive plan for their future.
“Australian farmers are the best in the world,” Mr Jochinke said.
“We consistently deliver the highest quality produce for Aussie families. We want policymakers to work with us to grow more in Australia. Too often it feels like they’re just working with our detractors. The common thread in every issue we’re facing is that they’re all driven by niche interest groups who don’t understand or support Aussie farmers.”
Mr Jochinke said a rally was an “unusual step” for the peak body “but we hope it will send powerful message to decision-makers ahead of the next election that these decisions need to stop”.
“We just want a return to common sense,” he said.
“We want policies informed by farmers’ lived experience and designed to grow the industry, not diminish it to appease activist agendas. Whether you’re a farmer or not, I encourage you to join us to celebrate the positive story of Australian agriculture in the heart of Canberra.”
Mr Littleproud said on Friday that the Nationals “100 per cent” supported the rally.
“This Labor government has decimated our farming and agriculture industry,” he said in a statement.
“It has been over 40 years since farmers last felt so aggrieved to protest against a government. It’s easy to understand why our farmers are fed up, after being constantly attacked by Labor and its anti-farming policies, from water buybacks to reckless renewables and its senseless phase-out of our live sheep export trade.”
Mr Littleproud said the Nationals were demanding 10 key changes by Labor, including reinstating the live sheep export trade, fixing the PALM scheme “mess” and stopping the “truckie tax and vehicle efficiency standard”.
“These 10 key areas are crucial to farming, agriculture and regional Australia,” he said. “The Nationals will not stop fighting until common sense prevails and our farmers get a fair go.”
Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash claimed the Prime Minister had “sold out WA farmers by banning the live export of sheep — destroying an entire industry in the process”.
“More than 3000 Australians work in this industry,” Ms Cash said on X last week. “They face losing their jobs, and families under financial stress will have to leave country towns.”
The Prime Minister visited Perth this week to introduce Trish Cook as Labor’s candidate for the new electorate of Bullwinkel, home to a number of regional communities affected by the live export ban.
Asked whether he had met with any industry representatives to discuss the impact of the ban during his visit, Mr Albanese said he had “met with industry reps in Canberra, and I’ve also met families in Kalgoorlie when I was there”.
“This an industry that’s worth $80 million [in] exports a year,” he said.
“The money that we have on the table is at least $107 million for adjustment. We want communities to be looked after. I think that this is an industry, if you compare $80 million for live exports with $4 billion which is what the sheep meat export industry is worth, I think that indicates where the industry needs to go. We want to make sure that people are looked after and we want to work with industry on that.”
Mr Albanese insisted Labor’s focus was on job creation.
“And that’s why, in transitioning away from the live sheep meat export trade, towards the sheep meat export trade, we can create more jobs,” he said.
“One of the things about when you process, just like value adding a future made in Australia across the board, I’m for value adding in Australia whenever you can. And that’s how you create more jobs, not less jobs. The big trade in the sheep industry in Australia is for sheep meat export.”
The Prime Minister acknowledged “adjustments are hard, which is why we have that support available, and why we are engaging”.
“But to be clear, the legislation was passed overwhelmingly through the House of Representatives and through the Senate,” he said. “This is a decision that I believe has the overwhelming support of the Australian population.”
Mia Davies, the Nationals candidate for Bullwinkel, told The West Australian the Prime Minister’s comments were “flippant”.
“The Prime Minister is flippant, and it’s a disgrace when it comes to talking about this industry [that] directly supports 3000 people’s jobs,“ she said.
“He’s talking about creating new jobs. How about we keep the jobs we’ve already got?”
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8 September, 2024
White House slams Tucker Carlson's 'sadistic' interview with so-called historian who claimed Hitler was NOT the chief villain in WWII
Ultimately, I think Churchill was right to distrust and oppose Hitler but the situation was not so clear at the time. Hitler had made it clear that he had no quarrel with his British racial brethren and was quite happy to leave the British empire in place while he controlled Europe
Some prominent British politicians were inclined to trust him on that so, had their views prevailed, the outcome MAY have been a much reduced loss of British lives
The White House is slamming Tucker Carlson for his interview with a man he called 'the best and most popular historian in the US' over his claims that Adolf Hitler was not World War II's chief villain.
Daryl Cooper - a podcast host and so-called historian - caused controversy when he said that not only did the Nazis not intend to murder millions but that Winston Churchill is the main villain of the war.
The show caused outrage online, especially after X CEO Elon Musk quote-tweeted the video, writing: 'Very interesting. Worth watching'. Musk has since deleted the post.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates issued a harsh rebuke to the episode of the show.
'Giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over 6 million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism, and to every subsequent victim of Antisemitism,' Bates said in a statement.
'Hitler was one of the most evil figures in human history and the 'chief villain' of World War II, full stop. The Biden-Harris Administration believes that trafficking in this moral rot is unacceptable at any time, let alone less than one year after the deadliest massacre perpetrated against the Jewish people since the Holocaust and at a time when the cancer of Antisemitism is growing all over the world.'
Much of what Cooper said about World War II blames Great Britain Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
'Now, he didn't kill the most people, he didn't commit the most atrocities, but I believe... that when you get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did,' Cooper said.
While he didn't consider Hitler to be the hero of World War II, he says that only erred when he got Germany into 'a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners.'
'They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there,' seeming to insinuate that the Holocaust happened by accident.
Cooper hosts a podcast called 'Martyr Made' which saw a massive boost in listenership following his appearance with Carlson.
The interview has been viewed over 29.1 million times, according to the social media platform's numbers.
Cooper doubled down on his blame of Churchill, posting a lengthy thread on the UK Prime Minister - considered by many the hero of World War II - on X after the controversy.
'I know that sounds like hyperbole. Churchill didn't order the most deaths, oversee the most atrocities, or commit the worst crimes. But most of those crimes could not have been committed if the war had not happened, and Churchill was the leader most intent on making it happen,' Cooper wrote.
Cooper's statements have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum, including by many conservatives.
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney wrote: 'Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, including, 'Churchill was the chief villain of WW2' and Hitler 'didn't want to fight.' No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage.'
'This is just the same old Hitler apologetics (“He didn’t want to widen the war,” “They didn’t know what to do with all POWs so he put them in camps,” etc.). Remarkably, there isn’t any historiography behind it. This “popular historian” just makes conclusory claims. Shameful,' added Compact Magazine Editor Sohrab Ahmari.
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Christianity defends against tyrants
All religions, including Christianity, were created to control the population and make them docile?
You have heard the argument before. Old religion is the opiate of the masses…
This line of attack is so tired that it probably does not have much effect on any serious thinking person. However, there is a kind of lazy thinker who still finds it to be an attractive line of thought, hence its usage in this show. Let’s take a step back and consider this argument for a moment. Come reason with me, and let’s test the soundness of this position. You’ll see how far short it falls.
What is the most significant religious moment in the whole Old Testament? If you have not read the Bible you might not know the answer to this, but it is simple. Outside of creation itself, the most significant moment is the Exodus. All of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, leads toward the Exodus. The rest of the Old Testament, in large measure, harkens back to it. It is the central salvation event in the Old Testament which frames how God’s people should see their Lord, each other, and this world.
What happened during the Exodus? Moses, at the instigation of He Who Is Who He Is, the Lord Almighty, led a rebellion and an insurrection against the largest empire in the known world at that time. It was such a cataclysmic event that Egypt never fully recovered. Egypt diminished as a result of the economic and social devastation caused by that Exodus. The central narrative of the Old Testament is an account of people choosing God over comfort, stability, and loyalty to the state, and being willing to suffer in the wilderness instead. There were times when many amongst the Hebrews regretted their decision and longed for the garlic and leeks of Egypt, but still, they chose to break free of their oppressors at the instigation of their Lord.
The central account of the first part of the most influential book in history was a kind of revolution that set people free from oppression.
This event was to frame how this people saw themselves. This creates a unique kind of people. This creates a people who have a complicated and dynamic relationship with their leaders.
There is much in the Old Testament which encourages and even commands submission to authority figures. But this submission to Earthly leaders is always one link in a chain that leads to the highest authority, God himself, and those who know they can defy Pharaoh at the command of God, also know that they can reserve the right to defy any other tyrant or leader who comes between them and God.
How can such a religion be accused of being created by tyrants to pacify populations?
Those who are familiar with Sunday school classes, even if not the whole Bible, will probably remember the account of Daniel and the Lions’ Den, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the blazing furnace. These two stories recount the godly defiance of unjust orders by four men who are considered heroes of the Christian faith. These men were part of the Jewish population in exile in Babylon at the instigation of the Lord himself, and they were under commands to work and pray for the welfare of the pagan cities amongst which they were sojourners. Yet they also understood that being good citizens of heaven was a higher priority than being good citizens of any earthly kingdom, and so when these two things came into conflict they chose the higher priority. This is what makes them heroes. They chose to risk terrible deaths, Daniel at the jaws of hungry lions, and the other three, the prospect of being burned alive, rather than risk defying their God.
They understood that the chain of authority is not a linear line. Yes, Kings stand at a higher point than the general populous in the hierarchy of authority ordained by God, but the authority of God overrules all other authorities at any point at which it comes into conflict with the authority of men. Therefore, everyone has a responsibility to follow God’s authority first. The kind of religion created by the Exodus creates the very kinds of heroes that we see in examples like Daniel and his three contemporaries. Men who obey God over other men. And they are not the only ones.
The most significant characters outside of the kings in the Old Testament are the prophets, who starting with Moses and ending with John the Baptist, often found themselves in conflict with the State. Tradition tells us that Isaiah, who was a high-ranking priest in Judah, was sawn in half. Jeremiah’s conflict with the authorities he is prophesying against is famous and recounted in some detail in the book named after himself. Many other prophets also found themselves in a similar situation, because they challenged the state structures that were defying the authority of God. Jesus himself describes what a prophet can expect, ‘Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’ (Matt. 5:11-12). The whole concept of being one of these men was being willing to defy unjust orders, or general injustice when necessary. This creates a particular kind of faith, a faith where its adherents are expected to be willing to suffer for doing what is right, even when it is unpopular, especially when it is.
This brings us squarely into the New Testament. Christians serve a Lord and Saviour who was murdered by the state, both Jewish and Roman, because he refused to play along with the traditions of the Jewish leaders. Take stock of that for a minute. Atheists, in all their grand intelligence, have the gall to argue that a religion where people serve a risen saviour who was killed for defying the state, was actually created to control the masses. Could you get a dumber premise? This premise is so illogical, to even assert it you would have to work really hard to either not think deeply about it, or to have worked equally hard to make sure you have never engaged with Christianity on a serious intellectual level.
I once considered writing a piece entitled Righteous Rebels, but I decided not to do so as the Bible is clear that the sin of rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. The motivation for Christians to defy tyranny is not based on a heart of rebellion, at least it is not meant to be. It is deeply grounded in a love for God and a love for our fellow man. We know we are called to prioritise our love for God and his commands above all else, and we are to oppose that which does wrong to our fellow human beings. This can bring us into conflict with the State even when we would prefer that it did not, because often the state is directed by men who defy the commands of our Lord.
I can tell you that most Christians, along with most unbelievers, would prefer to live a quiet life, minding their own business. This is our default setting. Indeed, we are told to prefer this in Scripture, ‘…and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you…’ (1 Thess. 4:11). You will even find Christians who define their faith around this sentiment, they want to withdraw from the world, work the land quietly, stay away from people, and stay as far away from any trouble as humanly possible. But remember, this passage was written by a man who was often coming into conflict with people both inside his churches and outside of them, from both Jews and Gentiles. Sometimes entire cities were thrown into a tumult, to such a point that once he was confused by a Roman soldier of being a violent Egyptian revolutionary even though he raised a hand to no one. We should prefer peace and quiet, and even work towards that, but there is what we would prefer and then there is what we sometimes have to oppose because God would not have us go along with evil.
When evil rises this can bring quiet and peaceful Christians into conflict with the world.
The tyrants of this world have often been hammers that the devil has sought to wield to destroy the Church, but he often comes into conflict with the anvil of the perseverance of the saints of the Lord who refuse to budge.
Now, I should note before I finish, that yes, there have been times when the State has overcome the authority in the Church and used the structure of the Church as a hammer against godly men and women. But whenever this situation arises, God lifts up ordinary men and women who will even stand up to that. Every believer knows they have a direct line from their conscience to God that no priest can override, and therefore, many believers have been forced even to confront ecclesiastical authorities across history as well. So, even those times which sceptics might use as proof of their position, times when Christianity was co-opted by corrupt forces, disprove their overall thesis. Christianity is designed from the inside out to be a self-critiquing religion where every human authority is shown its limits.
