This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
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.)
30 December, 2020
Hero Takes Bullhorn and Drops Some Lockdown Truth in the Costco Menswear Department
See the video Here:
It comes as a surprise to me, and probably most of you, that this story isn’t about me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking through a grocery store in the apocalyptic months of 2020, surrounded by the absurd reality of mask mandates with store employees barking at customers over the loudspeaker to “keep your mask over your nose!” and giant stickers yelling at me every few feet and clunky plexiglass barriers between me and the cashier. All while fighting with local Karens for the last roll of toilet paper. At times I have wanted to leap onto a conveyor belt and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”
My only saving grace is that I don’t own a bullhorn (and probably never should because I’m certain to do what this man did).
This poor gentleman has had all he can take, and who can blame him? Aren’t we all tired of the arbitrary rules that only seem to affect struggling small businesses while big corporations (like Costco) are raking in the big bucks because they’re “essential”? Governors and mayors tell their subjects to stay home while they party — even outside the country.
I feel this guy on a deep level. And my whole family just contracted and recovered from COVID (despite following all recommended guidelines including masking and social distancing). It’s wasn’t fun, but what’s less fun is living like prisoners being barked at and ordered about by people who make $8 an hour for the rest of our damn lives. That’s worse than COVID, and I’m speaking from up-close and personal experience with the Chinese plague.
And so when I am out and about surrounded by what appear to be perfectly happy little subjects doing everything they’re told in the name of safety, I feel like I’m losing my mind and I’m going to have one of these epic meltdowns at any moment. Is there no abuse too terrible for some of you to object to? Do you have a line that can’t be crossed? Or is there anything a governor can order you to do that you won’t do? What is it? I’m desperate to know what would finally make you take off the mask and announce, “No more! Time’s up!” And how did we get to a place in America where the country is made up of a bunch of followers? I don’t get it. I just don’t know you people anymore.
Yes, there’s a virus and it sucks and no one knows anything about it other than it’s pretty survivable for most people. We know that total deaths for 2020 are on track to be about the same as 2018 and 2019. People die. But in order to try and save some arbitrary number of people from dying this year (instead of next), we’ve decided to stop living.
Life is now worse than death. Or do you enjoy watching your children suffer, separated from their classmates and sports, or watching your neighborhood full of restaurants die? Do you like getting kicked off the beach or getting arrested for playing at the park? Do you get your kicks from the destruction of the movie theater industry or enjoy the swan song of cities that will crumble? At least if I’m dead I won’t have to listen to another corporate sponsor spit out platitudes like “mask up!” or “we’re all in this together.” Seriously, kill me now.
Death is better than this “new normal.” Dr. Fauci just said we’ll be continuing to muzzle ourselves even after the vaccine! It’s never going to end. Don’t you feel it? Guess what’s happening in the UK? A NEW COVID STRAIN IS SWEEPING ENGLAND!!!! Fifteen days to slow the spread has become “however many days we tell you, peasant.”
This is it, folks. This is our new normal unless a whole bunch more of you start freaking out in the Costco by the frozen foods with a bullhorn. We have the ability to stop this and go back to normal whenever we find the courage to do it. How much longer is it going to take? Because I can’t take much more of this.
Want your freedoms back? Well, “First, you’ve got to get mad,” like the man at Costco.
Far-Left Journalist Among Four Charged with Firebombing Police Vehicle Following BLM Protest
Renea Baek Goddard, a far-left journalist, is among the four people who are facing federal charges for firebombing police vehicles in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the Department of Justice.
The criminal complaint alleges Renea Baek Goddard, Emily Nowlin, and Aline Espinosa-Villegas broke into a fenced parking lot at Arkansas State Police Headquarters and set a vehicle on fire. One was vandalized with spray paint, and several others had punctured tires, with investigators discovering "a detonated Molotov cocktail made from a bottle of brandy."
The incident took place after officers arriving for duty at Little Rock Police Department 12th Street Substation on August 26 noticed several police vehicles in their parking lot had punctured tires and two green glass bottles with fluid inside that smelled like gasoline after a BLM protest took place the night before at the substation.
Brittany Dawn Jeffrey was charged after cooperating witnesses stated the Molotov cocktails that were used in the August 25 incident were assembled at Jeffrey’s residence.
The DOJ said they were able to identify the trio through surveillance video, cell data, and witnesses after their firebombing took place on August 28:
"Surveillance video from that incident shows three people entering the vehicle storage area wearing dark clothing and backpacks. The video shows them bending down in a motion consistent with slashing vehicle tires as well as throwing a lighted object into a police vehicle. The Complaint states that witnesses informed law enforcement that Renea Goddard, Emily Nowlin, and Aline Espinosa-Villegas were responsible for the incident. Federal search warrants were executed to obtain the locations of their cell phones, and cell site data confirmed that their cell phones were in the location of Arkansas State Police Headquarters on August 28, 2020."
The Post Millennial reported Goddard had attended the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and studied mass communication. She interned for the statewide news organization Arkansas Public Media, reported for KUAR Public Radio, and contributed to the LGBT online magazine Autostraddle. The others who were charged also had long histories of being involved in the BLM movement.
"Today’s arrests send a message that violence targeted toward law enforcement will not be tolerated,” stated U.S. Attorney Hiland. "Breaking into a police compound and firebombing a police vehicle with a homemade explosive device is clearly not a peaceful protest. Those who would target law enforcement with violent acts will not do so in the Eastern District of Arkansas without the full resources of the federal government being deployed to assist our state and local partners in bringing those responsible to justice. They will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
Parental Authority Over Children Stripped Away After Recently Passed Bill
Most people fail to realize how important local governments really are and how much power they truly wield.
There is never enough focus on the local government and most people think that all they can do is to help choose a president every four years as well as a couple of Senators and House Reps.
But local government is so much more important than that.
When tyranny abounds at the federal and even state level, your local county officials have the power to interpose against tyranny and stand in the gap between you and them.
This is something that we've seen in Virginia not long ago when the Democratic Governor was trying to intact some very strict gun laws over the state.
What ended up happening is that local sheriffs banded together to protect the Second Amendment rights of the citizens of their respective counties.
But what happens when that local government is also corrupt? Well, that's when you need to start worrying because that's where you're going to lose some freedoms.
This is what happened in Washington D.C. recently as they passed a bill almost unanimously to grant little kids the right to choose to be vaccinated without their parents' consent.
Look, I was that age once and most of us have had children of that age. They are in no state to logically evaluate risk vs. benefit when it comes to something like vaccinations.
Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) voted against the legislation. White, who has a 12-year-old son, said he sees 11-year-olds as too young to make independent decisions about their medical care.
“Parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children,” White said, before claiming that vaccines, which are generally safe, are a risk to children’s health. White cited the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has been used by conspiracy theorists to argue that vaccines are dangerous.
“Medical professionals and schools should not be permitted to coerce impressionable minors into procedures capable of causing injury or death behind their parents’ back,” he said.
People seem to be very aware currently with the risks that the COVID-19 vaccination poses, but folks, if you don't know this already, this is the case with every single vaccine that's currently out there!
Stay active in your local government to pick officials who will not allow this to happen in your own town.
Australian culture denied by obsession with cancel culture
By Tony Abbott (A former co0nservative Prime Minister of Australia)
With public spending on an unprecedented scale and previously unimaginable restrictions on our daily lives, 2020 hasn’t been a great year for “small government conservatives”.
But with “pandemic pragmatism” tempering the instinct for lower spending and greater freedom, there’s now scope to focus on the other main element in the conservative creed: namely love of country and appreciation of our history.
And there’s more need for that too, as the Australia that emerges from the pandemic will not only have more debt and bigger government. As things stand, it’s likely to be less self-confident about what holds us together as a nation.
The pandemic has coincided with a renewed assault on our history as fundamentally racist, and requiring atonement, even though Australia had become a magnet to migrants, eventually from all over the world, even while it was still a penal colony.
It can’t have been lost on anyone concerned about political correctness and the cancel culture that police in Victoria failed to make a single arrest when 10,000 people marched for Black Lives Matter, but made 400 arrests at a much smaller protest against ongoing health restrictions.
Yet almost nothing was made of this double standard – partly because the leaders who would normally notice it were preoccupied with the pandemic and trying to make a national cabinet work.
As well as habituating people to accept restrictions on freedom and massive government spending “for our own good”, the pandemic seems to have accelerated the elevation of opinion over fact and how we feel about things over what actually happened.
We know that Aboriginal people had inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years prior to British settlement. Post 1788, their society was disrupted and their population devastated, mostly by disease, occasionally by violence.
They weren’t always given a vote, didn’t usually get the same wage and didn’t often get the same justice.
But we also know that Captain James Cook appreciated the qualities of the Aboriginal people he found; that the British government enjoined Governor Arthur Phillip to “live in amity” with the native people; that Phillip refrained from vindictiveness or punitive measures as a matter of policy, even after he had himself been speared at Manly; and that white men were hanged for the murder of blacks as early as the 1830s after the Myall Creek massacre.
We also know that massive efforts have been made to give Aboriginal people a better life, first by missionaries and later by government.
It’s true that Aboriginal people are hugely over-represented in our gaols, even now. But that’s because they’re heavily over-represented in our courts and crime statistics; as are all people, regardless of background, who don’t finish school, don’t have jobs and live in dysfunctional households.
At least as much as some belated measure of recognition in the Constitution, Aboriginal people need to go to school and to take jobs at the same rate as other Australians, for reconciliation to be complete.
In the end, cancel culture is not about correcting a particular injustice or righting a particular historical wrong. It denies moral legitimacy to the whole Australian project, just as it also does in the United States and Britain.
You can argue that things could have been done better and that more must be done now; but it’s hard to maintain that British settlement should not have happened; or that, on balance, it wasn’t a golden moment in human history.
On balance, it was a blessing that the British settled Australia. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary Portuguese, Spanish or French governor declaring, as Phillip did, that there could be “no slavery in a free land”.
Even in those days, it was the Royal Navy that was doing its best to extirpate the West African slave trade to the Americas.
There are now calls for a pandemic-triggered “great reset” from the globalist establishment. This won’t just mean entrenching bigger government and higher spending.
Inevitably, it will also involve a new push to fundamentally rethink institutions that have stood the test of time.
In Australia, this always translates into agitation to change our flag and to remove the crown from our constitution.
Yet it’s dead wrong to see only the flag of another country (albeit our founder) within our own, rather than the crosses of St Patrick, St Andrew and St George representing our Christian heritage; or to neglect the symbolism of the Southern Cross with its significance to indigenous people.
It’s wrong to focus on a “foreign monarch” when that crown – and the ideals of duty and service that we have assimilated – has been with us every step of our journey as a nation.
Besides, it’s vandalism to demolish anything when there’s nothing better to replace it; and it’s arrogance in any one generation to think that its collective wisdom wholly surpasses that of every predecessor.
Our response to the Black Lives Matter protests was too apologetic.
Instead of looking the other way while their statues were graffitied, we should have resolved to end the neglect of people like Cook and Phillip because, without them, there would have been no Australia.
Cook was a scientist and a humanist, as well as one of the greatest explorers in all history.
Phillip didn’t so much found a penal colony as begin a nation; whose freedom, fairness and prosperity quickly became the envy of the Earth.
Instead of empathising with the would-be statue toppers, there should be a renewed emphasis on the wondrous legacy of the English-speaking version of Western Civilisation: including the world’s common language, the industrial revolution, the mother of parliaments, and the emancipation of minorities.
That perspective is at least as worthy of permeating the national curriculum as the currently-ordained indigenous, sustainability, and Asian ones.
And if there are too many statues to by-gone imperial potentates, let’s add a few more to those who should be Australian icons. To Sir John Monash, for instance, the Jewish citizen-soldier, hailed as “the most resourceful general in the British Army”, who broke the stalemate on the Western Front and helped to deliver victory in the Great War.
And to Lord Florey, the inventor of penicillin, that’s saved literally hundreds of millions of lives.
And if there’s too many “dead white males”, let’s enlarge our history, not rewrite it and be less blinkered about those who have made a difference.
People like Neville Bonner, for instance, the first Indigenous member of the Australian parliament; and Dame Enid Lyons, our first female cabinet minister. Neither of whom, as yet, seem to have statues in their honour.
The pandemic will pass. What should never pass is respect for the people and the institutions that have made modern Australia.
The economy will never be unimportant; because there can be no community without an economy to sustain it.
But post-pandemic, conservatives are likely to be patriots first and economic reformers second.
The coming campaign admonition might as well be “society, stupid”; because one thing the pandemic has helped to clarify is the new fault line in politics: not between those who want bigger and those who want smaller government, but between those who are proud of their country and those who can’t help wanting to remake it.
Of course, those with a preference for freedom and a concern for lasting prosperity still have to “fight the good fight” but also to focus even more on the one main element of conservatism that’s not in temporary eclipse.
Namely love of country, with all that involves: respect for our institutions, pride in our history and faith in our future.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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29 December, 2020
Black man Andre Hill's death is ruled a homicide after he was shot by cop six seconds after he emerged from a friend's garage carrying a cellphone
This is a classic blunder. A black man holding a phone under less than perfect light level is always likely to be shot for fear the phone is a gun. It has happened many times. The cop was not remotely to blame. The black was either being provocative or very stupid
The Ohio police officer who shot and killed Andre' Hill last week just seconds after he emerged from a garage with a cellphone in his hand has been fired following a disciplinary hearing.
Officer Adam Coy, 44, was terminated Monday afternoon from the Columbus Police Department just hours after the Franklin County coroner's office ruled Hill's death a homicide.
The hearing was led by Director of Public Safety Ned Pettus Jr., who promised a 'prompt' decision on Coy's employment. Hours after the hearing concluded, the 17-year veteran was officially fired.
Coy did not attend the hearing in person, according to local reports. He is not currently facing any criminal charges, with investigations ongoing.
His termination comes seven days after he fatally shot dead Hill, 47, in the early hours of December 22.
Police bodycam footage of the fatal exchange shows Hill stepping out of an open garage door holding up a cellphone as two Columbus police officers approach him, just after 1am.
Just six seconds later, Coy opens fire at Hill. Hill was pronounced dead less than an hour later at a Riverside Hospital at 2:25am.
Mostly Peaceful': a word of the Year
by Jeff Jacoby
AFTER GEORGE FLOYD was killed in Minneapolis, a vast wave of racial-justice protests swept the nation. The majority of the protests were nonviolent, but in hundreds of cities there were riots: Shops were smashed and looted, cars and buildings were set on fire, and at least 25 people were killed. The violence caused more than $1 billion in damage and hit minority neighborhoods especially hard.
Yet many on the left bent over backward to minimize the violence, insisting again and again that the protests were "mostly peaceful." On CNN, video of a government building going up in flames was captioned: "Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting." Most protests were peaceful. But that was no reason to downplay the destruction and mayhem of those that weren't.
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/24939/mostly-peaceful-from-2020-words-of-the-year
Trump Just Pardoned Two Border Patrol Agents – Ramos and Compean – Who Shot Drug Cartel CourierPresident Trump pardoned two former U.S. Border Patrol agents involved in the chase and shooting of a Mexican drug cartel drug mule who brought more than half a million dollars in marijuana across the border in 2005.
Though they were on the list of pardons, the pre-Christmas clemencies were little noticed by the media.
The case of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean exploded into public consciousness during their trial, when federal prosecutors gave the drug dealer – a Mexican national – immunity to testify against the border agents. The agents were each sentenced to more than ten years in prison for shooting at him—a shooting which they never officially noted in their reports of the case.
The case of Ramos and Compean became a cause célèbre in conservative media, among them former CNN host Lou Dobbs, and with congressional representatives who took the U.S. attorney and Bush administration to task for punishing the border agents while setting free the illegal alien drug courier in exchange for testimony.
But the case of Ramos and Compeon was much more intricate, it turned out.
The drug courier, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, driving a van load of marijuana, took border agents on a wild chase, abandoned the Ford Econoline van, and then tried to run back across the border in the El Paso border sector. Ramos, Compean, and another agent caught up with him and held him. But Compean testified that the courier rushed him and he took the butt of his shotgun to move him back and fell into a ditch. The courier was turning to run away when he was shot in his left buttock, according to The Texas Monthly.
As Aldrete-Davila sprinted across the last stretch of American soil, Compean, who had never fired his gun in the line of duty, pulled out his .40-caliber pistol and started shooting. When he missed, he reloaded and tried again, firing a total of fourteen times. Aldrete-Davila kept running, and as he approached the river’s edge, Ramos—who had crossed the ditch to come to his colleague’s aid—fired his first and only shot. The force of the bullet, which entered Aldrete-Davila’s left buttock, knocked him to the ground.
Stories varied, but both agents said they assumed their bosses knew of the shooting, yet never wrote about it in their reports of the wild car and foot chases. Compean picked up his brass. They later testified they thought the bad guy had a gun, prompting the shooting.
The Monthly reported that the outrage over the case came later during the trial, when it was discovered that the U.S. attorneys office in Texas granted immunity to the drug courier and paid for an operation to extract the only piece of evidence they had – the bullet in the side of the bad guy’s buttock. It matched Ramos’s gun.
Outrage went supernova when it was reported that the cartel mule would be set free while the agents would go to prison.
The El Paso Times reports that the feds threw the book at the agents.
The trial lasted two weeks, and the jury found Ramos and Compean guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon, assault with serious bodily injury, discharge of a firearm in commission of a crime of violence, tampering with an official proceeding and deprivation of rights under the color of law.
The agents were found not guilty of assault with intent to commit murder and aiding and abetting.
The agents were fired after their convictions. All their convictions, except obstruction of justice, were upheld on appeal.
Compean and Ramos went to prison. Ramos was later beaten by inmates. The two officers spent two years in prison before their sentences were commuted by President George W. Bush as he left office in 2009.
Now President Trump has wiped their records clean.
Democrats call ‘white Christian nationalists a national security threat’
A Democrat Political Action Committee advising Joe Biden and his transition team calls “white Christian nationalists” a threat to national security and recommends the federal government create “de-radicalization” programs. The Secular Democrats of America PAC prepared a report for Biden that outlines a roadmap to “boldly restore a vision of constitutional secularism.”
“The rise of white Christian nationalism is a national security threat,” read the document. “We recommend you: encourage the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice to dedicate resources to de-radicalization programs aimed at hate groups, including, but not limited to, white nationalists; increase monitoring of such groups, including the online environment, and take action to address increased hate crimes toward minority faith communities; and shift rhetoric to label violent white nationalist extremists as terrorists.”
Pastor Brian Gibson of Amarillo, Texas says these tactics are classic Marxism where “you project what you are doing onto those who don’t have your values – it has been done again and again throughout history with every Marxist-driven regime in the word.”
Gibson takes offense at the characterization of himself and many of his fellow Christians. “It is racist and bigoted and then to call us ‘nationalists’ is outrageous. We are talking about people who love their country. And for that we are a threat? I think it reveals who the bigots really are and who the security threats really are.”
Gibson, who is an outspoken advocate for religious freedom, questions why the document doesn’t target Antifa or radical BLM members? He said his life has been threatened by those groups more than once in the past year.
“As a patriotic Christian, you absolutely have a target on your back,” Gibson said.
So, what can we do?
“We stop being afraid and we trust god,” Gibson said. “It’s a time for prayer, but it’s also a time for action.” He called on church leaders to rise up and push back on the madness of the radical Left.
“Obviously, I am a peaceful man,” Gibson said. “I follow the Prince of Peace. But I don’t think we can just lay down all of our rights and let them run rough shod over us.”
Americans for Limited Government (ALG) President Rick Manning echoes Gibson’s views. “This is a defining moment in America. We must choose a side. Either you support religious liberty or you support secularism. Either you support the free markets, or you support socialism. Either you support law-and-order or you support chaos and anarchy.”
Manning encourages all patriots to stay engaged. “We must fight on to save our country,” Manning said. “We cannot get discouraged and let the other side win.”
Gibson said he gets frustrating when he sees uninformed social media posts by “twenty-years who don’t understand Christian theology or American history who cry, ‘Oh, the merger of Christianity and nationalism, that’s terrible. Or loving your nation, you can’t be like that.’ I want to remind them that there is no sin loving Jesus and loving your nation. They are two separate things. Jesus is my Savior, but I still love my country. It is not a sin to love your country.”
As for the “de-radicalization programs” the Biden transition team is considering, it is likely a new administration would use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube to get their government propaganda messages out.
“That’s why its so important for patriots to move to politically neutral social media sites such as Parler and Rumble,” Manning added. “I fear a Biden administration will collude with Big Tech to censor Christians and conservatives.”
You can follow ALG on Parler at @limitgov and follow us on Rumble at Americans for Limited Government.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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28 December, 2020
The Pressing Need for Everyone to Quiet Their Egos
Scott Kaufman offers some sound psychology below but seems unaware that it is mainly Leftism that he is criticizing.
It is clear that Leftist advocacy serves ego needs. It is submitted here that the major psychological reason why Leftists so zealously criticize the existing order and advocate change is in order to feed a pressing need for self-inflation and ego-boosting -- and ultimately for power, the greatest ego boost of all.
They need public attention; they need to demonstrate outrage; they need to feel wiser and kinder and more righteous than most of their fellow man. They fancy for themselves the heroic role of David versus Goliath. They need to show that they are in the small club of the virtuous and the wise so that they can nobly instruct and order about their less wise and less virtuous fellow-citizens. Their need is a pressing need for attention, for self-advertisement and self-promotion -- generally in the absence of any real claims in that direction. They are people who need to feel important and who are aggrieved at their lack of recognition and power. One is tempted to hypothesize that, when they were children, their mothers didn't look when they said, "Mummy, look at me".
We live in some times. On the one hand, things are better than they've ever been. Overall rates of violence, poverty, and disease are down. There have been substantial increases in education, longevity, leisure time, and safety. On the other hand... We are more divided than ever as a species. Tribalism and identity politics are rampant on all sides of everything.
Steven Pinker and other intellectuals think that the answer is a return to Enlightenment values—things like reason, individualism, and the free expression of as many ideas as possible and an effective method for evaluating the truth of them. I agree that this is part of the solution, but I think an often underdiscussed part of the problem is much more fundamental: all of our egos are just too damn loud.*
Watching debates in the media (and especially on YouTube) lately has been making my head explode. There seems to be this growing belief that the goal is always to win. Not have a dialectical, well-intentioned, mutual search for overarching principles and productive ways forward that will improve humanity—but to just win and destroy.
Now, don't get me wrong—I find a good intellectual domination just as thrilling as the next person. But cheap thrills aside, I also care deeply about there actually being a positive outcome. Arriving at the truth and improving society may not be explicit goals of a WWE match, but surely these are worthy goals of public discourse?
There is also an interesting paradox at play here in that the more the ego is quieted, the higher the likelihood of actually reaching one's goals. I think we tend to grossly underestimate the extent to which the drive for self-enhancement actually gets in the way of reaching one's goals—even if one's goals are primarily agentic.
Since psychologists use of the term ego is very different ways, let me be clear how I am defining it here. I define the ego as that aspect of the self that has the incessant need to see itself in a positive light. Make no doubt: the self can be our greatest resource, but it can also be our darkest enemy. On the one hand, the fundamentally human capacities for self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-control are essential for reaching our goals.
On the other hand, the self will do anything to disavow itself of responsibility for any negative outcome it may have played a role. As one researcher put it, the self engenders “a self-zoo of self-defense mechanisms.” I believe we can refer to these defensive strategies to see the self in a positive light as the “ego”. A noisy ego spends so much time defending the self as if it were a real thing, and then doing whatever it takes to assert itself, that it often inhibits the very goals it is most striving for.
In recent years, Heidi Wayment and her colleagues have been developing a “quiet ego” research program grounded in Buddhist philosophy and humanistic psychology ideals, and backed by empirical research in the field of positive psychology. Paradoxically, it turns out that quieting the ego is so much more effective in cultivating well-being, growth, health, productivity, and a healthy, productive self-esteem, than focusing so loudly on self-enhancement.
To be clear, a quiet ego is not the same thing as a silent ego. Squashing the ego so much that it loses its identity entirely does not do yourself or the world any favors. Instead, the quiet ego perspective emphasizes balance and integration. As Wayment and colleagues put it, “The volume of the ego is turned down so that it might listen to others as well as the self in an effort to approach life more humanely and compassionately.” The quiet ego approach focuses on balancing the interests of the self and others, and cultivating growth of the self and others over time based on self-awareness, interdependent identity, and compassionate experience.
The goal of the quiet ego approach is to arrive at a less defensive, and more integrative stance toward the self and others, not lose your sense of self or deny your need for the esteem from others. You can very much cultivate an authentic identity that incorporates others without losing the self, or feeling the need for narcissistic displays of winning. A quiet ego is an indication of a healthy self-esteem, one that acknowledges one’s own limitations, doesn’t need to constantly resort to defensiveness whenever the ego is threatened, and yet has a firm sense of self-worth and competence.
According to Bauer and Wayment, the quiet ego consists of four deeply interconnected facets that can be cultivated: detached awareness, inclusive identity, perspective-taking, and growth-mindedness. These four qualities of the quiet ego contribute to having a general stance of balance and growth toward the self and others:
Detached Awareness. Those with a quiet ego have an engaged, nondefensive form of attention to the present moment. They are aware of both the positive and negatives of a situation, and their attention is detached from more ego-driven evaluations of the present moment. Rather, they attempt to see reality as clearly as possible. This requires openness and acceptance to whatever one might discover about the self or others in the present moment, and letting the moment unfold as naturally as possibly. It also involves the ability to revisit thoughts and feelings that have already occurred, examine them more objectively than perhaps one was able to in the moment, and make the appropriate adjustments that will lead to further growth.
Inclusive Identity. People whose egos are turned down in volume have a balanced or more integrative interpretation of the self and others. They understand other perspectives in a way that allows them to identify with the experience of others, break down barriers, and come to a deeper understanding of common humanity. An ability to be mindful, and the detached awareness that comes with it, can help facilitate an inclusive identity, especially under moments of conflict, such as having one’s identity or core values challenged. If your identity is inclusive, you’re likely to be cooperative and compassionate toward others rather than only working to help yourself.
Perspective-Taking. By reflecting on other viewpoints, the quiet ego brings attention outside the self, increasing empathy and compassion. Perspective taking and inclusive identity are intimately intertwined, as either one can trigger the other. For instance, the realization of one’s interdependence with others can lead to a greater understanding of the perspective of others.
Growth-Mindedness. A concern for prosocial development and change for self and others over time causes those with a quiet ego to question the long-term impact of their actions in the moment, and to view the present moment as part of an ongoing life journey instead of a threat to one’s self and existence. Growth-mindedness and perspective taking complement each other nicely, as a growth stance toward the moment clears a space for understanding multiple perspectives. Growth-mindedness is also complementary to detached awareness, as both are focused on dynamic processes rather than evaluation of the final product.
These qualities should not be viewed in isolation from each other, but as part of a whole system of ego functioning.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-pressing-need-for-everyone-to-quiet-their-egos
Law Professor Speaks Out After Being Shamed for Writing Honest History of BLMSix months ago, William Jacobson, a professor at Cornell Law School and founder and publisher of Legal Insurrection, wrote two blog posts detailing the honest, but negative, history of Black Lives Matter. Students and faculty immediately called upon the school to take action against Jacobson for writing the posts.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.
Virginia Allen: It is my pleasure to welcome back to the show professor William Jacobson, a Cornell law professor and the founder and publisher of Legal Insurrection. Professor Jacobson, welcome back to “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
William Jacobson: Thank you for having me back. I appreciate it.
Allen: So, we last spoke almost exactly six months ago, and you shared about two blog posts, which you had written for Legal Insurrection, which detailed the history and the true mission of Black Lives Matter, being to further a Marxist agenda. Can you remind us [of] just this whole situation, what exactly was said? What you wrote in those blog posts?
Jacobson: Yes. So, I run a website called Legal Insurrection, and I’ve actually covered the Black Lives Matter movement since the Ferguson riots back in 2014. So I was very familiar with it, and I was very familiar with the shooting of Michael Brown and the controversy over it.
So when George Floyd died, there were riots, everybody knows, that’s not news. And one of the things I noticed was one of the themes of the marches was people walking with their hands raised above their heads chanting, “Don’t shoot.” And that was the Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative.
And I immediately recognized that to be false because I covered it at the time, I covered the [former Attorney General] Eric Holder, Obama Justice Department report and investigation, which said that never happened, his hands were not raised and he wasn’t saying “don’t shoot.”
In fact, he was shot and killed by the police because he punched a police officer in the face and tried to steal his gun.
So, I wrote a post, which I’d written before. I’ve covered this before and I said, “Reminder, the Michael Brown ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ is a fabricated narrative.” … That triggered a reaction at Cornell Law School—where I teach and have taught for almost 13 years—that led to alumni attempts to get me fired; led to letters or emails, I should say, to the dean.
I also wrote a second post right after my first one, which dealt with the rioting and the looting, and I severely condemned it. And I pointed out that this was reflective of the goals of the leaders of the movement—which is to tear down our society—which are Marxist, and which are anti-capitalist.
And so those two posts combined, but it was mostly the Michael Brown one that triggered it, but those two posts combined led to a concerted effort, both to fire me and to denounce me and to otherwise damage me.
So there was an email campaign by alumni, some alumni, obviously not thousands, but enough that the dean noticed to get me fired.
They were extremely upset that in this emotional time period that I would write something like that about the Michael Brown case. They didn’t dispute that I was right about it, but they felt it was highly insensitive and that to have someone like me on the faculty was inappropriate and he should take action.
Twenty-one of my colleagues signed a letter denouncing me in The Cornell [Daily] Sun, the student newspaper. And in very harsh terms, essentially calling me racist. And they didn’t name me in that letter to the Sun, but it was clear, it was about me. And in fact, the draft of the letter was circulated to students at the law school before it even appeared in The Cornell Sun. So everybody knew it was about me.
And then students organized a boycott of my course. Fifteen student groups organized a boycott of my course. And then the dean issued a statement denouncing me, saying I have academic freedom and I have job security. It’s not tenure, but it’s something similar. And therefore they weren’t going to take any disciplinary action against me, but what horrible things I wrote and expressed in very pejorative terms his view of me.
So I think that all came together and that’s the beginning of the story. And I can certainly get into more detail as to what happened after it.
Allen: Yeah. Well, if you would, you’ve set up very nicely. Thank you for just giving us that review of everything that happened.
So at that point, what was running through your head? Because, like you say, you’ve been at Cornell Law for almost 13 years, it’s no secret that you’re conservative. Everyone knows that on the campus.
So where was your thought process as far as, “I don’t know how this is going to end. Am I going to have a job in a month?” What were you processing?
Jacobson: Right. Well, the attacks on me came as part of attacks on a lot of, I would say, non-liberal professors, maybe not even necessarily conservative, after George Floyd. Any sort of criticism of Black Lives Matter, any sort of criticism of the rioting was enough to whip up an online mob against people.
So, before this happened to me, I had witnessed it happen to other professors, the Change.org petition with thousands of signatures, the protests, all those sort of things.
So I kind of knew what was coming or what I feared would be coming and so I had to make a decision. I could sit back and let it unfold, or I could be more proactive.
And what pushed me from sitting back and watching it unfold to being proactive is some people at the law school. I won’t even identify them by student, faculty, staff, or otherwise, but some people at the law school were very upset with what they saw going on about me.
While they weren’t willing to speak out publicly against it, because they didn’t want to be targeted, they did forward to me internal communications—emails, text messages, things that were circulating at the law school.
And then I realized that this wasn’t going to go away. It wasn’t just going to be a few alumni writing into the dean, that the faculty who signed the letter against me, or at least some of them, were in fact coordinating with the student groups. And so I decided that I couldn’t just sit back and watch unfold with me what had unfolded with so many others.
So I wrote a blog post about what was happening, which went fairly viral. It got picked up. I was invited on to Laura Ingraham’s show, got picked up by a lot of radio shows, got picked up by podcasts, including the one I’m on now, which was extremely helpful.
And so I decided to grab the narrative and to frame the issue as it properly should be framed, which is a complete intolerance for opposing viewpoints at Cornell Law School, a mob mentality, a fairly classic cancel culture.
A lot of people say, “Well, what’s cancel culture? You just don’t like being criticized.” What cancel culture is using the power that people have or think they have over your job and over your reputation to try to coerce you into not speaking or changing your view or apologizing. So it’s coercion rather than persuasion.
And in fact, when I wrote my first blog post about what was happening, I gave a challenge. I said that I will be willing to publicly debate, and I am asking the law school to sponsor it when school resumes in the fall.
