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.)
27 February, 2021
A penalty for "having it all" that women can suffer
Damaging stress
The wife of TV star Cameron Daddo, Alison Brahe, has revealed how her sex drive collapsed when she began an early menopause triggered by her stressed adrenal glands.
The former model, now 51, says she was plagued by “crazy symptoms” and had no idea leading a frenetic life in her 30s working and being a mum would lead to hormone hell later on.
And in a raw interview via a new podcast Tory Archbold’s Powerful Stories, Brahe says some studies suggest a link between stress and the exacerbation of perimenopausal symptoms.
“My (symptoms) really hit from when I moved our whole family from America to Australia and I left behind all of my closest friends, my home and my career,” she tells the podcast.
“I was just absolutely utterly exhausted and so of course my symptoms went sky high.”
From lack of libido to hot flushes and night sweats, the symptoms of perimenopause will vary considerably, depending on the woman. Brahe says she battled health issues for two years.
“I think the loss of libido is one of the things I struggled with the most, and I know a lot of women begin to feel embarrassed and ashamed about that,” she says.
“I would sweat buckets and buckets, and just couldn’t … there was nothing I could do. I’d have to leave the dinner table and go outside, because the heat was so overpowering that I couldn’t sit there and actually just eat my food.”
Brahe admits at times she felt like she was losing her mind, so unpredictable was her body.
“When you look at the symptoms, it can be really alarming. When you look at loss of libido, you look at lack of mental focus,” she tells the podcast.
“There’s things like intolerance to cold that can come up. There’s craving salt. There’s low blood pressure. There’s mood swings. There’s hot flushes. Loss of libido is a really challenging one.”
Brahe adds: “It comes at a time when, often, we’re tired. We’re often raising teenagers, or our parents are really elderly. We’re still in the workforce. So there’s so much going on. Our husbands are still often ready to go. Yet, things are happening, again, in our bodies. We’re exhausted.”
Australasian Menopause Society president Dr Sonia Davison says professionals are investigating the link between how modern women conduct their lives and an increase in perimenopause onset rates.
“Knowledge about perimenopause for some reason has been lacking,” Davison says.
Brahe adds: “What’s really interesting is women these days, because we are doing so much more, because we’re raising families, we’re in the workforce, we’re pushing harder, pushing ourselves harder than ever before with our fitness levels, and trying to do it all, which I think is amazing.”
Entrepreneur and CEO Archbold says early perimenopause is the “secret” illness plaguing more women in their late 30s and reveals her confusion and advice on how to cope with her own diagnosis.
“I always thought menopause was for women in their 60s. It can happen at any time.”
She encourages women to put their health and wellbeing first.
“If (we) can raise awareness for people entering their 30s to lead a more balanced life, it slows down the process. Personally, I didn’t think like that in my 30s; my health was secondary — it should have been seen as my primary asset.”
Brahe says: “The more the push, the more the adrenals get shot, the more the hormones fluctuate. That’s where the belly fat begins. You start to put on weight around the belly, around the bum. The best thing I can say is go to your doctor and get a full blood work done.”
Davison says a sexual function change may occur in perimenopause as hormones fluctuate considerably, eventually leading to a low level of the main oestrogen at the time of menopause. “The changes in hormones can affect the genito-urinary tract and also the brain, hence symptoms such as lowered libido are common by menopause.”
Other symptoms may (also) include mood disturbance, sleep disturbance, lethargy, heavy or irregular periods, headaches, breast tenderness and bloating.
For women concerned about their perimenopausal symptoms, Davison advises talking to a healthcare professional. Family, friends and partners can also be of support during this time.
Archbold says: “It’s about cracking open the conversation. Embrace it — it’s going to happen and should not be a taboo topic
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Do We Have the Courage of this Jailed Canadian Pastor Who Refuses to Be Silent?
Not long after Jesus was crucified and buried, two of his disciples, Peter and John, were jailed by the Jerusalem authorities for telling people that He had been resurrected from the dead after three days in the tomb, that He had talked multiple times with the disciples, and that He had ascended to Heaven.
Peter and John were preaching these things from Solomon’s Colonnade in the Temple, according to Acts 3:11, and in course of the incident, they healed a man who was lame, and claimed the healing was done “by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene — whom you crucified and whom God raised from the dead — by Him this man is standing before you healthy.”
And then they made the claim that began to change the world in the most radical ways possible: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven give to people by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
The authorities who had Peter and John arrested realized that they had put themselves between a rock (pun intended) and a hard place, saying, “What should we do with these men? For an obvious sign, evident to all who live in Jerusalem, has been done through them and we cannot deny it.”
So they did what governments have been doing to dissidents ever since: They ordered them to shut up, to stop preaching Jesus resurrected, on pain of further, likely much more severe, punishments. Since Jerusalem had no First Amendment, Peter and John were faced with a profoundly serious choice.
