This is a backup copy of the original blog
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
29 April, 2022
A shameful Presumption of guilt
When the Left is out to get you, you will be lucky to escape, regardless of justice. It was plain to me from the behginning that this was another Dreyfus case. It pained me to hear what this good and holy man was put through -- JR
Tony Abbott
What’s not both to enthral and repel in this story of Australian Catholicism’s greatest churchman, brought low by an allegation of child sex abuse, humiliated and imprisoned, only to be vindicated, triumphantly, by a seven-nil High Court verdict to the effect that he should never have been investigated, never have been charged, never have been convicted and never have been gaoled. What was really on trial here was the Australian system of justice: how susceptible it was to public hysteria, media stereotyping and lynch-mob justice so at odds with the traditional presumption of innocence. The verdict, albeit only at the last gasp, thanks to the High Court, is that it’s still capable of delivering justice according to law; but not before a fine man had had his reputation officially trashed, several years of his life stolen, and massive legal bills incurred that he has yet to re-pay. Yes, the cardinal had a win – but this was not a fight he should ever have been in.
Only because the Catholic Church had been judged collectively guilty of institutionalised sexual abuse and, therefore, needed to be punished; and only because Pell had become the personification of that church was a process put in place that, until its very end, but for his faith in divine providence and in his own innocence, would have put the cardinal into a very dark place. Of course, in the sloppily disciplined post-Vatican II church of the Sixties and Seventies there does seem to have been an unusually large number of pedophiles exploiting the cover and the opportunities of clerical life. And because abuse at the hands of God’s servants is such a monstrous betrayal, it’s to the church’s particular shame that this wasn’t realised and acted upon sooner. Paradoxically, Pell was actually one of the very first senior churchmen anywhere in the world to confront it directly: sacking deviant priests and reporting them to the police rather than simply forgiving their sins while moving them on. Perhaps this is why Windschuttle (who’s not a Catholic), Henderson (now a ‘cultural’ Catholic) and Brennan (a Jesuit intellectual, to be sure, but often Pell’s antagonist on theology and ecclesiology) have come so staunchly to his defence.
As expected of a trained lawyer, Brennan focuses on the extreme implausibility of the prosecution’s case. The idea that a fifty-something archbishop, of exemplary life and reputation, would or could slip out of the procession concluding High Mass; and, without anyone noticing, sneak back into the sacristy to commit enormities on two unknown 13-year-old choirboys, all while fully robed and in the space of six minutes, was never credible. Especially when a succession of witnesses testified to Pell’s invariable practice of going to the front of the cathedral to greet parishioners. What’s extraordinary is the lengths to which Victoria Police went on operation ‘Get Pell’: launching an investigation without a complaint; advertising for victims; disregarding and ignoring contrary evidence; and leaking to the media.
The fact that this vendetta was led by two police officers who went on to become successive chief commissioners says everything about the sorry state of Victorian officialdom. In any system that valued integrity, the current commissioner would have resigned in shame for sponsoring such an obviously flawed and prejudiced prosecution; as would the appeal judges who were so blind to such palpable faults.
But as always in the people’s republic of Victoria, no one takes any responsibility or accepts any blame; the public seems to accept that there’s ‘nothing to see here’; and the plethora of entities from the parliamentary opposition down that should hold officialdom to account are incapable of anything other than futile hand-wringing. Brennan’s conclusion: that ‘but for the incompetence and animus of the Victoria Police, the DPP, and the two most senior judges of the state, Pell would have been cleared of those charges much sooner, or more likely, not charged at all’ makes his further observation that ‘the Victorian criminal justice system cries out for reform’ a masterly piece of understatement!
Henderson’s J’Accuse…! extends beyond the police and the judiciary to the media and the Gillard government’s royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse which, as he makes clear, could be shoddy and biased. Here’s Henderson on the to-ing and fro-ing between Vic Pol, desperate to charge Pell, and the DPP, initially deeply hesitant: The case was sent by Victoria Police to the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions which sent the matter back to Victoria Police which sent the matter back to the DPP which sent the matter back to Victoria Police which sent the matter back to the DPP which sent the matter back to Victoria Police stating that it could lay charges against Pell if it wished. Which, eventually, it did.
As befits our most dogged and shrewd critic of sloppy journalism, Henderson is forensic in his exposure of the barrage of anti-Pell smear. Here he is on the media pile-on, particularly from the ABC: ‘The campaign against Pell was unrelenting across its main television (7.30, Four Corners, Lateline, News Breakfast) and radio (AM, The World Today, PM, Radio National Breakfast) outlets. The ABC also commissioned special programs which contained attacks on Pell –…Unholy Silence…Guilty…plus…Goliath.’ The conferral of a Walkley Award on one of the anti-Pell diatribes, Fallen – even after the High Court’s dismissal of the case against him – exemplified the intractable media hostility to the man who once joked, when asked about the church position on the Gay Mardi Gras, ‘Well, we’re not going to sponsor a float, if that’s what you mean’.
Both authors deserve our gratitude for their defence of the presumption of innocence and their insistence that justice according to law must prevail over guilt by association and accusation.
Still, not in Victoria, where the response of the Premier to Pell’s release was: ‘I make no comment about today’s High Court decision. But I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you, I hear you, I believe you
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/presumption-of-guilt/
****************************************Companies that loudly supported BLM fall silent when confronted with skyrocketing Black murders
Corporate voices boomed across the nation in support of Black Lives Matter and various social justice initiatives following the death of George Floyd in 2020. Nearly two years later, what was left in the wake of 2020 was a drastic spike in Black murders with experts pinning blame on the BLM and "defund the police" movements.
The summer of 2020 was marked by protests and riots from coast to coast in support of the BLM and defund the police movements following the death of George Floyd. Companies stretching from behemoth e-commerce and tech company Amazon to beauty giant Ulta posted messages reiterating "Black lives matter," and companies around the country pledged millions of dollars to various social justice organizations that pushed to reimagine policing and reallocate funds from police departments.
FBI data reported by Fox News Digital last week shows murders spiked disproportionally among Black Americans in 2020 by 32% compared to the year prior. Murders across the board spiked by nearly 30% that year, marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes.
At least 7,484 Black Americans were murdered in 2019, according to FBI data Fox News Digital reported last week. That number shot up to at least 9,941 murders in 2020, meaning there was an increase of 2,457 Black Americans murdered over the previous year.
For White Americans, FBI data show there were 7,043 White people murdered in 2020, meaning 2,898 more Black people were killed compared to Whites.
An average of 6,927 Black Americans were murdered each year between 2010 and 2019, meaning Black murders shot up by 43% in 2020 compared to the previous 10-year average.
To experts such as the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, BLM and the defund movements that swept the nation directly contributed to the spike. The spike "began months after lockdowns beginning only after riots," Mac Donald told Fox News Digital, noting the "spike was not at all related to COVID."
Fox News Digital reached out to a handful of corporations and companies that pledged support for Black Lives Matter and various organizations supporting tenets of the defund movement, such as the Equal Justice Initiative and the National Urban League in the days and months following the death of Floyd.
The Equal Justice Initiative advocates for the reallocations of "funds from traditional policing to services that promote public safety." While the National Urban League outlines on its website that it has "21 Pillars" on "comprehensive and realistic reform and accountability," including "collaborate with communities to re-envision public safety" and "change divisive policing policies."
Representatives for Nike, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Ben & Jerry’s, Nordstrom, Target and Ulta did not return Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Companies such as Nordstrom, Ben & Jerry’s and Amazon openly aligned themselves with Black Lives Matter.
Nordstrom said in January of 2021 that it was "supporting the important work of nonprofit organizations," including the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Amazon announced in 2020 that it was donating $10 million "to organizations that are working to bring about social justice and improve the lives of Black and African Americans," including BLM.
While Ben & Jerry’s noted in 2020 that it supported the BLM movement years before Floyd’s death and declared, "Today, we want to be even more clear about the urgent need to take concrete steps to dismantle white supremacy in all its forms."
Nike - along with Converse, Jordan Brand and Michael Jordan - announced in 2020 it would donate a combined $140 over 10 years to organizations such as the National Urban League and Equal Justice Initiative. Apple launched a $100 million program called the Racial Equity and Justice Initiative in June of 2020, which pledged support to various groups including working with EJI. Facebook pledged support to groups fighting racial inequality just days after Floyd’s death, including EJI, as did Ulta Beauty. In 2020, Target announced a $10 million commitment to "advancing social justice," including donations to the National Urban League.
The Equal Justice Initiative and National Urban League did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment when confronted with the FBI data on Black murders and experts arguing the defund movement contributed to the spike.
Black Lives Matter’s press team has not responded to repeated requests for comment on the data and experts’ arguments. The national organization, which was co-founded by a self-described "trained Marxist," has come under intense scrutiny in recent months as questions were raised about leadership’s financial dealings. Amazon announced in February of this year that it suspended the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation from its charity platform for failing to disclose where tens of millions of dollars were allocated.
Just last week, former diversity leader under the Donald Trump administration Bruce LeVell wrote an op-ed slamming corporations for their "huge miscalculation" in backing the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
"Unfortunately, BLMGNF has intimidated the leaders of some of America’s largest corporations into paying fealty to its harmful and deceptive narrative," LeVell wrote in the Tennessee Star on Thursday. "Rather than challenging the Marxist provocateurs at BLMGNF, corporate leaders have prostrated themselves and even donated shareholder resources to a cause that is intrinsically opposed to free markets, individual liberties, law and order, and everything else that allows American businesses to thrive.
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Pastor who lost job over anti-gay tweet is backed by tribunal as judge rules he was discriminated against for gay Pride views
Keith Waters, 55, a minister at an evangelical church, claimed he was ‘forced out’ of his caretaker job at a primary school following a single tweet.
He wrote: ‘A reminder that Christians should not support or attend LGBTQ “Pride Month” events held in June. 'They promote a culture and encourage activities that are contrary to Christian faith and morals. They are especially harmful to children.’
The comments were condemned as homophobic and triggered a vicious backlash, including a campaign of harrassment in which undertakers were sent to Mr Waters’ home to ‘discuss his funeral’.
Isle of Ely Primary School in Ely, Cambridgeshire, began an investigation but the married father-of-one resigned three weeks after the tweet – a day before he was due to face a disciplinary hearing.
Cambridge Employment Tribunal has now ruled he was the victim of indirect discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief. Judge Sarah King said a ‘widely shared belief demands particular care before it can be condemned as being not worthy of respect in a democratic society’.
She added: ‘Beliefs which are offensive, shocking or even disturbing to others can still be protected.’
After the ruling, Mr Waters said it was ‘an important win for our freedom to speak the truth of the gospel without fear of losing our jobs’.
He added: ‘I took legal action, not because I wanted to sue the school but because what happens to me goes to the heart of what it means to be free to preach the gospel in the UK.’
Mr Waters, who founded the New Connexions Free Church in Ely in 2007, made the tweet in June 2019 – the month Cambridge was hosting its first ever Pride event.
The school received three formal letters of complaint – one claiming he had called for ‘violence against people who support the Pride Festival’.
The tribunal did not uphold claims for direct discrimination and unfair dismissal.
A spokesman for the Active Learning Trust, which runs the school, said: ‘We welcome the decision of the employment tribunal that the claims of direct discrimination and unfair dismissal were not well founded and were dismissed.’
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I was an outcast, shunned like a criminal - just for wanting to keep my Girl Guides safe
The reaction was so cruelly disproportionate and unjust, Dr Katie Alcock felt like a criminal.
She was interrogated as if by the 'secret police' then expelled from Girlguiding, an organisation to which she'd devoted ten years of loyal, unpaid service.
Katie, who led a flourishing unit of Guides, Brownies and Rainbows, is the latest in a series of women who have been pilloried and spurned for daring to speak out against the transgender rights directives.
However, this time it was not trans-rights lobbyists, but the eminently traditional and long-established organisation, Girlguiding (formerly the Girl Guides, founded in 1910), that had produced the regulations on transgender issues she'd had the foresight to question — with such calamitous consequences.
In a four-year battle, Katie brought a legal action against Girlguiding on the grounds that she had been discriminated against for her 'gender-critical views'. And last week she reached an out-of-court settlement with the organisation, which had accrued a reported £100,000 in legal fees defending the case.
They agreed to pay a proportion of Katie's legal costs and invited her to re-join the charity from which she'd been dismissed four years earlier.
'Girlguiding has issued an apology of sorts,' says Katie today, 'and I'm relieved it's all over. But I'm not enthusiastic about running a unit any more. In fact, I feel quite cynical about the organisational side of Girlguiding.'
As well she might.
Katie, in her 50s and a senior lecturer in psychology at Lancaster University, is married to Glyn, a civil servant, and is mum to a seven-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son.
Her concerns first surfaced in 2018 when, without consultation, Girlguiding instituted new policy directives on trans rights. As well as welcoming trans-women and girls into the organisation as patrol leaders, Guides, Brownies and Rainbows, worryingly it stated that these trans members could 'share accommodation' with girls and women.
To be clear on this directive — and Girlguiding was singularly opaque about it — they were referring to individuals born male who had transitioned or who identified as women and girls, even if they still had male genitalia.
This rang alarm bells with Katie, who had by then run her own unit of Guides, Brownies and Rainbows — welcoming 100 girls from all social and ethnic backgrounds and religions — in Lancaster for a decade.
She felt that it could potentially allow a situation to exist where her charges could be put at risk.
'When I found out that men who said they were women could sleep in the same tents as girls, share the same toilets and use the same changing rooms if they went swimming, I was really worried. I thought Girlguiding had made a mistake.
'But when I contacted them about it they insisted they hadn't. They said they had consulted Stonewall (the LGBT rights' group) for advice and were following the law. As far as I was concerned, they were throwing the safeguarding of girls out of the window.
'I don't believe trans-women should face discrimination, but I don't think they can change their biological sex. And I think, for the safeguarding, privacy and dignity of girls and women, they, or their parents, should be allowed to decide if they share spaces with someone of the opposite sex.'
She was also concerned that the policy effectively excluded from Guiding girls and women such as Muslims who needed to be in single-sex environments because of their religious beliefs.
Had she been less passionate about the movement she might not have pursued the case with such fervour, but Katie's affiliation with the organisation goes back to her 1970s Warwickshire childhood when she joined the Brownies.
She revelled in its brand of robust, adventurous activity: it fostered initiative, self-reliance and independence. Indeed, it helped shape the person she is today.
Her mother was a teacher; her father an academic, 'and Brownies was across the road and became my second home,' she says. 'We ran around a lot, made telephones out of tin cans, baked scones; went on pack holidays. Then I moved onto Guides and, as well as the cooking and sewing, there were lots of outdoor activities and camping. We were given lots of freedom. It was low-cost adventure, accessible to everyone.'
After school, she took a degree then worked in Zambia as a secondary school teacher. A PhD in psychology at Oxford followed then she worked in Tanzania on a research project before spending two years researching in the U.S..
Returning to London, she began helping at a Brownie group, setting up her own unit in Lancaster in 2007, having moved to the city three years earlier.
In keeping with the movement's ethos, she set great store by inclusiveness: girls from Muslim, Hindu and a diverse range of other religious faiths were embraced. There were girls with learning disabilities and others referred by Social Services rubbing shoulders with grammar school pupils.
'Many people think Guiding is predominantly white, middle-class and Christian, but it isn't,' she says. 'It has a long history of being an inclusive movement.'
And her unit, next to Lancaster Castle — a working prison until 2011 — was far from exclusive: it shared its premises with a drop-in centre for relatives of prisoners.
However, comprehensive though her welcome was, she was deeply concerned when she discovered, through talking to other leaders early in 2018, that Girlguiding had unobtrusively slipped into its policy documents new directives on trans rights.
While happy that trans members should be welcomed into Girlguiding, she was deeply perturbed about sharing facilities. Indeed she had always been scrupulous to segregate girls and boys on overnight stays.
'Even when I'd taken my then four-year-old son to camp we'd slept in a separate tent from the girls,' she says, 'And he'd go to the male toilets while I waited outside.
'Then I found out that no separate arrangements were being made for biological adult males who said they were women; that they'd be sleeping in the same tents as Rainbows (aged four to seven), Brownies (aged seven to ten) and Guides (up to age 14).
'I was really worried because predatory male paedophiles will go to any lengths to gain access to young girls. Girlguiding had an almost zero rate of child sexual abuse. It had never happened. Any abuse had been by adult men in Scouting. But now it seemed they'd be opening the door to the possibility — and blatantly throwing the safeguarding of girls out of the window. This shocked me.'
Keen to challenge this, Katie wrote to Girlguiding's HQ and asked why there had been no consultation on such a contentious issue — but was told, emphatically, that the rules had been set and there would be no further communication on the subject.
'I was told, 'We're not changing anything. You just have to put up with it.' I felt utter shock and disbelief.'
In spring 2018 she set up a private social media group, inviting nine other unit leaders who shared her concerns. 'I wanted to discuss the matter because I felt many leaders didn't fully understand the implications of the new trans policies.
'We wanted to evolve a strategy: how would we talk to parents about this? I pointed out, too, that Girlguiding was a single sex group, but how could it continue to be if it admitted members with male genitalia?'
However, so febrile was the atmosphere around the debate that one Guide leader, who had infiltrated the group, made a complaint about Katie's views. A four-month inquiry followed during which Katie was interrogated by the organisation's human resources investigator.
'It was like being questioned by the secret police in some totalitarian state. I felt like a criminal,' she says.
The inquiry concluded she had breached the organisation's social media rules by airing her concerns online; even though she had only done so to a small, closed group. It also ruled she had broken Guiding's 'code of conduct' by refusing to adhere to its equality and diversity policy on transgender inclusion.
In September 2018 she was duly summoned to a meeting with the organisation's County Commissioner for North-West Lancashire. Faced with an ultimatum — to back down or lose her unpaid post — she refused to rescind her views and was duly expelled.
The atmosphere in the meeting room, at a Lancaster hotel, was forbidding and punitive.
'I asked if I could bring a friend and was told I could, but she couldn't speak. I was told I could take notes, but not take them away with me. It was like having my crimes read out in a secret court with no right of reply.
'I said I'd follow all the trans policies as long as they didn't conflict with safeguarding. I thought I'd done the right thing in not speaking out on a public social media site and that Girlguiding would applaud me for being concerned about safety. But they objected to both those things.
'They read a letter out to me saying I was expelled and I wanted to leave the room immediately. I couldn't hold it together. I was shaking, fighting back tears.
'I was due to have a meeting of a new Rainbows group the next day — my daughter had been looking forward to joining — and I rang one of the parents in tears and said, 'Don't come.'
'For years other leaders had been telling me I was doing a great job, encouraging girls who wouldn't normally go into Guiding to join; organising the sort of adventures for them I'd loved as a child and mentoring young leaders.
'Then suddenly I was being told I couldn't attend meetings any more; even if my daughter was there.
'Parents are the backbone of every unit; their help is crucial. And I knew my daughter wouldn't be confident enough to go to Rainbows without me, so she was effectively barred, too.'
Katie was shunned by friends; other leaders spurned her. 'I was distraught; struggling to function or talk to people. If they asked how I was I started crying.'
In January 2019 she lodged an appeal against her expulsion. It failed. Her distress began to turn into anger. She was determined not to back down and resolved to pursue a discrimination case against Girlguiding.
Backed by employment lawyer Peter Daly of Doyle Clayton and buoyed by the generosity of crowdfunding supporters who donated more than £50,000 to help fund her case, she brought her legal action.
It was finally settled out of court last week and she has pledged to return surplus funds for the use of gender critical litigants fighting similar battles to hers.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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28 April, 2022
My husband and I sleep in separate bedrooms — here’s why
I am pleased to see this story online. I am such a light and restless sleeper that I have always had to sleep separately from any partner. There are very few women who understand that, though. I do know what I am missing as I do enjoy lying cuddled up together at other times. Zoe is slim and only 5'1" tall so her small body fits very neatly into my cuddle
Influencer Taylor Paul shared a video revealing the reasons why she and her husband sleep in separate bedrooms.
Paul first explained that multiple times, her husband would search around their room at night looking for a shirt.
When he would go to another room to search for it, she suggested that he just sleep in the guest room so that she could go back to bed.
She explained that the nights he slept in the guest room, she would end up having a really good sleep.
“He also sleepwalks, sleep talks, and does some creepy s**t, so this just happened to work out,” she said.
Paul also said that she likes to sleep in warmer temperatures but her husband prefers it to be cooler.
Similarly, she likes to sleep in silence, yet he likes to use a white noise machine.
“I feel like this is the best situation for us,” she said. “We have a really healthy marriage, we get good sleep, and we both love our separate rooms.”
Giving her followers a tour of their separate rooms, she showed off her stunning bedroom, with perfect decorations, a large television, and a bathroom.
She laughed while showing off her husband’s much messier room, which had laundry thrown on the floor and his bedsheets stained from spray tans.
The couple has two children together and they believe that this sleep setup is the most beneficial for their marriage.
Viewers were split on the topic, saying: “I would never be able to!! I sleep better when he is next to me,” said one viewer, while another said: “We sleep in separate rooms because my husband snores so loud and I’m such a light sleeper.”
https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/my-husband-and-i-sleep-in-separate-bedrooms-some-think-its-weird/
*********************************************The CDC and Unmasking White Coat Supremacy
US district judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle has ruled that the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had exceeded its authority in extending an airline mask mandate until May 3. As the judge noted, the CDC improperly invoked the “good cause exception,” allowing the federal agency to avoid public notification and comment. The CDC also allowed mask exemptions for some groups and not others. The White House announced an appeal, and the loudest voice against the judge’s ruling was chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“For a court to come in and interfere in that is really unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because it’s against public health principles,” Dr. Fauci told reporters. “That’s no place for the courts to do that. This is a CDC decision.” Eric Boehm of Reason magazine took issue with the Biden advisor.
“Fauci’s belief that the CDC ought to exist outside of the constitutional limitations applied to government actions is stunning,” Boehm wrote. “This is either a complete misunderstanding of the American system’s basic functions or an expression of disdain toward the rule of law.” Boehm is right on both counts, as Dr. Fauci confirmed back in October of 2021.
In an event with McGill University in Canada, Dr. Fauci said, “you do have personal liberties for yourself and you should be in control of that. But you are a member of society, and as a member of society—reaping all the benefits of being a member of society—you have a responsibility to society. And I think each of us, particularly in the context of a pandemic that’s killing millions of people, you have got to look at it and say there comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision, for the greater good of society.”
The White House advisor thus makes it clear that he misunderstands the American system, disregards the rule of law, and dismisses the whole concept of personal liberty. The Biden advisor has also clarified that federal agencies do not know what is best for public health.
Dr. Fauci has changed his position on masks but now claims “I represent science,” and that those who criticize him are actually criticizing science. That sweeping claim calls for scrutiny.
Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but in 1968 he took a job with the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but in 1984, NIH made him head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a position he still holds.
Dr. Fauci never treated a COVID patient and ordered destructive lockdowns that caused widespread suffering. The Biden advisor now wants the CDC to override the courts, which calls for a look at Dr. Nancy Messonnier, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD).
In a series of telebriefings in early 2020, Dr. Messonnier praised the People’s Republic of China, a Communist dictatorship, and hailed CDC’s cooperation with the China-compliant World Health Organization (WHO). Dr. Messonnier never treated a COVID patient but when she suddenly retired to take a position with the Skoll Foundation, the CDC described her as a “true hero.”
Dr. Messonnier began her CDC career with the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), tasked to prevent infectious diseases from arriving on American soil. In the case of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the vaunted EIS failed completely. The CDC has been quiet on the EIS role, and if any EIS officers were demoted, disciplined, or lost their job.
This is the federal bureaucracy Dr. Fauci wants to override the courts, the Constitution, and individual liberty. Dr. Fauci thus unmasks white coat supremacy rule over the people by fallible medical bureaucrats unelected by the people. There comes a time when white coat supremacy must end if liberty is to endure.
https://blog.independent.org/2022/04/25/cdc-white-coat-supremacy/?omhide=true
********************************************Petulant liberals are melting down over the realization that they've lost the power to control and suppress everyone else's speech on Twitter
By Meghan Mccain
Twitter is and has long been the meanest, ugliest, and least fun of all the social media platforms.
I joined Twitter in 2008. And I have spent more time than I'd like to admit on the platform.
But I am a child of social media, like the rest of my fellow older millennials. For the most part, I don't regret my hours and energies spent on Twitter.
There was even a short period of time, from 2009-2012, when Twitter was still somewhat collegial. But after the Republican Party's nomination of Donald Trump all of that changed.
Twitter itself seemed to adopt the position that some speech is not just inappropriate – but immoral, dangerous, and evil.
It became a space utilized by trolls to harass, virtue-signal and vent their anger.
And its trending topics became something that meant a great deal to those working in media and almost nothing to the people working in the real world.
In fact, I have been seriously considering deactivating my account.
Personally, Twitter has too often become a vessel for abuse and harassment against me.
Look at the replies to my tweets about literally anything.
Most comments are about how fat, ugly, stupid, and disgusting I am, according to some random, anonymous troll, and the replies often stray into threats of violence and outright abuse.
By far my worst experience on Twitter occurred after the death of my father.
A photograph taken of me crying at my dad's casket was doctored to show a gun pointed at my head.
The image stayed on Twitter for days and was retweeted around the platform.
Twitter did not take any action to remove it until my husband started flipping out and demanding it be taken down.
It eventually was removed, and this sad episode ultimately led to a personal phone call and apology from Jack Dorsey.
I still appreciate the concern that he showed, but that ugly image stayed up far too long and caused unnecessary emotional distress at a time in my life when I was already broken from grief and sadness.
Put yourself in my situation. Imagine having to deal with not just an unresponsive Twitter but also the FBI and what amounted to a clear threat on my life.
I shouldn't have had to endure that, and I believe that if I were Sasha or Malia Obama, it would have been taken down immediately.
And therein lies the problem – Twitter has become a tool of the liberal elite status quo.
It has been long suspected that Twitter designed its' algorithms to favor liberal politicians, pundits, and personalities and their ideas, while at the same time censoring dissenting opinions.
Conservative personalities – including me – have suspected that Twitter has engaged in 'shadowbanning,' which is the secret suppression of an individuals' account without their knowledge.
Donald Trump and the satirical website The Babylon Bee were both deplatformed but Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei is still allowed to tweet out calls for genocide.
Some of the rules seem random, but too often, liberal and progressive sensibilities are protected, while conservatives are punished or ignored.
The obvious question is: Why did I stay on Twitter if it gotten so bad?
The truth is that I still believe in Twitter's potential to be a useful and positive force in the world.
Although most Americans are not on Twitter (it only has 38 million users in the United States as compared to the 221.6 million on Facebook), it is still a place where news, ideas, corporate messages and media narratives are crafted and spread.
I have stayed because it is still a great tool to distribute my work (like this column), opinions and ideas to a mass audience.
It is a good way to combat falsehoods and fight the spread of rumors.
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Now chocolate is incorrect
"Pure" chocolate is derived from cacao, the name for the unprocessed bean. And once the bean has been processed, ground and roasted, it's known as cocoa.
But while the end product might be incomparably tasty, the production of the cacao bean has been linked to farmer exploitation, corporate apathy, and adult and child slave labour.
Cacao trees have been traced back to both the Mesoamerican region – present-day Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras – and also the Amazon river basin in South America, explains Ingrid Fromm, a researcher at the Bern University of Applied Sciences.
In pre-Hispanic times, the Mayans, Aztecs and Olmec cultures greatly valued cacao. They consumed it crushed up in a thick and bitter beverage, says Dr Fromm, who is also a board member of the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa.
Spanish conquistadors who came to Mexico in the 16th century brought the exotic drink back to Spain. From there, cacao was transported into the rest of Europe, she explains.
Then, in the late 19th century, Switzerland became the first country to add milk powder to the cocoa, creating milk chocolate and the first chocolate bars.
"This was a huge breakthrough for the market of cocoa and for industrialised food products," Ms Off, who is the author of Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet, says.
"Not only was it something that was easy to sell, and to transport and to package, but it was also affordable to the masses."
And that's when the trouble began.
As the popularity of chocolate grew, so too did the demand for cacao beans. To keep up, cacao was transported from the Americas to the African continent.
In 1855, the Portuguese brought cacao to the island of Sao Tome off the West African coast, where a very humid, tropical climate was ideal for cacao production, Dr Fromm says.
Eventually, the bean made its way from the island to the mainland.
Today 70 per cent of cacao production takes place in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Cameroon.
And as at 2021, about 5 million tonnes of processed cacao beans were produced worldwide.
Dr Fromm says cacao is mainly produced by small-scale and "very resource-poor" producers.
These farmers do not have the same economic power as the large chocolate corporations, and the price they're able to get for their cacao beans has been decreasing.
Molly Harriss Olson, CEO of Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand, and the former chair of the global board of Fairtrade, said its 2015 report showed that in the cocoa industry "farmers everywhere in the world are living below [the] $1-a-day poverty line".
She says farmers who lack power or influence in their supply chains "are really forced to take the price that these very large companies can force through their power in the marketplace".
That means "family-type labour" is common in West Africa, and particularly Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Dr Fromm says.
"If you're a producer that has maybe more than two hectares of land, you may hire labour for that particular season, the harvest season, but it tends to be family labour.
"This is why we also know that there are cases of child labour. And this also has to do with the fact that the producers are paid very little money for the cacao beans, and poverty is also a driving force behind child labour," she says.
In 2012, the then-CEO of World Vision Tim Costello said that 61 per cent of the children who work on cocoa farms didn't get to go to school "so we get to eat cheap chocolate".
Indeed research undertaken by Tulane University in New Orleans found that in 2013/14, 2.26 million children were working in cocoa production in the Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Ms Off says chocolate companies denied knowledge of such practices when NGOs first raised alarms.
"[The NGOs reported] that it appeared there was a form of slave labour and ... children being moved from not just other regions, but other countries, into the cocoa-producing regions in order to work on these farms for no money," she says.
As pressure mounted in the early 2000s, including within the US Congress, "it became a political interest to question whether the chocolate companies were involved in some pretty bad practices in order to produce their product", Ms Off says.
But, in 2008, Fortune magazine reported that "little progress has been made". And according to the same publication in 2016, approximately 2.1 million children in West Africa "still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa".
There has been some improvement since then, says Dr Fromm. Today many bigger companies are working to ensure that farmers are paid a living income. She hopes that income continues to increase over the next decade.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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27 April, 2022
What are the least attractive jobs? Singles reveal the occupations they'd be most turned off by on a date
This report reveals how misleading generalizations can be. It says, for instance, that nurses are not a good partner choice. But I have always got on well with nurses. I had, for instance, a 7 year mariage to one and a 14 year relationship with another -- not to mention more fleeting liasons. So how come?
What attracts me is their down-to-earth nature but how do I deal with the shift-working issue? I don't. In the two relationships I mentionred, neither lady worked shifts. They had normal daytime jobs. Nursing is a quite varied field and that was no oddity. So the shift issue did not arise.
Mind you, I am friends with a nurse who does work shifts so that could be an issue if we ever took our friendship further.
But the basic point is that the category "nurse" is too broad. A lot depends on the particular nurse. I have some very good memories of nurses
Single men and women have revealed how a date's job can impact their attractiveness - and agree shift workers and those with 'huge responsibilities' are the least desirable.
Dating coach Louanne Ward raised the topic on her She Said, He Said Facebook Page and Aussie men and women explained why some occupations are 'a complete turn-off'.
And while many men and women feared they would be judged for low-paying or unglamorous jobs, it was the opposite.
The singletons admitted to steering clear of people with high-powered jobs, or well-paid industries because it can lead to a 'doomed relationship' and 'narcissism'.
Fifo workers, lawyers, doctors, policemen and sex workers were among the most commonly mentioned.
'I avoid shift worker occupations with irregular shift rostering or long shifts like 12 to 14 hour shifts. So people in nursing, or doctors or truckies,' one man said.
According the the men and women in the Facebook group the following professions are the least likely to 'get a date'.
1 - Nurses and doctors who do long shifts
2 - Fifo workers
3 - People in high-powered roles like doctors and lawyers
4 - Truck drivers
5 - Police officers and military men
'I think jobs where people are too much power, makes them lack empathy,' one woman said.
The conversation comes after a divorce lawyer revealed the jobs she would avoid when looking for Mr Right.
Firemen, police officers, military men, surgeons, and pilots all appeared on the list shared by JettieGirl28 on TikTok.
'When I first started practicing family law 13 years ago, a woman attorney gave me a statistic about the top five professions of men that women should avoid marrying,' she said in the video.
'Over the course of my career, I've watched my most difficult cases and, shockingly, many of them involved men in these five professions.'
The men and women in the dating advice group agreed with the lawyer for many of the fields.
One woman said she avoids men in the military and police force because she believes they can become 'callous'. 'I can't deal with the callous nature they very easily and scarily switch into as that's what they need to do at work to survive,' she said.
The divorce lawyer also did a post detailing the occupations people should avoid when looking for Mrs Right.
Many people assumed the same jobs would be on the list but she said that's not the case in her experience.
And while most of her female clients are teachers and nurses these are not the most difficult or dangerous divorces.
'If you have a problem with this scroll along, because I am about to hurt a lot of people,' she said.
She said the most difficult women in divorces are stay at home mums, explaining they are often terrified of their futures financially.
She also said in relationships where the mum stays at home the father often 'feels like an ATM' and the women feel under valued.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover: What will it mean for users?
What does Elon Musk intend to do with his new purchase if the deal is approved by shareholders? And will Twitter look different to users?
While Twitter is one of the most talked-about social networks, it has fewer users than many of its peers.
The company known for its bird logo boasts 436 million monthly active users, according to Statista, making it a distant follower to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram.
In Australia, the company boasts 5.8 million active users — a number that has remained steady.
But despite its smaller user base compared to other firms, Twitter is influential and has become a platform for companies, politicians, celebrities and even emergency services to issue public statements.
Musk’s ongoing focus on no-holds-barred free speech may include allowing the most vocal trolls and sources of disinformation to remain on the platform, despite the company’s past efforts to remove them.
In March, for example, after providing Starlink satellite internet services to Ukraine, Musk vowed not to block Russian news sources “unless at gunpoint,” saying he was a “free speech absolutist”.
In response to his deal for Twitter, he said: “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”.
His stance could leave the door open for those banned from using Twitter to return to the service, including high-profile users like right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos who led harassment of a Ghostbusters star before his permanent suspension, rapper Azealia Banks who issued a slew of transphobic and homophobic tweets about who should access Covid vaccines, “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, who publicly harassed a journalist, and former US President Donald Trump who spread misinformation to a wide audience using the platform.
Trump has said he will not return to the service, despite protesting his ban earlier, telling Fox News he will instead begin using his own social network, Truth, in the coming days.
Twitter allows users to report harassment they receive on the service, and “hide” offensive tweets sent in response to their own tweets. It’s not clear how that would continue.
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Another High-tech Titan Falters
You've probably heard of the high-flying Big Tech FAANG stocks -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Among the five of them, their market cap reached $6 trillion last year, which is more than the GDP of all but a small handful of entire countries. Moreover, their net worth is larger than the entire annual output of India, with more than 1 billion people.
These companies got so big and profitable so fast that politicians on the left, right and center started accusing them of monopolistic behavior. "Break them up!" shouted Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar. Some Republicans, such as Josh Hawley, endorsed the same strategy.
But has anyone noticed what has happened to the stock values of these once-invincible powerhouses?
Netflix's stock has gotten crushed of late. Just flattened.
Its share price collapsed by 35% in one day. This was one of the most significant single-day sell-offs in the history of stocks. For now, the rout doesn't seem to be waning. Over the past year, Netflix's market cap has tumbled from $267 billion to close to $96 billion.
Sorry if you own this stock. And most pension funds do own Netflix as part of their portfolios, so it wasn't just millionaires who got hurt.
The Netflix brass blames its demise of late on "fierce competition" for subscribers.
Meanwhile, Facebook has suffered even more considerable losses that exceed one-half a trillion dollars. That's not supposed to happen to monopolies that crush the competition. Instead, the hunters have become the hunted. Facebook is confronting serious competition from other social media platforms such as LinkedIn and China's TikTok, which are elbowing out Facebook's dominance.
What are we to make of all this jostling to be king of the mountain in the digital domain?
I carry no water for Big Tech, and I'm as frustrated with the free speech infringements against conservatives as anyone. But cries of "monopoly" are so early 20th century. Just as no one worries about Standard Oil, Microsoft or General Motors taking over their industries, we see the same cutthroat survival tactics in the hypercompetitive tech sector. This kind of competition is great news for the consumer. It lowers prices and makes a mockery of the "monopoly" rants.
Companies such as Google better look over their shoulders. If you slip up, the marauders are coming to steal away your market share. Sometimes, the raiders aren't even American companies. Globalization and free trade have dramatically lowered the prices of nearly all digital products.
That is as it should be in a free-market capitalist world. One day, you are on top of the world and seemingly in an impenetrable fortress, and the next, you lose half your market cap. We don't need trust-buster regulators in Washington, like the leftist Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission, policing our businesses. The market is doing that just fine, thank you.
America has gained tech dominance over our rivals, especially China, Japan and Europe, because we have allowed the digital economy to remain mostly tax- and regulation-free. It's the Wild West in Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas, which created the trillions in wealth in the first place. The high-tech industry has added value and wealth at a blistering pace, and how sad is it that when our American ingenuity and inventiveness succeed, the trust-busters want to tear it down? Then, when these tech giants start to surrender their competitive advantage, the fool politicians want to give them billions of dollars of corporate welfare handouts from taxpayers.
The late and great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the process of inventing new products to challenge the extant corporate power structures in business "creative destruction." The Netflix and Facebook sell-off is a jolting reminder that the market is a better way than government to keep companies honest and on top of their game. It also keeps prices low.
https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2022/04/26/another-hightech-titan-falters-n2606328
*********************************************Liberal Corporations Are Confused and Scared Because Conservatives Now Fight Back
It’s always fun when progressive jerks try to leverage their bizarre perceptions of our beliefs to get us to do what they want. It can be some smug Twitter blue check informing us that “Actually Jesus was a socialist who would want us to cancel student debt for spoiled rich kids who got degrees in Transgender Visual Arts” or, more recently, some newly-minted Milton Friedman acolyte goofsplaining that we must submit to the skeevy whims of California corporations and accept the imposition of grooming mandates because, after all, they are private businesses. And sometimes it works, even on alleged conservatives – David French has made whatever passes for his C-list career out of striving to twist conservatism to conform to his lib masters’ version of it.
But this cheesy ploy is not working anymore, at least not on the rest of us.
Ron DeSantis, the Scourge of Odd sitting on his growing throne o’ skulls in Tallahassee, is fresh from laughing off the howls of broken libs enraged that he gerrymandered them in Florida like they gerrymandered us in New York and Illinois. Ron is not one for accepting two sets of rules, one for the ruling caste and another, crappier one for us peasants. He identifies the applicable rule, and applies it good and hard. It’s about time the left learns that norm-breaking has consequences. And one consequence is frequent broken-norm suppositories.
Disney found out the hard way for the same reason as other woke corporations will. These CEOs, who appear to be ruthless robber barons in business, encounter a bunch of their own blue-haired, pierced subordinates who think a penis is irrelevant to determining their gender and suddenly these executives roll-over and give it up so cravenly that even Mitt Romney would look at them and mutter “Get a spine!”
And in the case of Disney, it was so objectively insane that you had to wonder about the thought process, but only for a moment until you realize that this is 2022 and everything is utterly stupid. Disney got welcomed into America’s homes and hearts by purveying safe and wholesome kiddie fare to American families and has decided, to please a pack of mutant employees, to administer a coup de grace to that rep by leaping into the arena to fight against a law that all normal people agree is so manifestly proper that it really should not have to be a law at all – that pervs can’t talk to little kids about sex in schools. But no, Disney had to weigh-in on the side of groomers because the consensus in the rarified circles its leadership circulates in and among the weirdo contingent on its staff is that the world must be made safe for bizarre sexuality.
Oh, and it did not help that a bunch of Disney employees recently got swept up in a child porn sting, and that the strange-os in its bureaucracy decided to brag on leaked Zoom calls about how they were injecting their freak show gender nonsense into its once sacrosanct movies and shows. You know what Buzz Lightyear was missing? Some not-hot girl-on-girl action. We are one revision away from changing the title of “The Lion King” to “The Otherkin Non-Binary Member of the Royalty.” “Hakuna matata” is supposed to mean “No worries,” not “It’s okay to lop off your junk if you’re not feeling like a boy today.”
So DeSantis decided that Disney needed some discipline, and that stepping to him (and, therefore, us) cried out for a response. Some folks worry that this is an attack on the First Amendment, but this was not just because Disney chose to weigh in on an issue (though it’s unclear why you are obligated to continue providing juicy tax breaks to political opponents – the Founders would have tossed you in a madhouse for arguing that). No, Disney has launched a broad offensive against normal people using political, cultural and economic power to change our society without our permission. This is not just about Disney expressing an opinion, though its groomer-tolerant opinion is creepy and gross.
DeSantis’s response was to strip away the special giveaway that Disney got for its overpriced hellscape in Orlando. The left responded by telling Disney it should pick up Disney World and move it to, say, Buffalo. Disney, on the other hand, realized it has stepped in a steaming San Francisco sidewalk sundae and is desperately trying to turn down the temperature.
Disney thought it was going to win, because, you know, Republicans like big companies and defer to them and, well, no. That’s not us anymore. After years of big companies leveraging their power to screw us over, from the NFL to Delta to Coke, now we’re over it. They are free to use their power – a potent cocktail of cultural, economic, and political power – as they see fit. And so are we. We have freed ourselves of the arbitrary rules that formerly prevented us from responding with our own brand of power – which is a little bit economic but mostly political – to fight back.
And a lot of conservatives have mixed feelings. Some part of that is legit – using political power to crush enemies can go too far. Hell, that’s essentially how Chicago works. But our new way of responding to our enemies – who, remember, chose to break the norm of businesses staying out of social issues – is not designed to shake them down but to shake them up. We are not twisting arms for cash tributes. We are trying to keep perverts away from our kids. It’s very clear – you corporations go make money and run your business and we’re not going to hassle you. But if you use your power to pursue the agenda of our enemies, you are now our enemy, and we will gleefully and without apology use all our power to harm you right back.
The fretting conservatives, some in good faith and others because they are worthless and weak, claim to worry that this is some grand violation of our principles. It is certainly not a violation of my principles, starting with this one: If you hit me, I will hit you back twice as hard and then kick your quivering body. One problem with so much of blue check conservative Twitter is that so many of those who would presume to lead us into battle have never been in a fistfight. I have no use for anyone who has never gotten in a brawl and lost – and I prefer ones who have experience winning too.
We’re told that for some reason we are obliged not to use our most effective strength, our primary mode of power, in support of our interests. What we are never told is why that is true. Where we hold the government, we need to use it to deter corporate intervention – when did conservatism drop the concepts of deterrence and righteous retribution? We believe that for criminals who wrong us, and we need to apply them to others who do so as well, including companies. And there’s a track record of not using our power, manifesting in the current crisis. We have seen what not fighting back does, what substituting conservative cliches for conservative ass-kicking has got us. So, what’s the alternative they suggest? We tried doing nothing and that didn’t work. Maybe do nothing twice as hard?
No, we’re way past the phase where our opponents can appeal to our principles to neutralize our ability to resist. Our goal is a freer, more prosperous country where our kids are not the target of weirdos. You don’t get that by holding fire when the California commie contingent comes to make you into second class citizens. And do not think for a moment that making us into serfs is not their desired end state. From running down the idea of free speech to reimagining “democracy” into meaning that they have total control over the levers of cultural and political power to their manifest desire to turn our kids into gender-baffled sex objects for the Democrat pervert constituency, the future our enemies seek is unacceptable.
And we need to follow the principled lead of guys like Ron DeSantis and simply not accept it.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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26 April, 2022
A shocking death
The girl had everything!
Sarah Shulze, 21, died by suicide on April 13, her family announced.
“Balancing athletics, academics and the demands of every day life overwhelmed her in a single, desperate moment,” Shulze’s family said. “Like you, we are shocked and grief stricken while holding on tightly to all that Sarah was.”