At that time we didn’t know if it would be in-person or virtual, a debate over Black Lives Matter. And I will debate a representative of these student groups and whichever faculty member they choose. So it wasn’t going to be me against a student. It would be me essentially against a faculty member of their choice, plus a student of their choice.
And I made that offer. That offer was immediately rejected. They have no interest in debating me. So this was not about criticism. If they wanted to criticize me, they would have had a perfect platform to do it. In fact, they would have had a platform that the whole law school could have seen. I asked that it be livestream so the rest of the interested people could see it. And that was flatly rejected.
So once this happened, there was an absolute outpouring of support for me, really, from around the country, but also from within the law school.
I received several hundred—I haven’t counted them—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails of support from people who saw me on TV or read about it. There was a fair amount of news coverage of it.
And then there was a lot of people within the law school. A lot of students who emailed me and said, “Look, I can’t afford to put myself at risk of being called these horrible names on the internet like you’re being called, but please understand that the student activists do not represent the whole school. They do not represent the whole student body. You have a lot of support within the building, but it’s quiet support. Everybody is afraid to speak out.”
Things developed and things percolated along for a while. I didn’t know what would happen with the student boycott. Fifteen student groups publicly announced, and circulated, on law school list serves that I was not allowed to respond on.
I asked the dean for permission to do it. Never got a response as to using a student list to respond to these accusations. And so I didn’t know what would happen.
As it turned out, we had a fairly normal sign-up. It was almost like nothing happened with the boycott. We were oversubscribed several times over, like we always are, and filled the course. …
That is the short-term end of the story, but I continue to work in a very hostile work environment. I continue to work with people, almost every one of whom that I would have daily contact with if we were in-person, in session.
Everyone on my hallway signed a letter against me. Not a single one of them approached me before they ran to The Cornell Sun. And some of these people I’d known for over a decade. Some of them were newer and I didn’t really know that well, but some of them I’ve known for over a decade.
Some of them I would have classified as friends, not necessarily social friends, we didn’t hang out on the weekends, that sort of thing, but they were work friends, not one of them had the common human decency to approach me beforehand. So that’s the environment I work in.
Allen: Well, obviously, it’s so encouraging that you do still have a job that students, even though they were being pressured by these 15 student groups to boycott your class, your classes were full. Students wanted to get your perspective to hear what you had to say in your classes.
But obviously, that kind of situation, it takes a toll on anyone when you are put in this position of being attacked from all sides. And like you say, there’s individuals who you thought were your friends who are not even coming to you to ask for your perspective, but are running straight to the paper.
More here:
Six Tasmanian Aborigines killed unlawfully in 1827
The killer was a livestock handler so it seems probable that the Aborigines came to attention for cattle stealing, a grave offence in those days
It is important to note that the killing was illegal -- not part of any official policy. It would in fact have been prosecuted if it became known. So it was no evidence of the colonialist "genocide" that some Leftist historians assert. It is in fact evidence against that
A soldier's diary disintegrating in Ireland's national library has revealed disturbing evidence of an undocumented massacre of Aboriginal people in Tasmania in the colony's early years.
The diary belonged to Private Robert McNally, posted to Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s, and records in gritty detail colonial life and encounters with settlers and a notorious bushranger.
But it's his account of his part in the cover up a massacre of men and women on March 21, 1827, near Campbell Town in the Northern Midlands, that stunned University of Tasmania history professor Pam Sharpe.
Searching the National Library of Ireland catalogue for documents about settlers, Professor Sharpe found a note referring to "two volumes in bad condition" of a soldier's writings.
Unearthed, the diaries were identified as the work of McNally, an Irishman who served in Ireland, India, Sydney and Van Diemen's Land, Professor Sharpe told ABC Radio Hobart.
Professor Sharpe said she approached the find with low expectations, but that soon changed when she got her hands on the first of two notebooks. "I didn't hold out much hope that it would be interesting, but I opened it and it was absolutely fascinating," she said.
What she read prompted Professor Sharpe to divert her research funding to have the handwritten entries digitised. Efforts are underway to conserve what remains of a second McNally volume in poor condition.
"It is extremely unusual, very valuable, and completely worth diverting my research to investigate because some of these things aren't on the record about Van Diemen's Land," Professor Sharpe said.
She said the diaries recounted McNally's time with the infantry from 1815 to 1836. "He gets to Van Diemen's Land around about the time that Governor [George] Arthur comes — 1825. He's here for three years," Professor Sharpe said.
"The critical thing is that it's the only diary of an ordinary soldier that anyone has found for colonial Australia."
Professor Sharpe said she was disturbed to read McNally's account of the aftermath of a deadly confrontation between a livestock handler named Shaw and local Indigenous people on the Sutherland Estate.
"McNally doesn't actually see any Aboriginal people for the first few months, but then he is involved in some alarming episodes," she said.
"He was called to [the scene of] a massacre that my researchers and I can't find any other evidence of."
McNally wrote:
"A man of the name of Shaw came to me with information that he had killed six of the natives, two of which was woman.
"I advised him to say no more about it but keep it as a secret as he would be called to an account before a justice. He took me to the place where I saw him make a bonfire of these bodies."
A lot of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal people happened in remote areas of Van Diemen's Land and many incidents were not recorded, Professor Sharpe said.
"It is horrific, absolutely awful, but unfortunately it is probably the story of what happened to a lot of Aboriginal people in the 1820s," she said
The University of Newcastle's Professor Lyndall Ryan, who created an online map of massacres in Australia, said there were lots of massacres that never came to light.
"Most of them were carried out in secret. If you were caught, you would be hanged," Professor Ryan said.
'Colonials hid massacres'
Heather Sculthorpe, chief executive of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, said any new information would need to be substantiated.
"It will be exciting if there is new information, but we do need it to be historically verified," she said.
"There has been a lot of work done on the history of Tasmania, but of course there is more to be found.
"The way that colonials would have written about massacres would have been hidden."
Professor Sharpe said she had only had four hours to examine the McNally diary before returning home to Hobart. She hadn't even seen the second volume, because it was covered in mould and deemed too fragile.
But the research continues.
"After a lot of effort, and the involvement of the Irish ambassador to Australia, the National Library of Ireland is now conserving [the second volume]," Professor Sharpe said.
"It is undergoing an enormous restoration process in the Marsh's Library in Dublin, where they're experts on 18th century paper conservation."
According to his diary, McNally witnessed another famous event in Tasmania's history.
Matthew Brady was known as the "gentleman bushranger" and one of his most audacious actions was the capture of the entire township of Sorell, near Hobart, in November 1825.
His "gentlemanly" attributes included rarely robbing women and fine manners while stealing from men.
"To start with [McNally is] chasing Matthew Brady, who more or less held the whole island to ransom," Professor Sharpe said.
"I mean, Brady and his gang are running rampant.
"Robert is part of the military force trying to capture him and they have an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter at Sorell jail and Brady gets away yet again.
"That's quite a famous episode, so it's just fantastic to have a very close and detailed account of this."
Immense drinking and women trouble
Professor Sharpe said the McNally diary also documented the minutiae of colonial life.
"There is a lot of everyday detail, including what they wore, what they do all the time and all the drinking they do, which is immense," she said.
"He recounts his liaisons with women. We have a lot of quite explicit detail of his affairs, which I hadn't expected of an early 19th century journal.
"He really struggles with forming relationships with women."
Signs of authenticity
Professor Sharpe said McNally was born in the 1790s and died in 1874 in Ireland.
She said she had strong indications the diary was McNally's own work and not that of an amanuensis, or person employed to take dictation or copy other people's experiences, which was common at the time.
She said the library conservator had established the diary was very early 19th century handmade paper.
"We've been able to fact check against military records, newspaper reports and so far, Robert McNally is where he says he is," Professor Sharpe said.
"We know that writers of military memoirs sometimes put themselves into the spotlight, as Albert Facey did in A Fortunate Life when he gives a description of the beginning of Gallipoli, when we know he wasn't there.
"In the McNally diaries there is quite a famous incident in Ireland called the Churchtown Burnings and Robert says he is nearby but not actually there.
"This gives us confidence that, when he gives himself a central role in the Sorell jail hold-up by Matthew Brady a few years later, he was actually there, and he did what he describes."
Robert Hogan is working as a research assistant on the diaries, and has found Private McNally's service record in the British National Archives.
"The information he gives in the journal is consistent with military history," Mr Hogan said.
"I found that he joined the 96th Regiment in 1816 and when they disbanded in 1818 he moved immediately to join the 40th Regiment.
"His length of service in each place is consistent with what he says in his diaries."
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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26 December, 2020
Must not doubt weepy tales of racism
The Left are constantly finding racists under every bed. Accusations of racism have become a form of virtue signalling. Claiming that you have experienced or seen instances of racism has become a form of Leftist identification and proof of your right thoughts.
And the temptation to get into that act is strong. You do yourself a favour by claiming to be someone who finds racism in others. So even where there is no racism it pays to make some up.
It is at its most ludicrous among various minorities who have actually done well for themselves. You might think that such people are a living disproof of us living in a racist society. But that will never do. To retain Leftist respectability, the successful minority member has to complain of all the racism he experienced on his way to the top and how he is still racially victimized.
It was such ungrateful people whom Steve Finn pointed to below -- mocking their claims of victimhood. But you must not doubt claims of racism so he was fired for pointing out the obvious
Coronation Street bosses axe director after he 'claimed that racism doesn't exist in the media and branded stars speaking out against discrimination "victim-making frauds"'
Coronation Street bosses have dropped freelance director Steve Finn after he made social media comments about racism and slammed those speaking out against it.
According to the Huffington Post, Finn claimed that racism doesn't exist in the media, reportedly taking things a step further by disparaging the public figures who spoke about experiencing it.
In posts attributed to Finn, historian David Olusoga was the target of vitriolic posts, calling him a 'victim-making fraud' after he spoke about being marginalised in his career. Further posts also took aim at director Noel Clarke and author John Amaechi.
After his Finn's posts came to light, a Corrie spokesperson told MailOnline: 'We have been made aware of comments on social media by a freelance director, Steve Finn, which are inconsistent with the values of both Coronation Street and ITV.' 'The director will not therefore be returning to Coronation Street,' they concluded.
After Olusoga spoke about his experiences with discrimination in the industry, a post attributed to Finn was shared on Facebook, which read: 'Oh poor dear, so crushed by his success on the unenlightened British media. 'Could I get just a tenth of his salary for making programmes which people actually watch, as he is so crushed.'
In further commentary on the matter, he is said to have claimed that he had never seen any racism during his decades-long career in television. The post read: 'I have worked in this business for over 40 years and I have not seen one instance of racism.
'I’m afraid I find people like him [Olusoga] beyond contempt because he has made a very nice earner out of his niche abilities, but now wants to ride the racism high-horse to maximum effect.
'I am a product of the white working-class, and have often felt alone and isolated, and yes unwanted, especially in the BBC, but I would never have made such a shameful parody of myself just to further my career.'
Another post read: 'People like Olusaga [sic] are victim-making frauds and need to be called out.'
He is also said to have called Kidultood star Clarke a 'f***tard' after he spoke about asking for a more diverse production crew on the set of a TV show. 'You got some white people "let go" to assuage your own agenda,' read the post.
In July, after a host of stars spoke out publicly about their experiences with racism, ITV announced a Diversity Acceleration Plan to 'create more opportunities for those from Black, Asian, minority ethnic and other underrepresented groups'.
Police welfare check turns into wrongful arrest as woman was getting ready to take a bath
A woman who was unlawfully arrested as she was about to take a bath, then tasered twice at the police station, has won a staggering $3.1 million payout.
Officers Tasered her twice at the police station, even though she was restrained in a chair.
A Colorado county paid $US2.4 million ($A3.1 million) to a woman who was unlawfully arrested while naked inside her apartment during a welfare check, according to reports.
Fremont County in Colorado doled out the sum last week to Carolyn O’Neal after she sued the sheriff’s office over her May 2014 arrest while at a sober living facility in Cañon City.
Deputies had responded due to concerns she might harm herself, The Denver Post reported.
Ms O’Neal told three responding male deputies she wasn’t going to hurt herself – and was naked while preparing a bath – but the officers used a key to enter her apartment anyway and tossed her onto a bed before arresting her, the newspaper reported.
Ms O’Neal was still naked when she was carted off to jail, where she was put in a restraint chair for several hours. Deputies also twice used a Taser on the woman despite her arms and legs being restrained at the time and being forced to wear a spit mask, according to the report.
“This was an outrageous case,” Ms O’Neal’s lawyer, David Lane, told The Denver Post on Sunday.
“Law enforcement officers who believed they were above the law got smacked down hard by a jury. And unfortunately, this costs the taxpayers of Fremont County a lot of money. But I hope it inspires the citizenry to demand accountability from law enforcement – otherwise, it’s coming out of their pockets.”
A jury initially awarded O’Neal $US3.6 million ($A4.7 million) last year in her wrongful arrest lawsuit against the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office, but the amount was later reduced by a federal judge to roughly $US2.1 million ($A2.7 million), prompting appeals from both sides, The Denver Post reported.
County officials later agreed to drop their appeal and settle with Ms O’Neal for $US2.4 million ($A3.1 million), Mr Lane told the newspaper.
Charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest that Ms O’Neal had faced were previously dismissed by a judge. Deputies have since admitted that she should have been taken to a hospital rather than a jail, KDVR reported.
“The police were called by management, her mother was dying, she was depressed and she made some offhand statement about ‘things are going so great, I feel like I should drive my car off a cliff,’” Mr Lane recalled Ms O’Neal saying prior to her arrest.
Ms O’Neal suffers from PTSD and other mental health issues, Mr O’Neal told KDVR.
Chicago Police Raided Wrong House, Terrorized Innocent, Naked Woman—and Hid the Body Cam Footage
Jon Burge lives on!
Stories like this one should make even the most ardent police supporters very angry. The Chicago Police Department for two years covered up a crime they committed against an innocent, naked woman. It took a lawsuit to make them cough up public records.
It’s very hard to support the police when whole departments conspire to hide wrongdoing instead of facing the music and dealing with it. CBS Chicago reports.
Last year, Anjanette Young filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the video to show the public what happened to her that day. CBS 2 also filed a request for the video. But the Chicago Police Department denied the requests.
Young recently obtained the footage after a court forced CPD to turn it over as part of her lawsuit against police.
“I feel like they didn’t want us to have this video because they knew how bad it was,” Young said. “They knew they had done something wrong. They knew that the way they treated me was not right.”
Hours before the TV version of this report broadcast, the city’s lawyers attempted to stop CBS 2 from airing the video by filing an emergency motion in federal court.
[…]
The video reveals on Feb. 21, 2019, nine body cameras rolled as a group of male officers entered her home at 7 p.m. Not long before, the licensed social worker finished her shift at the hospital and had undressed in her bedroom.
That’s when she said she heard a loud, pounding noise.
Outside, officers repeatedly struck her door with a battering ram. From various angles, the video captured the moments they broke down the door and burst through her home.
“It was so traumatic to hear the thing that was hitting the door,” Young said, as she watched the video. “And it happened so fast, I didn’t have time to put on clothes.”
As they rushed inside with guns drawn, officers yelled, “Police search warrant,” and “Hands up, hands up, hands up.” Seconds later, Young could be seen in the living room, shocked and completely naked, with her hands up.
“There were big guns,” Young remembered. “Guns with lights and scopes on them. And they were yelling at me, you know, put your hands up, put your hands up.”
Young looked terrified and confused as she watched officers search the home. An officer put her hands behind her back and handcuffed her as she stood naked.
Young repeatedly told the officers they had the wrong address but they wouldn’t listen to her. The way they treated her should be considered sexual assault and the officers involved in this horror show should face jail time. There’s no excuse for this. It’s evil.
With her hands bound behind her back, the video shows an officer wrapped a short coat around her shoulders. But the coat only covered her shoulders and upper back – leaving her front completely exposed as she stood against the wall. Officers stood around her home – in the kitchen, the living room and the hallways – while she remained naked. “It felt like forever to me,” she said. “It felt like forever.”
CBS Chicago did an excellent job piecing together this epic fail. Police did have bad information, CBS 2 Investigators uncovered, and they failed to do basic checks to confirm whether they had the correct address before getting the search warrant approved.
According to CPD’s complaint for search warrant, one day before the raid, a confidential informant told the affiant – or lead officer on the raid – that he recently saw a 23-year-old man who was a known felon with gun and ammunition.
The document said the officer found a photo of the suspect in a police database and showed it to the informant, who confirmed it was him. The officer then drove the informant to the address where the informant claimed the suspect lived.
Despite no evidence in the complaint that police made efforts to independently verify the informant’s tip, such as conducting any surveillance or additional checks as required by policy, the search warrant was approved by an assistant state’s attorney and a judge.
But CBS 2 quickly found, through police and court records, the informant gave police the wrong address. The 23-year-old suspect police were looking for actually lived in the unit next door to Young at the time of the raid and had no connection to her.
CBS 2 also found police could have easily tracked the suspect’s location and where he really lived because at the time of the raid, he was wearing an electronic monitoring device.
Sloppy and lazy police work led to this disaster. The refusal to release public information under the law should be a jailable offense for any public official who participates in hiding the truth to avoid scrutiny. FOIA laws are far too lenient. Violating them merely leads to fines that government offices pay with public funds. How is that a deterrent?
Any public official who breaks FOIA laws should be prosecuted. That would stop it. I have personal experience with FOIA shenanigans in Illinois and public officials who flout the law until you sue them. I had to sue a public library for the same issue, which you can read about in my book Shut Up! The Bizarre War One Public Library Waged Against the First Amendment. FOIA abuse is rampant all over the country and no one has any desire to make it stop.
Until police stop behaving like jackbooted thugs, their reputations will remain in the gutter. That’s unfortunate for the law-abiding police around the country. The City of Chicago should pay a huge price for this lawlessness. But unfortunately, they’ll probably only pay out millions of public funds and continue behaving however they want.
Hungary writes 'the mother is a woman, the father is a man' into its constitution as it bans gay couples from adopting children
Hungary has written 'the mother is a woman, the father is a man' into its constitution as the country brings in a ban on gay couples adopting children.
The country's MPs approved new measures targeting the country's beleaguered LGBTQ community yesterday.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government explained the change by saying 'new ideological processes in the West' made it necessary to 'protect children against possible ideological or biological interference'.
The amendment defines children's sex as that assigned to them at birth and 'ensures the upbringing of children according to... [Hungary's] Christian culture'.
MPs loyal to the nationalist Prime Minister also overwhelmingly voted in favour of a law effectively banning same-sex couple from adopting.
It comes just weeks after Hungarian anti-LGBT MEP Jozsef Szajer resigned after he was caught climbing out of a window naked when police raided an illegal gay sex party in the rue des Pierres in Brussels, Belgium.
The new law restricts adoption to married couples as part of the cultural conservative Prime Minister's push for 'traditional values'.
Aside from the anti-LGBT agenda, Hungary's government has also caused alarm abroad with what human rights groups say are attacks on democracy and the rule of law.
Orban is at loggerheads with Brussels over his moves to put the judiciary, media and academics under more state control, while Human Rights Watch has described his government as an 'authoritarian regime'.
A staunch anti-immigrant populist, Orban had a razor wire fence built along Hungary's southern border in 2015 at the height of Europe's refugee crisis.
Describing refugees as a threat to 'Christian values', he has also launched policies to encourage Hungarian women to have more children - a policy described by a Swedish minister as 'reeking of the 1930s'.
When he announced plans for free IVF treatment, Orban invoked the idea of a 'great replacement' of white Europeans which is often invoked by far-right extremists.
Earlier this year, Orban insisted that accusations that Hungary violates the rule of law were 'simply blah, blah, blah'.
In September he also became one of the few European leaders to endorse Donald Trump's re-election campaign, accusing US Democrats of 'moral imperialism'.
Exceptions to the gay adoption ban will have to be approved by the minister for family affairs.
The government has sharpened its anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in recent months, with Orban commenting in October that homosexuals should 'leave our children alone' when discussing a row over a children's book containing gay characters.
In May a ban on legally changing one's gender came into force, with rights groups warning this would expose transgender Hungarians to discrimination.
In 2018 a government decree effectively banned universities from teaching courses on gender studies.
Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said that the constitution 'now protects families and children in a unique way, even in Europe', adding it would ensure children's 'undisturbed development'.
Hungary director of Amnesty International David Vig said that 'these discriminatory, homophobic and transphobic new laws are just the latest attack on LGBTQ people by Hungarian authorities'.
'This is a dark day for Hungary's LGBTQ community and a dark day for human rights,' Vig said in a statement issued with the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) and the TGEU trans rights organisation.
LGBTQ rights activist Philip Baldwin said: 'I am horrified that Victor Orban has sought to ban LGBTQ couples from adopting.
'This is another shocking and regressive step from a regime which has little respect for LGBTQ people, following on from deeply transphobic legislation earlier this year.
'It demonstrates that when one group within the LGBTQ community is undermined, it is not long before all our rights are questioned.
'It is no coincidence that these changes are taking place as the world is distracted by coronavirus and protests are prohibited.
'It is now more important than ever that the international community stands up for LGBTQ rights and sends a clear signal to the Hungarian government that homophobia, biphobia and transphobia will not be tolerated.'
The constitution adopted after Orban came to power had already defined marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman.
A key figure in the drafting of that document, Jozsef Szajer, resigned as an MEP last month after being caught at what Belgian police said was an illegal all-male sex party that breached virus lockdown rules.
Apart from brief statements condemning Szajer's actions, the government and the pro-Orban press have largely ignored the embarrassing scandal and continued espousing their culturally conservative messages.
On Monday, Minister for Families Katalin Novak sparked an outcry with a video message on her Facebook page in which she said women should not always try to compete with men professionally.
'Don't think that at every moment or our lives we have to all compare ourselves and have the same job, the same salary as the other,' Novak said in her remarks, which were criticised by feminist activists.
The anti-LGBTQ measures in Hungary came on the same day that an ILGA report found that despite significant progress on gay rights around the world, dozens of countries still criminalise consensual same-sex activity and others have erected legal barriers to freedom of expression on LGBTQ issues.
The constitutional amendment effectively banning adoption by same-sex couples in Hungary is mentioned in the report as an example of a negative development.
Also on Tuesday MPs passed a change to Hungary's electoral law which means that parties wishing to contest national elections will have to stand candidates in at least 14 out of 19 provinces and put forward a much higher number of individual candidates than previously required.
The government says this is to prevent sham parties claiming state funds.
However, many in the opposition suspect the real purpose is to hinder the chances of allied opposition candidates standing against Orban's Fidesz party in particular seats in the next legislative elections in 2022.
A poll conducted last week put a hypothetical joint opposition list marginally ahead of Fidesz.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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24 December, 2020
Governor Abbott Announces Plan to Take Over Austin Police Department
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is proposing that the state take control of the Austin Police Department after the city council cut $21 million from the budget.
Can Abbott really do that? He previously suggested freezing property taxes of cities that defund their police departments. Taking over the management of a city police force by folding it into the Texas Department of Public Safety is a novel approach to preventing the inmates from running the asylum.
The Austin American Statesmen writes that the “Texas Constitution grants the state authority over local matters in the capital city when a statewide importance is determined.” That would seem to make Abbott’s proposal constitutional.
KXAN:
The tweet from Gov. Abbott was not a surprise. Just days earlier, he had promised to pass the legislation in the upcoming session.
“The state will fix this,” Abbott wrote on Twitter. “Texas will pass a law this session supporting law enforcement and defunding cities that defund the police.”
Back in September, Abbott expressed his displeasure with Austin City Council’s decision to cut $20 million from APD’s budget, in addition to transitioning $130 million out over a year. The council’s decision came after harsh criticism of the way APD handled protesters over the summer.
“Harsh criticism” from whom? Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters may not have liked being prevented from destroying the city, but they’re hardly neutral observers.
Back in September, Abbott expressed his displeasure with Austin City Council’s decision to cut $20 million from APD’s budget, in addition to transitioning $130 million out over a year. The council’s decision came after harsh criticism of the way APD handled protesters over the summer.
The move was condemned by Abbott, who called it “disrespect for law enforcement” that would invite chaos and endanger the public.
Abbott received a legislation proposal in September that would allow cities with over 1 million residents and fewer than two police officers per 1,000 to have its police force consolidated with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Back in September when Abbott said he was looking at taking over the Austin PD, one member of the city council referred to the idea as a “distraction.” “We’ve gotten used to threats by tweet and authoritarian threats by tweet whether it’s out of the Governor’s Office or the White House,” council member Greg Casar told KXAN.
This may not be the best time to talk about defunding the police. Murders are up 55 percent in Austin over the same period last year, as are other violent crimes. Abbott is absolutely right in not allowing BLM and antifa to dictate public policy — especially when those policies were formulated in the midst of a heated national election.
As it is, defunding the police cost Democrats dearly at the polls, as did their other kooky ideas. Perhaps the city council should take a second look at the funding cuts and grow a spine to stand up to the BLM bullies.
Professional Suspension, Cancel Culture, Censorship, and the Case of Midwifery Student Julia Rynkiewicz
Can you be censored, canceled, or even professionally suspended for standing up for the right to life? A groundbreaking United Kingdom settlement involving the University of Nottingham and midwifery student Julia Rynkiewicz has made clear that academic institutions should not sanction students who hold pro-life views.
Ms. Rynkiewicz, as a consequence of her pro-life beliefs, faced a suspension and four-month fitness-to-practice investigation, which threatened not only her education, but also her future career as a midwife. Now, having received a settlement from the University, she hopes her experience will pave the way for greater respect for fundamental rights on university campuses. As she states, “The settlement demonstrates that the university’s treatment of me was wrong, and while I’m happy to move on, I hope this means that no other student will have to experience what I have.”
If American universities are to retain their academic integrity, they should look to the Nottingham case as a cautionary tale. In the United Kingdom, a recent poll released by ADF International (UK) found that 44 percent of students self-censor in class for fear that they would be “treated differently” if they expressed their real opinions. More than a third agreed that the number of student events canceled because of the views of speakers has increased. Despite the profound American emphasis on freedom of speech, many U.S. college campuses evince the same trend with students increasingly suffering the silencing effects of a culture of censorship.
Standing up for life should carry no cost, and it is fortunate that in Ms. Rynkiewicz’s case, justice prevailed. However, the human toll of university-led “investigations” into matters that fall squarely within the ambit of rights to conscience and expression must not be minimized. Such efforts undoubtedly have the potential to permanently tarnish the professional ambitions of students who have done nothing other than express views that are not only well within their rights, but also shared by millions across the world. Moreover, it unleashes a devastating chilling effect in the very places of higher learning that require utmost respect for free expression in order to fulfill their academic missions.
As stated by Ms. Rynkiewicz: “What happened to me risks creating a fear among students to discuss their values and beliefs, but university should be the place where you are invited to do just that.” With academic freedom under assault, renewed attention to robust protections for students is needed now more than ever. A true culture of free expression requires protections that kick in before students face the arduous burden of having to defend against sanctions and suspensions, as occurred in this case. That is why at least fourteen states have passed campus free speech laws. Ohio is set to become the latest state to do so, as the governor is imminently expected to sign the FORUM Act—a bill designed to protect the First Amendment freedoms of students attending colleges or universities that receive state funding. This is an essential step in protecting students from facing the perils of academic censorship.
In response to the settlement announcement, Director of ADF International (UK), Ryan Christopher, noted that, “a culture of vibrant discussion and free debate should be restored to universities. Today’s censorial culture on campus could easily become cancel culture in the public square.” Let this serve as fair warning to opponents of our first freedom in the United States.
Academic censorship is not restricted to the walls of the lecture hall. What happens in our colleges and universities permeates the whole of our national discourse, and it is imperative that all students be allowed to exercise their constitutionally protected freedoms for the safeguarding of our democracy.
UK: The Law Commission’s hate-crime proposals must be rejected
If implemented, they would hand the state frightening new powers to police speech.
The right to free speech, curtailed by so many different acts of parliament, has long existed more in myth than in reality in Britain. Today, it’s not just on university campuses where the limits on what we can say are determined by the sensitivities of others.
Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic’. This can include verbal abuse, intimidation, threats, harassment, assault and bullying directed at individuals or groups on account of their race, religion, sexuality, disability or transgender identity. The police recorded over 100,000 hate crimes in the year ending March 2020, an apparent increase of eight per cent on the previous year.
However, police officers don’t just chase after perpetrators of hate crime – they also track down those accused of ‘hate incidents.’ A hate incident is any speech or action that is perceived to be hostile but is not, in itself, criminal or associated with a criminal offence. In this way, speech alone requires police investigation.
In the UK today, speech is proscribed according to a morass of different pieces of legislation, some stretching back over decades. Certain groups are offered more legal protections than others, and whether or not a crime, or non-crime incident, has been committed is based largely on perception. Rather than free speech we have speech that is legally restricted in selective and highly subjective ways.
The Law Commission, an independent body designed to review the law and make recommendations to the government, has now stepped into this mess. It has produced a consultation document that proposes changes to the law on hate crime and hate speech. But rather than narrowing the focus of the law, preventing police overreach and protecting free speech, the Law Commission wants to the definition of hate crime to be expanded and the number of protected groups increased further. Its illiberal and censorious proposals would hand power to those who most loudly proclaim offence and allow the state to police our every utterance, including conversations that take place in the privacy of our own homes.
In a new report, Policing Hate, published by Civitas, I examine the Law Commission’s proposals. Here are five reasons why I think it is vital they are rejected:
1) There is no evidence that hate crime is increasing
The Home Office acknowledges that year-on-year statistical increases in police-recorded hate crime have been driven by improvements in recording and identifying what constitutes a hate crime. In contrast, the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows a long-term decline in hate crime, with a 38 per cent fall during the decade from 2008 to 2018.
2) They are an attack on free speech
Under the Law Commission’s proposals, the legal definition of hate speech would be amended so that any utterance perceived to be hostile to a protected group, regardless of the actual words or images used, or the intention of the speaker, will be assumed to be hate speech. This means that cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, such as those used in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, would be outlawed in the UK. We need to repeal all elements of existing law that conflict with freedom of speech, rather than seeking new ways to regulate what we can and cannot say.
3) They would erode equality before the law
It is already the case that some identity groups receive more legal protections than others. The Law Commission now proposes expanding those considered to have victim status to include sex workers, the elderly, women, Travellers and members of ‘alternative subcultures’. Under plans to outlaw misogyny, women will be treated differently to men. This seems premised on a belief that women are one homogenous group, all equally as oppressed and victimised, all in need of police officers to guard them from abusive men. A previous generation of activists fought hard to achieve equality before the law. These proposals undermine that principle.
4) They would fuel hate-crime entrepreneurs
Under the Law Commission’s proposals, campaigning organisations such as Stonewall would be incentivised to present the groups they advocate on behalf of as victims in order to secure the power that comes with enhanced legal status. In this way, such campaigners become hate-crime entrepreneurs; they encourage their members to perceive offence and facilitate them in reporting hate incidents to the police. The Law Commission’s uncritical use of testimony from hate-crime entrepreneurs means that legal changes are being proposed not on the basis of objective evidence, but on the subjective demands of activists for recognition and affirmation of suffering.
5) They would destroy women-only spaces
The Law Commission proposes a definition of transgender in line with that favoured by Stonewall. This would rely on self-identification, rather than a need to acquire a gender-recognition certificate. This means that for all the legal protections being offered to women, anyone who defends female-only spaces or insists on defining ‘woman’ as an adult human female could be criminalised.
Respond to the consultation
The Law Commission represents the legal establishment, and its members clearly view British citizens with contempt. We are either victims in need of protection or perpetrators of hate and abuse. In either case, it thinks we need the state to step up the policing of our speech and behaviour. At present, the Law Commission’s proposals have not yet been debated in parliament or passed into law. We have a chance to make sure they never make it that far.
The Law Commission has launched a consultation on its proposals. You can take part by completing an online response form. There is no need to reply to every question, but you do need to be quick – the consultation closes on 24 December.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/15/the-law-commissions-hate-crime-proposals-must-be-rejected/
Human Rights Campaign Wants Christian Schools to Abandon Beliefs or Lose AccreditationThe Human Rights Campaign—a large, influential LGBTQ advocacy group— recently released a policy brief with recommendations for a Biden administration, and the suggestions are alarming.
The organization’s “Blueprint for Positive Change 2020” describes itself as “a comprehensive list of 85 individual policy recommendations aimed at improving the lives of LGBTQ people.”
But the Human Rights Campaign fails to mention just how much these suggestions for former Vice President Joe Biden, if implemented, would infringe on the rights of religious believers, conservatives, and Americans in general, all under the guise of helping a community that they claim is still marginalized.