If you wanted to create a religion to pacify the masses then Christianity is the opposite of what you would come up with. Christianity is the anti-tyranny faith. It is the bane of oppressors throughout history. It is the thorn in the side of many humans who seek to claim absolute power. Jesus Christ is the greatest slayer of tyrants, precisely because he overcame evil with his death and resurrection, and inspires in his believers a hope in a better world. When believed and correctly applied Christianity makes great citizens, who always reserve the right, when needed, to remind their authorities who the greatest authority is; the Lord Jesus Christ. Tyrants hate that.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/christianity-defends-against-tyrants/
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Kamala protected by left’s curious silence about her new Trumpian policies
If Kamala is elected, will we get Trump in a skirt?
In her adoption of a swathe of Trumpian policies, only the naive would believe Kamala Harris had experienced some Damascene conversion.
Notwithstanding this, there have been no protests – not even a peek – from Democrat notables.
The explanation is that Democrat powerbrokers are agreed on three points.
First, there is no question that Ms Harris remains a radical leftist but that, for electoral purposes, she is playing a chameleon, something to which she is accustomed as recounted in Peter Schweitzer’s Profiles in Corruption.
Second, given her inability to handle a challenging interview, it is better to exclude her, as Biden was, from most of the normal cut-and-thrust of the election.
Third, given the corruption of the greater part of the mainstream media, who now act as the Democrat propaganda arm, they will provide cover on both points.
As to the real Kamala Harris, the National Review editor-in-chief, Rich Lowry, slams Ms Harris as ‘weak’ and ‘a phony’, one who doesn’t truly care about ‘the country or the middle class’, a ‘shape-shifting opportunist’ who ‘can and will change’ on ‘almost anything when politically convenient’.
Even if when she is saying something popular, i.e. Trumpian, Lowry insists she cannot ‘be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office’. Democrat grandees are no doubt delighted with this.
This election is of singular importance. It is a fork in the road, and not only for America. On the one side is the MAGA doctrine, on the other, the Obama doctrine for the managed decline of the US and the West, the core of which is the continued appeasement of the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis.
Associated is the endorsement of the new far-left ideology, spread by the march of Newcoms (new communists) through America’s institutions, beginning with education and ultimately extending even onto the boards of some of the great corporations.
The core has been the anti-Western, discredited dogmas of climate catastrophism and critical race and gender theory.
In the meantime, an open border policy is designed to lock in millions of future Democrat voters.
Ms Harris began her simulation of Trumpian policy with her blatant copying of ending the taxing of tips. This was despite her breaking the tie in the Senate to enable the IRS, among other things, to pursue taxpayers receiving that important part of their remuneration, tips.
Based on Trump’s policy, very popular in the battleground state of Nevada and with legislation already introduced by Senator Cruz, she failed even to acknowledge that she had taken their policy.
Following this, she has renounced the EV mandate so that people can keep their gasoline-driven cars, and her policies of abolishing private health care, defunding the police, and banning fracking. Then, she claimed, she would complete the wall on the southern border.
The impact was such that Senator Cruz jocularly referred to White House leaks that she planned to dye her hair blonde and her skin orange, while wearing enormously long red ties at future appearances.
On closer examination, the border change was not as Trumpian as she suggested.
Harris says Trump persuaded Republican senators to block a so-called bipartisan immigration bill, one she says she will sign on day one of her presidency.
But as Mark Levin points out, it entrenches ‘catch and release’, instead of Trump’s policy of requiring aspring immigrants to stay in Mexico until a decision is made, a policy overruled by an executive order signed by Biden. Capping this off, illegals will have work permits and taxpayer-funded lawyers.
This continues and legitimises the Biden-Harris policy of opening the border and letting the drug cartels bring in over ten million illegal immigrants including criminals and terrorists, as well as vast amounts of the drug fentanyl.
For those four years, she and Biden undermined or, to use a term from the English Civil War, dispensed with immigration law. When two English kings tried that, one lost his throne and the other his head. But Biden and Harris were not even impeached.
Meanwhile there has been one last, desperate use of lawfare to stop Trump. Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose appointment has been ruled invalid by a Florida court, filed yet another indictment against Donald Trump over his challenge to the results of the 2020 presidential election. The indictment obviously attempts to navigate around the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity for official acts.
As it cannot be heard before the election, Smith’s action is obviously political and unlikely to affect the vote.
Meanwhile, the so-called interview on CNN was purely a propaganda broadcast, with Harris insisting on her vice presidential nominee being there to save her and that it be prerecorded, no doubt so that it could be edited. Harris had ready-made answers and frequently referred to a crib sheet which seemed to follow the order of the questions.She did not need to search for the answer. This suggested she had notice of the questions.
Harris was allowed long, uninterrupted, unchallenged answers and she received very few follow-up questions. It would have been wiser not to have done this. Americans will only compare it with Trump’s continuing availability for questioning, his obvious ad-libbing, his detailed disclosure of his agenda and the fact that in his last term, he donated his salary to various federal agencies.
Meanwhile, the united front of the anti-Trump media propaganda arm is weakening.The comments above by Rich Lowry were in the New York Times. X, previously Twitter, is now under Elon Musk and is a bastion of free speech.
And Mark Zuckerberg seems to be breaking ranks. He has apologised for giving in to White House pressure to censor comments on Covid, and for accepting FBI advice that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian misinformation. He declares that he will not repeat his 2020 contribution of $400 million to what many saw as Democrat fronts.
Meanwhile, Trump is constantly on the road, speaking to the people. His contributions are accessible on the internet.
He remains the hope of America and the West.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/kamala-trumped-by-lefts-curious-silence/
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The Bizarre Alliance Between Transgenderism and Abortion
When discussing the transgender craze and abortion, less is often more. But the alliance between the trans movement and the pro-abortion movement has become so aggressive that we can’t avoid talking about it (as much as we might like to).
At first glance, the issues of abortion and LGBTQ appear unrelated. Same-sex relationships are sterile and can’t result in pregnancy. But the homosexual movement has actively inserted itself into the abortion debate because both the trans and pro-abortion movements are built on a shared philosophy: sexual license that accepts no sexual limitations from church, state, or culture.
Abortion advocates and LGBTQ advocates alike generally believe that sex should be free for any reason, with anyone, and with zero consequences. And they demand that this philosophy be accepted by everyone.
The two movements are locked arm-in-arm, not only in principle but financially. This is why you see so many “Pride” flags at pro-abortion events and abortion rights signs at “Pride” parades.
Enter the transgender movement.
Gay rights activists achieved total victory in 2015 when the Supreme Court forced all 50 states to legally recognize same-sex unions as marriages. But the revolution never ends—it just finds a new outlet for upending society. So it’s no surprise that the same year, the TQ (transgender/“queer”) end of the LGBTQ acronym rose to prominence as Olympic legend Bruce Jenner insisted he is a woman named Caitlyn.
Just like the homosexual cause, the trans movement has joined forces with the pro-abortion movement. Abortion appears to be next, as trans advocates shout, “Trans men are men … and sometimes they need abortions!” We are reaching peak insanity.
The pendulum may well swing back toward sanity sooner rather than later because the coalition of sexual deviants supporting the abortion industry becomes increasingly unstable.
The abortion industry long has been allied with a feminist movement built on advancing the interests of women. But now the abortion industry has joined forces with a trans movement that essentially denies there is such a thing as a woman. Increasingly bizarre rhetoric reveals that the unholy trinity of the abortion industry, radical feminism, and LGBTQ is built on a house of cards. And it’s on the brink of collapse.
Perhaps no two movements in the history of the world have put more emphasis on the reality of biological sex than feminists and homosexuals.
For more than a century, feminists have worked for equality in the workplace, equality in sports, and celebration of the many things that women can do as well as or better than men. This approach is well intentioned—even if it sometimes seriously goes off the rails by veering into advocacy of abortion and other evils.
But whether the feminist movement is right or wrong on a given issue, it’s indisputably true that for feminists being a woman matters. The difference between women and men matters.
Your sex was no more “assigned at birth” than the reproductive organs you have. Vaginas and penises are not interchangeable to feminists. They are absolutely binary, and they are relevant to feminists and to their cause.
Men cannot get pregnant. Men don’t bear the joys and pains of pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Men don’t make the sacrifices necessary to breastfeed their children. The feminists know this as well as anyone, and they have traditionally been the loudest in sharing it.
The homosexual movement, too, understands that “biological sex” is a redundant term. This is why the LGBTQ movement was always destined to fracture.
On one hand, you’ve got the “TQ” side of the acronym that argues an infinite number of genders exist, genders can change, or there’s no such thing as gender. On the other hand, the “LG” side of the acronym takes the reality of biological sex so seriously that homosexual people choose their sexual partners based on the reality of their biological sex.
Homosexual men want to have sex with other men because they’re men. Lesbians want to have sex with women because they’re women.
Homosexual people often go so far as to root their very identity in their attraction to the same sex. They dedicate an entire month to celebrating their attraction to members of the same sex. They spent decades pushing for legal and social recognition of same-sex marriage.
Christians and homosexual activists sharply disagree on the morality of sexual relationships between two individuals of the same sex. But we can at least agree on what those relationships are and who they involve.
Transgender activists throw that shared understanding—which has been in place for all of human history—right out the window. Some insist that gay men actually must be straight trans women. Others insist that lesbians are bigots if they refuse to date trans women (who are actually men).
The previous paragraph would be laughable—if it wasn’t the dominating philosophy in media, politics, business, entertainment, and academia. But the bottom line is, the transgender movement is driving a wedge between itself and some of the other progressive movements you probably think of as their natural allies: the feminist and homosexual movements.
They don’t always admit it publicly, but many feminists and homosexuals are outraged at how the trans movement has hijacked their causes. We got a peek at this when there were split opinions on whether trans women (actual men) could be part of the Women’s March. These types of divisions show why the alliance between feminism and transgenderism isn’t sustainable.
Remember these three points when transgender nonsense enters your discussion of abortion:
First, you’re not crazy. Men cannot be women and women cannot be men. There are two sexes—always have been and always will be. No medication or surgery can change this reality.
To affirm those suffering gender dysphoria is to participate in a lie. We cannot participate in the lie no matter how loudly and forcefully transgender advocates shout. If I demand that you call me a woman (or address me as Frank Sinatra or Rosa Parks or President Ulysses S. Grant), you should not acquiesce.
Second, the notion that men can get pregnant and have babies is the greatest insult to women of our lifetime. And it’s brand new. Can you imagine Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Hillary Clinton, or any feminist from even 20 years ago saying, “Men can have babies”?
But amazingly, some of the same feminists who championed abortion by arguing, “I’m a woman, not a womb,” now reduce their identity to their reproductive capacity by self-identifying as “birthing persons.”
Clearly, the feminist movement has failed if women no longer can claim exclusive domain over the unique genius to conceive, bear, nourish, and nurture another human being. And if men can have babies, it was only a matter of time before we’d be told that men can have abortions.
Third, women who have abortions—whether they regret it or not—know it was a serious and hard decision. The way abortion supporters discuss the topic, you’d get the impression that abortion is the Vince Lombardi Trophy of what women can accomplish in post-Roe America. The staunchest and loudest abortion supporters have turned it into a sacrament.
In this brave new world, the essence of womanhood is access, willingness, and ability to get an abortion. Abortion is seen as the pinnacle of the female experience—socially, politically, and morally. There’s just one problem: Real women don’t agree.
Attacking women in the name of women’s rights isn’t something new. And it’s not something we should fear in conversation.
But the transgender attempt to annihilate women is just one more piece of evidence that the pro-life side is the side of science, reason, nature, compassion, medical alternatives, and—of course—women.
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5 September, 2024
When bureaucracy fails
Ministers relied on their bureaucrats. They cannot be legislators and regulators of every detail. That is what the bureaucrats are for. Sadly, in a bureaucracy nobody cares. The Guardian below seems to think that ministers should do the job of bureaucrats too
‘Atask that only the government can undertake.” A short, seemingly unremarkable sentence, tucked away on the 225th page of the second volume of Martin Moore-Bick’s 1,700-page Grenfell Tower inquiry report. But it encapsulates in a nutshell the broken political philosophy the preceding pages so graphically outline: a state that stepped back and allowed a ruthless, dishonest industry to regulate itself.
At its heart, Grenfell is a story about human suffering. It is about the 72 victims – 18 of them children – needlessly lost in a tower block fire that could so easily have been avoided. It is about their lost futures, the family members left behind and all the grief and pain and suffering the years of delay in delivering justice and change have piled on to them. But Wednesday’s report is also a story about politics, economics and power. It is about the sort of society we have built for ourselves in 21st-century Britain.