The California-born runner was a junior and member of the cross country, indoor track and outdoor track teams at the University of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin officials released a statement Friday regarding the beloved student, who was described as a gentle soul and decorated student-athlete.
“The Wisconsin Athletics community is heartbroken by the unexpected passing of Sarah Shulze,” the university said. “We extend our deepest sympathies and sincere condolences to Sarah’s family, friends and Badger teammates during this extraordinarily difficult time.”
She earned academic all-Big Ten honors in 2020 and 2021 for cross country and in 2021 while running at Wisconsin.
A 2019 graduate of Oak Park High, Shulze was a star distance runner at her high school. She was named Ventura County Athlete of the Year and earned a scholarship to Wisconsin in 2018.
Shulze’s family launched the Sarah Shulze Foundation to advance and support women’s rights, student athletes and mental health.
Shulze is survived by her parents, Brigitte and Scott, and her sisters Abbey and Ella.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/24/university-of-wisconsin-track-star-sarah-shulze-dead-at-21/
*****************************************************The Driver Behind the Recent Historic Collapse of Hispanic Support for Democrats
I’m sure you’ve heard about Joe Biden’s approval rating with a voter bloc the Democrats covet: Hispanics. They’re now Republicans. They’re drifted into our camp. The only people who don’t seem to know or care are…white liberals. For years, the narrative was that the GOP was too extreme on immigration enforcement. If only they moderated, they could clinch this voter group. Instead, the GOP stayed the same and the Left became so wild, so extreme, so gross, and so unpalatable that they become Republican voters. It’s all so delicious. The Democrats thought that demography was destiny. It’s not. Public opinion is shiftable sand, guys. You need to work at reaching voters, retool messaging, and in some cases, jettison policy positions because they’re too toxic. Getting cozy with pedophiles seems to be a debated topic among liberal academics. Making all the kids trans is another. Forcing everyone to wear masks is yet another policy position that is not polling well. Why do you think indoor mask mantes only came back in Philly and not anywhere else? Democrats know what’s up this year. It’s not hard to figure out.
It's also not like there have been canaries in the coal mines for Democrats about Hispanic voters. They’re not monolithic. They’re more conservative than liberal Democrats think—and they’re not too eager to back open borders. What about a pathway to citizenship? It’s not popular either. It barely cracks 50 percent, and that’s based on polling data from the past 10 or so years. Who know who mentioned this? It was a liberal data scientist, David Shor, formerly of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He’s now crunching numbers for Blue Rose Research. Shor was adamant that Democrats doubling down on immigration was a losing proposition. That Democrats had lost the ability to connect with voters who weren’t like them. That liberals need to be aware that they are the minority, and that nonwhite voters, even those who have backed Democrats for years, were not as ideologically rigid as the white college-educated lefties that now dominate the party base
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Crime rates drop after prosecutor focuses on repeat violent offenders
Gun control activists insist that by reducing the supply of firearms available to criminals, we can dramatically reduce violent crime, though they’ve never been able to adequately explain how exactly that’s supposed to work in a nation with 400-million firearms, 100-million gun owners, and the constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms.
A much more practical and constitutionally-sound approach to crime reduction is to reduce the demand for firearms among those likely to use them in the commission of a violent crime, and the best way to do that is to ensure that there are consequences for violent criminals.
It’s a lesson that Florida State Attorney Melissa Nelson appears to have taken to heart. As Fox News reports, the prosecutor overseeing criminal cases in and around Jacksonville has made prosecuting repeat violent offenders her top priority, and the strategy is paying off.
In 2021, Jacksonville’s murders were down 30% and overall shootings down 17% from the year prior, according to [Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office] data for non-domestic shooting incidents,” David Chapman, a spokesperson for the Fourth Circuit State Attorney’s Office, told Fox News Digital. “Given last year’s downturn, our numbers to date aren’t far off the mark and thankfully have not spiked like other cities.”
The Fourth Circuit covers Clay, Nassau and Duval counties and the city of Jacksonville and is led by State Attorney Melissa Nelson, who made waves for finding new ways to prosecute known criminals, such as pursuing firearms charges in connection with guns flaunted in music videos. She has sought stiffer sentences for people convicted of gun crimes.
This year, Nelson’s jurisdiction is seeing another drop in homicides, although shootings remained even with last year’s at the start of the month, statistics show.
“After experiencing a substantial downturn in violent gun crime in 2021, we continue to work together to combat violent crime in hopes that this trend continues,” Nelson told Fox News Digital. “Currently, we remain on par with last year’s numbers. Improving public safety and fighting violent crime remains a top priority for our office and law enforcement partners.”
This isn’t about just charging as many people as possible with as many offenses as prosecutors can get away with. In fact, Nelson’s office has also been working to get individuals wrongfully convicted out of prison. But the prosecutor’s top priorities in terms of obtaining convictions are the repeat offenders that pop up time and again in the criminal justice system.
“When she decided last year that she was going to really be aggressive about gun crimes, she got mocked, and one of her detractors was going on and on about, this never works, putting people away and throwing away the key,” said Betsy Brantner Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association and a retired police sergeant with nearly three decades on the job. “And now, look, since she’s been doing it, it’s been working.”
Brantner Smith noted that even when a person is arrested for the first time for a violent crime it may not be the first one they’ve actually committed, adding that most firearms offenses are not linked to legal gun owners.
“Generally speaking, these are not legally held firearms,” Brantner Smith added. “When you’re dealing with people who are willing to use a firearm to commit a crime, you’re dealing with really serious offenders.”
More importantly, the “really serious offenders” aren’t generally guys who commit a single crime. As we’ve noted before, just 1% of a city’s population can be responsible for nearly two-thirds of its violent crime, which means there’s a small group of very prolific offenders at the heart of every city’s crime problem. By focusing the limited resources of a prosecutor’s office on that cohort, officials like Nelson can have a much bigger impact on violent crime rates than gun control activists slapping another gun control law on the books could ever hope to achieve.
Trying to reduce the supply of firearms in a state like Florida is an exercise in futility. Trying to put the most violent and prolific offenders behind bars for as long as possible, on the other hand, seems to be paying off.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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22 April, 2022
You Thought Tax Day Was Bad? Biden Has Worse in Store
You could say “Happy Passover,” you could say “Happy Easter,” but you couldn’t really say “Happy Tax Day.” Tax Day is already bad, and President Joe Biden wants to make it worse.
If you filed for a refund, you may be waiting a while: As of March, the IRS hadn’t processed more than 12 million returns. jThe latest appropriations bill gave the agency funding to hire 10,000 more people, but that won’t solve the problem.
Biden wanted to give it a further $80 billion and hire another 87,000 agents. We already see IRS people chase waitresses around the table to tax their tips, run up and down city streets to make sure there’s no Uber hanky-panky and in their spare time go after successful small-business and gig workers.
That’s not enough for the president. Biden wants to make America No. 1 . . . in taxes.
If he had his way, the United States would have the highest individual, corporate and capital-gains taxes of all the developed nations. We’d have tax rates even higher than China’s.
And don’t forget his proposed confiscatory wealth tax on unrealized capital gains, which would be unconstitutional and impossible to calculate, besides being stupid.
Of course, Biden never acknowledges that under his tenure, Americans are already paying record taxes.
Just last week, Treasury announced it collected a whopping $2.1 trillion in taxes the first half of the fiscal year. It was the first time in history that tax collections exceeded $2 trillion in a six-month period. More than $1.1 trillion of that came from individual income tax.
You’d think that with record revenues, Biden would return some money to the working folks who earned it. Not a chance.
He wants to use it to expand his big-government regulatory state and control all aspects of the economy.
Instead of rewarding success, Biden and the Democrats want to punish it. They have no interest in economic growth. For them, tax policy is strictly a matter of class warfare and redistributionism.
But by hiking taxes on successful businesses and entrepreneurs, they reduce profits, which in turn reduces middle-class and blue-collar wages, increases consumer prices and throttles investor returns.
The left is always trying to tax the rich without realizing that you can’t be in favor of employees if you’re opposed to employers and you can’t support a system of capitalism without capital.
OK, Democrats aren’t always wrong about tax policy. One understood it well 60 years ago: John F. Kennedy.
So “long as our national-security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits,” he told the Economics Club of New York in 1962. “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”
JFK had it exactly right. He was describing the Laffer curve before there was a Laffer curve.
And Kennedy was for growth, which should be the top goal of tax policy. He took the top rate from 91% to 70%.
Years later, former Democrat Ronald Reagan took the top rate from 70% to 28%. In fact, when Reagan left Washington, we had a two-bracket income tax: 28% and 15%. His reforms ripped 10,000 pages of tax regulations out of the Federal Register.
As tax rates were lowered, the tax base was broadened, and taxes were simplified. The JFK tax cuts launched a decade of tremendous prosperity. The Reagan tax cuts launched a two-decade prosperity cycle.
The Trump tax cuts are giving us what limited prosperity we have. Congress should make them permanent.
A pro-growth tax-cut plan that flattened rates, broadened the base and simplified the code could generate 3% to 4% economic growth. It’d be a crucial element in a balanced budget that also included a domestic discretionary-spending freeze and a rollback of all the nutty Biden regulations, especially on fossil fuels. That would be a growth budget.
Over the roughly 50 years between the end of World War II and 2000, the US economy grew at a 3.6% annual rate. In the new century, from 2000 to 2021, it’s grown by only half that: 1.8% annually.
Why? Too much spending, too much deficit finance, too much money printing, too much inflation, too many regulations, too much central planning, too much big-government socialism. And Biden wants to raise taxes so he can do more of the same.
It doesn’t have to be this way. America deserves better. America can do better—as it has proved in the past.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14144&omhide=true&trk=rm
**********************************************Olympic hero's defiant take on trans debate
Australia's most decorated Olympian of all time, swimming superstar Emma McKeon, has made it clear she's against transgender athletes competing in women's sport, declaring "it's just not fair".
The trans-in-sport debate raging in Australia is more intense than ever because of the federal election campaign by Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, who's copped backlash for comparing her activism for women's sport to protesting against the Holocaust.
McKeon weighed in on the debate at Griffith University's A Better Future for All seminar this week. "I personally wouldn't want to be racing against someone who is biologically a male, so that's a concern," McKeon said.
"It's not a new thing, but it's new in that sport, swimming, are going to have to deal with it."
New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard sparked debate when she competed in women's weightlifting at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
More recently, Lia Thomas of the USA became the first known transgender athlete to win an NCAA swimming title when she took out the 500m freestyle.
On Australian shores, the AFL hasn't allowed Hannah Mouncey to compete in the AFLW, resulting in the former Australian men's national handball player taking the AFL to court.
McKeon says she doesn't think she'll race against transgender athletes in her career but admitted it had become a major point of contention. "I don't think it's going to come to that point," McKeon said.
"But now that it's a growing thing, the sport has to think about how to handle it and how to deal with it, because you do want to be inclusive, but you don't want to have females racing against swimmers who are biologically male, because it's just not fair."
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Assault on free speech in Tennessee
America is in a free speech crisis. The mere mention of involvement in issue advocacy has resulted in personal and professional attacks by internet thugs determined to deny Americans, and indeed, Tennesseans the right to participate equally in the political process and petition our government.
In 2008, Brendan Eich, the inventor of Java Script and founder of Mozilla, legally contributed $1,000.00 to a California initiative campaign opposing gay marriage (which incidentally was supported by the electorate.) Eich was forced out of his position as the head of Mozilla due to threats by Internet social justice warriors making threats against his company. Eich shared his position with then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, so it could not have been more mainstream, yet he lost his company and livelihood.
Today, doxing of conservatives is viewed as sport by the current generation of internet warriors, and the impact is that many people will not donate to causes if they believe that their names will be made public.
I don’t have to provide a laundry list of examples, we both know this is true.
SB 1005-HB1201 would paint a target on the back of anyone who donated to a non-profit group which expressed a position on legislation pending in Nashville. While I can certainly understand and sympathize with the intent behind the legislation, the practical violence it does to the basic freedom to petition lawmakers in violation of the First Amendment overwhelmingly argues in favor of a veto.
In the 1950s, the state of Alabama passed legislation which required the NAACP to provide their membership lists to the state with the intent of discouraging participation. In 1958, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down this legislation. The practical effect of SB 1005- HB 1201 is the same, as participation in issue advocacy campaigns that happened to be adjacent to elections would be squelched.
For example, disclosure makes it foolhardy for someone with an interest in developing a green energy technology to publicly support a legislative effort to increase police funding. This simple act would put that donor at risk of losing funding from Wall Street’s Environmental, Social and Governance driven investment instruments due to Black Lives Matter’s word of disapproval.
We live in a world where people’s legitimately held, mainstream opinions are used to cancel their careers and livelihoods. SB 1005-HB 1201 enables that political persecution and no amount of legislative tinkering changes that fact.
For this and other reasons, Americans for Limited Government strongly urges Gov. Lee to veto this well-meaning, but ill-considered, dangerous and unconstitutional legislation.
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Australia: Protecting women not a priority for Leftists
Steggall is an "independent" Leftist.
It was a mistake for Zali Steggall to refer to the protection of women, girls, and children as a ‘dead cat strategy’.
In one breath, she dismissed the rights of women to make way for the desires of biological men. Steggall may as well have lashed the history of feminism to the stake. This is not progressive thought – it is a regression back to a Medieval era where women were forced to shut up and put up with the dominance of men.
‘We were basically told to, “suck it up”,’ said one of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas’ teammates. The woman, who was too frightened to be identified, said that they felt uncomfortable and upset being exposed to a naked man in their locker room.
The Member for Warringah uttered her ‘dead cat’ line during a recent interview with Laura Jayes on Sky News Australia. It was not a poorly worded error. When pushed on the subject, Steggall doubled-down, accusing parents that raised concerns about the safety of young girls competing against boys in contact sport of being ‘transphobic’.
Steggall’s callous attitude toward the genuine fears of women confirms speculation that when it comes to the Culture Wars, the Left are prepared to sacrifice women, their rights, and their safety in order to appease biological men. So-called ‘moderate’ Liberal MP and New South Wales Treasurer Matt Kean said that this wasn’t the 1950s – no. Quite right. In the 1950s no self-respecting man would take a medal from a woman and describe it as an ‘act of bravery’.
Matt Kean went on to immediately tweet that, ‘Gender balance on treasury boards will rise from an impressive 40 per cent to a balanced 50 per cent! Chris Minns attacked the policy this morning. He really does stand for nothing. He won’t stand for a fair go for women.’
Kean didn’t clarify if his 50 per cent female quota target was made up of women or men.
The message is not getting through to men in positions of power like Kean. Women do not want men in their bathrooms, change rooms, sports, or other female-specific spaces. Individual groups of women make exceptions on a case-by-case basis – such as a desperate dad taking his female toddler to a public women’s bathroom – but the idea of legal power being used by the State to force the issue is unacceptable.
Shove a woman in front of a camera on national TV surrounded by a thrall of press and she might begrudgingly go along with the ‘tolerance’ line, but that answer is usually coerced out of fear that she may lose her job if she does not comply with the activist line. Shame on society for threatening women into accepting an unsafe situation. The Left are keen to point out the existence of ‘toxic masculinity’, paint every young boy as a potential abuser, and talk at length about women as victims of male violence, but they outright refuse to accept that this biological imbalance remains regardless of modern ‘gender-fluid’ theory.
When a woman says that she feels unsafe with a naked man occupying a change room, is it the woman who is banned from the gym or told to stop complaining. When a woman says that it is unfair for a man to set unattainable records in competitive sport, they are told that sport is meant to be about ‘inclusion’, not winning. When a woman loses her career to man, she is forgotten and left to watch a man take her scholarship, money, and future.
This paradox of political correctness ensures that women who stand up and bravely demand equality are labelled as bigots.
Virtue signalling is a currency best measured in ‘clicks’ and Australia’s media core attack conservative women like seagulls on a chip. These are the sorts of journalists who like to remind us that Warringah is ‘an electorate that voted 70 per cent in favour of same-sex marriage’ as if there is a genuine comparison between two consenting adults entering a marriage and the side-lining of women or surgical mutilation of a child’s body. There is not.
When Deves said that the behaviour of militant activists reminded her of the Nazi regime’s habit of ruthlessly silencing those who opposed it, she was describing the intolerant, hate-fuelled landscape of social media that women are subjected to if they dare to defend their biological rights.
Besides, no one throws the ‘Nazi’ accusation around more liberally than the radical left, who use it as a daily slur against anyone and everyone who stands slightly to the right of Stalin. Trump is a Nazi. Scott Morrison is a Nazi. The Liberal Party are Nazis. Anti-vaxxers are Nazis. J.K. Rowling is a Nazi. Murdoch is a Nazi. Jewish people who support Israel are Nazis. Free speech supporters are Nazis. Anyone who has refused to actively ‘affirm’ the LGBTQ movement has been accused of being a Nazi by someone with pronouns in their bio. Last year in Melbourne, Union members were called Nazis by none other than ex-Labor Leader Bill Shorten. Everyone is a Nazi to the rabid mob.
What we are witnessing is an ideological movement that has become so corrupted by the cheap thrill of outrage that they cannot stand to look at themselves in a mirror. The level of festering violence sitting beneath anonymous social media accounts is astonishing and speaks to a deeper psychological problem rampant in the last few generations who manage their emotions by abusing strangers on the internet. Is social media desensitising people or are these kids being radicalised to hate by a State-sanctioned education program that demonises conservatives and traditional family values?
Matt Kean correctly stated that, ‘This is not an intolerant society.’ Unfortunately, Kean can’t tell the difference between tolerance and cheating, something he has experience with when it comes to women’s issues. No, he wasn’t cancelled. Male privilege, perhaps? Australia has a reputation for fairness, and that is what Katherine Deves campaigns on. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins stated that the ‘practical guidance [of the re-interpreted Sex Discrimination Act in 2013] on how sporting organisations, their staff, and volunteers can promote the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in line with human rights-based principles.’
And therein lies the problem. Sport is not about ‘inclusion’ and it is not a human right. Sport is a competition divided by gender to promote fairness where contestants are selected based upon merit. It is about finding the limits and peak performance of that gender. If, as of 2013, sport is about ‘inclusion’ then fine – let’s forget the whole gender division thing and throw everyone into the unisex category. We’ll see how long it takes for professional female athletes to tear apart the sporting world when they find themselves losing to teenage boys and excluded from multi-million dollar prizes.
Katherine Deves isn’t being set upon by activist wolves because she’s wrong. Deves is hounded by every able-bodied member of the left because she’s right. The majority of men and women know that there is a fundamental difference between the sexes that cannot be erased by wishful thinking and medical intervention. Deves stated reality and the electorate pulled toward her.
Steggall felt it. Albanese felt it. The activists draining millions out of the taxpayer purse felt it.
At some point, society has to sit down and choose.
Do we honour the biological rights and safety of women – or do we bow to the demands of Labor, the Greens, the ‘moderate’ Liberals, and the so-called Independents who want us to cast women back to the Dark Ages?
Choose.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/protecting-women-is-not-a-dead-cat-strategy/ ?
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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21 April, 22
Leftists’ anti-police policies have led to a startling number of black, Latino crime victims
A Fox News story reports there was a staggering 43% increase in the murders of black Americans in 2020 compared to the past 10-year average.
The finding is shocking — but not surprising. After all, New York proved decades ago that reducing crime disproportionally benefited blacks and Latinos because they comprise most of crime’s victims. Fewer crimes mean fewer victims of all races, but the drop is most pronounced among nonwhites.
If we didn’t know it before, we now know the opposite is also true. More crimes mean more black and Latino victims.
All this matters because the nation’s large cities are so swamped by horrific crime and violence that police, criminologists and a few honest elected Democrats are finally conceding the obvious: the progressive movement, including Black Lives Matter, that ostensibly aimed to protect minority racial groups by defunding the police and coddling criminals backfired big time.
The people the progressives claimed to be helping actually were harmed by the anti-police, pro-criminal policies.
Bill Bratton, who led the Los Angeles police between two terms as head of the NYPD, recently put it this way on a podcast: “The scales right now are tipped very heavily in favor of the reforms of the progressive left . . . and what we have as a result is this growing fear of crime, this growing actual amount of crime in almost every American city.”
Mayor Adams agreed, telling ABC News that while there had been issues of trust between police and some black New Yorkers, “we can’t rebuild that trust by allowing those who are dangerous and that have a repeated history of violence to continue to be on our streets.”
Yet it’s too kind to suggest the proponents were well intentioned but just went too far. All along, there was voluminous evidence showing they were taking huge risks by toying with unprecedented success.
They should have known better but common sense is not so common on the activist left. Besides, it wants revolution, not reform, and is willing to sacrifice others to get it.
The Fox story, based on FBI statistics, captures the failed experiment in bloody detail. Records show 7,484 black Americans were murdered in 2019 and 9,941 in 2020, an increase of 2,457 victims.
Previously, between 2010 and 2019, there was an average of 6,927 black murder victims each year, meaning the 2020 carnage involved 3,014 murders above the 10-year average.
Although blacks make up only 13% of the US population, they often are a majority of murder victims and perpetrators.
The year 2020 was an inflection point for various reasons. Although an anti-police movement has long been a fixture on the left, a series of police incidents in previous years culminated in the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Captured on video when much of the country was on pandemic lockdown, Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and riots.
As in previous anti-police riots, one effect has been that “police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously,” Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox.
The continuing crime spike is also being fueled by prosecutors and lawmakers who invoked extreme leniency and forced judges to release prime suspects, many of whom then commit new violence and even murder.
New Yorkers know these patterns in up close and personal ways.
For 20 years, under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, the NYPD turned Gotham into the nation’s safest big city. Murders fell from about 2,000 a year in the early 1990s to 300, sparking an economic and cultural renaissance that I liken to a new Golden Age.
But political profiteers undermined that success and turned the 2013 mayoral election into a referendum on supposed police brutality and racism. Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty and spent much of his eight years fanning the flames of police distrust.
He failed at just about everything else, but was successful in making New York more polarized and dangerous.
For example, he cut the NYPD budget by $1 billion to pander to the defund mob and ended the undercover units that searched for illegal guns.
The result is that New York became a microcosm of the national police stats. Murder rose here in 2020 and 2021, as did crimes in all seven major categories, creating more nonwhite victims.
None of that was necessary, and certainly was not what any sector of the public wanted.
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Why Local Leaders Don’t Want This Prosecutor Making Their Towns a ‘Petri Dish for Social Experiments’
In the eyes of some Los Angeles County leaders, District Attorney George Gascon is guilty of creating an environment for crime to go unchecked.
“We have great concern about various prosecution policies that basically aren’t being enforced,” Joe Vinatieri, mayor of the city of Whittier about 20 miles southwest of Los Angeles, told The Daily Signal.
Vinatieri says his biggest priority as mayor is to keep his citizens safe, a task that has become more challenging for communities such as Whittier that are part of Los Angeles County and subject to Gascon’s policies as DA.
Gascon, a Democrat elected in November 2020, ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration. He promised to make “neighborhoods safer, hold police accountable to the communities they serve, and reform our justice system.”
As district attorney, Gascon is a progressive prosecutor, or what Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Cully Stimson calls a “rogue prosecutor.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“To put it succinctly, Gascon is a rogue among rogues,” Stimson wrote for The Daily Signal in 2021. “And unfortunately, for crime victims and the citizens of Los Angeles County, he is making their communities less safe.”
Gascon, 68, is one of about two dozen prosecutors whose campaigns were financially backed by liberal billionaire George Soros.
Andrew Lara, a city council member in Pico Rivera, 12 miles southwest of Los Angeles, says he would describe Gascon’s approach to criminal prosecution as “inadequate.”
“All his directives are just going to make crime and our quality of life, especially in Pico Rivera, much more difficult,” Lara, a Democrat, said.
Lara and Vinatieri spoke with The Daily Signal during a Heritage Foundation event April 7 in Los Angeles focused on rogue prosecutors such as Gascon.
On his first day in office, Gascon issued a memo listing 13 crimes that the District Attorney’s Office no longer would prosecute, including resisting arrest, prostitution, drug possession, criminal threats, trespassing, and driving without a valid license.
Gascon also announced that he would “cease filing ALL enhancements.”
“Enhancements” refers to factors such as gang activity that can lead to harsher sentencing by a judge.
“When I heard that he [Gascon] was not going to prosecute enhancements related to gang affiliation, I knew that that was going backwards,” Lara, who grew up in east Los Angeles and witnessed a lot of gang activity, said.
In Pico Rivera, population 65,000, residents want to “move away from gangs,” Lara said, adding that “we want the best for our children, just like, I think, any American city.”
Lara and Vinatieri say that Gascon’s policies aren’t serving communities like theirs.
In Whittier, a city of about 86,000 where future president Richard Nixon got his start in politics, “we are seeing an increase in petty thefts, of car break-ins, things like that,” Vinatieri said.
The increase in property crime is caused largely by those who are on illegal drugs, the mayor said, and who steal to pay for their addiction.
Under Gascon, law enforcement in Whittier often have no choice but to release those who commit nonviolent crimes back onto the streets hours after they committed the crime. Already, a California ballot initiative in 2014 known as Proposition 47 had decreased the consequences for many crimes and turned some felonies into misdemeanor offenses.
In 2021, Whittier police no longer could seek prosecutions in over 400 arrests because of Gascon’s progressive policies, a local law enforcement officer who requested anonymity told The Daily Signal.
Instead of incarcerating anyone who commits a crime, Gaston says that as Los Angeles County’s district attorney he will “??employ a holistic paradigm of public safety that requires individualized sentencing and treatment plans, which may or may not include appropriate incarceration, and restoratively holds people who commit crimes accountable, while acknowledging their humanity and capacity for redemption.”
Although it is true that “jail is not the solution for everything,” the local officer said, when you say you have a plan to stop prosecuting, but don’t have plans in place to help those offenders, that causes problems.
Los Angeles County doesn’t have the power to involuntarily commit someone to an institution for drug treatment, the officer said, and that is problematic when so much crime is driven by drug addiction.
People aren’t getting the help they actually need because the county isn’t prosecuting misdemeanors, Pico Rivera’s Lara said.
“If you fail to prosecute prostitution, if you fail to prosecute drug possession or reckless behavior, if you fail to prosecute those crimes, then none of those people get court-mandated diversion,” Lara said.
When individuals don’t go to court for breaking the law, “there’s no legal mechanism to make sure that these people are getting the help that they need,” Lara said, adding that “by doing nothing, nothing is happening. No one is being helped.”
The council member said he is all for slow, gradual changes to the criminal justice system, but is “tired of politicians making communities like mine a petri dish for social experiments.”
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Report: Maine, New Mexico, Nebraska and North Carolina take bold steps to end civil asset forfeiture’s deprivation of property rights
By Robert Romano
Every year the federal, state and local governments seize about $3 billion of property via a process known as civil asset forfeiture, a perverse incentive for law enforcement officials to engage in searches in the hopes of finding something valuable to seize, knowing that that it most likely will not be challenged and recovered.
Now, many states are taking action to finally end the practice, a study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Dan Greenberg, “Five Myths of Civil Forfeiture,” reveals.
In it, Greenberg advocates to “establish a criminal forfeiture system, as opposed to a civil forfeiture one. A criminal forfeiture system simultaneously adjudicates both the criminal liability of the defendant and the defendant’s rights to the seized property… In contrast to the current civil forfeiture system, defendants would not be deterred from appearing in court under a criminal forfeiture system because of cost concerns… Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, and North Carolina have adopted this system.”
The key here is litigating asset forfeiture in the context of and side-by-side with bonafide criminal prosecution, where not only the prosecution but any attempts at asset forfeiture can be contested by defense attorneys every step of the way.
In these states, you have to actually be charged with a crime first and convicted before any assets can be seized. The government has to prove that those assets were connected to the crime that was committed, and then the forfeiture is tethered to the prosecution and then sentencing, only attainable upon conviction.
But, Greenberg warns, conviction requirements on their own do not end civil asset forfeiture if they do not get the process out of civil courts, writing, “conviction prerequisites that keep forfeiture litigation in civil court have little or no effect, and that these provisions’ impact on the fairness or the consequences of forfeiture programs is largely insignificant.”
Here, Greenberg is noting that in most states, in order to assert a right against asset forfeiture, a citizen would have to hire an attorney to fight it out in civil courts, which run separately from the original criminal prosecution, if such a prosecution even occurred. In many cases, property is seized without even a prosecution, let alone a conviction.
Those are deprivations of liberty and property without due process of law, a clear violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Instead, Greenberg proposes that asset forfeiture be exclusively a part of the criminal justice process. It still requires a conviction, but keeping the process in the criminal system is an important distinction.
Other keys to these laws are higher thresholds in order for asset forfeiture to come into play and requiring a nexus of the property to law being broken as ill-gotten gains. In New Mexico, property is required to be at least $50,000 in value; in Nebraska, it’s $25,000; and in Maine it’s $100,000. Greenberg dispels the myth that most civil asset forfeiture are in such high amounts. Those, he writes, are the exception, not the rule: “A typical cash seizure and forfeiture often ranges from several hundred dollars to a little over $1,000.”
And that’s generally the problem. Usually, the cost of fighting the seizure costs more than the asset is even worth and so the theft goes uncontested.
In addition, laws should block “equitable sharing” with federal law enforcement. This is the practice where local officials seize property, give it to the feds under the program, and then receive a substantial amount in return — all to avert state laws designed to rein in civil asset forfeiture.
New Mexico’s law explicitly prevents “equitable sharing” in its law, stating, “The law enforcement agency shall not transfer property to the federal government if the transfer would circumvent the protections of the Forfeiture Act that would otherwise be available to a putative interest holder in the property.”
Nebraska allows for property to be transferred to the federal government, but only ill-gotten gains: “The person from whom the money or property was seized is the subject of a federal prosecution or the facts and circumstances surrounding the money or property seized are the subject of a federal prosecution.”
Greenberg outlined two additional reforms that states should consider as well: 1) “require that forfeited assets go to a state’s general fund, rather than to supplement the budgets of police agencies and prosecutors’ offices… reduc[ing] system incentives… that appear to encourage some degree of personal and political corruption among public employees.” And 2) “require greater transparency in seizure and forfeiture processes.”
This theft of property by the government of private citizens needs to come to an end. Here, states like Maine, New Mexico, Nebraska and North Carolina are providing a strong basis for ending civil asset forfeiture the right way and restoring due process under the Constitution. It’s about time.
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Seattle’s transit system struggles as riders refuse to pay
Seattle’s Link Light Rail is a freeloader’s paradise.
There are no turnstiles, so passengers are supposed to either buy a ticket or tap their pre-paid card. But so few riders are paying, fares are currently covering just 5% of the system’s operating costs, a fraction of the 40% mark Sound Transit set as a requirement.
At a recent Sound Transit Board meeting, the outgoing CEO summed up the situation. “Our fare collection system relies overwhelmingly on an honor system,” Peter Rogoff said, “and our increasingly acute problem is that our riders aren’t honoring the system.”
By one measurement, as many as a staggering 70% of all passengers are free riders. But even that is only an estimate as there is almost no fare enforcement. Sound Transit did away with fare enforcement officers after a study revealed people of color were disproportionately getting fined. Instead, the system now relies on fare ambassadors. There are only a handful for the whole light rail system, so riders will rarely encounter them. They currently engage only 2% of all riders.
When fare ambassadors do board a train, they ask passengers if they have paid their fare. Most have not. But instead of removing fare evaders from the train, fare ambassadors ask a series of questions starting with a request for identification. About 76% of the free-riding passengers refuse to produce valid ID, which makes it impossible to issue a warning.
Sound Transit allows two warnings before even the first fine is issued. But with so few people providing identification, fines are infrequently given and even more rarely paid.
Fare ambassadors may not get many scofflaws to pay, but they do collect data on them. They ask non-payers for their address, race and gender.
King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn sees the lack of fare enforcement as part of a larger problem.
“What we’re seeing here in Seattle is the systemic decriminalization of everything, all the way from farebox recovery to failure to register as a sex offender, and using the guise of equity and social justice so that there isn’t any enforcement of laws,” said Dunn, “And what you get is higher crime and more evasion.”
There are a few other light rail systems that rely on the honor system, including the ones in Portland, Denver and Dallas. But they all issue hefty fines to fare evaders the first time they are caught. Most of the Sound Transit Board members seem unfazed by the poor fare collection performance. Claudia Balducci is among those who supports the fare ambassador’s light touch.
“People are feeling more welcome on our system and less afraid to use it because there’s less of a fear of fare enforcement,” Balducci said.
But, the lone Republican on the Sound Transit Board says taxpayers who have forked over $168 billion for the system are getting ripped off.
“It’s gotta be safe, secure, reliable and sustainable, or it’s the biggest waste of money we’ve ever seen,” said Bruce Dammeier.
Sound Transit collects money from virtually everyone in Pierce, Snohomish and King counties. Those who live inside the special taxing district have to pay extra property tax and a much higher fee for their car tabs. Depending on the Blue Book value of the car it can easily cost an extra $200-$300 each year to register. And everyone pays an additional 1.4% on their sales tax to fund Sound Transit.
Tax revenue keeps increasing as fare revenue keeps plunging. In 2019, Sound Transit collected $96 million from users. In 2020, it received just $30 million from riders. Some of that is explained by a drop in ridership during the peak of the pandemic. But in recent months ridership has rebounded while fare collection has not.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/12/seattles-transit-system-struggles-as-riders-refuse-to-pay
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Military stamped out racist attitudes long before Pentagon started launching initiatives, retired Army Rangers says
A retired Army Ranger said the military was a melting pot that already stamped out racist tendencies even before the Pentagon started launching initiatives.
The Department of Defense under Secretary Lloyd Austin has taken several steps aimed at eliminating extremism from the service and expanding equity. But extremism and racism aren’t issues within the ranks, since such beliefs are incompatible with unit cohesion – a necessary element for combat victory, the former Ranger, Jariko Denman, told Fox News.
"You as an individual are not important," he said. "The mission is important, and your teammates are important."
"You always put your teammate before yourself," Denman, who served 20 years in the Army, added.
Most recently, the Pentagon released its "Equity Action Plan," which aims to "establish a holistic strategy for continuing to cultivate enduring and equitable change." It was part of the Pentagon’s assessment "to identify potential barriers that underserved communities and individuals face," the report said.
The plan outlines actions the department will take, such as seeking "new investments in underserved communities around military bases and installations" and driving "towards more equitable outcomes for students of color, students with disabilities, and other underserved students in DoD schools."
"While the Department has historically focused on increasing equity within the DoD community, the collective actions described in this plan represent a shift in the Department’s approach and focus to better ensure that we leverage our capabilities to create opportunities for all Americans," the report said.
The plan also includes a "summary of accomplishments," which notes how Austin last year issued a one-day stand down order "for discussion of the principle that all those who support DoD’s mission deserve an environment free of discrimination, hate, and harassment."
A 2017 Military Times survey found that nearly one-quarter of troops polled said they witnessed White nationalism within the ranks. The publication reported similar results in subsequent polls.
Denman said racism and other forms of bigotry is most often seen among new recruits who haven’t been previously exposed to a diverse population. But those preconceived notions disappear soon after joining the military’s melting pot, the retired Ranger said.
"People come from all walks of life to come to the military," Denman, who retired in 2017, told Fox News. "People that came in with some of those views – they were racist, they were sexist, they were homophobic – it didn't take long for them to lose it."
"All of the kind of ignorance that leads to extremist behavior, it's squashed because you're immersed in all these other cultures," Denman added. "You're immersed with all these other types of people."
Austin’s stand down order also "included a focus on how extremist or dissident ideologies violate the fundamental principles of the Department," the equity plan said.
"The overwhelming majority of those who serve in uniform and their civilian colleagues do so with great honor and integrity, upholding our core military values and oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution," Maj. Charlie Dietz, a Pentagon spokesman, told Fox News. "However, we owe all of our people an environment free from prohibited extremist activities, and we owe our country a military that reflects the founding values of our democracy."
More than 30 current and former service members, including Denman, said they’d never witnessed extremism among the ranks, Fox News reported in a previous investigation. The Pentagon and outside groups have repeatedly failed to produce evidence that the military is a breeding ground for violent radicals, Fox News found.
"Seeing all these people of all walks of life, different races, different creeds, different sexual orientations, all this, doing great things together and then to have our government come in and say 'the military has an extremism problem,' it's a slap in the face," Denman, who came from a military family, said.
The Defense Department identified less than 100 instances of confirmed extremist activity in 2021, the Pentagon reported in December. It didn’t provide a precise figure or identify any specific instances.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/former-army-ranger-discusses-military-racism-iraq-afghanistan-tours
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It sucks to be a Christian who doesn’t believe
Sam Leith's title above is paradoxical. How can one be both a Christian and an atheist? One cannot of course. The central event of Chistianity is the resurrection. Denying that that happened severs you from Christianity.
But Sam Leith makes the point not only that we live in a culture suffused by Christian thinking and values but also that we can personally be aware of, and influenced by, elements of Christianity. He is a cultural Christian. I am glad that he has "come out" as that as I am such a person too. The wonderful words of the KJV are burned into my brain too. And I accept Christian principles and values as the best guide to life
And I have been much rewarded by that. Whenever I do the Christian (kind, generous, forgiving) thing I get a reward. Often almost instantly and sometimes after many years. I have found to be true the positive statement of verse 1 in the profoundly wise 11th chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes:
"Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou SHALT find it after many days" (KJV)
Many atheists seem to be very angry about religion. They even hate it. But there are some of us who grew up under explicitly Christian influences who are very glad of it
Easter Sunday. I went to church for the first time in ages. The little parish church has stood for 900 years in a village near where my parents live. It’s where my father James, who died last week aged 75, will be buried. It was a friendly, pomp-free service of the pragmatic sort – dogs were welcome, and there were tables with colouring-in pens to keep the kids occupied during the Eucharist. There was an easter-egg hunt in the graveyard afterwards.
Pathetic fallacy is a bitch. While my dad was dying, outside the window of his bedroom the wet Wiltshire spring went indifferently about its business. Now, with my dad a week gone, the sun is out and the sky blue. New lambs are cantering unsteadily in the field on the other side of the garden fence. The skirts of the treeline are full of bluebells and daffs. Everything taunts us with new life.
The reading in church was from the resurrection story, as told in the gospel of St John: Mary Magdalene, finding the stone rolled away from the tomb; Mary, confronting the man she takes for the gardener; and the man saying to her: ‘Mary.’ What a freight of feeling there is in that simple pair of syllables.
It’s funny: I found myself tearing up at these familiar points of the story. (Well, maybe not funny: maybe entirely predictable. Last week a YouTube video of the Ukulele Orchestra covering ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ had me in floods.) Even if what it describes never happened, there’s such beauty in the yearning it encodes, and in the generation after generation that have stood in this same place to affirm faith in it or to share that yearning. Here is Larkin’s vast, moth-eaten musical brocade, nothing to be derided.
At the same time, I was inwardly, priggishly disappointed that the gospel reading in this service was in a modern translation. Years of compulsory chapel in C of E schools, somewhat resented, have burned the sombre cadences of the King James Version into me. It occurs to me, with a shade of self-reproach, that in the first place I have no right whatever as an atheist to take a view on the form a Christian service should take – and that in the second, on the evidence of this if I’d been born a few centuries earlier I’d probably have been in favour of seeing William Tyndale burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.
Yet I do take a view. I don’t think I’m alone in it. The thumbprint of the church is on me. That, I think, is what I identify in myself as cultural Christianity. The historian Tom Holland, among others, has made an eloquent case that we in the West live in a deeply Christian world even where we do not profess the faith. Secular liberal universalism, or whatever you want to call it, comes out of the Sermon on the Mount. The shape of Christian ethics is the shape of our secular ethics. It’s personal as well as societal. To be culturally Christian means to live a life without a shred of faith – yet knowing that the God in whom you don’t believe is the one who died on the cross at Golgotha.
It’s knowing that your father, who also did not believe, nevertheless felt the value of ritual to the human creature – and that to sing ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ and ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’ over his coffin will not be just a social formality or a hypocritical hat-tip, but will supply a comforting connection to the deep rhythms of history, to patterns of stories and of language that go back through the years. These stories, these rituals, are rich because they hold meaning in many more ways than the literal.
Poetry supplies the same connection. When we were openly distressed in front of him in the week before he died, my father would say: ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Julian of Norwich by way of T S Eliot: solace passed across the centuries hand to hand from the dead to the living. Also in his mind were fragments of Yeats: ‘I shall arise and go now.’ We’ll read the closing lines of “Little Gidding’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at his funeral.
Also, we’ll play some music from the soundtrack of his favourite film, Top Gun. Sublime; ridiculous. Something very ordinary is happening here, something very unremarkable, something that has happened in every church in every generation since a man she took to be a gardener said: ‘Mary.’
I’d like to sit with a takeaway pizza on my lap and watch that movie with him again, crank the sound up and see the excitement on his face as the tomcats jump off the deck of the carrier in the opening minutes. But you know: Goose doesn’t come back. The tomb in Palestine is not the porch of spirits lingering. It sucks to be a Christian who doesn’t believe. I don’t hold out for the resurrection of the body or the promise of life everlasting. I want my Dad to be still alive.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/it-sucks-to-be-a-christian-who-doesnt-believe/
************************************************The Myth of Cuban Health Care
How did something so at odds with reality persist for so long? And why is it finally crumbling?
"If there's one thing they do right in Cuba, it's health care," said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. "Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area," according to Angela Davis, "and in many respects much better than the U.S."
"One thing that is well established in the global health community is the strength of the Cuban national health system," said Clare Wenham, a professor at the London School of Economics.
Claims like these have appeared in hundreds of documentaries, newspaper articles, and magazine features over the years celebrating the supposed marvel of Cuba's health care system. It's a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long.
"The Cuban health care system is destroyed," Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country's medical mission while stationed in Mexico, tells Reason in Spanish. "The doctor's offices are in very bad shape."
"People are dying in the hallways," says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela, interviewed by Reason in Spanish.
According to Rios, Sánchez, and others with firsthand experience practicing medicine in Cuba, the island nation's health care system is a catastrophe. Clinics lack the most routine supplies, from antibiotics to oxygen and even running water, and their hallways are often occupied by ailing patients because there aren't enough doctors to treat their most basic needs. Cuban hospitals are unsanitary and decrepit. It's exactly what you'd expect in a country impoverished by communism.
The only thing that's changed is that because of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's propaganda facade has finally started to shatter.
And yet in 2021, some journalists were falling for the claim that the Cuban government had set the model in its response to COVID-19. By July of that year, ordinary Cubans had taken to the streets—and to Twitter and Facebook—in part to call attention to what the pandemic had actually meant for Cuban hospitals and clinics.
In the 15 years since the release of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, which celebrated Cuban health care, everyday citizens have been armed with smartphones, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, empowering them to tell the truth about what it's really like to walk into a Cuban hospital.
So how did the Castro regime's propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? According to Maria Werlau, executive director of the Cuba Archive, the answer lies with Cuba's foreign medical missions, which are teams of health care professionals dispatched to provide emergency and routine care to foreign countries.
The first medical mission was sent to Algeria in 1963. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the government lost its major source of aid, the program was ramped up significantly as a source of revenue for the impoverished nation.
The Cuban government has promoted the missions as a humanitarian endeavor, and a demonstration of the community spirit and selflessness central to the communist project. In his 1960 speech "On Revolutionary Medicine," the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara said that "Individualism…must disappear in Cuba." He recounted the story of a group of physicians in Havana "who demanded remuneration" before going into the country's rural areas to treat the sick. He dreamed of replacing them with a new class of doctors drawn from the peasantry who would "run, immediately and with unreserved enthusiasm, to help their brothers."
Rios participated in the medical mission in Sierra Leone in 2013, where health care specialists from around the world came to help contain the Ebola epidemic. The members of the mission were told that when they returned to Cuba, they would be received as heroes. Rios says that, while he did receive a stipend that went to cover his living expenses, medical personnel from other countries were generously compensated.
The myth of Cuban physicians as selfless healers started to fracture in 2000 when two doctors from the mission in Zimbabwe slipped a note to an airline official with the handwritten word kidnapped. They had denounced the Castro regime and were being brought back to Cuba against their will, possibly to face jail time. Instead, they wound up in the U.S. and were granted political asylum.