One of the more alarming suggestions from the organization’s proposal concerns accreditation for religious schools and universities, stating:
Language regarding accreditation of religious institutions of higher education in the Higher Education Opportunity Act could be interpreted to require accrediting bodies to accredit religious institutions that discriminate or do not meet science-based curricula standards.
The Department of Education should issue a regulation clarifying that this provision, which requires accreditation agencies to ‘respect the stated mission’ of religious institutions, does not require the accreditation of religious institutions that do not meet neutral accreditation standards including nondiscrimination policies and scientific curriculum requirements.
From the sound of it, the Human Rights Campaign essentially is calling for faith-based education—from K-12 schools to colleges and universities—to adopt the campaign’s positions on gender identity, same-sex marriage, transgender transitioning, and more, or fail to be accredited.
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says it’s clear that faith-based education facilities are “to be coerced into the sexual revolution or stripped of accreditation.”
The blueprint calls this “science-based curricula,” but we’ve seen this movie before: What leftist activists call science, conservatives call a distortion of biology. It’s just a way for the activists to claim credibility for identity politics.
It sounds like the Human Rights Campaign is co-opting this moment—with a liberal likely becoming president—essentially to push faith-based education facilities out of the marketplace by forcing them either to abandon their beliefs or lose their ability to legally “compete.”
Mohler again summarizes this aptly on his website: “This would mean abandoning biblical standards for teaching, hiring, admissions, housing, and student life. It would mean that Christian schools are no longer Christian.”
Let’s hope that if a Biden administration even attempted to follow this policy suggestion, enough faith-based institutions would fight back and it would fail.
Still, the effort would be costly, and the attempt to force religious schools out of the marketplace should never happen, given the authoritative protections of the First Amendment.
The Human Rights Campaign’s blueprint makes other suggestions that are equally frustrating because, like the one about accreditation, they stem from a worldview that not only favors identity politics over ideology or beliefs, but acts as if their LGBTQ beliefs should trump everyone else’s.
Policy in this country should reflect core American values of equality and freedom, not entitlement for select groups.
The blueprint suggests that a Biden administration “appoint openly-LGBTQ justices, judges, executive officials and ambassadors.” For starters, some judges and executive employees already are openly LGBTQ.
The proposal also flips the supposed aim of the movement, which is to accept people for who they are—regardless of faith, sex, gender, race, creed, or sexual orientation—to giving preference to people specifically because of their sexual orientation.
The blueprint also suggests that Biden establish “an interagency working group to protect and support LGBTQ rights globally.” This sounds nice, but there’s only one problem: It’s already illegal to discriminate in the United States based on a person’s sexual orientation, so there’s no need to pluck out this group and give it special protections.
These policy suggestions are ignorant, shortsighted, and just plain false. By suggesting LGBTQ individuals need extra care, they undermine cases such as Bostock v. Clayton County that already made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.
By suggesting LGBTQ rights need to be protected more, the blueprint perpetuates the myth that somehow in the freest country in the world, with more sexual parity than almost anywhere else, LGBTQ individuals remain marginalized and disenfranchised. There’s little evidence to show that’s the case.
The Human Rights Campaign has enormous influence. It’s one thing to stand up for equality in a giant policy brief. But it’s quite another to use that brief as a guise to push religious bigotry, such as by suggesting that faith-based schools lose accreditation if they don’t fall lockstep in line with the newest LGBTQ orthodoxy.
The Human Rights Campaign’s “Blueprint for Positive Change” does its community members no favors by gaslighting them into believing that it’s legal to discriminate against them and suggesting that all will be well when they receive entitlement, not just equality.
Few groups have pushed—and received—more recognition for equality, and then some, than the LGBTQ community. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous and blatant identity politics.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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23 December, 2020
JK Rowling laughing all the way to the bank
She might have made her fortune through the Harry Potter franchise, but the author is raking in big bucks from a completely different project these days.
Figures that have been revealed this week show that Rowling paid herself dividends of $27 million, reports The Sun.
The huge amount of money has come from her TV show Strike, which was adapted from her novels Cormoran Strike.
She got $22 million in 2018 and $4.3 million last year through her own agency that deals with her television work.
Rowling has definitely been on a winning streak, with her most recent venture Troubled Blood shooting straight to the top of the Amazon book charts.
Interestingly, it was this novel that upset a lot of people.
In September, social media was alight with the hashtag “RIPJ.K.Rowling” after news spread the series featured a transvestite serial killer — who is now a suspect in another murder.
One British reviewer declared the moral of the story was: Never trust a man in a dress.
The characterisation may not have attracted the level of ire it received if Rowling had not being embroiled transgender issues which led to her being accused of “transphobia”.
In that context, a killer transvestite character was seen as tone deaf, to say the least.
In June, Rowling defended past controversial transphobic comments in a lengthy essay, which also revealed that she was sexually assaulted as a young woman.
“I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility,” she wrote.
While her comments haven’t sat well with a lot of people, the author continues to be one of the most successful authors of all time.
What's good for Republicans was not good for George Floyd?
Antifa Rioter Tries to Weasel Out of Andy Ngo Lawsuit. This Judge Isn't Having It
On June 29, 2019, Portland antifa rioters physically assaulted Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at The Post Millennial, who was reporting on the riot at the time. After police apparently failed to investigate the assault, Ngo took matters into his own hands in June, filing a lawsuit against Rose City Antifa and members of the mob who allegedly beat up Ngo. Benjamin Bolen, the antifa rioter whom Ngo blamed for one of the assaults, attempted to weasel out of the lawsuit via an Anti-SLAPP motion. Multnomah County Judge Kathleen Dailey rightly refused this move.
“This is finally a step in the right direction for the rule of law in Portland where the police, district attorneys office, and local politicians have totally failed to bring justice to the perpetrators of this heinous act,” Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty and a lawyer representing Ngo, said in a statement Tuesday. “We brought this lawsuit as a last resort in the face of their unwillingness to enforce the law. As we have watched America’s greatest cities burn live on television at the hands of Antifa terrorists, we know they were emboldened by the inaction in Portland.”
Ngo sued Rose City Antifa, Bolen, Corbyn (Katherine) Belyea, Joseph Christian Evans, John Hacker, Madison Lee Allen, and fifty other antifa rioters. He alleged that Bolen punched him in the abdomen on May 1, 2019. According to the lawsuit, John Hacker threw an unknown liquid on Ngo’s head while the journalist was at his local gym.
Then antifa rioters threw containers full of liquid at Ngo’s head at a protest on June 29 — “milkshakes” that Portland Police warned might contain quick-drying concrete. Belyea allegedly threw one of these “milkshakes.” Finally, again on June 29, an antifa mob again attacked Ngo, throwing projectiles at him, punching him, and kicking him. Evans and Allen allegedly took part in this attack.
“Antifa members engage in rioting, property destruction, and armed brawls with political opponents and bystanders or journalists perceived to be allies of their opponents,” the lawsuit explains. “According to Antifa, any violence against public demonstrations by groups they view as fascist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, conservative, or right-wing is inherently ‘self-defense’—irrespective of whether such groups actually subscribe to such views— because such public demonstrations purportedly lead to violence against marginalized groups.”
Ngo’s lawsuit notes that antifa’s attacks on this particular journalist undermine the group’s “self-indulgent proclamations of protecting minority groups,” because Andy Ngo is both gay and of Asian descent.
The lawsuit seeks compensatory damages of more than $300,000, tripled to $900,000, along with “temporary, preliminary, and permanent injunctive relief prohibiting Defendants from harassing, threatening, harming, or attempt to do the same to Ngo, and prohibiting Defendants from further engaging in” violence against Ngo.
In response to this lawsuit, Bolen filed an Anti-SLAPP motion, claiming that Ngo targeted him for his constitutionally-protected speech. This move amounted to an attempt to weasel out of the lawsuit on false pretenses. Judge Kathleen Dailey refused his motion and she struck from the record as inadmissible certain attacks on Ngo that Bolen included in his affidavit.
Bolen claimed that he did not attack Ngo. Rather, he accused Ngo of mixing him up with someone else and attacking Bolen because he exercised his constitutional right to protest. Oregon’s anti-SLAPP law shields people from lawsuits based on claims that “arise out of” their exercise of such rights.
Yet Ngo is not suing Bolen for taking part in a protest. Ngo claimed that Bolen physically assaulted him. Physical assault is not protected speech, and Bolen admitted as much.
Bolen may be innocent of assaulting Ngo, but he cannot use an anti-SLAPP law to strike Ngo’s claims against him. His attempt to weasel out of the lawsuit may only weaken his position.
Judge Dailey also struck some of Bolen’s remarks from the record. Bolen claimed that Ngo “appears at these rallies in an effort to dox leftists, which means to uncover their identity and then publicly post personal identifying information online so white nationalist or right wing groups can access the information and use it to target leftists and their families with harassment, threats, and sometimes even violence.”
Bolen claimed that Ngo “believes that racially motivated crimes are hoaxes” and that the journalist “engages in stochastic terrorism by both demonizing leftists and posting their personal identifying information online.” The antifa fellow-traveler also claimed, “Mr. Ngo does not care about the truth or about being accurate.”
The judge struck these accusations because they are either inadmissible or because they are based on “insufficient evidence” or a “lack of personal knowledge.”
Judge Dailey served the cause of justice by refusing Bolen’s attempt to weasel out of Ngo’s lawsuit, but the journalist still faces a difficult legal battle to hold his antifa assailants accountable.
Seattle’s ‘Poverty Excuse’ Would Destroy the City
Matthew Humphrey recently lost $4,000 worth of goods in a theft of his Seattle barbershop. Under a new proposal the Seattle City Council is considering this month, what happened to him wouldn’t even be a crime—if the thieves claimed they were driven by poverty, that is.
“I think it’s insane,” the victimized barber told a local news outlet. “It’s one of these well-intended concepts (of) we want to take care of people that can’t take care of themselves. But what you are really doing is hurting other people.”
Up for debate is a reform proposed by Seattle City Council-member Lisa Herbold. For up to 100 different misdemeanor crimes, including theft, harassment, shoplifting, trespassing, and more, an individual could be excused if he or she claims poverty was their motive.
“In a situation where you took that sandwich because you were hungry and you were trying to meet your basic need of satisfying your hunger; we as the community will know that we should not punish that,” King County Director of Public Defense Anita Khandelwal said of the proposal, which she helped craft. “That conduct is excused.”
The intent of the proposal is to avoid punishing desperate people just trying to survive. But the provision exempts not only stealing food or similar necessities, but stealing anything—if you claim the money gained from its sale would be used for essentials.
First and foremost, this policy would obviously incentivize more crime and more theft.
It would basically give anyone with a good sob story a green light to violate property rights at will. In doing so, it would condemn Seattle to economic decline. In a free market with secure property rights, people can engage in mutually-beneficial commerce. In working to earn a profit, they will create employment opportunities and provide others with the goods and services they need. Businesses can invest and communities can grow.
Without secure property rights, none of this is possible.
Think about it using Humphrey, the aforementioned barber, as an example. As a small business owner, he employs people in his Seattle neighborhood. They go out and spend their money elsewhere around town. Meanwhile, locals can get haircuts they want at a price that’s worth it to them (otherwise, he’d be out of business with no one willing to pay).
Yet if the Seattle proposal became law, Humphrey and thousands of other small business owners would likely have to shut down.
“It’s a little upside-down world,” he said. “The end result is small companies like mine have to close their doors because they can’t afford to be broken in [to] all the time.”
You certainly can’t blame him. There’s no way any small business owner could possibly operate when anyone who is poor or homeless—or claims to be—is able to rob their store and get away with it. Survival, let alone profitability, is impossible amid such unpredictability and lawlessness.
And so, while perhaps some homeless or poor people might benefit from lawless looting in the very short-term, this reform would almost certainly destabilize and erode the city’s economy and incentivize crime. If businesses cannot operate, jobs will not exist, wages will not be offered, taxes will not be paid, and, in short order, crime and poverty will only increase.
This is why free-market economist Thomas Sowell once said that property rights “belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.”
None of this is conjecture. The strength of property rights in a nation (and it’s certainly true for a city as well) closely correlates with its average per-person income.
Progressive Seattle officials might have the best of intentions behind their proposal to create a hardship exemption to property crimes. But, if successful, their naïve efforts would undermine the rule of law and property rights necessary for Seattle’s economy to survive.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2020/12/22/seattle-poverty-excuse-crimes/?omhide=true
Defund Police, Destroy ProsperityDefunding the police is a popular notion espoused by the most radical of left-wing politicians and activists. Prominent voices in the black community support this idea that less policing would result in saved lives by way of reduced police brutality. But what does “defunding the police” really look like for our most desperate communities?
For nearly a decade, Black Lives Matter supporters have used brute force to push their narrative regarding police brutality, leveraging the rarest instances of police stops resulting in the death of a suspect. Starting with the Trayvon Martin case, progressives have villainized law enforcement officers across the nation. In 2020, the George Floyd case quite literally set cities on fire, taking with it members of the police force. Just two months after the incident took place in Minneapolis, “nearly 200” law enforcement officers applied to leave their positions, with similar instances occurring in other riot-ravaged areas. Despite this, the city council recently voted to redirect $8 million from the police budget to “violent prevention,” among other services.
A full-on “defunding” has yet to take place, yet police officers are already leaving in significant numbers. Disrespected and abused, the men and women in blue are being forced out of the most desperate communities to an unknown fate. Video testimonies and personal posts all highlight the painful decision to hang their hats for good.
So what does a world without police look like?
According to the Defund the Police website, the term defunding the police “does not mean the abolishing of community safety.” So what should it mean? The website goes on to explain how there are “alternatives” to law enforcement services that are “more effective.” It also includes decriminalization, disarmament, and demilitarization. Some municipalities even suggest replacing law enforcement with social workers. But this isn’t right. None of these demands is of sound logic.
For one, what person decides who is most effective at the scene of a crime? Law enforcement officers have upheld the tried-and-true tradition of being able to mitigate sensitive and potentially fatal situations unlike any other public safety sector. It’s not simply about protecting the life of the person of interest and the officer but also the lives of those nearby. A social worker isn’t trained to engage with anyone but his or her own client with whom he or she has an existing medical relationship. And in many of these cases, there’s little time for observation and questionnaires — even in cases when mental health is a concern. This only serves to add an additional person in harm’s way — for the inevitable police officer to arrive anyway. Case in point, the swift response of a true first responder will always be essential in the eyes of the people being protected. Defunding this only delays the help when time is of the essence.
Imagine if police officers were disarmed. While studies suggest that few police interactions require deadly force that would require a gun or weapon, people do tend to feel safer when police are around. Part of that has to do with the fact that police officers are armed. A friend or neighbor doesn’t offer the same peace of mind, much less an unarmed police officer — especially in desperate urban areas where homicides are highest. An unarmed officer is another sitting duck, another victim in a potential crossfire. This would call for the dispatch of even more police to rectify an unfortunate situation that could have been prevented with just one armed officer nearby.
Finally, imagine decriminalization, a notion echoed by many on the far Left. To the naive, it sounds like the libertarian thing to do — live and let live. This sounds good until someone runs low on his supply and decides that robbing his neighbor is the best course of action. Remember, drugs impair judgement, and while some argue that drug users aren’t all bad, law enforcement officers know exactly how illicit substances influence fatal interactions with others. Decriminalization only allows for this plague of bad judgment to proliferate, leading to physical abuse of spouses and children, neglect of minors and the elderly, and destruction of property — all mitigated with the presence of law enforcement to discourage its use and sale. This is why defunding police is hardly a remedy.
To those who maintain their argument for divesting funds away from local police forces, I challenge you to do a ride-along in the worst neighborhoods in your area. If the fear you experience doesn’t make your stomach turn upside down, then we can discuss alternative methods to law enforcement. Until then, you need them, possibly more than you could ever know.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76427-defund-police-destroy-prosperity-2020-12-12
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 December, 2020
Helen Keller was blind, deaf and mute, so to suggest she had ‘white privilege’ is racism at its very worst
I’ll freely admit that anytime one of the woke mob opens their mouth, all I hear or see is a word salad. It seems there are more and more activists who simply jumble together a bunch of terms that are used as accusations against others.
In some cases, it gets so nonsensical that it feels like the whole world needs to stop for a second to pull the idea apart so people on the outside can understand exactly what is wrong with what is being said. And here’s the most recent, crazy example: ‘Helen Keller had white privilege.’
For those who do not know the story of Helen Keller (1880-1968), she was a woman who was born blind, deaf and mute. It was the intervention of a tutor that enabled her to finally communicate after her parents had given up on her.
She later went on to become an author and a prolific member of the Socialist Party of America. She should be an icon to the far left but, in a piece in Time by Olivia Waxman, she has been called “just another privileged white person” by Anita Cameron, who is described as a ‘disability rights activist.’
Yes, you read that right. Helen Keller, who battled adversity and campaigned for the rights of people with disabilities her whole life, was “privileged.”
Here’s what makes no sense. You have one person who is an advocate for the rights of the disabled trashing the most famous advocate for the rights of the disabled, and why? On the basis of the color of her skin.
Because privilege is non-existent here. And I’m going to use the term as it is read and defined, because this situation deserves a bit of sanity. It is a privilege for my eyes, ears and tongue to work. Any person who is not blessed with this at birth is not privileged.
There is no privilege in having to maneuver your life in an absolute darkness. So what are we left with? We are left simply with someone furious over another person’s skin color. In the sane world, we call that racism.
Among those who agree is the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, Mary Vought, who told the Washington Examiner, “As a mother to a child with a disability, this is extremely offensive. Helen Keller dedicated her life to advocating for those with disabilities and illness. To suddenly cancel her now because of her skin color is not only outrageous, it’s racist.”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/510108-helen-keller-white-privilege/
Rep. Debbie Dingell Demands Facebook Remove Criticism of IslamThe Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has always had friends in high places, and on Wednesday it celebrated another, announcing that it had “thanked Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-MI) – and the 29 congressional colleagues that joined her – in urging Facebook to take immediate action to eliminate anti-Muslim bigotry from that social media platform.” CAIR’s longtime spokesman Ibrahim “Honest Ibe” Hooper noted proudly that it was “one of several organizations named by Rep. Dingell in her press release announcing the letter.”
Dingell and her colleagues demanded that Facebook’s chief Mark Zuckerberg “immediately implement” measures including the formation of “a working group comprised of senior staff focused on anti-Muslim bigotry issues”; enforcing “your hate content and hate group policies in a way that ensures militias and white supremacists cannot use your event and group pages to terrorize targeted communities”; agreeing to “an independent third-party review of the company’s role in enabling anti-Muslim violence, genocide and internment”; working toward and committing to a “100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content and all other forms of hate before it is even seen”; committing to “regular anti-discrimination training for your entire staff world-wide [sic]”; and “training key staff on civil rights issues and common words, phrases, tropes or visuals used by hate actors to dehumanize and demonize Muslims.”
Joining Dingell in this call for sweeping censorship, according to CAIR, were a rogue’s gallery of the most sinister anti-free speech forces in Congress, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (where Ayanna Pressley, the fourth member of The Squad, was on this was not disclosed). Also signing were the House’s quietest Muslim member, André Carson, as well as Carolyn B. Maloney, Jahana Hayes, Max Rose, Barbara Lee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Bobby L. Rush, Daniel T. Kildee, Jared Huffman, Kathy Castor, Gwen S. Moore, Lauren Underwood, Jan Schakowsky, Mark Pocan, Grace Meng, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Darren Soto, Donald S. Beyer Jr., James P. McGovern, Peter Welch, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Yvette D. Clarke, Raúl M. Grijalva, Earl Blumenauer, and Nydia M. Velázquez.
No one could reasonably object to removing calls for “anti-Muslim violence, genocide and internment.” The problem arises over the demand that Facebook remove “anti-Muslim content…before it is even seen.” CAIR and its allies have for years defamed any and all opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, gays and others as “anti-Muslim bigotry,” lumping such opposition together indiscriminately with calls for “violence, genocide and internment,” stigmatizing it all. This was not careless or rhetorical excess; it was a concerted, well-executed strategy. Now it is taken for granted that the slightest negative word about how Islamic jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims, and the smallest hint of disapproval of anything related to Islam, is immediately denounced and dismissed as anti-Muslim bigotry.
Skeptical? Consider, then, the case of British journalist Julie Burchill. Apparently oblivious to the titanic dimensions of the irony, the publisher Little, Brown just canceled her book Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics because of an “Islamophobic” Twitter exchange Burchill had with Muslim writer Ash Sarkar. In the course of the exchange, Burchill alluded to Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old girl when he was 51, an event that is attested to in the earliest available Islamic texts. Yet for stating something that millions of Muslims around the world take as axiomatically true, Burchill’s book on the cancel culture was canceled.
And now Dingell and her henchmen are demanding that Facebook implement policies that will institutionalize and universalize such fascist hysteria. Even worse, the political climate is so rancid today that Dingell will pay no political price either for her association with Hamas-linked CAIR or for her open opposition to the freedom of speech. If she doesn’t know that Hamas-linked CAIR and its allies have for years been demonizing and stigmatizing honest discussion of the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism as “anti-Muslim,” and that her demands will also likely result in the silencing of such discussion, she should know it. Dingell is actively aiding an endeavor to silence all criticism of Islam, which is all smeared in the same way, and enabling the tacit acceptance of Sharia blasphemy law, which forbids such criticism. She is, in short, the very definition of a useful idiot.
Cuomo Sentences Small Businesses to Death with Minimum Wage Hike
Despite an unemployment rate of ten percent and about one-third of small businesses already shuttered as a result of his coronavirus lockdowns, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is apparently unsatisfied in his efforts in the state. So he’s decided to go ahead with a planned minimum wage hike.
That’s OK. All business people are rich, aren’t they?
Reason:
The New York Department of Labor announced Wednesday that it will move forward with plans to hike the state’s minimum wage on December 31. Under the state’s phased-in minimum wage increase that started in 2016, businesses in New York City are already required to pay workers a minimum of $15 per hour. On December 31, the minimum wage in Long Island and Westchester County will increase by $1 to $14 per hour, and the minimum wage across the rest of the state will jump from $11.80 to $12.50 per hour.
Cuomo’s Labor Department considered canceling or postponing the increase — especially after the governor reimposed many lockdown orders and promised more in the future. After all, “minimum wage” is sort of irrelevant when no one is getting paid any wages at all.
But the fight for social justice and economic equality must go on — even if it kills off every business in the state.
Greg Biryla, New York director of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), told the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle that the Cuomo administration’s reasoning for approving the minimum wage hike “defies logic.” Even with assistance from the state and federal governments, 39 percent of NFIB members say they could be out of business in the next year.
Doesn’t Cuomo care about what he’s doing to these small businesses? The answer is no.
The infuriating thing is that the state is well aware of the additional burden it is creating—the Cuomo administration just doesn’t seem to care. A report commissioned by the labor department to review the potential costs of hiking the state’s minimum wage in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis notes that “COVID-19 has dramatically changed the economic landscape, casting doubt on whether the capacity to absorb minimum wage increases without adverse impact can continue over the near-term.”
Bureaucratic understatement can be so maddening.
But the analysts add that “Anecdotally, our research has found examples of job openings upstate offering wages well above $12.50,” and conclude that “these examples could be interpreted as evidence that upstate businesses are able to offer the wages necessary to attract the workers they need.”
“Anecdotally” means they don’t have any hard data or evidence of any kind. I guess the bureaucrats’ Auntie Midge told them about how Hank’s Hardware Store in Schenectady was paying $13.00 an hour. She heard it from Uncle Bob, so it’s got to be true.
Cuomo is determined to ignore reality. The consequences of this idiocy will be felt by thousands of small businesses that might be willing to reopen their doors when the pandemic passes, but will be unable to afford the new wages until they get back on their feet. Cuomo has condemned these businesses to death.
Justin Amash Introduces Bill To End Civil Asset Forfeiture Nationwide
Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) on Thursday introduced a bill to end civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government to take property from someone without ever charging them with a crime.
Law enforcement on the local, state, and federal levels can seize assets if they were thought to be used in connection with illegal activity. That's often based solely on suspicion, though. Many people never receive their items back, even if they were acquitted or never charged in the first place. Since 2000, state and local governments have robbed people of more than $68 billion.
Police often deposit those sums into slush funds for their departments.
What's more, the property seized doesn't necessarily have to have been used by the alleged criminal in question. Such was the case with Kevin McBride, who had his Jeep taken by police in Tucson, Arizona, after his girlfriend allegedly used it to sell $25 worth of weed to an undercover cop.
Amash's bill would eliminate the practice as we know it nationwide. "Civil asset forfeiture is a due process violation, and it always has been," said Amash in a statement. "Its history is riddled with injustices not because it's a valid practice that gets misused, but because its central premise—denying people their procedural rights—is inherently flawed. By ending it, my bill helps fulfill Congress's obligation to stop rights violations at both the state and federal level, and it ends a practice that contributes to the frayed relationship between law enforcement and the public."
It seems to be commonsense that civil asset forfeiture plainly violates our constitutional rights, particularly as laid out under the Fourth and 14th Amendments. On the federal level, Amash's bill ends the practice outright. "No person shall be required, under the laws of the United States, to forfeit to the United States any property, real or personal, pursuant to a civil forfeiture proceeding, including a nonjudicial civil forfeiture proceeding," the bill reads. Such a change would ensure, for instance, that the Drug Enforcement Administration is no longer allowed to seize money at airports, as has been their practice when travelers carry large sums. The agency stole $43,000 from a woman in Wilmington, North Carolina, and $82,373 from an elderly man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, simply because they dared to fly with it. Neither was ever charged with involvement in the drug trade.
The legislation also quashes the practice at the state level by prohibiting governments from taking assets unless they secure a conviction against the alleged criminal or determine via a civil proceeding that the property owner committed the offense begetting forfeiture.
The libertarian congressman, who is retiring after this session, has long been a proponent of criminal justice reform. Earlier this year, he introduced the first bill to abolish qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to hold public officials accountable for violating your civil rights.
"The Constitution authorizes and obligates each branch of the Federal Government to protect individual rights," the bill reads. "The long-term failure of Congress, presidents, and the judiciary to recognize the illegitimacy of the government's civil forfeiture practices does not divest them of the authority to do so. The government cannot lawfully jettison the rights of the accused for the sake of convenience and profit."
https://reason.com/2020/12/17/justin-amash-introduces-bill-to-end-civil-asset-forfeiture-nationwide/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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19 December, 2020
UK: Victory in the war on woke: Judges' landmark ruling in case of mother who called trans woman 'he' on Twitter means freedom of speech DOES includes the 'right to offend'
Judges have insisted that freedom of speech includes the 'right to offend' in a landmark ruling which could help to turn the tide on 'woke' intolerance after a feminist who called a transgender woman a 'pig in a wig' and a 'man' was cleared.
Presiding over a case in the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Warby said: 'Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.'
They added that 'free speech encompasses the right to offend, and indeed to abuse another'. The judgment from two senior members of the judiciary will set a precedent for future cases involving freedom of speech.
The ruling has emerged only now, but came in the successful appeal decided last week in favour of mother-of-two Kate Scottow, from Hitchin in Hertfordshire, after she had been found guilty under the 2003 Communications Act earlier in the year.
Miss Scottow told The Daily Telegraph: 'It was necessary to enshrine one of the most fundamental rights of every living being in a democratic society – the right to freedom of speech that is now routinely attacked...' But Miss Hayden said: 'This is... a kick in the teeth to the entire LGBT community.'
Miss Scottow was arrested in 2018 and taken from her children and into custody after referring to trans woman Stefanie Hayden as a man, a 'racist' and a 'pig in the wig'. Miss Hayden, 47, reported the online remarks to police.
She had been arrested by three police officers in 2019 at her home in Pirton near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in front of her daughter, 10, and son, 20 months. Boris Johnson later called it an abuse of power.
In February this year radical feminist Miss Scottow, 40, was handed a two-year conditional discharge, and ordered to pay £1,000 compensation, with district judge Margaret Dodds telling her: 'Your comments contributed nothing to a debate. We teach children to be kind to each other and not to call each other names in the playground.'
But, overturning the decision, Mr Justice Warby explained that the relevant parts of the Communications Act 'were not intended by Parliament to criminalise forms of expression, the content of which is no worse than annoying or inconvenient in nature'.
Mr Justice Warby also suggested that the prosecution had been an 'unjustified state interference with free speech'.
Lord Justice Bean said the appeal illustrated the need for decision-makers in the criminal justice system to have regard to issues of freedom of speech.
The two appeal judges, who outlined their reasoning in a written ruling published on Wednesday, said prosecutors had not obtained 'all the contextual material for the offending messages', and had presented the case in a 'somewhat disorderly way' at the trial.
Boris Johnson said at the time that sending three officers to deal with the case and holding Ms Scottow for seven hours was an 'abuse of manpower' at a time when violent crime is increasing
Female prisoner who was sexually assaulted bidding to ban trans inmates from women's jails
A female prisoner who was sexually assaulted by a trans inmate has launched a challenge against the policy of keeping such offenders in women's prisons, it emerged last month.
She was attacked by an inmate who identified as female but had not had reassignment surgery.
The trans woman had convictions for serious sexual offences. Yet the offender was still put in a women's jail, Downview in Surrey.
A judicial review will seek to overturn government policy which allows men who have been awarded a gender recognition certificate from being housed in female prisons.
The landmark case will argue the Government is breaching equality law. It will focus on trans women inmates who have committed sexual or violent crime.
Activist Miss Hayden, who began medically transitioning in 2007 and was given a gender recognition certificate in 2018, won a landmark case at the High Court in April last year when website Mumsnet was forced to reveal the identity of an anonymous user who had been accused of bullying her online.
In February Ms Scottow, 39, was found guilty of persistently making use of a public communications network to cause annoyance, inconvenience, and anxiety to Stephanie Hayden, 48, between September 2018 and last May.
The 'radical feminist' was accused of deliberately 'misgendering' Ms Hayden by referring to her as 'he' or 'him' during a period of 'significant online abuse'.
Throughout the trial her supporters gathered outside St Albans Magistrates' Court to protest the verdict, chanting 'pig in a wig' and 'he's a man - go on prosecute me'.
Holding banners which read 'we love free speech', the mob tied scarves in the Suffragettes' purple, green, and white to lampposts outside the courthouse.
But Ms Hayden argued the defendant was guilty of 'harassment' and had 'misgendered' her 'to annoy people like me', adding: 'It's calculated to violate my dignity as a woman.'
Trumpeting her Gender Recognition Certificate, the complainant told the court how Ms Scottow was bound by law to refer to her as a woman. Ms Scottow was handed a two-year conditional discharge, and was ordered by the court to pay £1,000 compensation within six months.
But now after a successful appeal the prosecution has been quashed.
In a separate incident Father Ted creator Graham Linehan was given a verbal harassment warning by West Yorkshire Police after Miss Hayden reported him for referring to her by previous names and pronouns on Twitter in 2018.
Police faced a backlash for phoning a 74-year-old woman to warn her that her online posts about gender identity had offended transgender people.
Former local journalist Margaret Nelson wrote in her blog that if a transgender person's body was dissected post-mortem, 'his or her sex would be obvious to a student or pathologist'.
But she was later contacted by Suffolk Police, who woke her with a morning phone call, telling her the comments had provoked complaints from members of the trans community.
A Necessary Defense of Girls' Sports
How surreal it must’ve been for Selina Soule and the other girls to watch it disappear like it did. Everything they’d worked so hard for in track and field had just evaporated.
Soule had run a great race, missing her personal best in the 55-meter dash by a mere hundredth of a second. And yet she was denied a spot in the Connecticut high school state finals by two “transgender” runners who smoked the rest of the field.
“It’s just really frustrating and heartbreaking,” she said last year, “because we all train extremely hard to shave off just fractions of a second off of our time. And these athletes can do half the amount of work that we do, and it doesn’t matter. We have no chance of winning.”
Soule, who’s been smeared by the always-classy Left as “transphobic” and a “sore loser,” was speaking about her state’s anti-science policy of allowing high school student athletes to compete based solely on their expressed gender identity. This policy is at odds with both the International Olympic Committee and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which require “transgender” athletes to take testosterone-suppressing drugs to compete in the women’s category. It’s a policy that cost Soule and a number of other girls the satisfaction and the college scholarships that typically accompany championship-level performances in track and field. (To get a sense of the ridiculousness of expressed gender identity, check out Oxford-educated British rapper Zuby, who one day expressed himself as a female long enough to smash the British women’s deadlift record.)
Of course, as our Arnold Ahlert pointed out back in February of 2019, the Left insists there’s no difference whatsoever between boys and girls, men and women.