Acts 4:19-20 tells us the choice they made: “But Peter and John answered them, ‘whether it’s right in the sight of God for us to listen to you rather than God, you decide; for we are unable to stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”
So Peter and John kept right on proclaiming Jesus as the resurrected savior of all who would accept Him, defying the very authorities who had murdered Him with a cross and held the same power over His disciples who now refused to shut up.
A remarkably similar scene has just happened in our neighbor to the North. Pastor James Coates of Edmonton, Canada, Grace Life Church, was jailed earlier this month for preaching to an assembly of unmasked congregants whose numbers exceeded the 15 percent of building capacity permitted by the authorities during the Covid pandemic.
Coates was tried in secret and sentenced to prison, according to his wife, but on the condition that he can be a free man if he agrees not to again violate the Covid restrictions by preaching to his congregation assembled illegally for worship. Coates, like Peter and John, refuses to be silent. Unlike Peter and John in Acts, Coates remains in jail.
Coates is the first Canadian pastor to be so jailed. No American pastor has been jailed, yet, but many of them, especially in California, face fines that in some cases approach millions of dollars. And the prospect of going to jail is very much on their minds.
Canadians are guaranteed freedom of worship. Americans have the First Amendment to the Constitution, with its guarantee of freedom of worship and assembly.
The U.S. Supreme Court, unlike those in Canada, is steadily striking down and limiting the actions of presumptuous officials threatening church congregations and their pastors with fines and imprisonment for their obedience to God’s command at Hebrews 10:25 “to not neglect the assembling together [for worship].”
But why are these battles having to be fought in the first place if governments are bound by their chartering documents to respect freedom of assembly and worship?
Lawyer James Kitchen of Canada’s Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms suggests that a major part of the answer to that question is the fact we let officials trample on our rights:
“More people need to stop self-censoring. They’re scared to speak up. They’re scared of getting in trouble at work, they’re scared of losing their friends, they’re scared of what people are going to say, they’re scared of dirty looks, this is what I hear, they’re scared of other people.
“And unfortunately, the more influence people have, the more they’re scared to use it, to say ‘You know, this is wrong. Count me in, I disagree with this. This has to stop.’ People with their words and with peaceful actions need to say, stop, enough is enough.”
“Democracy is governing by consent. This is the whole underlying philosophical purpose of elections, You choose who governs you. … It is time for people to say, ‘I am removing my consent to be policed and governed this way,’” said Kitchen.
That advice holds true on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border, and it is a challenge to each and every one of us.
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Trans-‘inclusive’ language is erasing women’s biology
CLAIRE LEHMANN
In the 1979 Monty Python classic Life of Brian, four people sit on the steps of a Roman amphitheatre, speaking in hushed tones.
“Any anti-imperialist group like ours must reflect such a divergence of interests within its power base,” one asserts. They then proceed to debate a man’s inalienable right to have a baby.
Stan: I want to be a woman. From now on I want you all to call me Loretta.
Reg: What!?
Stan: It’s my right as a man.
Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?!
Stan: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can’t have babies.
Stan: Don’t you oppress me.
Forty-two years later and Monty Python’s absurdist vision has materialised. Not only do (trans) men have the right to have babies but their right to not be offended in the maternity ward now outweighs a woman’s right to be described as a mother.
The push to be more inclusive of trans men within maternity care has prompted an increasing number of hospitals, medical organisations and bureaucracies to alter standard language around pregnancy so that it is gender neutral and “inclusive”.
In practice, this means midwives at two National Health Service hospitals in Britain — Brighton and Sussex — have been instructed to refer to breastfeeding mothers as “chest-feeders” and to use the term “human milk” in place of breast milk.
A debate erupted in the House of Lords recently as a maternity leave bill brought before Westminster referred to “pregnant persons” instead of pregnant women. Peers across the political spectrum drew attention to the fact women’s experiences — and biology itself — was being erased by such language.
It’s not just pregnancy-related terminology that is being altered but also sex education materials. An LGBTQIA Safer Sex Guide published on the US website Healthline refers to “front holes”.
On the same website, a guide to foreplay with women describes the female of the human species — more than 50 per cent of the population — as “vulva owners”.
Most worryingly is the fact these ugly and dehumanising contortions of the English language are creeping into the mainstream medical profession. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading US health bureaucracy, uses the term “pregnant persons” instead of pregnant women. As more and more organisations do the same, it will become harder for those who wish to resist the long march to a transgendered utopia. As JK Rowling recently found out, pushing back against trans activists can lead to vicious backlash.
But pushback is required. Articles in leading medical journals such as the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology have advocated for the erasure of women in language on pregnancy care. The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an article that argued that sex should not be recorded at birth, as it was offensive to intersex people and those who may later grow up to be trans. As my colleague, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, has argued in Quillette, these journals are betraying their scientific mission in an effort to conform to fashionable cultural trends.