In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch said the Cuban medical missions "violate [doctors'] fundamental rights," including "the right to privacy, freedom of expression and association, liberty, and movement, among others." It noted that "many doctors feel pressured to participate in the missions and fear retaliation if they do not," and that "governments that accept Cuban assistance that includes the abusive conditions imposed by Cuba risk becoming complicit in human rights violations."
In 2006, the George W. Bush administration created the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, granting health care workers stationed abroad permanent resident status. All they had to do was make it to a U.S. embassy. Over 7,000 medical workers took advantage of the program.
In 2014, the New York Times op-ed page published an editorial calling for an end to the program. American immigration policy "should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation," it noted. In other words, the rights of doctors to decide where and how to live should be subordinate to what was best for the Cuban government.
After the mission in Sierra Leone, Rios was redeployed to a military base in Mexico. One day, he was sent with a group of doctors to buy some phone cards so they could connect with their relatives back home. He decided to make his escape. Rios found a job at a Mexican pharmacy and started saving money to pay a coyote to bring him into the U.S. He was picked up by border officials, and taken to an immigrant detention center for 42 days. After his release, he could join his family in Miami.
In 2018, a group of Cuban doctors who defected from the medical missions sued the Pan American Health Organization, which is part of the World Health Organization, for aiding in human trafficking and for earning $75 million in fees by acting as a middle man.
The medical missions are primarily a way of selling Cuban health care services abroad. So what's health care like for those living on the island?
Julio Cesar Alfonso is the president of the Miami-based Solidarity Without Borders, which helps Cuban doctors who have escaped. He says that there are two health care systems in Cuba—one that is used by the majority of regular citizens, and another that is reserved for tourists and the Cuban elite.
When defenders of Cuban health care acknowledge its deficiencies at all, they usually point the finger at the U.S. trade embargo, which has been in place since 1962. But the deplorable conditions in Cuban hospitals have more to do with a lack of basic health care supplies, which are readily available from other countries, such as antibiotics and steroids. Cuban hospitals also have a shortage of beds and stretchers, and some were without water for six to 12 hours a day at the height of the pandemic.
So what impact does the embargo really have on Cuban health care? Medical products have been technically exempt from the embargo since the passage of the 1992 Cuba Democracy Act. But the law does stipulate that U.S. companies need a license in order to sell to Cuba—and critics are correct to point out that this requirement adds red tape to the process. Total U.S. health care products purchased by Cuba from 2003 to 2021 averaged a mere $1.4 million annually, in what should be a $50 to $100 million market. But it's not the licensing process that accounts for such paltry sales; companies would gladly obtain permission to sell their products to Cuba if they could earn enough money to make it worth the effort. Cuba has a severe foreign currency shortage because it produces little in the way of goods and services that the rest of the world apart from the U.S. wants to buy.
Promoters of Cuban health care often cite the country's infant mortality rate as evidence of its success. "How is this possible" that "an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant," wrote Nicholas Kristof in a 2019 New York Times column that looked at one of the most often repeated figures in support of the claim that there's something exceptional about Cuba's health care system.
While conceding that "the figures should be taken with a dose of skepticism," Kristof chose to interpret them regardless in support of his priors: "Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about."
Cuba has a variety of strategies for manipulating its infant mortality rate, such as seeing to it that fetuses less likely to survive outside the womb never get the chance. There's significant evidence that Cuban doctors coerce women into aborting fetuses shown to have abnormalities after routine ultrasounds.
Vincent Geloso, who's an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, co-authored a 2018 paper arguing that Cuba's low infant mortality rate is the result of misclassification using a different indicator known as "late fetal deaths."
Despite reports early in the pandemic that Cuba was an outlier in its success in combating COVID-19, by August of 2021 The New York Times was reporting that Cuba's health care system was "reeling," with oxygen supplies running low, a shortage of syringes, and mortuaries and crematories "overwhelmed." Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the U.S. trade embargo.
Sánchez thinks that, as the Castros' health care myth crumbles, ordinary Cubans are beginning to realize that they are not threatened by foreign enemies, as the regime propaganda machine has claimed for decades.
"The only enemy of the Cuban people," he says, "is the Cuban government."
https://reason.com/video/2022/04/18/the-myth-of-cuban-health-care/
*************************************************Amid the shortage of rental accomodation, some homeowner associations are trying to make the shortage worse
Small groups of neighborhood volunteers are blocking companies from buying single-family homes, rewriting homeownership rulebooks to thwart investor purchases of suburban housing.
These groups, called homeowner associations, spend much of their time enforcing rules related to things such as lawn care and parking. But they often have broad powers to regulate how homes are used.
Some of these associations now believe that the rise in home purchases by rental investors has led to a decline in property maintenance and made their neighborhoods less desirable. Investors are also making it more difficult for local families to buy houses, these groups say.
Homeowner tactics include placing a cap on the number of homes that can be rented in a particular neighborhood, or requiring that rental tenants be approved by the association board. In most cases, associations need at least a two-thirds majority to pass these measures.
In Walkertown, N.C., near Winston-Salem, members of the Whitehall Village Master Homeowners Association are trying to amend their covenants to require new buyers to live in a home or leave it vacant for six months before they can rent it out. This move, they believe, would effectively prevent investors from buying any more houses.
Chase Berrier, the Whitehall Village homeowner group’s president, is concerned that investors are making it harder for families to buy homes.
“They’re coming in, and they’re basically bullying people out with cash offers,” said Chase Berrier, the association’s president who is leading the effort. He said some of the homes in the subdivision owned by investors now look shabbier, and absentee owners are hard to contact to resolve problems.
Investor purchases have been rising in recent years and accounted for more than one in five home sales in December, according to housing research firm CoreLogic. Their effect on the housing market and local neighborhoods has become a hot-button issue across the country. Home prices have also risen at historically high rates during the pandemic, and would-be buyers say they have a hard time competing with companies that pay in cash.
Some housing analysts say that blocking investors from neighborhoods could end up hurting renters, who are often less wealthy than their homeowner counterparts or who struggle to find affordable housing. “There’s a pretty deep and pervasive social stigma against renters,” said Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
These new rules adopted by homeowner associations for single-family homes are already common in condominium and co-operative housing communities, especially in New York City, where many co-op boards limit investor purchases and rentals in their buildings.
It is hard to know exactly how many associations have proposed measures to block investor buyers, but they likely number at least in the thousands.
Since the beginning of 2019, about 30% of the more than 1,000 amendments from HOAs in 21 counties in Florida, Arizona, North Carolina and Texas were leasing and usage restrictions, including restrictions on short- or long-term rentals, according to an analysis by the real estate technology company InspectHOA for The Wall Street Journal. That is up from 21% of amendments filed in the same counties from 2016 to 2018.
State lawmakers are debating how much power homeowner associations should have over rentals. As part of an effort to encourage homeowners to build small rental properties on their land, California now prohibits associations from imposing some limits on long-term leases.
**************************************************
Don't blame crime spikes on "2A Absolutism"
The editors of the Houston Chronicle have a new scapegoat for the age-old problem of violent crime: “Second Amendment absolutism.” As we show on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, however, their anti-gun rationale simply doesn’t stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny, and their calls for criminalizing our right to keep and bear arms would only make us less safe.
The first problem with the Chronicle’s screed comes in its opening paragraph. What do they use as their first piece of evidence that America is devolving into a gun-law-free zone?
The same week that a 62-year-old man boarded a subway train in Brooklyn and opened fire on his fellow passengers with a Glock 9-millimeter handgun, Georgia became the 23rd state to allow almost anybody and everybody to walk around with a concealed handgun on their person, no permit required. Texas was the 20th to dispense with permits; it’s a trend.
That’s right. The paper actually pointed to a shooting on a New York subway by someone who was not lawfully carrying a gun in order to argue that we’re making it too easy to exercise our Second Amendment rights. Of course, they also got the numbers wrong when it comes to Constitutional Carry: Georgia is the 25th state, not the 23rd, to recognize the right to bear arms without the need for a government-issued permission slip.
It’s not an auspicious beginning for the op-ed, which never does make the case that we live in a land of Second Amendment absolutism. There’s no attempt to explain away the hundreds of gun control laws on the books in states like California or New York, not to mention the NFA, GCA, and the other gun laws enshrined in federal statute.
Unfortunately things only get worse from the opening sentences. Here are the Chronicle editors trying (and failing) to make the case that increased gun sales are responsible for the massive upswing in violent crime since 2020.
The subway shooter has been walking around with a gun at least since 2011. That’s when he purchased his gun legally. Millions of his fellow Americans during the past couple of years have been buying guns at an ever-accelerating rate. In March last year, federal background checks reached one million in a week for the first time since the government began tracking them in 1998.
… People usually die when guns are the weapon of choice, and these days they’re dying at accelerating rates. According to data released last year from the FBI, homicides in 2020 were up by a quarter from the year before. Data from a sampling of 37 cities shows that the trend has continued through the first three months of 2022, with about 18 percent more homicides than in the same period last year. Although the homicide rate is still far lower than in the 1990s, the trend is troubling. More guns = more gun deaths.
If more guns = more gun deaths then the number of firearm-related deaths would be climbing each and every year. That’s simply not the case, as this graph from the liberal Brennan Center for Justice shows.
Crime rose almost continually from the early 1960s through the early 1990s; a time period that saw the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, bans on handguns in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, California’s ban on “assault weapons”, and a host of other gun control laws enacted at the state and local level. That crime spike also took place before any state save Vermont had adopted Constitutional Carry, and it happened when there were far fewer firearms in the hands of law-abiding Americans.
And then a funny thing happened starting around 1991; violent crime started declining. Yes, even before the Joe Biden-authored ban on “assault weapons” was signed into law by Bill Clinton, violent crime was already declining, and it continued to do so for almost thirty years; a time period that includes the adoption of “shall issue” carry laws by dozens of states, permitless carry laws in more than 12 states, tens of millions of Americans becoming concealed carry licensees, and big surges in gun sales in both 2012 and 2016.
If “more guns = more crime” then none of that would have happened. The level of violent crime never would have peaked in the early 1990s, and it most certainly wouldn’t have dropped by 50% while millions of Americans were bearing arms for the first time.
Honestly, I could pick apart every paragraph of this Chronicle op-ed, but I’ll limit myself to one more item; the editors’ support for Joe Biden’s attempt to talk tough on “ghost guns.”
Biden’s order mandates background checks on ghost-gun purchasers and requires adding serial numbers to the assembled weapons. It’s a modest effort to address a real problem, but like Pavlov’s canine pal, our own Sen. Ted Cruz rose up in hind-legs dudgeon. He announced plans to introduce a resolution to block the ghost-gun order.
“By introducing this resolution, we’re pushing back,” Cruz said, who was joined by three other GOP senators. “We want to stop the false narrative that links the rise in crime to ‘ghost guns,’ and firearms, and we want to protect law-abiding citizens who are exercising their Second Amendment rights.”
Cruz’s Second-Amendment absolutism makes about as much sense as a man stepping into a subway car and opening fire with a Glock. As polls show, most Americans realize that modest gun-safety measures have nothing to do with abridging Second Amendment rights. They have to do with pushing back against only-in-this-country gun insanity, insanity that tolerates gun deaths as mere collateral damage. Only in this country can we rise up and say “Enough.”
You can rise up and say “enough” all you want, and it’s going to have the same impact on violent crime rates that the Gun Control Act of 1968 had; none at all. Biden’s attempt to criminalize some home-built firearms will do more to create non-violent offenders than actually deter violent criminals, and calling it a “modest effort” is a pathetic attempt to avoid labeling the measure what it truly is: ineffective and aimed in the wrong direction. The crime spike that started in 2020 has far more to do with the lack of consequences for criminals than a lack of gun control laws, and instead of putting new laws on the books we should be putting more police on the streets and more prosecutors (and public defenders) in court, while reducing plea bargains and removing non-violent possessory firearm offenses from statute to ensure that our decidedly imperfect criminal justice system is most effective when it comes to the most violent offenders.
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2022/04/18/dont-blame-crime-spikes-on-2a-absolutism-n57526
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*****************************************
19 April, 2022
We’re proud bimbos who are hell-bent on creating a new women’s movement
This sounds like youthful defiance of standards but it is difficult to see anything constructive in it. Some of the women concerned appear to be naturally attractive so they can afford to be self-indulgent in their personal presentation. They will attract partners anyway.
There has to be tolerance of differences in all relationships. And tolerating extreme forms of self-presentation may be seen by some men as just the price they have to pay for an otherwise desirable relationship. For less attractive women, however, such a style could well be repellant
I feel lucky that my girlfriend is both good-looking and into naturalness. She has no tattoos and wears minimal jewellery. So I have to make no compromises on appearance. She is very bright too, which I need.
TikToker Chrissy Chlapecka has brought back more than just Paris Hilton-esque micro-miniskirts and bleach-blond hair — she and her fellow Gen Zers are proud “bimbos,” too.
The Chicago native, who has garnered 4.3 million followers on TikTok, regularly posts shamelessly scantily clad videos dolled up in head-to-toe pink to hype up her “bimbos-in-training,” convince them to dump their boyfriends and reclaim the term by embracing overt sexuality.
“It’s time to start being yourself if you want to dye your hair pink, dye your hair pink,” she exhorts in an intentional upskirt clip with 2.5 million views. “Life is short, nothing matters. Kiss that girl, get revenge on your ex, punt him into the sun, steal that man’s credit card info. Who cares!”
Her titillating hashtag, #BimboTok, has clearly inspired a legion of ladies, garnering more than 74 million views from wishful wannabes. Offshoots like #BimboTikTok and #Bimbofication have racked up another 500-million-plus views.
“It’s just my art form,” Chlapecka, 22, told The Post.
“I kind of see myself as TikTok’s older sister, who gives you silly bits of advice and wants to hype you up and wants you to embrace all the beautiful parts of yourself,” she continued. “Whether that’s your hyper-femininity, your bimbo wisdom in the way that I present it or however somebody wants to in their own way. Wearing the outfits I do makes me feel like the most authentic, beautiful version of myself.”
For Fiona Fairbairn, being a bimbo takes a simpler tune: Just leaning into extreme self-love and, of course, being the sexiest version of herself.
In a now-viral TikTok video with more than 688,000 views, 19-year-old Fairbairn crafted the unofficial bimbo manifesto to guide the bimbo army. Titled “Rules for Bimbofication,” the Toronto-native satirically advises aspiring fellow floozy friends to stop fact-checking, only focus on their looks and not to critically think.
Her video received a chorus of applause — and laughter from its slightly satirical tone — from women on the app, calling it “therapy.”
While the video was in jest, the message still rings true: At its core, bimboism is a “self-love movement” for many women. Fairbairn said the so-called trampy trend is “just about being in your own world and being OK with people underestimating you.”
“Knowing yourself and almost being obsessed with yourself, dating yourself — I feel like that’s the route to actual self-love,” Fairbairn, who has over 171,000 followers on TikTok, told The Post. “When you kind of exaggerate it, it will actually translate into real self-love. And when you have so much self-love, you’re calm, you don’t overthink so much.”
But don’t underestimate these brazen broads: While the clothes and attitude pay homage to the days of Playboy’s Holly Madison, these self-proclaimed bimbos have much more than air between their ears.
“I think a lot of people really underestimate the true intelligence that I have,” Chlapecka, who built her TikTok bimbo dynasty nearly two years ago, said. “My intelligence comes from emotional intelligence, connection and being able to communicate and talk to people the way they deserve to be . . . I think that can totally get overlooked.”
The term “bimbo” hasn’t always been so comforting — see the “holy trinity” of social pariahs Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears during their “bimbo summit” heyday just over a decade ago. While the trend percolated in 2017 when adult star Alicia Amira founded “The Bimbo Movement” to empower women, these Gen Z gals, who came to adulthood in a post-#MeToo world, are bringing it mainstream once again — and are hell-bent on changing perception once and for all.
“It’s reclaiming hyper-femininity to not be seen as something that is inherently or innately vapid and something that should be looked down upon,” said Syrena, who goes by her username FauxRich.
Syrena, who boasts more than 122,000 followers on TikTok, said that being a girly girl is often “looked down upon as something that’s just so frivolous and stupid,” but she chalks it all up to systemic “misogyny.”
“To reclaim that is powerful,” the 23-year-old said.
Despite being enrolled in accelerated courses in high school, Syrena said people used to make fun of her voice for sounding “stupid.” But “ridding herself of the shackles” by becoming a self-proclaimed bimbo and ridding herself of the notion of what makes someone “smart” gave her liberation.
“As I’ve evolved into more of an adult woman, I dressed like what makes me feel really comfortable and what inherently makes me look at myself in the mirror and go like, ‘Oh, yeah, I would totally date myself,’ ” said Syrena.
The negativity surrounding bimboism is something Chlapecka is familiar with, too, but she takes the stigma in stride, even making reaction videos to their “funny” remarks.
“[They’re] just people who are angry at somebody who is openly queer and openly loving themselves and being a bimbo,” Chlapecka said. “Wearing the outfits I do makes me feel like the most authentic, beautiful version of myself.”
“They’re just mad at that person, me, for existing,” she added.
Fairbairn ignores the noise, though, and strides with pride as a bimbo.
“I just realized [when you’re] focusing on yourself and being your best self and being the hottest version of yourself,” she said, “you don’t have enough time to think about what other people are thinking about you.”
https://nypost.com/2022/04/13/were-proud-bimbos-and-hellbent-on-bringing-back-bimboism/
*************************************************'Putin's price hike' is just the latest Biden inflation myth
by Jeff Jacoby
WHEN JOE BIDEN took the oath of office in January 2021, the Consumer Price Index was 1.4 percent higher than it had been 12 months earlier. A month later, inflation had bumped up to 1.7 percent. By April, it was above 4 percent. It topped 5 percent in June, passed 6 percent in October, and hit 7 percent in December. By Jan. 20, 2022, Biden's first anniversary as president, the year-over-year surge in prices had reached 7.5 percent.
More than a month later, on Feb. 24, Vladimir Putin launched the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine. That was just seven weeks ago. Last Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had risen yet again in March. Over the last 12 months, consumer prices have climbed 8.5 percent. Inflation is now at a 40-year high. As The Dispatch observed Thursday, "Muhammad Ali was still boxing the last time a CPI report was this bad."
The White House blames the soaring cost of goods and services on the war in Ukraine. "Putin's price hike," the president and his spokespeople call it. But inflation has been accelerating throughout the Biden presidency and was already at the highest level in more than a generation when the Ukraine invasion began. Russia's dictator is guilty of many crimes, but the dwindling purchasing power of the American dollar is one outrage that can't be laid at his feet.
Like all presidents, Biden is glad to take credit for the economy's good news — the drop in unemployment, the stock market boom, the surge in new business applications. But the White House takes no responsibility for bad economic news. The more Americans stress over rising prices, the more Team Biden has bent over backward to either minimize the problem or pin the blame elsewhere. The lame attempt to rebrand inflation as a "Putin price hike" is only the latest installment in an ongoing series.
When price hikes started to pinch last spring, the administration's first instinct was to cheer them as evidence of a strengthening economy. Then it pivoted to claiming that "no serious economist" was worried that inflation would get worse. In October, the White House chief of staff endorsed the view that inflation was a "high class problem" that shouldn't worry voters. Next the president insisted that price increases were "expected" and "temporary" and that there was no reason to worry about "persistent inflation." In December came assurances that inflation had peaked and would soon start to fall.
At times, the administration has gone so far as to claim that the way to "ease inflationary pressures" was to pass the so-called Build Back Better bill so the government can spend trillions of additional dollars. At other times, it has endorsed the argument of class-warfare populists like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders that "corporate greed" causes inflation. Or it has contended that "the reason for the inflation," as Biden put it in a February interview, is that "the supply chains were cut off." Now, as war rages in Ukraine, it blames inflation on the Kremlin's ruler.
The White House, when it seeks to evade accountability or downplay the severity of inflation, is as flexible as Simone Biles . But when it comes to halting the reckless government spending spree — the best anti-inflationary remedy in the federal dispensary — it remains as rigid as a Coldstream Guard.
From the earliest days of his presidency, Biden was warned that the massive new outlays he was pushing for, beginning with the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, were likely to send consumer prices soaring. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president (and a lifelong Democrat), warned in a Washington Post column in February that so much additional spending was apt to "set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation." Summers continued to sound the alarm in the months that followed but was derided by the White House as "flat-out wrong."
It was understandable, perhaps, that an administration under pressure from progressive Democrats, intent on all the progressive agenda items it could achieve by letting the economy continue to "run hot," would be inclined to disregard Summers. Why listen to a Cassandra when other economists were reassuring Biden that inflation was nothing to worry about? After all, federal spending had been rising for years, under Republicans and Democrats alike, without unleashing inflation. Why shouldn't that pattern continue?
Federal outlays have been climbing for years, but — as indicated in the Federal Reserve graph above — the explosion of government spending unleashed by the COVID pandemic in 2020 was on a scale beyond anything in Washington's experience.
But there was no comparison between the upward trend in government outlays pre-COVID and the explosion of spending unleashed by the pandemic in 2020. The federal budget skyrocketed from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to an unheard-of $6.5 trillion one year later — then to an even wilder $7.2 trillion in Biden's first year as president. This was spending growth at an order of magnitude far beyond anything in Washington's experience, all of it exacerbated by a Federal Reserve policy that kept interest rates at zero. The result was to unshackle the inflation monster that had been tamed in the 1980s. Prices started climbing in earnest. They show no sign of stopping.
The Biden White House was warned that this would happen. Almost at once the warnings began coming true. A wiser administration would have responded by altering its fiscal priorities. Biden and his people altered only their talking points.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26159/putin-price-hike-is-just-the-latest-biden90ui90ui90ui90uio9909
************************************************Riots in Sweden as anti-Islam activists set fire to the Quran
When it comes to Muslims, many Swedes do not agree with their government's tolerant policies. The more they see of Muslims the less they like them. The specifically anti-immigrant "Sweden Democrats" party gets around a third of the vote in national elections
Sweden has arrested more than 40 people after clashes between police and protesters rallying against plans by a far-right group to burn copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, police said on Monday.
Eight people were arrested in the city of Norrkoping and 18 people were detained in the neighbouring city of Linkoping, police said in a statement.
Protests have turned violent in several cities since Thursday, leaving 26 police officers and 14 civilians injured, police said at a press conference on Monday.
The unrest has been sparked by the leader of the anti-immigration and anti-Islam group Hard Line, the Danish-Swedish politician Rasmus Paludan who is aiming to drum up support ahead of September elections.
Paludan, a lawyer and a YouTuber who intends to stand in Swedish legislative elections in September but does not yet have the necessary number of signatures to secure his candidature, is currently on a “tour” of Sweden.
The 40-year-old is visiting neighbourhoods with large Muslim populations where he wants to burn copies of the Muslim holy book Quran as Muslims observe the holy month of Ramadan.
In Malmo, where he burned a Quran on Saturday, fire erupted in a school overnight, officials said.
“Criminals have profited from the situation to show violence toward society, without any link to the demonstrations,” national police chief Anders Thornberg said at a press conference on Monday.
“There are too few of us. We have grown, but we have not grown at the same pace as the problems at the heart of society,” he said, asking for more resources for the police.
As protesters burned cars and lobbed rocks at the police in Sunday clashes, officers responded, head of police special forces Jonas Hysing said.
“Some 200 participants were violent and the police had to respond with arms in legitimate self-defence,” he said.
Police had earlier said officers wounded three people after firing warning shots during Sunday’s “riot”.
On Thursday and Friday, around 12 police officers were injured in the clashes. In the wake of the string of incidents, Iraq’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that it had summoned the Swedish charge d’affairs in Baghdad.
It warned that the affair could have “serious repercussions” on “relations between Sweden and Muslims in general, both Muslim and Arab countries and Muslim communities in Europe”.
Saudi Arabia has condemned what it called the “deliberate abuse of the holy Koran by some extremists in Sweden, and provocation and incitement against Muslims”.
Iran and Iraq earlier summoned the Swedish ambassadors to lodge protests.
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Australia: Antisemitic nut not welcome at Israel Independence Day celebrations
She is clearly a Leftist "independent" candidate. Ever since Karl Marx, Leftists have despised Jews and they often still do beneath the surface
Outrage within Melbourne’s Jewish community over independent candidate Zoe Daniel attending upcoming Israel Independence Day celebrations has resulted in a Shule stopping her and Liberal opponent Tim Wilson from taking part in the festivities.
The former ABC journalist was due to attend a local event on Shabbat on May 7 at the Blake Street Shule at Caulfield South to celebrate Israel’s national holiday, but serious concerns were raised after Ms Daniel recently refused to withdraw her signature from a controversial letter accusing Israel of maintaining an “apartheid regime against Palestinians”.
When The Australian contacted the Shule on Monday both Ms Daniel and Mr Wilson, the incumbent MP, were both due to attend the celebrations, but hours later they were both told they were no longer welcome.
Many members of the Jewish community remain furious Ms Daniel has refused to remove her signature from an open letter she signed in 2021 that states, “Israeli vigilante mobs attack Palestinians and the Netanyahu government has unleashed a new, brutal war against the besieged population of Gaza”.
Alex Goodman, one of the Shule’s founding members, said he was “concerned” that Ms Daniel was scheduled to attend the Israel Independence Day celebrations at any Shule, including his own.
“The main reason is her signing of the letter with other journalists to be blatantly biased against reporting on Israel and the false claim that Israel is apartheid which is totally offensive,” he told The Australian.
The celebrations on Israel Independence Day mark the anniversary of the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubenstein has repeatedly called for Ms Daniel to “remove her signature and renounce the “Do Better on Palestine” letter.
The letter said “the coverage of Palestine must be improved” and “consciously and deliberately make space for Palestinian perspectives, prioritising the voices of those most affected by the violence”.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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18 April, 2022
What the Left Has Done to Women’s Desires
Dennis Prager
As I’ve documented on a number of occasions, the left ruins everything it touches.
There is no exception. From universities to high schools and now including even elementary schools, to late-night TV, to sports, to the arts and, increasingly, science, the left is a destruction machine.
And nowhere is this damage more evident or tragic than with regard to women.
In fact, nothing demonstrates the power of left-wing ideology as much as what this ideology has done to women. So powerful is leftist ideology, it is more powerful than women’s nature.
Here are five examples:
1) Desire to Bond With a Man
For all of recorded history, virtually all women sought a man with whom to bond. Of course, a progressive would argue that this was true only because all societies implanted this desire in women or because societal pressure gave women little choice about the matter. It is not, progressives would argue, innate to female nature to yearn for a man.
But whatever the reason—innate nature or societal expectation—it is a fact that women desiring a man was virtually universal.
Then along came modern left-wing feminism, which communicated to generations of young women through almost every influence in their lives—most especially teachers and the media—that a woman doesn’t need a man.
In the witty words of one feminist aphorism, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Unfortunately, however, the reality is most women need a man just as most men need a woman. Most men don’t fully grow up without a woman, and most women don’t fully grow up without a man. (I am, of course, referring to heterosexual women and men.)
If you need proof, ask almost any married person, man or woman, if marriage matured them.
2) Desire to Marry
Along with wanting a man, the vast majority of women wanted to marry. It was assumed that wanting that public commitment to and from a man was part of female nature. Yet, the left has successfully undone that part of women’s nature, too.
As a result of feminist and other left-wing indoctrination, the belief that a woman doesn’t need a man led to the inevitable upshot: Marriage isn’t necessary. And it might even be a tool of oppression.
And as a result of that, a smaller percentage of American women are marrying than ever before.
This has serious social consequences. We have long known that single men perpetrate most of the violent crime in society. Single men are a societal problem. What we have not acknowledged—and perhaps not even known—are the deleterious effects of women not marrying.
While single women don’t commit nearly as much violent crime as single men do (though they may be starting to catch up), single women are increasingly a societal problem.
The most obvious problem is that women who have children without ever marrying their children’s father—or another man—produce a highly disproportionate percentage of social misfits.
But many women who never give birth nor marry also constitute a societal problem. They are more likely to be angry and to express that anger in support of radical causes that undermine society.
As Barron’s reported, while overall a mere 14.2% of the population contributed to “racial justice causes,” such as Black Lives Matter, in 2020, “nearly half of single women in the U.S.—a larger percentage than single men or married couples—supported or were actively involved in racial justice protests.”
As reported by one women’s activist organization, Women’s Voices Women Vote, in the 2012 election, “the marriage gap dwarfed the gender gap.”
3) Desire to Have Children
At least as much as wanting to bond with a man and wanting to get married were deemed a part of women’s nature, the desire to have children was regarded as even more embedded in female nature.
Yet, incredibly, leftist ideology is even succeeding in eliminating that part of women’s makeup. More women than ever before—abroad as well as in America—are choosing not to have children.
See, for example, the article “More women like me are choosing to be childfree. Is this the age of opting out?” published, appropriately, in The Guardian.
The author ends her piece this way: “I’ll say it plain: I don’t want children, I never have, and it doesn’t feel like any kind of lack. To me, it just feels like being alive.”
She speaks for an increasing number of women.
4) Desire to Have Sex With Commitment
Another part of women’s nature that the left has undermined is the desire of women to have sexual relations with a man who might commit to her. Or, at the very least, to have sex only with a man to whom she has some emotional attachment.
Left-wing feminist ideology has even been able to undermine that. Three generations of American women have been indoctrinated into believing that their sexual nature is the same as that of a man.
Therefore, she can have “hookups,” i.e., non-emotional, noncommittal sex, just like men can with no emotional fallout. And so, many young women do.
But a far greater percentage of them experience regret or even depression than do young men who engage in “hookup” sex, a form of sex that is indeed part of male nature.
5) Desire to Protect Children’s Innocence
Perhaps the most amazing thing progressive ideology has done to women is to subvert the innate female desire to protect children; specifically, children’s sexual innocence.
The movement to teach very young children about sex, about “gender fluidity,” expose them to “Drag Queen Story Hours,” etc., is overwhelmingly led by and composed of women.
Leftism would appear to demonstrate that ideology can trump human nature. Such is the power of social indoctrination.
One inevitable result is a generation of more depressed young women and more regretful middle-aged women than ever before in American history.
The left ruins everything it touches. You can add women to the list.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/12/what-the-left-has-done-to-womens-desires
***********************************************Western civilisation and all its astonishing achievements in culture, science, medicine and free thinking are being erased from history as the product of ‘dead white males’
By DOUGLAS MURRAY
More than 50 years have gone by since the BBC ran Lord
(Kenneth) Clark’s extraordinary 13-part documentary series Civilisation.
It aimed to give a unified history of Western civilisation, and it did so, informing the understanding of millions of viewers around the world.
In 2018, the BBC tried to follow this up. Civilisations (note the plural this time) was a hodgepodge creation of three different historians, trying desperately to make sure that they didn’t sound as if they were saying the West was better than anywhere else and giving a sort of world history that made nothing very clear.
In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame them.
Here was just one example of the cultural war going on in our country, a remorseless assault on everything to do with the Western world, past, present and future. Those waging it rail against all the roots of that tradition and everything good it has produced.
They constantly make one-sided arguments and level unfair claims. They corrupt the language of ideas with the result that words no longer mean what they once did.
They talk of ‘equality’ but do not care about equal rights. They talk of ‘anti-racism’ but sound deeply racist. They speak of ‘justice’ but seem to mean ‘revenge’.
In a demented discourse of their own invention, they have pulled us into a zero-sum discussion that insists the history of the West is a history of patriarchal oppression, sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, larceny and much more. They try to lock us into a cycle of unending punishment, with no serious effort at (or even consideration for) its alleviation.
An unfair ledger has been created, one in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it.
I have come to the conclusion that the era we live in is defined by one thing above all — a civilisational shift that is rocking the deep underpinnings of our societies because it is a war on everything in those societies.
A war on everything that has marked our societies out as unusual — even remarkable. A war on everything that the people who live in the West have, until recently, taken for granted.
There are many curiosities in all this. Not the least of them is that while the West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these things — including the development of individual rights, religious liberty and pluralism — are held against it.
The culture that gave the world life-saving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity.
The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say.
New generations are taught this ignorant view of history. They are offered a story of the West’s failings without spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories. Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. But how many can describe — without irony, cringeing, or caveat — the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world?
IF THIS war on the West is to prove unsuccessful, then it will need to be exposed and pushed back against. The trouble is, however, that one side — the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles — has prematurely surrendered.
It is now more than 30 years since student protesters at California’s Stanford University demonstrated against an introductory part of the curriculum called ‘Western culture’. They claimed there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition.
But what was striking was that the university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of Western culture with the study of many cultures. In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead.
The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of ‘dead white males’, to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language. Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilisation has met with sustained hostility, ridicule and even violence. Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues.
Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilisation was commonplace. Today, it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.
Of course, some swing of the pendulum is inevitable and may even be desirable. There certainly have been times in the past when the history of the West has been taught as though it is a story of unabashed good. Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea.
However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn’t become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme answers.
If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.
That’s why this culture war should not be downplayed by those tempted to think it is just a passing phase. Its outcome will impact the lives of future generations. The stakes here are as high as any fight in the 20th century.
In Britain, as in America, this kicking at the foundations has taken on a special fury in recent years. Just as the Floyd protests in America began with debatable figures and then roared right toward the centre of the nation’s history, so in Britain it burned from the outside in at a record pace.
In the days immediately after the death of George Floyd, a crowd in Bristol attacked a statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721), a local merchant and philanthropist who had been involved in the slave trade.
As the police looked on, the crowd pulled the statue from its plinth, rolled it down the street, and hurled it into the harbour.
As in America, there was a clear elation in the air, a feeling that here — in this permissible vandalism — was something to do. A way to right something. One major problem is that critics of Western civilisation venerate every culture — so long as it is not Western. For instance, all native thought and cultural expression are to be celebrated, just so long as that native culture is not Western. The idea that non-Western ‘indigenous’ cultures are purer and more enlightened than Western culture has not only taken root in our universities but in other institutions, too.
Britain’s National Trust is meant to exist to keep open many of the country’s most beautiful and expensive country houses. Its 5.6 million members tend to enjoy wandering around a stately mansion and then having a spot of afternoon tea.
But in recent years, the Trust has decided it has another job: to educate its visitors about the horrors of the past. And not just connections to empire and the slave trade, homophobia, and the crimes of primogeniture. It has recently chosen to push the idea that the English countryside itself is racist and is (as an academic who is part of the Trust’s Colonial Countryside project calls it) a ‘Green Unpleasant Land’.
I select that one example, but you can look at almost any area of life and find that it has been similarly denounced. Everything — from art, mathematics and music to gardening, sport and food — has been put through the same spin cycle.
This drift towards seeing other cultures as, by definition, better than ours also means that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past.
This is a habit that some foreign powers encourage. Today, we need look no further than Putin and his casual assumption that what he saw as the degenerate West would simply look the other way when he invaded Ukraine.
After all, if the West is so preoccupied with denigrating itself, what time could it find to look at the rest of the world?
IN THIS anti-West culture, racism is presented as though it has never been worse — at the very point at which it has never been better. Nobody can deny the scourge of racism — a scourge that is to be found in some form throughout recorded history.
Yet, in recent decades, the situation in Western countries has been better than ever. Our societies have made an effort to get ‘beyond race’, led by the example of some remarkable men and women of every racial background, but most notably by some extraordinary black Americans, such as Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and author and civil rights activist James Baldwin.
It was not inevitable that Western societies would develop, or even aspire to, the tradition of racial tolerance that we have.
It was not inevitable that we would end up living in societies that justly regard racism as among the most abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and women made the case, fought for that situation, and claimed their rights.
But in recent years, it has come to sound as though that fight never happened. As though it was a mirage. Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades.
In fact, the discourse has worsened to the extent that racial minorities who have integrated well, contributed to the West and are even admiring of it are increasingly treated as though they are race traitors. As though another allegiance were expected of them.
Black people and others who want to celebrate the West and add to it are talked to and about as though they were apostates. Love of the society they are in is treated as a point against them.
At the same time, it has become unacceptable to talk about any other society in a remotely similar way. In spite of all the unimaginable abuses perpetrated in our own time by the Communist Party of China, almost nobody speaks of China with an iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against the West from inside the West.
Western consumers still buy their clothes cheap from China. There is no widespread attempt at a boycott. ‘Made in China’ is not a badge of shame.
Terrible things go on in that country right now, and still it is treated as normal. Authors who refuse to allow their books to be translated into Hebrew are thrilled to see them appear in China.
Because in the developed West some different standard applies.
In the place of colour blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted.
Like all societies through the ages, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used.
Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid over everything.
Terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Travel anywhere in the Middle East — even to the ‘progressive’ Gulf States — and you will see a modern caste system at work.
There are the ‘higher class’ racial groups who run these societies and benefit from them. And then there are the unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an imported labour class.
These people are looked down upon, mistreated, and even disposed of as though their lives were worthless. And in the world’s second most populated country, as anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste system remains in vivid and appalling operation. This still goes all the way to regarding certain groups of people as ‘untouchable’ for no reason but an accident of birth.
It is a sickening system of prejudice, and it is very much alive. Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism.
This warped claim even has a final extension, which is that if other countries do have any racism, it must be because the West exported the vice to them.
As though the non-Western world is always made up of innocents from the Garden of Eden.
Why open everything in the West to assault? All aspects of the Western tradition now suffer the same attack. The Judeo-Christian tradition that formed a cornerstone of the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault and denigration.
But so, too, does the tradition of secularism and the Enlightenment, which produced a flourishing in politics, sciences and the arts. And this has consequences. A new generation does not appear to understand even the most basic principles of free thought and free expression.
Indeed, these are themselves attacked by people who don’t understand how or why the West came to the settlements that it did over religion. Nor how the prioritising of science allowed people around the world untold improvements in their lives.
Instead, these inheritances are criticised as examples of Western arrogance, elitism and undeserved superiority. As a result, everything connected with the Western tradition is jettisoned. At education colleges in America, aspiring teachers have been given seminars where they are taught that even the term ‘diversity of opinion’ is ‘white supremacist bulls**t’. Similar pernicious attitudes have already arrived here.
Let me make it clear: I do not want to shut down the considerable debate that is going on at the moment. I enjoy that debate and think it helpful. But to date, it has been riotously one-sided.
Politicians, academics, historians and activists are getting away with saying things that are not simply incorrect or injudicious, but flat-out false. They have got away with it for far too long.
There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried out across the media and airwaves, and throughout the education system, from as early as preschool.
It is rife within the wider culture, where all major cultural institutions are either coming under pressure or actually volunteering to distance themselves from their own past.
We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs.
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Hardline Denmark also wants to export refugees
While Britain’s plan to process asylum-seekers in Rwanda has provoked bemusement in much of Europe, it has been welcomed by Denmark, which appears poised to conclude a similar deal.
Since 2015, when more than a million asylum-seekers from Syria and elsewhere arrived in Europe, successive Danish governments of both right and left have introduced, or at least threatened to introduce, headline-grabbing measures to dissuade migrants by making the wealthy and otherwise liberal Scandinavian country seem as unwelcoming as possible.
Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democratic Prime Minister, has said her aim is to reduce the number of people seeking asylum in her country to zero.
One law, passed in 2016, stipulated that newly arrived asylum-seekers should hand over jewellery, gold and other valuables to help pay for their stay. Other measures included labelling areas with high numbers of immigrants “ghettos” and limiting the number of “non-Westerners” who could live in them.
Denmark gave refuge to 30,000 Syrians but became the first country in Europe to decide that it was safe for some to return to their homeland. But it has been unable to send them back because it does not have diplomatic relations with Damascus. Caught in legal limbo, they have been sent to so-called expulsion centres.
“Everything the Danish state has done for the past 20 years is about deterrence,” Michala Bendixen, the founder of Refugees Welcome, said last year at one such centre in rural Jutland.
“It is about scaring people away from Denmark. “The message is: you should stay in Germany or France or wherever. Everywhere else is better than here.”
Denmark, like Britain, has been negotiating with Rwanda for months but was pipped to the post by last week’s announcement by British Home Secretary Priti Patel.
The British plans are modelled on Australia’s offshore processing of asylum-seekers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
Though stressing that a deal has not yet been agreed on, Mattias Tesfaye, Ms Patel’s opposite number in Copenhagen, said his talks with the Rwandan government included “a mechanism for the transfer of asylum-seekers and should ensure a more dignified approach than the criminal network of people smugglers that currently characterises migration across the Mediterranean”.
Mr Tesfaye, whose father arrived in Denmark as a refugee from Ethiopia, has welcomed Britain’s deal as “a step in the right direction”.
Denmark’s policy, which is in stark contrast with the liberal stance of neighbouring Sweden, began under the right-of-centre minority government of Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who came to power in June 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis and depended on the right-wing Danish People’s Party for his majority.
One of his government’s more controversial proposals was to use Lindholm, a tiny island a few kilometres off the coast, to house 100-150 migrants who had served sentences in Denmark for murder, rape and other serious crimes but were refusing to return to the countries of their birth. The island, immediately dubbed Alcatraz, had been used as a research centre into infectious animal diseases and was contaminated with traces of BSE, foot-and-mouth disease and swine fever. With the locals on the mainland opposed and the bill for decontamination put at 759 million krone ($162m), the plan was shelved.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Ms Frederiksen, whose centre-left coalition replaced Mr Rasmussen’s government in 2019, embraced her predecessor’s policies, which go down well with her party’s working-class voters. The measures have provoked controversy – and seen the country hauled before the European Court of Human Rights. It does, however, appear to have reduced numbers: only 1547 people applied for asylum in 2020, a 57 per cent fall from 2019 and the lowest number since the 1990s.
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American Occupation
DAVID MAMET
Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?
No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”
Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?
Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.
Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”
Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.
For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.
Yet I believe there is hope for reason and self-direction. Hispanics in Texas are opposing the policies which have infested their state with the gang violence they fled in Mexico; Ron DeSantis and conservative Floridians have displayed irrefutable common sense, responsibility, and probity, opposing “critical race theory” and the sexual indoctrination of adolescents. Black conservatives, similarly, appeal to the reason of their historically reasonable community, to address the horrors the left has made of the cities. In San Francisco, a place where many of us left our hearts but the natives have historically surrendered their brains, the people voted to remove the wicked fools on their school board. And Bari Weiss founded a university in Austin, Texas, for the pursuit of free thought.
As Tennessee said, “Suddenly there’s God so quickly.”
This is a bit more than facetiousness on my part. I’ve found great comfort in the Torah, counseling Moses again and again, when he was reluctant to fight the power of the Egyptians, and unsure he could do it alone, that he would not be alone, as God would be with him.
What we are seeing through these brave dissenters is the wisdom of the Rumpelstiltskin story. The young woman marries a king who locks her in a cell until she is able to spin flax into gold. She despairs at the impossible task, until an elf shows up and says he’ll show her how. He does so. She asks how she can thank him, and he says all he wants is her firstborn child. And she must give him her child until, or unless, she figures out his name. She is terrified and clueless, but she knows she must try. Eventually, after committing to the task, she guesses his name. What prompted her, frightened though she was, to break the sick cycle? She would not visit her plight upon her child.
Now, the disease having proclaimed itself and its dangers having become clear, it is time for us all to overcome the occupation by standing up to those tyrannies under which we are not prepared to live.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/new-occupation-david-mamet
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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17 April, 2022
Trans doctor who helps teens transition says it’s now ‘gone too far’
A transgender psychologist who has helped hundreds of teens transition has warned that it has “gone too far” — and fears many are making life-changing decisions because it’s “trendy” and pushed on social media.
Erica Anderson, 71 — who is transgender herself — told the Los Angeles Times that she is horrified that even 13-year-old kids are now getting hormone treatment without even meeting with psychologists.
“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the US professional society at the forefront of transgender care.
“For a while, we were all happy that society was becoming more accepting and more families than ever were embracing children that were gender variant.
“Now it’s got to the point where there are kids presenting at clinics whose parents say, ‘This just doesn’t make sense,‘” she said.
Anderson is so concerned, in fact, she said she is considering ending her own pioneering work helping teens transition.
“I have these private thoughts: ‘This has gone too far. It’s going to get worse. I don’t want any part of it,’ ” she said.
“I worry that people will accuse me of setting the train in motion, as part of those who advocated the affirmative approach to gender in youth, even though that’s not a reasonable account of what happened.”
She believes that the dramatic rise in teens seeking treatment is likely driven by peer pressure as much as wider acceptance of trans issues.