Connecticut is one of 18 states that allow this abomination — this pitting of biological boys against competitors who are, on average, 9% shorter; whose bones are smaller and weaker both in terms of size and density; whose heads are smaller; whose elbows, shoulders, fingers, and pelvises are physically different; whose torsos are longer and whose arms and legs are shorter; and, critically, whose bodies have a significantly smaller proportion of muscle mass. But hey, that’s just the science talking.
Soule, along with two fellow athletes, Alanna Smith and Chelsea Mitchell, finally had enough, and in February the Alliance Defending Freedom filed suit on their behalf. Their argument is that allowing boys to compete in the female category denies girls “opportunities for participation, recruitment, and scholarships,” and is thus at odds with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its Title IX prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex.
Congress has been curiously silent about this issue. Perhaps our elected representatives are afraid to run afoul of the Rainbow Mafia or be disinvited from all the best cocktail parties. But outgoing Hawaii Representative and former Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard isn’t afraid. Nor is Oklahoma Republican Congressman Markwayne Mullin, himself a former professional MMA fighter. Last week, they introduced a bill called the Protect Women’s Sports Act to secure the sanctity and fundamental decency of women’s sports by clarifying that Title IX rules apply to female athletes based on their biological sex rather than their preferred “gender identity.”
“Title IX,” says Mullin, “was designed to give women and girls an equal chance to succeed, including in sports. Allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports diminishes that equality and takes away from the original intent of Title IX.”
The bill is a nice parting shot from Gabbard, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve and a libertarian-leaning progressive who’s been a steady thorn in the side of the Democrat establishment, as this paint-peeling 2019 Twitter takedown of Hillary Clinton will attest. She’s represented Hawaii’s second congressional district since 2012 and ran for president this year, but she didn’t seek reelection to the House. Not surprisingly, she’s taken plenty of incoming fire from the Left for her bill, but she spent the weekend hitting back via Twitter and educating via an explanatory video.
“My ‘Protect Women’s Sports Act’ is based on science. It safeguards equality & ensures a level playing field for girls & women competing in sports. It upholds Title IX’s original intent which was based on the general biological distinction between men & women athletes based on sex.”
This is all well and good, of course, but unless this bill gets to the House floor for a vote, it’s little more than posturing. And, come to think of it, what are the odds that Nancy Pelosi and her hard-left caucus will actually acknowledge the science and stand up for our daughters?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76465-a-necessary-defense-of-girls-sports-2020-12-15
Queen's Zulu painting is given 'colonial' warning: Image depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift has description updated to acknowledge its links to imperialismA royal painting of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift has had its description updated to acknowledge its links to imperialism.
It is among 62 works in the Royal Collection to be amended in the wake of the Black Lives Matter campaign.
Part of the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, Rorke’s Drift saw 141 British soldiers defend a field hospital against an attack from 4,000 warriors.
Eleven Victoria Crosses were won in the battle which was depicted in Zulu, a 1964 film starring Michael Caine.
The online description of the oil painting, by Elizabeth Thompson under commission from Queen Victoria, now notes: ‘This work is connected to colonialism and imperialism.
'Like all Royal Collection records, this work is subject to ongoing research as the Royal Collection Trust seeks to present fully the narratives represented in the collection.’
A bust of the philosopher John Locke in Kensington Palace has had its description updated to acknowledge his links to slavery.
He was an investor in the Royal African Company, which controlled the British slave trade.
The royal trust’s online description of the marble bust of Locke now notes he was ‘connected with the transatlantic slave trade and supported it politically’.
The description of a Windsor Castle bust of the Duke of Marlborough is another to have been updated.
It now says: ‘The Duke of Marlborough was connected with the transatlantic slave trade and benefited from it financially.’
The duke won a crucial military victory over France in 1704.
The royal trust began reviewing hundreds of thousands of artworks in the Queen’s collection for colonial and slave links this summer. None have been removed.
A painting of Sir Thomas Picton, known as the Hero of Waterloo, was the first to have been updated in July, adding reference to his links to slavery.
As well as for links to slavery and colonialism, the Trust has also been reviewing items which feature BAME sitters.
Some of these have had their description updated with the words: 'Royal Collection Trust welcomes further information relating to the identity of those depicted and the creation or provenance of this object.'
Yesterday a Royal Collection Trust spokesman said: 'We have an ongoing programme of activities to research, display, loan and publish detailed records of objects in the Royal Collection, in order for a wide range of audiences to learn about the collection and its history.
'Displays and publicly available object records are continually under review.'
Supreme Court Strikes Down Restrictions on Colorado Churches
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court granted a temporary injunction to a Colorado church that was fighting Governor Jared Polis’s restrictions on capacity.
The court pointed to a decision in New York where the Catholic diocese of Brooklyn sued Governor Andrew Cuomo over his pandemic restrictions and won on the grounds that Cuomo’s orders violated the First Amendment.
This would appear to open the door to churches nationwide to decide their own COVID policies.
Washington Examiner:
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, along with Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, pointing to the fact that Colorado had preemptively lifted its church limitations once the High Plains Harvest appealed to the high court.
“The state has explained that it took that action in response to this court’s recent decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo,” Kagan wrote. “Absent our issuing different guidance, there is no reason to think Colorado will reverse course — and so no reason to think Harvest Church will again face capacity limits.”
Given that governors are slapping restrictions as severe as they were in the spring on their citizens, Kagan and the liberals are taking a lot on faith.
The arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court has proven to be a godsend to religious liberty.
CNN:
The cases highlight the impact of Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the bench. Before her arrival, Chief Justice John Roberts had sided with the liberals, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, against houses of worship in similar disputes. Since Barrett’s arrival, however, and the establishment of a strong 6-3 conservative majority, the court now has reversed course and has the necessary votes to side with religious groups.
Another important religious liberty case in New Jersey was also decided in favor of houses of worship. The New Jersey suit concerned not only limiting capacity but also the mask mandate that required mask-wearing in church except for receiving communion.
New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal defended the state’s restrictions telling the justices that the state as “accommodated religious conduct — ensuring religious activities receive at least as much protection as secular conduct, if not more.”
New Jersey requires that religious gatherings fill no more than 25% of the room.
The Supreme Court issued the order with no dissent.
What’s truly disturbing is that political authorities thought nothing of violating the religious beliefs and liberty of the people in the name of “public health.” That the Supreme Court was forced into upholding our most fundamental rights against this assault says a lot about the state of freedom in the United States today and why vigilance, especially over the next four years, will be so important.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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18 December, 2020
How our data encodes systematic racism
Deborah Raji below is pretty fired up about what she calls bias in the data we use in decision-making. She notes that the data we use is mainly generated by whites in white societies and reasonably notes that this can introduce bias into research findings.
But I think she is asking a lot to ask for data with a worldwide perspective. We just do not generate such data for cost and other reasons. I have long been aware of cultural bias and did as a result gather multicultural data in much of my research. But I was limited by language constraints and much else. She may be pleased that I gathered some of my data from her ancestral India.
So I think she needs to moderate her ambitions. Gathering bias-free data is a snark. The best we can do is to point out instances of cultural bias when we see them
I’ve often been told, “The data does not lie.” However, that has never been my experience. For me, the data nearly always lies. Google Image search results for “healthy skin” show only light-skinned women, and a query on “Black girls” still returns pornography. The CelebA face data set has labels of “big nose” and “big lips” that are disproportionately assigned to darker-skinned female faces like mine. ImageNet-trained models label me a “bad person,” a “drug addict,” or a “failure.” Data sets for detecting skin cancer are missing samples of darker skin types.
White supremacy often appears violently—in gunshots at a crowded Walmart or church service, in the sharp remark of a hate-fueled accusation or a rough shove on the street—but sometimes it takes a more subtle form, like these lies. When those of us building AI systems continue to allow the blatant lie of white supremacy to be embedded in everything from how we collect data to how we define data sets and how we choose to use them, it signifies a disturbing tolerance.
Non-white people are not outliers. Globally, we are the norm, and this doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Data sets so specifically built in and for white spaces represent the constructed reality, not the natural one. To have accuracy calculated in the absence of my lived experience not only offends me, but also puts me in real danger.
Corrupt data
In a research paper titled “Dirty Data, Bad Predictions,” lead author Rashida Richardson describes an alarming scenario: police precincts suspected or confirmed to have engaged in “corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal” practices continue to contribute their data to the development of new automated systems meant to help officers make policing decisions.
The goal of predictive policing tools is to send officers to the scene of a crime before it happens. The assumption is that locations where individuals had been previously arrested correlate with a likelihood of future illegal activity.
What Richardson points out is that this assumption remains unquestioned even when those initial arrests were racially motivated or illegal, sometimes involving “systemic data manipulation, police corruption, falsifying police reports, and violence, including robbing residents, planting evidence, extortion, unconstitutional searches, and other corrupt practices.” Even data from the worst-behaving police departments is still being used to inform predictive policing tools.
As the Tampa Bay Times reports, this approach can provide algorithmic justification for further police harassment of minority and low-income communities. Using such flawed data to train new systems embeds the police department’s documented misconduct in the algorithm and perpetuates practices already known to be terrorizing those most vulnerable to that abuse.
This may appear to describe a handful of tragic situations. However, it is really the norm in machine learning: this is the typical quality of the data we currently accept as our unquestioned “ground truth.”
An analysis of 63 recent statements shows that US tech companies repeatedly placed responsibility for racial injustice on Black people.
One day GPT-2, an earlier publicly available version of the automated language generation model developed by the research organization OpenAI, started talking to me openly about “white rights.” Given simple prompts like “a white man is” or “a Black woman is,” the text the model generated would launch into discussions of “white Aryan nations” and “foreign and non-white invaders.”
Not only did these diatribes include horrific slurs like “bitch,” “slut,” “nigger,” “chink,” and “slanteye," but the generated text embodied a specific American white nationalist rhetoric, describing “demographic threats” and veering into anti-Semitic asides against “Jews” and “Communists.”
GPT-2 doesn’t think for itself—it generates responses by replicating language patterns observed in the data used to develop the model. This data set, named WebText, contains “over 8 million documents for a total of 40 GB of text” sourced from hyperlinks. These links were themselves selected from posts most upvoted on the social media website Reddit, as “a heuristic indicator for whether other users found the link interesting, educational, or just funny.”
However, Reddit users—including those uploading and upvoting—are known to include white supremacists. For years, the platform was rife with racist language and permitted links to content expressing racist ideology. And although there are practical options available to curb this behavior on the platform, the first serious attempts to take action, by then-CEO Ellen Pao in 2015, were poorly received by the community and led to intense harassment and backlash.
Whether dealing with wayward cops or wayward users, technologists choose to allow this particular oppressive worldview to solidify in data sets and define the nature of models that we develop. OpenAI itself acknowledged the limitations of sourcing data from Reddit, noting that “many malicious groups use those discussion forums to organize.” Yet the organization also continues to make use of the Reddit-derived data set, even in subsequent versions of its language model. The dangerously flawed nature of data sources is effectively dismissed for the sake of convenience, despite the consequences. Malicious intent isn’t necessary for this to happen, though a certain unthinking passivity and neglect is.
Little white lies
White supremacy is the false belief that white individuals are superior to those of other races. It is not a simple misconception but an ideology rooted in deception. Race is the first myth, superiority the next. Proponents of this ideology stubbornly cling to an invention that privileges them.
I hear how this lie softens language from a “war on drugs” to an “opioid epidemic,” and blames “mental health” or “video games” for the actions of white assailants even as it attributes “laziness” and “criminality” to non-white victims. I notice how it erases those who look like me, and I watch it play out in an endless parade of pale faces that I can’t seem to escape—in film, on magazine covers, and at awards shows.
Data sets so specifically built in and for white spaces represent the constructed reality, not the natural one.
This shadow follows my every move, an uncomfortable chill on the nape of my neck. When I hear “murder,” I don’t just see the police officer with his knee on a throat or the misguided vigilante with a gun by his side—it’s the economy that strangles us, the disease that weakens us, and the government that silences us.
Tell me—what is the difference between overpolicing in minority neighborhoods and the bias of the algorithm that sent officers there? What is the difference between a segregated school system and a discriminatory grading algorithm? Between a doctor who doesn’t listen and an algorithm that denies you a hospital bed? There is no systematic racism separate from our algorithmic contributions, from the hidden network of algorithmic deployments that regularly collapse on those who are already most vulnerable.
Resisting technological determinism
Technology is not independent of us; it’s created by us, and we have complete control over it. Data is not just arbitrarily “political”—there are specific toxic and misinformed politics that data scientists carelessly allow to infiltrate our data sets. White supremacy is one of them.
We’ve already inserted ourselves and our decisions into the outcome—there is no neutral approach. There is no future version of data that is magically unbiased. Data will always be a subjective interpretation of someone’s reality, a specific presentation of the goals and perspectives we choose to prioritize in this moment. That’s a power held by those of us responsible for sourcing, selecting, and designing this data and developing the models that interpret the information.
Essentially, there is no exchange of “fairness” for “accuracy”—that’s a mythical sacrifice, an excuse not to own up to our role in defining performance at the exclusion of others in the first place.
Those of us building these systems will choose which subreddits and online sources to crawl, which languages to use or ignore, which data sets to remove or accept. Most important, we choose who we apply these algorithms to, and which objectives we optimize for. We choose the labels we create, the data we take in, the methods we use. We choose who we welcome as data scientists and engineers and researchers—and who we do not. There were many possibilities for the design of the technology we built, and we chose this one. We are responsible.
So why can’t we be more careful? When will we finally get into the habit of disclosing data provenance, deleting problematic data sets, and explicitly defining the limitations of every model’s scope? At what point can we condemn those operating with an explicit white supremacist agenda, and take serious actions for inclusion?
An uncertain path forward
Distracted by corporate condolences, abstract technical solutions, and articulate social theories, I’ve watched peers congratulate themselves on invisible progress. Ultimately, I envy them, because they have a choice in the same world where I, like every other Black person, cannot opt out of caring about this.
As Black people now die in a cacophony of natural and unnatural disasters, many of my colleagues are still more galvanized by the latest product or space launch than the jarring horror of a reality that chokes the breath out of me.
The fact is that AI doesn’t work until it works for all of us.
For years, I’ve watched this issue extolled as important, but it’s clear that dealing with it is still seen as a non-priority, “nice to have” supplementary action—secondary always to some definition of model functionality that doesn’t include me.
Models clearly still struggling to address these bias challenges get celebrated as breakthroughs, while people brave enough to speak up about the risk get silenced, or worse. There’s a clear cultural complacency with things as usual, and although disappointing, that’s not particularly surprising in a field where the vast majority just don’t understand the stakes.
The fact is that AI doesn’t work until it works for all of us. If we hope to ever address racial injustice, then we need to stop presenting our distorted data as “ground truth.” There’s no rational and just world in which hiring tools systematically exclude women from technical roles, or where self-driving cars are more likely to hit pedestrians with darker skin. The truth of any reality I recognize is not in these models, or in the data sets that inform them.
The machine-learning community continues to accept a certain level of dysfunction as long as only certain groups are affected. This needs conscious change, and that will take as much effort as any other fight against systematic oppression. After all, the lies embedded in our data are not much different from any other lie white supremacy has told. They will thus require just as much energy and investment to counteract.
Yes, Georgia Senate Candidate Raphael Warnock Is a Radical, Bigoted Nutjob
Rev. Raphael Warnock, one of the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate in Georgia runoff elections, praised the racist and anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan‘s Nation of Islam back in 2013.
On July 11, 2013, Warnock gave a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., called “The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety and Public Witness.”
During the Q&A after the lecture, he was asked by a member of the audience about the Nation of Islam’s relationship with the church, and whether “the black church” is having similar attendance problems as “so-called mainstream white” churches and synagogues.
“Well, the Nation of Islam is significant. But its numbers don’t come anywhere near the membership of our churches,” Warnock explained. “Its voice has been important, and its voice has been important even for the development of black theology, because it was the black Muslims who challenged black preachers, and said, ‘You’re promulgating,’ you know, they called ‘the white man’s religion. That’s a slave religion. You’re telling people to focus on heaven. Meanwhile, they’re catching hell.’ And so we needed the witness of the nation of Islam in a real sense to put a fire under us and keep us honest about the meaning of the proclamation coming from our pulpits.”
Warnock’s radical left-wing and racial ideology is well-documented. In 2008, he defended Barack Obama’s racist former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, during an appearance on Fox News, even defending Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks as a form of the “truth-telling tradition of the black church,” which makes people “uncomfortable.” Warnock then blamed the media for “constant playing over and over again of the same sound bites outside of context,” before comparing Wright to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and calling him a “preacher and a prophet.”
In February 2013, Warnock defended the sermon in which Wright proclaimed “God Damn America” as a “very fine homily entitled on confusing God and government” and said it was “consistent with black prophetic preaching.”
Despite recent attempts to brand himself as pro-Israel, Warnock has a history of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiments.
Warnock compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to segregationist Democrat George Wallace by saying his two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “tantamount to saying, ‘Occupation today, occupation tomorrow, occupation forever,'” alluding to Wallace’s past words about segregation. Warnock also accused Israel of killing Palestinians like “birds of prey.”
“We saw the government of Israel shoot down unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey,” Warnock said in a 2018 sermon delivered shortly after the U.S Embassy in Jerusalem was opened. “And I don’t care who does it, it is wrong. It is wrong to shoot down God’s children like they don’t matter at all. And it’s no more anti-Semitic for me to say that than it is anti-white for me to say that black lives matter. Palestinian lives matter.”
Warnock’s radical views are further proven by his past praise of communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In 2016, Warnock eulogized Castro before his congregation. “We pray for the people of Cuba in this moment. We remember Fidel Castro, whose legacy is complex. Don’t let anyone tell you a simple story; life usually isn’t very simple. His legacy is complex, kind of like America’s legacy is complex,” Warnock said. “While we focus on political prisoners in Cuba, you saw the folks standing here this morning. If some people get slapped on the hand for the same crime and others go to federal prison, then we too have our own political prisons because politics more than the crime politics of race and class. And in that sense, many of us have sisters and brothers who are political prisoners. We are about to pray to a man who was a political prisoner.”
Warnock also allegedly attempted to obstruct a 2002 police investigation into suspected child abuse at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Maryland. This is disturbing on several levels, and not just because of his history of anti-law enforcement rhetoric.
In 2015, Warnock complained about “police power showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality” in Ferguson, Missouri.
He even claimed that law enforcement officers are often a danger to children. “Our children are in trouble, and it’s often those who are sworn to protect who cause more trouble. … Our children are in danger,”
In another sermon, he said, “We shouldn’t be surprised when we see police officers act like bullies on the street.”
PJM’s Stephen Kruiser described Raphael Warnock as “a ferret-molesting nutjob.” That’s a fairly good description.
And Joe Biden is in Georgia today stumping for Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the other Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in the runoff elections.
Breonna Taylor: The True Story of a BLM Hero
Hey, guys, I found out the true facts in the Breonna Taylor case!
Remember the “botched raid” (New York Times) on Breonna’s apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, last March, when police officers killed this innocent black woman as she slept peacefully in her bed?
Yes, apparently, without announcing themselves, the police smashed in the front door of the WRONG APARTMENT. Their warrant was for a man Breonna had dated eons ago and barely knew anymore, and whom they already had in custody! Assuming the police were home invaders, Breonna’s boyfriend pulled out a gun — again, police were at the WRONG APARTMENT — whereupon the officers opened fire, killing Breonna and wounding one of their own in friendly fire.
You probably won’t believe this, but it turns out, none of that is true.
Contrary to the repeated claim that the police “had the wrong address and the wrong person and the person was in custody” — as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it — the police were not at the wrong house at all.
It seems that Breonna Taylor was knee-deep in the criminal enterprise of her sometime-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, who was running a massive drug operation, selling crack cocaine and fentanyl to the citizens of Louisville.
The morning after Breonna was killed, for example, Jamarcus told his baby mama (on a police-recorded phone call): “This is what you got to understand, don’t take it wrong, but Bre been handling all my money, she been handling my money … She been handling sh*t for me and Cuz, it ain’t just me.”
He detailed the amounts when an unidentified male got on the line, saying, “Tell Cuz, Bre got down like $15 (grand), she had the $8 (grand) I gave her the other day and she picked up another $6 (grand).”
And yet, the media credulously repeated that Breonna barely knew Jamarcus, based on the family’s lawyer, Sam Aguiar, saying that they had broken up two years earlier and had only a “passive friendship.”
In addition to “handling sh*t” for Jamarcus, Breonna had bailed Jamarcus out of jail, driven with him to a “trap house” (where the drugs were sold), and allowed him to use her address — the site of the raid — for his mail, phone bills, a bank account and jail bookings. All this in 2020.
Police GPS tracking showed that Jamarcus had been to Breonna’s apartment six times in January alone, and had called her from jail dozens of times since they had allegedly broken up.
Jan. 3, 2020:
Jamarcus: “Just be on standby so you can come get me. Love you.”
Breonna: “Love you, too.”
More significantly, police had photos of Jamarcus picking up USPS packages at Breonna’s apartment as recently as Jan. 16, 2020, then taking them directly to a trap house. The photos are available online. (If only our media had access to the internet!)
And of course, back in 2016, after Breonna had rented a car for Jamarcus, police showed up at her door because … a dead body was found in the trunk. The murdered man turned out to be the brother of one of Jamarcus’ co-conspirators. Surely that gave Breonna an inkling that Jamarcus was not walking on the right side of the law.
These are a few of the reasons why, on March 13, Louisville police planned to execute four simultaneous no-knock search warrants on homes associated with Jamarcus’ drug operation: 2424 Elliott Avenue (the trap house, where vast amounts of crack cocaine, fentanyl pills and guns were found), 2425 Elliott Avenue, 2426 Elliott Avenue (the houses next door, used to hide guns and drugs), and 3003 Springfield Drive No. 4 (Breonna’s apartment).
Although all the warrants were written as “no-knock” to protect the officers and prevent the destruction of evidence, the police did knock and announce themselves at Breonna’s apartment. The officers say so, and at least one brave neighbor broke with “the community” to admit he heard the police announce themselves.
The media make the inane point that a dozen neighbors didn’t hear the police announce themselves. Even assuming they’re telling the truth, that proves: A dozen neighbors didn’t hear the police announce themselves. It doesn’t prove that the officers didn’t announce themselves. (This is why there are LSATs to get into law school.)
Even Breonna’s boyfriend says they knocked. You’re the bagwoman for a major crack cocaine operation, there’s loud banging on your door after midnight, and your reaction is:The last thing I imagined was that it could be the police!
Team Breonna makes a big point of the fact that the police found no drugs or money at her apartment. Yeah, that’s because they didn’t look.
The first officer through the door was shot by Breonna’s boyfriend — who eventually admitted he shot first — and the officers returned fire, hitting Breonna five times, one fatally. (All proved by federal ballistics reports.) In the commotion after the shootout, the officers never executed the search warrant.
That was confirmed by a police investigator to the grand jury — and also by Jamarcus, who said in jailhouse recordings that his money was still at Breonna’s house:
Jamarcus: “It was there, it was there, it was there … They didn’t do nothing though that’s the problem … [Breonna’s boyfriend] said ain’t none of that go on.”
[Unidentified man] to Jamarcus: “So they didn’t take none of the money?”
Jamarcus: “[Breonna’s boyfriend] said that none of that go on. He said Homicide came straight on the scene and they went to packaging Bre and they left.”
But how on earth did the officers hit Breonna, when she was sound asleep in the next room? She wasn’t. She was standing in the hallway right next to her boyfriend … who, again, was shooting at the police. He ducked, she didn’t.
As Jamarcus summarized what happened to Breonna in a jailhouse phone call: “that n@gga did this shit. At the end of the day, if I would have been at that house, Bre would be alive, bruh. I don’t shoot at no police.”
For this, Breonna’s family got $12 million from the city and the rest of us got endless nights of violent riots.
https://anncoulter.com/2020/12/16/breonna-taylor-the-true-story-of-a-blm-herox/
Australia: Indigenous leader appointed to Murray-Darling Basin board
A man with a red beard is an Aborigine? Pull the other one! The stream of articles like this are amazingly racist. They constantly show that you have to be effectively white to be regarded as a high-achieving Aborigine
The legislated position for permanent Indigenous representation on the board of the Murray Darling Basin Authority has finally been filled after more than a year’s delay.
Rene Woods has been appointed to the position by Water Minister Keith Pitt. Mr Woods was chairman of Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN), which is a confederation of Indigenous Nations or traditional owners in the southern part of the Basin. He stepped down from the role to serve on the MDBA board.
Mr Woods said Indigenous representation was a “step in the right direction” to improving the influence of First Nations on water management.
“It’s my hope that there will be more First Nations representation in coming years that will continue to take our voices to the Authority, improving their understanding of First Nations water issues,” Mr Woods said.
“My father, Ian, was the first Indigenous man on the Murray Darling Basin Commission – he started to advocate for more involvement in decision making – I’m proud to continue that work.”
'Disgrace': Calls for Indigenous voice in water management
The decision to deliver a permanent Indigenous representative on the authority’s board was announced in September last year by then-water minister David Littleproud, but the position remained vacant until Mr Woods’ appointment on Friday.
Indigenous representatives railed against the appointment delay. The Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations labelled it “appalling” and MLDRIN vice chairman Grant Rigney said it was “unjustifiable”.
MLDRIN’s acting chairman Grant Rigney said Mr Woods was the “the ideal candidate”.
“Now more than ever, as controversial new dam projects and flood plain harvesting rules pose heightened threats to our sacred waterways, First Nations need a strong voice at the highest decision-making table of the MDBA,” Rigney said.
Mr Pitt said Mr Woods had been a prominent force in his representation for MLDRIN and he was well qualified for the MDBA board.
“He grew up with the Murrumbidgee River running through his veins and has a wealth of valuable experience in a broad range of local and national water management issues.”
The MDBA oversees water resource management and delivers the $13 billion Basin Plan to recover water for the environment.
A study from Griffith University this year found in NSW Aboriginal people collectively have rights to 0.2 per cent of the available surface water (12 gigalitres). Aboriginal people comprise 9.3 per cent of the population in NSW’s Murray Darling Basin, but only hold rights to 0.1 per cent of the value of the water market there ($16.5 million).
Two other overdue MDBA board appointments remain unfilled.\
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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16 December, 2020
Can Human Rights Be Rescued From Human Rights Activists’ Overreach?
Human Rights Day is celebrated annually on Dec. 10 in recognition of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has served as the foundation of the international human rights system for some seven decades, but it’s threatened by its very success, as activists use it to assert an ever-growing list of “rights” that undermine the inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms it was designed to promote and protect.
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt served as chairwoman of the committee that drafted the declaration, which included representatives from diverse countries, political systems, cultures, languages, and religions.
It recognized “the inherent dignity” and “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”
Forging consensus among the experts contributing to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a singular achievement. Securing support for it among the world’s nations was a triumph.
Over the ensuing decades, however, the remarkable consensus has been challenged by a powerful new movement of sovereign and non-sovereign entities, including lawyers, academics, nongovernmental organizations, activists, and U.N. officials, who seek to “improve” on what was accomplished in 1948.
In order to meet perceived new challenges, this movement asserts new rights and new interpretations of legally recognized rights. As noted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the original 30 rights in the declaration have proliferated into 1,377 rights provisions in 64 agreements.
This effort to promote the “evolution” of human rights threatens to undermine the great and noble project in fundamental ways.
These rights are often in tension—and sometimes in outright conflict. Unlike more traditional rights, which seek to protect the individual from infringements on their freedoms by government, new rights typically seek to guarantee benefits to individuals from governments or to assert rights to categories of people or to a specific community.
High-minded assertions of rights to broadband, a clean environment, or development cannot magically be realized. They require regulations, allocation of resources, and financial transfers by government.
Too often, enforcing new rights requires restrictions on the more traditional rights. For instance, calls for addressing “hate speech”—which advocates support as a means for combating what they see as intolerance and racism—nearly always involve restrictions, prohibitions, or punishments that infringe on the freedom of speech or freedom of religion and belief.
Confusion and controversy over what human rights mean diminish prospects for greater enforcement. Governments use the proliferation of rights to deflect from their violations by pointing to protection of other “rights.”
This long-standing problem dates back decades to communist countries asserting their fidelity to economic, social, and cultural rights—such as the right to a job or a right to health care—as a way to obscure their denial of civil and political rights, such as the right to self-government and freedom of speech.
Today, the problem continues at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Repressive states claim concern over human rights violations in other countries, while rarely being confronted over their hypocritical failure to admit their own problems or the human rights shortfalls of their allies.
Meanwhile, countries like the U.S. receive more criticism and recommendations on improving their human rights practices than Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela.
Accountability is further undermined by activists seeking to reinterpret the traditional definitions of rights and assert new rights not contemplated in the original negotiations.
We see this with claims that women’s rights cannot be realized without inclusion of a right to abortion. Bypassing the democratic process to impose new interpretations of existing rights is an assault on the very spirit of rights.
The State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, made up of experts on the right and the left, acknowledged these problems in a report released last summer.
Many human rights activists strongly opposed the report because it recommended steps to slow their counterproductive efforts to expand the number and definition of rights.
Specifically, the commission recommended that policymakers carefully consider new rights claims, weighing how closely they are rooted in the rights laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; their consistency with U.S. constitutional principles and American traditions; whether the U.S. and other nations have formally given their sovereign consent to recognition of the claimed rights; whether there’s a clear consensus of support among the many cultures and traditions of the human family; and whether new rights can be integrated into the existing human rights rubric without harmful conflicts.
The commission’s recommendations were hardly radical. They merely call for due consideration of new rights claims, reflection on their potential impact, and democratic accountability. But prudence often involves modest steps, not the sweeping, rapid changes that activists increasingly demand.
Pompeo observed, “More rights does not necessarily mean more justice.” Indeed, the proliferation of ever more rights and the desire to advance all of them without preference has diffused efforts to advance the fundamental rights and freedoms essential to individual liberty.
Respect for and enforcement of universal human rights depend on a clear understanding of what human rights are, practical consensus around the legal norms that protect rights, and respect for the sovereignty of states that guarantee those rights.
Is Israel Racist? A Reply To An Anti-Semitic Writer
The Jewish State, by definition, rejects some and welcomes others into the fold.
In “Is Israel Racist?”, a reply to an anti-Semitic interviewer (he bailed), the emphasis was on demonstrating why Israel’s particularism is an extension of the individual’s right as a sovereign, discerning human being. For the freedom to include or exclude is not racist. Rather, it is the inherent right of free individuals, living severally or collectively.”
Jews are to be faulted only to the extent that they deny to other nations the rights they claim for the Jewish ethno-state.
Israel’s particularism, moreover, is not race-based, it’s religious.
As understood in the U.S., racism is more often concerned with discrimination based on distinct physical characteristics. It’s thus important to understand that Jews no longer constitute a race.
Before the two exiles of the Jews from Israel, the first in 586 BCE, I would hazard that Hebrews were likely genetically quite distinct.
Some scientists suggest there is a “genetic basis for a common ancestry of the whole of the Jewish population.” The Cohanim, descendants of Aaron of the priestly caste, certainly share distinct genetic markers.
Thousands of years hence, however, there are white, brown and black Jews in Israel. In fact, there are Jews from 100 countries, including Yemen, India, the Arab countries and Ethiopia.
In 1991, roughly 36,000 Ethiopian Jews were lifted to safety in a series of daring operations initiated by successive Likud governments, headed by Menachem Begin, heir to founding father Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s classical liberalism. It’s hard to imagine an American government doing the same, say, for the racially persecuted Christians of South Africa or Zimbabwe. At the time, Ethiopian Jews were being oppressed by a brutal Marxist-Leninist, Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam.
While Israeli Jews share a common faith—Judaism—in what way are they a race? Clearly, Israeli Jews are a variegated people – many look just like Arabs and vice versa. The charge of racism as we know it in the U.S. is no more than liberal lather, racial agitation as atavistic and base as the kind that unleashed violence on American cities, during 2020.
By all metrics, Israeli-Arabs are not shunned and “segregated” based on defining physical appearance. The accusation that roughly 18 percent of Israel’s more than six million citizens incur “institutional racism” doesn’t pass muster. The same deductive debunking applied to this concept in the column “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” applies in Israel.
Namely, from the fact that distinct racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions disproportionately to their presence in the larger population—it doesn’t follow that they have been disenfranchised. Discrimination is far from the only plausible explanation for the lag in the fortunes of certain homogenous groups.
While (unofficially) rejecting multiculturalism, Israel retains liberal, democratic institutions and accords equal rights and protections to minorities. Israeli Arabs have equal voting rights, freedom of speech, assembly and press, as is evident from the hate-filled Islamic journals that thrive in Israel. Israeli Arabs run for the Knesset, hold government posts, and serve on the bench. Israel is one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote. Arabic is one of Israel’s two official languages.