The report opens by tracking the actions of the British government, from the aftermath of a cladding fire at a building in Knowsley, Merseyside, in 1991 through to the days immediately preceding the Grenfell fire. Here we witness a state operation fail again and again and again to amend its official guidance to restrict the use of highly dangerous combustible cladding products.
And this happened despite multiple fires, increasingly urgent warnings of a looming catastrophe and even tests – paid for with public money – that confirmed there was a major, life-safety risk from commonly used cladding materials.
But at every stage, government advisers and officials – those who should have been acting in the interests of the citizens they represented – hummed and hawed and did nothing. For years, the bereaved and survivors have thrown a two-word accusation at those they see as responsible: they knew. This report confirms that.
It sets out how at points, officials appeared to cover up the extent of the problem. A report in 1999 was edited to remove references to flaws in official guidance. A devastating test failure on the cladding later used on Grenfell in 2001 was “shelved” and “forgotten”. The official investigation into the 2009 Lakanal House fire, in Camberwell, south London, which killed six people, was halted after less than a month with many key questions left unanswered.
Why? That’s a key question for survivors and campaigners. The report seems to brand the officials responsible as worn out and incompetent rather than actively corrupt. They are described as “complacent and shortsighted”, their actions as “surprising” or “difficult to understand”. But the sense of a creaking operation left to rot in a dusty corner of a neglected government department comes through.
By the mid-2010s, the building control division within the government department now called the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, had seen its team cut from 14 staff to six and given no budget to hire additional support. They were “demoralised and demotivated”, management by more senior officials was “sporadic” or “nonexistent” and the department had neither the “ability nor capacity to issue practical guidance to industry because its systems … had become obsolete”.
But culpability goes higher. Look to government; look to ministers who no longer saw regulating industry as a priority. Ministers, in fact, who were intensely pushing the opposite agenda: they wanted economic growth and they wanted the state to get out of the way of industry’s capacity to deliver it. Regulation was red tape and needed to be removed, not imposed.
Eric Pickles, secretary of state during the key period in the early 2010s, angrily insisted when questioned back in 2022 that building regulations relating to fire safety were exempt from this push – and that he would never have allowed a deregulatory agenda to compromise life safety.
But the report says that evidence was “flatly contradicted by that of his officials and the contemporaneous documents”, which made it abundantly clear that the government believed the construction sector should be left out of the bothersome reach of meddling bureaucrats and should be allowed to forge its own, innovative path.
Trapped in this climate, officials did not recommend tougher regulations, even when they knew them to be necessary, because they realised it was not what ministers wanted to hear. This abdication of responsibility by the state is ghoulishly encapsulated by the government paying scientists at a private laboratory to monitor the risk from real world fires, but barring them from making policy recommendations that would have resulted in tougher regulation, a state of affairs the inquiry said “epitomised what had gone wrong”.
In what should probably be read as a repudiation of one of the central economic tenets of David Cameron’s government, the report concluded that it “was not in the public interest to allow policy on deregulation to impede the ability of officials to promote changes … that would improve public safety”, calling this “a serious failure of leadership”.
That was government. It should have protected the public. It didn’t. Instead, it offered the industry regulatory freedom. After recounting these failures in central government, the report examined what corporations did with that freedom. Here the report’s language hardens further. It is clear, grieving families will learn, that “systematic dishonesty” by the manufacturers of these products was a “very significant reason” why the products ended up on Grenfell Tower.
Arconic, which made the violently combustible polyethylene-cored cladding panels, was found to have “deliberately concealed from the market the true extent” of the danger of using its panels on high rises, and instead “sought to exploit what it perceived to be a weak regulatory regime in the UK” to make sales.
Then there are the insulation manufacturers. While the report may not have found the products made by these two firms contributed significantly to the spread of the blaze, their behaviour has still been savagely criticised.
Celotex, which made most of the combustible insulation that sat behind the cladding panels, “embarked on a dishonest scheme to mislead its customers and the wider market”, while Kingspan, the market leader which provided a small amount of material for Grenfell, was said to have indulged in “deeply entrenched and persistent dishonesty … in pursuit of commercial gain”.
This was the market at its ugliest; given full rein. These companies were all supported by private (or privatised) companies that had effectively taken on the regulatory roles the state no longer wanted: certifying products as safe, testing materials against the official criteria and even writing the guidance documents that set the rules on what could and couldn’t be used.
These firms came in for severe criticism in the report. The British Board of Agrément (BBA), an organisation that provides certificates apparently confirming the performance of construction products, was said to have displayed “incompetence” and an “ingrained willingness to accommodate customers instead of insisting on high standards”.
The Building Research Establishment (BRE), our former national research facility, which was privatised in 1997, was “marred by unprofessional conduct, inadequate practices [and] a lack of effective oversight” and had “sacrificed rigorous application of principle to its commercial interests”.
These bodies and others failed to do the job of regulating the industry – one the government had abdicated from. The scandal of Grenfell encompasses the betrayal by those who committed bad acts and those who did nothing to stop them.
So we come back to the conclusion quoted at the start of this piece: the housing and construction sector is huge, it is powerful. Regulating the industry is a task only the government can undertake.
But our government stopped doing this. This story is complex, but also simple. Failure of governance allowed our buildings to be covered in combustible building products and disaster became all but inevitable. On 14 June 2017, this disaster manifested and 72 people at Grenfell Tower paid with their lives.
There are many other things grieving families will read in this report that confirm the allegations they have made since the day of the fire: of the “toxic” and “bullying” culture at the social housing provider in west London; the “cavalier attitude” to safety of the construction firms involved in the refurbishment; the catastrophic failure of the state to provide a humanitarian response in the aftermath or the abdication of responsibility by the London fire brigade to prepare for a foreseeable disaster in the years before the fire.
But I believe the dark heart of this catastrophe lies in this simple, depressing narrative: the state stepped back, corporate greed stepped in and innocent people died.
Now this story of inquiry must turn to justice. Moore-Bick’s report sets out in forensic detail the failures of the corporations and individuals who allowed this disaster to happen. The evidence is all there, in thousands of footnotes and publicly available documents it cites.
The state may have stepped back from regulation, but it still provides a criminal justice system. That must now do its job. Grenfell was an utterly avoidable disaster. Those who brought it to pass must be held to full account.
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Too many people have pets instead of babies: Pope
I agree
The Pope has reignited his long-running quarrel with childless pet owners after he praised couples with five children and criticised those who prefer cats and dogs.
Addressing politicians in Indonesia on Wednesday at the start of his four-nation tour of southeast Asia, Francis said: “In your country people have three, four or five children, that’s an example for every country, while some prefer to only have a cat or a little dog.” He added: “This can’t go well.”
When Indonesia’s President Widodo laughed at the quip, Francis turned to him and said: “It’s true, isn’t it?”
Throughout his papacy, Francis has called for bigger families to counter plunging birth rates in the West, and pet owners have often come in for criticism.
In 2023, Francis recalled how a woman had asked him to bless her dog, calling it “my baby”. He said at the time: “I lost my patience and scolded her, saying many children are hungry and you bring me a dog.”
Francis has bemoaned the fertility rate in the European Union of about 1.5 births per woman, far lower than the 2.1 rate needed to sustain the population.
This year he called Europe “old, tired and resigned”, claiming: “Homes are filled with objects and emptied of children, becoming very sad places. There is no shortage of little dogs, cats – these are not lacking. There is a lack of children.”
Francis has found common ground on turning around Italy’s demographic decline with Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, who shared a stage with him at a conference on boosting birth rates.
In the US JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has been strongly criticised for referring to Democratic politicians as “a bunch of childless cat ladies.”
During a meeting with 200 Jesuit priests in Jakarta on Wednesday, Francis said their youth was “the thing that strikes me most”.
During his 12-day visit to Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and Singapore, Francis, 87, will also focus on tolerance between faiths and the fight against interreligious violence.
“In order to foster a peaceful and fruitful harmony that ensures peace … the Church desires to strengthen interreligious dialogue,” he said in his speech at the presidential palace.
Indonesia’s eight million Catholics, who make up 3 per cent of the majority Muslim population, have been targeted in attacks, including a suicide bombing in 2021 outside a cathedral on the island of Sulawesi in which 20 people were injured.
Extremists were using “deception and violence” to divide faiths, Francis said.
Francis will celebrate Mass at a football stadium in Jakarta on Thursday and Indonesia’s religious affairs ministry has asked television channels not to air Muslim prayer videos as a sign of respect.
The Jakarta visit marks the start of a gruelling trip for Francis, who is using a wheelchair. He appeared in good spirits on Wednesday, joking at the end of his audience with the Jesuit priests: “The police have come to take me away.”
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UK: Leftist war on the pensioners and the poor
Ruthlessly tax-hungry
Two months in, and Labour has picked its soft target… Those on low incomes and the elderly.
Recently, the Keir Starmer government doubled down on its commitment to scrap the Winter Fuel Allowance despite protests from its own MPs. Those dissenting MPs understood the devastating impact the decision would have on hundreds of thousands of elderly people, many of whom earn just £11k.
Of course, Labour didn’t scrap MPs expensing their heating bills from their second home to the taxpayer despite MPs earning at the very least £90k per year.
In addition to this, Labour are considering scrapping the £2 bus cap brought in by former Tory transport Minister Richard Holden which meant that a single bus fare could cost no more than £2. It was a good initiative that made travel much cheaper, especially for those in more rural communities. Its introduction had a profound impact on helping those on low incomes and scrapping the cap will have a disproportionate effect on those who often use public transport because they cannot afford a car.
Despite this penny pinching, Labour have dished out billions of pounds worth of including a 14 per cent pay-rise to train drivers who already earn twice the average national UK salary.
Labour have also refused to rule out scrapping the singles council tax discount that gives people who live alone a 25 per cent discount on their council tax. Those targeted by this are mainly pensioners whose partners have died or young people. These groups typically do not have high incomes and therefore massively benefited from this discount. So many are already struggling to make ends meet and this will be the nail in the coffin.
Additionally, Labour have promised more tax rises on the horizon and the introduction of a pay-per-mile scheme for cars.
All of these decisions rob the pockets of those already struggling whilst feeding the pockets of already well-off public sector workers.
None of these things were suggested in Labour election campaign because if Labour had admitted that they would go to war with Britain’s least well-off, they would have been rejected at the ballot box.
They have won on a pack of lies and have betrayed Britain’s working class. In other words, when in power, Labour have become everything they claimed to be against.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/starmers-war-on-the-pensioners-and-the-poor/
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More "colonialism" lies in Australia
The article about Aborigines below is grossly misleading. In my usual pesky way have gone back to the original source and read the Act concerned. It is here:
https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/hist_act/tapa1886265.pdf
The Act was a genuinely charitable act designed to protect and support Aborigines in various ways and says NOTHING about taking part-Aboriginal children away from their parents.
It is in fact thoroughly modern in that it defines who is an Aborigine by their associations. Regardless of your ancestry, you are an Aborigine if you associate with Aborigines. A person who is of mixed ancestry can still be an Aborigine for legal purposes. That is pretty much still the law to this day
Amazng! Our ancestors have been greatly and unfairly vilified by biased reporting
The great-grandson of Australia's second Prime Minister has apologised to Aboriginal Australians for the harm inflicted by his ancestor.
Peter Sharp, a descendant of Alfred Deakin, believes the role his great-grandfather played in enabling the devastating Stolen Generations has been downplayed.
The revelation was heard at Victoria's Yoorrook Justice Commission which is investigating claims of ill treatment of Aboriginal people since colonisation.
Mr Sharp said he had grown up believing his famous ancestor was a 'wonderful man', 'a storyteller' and a 'playful' person but had discovered the truth in 2017.
'To all those viewing, who themselves have been and still are being impacted by the introduction of laws and policies in which a member of my family played such a significant role, I say that I am personally and profoundly sorry,' he said.
'It came as a shock to learn that the attempted elimination [of First Nations peoples] continued after frontier violence diminished and I say 'diminished' because it really probably hasn't ended.
'It was a greater shock when I stumbled on the evidence that indicated that a member of my own family had enabled the attempted elimination to be put into law.'
Mr Deakin was a young minister in the Victorian government that passed the Aborigines Protection Act 1886.
Commonly known as the Half-Caste Act, it sought to remove children of mixed Aboriginal and European heritage from indigenous communities to be raised by the state.
The Victorian law was matched in various forms by the English colonies that then existed across Australia prior to federation in 1901.
The practice of removing children from Aboriginal communities has been termed the Stolen Generation, and many studies have testified to the impact upon Aboriginal families then and into the future.