Similarly, those who instruct midwives to refer to new mothers as “chest-feeders” are betraying their duty of care to the many women who require empathetic support at a critical and life-changing time in their lives.
While we can all agree that transgender individuals who become pregnant and give birth should be treated with respectful and compassionate healthcare, women also have a right to be treated with dignity. Transgender rights should not outweigh the rights of half the population, and using reproductive anatomy to describe women should be left to the realm of dystopian fiction, not standard midwifery practice.
Speaking in the House of Lords, peers from across the political spectrum denounced bureaucrats who sought to normalise these new terms: “Our laws and words must never treat people as non-human things,” said Baroness Claire Fox. “I am not a uterus holder, nor a person with a vagina nor a chest-feeder. These are linguistic abominations.”
While these peers should be celebrated for standing up for common sense, it also speaks to the oppressive moment we live in that only those with the most secure privileges are able to speak freely without fear of repercussion. We need more individuals to stand up and speak fearlessly before we all end up living inside a Monty Python sketch.
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Fact-Checking the Leftmedia 'Fact-Checkers'
USA Today has not corrected the factual errors in its own fact check.
The Patriot Post is often the target of unfounded social media “fact-checks” and “missing context” claims. In every case, we are deemed “guilty until proven innocent,” and it’s almost impossible to get redress from any of the social media outlets. There is another “missing context” claim to tell you about, but first…
Let me tell you about how the so-called “fact-checkers” have been checking on the Biden/Harris regime. You may have heard that the mass media and Big Tech First Amendment suppressors have a slight leftist bias, so brace yourself.
This week, Joe Biden repeated a litany of ludicrous ChiCom Virus pandemic lies in a CNN “town hall” event. Among them he declared, “We didn’t have [the vaccine] when we came into office.” Now, for us mere mortals, this would have resulted in a costly strike, but in Biden’s case, WaPo’s head fact-checker faker, Glenn Kessler, ran interference for him. He claimed the comment was a “verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe,” adding, “People screw up on live television. Biden with his stutter especially does so.”
Fact check WaPo: Biden has already said he does not have a “stutter.”
Apparently it was the same “gaffe” script of lies that Kamala Harris used a few days earlier when she repeated, “There was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations.” And she added this stutter: “In many ways, we’re starting from scratch on something that’s been raging for almost an entire year.”
Before the White House arbiters of truth could intervene on Harris’s behalf, some lowly fact-checkers had rated her comments what they were: False. Even the left-leaning crew at PolitiFact declared it was wrong. But mysteriously, the fact-checks were deleted almost as quickly as they were posted.
Must be nice!
Again, these are not just factual errors; these are outright lies. More to the point, hearing Harris repeat the lie again, former Trump administration economic adviser Larry Kudlow was caught on a hot mic with this assessment: “Bulls—t! Bulls—t! Bulls—t!”
Of course, the Trump administration left the Biden administration a vaccine already in distribution and a robust plan to continue production and distribution. Anthony Fauci, the COVID Godfather, had already refuted the Biden/Harris assertions the day after the inauguration, insisting, “We certainly are not starting from scratch.” In fact, this week the daily average for vaccine doses administered has now ramped up to 1.7 million per day. That is not a “Biden/Harris” success story.
So, what was the latest hit against our Patriot Post social media pages?
As you may know, last June, after Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer staged a theatrical kneeling for George Floyd in the Capitol rotunda — which added accelerant to their constituents’ burn, loot, and murder “summer of rage” — I started posting tributes to police officers murdered in the line of duty and asking Pelosi and Schumer why they have not taken a knee for them. Of course, George Floyd was just a political prop for Pelosi and Schumer.
Last week, we created a meme image asking that question about Officer Brian Sicknick, but removed it soon after posting to Facebook because, while Pelosi and Schumer did not take a knee for him, I believe they disgracefully used his Capitol rotunda funeral as political fodder, timed as it was to coincide with their Trump impeachment inquisition.
However, on 09 February, after removing the image, USA Today’s fact-checker found it on a personal social media page and declared the image was, you guessed it, “missing context.” Under the title, “Democratic leaders honored officer Brian Sicknick,” she asserted that Pelosi and Schumer did honor him. Our social media director, Andrew Culper, recently wrote that the ubiquitous “missing context” label is now the Big Tech censorship catch-all to hit conservative social media pages.
Notably, USA Today’s “missing context” claim asserted up top, “[Officer Sicknick] was struck in the head by a fire extinguisher during the riots and died from his injuries the following day.” The writer then asserts, “Misinformation surrounding the Capitol riot has been rampant on social media.”
Indeed it has.