The sole legal distinction between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel is that the latter are not required to serve in the Israeli army. A perk, some would say. As such, they don’t qualify for veteran benefits and, I imagine, will not get work where military security clearance is required. On the other hand, as the Jewish Virtual Library points out, Israeli Arabs get a head-start in the economy while Jews are conscripted for three years.
Is most "racism" in police practice actually classism?
A brief background for you, I was a police officer for a larger county department and a smaller city department for 13 years total. I was predominately a "beat cop," but spent a year my department's gang unit. I trained police officers at both departments, though a lot more at the second department, and I was a police instructor. I worked both the wealthiest side of town, and the poorest side of town.
I don't think law enforcement has a racism problem, but a classism problem. The poorer you were, the worse you were treated by police. While I was on my department's gang unit, I was assigned to a newly formed "high crime taskforce." We were tasked with spending our days in the worst neighborhoods and apartment complexes for several months after a kid was beaten to death at a bus stop. I witnessed numerous illegal searches and seizures, found case law that involved one of my fellow officers that should have stopped certain policing tactics since it was deemed illegal, but I was told "they're poor, they can't afford good attorneys" and was eventually kicked out of the unit. The areas I worked on that unit were 99% black/hispanic. If you saw a white person you never saw before, you would stop them because they were probably there trying to buy drugs. In fact, we would catch a car load of white teenagers coming out of a local apartment complex, driving a BMW, and they would get stopped immediately. Whenever we did a roadblock, it was in the poorest neighborhoods. Whenever we had a "targeted patrol" or "foot patrol," it was in the poorest areas of town, which just happened to be black/hispanic.
After getting kicked out of the gang unit for my "questioning" of their tactics (several promotions came from the "success" of that unit mind you), I went to work in an area that was poor white/black/hispanic. Poor whites were not treated any differently than poor blacks or hispanics. The poor white kid caught with weed went to jail just the same as the poor black or hispanic kid, and you were praised for it.
So I question, are the police actually conditioned to target minorities (or inherently racist), or do they target poor people? Unfortunately, the poorest areas in our country happen to be minority communities, but that's a different debate with LBJ's "great society," welfare, etc.
Germany cancels Christmas: Angela Merkel plunges country into new national lockdown over the festive season in desperate bid to drive down Covid infection rate
Germany will be plunged into a new national lockdown for the Christmas period as Angela Merkel makes a desperate bid to drive down soaring Covid infection rates.
The country will be closing non-essential shops, hair salons and schools, and further limiting social contact.
Chancellor Merkel said she and the governors of Germany's 16 states agreed to step up the country's lockdown measures from December 16 to January 10 to stop the exponential rise of COVID-19 cases.
Existing restrictions imposed in November failed to significantly reduce the number of new infections, she said.
Germany recorded 20,200 newly confirmed cases and 321 additional deaths on Saturday, a high number for the weekend when many local authorities don't report figures.
The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Germany has risen over the past two weeks from 21.23 new cases per 100,000 people on November 28 to 26 new cases per 100,000 people on December 12.
With the exception of Christmas, the number of people allowed to meet indoors will remain restricted to five, not including children under 14.
Companies have also been urged to allow employees to work from home or offer extended company holidays.
Alcohol sales will be banned in public places, essentially outlawing the business of mulled wine stands, which have proved popular in the days running up to Christmas.
Restaurant takeout will remain permitted, but consumption on-site will be banned.
The sale of fireworks traditionally used to celebrate New Year's will also be banned.
'The corona situation is out of control,' said Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder, welcoming the tougher restrictions which he pledged to implement in his state.
Germany in November closed leisure and cultural facilities and banned indoor dining in restaurants.
The measures had helped to halt rapid growth of infections after the autumn school holidays, but numbers had plateaued at a high rate.
Over the last week however, the country's disease control agency reported that the infections trend has taken a worrying turn.
'With increasing mobility and the therefore linked additional contacts in the pre-Christmas period, Germany is now in exponential growth of infections numbers,' said the policy paper agreed by regional leaders and Merkel.
It was therefore 'our task to prevent an overload of our health systems and that's why there is an urgent need to take action,' said the chancellor.
Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said the government would provide further financial support for businesses affected by the lockdown.
German news agency dpa reported that the additional sums set aside amounted to 11.2 billion euros ($13.6 billion).
Religious services will be permitted, provided minimum distancing rules are in place and masks are worn, though singing will be banned.
Staff in nursing homes will be required to take COVID-19 tests several times a week, and visitors will also have to provide a negative test result before being able to see relatives in care.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 December, 2020
Tulsi Gabbard Introduces Bill that bans transgender individuals from competing in women's sports.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is getting lonely on her side of the political aisle. First she celebrates the Supreme Court's ruling that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (D) edict to limit gatherings in Catholic diocese and synagogues was unconstitutional as a religious freedom win. Then she sides with President Trump on his decision to oppose the NDAA because of Section 230, a provision that protects tech firms from liability over third-party content on their platforms.
And her next move isn't pleasing many liberals either. On Thursday, the Democrat introduced a bill with Republican Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin called the "Protect Women’s Sports Act of 2020," which bans transgender individuals from competing in women's sports.
Gabbard explained that her intent is to protect Title IX, which has been "weakened" by some states' misinterpretations.
“Title IX was a historic provision championed by Hawai‘i’s own Congresswoman Patsy Mink in order to provide equal opportunity for women and girls in high school and college sports," Gabbard said in a statement. "It led to a generational shift that impacted countless women, creating life-changing opportunities for girls and women that never existed before. However, Title IX is being weakened by some states who are misinterpreting Title IX, creating uncertainty, undue hardship and lost opportunities for female athletes. Our legislation protects Title IX’s original intent which was based on the general biological distinction between men and women athletes based on sex. It is critical that the legacy of Title IX continues to ensure women and girls in sports have the opportunity to compete and excel on a level playing field.”
LGBTQ leaders and organizations said they were furious but not surprised by her bill.
Thousands demonstrate in streets of Polish capital Warsaw after country's right-wing leaders all-but banned abortions except in the most exceptional circumstances
Thousands marched on Sunday in Warsaw and other Polish cities to protest the country's right-wing government after a high court ruled to tighten the country's already restrictive abortion law.
Sunday's protests coincided with the 39th anniversary of the 1981 martial law crackdown by Poland's communist regime.
Many Poles accuse the current government of acting more and more like that authoritarian regime by disregarding the civil liberties of citizens.
Due to a ban on gatherings of more than five people amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the marches were organised as 'spontaneous walks' and the slogan was: 'We are going for freedom. We are going for everything!'
The protests were organised by the Women's Strike, a group behind recent mass nationwide protests. Others also joined in, including farmers and entrepreneurs angry at the government´s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The weeks of protests have morphed into the largest protest movement in Poland since communism fell three decades ago.
An October 22 ruling by the Polish constitutional court to ban abortions of foetuses with congenital defects, even when the foetus has no chance of survival at birth, sparked the protests, which have now grown to include other grievances.
'We are no longer fighting just for women's rights, but for everyone´s rights. What is happening at this point is dramatic,' said Adrianna Gluchowska, a protester joined by her father.
The protesters gathered at a central intersection and began marching to the home of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the ruling Law and Justice party. Riot police blocked the protesters, forcing them to take another route along the Vistula River to reach Kaczynski's home in the northern Zoliborz district.
Police announced on loudspeakers that the protest was illegal, saying 'we have an epidemic.' To that the protesters replied: 'We have an epidemic of PiS,' using the Polish acronym for Law and Justice. 'We are overthrowing the government!'
Many carried European Union and rainbow flags to show their support for liberal Western values. One protesters was dressed as a human-sized tear gas canister. Police in recent weeks have been using tear gas on protesters.
Kaczynski's apartment building was surrounded by hundreds of police officers in riot gear. Several people dressed in communist-era militia costumes managed to get near Kaczynski's home and were removed by police.
Smaller protests also were held Sunday in dozens of other cities, including Gdansk, Krakow, Poznan, Lodz and Szczecin.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9048477/Warsaw-protesters-march-home-countrys-leader.html
Authoritarian. Unyielding. Merkel gets Brexit so wrong because her arrogance is boundlessBy DOUGLAS MURRAY
Most of us have been in no doubt over who is to blame for the obstacles and burning barricades blocking our route to a viable trade deal.
Emmanuel Macron, the sharp-suited, sharp-nosed President of France, has been in the vanguard of those wanting to punish Britain for daring to leave. Desperate to preserve the advantages enjoyed by French fishermen. Desperate to be the saviour of the whole European project.
However, Macron is by no means alone in conducting this unpleasant campaign of sabotage. For, as The Mail on Sunday explains today, his sensibly-suited counterpart in Germany, Angela Merkel, has played her own discreditable role.
It is Chancellor Merkel who has consistently presented herself as the voice of common sense and compromise.
Yet it is Merkel who has completely failed to understand Great Britain and misjudged it – and it is she who must take prime responsibility for the EU's calamitous negotiating stance. It is, in part, a personal matter.
Angela Merkel is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. Known as Mutti – or Mummy – to voters, her formative years were in East Germany, the Communist state ruled over by the Stasi. Like others, she belonged the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official communist youth movement.
Rectitude and certainty pour from her. And she has no time for Boris Johnson, a man she dismisses – with remarkable condescension – as no more than a dissembler and a libertine.
Despite his huge parliamentary majority and the certainty that he speaks for millions, she refuses to trust the Prime Minister or believe him. And, however calmly she projects herself before the cameras, she has been utterly unbending behind closed doors.
We have seen Merkel's handiwork before.
In 2016, our then Prime Minister, David Cameron, paid a last-ditch visit to Brussels to negotiate a better arrangement with the EU ahead of the referendum.
Cameron begged his European counterparts to give him a meaningful concession, one that would allow him to argue that remaining within the bloc would be to our advantage.
But Merkel and the EU sent him packing. Months later the UK voted to leave entirely.
We can't blame Macron for these events, which all happened a year before he was seriously in the running for the French presidency.
The only major player from that disastrous episode still in post today is the Chancellor herself, the great survivor of European politics now into her 15th year of rule.
Then, as now, Merkel had a reputation for hard-headed efficiency.
But, while it is true she helped guide the continent through the Eurozone crisis, she did so with an authoritarian rigidity which still sees her loathed in much of southern Europe.
Despite its vast trade profits, Germany refused to bail out the 'feckless' Mediterranean neighbours who had been stupid enough to buy its products.
Then, in 2015, it was Merkel who made the calamitous decision to open the borders of Europe. She did not consult her counterparts. She simply did it, single-handedly turning a migrant challenge into a migrant crisis.
Even now, an unrelenting Merkel continues to try to punish those countries in Central and Eastern Europe which refuse to pay for her errors and accept large quotas of migrants themselves.
For all her reputation as a pragmatic political performer, her flaws have been obvious for years: Unyielding when she ought to yield.
Authoritarian while presenting herself as a champion of liberty. Feted as uniquely insightful, yet wildly off-beam in her most basic political calculations.
In 2016, Merkel believed that the EU must be seen to be rigidly inflexible and that Cameron must be given no new concessions for fear that other nations might demand flexibility in turn.
But – and not for the first time – it was a huge miscalculation. Despite mounting evidence that British voters were fed up, Merkel refused to believe that we would leave. A major error and a dereliction of her duty to understand her counterparts.
Today we see the same pattern – bad advice combined with belligerence. Once again, the German Chancellor has started from the assumption that Britain will not leave the EU without a deal. Once again, she has refused to believe the clearest possible assertions from the Prime Minister that we will.
The advice that Merkel received from her side was that Boris was bluffing. And so she resumed her role as unbending negotiator. Doubtless, she believes that Britain will move her way. Doubtless, as in 2016, she is completely wrong.
This is not the first time she has been accused of behind-the-scenes manipulation. According to a 2013 biography, Merkel was no mere cultural officer of the Free German Youth, but a higher ranking 'Agitation and Propaganda functionary' – claims she has never openly denied.
Whatever the truth, we can be certain that Merkel has received provably wrong advice at every step of the way in the Brexit negotiations – and acted upon it. And it is her failure to understand this country that now makes a No Deal departure so likely.
Were she truly a pragmatist, she would have tried to make these negotiations work. A good and workable UK-EU trade deal would be to the benefit of the whole continent.
Millions of people across the EU work in businesses which need access to our markets. Any reasonable and pragmatic EU leader would have the livelihoods of those people in mind and negotiated on their behalf.
Instead, the EU stance is both immoderate and unstable. And that derives from the qualities for which she has been so often lauded. An inflexibility. An authoritarian efficiency. An instinctive distrust of her negotiating partners.
Push them and they will crumble, is the advice she has been doling out to the EU leaders. And they have pushed. But there is no evidence that we will crumble.
What has crumbled is the reputation of the Chancellor as the fair-minded pragmatist. She is no such thing. Mutti is an ideologue who destroys the very things she is meant to be protecting.
Australian Anglican Church on a path to schism over blessings of same-sex unions by national body
As ever, Sydney diocese stands firm on Bible teachings. Since they have a third of Australia's Anglican parishoners, they will always have the last laugh.
But their place in the Anglican communion is an odd one. Most of the Anglican churches in the Western world are so wishy-washy about doctrine that their claim to being Christian is dubious. The Sydney diocese is about the only place where the old Anglican faith lives on.
But they are not a bit abashed by that. Their seminary (Moore College) has hundreds of students and their churches too are pretty full. So their collections make them very robust financially as well.
And there is plenty of passion at their Synod, as they take doctrine seriously
You would think that other Anglicans would learn from them and return to the faith once delivered. In reality, however, it is the Devil's gospel that you hear from most Anglican pulpits
Bible references on homosexuality: Romans 1:27; Jude 1:7; 1 Timothy 1:8-11; Mark 10:6-9; Matthew 19: 4-16; 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11; 1 Corinthians 7:2; Leviticus 18:22; Leviticus 20:13; Genesis 19:4-8
The conservative Anglican Diocese of Sydney has told its top personnel the church is "on a trajectory towards disintegration" over a decision to allow the blessing of same-sex unions.
The church's *national* appellate tribunal – a legal advisory body comprising three bishops and four lawyers – ruled last month that Anglican priests could give a blessing to same-sex couples who had already been married elsewhere.
The tribunal found it would not breach the church's fundamental declarations and principles, and it was up to each diocese whether they allowed such blessings. Many LGBTQ people of faith still want such a blessing from their bishop or priest even if they are not able to marry in their church.
Sydney Archbishop Glenn Davies, who will retire in March, recently wrote to hundreds of bishops, wardens and school chaplains promising a showdown in coming months over the tribunal's decision.
He said the Bible and therefore the Anglican Church clearly taught that "the sexual union of two persons of the same sex was sin", and "to bless such a union would amount to the blessing of sin".
Dr Davies wrote: "While the world may deride our commitment to the standard of morality that God has established for his people, we have been called to holy and righteous living."
Bishop Michael Stead – a leading candidate to succeed Dr Davies as archbishop next year – warned "the majority opinion [of the tribunal] has put the Anglican Church of Australia on a trajectory towards disintegration".
Mr Stead said it was not feasible that clergy in the Newcastle diocese could be permitted to bless same-sex marriages while clergy in the Sydney diocese would be disciplined for such an action. He compared it to the invention of rugby in 19th century England which eventually led to the establishment of association football.
"Just as there are different codes in Australia which are all called 'football', there will be different versions of the Anglican Church of Australia, which have nothing in common except the name," he wrote in a letter seen by The Sun-Herald which was attached to Dr Davies' communique.
"While some might applaud the judicial innovation of the appellate tribunal for finding a way to enable an already fractured church to remain together, they have in fact entrenched separation and division. This decision has destroyed the rationale for a national church."
Late last month following the tribunal's decision, a retired bishop in Victoria's Wangaratta diocese, John Parkes, blessed the marriage of retired clergymen John Davis and Rob Whalley using a liturgy the diocese approved in 2019.
In response to reports of the blessing, Dr Davies issued a further statement last week saying it was untenable to have some members of the church "purporting to declare God's blessing" on same-sex marriages.
"It would be naive to think that mutually contradictory views on same-sex marriage can co-exist within our national church," he said. "To pursue this course will not bring healing but will only lead to a collapse in the fellowship that binds us together."
The issue will be debated at the Anglican church's national General Synod in 2021.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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13 December, 2020
UK: Book your pew for church this Christmas, CofE guidance says
From the grandest cathedrals to the snuggest village chapel, it will be ticket-only for Christmas services
Welcome to Covid Christmas. At least going to church this festive season will provide your family with some semblance of normality.
Think again. Just as there was no room at the inn for the Holy Family as Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, so it’s likely there will be little room in the pew for you and your own loved ones at church this Christmas.
Church worship has been a seesaw experience during the pandemic. First there was full church closure, then limited opening for private prayer, progress to socially-distanced services, back to lockdown and now services are allowed again.
During the deep lockdown of early spring, the Church of England upset many when it ordered church doors to be locked and its clergy took to their kitchen tables and livestreamed from there. The Roman Catholic Church, also mindful of contagion, directed churchgoers to livestreaming of Mass but kept its priests at their altars, broadcasting solitary services.
A week into Advent, doors have opened again after public health experts showed that masks, sanitiser and regular cleaning make church buildings safe spaces. Regular churchgoers now regard QR codes, no handshaking at the sign of peace and definitely no congregational singing with its risky aerosol particles as the norm. Choirs, though, have returned.
Given that most parishes have congregations small enough to accommodate even when socially distanced, church services have gone pretty smoothly. But Christmas itself is different. People who usually only go to church for hatching, matching and dispatching add Christmas to their attendance.
Tis the season to be jolly and to do God as well. They want to hear that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Singing O Come All Ye Faithful with gusto matters, even if the rest of the year they are, well, pretty faith-lite. The hush that falls as people queue up for Communion while Silent Night is sung, soft as a lullaby, means it truly is Christmas.
Covid has put paid to that. The usual rugby scrum for a seat will not be happening. From the grandest cathedrals to the snuggest village chapel, it will be ticket-only for Christmas services.
The Church of England has already recommended to vicars and cathedral deans that they set up a booking and seat allocation system for all Christmas services. “Let everyone know that attendance must be booked”, its guidance says.
One alternative is first come, first served. But lengthy queues with people getting crosser and too close for comfort will hardly encourage the Christmas spirit and could even be lethal.
Considerable numbers have tried church by watching online in the privacy of their home. But Christmas is Christmas: people need smells and bells, music, candlelight, sonorous voices intoning the Gospel and a high solo treble rising to the rafters, not peering at a flickering screen.
When Boris Johnson announced the Government’s relaxation of restrictions for Christmas, it was a recognition that after all the sacrifices people have made, families really do need to be together at Christmas. A true celebration is a communal experience and religion too is about people gathering together. For most of us wanting to mark the birth of Christ, a digital, streamed experience just isn’t enough. We need the comfort and joy of being together, even if we are a safe two metres apart. And if the churches can’t help us do that, it really will be a bleak midwinter.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/11/book-pew-church-christmas-cofe-guidance-says/
Who Is Responsible for the Loss of Faith in Science?In an essay in the liberal UK broadsheet The Guardian, multiple authors chart out the most important task for the incoming Biden administration: to “restore the faith in science.”
“Joe Biden’s most important promise to the American people was a policy platform taken for granted prior the Trump presidency: believe science,” the article suggests, adding that “Restoring trust in science will not be simple after four years of lies, half-truths, misdirections and conspiracy theories.”
Days later, the academic journal Nature was under pressure from a concerted effort because it dared to publish a paper showing that “increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors.”
Why are those two instances important? Because lately, oblivious to the internal contradictions, a section of the elite is determined to restore faith and trust in a somewhat religious idea of “science” as long as the conclusions adhere to a Whiggish liberal worldview.
Conversely, it is also that same section of elites that are opposed to any scientific conclusions that contradict their worldview. That makes this whole charade a sort of faith-based activism, where the definition of “science” is somewhat of a mystery.
The Nature brouhaha is instructive.
The paper argued that, in simple terms, the number of female mentors is proportional to post-job success. A dataset of over 222 million scientific papers, this study found female academic advisors who mentored female protégés gained 18 percent fewer citations than those who mentored males. The paper further concluded that same-gender mentorship is perhaps detrimental.
“While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career,” the paper argued. Naturally, it is under extreme criticism and facing activist open-letter campaigns even when the science on same-gender academic competition is quite clear.
Science is, naturally, not a deity to be believed or trusted. Having faith in something renders it a form of theology, not theory. Science depends on critique, skepticism, and a willingness to challenge long-held beliefs, be they scientific consensus, morality, or something else.
But science as a process is challenged by this clueless idea that one has to have “faith” in science. Yet it is gaining traction and forms the foundation of the politicization of science. The problem is that the same section of the ruling hegemonic soft-liberal socio-economic elite, mostly permeating the upper echelons of our media and academia, are also opposed to any scientific conclusions that rub against their ideological priors, as the Nature fiasco demonstrates.
Sadly, this deification of science is not isolated. It is partly responsible for a hefty mass of people losing trust in the entire idea of scientific expertise, as science is now considered akin to ideological activism. Prior to the U.S. election, Nature came out with four different articles taking sides. On October 15, it argued that scientists should get more political if they are “tired of being ignored.” It also endorsed Joe Biden for president. Prior to that, on October 8, Nature published an editorial arguing that science and politics are inseparable.
Around the same time, Scientific American, the premier American science journal, also broke its long tradition of political neutrality to endorse Biden. “On COVID-19, (Biden) states correctly that ‘it is wrong to talk about “choosing” between our public health and our economy… If we don’t beat the virus, we will never get back to full economic strength,’” Scientific American argued, without mentioning that it is not a scientific, but a political decision.
Nature then topped it with a panicky op-ed after the election, stating that scientists are aghast that there was no Biden landslide. “With so many votes cast for Trump in the US election, some researchers conclude that they must work harder to communicate the importance of facts, science and truth,” it concluded. Similarly, the Lancet, one of the oldest medical journals, has taken to publishing “personal view” articles that use a “Marxist ecofeminist” analysis to warn of the influence of “neoliberal capitalism.”
Of course, the idea that science can be purely neutral is flawed. Likewise, science has been consistently weaponized for policy ends that consistently help one political worldview.
Consider the recent coronavirus-related lockdown and gathering rules, which are stringently enforced depending on the cause. Scientific processes and methodologies are rigorously designed to eradicate biases. But they get more complicated when policy questions are involved—which are, by definition, political questions involving a set of choices with historical and economic variables and assumptions, and ultimately decided by humans.
The desire to simply “follow the science” wishes away those complications. Science can inform our choices, but it can’t guarantee wisdom.
The “restoration of faith” in science is, therefore, a dubious quasi-theological concept akin to “scientism,” which is the imitation of scientific methods without the rigor, as Karl Popper and F.A. Hayek argued. It also results in a peculiar problem. Science here is treated as a faith. If science mostly supports climate change, any question about the effects of climate change would render an individual to be an apostate to the faith of “science.”
On the other hand, the moment any science shows intra-sexual competition, biological and genetic heritability, gender and sexual difference, then that is considered bigotry.
The short-term political gains by weaponizing science could have long-term costs that leaves society in a worse place. Scientism reinforces dogma, which creates echo chambers, flawed predictions, and erodes trust. For example, there is documented evidence of collapsing trust in expertise in America, as well as evolving polarization along ideological lines, about trust in science.
This decline in trust is a vicious cycle. More political activism in science as advocated by Nature and Scientific American will push the academic community away from their goal of building influence, not closer to it.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/12/who-is-responsible-for-the-loss-of-faith-in-science/
A Michigan Politician's Sickening Incitement to ViolenceDems are the party of The Mob, which makes Cynthia Johnson's words even more dangerous and despicable.
One sure sign of a country in turmoil is political violence. And we’ve experienced our share of it this year thanks to the thousands of antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs who’ve taken to the streets to vandalize and intimidate and burn and bludgeon and wreck and loot and murder. Oh, and the odd assortment of 13 anti-government types who plotted to kidnap Michigan’s Democrat governor a few weeks back.
But when our elected representatives themselves, rather than being voices of calm and reason, resort to calls of physical violence against their political opponents, we’re getting into dangerous territory. And so it was earlier this week with Michigan State Representative Cynthia Johnson.
As Craig Mauger reports in The Detroit News, “On Dec. 2, the House Oversight Committee took testimony from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney. Johnson pushed back on Giuliani’s unproven [sic] claims of voter fraud and accused witnesses presented by the former New York City mayor of ‘lying.’ Afterward, Johnson, who is Black, received violent and racist threats, including one in which a person left a message telling her: ‘Your time is coming … from the (expletive) gallows you’ll be hanging.’”
Clearly, Johnson started all this with her idiotic and ill-advised smear of citizens and eyewitnesses who, under penalty of perjury, have sworn affidavits to the electoral fraud they saw. But when angry, anonymous partisans responded to her with threats of violence, she should’ve turned the matter over to law enforcement. And that should’ve been the end of it. Instead, though, she took to her Facebook page to post a video with an ominous call to violence against “Trumpers.”
“This is just a warning to you Trumpers,” Johnson says. “Be careful. Walk lightly. We ain’t playing with you. … And for those of you who are soldiers, you know how to do it. Do it right. Be in order. Make them pay.”
Reaction to Johnson’s sickening comments was, rightly, bipartisan. There’s no room in our politics for bile like that. Her fellow Michigan Democrats condemned the statement, and she’s been stripped of all her committee assignments.
As Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff noted, “It reminds me of the Black Panthers, except those thugs weren’t elected officials. … Johnson’s defenders suggest that she was only talking about hitting ‘Trumpers’ in the pocketbook. It’s true that she mentions that. But the phrases ‘we ain’t playing with you’ and ‘those of you who are soldiers’ undermine the ‘pocketbook’ defense. Even Johnson’s fellow Dem legislators aren’t buying it.”
One elected official who might be buying it, though, is the one who has the greatest reason not to: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. As we mentioned above, Whitmer herself was the target of a kidnapping plot not long ago, so it’d seem that she, more than anyone else, should have zero tolerance for this sort of behavior. And yet there she was just yesterday, saying that Michigan House Republicans, who are in the majority and therefore control the legislative body’s committee assignments, have gone “too far.”
“I think this is a woman who has been through a lot,” Whitmer said. “And I think it’s important that every single one of us give one another a little bit of compassion and grace.”
Strange, though. We don’t recall any “compassion and grace” from Whitmer during her recent “Meet the Press” interview in which she proudly displayed her “8645” sticker — as in, “86” our 45th president.
The Left, as we know, is also The Mob. And it’s historically the political faction that resorts to violence. The rest of us should always be mindful of that reality, and ever vigilant against it.
The Attorney on a Political Witch Hunt Against the McCloskeys Has Been Removed
The zealous prosecutor, a black female, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies after they defended themselves against a Black Lives Matter mob at their home this summer has been dismissed from the case by a judge. From local NBC 5:
A St. Louis judge has disqualified Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner and her office from prosecuting Mark McCloskey's case, saying campaign fundraising emails she sent before and after issuing charges against the couple “raise the appearance of impropriety and jeopardize the defendant’s right to a fair trial.”
Judge Thomas Clark’s ruling comes about six weeks after the attorneys for Mark and Patricia McCloskey argued their motion to disqualify Gardner and her office from the case, saying her emailed solicitations for campaign contributions demonstrated she and her office have a personal interest in the case and jeopardized Mark McCloskeys’ right to a fair trial.
In her rebuttal, Gardner argued she sent the emails merely to respond to criticisms from the governor and president.
But, in his 22-page ruling, Clark disagreed.
“Ms. Gardner has every right to rebut criticism, but it appears unnecessary to stigmatize defendant – or even mention him – in campaign solicitations, especially when she purports to be responding to others,” he wrote. “In fact, the case law and Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit it.”
Should Clark's ruling stand, a special prosecutor will be appointed to handle the case. In St. Louis, the presiding judge picks the special prosecutor.
Gardner's office responded to the ruling by saying they were not "officially informed" prior to media coverage of the decision.
When Gardner filed the charges against the McCloskey's in July, she urged them to take advantage of a program designed to "reduce unncessary involvement with the courts," indicating she doesn't have a legitimate case against the couple.
Shortly afterward, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a brief calling for the dismissal of the charges.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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12 December, 2020
When Whistleblowers Are Treated Like Criminals
Bradley Birkenfeld is a whistleblower, someone who exposes corruption in either government or the business world that cost taxpayers a fortune. Through information from Birkenfeld, a former wealth manager at UBS in Switzerland, the federal government was able to recover “$780 million dollars in civil fines and penalties paid by UBS bank, and over $25 billion dollars in collections from U.S. taxpayers who had illegally held ‘undeclared” offshore accounts in Switzerland and other countries,” according to the National Whistleblower Center.
That’s a lot of money, so you’d think the federal government would’ve been very grateful to Mr. Birkenfeld. After all, The New York Times reported in 2012 that his actions led to “(t)he disclosure of Swiss banking information — which caused a fierce political debate in Switzerland before winning approval from the country’s Parliament — set off such a panic among wealthy Americans that more than 14,000 of them joined a tax amnesty program. I.R.S. officials say the amnesty program has helped recover more than $5 billion in unpaid taxes.” But gratitude is not what happens when someone exposes the wealthy and connected cheating the system.
The government gleefully recaptured all the funds illegally hidden overseas by Americans, but the Obama Justice Department…pressed charges against Birkenfeld for allegedly withholding information about one of his clients.
Why Birkenfeld would have withheld information on one client while exposing thousands of other lawbreakers doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it still makes more sense than him, the person who exposed this fraud, being the only person involved in the whole affair to go to jail.
None of the tax cheats were prosecuted – billionaires hiding billions of dollars in income from the IRS and only the whistleblower went to jail, or was even prosecuted. It’s the ultimate in swampiness.
It pays to be a well-connected person who can afford to “donate” to the powerful.
When she was Secretary of State, in what seems like an unusual move, Hillary Clinton herself announced a deal with the Swiss bank that gave the IRS 4,450 of the 52,000 names of wealthy Americans who’d illegally hidden money overseas. In typical Clinton fashion, the Wall Street Journal reported, “From that point on, UBS’s engagement with the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased. Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank.” Bill Clinton also received “$1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions” with a UBS executive.
The rich were protected, sheltered really, and the Clintons had a lot of money thrown their way. As always happens with the Clintons, I’m sure it was just a coincidence.
While Birkenfeld was sentenced to 40 months in jail, it wasn’t all bad. Thanks to whistleblower laws that reward people who expose fraud and corruption with a percentage of the monies recovered, after he was released from prison he received $104 million, a record amount for these types of cases (and the only part of the story I remember hearing at the time it was happening). But he’s still a convicted felon. As an American, the idea of having a conviction for exposing one of the largest fraud cases in U.S. history on your record doesn’t sit well with Brad, no matter how much money he got. So he’s seeking a presidential pardon.
The day Birkenfeld was sentenced in 2009, President Barack Obama was golfing with Robert Wolf, the CEO of UBS, the very bank he’d exposed in this scam. The guy who exposed the crimes goes to jail, the guy who oversaw the company enabling them gets to pal around with the president of the United States.
In what is perhaps the least shocking part of this whole story, Wolf has a long history of donating to politicians, large sums of money, and mostly to Democrats. The ability to golf with the president while your company has just been exposed for enabling financial crimes against the United States doesn’t happen for just anyone, and it doesn’t come cheap.
The whole story reads like the ultimate swamp tale – the person pointing out the crimes of the elite is the only one to pay a criminal price. Sure, he’s rich now, so it’s not like he didn’t receive some semblance of justice, but he still has the stigma of being a convicted felon.
With all the people pushing President Trump to pardon people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, someone like Bradley Birkenfeld, who actually served time rather than flee the country, would be a better use of pardon power. It’d also be a nice way to thumb his nose, one more time, at the elitists who have been allowing the rich and powerful to get away with damn near everything for decades.
Yet Another Muslim Country Joins Abraham Accords With Israel
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that the North African Muslim-majority nation of Morocco would normalize relations with Israel, marking yet another massive diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East thanks to Trump’s strategy and negotiations.
“Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!” the president tweeted.
America gave Morocco an important concession as part of the deal.
“Today, I signed a proclamation recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara,” Trump added. “Morocco’s serious, credible, and realistic autonomy proposal is the ONLY basis for a just and lasting solution for enduring peace and prosperity! Morocco recognized the United States in 1777. It is thus fitting we recognize their sovereignty over the Western Sahara.”