Mr Sharp believes Mr Deakin, then Victoria's chief secretary, had intentionally destroyed the state's Aboriginal population in order to create a 'White Australia'.
'I believe that now after nearly 140 years, the evidence shows that Deakin played a key role in ensuring that the critical element of the 1886 Act was to categorically deny any Aboriginal people of mixed heritage the right to be recognised as Aboriginal and, furthermore, to forcibly deny them contact with those deemed Aboriginal, thereby destroying their culture, kinship and language,' he said.
'I believe that the evidence shows that he intended it never to be known and disguised his hand in every way he could. Suddenly I realised he actually meant this. This was deliberate.'
The Yoorrook Justice Commission is due to deliver a report to the state government by June 2025 that will make recommendations for reforms.
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4 September, 2024
Harvard researchers pinpoint TWO ultra-processed foods that surge heart attack risk - as well as 8 that surprisingly don't
I have had a look at the underlying academic journal article behind this report and am most amused. It is very much what I expected from previous studies of diet: Basically an attempt to find things that are not there
It's a general rule in academic reports that the fancier the statistics, the weaker are the effects being analysed. And this report has statistics of blinding complexity. And that foretells what this study has to report. They relied on extreme quintiles to detect what was going on in their data. That throws away the majority of your data before you analyse it. Not very reassuring! It suggests that there was nothing to report in the data as a whole.
And when they did squeeze something out of such tortured data, all they found were hazard ratios close to 1.0, indicating negligible effects
Given their tricks with the analysis, we have to conclude that there was nothing really going on in the data. Eating UPFs had NO effect on health
And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, I note that among the plethora of confounders that they allowed for, one they left out was the big one: income. But they did find that big eaters of UPFs were fatter and smoked more, so that could suggest that income was in fact an important confounder that they missed.
There are NO negative policy implications of this study. Eat what you like. You will be no worse off doing so.
I am 81 and have always eaten what I liked regardless of the vagaries of official diet recommendations so take heart if you too just eat what you like
The journal article:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00186-8/fulltext
Sugary drinks and processed meats are the only two ultra processed foods associated with a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, Harvard researchers have discovered.
The scientists used data collected from nurses and health professionals to test the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease and strokes from eating a range of different ultra-processed foods.
But although they have long been vilified not all ultra-processed food (UPF) is made equal.
In fact, yoghurt, wholegrain bread and savoury snacks were shown to slightly reduce the risk of the diseases.
UPFs make up 57 per cent of the average UK diet — and the category includes fizzy drinks, processed meats like ham and bacon, as well as breakfast cereal.
One sign of a UPF food is that it contains ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen cupboard, such as unrecognisable colourings, sweeteners and preservatives.
Another clue, some experts say, is the unusually high amount of fat, salt and sugar in each item.
But supermarket staples such as breakfast cereals and pre-packaged bread can be mass-produced and are also considered to be ultra-processed.
That's because they often contain extra ingredients such as emulsifiers, artificial flavours and sweeteners, instead of just flour, salt, yeast and water.
However, the study published in the Lancet this week suggests we should 'deconstruct' the ultra-processed food classification as many of the UPFs have a 'diverse nutritional composition' and therefore have cardiovascular benefits.
UPF intake was assessed through food frequency questionnaires in three studies.
Researchers looked at data from The NHS Nurses' Health Study of 75,735 female nurses aged 30 to 55 years, a second nurses health study of 90,813 women aged 25 to 42 years and a follow-up study of 40,409 men aged 40 to 75 years.
Those who had prior cardiovascular disease, cancer or who had a high BMI were excluded from the study.
A selection of UPFs were divided into ten groups: bread and cereals; sauces, spreads, and condiments; packaged sweet snacks and desserts; packaged savoury snacks; sugar-sweetened beverages; processed red meat, poultry, and fish; ready-to-eat/heat dishes; yoghurt/dairy-based desserts; hard liquors; artificially-sweetened beverages.
The scientists found there was an associated risk of consuming a diet heavy in sugary and artificially sweetened drinks and cardiovascular disease risk.
This risk was also found in diets high in processed meats, such as sausages, bacon and hotdogs.
However, there were inverse associations observed for bread, breakfast cereal, yoghurt, dairy desserts and savoury snacks.
Processed meats and soft drinks should be particularly discouraged due to their consistent adverse association with cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and stroke, study authors said.
But they stress some of the UPFs they studied had potential 'cardioprotective benefits', due to the vitamins, minerals and fibre found in them.
This included wholegrain breads as well as yoghurt, especially fermented types.
Study authors noted the benefit remained despite the usually high saturated fat and added sugar content of the dairy products. They added that yoghurts that contain probiotic bacteria or fatty acids may contribute to lower cardiovascular risk.
Professor Gunter Kuhnle, a food scientist and nutritionist based at the University of Reading, posted a graph from the study on X explaining that the data showed most UPF food groups ‘actually protect and reduce disease risk’.
‘The big problem is so many foods are classed as UPF,’ he told MailOnline.
‘Most studies show people who consume a lot of soft drinks, especially sugar and sweetened drinks, are more likely to be obese and suffer diabetes, as well as other diseases.
‘The data show a huge impact of sugar sweetened beverages and processed meat, while everything else is very neutral.'
For example, bread sold in supermarkets is often classed as a UPF but Professor Kuhnle explains it can still be healthy.
He said: ‘Wholegrain bread is probably a healthy form of bread, whether it is manufactured in a big factory or made at home, the difference between the two will be tiny.’
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Pavel Durov's Arrest: Intel Agency Intrigue?
On August 24, 2024 Pavel Durov—founder of encrypted free speech platform Telegram— was arrested in France on criminal charges relating to an alleged lack of content moderation on Telegram and refusal to work with police, which allowed the alleged spread of criminal activity. Durov holds French citizenship and was arrested at Le Bourget Airport in Paris while on a refueling stop in his private plane.
I find this an intriguing detail, as it suggests he did NOT know that French authorities were deeply unsatisfied with his purported lack of cooperation with their purported criminal investigation of Telegram users.
On the face of it, it’s hard to imagine how Pavel could maintain an encrypted free speech platform while at the same time making it readily accessible the state’s entreaties to access it. In none of the (characteristically superficial) reporting I’ve seen on Pavel’s arrest in the mainstream media have I seen any mention of a French police obtaining a wiretap warrant from a French judge to access a Telegram user’s account.
A recent report in Politico states that arrest warrants for Pavel and his brother Nikolai were issued on March 25. Does this mean that Pavel and his brother were NOT informed they they would be arrested if they did not honor a wiretap warrant? The Politico report touches on this question, but doesn’t clarify it.
The arrest warrants were issued after the messaging platform gave "no answer" to an earlier judicial request to identify a Telegram user, according to the document, which was shared with POLITICO by a person directly involved in the case.
The document also stresses "Telegram's almost non-existent cooperation" with both French and European authorities in other cases.
Warrants for Pavel and his brother Nikolai, the platform’s co-founder, were issued on March 25 over charges including “complicity in possessing, distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in an organized group.” French media had previously reported the probe was opened in July.
QUESTION for any French lawyer who happens to read this post: What exactly does the phrase “judicial request”—in French demande judiciaire—mean, and how does this general concept differ from the more precise “wiretap warrant” —mandat d'écoute électronique?
Everything about Pavel’s arrest raises the suspicion that the charges against him were trumped-up, probably in an intrigue initiated by French and U.S. intelligence, both of which are very keen to gain access to Telegram’s encrypted communications.
Of special note is a fact also noted in a recent Politico report.
Telegram is widely used by the Russian military for battlefield communications thanks to problems with rolling out its own secure comms system. It's also the primary vehicle for pro-war military bloggers and media — as well as millions of ordinary Russians.
“They practically detained the head of communication of the Russian army,” Russian military blogger channel Povernutie na Z Voine said in a Telegram statement.
The timing of Pavel Durov’s arrest raises the suspicion it is a gambit to persuade him to grant French (and U.S.) authorities access to Telegram in order to monitor Russian military communications
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/pavel-durovs-arrest-intel-agency
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Melania Trump under attack
I saw the New Yorker’s mock review, “Me, Lania”: A First Lady’s Memoir” in its August 5, 2024 edition. In our era of humbug faux piety about women in which few if any men are at liberty to write frankly about them, New Yorker writers have made a notable exception when it comes to penning nasty pieces about Melania Trump. The author of the purportedly humorous “Me, Lania” piece scarcely conceals his contempt for the woman—contempt that verges on outright hatred.
As is usually the case when I read this kind of trash penned by a privileged chickenshit writer, the mocking review inspired me learn something about Melania’s memoir. Though I haven’t yet had the chance to read it, I have corresponded with the publisher—Tony Lyons at Skyhorse—who characterizes it as a frank account of Melania’s odyssey from the small-town Slovenia of her birth to New York, and ultimately to becoming the first foreign born First Lady.
I have sympathy for ex-pats, having been one for much of my life. I left my native United States in 1996 and settled in Vienna, Austria. Melania, who is exactly my age, was born in Novo Mesto, Slovenia, about 250 miles south of Vienna. Also in the year 1996, she moved to New York to seek her fortune as a fashion model. Two years later she met the real estate developer, Donald Trump, who was 52 at the time.
While the New Yorker mock review characterizes the older Donald Trump as looking like “rotten produce” at this time, in fact the tall and still slender man cut a dashing albeit garish figure, as was showcased in the following illustration from a Vanity Fair feature one year after Melania met him.
To be sure, this was over a decade before Trump was elected president, at which time the New York press that had previously liked him—or at least only made gentle fun of him—suddenly discovered that he is a monster.
According to Mr. Lyons, Melania tells of her Slovenian childhood and her journey into high fashion in Europe and New York. She colorfully relates the story of meeting Donald Trump and the fun and exciting time he showed her during his courtship. She then offers candid accounts of motherhood, her life as First Lady, and her advocacy work for various causes.
Like Marie Antoinette in her day, Melania Trump has, since 2016, often been the subject of mocking derision by the press. Like Antoinette, she has responded to this scorn with quiet dignity. I look forward to reading her memoir, both out of curiosity and as an act of defiance against all of Melania’s rude detractors. Please consider pre-ordering a copy so that we can make it a bestseller to the chagrin of the weenies at the New Yorker.
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/melania
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Indecision about sexuality question in the Australian census
The Albanese government has made a complete hash of the proposed inclusion of questions about sexuality and gender in the five-yearly census. They were in, then they were out, and now questions about sexuality may be in. It didn’t have to be this way.
The whole episode demonstrates a misunderstanding of the role of the census and the options for other means of collecting statistical information.
It also underscores a lack of appreciation of how sampling is often just as good as the comprehensive coverage of a census. All undergraduates of economics learn that if a sample is carefully chosen for a survey, the estimates of the underlying population parameters are almost as reliable as those obtained from a census. (Perhaps our Prime Minister skipped those lectures in economic statistics.)
Moreover, the results of surveys are much timelier than any information that can be derived from a census.
It’s worth going through some of the background to our census to understand how this fiasco played out. The census is the dominant activity of the Australian Bureau of Statistics; it is estimated to cost around $600m to conduct each time. It is a continuous focus of the ABS, from the planning to the execution to the evaluation stages.
Our census has a relatively large number of questions already. In other countries – the US, for instance – there are only a handful of questions asked; it is essentially a headcount. It is also only conducted every 10 years.
Ways of reducing the cost impact of censuses have been in active consideration for many years all over the world. One option is to follow the US example and conduct them only every 10 years. Having fewer questions is also a common consideration. Some countries have considered dropping their censuses altogether.
(Australia is unlikely ever to completely drop the census because of its role in redrawing electoral boundaries as well as providing the basis for some funding for local, state and territory governments. It is really the only source of detailed, small-area data, albeit on a very lagged basis.)
There was a time when the number of questions in our census grew likely Topsy. There is always a constituency for every topic – about housing and income, for instance.
There is also a handful of demographers and consultants who essentially make their living from accessing census data at a detailed level.
There are some very poor rationales for keeping many of the questions. We have better data through administrative sources, through the banks as well as other officially collected statistics. No one really believes the answers to the income questions, and the broad income brackets specified make this information not very useful.
The unfortunate reality is that there are always strong opposing forces should there be any suggestion that certain questions are dropped.
It is one reason why the Australian census was relatively unchanged for many years; it is generally a one-way street, enlarging its scope. Doing so can also introduce its own set of problems such as respondent fatigue. Last time, there were additional questions about long-term health conditions and the Australian Defence Force.