“A fair number of kids are getting into it because it’s trendy,” she previously told the Washington Post. “I think in our haste to be supportive, we’re missing that element.”
In her latest interview, she told the LA Times, “To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality. Teenagers influence each other.”
That appears to have been exacerbated by the pandemic, with children becoming more isolated and also leaning more on networks on social media.
“What happens when the perfect storm — of social isolation, exponentially increased consumption of social media, the popularity of alternative identities — affects the actual development of individual kids?” Anderson asked the LA paper.
“We’re sailing in uncharted seas,” she warned.
Anderson readily shared her birth name, Eric, and her story of how an endocrinologist refused to prescribe hormones and left her feeling deeply ashamed when she first sought them at age 45.
She finally got them at 58, and had genital surgery at 61, thrilled to finally “become a woman.”
But while thrilled that the world is now more accepting, she fears it has swung to an extreme, noting a 13-year-old patient whose pediatrician put him on testosterone, even though he had not met with a psychologist.
“Why is this kid on testosterone so precipitously?” Anderson asked.
Anderson, a member of the American Psychological Association committee that is writing guidelines for transgender health care, believes some children seek treatment in the hope that it helps with wider psychological problems, leaving them depressed when it doesn’t.
She insisted that those allowing medical treatment for kids without rigorous psychological evaluation risk committing malpractice.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/15/transitions-have-gone-too-far-trans-psychologist/
*************************************************If he transforms Twitter, Musk will be demonized as severely as Trump. He should do it anyway
The Left loves free speech, but only if their speech is freer than that of people outside of their tribe. As big tech’s social media platforms have saturated American culture over the past 10-15 years, Silicon Valley technocrats have gained a previously unimaginable power- the ability to direct, accelerate, or even halt discussion of significant topics within the realm of public discourse. Which topics get manipulated is determined by the utility- or liability- of the information presented in those topics. Never in human history have the thoughts of so many been guided by the wishes of so few.
The censorship of “other” (individuals and groups with thoughts that diverge from the Left) was subtle at first. It was a small, restrictive policy change here, or a seemingly insignificant update to the terms of service there, every several months or a year. It had to happen slowly at first. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube did not want to risk scaring away their userbase before the social media addiction took hold. The psychological grip of social media is so potent, and so well documented, that a founding Facebook executive will not allow his children to use the platform.
The significance of the addictive nature of social media is that it made most of country- even most the modernized world- habitual users. Habitual use by the masses is how big tech social media platforms have become the de facto town square of the 21st century. This online cultural shift of the 2010s is the prequel to how free speech is monopolized and titrated by the Left today in 2022. Silicon Valley companies have Americans so hooked to their platforms that individuals can be censored and still seek to remain active. It's difficult to blame them. The alternative would be getting shut off from the world.
Leftist tech overlords will fight tooth and nail to retain their God-like powers to control human thought and cultural narratives. The Left wants their version of free speech to be standardized, or no one’s at all.
The Left’s hunger for thought control is precisely why they have hated President Donald Trump for the past six years and why Elon Musk is quickly becoming their new mortal enemy. Trump refuses to bow the knee to the woke mob and Washington swamp creatures. Musk explicitly rejects the idea that any group should have greater access to free speech than another. Given these conditions, the corporate media and big tech are and have been operating from a kill-or-be-killed perspective. While Trump had the power of the government and still has tremendous public influence, Musk has so much wealth that he could personally buy out Twitter, dismantle the company, and rebuild it as he pleases.
Pay close attention during the coming days and weeks. The attempted character assassination of Elon Musk may appear novel and distinct from that of Trump, but they have the same root. Eliminate the existential threat to Leftist groupthink dominance. While it’s true that character assassination is a longstanding practice in American politics, never have there been so many organizations, media outlets, and vast amounts of money aligned against one individual such as Trump, and now to a lesser extent, Musk. The Leftist character assassination tactics are arguably more vitriolic since Trump’s election than they have ever been at any other time in modern American electoral politics.
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Google's "geofence" facility knows a lot about you
In the first order of its kind, a federal district court has held that a warrant used to identify all devices in the area of a bank robbery, including the defendant’s, “plainly violates the rights enshrined in [the Fourth] Amendment.” The court questioned whether similar warrants could ever be constitutional.
The case is United States v. Chatrie, and addresses a controversial tool called a geofence warrant. The police issued the warrant to Google seeking information on every device within the area of the robbery during a one-hour period. The geographic area was about 17.5 acres (about 3 and a half times the footprint of a New York city block) and included a church, a chain restaurant, a hotel, several apartments and residences, a senior living facility, a self-storage business, and two busy streets.
Google’s initial search identified 19 devices, with a total of 210 individual location points. Google assigned anonymizing identifiers to each device and provided their locations to the police. Following a three-step process designed by Google, the police expanded the time period to two hours to get additional location information for 9 of the devices. Ultimately, police obtained detailed, identifying subscriber information for three devices. One of those belonged to the defendant.
Mr. Chatrie filed a motion to suppress the geofence evidence, and, after several hearings and extensive expert testimony, the court issued a thorough, 63-page order holding the warrant was unconstitutional. The court held that it’s not enough for the police to allege that a crime was committed and the perpetrator used a cellphone. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, something that’s likely impossible in a busy area like this one.
The court further held that Google’s three-step process did not cure the warrant’s defects. The initial anonymization of the data didn’t help because, as the court recognized, “[e]ven ‘anonymized’ location data—from innocent people—can reveal astonishing glimpses into individuals’ private lives when the Government collects data across even a one- or two-hour period.”
The second and third steps of the process, taken ostensibly to narrow the number of devices disclosed to police, couldn’t buttress the search either. They were “undertaken with no judicial review whatsoever” and “provided law enforcement unchecked discretion to seize more intrusive and personal data with each round of requests—without ever needing to return to a neutral and detached magistrate for approval.” There were no objective guardrails in the warrant or “any semblance of objective criteria to guide how officers would narrow the lists of users.” And even though Google (rather than the police) insisted on narrowing at the second step, the court held “Fourth Amendment protections should not be left in the hands of a private actor.”
Chatrie follows everal other courts that have also held geofence warrants to be unconstitutional, but in each of those cases, the judges were reviewing the warrant before a defendant had ever been charged. The Chatrie case is different because the warrant was approved by a magistrate, and the investigation ultimately resulted in the case brought against Mr. Chatrie. With the help of experienced defense attorneys and extensive testimony from Google and expert witnesses for both the defense and prosecution, the parties were able to create a robust factual record, which the court detailed in its order. This should prove extremely helpful for other defendants challenging similar geofence warrants in the future.
The facts established in the case confirmed much of what we already suspected—that Google has a voluminous, detailed, and searchable database of location information, which it collects from “numerous tens of millions” of its users. The data comes from a database Google calls “Sensorvault,” where it stores location data for one of its services called “Location History.” Google collects Location History data from different sources, including wifi connections, GPS and Bluetooth signals, and cellular networks. And it logs a device’s location, on average, every two minutes. This makes it much more precise than cell site location information and allows Google to estimate a device’s (and by extension, the device owner’s) location to within 20 meters or less.
This precision also allows Google to infer where a user has been, what they were doing at the time, and the path they took to get there. Google can even determine a user’s elevation and establish what floor of a building that user may have been on. As the court noted, “Location History appears to be the most sweeping, granular, and comprehensive tool—to a significant degree—when it comes to collecting and storing location data.”
However, the fact witnesses also showed that, despite this claimed precision, the data may not be all that accurate. It may place a device inside the geofenced area that was, in fact hundreds of feet away and vice versa. This creates the possibility of both false positives and false negatives—people could be implicated for the robbery when they were nowhere near the bank, or the actual perpetrator might not show up at all in the data Google provides to police.
Unfortunately for Mr. Chatrie, despite the court’s determination that the warrant was plainly unconstitutional, the court nevertheless refused to suppress the evidence. The court held that the officer acted in good faith on what he thought was a valid warrant. This is a frustrating outcome that lets the police off the hook in this case. However, the court’s order makes clear that this can’t happen again in the future. The police are now on notice that geofence warrants are, by default, unconstitutional, and there are very few—if any—scenarios in which they could satisfy the Fourth Amendment.
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JAN MOIR: Sorry, but women don't want changing rooms open to all... Public spaces where women and girls are undressing should be sacrosanct
In the article below, "Monsoon" is a women's fashion shop. "Shower" is British military slang of obscene but very derogatory meaning
What a right shower they are at Monsoon.
Following a complaint by one non?binary teenager this week — let me repeat, a single person who made one solitary protest on social media — the fashion chain, whose entire range is designed for women and children only, has declared that its changing rooms are now ‘available to all customers’.
Does this mean that any dirty old men who want to spy on young girls trying on crop tops should throw on their crusty macs and thunder down to one of Monsoon’s 180 shops pronto, grab some floaty skirts and head for the changing rooms? Who knows? But if they did, no one at Monsoon would be able to stop them.
This all started because sixth?former Charlie Moore wanted to buy a prom dress, so went shopping at a Monsoon branch in Birmingham.
So far, so ordinary — except that Charlie (who uses the pronouns ‘they/them’ instead of ‘he/she’) was asked to leave the store’s changing rooms after being told by an assistant that ‘males are not allowed to try our clothes on’.
Charlie does not feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth. Born male, they now wish to live their life as a non-binary person and is hoping for gender-affirming hormone therapy. Fair enough, that’s totally Charlie’s call.
After leaving the store, the 18-year-old complained on social media, where Charlie lists themself as ‘pansexual’ and also the chair of the West Midlands Young Liberals and trans-spokesperson for the Young Liberals.
Uh-oh.
One can only imagine the panic bomb that exploded at Monsoon HQ. God, no! Anything but the Young Liberals!
The company immediately capitulated. There was an ocean of grovel, fawn, cringe, kowtow — and how.
Not only did it declare that its changing rooms were now open to all, it offered to find a dress for Charlie ‘free of charge’. Result!
I’m glad for Charlie and hope their hurt feelings are assuaged and that they shall go to the ball. (Unlikely to do so in a Monsoon dress, though, as they have said they will never shop there again.)
However, where does that leave the majority of Monsoon customers — the birth-assigned females, the mothers, the loyal shoppers who might well feel differently about another formerly ‘safe space’ going, going, gone? What about our rights and feelings?
Because really, this isn’t about Charlie, who only wants to live their life. But what if the person in the next changing room is not this Charlie — but Charlie Nutter or Creepy Charlie, who is very much not your darling? The point is that public spaces where women and girls are undressing should be sacrosanct.
Young women should be able to shop in peace, with an expectation of privacy and safety, free from the male gaze and possibly predatory interest. Older women should be able to welcome the comfort and security of female-only zones.
By making its changing rooms available to ‘all customers’, Monsoon is at risk of alienating the majority of its core clientele. Why are their feelings, hurt or otherwise, never taken into account?
Is it just a coincidence that this all happened just days after the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued guidance that services such as gym changing rooms, bathrooms and domestic abuse refuges should be open to trans people whenever possible? And that exceptions are only acceptable if there are ‘proportionate and justified reasons’?
It’s not the law, not yet (just an interpretation of existing equality laws), but one can see the way things are going.
A tolerant and healthy society can be accommodating and flexible, but how will commerce cope? Hard to imagine companies such as Monsoon allowing the need for more diverse changing rooms to eat into an inch of their high-profit retail space. Far easier to trample over women’s rights instead, so let’s just do that, shall we?
Many will sympathise with Charlie and their difficult journey. I know I do. Charlie has already started a GoFundMe page to raise the money for their gender therapy: ‘The NHS’s gender services are terribly underfunded and inadequate, and to avoid furthering already present medical-related trauma, I’ve elected for a private route,’ they write on their page. ‘Please chip in.’
At the time of writing, Charlie has reached half of the £1,200 goal. The kindness of strangers and the support of friends is so inspiring, isn’t it?
That won’t stop the storm clouds gathering for Monsoon. But I feel it deserves the approaching culture war squalls.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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15 April, 2022
A consensus can be both powerful and wrong
by Alana Newhouse
In 2017, I was one of the few among my friends who didn’t attend the Women’s March. I recognized the legitimacy and even urgency of the cause, but I had concerns about the movement and its leaders. When I asked questions or noted inconsistencies, clear answers were never forthcoming. Instead, my impulse to examine and weigh evidence was suddenly considered suspect. I was sneered at, if not openly attacked: Was I against empowering women? Against the elevation of women of color? In favor of rape?
Once the answers were finally uncovered—showing the march to have been mired in financial mismanagement, to say nothing of the antisemitism espoused by its founders—some of the same people who questioned my allegiance to my own sex, or my politics, or whatever else they suspected, confessed to being shocked that they were putting money in Louis Farrakhan’s pockets while funding an organization that badly damaged the cause they meant to support.
In the summer of 2020, Jewish groups tripped over each other to issue press releases supporting Black Lives Matter—the movement, not the idea. Every Jew of goodwill agreed that nothing could be more important than adopting this slogan wholesale, painting it on walls, adding it to websites, stamping it on children’s clothing, putting it on lawn signs and, of course, writing out large checks from personal and communal accounts, immediately. The fact that the checks hadn’t been written yesterday, or years ago, was already a scandal.
When well-meaning people inside of communal life asked whether those Jewish leaders knew anything about the organization that would be cashing these checks, the questioners were reflexively branded as racist enemies of progress. I believe that many of the people who said these things sincerely felt, in the moment, like they were on the right side of history, and that those asking questions were not. But now that the truth has come to light—with one BLM organizer holding forth about how charity transparency laws make her feel unsafe—I wonder if they will ever be granted apologies.
When Tablet defended the Satmar community’s response to draconian COVID policies, including their insistence on sending their children to school or their commonsense inquiry into why one would close playgrounds—forcing people to stay indoors, often in close quarters, during an airborne pandemic—our writers were called medieval science-deniers. When people asked questions about mask mandates and vaccine passports, they were smeared as anti-vaxxers and right-wingers—even when they were obviously nothing of the sort.
In an age of uncertainty, it feels good to cast the habit of questioning aside and embrace the idea that the cautious weighing of evidence is unnecessary. Your side walks in light. The other side dwells in darkness. And indeed, there is nothing wrong with fighting racism, wherever you find it. Fighting for equal rights for people of any gender, orientation, or sexual preference is good. Promoting public policies that bring safety and security, and clear air and clean water, and needed medicine and economic opportunity to more people is a noble aim. Protecting the environment is also good. There is nothing wrong with opposing Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
What is wrong, as I now see it, is that none of this activism results in making anyone’s lives better. The Women’s March collapsed under the weight of the very sorts of problems raised by its few early skeptics. Time’s Up has been mired in one scandal after another. Barely a year and a half after garnering an Emmy, a $5 million book deal, and an army of “Cuomosexual” fans online, the former governor of New York left office in disgrace. According to New York Magazine’s Sean Campbell, Black Lives Matter spent $6 million on a mansion for its leaders. The word “science” was used to shame those who wouldn’t fall in line and boost the profit margins of large pharmaceutical companies that had been, barely minutes before, justly infamous for lying to the public and profiteering off of illnesses that they often did little to heal—and even, as in the case of America’s recent opioid epidemic, caused.
The public campaigns that utilize these virtuous slogans on social media are political tools, wielded by people who are interested in corralling the public toward a variety of unrelated ends—including their own self-enrichment. If you’re wondering whether or not your favored cause is a radical effort to help those who are genuinely in need or powerless, there’s an easy way to find out:
Ask yourself why BlackRock—a corporation making it impossible for middle-class Americans to own homes—is draping itself in the language of social justice. Ask yourself why, in fact, so many corporations now all support the same roster of causes. Ask yourself how all channels of discourse in America suddenly flow in the same direction, making local and institutional and communal distinctions that were once defining seem vanishingly trivial. Why do all universities have the same politics and curricula and trigger warnings and quotas? Why must all hospitals and schools have them too? At what point does one accept that all of these causes and crises are related, that the closeness of their relationship to each other is quite strange?
A new and decadent power center has been built, made up of the federal government and a constellation of corporations and nonprofits that operate as connected wings of the same sprawling complex. The people who control the key platforms and networks are aggregating power to themselves at the expense of everyone else. These people and the institutions they dominate are not interested in social justice, or any other kind of justice, except to the extent that they can be used as shields. They festoon their corporate headquarters with slogans about women’s rights, Black rights, and trans rights while hoovering up millions of jobs and billions of dollars that once belonged to small- and medium-sized American businesses and shipping it all to China. Through their networks of foundations and NGOs, they have emptied out America’s free press and turned most of it into a quasi-governmental political propaganda apparatus that is remarkably empty of meaningful information about how power works in America and why the quality of so many people’s lives keeps getting worse.
Different people have different words for this new monolithic reality, but everyone who isn’t either naive or craven knows that it exists. I envision it as a pyramid—one that contains the sum total of every slogan and brand name and source of prestige, acting and speaking in unison. To live in its shadow, to take one’s moral or political or social cues from the pyramid’s overseers, is not simply an act of idol worship; it’s a form of servitude.
For American Jews, our addiction to being insiders is especially dangerous at this moment, because it means siding with people who don’t like Jews very much, and in some cases actively wish us harm. But it’s more than that, for everyone: When status becomes the reward for serving those in power, who in turn reduce the rest of the population to forms of abject powerlessness, then seeking it out becomes toxic. And it’s not simply that we shouldn’t be participating in this system; it’s that we—especially those of us who care about the less fortunate, who want to see more justice in the world, who want more safety and health and prosperity for greater numbers of people—should be leading the charge out of this Egypt, helping to build the institutions and communities and companies and cultural organizations of a new and better future.
Because if there is the pyramid, there is also a space emerging outside of it—a space increasingly populated by people who want to take back their right to question, who want to experiment and quarrel and even get things wrong sometimes but to do so according to their own consciences, and who are willing to sacrifice comfort and prestige for that freedom. The people who dwell here are not part of any political faction or ideological school—or rather, they are from all of them. Indeed, the operative distinction in the near term in American politics will not be between left and right, but between insider and outsider; between those incapable of leaving their fleshpots and those who would willingly face uncertainty and risk for the chance at a better world. Between the majority that stays and is swallowed up by history, and the minority that leaves and makes the future.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-jews-who-didnt-leave-egypt
*************************************************Pervasive Leftist hate of their own society
Like many of us, I am always baffled by the nihilism and self-loathing attitude towards the West that dominates our offices, dinner parties, and restaurants.
Black Lives Matter protesters can loot small businesses during the middle of a pandemic. Climate Change activists can obstruct traffic streets while holding signs advocating for socialism or communism – causes that have killed 100 million people since the Russian Revolution.
In inner-city suburbs of Australia, I’ve seen murals where the Australian flag is being shot and lit on fire.
Instead of calling these people out for openly supporting movements that have committed some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, we celebrate them.
On the flip of a coin, when people are fighting for important things like freedom – the Canadian Trucker Blockade or the Melbourne Lockdown Protests – they are written off as far-right looneys and neo-Nazis.
The double standards are astounding. If you are on the wrong side of politics, be careful of these vicious representatives of our pseudo-collective conscience because they’ve turned virtue signalling into a blood sport.
Whenever I hear our modern-day saints – the Cardinals of the new 21st century Church – adding up the injustices and flaws in our society, I always ask them the same question I have asked several times in these very pages; ‘All objective data suggest we are fortunate enough to live in the most prosperous and inclusive society in human history. Can you name a better period to live in?’
As you could imagine, I am always met with crickets. None of these people, who have a bizarre fetish for victimhood and ostensibly solving social issues through meaningless conversation, can name any other time than now.
The jury is still out as to whether I will ever get a credible response. Though, I recently keep coming across an interesting answer worth sharing.
In retort to my question, I am repeatedly told that Vietnam’s economic boom over the past twenty years shows how socialism is superior to capitalism. Furthermore, they suggest we adopt this model to end all the problems the world is experiencing.
As the old saying goes ‘if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is’. Vietnam is not a shining beacon of hope for socialism. In fact, it’s the opposite.
According to the World Bank, ‘Vietnam’s shift from a centrally planned to a market economy has transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world into a lower middle-income country. Vietnam now is one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the East Asia region.’
The Vietnam success story started in 1986 when the government sought to liberalise their economy in 1986, under a policy known as ‘??i M?i’, which saw them switch to a socialist-oriented market economy.
Before the restructure, central planning and isolationism were not effective apparatuses for helping the country recover from the Vietnam War. In 1985, the GDP per capita was US$231, about 70 per cent of its population was living below the poverty line and the economy was on the brink of collapse.
Change was needed and ??i M?i’ is widely considered a success, with the poverty rate being reduced to 58 per cent by 1993.
Thanks to this strong foundation, Vietnam underwent dramatic economic changes in the early 2000s which expanded the roles of the private sector, saw the government sell state-owned assets and a Bilateral Trade Agreement signed with the United States.
Following this, Vietnam almost immediately became one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
The World Bank reported that, ‘Between 2002 and 2020, GDP per capita increased 2.7 times, reaching almost US$2,800. Over the same period, poverty rates declined sharply from over 32 per cent in 2011 to below 2 per cent.’
In terms of infrastructure, the country went from 14 per cent having access to electricity in 1993 to 99 per cent in 2016.
Health standards also rapidly improved, ‘Infant mortality rates fell from 32.6 per 1,000 live births in 1993 to 16.7 per 1,000 in 2017. Life expectancy rose from 70.5 to 76.3 years between 1990 and 2016.’
After being considered one of the most impoverished countries on earth just 30 years ago, the World Bank says it is now on track to become a high-income nation by 2045.
Many economists credit the move towards a globally-oriented market economy for rescuing the country, showing how quickly capitalism can generate wealth, education, and a better quality of life for entire populations.
And to those who still think capitalism is soul crushing – like The Guardian who ignored all objective data in 2015 reporting ‘Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption’ – the Pew Research Centre found 95 per cent of Vietnamese people support capitalism.
This leads me to two possible conclusions. The progressive left is blinded by their pursuit of equality and cannot see the unintended consequences, or they are misanthropes who do not want humankind to prosper unless it’s through their monolithic worldview.
I hope it’s the former.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/how-the-progressive-left-perpetuates-poverty/
****************************************************LA’s crime surge migrates to wealthy, whiter zip codes
On March 22, in the broad daylight of a typically gorgeous day in Beverly Hills, thieves in hoodies and sunglasses took a sledgehammer to the plate glass window of Peter Sedghi’s boutique and furiously rummaged through the shards. In less than 90 seconds, the robbers stole more than $3 million worth of jewels. Two days later, in response to a wave of high-end robberies, the Los Angeles Police Department announced there would be no arrests. Instead, it cautioned Hollywood residents not to wear high-quality jewelry in public.
“Beverly Hills is one of the most affluent, safest neighborhoods in the world and now everyone is scared,” Sedghi said. “All of my clients – no one wears anything.”
Crime has risen dramatically in Los Angeles, as well as in many other major cities, since the start of the pandemic and last summer’s protests against police violence resulted in the slashing of many law enforcement budgets. News stories document rising fear across LA and crime has become the major issue in both the upcoming mayor’s election and a possible recall of the district attorney. It may not be surprising that issues of race and class are driving this concern, though they have a new twist.
Wealthy and predominantly white neighborhoods have experienced the sharpest upticks in a wide array of crimes, according to an analysis conducted for RealClearInvestigations by criminologist John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
The zip codes showing the largest increases are home to film and pop stars, including Beverly Hills, of "90210" fame, where Beyonce and Jay-Z have their West Coast house; Bel Air, of "Fresh Prince" Will Smith fame, where Jennifer Lopez now resides; and Los Feliz, where Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom share a house and where Angelina Jolie has resided since her divorce from Brad Pitt. Nearby, the U.S. Postal Service has suspended delivery to one neighborhood in Santa Monica – a town where celebrities including Tom Cruise, Christian Bale and Sandra Bullock reportedly have homes – because “multiple carriers have been subjected to assault and threats of assault.”
Lott’s analysis, which correlates census and LAPD crime statistics for the period January 2019 to January 2022, also reveals that those neighborhoods now account for much greater shares of the total number of crimes committed in Los Angeles. It shows that the richer and whiter the area, the greater the increase in both raw crime totals and percentages of total city crime. This includes a wide range of felonies, from robbery, burglary, shoplifting and car theft to aggravated assault and rape. Although poor and minority neighborhoods still experience the largest total number of crimes, including violent crimes such as murder, the shift to relatively safer neighborhoods is pronounced.
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Boris Johnson to send migrants from the Channel ‘straight to Rwanda’
Migrants crossing the English Channel to seek asylum in the UK will be flown more than 9000 kilometres to Rwanda to have their claims processed offshore.
The new policy will be part of a landmark immigration deal, to be detailed by British Home Secretary Priti Patel, under which thousands of asylum seekers will be relocated to the landlocked east African nation.
It comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson warns that “vile” people smugglers are “turning the Channel into a watery graveyard” with people “drowning in unseaworthy boats and suffocating in refrigerated lorries”.
Johnson will on Thursday, London time, unveil a series of measures aimed at tackling illegal immigration, including putting the military in charge of operations in the Channel from Friday.
He will also signal moves to end the practice of housing asylum seekers in expensive hotel accommodation and unveil plans for the first purpose-built reception centre in England to hold illegal arrivals.
The immigration blueprint is a key part of plans to relaunch Johnson’s premiership ahead of local elections and after hew was hit by a public backlash over “partygate”.
Patel has come under sustained pressure to cut the number of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. Already a record 4600 have crossed this year, double the 2021 figure. On Wednesday, 600 migrants reached the UK, the highest number in one day so far this year.
The Channel crisis has been blamed for exacerbating problems at airports by drawing Border Force officers away to handle it.
The plans are modelled on Australia’s offshore processing of asylum seekers in detention centres on the islands of Nauru and Manus, Papua New Guinea.
Alexander Downer, one of the architects of the Howard-era Pacific solution and formerly Australia’s high commissioner in London, has just been appointed by the British government to review the country’s Border Force department.
Ministers have struggled to remove illegal Channel migrants once they arrive in Britain and have been accommodating them in hotels at a cost of £3.5 million ($6 million) a day.
They believe offshore processing will act as a deterrent to migrants who think it is difficult for the UK to remove them
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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14 April, 2022
Approval-seeking and the decay of critical thinking on the American Left
Writing below, MICHAEL LIND blames the mental straitjacket that encloses the American Left on the influence of big charitable foundations.
I think he mistakes a symptom for the disease. He seems to overlook that similar authoritarian uniformity prevails in the Western word generally. From Finland to Australia, the Left have virtually the same current obsessions, It does not need the support of American charitable foundations,
So how has this irrational and stifling mental uniformity that Lind describes arisen? I see it as an effect of prosperity. A majority of the population now has a life of no great material difficulty. And they feel rather good about that. They can now stop worrying about where the next meal is coming from and devote their attention to their quality of life. At the simplest level they can now eat juicy steaks instead of sausages.
But food is not the only good thing in life. There are many other things that people desire. And a big one is that people like to be liked. They seek approval. The esteem of one's peers is in fact hugely important. People commit suicide for the lack of it.
So that gives us a handle on what is happening and why it is so powerful. Ones political stances can have a big effect on how we feel. To some people politics is important. And having people agree with you can be VERY important. Agreement feeds your hunger for approval. So some people pursue what they see as commendable ideas with great zealotry.
But there is no consensus on what policies are coommendable. Most political ideas have powerful counterarguments. So the choice of what policy to support is very important. There is real doubt about which policy will win the approval of people you know. And you may get it wrong!
So how is one to avoid such doubts? Intellectual uniformity does that. So we live in an age when political positions are personally important to a lot of people, positions that strongly influence how well other people think of us. Our material needs are easily met so our big goal in life has become the approval of others.
So when a political idea seems to be getting a lot of approval, a huge slice of the population gets onboard with it. It becomes the gospel of the day and, like all gospels, dissenters from it must be attacked and preferably be disposed of. Dissenters threaten one's feelings of self-worth so are resisted in any way possible. They threaten our ability to run with the herd.
And ideas have to be simple to be widely accepted. So seemingly crazy ideas such as "all men are equal" are proclaimed. They are are simple yet appealing in various ways. The pursuit of equality, or "equity" as it is presently called, could not be simpler in theory and seems big-hearted. It is wishing prosperity on everyone. That it produces poverty and oppression if seriously pursued is undoubted but thinking about that is unpleasant so such thoughts are avoided. Reality is uncomfortable.
And self-deception is widely practiced. People tend to believe what they want to believe. So crazy ideas can be entertained. Unpleasant aspects of reality can be kept below recognition. The Leftist herd likes pleasant and simple ideas so they are what will be declared. Any thought that the ideas concerned are destructive will be suppressed.
By and large, conservatives, by contrast, have sufficient strength of character to deal with reality as it is, without needing either simplification or self-deception.
So we see how the American Left have become the mental automatons that they usually are. The cause of it runs deep into the present state of our civilization so all we can hope for is that their myths are not persuasive to a majority of the voters. One hopes that reality and rationality will eventually win the day.
If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.
Consider center-left journals of opinion. In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.
You cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star.
It is not surprising that the written output of this billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus tends to read like an NGO word salad with crunchy croutons in the form of acronyms that stud post-intellectual progressive discourse: DEI, CRT, AAPI, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. Wokespeak is Grantspeak.
Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism Inc. has shut down debate on the center left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGO-sphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.
In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that “the debate about affirmative action is over.” Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center left as “colorblind racism,” and progressives in the name of “equity” are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and “white-adjacent” Asian-Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.
Immigration policy provides an even more striking example of the power of Progressivism Inc. to stifle debate on the center left. Up until around 2000, libertarians and employer-class Republicans wanted to weaken laws against illegal immigration and expand low-wage legal immigration, against the opposition of organized labor and many African Americans, who for generations have tended to view immigrants of all races as competitors. The Hesburgh Commission on immigration reform, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and the Jordan Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton and led by Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, the pioneering civil rights leader who was left-liberal, Black, and lesbian, both proposed cracking down on illegal immigration—by requiring a national ID card, punishing employers of illegal immigrants, and cutting back on low-skilled, low-wage legal immigrants. As late as 2006, then-Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both voted for 200 miles of border fencing in the Southwest.
Then, virtually overnight, the progressive movement flipped and adopted the former talking points of the Chamber of Commerce cheap-labor lobby. While Democratic politicians deny that they oppose enforcing immigration laws, center-left journals and journalists keep pushing the idea of open borders, in alliance with crackpot free market fundamentalists. On April 12, 2022, David Dayen in the American Prospect wrote that “declining immigration rates since the pandemic have contributed to labor shortages in key industries and harmed Americans who rely on those services.” Dayen linked to an article in the libertarian Wall Street Journal bemoaning rising wages as a result of lower immigration. On Feb. 20 of this year, The New Yorker published a long essay by Zoey Poll, “The Case for Open Borders,” a fawning profile of the libertarian ideologue Bryan Caplan, author of Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, which, appropriately, takes the form of a graphic novel—that is to say, a comic book.
Back in 2015, Ezra Klein, then editor of the “progressive” outlet Vox, asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about the idea of “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders replied in alarm: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.” The lobby FWD.us, funded by Facebook and other large tech corporations that prefer hiring indentured servants (H-1Bs) bound to their employers instead of free American citizen-workers and legal immigrants, denounced Sanders for holding “the totally-debunked notion that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting Americans.” Vox then published an article by Dylan Matthews titled “Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrong-headed.” “If I could add one amendment to the Constitution,” Matthews declared, “it would be the one Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley once proposed: ‘There shall be open borders.’” In 2018, the progressive author Angela Nagle was canceled by Progressivism Inc. when she published an essay in American Affairs, “The Left Case Against Open Borders.” By 2020, when Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, published One Billion Americans, the purging of dissidents and the fusion of the Progressivism Inc. party line on immigration with the anti-union, cheap-labor policies favored by The Wall Street Journal and Silicon Valley was complete.
The energy debate provides another example of the closing of the progressive mind. As recently as the early 2000s, some environmentalists favored reducing atmosphere-heating carbon emissions by expanding nuclear power, replacing coal with lower-carbon natural gas, or both. By 2010 these positions had been thoroughly anathematized by Progressivism Inc. Not only all fossil fuels but all nuclear energy—which provides 20% of utility electric generation in the United States, roughly the same as all renewable energy sources put together—must be completely eliminated from the energy mix, according to the green commissars. Insofar as only around 11% of global primary energy, and only around a quarter of global electricity, comes from renewable energy (chiefly hydropower, which has limited potential for expansion), the green fatwah against nuclear energy seems self-defeating—as well as certain to shovel American money to China, which holds near-monopolies on the rare earth metals and production facilities used to make things like solar panels and lithium batteries. China also happens to be a major source of the fortunes of some of the billionaires who fund progressive media and NGOs.
At this point in history, the foundations and advocacy nonprofits of Progressivism Inc. do not even bother to go through the charade of public debate and discussion before imposing a new party line. Half a century of debate, discussion, and activism gradually led to a majority consensus among American voters in favor of “negative liberty” for gay men and lesbian women, whose right to be free as individuals from discrimination in employment, housing, and military service need not require other Americans to change either their actions or their views.
In striking contrast, in a few years the ideology of gender fluidity went from being an obscure strain of thinking on the academic left to becoming the centerpiece of a radical program of social engineering from above carried out simultaneously by progressive, corporate, and academic bureaucracies. During President Obama’s second term, the federal government reinterpreted Title IX, a civil rights law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, and suddenly threatened federal lawsuits and the cut-off of federal funding for public schools that did not allow boys and girls to use the bathrooms of the opposite (biological) sex, and demanded that boys and young men with gender dysphoria be allowed to join girls’ sports teams and use female locker rooms and showers. States that resisted this bizarre misreading of Title IX, which eliminated legal distinctions grounded in biological sex that the statute was written to protect, found themselves boycotted by multinational corporations and sports leagues. Corporate employees and university personnel who questioned the new party line now did so at risk of being fired or punished. All of this happened just between 2012 and 2016, with no public debate or discussion within the progressive camp, and no attempts to persuade conservatives, libertarians, liberals, or even pre-2012 progressives—only a sudden diktat from above, accompanied by contemptuous threats of punishment. In 2012, progressives were allowed to agree with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the time that, while lesbian women and gay men should have access to civil unions, marriage should be between a biological man and a biological woman. By 2020, you were a hateful reactionary conservative bigot if you did not agree that some men can be pregnant and some women have penises.
Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.
The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats, to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees. The methods by which they enforce this discipline can be described as chain-ganging and shoe-horning.
Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African American community activist complained to me privately: “Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young Black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.”
Shoe-horning is what I call the progressive donor practice of requiring all grantees to assert their fealty to environmentalist orthodoxy and support for race and gender quotas, even if those topics have nothing to do with the subject of the grant. It is not necessary for the donors to make this explicit; their grantees understand without being told, like the favor-seeking knights of Henry II: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” In the last few years, even the most technocratic center-left policy programs—advocating slightly higher earned income tax credits or whatever—have often rewritten their mission statements to refer to “climate justice” and “diversity” and routinely sprinkle grantspeak like “the racial reckoning” and “the climate emergency” throughout their policy briefs in the hope of pleasing program officers at big progressive foundations.
Thanks to the buy-out of the American center left by Progressivism Inc., there is literally nothing for a progressive public intellectual to do. To be sure, there are plenty of other kinds of mental work that you can perform as a member of the rising generation of young progressives even in the absence of a functioning public intellectual sphere. You can keep your head down and doubts to yourself, as you work on the technocratic policy that appeals to you the most: raising the minimum wage or free school lunches, perhaps. Or you can write endless variants of the same screed denouncing Republicans and conservatives as rabid white nationalists threatening to create a fascist dictatorship right here in America. Or you can join mobs on Twitter and social media to take part in Two-Minute Hate campaigns against individuals or groups singled out for denunciation that day by Progressivism Inc. Or you can try to obtain fame and bestseller status and wealth and tenure by getting the attention of the MacArthur Prize committee and editors at The Atlantic by auditioning for the role of designated spokesperson for this or that “protected class” or minority identity group—nonbinary Middle East or North African MENA), for example, not low-income Scots Irish Appalachian heterosexual Pentecostalist.
You can even be a professor. High-profile American progressive academics like Paul Krugman and Jill Lepore and Adam Tooze who moonlight as public affairs commentators are not public intellectuals, because they have the pre-approved left-liberal opinions on all topics that are shared by nine-tenths of the U.S. academic bureaucracy, from the richest Ivy League superstars to the lowliest adjunct at a commuter college. Back in the early 1990s, when as a young neoconservative Democrat I worked for The National Interest, our publisher, Irving Kristol, exploded in comic exasperation one day: “People are calling professors intellectuals! Professors aren’t intellectuals. Intellectuals argue with each other in cafes and write for little magazines. Professors are boring people who take out their dusty 20-year-old notes and give the same lecture over and over again.”
Unlike academics who recite the approved current center-left positions on all issues, genuine intellectuals, even if they happen to be employed by universities, are unpredictable. Often they are unpopular, because they criticize their own allies and appreciate what other schools of thought get right. They do not indulge in contrarianism for its own sake but tend to be controversial, because they put loyalty to what they consider to be truth above party or faction. Needless to say, such intellectual mavericks tend to perform quite poorly when it comes to the boot-licking, rote repetition of political slogans, acronym-juggling, groupthink, and “donor servicing” that constitute the forms of intellectual activity favored by big foundations and NGOs, whether of the right or of the left.
Young progressives who prefer a life of significant contention to a career of lucrative grant-mongering may take some solace from the fact that we have lived through this kind of foundation-driven, extinction-level event in our nation’s intellectual life before. In “Why Intellectual Conservatism Died,” published in Dissent back in 1995, I wrote that “instead of boldly attacking falsehoods wherever they are found, conservative editors tend to print only what they believe will confirm the prejudices of the program officers. The addiction to foundation dollars has reinforced the disastrous ‘no enemies to the right’ policy. The last thing the foundations want is for one set of grantees to criticize the policy views or intellectual standards of other grantees.”
Sound familiar? In hindsight, the end of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush witnessed a golden age of discussion and controversy on the American right, as neoconservatives debated paleoconservatives and religious-right thinkers, and national security hawks debated isolationists and foreign policy realists. Around 1992 that window suddenly closed, as right-wing foundations like Bradley and Olin made it clear that the only nonprofit organizations and journals that would receive funding would be those that espoused a new version of “fusionism”—uniting neoconservative fantasies of American world domination in foreign policy, libertarian fantasies about privatizing Social Security, and religious-right wishful thinking about a Christian or Judeo-Christian revival.
Thanks to blacklisting and censorship, foundation-imposed groupthink triumphed on the right, consolidating Conservatism Inc. and driving away those of us who sought to put the life of the mind above the life of the party. A decade later, President George W. Bush attempted to implement fusionist conservatism with a rigor that Reagan never attempted. In foreign policy, the Bush administration used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq and attempted to realize the conservative fantasy of an American global empire, plunging the Middle East into chaos and bringing Iraq War critics Barack Obama and Donald Trump to power. In domestic policy, Bush tried to partly privatize Social Security, creating a voter backlash. The 2004 Bush-Rove campaign against gay marriage, calculated to bribe working-class evangelicals into voting for the party of tax cuts for the rich, backfired and led to majority acceptance of gay men and lesbians and the defection of many younger Protestant evangelicals.
On today’s center left, as on the bygone center right, the groupthink imposed by behind-the-scenes donors and their favored nonprofits and media allies is resulting in electoral disaster—this time, for Democrats. The progressive foundations, billionaires, and woke corporations backed a California initiative to legalize anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination; it lost, in part because so many Black and Hispanic Americans support the ideal of a colorblind American society. Democrats underperformed dramatically in 2020, even after COVID killed the economy and terrified most Americans, because the slogans of foundation-backed nonprofits—like Defund the Police and comparisons of the U.S. border patrol to the Gestapo—alienated many Democratic voters as well as swing voters. Black Democrats have favored candidates like Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Eric Adams who oppose anti-police radicalism. And a major reason for the political shift of Hispanic voters in Texas border counties is their opposition to the Democratic Party’s toleration of mass illegal immigration, summed up in the fatuous slogan “No human being is illegal.”
Conservatism Inc., including flagship journals like the National Review and flagship think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, remains a museum of mummies. Today, Progressivism Inc. is equally brain-dead. What survives of intellectual politics in the United States today consists of a growing number of exiles from establishment wokeness on Substack and an assortment of dissident leftists, conservatives, and populists, some of whom have come together in new publications like American Affairs, Compact, and The Bellows, and in quirkier couture shops like Tablet.
Having watched from up close over the past four decades as cliques of foundation program officers, individual billionaires, and their nonprofit retainers lobotomized first the American right and then the American left, I hope that I may live to see the American center left free itself from top-down orthodoxy and welcome dissension, discussion, and debate once again. But I doubt I will live that long.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-end-of-progressive-intellectual-life
*************************************************‘Walt Not Woke’: Dad’s Hand-Made T-shirt Causes a Stir at Disney
In an effort to “honestly and respectfully” express how he feels about what is going on with the Disney company’s management, one dad’s hand-made T-shirt caused quite a stir at “the happiest place on earth.”
Dan Geffers has been taking his daughters Lila and Bryn to Disney for years. Over those years he has noticed the subtle changes the company has been making regarding causes they support and the policies they are implementing at their parks. But the things that have developed lately in the ongoing effort by Disney’s management to protest the passing of legislation meant to protect children “was the last straw.”
Geffers said they had already purchased Disney tickets for himself, his wife, and their two daughters to go spend two days at two different parks at Disney in Orlando, Florida. Going with them were a friend of their daughter’s, Halle Nebl, as well as Michelle Depa and her daughter Allison Stromske.
But two days after they bought the tickets, they saw on the news how Disney Parks’ diversity and inclusion manager, Vivian Ware, announced the company has “removed all of the gendered greetings” like “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.” Disney Television Animation executive producer Latoya Raveneau also boasted in an internal meeting about how she is inserting the “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” into children’s programming and “adding queerness” wherever she can. The news came out after Disney CEO Bob Chapek and the rest of the Disney corporation had already launched into a battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the Parental Rights in Education legislation he signed into law.
“That was it for me,” Geffers told The Epoch Times. “I didn’t want to go anymore. So, I made calls to see about getting a refund on my tickets.”
Unfortunately, Geffers said the effort went nowhere. Two separate calls put him on hold for at least 20 minutes each time. He finally gave up, and the seven of them just decided to go. After all, seven tickets for a two-day trip to two parks had already cost them over $2,000. It would have been a tremendous waste.
Then they got an idea. It involved “a plain white T-shirt and a couple of sharpies.”
“I had to make a statement,” Geffers said. “So, I went out and bought a T-shirt. I put a couple of things on the back and a couple of things on the front and I wore it to the park.”
On the back, Geffers wrote “Hello Boys and Girls, Ladies and Gentlemen.” On the front, he wrote, “Walt Not Woke.” While he wasn’t sure how people were going to respond, Geffers said he needed to do something to express how he felt about what was going on at “the happiest place on earth.”
On the first day, Geffers and the rest of his entourage went to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. According to Geffers, they hadn’t even gotten into the park before he noticed people pointing, whispering, smiling, and making comments. “Walt Not Woke” seemed to be the favorite.
“I was very surprised,” Geffers said, recalling how even the employees who were directing guests toward the entrance were commenting, saying: “Nice T-shirt,” and “I like your shirt.” When they got inside and proceeded toward the gate for admission, more employees made comments on how they liked the shirt. “It was nice to hear,” he said.
“Once inside the park and throughout the day, many people came up and wanted to take a picture with him, saying ‘I have to send this to my husband, he didn’t want me to come today’ or “I’m going to send this to my buddy, he’s going to get a kick out of this.’ Some people would just tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, thanks for wearing that shirt’ or ‘I like your shirt.’ He even made sure to get a picture of himself in the T-shirt with his daughters.
What really surprised Geffers was when he went to one of the concession stands to get some ice cream bars and popcorn for his girls.
“I handed her the money to pay for it and she said, ‘It’s on Mickey. I like your shirt,’ and I was like—okay.”
On the second day, Geffers and the gang went to Hollywood Studios. His T-shirt drew a lot of attention there as well. He would see people walking by, snapping pictures, and tapping friends and family members on the shoulder to point and smile. More notable, Geffers said did not notice or hear any negative comments. Neither did his daughters or the other people in the group.