Spain decolonized Western Sahara in 1975, giving Morocco and Mauritania joint administration of the territory. During a war between Morocco, Mauritania, the Sahrawi nationalist movement, and the Polisario Front, Mauritania relinquished control over the territory in 1979 and Morocco secured de facto control of about 80 percent of Western Sahara, with the Sahrawi nationalist movement controlling the rest.
American acknowledgment of Morocco’s rule of Western Sahara is a major diplomatic coup for the North African nation, but Trump was also right to cite Morocco’s early recognition of the United States. On December 20, 1777, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognize American independence. Morocco would later join the Barbary States in the First Barbary War (1801-1805) against the United States.
Morocco itself has a fascinating history. Christopher Columbus connected Europe with the Americas after King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille united Spain and expelled the Muslim rulers from Granada in 1492 in the Reconquista. After a succession of Arab sultanates ruled Morocco, Spain and France carved out zones of influence in the early 1900s and Morocco finally gained its independence in 1956.
Morocco’s normalization of ties to Israel marks yet another historic step toward peace in the Middle East and North Africa, one of Trump’s greatest achievements as president.
Trump laid the groundwork for these historic deals by pulling out of the Iran deal, strengthening America’s energy independence through oil and natural gas, and moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The assassination of Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani also played a key role. Trump put a key check on Iran’s influence in the Middle East and skirted the Palestinians’ repeated obstruction of diplomatic progress. This opened the floodgates for Arab-Israeli peace deals as countries like Saudi Arabia began to view Israel as a potential ally against Iran.
In the Abraham Accords, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) normalized relations with Israel. Shortly before the Abraham Accords, Trump brought Muslim-majority Kosovo and Christian-majority Serbia together for a historic agreement that included promises to set up embassies in Jerusalem. Last month, Sudan — which recently ousted a dictator who had supported terrorism for decades — normalized relations with Israel.
Before the Abraham Accords, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia announced they would open their skies to Israeli flights to the UAE. As part of its rapprochement with Israel, the UAE agreed to order hotels to serve Kosher foods in Abu Dhabi, delivering a powerful symbol of Jewish acceptance in a notoriously anti-Semitic part of the world.
These historic diplomatic successes have brought Trump multiple Nobel Prize nominations. The Trump administration also appears to be aiming for one last major breakthrough: an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which would be the jewel in the Trump administration’s Middle East policy crown.
If Joe Biden does indeed enter the White House next month (as seems likely, though Trump is still contesting the election), this progress in the Middle East may represent one of Trump’s most important legacies. While Biden will undermine much of Trump’s progress, the fact that Morocco was willing to make this move after the president appears to be on his way out illustrates that Trump’s new Middle East may be here to stay, regardless of Biden’s desperate attempts to restore the status quo.
California’s Coronavirus Restrictions on Religious Services Struck Down by Ninth Circuit Court
With some Trump-appointed judges on it now, the 9th Circuit is no longer automatically the 9th circus
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a California church fighting coronavirus restrictions on indoor worship services.
The appeals court struck down an October order from a district judge and awarded South Bay United Pentecostal Church relief against California’s indoor worship restrictions.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the lawsuit argued that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, while condoning large outdoor protests and secular indoor gatherings, targeted religious services with coronavirus restrictions. The church also highlighted the fact that Newsom was caught dining at an expensive restaurant even though he told Californians to stay home because of the virus.
According to KPBS news, the panel based the decision on recent rulings from the Supreme Court, which favored houses of worship challenging New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and another California church which also challenged Newsom on similar grounds.
Paul Jonna of the Thomas More Society Counsel, the group representing South Bay United Pentecostal Church, stated that, "[T]he guidance from the Supreme Court makes it abundantly clear that California's restrictions on houses of worship are blatantly unconstitutional. We are confident that South Bay will fully vindicate its fundamental constitutional rights in short order." Jonna also told the Free Beacon that “[I]t's just a matter of time before they're struck down.”
This panel clearly ruled correctly. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in the Supreme Court case of Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of New York last month, “[I]t is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques.” And, as Justice Neil Gorsuch added, “[E]ven if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical.”
Voters are finally beginning to resent total nationalist control over Scottish life
From politics and culture to education and family life, Nicola Sturgeon's influence is felt everywhere
She’s regularly closed their pubs. And they shrugged and didn’t complain. She cancelled their summer holidays. And, again, they just about put up with it. She even effectively abolished Hogmanay by excluding the entire traditional Scottish New Year holiday from the five-day festive freedom period. Once more hardly anyone – yours truly excepted – protested. How can this be happening in as disputatious a nation as Scotland?
Easy: so overwhelming is the grip Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP has on every aspect of life in Scotland – political, economical, educational, cultural – that a majority of Scots appear to have become inured to Nat control.
Until now. There are at last signs that the worm may be turning and that the Scots have remembered how to complain. That may be a startling conclusion to those who subscribe to PG Wodehouse’s view of Scots, grievances and rays of sunshine, but it’s happening nevertheless.
Perhaps the most significant cri de coeur has come from no less than Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s best-known historian. He’s described as “arrant propaganda” and “dangerous nonsense” a 27-page document designed to be taught in Scottish schools, which had been accused of presenting a warped pro-independence and anti-English view of Scotland’s past. It contained numerous references to Scots being mistreated by the English and wrongly claimed that Winston Churchill sent English troops and tanks to put down the Red Clydesiders after the First World War.
But propaganda in Scotland’s schools is just the start of it. Culturally, Scotland is firmly in the grip of the SNP and its separatist sympathisers. Fiona Hyslop, the culture secretary, controls a £230 million budget. But to critics who claim that the best way to win a grant is to support the SNP or be proficient in Scottish fiddle and accordion music, she says that artists ‘‘don’t have to be close to government. They just have to have a common understanding of what the country wants.” The country’s best-known composer, Sir James MacMillan, has accused the SNP of turning cultural endeavour into ‘“state propaganda” and of controlling culture for political purposes.
It’s in broadcasting that the real control is most obvious. First Minister Sturgeon’s pressure won a £40 million new TV channel from the BBC which aims to present the news “from a Scottish perspective”. The highlight of its schedule since the middle of March has been a daily 60-minute briefing by Ms Sturgeon, with no opposition to get in the way, which has dominated the pandemic battle and enabled her to shoot ahead in the opinion polls.
Meanwhile, on STV, Scotland’s main independent channel, you’ll quickly note that every commercial-break is filled with “ads” paid for by the Scottish Government and which underline and re-emphasise the First Minister’s Covid messages. Earlier this year the station was forced to withdraw a video it had circulated which showed smiling children delivering a paean of praise to “Nicola, our First Minister. Thank you for always keeping us safe”.
Family life is not excluded from SNP influence. Consider the SNP’s decision to criminalise parents who smack their children and their attempt to legislate that every child, no matter their circumstances, should have a guardian or “named person” to support them. That bid has been seen off for now, but the SNP is determined to bring it back.
Although hotly denied there is little doubt that anti-Englishness is a main driver of the national agenda, one that is now pumped out from every part of Scottish public life. As Neil Oliver, the TV archaeologist and opponent of independence, said, the prevalent nationalist attitude is that “south of the border... lies the embodiment of all that is corrupt, selfish and heartless.”
But it was never going to be possible to blame the English for all that ails Scotland. In an astonishing sign of party disharmony, SNP leaders of Edinburgh council, as well as a local MP, are furious that Ms Sturgeon’s restrictions have left the capital’s pubs and restaurants effectively closed in the week before Christmas. However, it is the sheer scale of the SNP’s suffocating grip on every aspect of Scottish life – together with growing suspicions about La Sturgeon’s and her husband’s role in bringing down Alex Salmond – that may at last be alienating the voters.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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10 December, 2020
Amazing: Trump Admin Fails to End DACA
Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis on Friday ordered that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program be fully reinstated. This decision is the latest blow to President Donald Trump’s years-long effort to end Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive order.
Recall this past summer the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling against the Trump administration’s attempt to halt DACA — not over the question of the legality of the program itself but over procedural issues. The Court declared that the Trump administration violated the Administration Procedure Act when ending DACA.
Following this latest setback from Judge Garaufis, however, the Trump administration has essentially thrown in the towel, as the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would abide by the ruling and begin the reimplementation of DACA this week. This means that at least 300,000 more illegal aliens will be eligible to be added to the current 640,000 DACA recipients.
With the increasing likelihood of Joe Biden taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the new year, the possibility of truly ending DACA is all but dead. Biden has vowed not only to retain the program but to also press Congress to make it a pathway for U.S. citizenship for its recipients.
However, there remains the possibility that DACA’s reinstitution may be short-lived, as a federal judge in Texas will rule on the program’s constitutionality before the year is up. CBS News reports, “Judge Andrew Hanen, who has previously said DACA is likely illegal, has scheduled a hearing on this case for December 22.” Should Judge Hanen rule against DACA, then SCOTUS will likely and finally have to rule on the constitutionality of the program itself. And, hopefully, given the current conservative makeup of the Court, even Chief Justice John Roberts won’t be able to save yet another unconstitutional power grab.
DACA’s merits (or lack thereof) is actually not the primary issue here. Rather, it’s the manner in which Obama blatantly acted to circumvent Congress and the Constitution to issue an executive order that effectively legislated a new immigration law. Initially, it was a move that he himself repeatedly and correctly declared was beyond his constitutional authority. That wrong needs to be righted, irrespective of the larger illegal immigration issue.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76294-trump-admin-fails-to-end-daca-2020-12-08
Trump and the Delusional LeftMost of the US Left seems to have bought into the narrative that Trump is either a literal fascist or a conventional reactionary or right-wing strongman like Putin, Erdogan, Orban, Duterte, Bolsonaro, etc. I think all of this is a misunderstanding of what historic fascism actually was, how the US political and economic system actually works, and the Trump phenomenon itself.
Historic fascism and its similarities tended to appear in countries experiencing early or relatively early stages of industrialization, that were under the direct or indirect domination of external forces, and had experienced some kind of national humiliation (like Versaille), economic disaster (like the Great Depression), war devastation (like Cambodia in the 70s or Afghanistan in the 90s) or merely an archaic ruling class that was impervious to any kind of reform leading toward modernization (like Spain and Portugal in the 30s or Libya in the 60s or Iran in the 70s). That was true of Italian fascism and German Nazism, as well as revolutionary nationalist or religious fundamentalists in the Middle East like Nasser, Qaddafi, Assad, Khomeini, the Taliban,etc. The Pol Pot regime came to power in a similar context.
The USA is a much different kind of society, a highly sophisticated techo-state, with unprecedented wealth, military power, and technology, not a weak Second World/Third World system easily vulnerable to strong men and demagogues. The USA is closer to the Empire in “Star Wars” than postwar Italy. US Presidents are not traditional monarchs or dictators but managers in the employment of a plutocratic-technocratic oligarchy, the same way a CEO is answerable to major shareholders, boards of directors, creditors, and the fickleness of the market.
Michael Bloomberg gave the game away back in 2016 when he said that among the plutocratic class Trump is known as a cheat and a conman, and that’s why the power elite and the media worked overtime to unseat him. They view him as an oafish rogue from their own ranks whom the perceived backward peasants like because of rather than in spite of his crudities.
Plus, the theme of the Democrats’ last two campaigns has amounted to “Vote for us because at least we’re not that guy.” Trump himself is more a used car salesman than a fascist “man of action” type. To the degree that he has any serious political views at all, he seems to be a standard New York liberal in the Rockefeller Republican tradition who, like Nixon, appeals to the hardhat types even if he has nothing in common with them except a propensity for bad language.
https://attackthesystem.com/2020/12/07/trump-and-the-delusional-left/
Obamacare Makes Discrimination against Those with Preexisting Conditions Even WorseIf Republicans want to have a prayer of competing with Democrats on healthcare, they need to bury the conventional wisdom that Obamacare “banned” (Elizabeth O’Brien, Time), “outlawed” (Sharon Begley, Reuters), and “ended” (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions.
Obamacare has not eliminated discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions, and not by a long shot. Jeanne Balvin’s experience shows Obamacare perpetuates some forms of discrimination against the sick. Colette Briggs’s experience shows Obamacare has repealed other forms and replaced them with “backdoor discrimination” that is arguably worse. President??elect Joe Biden and his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, California attorney general Xavier Becerra, strongly support the rules that give rise to these forms of discrimination.
Colette Briggs, now 7 years old, received a leukemia diagnosis at the age of 2. On the surface, Obamacare would seem to guarantee she will get the treatment she needs. It requires insurers to enroll her family and to charge it a premium no higher than healthier families.
If Republicans want to have a prayer of competing with Democrats on healthcare, they need to bury the conventional wisdom that Obamacare “ended” discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions.
Under the surface, however, those same rules have pushed Obamacare plans to drop coverage for the only local providers who offer the treatment she needs, which they have done repeatedly for five years.
How does a ban on discrimination against the sick instead encourage such discrimination? To illustrate, let’s say the Briggs family costs $100,000 per year to insure. Obamacare requires insurers to charge the family far less — let’s say $20,000.
From an insurance company’s perspective, the Briggs family represents an $80,000 liability. Each year, the Briggs family will reliably choose whichever plan offers the best coverage for Colette’s illness.
The combined effects of these factors are to threaten insurers with an $80,000 loss if they make the mistake of offering the best coverage for Colette and to force insurers who want to stay in business to compete to make their plans worse for expensive patients, in the hope of encouraging those patients to select a different insurer.
Health plans can do so by dropping from their networks hospitals or doctors that expensive patients prefer (as in Colette’s case), requiring high or variable cost??sharing for drugs that expensive patients use, or requiring strict utilization controls (e.g., prior authorization, step therapy) for drugs that expensive patients use. Obamacare’s preexisting conditions provisions reward insurers who implement any design feature that differentially discourages unprofitable patients from selecting one of its plans.
Economic research provides evidence that these “protections” are forcing insurers to engage in such discrimination against patients with multiple sclerosis, infertility, substance abuse disorders, hemophilia, severe acne, nerve pain, and other conditions. Patient advocacy groups have alleged such discrimination against patients with cancer, cystic fibrosis, hepatitis, HIV, and other illnesses. Across all Obamacare plans, choice of doctors and hospitals has grown narrower, and drug coverage has gotten skimpier.
These findings aren’t particularly surprising or even controversial. Obamacare’s architects knew this sort of race to the bottom was a likely, if unintended, consequence of the law’s preexisting conditions provisions. They even included in the law a special insurer bailout program in the hope of preventing a race to the bottom. It isn’t working.
One cannot claim this race to the bottom is simply how health insurance works. “Short term” plans offer broader provider networks precisely because Congress exempts them from Obamacare’s preexisting conditions provisions. More importantly, prior to Obamacare, competition created incentives for insurers to offer better coverage for the sick by building up reserves according to how much consumers were willing to pay. Insurers have always faced incentives to renege on their commitments to the sick, but Obamacare’s “protections” made those incentives worse.
Indeed, this form of discrimination against preexisting conditions is arguably worse than the kind it (mostly) displaced. Unlike discrimination in pricing and enrollment, discrimination in plan design harms all consumers. It not only “undoes intended protections for preexisting conditions” but creates a marketplace where even “currently healthy consumers cannot be adequately insured.” Patient??advocacy groups insist discrimination in plan design “completely undermines the goal of the ACA.”
In 2017, Obamacare also discriminated against 61??year??old Arizona resident Jeanne Balvin, first because she is a woman and again because she had a preexisting condition.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Obamacare ended discrimination against women in health insurance, the law dramatically increased Balvin’s premiums because she’s a woman. Economic research shows Obamacare increased premiums for near??elderly women more than any other group because its preexisting conditions provisions lump those women together with sicker men of the same age.
Fortunately, Balvin found protection from Obamacare’s protections. In April 2017, she purchased a short??term plan from UnitedHealthcare, the largest insurer in the country. Since Congress exempts short??term plans from that hidden tax, her plan cost one??third as much as the cheapest Obamacare plan. When she required emergency surgery for diverticulitis, her short??term plan paid her hospital claims on time and in full.
The Obama administration didn’t like that short??term plans gave people like Balvin an alternative to Obamacare, though. So it invented a requirement that insurers must cancel all short??term plans after just three months. That rule stripped Balvin of her coverage right before she returned to the hospital two more times in July 2017, leaving her sick and uninsured.
Obamacare’s preexisting conditions provisions then discriminated against her again by barring her from enrolling in an Obamacare plan. With narrow exceptions, those provisions prohibit consumers from enrolling in coverage or switching plans outside a narrow window from Nov. 1 to Dec. 15. (A dozen states allow enrollment as late as Jan. 31).
The one??two punch of stripping Balvin of her coverage and then denying her Obamacare coverage left her with $97,000 in unpaid medical bills. The ban on mid??year enrollments may not appear to discriminate against patients with preexisting conditions. After all, it applies to everyone. But it exists to block people with preexisting conditions who would tank Obamacare’s risk pools, not by healthy people who would improve them.
When the Briggs’s insurer dropped coverage for Colette’s treatment (again) in March 2020, Obamacare blocked her family from switching to a plan that would have covered it. If a consumer misses this year’s open enrollment window and then contracts COVID-19 on Jan. 1, Obamacare will offer her coverage with an annual limit of zero.
Obamacare supporters criticize this type of discrimination when free markets do it, even though Obamacare does it for the same reason: Insurance pools are not sustainable otherwise. What is the difference between private insurance companies and Obamacare supporters? Insurers don’t pretend they aren’t discriminating against preexisting conditions.
Had Obamacare simply left the Briggs family alone, it would have had better access to care. When Colette was born in 2013, her family had a health plan that prohibited its insurer from dropping it or charging higher premiums. That is, discriminating against the family if, say, its newborn daughter developed leukemia.
Obamacare threw the family out of that plan, dramatically increased its premiums, and encouraged insurers to discriminate against Colette. In its struggle to get Obamacare to cover her treatment, the Briggs family has written op??eds, lobbied members of Congress, and even used its public relations skills to get NPR and the Washington Post to tell Colette’s story. It still had to create a GoFundMe page.
Had Obamacare left Balvin alone, she could have purchased a plan that covered her treatment for diverticulitis and beyond. Come Dec. 15, Obamacare will again deploy the sort of discrimination against patients with preexisting conditions that blocked her from enrolling in coverage.
It is time for policymakers to admit that Obamacare both discriminates against preexisting conditions and denies coverage and care to sick patients who otherwise would have had it. Remember that the next time someone stokes fear about what would happen if Congress or the Supreme Court were to overturn it.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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December 09, 2020
Trump and followers not giving in
From the moment the 2016 election results were known, Democrats never stopped using fair means and foul to undermine the result -- using such things as the manufactured "Russian conspiracy" hoax.
But when Trump uses perfectly legal means of exposing possible voter fraud in 2020, that apparently makes him into a childish sore loser.
Despite many reports of voting fraud, it is very difficult to prove that in court so Trump's legal moves may fail but that is no proof that Biden was legitimately elected
Only an election where strong anti-fraud measures were in place could have delivered a legitimate Biden presidency but the opposite was true -- the opportunities for fraud surrounding the postal voting system were enormous
I have deleted some derogatory adjectives below. They are just a form of editorialising
Dozens of state lawmakers, elected officials and party leaders in recent weeks have endorsed and advanced Trump’s claims. Activists say they see the “stop the steal” campaign as the animating force behind the next wave of Trump-era conservative politics.
“I definitely see a brand new movement taking shape,” said Monica Boyer, a former lobbyist in Indiana and early national voice of the tea party movement. “Was this election stolen? I don’t know. But people have the right to know.”
Signs of the power of that burgeoning political force have been building: In Pennsylvania, 64 Republican lawmakers — including leadership — have signed a statement urging members of Congress to block the state's electoral votes from being cast for Biden.
In Texas, the state's Republican attorney general has filed a lawsuit to the US Supreme Court demanding that other states' Electoral College votes be invalidated.
Even in liberal Massachusetts, five GOP candidates who lost their races filed a federal lawsuit on Monday trying to decertify the state’s election results, recycling claims about irregularities and voting machines.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Michigan, Arizona and Georgia all hosted meetings with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani where they allowed hours-long airing of grievances over the election as the states certified results for Biden.
To be sure, such efforts have done more to build political support than overturn results. Trump and his allies have lost more than 40 times in federal and state courts. Tuesday is “Safe Harbor Day,” the federal deadline for Congress to accept the electoral votes that will be cast next week and sent to the Capitol for counting on January 6. Biden has already secured the 270 electors needed to win.
Meanwhile, Trump's attempts to personally persuade GOP lawmakers, governors and state election officials to intervene have failed.
The president reached out twice last week to Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler, a Republican, to press the state’s legislature to replace the electors for Biden with those loyal to Trump. Cutler told him state law prevented such a move, according to a spokesman.
Still, Trump has succeeded in using his grievances to build political power. The president has already raised more than $US170 million ($229 million) since losing to Biden, requesting donations for an “election defence fund.” Most of that will become seed money for his post-presidency political career, going to a Trump-founded political action committee called Save America.
The president has shown he's willing to attack state Republicans who don't back his cause. Trump tweeted Monday that Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who had worried publicly about the spread of election misinformation, was “too dumb or corrupt to recognise massive evidence of fraud" and said he should be replaced.
Duncan replied Tuesday: “Thank you for 4 years of conservative leadership,” adding that Trump had proven that a “business minded outsider can be effective in DC.”
Some Republican groups, including state GOP committees, have grabbed hold of the Trump team's claims with both hands.
The Arizona Republican Party late on Monday appeared to ask supporters to consider dying to keep Trump in office. The state party's official Twitter account retweeted conservative activist Ali Alexander's pledge that he was “willing to give my life for this fight."
“He is. Are you?” the Arizona GOP added.
Many of those seeking a political future in the Republican Party have been far more careful in their criticism. Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler this week repeatedly refused to acknowledge Biden's win, as she hopes to persuade Trump supporters to support her in her January runoff election.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, filed his lawsuit as he is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly using his office to help a wealthy donor, and while the president is said to be considering a slew of pardons and commutations before he leaves office.
Legal experts dismissed the filing as a long shot. The lawsuit repeats numerous unsupported allegations of illegal mail-in balloting and voting in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Dale Carpenter, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, noted that Texas typically files federal cases with a coalition of other states but in this case was alone. Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins did not sign the petition, which is also rare for a state filing to the US Supreme Court.
“I do not believe this effort will be successful. In fact, I’m certain it will not be,” Carpenter said. “But the fact that it was even attempted is an indicator of some degree of erosion of our norms of politics.”
Another Leftist boycott call backfires
Congratulations to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was recently named “employee of the month” at Goya Foods for her outstanding contributions to the company’s bottom line.
Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue innocently praised Donald Trump in July after a roundtable at the White House with Hispanic business leaders. He politely pointed out, “We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder.”
In the Cloud Cuckoo Land of left-wing hysteria, Twitter exploded, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a boycott of Goya Foods.
Pathetically, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major media outlets enthusiastically embraced the idea. “Goya Foods Boycott Takes Off…” was the Times headline.
Except, it didn’t “take off.” The “boycott” became a “buycott” as Goya sales spiked 1,000 percent, according to Unanue, who appeared on the Michael Berry Show.
Fox Business:
“When she boycotted us, our sales actually increased 1,000%,” Unanue said on the show which is syndicated on some 20 stations across the country, “So we gave her an honorary, we never were able to hand it to her, but she got employee of the month for bringing attention to Goya and our adobo.”
He noted that the boycott allowed Goya to reach “so many new people” while maintaining its base.
It was an idiotic, naive ploy to actually think people would give up favored ingredients for traditional dishes because of politics. The world doesn’t work that way, people don’t think that way — except in the fevered imaginations of left-wing zealots who think that everyone shares a pathological hatred of Donald Trump, where even the mere mention of his name in a positive light can get one canceled.
The inexplicable belief that a boycott would actually work was shared by many on the left who should have known better. Paul Reyes wrote at CNN that Latinos would bring Goya Foods down.
There is an element of pathos here, too. Latinos have a unique relationship with Goya Foods because Latinos love Goya products. They remind people of their grandmother’s favorite recipe or delicious holiday meals. For some immigrants, Goya’s products are literally a taste of home. They can be found in virtually every Latino household across the country. So as word has spread about Unanue’s remarks, many Latinos have felt a mixture of betrayal and sadness that a beloved brand is now tarnished by an association with Trump. This is a boycott that is rooted in sadness as much as it is rooted in anger and outrage.
The boycott was “rooted” in nothing but delusional thinking. That’s a lot sadder than “tarnishing” Goya’s image by its CEO saying nice things about the president.
Unanue may have been gently tweaking AOC for her misguided boycott but he actually genuinely likes her and wishes she would change her radical beliefs.
Newsweek:
“It’s interesting that AOC was one of the first people to step in line to boycott Goya. To go against her own people, as supposedly a Puerto Rican woman, to go against people of her own Latin culture,” Unanue said. “To some extent I can understand AOC. She’s young, she’s naïve, she doesn’t get it. But you’ve got someone like [Senator Bernie] Sanders, who’s older than us … other than me, who still doesn’t get it.”
Unanue has been a strong voice for economic and personal freedom and has been unafraid to take on the radical bullies. The irony of AOC’s actions leading to exactly the opposite reaction by consumers is more delicious than a black bean soup made with Goya products.
A feminist wedding?
December 08, 2020
The Left's 'Fact-Check' Farce
The Leftmedia's fact-check industry is a dishonest means of one-sided damage control.
Dennis Prager has made many astute observations in his life, but perhaps none of them more perspicacious than this: Leftism destroys everything it touches.
It’s true. You name it, and the Left has likely ruined it. As Prager points out, leftists have destroyed our universities by making them “laughingstocks of intolerance.” They’ve debased the arts by turning them from a pursuit that elevates us to one that seeks simply to shock. As for literature, they’ve canceled Shakespeare in favor of a more “diverse” lineup of authors, poets, and playwrights. Once-funny late-night TV is now unfunny “Left-night TV,” religion has been poisoned by hard-left politics, free speech is now “hate speech,” and on and on.
The Left even wrecks the words we use. Take the word “fact,” for example. According to the ol’ Funk and Wagnalls, it means: Anything that is, is done, or happens; an act; deed; truth; reality.
Fact = reality. Got it? Got it.
But no more. A fact, according to the Left, is now contingent on context. For example, when we point out the fact that a lot of Democrat politicians are preaching one thing while practicing another — telling us to stay home to stop the spread of COVID while they sneak into a tony San Francisco salon, or slink off to some sickeningly snobbish French restaurant in Napa Valley, or jet off to a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas — the Leftmedia can now run a “fact-check” headline telling us that “politicians on both sides of the aisle have flouted COVID-19 guidelines” and that our claim “lacks context.”
Republicans are doing it, too! scream the “fact-checkers” at USA Today.
And indeed they are, from President Donald Trump on down. But there’s one yuuge difference: hypocrisy. The Republicans are on the opposite side of the “lockdown” argument, and they haven’t been shuttering their constituents’ businesses and sanctimoniously telling them to stay home. The Democrats have.
Lots of folks can stomach onerous rules and regulations. Nobody, though, likes a hypocrite. And when it comes to hypocrisy, the list of pro-lockdown Democrats who’ve broken their own COVID-19 guidelines is a long one: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Governor Gavin Newsom, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, and Austin Mayor Steve Adler, to name some of the leading culprits.
In a similar vein last week, USA Today “fact-checked” the claim that Jen Psaki, Joe Biden’s nominee for press secretary, posed for a picture with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Stooge John Kerry while wearing a stylishly pink Cossack hat with the Russian hammer and sickle on it.
Remember: This is the same USA Today that recently “fact-checked” as true the claim that the eagle on an “America First” shirt was actually a Nazi symbol.
This hammer-and-sickle thing would seem to be the easiest of claims to check. Either Psaki was wearing the hat or she wasn’t. And she was, as this photo makes abundantly clear. Or so we think.
See if you can make sense of USA Today’s “fact-check” ruling: “Jen Psaki, recently named White House press secretary for President-elect Joe Biden, is seen in a 2014 photo … wearing a pink hat with a hammer and sickle emblem, which was a gift from the Russians that she returned. At the time, Psaki was spokesperson for the U.S. State Department. The image is real, but claims that the hat was anything more a gift or that Psaki was with Russian officials in any capacity beyond her official role are MISSING CONTEXT.”
Who cares whether it was a gift? And who cares whether she returned it? Did she wear the hat or didn’t she?
Clearly, we’ve entered a strange new world. As the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams notes, “Fact checks are supposed to review claims for factual accuracy, not downplay them with a ham-fisted attempt at bothsiderism. … This is not fact-checking. This is damage control. This is advocacy.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/76251-the-lefts-fact-check-farce-2020-12-07
6 December, 2020Leftist Politicians’ Hypocrisy Demonstrates Shallowness of ‘Party of Science’
States around the country are heading into the second wave of pandemic lockdowns, but many Americans may not be so keen on complying this time around.
Progressives and Democrats are apparently the most eager to shut everything down to stop the spread of the coronavirus, even though this policy stance ignores what science is telling us—namely, that full lockdowns are not as effective as a targeted approach.
However, the personal behavior of political leaders in the “party of science” suggests that they either don’t take their own proposals seriously or that lockdowns are for the “masses” and not very important people like themselves.
No wonder so many Americans are in a populist mood.
In the opening days of the COVID-19 outbreak, extreme measures may have been justified to bend the curve of cases and preserve the American health care system.
Certainly, government at all levels can and should provide assistance in beating this pandemic—streamlining the process of approving rapid self-testing kits would be a huge boon in coming months—but it is now too often being wielded like a blunt instrument by overzealous politicians.
And far too many of those politicians have demonstrated that the draconian and often absurd rules they want to foist on Americans don’t really apply to themselves.
Leave it to the California governor to be the most ridiculous pandemic lockdown hypocrite.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a California Democrat, was rather infamously caught dining with a group of friends, advisers, and—perhaps most importantly—a powerful lobbyist at The French Laundry, one of the country’s most expensive and exclusive high-end restaurants. Newsom’s dinner party came just hours after he urged families not to travel and gather for the holidays.
And remember, California’s rules for Thanksgiving were so strict as to be absurd. Californians were told that all gatherings must be outside, that restrooms could only be used if frequently sanitized, and that gatherings should be two hours or less, and that every guest must be seated 6 feet apart.
Oh, and no singing.
Do Newsom and his fellow French Laundry diners appear to be 6 feet apart or outside here?
“Party of science” hypocrisy appears to be at its worst in the Golden State, where a virtual one-party lock on government power means politicians pay little price for bad behavior.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was caught going to a hair salon when San Francisco had banned the practice.
Her excuse was that it was a setup to make her look bad.
Mission accomplished, I guess.
“Cases are spiking, in part because we’re letting our guard (and masks) down with family & friends,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo tweeted just before Thanksgiving. “Let’s cancel the big gatherings this year and focus on keeping each other safe.”
Liccardo then proceeded to have a gathering of eight people, comprising several households.
Of course, it’s not just California politicians who’ve been hypocrites during the pandemic.
There have been countless other examples around the country of politicians and public officials who have been zealous about shutting everything down for our own good, but finding ways to personally skirt the rules.
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser went to an Election Day party in Delaware despite the state being put on a high-risk travel advisory, a trip she called “necessary.”
The message from all these activities is clear: The political class has deemed swamp slithering more important than whatever silly little business, family matter, or religious gathering you think is essential.
It’s understandable that these politicians wish to go about their lives, but how can they justify this when Americans have been entirely barred from, say, going to funerals and activities they deem absolutely necessary?
Unfortunately, it’s not just politicians betraying public trust with blatant double standards.
Public health officials have made pronouncements that lockdowns are necessary, and people shouldn’t gather, then ignore those guidelines for political movements they sympathize with.
Much of the legacy media seems in on the game too, of course. The almost ridiculous difference in coverage between rallies for President Donald Trump and Joe Biden street parties was beyond laughable.
One was an example of a superspreader event, the other a wonderful expression of democracy. For those paying attention, is this kind of one-sided coverage really a surprise?
These individual cases of hypocrisy might be no more than a mockable trifle in normal circumstances. But when you put them all together, they are examples of a larger phenomenon taking place in the United States and the West in general. People are losing faith in once trusted institutions and look upon them with hostile suspicion.
This crisis of the elite has been simmering for quite a while, the pandemic merely brought it more clearly out into the open.
The result is that people are less likely to take politicians, the media, and “experts” seriously.
Yes, the people are revolting, and they have a very good reason to be. Perhaps we should be using common sense and actual science to aid individuals and civil society in clamping down on the second COVID-19 wave instead of rushing back into a total lockdown.