During the last election campaign, the Labor Party pledged to include questions about sexuality and gender in the next census. But there was insufficient thought given to the practicalities of doing so. No doubt it felt good; there was some symbolic benefit. The LGBTI+ groups welcomed the promise.
Even under the best-case scenario, census-derived information on sexuality and gender would not be available until 2027, all going well, after the next census is conducted in 2026. This is a long time to wait given there are alternatives that could be undertaken much more quickly.
For example, the ABS conducts large household surveys every month to estimate the rate of unemployment and other labour market indicators. There are supplementary questions attached to most of these surveys. One option would have been to include questions about sexuality and gender in these surveys. The involvement of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare could have strengthened the integrity of this approach.
The other benefit of using supplementary surveys is that they can be repeated on a regular basis and, in this way, some picture of any changing patterns in people’s sexuality and gender identification can be detected quickly. These surveys also involve relatively small numbers of respondents compared with the census; any backlash is likely to be relatively muted.
Had the federal government proceeded down this alternative path, the issue would have been resolved by now. To be sure, there will always be some contention, even disagreement, about the official statistical agency asking people questions about their sexual preferences and gender identity. For example, some people may have strong objections to being asked about their sexual preferences, regarding this issue as an entirely private matter.
In all likelihood, any questions about sexuality and gender would have to be made optional, just as the question about religion in the census is optional. But note here that almost all census respondents do answer the question about religion. Responses for members of households aged 15 and under would also not be required.
The normal testing of questions could take place involving consultation with representatives of the LGBTI+ community as well as others. There are examples of questions used in other countries, including Canada, New Zealand and the UK.
The position the federal government has landed on is completely unsatisfactory. The ABS is effectively being instructed to test questions on sexuality but not gender, a split that will displease some activist groups.
It has raised the profile of the issue, potentially leading to conservative groups becoming involved. Rather than diluting the potential divisiveness of the issue, the political heat has been turned up.
There was always a simpler and faster option that would have yielded information about the LGBQI+ community much more quickly and with a reasonable degree of accuracy. This is not to downplay the complexities of achieving consensus on the precise questions, particularly in respect of gender identity. But testing and piloting on a small scale should have been able to iron out some of these problems.
The Albanese government is now left to sort out this mess of its own making.
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September 03, 2024
Such a happy big smile it moved me to tears
She is a former Miss Ireland and a former mine worker
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13803279/Miss-Universe-Ireland-Grainne-Gallanagh-FIFO.html
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Social media erupts over Kamala Harris' 'fake accent' in speech to teachers union
Kamala Harris is facing more allegations of flip-flopping, but this time it's with her voice.
Critics claim the vice president nominee used a 'fake accent' when speaking to a teachers union during a swing state campaign push in Michigan on Monday.
Social media erupted with accusations the Democratic presidential candidate altered her voice during the remarks praising teachers union members at a Detroit high school.
Harris has faced allegations and mockery of allegedly using different accents before, and the claims, and they are now emerging with just two months until election day.
'New Kamala accent just dropped,' one X user wrote in response to a clip of Harris speaking to a teacher's union at a high school in Detroit, Michigan on Monday.
In her remarks, social media users claim that Harris adopted an urban accent to relate to the working class crowd.
'You may not be a union member but you better thank a union member for the five day work week,' Harris said in a tone of voice atypical of the one she uses in her usual stump speeches.
She went on: 'You better thank a union member for sick leave. You better thank a union member for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time.'
'I'm from California. We all talk like this,' an X user sarcastically wrote alongside a phonetic spelling of how Harris spoke in her remarks: 'I'm gonna make sure to thanka union memba today.'
At another point an audience member shouted something about her future beyond just the 2024 election.
Harris, still employing this new accent, replied with a large smile and laugh before leaning over the podium and saying: 'Let's just get through the next 64 days.'
'New Kamala accent just dropped,' one user wrote on X.
Harris was in Detroit on Labor Day speaking with union members at Northwestern High School's gymnasium about the contributions of unions to the labor force.
The vice president is half Jamaican and half Indian. The Trump campaign has accused her of using her blackness to her advantage when it suits her and has pointed to the fact that she touted her Indian-American heritage when she became a U.S. Senator in 2017.
Trump also said during a hostile interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago last month in an interview that Harris only started 'promoting' her blackness when she ran for president.
'I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,' he said during the annual convention. 'So, I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?'
Discovery Institute journalist Jonathan Choe noted on X, formerly Twitter, that it was a code switch Harris was using to relate more with a predominantly black and urban audience listening to her remarks on Monday.
'Kamala Harris code switching again as she busts out a new accent at a rally in Detroit,' he wrote.
The latest criticism comes after Harris was also mocked in July for faking a southern accent during a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.
'You all helped us win in 2020 and we gonna do it again in 2024,' Harris told voters in her fake Southern accent.
Harris commonly slips into a Southern accent when speaking to voters in Southern communities. The VP grew up in San Francisco, California and spent her high school years in Montreal, Canada.
She faced similar criticism on the campaign trail in 2020 when she extending her vowels during an even in Florida when she said: 'We will tell them we were hangin' out in a parking lot this particular Saturday afternoon with Kamala and all our friends.'
Outkick writer Ian Miller posted of the latest accent use on Monday: 'At some point, Kamala's going to speak in England and adopt a full on British accent and everyone will pretend like it's totally normal.'
Outkick writer Ian Miller posted of the latest accent use: 'At some point, Kamala's going to speak in England and adopt a full on British accent and everyone will pretend like it's totally normal.'
'BREAKING: Kamala Harris unveils a new urban accent in Detroit,' the pro-MAGA account End Wokeness wrote.
'This is cringe pandering,,' another wrote. 'Kamala is using her new 'accent' when talking to a certain demographic of people.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13805715/Kamala-harris-campaign-speech-teachers-union.html
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Irish teacher Enoch Burke is jailed for a THIRD time after being arrested outside school that sacked him for refusing to 'call a boy a girl'
Irish teacher Enoch Burke has been jailed for a third time after he was arrested outside the school that sacked him for refusing to 'call a boy a girl'.
The Evangelical Christian was yesterday placed inside a Garda vehicle outside Wilson's Hospital School in Ireland's Co Westmeath and driven to the Four Courts in Dublin, reported the Irish Independent.
He was back behind bars at Mountjoy Prison last night having already spent more than 400 days incarcerated there for repeatedly defying a High Court injunction banning him from the school's grounds.
Justice Michael Quinn jailed him for contempt of court after the history and German teacher refused to give a 'yes' or 'no' answer when asked if he intended to return to the Westmeath school again.
As the order was passed, Mr Burke told Justice Quinn: 'You will answer to God for imprisoning me for my religious beliefs.'
Mr Burke - who had only been released from prison in June - was sacked from the school for gross misconduct in January 2023 after he refused to use a transitioning pupil's new name and chosen pronoun 'they', saying it was against his religious beliefs.
Despite his dismissal, a court heard in February he was still being paid his salary pending his appeal against the school's decision to sack him. At that time, he had been paid around €72,000 while still on administrative leave.
Justice Quinn said there was an 'urgent requirement' for him to deal with the difficulties Wilson's Hospital School has been experiencing, due to Mr Burke's continued presence there.
He said Mr Burke was disrupting day-to-day activities and duties performed by teachers and staff in the school.
During the hearing, he and his family protested that the many judges who have dealt with the case had failed to deal with a report made by the then school principal Niamh McShane.
Mr Burke said Ms McShane had claimed he was guilty of gross misconduct due to his refusal to call a transitioning student by a new name and the pronoun 'they'. He said the legality of that demand was never considered by the court.
However, last year, Judge Owens found the school was right to suspend Mr Burke over fears of 'harmful and disruptive conduct'.
He cited Mr Burke's challenge to the principal during a staff meeting, a chapel service and at a dinner.
Mr Burke yesterday insisted: 'This court is simply denying me my religious beliefs, and my right to my religious beliefs. I am a Christian. I have Christian beliefs. My belief is male and female, God made them male and female.'
He quoted passages from the Bible, including Genesis and the Gospel of Matthew, and claimed teachers in Ireland were being 'commanded to force transgenderism on students'.
He said this was a 'hellish ideology' which resulted in children taking puberty blockers and being 'scarred for life'.
He said his religious beliefs would not lead children 'down the road of suicide, mutilations, regret' and a breakdown of relationships with their parents.
'I did not force my beliefs on anyone,' he said. 'That belief was forced on me. I was commanded to feed that poison to young people in my care.'
The court heard Mr Burke has not paid €88,000 in fines he incurred for attending the school in defiance of the court order last year.
Rosemary Mallon BL, for the school, confirmed there were 'difficulties' in collecting it.
She said the law allowed for a debt collection agency to recoup fines handed out in the District Court, but sequestration of assets was more generally used against a company rather than an individual, and there was no simple way to do it.
She confirmed Mr Burke is still being paid his salary by the Department of Education, while his appeal against his January 2023 dismissal remains on hold.
The court was told that appeal cannot be heard until the Court of Appeal rules on Mr Burke's challenge concerning members of the appeal board.
Mr Burke became caught up in a gender row at Wilson's Hospital School in May 2022.
He told his headteacher that he 'opposed transgenderism' due to his religious beliefs and stated he would not address the student, who was transitioning, by their new name and using 'they' pronouns.
Burke publicly criticised the school's 'demand' that he use the student's chosen pronouns.
It came following an email to staff from headteacher Niamh McShane, in which they were asked to address the pupil in question by their new pronouns.
He was first jailed in September 2022 and spent 100 days in prison before his release. He was jailed for a second time in September 2023 in which he spent Christmas behind bars before he was released in June this year.
Mr Burke is appealing his dismissal from the school.
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Director of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra fired over her opposition to antisemitism
Hatred of Israel is an amazingly powerful thing. It seems to rot the brain
Sophie Galaise has revealed the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra board sacked her last week as managing director after it unilaterally overturned the unanimous decision of her executive team to sideline pianist Jayson Gillham following his onstage anti-Israel comments.
Sophie Galaise says she was sacked as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s managing director after the board overturned her executive team’s decision to sideline pianist Jayson Gillham. Picture: Arsineh Houspian
Sophie Galaise says she was sacked as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s managing director after the board overturned her executive team’s decision to sideline pianist Jayson Gillham
The former managing director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has hit out at her sacking over the sidelining of a pianist who attacked Israel’s conduct in Gaza, declaring that music concerts should be “safe havens” for all Australians and free from political protest.
Sophie Galaise has broken her silence over the controversy that has rocked the country’s oldest orchestra, insisting she and her management team were right to demand audience members be free to listen to music without being subjected to political lectures.
Ms Galaise has revealed that the MSO board sacked her last week after it unilaterally overturned the unanimous decision of her MSO executive team to sideline pianist Jayson Gillham after his onstage anti-Israel comments last month.
The MSO controversy is the latest involving pro-Palestinian activism on stage that has divided the artistic community and angered Jewish patrons and donors. It follows a backlash against the Sydney Theatre Company from patrons and donors last year after three actors wore pro-Palestinian keffiyeh scarfs during a curtain call.
Ms Galaise was the only person the MSO board sacked despite the fact her six-member management team agreed with her that Gillham should not play at a subsequent concert because of his anti-Israel comments, which breached the orchestra’s position of neutrality in the Gaza conflict.
“Why was I sacked? In my opinion it’s not fair,” Ms Galaise told The Australian in her first comments on the controversy.
“It was a disagreement (with the board) but it (my position) was not a mistake. I still believe the MSO should be a platform that is neutral and that focuses on doing good music. It is important to respect other people’s (political) opinion but the MSO should be a safe haven, a place where people can come and listen to great music and know they are going to be safe.”
Ms Galaise said she was exploring legal options after an extraordinary series of events that culminated in her taking the fall for the stunning split between the MSO’s board and its management team.
The 11-member MSO board, which is under pressure to explain its actions, includes chairman David Li, former Qantas chair Margaret Jackson, former Victorian government minister Martin Foley, investment managers Edgar Myer and Farrel Meltzer, former PwC executive Mary Waldron and former ANZ executive Shane Buggle.
The saga began on Sunday, August 11, when pianist Gillham took the stage to perform at Melbourne’s Iwaki Auditorium. He included in his performance a rendition of a piece called Witness which was composed by Connor d’Netto as a tribute to journalists working in Gaza during Israel’s attacks on Hamas in the enclave.
When introducing the piece, Gillham, who did not tell the MSO what he planned to say, alleged that of the reported 113 Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli air strikes during the conflict, “a number of these have been targeted assassinations”, a war crime that is denied by Israel.