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In Defense of Inequality
The subject of “inequality” is very much in the news at the moment. For a great many professors, researchers, editorial writers and talking heads on mainstream and social media, this is the topic of the day. By contrast, it is of almost no interest to everyone else.
For the chattering class, a new book by Thomas Piketty is grist for the mill. Even if they don’t understand Piketty’s complicated economics, they will have no trouble discovering his bottom line: inequality of income and wealth is unquestionably bad.
Ordinary people do not think about inequality. They don’t talk about it. They certainly don’t obsess over it. But if they did stop to think about it, they might conclude that inequality is not necessarily a bad thing after all.
In her book The Genetic Lottery, Katherine Page Harden argues that many differences among people are present at birth and are bequeathed to us by our genes. In most cases, a graph of a trait (such as height) would resemble a bell curve – with a few very tall people at one tail of the distribution, a very few short people at the other tail, and the rest of the population somewhere in between.
Now suppose you could play God and change all that. Would you do it?
Take IQ, a trait that has been studied more than any other and is definitely related to personal income. The consensus seems to be that IQ is about 75 percent determined by genes among adults, with the remainder fixed by environment – although this is a subject of continuing debate. Suppose you could wave a magic wand and eliminate the effects of both nature and nurture – leaving everyone with the mean IQ of 100.
The likely result would be no Euclid, no Gauss, no Newton, and no Einstein. Arguably, the most important aspects of the modern world were made possible (in part) because some IQs were several standard deviations above the mean. Without all those geniuses, down through history, life today would likely be no better than it was 2,000 years ago.
In a very real sense, inequality of IQ is responsible for the creation of the modern world.
What if you could wave a wand and reduce everyone to the mean in terms of athletic, singing or acting ability? Would anyone ever watch a football game? Or attend an opera? Or go to a movie? Like IQ, many talents are also correlated with income. A world without differences in talent would be a boring world indeed.
The economic system creates financial rewards for highly intelligent and creative people to use their talents and abilities to make life better for everyone else. Without those rewards, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and others might have devoted all their attention to imaginary number theory instead of meeting our needs.
But is the system fair? Let’s ask ordinary people.
I went to high school with more than 400 classmates – all very middle class. After going to several reunions through the years, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Roughly 5 to 10 percent of my classmates appeared to earn half the class income. Yet I have never heard a single classmate say this is unfair. If anything, my classmates seemed proud of the accomplishments of others.
In college, I was in a fraternity with others of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Later in life, I did another back-of-the envelope calculation: Roughly 5 to 10 percent of my fraternity brothers appeared to be earning half the group’s income. Yet, again, I have never heard a single fraternity brother complain that this outcome was unfair.
I don’t have an explanation for these distributional results. If I went back through time, I would not have been able to predict in advance which of my colleagues would be the most successful and which ones would earn ordinary incomes. For the nation as a whole, the top 20 percent of the population earn 50 percent of personal income. No one has an explanation for that result either. There may be a lot of randomness in the fortunes that befall people.
Is my experience unusual? I invite readers to conduct their own survey among their childhood friends and associates.
What about the idea of government taking from the rich and redistributing to everyone else? The economist Arthur Okun proposed a “leaky bucket” theory, according to which taking from Peter and giving to Paul creates negative incentive effects for both Peter and Paul. As a result, income transfers lower total national income.
Okun’s metaphor asks us to consider this question: If more equality is a good thing and if it comes at a price, how much are we willing to pay to get it?
Here again, why not ask ordinary people.
According to Gallup, there are 42 million people in the world who would like to permanently migrate to the United States. Many of them live in countries where (setting aside a few wealthy elites) everyone is equally poor. If these people came to the United States, they would start out at the bottom of the income ladder.
Millions of additional people are revealing their preference for opportunity over equality through their actions – as they cross our southern border illegally. If people are forced to choose between opportunity and equality, for a very large number opportunity wins in a heartbeat.
Finally, there is evidence from introspection.
If you had to select a partner for tennis doubles or a member of a sandlot basketball team, would you select someone with the same skills you have? Or would you select someone better? If you had a choice of a dinner companion, would you choose someone with the same income as yours, or someone who earns a lot more? The wealthier the dinner partner, the greater the likelihood of a new job, or an investment in your company, or a donation to your charity.
A desire for equality is not reflected in the choices most people make most of the time.
https://townhall.com/columnists/johncgoodman/2022/04/13/in-defense-of-inequality-n2605800
***************************************************Biden owns 40-year inflation high
Inflation is raging at an annual rate of 8.5 percent up from 7.9 percent last month. March’s extremely hot price growth of 1.2 percent pushes the nation’s inflation rate to levels not seen since the first few months of the Reagan administration in May 1981.
Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has no idea why prices are out of control, even though he is the only person in Washington who was in the Senate when inflation last was raging in the 1970s.
During his 15 months in office, we have heard Biden dismiss inflation, call inflation transitory, and now blame it on Putin and anyone else he can find.
What Joe Biden doesn’t seem to understand is that when you set the inflation house on fire and keep pouring gasoline on it through federal spending schemes, anti-energy policies and failed foreign policies, you don’t get to blame the guy down the street for fanning the flames you allowed to consume most of the house.
Here is the truth. It is Joe Biden’s unnecessary 2021, me-too, COVID spending extravaganza which lit the inflation fire. It has been Joe Biden’s anti-fossil fuel policies which discourage domestic production and deny pipeline infrastructure to move oil and natural gas around the country which figuratively poured gasoline on that inflation fire. And it is his disastrous pro-Iranian, anti-Saudi and Israel, Middle East foreign policy which has turned the world’s largest producer of crude, Saudi Arabia, from allies on most things to at best disinterested observers, resulting in their unwillingness to increase the world’s oil supply.
Just this week a brutal parody of the President and Vice President appeared on Saudi television mocking Biden. An unheard of action in a formerly allied country where the media is pretty much state controlled. This follows the Saudi’s refusal to increase oil production after a direct appeal from the President and later, a refusal of Saudi leaders to even take President Biden’s phone call recently.
Congress needs to take back control over spending in America by rejecting any new COVID bailouts, including but not limited to the Restaurant Restoration Act which would add $40 billion in new spending and impose a freeze on the growth of all regularly appropriated spending until inflation is wrestled to the ground.
Congress should also send a direct message to the Biden administration by opposing their on-going negotiations with Iran, which are rumored to include a $90 billion payment to the terrorist Iranian regime .
Congress should have a fight over Biden’s disastrous domestic energy policy every single day and make Joe Biden and the Democrats feel the political pain because of what their policies are doing at the pump.
In short, it is time to stop spending, restore domestic energy development and abandon the crazy Biden-Iranian Mullah alliance. There are things that can be done to fight inflation, the sad fact is that Joe Biden is either incapable or unwilling to do them.
To get inflation under control, it will take a major attitude adjustment amongst many of our political class. For years, Democrats and some Republicans in Washington accepted the idea that they could spend unending amounts of money with no one paying the bill. Now that inflation bill has now come due and if Joe Biden and Congress refuses to act in this crisis, the inevitable outcome will be a deep, painful recession which has been how inflation spirals have typically ended.
You will know that Biden is getting desperate when he takes a cue from his first term in the U.S. Senate, when then President Gerald R. Ford fought inflation by urging everyone to wear a Whip Inflation Now (WIN) button .
I can see the hashtag already.
https://dailytorch.com/2022/04/biden-owns-40-year-inflation-high/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*****************************************
13 April, 2022
Cancel Culture Targets Civil Rights and Biblical Values Activist
Arthur Goldberg has spent a lifetime fighting for the rights of others and promoting biblical morality.
Now, at the age of 81, Goldberg, a devout Orthodox Jew and president of his local synagogue, is engaged in the moral and legal fight of his life.
His offense: insisting that Jewish men and others have the right to obtain counseling and therapy to overcome unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA) and founding a nonprofit organization to refer them to places of help.
“For promoting those rights, providing seekers with that information, and referring them for gender affirmation therapy, I have been canceled,” Goldberg told The Epoch Times.
“Where is the person’s right to determine his or her own therapeutic goals? Where is the freedom to choose? What happened to a person’s right to voluntarily choose to change his or her sexual orientation?
“Men and women desiring help with SSA are being denied the right to information about the availability and effectiveness of gender-affirming methods and therapies.”
According to Goldberg, gender affirmation therapy is the empowerment of willing individuals combating unwanted same-sex attraction to affirm the gender of their birth.
When Goldberg, a retired investment banker, saw the painful struggles of some acquaintances dealing with SSA, he was moved to co-found a nonprofit organization called Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) to offer them hope and assistance.
JONAH’s mission was to refer primarily Jewish men struggling with SSA to professional and religious counseling.
The goal was to help them fulfill their desire to live a life consistent with the tenets of their Jewish religion as declared in the Torah (the five books of Moses), which holds to heterosexuality, the marriage of a man to a woman, and the bringing forth of children within its confines.
“I saw many Jewish men, as well as people of other faiths, who wanted to be free from same-sex attraction and who desperately wanted to start a traditional family,” he said.
“They needed to know that there is available to them a guided process involving professional counseling, self-discovery, and a combination of spiritual and behavioral self-adjustments characteristic of the Jewish concept of teshuvah, meaning ‘returning to the path,’ or repentance.
“We are not about curtailing the hard-won civil rights of gay people. In fact, we acknowledge what the gay rights movement has done to improve the social status and the economic and political integration for both male and female homosexuals.
“The counseling and therapy we recommend are based on love. We only deal with people who come to us wanting to change.”
Deep Religious Convictions and Compassion
While Goldberg is a published author of a book and many articles on homosexuality and has much to say about the debate over its clinical and political aspects, he’s especially passionate about the spiritual side of the subject.
He views with joy and optimism the Creator’s stark declaration in the Bible’s Book of Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22, which reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” (King James Bible)
Goldberg points out that to’eivah, the Hebrew word for “abomination,” is referring to the action and not the person—the sin and not the sinner.
Citing the teaching of several prominent rabbis and linguists, Goldberg believes that to’eivah has in it more than the idea of abhorrence, which is the common English definition.
“The Hebrew word has in its meaning the idea of ‘a straying or to be led astray.’
“To’eivah contains in it the possibility of teshuvah.
“If you can stray off the path, it is implied you can return to the path,” he said. “This offers so much hope, humaneness, compassion, and relief for those crushed between unwanted powerful personal inclinations and their strong dedication to their religion.
“The Torah teaches us that the Creator is not cruel. He is just and loving, much more willing to demonstrate mercy than to punish or destroy.
“Primarily in the West, nations have lost their traditional bearings. This has resulted in an unprecedented confusion of values.
“Once we threw away the compass of right and wrong passed down to us from ancient wisdom, self-indulgence has become the rule, supported by a good deal of creative rationalization.
“We live in a time of moral relativism, which has led to an intolerance of objective morality and those standing for it.”
Goldberg says his activism on behalf of those voluntarily seeking help with SSA, or other forms of what he calls “sexual brokenness,” is for him a religious and moral imperative.
“If a Jewish homosexual turns to another Jew for help in finding a way out of his homosexuality, the Torah indisputably forbids turning him or her away,” Goldberg said.
**************************************************
Germany still likes its links with Russia
Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a 100-billion-euro plan to arm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.
It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Mr. Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.
But six weeks later, the applause has largely ceased. Even as images of atrocities emerge from Ukraine since the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Scholz has ruled out an immediate oil and gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is dragging his feet on sending 100 armored vehicles to Ukraine, saying that Germany must not “rush ahead.” There are new debates in the ruling coalition about just how to go forward with the massive task Mr. Scholz has laid out, let alone how fast.
Already doubts are building as to the German government’s commitment to its own radical plans. “Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”
The changes Mr. Scholz announced go far deeper than his commitment to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on the military — some €70 billion ($76 billion) a year, compared with France’s €41 billion ($44 billion).
They go to the heart of Germany’s postwar identity as a peaceful exporting nation — and to the heart of a business model that has enriched Germany and made it Europe’s largest and most powerful economy.
Now Germans are being asked “to rethink everything — our approach to doing business, to energy policy, to defense and to Russia,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “We need a mind-set change. We need to recognize that this is about us — that power politics are back and Germany must play a role.”
But she added, “Once again Germany is not leading, it is being dragged.”
Truly reorienting Germans for a new world where security has its real costs — not only in terms potentially of lost lives, but also in lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth — will be a wrenching endeavor that will take time, even a generation, and more than an afternoon’s policy pronouncement.
That realization is dawning, for Germans and their frustrated European partners.
“I don’t understand how anyone in Germany can sleep at night after seeing horrors like this without doing anything about it,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador in Berlin, referring to the atrocities in Ukraine. “What does it take for Germany to act?”
Even Annalena Baerbock, the self-assured Green foreign minister, expressed concerns that Zeitenwende may be more temporary than fundamental. She said she worried that the consensus was fragile, that Germans who favor close ties to Russia were silent now, but had not changed their views.
“You can feel this,” she said in an interview. “They know they have to do it right now with regard to sanctions, energy independence and weapons deliveries, also with regard to how we treat Russia. But actually, they don’t like it.”
Since Mr. Scholz put forth his Zeitenwende before a special session of the Parliament on Feb. 27, multiple cracks in Germany’s commitment to change have already begun to appear.
German celebrities made headlines with an appeal to the government against rearmament and the “180-degree change in German foreign policy” that has so far been signed by 45,000 people. Green lawmakers have lobbied to spend only part of the €100 billion special fund on the military, citing other needs like “human security” and climate change. Labor unions and industry bosses are warning of catastrophic damage to the economy and an immediate recession if Russian gas stops flowing.
As the chief executive of the German chemicals giant BASF, Michael Heinz, put it last week: “Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness.”
It has in fact been the basis of the German economy. Now that German businesses are facing the possibility of being asked to do without it, resistance is quietly mounting. Government ministers say they are being asked discreetly by business leaders when things will “go back to normal” — that is, when they can return to business as usual.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/world/europe/germany-russia-ukraine-war.html
**********************************************Socialism deserves the same revulsion as Nazism
Nazism was in fact a form of socialism
Why don’t we view socialists and the hammer and sickle with the same revulsion as we view Nazis and the swastika?
As a Modern History teacher for the past two years, I have had the opportunity with my classes to cover a broad spread of the worst atrocities ever committed in the 20th century – the Nazi Party’s rise to power, the Cold War, Communist China. However, in our professional groups on social media, there are a vocal minority of fellow history teachers who, in spite of the clear lessons that history teaches us, feel it appropriate to share openly socialist propaganda among our fraternity.
Now I understand that the economic system that we have, with governments and corporations giving concessions to each other, is hurting young people most of all. Many young people feel that they have no future in our society as it stands. They perceive that those who are wealthy are using their wealth not to help their communities, but to slam the door on the rest of them who are trying to make a comfortable life. They see that the government has been bought out by special interest groups to give our taxpayer dollars to and to make laws that benefit big corporations who don’t need the help.
But having seen this, many in my generation have concluded that the only course of action is to embrace socialism, to forcibly redistribute the wealth at the end of the barrel of a gun, or the improvised weapons of the mob. Of course, whether due to ignorance, wilful blindness or realpolitik, they dare not admit this openly.
Socialism, on the face of it, does not like being seen to indulge itself in street violence. Its proponents position it as an intellectual movement that demands to be answered on an equal footing with our beloved classical liberal ideals. We must not forget also that the Nazi party used the veneer of academia, science, and philosophy to grant legitimacy to their genocidal dogma, even as their will to power was enforced by similar ideologically-possessed footsoldiers to those that walk the streets of America today.
In contrast to our forgetting of Nazism’s intellectual claims and reduction of Nazis to jackbooted thugs, why must we contend with Soviet commissars, pistols against our foreheads, as if they are a study circle of Parisian intellectuals?
Socialism is all too quick to claim the moral high ground over our decadent and uncaring capitalist system. While Nazism’s dogma of racial superiority is apparent in its barbarism, socialism, on the other hand, claims to have the best interests of every citizen at heart. After all, what kind of sociopath doesn’t care about equity for all people? Socialism can, through its generosity with the possessions of others, claim the mantle of morality while sweeping its history of bloodshed and tyranny under the rug.
It is a grave injustice that, between Nazis and socialists, only the 13,000,000 industrialised murders* committed by the Nazis are accepted as a self-evident refutation of the legitimacy of that ideology. Why are the 75,000,000-110,000,000 deaths** from repression, engineered famine, ethnic cleansing not considered enough of an argument to consign forever socialism’s broken promises to the dustbin of history? Why is that ‘not real socialism’?
Socialism pretends that everybody will benefit from the confiscation of private property by the state – but what about those who don’t want to give up the businesses and land they’ve worked so hard to own and maintain? Quite simply, they will be executed; as they have in every other socialist regime. Business owners and private landowners in our service economy would most assuredly face the wall, as did the landholders of every previous agricultural economy to suffer a socialist takeover.
But the bourgeoisie have no more to fear from a socialist regime than do socialist revolutionaries themselves. No one is more in danger from socialism as its activists, most of whom history shows are liquidated by their newly-crowned regime when their usefulness expires. In a sense, I have said all that I have because I love socialists and communists; I want to see them give up their wrong-headed beliefs that will get them killed if they ever get what they want.
Let us make no mistake: socialists deserve to be treated with as much scorn as do Nazis, and we have neglected our civic duty by failing to do so. The Cold War may have ceased in 1991, but the pernicious ideas that first took root in 1917 pose no less of a threat to our society. As we have successfully ostracised anyone who would dare raise their hand in salute of a fascist ideology, so must we relentlessly run out of public spaces any who would so much as speak a word in favour of socialist principles.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/socialism-deserves-the-same-revulsion-as-nazism/
*****************************************************Sanity is winning the TERF wars
Feminists versus trannies
Four immovable words have become emblematic of a welcomed cultural reset taking place in the West – namely, what is a woman?
Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s inability to answer this question set tongues wagging several weeks back.
The dominance of Lia Thomas over female competitors in the NCAA national championship 500-yard freestyle event sparked further debate about the boundaries of gender.
USA Today’s decision to decorate Rachel Levine with a ‘Woman of the Year’ award only added fuel to the fire – as did Twitter’s decision to lock The Babylon Bee’s account for seeing the funny side and dubbing Levine ‘The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year’.
Britain has had its own ‘What is a woman?’ moment in the recent debate over Emily Bridges’ place – or lack thereof – in female cycling.
And it is from Britain that Hadley Freeman, writing for UnHerd, has declared that the wheels have finally begun falling off the bandwagon of trans ideology. She writes:
‘Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case.’
Citing a string of events similar to that above which led even Prime Minister Boris Johnson to decry the presence of ‘biological men’ in women’s sports, prisons, and change rooms, Freeman heralds the dawn of a new day:
‘Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists … pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition, and any open acknowledgement of female biology.’
‘This was the week the spell began to break,’ she writes, adding that she sensed all along that sport would be the catalyst for our collective return to sanity:
‘When historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped Western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates.’
‘Toxic’ is an apt descriptor. The TERF wars have been short-lived but brutal, for feminists especially. For those unaware of the acronym, TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist – a rather opaque way of describing those who believe women are women, and men are not.
Astute cultural observers foresaw the events of recent weeks. In 2020, Christian historian Carl Trueman noted in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self that the LGBTQ+ movement is not as coherent as it appears at first glance.
The union of these assorted letters, he argues, ‘Is not the result of any intrinsic affinities shared by its component parties but an alliance of historical and political convenience rooted in a shared sexual iconoclasm.’ So while the L and G assume the fixed nature of gender, the T and Q reject biology altogether.
This is no small thing. Trans ideologues will not rest until gender categories are effectively erased and gender identity is seen merely as software that can be uploaded into any human body. Team reality, on the other hand – and traditional feminists in particular – see the female body as central to the female experience and identity.
Both teams cannot win. Like it or not, this one is a zero-sum game.
And while the war rages on, truth now has the upper hand, thanks in large measure to four simple words. Liberal Senator for South Australia Alex Antic discovered the power of those words this week, and the results were, as you might expect, glorious. [Antic said that radical gender theory has ‘seeped into our institutions’].
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/sanity-is-winning-the-terf-wars/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*****************************************
12 April, 2022
Biden said: "We will take Russia back to the 19th century"
Map of Russia in the 19th century:
https://vk.com/wall-201898594_9006
Biden actually said that Putin is trying to return Russia to the 19th century. I doubt that even Putin is that ambitious****************************************************
The White House pushes irreversible transgender therapies for children to appease the radicals, but parents are terrified by what gender ideology is doing to their daughters
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary accused Republican lawmakers of 'engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,' and exploiting them.
'Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country's mental health crisis,' she said, 'Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.'
Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?
No, she means 'gender affirming care' that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching.
As I've written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.
For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use.
But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration.
Psaki said, 'Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.'
There is, in fact, no proof that 'affirmative care' improves the mental health of gender dysphoric youth long-term—much less that its interventions are 'life-saving.'
An outstanding recent paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy is only the latest to expose the poor empirical basis for these treatments with minors.
It's a must-read paper for any policy maker, parent, or psychologist grappling with this fraught question.
The authors state, as if with a sigh: 'The evidence underlying the practice of pediatric gender transition is widely recognized to be of very low quality.'
Activists often exaggerate the suicide risk to gender dysphoric minors—as well as the mental health efficacy of these treatments—in order to coerce parents into acceding to the interventions.
But as the authors point out: 'The 'transition or suicide' narrative falsely implies that transition will prevent suicides. [N]either hormones nor surgeries have been shown to reduce suicidality in the long-term.'
That the Biden administration would peddle an activist talking point with no solid factual basis signals how desperate it is to please the radical flank of its supporters.
That is too bad.
Leaders who mollycoddle the activists quietly corrupting nearly every institution of American life fool themselves that they are merely paying a tax.
They don't realize it's a ransom, and that those who demand it will never be satisfied until they have despoiled every American institution.
And much worse in this case: they encourage irreversible harm to children.
In an address chock-a-block with fictions, perhaps Psaki's most surprising was the notion that unlike the 'economy, COVID' and the 'country's mental health crisis,' the risks gender activists now pose to our children is not a 'kitchen table issue.'
It is - she means - the sort of thing that excites Twitter, not normal Americans.
In Psaki's worldview, then, Americans are not shaking their heads at their talented daughters, wondering if they ought to bother helping them train in a sport.
Nor does she think Americans are desperately worried about what radical teachers are pushing on their kids at school—from racial essentialism and division to phony gender science about their bodies and identities.
But in the real world, Americans are very, very worried about these things.
I've been privileged with a special window into their terror: an inbox full of thousands of desperate parents who write me daily of their teen daughters caught in the grips of a sudden transgender epiphany.
And Ms. Psaki, I can promise you this: given the widespread availability of medical gender treatments, on demand, without therapist oversight and often without requiring parental consent - that is not merely one of that family's concerns.
It is all that family is thinking about. Every minute of every day—dear God, how can I save my little girl from doing harm to herself?
America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15.
As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis.
The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters.
Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it.
All across this country, loving parents now find their custody threatened whenever they greet their teen daughter's gender identity announcement with anything other than hosannas.
Teachers, social workers, and therapists are quick to call social services, on the grounds that anything other than immediate 'affirmation' of the new identity is child abuse.
Again, I am in touch with many parents in precisely these circumstances, now fighting to retain or regain access to their daughters.
Their only sin, in many cases?
Dropping their daughter off to a therapist who seemed nice.
Any of these parents would gladly pay a hundred bucks a gallon for unleaded gas to get their daughters to safety.
A mom whose teen daughter is suddenly clamoring for 'top surgery' would take her chances with COVID in a heartbeat.
Hell, she'd sign up for an unmasked tour of the Wuhan Institute for Virology—if she could only shield her children from the people who'd prefer to push gender ideology than doing their actual jobs (much less respect the curtilage of a family).
Parents will hold their noses and vote for any politician that gets this right.
When you threaten our children, it's amazing how little we care about Build Back Better.
Pity the politician who doubts that.
**********************************************
LGBT Left Is Aggressor in Culture War
Last week, reporter Christopher Rufo released video footage of top Disney employees vowing to inject their radical LGBTQ agenda into children’s programming.
Disney producer Latoya Raveneau told an all-hands meeting that her team works to push a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” in programming aimed at kids and sought to add “queerness” to such content.
Disney corporate president Karey Burke announced that she was the mother of “one transgender child and one pansexual child” and that she would try to achieve a quota system whereby half of all Disney characters would be LGBTQ or people of color.
Disney diversity and inclusion manager Vivian Ware stated that Disney’s beloved theme parks would be eliminating any mention of “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.” This prompted a well-deserved firestorm for the Mouse House.
Disney has long been left-wing on social issues, but in the aftermath of ginned-up controversy surrounding Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which protects small children from indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity, an angry coterie of employees pushed management to signal fealty even harder.
So Disney’s brass did, announcing that they opposed the Florida bill and then turning over the company to its most radical contingent.
And people reacted. #BoycottDisney began to trend on social media. We at The Daily Wire committed to spending $100 million to develop children’s content that would be safe for kids—content dedicated to traditional values, where parents wouldn’t have to worry about prescreening content for messages about nonbinary 5-year-olds.
The left—caught with its hand in the kiddie jar—immediately swiveled and accused the right of initiating this culture war. Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times lamented that she felt terrible for Raveneau, who, after all, was just “step(ping) up to defend the company’s queer friendliness, only to become a national object of right-wing fury and disgust,” and whose injection of LGBTQ propaganda into children’s content was “sweetly anodyne.”
CNN hosted Washington Post transgender columnist Charlotte Clymer, adding the chyron “LGBT COMMUNITY LATEST TO BE CAUGHT IN CULTURE WAR.” The takeaway, according to the social left, is that anyone who defends traditionalism in child-rearing—or anyone who simply doesn’t want children turned into targets of sexual propagandizing—is the true cultural aggressor.
This is a transparent lie. And it’s a lie that won’t redound to the benefit of those who seek radical change.
If they wish to pose the rubric of gay rights against parental rights, gay rights are likely to suffer. If they wish to suggest that LGBTQ freedom extends to teachers initiating children into sexual conversations without parental permission, parents are unlikely to go along for the ride.
For decades, the social left has made inroads by arguing that they simply want to be left alone. The right, by contrast, has argued that the left’s agenda is far broader, that the left demands cultural celebration of its sexual mores and that it will stop at nothing to remake society in order to achieve its narcissistic goals.
Disney’s latest foray into the culture wars proves that the right was correct, that the left’s stated agenda was a lie and that its “not-at-all-secret” agenda targeted the most vulnerable Americans.
Disney shows no signs of backing away from the extremism its all-hands meeting unmasked before the world. And other corporations are following Disney’s lead, pushing wild left advocacy instead of catering to the broadest possible market.
For too long, Americans have planted their heads firmly in the sand, hoping that the forces of the free market would militate against the cultural hijacking of corporate institutions. Instead, corporations built by entrepreneurs have been hijacked by woke employees and a feckless managerial class.
The blowback will be real, and it should be real. And if that means parents swearing off Mickey Mouse, increasingly they will.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/06/lgbt-left-is-aggressor-in-culture-wars
************************************************Mississippi's mainstream abortion law
Jeff Jacoby
Sometime this spring, probably in late June, the US Supreme Court will hand down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, an appeal testing the constitutionality of Mississippi's 2018 law banning elective abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Upholding that ban would dramatically change America's abortion rules. In Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases, the high court established an unfettered right to abortion until a fetus is "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb," which doesn't occur until around weeks 22 or 23 of gestation. If Mississippi's law is upheld, viability would lose the constitutional significance with which Roe invested it. States would no longer have to wait until a pregnancy is past the halfway mark before they could disallow abortion on demand.
Ardent supporters of abortion rights are appalled by the thought that Roe might be curtailed. They have characterized Mississippi's 15-week ban as a calamity for women's freedom and autonomy. The measure has been labeled "radical" (by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), "not reasonable or moderate" (The New Republic), "severe, extreme, and unconstitutional" (Catholics for Choice), and "a near-total ban on abortion" (National Abortion Federation).
But most Americans don't see it that way, and neither do most other countries.
According to a new Wall Street Journal poll, nearly half of US voters — 48 percent — support a ban on abortions after 15 weeks (with exemptions to protect the health of the mother), while only 43 percent are opposed. On the other hand, when respondents were asked about a law banning abortions after six weeks, just 42 percent were in favor, while 50 percent were opposed.
The Journal's findings are roughly in keeping with what years of survey data have consistently shown: On the whole, Americans want abortion to be legal early in pregnancy or when there is a medical emergency, but they are against an unlimited right to abortion once a fetus is further along.
Contrary to what many abortion rights advocates may believe, an abortion limit of 15 weeks does not amount to a "near-total ban." Indeed, it would not affect most abortions. The overwhelming majority of abortions in the United States — 93 percent, by the estimate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — are performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. If the high court sustains Mississippi's law, it may put a dent in the extremely permissive abortion regime that Roe authorized, but it won't make abortion in America rare or illegal.
It would, however, make America less of an outlier among its international peers.
The United States is one of only seven nations that permit elective abortion past 20 weeks of gestation until fetal viability. As Chief Justice John Roberts remarked during the Dobbs oral argument in December, "we share that standard with the People's Republic of China and North Korea." (The other four are Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Vietnam).
Of the 198 countries whose abortion laws were analyzed in a 2014 study by the Lozier Institute and a 2017 report by the Guttmacher Institute, roughly two-thirds allow abortion for specified grounds. These vary widely, from the very restrictive — for example, in cases of rape or incest — to the broadly permissive, such as mental well-being or socioeconomic concerns. The remaining countries, about 60 in number, permit abortion for any reason, but only for a specified gestational period, which in most cases is 12 weeks.
Among the nations of Europe, 13 countries prohibit abortion on demand entirely and allow a pregnancy to be terminated only in "exceptional cases," according to the European Centre for Law and Justice, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Dobbs case. Of the remaining 34 countries where abortion can be accessed without having to give a reason, "eight states permit it only through the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, Estonia through 11 weeks, and a further 20 states through 12 weeks."
In short, the abortion laws of nearly every European country impose stricter gestational limits than the 15-week standard of the Mississippi law.
Obviously, the constitutionality of Mississippi's statute does not depend on the findings of opinion polls here at home or on how abortion is regulated abroad. But surely it is appropriate to note that Roe has made it impossible to enact gestational limits that reflect what the mainstream of Americans appear to support and that line up with what most of the Western world considers appropriate. A win for Mississippi wouldn't mean that the United States has lurched to an outlandish extreme in how it regulates abortion. It would mean that it no longer does so.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26142/mississippi-mainstream-abortion-law
*********************************************UK: ‘Biological males’ should not compete in women’s sports – Boris Johnson
“Biological males” should not compete in women’s sports, while women should have access to single-sex spaces in places such as hospitals and prisons, the Prime Minister has said.
Boris Johnson said it seems to him to be “sensible” that biological males should not be able to participate in women’s sporting events.
And, in what appeared to be a nod to controversial guidance issued by the equalities watchdog earlier this week, he said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which are “dedicated to women”.
I don't think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that's a controversial thing... but it just seems to me to be sensible
Prime Minister Boris Johnson
During a visit to a hospital in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, he said: “I don’t think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that’s a controversial thing… but it just seems to me to be sensible.
“And I also happen to think that women should have spaces, whether it’s in hospitals or prisons or changing rooms or wherever, which are dedicated to women.
“That’s as far as my thinking has developed on this issue. If that puts me in conflict with some others, then we have got to work it all out.
“That doesn’t mean that I’m not immensely sympathetic to people who want to change gender, to transition.
“It’s vital that we give people the maximum possible love and support in making those decisions.
“But these are complex issues and I don’t think they can be solved with one swift, easy piece of legislation. It takes a lot of thought to get this right.”
Mr Johnson made the comments after being asked about the decision not to include transgender people in the Government’s proposed ban on conversion therapy.
The Government has faced fierce criticism over a series of U-turns last week on the promised legislation and whether transgender people would be protected by it.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/biological-males-not-compete-women-133319408.html
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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11 April, 2022
'My boyfriend dumped me because I got breast implants'
I think this woman's experience may not be too unusual. He may have chosen her not only because her shape was OK to him but more importantly he may have not wanted her to be attactive to other men. He was insecure about being with an attractive woman out of fear that some other man might suddenly snatch her off him. That is also one reason why some men take up with an overweight woman. It is also why many married men want their wife to dress modestly while on outings
Lizzie thought Michael was 'The One' - but when she unveiled her new boobs, his reaction was surprising.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable about my boobs. While all the other girls were developing curves at high school, I remained as flat as a board. Kids teased me at school that my lack of boobs and hips made me look like a boy.
I grew up feeling unfeminine and so self-conscious
Now in my late twenties, I have tried not to let my flat chest get to me – and to enjoy the benefits of my androgynous figure, such as being able to wear almost any clothes I want – except for low-cut tops, which made me look ridiculous.
Last year I met a guy who didn’t seem to mind my lack of breasts – someone who liked me for me.
As with all my previous relationships, I felt uncomfortable the first few times Michael and I got naked together but he seemed to enjoy himself and he told me he thought I was beautiful.
Michael was smart, funny and well-travelled. He had his own café and was passionate about art and coffee and music. He was also hot as hell and I was hooked
I started thinking ahead to what it would be like to live together, get married, and even have his babies. I was absolutely smitten.
About six months into our relationship I inherited some money when my grandmother passed away. She and I had always been close and she had been sick for a long time.
Before she died, she said to me, “I don’t want you to do anything sensible with the money I leave you, do something fun and irresponsible – something that’s just for you.”
When she died, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I booked my breast augmentation surgery for the following month. I didn’t tell a soul.
I was nervous the day of my surgery but the doctor was wonderful and when I woke up and saw the results, I was thrilled. I didn’t do anything over-the-top but the fact I could now wear a B-cup was thrilling to me. I was so happy with my new shape.
I laid low for a couple of weeks, telling Michael I had the flu, before we saw each other again. When I turned up to his house, just wearing a t-shirt and jeans – I could see he was shocked and confused.
I told him what I’d done, and apologised for lying to him. I said it was something I just had to do for me. Michael gave me a hug and told me I looked great, but that he thought I looked beautiful before too.
He said he was never concerned about my flat chest or gave it a second thought, and that he had been attracted to me as a whole person. He also said he felt sad I thought I had to do that to feel like a real woman. “But if that’s what you needed to do to be happy, I’m happy for you,” he said.
We hung out that night and watched a movie, and then we went to bed. I was still feeling tender and Michael said he didn’t want to hurt me while I was recovering, so he didn’t want to have sex. I thought he was being considerate, but I could also tell something was a little bit off.
We saw each other a few more times after that but I could tell something had shifted between us. There was a distance that wasn’t there before. I dreaded bringing it up because I felt like I could sense what was going to happen, but eventually I asked Michael what was going on.
Michael said he’d been putting off talking to me about what was bothering him because he was hoping he could get past it – that if he just waited everything would magically be all right.
“I just can’t seem to shake this feeling though,” he said. “I thought you were this strong, confident, kick-arse woman who was comfortable in her own skin and unapologetic about who she is. That was what attracted me to you in the first place.
“The fact that you needed to surgically alter your body in order to feel acceptable to the world – who, by the way, couldn’t give a shit what you look like – tells me you’re not the woman I thought you were and I wish I could but I just don’t think I can get past that.”
Michael said he wished I hadn’t got the implants in the first place and things could go back to how they were before, but that maybe this was just showing us early on that we’re different people.
I joked that there are thousands of guys who wish their girlfriend would get implants, and he kissed me and said he wished he was one of them.
I never considered having the implants removed or trying to convince Michael to stay. This was clearly a deal-breaker for him and I don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t accept me and the decisions I make about my own body, but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had used Granny’s money for a nice holiday somewhere.
But I made my choice and I’m standing firm (pardon the pun). The wounds have healed and I’m still thrilled with my new body. As soon as the emotional bruises abate I’ll put my heart back out there too.
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'If you can creep them out, they leave you alone': Woman reveals clever ways she deals with men who harass her
A self-described 'villain coach' is teaching women how to 'traumatize men' who harass them on the street by scaring them off with off-putting remarks, creepy threats, and bizarre overshares.
Kitti, 26, says that nearly every day, a man she doesn't know will approach her out in public and catcall her, hit on her, or make other unwelcome advances — and she knows that many other women have similar experiences.
She also knows that a police 'no' often does nothing to fend off these men, who can be persistent and demanding.
So now Kitti gives them a reason to back off by TKing, Tking, and even threatening to sell their information to organ harvesters.
'If you can creep them out, they leave you alone,' she says.
She said she was always good at dealing with bullies, so she's applied her tactics to these men
In one video, which has been viewed 5.5 million times since it was posted last month, Kitti records the moment she is walking outside when a man approaches her and asks if he can give her his phone number.
'You don't want to give me your number ... because anyone who's in my phone gets contacted by organ harvesters,' she replies. When the man asks what that is, she tells him, 'It's people who take your organs and sell them.'
'Yeah, never mind,' he says.
She made similar organ harvesting comments to a group of men who began talking to her on her walk last April.
In yet another video, she fires back a guy who calls after her, asking if she had a boyfriend.
'Not one that's alive anymore!' she says.
To a man that asked her to hang out, she said: 'People don't like to hang out with me because I like to dig up dead things and carve them up.'
Kitti has also shared her tips for what can tell men who tell them to smile.
'I'm afraid I don't have anything to smile about,' she suggests, adding that women should then go into a laundry list of problems, including: 'One of the people I owe a lot of money to just came to collect. I'm minus a pinky toe.'
'One of my hemorrhoids just popped and for the last couple of days, pus and blood has been caking between my a** cheeks and every time I walk I feel like there's sandpaper in my a**,' she goes on.
'All of my hair is falling out. I have impacted molars. I found out I've been mispronouncing depaccio my entire life... who was gonna tell me it's despacito?
'A tree recently fell on my house and killed my grandfather,' she says. 'I just ran of meth,' she adds.
Kitti's deadpan delivery had delighted TikTokers, who have called her a 'hero.'
Speaking to BuzzFeed, Kitti said that she was always good at creeping out bullies, so she has applied those same tactics to men.
'They're always just super confused and put off. They don't necessarily feel proper rejection, so they don't get all emotional. Instead, they choose to leave the interaction. Men will always ask, "Why not?" when rejected anyway, so I give them a solid preemptive reason.
'We femme-presenting people and women don't get the luxury of saying "no' politely since it can get us murdered. We always have to give a reason when we reject advances anyway, so why not have fun and teach them a little lesson about approaching strangers?' she said.
'I'm creepy because it does not escalate the situation and makes unwanted advancers leave with just a wee bit of trauma, which hopefully will stick with them the next time they think to bug a pretty girl. If I'm the villain in their narrative, then that's fine by me.'
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Racism row erupts at Sky News after senior reporter claimed its Ukraine war coverage was 'too white'
A racism row has erupted at Sky News after a senior reporter claimed its coverage of the Ukraine war was 'too white'.
Inzamam Rashid complained to Sky News boss John Ryley that 'not a single person of colour on or off air has been to cover the crisis'.
But the channel's award-winning special correspondent Alex Crawford has hit back at Rashid – who was taken off air for three months after breaching Covid-19 rules to attend anchorwoman Kay Burley's 60th birthday in December 2020.
In an email to colleagues, Crawford wrote: 'It is not quite correct to say there has been 'no single person of colour either on or off screen' in our coverage of Ukraine. My Chinese mother and grandmother would be appalled at their daughter/granddaughter's heritage being dismissed.
'And I'm pretty sure Neville Lazarus, who is currently in Odessa; Zein Ja'far, who is heading back for his second stint in Ukraine; plus Dominique Van Heerden, just recently back from her trip, would all take exception to your assertion.'
Other staff at Sky News are also infuriated by Mr Rashid's claim.
One told The Mail on Sunday: 'I don't think we should be taking much guidance from someone who brought the company into disrepute.'
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Staggering moment Australia's top health expert fails to define what a 'woman' is - sparking a scathing reaction: 'If I asked my kids they would know the answer'
Australia's top health bureaucrat was left stumbling over his words when asked to define what a woman is.
Liberal Senator Alex Antic posed the question to the Department of Health bosses, including chief Dr Brendan Murphy, during Senate Estimates on Wednesday, and the room fell silent.
'Can someone please provide me with what a definition of a woman is?' he asked. 'Department of Health - (what is the) definition of a man, definition of a woman, anyone? Basic stuff.' He then directed the question to Professor Murphy who laughed as he struggled to find the right words.
'I think there are a variety of definitions,' he said.
Mr Antic then requested a simple answer.
'Perhaps to give a more fulsome answer we should take that on notice.'
Mr Antic then questioned why the health secretary needed to take notice on such a simple question.
'It's a very ... uh ... it's a very contested space at the moment,' Dr Murphy continued.
'There are definitions in how people identify themselves so we are happy to provide our working definitions on those.'
The Senator labelled his response 'hilarious' and said it was 'the best thing I've seen thus far' in the hearings.
Speaking about the incident with 2GB's Ben Fordham, Mr Antic said he'd been asking departments around the country if they could give a simple definition of a woman but so far hadn't had any luck. 'I think this problem is endemic in the bureaucracy,' he said.
'It is utterly ludicrous to suggest there isn't a single definition and that that definition isn't an adult female, why can't they say it?'
The senator speculated whether authorities were afraid to provide a definition in fear they may offend some people and cop backlash.
'People who five years ago would have been quite comfortable answering a simple question now seem to almost look over their shoulder and wonder who's coming for them, it's extraordinary,' he added.
Mr Antic said he was looking forward to hearing back what the health department's definition was, while host Fordham said his primary school aged children could have easily answered the question.
'I've got kids in primary school I'm pretty sure if I asked them tonight they'd know the answer but anyway, apparently our health secretary needs a month to come up with an answer,' the radio presenter said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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10 April, 2022
60 years after the first breast enlargement, LIZ JONES despairs that women are still having surgery that damages their minds AND their bodies
This woman is missing the elephant in the room. She is not taking account of what most women know: Big breasts are attractive to men. And being attractive is a huge part of a woman's life. Without being attractive to men, her chances of children and a normal family life are very small. So women without big breasts do what is needed to attract men.
The thing that rather surprises me that quite clumsy implants that look quite un-natural (not dangly at all) still seem to be proudly displayed and are apparently still attractive to many men. See below:
So I think that women who have an augmentation probably do better for it but I suspect that it may often not be a tie that binds
Sixty years ago this spring, there was a huge — literally — shift in women's bodies. For such a fundamental change, it happened almost by accident.
Timmie Jean Lindsey, a 29-year-old mother of six, went into hospital in Houston, Texas, for a routine operation to remove a tattoo from her breast.
Her two surgeons, Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin, persuaded her to undergo a new procedure, which until then had only been tested on dogs: breast implants. She went from a B to a C cup.
It was curious timing, given the procedure took place within weeks of another memorable occasion in the history of womankind — May 19, 1962, when the world was given an eyeful of a woman deemed the pinnacle of female beauty, whose breasts were all her own.
Marilyn Monroe sang happy birthday to President Kennedy in a near-transparent cobweb dress that exposed her bra-less embonpoint.
She was the envy of every woman in the world, desired by every man.
Her breasts were natural. They were bountiful. They hung, as they should, creating an almost triangular outline that, if it were the hands on a clock, would be telling the time at precisely 20 minutes to four.
But as an ideal they were soon, because of a scalpel wielded 1,500 miles away, to become extinct. An outline to be ashamed of, altered, excised, deemed not good enough.
Reflecting on the consequences of her procedure, Timmie said some ten years ago: 'I was not wise enough to realise the magnitude of it.'
The 1960s are remembered as the decade when women were released from so many shackles. Unwanted pregnancy, thanks to the Pill.
Backstreet abortions, thanks to legalisation. Giving up work after having children. The expectation of marrying young.
But breast augmentation was waiting in the wings to spread as rapidly as a stain on a shirt when someone has been stabbed in the chest. Which, in a way, we have.
It is the modern-day equivalent of foot binding — mutilation of the female body to fit an unrealistic beauty ideal.
Because for all those adverts that litter the internet and glossy magazines, which fool women into believing cosmetic surgery is easy, as simple and thoughtless an act as dyeing your hair, the reality is so very different.
It's an operation from which it takes weeks to recover and it carries risks galore — not to mention the fact that those implants will likely need replacing after a decade or two.