Responding to the “fact-checker,” we asked for her facts: “A week before you posted your assertion about [Officer Sicknick’s] death as fact, CNN reported in their article, ‘Investigators struggle to build murder case in death of US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick,’ that despite the oft-repeated claim about his injuries, ‘investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.’” Even The New York Times quietly corrected its 08 January post making the “fire extinguisher” assertion — but not until after the Demos’ closing impeachment arguments — which relied, in part, on the Times’s false narrative. (I am sure the timing of the Times’s correction was just coincidental…)
We asked the “fact-checker” to back up her facts. No response.
We also asked the fact-checker, for the sake of transparency, to disclose whom she supported for president in 2016 and 2020. No response.
Finally, we inquired about a note at the bottom of her article: “Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.” We asked, “By way of full disclosure, please advise how much funding or other support you and your organization receive from Facebook.” No response.
As of this writing, the factual errors in the USA Today “fact-check” have not been corrected.
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/77881-fact-checking-the-leftmedia-fact-checkers-2021-02-19
***************************************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 February, 2021
Australian College principal defends teen thugs who attacked tradesmen
Comment from a social work reader:
"And the school principal calls his thugs “vulnerable” and “broken babies”.
I expect he is a soppy leftie, and maybe worse, a cunning and manipulative one.
"I worked with leftist forensic psychs who would justify crim’s crimes, coach them into believing they were victims of society’s artificial expectations, so they would continue to be crims after release, by telling them things like there is no truth, just perception and feelings, no right or wrong, just social expectations, and if you feel it, it’s true for you, and in another society you would not be in jail, you would be considered a good citizen, even a hero….
I would not be surprised if the principal and a number of his teachers are of the same sort of character as those psychs, committing crime by proxy through manipulating dumb thugs and crims, all the while acting themselves as if they are caring and wise"
A school principal has thrown his support behind the gang of thugs filmed savagely beating tradies during a wild rampage earlier this week.
The saga began on Tuesday, when two tradesmen arrived at SMYL Community College in Rockingham, southwest Perth, to fix a broken fire hydrant.
But soon after their arrival at the school for at-risk teens, a group of up to 10 students began surrounding the men and verbally abusing them, with footage of the incident livestreamed to Instagram.
The incident soon escalated, with around six teens seen throwing punches at the men while they are trapped in a corner, amid shouts of “bomb him, bomb that motherf …” and “keep going”.
Teachers soon arrived in an attempt to break up the attack, but as the incident was unfolding, another teenager was seen smashing the front windscreen of the tradesmen’s work vehicle after jumping on the bonnet and yelling “let’s smash his car”.
The attack made headlines across Australia and shocked the country – but despite the “appalling” violence, college director Sam Gowegati has defended the perpetrators, describing them as “broken babies” who needed help.
“The reason these kids are sent here is because they’re disengaged from mainstream education,” he told The West Australian.
“These kids are already vulnerable … and they do dumb stuff, that’s why they’re here, closed off in this area so we can manage that process.”
Earlier this week, Mr Gowegati told The West Australian some students had been suspended following the brutal attack.
“It is an atypical event. We’re just trying to figure out what happened and what triggered it,” he told the publication.
“A number of students have been currently sent home to decide what their futures are going to be.”
Mr Gowegati’s comments come after the publication reported that some staff were so concerned by student behaviour that they were “petrified” of going to work, with one teacher telling The West Australian some staff were “scared for their lives”.
According to the school’s website, SMYL Community College aims to “ provide an inclusive and supportive learning community that offers an alternative approach to education and training for young people aged 14 to 17 years of age who are at risk of missing out on opportunities due to their home life, health and other issues.”
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Venezuela Goes Private After Socialism
Early in 2007, after winning a second six-year term as president, Hugo Chávez announced his plan to nationalize Venezuela’s largest telecommunications company, CANTV, hinting at wider nationalization plans to come.
“All that was privatized, let it be nationalized,” announced Chávez, who had run under the banner of democratic socialism.
Nearly a decade and a half later, on the brink of mass famine and a growing energy crisis, Venezuela is now moving in the opposite direction.
According to Bloomberg News, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has quietly begun transferring state assets back into the hands of private owners in an effort to reverse the country’s economic collapse.
“Saddled with hundreds of failed state companies in an economy barreling over a cliff, the Venezuelan government is abandoning socialist doctrine by offloading key enterprises to private investors, offering profit in exchange for a share of revenue or products,” write Caracas-based journalists Fabiola Zerpa and Nicolle Yapur.
The transfer, which was not announced publicly but was confirmed by “nine people with knowledge of the matter,” reportedly includes dozens of coffee processors, grain silos, and hotels that were confiscated as part of Venezuela’s widespread nationalization that began under Chavez.
Venezuela’s Collapse
In some ways, Venezuela’s plight is the most unlikely of stories.
In 1950, Venezuela was one of the most prosperous nations in the world. It ranked among the top 10 in GDP per capita and had a labor force with higher productivity than the United States.