Ms Galaise was at home when she was contacted by one of her management team about what Gillham had said. Several members of the 156 people in the audience had subsequently complained to the box office after the performance, while others had emailed their complaints to the MSO including to Ms Galaise herself. She said she could not remember exactly how many complaints the MSO received but described it as a “large number” for a “small audience”. She said they were received ‘by email, by phone calls to the box office, by people complaining at the box office right after the concert and I also received complaints (directly) by email”.
One Jewish audience member emailed the MSO after the performance stating: “I was angry and traumatised after listening to the (pianist’s) speech and the piece which followed. I felt humiliated. There were other Jewish members of the audience present and several of us approached a staff member to make a complaint after the concert. Music should be a refuge in these times for everyone. To alienate Jewish members of the audience to create a political platform during a performance is inappropriate and inexcusable … the MSO should issue a public apology to their subscribers.
“I have been a subscriber to MSO for a number of years and feel this incident will make me feel reluctant to come to further concerts in light of MSO allowing this attack on its patrons.”
On the morning after the concert, Ms Galaise called a full meeting of her management team to discuss what to do. The background to their decision, so far unreported, was that she said the MSO had publicly stated its neutrality on the Gaza conflict in December, and that position had been conveyed to the MSO’s musicians and in a newsletter before Christmas to MSO subscribers.
“We had worked with the board, the management, our musicians and our people to decide what we would be doing in regards to the geopolitical situation in Gaza and that was published last December,” she said.
“And we decided that we are a diverse organisation and that we would focus on doing music and that we would not take sides in the conflict … we would try to remain a safe haven for people who want to hear good music and not be subjected to different personal opinions.”
She said this had been discussed in meetings with the musicians, via meetings with the artistic players’ committee which represents the musicians, so the musicians were aware of the MSO’s stated neutrality on the issue of Gaza.
The MSO’s decision to adopt a neutral position on Gaza was unusual but it reflected the uniquely divisive nature of the issue. The company has chosen to support various political positions in the past including support for the Yes vote in the voice referendum, support for gay marriage and even a concert dedicated to Ukraine immediately after Russia’s invasion of that country.
On the Monday morning after Gillham’s performance, Ms Galaise and her management team discussed how the MSO should respond, and also sought legal advice on the issue.
Gillham had breached the MSO’s publicly stated neutrality on Gaza so it was felt that the orchestra owed an apology to those audience members who were offended.
Ms Galaise said management’s thinking was informed in part by the damaging rift at the STC last year over pro-Palestinian activism on stage, leading to fears of a public backlash, including from Jewish donors. About $8m of the MSO’s roughly $40m budget comes from donations. And the MSO’s partners include Jewish organisations such as the Gandel Foundation and the Besen Family Foundation.
“We have donors that are Jewish and non-Jewish, so it’s a mix,” Ms Galaise said. “They are supportive of the work of the MSO and they did not come forward and request anything but the complaints were really made about the fact that, as an organisation, we had allowed this pianist to speak and take one side.
“In my opinion that was the perception of the people who were complaining. And that is where we said ‘no, it is not okay to have our platform used in such a way – we respect freedom of speech and he is quite entitled to think whatever he thinks – but taking our organisation as a platform to do so without discussing it with us was a challenge’,” she said.
On top of this Gillham was due to perform again on the Thursday night, three days later. Would he repeat the same comments, setting off more complaints, or could an audience member, knowing what he had said previously, disrupt the performance with a counter-political outburst?
Ms Galaise and her management team decided that the safest path was to apologise to the concert audience. The team agreed that the MSO would write to attendees, apologise for Gillham’s remarks and notify them that his subsequent concert appearance had been cancelled. A statement was drafted saying: “The MSO does not condone the use of our stage as a platform for expressing personal views.”
On that Monday evening, Ms Galaise with the backing of her management team sent the apology to Gillham’s audience.
Ms Galaise said she tried to contact two of the most senior board members on that Monday to inform them of the management’s decision but could not make contact.
At 6.41am the following day, she sent an email to all 11 MSO board members informing them of the decision. The MSO’s letter to Gillham’s audience quickly found its way into the public arena and the powerful forces of the pro-Palestinian movement immediately took aim at the organisation.
“We started being bombarded by keyboard warriors and people who have nothing to do with the MSO being quite aggressive with the organisation,” Ms Galaise said. “I received a lot of (pro-Palestinian) hate messages, some about being a woman CEO, about my hairstyle, my accent (Ms Galaise has a French-Canadian background) – they were calling me all sorts of names.”
The union representing the MSO’s musicians, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, said: “The response by the management of the MSO had been disproportionate and is offensive to the principles of artistic expression.”
With the MSO in the crosshairs of pro-Palestinian activists, the MSO board created an instant working committee, including some board members, Ms Galaise and some of her management team, to meet that Tuesday evening to discuss the situation.
The board also hired an external crisis management team to advise it. To Ms Galaise’s amazement, that crisis team suggested to the board that the MSO do an about-face and publicly state that its attempted cancellation of Gillham had been a mistake.
The argument was that if it did not do so, the MSO concert on the Thursday – and future MSO concerts – could be disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests. Ms Galaise said she argued against a reversal because she knew it would “piss off everyone” on all sides and make the MSO look weak and indecisive.
“In my opinion, we had already said ‘Jayson Gillham, you cannot take us hostage’ and now we are going to backflip and apologise?” she said.
The board initially tried to discuss with Gillham’s management whether he could be persuaded to take the stage for the concert on Thursday. But when it became clear that he would not play, the board cancelled the entire concert citing security grounds because audience members might have had to encounter pro-Palestinian protests.
Under the board’s instructions the MSO management team was forced to declare that the attempted cancellation of Gillham’s appearance had been an “error”.
“While the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra maintains that a concert platform is not an appropriate stage for political comment, we acknowledge Jayson’s concerns for those in the Middle East and elsewhere,’ an MSO spokesman said at that time.
Sure enough, the MSO board’s decision to reverse its position pleased pro-Palestinian activists but upset the Jewish community.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim said: “The MSO got it right the first time. People attend concerts to relax and appreciate the music, not to be drawn unexpectedly into a political rally. It is wrong for an artist like Mr Gillham to exploit the situation by forcing his audience to listen to his highly questionable political views on a subject about which he has no special knowledge or expertise.”
For Ms Galaise, the board’s decision to overrule the views of not just herself but her entire management team regarding Gillham deepened a rift that had begun to emerge over other issues.
Ms Galaise, who has been the MSO managing director for eight years after a successful career running major music organisations in Australia and Canada, had fallen out with Mr Li. Ms Galaise and Mr Li had differences over the handling of several internal issues. These included an investigation by Al Jazeera in which the network last month aired a piece alleging that Mr Li had hidden past links to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and that China had undue influence over the MSO, allegations Mr Li denies.
It was clear, in hindsight, that the controversy over Gillham had further soured relations between the board and Ms Galaise. A week after the controversy, Ms Galaise took a work trip to Singapore for a long-planned and important series of meetings and functions to cement the MSO’s new strategic relationship with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
Contrary to reports, Ms Galaise said no-one at the board advised her against taking the trip so close to recent turmoil over the Gillham affair. Ms Galaise said she went to Singapore because it was important for the MSO and she stayed in daily contact with her management team in Melbourne during that time. But on the last night in Singapore, shortly before her flight she received a call from a senior board member asking her to come to a meeting when she returned to Melbourne the following morning.
Ms Galaise was told that the meeting was to further discuss the board’s recent decision to ask Midnight Oil frontman and former Labor minister Peter Garrett to review the MSO and evaluate its policies, procedures and processes, and cover protocols around freedom of speech and artistic expression on stage.
Instead, Ms Galaise said, when she turned up at the meeting she was sacked. “They said they had no faith in me and no trust and so I was terminated,” she said. “It’s been very difficult for me because my reputation is now in tatters. I love the world of music but who would now like to hire me?”
Ms Galaise said she knew that the board’s decision to reverse the cancellation of Gillham was damaging to the MSO’s reputation but she had no idea it would lead to her being sacked. She said it was simply a disagreement between her management team and the board over how the issue should be handled.
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September 02, 2024
Anti-immigration parties do well in German State elections
Hard-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has become the first of its ilk to win in the nation since the Second World War, exit polls showed.
AfD took between 30.5% and 33.5% of the vote in the former East German state of Thuringia, with the conservative CDU coming in second place with 24.5% of the vote.
Thuringia, a rural region and the only state currently led by the far-left Die Linke, a successor of East Germany's ruling communist party, was one of two to hold regional elections today, ahead of national elections in 2025, with AfD nearly winning in neighbouring Saxony, a conservative stronghold that is the largest in former East Germany, as well the polls showed.
While the party is unlikely to come to power in either state, as other parties have vowed to coalesce to force the far-right out of power, the result is reflective of the party's growing popularity.
Bjoern Hoecke, the controversial head of the AfD in Thuringia, told the ARD broadcaster his party was the 'people's party in Thuringia'.
'We need change and change will only come with the AfD,' he said, hailing the 'historic result'.
Hoecke is one of Germany's most controversial far-right politicians and was fined twice this year for deliberately using a banned Nazi slogan.
Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the AfD, hailed the result as a 'historic success', while the party's other co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, said the party had a 'clear mandate for government' in Thuringia.
Chrupalla said both states had sent the message that 'there should be a change of politics' and the AfD was 'ready and willing to talk to all parties'.
The contests in Thuringia and Saxony come just over a week after three people were killed in a suspected Islamist knife attack in the western city of Solingen, which has fuelled a bitter debate over immigration in Germany.
The alleged attacker, a 26-year-old Syrian man with suspected links to the Islamic State group, was slated for deportation but evaded attempts by authorities to remove him.
The government has sought to respond to the alarm by announcing stricter knife controls and rules for migrants in Germany illegally.
Tonight's exit polls also showed a good night for BSW, a new party founded by the firebrand politician Sahra Wagenknecht after she quit the far-left Die Linke.
BSW scored between 14.5 and 16 percent in Thuringia and between 11.5 and 12 percent in Saxony, according to the polls.
Wagenknecht's party has appealed to voters in eastern Germany with a dovish stance towards Russia and calls for a radical crackdown on immigration.
The party scored an immediate success in June's European elections, hauling in around six percent of the German vote.
Other parties' refusal to work with the AfD potentially leaves BSW as the kingmaker in Thuringia and Saxony, despite serious policy disagreements with potential partners, especially on Ukraine.
Scholz's coalition partners, the Greens and the FDP, had a dismal night in both states, scoring even less than the SPD.
A third former East German state, Brandenburg, is also due to hold an election later in September, where polls have the AfD ahead on around 24 percent.
Created in 2013 as an anti-euro group before morphing into an anti-immigration party, the AfD has capitalised on the fractious three-way coalition in Berlin to rise in opinion polls.
In June's EU parliament elections, the party scored a record 15.9 percent overall and did especially well in eastern Germany, where it emerged as the biggest force.
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California reparations bills fail to pass
Protests have erupted at the California state capitol after two stalled reparations proposals for black residents were seemingly killed.
The development came during the final day of the legislative session in Sacramento Saturday, following hours of fierce lobbying.
Some two dozen protesters were seen inside and outside the building that day, airing shouts for the bills to move forward and chants for reparations 'now'.
Signs and shirts emblazoned with the same message were also on display, as lawmakers made their way to and from the Assembly floor.
Onlookers cry, meanwhile, emanated throughout, but The California Legislative Black Caucus would still later reveal in a statement how neither bill was moving forward, ahead of their midnight deadline.
State Sen. Steven Bradford, a member of the caucus, spoke to several local outlets Saturday from the senate floor, revealing what exactly stalled the process.
'We're at the finish line,' Bradford told reporters after penning Senate Bills 1403 and 1331 himself.
'And I think we as the Black Caucus owe it to the descendants of chattel slavery, we owe it to black Californians and Black Americans. to move this legislation forward and get it to the governor's desk,' he continued.
When asked about the holdup, Bradford blamed 'a fear of the veto.'
In a written statement, the Black caucus added, in part, 'The caucus was unable to participate in the legislative process collectively and only recently became aware of the concerns and issues with the bill.'
Previously, both bills had the votes to clear the Assembly, but Bradford said he and others also found issue with edits to the proposed guidances proposed by the state's governor, Gavin Newsom.
Newsom's aides pushed to authorize further study of the issues rather than make restitution right off the bat, he said - something he and others will not accept.
'We owe it to our ancestors,' said the Democrat from Gardena said. 'And I think we disappointed them in a way.'
The bills initially sought to create a process for those whose land was stolen as a result of racism and slavery, while demanding a formal apology from the state.