A licence for black crime
In the city of Seattle, the radicals never sleep, never let up. It’s why there’s a real danger they will win in the end and why they must be fought at every turn.
Their latest guilt-laden idiocy is to propose eliminating misdemeanor crimes for the “underclass.” Anyone who can prove they’re a victim of society receives a “get out of jail free” card.
The woke Seattle city council members refer to misdemeanors as “crimes of poverty” and want judges to throw them out.
City Journal:
This is the latest and most brazen effort in the city’s campaign to establish what might be called a “reverse hierarchy of oppression.” The underlying theory is that society has condemned the lower class to a life of poverty and stigma, which leads to addiction, madness, and indigence. The poor, in the logic of Seattle’s progressive elites, are thus forced to commit crimes—including violent crimes—to secure their very existence. Therefore, as society is the perpetrator of this inequality, the crimes of the poor must be forgiven. The crimes are transformed into an expression of social justice.
Christopher Rufo refers to the underclass as “the new untouchables.” Just what crimes would be untouchable?
On a practical level, if this ordinance becomes law, it will effectively legalize an entire spectrum of misdemeanor crimes, including theft, assault, harassment, drug possession, property destruction, and indecent exposure. Criminals must simply establish that they have an addiction, mental-health disorder, or low income in order to evade justice.
The impact of this measure would be enormous. In 2019, the Seattle Police Department reported 25,993 thefts, 8,442 assaults, 6,430 property offenses, 4,194 frauds, 3,910 trespasses, and 1,640 narcotics violations—representing 72 percent of all reported crimes. If the ordinance passes, nearly all these crimes would be permitted under law.
The law would make Seattle the safest city in the industrialized world — on paper. Otherwise, not so much.
I marvel at the reasoning behind this proposed law. “Poverty made me do it” is better than the devil interceding with humanity to force people to do wrong.
The problem is that most poor people are not addicted, are not mentally ill, are not homeless, and the overwhelming majority are law-abiding citizens. If some poor people are “forced” to commit crimes to survive, how come others aren’t? Why are the majority of poor people perfectly capable of living their lives without extracting “social justice” from the rest of society?
The consequence of this measure is predictable. By dramatically reducing penalties for theft, assault, drug crime, and property crime, the city would effectively announce, “crime pays here.” With at least 90 percent of the jail population able to claim dispensation for indigence, addiction, and mental illness, the city’s criminal class could operate with impunity. Seattle’s downtown, already besieged by tent encampments and an addiction-fueled crime boom, would become a free-for-all.
Fortunately, an alert watchdog group in Seattle flagged the legislation and the Seattle Times ran an editorial against it. People were rightly appalled. But the legislation is not dead. The councilwoman pushing the scheme, Lisa Herbold, tried ramming the law through the regular budget process. Stymied there, she will now take it to the Budget Committee where it will have another life.
Someone should drive a stake through this bill once and for all.
UK Issues Landmark Ruling Protecting Kids from Life-Altering Hormone Replacement Therapy
A High Court in the U.K. issued a landmark judgment this week that will protect children 16 years of age and younger from receiving potentially harmful hormone replacement therapy. The High Court ruled that treatments often used to aid gender “transitions”—like puberty blockers and other sex-change hormones—are too experimental and are no longer able to be administered to 16-year-olds or younger without permission from the court.
This is an incredible ruling for those who have been spreading the word for years about the dangers of transitioning.
The ruling against Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which operates the U.K.’s sole “gender-identity development service,” is a good sign that the U.K. is finally waking up to the harm puberty blockers do to young people. The judges made their decision due to a number of factors, including the testimony of one of the claimants in the case, Keira Bell.
Bell was referred to Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and prescribed puberty blockers at age 16. Now 23, Bell testified in October that after receiving hormone replacement therapy and a mastectomy at the behest of the clinic, she began to regret her transition. A mother of a 16-year-old girl with autism who had been waiting for gender dysphoria treatment was also a claimant in the lawsuit.
The court also ruled that clinicians would need to involve the court in potential cases where the clinic is unsure if it is appropriate for a 16- or 17-year-old to receive puberty blockers or hormones.
In a statement, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust said they were “disappointed” and that “that the outcome is likely to cause anxiety for patients and their families.
A group called Transgender Trend, which tracks transgender-related news, intervened in this case and, in a post, said the judgement rendered “reflected some of the concerns we raised.”
The group said, “In our intervention, we submitted evidence that the [gender-identity development service] operates within a core illogicality: a belief that biological sex is irrelevant to being a boy or being a girl, while providing a service that is predicated on the existence of, and ability to define, a ‘boy body’ and a ‘girl body’ that children might move between through medication and subsequent surgery. This is of course an impossibility, but it is an outcome that children are led to believe is possible.”
Bell’s lawyer made a strong case to the High Court in October that children and teenagers were unable to understand the effects of hormone replacement therapy, and said clinics should only be able to prescribe said therapy with a court order due to the “lifelong medical, psychological, and emotional implications” of taking the treatment.
In an e-mail, Ryan Anderson, William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow and author of “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement,” praised the High Court’s decision, saying:
Children who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve real therapy aimed at helping them feel comfortable with their own bodies. Adults should never encourage a child to reject their body, nor interfere with their natural pubertal development. Blocking puberty and administering cross-sex hormones to a minor is not only an experimental set of medical procedures but is a profound violation of medical ethics. American courts and legislators should follow the U.K.’s lead and prohibit these unethical experimental procedures from being performed on minors.
This is an incredible ruling in a controversial case many lawmakers in the U.S. have been following. In fact, informed and motivated by Bell’s story, Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., introduced legislation in August that would prohibit these procedures from being performed on minors in this country.
The existence of HR 8012, as a result of Bell’s powerful story, is an important move forward in the United States’ ability to protect children from being forced to take puberty blockers or other hormones without proper education and that may have irreversible effects and produce irreparable harm.
For years, the U.K. has been zealously embracing transgender ideology while demonstrating a laissez-faire attitude towards the harmful effects of hormone replacement therapy. This ruling puts the brakes on that hazardous approach and protects children and their bodies.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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5 December, 2020
The joy of living with defunded police: Minneapolis
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports carjackings have skyrocketed in 2020. They’re up a “staggering” 537% over last year.
Over the past two months, Minneapolis police have logged more than 125 carjackings in the city, a troubling surge that authorities had largely linked to small groups of marauding teens. But an increasing number of adults have been arrested in recent weeks for the same crime.
Within a one-hour period Saturday morning, police reported three separate carjackings in southeast Minneapolis, including one where an elderly woman was struck on the head. Such attacks are up 537% this month when compared with last November.
James Lileks described one carjacking in harrowing detail earlier this week.
Minneapolis has blazed the rhetorical trail on defunding police over the past half year, though its actual cuts have been more modest than, say, radical Austin, Texas, which cut a whopping $143 million from its police budget and canceled upcoming police cadet classes. Minneapolis is looking at cutting about $8 million
The rhetoric matters. Police in Minneapolis and elsewhere across the country are demoralized after being demonized relentlessly for months. Many are walking off the force and won’t be replaced anytime soon. Why put your life on the line when your city’s elected officials not only do not have your back, they’re openly stabbing you in the back?
After spending decades reversing the extreme crime rates of the 1990s, cities like Minneapolis see crime surging again. Democrats who control those cities have no answers that won’t just make crime worse. And it will get worse.
All of this was predictable. In fact, I predicted it when “defund the police” became a thing across the country.
The title of a piece I published here on July 2 was “‘Defunding’ Police Will Lead to More Violent Crime, But Don’t Ask the Mainstream Media.” Media totally abdicated its responsibility to report anything fairly or honestly with regard to the defund movement. Media didn’t report its goals, its origins, where it was likely to lead, or anything else at the time. Media failed to report that majorities of about 80% across all demographics oppose defunding police. Big Tech didn’t flag or censor the defund movement for inciting violence, which it obviously was and still is. “Defund the police” is destroying cities such as Minneapolis.
Before that piece, I wrote about New York City’s murder surge. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio led defunding the city’s police. Before that, back on June 8, I took a look at the history of violent crime in America and why we were likely to see more of it as the defund movement took off. Predicting that demoralizing and chopping police would lead to more crime was probably the easiest prediction of my entire career. But no one in the mainstream media made the same obvious case.
Our cities are getting what they voted for, unchecked Democrat power, and they’re getting it good and hard. Along with a crime surge, they’re getting arbitrary and often politically-motivated shutdowns of small businesses, and of schools, the latter powered more by the teachers’ unions relentless demands for power than by the science, which clearly states and has stated for months that children are not likely conduits to spread COVID.
The school closure is hurting our children: In Houston, Texas’ largest school district, a whopping 42% of students are failing at least one class, according to the Houston Chronicle. Houston is, of course, Democrat-run. Houston’s schools have been on remote learning for months, but few of its 215,000 students seem to be learning.
This will lead to an increase in the dropout rate, which will in turn lead to more crime. Houston, at least, hasn’t defunded its police. It’s better run than Austin, which has, and led the nation in the rate of increase in violent crime earlier this year.
Portland and Seattle are basket cases and may be beyond saving at this point.
Returning to Minneapolis, police didn’t even track carjackings as a separate statistic until this fall because they were so infrequent. Now they’re almost unavoidable and they’re spread all across the city.
MPD didn’t specifically track this type of crime until Sept. 22 because they were so infrequent. Previous cases fell under the larger umbrella of robberies and auto theft. The agency created a new coding system after the summer months yielded an unusually high number of attacks.
A retroactive count by analysts determined that Minneapolis has seen at least 375 carjackings this year — including 17 last week. That overall tally is more than three times higher than 2019.
It’s going to get worse until sanity prevails. When that will happen is anyone’s guess. Voters in cities such as Minneapolis will have to vote their cities’ destroyers out of office and replace them with people who have some contact with reality. For that to happen, media in those cities will have to report what is actually happening. City councils will have to hear and respond to voices other than the far-left radicals who proposed defunding police, without any conscience for the inevitable consequences. Local media will have to report all this accurately. The Star-Tribune has started, about six months too late and long after the trajectory of crime was obvious.
The Left's Gender Theories Are Anti-Scientific Nonsense, but They're Gaining Ground
Ben Shapiro
On Nov. 22, 2020, New York Times columnist Charles Blow unleashed one of the most bizarre tweets in recent memory. "Stop doing gender reveals," he stated. "They're not cute; they're violent. All we know before a child is born is their anatomy. They will reveal their gender. It may match your expectations of that anatomy, and it may not. If you love the child you will be patience, attentive and open."
This is patently insane for a variety of reasons.
First, the characterization of gender reveal parties -- parties during which parents celebrate finding out whether their unborn children are boys or girls -- as "violent" is, in and of itself, radically nuts. Parents are excited to learn whether their children will be boys or girls. That is absolutely unobjectionable. But for an ardent fan of abortion on demand such as Blow to characterize a gender reveal party celebrating the sex of an unborn baby as "violent" while characterizing the in utero dismemberment of that same unborn baby as "choice" is so morally benighted as to boggle the mind.
Blow's tweet goes further. The implication that parents are doing violence against their own children if they connect sex and gender is utterly anti-evidentiary. Sex and gender are interconnected. For nearly every human being born, biological sex will correspond with genital development in the womb. And gender, contrary to the idiotic, pseudoscientific paganism of the gender theory set, is not some free-floating set of biases we bring to the table. Males and females have different qualities in a variety of functions, attitudes, desires and capabilities. In every human culture -- indeed, in every mammalian species -- meaningful distinctions between male and female remain. To reduce children to genderless unicorns simply awaiting hormonal guidance from within piles absurdity upon absurdity.
And, of course, Blow's take on "patience" is not limitless. Presumably, should your daughter announce that she is a boy at the tender age of 5, all measures will immediately be taken to ensure that she is treated as a boy by those such as Blow. There will be no call for watchful waiting; to do so would be yet another act of "violence."
Why does any of this matter? Because Blow's perspective has become mainstream on the left. In October, Healthline, a supposed medical resource, ran an article reviewed by a licensed marriage and family therapist titled "'Do Vulva Owners Like Sex?' Is the Wrong Question -- Here's What You Should Ask Instead." Whether "vulva owners" like sex is indeed the wrong question. The right question, to begin, might be what makes "vulva owners" distinct from women; as a follow-up, we might ask how one would go about leasing or renting a vulva if ownership seems like too much of a burden.
But the madness gains ground. CNN reported in July that the American Cancer Society had changed its recommendations on the proper age for cervical cancer screenings for women, only CNN termed women "individuals with a cervix." Which seems rather degrading to women, come to think of it.
Lest we believe that this is merely some lunatic fringe, it is worth noting that Blow, Healthline and CNN are merely saying out loud what those who place gender pronouns in their Twitter bios, such as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, imply: that gender and sex are completely severable, and that biology has nothing to do with the former. President-elect Joe Biden has openly stated that an 8-year-old can decide on his transgenderism; Sen. Elizabeth Warren infamously stated that she would have a 9-year-old transgender child screen her secretary of education nominee. Male and female are arbitrary categories to which anyone can claim membership.
Unless, of course, the left wishes to treat sex as an important characteristic. Then the logic changes. Thus, it is historic that Biden has nominated an all-female communications team, and it is deeply moving that Harris is a woman.
It's almost as though the definitions of words have no meaning, according to the left. All that matters is fealty to whatever narrative the chosen moral caste dictates on a daily basis. And if you cross it, you're doing violence.
The sacredness of trannies reaches a peak in Norway
For more than 15 years, I have been saying that gay activists calling for “equality” and “tolerance” would want to silence dissenting voices. About 10 years ago, a Christian attorney said to me, “Mike, take that one step farther. Those who were once put in jail will want to put us in jail.”
When I repeated his comment on Christian TV, I was widely ridiculed by the left. “No one wants to put people like you in jail!”
That tune quickly changed when, in 2015 Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, was jailed for refusing to follow a court order and issue a marriage certificate for a same-sex couple.
Many on the left applauded her arrest, thrilled that she was in jail and hoping she would not get out anytime soon. And on social media, comments were completely unhinged, like this one.
“But,” someone might say, “the arrest of Kim Davis proves you’re exaggerating your point. She refused a direct order from a judge, and still, she only spent a few days in jail. Don’t make a martyr out of her or give the false impression that this is an everyday affair.”
Actually, I could multiply other examples, not just from America but from other countries as well, like the case of a father whom I met last year in Canada.
He objected to his 14-year-old daughter’s desire to identify as a male and receive hormone therapy. But the courts ruled with the daughter, not only affirming her “right” to begin the therapy, but also banning him from referring to his own daughter by her birth name or referring to her as female, even in the privacy of his home. If he dared to do so, he could be arrested on the spot.
For several years now, in New York City, “discriminatory” treatment in the workplace against those who identify as transgender can result in a $250,000 fine. And what, exactly, constitutes discriminatory treatment?
According to the official government website, this would include failing to use an individual’s preferred name or pronoun, refusing to allow them to use the bathroom of their choice, or even “sex stereotyping.” Cross any of these lines, and you could be in a heap of debt – or worse.
Now, “Norway Has Made Biphobic, Transphobic Speech Illegal.” More specifically, “The penal code states that those who are guilty of hate speech face a fine or up to a year in jail for private comments, and a maximum of three years in jail for public remarks. Furthermore, those charged with violent crimes that are motivated by a victim’s orientation or gender identity will receive harsher sentences.”
So, a private comment deemed hateful to an LGBT person or persons could get you a one-year jail sentence. Make this comment in public, and you’re looking at three years in jail, the same penalty for third-degree murder (meaning, by neglect) in Norway. You heard that right.
Supporters of the bill note that “for prosecution, comments must be direct attacks against LGBTQ+ people or include language that intentionally dehumanizes them to the public.”
But would quoting relevant verses from the Bible cross that line? Would stating that there are only two sexes cross that line? Would denying the term “marriage” to a same-sex union cross that line?
This much is sure. There are plenty of LGBT activists and allies who are more than ready to bring potential cases to court.
Back here in America, in January of this year, Joe Biden tweeted that transgender rights are the Civil Rights issue of the day. And he has made clear that one of his first legislative priorities (in the event that he is sworn in as our next president) will be to pass the Equality Act, which constitutes a direct threat to our religious freedoms.
Do not be deceived.
This is one of many reasons so many of us strongly opposed a Biden-Harris administration. And it’s another reminder that my Christian attorney friend, who himself was on the front lines of the culture wars, was hardly exaggerating at all.
Now would make a great time to determine that you will do what is right and stand up for what is right regardless of cost or consequence. Your compassionate courage could be the very thing that stands as the last bulwark against dangerous government overreach.
Stock exchange Invests in Racial Discrimination
As ABC News reports, “Nasdaq filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday that would require all companies listed on its U.S. stock exchange to publicly disclose the diversity statistics of its board of directors. Moreover, the new rules would require companies on the stock exchange to have at least one woman director and one who self-identifies as an ‘underrepresented minority’ or member of the LGBTQ community — or face possible delisting.”
NASDAQ President Nelson Griggs, however, couched this ominous threat of delisting as — what else? — an opportunity. Now, instead of working to improve the quality of their product or service, these companies can focus on the critical task of “increasing representation of women, underrepresented minorities and the LGBTQ+ community on their boards.”
As Power Line’s John Hinderaker points out, “The purpose of a board of directors is to manage a corporation for the benefit of its shareholders. It is not to advance a collateral liberal agenda, which is what NASDAQ no doubt has in mind. It is noteworthy that the American Civil Liberties Union, which once advocated for civil rights but now is on the other side, applauded NASDAQ’s crudely discriminatory initiative.”
Not so fast, though, says attorney Hans Bader, who notes that NASDAQ’s discriminatory designs seem to runs afoul of federal law. “The stock exchange NASDAQ plans to impose racial quotas on companies that are listed on it,” he writes, “requiring them to violate federal law. Under a proposed NASDAQ rule, corporations would have to put at least one minority and one woman on their board of directors. Such racial quotas violate a federal statute, 42 U.S.C. 1981, which forbids racial discrimination in contracts, and which has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as forbidding racial quotas even when such quotas are motivated by a desire for diversity.”
Ah, yes, the Supreme Court. Thirteen years ago, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1, Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Seems like a pretty sensible concept.
If NASDAQ’s dopey diversity directive ever winds its way to the nation’s highest court, we’ll get to find out whether the chief justice really believes what he says he believes.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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4 December, 2020
The Strangely Unscientific Masking of America
Iremember vividly the day, at the tail end of March, when facemasks suddenly became synonymous with morality: either one cared about the lives of others and donned a mask, or one was selfish and refused to do so. The shift occurred virtually overnight.
Only a day or two before, I had associated this attire solely with surgeons and people living in heavily polluted regions. Now, my friends’ favorite pastime during our weekly Zoom sessions was excoriating people for running or socializing without masks in Prospect Park. I was mystified by their certitude that bits of cloth were the only thing standing between us and mass death, particularly when mere weeks prior, the message from medical experts contradicted this new doctrine.
On February 29, the U.S. surgeon general infamously tweeted: “Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS. . . They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Anthony Fauci, the best-known member of the coronavirus task force, advised Americans not to wear masks around this time. Similarly, in the earliest weeks of the pandemic, the CDC maintained that masks should be worn only by individuals who were symptomatic or caring for a sick person, a position that the WHO stood by even longer.
As rapidly as mask use became a matter of ethics, the issue transformed into a political one, exemplified by an article printed on March 27 in the New York Times, entitled “More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection.” The piece was heavy on fear-mongering and light on evidence. While acknowledging that “[t]here is very little data showing that flat surgical masks, in particular, have a protective effect for the general public,” the author went on to argue that they “may be better than nothing,” and cited a couple of studies in which surgical masks ostensibly reduced influenza transmission rates.
One report reached its conclusion based on observations of a “dummy head attached to a breathing simulator.” Another analyzed use of surgical masks on people experiencing at least two symptoms of acute respiratory illness. Incidentally, not one of these studies involved cloth masks or accounted for real-world mask usage (or misusage) among lay people, and none established efficacy of widespread mask-wearing by people not exhibiting symptoms. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that healthy people ought to wear masks when going about their lives, especially outdoors. Yet by April, to walk the streets of Brooklyn with one’s nose and mouth exposed evoked the sort of reaction that in February would have been reserved for the appearance of a machine gun.
In short order, the politicization intensified. President Trump refused to wear a mask relatively early on, so resistance to them was equated with support for him. By the same token, Democratic politicians across the board eagerly adopted the garb; accordingly, all good liberals were wearing masks religiously by the beginning of April. Likewise, left-leaning newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post unequivocally promoted mask-wearing after that March 27 article, with no real analysis or consideration of opposing views and evidence.
The speed with which mask-wearing among the general public transitioned from unheard of to a moral necessity struck me as suspicious. After all, if the science was as airtight as those around me claimed, surely masks would have been recommended by January or February, not to mention during prior infectious disease outbreaks such as the 2009 swine flu. It seemed unlikely that the scientific proof became incontrovertible sometime between late February and late March, particularly in the absence of any new evidence surfacing during that time period.
Perhaps none of this is particularly surprising in this hyper-political era. What is shocking is the scientific community’s participation in subverting evidence that does not comport with the consensus. A prime example is the Institute of Health Metrics Evaluation’s (“IHME”) rather astounding claim, published in the journal Nature-Medicine and echoed in countless articles afterward, that the lives of 130,000 people could be saved with a nationwide mask mandate.
As my colleague Phil Magness pointed out in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the IHME model was predicated upon faulty data: it assumed that 49% of Americans were wearing masks based on a survey conducted between April and June, while claiming that statistic represented the number of Americans wearing masks as of September 21. In fact, by the summer, around 80% of Americans were regularly wearing them. (Ironically, had Dr. Fauci and the Surgeon General not bungled the message in March, mask use probably would have reached much higher rates much earlier on).
This called into question the accuracy of the 130,000 figure, since many more people habitually used masks than the study presumed.
Although Magness contacted Nature-Medicine to point out the problem, after stalling for nearly two weeks, the journal declined to address it. Needless to say, the damage had been done: newspapers such as the New York Times undoubtedly would fail to correct the error and any retractions certainly would be placed far from the front page, where the initial article touting the IHME figure appeared. Thus, as expected, the unfounded claim that 130,000 lives could be saved with a nationwide mask-mandate continues to be repeated, including by president-elect Joe Biden and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
That the science behind mask-wearing is questionable at best is further exemplified by a letter to the editor written in response to Magness’s article. Dr. Christopher Murray acknowledged that rates of mask-wearing have steadily increased, but then concluded that masks should be used because they are “our first line of defense against the pandemic” and current IHME modeling indicates that “if 95% of U.S. residents were to wear masks when leaving home, we could prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans” because “masks work,” and “much deeper pain is ahead if we refuse to wear them.”
None of this accounts for the failure of either Nature-Medicine or the IHME modelers to recognize and correct the error. Moreover, neither the IHME modelers nor Dr. Murray provide any evidence that masks work. They assume masks are extremely effective at preventing spread of the coronavirus, and then claim that the model is correct for that reason. This sort of circular reasoning is all-too typical of those who so vociferously insist that masks are effective without going to the trouble of substantiating that contention – or differentiating what is likely a modest benefit from mask-wearing in specific indoor locations and around high-risk individuals from the media-driven tendency to depict masks as a silver bullet for stopping the virus in all circumstances.
Coverage of a recent mask study conducted in Denmark likewise epitomizes the failure of the scientific community to rigorously engage with results that do not fit the prevailing masks-as-a-panacea narrative. The first randomized and controlled study of its kind (another appeared in May but it pertained to flu and had similar results), it found an absence of empirical evidence that masks provide protection to people wearing them, although it apparently did not assess whether they prevent infection of those who encounter the wearer. The report was covered in a New York Times article bearing the patronizing headline, “A New Study Questions Whether Masks Protect Wearers. You Need to Wear Them Anyway.”
Noting that the results “conflict with those from a number of other studies,” primarily “laboratory examinations of the particles blocked by materials of various types,” the author remarked that, therefore, this research “is not likely to alter public health recommendations in the United States.” Notably, laboratory examinations, as opposed to the Danish study, do not account for the realities of everyday mask usage by non-medical professionals.
The author then quotes Susan Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, who claims that the study indicates a trend: “‘in the direction of benefit’ even if the results were not statistically significant. ‘Nothing in this study suggests . . . that it is useless to wear a mask,’” according to Dr. Ellenberg.
Nor does anything in this study suggest that it is useful to wear a mask, a fact that Dr. Ellenberg (and the headline) conveniently ignores. Furthermore, if a result is statistically insignificant, it should not be used to make the case for any proposition — as even I, a layperson, know.
Scientists ought to dispassionately analyze data that contradicts their biases and assumptions, and be open to changing their beliefs accordingly. That the results of the only randomized, controlled study were and continue to be automatically discounted demonstrates that, when it comes to the subject of masks, anything approximating the scientific method has gone out the window. That is all the more evident given the lack of interest that mask proponents have shown in conducting a randomized, controlled study themselves.
An article in the Los Angeles Times went even further: it twisted the findings of the Danish study to argue, incomprehensibly, that the research demonstrated more mask-wearing is warranted. The author cited, as supposedly compelling evidence that masks work, the low Covid-19 death rates in Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Indeed, according to the latest YouGov poll, administered in mid-November, 83% of Americans now wear masks in public, higher rates than Vietnam (77%) and Taiwan (82%).
Furthermore, there are other explanations, apart from widespread mask usage, for the remarkably low death rates in these countries. Some scientists believe that previous exposure to other coronaviruses in these regions may confer partial or total immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Others have speculated that obesity, environment or genetics could be the reason that Europe and the United States have substantially higher death rates than many Asian and African countries; after all, obesity is one of the most significant risk factors for severe illness.
To conclude on the basis of low death rates in several countries that masks prevent coronavirus transmission is patently absurd, illogical, and unscientific. A casual observer might also note that coronavirus cases (albeit not necessarily deaths) are rising in many parts of the world, regardless of mask mandates or rates of implementation. While not a controlled experiment, this fact at least ought to be addressed when making such sweeping claims.
Ultimately, I do not have the credentials to determine whether or not –or to what extent — masks work. But it is obvious that the issue has become so politicized that mainstream media outlets, politicians, and even scientists seize upon the slightest bit of favorable evidence, dismiss out of hand anything that conflicts with their theory, and most egregiously of all misrepresent the data, to support the conclusion that masks worn by asymptomatic people prevent coronavirus transmission.
And masks are only one part of this story: school closures, lockdowns, and social distancing all have been dogmatically embraced as a means of controlling infection. The substantial evidence that these mechanisms are not effective, particularly beyond their duration, has been automatically rejected for too long. This is not science: it is politics, and those within the profession who have refused to examine their confirmation biases, or manipulated the evidence to score political points, are utterly unqualified for the job.
https://www.aier.org/article/the-strangely-unscientific-masking-of-america/
Leftmedia Uses COVID to Justify AuthoritarianismFomenting panic over the highly survivable novel virus is all about promoting leftist politics.
We coined the term “Leftmedia” to quickly identify the agenda behind news media organizations, an activist agenda promoting socialist ideals. The Leftmedia’s socialist agenda has been made all the more apparent during the global COVID-19 pandemic, during which the press has sought to induce panic over a disease that has a survival rate of over 99.9% for anyone under 50 years old and a 99.5% survival rate for anyone under 70. In fact, even those over 70 who contract the virus have a survival rate of 94.6%. These stats come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To put it bluntly, contracting the coronavirus is not anywhere in the ballpark of a death sentence for the vast majority of Americans, so why the outsized panic?
It’s simple. By stoking illogical fear over the novel disease, Leftmedia outlets, working on behalf of the Democrat Party, have been able to convince millions of Americans to willingly allow for their God-given rights and liberties to be trampled upon by authoritarian-minded government officials. “All for the greater good,” which for the Leftmedia means getting rid of President Donald Trump.
Hence, the constant bad news on COVID propagated daily by the Leftmedia, despite the fact that, on balance, there is more good news regarding the virus in recent months than bad. Good or even alternative news runs counter to the narrative — a narrative that Big Tech’s leftist thought police have worked to promote and protect via their censorship campaign.
Three Ivy League professors, two from Dartmouth and one from Brown, noticed the constant negative media coverage of COVID and decided to do a little research into the numbers, which resulted in a paper titled, “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” The researchers note, “Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals. The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials. Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience.” In short, the mainstream media has convinced the majority of Americans to believe the worst about COVID and to ignore any good news as unreliable or wishful thinking.
Is the MSM simply giving Americans what they want? Perhaps in part, but don’t underestimate Big Tech censorship that silences or “fact-checks” any COVID story from non-mainstream media that fails to toe the “COVID panic” narrative. It may be less about what consumers are demanding and more about what media sources consumers are allowed or encouraged to access.
In any case, it’s clear that a political agenda is fueling the Leftmedia’s narrative surrounding COVID.
One obvious example of this comes from the San Francisco Chronicle. On November 2, the day before the election, it ran an article titled, “Record 61,000 children in the U.S. infected with coronavirus last week.” Joe Biden made President Trump’s response to COVID the centerpiece of his campaign, ridiculously asserting that Trump was responsible for more than 200,000 American deaths. The bulk of the Chronicle story focuses on the increasing number of children catching the novel virus in California, only to note in the second-to-last paragraph the following fact: “Two children have died in California [from COVID].” Think about that for a moment. Only two children have died from COVID, and yet the state has closed schools and largely shut down its economy. How many children have died due to California’s overreaction to the novel virus? How many suffered in other measureless ways?
As if to prevent the entire fearmongering purpose of the story from being undercut by facts, the author concludes, “But while the chances for death and serious complications are minimal for children, researchers are concerned about the explosive growth in childhood cases seen over the past weeks.” What was clearly a good piece of news — that children are not dying or seriously threatened by the coronavirus — was spun into a negative story. Keep the panic going, while at least implicitly blaming the Bad Orange Man.
And now, with Trump’s Operation Warp Speed leading to the development of two COVID vaccines, the Leftmedia is still stirring panic over a virus on the verge of being defeated for no other purpose than to keep providing cover for totalitarian-minded government officials who continue cracking down on Americans’ civil liberties.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/75266-leftmedia-uses-covid-to-justify-authoritarianism-2020-12-01
The Left Is Guilty as ChargedHarold Hutchison
If one thing has become clear in the five-plus years since Donald Trump first announced his campaign for the presidency, it's that the Left has unequivocally revealed its true colors. In fact, in the battle over the 2020 election, one pattern of conduct by leftists is a fundamental admission of doing everything they've ever been accused of by grassroots Patriots.
What pattern is that? Let's start with the way Big Tech has handled the evidence-backed claims of both voter fraud and failing to follow the rules. Even though the red flags are obvious to experienced fraud investigators and casual observers alike, Big Tech has been gaslighting the American people for nearly a month over this issue via censorship. If, for example, we wanted to examine or share the complaints filed by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, we'd see the websites that hosted those complaints labeled as "dangerous sites."
It's a pattern of behavior that mirrors the treatment of a certain bombshell story recently reported by the New York Post and then systematically suppressed by Big Tech.
Next, we see the targeted harassment of lawyers who were representing the Trump campaign. One firm, Porter Wright, dropped its representation of the president altogether. The loathsome Lincoln Project vowed to target others intent on determining how badly the integrity of this election was compromised.
Even the alternative news outlets are being targeted. One America News Network was demonetized by Google. Parler is now the target of media hit pieces. CNN is going after Newsmax. All this is happening as these platforms are giving grassroots Patriots new voices while Fox News increasingly lets them down.
The common theme is plain to see: The establishment is trying to reassert control by going after upstart alternative news sources. In the early years of the Internet, these media and tech powers had it easy. The only conservative voices they needed to worry about at the time were those permitted by gatekeepers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN.
But the combination of talk radio, Fox News, and a vibrant Internet broke that paradigm. And the establishment hates it, because deep down, it knows it loses a fair fight on the field of ideas. The establishment knows it can't beat the NRA in an honest debate, so New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his ilk have been abusing power with the express intent to silence other voices. The same goes for past attacks on Gab, the current bans and censorship of social media, and even the dismissive rants of Old Media. To say that these leftist powers are frightened of having their bankruptcy of ideas revealed is a charitable explanation.
There's also a less charitable explanation, one that fits the rhetoric we've been hearing from the Left. The pattern of censorship confirms what people like Kurt Schlichter and Dennis Prager have been saying for years: The Left hates our guts, thinks we don't deserve to be heard, and is intent on destroying those of us with the courage to speak out.