Venezuela’s economic growth began to stall in the mid 1970s, however, after it nationalized the petroleum sector, which resulted in a surge of government revenue and public spending. It’s estimated that Venezuela brought in $7.6 billion in 1975 alone from nationalization ($37 billion in 2021 dollars). This led to an unprecedented surge of public spending. John Polga-Hecimovich, a professor of political science at the US Naval Academy, said the Venezuelan government spent more from 1974 to 1979 than in its entire previous history.
Despite the growth in government spending, the political situation remained relatively steady. In the late 70s, University of Michigan political science professor Daniel H. Levine asserted that “Venezuelans have achieved one of the few stable competitive political orders in Latin America.”
However, Venezuela’s flirtation with socialism would eventually turn into a love affair.
In 1998, Venezuelans voted in Chavez, a populist and self-described Marxist. He was re-elected in 2000 (59.8% of the vote) and in 2006 (62.8%), at which point he began to nationalize various sectors of the economy—including agriculture, the steel industry, transportation, and mining—and confiscating more than a thousand companies, farms, and properties.
At the time of Chavez’s death, his socialist policies were heralded by Salon as an “economic miracle”—but in reality the Venezuelan economy was already in a free fall.
By 2014, with the price of oil collapsing, Maduro’s government admitted it was in severe recession and Venezuela was suffering from the highest inflation in the Americas. By January 2016, the country was on the verge of “complete economic collapse.” Not long after, the Venezuelan government abandoned any pretense of being a “democratic” regime.
A 2019 United Nations report concluded that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that” Maduro’s government had used special forces to kill thousands of political opponents in “extrajudicial executions.”
To date, it is believed that more than 5 million Venezuelans have fled the country to escape economic ruin and political oppression.
Privatization to the Rescue?
The collapse of Venezuela, once the most prosperous country in Latin America, is hardly a secret. But Maduro’s pivot toward private enterprise in an attempt to stabilize the collapsing country is a new revelation.
It’s not unprecedented, however.
“This process is similar to the privatization process in Russia in that assets are transferred to private local companies and to investors from countries allied to the government,” Asdrubal Oliveros, head of economic consultancy Ecoanalitica, told Bloomberg.
Rodrigo Agudo, head of the Venezuela Food Network, told the news agency that the regime instituted “a wild capitalism” by ceasing the collection of taxes on certain companies, liberalizing licensing on imports, and convincing military and other connected officials to invest in certain businesses.
Ramon Lobo, a lawmaker with the ruling socialist party and a former finance minister, said the arrangements tend to have time limits (usually less than 10 years) and work much like a concession. Companies are allowed to invest and manage the asset, with the government then taking a percentage.
“We believe this is positive because it is the synchronization of the public sector with the private sector,” said Lobo. “The state acts as a supervisor and receives compensation.”
Economic Fascism Is Not Capitalism
In one sense, the revelation of Venezuela’s privatization push is a clear positive development.
Maduro’s effort to quietly form private-public partnerships, a strategy that began in 2017, reveals the total failure of Venezuela’s command economy. Bloomberg points out, for example, that once-successful food processing plants have been “mostly idle” since being seized by the government, plants that could have been feeding a starving population.
This revelation is both tragic and infuriating, but it’s not surprising. By their very nature, command economies are doomed to fail because they lack the basic incentive and price structures that are present in a market economy.
“It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movements of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement,” the Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek wrote.
Many might be tempted to think that Maduro was just a bad or stupid person. But Ludwig von Mises reminds us that the quest to find the right person to run a command economy is a futile one for this very reason.
“It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry,” Mises observed.
It seems that after much pain and suffering, even socialist leaders in Venezuela have conceded that they cannot run an economy with enough efficiency to avoid economic ruin. But while returning enterprises to private owners is a step in the right direction, it’s hardly accurate to call Maduro’s strategy “capitalism.”
The Maduro government is still using everything from price controls on food to minimum wage hikes to currency manipulation to manage its economy, not to mention selecting which businesses get to participate in its privatization efforts (and who gets to invest). In terms of overall economic freedom, Venezuela ranked 179 out of 180 countries in 2020—one place ahead of North Korea and one behind Cuba.
At best, Venezuela’s current economic system is a form of fascism, which Sheldon Richman once described as “socialism with a capitalist veneer.”
So while applauding Venezuela’s small but important step, we should not lose sight of an observation from Nobel Laureate economist Vernon Smith, who in 2018 noted that prosperity would return almost at once to Venezuela if politicians repealed their harmful policies and unleashed the power of markets.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/02/23/bloomberg-venezuela-privatization/?omhide=true
***********************************Wait, How Many Identify as 'LGBT'?
How much of the population would you say “identifies” as one of the “LGBT” categories? Ten percent? Twenty-five percent? Based on the adulating attention in news and entertainment this segment of the population commands, including cultivated Netflix movie listings and Hollywood quotas to go along with a whole dedicated “Pride Month” dutifully observed by businesses nationwide, you could be forgiven for thinking so.