It's not only a physical mutilation, but a mental one, convincing you that your breasts, those implicit symbols of femininity, can somehow be deficient. That a surgeon's knife is the only thing that can 'fix' you.
That high, hard, perky breasts are somehow more desirable than your soft, natural female form.
Millions of women have had breast implants since Timmie went under the knife. The most popular form of cosmetic surgery in the world, in the UK alone some 7,000 women a year have their breasts altered.
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Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signs bill making it a FELONY for doctors to give children medication to alter their gender
Alabama's Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill on Friday making it a felony for doctors to assist minors in gender transition.
'I believe very strongly if the good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl,' Ivey said in a statement on the bill.
'We should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life. Instead, let us focus on helping them to properly develop into the adults God intended them to be.'
The Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act makes it a felony for doctors to perform medical procedures or prescribe medication to minors who want to alter their appearance, gender or delay puberty. The criminal penalty would be up to 10 years in prison.
The bill passed the Alabama House 66-28. The American Civil Liberties Union said the bill was the first of its kind to make trans healthcare a felony and promised to challenge it in court.
The legislation also purports to ban puberty blockers, which it says can cause infertility and other health risks.
Democrats who opposed the bill said it contradicted Republican principals of small government.
'This is not small government; this is not a conservative bill,' Democratic Rep. Neil Rafferty told the chamber.
But Republican Rep. Wes Allen likened the initiative to laws that prevent minors from getting tattoos or buying nicotine products.
'We make decisions in this body all the time that are to protect children from making decisions that could permanently harm them,' Allen said.
Last year Ivey signed a bill banning transgender youth from playing in sports that align with their gender identity.
The governor also on Friday signed a bill that would ban K-12 students from using the bathrooms and school facilities that do not correspond with their biological sex.
'Here in Alabama, the men use the men's room, and the ladies use the ladies' room - it's really a no brainer.
This bill will also ensure our elementary school classrooms remain free from any kind of sex talk. Let me be clear to the media and to opponents who like to incorrectly dub this the 'Don't Say Gay' amendment: That is misleading, false and just plain wrong. We don't need to be teaching young children about sex.'
The bill compels school personnel to alert parents if 'minor's perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor's sex.'
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday went off about Republicans who she said are 'engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids.'
'Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country's mental health crisis,' she said, 'Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.'
Psaki continued: 'Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.'
Last week, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill banning irreversible gender reassignment surgery for minors.
In February, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to conduct child abuse investigations into parents who get their children healthcare to alter their gender.
A Texas judge temporarily stayed such investigations, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton insisted they were legal and would continue.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen states now ban transgender athletes from participating in girls' sports. The fresh wave of anti-trans legislation came as University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who transitioned from a man to a woman before senior year, won a Division I title.
But last month Republican governors in Utah and Illinois vetoed legislation banning transgender youth from sports, arguing the issue did not pose a problem in their states. Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear did the same.
An average of 1.8 percent of high school students identify as transgender, according to a CDC study from 2019.
Most Americans say trans athletes should have to play on the teams that match their birth gender. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 62 percent of Americans said that trans athletes should play on teams corresponding with their biological gender, while 34 percent said they should be able to play on teams that match their gender identity.
Amid the uptick in laws regarding health care for trans youth, the Department of Justice issued a memo last month to state attorneys general reminding them of their 'federal constitutional and statutory obligations' to protect them.
'State laws and policies that prevent parents or guardians from following the advice of a healthcare professional regarding what may be medically necessary or otherwise appropriate care for transgender minors may infringe on rights protected by both the Equal Protection and the Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,' the letter warned.
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Biden Directs ICE To Drop 'Low-Priority' Immigration Cases
The Biden administration is seeking to clear potentially hundreds of thousands of deportation and asylum cases pending before immigration courts, an unprecedented move that could significantly reduce the current backlog of 1.7 million cases.
In a memo dated Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement directed its lawyers to review cases and try to clear those considered low priority under enforcement guidelines that the administration established last year. The American Immigration Lawyers Association estimates that there are at least 700,000 such cases — about 40 percent of the court backlog.
The agency would not provide an estimate of how many cases would be cleared under the directive or how long it would take. Previous administrations have moved cases off the court docket but not on such a broad scale. During the eight years of the Obama administration, more than 166,000 immigration cases were administratively closed, according to court data.
The court backlog has ballooned to the largest ever, causing yearslong delays for immigrants seeking asylum and other forms of relief. One reason is that the coronavirus pandemic has delayed proceedings. A significant number of cases were added during the Trump administration, especially after a surge in undocumented migrants crossing the border in 2019. That administration also reopened tens of thousands of cases that had been removed from the court docket.
The effort to reduce the backlog comes as the Biden administration prepares for what could be the largest increase yet of undocumented migrants crossing the border. The surge is expected to coincide with the end of a pandemic-era public health order that has given border officials the authority to quickly expel undocumented migrants.
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America's new vulnerability in resources
Beginning in the Clinton years, policymakers and economists of both parties celebrated the shift of the United States to a “post-industrial economy.”
In a speech titled “The Challenges of Success” to tech executives and investors in San Francisco on April 28, 1998, the neoliberal economist Larry Summers, then deputy secretary of the treasury, celebrated the allegedly immaterial information economy: “The twin forces of information technology and modern competitive finance are moving us toward a post-industrial age,” he said. Silicon Valley and Wall Street, not manufacturing or agriculture or oil and gas, symbolized the “new economy.”
Summers listed examples of this new economy—“AIG in insurance, McDonald’s in fast food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news.” Let backward, old-fashioned East Asians and Germans make cars and TV sets and telephones and computers; America will sell insurance and infotainment to the world.
In the post-industrial economy, large firms regulated and supported by government and negotiating with organized labor would give way to spunky startups founded by overnight tycoons, according to Summers in 1998: “Look right here in California, where millions are invested before revenues, let alone profits come, and anyone with a good idea can make their first million before buying their first tie.”
A quarter-century later, when it turned out during the COVID pandemic that the United States had ceased making many essential drugs and medical supplies and was dependent on autocratic, anti-American China for many of them, the same Larry Summers was apparently shocked to learn that many things are no longer made in America. On March 21, 2020, Summers tweeted: “Thoughts at the end of a long week: Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?”
Cold War II may finally discredit the fallacies of the free market globalist economists who shaped the consensus among both Democrats and Republicans for three decades.
Following COVID-19, Cold War II may finally discredit the fallacies of the free market globalist economists like Summers, Paul Krugman, and Glenn Hubbard who shaped the consensus among both Democrats and Republicans for three decades. Appropriately enough, for a financial and online business services superpower, the United States responded to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine with more or less the arsenal described by Summers in 1998—“AIG in insurance, McDonald’s in fast food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news.” The United States waged financial warfare against Putin’s Russia, American credit card giants cut off Russian consumers, and, in a devastating blow, McDonald’s pulled out of the Russian Federation.
It may be that financial and economic sanctions are enough to force Russia to retreat or negotiate. But Germany, the major NATO economy after the United States, is dependent on Russian oil and gas, which Germans continue to buy, partly subsidizing Putin’s military. At the same time, the world’s largest nation and its biggest economy (in purchasing power parity terms), China, which has surpassed the United States in many areas of manufacturing if not yet software, is in a position to help Russia endure Western sanctions as part of a common crusade to drive the United States out of their regional spheres of influence.
Even the beneficiaries of U.S. dependence on China—Silicon Valley, universities, Wall Street, “green” technologies that need Chinese imports—are being forced to acknowledge that we still live in a material world in which countries can be great powers even if they do not dominate global banking and insurance markets, on the basis of mining energy and minerals, growing crops, and making physical things. Russia and Ukraine together are responsible for more than a quarter of global wheat exports. Russia and Belarus together produce nearly half of the global exports of potash, a critical nutrient used in fertilizers, while Russia produces more than a fifth of the ammonia exports used in global agriculture.
For its part, China dominates global production of many essential minerals, both directly—producing 63% of rare earths and 45% of molybdenum—and indirectly, by investing in lithium mines in Australia, platinum mines in South Africa, and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A few decades ago, the United States mined and refined many of the minerals it now imports. But thanks to cheap labor abroad, excessive environmental regulations at home, and the fantasy of the post-material “information economy,” the U.S. government allowed corporations to shut down many American mines even as other firms shuttered American factories. The energy analyst Mark P. Mills describes the result:
As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. …
More relevant, as the United States Geological Survey (USGS) notes, are strategic dependencies on specific critical minerals. In 1954, the U.S. was 100% dependent on imports for eight minerals. Today, the U.S. is 100% reliant on imports for 17 minerals and depends on imports for over 50% of 29 widely used minerals. China is a significant source for half of those 29 minerals.
Along with free market globalism, the environmental movement has crippled and endangered the economies of the United States and its allies. Rejecting the asceticism of the old Malthusian left that called for voluntary poverty, edgrowth, and population decline through anti-natalism, establishment environmentalist leaders like Al Gore and his European counterparts have optimistically claimed that existing technology permits a rapid “green transition” from fossil fuels and nuclear energy to solar, wind, and hydro power, with no need to lower Western living standards or cripple what remains of Western industry.
But according to experts on global mineral production who belong to SoS Minerals, in a letter delivered to the British Committee on Climate Change:
The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric [in the UK] by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper.
This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and 12% of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry. …
Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.
There is not enough cobalt, neodymium, or lithium being mined and refined in the entire world today for Britain to meet its green transition goals in the next generation. And Britain has only 67 million people. The United States has 330 million. The world has nearly 8 billion. Do the math.
“Clean” energy is not clean. No less than natural gas and oil extraction, extracting the minerals required for solar, wind, and hydro power equipment requires massive mines and destruction of local landscapes and ecosystems. For pointing out this obvious fact, the left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore’s documentary Planet of the Humans was denounced by the organized green lobby, and Moore himself has been canceled by the left.
While some democracies like Australia, Canada, and the United States have significant mineral resources, many of the countries with large mineral resources and reserves are autocracies or fragile postcolonial regimes: China (gold, tin, and bauxite, used to make aluminum), Indonesia (nickel, tin, gold), and Russia (oil, gas, nickel). Half of global cobalt reserves are found in one country—the Democratic Republic of Congo. Substitutes for some of these minerals may be discovered or synthesized. But in other cases, natural deposits of elements that are essential to an advanced industrial society may give particular countries enormous economic windfalls.
During and after the first Cold War, many Westerners assumed that capitalism was associated with democracy and liberalism, and communism with autocracy. But economies based on resource capitalism or a single commodity crop (“banana republics”) have so often been ruled by dictatorships or oligarchies that the phenomenon is known as the “resource curse.”
To excel in global manufacturing, a country has to have a well-educated workforce, while innovation requires a high degree of intellectual (if not political) freedom. But if a government or economic elite derives its income simply by selling other countries the products of its mines or farms or ranches, what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call an “extractive” regime, it has no incentive to educate most of the population or respect their rights and every incentive to enserf or enslave the miners or agricultural workers. And if the route to personal political power and wealth in a nation lies through control of the nation’s oil fields, mines, or agricultural estates, ambitious individuals will be tempted to dispense with cumbersome elections and to seize power and resources directly through assassination and coup d’etat.
We Americans should recognize this pattern in our own history. The “original sin” of the United States was not slavery or racism; it was plantation agriculture. The Southern planters—oligarchs who raised first tobacco and then cotton for export—did not care what race their unfree workers were, settling on African and African American slaves only after experiments with exploiting Native American labor and European indentured servants had failed. And as Barbara Fields and other scholars have observed, Southern racism was formulated and enforced to rationalize labor exploitation in the plantation system, both before and after the abolition of slavery.
Far from being “backward” or “premodern,” the 19th-century Southern planter oligarchy, like the theocratic monarchy in 21st-century Saudi Arabia, was a product of modernity. As Britain and the Northern United States industrialized, the demands of their factories for Southern cotton grew and enriched the lords of cotton, just as global industrial development has enriched the monarchs and military dictators of various contemporary petrostates. Southern planters and Saudi princes, like Russian oligarchs, recycled the wealth they gained from the industrial regions by importing manufactured goods and vacationing and buying luxury real estate abroad.
This kind of elite “co-dependency” is built into industrial capitalism. The more advanced the technology becomes, the richer become those who, through fair means or force and fraud, control the appropriate industrial inputs and energy supplies. The genius of the creative entrepreneur in the diversified industrial economy who improves the quality of life of working class people with innovative goods may indirectly create corresponding fortunes in poor countries with deposits of essential minerals ruled by hereditary cliques or military dictators.
A green transition, then, will not necessarily lead to a liberal democratic world. Rather, it may simply ensure that petrostate oligarchs will have to share Swiss banks and swank London and New York neighborhoods and New England prep schools with counts of cobalt and lords of lithium, whose yachts and mansions may be as impressive as those of Jeff Bezos or Putin’s fellow kleptocrats. Generations of politicians from liberal democracies who are yet unborn may find themselves forced to flatter the president-for-life who controls a large bauxite deposit or the junta whose country sits atop a lot of samarium.
Last but not least, great powers like the United States that have decided to forgo entire areas of manufacturing as well as resource mining and refining may find that cornering the global market in insurance, investment banking, and adolescent action movies may not help them in the global resource competition to come.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-coming-resource-wars
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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8 April, 2022
The Fallacy of the 50/50 Date
I agree with most of what the woman below says. I certainly never even think of asking a woman to pay. The big exception is her liking for expensive restaurants. I find that the more expensive the restaurant, the worse the service.
I get best service in ethnic restaurants (Vietnamese, Korean, Indian etc) plus more varied and interesting food. And I nearly always take women to such places. And I avoid snooty women that way too
A small caveat perhaps: The only women I get on with are highly intelligent so maybe they are more aware of what really matters rather than being distracted by superficialities. I have NEVER taken my very bright present girlfriend to anything fancy. We met in a suburban coffee lounge. She has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Belgrade!
See her below
A woman's 50% share is not a man's 50% share because, on average, women make less per dollar in salary. On average, a woman of my genetic background makes 60 percent of every man's dollar. So, if a meal costs 100 dollars, and a man asks me to split the bill 50/50, that means that my "$50" expense is equal to $60 of his dollars, and his portion is actually $50. I had to work 40% harder and more hours to earn the same $100 that he makes. The woman pays more with time and money when dates are split 50/50. It is not fair, and it is not equal.
In addition to this, women endure the hidden costs of dating that men take for granted. While men can shower and go, the average woman makes several salon appointments and goes shopping to make herself presentable because we understand that men are "visual creatures."
News flash; women do not roll out of bed looking as we present ourselves on dates. We could show up to dates bare-faced, zits exposed, in sweatpants with armpit hair, and greasy head hair, and crusty feet, but we do not. If we look good, it took lots of silent effort.
Before she even arrives at the date, the woman has likely spent: $350 or more. Here are a few hidden costs of dating for women:
Hair (Blowout): $120
Gel Nail Manicure: $45
Pedicure: $35
Dress: $109
Makeup: $20
Transportation: $40 (Gas and Parking)
Just as men want to be spared the details of our beauty regimens and the associated costs, we would like you to be quiet and swipe the card when the check comes.
Itemizing expenses on a date is in bad taste. Men would cringe to hear: "I paid $120 for my hairstyle. I paid $45 for my gel manicure." etc. We understand this. So, we do not speak on it, however, it is a lot to absorb financially.
Men should understand the economics of dating before asking a woman to pay for her food. Plan so that you do not get "sticker shock." Be kind, considerate, and appreciate the effort she silently put forth into making herself beautiful to you. Pay for the date.
2. Being a Cheapskate Robs You Too
Did you ever notice that you may need to flag the waiter down several times for service when you go to less expensive restaurants? Do you notice that servers in lower-tier restaurants generally do not take pride in their jobs? Do they seem aggravated and have no problem showing their frustration? Maybe the glasses have fingerprints, or the silverware is less than clean. Perhaps the food is still frozen and unevenly cooked. The customer service is lacking because they want to get you in and out.
When you pay more and opt for a more expensive restaurant, the service, the food, and the general experience are better. The servers are more highly compensated. Many are in study to be managers in the hospitality field. They care. The food is fresh and pulled from local farms instead of shipped in frozen containers and microwave heated, then transferred to your plate.
Some men think that getting a woman to “pay her share” or opting for a less expensive restaurant is helping him to save money. It is not. Being cheap robs you too. You get what you pay for. Save money until you can take her somewhere memorable. Who knows, you may have your first food orgasm.
It is also important to note that "home-cooked meals" are creepy first dates. It is very unsafe and grounds for assault or rape. Dates should be public.
If you do your research and ask around, you may be pleasantly surprised by your experience and new opportunities. It will be enjoyable for both of you.
3. Asking a woman to pay for half is immature
I can immediately tell that a man is inexperienced if he does not understand the economics of dating and is a cheapskate. With more years behind me than ahead of me now, I do not have time to entertain inexperience. It is a hard pass for me when a man cannot foot the bill which I can afford on my own.
Conclusion
Even if the date turns out not to be great, please keep in mind that a woman does not owe you sex in exchange for a meal. She does not owe you a relationship either. As mentioned before, she has already paid before showing up. It is a mutual exchange of time and energy, and resources.
Dating is an exercise that should be done in a comfortable, safe environment. In choosing the venue and paying the man is simply facilitating a meeting wherein he and a woman are bargaining their futures together.
Make sure the experience is worth every coin because happiness is priceless.
Do not negotiate the cost or quality of dates. Please do it for her and yourself.
Seize the day!
https://medium.com/tcg-by-mbmm/the-fallacy-of-the-50-50-date-bb6da72c1c59
**************************************************GOP Rep Says People Should Hit a Certain Age Before Making ‘Life-Altering’ Decisions About Gender Identity
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, from Colorado, said Friday that children should be required to reach a certain age before they make life-altering decisions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
“We require people to be 21 to purchase alcohol beverages, and 21 to purchase tobacco products,” Boeert wrote on Twitter. “Why is it so unreasonable to require people to reach a certain level of maturity before making life-altering decisions about their sexuality and identity?”
Last Thursday, both the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Child Traumatic Stress Network released documents on “Transgender Day of Visibility” promoting “gender-affirming” healthcare for minors.
The day before, Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey signed a series of bills, one of which, Senate Bill 1138, prohibits minors from underdoing sex reassignment surgey, as Townhall covered.
Senate Bill 1138 states that “a physician or other health care professional may not provide gender transition procedures to any individual under eighteen years of age."
In a letter to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Ducey explained that this type of surgery is irreversible and has a lasting impact on a person’s life.
“S.B. 1138 delays and irreversible gender reassignment surgery until the age of 18. The reason is simple, and common sense – this is a decision that will dramatically affect the rest of an individual’s life, including the ability of that individual to become a biological parent later in life,” Ducey wrote.
Lawmakers in Idaho also created legislation that would outlaw “gender-affirming health care” for minors.
Republican State Rep. Bruce Skaug, who sponsored the bill, told the House State Affairs Committee that children experiencing gender dysphoria should undergo mental health treatment rather than gender affirming treatment.
In addition, he said that children are too young to be making decisions of this magnitude that could alter the course of their lives, NPR-affiliated Boise State Public Radio reported.
“If we do not allow minors to get a tattoo, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, sign a legal contract, why would we allow them to go through these physical mutilations because of their feelings at the time,” he said. “It’s a bill to get proper treatment and to prevent them from lifelong, permanent decisions that will make them sterile and mutilate their bodies.”
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The White House Is Pushing Puberty Blockers for ‘Trans Kids.’ It’s Relying on a Problematic Study
The Biden administration promoted the use of puberty blockers for transgender children by citing a study from an LGBT group funded in part by a manufacturer of the controversial drugs used in gender reassignment.
In statements commemorating "Transgender Day of Visibility," the White House and Department of Health and Human Services cited research from the Trevor Project to support the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and sex-reassignment procedures in children seeking to change genders.
Two of the Trevor Project’s donors, AbbVie and Allergan, make drugs and medical products used in the medical gender transition process. The charitable foundations of both companies gave at least $50,000 to the Trevor Project, according to a review of tax documents and the Trevor Project’s website. The Trevor Project did not disclose the funding in its research.
The Biden administration’s support for "gender-affirming" care, the progressive buzzword for gender transitions, comes as conservatives push to stop the prescription of hormones and puberty blockers to children. Texas governor Greg Abbott (R.) has called on the state’s child welfare service to open abuse investigations into parents who give puberty blockers and hormones to children. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R.) subpoenaed AbbVie and drug maker Endo Pharmaceuticals, claiming both companies improperly promote the use of puberty blockers in transgender children.
The Trevor Project study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and cited by numerous news outlets, claimed that teenagers with access to drugs and procedures to change genders were less likely to have depression and suicidal thoughts. The organization polled nearly 12,000 transgender and nonbinary youth, offering gift cards to some participants. In citing the study, HHS said "early" use of the drugs was "crucial" to the well-being of transgender children.
AbbVie makes Lupron, a drug designed to treat premature puberty that is sold off-label to transgender children. The company also sells Androgel, a testosterone booster used in the female-to-male transition process. Allergan makes materials used in gender reassignment procedures.
Though the medical gender transition industry is growing rapidly, some researchers say puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children have not been studied enough to ensure their safety.
A group of scientists, including a physician who has taken part in clinical research for AbbVie, wrote in a 2019 letter published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that the therapies could cause sterility, sexual dysfunction, and cardiovascular problems. The researchers also said that limited data from people who have undergone gender transitions "fail to demonstrate long-term success in suicide prevention."
The Biden administration’s endorsement could pave the way for broader acceptance of the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy in children. The White House said in its fact sheet on Transgender Day of Visibility that children who identify as transgender have "the right to access gender-affirming health care."
Drug companies have ramped up funding for LGBT groups and transgender research in recent years. A group of Stanford researchers who released another influential study this year endorsing hormone treatments received funding from Pfizer and Arbor, according to a report from the Daily Caller. Pfizer sells estradiol, an estrogen hormone used by males transitioning to females.
Pfizer is a sponsor of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT rights organization that was also cited in the HHS document touting treatment for transgender children. The document also cited research from the Endocrine Society, a medical group that has endorsed the use of puberty blockers for children seeking a gender change. AbbVie, Pfizer, and other drug companies that make drugs used in the gender transition process are corporate liaisons for the Endocrine Society. AbbVie gave $20,000 to the Endocrine Society in 2020.
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/white-house-pushes-puberty-blockers-for-trans-kids/
**********************************************UK: Has the transgender bathroom question finally been answered?
Debbie Hayton
As Keir Starmer still struggles to tell us what he thinks the word ‘woman’ means, some much-needed common sense has been injected into the transgender debate. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has published guidance for providers of single-sex and separate-sex services: in short, it says bathrooms and domestic abuse refuges can be single sex in certain circumstances. This is welcome news for women – and for transgender folk like me.
For too long, lobby groups have ruled the roost in this area, obfuscating language and denying reality. And the inevitable howls of protest in response to this publication have already started. I can understand the upset and anxiety being expressed by other trans people who had been persuaded that they had the right to use services designated for the opposite-sex just because they wanted to. But the resulting free-for-all has led in part to the increased suspicion of trans people. That helps nobody, least of all trans people.
Instead the guidance offers comfort and security to trans people. It reminds everyone that nobody can be excluded on the basis of their biological sex unless it is a ‘a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’. Service providers, it says, need to demonstrate this and ‘balance the impact upon all service users.’ That includes trans people.
Trying to merge the rights of women and trans people together was never a good idea. It has satisfied nobody, and led to confusion that has fuelled an increasingly toxic debate. Women and transwomen are not the same and there are times when we need different services. Thankfully the EHRC is not only aware of that truth, but has had the bottle to point it out.
Without a hint of irony, the guidance explained that: ‘We have used plain English to help explain legal terms. This does not change the meaning of the law.’ The EHRC swiftly adds:
‘We use the term ‘biological sex’ because this is how legal sex is defined under the Equality Act for people who do not have a Gender Recognition Certificate.’
Maybe Starmer also needs to read this document before his next media interview? It might help him to stop fudging and start clarifying. Those making decisions about who can and can’t use their toilets are not helped by politicians engaging in political sparring; they need straight answers in order to do their jobs.
It’s also worth remembering amidst this angry debate that the EHRC has not changed the law. The Equality Act has been in place since 2010; paragraphs 26 and 27 set out the rules and give examples when providers can provide separate service for each sex or, ‘a service only to persons of one sex.’ The problem in recent years, though, is that confusion over language has led to uncertainty when it comes to separate services for women and men. That is why the EHRC’s use of the term biological sex is so important. Fear of being labelled as transphobic – and possibly losing funding as a result – has led to biology being displaced by feelings.
The guidance goes on to make it clear that:
‘The exceptions outlined in this guidance therefore do not depend on whether or not an individual has a Gender Recognition Certificate.’
Once again, this could not be clearer. Separate-sex and single-sex services are permitted because men and women have different biology; that is not affected by a legal fiction created under GRA. Thank goodness that the EHRC is willing to point this out.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/has-the-transgender-bathroom-question-finally-been-answered
************************************************Oklahoma lawmakers pass bill to make performing an abortion illegal
Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.
Oklahoma’s bill is just one in a raft of Republican bills to severely restrict or ban abortion, all timed before a widely anticipated supreme court case that disrupts nearly 50 years of established protections for abortion rights. If Oklahoma’s bill passes into law, it will take effect this summer.
“When [patients] hear this is happening, and probably will happen soon, they are in shock,” said Dr Iman Alsaden, medical director of Planned Parenthood Great Plains.
“The implications of all of this is there’s going to be a few states that are relied on to provide abortion care to people, and those people who do not live in those states will have to wait enormously long wait times,” said Alsaden. “You’re just looking at really making people jump through extraordinary hoops.”
More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas outlawed abortion after six weeks gestation in September 2021.
Since Texas outlawed most abortion services, Planned Parenthood Great Plains’s caseload of Texas patients has gone from about four dozen from September to December 2020, to more than 1,100 in the same three-month period in 2021. Demand from patients in Texas has been so great it has already displaced some Oklahoma patients, Alsaden said, who she has seen travel to Kansas for care.
Alsaden said Planned Parenthood Great Plains intended to challenge any abortion bans in court. However, the fate of any such challenge and others like it are uncertain.
Before former president Donald Trump took office, federal courts routinely blocked abortion bans. However, Trump was able to confirm three conservative justices, which tipped the balance of the supreme court to the right.
Since then, the supreme court has shown a willingness to severely restrict or perhaps overturn the right to terminate a pregnancy, even though the majority of Americans support legal abortion. A supreme court decision in a crucial abortion rights case is expected in June.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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7 April, 2022
Florida groom is moved to tears on his wedding day after future stepdaughter asked him to adopt her during a heartwarming first-look photo shoot
I am delighted to read this story. Stepfathers usually get a bad rap but good relationships between step-parents and stepchilden are not uncommon. I myself got on well wth THREE stepchilden, including two girls. And we are all still in affectionate touch, many years later
A Florida groom was moved to tears on his wedding day when his future stepdaughter asked him to adopt her and officially become her dad.
Adam Hansen, 30, had no idea the surprise his bride, Brianna, 27, had in store for him when they wed on October 29, 2021. Ahead of the ceremony, he took part in a heartwarming first-look shoot with her six-year-old daughter, McKinley.
He was already overcome with emotion when she saw her in her white tulle dress. He squatted down to give her a hug, saying: 'You look so pretty.'
McKinley then handed him a white gift bag containing a petition for adoption that Brianna had prepared ahead of time. His eyes welled up with tears as soon as he realized what he was reading.
Adam had always been a father figure to the little girl and had hoped to make it official after he married Brianna.
'If I'm becoming a Hansen today, it's only right that she becomes a Hansen too,' she told him. Adam apologized to McKinley for his tears, saying it was the 'only time' he would cry.
'Do you know what this means? It's our paperwork so that I can be your dad forever,' he explained. 'I would love to be your dad forever. I love you so much.'
'I was not expecting this,' he said as they shared a family hug.
Brianna opened up about the heartwarming moment on Instagram a month after their wedding, saying she has been 'so proud' to watch Adam 'evolve into this amazing man and father.'
'For so many months we held this little surprise in for Adam,' she explained. 'The bond that him and McKinley have shared from the very beginning of their relationship is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
'It was like their souls recognized each other. I believe she came in to this world with the title of Dad left blank for the sole purpose of Adam filling it.'
'I believe [McKinley] came in to this world with the title of Dad left blank for the sole purpose of Adam filling it,' Brianna wrote on Instagram a month after their wedding
Brianna also paid tribute to her husband, writing: 'Adam, thank you for showing us a life I told myself we may never get. I should’ve known this was God’s plan from the start.'
'The most beautiful moment the three of us will never forget,' she concluded.
The footage of Adam's wedding day surprise has since gone viral, and it was most recently shared on the Today show on Tuesday as part of the 'Morning Boost' segment.
'If you didn't think a wedding day could get better, how about that?' co-anchor Hoda Kotb said. 'Those adoption papers made it even more joyful and memorable for that incredible family.'
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REAL diversity: GOP governors could institute Diversity & Inclusion of thought in public schools, state bureaucracies—by hiring more Republicans
Whether they are policies aimed at restricting the teaching of critical race theory in public classrooms, or to take on public sector unions that have insulated public school teachers and state bureaucrats with tenured job security, Republican governors and legislatures have been no strangers to dealing with government employees — who they often do not see eye to eye with ideologically.
A 2016 survey by Education Week found that only 27 percent of teachers were Republicans versus 41 percent Democrat and 30 percent independents. In higher education, the advantage is more like 10 to 1. In civil service positions, the Democrats’ advantage is 2 to 1.
And that’s just in the government, but it is the essence of the problem that Republicans face: The GOP lacks representation in our nation’s institutions. In some cases, this might be because of employment discrimination. And for others, Republicans, for various cultural reasons, are less likely to seek to work for the government.
So far, many of the policies either seek to restrict what can be taught in classrooms, or to make it more difficult for government employee unions to engage in political activities — which typically favor Democratic candidates — essentially attempting to regulate outcomes via laws and other public policies.
But why don’t red states run by the GOP simply hire more Republicans to be teachers and bureaucrats and even things out a little?
One model Republicans could look toward are the current Diversity & Inclusion standards that have become a mainstay in human resource departments at public traded corporations. Everything from racial and gender hiring and content quotas are on the table. Hire more minorities. More women. More LGBTQIA. More representation in media for marginalized groups. And so forth.
Diversity & Inclusion, sometimes called Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, are just one among the many Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors that are now dominating private companies in America. By including these types of quotas, companies can gain more favorable access to credit and capital by gaining high ESG scores.
Even if those hiring quotas plainly violate the letter of the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act explicitly prohibits using race, sex or religion as a criteria for hiring, firing or promoting employees:
““It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer… to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or … to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Steelworkers v. Weber that preferences on the basis of race and sex in favor of women and minorities, which plaintiffs argued was reverse discrimination, were not a violation of the Civil Rights Act, in effect legalizing employment discrimination against whites and males.
Then Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who went on to become Chief Justice in 1986, blasted the ruling in his dissenting opinion: “Now we are told that the legislative history of Title VII shows that employers are free to discriminate on the basis of race: an employer may, in the Court’s words, ‘trammel the interests of the white employees’ in favor of black employees in order to eliminate ‘racial imbalance.’… Our earlier interpretations of Title VII… were all wrong.”
Here, the court was saying that reverse discrimination was okay — if it served the purpose of eliminating, in this particular case, “racial imbalance.”
So, what about eliminating political imbalance so we have Diversity & Inclusion of thought in government employees?
Here the Civil Rights Act, and most state civil rights laws, are silent on the question of employment discrimination on the basis of political party affiliation or ideology. This implies that hiring and firing decisions could conceivably be made with a political rationale, even more so than race or sex or religion, for which there is an explicit prohibition.
In other words, while a racial affirmative action program, even with the old Steelworkers precedent, could still be found to violate the letter of the law of the Civil Rights Act, a political employment standard is not even regulated under the Civil Rights Act.
So, what if a Republican governor or legislature instituted political hiring quotas so that state civil services and public schools were more representative of the body politic of that state? This could be done in a few ways: Hire more Republicans, fire more Democrats or do both until the political imbalances among public employees are eliminated.
Surely such a standard would be challenged legally, the result of which would resonate for years.
On one hand, political quotas in hiring or firing at the state level could be found to similarly violate the Civil Rights Act even though Congress never included politics as a means of employment discrimination. After all, the Supreme Court in 2020 read transgender, gay and gender identity discrimination into the Civil Rights Act in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. Or, the Court might be satisfied to strike down a political hiring standard perhaps under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection of the laws, and leave the Civil Rights Act out of it. That would be a ruling against political discrimination in schools or bureaucracy.
Or it might be upheld because states have a compelling interest in ensuring a politically neutral on balance civil service and public school system. That would be a ruling in favor of politically neutral government agencies that do not oppress political minorities.
Neither would be a terrible outcome.
In the meantime, just by raising the issue, states, particularly red states, would hire more Republicans — who similarly would be awakened to these imbalances — thus helping to restore political balance in classrooms and state bureaucracies. If Republicans want to take back institutions, particularly those in states they control, then what’s stopping them?
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Éric Zemmour: The anti-immigration insurgent reshaping the race for the French presidency
The suburbs, she says, feel like a foreign country, and France's streets are no longer safe for white women.
More and more young people are tuning in to these views, even though they are exaggerated. They provide a populist answer to the insecurity about employment and the future that many of the country's young are feeling.
"I definitely support Éric Zemmour," she says. "I think he's a very, very brave person, that everyone says he's a demon."
Mr Zemmour gained notoriety as a journalist and pundit, with a million viewers tuning in to his appearances on conservative news channel C-News.
He popularised a conspiracy theory called "The Great Replacement", which claims white Europeans are being replaced by Muslims from Africa and the Middle East.
If elected, Mr Zemmour has proposed a program of "re-migration" which would see a million foreigners deported within five years.
Such extreme views were once unacceptable and consigned to the toxic margins of French politics.
In the last election, in 2017, far-right politician Marine Le Pen campaigned on a similar platform. She spoke against immigration and Islam, but lost to the upstart former banker, Emmanuel Macron.
Ms Le Pen is standing again and, this time, is presenting a more moderate image that is winning over voters. She's coming second in the polls — and rising.
That's allowed space for Éric Zemmour's extremist views to take hold on the political extreme right.
One in three voters are now saying they will vote for a far-right candidate when the country goes to the polls this weekend.
If no-one wins an outright majority on Sunday, then there will be another election two weeks later between the top two candidates.
Many are predicting it will be the current president, Macron, going head-to-head with a re-energised Le Pen.
Thaïs D'Escufon says Marine Le Pen is too "soft". Her moderation is a "betrayal" of her voters, she says. Thaïs wants Éric Zemmour to win the election.
"He loves France and wants to defend it," she says. "I really hope he will be elected because people just say to him, 'Please save us".
Thaïs, from Toulouse, is one of a growing band of far-right influencers trying to win over apathetic young French voters.
While surveys show most young people are concerned about global issues such as climate change and the environment, they are not engaged by the presidential candidates, and many simply will not vote.
Participation rates have been falling precipitously in recent elections, with a third of eligible voters aged 18 to 25 failing to vote in 2017.
France's youth have traditionally thrown their support behind left-wing candidates, but at the last election many flocked to the right.
Thaïs has gained a following online for her extreme views. She was once part of the banned nationalist movement Generation Identity and has been convicted for "creating public disorder". Yet she persists, vehemently denouncing the laws that are designed to restrain hate speech.
"I want to defend my identity as a French person," she says. "This is considered you are a racist, the worst thing you can be, just for saying that you love your country and want to defend it."
In one YouTube video, she argues "white privilege" has driven much of the world's progress over the centuries.
And she continues to rail against what she describes as "mass immigration", despite no such program currently existing in France.
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Making Beethoven Woke
Perverting a great work of art to push counterfactual propaganda really is pathetic
For decades, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to revise operas to conform to their political agendas. They do so through wildly incongruous stagings that update the action to modern times and introduce progressive totems that would have been unfathomable to an opera’s original creators. Such directorial interventions left the libretto intact, however. Now even that cordon sanitaire between the structure of a work and an interpreter’s political preferences has been breached.
Beethoven has been a particular target for textual revision. In February, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosted a production of Fidelio, an Enlightenment paeon to freedom and to marital love. In Beethoven’s version of the opera, a wife disguises herself as a male prison guard to free her husband from a Spanish fortress; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fidelio became a Black Lives Matter critique of mass incarceration. A BLM activist is writing a doctoral dissertation on the Thirteenth Amendment and investigating corrupt “fascists” in the criminal-justice system. In retaliation, racist cops shoot him, and a racist warden of a supermax prison throws him into solitary confinement. The activist’s wife, unable to persuade any lawyers to take up her husband’s case pro bono, goes undercover as a female correctional officer in her husband’s prison.
This change from a male to a female disguise allows for a pleasingly homoerotic revision to the plot. In the original opera, a prison guard’s daughter falls in love with the new “male” employee, echoing Lady Olivia’s fruitless infatuation for the disguised Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In the Met Museum’s Fidelio, produced by Heartbeat Opera, the prison guard’s daughter is a lesbian; her black father encourages his daughter to court the new black female assistant. Of all the production’s revisions, this paternal matchmaking is the most counterfactual, given black working-class attitudes toward homosexuality.
In the current political and artistic environment, Fidelio was a Black Lives Matter manifesto waiting to happen. What made the Met Museum’s production noteworthy was that the revision did not occur exclusively through the staging; Heartbeat Opera rewrote the spoken dialogue as well. (That dialogue was delivered in English, while the arias and ensembles remained in their original German.) The activist’s wife complains that the “real conspiracy” was not the one for which her husband was detained but rather the “suppression of immigrants and people of color” in the U.S. The supermax prison contains people “whose only mistake was being poor and black.” The imprisoned activist rails against his black jailer: “You are complicit in a corrupt system that oppresses our people. I see in you a field Negro.”
The white prison warden reveals the depths of his racism by announcing that if the activist really “wanted to help his community he would tell them to stop burning down their neighborhoods and to pull up their bootstraps.” Such an invocation of personal responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy. None of these lines is related to the original libretto.
The only reason the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted Fidelio was the Black Lives Matter gloss. Without it, the museum’s leadership would have had no interest in the work. The production provided the museum with a racial-justice twofer, however, since opening night featured a post-performance discussion between five “social justice advocates” on how to dismantle “current systems of incarceration through the abolitionist movement.” The Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University sponsored the discussion. Such a panel may have once seemed tangential to the mission of an art museum; in the post-George Floyd era, such racial-justice advocacy has become central to curating and programming.
https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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6 April, 2022
It's reasonable for single women to avoid poor men
Jacqueline Atulip
There is a growing movement of men who resent women who expect and require men to spend their money in exchange for a woman’s time, companionship and courtship. I certainly will not place the blame squarely on men for this shift. The pervasive feminist ideology continues to deliver an extreme version of women’s independence that would deny both the presence and importance of a woman’s basic femininity, while glorifying and promoting a financial model where men receive the same benefits from women that they always received, at half the price. How sway?!
Yes, there are increasingly more women in the workforce than there used to be, but this doesn’t negate the fact that the average woman still expects and requires a man to be a provider. Whether or not he is the SOLE provider is a personal choice. Nonetheless, a woman respects, desires, and prefers a man with more resources and the men with the most resources will always have the most and best selection when it comes to picking a mate.
It’s not a superficial desire, it’s survival. If all men are created equal, I could just as easily love a wealthy one, as a “struggling” one, especially if I have to deal with the same relationship challenges from both.
When I have conversations about this with friends, associates, social settings, the entire group becomes divided. Without fail, insults, complaints, and derogatory comments always rear their ugly heads. Instead of accepting this as a fact, or even simply my myopic worldview, men almost always label me a gold digger or sarcastically wish me luck in my journey.
It makes a “financially struggling” man’s ego feel better about not being able to obtain a certain kind of woman by trying to convince her that she probably won’t be able to obtain the kind of man she wants, either. But for every New Age, hyper-liberal, forward-thinking “genderless” geared male, there are about 50 more men who are making the necessary money and are pursuing women with my exact philosophy, with reckless abandon.
If it works for the parties involved, why are you so disgruntled? Shouldn’t you be off somewhere trying to make more money so you don’t have to shed your “broke” tears about how transactional women are and how hard it is to find a woman who prioritizes your character over what’s in your wallet? Why not pursue the legions of women who wholeheartedly believe and support the notion of building with a man?
NEWSFLASH! Women who want financially successful and secure partners are not required to entertain broke men. If you believe that a woman will die alone and miserable, is the solution to lower her standards and settle for a life that she does not want? These women are already building a life that they want independent of a man. Contrary to popular erroneous assumptions, they are not sitting around filing their nails awaiting a knight in shining armor to come and rescue them from a poverty-stricken life. They are catching flights, eating well, shopping, building businesses, and more.
They want partners that match and supersede the standards that they already established for themselves. After they get married and decide to have children, they deserve partners that will be able to sustain this life should they desire to take a break and nurture their children and prioritize their families.
Desiring money is not vapid. We simply can not live without it. Convincing women that they are superficial and undeserving of a certain quality of life is low vibrational and irrational. Convincing the vast majority of women that they’ll never have the man that they desire is just a cover for the insecurity you feel as a man who can’t deliver what is being required or a woman who never thought to require and desire the same. Vilifying economic success or dismissing the importance of the role money plays in our daily lives does not impact the reality of how pertinent money is.
It’s bitter broke men who lack ambition, that would rather try to shame women about having standards and push the 50/50 paradigm that has severely damaged the dating pool. Instead of convincing women that don’t want broke men, why they should see the potential in a man and or struggle with him while he self-actualizes, why not just find a woman that wants to build with you? Or who shares a similar life philosophy?
The problem is that these men want the women who don’t want them and to that, I say, “women value men with resources. Make more of it or shut up.”
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Conservatives celebrate Musk's Twitter stake as 'WIN' for free speech
Billionaire Elon Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder, sparking celebration from conservatives who predict freedom of speech will be ushered back onto the platform.
"If Musk helps restore @Twitter to its free speech roots and moves it away from its left-wing censorship regime, it will be perhaps the most heroic and public-serving action I have seen a billionaire take in my lifetime," Claremont Institute senior fellow Jeremy Carl posted to Twitter.
Reports first surfaced Monday that the Tesla CEO bought a 9.2% stake in the social media company. His shares dwarf that of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has over a 2% stake in the company, and other shareholders.
Musk, who has described himself as a "free speech absolutist," now owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, valued at $2.89 billion based on Friday's closing price.
Twitter has long come under fire from conservatives and free speech advocates for censoring conservative viewpoints. The tech giant permanently banned former President Donald Trump from the platform in 2021, blocked the New York Post’s story in 2020 on Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop, and locked conservative satire site The Babylon Bee out of its Twitter account in March for awarding transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine a fictitious "Man of the Year" award.
Conservatives celebrated the announcement on Monday, urging for Trump’s return to the platform and lauding it as a turning point for free speech in big tech.
The purchase comes after Musk ran a public poll on the platform on March 25 asking: "Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?"
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-reactions-twitter-shareholder-stake
***********************************************Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey bans abortion after 15 weeks, introduces limits on gender reassignment surgery and bans transgender athletes from participating in school sports
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed bills into law Wednesday that banned abortion after 15 weeks, outlawed gender reassignment surgery for anyone under the age of 18 and put limits on sports participation for transgender girls.
The bill outlawing abortions past 15 weeks also contains a penalty for physicians who violate the law, as they would face felony charges and potential suspension of their licenses. The bill does not include exemptions for cases of incest or rape.
'In Arizona, we know there is immeasurable value in every life - including preborn life,' said Ducey, a Republican. 'I believe it is each state's responsibility to protect them.'
Florida lawmakers passed a similar 15-week abortion ban earlier this month that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign. Other states are considering similar bans or passing versions of a ban enacted in Texas last year that bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, which the Supreme Court has refused to block.
Bills targeting abortion and transgender rights have been popular with the conservative base in states where Republicans dominate but could be politically risky in a battleground states where Democrats have made significant inroads.
The Arizona abortion legislation mirrors a Mississippi law now being considered by the Supreme Court. The bill explicitly says it does not overrule a state law in place for more than 100 years that would ban abortion outright if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that enshrined the right to abortion in law.