Either way, these actions are an admission that the Left is afraid to discuss the issues of the day in good faith. That admission should speak volumes.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/75238-the-left-is-guilty-as-charged-2020-12-01
Trump Lawyer Jenna Ellis Receives Threats: ‘You Deserved to Be Raped’Jenna Ellis, a legal advisor to President Donald Trump and senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, has received threats, late night phone calls from unfamiliar numbers, and public calls for her disbarment, she told Breitbart News exclusively Wednesday.
Via direct message (DM), Ellis told Breitbart News that she had received “Hundreds of DMs and messages etc threatening me.”
Some threats have been public, like attempts to have her disbarred and encouraging the public to file Bar complaints.
Others have been more direct — and less subtle.
She added: “CNN reporter messaged today accusing me of my bar license being lapsed. Unknown number has called my cell dozens of times between midnight and 4am to blow up my phone and try to get through the DND [do not disturb].”
Ellis provided Breitbart News with a screen grab of text messages from an unknown person who attempted to provoke her to respond, ending with: “You’re a f**king c**t. You’re the reason people despise humanity. You deserved to be raped.”
Other Trump attorneys have been harassed, including by the Lincoln Project, a group of Never Trump Republicans who have encouraged the public to harass law firms taking up the president’s case.
The mainstream media has defended these efforts; the Washington Post, for example, published an op-ed Nov. 12 titled “Yes, going after Trump’s law firms is fair game.” Trump’s lawyers in Pennsylvania withdrew the following day, reportedly because of threats.
Joe Biden has not said anything about the threats against Trump’s legal team, as scholar Jonathan Turley has noted.
“When such actions were taken against lawyers representing civil rights groups and others in the 1960s, it was correctly denounced as an outrageous abuse of our legal system,” Turley tweeted this week. “Now it has become a campaign supported by politicians, lawyers, and the media.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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2 December, 2020
The Israelis Are Amazing — and So Is the Left
I always thought no one — including Israel — could pull off something as incredible as the July 4, 1976, raid on Entebbe, Uganda. To remind readers what happened that day: A week earlier, on June 27, two Palestinian and two German terrorists hijacked an Air France Tel Aviv to Paris flight with 248 passengers on board, which they diverted to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. At the airport, the hijackers and four additional terrorists, aided by Uganda’s Idi Amin regime, held the Israeli and other Jews, and allowed the 148 non-Jewish passengers to fly on to Paris. The terrorists announced that unless 53 Palestinian prisoners — 40 in Israel and 13 elsewhere — were released, the kidnapped Jews (and the Air France crew, all of whom heroically remained with the Jewish passengers) would be killed.
On July 4, the Israelis flew a disguised transport plane filled with Israeli commandos 2,500 miles from Israel to Entebbe. After refueling in Kenya, they landed in Entebbe, killed the terrorists and saved nearly every hostage — all in 53 minutes.
No one had seen anything quite like the raid on Entebbe, considered at the time to have achieved the impossible … until last week.
On Friday, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian scientist considered to be “the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program for two decades” (The New York Times) was assassinated in Iran. To appreciate how remarkable this operation was, consider this: Fakhrizadeh traveled a different route to work every day, traveled in a bulletproof car and was accompanied by three personnel carriers that transported heavily armed bodyguards.
The assassins had cut off electricity to the area surrounding the assassination and disabled all video cameras in the area. They exploded a car next to Fakhrizadeh’s car and had a remote-control machine gun fire at Fakhrizadeh. The entire operation took three minutes. None of the assassins were killed or even wounded. All 12 (the number of assassins, according to Javad Mogouyi, a documentary filmmaker for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) got away.
Fakhrizadeh was the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist killed in the last 13 years. One must assume that most, if not all, of these assassinations, whether Israel was involved or not, were carried out by Iranians — which only shows how many Iranians loathe their liberty-suppressing, life-suppressing, women-suppressing, Islamo-fascist regime. Too bad Western countries and the Western media also don’t loathe the Iranian regime (what they loathe is labeling the Iranian regime “Islamo-fascist”).
One would think that every decent human being would welcome the elimination of a man whose life was dedicated to the annihilation of another country. There is, after all, no parallel in the world to the Iranian regime’s repeatedly stated goal of annihilating Israel. And Israel — to the consternation of European leaders, the United Nations and major American media — does whatever it takes to prevent itself from being annihilated.
John Brennan, the head of the CIA under President Barack Obama, strongly condemned the Fakhrizadeh assassination. Brennan, who has never abandoned the moral values he held when he was a communist, condemned the assassination as “a criminal act” and “highly reckless” and labeled it “murder” and “state-sponsored terrorism.” He asked Iran to “resist the urge” to retaliate and “wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage.” In other words, wait until the Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist, America-hating, genocide-seeking Iranian regime is appeased by a Democrat in the White House — something guaranteed by, among other developments, Joe Biden’s appointment of Brennan’s former deputy director at the CIA, Avril Haines, as his director of national intelligence.
A United Nations spokesman said, “We condemn any assassination or extrajudicial killing.”
A spokesperson for the European Union called Fakhrizadeh’s killing “a criminal act” that “runs counter to the principle of respect for human rights the EU stands for.”
A New York Times opinion piece said the assassination “could strengthen hard-line factions in Iran arguing against a return to diplomacy.” This statement embodies the naivete of the world’s left, including liberals: that evil regimes are composed of “hard-line factions” and “moderate factions.” The author of the Times opinion piece, Barbara Slavin of the Atlantic Council, added that the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany should “issue a statement condemning the assassination as illegal under international law and damaging to the cause of nonproliferation. … It would be the ultimate tragedy if Israel’s aggression now led Iran to change its calculus and go for weapons.”
To the left around the world, Israel is the villain here, not Iran.
Upon returning to France, Michel Bacos, the heroic captain of the Air France plane hijacked to Entebbe, who refused the opportunity to return to France and insisted on remaining with the kidnapped Jews, “was reprimanded by his superiors at Air France and temporarily suspended from duty” (The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 3, 2006). Such are the values of our European allies.
Red States Could Have Upper Hand in Possible Biden Presidency
By Rick Manning
The final outcome of the presidential and Senate majority fight remain in doubt, but no matter how things turn out, Americans will be much better educated about the importance and primacy of the states over many aspects of governance.
On many matters, states have a much more significant role than the federal government. Election law is just one example where the federal courts seem to be bending over backwards in deference to the states, but another that was discovered during the first four years of the Trump administration is enforcement of federal immigration policy, and there has long been an argument over whether the federal government has any real enforcement power over education, transportation, land and housing policies.
This is stunning. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency almost 90 years ago, we’ve seen a steady stream of power away from state capitols and local governments toward the administrative state in Washington, D.C.
In one of the ironic twists, the United States Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that the federal government could not withhold appropriated law enforcement dollars from states that refused to enforce federal immigration policy. Because this case is precedent setting, it is of mounting importance. In California v. the United States, the far-left Attorney General of California actually argued,
“The Constitution “‘confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States.’” Murphy v. Nat’l Collegiate Athletic Ass’n, __ U.S. __, 138 S. Ct. 1461, 1476 (2018) (quoting New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 166 (1992)). Under the Tenth Amendment and the structure of the Constitution, the federal government may not compel state officials to enforce or administer a federal regulatory program. See Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 935 (1997). Similarly, it may not require state legislatures to affirmatively adopt federally preferred policies, see New York, 505 U.S. at 161-162, or prohibit them from enacting legislation of their own choosing, see Murphy, 138 S. Ct. at 1477-1478.”
Assuming that the Supreme Court will apply the same regard to conservative states as they have given the state of California, these states can resist a potential Biden administration’s encroachment on their state policies. And they will have the Attorney General of California to thank! He obtained the Court’s implicit agreement that the federal government cannot force states to enforce or administer a federal regulatory program.
Apply that rule to just one of the Obama/Biden administration policies that a possible Biden presidency would likely resurrect, the Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation, which allowed HUD to effectively have veto power over local zoning decisions that federal bureaucrats determined had a disparate impact on racial desegregation if a locality had accepted Community Redevelopment Grant funds.
If the Trump Justice Department could not withhold federal funds from California for its refusal to assist in enforcement of immigration laws, then it seems logical that HUD cannot take over local zoning, using the denial of federal grants as a cudgel. (NOTE: Even with this assumption, just to be safe, no locality should apply for or accept a federal redevelopment grant and Congress should take steps to make certain that when given, they are unfettered by federal government strings.)
The choice to let stand the lower court ruling in the California case matters immensely. Should Joe Biden become President and the state of Georgia not provide Senate Democrats a majority in their run-off election on January 5, Biden’s only path to enforce his socialist vision will be through regulatory action.
With the GOP controlling the legislative and governor’s offices in twenty-four states and with full control of the legislative branch in thirty-one states in 2021, almost half the states could opt-out or outright reject the most egregious federal policies, effectively neutering Biden on domestic policy.
To strengthen their legal hands, it might be wise for GOP-controlled states with common interests in land, environmental, education, judicial or housing policies to band together in compacts for the purposes of asserting their Tenth Amendment right to resist federal policies which the state of California so helpfully asserted and won when it came to federal immigration enforcement.
And by the Court’s ending the ability of the federal government to deny states funding who refuse to assist enforcement of regulatory edicts, the power to coerce state compliance is largely stripped away.
Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that the Supreme Court will treat issues brought forward by GOP-led states seeking to stop the growth of federal government power as they did to California in its attempt to aid and abet criminal aliens from deportation.
Who knows, stranger things have happened, after all, the media would have us believe that more than 80 million people voted for a guy on November 3, who hid in his basement out of fear of getting sick rather than actually running for the office.
https://dailytorch.com/2020/11/red-states-could-have-upper-hand-in-possible-biden-presidency/
California megachurches rebrand as ‘family friendly strip clubs’ to protest state’s Covid-19 restrictionsTwo megachurches decided to open Sunday services with some safe-for-work joke stripteases, in a cheeky protest against California’s closing down of churches due to the Covid-19 pandemic, while letting strip clubs stay open.
Before the start of Sunday’s sermon, pastors at two churches opened with short burlesque dance routines, taking off their jackets and even throwing their ties into the cheering audience.
“Strip clubs (Not Churches) are exempt from the Covid lockdowns, and are deemed essential by our governor!” said senior pastor of Awaken Church Jurgen Matthesius on Instagram. “So we decided we are NOW Awaken family friendly strip club!” he quipped.
The pastor then rolled with the joke, clarifying, “we strip the devil of his hold, power & authority over people’s lives!”
With God working in mysterious ways, a similar bit was performed by pastor Rob McCoy at Godspeak Calvary Chapel. “This is insane!” McCoy later said of unequal rules set for churches and strip clubs in the state. “Cannot America see the hypocrisy and the stupidity of all this?” he asked, calling the rules “tyranny.”
The tongue-in-cheek stripteasees at the Awaken Church and Godspeak Calvary Chapel came after the San Diego Superior Court’s November 6 decision, which allowed for strip clubs to reopen while churches remained closed.
California Christians have been up in arms about the ban on in-person church services for months. “There is a desperate need for the church with the brokenness within our community,” senior pastor Matthesius told Good Morning San Diego earlier this month.
https://www.rt.com/usa/508039-california-churches-strip-clubs/
'F*** Thanksgiving!': Antifa Topples Statues of George Washington, Veterans to Fight 'Colonization'While most Americans were eating turkey and stuffing at whatever kind of socially-distanced gathering their state government would allow, “peaceful protesters” — who never spread the coronavirus, apparently — toppled statues and spray-painted anti-Thanksgiving messages to celebrate the holiday. Vandals targeted statues of President William McKinley in Chicago, a veterans monument in Portland, an Abraham Lincoln statue in Spokane, Wash., and two statues in Minneapolis: one of George Washington and another celebrating pioneers.
“Stop colinization [sic]. End Thanksgiving. F**k 12,” vandals spray-painted on the plinth of the Washington statue in Washburn Fair Oaks Park in Minneapolis. The vandals targeted the statue either late on Wednesday night or early on Thanksgiving morning.
A group organizing under the Pan-Indigenous People’s Liberation (PIPL) network took credit for the vandalism, which they said was part of a “national decolonial day of action.”
A few miles away from the Washington statue, vandals also targeted a large granite monument to pioneers in the city’s B.F. Nelson Park. Vandals spray-painted the messages, “no thanks,” “no more genocide,” decolonize,” and “land back” on the statue, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.
“Land back” seemingly refers to The LANDBACK campaign, a Native American movement supposedly fighting “white supremacy.” The campaign calls for the dismantling of the “white supremacy structures” supposedly responsible for removing Native Americans from their lands, including the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service; for the defunding of “white supremacy” in the forms of the police, the military-industrial complex, Border Patrol, and ICE; a “return” of “all public lands back into Indigenous hands”; and a policy of “consent.”
This iconoclasm is nothing new. While it began with Confederate monuments, this summer vandals progressed to targeting America’s heroes, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Then came Mahatma Gandhi, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, black Union soldiers, and freed slave Frederick Douglass. Vandals even attacked a monument to 9/11 firefighters and painted a statue of Jesus black.
However, targeting patriotic symbols just before Thanksgiving seems particularly disgusting.
Early on Wednesday morning, police prevented vandals from toppling a statue of President William McKinley in a Chicago park. The vandals tethered a rope to a police car and spray-painted the statue with the words “Land Back,” NBC 5 Chicago reported. Activists have condemned McKinley, who served as president from 1897 to his death in 1901, as a racist because he championed westward expansion.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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1 December, 2020
Jordan Peterson: how the left manufactured a folk devil
Over the past few days, Jordan Peterson’s critics have been doing their utmost to publicise his forthcoming book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. The famous clinical psychologist announced the publication on his YouTube channel on Monday, and within hours the book was being widely denounced on social media for its hateful content. This is quite a feat of the collective imagination, given that nobody has read it yet.
Much of the furore has come about because employees at the Canadian branch of the publisher, Penguin Random House, have called for the book to be cancelled. After multiple complaints were filed, they confronted their management at a meeting in which some burst into tears and shared their stories of how the evil Professor Peterson had caused such emotional havoc in their lives due to his ‘problematic’ opinions. According to a report in Vice, ‘one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalised their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend’.
This is just the latest example of a new trend of activist employees threatening to strike for ideological reasons. At the audio-streaming company Spotify, workers recently demanded editorial control of Joe Rogan’s newly acquired podcast series, after they had successfully removed a number of episodes deemed to be controversial. At publishing giant Hachette, employees threatened to walk out after JK Rowling’s children’s book, The Ickabog, was announced. All these internal revolts have failed, presumably because figures such as Rowling, Rogan and Peterson are too popular to cancel. One wonders how a less lucrative artist would fare under such circumstances.
When I reviewed 12 Rules for Life for spiked (published alongside a counterview by Luke Gittos), I noted that there were two Jordan Petersons. The first ‘a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto with a particular interest in religious and ideological belief systems’, and the second ‘a notorious firebrand of the alt-right… a transphobic provocateur whose lectures amount to little more than hate speech’. As I pointed out, only the first of these two actually exists.
The viperous attacks on Peterson we have seen on social media over the last few days can only be described as a kind of hysteria. He has been smeared as a ‘Nazi apologist’ and a ‘fascist’ by people whose familiarity with Peterson’s work amounts to a few bad-faith articles and a smattering of selective quotations taken out of context.
He has routinely been called ‘far right’, even though the core tenets of the actual far right – a sense of racial or national superiority, support for authoritarianism and the worship of the state – represent the polar opposite of Peterson’s worldview. Many critics have attempted to broaden the traditional definition of the ‘far right’ – incorporating cultural conservatism, a belief in the importance of personal responsibility and an awareness of biological sex differences – so that it can then be applied to Peterson. This is the equivalent of attaching plastic horns to a bulldog so that you can call it a monster.
True, there are subsidiary features common to the far right: homophobia, sexism and other reactionary viewpoints. But to brand anyone as ‘far right’ on the basis of these things alone – particularly when they are imagined rather than supported by the evidence – is a form of political illiteracy. Peterson’s opposition to feminism is well documented and there are legitimate arguments to be had over the merits of his views. But even if one were convinced that they are tantamount to chauvinism, this would not be sufficient to justify the epithet of ‘far right’. Were that the case, then there would no longer be any distinction to be made between Benny Hill and Hermann Göring.
The determination to misrepresent Peterson’s ideas is on a par with the frenzy surrounding JK Rowling, whose compassionate and nuanced views on the ways in which gender-critical feminism and trans activism are in conflict have been taken as proof that she is the devil incarnate. This monstering of public figures, based on the flimsiest of evidence, is indicative of a cultural and intellectual malaise that we would be foolish to ignore. There are all sorts of sensible reasons to take issue with Peterson’s opinions, but why has it become so difficult for so many to present a counter-argument without resorting to adolescent catastrophising?
Consider the words of a junior employee at Penguin Random House. Peterson is apparently ‘an icon of hate speech and transphobia’ and ‘an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book’. When pushed for further detail, such people invariably claim the power to intuit Peterson’s private feelings, but simply declaring that your ideological opponents are harbouring malevolent intentions is only evidence of your desire that they should. This is why the accusation of ‘dog whistling’ – sending out secret signals that only one’s followers can hear – is so common. As one of his critics put it on Twitter, ‘one thing Peterson does consistently is toss bones and winks to his far-right followers, couched in vague or ambiguous terms that allow him to say that of course he didn’t mean THAT’. It takes an acute kind of narcissism to assume that you are able to divine the secret workings of someone else’s mind simply because you have decided that it must be so.
It should go without saying that if you believe that books ought to be cancelled simply because you disagree with their contents, a career in publishing is probably not for you. We need to reckon with this new reality of our times: that there exists a substantial proportion of the adult population, educated to university level, who are nonetheless incapable of critical thinking and lack the basic skills of argumentation. Worse still, many of the most vicious comments about Peterson – including mocking him for a benzodiazepine addiction brought on by his wife’s cancer diagnosis – have come from those who believe themselves to be compassionate and virtuous campaigners for justice. If such people really are ‘on the right side of history’, then the future of humanity looks pretty bleak.
Peterson’s key thesis is that life is unbearable without a sense of purpose, and that this can largely be achieved through personal responsibility and taking charge of one’s life. He believes that civilisations collapse without structure, which is why children ought to be socialised in accordance with the ethical parameters we set for ourselves. He maintains that science and technology have improved our lives, but do not satisfy our need for meaning. This is why his work focuses on the stories that recur in ancient traditions and religious beliefs. There is wisdom in these narratives, he argues, even if their supernatural elements have no basis in reality.
If you find these views rebarbative, you can always offer a rebuttal or choose not to expose yourself to Peterson’s output. If you need to indulge in straw-man arguments, or convince yourself that he is ‘alt right’ or ‘fascist adjacent’ in order to justify your opposition, then you are in no position to complain if you are not taken seriously. Screaming abuse at those who enjoy Peterson’s writing, or calling for his book to be cancelled, is not the behaviour of a responsible member of a civilised society. If you don’t like his work – either because of its actual contents or what you have simply imagined them to be – then don’t buy his books. Problem solved.
We need to ask ourselves how we have reached the point where grown adults are willing to accept such wild mischaracterisations of public figures without even attempting to engage with the reality of what they say and think. We need to redress the widespread historical ignorance that dilutes the terms ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ to meaningless slurs. We need to restore critical thinking in our education system to counteract the ongoing degradation of public and political discourse. We need to consider how anyone above the age of 16 believes that throwing insults is an effective form of rebuttal. This isn’t simply about Jordan Peterson; this is about the kind of hysteria he inspires in an infantile society. Something has to change.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/27/jordan-peterson-how-the-left-manufactured-a-folk-devil/
California: ISIS Jihadi Stabs Four in University Classroom, University Blames Toxic MasculinityThe FBI last Wednesday released new details about the case of Faisal Mohammad, who in November 2015, while he was a freshman at the University of California, Merced, entered a classroom and stabbed four people. It was already known back at the time of the attack that young Mohammad was a jihadi: The College Fix reported that he “was found to have an image of the ISIS flag, a handwritten manifesto with instructions on how to behead someone, and reminders to pray to Allah.” The new information that has just been released about the case only confirms this, and shows up the abject idiocy of the university’s utterly predictable reaction to the attack.
Mohammad, according to the Associated Press, “planned to praise Allah while slitting the throats of classmates and use a gun taken from an ambushed officer to kill more.” Then he planned to call 911 to report the killings, “read the Quran until he heard sirens, and then ‘take calm shot after shot’ with the gun” when the police arrived. He mapped out a detailed for his jihad; it “included putting on a balaclava at 7:45 a.m. and saying ‘in the name of Allah’ before stepping into his classroom and ordering students to use zip-ties he provided to bind their hands. Mohammad also planned to make a fake 911 distress call to report a suicidal guy [sic; this is how they write at AP these days] and wait for police outside the classroom before ambushing from behind ‘and slit calmly yet forcefully one of the officers with guns.’” Presumably in the officer’s throat, in accordance with the Qur’an’s directive, “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (47:4).
All this stands in stark contrast to how the attack was initially reported, and even more to the reaction to it at the University of California, Merced. Mohammad’s attack, as The College Fix noted back in November 2015, was widely characterized as “revenge for being kicked out of a study group.” Even worse, instead of waking up to the reality of Islamic jihad, many at the University of California-Merced mourned for the attacker, with a Facebook “R.I.P” tribute to Faisal Mohammad “gaining massive support among the campus community.”
Not even that was enough for the relentlessly woke UC Merced faculty, who hosted a “teach-in” that about 200 students attended, entitled “Don’t Turn Our Tragedy Into Hate.” It didn’t mention Islam or jihad at all, except in the context of discussion about how Muslims are victims of “Islamophobia.” According to one student who attended the teach-in, “‘Islamophobia’ was cited as the reason people want to call it a terrorist attack….‘People were quick to sympathize with the attacker and assume anyone who thought this was related to radical Islam was a xenophobic racist.’”
Among the topics discussed were “What does mental health have to do with this?”; “How do we define our community – what lives are grievable?”; and “What do race and religion have to do with this?”
Standing out in this soup of fashionable Leftist shibboleths was this: “Why are men more likely to be perpetrators of violence?” One speaker suggested that the attack was all about men not being allowed to be weak, self-centered, weepy narcissists: “Anger, that is really what we think about when we think about emotional men. They are subject to social sanctions if they deviate from masculinity. If you are perceived as failing at it, you are subject to being called a fag, a pussy, a wimp, pretty much what women are, right? So when you have this limited ability to sort of express your emotions and possible feelings of emasculation, of low self-esteem, how do you really [deal with] that? A lot of times they … engage in violence. They need to compensate for their loss of masculinity in the most manly way they have access to, and unfortunately, a lot of times that’s violence.”
Of course! It was all about toxic masculinity, don’t you see? If poor Faisal hadn’t been so pressured to conform to “society’s notions of masculinity,” if he had just been able to put on a comfy shift and lounge around his dorm room in high heels, he never would have gone on his stabbing spree! Faisal Mohammad stabbed four people just because he was a sensitive soul in a world that was too harsh for him.
Why, what other explanation could there possibly be?
The University of California Merced is no different from any other campus all over the country today: full of self-righteous, pseudo-intellectual, indoctrinated bots who have been thoroughly imbued with the notion that when Islamic jihadists attack us, it is our fault.
All too many even among law enforcement and counterterrorism officials assume the same thing. No number of Faisal Mohammads, and there will be many more, will convince them otherwise. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate but true that eventually all this denial and willful ignorance is going to blow up in everyone’s face. We can only hope that the blow-up won’t be literal.
Liberals Want You Demoralized, So Don’t Be
The next guy who tells me his sad feelz are so intense over the election that he’s not going to vote in Georgia or anywhere else ever again cuz all is lost and blah blah blah is getting slapped.
Hard. I’m getting tired of loser talk, and I won’t have it.
This is for the benefit of the weak-hearts: Oh no, did you have a set-back? Did stuff not work out the way you wanted? Is it – gasp! – hard?
Too bad. Man up. Or woman up. Or genderfluid up. Just stop bawling like Brian Stelter over his cousins when he gets passed a bowl of mashed potatoes and get your head right. We’re in a fight. Fix your bayonets and follow me over the top.
Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?
Freedom, justice, and liberty aren’t easy to win. If they were, everyone would have them. When the going gets tough, the tough don’t act like a bunch of millennial college students sobbing over microaggressions – and when you find, to your horror as I just did, that Word recognizes and autocorrects “microaggressions,” you don’t take that as a sign of cultural defeat and just give up and put in your application for cultural serfdom.
Die on your feet before you live on your knees.
Here’s how it’s going to be. Whether Trump ends up winning or losing – the court battles continue – you’re going to support the Republicans in Georgia in January and everywhere else thereafter. You’re not going to pout in performative despair about how the mean old Democrats cheated and how there’s no point in voting and boo hoo hoo. You’re going to elect people to stop the libs, winning outside the margin of fraud, and you’re going to keep fighting against fixed elections in court and elsewhere.
Is it always going to be fair or right or honest? No. So what?
This all brings to mind the new book by my friend and fellow Townhall alum Michael Walsh, Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost, in which he chronicles a bunch of remarkable fights against all odds throughout history (including his Marine father’s story of the Chosin Reservoir, which alone is worth the price of the book). Sometimes you win these fights, like the Brits did at Rorke’s Drift (there’s a tribute to Zulu in the form of a battle in California in my new conservative action novel Crisis). And yeah, sometimes you lose. The Romans lost to my ancestors at the Teutoburg Forest and the cavalry lost to Elizabeth Warren’s ancestors at Little Big Horn. But here’s the thing – you don’t give up.
At Cannae, Hannibal slaughtered 80,000 Romans. And not just any Romans – lying dead in the dirt were the cream of Roman society. But did the Romans give up? Did they start talking about how Carthage cheated and now there was no hope and how they might as well ditch Jupiter and get on the Baal bus?
No.
They built another army. And then they fought. And eventually, they razed Carthage, sold everyone that they didn’t run through with a gladius to the highest bidder, and sowed the fields with salt.
See, that’s how hard people take care of business.
Now, compare and contrast that with the social media sissies who insist that because Biden cheated and because some GOP wimps are wimpy, they’re just going to take their votes and go home. Sure, some of these are liberal bots trying to incite people into sitting out Georgia. But some people pushing this suicide pact are misguided cons blinded by emotion.
If you are so mad and frustrated by this bogus election and the fact that the Republicans haven’t waived their magic wand and made it all better that you refuse to fight the libs anymore, then you’re no better than some simpering sophomore majoring in Trans Poetry of Upper Volta at Gumbo State who sees the American flag and starts “literally shaking.”
No, we won’t give up. Not until we exhaust our remedies to this fraudulent election and not until we use our considerable political power to ensure it never happens again in the future. And we don’t give up then either.
We never give up. Never.
Yeah, we are headed for tough times, with a garbage Establishment that will use garbage corporations and garbage media along with garbage bureaucrats to stomp their Gucci loafers in our faces, but it won’t be forever. They are weak, and they are stupid, and they are brittle. We will win. But we have to fight.
History is not over. The defeatists eschew hope, maybe out of misguided angst but maybe because giving up lets them off the hook. Freedom is hard, serfdom is easy. If you want to be like the Fredocon weenies, begging for scraps from their Establishment masters, your life will be easier. You’ll just not be a man. If you can live with that, as the Bulwark slugs can and do, then ahoy soft and safe submission.
But if you can’t live like a gimp, then pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and get back in the battle. History teaches that today’s last stand is tomorrow’s victory.
Australian Prime Minister and defence chief Angus Campbell at odds over war crimes report
General Campbell gets it wrong -- again. Past wisdom: "He decided that it was terribly wrong for our service personnel to be wearing “symbology” portraying death. Seemingly ignoring the fact that a soldier’s job is to engage and kill the enemy, Campbell says, “This is not where we need to be as a national institution. As soldiers our purpose is to serve the state, employing violence with humility always and compassion wherever possible. The symbology to which I refer erodes this ethos of service.”
The Sydney Daily Telegraph got it right when it said, “There’s your new army slogan: “Employing Violence with Humility”. It’ll probably sound less stupid in Latin.
It appears to have escaped General Campbell’s notice that he himself wears the Infantry Combat Badge that displays a bayonet. The bayonet has one purpose and that is to kill and maim. Is this befuddled General going to ban that badge too.
General Angus Campbell seems to favour focusing on gender issues instead of concentrating on our reduced military capabilities within our own region. Last year Campbell addressed a Defence Force conference on recruitment at which time he said,
“The number one priority I have with respect to recruitment is increasing our diversity, with a focus on women and indigenous Australians.” In summing this up Cori Bernardi also took into account the issuing of Halals ration to our troops when he said, “This demonstrates just how our military has been captured by minority interests and appears to have suspended the application of common sense.”
Campbell is a Duntroon graduate so has some claim to being a real soldier but as far as I can tell he has never been shot at so his judgement seems to be essentially civilian. Why can we not have a real soldier with substantial combat experience running our forces?
One consolation is that he has not emulated the extremely politically correct Lieutenant General David Morrison, best known for walking around in women's high heeled shoes! What has the army come to? It is a long way from the army I served in many years ago
It's not often we see the Prime Minister and the Chief of Defence at odds, but the Brereton Report detailing allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan has exposed a public rift between the two and it's already pretty clear who will win the argument.
General Angus Campbell won mostly praise for his handling of this bombshell report released 10 days ago.
As Chief of Army, he was the one who commissioned the inquiry four years ago and now as Defence Chief, General Campbell accepted the findings and recommendations with the seriousness and gravity they deserved.
In one of the darkest moments for the Australian Defence Force, the General is seen by both sides of politics to have responded well.
Mostly, anyway. Then came the reaction
On one matter, there was immediate controversy: the decision to strip a group citation for the special forces in Afghanistan. It was hardly the most significant recommendation of the report; a unit citation is not a war medal and stripping it is hardly akin to what might be in store for those who committed war crimes.
But it was by far the most sensitive recommendation, given the number of troops affected and the signal sent to the broader veteran community.
When he released the report, General Campbell was clear.
"I have accepted the Inspector-General's recommendation," he said in his opening remarks to a nationally televised press conference, "and will again write to the Governor-General, requesting he revoke the Meritorious Unit Citation awarded to Special Operations Task Group rotations serving in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013."
It was presented as a final decision. The Chief of Defence had spoken. No ifs, no buts. A deployment marred by 39 alleged war crimes could hardly be considered "meritorious" any longer. The group citation was being revoked.
Then came the reaction, from the public, the veteran's community and inevitably, the politicians. Some of those who served honourably in Afghanistan and did nothing wrong wondered why they were being punished. The furious father of one commando killed in action said the citation would have to be collected "from his gravestone".
An online petition to "save" the unit citation received more than 40,000 signatures at last count.
Labor MP Luke Gosling, himself a former commando, suggested it would be "cruel" to strip the honour from 3,000 personnel, the overwhelming majority of whom served with distinction.
Within the Government, a similar view formed.
'Decisions haven't been made yet'
While the citation may not have been issued to the special forces if we knew then what we know now about events in Afghanistan, most agreed the idea of revoking it was crazy and at the end of the day, impossible to implement.
Veterans Affairs Minister Darren Chester, who initially supported the CDF's decision, noted calls to the Open Arms support line for veterans had doubled in the space of a week.
The Prime Minister was asked by Ben Fordham on 2GB why thousands were being punished for the "sins of a couple of dozen".
His response made it clear he was uncomfortable with General Campbell's position. "Decisions haven't been made yet on these things", he suggested, "so let's see how each step unfolds".
Morrison went on to say he was "very sensitive to the issues … as is the Defence Minister".
Morrison has a finely tuned political radar and could well be right in detecting where community sentiment lies on this issue.
Ultimately though, someone must decide. The worst outcome would be leaving it to the Governor-General (himself a former chief of defence) to choose between conflicting advice from General Campbell and the Prime Minister. To avoid that, it appears Defence has decided to blink.
Asked if General Campbell is still going to write to the Governor-General recommending the citation be revoked, a spokesperson for Defence told the ABC in a written statement, "Defence is preparing a comprehensive implementation plan to action the Inspector-General's recommendations", and "final decisions on this advice will be a matter for Government."
Decoding the language of Defence Media, it appears General Campbell's declaration 10 days ago that he would write to the Governor-General is now in doubt.
Pressure from veterans, the public and most importantly Defence's political masters has undoubtedly had an impact. It now seems most unlikely the citation will be revoked.
Instead, the special forces deployment to Afghanistan will continue to be regarded as "meritorious", despite the 39 alleged war crimes.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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For the notes appearing at the side of the original blog see HERE
Pictures put up on a blog sometimes do not last long. They stay up only as long as the original host keeps them up. Some newsapers keep their published pictures online for as little as a week. I therefore keep archives of all the pictures that I use. The recent archives are online and are in two parts:
Archive of side pictures here
Archive of this year's pictures in the body of the blog. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here
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