But what if we told you the number of “LGBT” individuals in America was actually just 5%?
According to Gallup, that’s the case, and only because of a dramatic rise in recent years: “Gallup’s latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup’s previous update based on 2017 data.” Way back in the dark ages of 2012, it was just 3.5%.
The Rainbow Mafia will argue that the percentage is even higher, especially because Gallup says “7.6% do not answer the question about their sexual orientation.” They’ll say this is evidence that LGBT individuals are still oppressed and are afraid to come out.
We’d argue the exact opposite is the reason for the nine-year 60% surge in alternative identifications.
That said, young people account for the bulk of the surge, and the rebellious among them are especially susceptible to having a martyr complex. They gravitate toward forbidden behavior as a way to buck the system all while secretly reveling in whatever opposition they encounter. And, in this case, they’re lionized for it.
Beginning in the ‘60s, this manifested in the “free love” movement that could only take off because of prevalent birth control and then the legalization of abortion. Love “without consequences.” Now, of course, the rebellion du jour is gender dysphoria. Supposed oppression becomes the attraction.
LGBT individuals are by and large not the victims of discrimination, of course. Quite the opposite — they’ve become nearly sacrosanct.
Gays and lesbians who were “born this way” are encouraged to be their “true selves” and then are adoringly celebrated. So-called “transgendered” people who were not born that way are likewise revered as the very bravest members of society. Anyone who points to biological science is silenced.
The worst part of this is the predatory nature of the Rainbow Mafia. “Younger Americans are increasingly likely to consider themselves part of the LGBTQ community: Nearly 16 percent of Generation Z, those 18 to 23 in 2020, consider themselves something other than heterosexual,” reports NBC’s “Out News,” which of course thinks this trend is actually a marvelous revelation that this percentage has been true but suppressed all along. But don’t think for a moment that the Rainbow Mafia isn’t deliberately indoctrinating our children to increase its own ranks.
The purveyors of this sick-think are exploiting vulnerable young people, especially those without fathers and primarily through entertainment as indoctrination, to further the Left’s divisive identity politics for cultural and political gain. Young Americans — our children and grandchildren — deserve so much better.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/78011-wait-how-many-identify-as-lgbt-2021-02-25
***********************************Relying on Authorities for information is a very slippery slope
Many people are hardwired to make quick decisions, often resulting in conclusions that are incorrect. This typically happens when their conclusions are reached on the basis of too little information or information that isn't factual. Unfortunately, taking the time to test information for accuracy requires more discipline than many people are willing to expend.
Since lots of folks think they are smart enough to correctly connect the least number of dots to reach a valid conclusion, this leads many of them to underrate complex issues and look for simple answers. As a result, their conclusions are often unsupportable. This is what happens when you hear clip-clopping in the dark and conclude that a horse is coming — but it actually turns out to be a zebra.
So, when we "connect the dots," what are the "dots" we try to connect? Most of them consist of information provided by other people. If we trust them, we tend to trust the information they provide. When a trusted source tells us it's a horse, we think, Yes, that seems to make sense, so it must be a true. Although that kind of reasoning is more or less logical (and sometimes even correct), it's still lazy and runs the risk of being seriously wrong.
This becomes even more problematic when we trust people we don't know, including television personalities, actors, journalists, and politicians. Lots of people trust these celebrities because they think they are important and believe important people tell the truth. This becomes an even bigger problem when a trusted source is only quoting someone else, or even many others. This can result in an intellectual echo chamber in which multiple voices reinforcing one another can all be equally wrong.
Another problem is that the dots we rely on are words and failing to recognize that the same words can have very different meanings for different people. For example, take the words "white privilege." The meaning of "white" is clear enough in this context, but "privilege" is anything but. It is defined as "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group." The term "white privilege" suggests a zero-sum assertion that some benefit is explicitly granted to white people while being intentionally withheld from all others. It eliminates the possibility that other variables can be involved; things like education, experience, value systems, cultural imperatives, and so on. It defines whole populations in the abstract while asserting collective outcomes that are specific. Actual white privilege was far more common in the past, and it may even operate in some instances today. But there is no evidence that it is currently "systemic" (whatever that means). Therefore, to generalize from the exception to the whole, especially in formulating policy, only creates problems.
Finally, there's the problem of proactive inhibition. This happens when you're forced to accept the rival meaning of something out of fear that if you don't, you will be punished. A good example is in the area of gender identification. The word "gender" was originally used as a term in grammar and had nothing to do with sex. It is now used to denote a range of sex "identities" that are not limited to male and female. It imposes different social meanings on what has been historically and genetically determined as binary. Failure to accept this new social meaning now leaves the user open to criticism and even retribution. It even requires a reformulation of language to alter grammatical gender, resulting in linguistic confusion.