Ducey is an abortion opponent who has signed every piece of anti-abortion legislation that has reached his desk since he took office in 2015. He said late last year that he hoped the Supreme Court overturns the Roe decision.
The president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona called the 15-week ban just the latest in a series of 'unrelenting attacks' on a woman's right to choose by Arizona Republicans.
But State Sen. Nancy Barto, the Republican sponsor of the bill, has said she hopes the High Court upholds Mississippi's law banning abortion after 15 weeks.
'The state has an obligation to protect life, and that is what this bill is about,' Barto said during a State Senate debate last month.
Meanwhile, Arizona joins a dozen other states with limits on sports participation for trans girls and becomes the third state to try and limit health care options for transgender teens.
Until two years ago, no state had passed a law regulating gender-designated youth sports. But the issue has become front and center in Republican-led statehouses since Idaho lawmakers passed the nation's first sports participation law in 2020. That law is now blocked in court, along with another in West Virginia.
Republicans have said blocking transgender athletes from girls sports teams would protect the integrity of women's sports, claiming that trans athletes would have an advantage. Ducey echoed that sentiment in his signing statement.
'The reason is simple, and common sense – this is a decision that will dramatically affect the rest of an individual's life, including the ability of that individual to become a biological parent later in life,' Ducey said.
He also inked a bill that requires all public schools and private schools that compete against them 'to expressly designate their interscholastic athletics teams based on the biological sex of the participating students.'
'Every young Arizona athlete should have the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities that give them a sense of belonging and allow them to grow and thrive,' he said regarding the bill.
Many point to the transgender collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas, who this month won an individual title at the NCAA Women's Division I Swimming and Diving Championship.
But there are few trans athletes in Arizona schools. Since 2017, about 16 trans athletes have received waivers to play on teams that align with their gender identities out of about 170,000 high school athletes in the state, according to the Arizona Interscholastic Association.
Critics said the legislation dehumanizes trans youth to address an issue that hasn't been a problem. Just 16 transgender high school athletes have received waivers to play on the team that aligns with their gender identity in the last five years. They said decisions about health care should be left to trans children, their parents and their health care providers.
'We're talking about legislating bullying against children who are already struggling just to get by,' Democratic Rep. Kelli Butler said during the House debate on the sports bill last week.
The Republican governors of Utah and Indiana this week vetoed bills banning transgender girls from girls sports, calling the issue virtually nonexistent in their states. Utah's Republican lawmakers overrode the governor's veto Friday, and Indiana lawmakers were considering doing the same.
New laws typically take effect 90 days after the legislature adjourns in Arizona, which would make this law effective by late summer if it is not successfully challenged in court.
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Why Joe Biden’s ‘billionaire tax’ is doomed to fail
The highest inflation in 40 years, Ukraine blunders and an approval rating at new lows. Joe Biden and the Democrats are facing a mountain to climb heading into this year’s midterms.
In an attempt to get his presidency back on track, Biden is trying to salvage his Build Back Better agenda with a new billionaire tax that will target America’s richest.
The proposals for the 2023 budget will attempt to create a minimum 20 per cent tax rate on the incomes of households worth $US100 million ($133 million). But Biden’s budget “Hail Mary” ahead of November’s midterm elections might already be doomed as he struggles to clear practical and political hurdles.
“This is effectively their last roll of the dice,” says James Knightley, ING chief international economist. “At the moment nationally the Republicans are ahead by some 3 or 4 percentage points and that would imply quite a heavy beating at those elections.”
The proposal is not just aiming to tax America’s rich more on their income but also to target unrealised gains on investments, which makes the proposal harder to execute and far more radical.
This widening means that shares that rise in value will be taxed even if the assets have not been sold. If the taxed person does not have the cash to pay the tax, they could have to sell assets. However, rich households will be able to spread out tax payments on unrealised gains. It makes the measures more akin to the wealth taxes that have divided the Democratic party between radicals and moderates.
Chris Krueger, a policy analyst at Cowen, says this will be an attempt to salvage Biden’s fiscal policy “in a great rebrand of Build Back Better into an inflation-fighting, supply-chain-fixing, deficit-reducing panacea”.
The White House estimates that 0.01 per cent of Americans would be affected by the tax, meaning that it could hit more than 30,000 people, rather than just the country’s 700-plus billionaires. The changes would force Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s two richest men, to pay an additional $US50 billion and $US35 billion in tax respectively, according to estimates for The Washington Post.
The Democrats risk losing their slim majorities in both chambers of Congress in the midterms, effectively paralysing Biden’s domestic plans. However, persuading his own party to back a budget including a wealth tax will prove tricky. In an attempt to win over the party’s stubbornly resistant moderates, Biden’s budget plans aim to reduce the deficit by $US1 trillion over the next decade. The White House hopes the tax targeting billionaires would raise $US360 billion over the next decade.
Knightley says it stands a much greater chance than previous attempts to introduce a tax on billionaires, but adds that “it’s still going to be a very slim probability”.
While the radical wing of the Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, has called for wealth taxes, a similar plan to hit billionaires last year fell apart after a backlash within the party.
The Democrats also have a razor-thin majority in the Senate, which is split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris being the tiebreaker.
Just one rebel can block the party’s plans. West Virginia’s moderate Democratic senator Joe Manchin has been a thorn in the side of the president’s Build Back Better plans, rebelling over the size of the spending and whether it would worsen inflation.
Manchin opposed the billionaire tax proposals last year, saying: “I don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.”
Paul Ashworth at Capital Economics says the “extremely radical” proposals are unlikely to win support. “This is never going to pass in a normal budget because that requires 60 votes in the Senate, which means 10 Republicans have to support it,” he says. “It could pass via reconciliation on a simple majority, but Democrats have struggled to get Manchin to support such a bill. Throwing in this tax-raising measure doesn’t change that maths.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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5 April, 2022
Everything the Left disapproves of is "hate"
Which is a superb example of seeing your own faults in others
We in the West are living in a world that more and more lacks any shared moral goalposts. There is no consensus at all on a range of issues from the desirability of quotas based on group identity, to abortion, to who can marry, to the worth of inculcating patriotism in school, to believing in the very notion of merit, to religion, to whether life in today’s West is the best that’s ever been on offer or a repository of the fruits of past evil-doing, all the way over to matters having to do with the need for strong borders and the nation state. Heck, big chunks of today’s population in the West purport not to know what does and doesn’t make someone a woman. The problem here is not just that people divide on all these issues and more. And it’s not just that the divisions seem to cleave countries ever closer to half-on-one-side and half-on-the-other carve ups. And it’s not even that one side on these debates has managed to capture most of the cultural institutions – the national broadcaster, the universities, the teaching profession, the vast preponderance of the legacy media and its journalists, the top public servants, most of the judges and even the upper echelons of the big corporations.
All that is are true, and lamentable. But the bigger problem than all those might be that there are no longer any shared first principles that allow people to debate such issues and try to resolve them. A legal philosopher friend of mine in the US suggests that this is why the language of ‘hate’ has become so pervasive. It’s because the notion of a sort of undefined hate, and of its being a bad thing, is one of the few remaining first principles that virtually all of us sort of accept. So one of the few remaining ways of winning arguments, or at least of keeping those on the other side quiet, is to throw around the charge of hate with gay abandon. (I don’t say most others would put the point exactly in those terms, but hey, I’m old-fashioned in my choice of phrases.)
Here’s the idea. If Jill is against transgender biological males – with all the massive advantages a male puberty, years of testosterone coursing through the body, muscle twitch speed, etc. give them – competing against biological females and ruining women’s sports, well don’t argue with her. Call her a ‘hater’. Or if Jack objects to quotas for good jobs or university places, even under today’s insidious guise of ‘diversity and equity’, well he must be a ‘hater’ too. Ditto anyone who wanted to stop self-styled refugees coming here by boat. And so on.
And wouldn’t you know it? One of the biggest threats to free speech in the West – and by that I mean the free speech of any of us who are not possessed of a progressive, inner-San Francisco set of sensibilities – is Big Tech and its incredible censorship of anyone to the right of, well, them. So if you hold, say, 90 per cent of the views that JFK held, or Bob Hawke held, or even Eleanor Roosevelt held, these Big Tech guys will feel free to censor and cancel you. Ending this pseudo-corporate oversight of speech has to be the biggest goal of any incoming Republican administration and Senate and House after the 2024 election. (And yes, I say this knowing our Prime Minister laughably does not believe free speech ever created a single job and hasn’t quite got his mind around such notions as ‘the presumption of innocence’.)
Now as some people think it is perfectly fine for Twitter to hush up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and to have cancelled indefinitely the account of former president Trump (and congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, and writer Alex Berenson, and the Project Veritas organisation, and James O’Keefe, the list goes on and on but only on the right side of politics I assure you) while leaving open those of such upstanding figures as the mullahs in Iran and the despots in China, let me point to a different example. Take the very funny US website Babylon Bee. It’s a conservative Christian site (full disclosure, I’m conservative but also an atheist, albeit one who read the whole King James Bible and loved parts of it). Not only is this site vastly funnier in a day than anything you’ll see or hear on the ABC over a ten-year period, it deals in biting irony and spoofs.
When the USA Today newspaper recently named Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health, the transgender Dr Rachel Levine, as one of its ‘women of the year’, the Babylon Bee the next day named Levine its ‘man of the year’. Funny, right? And if it offends someone, well that’s part and parcel of life in a vibrant democracy. I can attest to being called a lot worse things than that, over many years. But if you’re some San Francisco Big Tech employee this is just too much. Twitter immediately locked the account of Babylon Bee, despite its huge audience. Why? It was hateful said Twitter. Babylon Bee refused to apologise or take down its tweet. It remains banned. When Charlie Kirk noted that Levine spent 54 years of his life as a man and had had a wife and a family that too was deemed hateful and a violation of Twitter rules warranting censorship. When Tucker Carlson pointed out that what Kirk said was 100 per cent true, well, you guessed it. Hateful. Also suspended. This is bonkers, right? These jumped-up sanctimonious little twits on the US West Coast running Big Tech, hipsters who haven’t met a person since high school with political views to the right of Bernie Saunders, are willy-nilly censoring and cancelling people because of legal protections put in place a few decades ago to let the internet expand and grow. These have to be changed. There are plenty of options from amending or repealing Section 230 to forcing old phone company-type ‘common carrier’ rules on them to, well, nationalising them all. (Bad for efficiency and innovation, yes, but then at least the 1st Amendment would apply and the censoring would stop, a net win I think.)
Look, the US Pew Survey last month (and it is no friend to conservatives) found that 3 per cent of Americans sent 90 per cent of tweets. Under 8 per cent of the country is active on Twitter, and these people lean Democrat by a whopping +15 points. Worse, 92 per cent of all tweets were/are sent by 10 per cent of users. These active users lean left or Democrat by an incredible +43 points.
That’s two or three standard deviations to the left of the US’s political median voter, a bit like the crowd that votes for the mayor of Berkeley or the dean of a university’s women’s studies department. That’s the sewer of Twitter; that’s the outlet that scares our idiotic conservative politicians so witless (or more witless I suppose, to be accurate). And if you object to having lefty lunacy rammed down your throat? Apparently you’re a hater my friend. My advice? Embrace the term. Laugh at these morons.
And start fighting back, including by electing those who will.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/morality-through-the-lens-of-hate/
************************************************More on the conservative victory in the Hungarian election
The opposition laid the groundwork for its defeat in the final weeks of its campaign, latching onto claims of gerrymandering and voter fraud as pre-emptive strikes to invalidate its impending loss. The gerrymandering complaint, which says a 2012 redrawing of the electoral map favours Fidesz, would have been a bone of contention if the total number of votes won by the two sides had been remotely similar – but they weren’t. And rage about how a first-past-the-post constituency system, accounting for just over half of the seats in parliament (the rest are allocated via proportional representation) leaves Fidesz with a disproportionately high share of MPs forgets that this is an inevitable result of first-past-the-post. The system favours Fidesz, as the party with the largest and most evenly distributed voter base, in much the same way as it did the Tories in Britain at the last election.
More concerning are allegations of voter fraud, with photos reportedly showing burnt bags of opposition postal votes from Hungarians in Romania sweeping through social media last week. The allegations will need to be investigated, although it should be remembered that Orbán opened up postal voting to ethnic Hungarians in Romania precisely because his long-time championing of their rights means most support him.
Instead of complaining that the game is unfair, perhaps the United Opposition should consider whether the fault for defeat lies with themselves. Coalition partners are already tearing each other to shreds, with the ire rapidly focusing on their leader, Márki-Zay. This is unfair: gaffe-prone he may be, but when I met Márki-Zay last year, I was also impressed by his eloquence and conviction.
As I wrote here in January, the opposition’s biggest problem always lay in the fact that it was united only by hatred for Orbán and presented no positive alternative vision for Hungary. Its only clear policy proposal was ‘loyal’ alignment with the EU in an attempt to ‘restore democracy.’ An inability to see any problems in a pro-democracy movement affirming that there was only one correct democratic choice was depressing to witness.
Yet in the closing weeks of the campaign, the opposition hit on its most disastrous campaigning ploy of all, portraying Orbán’s relative ambivalence over the Ukrainian conflict as evidence of his ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Orbán’s feet-dragging on Russian energy sanctions and refusal to send arms to Kyiv led to suggestions that Hungary under his rule is a pro-Kremlin ‘Trojan horse’ in the EU.
The tactic backfired because most Hungarian voters know that although Fidesz manipulates the press to its own ends, Hungary isn’t Russia. Opposition politicians bewail their impression that rural voters ‘only receive government propaganda,’ as though it’s not possible for anyone in Hungary with internet access to find various anti-Fidesz media outlets with a single click online. And Orbán clearly enjoyed the even-greater polarisation brought on by references to Russia and Ukraine, saying in his victory speech that ‘we have never faced so many opponents at the same time,’ listing Brussels bureaucrats, international media, ‘and the Ukrainian president too,’ after president Zelenskyy openly criticised his stance at a recent EU Council meeting.
Messianic messaging about ‘restoring democracy’ and turning away from Russia was a bad choice because Hungarians – like most central Europeans – don’t want to be saved by their politicians. Twentieth-century communism left people in this region deeply suspicious of utopian political ideals. Most don’t want a socialist utopia, or a utopia of ‘European values’: they want pragmatism, positivity, and respect for tradition. Fidesz offers these by the bucketload. The United Opposition offered confusion, negativity, and a desire to sacrifice traditional social policies on the altar of EU liberalism. As long as it continues to do so, Orbán will keep winning.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/why-viktor-orban-keeps-winning/
******************************************************Trans rights extremists destroyed my career, friendships and marriage — but I will never give in
Multi-BAFTA-winning writer Graham Linehan can barely hold himself together. He tells me he hardly slept last night.
There are times he has 'howled in pain' and times he has 'raged'. Mostly, though, the genius behind the comedy series Father Ted and The IT Crowd is, he says, 'befuddled'.
For Graham, a vocal defender of women's rights, has lost everything he holds dear in life because he dared to challenge a 'subculture' of trans activists over the 'insane' (his word) belief that a person with a penis can be a woman.
He began to share his views with his 800,000 Twitter followers five years ago and the fury of the Left rained down on him.
Today his marriage is over, his once glittering career has been laid low and he is, as he says, 'thoroughly cancelled'.
Graham is giving his first interview about what he has endured in the same week a brave group of women's rights campaigners launched what they call 'the most significant female movement since the Suffragettes'.
In mobilising voters to quiz politicians about their stance on women's rights with the slogan 'Respect My Sex if you want my X', they are determined to put a simple and very direct question to our elected representatives: 'Can a woman have a penis?'
Indeed, such is the toxic nature of this febrile transgender debate, few want to be drawn into it, including Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who this week refused to say if a woman can have a penis as he floundered during a trans rights debate on LBC radio.
'It's mad,' says Graham. 'Politicians can't answer simple questions because these people [trans activists] have persuaded them it's complicated and difficult. It's not. All you have to do is stick to the principles we all know: the birds and the bees.
'People are terrified of getting into the debate, terrified of saying something wrong. If you disagree with them — if you say it denies biology or that it [the right to self-identify] is a gift to sex offenders and conmen who are able to completely erase any mention of who they previously were — they will try to destroy you.
'I'm not talking about trans people. I'm talking about trans rights activists. They tried to destroy me. They have taken everything from me.
'They took my family, my ability to earn a living. I haven't considered suicide but that's what I believe they want me to do.
'You know, I'm so cancelled that there were two shows called Cancelled and I wasn't asked to appear on either of them.'
Graham attempts humour but there is nothing funny about what has happened to this decent man.
During the five-year campaign waged against him, Graham, 54, has been condemned as a bigot, accused of harassment and Twitter has shut down his account. He has been reported to the police on three occasions.
Officers have turned up at his home twice. Family members have been attacked by trolls. His wife of 18 years, Helen, with whom he created the hugely popular comedy series Motherland, was threatened and her address released online. They separated during lockdown.
'It puts you under so much stress that you don't have room for anything else in your life. You don't have room for love or anything like that.
'You're just under attack all the time. I was f*****g bullied and beaten for years. I've been smeared by Pink News, The Independent and The Guardian — none of whom have ever asked for an interview, by the way.'
On one occasion, two years ago, after trans activist Dr Adrian Harrop accused Graham of transphobia, Graham and Helen awoke to find police at the door.
Dr Harrop has recently been suspended by the General Medical Council for sending offensive tweets to some of those who challenge transgender ideology online.
'We were lying in bed on a Sunday morning. I opened the door and let the policeman in. I said, "This is the guy who abuses women online. He threatens them and he's using you to intimidate me." The policeman shook hands and went off.
'My wife and kids were still in the bedroom. I just shook it off but my wife was incredibly upset. She was horrified the police had come to her house. It was confusing for her — and is for anyone close to victims — because she just didn't know if I was doing anything wrong.'
A week ago, Graham moved from a rented 'box' into the modest two-bedroom flat in Norwich where we meet after finally accepting that his 18-year marriage is over. There are photographs of his children on the wall but little else.
He used to live in a house filled with the stuff of family life, in the days when his comedies earned him a small fortune each year and he thought the good times 'were going to last for ever'.
'Basically what happened with my wife is I wouldn't shut up,' he says. 'They couldn't shut me up. I refused. I thought 'this is too important'. We're talking about women's rights.
'So they started going for her. They released her address online. They tried to get her animated children's series taken out of an animation festival in Ireland.
'They just turned their attention to her and, you know, it's frightening. The stress has its effect. You're losing opportunities, losing work, losing commissions, losing friends.'
He was once firm showbusiness friends with Matt Lucas and David Walliams — but not any more. Executives at leading production companies who used to fall over themselves to wine and dine him in London's swankiest restaurants won't so much as take his calls.
Then, earlier this year, he was offered £200,000 to 'walk away' from Father Ted The Musical by Hat Trick Productions, which produced the comedy series.
'It was going great. Neil Hannon [the Irish singer songwriter] has written some brilliant songs. We'd rehearsed it twice. Then they're saying I have to walk away from it and offering me £200,000.
'I was really close to taking it because I could use the money, but they're saying I can't even have any creative involvement. I can't even go to rehearsals. What the **** is going on?
'These people, I thought, were my friends. They were saying they won't be able to get financiers for it unless I step away. I don't think that's true. I think the truth is that, like every other company, they are being ordered about by their under-35s who all seem to believe this s**t.
'I've been called a bigot for years and no one stood up for me. Not Matt Lucas or David Walliams, who I made very famous. I directed the Little Britain pilot and they only got the meeting at the BBC because of me. Neither of them has had the guts to say "I know Graham Linehan and he's not a bigot".'
A few weeks ago, Graham heard the mother of one of the swimmers competing against Lia Thomas — who identifies as a woman but is a biological male — talking about how her daughter had said she didn't know what she was allowed to do if Lia came into the dressing room.
'She was in tears, saying she had to explain to her that she didn't have to put up with anything like that. She couldn't believe she had to have that conversation with her daughter in 2022.
'I heard that and thought, '**** it. I'm not walking away. This has nothing to do with my toxicity and getting people to fund the show, it's about women's rights. There's a huge failure of the celebrity class. If only one or two big names said something, it would change the whole debate. They're cowards. Despicable cowards.'
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Biden’s Regulatory Blitz a Massive Tax, Especially Harming Seniors and Low-Income Americans
Public attention is understandably focused these days on the inflationary effects of massive government spending, which has increased the national debt by $7 trillion in the past two years. No less dire are the repercussions of the Biden administration’s radical regulatory agenda.
The president’s 2022 regulatory to-do list includes 2,678 “active” actions, which exceeds by 35% the number of rule-makings in the Trump administration’s second-year agenda.
Some 200 of the regulations are designated as “economically significant”—i.e., regulations that are each expected to have an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more. These include more stringent standards on the “housing environment” of chickens, rear seat belt reminder systems, and the use of “healthy” on food labels, as well as new restrictions on medical insurance options.
None of more than 450 federal agencies track regulatory costs either cumulatively or in the aggregate. The most widely cited estimate pegs the annual private sector cost of compliance as exceeding $2 trillion.
Just the paperwork burden of red tape currently totals 10.6 billion hours annually. This bureaucrat-driven paper shuffling costs taxpayers nearly $80 billion annually—up from $25 billion in 2000.
Despite their enormous costs, few, if any, of the thousands of looming rules are necessary or beneficial. For example, the Biden agenda is brimming with global warming dictates that will have absolutely no effect on climate. Just this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed requirements for publicly owned companies to disclose purely speculative “climate risks.”
Also in the works are more than 100 other regulations governing the design and functioning of appliances. Household items that will be affected include refrigerators and freezers; clothes washers and dryers; furnaces and boilers; ceiling fans; pool pumps and heaters; air compressors; light bulbs; water heaters; dishwashers; battery chargers; televisions; ice makers; air conditioners; dehumidifiers; electric motors; pre-rinse spray valves; and air cleaners.
The Biden administration is dedicated to canceling the commonsense regulatory reforms instituted by former President Donald Trump, who reduced the volume of new regulations by 74.9% compared to the Obama administration (within the same period).
Among President Joe Biden’s targets: Trump’s long-overdue modernization of permitting procedures. Undoing that would drive up the costs of repairing the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and railways.
Dozens of the Biden regulations will encroach on state and local affairs, including how Americans fuel our cars and heat our homes, educate our children, zone our communities, and construct our roads. The feds are even prescribing qualifications of state employees who provide services to farmworkers and the criteria for evaluating career training programs.
Such excessive federal interference inhibits policy competition among states and subordinates the relative transparency and accountability of state- and local-level regulation. It also impedes the ability of both citizens and businesses to escape flawed policies by crossing state borders.
In introducing its regulatory plan, the White House boasted that federal agencies will “build on significant progress the administration has already made advancing our priorities and proving that our government can deliver results.” But this conceit about the federal government’s efficacy and beneficence is deeply misguided.
Regulations shift labor and capital away from innovation and job creation to compliance activities, including the purchase of equipment, process and product reengineering, retraining, and loads of legal advice. There are also indirect costs such as deferred research and development, heightened barriers to competition, and diminished job creation.
While a burden for all, regulatory overreach harms low-income families and fixed-income seniors the most. The billions of dollars in compliance costs translate to higher consumer prices that exhaust a relatively larger share of their household budgets.
Biden’s expansive regulatory agenda represents a massive tax. It is the worst course possible at any time—but particularly now, when regulatory escalation will exacerbate runaway inflation and inhibit recovery from the COVID-19 lockdown.
More broadly, this unconstrained federal power grab is antithetical to the limited government of America’s founding, its constitutional framework, and its republican ideals.
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Faulty domestic violence messaging: Australian study
Focusing on attitudes to women misses other factors leading to abusive behaviour. The abusers tend to be men who are violent offenders generally. So precise targeting is pointless. Violent behaviour in general needs to be targeted. And the only way of doing that is by heavy penalties -- mostly in the form of long and onerous prison sentences. About a third of ex-prisoners do learn from it and cease to offend
New research published in international journal Homicide Studies suggests there could be little difference between men who murder their partners and other killers.
But policymakers continue to place emphasis on behaviours and circumstances that “may not be as important as we think”, the study found.
Men who kill their female partners have long believed to be fuelled by gender factors like “power and control” and “entitlement”.
However, the report’s co-author Dr Samara McPhedran said socio-economic factors, upbringing and education played just as great a role — and were too often overlooked.
“Attitudes [towards women] are important; but have we reached a point in policymaking that we are so focused on addressing men’s attitudes to women that we are overlooking all these other factors that occur alongside that?” Dr McPhedran said.
The study — designed to get to the nub of Australia’s shocking domestic violence epidemic which sees a woman slain by her partner each week — used data from the Australian Homicide Project that interviewed more than 250 men convicted of murder or manslaughter.
She said traumatic experiences in childhood, including abuse and neglect, a lack of education, socio-economic differences were just as prominent.
“All these factors are very well known to contribute to homicide and are present with intimate partner homicides as other forms of homicide,” she said.
“When you look at the dialogue that’s been unfolding around intimate partner homicide, it has become very much focused around things like coercive control. And that’s important because, yes, coercive control is a part of this, but not to the exclusion of everything else. We were really surprised with the results that we got. And particularly what surprised us was just how similar in attitudes the different groups of men were.”
Dr McPhedran said the study findings should prompt an urgent education rethink.
“Have we focused too heavily on one set of responses at the expense of others? Because what our work is really suggesting is there is no one theory of men killing people that’s going to fit everyone. There’s no theory of men’s violence against women that’s superior,” she said.
Dr McPhedran said there was a danger of Australians dying who could have been saved.
“We want to maximise our chance of reducing violence or preventing homicide against women,” Dr McPhedran said.
Chief executive of Full Stop Australia Hayley Foster said there were a lot of generalised offenders who were responsible for “high repeat” incidents.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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4 April, 2022
Single woman says men shouldn’t get a second date if they don’t pay
I don't agree wholly with what the woman below says but I think she is right about paying on the first date. It is a test of financial competence and a woman can rightly be concrerned about that. If he can't pay on a date, how is he going to go on later occasions? She is simply being realistic, unfeminist though that may be. I have NEVER asked a woman to pay for anything when they are out with me
A woman who goes by Gabby admitted to testing men on first dates in order to determine if she’ll go out with them again.
“Here are some tests that I play on men in order to see if they;re going to be able to provide and protect me,” she stated on her TikTok.
She started with a widely debated social media topic, men paying on the first date, The Sun reported.
She asserted that the man needs to be paying on the first date, regardless of circumstances.
“And if he’s not then, goodbye,” she said dismissively.
The next test came with an example.
“This weekend I went out to the bar in Miami and I ran into someone that I had been following on Instagram. So we hung out for most of the night and then as we were leaving we both had Ubers going separate ways.
“His Uber came first. He was like ‘oh no I’ll wait for you.’ I was like ’you don’t have to wait for me,’ being kind, whatever. And this man gets into his Uber and takes off.
“It is 4:00 AM in Miami, Florida, where no good is to come. Everything is shut down and I’m standing by myself in the middle of the f*****g street? Immediately no, immediately no.
“If you don‘t care about my safety and making sure that I get into my Uber safely, you’re done. You’re done for. And then if you don’t go ahead and double-check that I made it safely? Bye.”
Gabby’s final test was relative to temperature.
When she‘s out, if a guy has a jacket or some type of outerwear on, she will claim to be cold to gauge if the guy would give her “the shirt off his back.”
“And if you don‘t you’re dead to me,” she concluded.
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The New Authoritarians
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, many Democratic voters felt baffled and betrayed. Pollsters and statisticians had predicted a decisive victory for Hillary Clinton, and her campaign had even attempted to elevate Trump because they thought he was the easiest candidate for her to beat. Conveniently, the Russian collusion narrative and allegations of white supremacy allowed the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign, and the media to avoid asking themselves how they had made such an enormous miscalculation.
In reality, their inability to predict or understand Trump’s appeal to voters was symptomatic of a class stratification that had been building for decades. From the 1970s until the 2008 financial crash, only the top 20% of the country saw its real income steadily grow while the real income of the bottom 80% stagnated. This top 20% consisted largely of affluent college-educated professionals who migrated to the Democratic Party, while large segments of the working class left it. In 1960, Democratic President John F. Kennedy lost the votes of white college graduates, but he won the support of white voters without a college degree by a 2-to-1 margin. For Joe Biden, the results were the exact opposite. In 1992, almost 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a degree, but the same was true of only 27% of Biden voters. By 2018 the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts were all held by Democrats.
The Democratic Party’s elitism problem corresponds to a long-standing trend among liberal professionals. For decades, they have been waging a thinly veiled class war against their perceived inferiors, which Christopher Lasch described in his 1994 book Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. One of Lasch’s central arguments was that managerial elites had abandoned public debate and their basic obligations to the majority. The economic divide between the Democrat-affiliated upper-middle class and the rest of the country has produced a highly insular intelligentsia increasingly disconnected from reality and aligned with corporate interests.
While the GOP was once considered to be the party of big business, the country’s top billionaire megadonors are split between Democrats and Republicans, and Democrats equal or outpace Republicans in donations from pharmaceutical companies, the tech sector, and Wall Street. The alliance between Democrat-led causes and corporate executives is sometimes portrayed as necessary for holding off an insurrectionist, anti-democratic threat from the right. However, it is this very alliance that has produced highly centralized government and corporate control while curbing free expression and open discourse.
After Trump’s election, many commentators expressed anxiety that his followers would plunge the country into far-right authoritarianism. Instead, it is the class of college-educated Democrats that now openly argues for the value of blind submission to authority and the elimination of personal freedoms. The trend Lasch wrote about in the 1990s has metastasized. It no longer poses a mere threat to democracy—it has become a full-fledged attack on basic democratic principles. Far from upholding civil liberties, the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Trumpism has itself exhibited many hallmarks of authoritarianism: suppression of dissent, demand for unquestioning obedience, and tight control over the flow of information. While scapegoating Trump supporters, a nexus of billionaires, woke corporations, public intellectuals, and Democratic officials have sparked the very descent into authoritarianism they claimed would emerge from the populist right.
The TV production of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on April 26, 2017, and was widely touted in liberal media outlets as a “prescient” “mirror” of the country under Trump. Journalists warned that the United States was on the precipice of becoming a Gilead-like dystopia where human rights would be nonexistent. Yet based on the domineering COVID-era behavior of the show’s own target audience, The Handmaid’s Tale appears to have been less of a warning to viewers and more of a handbook. Forced and coercive medical procedures, adoption of mandatory new garbs, censorship, and frozen bank accounts were central to the totalitarian state depicted in the novel and the show. In the end, this program found its real-world parallel not in autocratic moves from the right, but in liberal-approved measures like vaccine mandates, mask requirements of dubious medical value, restrictions on speech, and seizure of protesters’ financial assets—all of which were vocally supported by the affluent laptop class.
This is not simply a matter of hypocrisy. It is only by painting themselves as victims fighting against their oppressors that college-educated professionals can rationalize their own authoritarianism. The cult of victimhood conjures the specter of fascism, misogyny, or white nationalism in order to justify blatantly repressive measures. This is why, for example, the professional class consistently portrayed unvaccinated people as Trump supporters even though in many major cities vaccine passports mostly excluded Democrat-voting Black residents from indoor establishments.
Under the guise of combatting anti-vax extremism, woke liberal politicians embraced segregation and the exact kind of “systemic racism” they claimed to oppose. While considering themselves to be on the side of righteousness and rationality, commentators called for hospitals to reject unvaccinated patients, and some even celebrated their deaths. This is precisely the type of punitive, regressive tendency that progressives warned would be a consequence of Trump’s election.
It is also the inevitable outcome of a discourse that allows some of the most powerful people to depict themselves as helpless and persecuted. When The New York Times editorial board recently decried the culture of “social silencing” that has permeated most American institutions, some prominent progressives were incensed. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose election to Congress was powered by the most gentrified neighborhoods in her district) argued that only the left is subject to real censorship, and that concerns about cancel culture are merely “about protecting bigots from feeling embarrassed in public.”
Ocasio-Cortez seemed to forget that she has explicitly advocated for censorship herself on more than one occasion. In 2019, she called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “take down lies,” and in 2021 she pressured Apple and Google to remove Parler, a social media service popular among conservatives, from their app stores after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t think she’s calling for real censorship because she believes that the entire political opposition is composed of violent domestic terrorists bent on killing her. (She was not in the Capitol building on Jan. 6.) It is precisely her self-image as a perpetual victim that allows her to justify a tyrannical approach.
President Biden likewise encouraged Big Tech to deplatform anyone with alternative views about COVID vaccines by presenting the people sharing these views as literal murderers who were “killing people.” Sweeping censorship that amounted to digital book burning helped create an illusion of consensus even though many of the claims prohibited on social media (such as the fact that the vaccines did not prevent transmission) proved to be true. Far from private companies exercising discretion over how their platforms are used, these tech companies operated in coordination with the executive branch, meaning their clampdown on speech was in violation of the First Amendment. This is exactly the type of orchestrated silencing effort we were once told only happens under dictatorships.
Moreover, it is not social media but mainstream news outlets that have been the largest purveyors of “misinformation.” One accusation often made against Trump supporters is that they blindly and unthinkingly believe false claims. But during the pandemic this was consistently true of college-educated Democrats, who still hold the most skewed and erroneous views about COVID. In 2022, 48% of “very liberal” people still believed that COVID posed a “great risk” to children’s health despite widely available evidence that the risk COVID poses to children is miniscule. Between January 2021 and September 2021, the CDC reported that 280 children died with COVID (later the CDC would admit that it had inflated its total death numbers by almost 25%).
According to the latest available data (from 2015-19), flu and pneumonia killed more children annually. Heart disease, firearms, drowning, and motor vehicles all pose a much greater risk to children than COVID. Believing that COVID is a “great risk” for kids, justifying child mask mandates and school closures, is exactly the kind of persistent scientific illiteracy of which journalists accuse Trump supporters.
College-educated Democrats have also expressed growing support for the national security surveillance state. In response to Tucker Carlson and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s dissenting views about the war in Ukraine, for example, the hosts of The View suggested that the Department of Justice should conduct a McCarthyite investigation comparable to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
While decrying local police and virtue signaling support for Black Lives Matter, many progressives have embraced powerful agencies that have unchecked power and a history of civil and human rights violations. In 2017, 69% of Democrats said the FBI was doing a “good” or “excellent” job, compared to 49% of Republicans (and 44% of Democrats in 2003). Also in 2017, the CIA had a net favorability of 32% for Democrats, compared to a net favorability of just 4% for Republicans.
Democratic support for federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies has coincided with increasing cooperation with tech companies and media outlets. This was demonstrated by the suppression of the now “verified” 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, which was restricted on Twitter and Facebook while the media and dozens of intelligence experts attempted to discredit it as “Russian disinformation.” The beneficiaries of a mounting culture of censorship, silence, and exclusion are not just Democrats who see some political gains. More significantly, it is their financial backers. Throughout the COVID era, the party and its affiliated voter base of white-collar workers have solidified their role as ideological enforcers for billionaires and corporations.
During lockdowns and vaccine mandates, tech and pharmaceutical companies made astronomical profits and were aided and abetted at every turn by their pajama-class foot soldiers. While lockdowns plunged millions of Americans into conditions of unemployment, despair, and hunger, it gave professionals a luxury: a time to rest at home and be free from stressors like commuting. As billionaires saw their wealth surge, the upper-middle class stayed silent or complicit. This occurred not just because many of them were eager to keep their new remote work lifestyle going for as long as possible, but also because of the “social silencing” the Times editorial board described.
This silencing had serious repercussions. It is now commonly acknowledged, for example, that school closures were a mistake, but those who spoke up early lost friends, jobs, and opportunities. What is dismissed as cancel culture is actually central to the authoritarian project. A new idea (“flatten the curve,” “save Grandma,” “two weeks to stop the spread”) can be introduced at any moment, and if it’s framed as morally necessary and unquestionable, it will receive resounding support from the most well-educated class. This poses a huge threat to society as a whole.
When new moral panics, rigid rules, and speech codes are constantly being introduced, the main function they serve is to test people’s loyalty to the dominant ideology. Anyone who has walked through a wealthy neighborhood in a coastal liberal city is likely familiar with the signs that begin “In This House We Believe …” Beyond the most surface-level beliefs of their owners, these signs point to one singularly important characteristic: the desire to conform.
But why is the professional class so concerned with virtue signaling and policing its own members? Since the 1980s, upward mobility has been declining, and college-educated millennials never economically recovered from the Great Recession. They struggled to pay off student debt, racked up high-interest loans, and experienced a “lost decade” in which few made economic progress. Home ownership has become nearly impossible, and many millennials’ finances are deeply impacted by inflation.
As a result of this increased economic pressure, the class war waged by college graduates has become two-pronged. Not only is a nexus of Democrat-affiliated academics, NGOs, and bureaucrats waging a campaign against the “unenlightened” masses, but it is also engaged in evermore competitive intra-elite battles. These battles escalated with Trump’s election, but have reached a fever pitch since the beginning of the pandemic. Thus are woke professionals of all ages advancing evermore extreme positions to oust their competitors and vie for limited spots in the managerial elite. As these positions become more extreme, the people who hold them become more absolutist, cruel, and deeply undemocratic. In other words, they become everything we were once taught to fear from Trumpism.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-authoritarians
************************************************The Leftward lurch of New Zealand
New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was born in 1980 and claims because of the poverty around her, by the age of 17, she was drawn to the Labour party.
One wonders which Labour party that was? The only Labour government she would have known was the one led by David Lange which stood out as a beacon for free markets and smaller government the world over.
Perhaps she confused Sir Robert Muldoon’s National party for Labour? He was prime minister when Ms Ardern was born and was a big government demagogue. His ‘New Zealand – The Way You Want It’ hubris, along with his statist ‘Think Big’ heavy industry programmes and compulsory superannuation scheme, left the country crippled with debt, a balance of payments crisis, high interest rates and rampant inflation.
Muldoon’s passion for control no doubt appealed to the young Ms Ardern. But the Labour party of her youth was the antithesis of the government she leads today. Indeed, she has been described as ‘Rob Muldoon with slogans and kindness’.
The Labour party she says she was drawn to was about deregulation. Prime minister David Lange and his finance minister Roger Douglas, corporatised several government departments and sold privatised state assets. They used monetarist measures to control inflation, floated the dollar and allowed markets to set interest rates. They slashed subsidies and trade tariffs and turned a moribund economy into one that was internationally competitive. New Zealand shifted from being one of the world’s most regulated economies to one of the freest.
Did she once support that?
Since her election, Jacinda Ardern appears intent on squandering what’s left of Lange’s legacy. She is actively changing the nation’s ideological direction and international alignments. Her new employment laws empower trade unions and place centralised wage bargaining back at the heart of industrial relations. Her climate change policies are economically and socially reckless
She is also getting closer to Beijing. She refused to sign a Five Eyes condemnation of China for human rights abuses and distanced herself from Australia and its Five Eyes partners in speaking out against a staged World Health Organisation investigation into the origins of Covid-19. She also joined with China in hectoring Canberra on climate change, crowing ‘Australia has to answer to the Pacific’, conveniently ignoring that over the past thirty years, New Zealand’s per capita emissions have outstripped Australia’s fivefold.
Still, Comrade Ardern, the former president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, is lauded by global elites as a ‘new kind of leader’. The Atlantic referred to her as ‘the most effective leader on the planet’. The New York Times described her leadership during the pandemic as a ‘master class’.
Some 568,000 New Zealanders who call Australia home would disagree. They have decided the warm glow of a young, compassionate, socialist prime minister, pales when compared to the tangible benefits of a 36 per cent higher per capita GDP.
Like so many authoritarian leaders, Ardern is now confronting the enormous social and economic damage her Zero-Covid strategy has inflicted. She too has capitulated to street protesters demanding their lost freedoms be returned and finally admits ‘that long periods of heavy restrictions have not got us to zero cases’.
As the country opens up to spiking infections, struggling businesses are facing new government imposts and red tape. For a country already suffering poor productivity, low wages, a widening wealth gap, unaffordable housing, skills shortages, shallow domestic capital markets, a lack of diversification and under-investment in infrastructure, the latest policies seem inept.
If these structural issues are not enough, Ardern’s commitment to Zero-50 emissions could be the last straw. A recent Ministry for the Environment paper finds that converting sheep and beef farmland to pine forests is significantly cheaper than nearly any other option. Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, Wellington continues to pretend its relationship with Beijing is simply pragmatic. Perhaps once upon a time? But, today, China’s colonisation of New Zealand is accelerating. Indeed, Beijing sees New Zealand as a useful Trojan Horse in its fight with Canberra. Moreover it is a valuable platform from which to penetrate Five Eyes intelligence. When 32 per cent of NZ trade goes to China and, with an economy running close to the edge, Beijing is ideally placed to pursue its ambitions.
And it knows it.
In February, it upgraded its long-standing trade agreement with Wellington. The new pact will stimulate further Chinese investment with caps being lifted tenfold. That will add to Beijing’s growing influence and draw New Zealand even further into China’s orbit. In a veiled reference to Canberra, China’s Global Times observed, ‘Compared with certain Western countries, New Zealand has a positive attitude toward Chinese investment.’
Belatedly, Australia has woken up to Beijing’s Pacific intentions. China’s debt-trap diplomacy is paying off, allowing it to secure a naval base in the Solomon Islands and another military facility rumoured for Vanuatu. Beijing also announced it will build a new $200 million ‘fishery complex’ on Papua New Guinea’s Daru Island, less than 250 kilometres from Australia’s mainland.
Neutralising New Zealand would be a strategic coup for Beijing. Despite its Anzac traditions and close cultural ties, Wellington’s defence links with Australia have been drifting apart for decades. New Zealand now views the once pivotal Anzus Agreement as informal. New Zealand is not included in Australia’s latest trilateral Aukus Agreement, nor in the Quadrilateral between Australia, India, Japan and the United States. The Closer Defence Relations, established in 1991 to mirror Closer Economic Relations, lacks the military obligations set out in the Anzus Treaty.
These realities should cause alarm bells to ring in Canberra and Washington. Wellington’s never-ending welcome mat and, its recent actions and words, demonstrate that, despite protestations to the contrary, Ardern’s New Zealand increasingly favours China over Australia and America. Which means for ordinary Kiwis, to paraphrase Trump advisor General H.R. McMaster, she believes servitude is better for them than sovereignty.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/land-of-the-long-white-lie/
***************************************************Wokeism: the next big religion
Complete with an Armageddon and a future utopia
One of the more intriguing aspects of neo-Marxist inspired wokeness, notwithstanding its avowed secular nature and hostility to Christianity, is how it embraces many of the characteristics of the religion it seeks to destroy and replace.
It’s an article of unquestioned faith that the world is about to end because of man-made global warming and the teenage Greta Thunberg is worshipped as a new-age messiah. Climate sceptics are denounced as evildoers and banished to the outer regions.
Watch the young climate change novitiates demonstrating outside the Prime Minister’s Sydney residence last week and, like the puritan girls depicted in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, it’s obvious they are consumed by a religious fervour that is overwhelming, all-consuming, and driven by hysteria.
Similar to Christianity, woke activists also have their martyrs including George Floyd and the countless other people of colour oppressed and victimised by an inherently racist society guilty of a multitude of sins including Euro-centrism and white supremacy.
Instead of the 12 disciples and the myriad Christian saints, the ‘Church of Woke’ immortalises and worships revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Mao and before them Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels.
Like Christianity which incorporates various denominations and faiths, woke religion also includes numerous beliefs and ideologies ranging from cultural Marxism to deconstructionism, post modernism, radical feminism along with gender, queer, and post-colonial theories.
Instead of the Bible neo-Marxist woke activists worship Das Kapital as their foundation document supplemented by more recent works including Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Revolution, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and The Order of Things, Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
While often in disagreement what all cultural-left ideologies hold in common is the belief utopia can be achieved on this earth and suffering and inequality erased if only doubters and sinners repent and drink the Kool-Aid.
While adopting many of the characteristics of religion it is obvious the Bible and the word of God are diametrically opposed to neo-Marxist inspired, woke ideology. Whereas religion stresses the importance of spirituality and transcendence Wokeness is immediately practical, worldly, and utilitarian.
There is no afterlife, this world is the sum total of existence and concepts like wisdom and truth, drawing on Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus, are simply social constructs imposed by society’s elites to disguise their dominance and control.