Both bills, awaiting votes in the state Assembly this week, had new drafts from Newsom by Monday, with the progressive shifting their entire purpose.
As of writing, Newsom's office has yet to comment on the tossing of the two bills, but officials did tell the Sacramento Bee that they were still working with the caucus on both.
The last minute development left supporters who showed up at the Capitol Saturday in hopes of witnessing history irate, with the bill's core purpose - creating a new Freedmen Affairs Agency - seemingly no more.
'They're killing the bills because they're scared of the governor,' Chris Lodgson, an organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, told the Bee as onlookers shouted and chanted at lawmakers before proceedings were halted.
'We've got the money,' he said, pushing back on the budget concerns reportedly aired by Newsom. 'Do we have the will? Do we have the courage?'
The bills, for now, thus remain in limbo, years after the reparations movement first gathered momentum across the US following police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13802251/california-reparations-bills-killed-senate.html
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‘You Will Resign, or We’ll Make This Ugly’: Idaho National Guardsman Punished for Biblical Values
A Christian infantry officer is now being punished by the Idaho Army National Guard for using his First Amendment right to speak out against the LGBTQ+ ideology that he believes is harming children.
In 2023, the officer posted about some of his deeply held beliefs on his private social media account while running for political office in his “private capacity.” According to Liberty Counsel, the legal group defending him, his posts included statements “against graphic, obscene children’s books in a library and the promotion of a ‘drag kids’ event and drag queens in schools.”
He also posted statements such as ‘No child is born in the wrong body,’ males should not be competing in female sports, and against the medical mutilation of gender-confused children.
His concern over LGBTQ+ indoctrination resulted in “a subordinate senior enlisted man who claims to be homosexual” filing “a formal discrimination military complaint against the officer” for sharing his beliefs. The complaint accused the infantry officer’s posts of showing “just how much [the officer] truly hates the LGBTQ community.”
His complaint continued:
I feel like I have been discriminated against because of my sexual orientation, [which] has caused a hostile work environment. … I am deeply concerned about the hostile and prejudiced behavior I have experienced, which has adversely affected my well-being, work performance, and overall sense of belonging within the workplace/organization.
I must emphasize that this has created an uncomfortable, unsafe, and a hostile work environment, making it increasingly challenging for me to perform my duties effectively. With the active ties to the extremist/hate group, it makes me feel threatened and unsafe. All the posts on his social media and how public he is about his hate toward individuals like me and my family. Not just for me, but for my husband and my child.
As a result of this complaint, the infantry officer was removed from command by the Idaho Army National Guard, “then illegally pressured … to resign without benefit of any counsel or notice.” However, he chose to rescind his notice shortly after he sought help from Liberty Counsel. As they summarized, “[A]s a Christian, the officer believes all people are made in God’s image and have inherent dignity and are worthy of respect. He is committed to serving those under his command, regardless of political or religious disagreements, and would give his life in defense of his state and nation.”
Additionally, Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver stated:
[Idaho] Gov. Brad Little must ensure that the Idaho Army National Guard upholds federal and state law and protects the free speech of enlisted personnel. This discrimination against an officer based on a frivolous complaint must be addressed and his record cleared and career restored.
To provide further detail, Liberty Counsel’s Associate Vice President of Legal Affairs Daniel Schmid joined Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” According to Schmid, “[I]mmediately upon receiving the complaint, some of the superiors in [the officer’s] chain of command brought him in and said, ‘You will resign, or we’ll make this ugly.’ Those were the words to him. They forced him to resign without counsel, without the presence of counsel, and without advice of counsel.”
Schmid went on to explain how “the complaint was not based on anything he did as a commanding officer.” It was about “a speech that he made outside of the military context, in the context of a political campaign. … He was making statements on various issues in the culture today, from a religious perspective, [and] the First Amendment affords him that right.” And yet, his statements are now “the subject of an investigation that’s ongoing even to this day.”
According to Schmid, this case is about making “sure that the individuals who sign up to defend our liberties, our constitutional rights, are [also] entitled to those same rights”—specifically, he clarified, the First Amendment. “You don’t surrender your constitutional rights or your statutory rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and others just because you sign up for military service.”
In the case of this officer, Schmid contended that he “was entitled to political speech.”
He was entitled to hold religious values and to espouse those values in life and in his speech. He didn’t surrender those. He’s entitled to the same Constitution that he swore an oath to defend, and we ought to stand up and defend him.
But it’s also a fight for all Americans, guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., emphasized, since this case demonstrates a clear “disregard for the law.” Not to mention, he added, this isn’t the first time an instance such as this has occurred.
Schmid agreed. “That’s the sad part,” he sighed. “Because we’ve seen this before,” referring to how the military dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic with “the attempted purge of religious adherents for the COVID vaccine mandates. … [T]here was just a blatant disregard for the law in that realm as well.” He continued, “disturbingly, in the current administration, we see an open disregard for people of faith, for those who espouse conservative views.”
In this “particular complaint,” the concerns that people of faith are being targeted become further justified because, as Schmid explained, there was “a reference in the investigation to a Department of Defense instruction, which … we termed … as an attempt to purge conservatives from the ranks of the military.”
As Schmid went on to argue, the instruction that claimed to “root out extremism … was written so broadly” that it can easily be applied to anyone who chooses to espouse their views in response to the current political climate—specifically, views that are Christian and conservative.
Schmid contended, “[U]nder the current administration, it seems [they] don’t want those guys in the military service. [They’ll] purge them by virtue of vaccine mandates, or [they’ll] purge them by virtue of … their social media. … It’s astounding what’s taking place in the military right now.” He added, “[T]hese are our heroes. These are the ones who signed up to defend us. And they’re entitled to the same protections that you and I are. And we should make sure that they receive them.”
As Hice concluded, “[S]tanding for this infantry officer” is “standing on behalf of every one of us.”
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Australia: A requiem for "Voice"
Its advocates can't admit that they got it wrong in wanting special representation for blacks
There was a time when the Yes side infuriated me with the shallow quality of their “debate”. Now the Yes side bores me. It has been 10 months since the proposal to change our Constitution failed, and its proponents still have not moved past the second stage of grief. They are now wallowing in anger. Why did this happen, who is to blame? Someone, please wake me up when the bloodletting stops. Even better, let’s hope they get to the final stage – acceptance – soon. Please.
In recent weeks, some losers on the Yes side have displayed tedious self-indulgence, blaming everyone except themselves for the loss. The recent contributions of Shireen Morris and Greg Craven tell you something about the lack of insight and the shoddy analysis that have marked much post-referendum contributions by voice supporters. What we’ve learned most clearly is how deluded they remain.
Mr Albanese holds a press conference for The V once referendum at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Sam Ruttyn
Mr Albanese holds a press conference for The V once referendum at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Sam Ruttyn
It might have helped the nation better understand the voice if the violent disagreements among people on the Yes side had been aired in public in full and before the referendum rather than behind closed doors after the referendum. Only towards the end of the campaign did we see even the hint of cracks emerge in their facade.
Instead, with completely ineffectual exceptions, the Yes side presented itself publicly as a solid phalanx of moralising custodians of the path to righteousness. Now they are more like Moaning Myrtles, shouting over metaphorical toilet cubicles past each other.
Craven made his last-gasp concerns particularly irrelevant by saying the defects of the voice proposal could be ignored. He would still vote Yes because it was the moral thing to do. The radicals picked their marks superbly. They didn’t need to compromise because all those who might have had sufficient influence to speak up and seek a workable compromise were already locked into whatever the radicals served up.
Morris writes in her extract from Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum that “Indigenous leaders repeatedly compromised to try to win Coalition support”. This is barmy stuff. As someone who followed this debate very closely, I know numerous compromises were offered – and categorically rejected by the Yes side. Both Father Frank Brennan and barrister Louise Clegg bravely put forward proposals with more moderate constitutional wording aimed at narrowing the voice’s operations. Both were ignored.
Indeed, according to another Yes supporter, Damien Freeman, Morris stopped working with the group Uphold & Recognise, the moderate voice supporters, after they held a forum in February last year that included Brennan and Clegg. “She objected to the fact that we allowed Clegg and Brennan to raise their concerns about the constitutional draft amendment that the Prime Minister announced … at Garma. Morris believed we should have put up only speakers who made the case for the Garma amendment,” Freeman wrote last weekend.
No signs of compromise there.
Others, including me, suggested that any constitutional provision include a “non-justiciability” clause to ensure that a future High Court could not soak itself in social and political activism with the new voice provisions. In fact, for many years Morris assured us “a First Nations voice was specifically designed to be non-justiciable”.
Alas, there was no compromise. When the Prime Minister released the proposed wording at Garma, non-justiciability was tossed aside. Leading Yes activist Marcia Langton laid bare the radical demands: “Why would we restrict the voice to representations that can’t be challenged in court?” And, according to Freeman, Morris didn’t want any critics of the High Court’s major role speaking at the Uphold & Recognise forum.
Others suggested the proposed wording of the voice be limited to advising on acts of parliament so that it would not reach into every part of executive government, including every move by a bureaucrat. That was ignored, too.
Morris is wrong about another more fundamental matter. It is, in my view, almost certain that the voice, even if all the various compromises had been accepted, would have been defeated.
At its core it was a bad idea for the simple reason that Australians would never accept a two-tier Constitution, where one group of people had special rights permanently entrenched in the Constitution. Dividing groups by race made a bad proposal worse. Acceptance of this simple yet powerful truth will be the final stage of activists dealing with their loss. However, some of the compromises at least would have moved the voice closer to success than the firm rejection it finally received last October.
So, failure doesn’t rest with the political right, as Morris alleges. The failure is twofold: a bad idea that was badly prosecuted.
The voice proposal was, in large measure, a vibe thing, packaged up as this undefined goal called reconciliation, along with a reaching out, hands in friendship thing, and so on. The only clear part of the proposal was that if you opposed the voice, you could expect abuse (we were racist), ridicule (we were too stupid to understand it) and mocking labels (we were Chicken Littles). What stood out was the deep disrespect of Yes advocates towards just about everyone. Even those who agreed with the voice were not told candidly and precisely what this body would entail.
The Yes side had little idea how to win friends and influence people. They treated morality as a zero-sum game – we on the Yes side are moral; you No people are not – when disagreement should have been respected as a difference of opinion.
Craven was one of the biggest disappointments during the debate. The constitutional academic had a long history of being astute about our Constitution and our High Court. In 1999, he wrote about our highest court under the title A Study in the Abuse of Power. The professor wrote: “The Court now has a long record of consciously ‘interpreting’ the Constitution in a manner contrary to the Founders, with a view to achieving this or that supposedly desirable social result … the court simply has begun a process of inventing appropriate rights, and purporting to ‘imply’ them into the Constitution.”
In 2012, writing in The Australian Financial Review, Craven wrote that “putting a whole new section into the Constitution to deal with Indigenous people, then packing it with abstract, legally binding value statements, displays the sort of political naivety usually encountered in the Mosman branch of the Young Greens. Once again, the slogan will be ‘Don’t Know – Vote No’.”
Back then, Craven predicted correctly that “legions of depressed Australians, entirely committed to reconciliation, yet not prepared to maul the Constitution to escape the lash of Professor Langton’s tongue” would vote no.
I miss that version of Craven – the genuine constitutional conservative. In recent years, Craven succumbed to unintellectual emotion and moralising every bit as unhelpful as the more radical activists. He treated thoughtful concerns about the voice with shrill contempt, never properly addressing them as a constitutional conservative should. Quips and comedy may help Craven get through his day but it was never going to carry the day for the voice.
If Craven was having heated disagreements with the Yes side, and I don’t doubt him, he didn’t bother telling us soon enough or fully enough. Only much later, when it became clearer that the Yes vote was probably going to fail, and he would be on the losing side, was Craven candid enough that there were problems with the proposal as drafted. The killer punch to Craven’s constitutional conservatism came when he threw caution to the wind and said he’d vote for the voice anyway because it was the moral thing to do.
Unlike Craven, Freeman has offered the one piece of post-referendum insight that helps us truly understand why such a bad proposal was put and why it was prosecuted with such fervour.
Freeman, a fellow Yes advocate, has the courage to identify the proposal as driven by a particularly radical form of identity politics. This consists not only of the belief that some groups in society have been oppressed and that political action is needed to correct that oppression but that “only the oppressed group can determine what political action is necessary to overcome the oppression they have experienced”. Now we understand why at least some of those who might have been sceptical about the voice proposal felt themselves unable to object to it.
One thing Craven said 30 years ago is worth repeating. He described constitutional academics as “pretty pointless people”.