Sadly, sometimes it's just simpler to throw logic and truth to the wind and give up. For too many folks, it's easier to accept that a zebra is just a horse of another color.
Many people are hardwired to make quick decisions, often resulting in conclusions that are incorrect. This typically happens when their conclusions are reached on the basis of too little information or information that isn’t factual. Unfortunately, taking the time to test information for accuracy requires more discipline than many people are willing to expend.
Since lots of folks think they are smart enough to correctly connect the least number of dots to reach a valid conclusion, this leads many of them to underrate complex issues and look for simple answers. As a result, their conclusions are often unsupportable. This is what happens when you hear clip-clopping in the dark and conclude that a horse is coming — but it actually turns out to be a zebra.
So, when we “connect the dots,” what are the “dots” we try to connect? Most of them consist of information provided by other people. If we trust them, we tend to trust the information they provide. When a trusted source tells us it’s a horse, we think, Yes, that seems to make sense, so it must be a true. Although that kind of reasoning is more or less logical (and sometimes even correct), it’s still lazy and runs the risk of being seriously wrong.
This becomes even more problematic when we trust people we don’t know, including television personalities, actors, journalists, and politicians. Lots of people trust these celebrities because they think they are important and believe important people tell the truth. This becomes an even bigger problem when a trusted source is only quoting someone else, or even many others. This can result in an intellectual echo chamber in which multiple voices reinforcing one another can all be equally wrong.
Another problem is that the dots we rely on are words and failing to recognize that the same words can have very different meanings for different people. For example, take the words “white privilege.” The meaning of “white” is clear enough in this context, but “privilege” is anything but. It is defined as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.” The term “white privilege” suggests a zero-sum assertion that some benefit is explicitly granted to white people while being intentionally withheld from all others. It eliminates the possibility that other variables can be involved; things like education, experience, value systems, cultural imperatives, and so on. It defines whole populations in the abstract while asserting collective outcomes that are specific. Actual white privilege was far more common in the past, and it may even operate in some instances today. But there is no evidence that it is currently “systemic” (whatever that means). Therefore, to generalize from the exception to the whole, especially in formulating policy, only creates problems.
Finally, there’s the problem of proactive inhibition. This happens when you’re forced to accept the rival meaning of something out of fear that if you don’t, you will be punished. A good example is in the area of gender identification. The word “gender” was originally used as a term in grammar and had nothing to do with sex. It is now used to denote a range of sex “identities” that are not limited to male and female. It imposes different social meanings on what has been historically and genetically determined as binary. Failure to accept this new social meaning now leaves the user open to criticism and even retribution. It even requires a reformulation of language to alter grammatical gender, resulting in linguistic confusion.
Sadly, sometimes it’s just simpler to throw logic and truth to the wind and give up. For too many folks, it’s easier to accept that a zebra is just a horse of another color.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77980-is-it-a-horse-or-a-zebra-2021-02-25
***************************************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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25 February, 2021
The Authoritarian Left Is on the March
This week, Democratic Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Jerry McNerny, D-N.J., sent out a series of letters to America’s largest communications corporations: AT&T, Alphabet Inc., Cox Communications, Dish Network, Comcast, Apple, Amazon and others. Their letters demanded answers from these corporations on one simple topic: Why would these platforms continue to allow the dissemination of “misinformation” from conservative outlets?
“Our country’s public discourse is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies,” the House Democrats wrote. “These phenomena undergird the radicalization of seditious individuals who committed acts of insurrection on January 6th, and it contributes to a growing distrust of public health measures necessary to crush the pandemic. … Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN?”
The overt move by members of the government to cudgel private corporations into silencing unpopular viewpoints was clearly violative of First Amendment principles. The Constitution clearly provides that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or the press; Democrats have now hit upon a convenient workaround where they bully private actors into doing their censorious bidding.
This clever gambit is rooted in the conflation between “disinformation” and “misinformation” promulgated by the establishment media since 2016. After the 2016 election, the media went berserk with the theory that Hillary Clinton had lost the election thanks only to Russian interference. “Russian disinformation” — meaning false information promulgated by a foreign government for the purpose of interfering in domestic politics — had twisted the election. Now even disinformation promulgated on American soil is protected by the First Amendment. But it soon became clear that the authoritarian left wasn’t interested merely in active disinformation springing from foreign sources. It was troubled by any narrative or information that contradicted its point of view. This information could quickly and easily be labeled “misinformation.”
And “misinformation,” it said, had to be policed.