As argued by Augusto Del Noce, whereas religion is inherently moral with clearly defined concepts of good and evil woke ideologies, to a greater or lesser extent, are based on the belief the end will always justify the means.
De Noce writes, ‘There is no separation between ends and means since these latter are organically subordinated to whatever goal has been discerned… Hence every kind of violence, every ruse, every illegal action, every dissimulation, and every deception becomes licit if they are deemed to be necessary to reach the goal.’
Violent protests, destruction of property, abusing and victimising others and breaking the law are all permissible if considered essential to furthering the cause. As argued by Herbert Marcuse in his essay Repressive Tolerance, such is the evil nature of Western, capitalist societies that tolerance is no longer necessary or acceptable. Marcuse writes what is needed is ‘intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left’.
Christianity while evolving over time is also based on the belief there is a past worthwhile acknowledging, protecting, and supporting. An essential part of any vibrant and enduring culture is the inheritance passed on from generation to generation based on the need to promote continuity as well as change.
Pol Pot’s ‘Year Zero’ best illustrates how many on the cultural-Left are committed to either destroying or rewriting the past to suit their ends. In 1984, Winston’s job in the Ministry of Truth also demonstrates how totalitarian regimes control the present and future by manipulating past events.
Adam Zamoyski in Holy Madness Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871, when detailing the radical secular nature of the French Revolution and the way Christianity was destroyed, makes the point people will always search for a deeper and more lasting sense of life.
He writes, ‘By destroying the credibility of traditional ways of practising faith, through feasts, rituals, and displays, they created a vacuum. Man seeks ecstasy and transcendence, and if he cannot find it in church, he will look for them elsewhere.’
In 1916 the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci referred to socialism as the ‘religion destined to kill Christianity’. While characterised as a secular ideology opposed to God’s word the irony, in seeking to banish religion, is that Marxism and its most recent iteration Wokeness, adopt many of the same characteristics.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/03/wokeism-the-next-big-religion/
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An invitation to Men: view the world through the eyes of women
I have long been aware of what the woman describes below and been appalled by it. I feel deeply sorrowed by the way women often have to live. Keeping safe can need a lot of work, attention and effort from women.
She goes on to say that men's attitudes need changing in order to improve the situstion but I think that is pissing into the wind. Attitudes will not change much and if they do it may not led to much behavior change. And it is not the actions of "men" that need changing. Men in general are decent. It is just a small and dysfunctional minority of men -- many of them ethnic minorities -- that create the problem
I am afraid to say that I think the only way we can help women is the old-fashioned way -- making a point of escorting them to wherever they want to go as far as we can. Feminists can hiss and scream at that idea but the safety of women should trump their delusions
Last week my boyfriend and I went out for dinner in York. We walked back to our car, taking the stairs down from Lendal bridge to walk along the river, commenting on how it was hard to see the steps in the dark. But we made it down to the riverside without issue and strolled arm in arm along the footpath, the picture of romance, before reaching our car.
Last night we were discussing the issue of women feeling safe after the sentencing of Sarah Everard’s killer and the ludicrous comments by North Yorkshire police boss Philip Allott who revealed his engrained misogynistic beliefs that women need to take responsibility for their own safety by being ‘more streetwise’ about when they can and can’t be arrested. I mean seriously…..
I asked my boyfriend – who is fierce champion of women – if he ever felt unsafe walking on his own. He said that in some foreign, slightly dodgy cities, yes he had been more on his guard.
‘But what about here, in the UK, in York? Do you ever feel unsafe here?’
He said no.
Now York is a safe city and I have often walked home on my own at night. I also regularly hike on my own and wild camp on my own in the moors. I feel relatively safe doing all of that. But, then I thought back to our recent evening out and the dark stairs, which had simply posed a trip hazard, and the quiet footpath along the river.
And I realised that had I been on my own, I wouldn’t have taken that route. Or if I had, I would have walked fast, looking behind me, particularly on the dark stairs and the pitch black nook behind the stairs. I would have breathed a sigh of relief when I reached the lights from the Star in the City restaurant. I would have scanned the riverside footpath ahead for anyone seedy looking. If clear, I’d have walked confidently, car keys clutched in my hand, no earphones in. I would have actively looked for other couples who I might be able to rely on for help should I need it. Once off the footpath, I’d have walked cautiously to the dimly lit car park. I would have walked on the road rather than up the dark snickleway to get there. I’d have scanned all around me while paying for my parking and walked fast to my car, alert to anyone coming out of the shadows.
I realised, as I was describing this to my boyfriend, that I don’t even realise that I am doing any of this stuff at the time. It’s instinctive. As a woman, you constantly make a million tiny assessments about whether something is safe. It is so hard-wired into us that I find it almost impossible to believe that men don’t do this. Because they do this when they are in a foreign, dodgy place. They know when they need to be alert. They make the same nano assessments.
But they don’t do this every day. Because they don’t feel at risk. Women do. And I guess marginalised people at risk of racism, bigotry, homophobia or derision for being different do too. I think the average bloke would be genuinely surprised by the number of micro adjustments women make to their lives every day to keep themselves safe.
I used to live in South Africa. It was only after I left that I realised how much constant fear I lived with. When I got to the UK I relaxed. I could put my groceries in the boot of my car without constantly looking around me, or I could approach my driveway without scanning for hijackers loitering in the bushes. It felt like a load had been taken from me; my adrenalin could chill the F out. Being on guard all the time is exhausting. I don’t think the average man realises just how exhausted women are from this shit.
I don’t know how we fix this either. It will take generations before ‘the fear’ that is passed from mother to daughter, sister to sister, girlfriend to girlfriend dies out. It’s something we’ve been doing for so long that it is now just a part of us. A very, very tiring part. But perhaps a good first step is for all men to realise that this is how women feel.
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Sorry, but you don't become a woman by just saying you are one
KATHLEEN STOCK
Had someone told you, not so long ago, that politicians would be terrified to answer the simple question ‘What is a woman?’ who would have believed it?
Very few, I think. Yet today the question has become so toxic that elected representatives try desperately to change the subject when it’s raised. Or they stammer something nonsensical by way of reply.
For we live in a world where to state a simple truth — that ‘a woman is an adult human female’, or ‘women don’t have penises’ — is deemed so offensive you could be banned from social media, rebuked by your teacher, disciplined by your employer or even cautioned by the police. And I should know.
Last year, I was harassed out of my university job of 18 years for saying such things. Masked men with flares came on to the campus, putting up posters and holding banners saying I should be fired.
Some of my colleagues took to social media to say they agreed with them. Eventually, I felt I had no choice but to leave.
Extreme as it was, my case is part of a wider pattern, one that is affecting ever greater numbers of ordinary people.
This is why I welcome the new campaign to protect women’s rights: Respect My Sex If You Want My X.
The sooner we wake up to the dangers, the faster we can get to a world that is both safe and fair for women.
This should concern everyone, not least because we have arrived here through profoundly anti-democratic means, including orchestrated campaigns, internet mobs and relentless lobbying.
Campaigning groups, and in particular the charity Stonewall, have influenced business, public institutions and government alike. And they have done this so effectively that hundreds of thousands of people feel frightened into silence.
It takes some bravery to question the Stonewall orthodoxy — that, to count as a woman, a male doesn’t need surgery or hormones, a legal sex change or a medical diagnosis of a health condition.
He doesn’t even need to dress like a woman. As long as he says so, he — or rather ‘she’ now — is a woman.
This is a radical view with profound and troubling implications. Yet thanks to aggressive and sometimes coercive campaigning, it is increasingly regarded as mainstream.
When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis announced he was trans last week, he was applauded for bravery — even though it seems he will continue to be in all other ways a man, including how he dresses.
This policy of accepting whatever people say about their own gender, irrespective of the physical facts, is what is known as ‘self-identification’ or ‘self-ID’.
Stonewall wants it recognised in law. And although the group has failed so far in England, it has succeeded in Scotland, where self-ID will soon be the only thing required for a legally acknowledged gender recognition certificate.
The principal victims in all this are women.
Pressure groups have persuaded public bodies that a biological male who believes he is a woman should have access to female changing rooms, sports teams, hospital wards, rape crisis services and domestic violence refuges.
They have persuaded some police forces to record a male-bodied rapist as ‘female’ if he asks to be. Some biologically male criminals who self-identify as women are sent to women’s jails.
Yet in losing the meanings of the words ‘woman’, ‘girl’ and ‘female’, we have lost the power to communicate clearly about the needs and interests of females: a group that makes up half the population.
The most visible effect is the blatant unfairness of women athletes having to compete against biological males whom they haven’t a hope of beating, given their respective body types.
In addition, there are the negative effects on female sexual assault victims, anxiously having to face the possibility of predatory male-bodied people in changing rooms or hospital wards, and even of being obliged to call their own attackers ‘she’ in court.
With the ideas behind self-ID being championed in schools, youth groups and universities, many young people are confused about what a woman or man is.
This confusion has contributed to a huge rise in troubled young people demanding medication to change their bodies permanently. Many are then receiving it, even though doctors know little about the long-term effects.
These ideas have been adopted without proper consultation, mainly by frightening people into compliance, which is dangerous and coercive.
I believe it is one of the greatest of the many threats to free speech now blighting our society. From the start of their crusade, campaigners have argued that merely to question self-ID renders you ‘transphobic’. This is a grotesque insinuation — and is totally false in my case.
I have backed strong legal protections for trans people throughout my writing and speaking on the subject.
Stonewall states that people’s reasonably founded worries about the risks involved in self-ID policies must be the result of bigotry. That they stem from the belief that ‘all’ trans women are predators.
Of course, this is false. Most trans women aren’t dangerous, just as most men aren’t dangerous, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to protect women from the few males that are.
Inevitably, attempts to smear those who dare to question self-ID have made people very afraid.
There is now a ‘hate crime’ law that says someone can get a heavier sentence if an initial crime was accompanied by transphobia.
When perceptions of trans- phobia can include telling an adult biological male that he is not, in fact, female, this is a very scary state of affairs indeed.
No wonder politicians are frightened to say what a woman is.
The fact is that feeling or believing or saying you are a woman doesn’t make you a woman, no matter what campaigners, the police, your boss, The Guardian, or anyone else may think.
Human biology is unaffected by thoughts or words.
Even getting a gender recognition certificate or having medical treatment doesn’t affect the basic facts about biology. Just saying something doesn’t make it so.
If politicians can’t say what a woman is, how can they be expected to represent women’s interests?
At a time when violence against women is on the increase and prosecutions at an unprecedented low, women and girls desperately need advocates.
Trans people deserve more sensible representation, too.
Indeed, I know that many are deeply concerned about the direction Stonewall has taken in their name. They fear a backlash.
In the meantime, too many public figures hope this mess will clear itself up. But it won’t.
You can’t change material reality by unilaterally changing words. Instead, you merely create misunderstanding and set groups of people against each other.
What we need is a free, open and honest debate that acknowledges the biological facts, one that elected politicians cannot shirk.
We owe it to ourselves as members of a democratic nation.
We owe it to trans people. Most of all, we owe it to women.
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Conservative claims victory in Hungary election
Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has scored a fourth consecutive landslide win in general elections, as voters endorsed his ambition of a conservative, “illiberal” state and shrugged off concerns over Budapest’s close ties with Moscow.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had appeared to upend Orban’s campaign in recent weeks, forcing him into awkward manoeuvring to explain decade-old cosy business relations with President Vladimir Putin.
But he mounted a successful campaign to persuade his Fidesz party’s core electorate that the six-party opposition alliance, United For Hungary, of Peter Marki-Zay promising to mend ties with the European Union could lead the country into war, an accusation the opposition denied.
Surrounded by leading party members, a triumphant Orban, 58, said the victory came against all odds.
“We have scored a victory so big, that it can be seen even from the moon. We have defended Hungary’s sovereignty and freedom,” said Orban, who has often been condemned by the European Union for democratic backsliding and alleged corruption.
“The whole world has seen tonight in Budapest that Christian democratic politics, conservative civic politics and patriotic politics have won. We are telling Europe that this is not the past, this is the future,” Orban said.
Preliminary results with about 98 per cent of national party list votes counted showed Fidesz party leading with 53.1 per cent of votes versus 35 per cent for Marki-Zay’s opposition alliance. Fidesz was also winning 88 of 106 single-member constituencies.
Based on preliminary results, the National Election Office said Fidesz would have 135 seats, a two-thirds majority, and the opposition alliance would have 56 seats. A far-right party called Our Homeland would also make it into Parliament, winning seven seats.
His comfortable victory could embolden Orban, 58, in his policy agenda which critics say amounts to a subversion of democratic norms, media freedom and the rights of minorities, particularly gay people.
Orban — a fierce critic of immigration, LGBTQI+ rights and “EU bureaucrats” — has garnered the admiration of right-wing nationalists across Europe and North America. He has taken many of Hungary’s democratic institutions under his control and depicted himself as a defender of European Christendom against Muslim migrants, progressives and the “LGBTQ lobby”.
Conceding defeat, Marki-Zay, 49, said Fidesz’s win was due to what he called its vast propaganda machine, including media dominance.
“I don’t want to hide my disappointment, my sadness ... We knew this would be an uneven playing field,” he said. “We admit that Fidesz got a huge majority of the votes. But we still dispute whether this election was democratic and free.”
The contest was expected to be the closest since Orban took power in 2010, thanks to Hungary’s six main opposition parties putting aside their ideological differences to form a united front against Fidesz.
Marki-Zay had promised to end to what he alleged was rampant government corruption and raise living standards by increasing funding to ailing healthcare and schools.
Opposition parties and international observers have noted structural impediments to defeating Orban, highlighting pervasive pro-government bias in the public media, the domination of commercial news outlets by Orban allies and a heavily gerrymandered electoral map.
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Conservative victory in Serbia’s national elections
Claims of a corrupted electoral system are common in Europe but it is unlikely that they are are more corrupt than the electoral system that made Joe Biden president
Opposition claims of widespread irregularities marked Serbia’s national election in which President Aleksandar Vucic and his ruling populists hoped to extend their 10-year grip on power.
Vucic secured about 59 per cent of the vote in the presidential contest, more than enough to secure a second term in office without a run-off ballot, according to a partial count taken by the non-governmental Centre for Free Elections and Democracy.
The Serbian President accused Australia of “torturing and tormenting” Novak Djokovic and treating him “like a mass murderer” when it deported the tennis star in January for not being vaccinated against COVID-19.
Some 6.5 million voters were eligible to choose the country’s president and a new parliament, and elections were being held as well for local authorities in the capital, Belgrade, and in over a dozen other towns and municipalities. Turnout was reported about 55 per cent an hour before polls closed, higher than in most Serbian elections.
His Progressive Party-led bloc won about 43 per cent of the vote, while a coalition of centre-left opposition parties running as United for Serbia’s Victory took 13 per cent, the early count by the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy showed.
IPSOS and CESID pollsters, which have proven reliable in previous Serbian ballots, predicted Vucic would end up with nearly 60 per cent of the votes.
Opinion surveys ahead of the vote predicted that Vucic would win another five-year term and that his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party would yet again dominate the 250-member assembly. But opposition groups stood a chance of winning in Belgrade, analysts said, which would deal a serious blow to Vucic’s increasingly autocratic rule.
Opposition groups multiple irregularities were spotted during the vote. Opposition election controllers reported widespread ghost voting — voting under the names of people who are dead or don’t exist — as well ruling party activists offering money in exchange for votes.
One opposition leader was attacked outside Vucic’s party offices in a Belgrade suburb, suffering facial injuries. A ruling party official was reportedly attacked in the central town of Nis.
Vucic, a former ultranationalist who has boasted of his close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sought to portray himself as a guarantor of stability amid the turmoil raging in Europe due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Speaking after voting in Belgrade, Vucic said he expected Serbia to continue on the path of “stability, tranquillity and peace”.
“I believe in a significant and convincing victory and I believe everyone will get what they deserve,” he said.
In a country that went through a series of wars in the 1990s and a NATO bombing in 1999, fears of a conflict spilling over have played into Vucic’s hands. Although Serbia is formally seeking entry into the 27-nation European Union, Vucic has fostered close ties with Russia and China, counting on the Serbs’ resentment of the West over the 1999 NATO air war.
Serbia has supported a UN resolution that condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but Belgrade has not joined Western sanctions against Moscow, a historic Slavic ally.
Beleaguered opposition groups have also mostly refrained from publicly advocating a tougher line on Moscow. Russia has supported Serbia’s claim on Kosovo, a former province that declared Western-backed independence in 2008.
After boycotting Serbia’s previous vote in 2020, the main opposition parties said Sunday’s vote was also far from free and fair because of Vucic’s domination over the mainstream media and the state institutions.
Vucic’s main opponent in the presidential election comes from a centrist-conservative coalition, United for Victory of Serbia, which comprises the main opposition parties. General Zdravko Ponos, a Western-educated former army chief of staff, was hoping to push Vucic into a second round in the presidential ballot.
“These elections are going to [bring] serious change in Serbia,” Ponos said after casting his ballot. “I hope citizens of Serbia are going to take [a] chance today.”
Ahead of the vote, reports emerged of ballots being sent to addresses for people who don’t live there, prompting opposition warnings of potential fraud. But ruling populists have denied manipulating ballots or pressuring voters.
Their standing in the capital has been lower than the rest of the country due partly to a number of corruption-plagued construction projects that have devastated Belgrade’s urban core.
A green-left coalition, Moramo, or We Must, ran in the election for the first time, campaigning on the discontent in Belgrade and on anger over Serbia’s numerous environmental problems. The group has drawn thousands to protests against lithium mining in the country and to demand cleaner air, rivers and land.
Since his party came to power in 2012, Vucic has served as defence minister, prime minister and president.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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3 April, 2022
“Desirability Ceiling” Is A Term That Explains How Great People Stay Single
Ossiana Tepfenhart has noticed that men place a high value on women with hourglass figures and that women go for tall men. Her main point is that people will not go far away from such preferences in choosing a partner. Fat is a turnoff, shortness is a turnoff
I have never attached much importance to appearance in choosing partners but I cheerfully admit to being pleased that my present girlfriend has a great shape as well as being brainy
Where has this term been all my life? Moreover, isn’t it time we be honest about this issue?
Recently, I had a friend send me a link to a Reddit thread that struck a nerve with me. It was on a term that a guy coined — the “desirability ceiling.” The term itself is a phenomenon many people (of all genders) have experienced or felt.
Honestly, this post brought in a huge amount of thought to an issue that we do not really talk about in dating. The truth is, statistics show that certain demographics are going to get more attention and dates than others. It’s time we talk about this.
First off, what is the desirability ceiling?
The best way to explain this is that the “desirability ceiling” acts like the glass ceiling of dating preferences. In economics, the glass ceiling is a term that shows how women can work just as hard as men but “cap out” at a fraction of the earnings.
The desirability ceiling is a social phenomenon that many people have experienced at one point or another. It’s an ugly and discouraging part of dating. These stats show good examples of it:
Statistically, men who are white and women who are Asian are the most likely to get replies back on dating apps.
Women of color are the least likely to get a reply back on dating apps, and are often viewed as the least desirable.
Most Americans marry within their race.
The more a person weighs, the less likely they are to get a reply back on dating apps.
Younger women and men are statistically more desirable than older ones.
Both the desirability ceiling and the glass ceiling have the same effect: for reasons beyond your control, you won’t be able to get as far as someone who is born into the right demographic.
Why does the desirability ceiling exist?
I’d wager that it’s a mix of things.
When it comes to matters of race, a large portion of it deals with the social stigmas that our society holds. People who are underrepresented, marginalized or only represented through “comic relief” stereotypes are seen as low status.
Bad as it is to say, a lot of people do not date who they are attracted to. Rather, they are there to date for security and status. This is why trophy wives exist and why women marry rich men who are shaped like potatoes. It’s a status thing.
However, it isn’t just that. Human attraction is a physical and psychological matter. It’s complex. And studies show that we are wired to look for healthy mates. So, certain traits (a trim figure, not appearing deceased) are going to be more wanted than others.
Is there any way to make the desirability ceiling go away?
I wish I could say yes, but the answer is no.
There is a major issue that people do not want to confront when it comes to dating: life isn’t fair. Dating, by definition, is going to be discriminatory. Attraction is not logical, nor is it controllable.
What’s interesting, though, is that desirability is, to a point, performance-based. The guy with a wicked sense of humor is going to be more attractive than Mr. Dourpants-McSadface.
We as humans cannot and should not try to force ourselves to be with people we’re not attracted to. I mean, who wants to be with someone you have zero interest in? Moreover, does anyone want to be with a partner who’s embarrassed of being with them?
However, there is something that is worth noting that could alleviate the desirability ceiling…
As the Redditor who made this post noted, there is something that seems to change the desirability ceiling a lot. Seeing marginalized people and “conventionally unattractive” people in positive lights diminishes this effect.
Our attraction isn’t totally set in stone. In other words, a lot more people would date a wider range of people if the stigma around their demographic faded into the background.
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Disney boycott: Furious families are swearing off the entertainment conglomerate as they accuse it of 'surrendering to the woke mob' and 'indoctrinating their children'
Furious families are speaking out after Disney CEO Bob Chapek promised to work to overturn Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' so-called Don't Say Gay Bill and apologized to the LGBTQIA community for not being 'a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights.'
His comments came after Disney employees staged a walk-out in protest of the company's response to the new Florida law.
But the reaction was the last straw for many conservative families who are angry that their children's favorite animated films are being used 'to indoctrinate the children of America into becoming the woke activists of tomorrow'.
They also point to other moves by the newly woke Disney, such as including a same-sex kiss in the new Lightyear movie, adding 'racism' warnings on children's classics such as Peter Pan and The Jungle Book, and changing it's greetings at parks from 'boys and girls' greeting to the gender neutral 'dreamers of all ages'.
Texas father of two Trent Talbot, told Fox News that Disney caved in to woke culture.
'Disney has surrendered to the woke mob and is using its platform to indoctrinate the children of America into becoming the woke activists of tomorrow,' he said.
'Kids need entertainment that is a refuge from this crazy culture, where they can be entertained with just great stories and fun characters. And parents should have confidence that their children are seeing and hearing stories that are good and true,' he added.
Talbot also said this is why his company BRAVE Books is working on providing children with alternative options. 'There needs to be more companies that step up and create alternative entertainment options for families.'
Many families see the company's shift to woke policies as hypocritical and parents hit the company from the other side for what they said was pandering to liberal politics.
One of those parents is Ohio mother and grandmother Patti Garibay, who told Fox News she and others should 'void your household of all things Disney.'
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Another GOP Governor Signs Law Protecting Girls’ Sports
GOP Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed the “Save Women’s Sports Act” this week that prevents biological male athletes from competing against females. Republican governors in both Iowa and Arizona have signed similar legislation, as Townhall has covered.
In an interview with Fox News, Stitt said that he thinks the law is “common sense” and that “biological males cannot compete in women’s sports.”
“We’re not going to let it [biological males] be an unfair advantage against them [women],” he added.
The bill Stitt signed states that student-athletes must compete in sports that match their biological sex. This comes after the controversy surrounding biological male swimmer, William “Lia” Thomas, competed on the women’s swim team at University of Pennsylvania this season and won a race at the NCAA swimming championships.
"It's important for me to protect women and girls in sports," Stitt told Fox. "I've got a daughter that's going to be standing behind me, as well as a lot of other women and girls."
"They train and put their whole effort into competing and being the best that they can be," he added.
Female athletes who were present for the signing told Fox News that they were happy with the legislation protecting girls’ sports.
"It's no secret that there is a biological difference between males and females,” said Alyssa Amundsen, who is a former cheerleader for the University of Oklahoma. She added that “our predecessors worked so hard and had a huge victory with Title IX.”
"I think we owe it to them and we owe it to future generations of girls to pass this bill,” she continued.
A University of Oklahoma track and field athlete, Levi Gladd, told Fox that it’s unfair for women to have opportunities taken away “by biological things that they can’t deal with, or overcome.”
This month, two Republican governors vetoed bills protecting girls sports, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb. As Townhall covered, Utah lawmakers overturned Cox’s veto.
Stitt told Fox News that he is "happy to talk to any critics that are basically choosing to stand with someone else over women and sports.”
"In Oklahoma, we're inclusive of anybody and what is your life liberty and pursuit of happiness," the governor said. "We're not going to let a biological male compete against young women."
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Why America’s Labor Force Decline Matters Beyond Current Supply Shortages, Rising Prices
Work is fundamental to human flourishing. Work determines individuals’ incomes and total economic output, and it’s also a core component of meaning and contentment in people’s lives.
A strong work ethic was fundamental to America’s founding, and it enabled America to become one of the most prosperous nations in the world. That’s why the recent decline in labor force participation in the United States is so troubling.
Having declined steadily over the past two decades from a peak of 67.3% in early 2000, the U.S. labor force participation rate plummeted, and has yet to fully recover, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Between February 2020 (prior to the pandemic) and February 2022, the labor force participation rate declined 1.1 percentage points, from 63.4% to 62.3%. That translates into 3 million fewer workers today.
Demographic shifts explain part of the longer-term decline over the past decades. The retirement of the baby boomer generation—which is expected to be fully retired by 2030—is responsible for roughly half of the pre-pandemic labor force decline. And the pandemic appears to have caused some baby boomers to retire earlier than planned, as roughly 1.75 million baby boomers retired in 2021 versus the typical 1 million per year.
But the decline in labor force participation isn’t just older Americans hanging up their work hats a few years early.
The labor force participation rate for America’s core workforce of individuals ages 25 through 54 has declined 2.2 percentage points since 2000. That translates into 2.7 million fewer workers, and 1 million of that loss occurred just over the past two years, during the pandemic.
Labor force declines have been most significant—and troubling—among men. Between 2000 and 2022, the labor force participation rate of men ages 25 through 54 dropped 3.4 percentage points, resulting in 2.2 million fewer prime-age working men today.
Although there has been a slight recovery in labor force participation rates since the start of the pandemic, current economic policies and welfare-without-work government programs are holding back labor force participation.
But people working is what drives output and fuels innovation. It’s only through work that basic necessities such as food and housing are available and that innovations such as automobiles and smartphones that make our lives easier and more mobile are possible.
Work is also essential to support essential government services, such as national defense and a justice system.
A 2017 Heritage Foundation study reported that 71% of young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 were ineligible to serve in the military because of health problems (obesity, substance abuse, and mental health, to name a few), a lack of education, and criminal records.
As retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, the report’s author, explains, “A manpower shortage in the United States military directly compromises national security.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of the Heritage Foundation.)
On top of that, the more lawmakers continue to expand the size and scope of government—and the national debt—the more that a declining labor force could become a vicious cycle.
For example, entitlement programs have grown so much that current workers pay for 100% of providing Social Security and Medicare benefits to current retirees, including even interest payments on past borrowing from those programs.
But the more the government raises taxes to increase benefits for nonworking Americans, the less people will work.
Most importantly, Arthur Brooks, a Harvard University professor and former president of the American Enterprise Institute, has explained, earned success that comes through work is the secret to human happiness and dignity.
Brooks points out: “To truly flourish, we need to know that the ways in which we occupy our waking hours are not based on the mere pursuit of pleasure or money or any other superficial goal. We need to know that our endeavors have a deeper purpose.”
This is why, regardless of pay, people who feel productive at their jobs are five times as likely to be satisfied in their jobs as those who don’t feel productive.
For the sake of personal and societal happiness, for the sake of financial well-being, for the sake of America’s dire fiscal situation, and for the sake of preserving the foundation of American society, it’s time for lawmakers to recognize the value and rewards of work in the policies they implement.
By protecting individuals’ rights to pursue the type of work that is best for them and not forcing workers into unions, policymakers can expand opportunities for people to achieve meaningful and rewarding work.
By eliminating double taxes on investments, policymakers can expand investments in education, experience, and technology that increase the returns to work.
And by orienting welfare programs toward work instead of hooking people on dependency, lawmakers can help more people achieve their potential.
Work truly affects every aspect of American life. Our economy, our personal well-being, and even our national security depends on it.
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Belgium eyes ban on round goldfish bowls... because they are too STRESSFUL
Round tanks often have a smaller water surface area than square or rectangular ones, which affects the amount of oxygen absorbed into the water.
A small surface area risks the 'health and wellbeing of the fish', according to Belgian government documents.
'We know that the round jar has an impact on fish stress,' animal welfare minister Bernard Clerfayt told La Capitale newspaper.
The proposed ban, which would apply only to the Brussels-Capital region, would prohibit the sale of round bowls but not the use of them.
There is no corresponding law in Britain – but the RSPCA has also warned against fish tanks that have a small water surface area.
Mr Clerfayt added: 'We are not going to start controlling the size of the aquarium in each household. Prohibiting the sale of bowls would be much more effective.'
Fireworks and electric dog collars will also be added to the list of items deemed harmful to pets under the proposed 'Brussels Code of Animal Welfare'.
Belgium already has some of the world's strictest laws against animal cruelty.
The worst cases of animal cruelty are punishable with prison sentences of up to 15 years and fines of up to €10million in the French-speaking south.
In the Dutch-speaking north, MPs brought an end to the ritual slaughter of animals by religious groups, arguing that the animals must be stunned first.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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1 April, 2022
Why Women Need to Stop Complaining About Men
Jennifer Pitts below is obviously a happy lady. She actually likes men and is most comfortable among them. I married such a lady once many years ago and while we have gone our separate ways since, we are still in contact and supportive of one-another
I think she is broadly right in what she says below but I would dispute that men enjoy "hunting" women. Some may but I would think that they are shallow types who would not make good or stable partners.
But her advice to take it slowly I nonetheless agree with. I have very rarely slept with a woman on a first date and have always been happy to take whatever time the lady needs if I see her as worthwhile.
And her advice to focus on deeds, not words is solid gold
It’s time for us to start understanding the male species; they are not us
I have a lot of love for the male species, maybe because I had little brothers growing up or an uncle and Grampie that were support systems for me, but mostly I’m a tomboy at heart, and I’ve always enjoyed hanging out with boys.
My first best guy friend at age ten was Shawn; he had a rat’s tail and steps on the side of his sideburns, a very cool look in the nineties. We used to roll around our city together doing badass kid stuff like stealing candy and spitting on everything; the phase did not last long, thank God. He was my first male friend and what I liked about him is how comfortable I felt in his company and how I could be myself.
Another male friend before Shawn was Will. We hung out because my mom babysat him and his sisters. Like Shawn, we had an instant friendship climbing trees and eating crab apples until our mouths would pucker.
As I reached my teenage years, into my twenties up until now my forties, I’ve had a few handfuls of exceptional male friends, and I have a good understanding when it comes to the male species. Still, I wanted to do some research to learn more about how they are different from us women.
Men are emotional creatures just like us.
Men are emotional creatures like women, but they don’t always handle their emotions the same as us. According to psychology, today, men will express their feelings such as sadness and vulnerability through anger and pride.
When it comes to expressing their emotions, society has portrayed them as weak. In a recent survey by elite singles, they questioned 1500 men, and the results show that women prefer a man who is in touch and expresses his emotions. Unfortunately, 1 in 6 men still believes that women do not want them to be expressive because it will make them seem unattractive. They pull away because they are scared.
I always thought that when a man pulled away, he hinted that he wasn’t that into me. I assumed because that’s what I’ve learned throughout the years from movies, books, or having conversations. However, the problem is that I always felt they did like me because I wouldn’t continue to engage with someone who didn’t.
I started to better understand men after watching Jonathon Aslay YouTube videos and the author of What is Self-love Anyways.
I realized that a man who pulls away might not have a proper foundation built in his life, or he could be going through a tough time. He has enough respect not to pull you into his life until he feels it’s stable enough.
According to Jonathon, another reason is the fear of intimacy, which can be related to childhood wounds depending on their experience growing up. If they haven’t healed these wounds either from childhood or adulthood, they could be causing a block in having an intimate relationship.
So, the next time a man is pulling away, maybe have a different perceptive that it’s him, not you. They really do love us, even if they have a funny way of showing it.
Women love men differently from how they love us, and I’m not sure we have come to understand this yet. When we love, we are more verbal with our emotions, but they show love through actions. This is because their brains are designed differently from ours when it comes to their experiences. When they start to feel love for us, their brain shuts down. That’s why it's hard for them to talk about how much they care about us.
We need to understand this, so we don’t feel insecure and start doubting their love for us. *Pay attention to his actions more than his words*, and his actions will show you how much he loves you.
Does he support you when you need him? Is he making sure you get home safe after a date? Does he show that he’s interested in your life? Will he stand up for you if someone is talking negatively about you? Will he fix things around the house for you? These are all actions of a man that loves you.
They are natural-born hunters. Let them hunt you.
I remember my ex-husband telling me that if I had slept with him on the first date, he wouldn’t have called me, and it’s true because it didn’t last very long with the men that I have slept with quickly. That’s because they enjoy the hunt at the beginning of a new connection.
Of course, there needs to be a balance, and although men enjoy the chase, they also want reciprocation. I’m not talking about game playing when it comes to men chasing women.
After reading Steve Harvey’s book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, he mentions that men put women into two different categories. We are either in the sports fishing or in the dream girl category. Depending on how long we allow them to hunt us, men’s first goal is to get us into bed. A man interested in pursuing a specific woman like his dream girl will take his time with her if she allows him to chase her. By us allowing this, we can set down boundaries and build a proper foundation with the man. If he becomes lazy and stops pursuing you after the first two dates or so, he only wanted sex, so you didn’t waste your time.
It all depends on what you want out of a connection. For me, I always have a sense when a man is going to be special to me, so I never sleep with him right away. I allow it to unfold naturally, and my two greatest loves so far paid off for years because I allowed them to hunt me.
If you're looking to have a good time, feel free to sleep with them but don’t expect any commitments from men, but of course, there is always the exception of the rule.
The takeaways
Keep in mind the next time you do not understand a man.
#1 — They are emotional, just like us.
#2 — They pull away because they are scared.
#3 — They really do love us.
#4 — They want to hunt us, so let them.
We must become more understanding of how men behave compared to us. The more we can understand them, the more we can connect with them, and the more they will feel safe to open up.
https://medium.com/inspired-writer/us-women-need-to-stop-complaining-about-men-7adaf01cd83a
*********************************************Finnish Court Clears Christian Politician, Bishop of ‘Hate Speech’ Charges
A court in Finland rules unanimously that it isn’t its job “to interpret biblical concepts." Pictured: Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament, holds a Bible as she arrives Jan. 24 with her husband, Niilo, for a court session in Helsinki, Finland. (Photo: Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Lehtikuva/Getty Images)
A Finnish court has dismissed all charges against a Christian member of Parliament and a bishop charged under Finland’s “hate speech” and “ethnic agitation” law for supporting traditional marriage. The court ordered the government to reimburse the two.
In a unanimous ruling Wednesday, the Helsinki District Court determined that it isn’t its job “to interpret biblical concepts” in dropping the case against Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament and former minister of interior, and Bishop Juhana Pohjola.
“I am so grateful the court recognized the threat to free speech and ruled in our favour,” Räsänen, also a medical doctor, said in a press release.
“I feel a weight has been lifted off my shoulders after being acquitted. Although I am grateful for having had this chance to stand up for freedom of speech, I hope that this ruling will help prevent others from having to go through the same ordeal,” she said.
ADF International, which helped defend Räsänen and issued the press release on the court ruling in Finland, is the global arm of Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based legal organization specializing in religious liberty.
Early in the case, the prosecutor’s office said Räsänen’s statements “violate the equality and dignity of homosexuals, so they transcend the boundaries of freedom of speech and religion.”
The prosecutor quoted a Bible verse included in Räsänen’s tweet. In the closing argument of the trial, the prosecution alleged that the word “sin” could be “harmful” and called for heavy fines in the event of a guilty verdict.
Prosecutors charged Pohjola, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, with one count of violating the law in connection with hosting a pamphlet published by Räsänen on his church’s website 17 years ago.
But the court didn’t agree and issued a stinging defeat to the government, ordering the prosecution to pay 60,000 euros (about $66,940) in legal costs, according to Alliance Defending Freedom. The government has seven days to appeal.
Räsänen, 62, who is a member of the center-right Christian Democrat Party, has been a member of the Finnish Parliament since 1995. From 2011 to 2015, she was the government’s interior minister.
In 2004, Räsänen published a pamphlet, titled “Male and Female He Created Them,” about the Bible’s teaching on marriage. In 2019, she spoke on a radio program about her controversial tweet including a photo of Romans 1: 24–27, which says that “women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” and “Men committed shameful acts with other men.”
For that, prosecutors charged Räsänen with three counts of violating Finland’s ethnic agitation law.
Finland’s ethnic agitation law was adopted in the 1970s to protect ethnic minorities and was amended several times to extend it on the basis of disabilities and sexual orientation.
The law says:
A person who makes available to the public or otherwise spreads among the public … an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed or insulted on the basis of its race, skin colour, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis, shall be sentenced for ethnic agitation to a fine or to imprisonment for at most two years.
Global Attention
The case garnered international attention over its focus on free speech.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, praised the Finnish court’s decision Wednesday while noting the injustice of the prosecution.
“Today, I join with thousands of Americans and people around the world united in our joy and thankfulness that Finnish M.P. Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola were justly and unanimously found ‘not guilty,’” Roy said in a public statement.
During the trial, crowds gathered outside the Helsinki courthouse, according to the ADF International press release.
In Hungary, more than 3,000 gathered outside the Finnish Embassy in Budapest to protest the charges. Räsänen got letters of support from groups such as the International Lutheran Council and the European Evangelical Alliance.
“This decision is a victory for the God-given rights of free speech and religious expression both in Finland and across the globe,” Roy said in his written statement. “But, the fact that there was even a prosecution is unacceptable and a reminder that we must remain vigilant in defense of our faith, our values, and the very unalienable rights that form the foundation of Western civilization.”
In January, five Republican senators wrote to Rashad Hussain, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, expressing concern that Finland’s hate speech law “could open the door for prosecution of other devout Christians, Muslims, Jews and adherents of other faiths for publicly stating their religious beliefs.”
Andrew Brunson, an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey for about two years, traveled to Finland on behalf of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based educational institute focused on traditional values, for closing arguments that wrapped up Tuesday. Brunson brought 14,000 pledged prayer requests for the two defendants.
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FEC fines DNC and Clinton for Trump dossier hoax
The Federal Election Commission has fined the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for lying about the funding of the infamous, and discredited, Russian “dossier” used in a smear attempt against Donald Trump weeks before he shocked the world with his 2016 presidential victory.
The election agency said that Clinton and the DNC violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm.
A combined $1,024,407.97 was paid by the treasurers of the DNC and Clinton campaign to law firm Perkins Coie for Fusion GPS’s information, and the party and campaign hid the reason, claiming it was for legal services, not opposition research.
Instead, the DNC’s $849,407.97 and the Clinton campaign’s $175,000 covered Fusion GPS’s opposition research on the dossier, a basis for the so-called “Russia hoax” that dogged Trump’s first term.
The memo said that the Clinton campaign and DNC argued that they were correct in describing their payment as for “legal advice and services” because it was Perkins Coie that hired Fusion GPS. But the agency said the law is clear and was violated.
It added that neither the campaign nor the party conceded to lying but won’t contest the finding. “Solely for the purpose of settling this matter expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs, respondent[s] does not concede, but will not further contest the commission's finding of probable cause to proceed” with the probe, said the FEC.
The FEC, in a memo to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, which filed its complaint over three years ago, said it fined Clinton’s treasurer $8,000 and the DNC’s treasurer $105,000.
The memo, shared with Secrets, is to be made public in a month.
Dan Backer, who brought the complaint on behalf of the foundation, which focuses on free speech and the First Amendment, told Secrets, “This may well be the first time that Hillary Clinton — one of the most evidently corrupt politicians in American history — has actually been held legally accountable, and I'm proud to have forced the FEC to do their job for once. The Coolidge Reagan Foundation proved that with pluck and grit, Americans who stand with integrity can stand up to the Clinton machine and other corrupt political elites.”
Clinton has in the past defended her campaign’s spending for the information and the work of her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, with Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier and hired former British spy Christopher Steele to dig further on Trump.
Trump has assailed the dossier as full of lies, and the FBI has called it fake, but only after the damage settled in on the president.
Republicans have continued to press for charges against Clinton.
Backer, with Washington’s Chalmers & Adams law firm, held out hope for further action against the former first lady. He said, “Hillary Clinton and her cronies willfully engaged in the greatest political fraud in history — destroying our nation's faith in the electoral process, and it’s high time they were held accountable. I hope this is only the beginning.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fec-fines-dnc-clinton-for-trump-dossier-hoax
**************************************************2.5 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended since Biden took office. Almost all of them were released
Since President Joe Biden was sworn into office in Jan. 2021, more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended at the southern border, the greatest unchallenged influx of illegal immigrants in American history, according to data compiled by U.S. Customs & Border Patrol (CBP).
Of those, just 167,392 were either deemed inadmissible or expelled due to health concerns, according to the CBP.
Currently, just 20,146 illegal immigrants are currently detained in FY 2022 according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 136,725 have been released in FY 2022: 7,879 were bonded out, 85,747 were given orders of recognizance and 38,745 were paroled out. Besides that, ICE reports that Alternatives to Detention (ATD) currently number at 191,988.
That’s catch and release.
In addition, reports that in FY 2021, there were just 59,011 removals in its latest annual report, a 68 percent decrease from FY 2020, when 185,884 illegal immigrants were deported. And that was during the height of the Covid pandemic, and with far fewer apprehensions to work with.
So, working through the numbers: 2.5 million illegal immigrants were caught at the border, but only 167,392 were turned away and another 59,011 were deported.
Meaning, 2.27 million illegal immigrants just from Biden’s time in office remain in the country. They were all released.
Unfortunately, many of them are indentured slaves and victims of human trafficking who paid the Mexican drug cartels to get into the U.S. Once here, they are obliged to keep paying protection money. Many of them are sex slaves. How many?
In the year 2000, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated as many as 50,000 women and children are smuggled to the U.S. every year to serve as prostitutes and forced laborers in violation of the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of slavery and indentured servitude.
After more than 20 years, that would mean there are more than 1 million slaves in the U.S. and likely, given the numbers we are seeing presently at the border, there are many, many more than that.
And the Biden administration—and prior administrations although not the Trump administration, which prioritized securing the border—is letting it happen. In fact, by opening the border, Biden is accommodating this abhorrent crime against humanity.
According to a report by the Organization of American States on human trafficking, the conditions of these slaves are atrocious: “The victims, mostly women and children, are often deceived about the true nature of the work. They are exploited in slavery-like conditions. The traffickers grow rich, but the victims are held in debt bondage… Some are abducted and sold, some are deceived into consenting by the promise of a better life or a better job, and some feel that entrusting themselves to traffickers is the only economically viable option. Regardless of the route of entry, most women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation suffer extreme violations of their human rights, including the right to liberty, the right to dignity and security of person, the right not to be held in slavery or involuntary servitude, the right to be free from cruel and inhumane treatment, the right to be free from violence, and the right to health.”
The report continued: “Why can’t they just leave? Some trafficking victims are physically imprisoned by locks, bars or guards. Those with apparent freedom to leave are controlled by other means. Physical, sexual and psychological violence are employed against them effectively.”
Former President Trump dealt with this problem by threatening Mexico with massive tariffs if they would not deploy their military to secure their side of the border. The Migrant Protocols and the Remain in Mexico policy were adopted by both countries, and apprehensions dropped substantially.
Then, Biden arbitrarily ended the Remain in Mexico policy, an action which the Supreme Court then struck down. Not that it matters. While the U.S. and Mexico have nominally agreed to reinstate the program in December, without the threat of tariffs, the amount of apprehensions is higher than ever.
Who’s remaining in Mexico if 838,685 illegal immigrants have been apprehended this year?
The better question is, of the millions of illegal immigrants coming here, how many of them are now enslaved here in the U.S. by the cartels? Maybe somebody should ask President Biden at this next press conference.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Most pictures that I use in the body of the blog should stay up throughout the year. But how long they stay up after that is uncertain. At the end of every year therefore I intend to put up a collection of all pictures used my blogs in that year. That should enable missing pictures to be replaced. The archive of last year's pictures on this blog is therefore now up. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and clicking will bring the picture up. See here (2021). See also here (2020)
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