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1 September, 2024
Elitism denied: Probably imperative in a democracy
I have a faint claim on an elite identity, in that I have a social science doctorate and a past career as a university teacher, so I was a bit amused by the story below. I really, really am the son of a lumberjack and went to a small and undistinguished Austalian country school. So I am clearly not elite enough
The Eton Wall Game above. Britain's "Public" schools seem to be as influential as ever
During the first TV debate of this year’s election campaign pollster James Johnson handed a thousand viewers a ‘worm’ tracker to monitor their instinctive reactions. In an otherwise tetchy and uneventful hour, one moment elicited a notable bump in Keir Starmer’s favourability. ‘My Dad worked in a factory, he was a toolmaker’, Starmer explained, speaking directly to the camera. ‘We didn’t have a lot of money, and on occasion we were in a position where we couldn’t pay our bills…so I know how that feels’. The worm surged.
A week later at the second leaders debate Starmer told the same origin story. This time the audience audibly groaned. When powerful people successfully convince the general public they’re perfectly ordinary the implications can be powerful. But as this illustrates expressions of ordinariness don’t always land. We also saw this at play when Rishi Sunak – son of a doctor and educated at the elite Winchester College – tried to hark back to his immigrant grandmother to ground himself in a rags-to-riches story in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign. Or more recently when he claimed he ‘went without lots of things’ as a child, including Sky TV. Claiming ordinariness can backfire.
But Starmer and Sunak are not the only influential people to navigate the treacherous terrain of how to tell your backstory. In our new book, Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, we interviewed hundreds of influential people who told us an upward origin story. But like Sunak many of these claims were questionable. When we surveyed over 3000 entrants of Who’s Who - Britain’s longstanding catalogue of ‘influential and noteworthy’ individuals – we found that 43% of those that told us they came from working-class backgrounds had actually grown up in families where their parents did solidly middle-class professional work.
In interviews this played out in subtle ways. Many mentioned some aspects of their upbringing but omitted others. Others downplayed childhood experiences that might signal privilege; they stressed the inexpensive nature of their private schooling, the periods of economic uncertainty their family had faced, or the working-class struggle of their grandparents. There was a sense that instinctively many felt moved to cast their origin in a humble light. One CEO, Mary (not her real name), explained that she had even gone as far as hiding her elite private schooling from colleagues, and had deliberately omitted it from her Who’s Who profile.
Deflecting privilege is one part of a wider strategy we detected among today’s elite to present themselves as ordinary, regular, and unspectacular. These people generally eschewed their influence, and directly counterposed their meritocratic trajectories with the stuffy aristocratic elites of the past. Claims to ordinariness were also staked via lifestyle. Analysing the changing ‘recreations’ expressed in 70,000 Who’s Who profiles over the last 125 years, our analysis provides a unique window in
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Strange bedfellows over Israel
I find it very hard to comprehend hatred of Israel. I have always seen Israel as a great triumph of the human spirit
Just as Nazis and Soviets once joined forces against a common foe, so too have groups as diverse as the Greens political party, far-left academics, Trotskyites and Islamists found themselves aligned in their opposition to Israel. Despite their differing ideologies and goals, these groups have united in a shared disdain for the Jewish state, finding in each other a temporary ally in the struggle against a common enemy.
Genesis of the alliance
At first glance, the coming together of these groups seems improbable. The Australian Greens, a political party that once focused purely on environmental issues, now aligns with far-left academics who dominate the intellectual landscape of our universities. These academics, steeped in Marxist theory, find common ground with Trotskyites who advocate for permanent revolution, and with Islamists whose vision for the world is rooted in religious law and the establishment of a global caliphate. What binds them together is not shared values but a shared enemy – Israel.
To understand how these strange bedfellows have united, one must look beyond their surface-level differences and explore the deeper currents of ideology and emotion that drive them.
The Greens have long abandoned their single-issue focus on the environment, instead embracing a broader social justice agenda that includes fervent opposition to Israel.
Their rhetoric, once centred on climate change and conservation, now includes sharp criticism of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, framing the Jewish state as a colonial oppressor.
Far-left academics, for their part, have embraced a view that sees the world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. In their narrative, Israel represents the last vestige of Western imperialism, a state that was born of colonialism and continues to perpetuate injustice against the Palestinian people.
These academics have indoctrinated generations of students with this perspective, creating a climate on university campuses where any defence of Israel is met with hostility and attacks on Jews, as supporters of Israel, are acceptable.
Trotskyites, whose revolutionary zeal has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, see Israel as a symbol of capitalism and Western dominance. For them, the struggle against Israel is part of a broader struggle against the global capitalist system. They view the Palestinian cause as a rallying point for anti-imperialist movements worldwide and they are willing to align with any group that shares their goal of dismantling the current world order.
Islamists, meanwhile, have their own reasons for opposing Israel. Their opposition is rooted not in secular ideology but in religious conviction. They view the existence of a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world as a direct affront to their faith.
For Islamists, such as Hamas and its fellow travellers in the West, the destruction of Israel is a religious duty and they are willing to make common cause with secular leftists to achieve this goal.
Nature of the alliance
This alliance is not one of mutual respect or shared values; it is an alliance of convenience, forged in the fires of hatred towards a common enemy.
Like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it is a fragile and unstable coalition, held together not by love but by loathing. The various factions within this alliance are often at odds with each other on other issues, but when it comes to Israel they are united in their opposition.
What is striking about this coalition is how effectively it has managed to bring together groups that otherwise would be in direct conflict.
The Greens, who champion LGBTQ+ rights, have aligned themselves with Islamists who advocate for sharia law, under which homosexuality is punishable by death. Far-left academics, who preach the virtues of feminism and gender equality, have found common ground with Trotskyites who historically dismissed women’s issues as secondary to class struggle.
This alliance is held together by a shared narrative – one that casts Israel as the ultimate villain in a global drama.
In this narrative, Israel is not just a country with its own interests and security concerns; it is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the world. It is portrayed as a colonialist, apartheid state that oppresses the Palestinians with the full backing of Western powers.
This narrative is repeated endlessly in classrooms, media outlets and political discourse, reinforcing the belief that opposition to Israel is a moral imperative.
And this portrayal of Israel is increasingly tinged with disdain for Jewish people everywhere, so much so that historical anti-Semitic tropes are again rising to the surface of public discourse and violence against Jews, as in the 1940s, is justified.
The role of universities
The universities play a critical role in sustaining this alliance. It is on campus that young minds are shaped and indoctrinated with the idea that Israel is the villain in the story of global injustice.
Far-left academics, who dominate the humanities and social sciences, have used their positions of power to promote anti-Israel rhetoric and to marginalise pro-Israel voices. Students are taught to view the world through a binary lens of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel firmly placed in the role of the oppressor.
This narrative is reinforced by student organisations, many of which are influenced or controlled by Trotskyite groups. These groups organise protests, divestment campaigns and other actions aimed at delegitimising Israel. They create a climate on campus where any expression of support for Israel is met with social ostracism and even violence. It is now well known that Islamists also have been instrumental in organising and directing student protests.
The result is a generation of students who have been indoctrinated to view Israel as the enemy, not just of the Palestinians but of all oppressed people. This indoctrination extends beyond the classroom and into the broader culture, influencing the media, politics and public opinion.
Impact on discourse
The impact of this alliance on public discourse cannot be overstated. The narrative that Israel is a colonialist, apartheid state has become so pervasive that it is now accepted as fact by many in the media, academe and politics.
This narrative has led to a growing polarisation on the issue of Israel, with pro-Israel voices increasingly marginalised.
The alliance also has succeeded in framing the debate over Israel in moral terms, where opposition to Israel is seen as a moral duty. This has created a climate where any criticism of the alliance’s position is dismissed as immoral or even racist. The result is a chilling effect on free speech, where individuals who defend Israel are labelled as bigots or worse.
This stifling of dissent is reminiscent of the tactics used by totalitarian regimes, where dissenting voices are silenced and only the official narrative is allowed to be heard.
It is ironic that groups that claim to champion free speech and human rights are using these tactics to silence their opponents.
Future of the alliance
Like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the alliance against Israel is unlikely to last. It is an alliance built on hatred and convenience, not on shared values or genuine respect. As the interests of the various factions diverge, the alliance will likely fracture, just as the Nazi-Soviet alliance did when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
Already, there are signs of strain within the coalition. The Greens are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile their social justice agenda with their environmental mission. Far-left academics are facing growing backlash from students and alumni who are tired of the one-sided narrative being pushed on campus. Trotskyites, whose revolutionary zeal has always been out of step with mainstream politics, are finding themselves increasingly isolated. And Islamists, who once found common cause with the left, are being challenged by reformist Muslims who reject their extremist views.
As these factions begin to turn on each other, the alliance will likely unravel. But the damage they have done to public discourse and to the perception of Israel will take much longer to repair. The narrative they have created – that Israel is the ultimate villain in a world of injustice – has taken root in the minds of many and it will take a concerted effort to challenge and dismantle it.
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First-time homebuyers in Oregon get $30K grant — but American citizens aren’t eligible
First-time homebuyers in Oregon are being encouraged to apply for a taxpayer-funded $30,000 grant for down payment assistance – but only non-U.S. citizens need apply.
Latino-led housing support group Hacienda Community Development Corporation in Portland is advertising the perk through its Camino a Casa program, which stipulates that it is “only for people who are not American citizens.”
“Clients work closely with financial coaches and HUD-certified housing counselors throughout the entirety of the homebuying process. In addition to mortgage readiness and financial fitness workshops, we provide various opportunities for down-payment assistance,” according to the group.
Republican Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl called the effort “state-sponsored discrimination” and noted that he is “appalled that the hard-earned, limited tax dollars of Oregonians are being used to prioritize home ownership for certain non-US citizens,” according to the Daily Caller.
The funds come from the state’s tax-funded Economic Equity Investment Program, a program that aims to build economic equity for disadvantaged people, which allocated a $692,775 grant to Hacienda.
Republican elected officials in Oregon, a blue state, are taking steps to repeal some of the state’s sanctuary laws.
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Ordinary Americans have "had enough" of inclusivity and diversity policies at US companies, according to Robby Starbuck, who has led a one-man campaign against the controversial initiatives.
In just three months he has convinced half a dozen US firms to roll back their so-called "DEI" policies, practices aimed at righting historical discrimination but that the right has long criticized as unfairly targeting white people and men, including motor giant Ford.
In an undated memo published by Starbuck this week and confirmed by Ford, the auto maker said it would not impose quotas for minority dealerships or suppliers.
"Sanity is coming for corporate America," Starbuck wrote on X.
His campaign of video "exposes" and letter writing has seen Harley Davidson motorcycles, John Deere tractors and whiskey maker Jack Daniel's abandon their own policies, some of which advocated for LGBTQ workers and racial minorities.
"You end up in a position where every employee is being told you need to consume this one ideological sort of viewpoint and the other viewpoints not represented," he told AFP.
"People are entitled to their views, and we need to have a system that creates equal footing for everybody and doesn't force any one ideology down everybody's throats."
The pro-LGBTQ Human Rights Campaign, from which Ford broke as part of its step back from DEI, called Starbuck an "extremist troll" and said he was using corporate America "as pawns."
HRC had assessed Ford as part of its corporate equality index.
Music video director and producer Starbuck said that before becoming an activist he was a supporter of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate in November's election.
He rails against policies that champion what he describes as "woke culture" that aim to remedy racial inequalities and promote LGBTQ rights which gained traction following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
He has also campaigned against the imposition of anti-climate change policies on companies, and in a recent video on X where he has 600,000 followers denounced US militarism abroad.
"We deserve to have our ideology, our ideas, respected in the same way that everybody else wants to be respected," he said.
Starbuck, who wears his hair in a tight ponytail, said that the fight against woke goes beyond Trump.
"One of the great things that Trump did was he changed the dynamics in politics where outsiders could not get inside. They couldn't have their voice heard," said Starbuck who has previously run for office, but insists he has no new plans to seek election.
He questioned why he would want to "muddy" himself when he can instead shape the debate from the comfort of his farm in the home of country music, Nashville in Tennessee where he lives with his activist lawyer wife and their three children.
"We've accomplished more in two months than any other social movement (has with) corporate America in the last decade -- probably the last two decades," Starbuck said, though he did not provide details.
"There's a massive number of people behind me."
He credits the huge number of supporters he has amassed as well as whistleblowers from within the corporations themselves, opposed to management initiatives.
"They don't want to have their lives dictated by this group of people who think that they should be able to force their ideology into every part of our life, into our kids' schools, into our workplaces, everywhere," he said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wing-activist-leads-charge-against-021615902.html
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (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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