Why, precisely, wouldn’t the answer to misinformation be factual rebuttal? Because, the authoritarian left argued, misinformation led to “incitement.” Now, there is a legal standard for “incitement” — and it’s a high bar to reach. But the authoritarian left has broadened out the meaning of incitement to include any verbiage that elicits strong emotions … so long as conservatives are responsible for such verbiage. Thus, it’s possible incitement to call people by their biological pronouns but perfectly innocent fun to wink and nod at widespread looting and rioting.
The answer to “misinformation” and “incitement,” however, can’t lie within government. So Democrats have turned toward hijacking the private instruments of informational dissemination, all in the name of reestablishing an informational monopoly the left lost with the death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and with a monopoly that collapsed completely with the rise of the open internet.
And corporations are going along with all of this. This week, Amazon banned a book on transgender people, “When Harry Became Sally,” presumably because it took a non-woke line on the subject. Coca-Cola is now apparently indoctrinating its employees into the cult of Robin DiAngelo “anti-racism.” Facebook and Twitter and Google are all preparing new measures aimed at cracking down on “misinformation” — opaque guidelines and nonrigorous standards that will surely cut in favor of the same establishment media now pushing censorship, and the Democrats they support.
The establishment media are fond of saying that we’re experiencing a crisis of authoritarianism in America; they point to the criminal acts of Jan. 6 and suggest that right-wing authoritarianism threatens democracy itself. The far greater threat to democracy, however, lies with an authoritarian left that is now ascendant in virtually every powerful institution in America.
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New York backtracks on de Blasio’s plan to close Trump-owned ice rinks
New York City is doing a full "180" on its plan to shutter Trump Organization-operated ice skating rinks.
City Hall on Sunday reversed Mayor de Blasio’s move to shutter Lasker and Wollman rinks in Central Park six weeks ahead of their typical April closing dates — in an apparent effort to freeze out his political rival.
"New York City kids deserve all the time on the ice they can get this year. The Wollman and Lasker rinks will stay open under current management for the few weeks left in this season," City Hall press secretary Bill Neidhardt told the New York Post.
"But make no mistake, we will not be doing business with the Trump Organization going forward. Inciting an insurrection will never be forgotten or forgiven."
Hizzoner announced last month he was nixing the city’s contracts with the Trump Organization, alleging then-President Trump had incited a riot at the Capitol. The rinks were both set to be shuttered at close on Sunday.
The stunning policy reversal came after devastated skaters fumed over the weekend that they shouldn’t be kept off the ice due to the mayor's beef with the Trump administration.
"The real people they’re hurting are the 2,500 children that have been benefiting from the skating program this season and 250 innocent employees who have been keeping this going for us," said Lee Klausner, 49, who was watching her two daughters skate.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the rinks would remain open until April, as they have in past years.
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Coke slammed for ‘blatant racial discrimination’
Coca-Cola has been accused of reverse racism after a training video for its employees told them to “try to be less white”.
The soft drink giant has been slammed for the racial discrimination training after a disgruntled employee shared it on social media and it went viral.
The training seminar was shared on LinkedIn with slides that featured tips on how “to be less white”, including being “less ignorant,” and “less oppressive”.
The slides came from an 11-minute video titled ‘Confronting Racism with Robin DiAngelo’, an author and consultant who argues white people are complicit in racist structures unless they actively work to be anti-racist.
“In the US and other Western nations, white people are socialised to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white,” one slide said.
Coca-Cola said the video was uploaded to their LinkedIn Learning platform but was not part of their compulsory curriculum. “The video and images attributed to a Coca-Cola training program are not part of the company’s learning curriculum,” the company said in a statement to The Sun.
“Our Better Together global training is part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace. It is comprised of a number of short vignettes, each a few minutes long.
“The training includes access to the LinkedIn Learning platform on a variety of topics, including on diversity, equity and inclusion.
“The video in question was accessible on the LinkedIn Learning platform but was not part of the company’s curriculum. We will continue to listen to our employees and refine our learning programs as appropriate.”
Self-identified employment lawyer Harmeet K Dhillon accused the company of “blatant racial discrimination”.
While some people said they would boycott Coke, others supported the initiative, saying it was poorly worded but could encourage people to realise their racial prejudices.
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"Progressive" cancel culture is less about deplatforming extreme ideas and more about persecuting people with whom they disagree
Ensconced among the cherry trees ringing the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., rests the Jefferson Memorial. The rotunda of this stately edifice shelters a statue of the great man. Among his many inscriptions adorning the walls are these words:
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
With a craven cancel culture now in full sway, one can only wonder what the man who crafted the Declaration of Independence might say about it. Perhaps he would rehearse the Declaration’s self-evident truths:
“That we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
George Washington too “controversial”?
Well, apparently what the Lord giveth the Lifetime Network taketh away. After nearly three years of Lifetime airing our weekly Truths That Transform television program—one in which we apply Biblical truths to the great moral, ethical, and cultural question of our day—officials at Lifetime have suddenly decided our program content is too “controversial,” forcing us off their network.
They objected to our exposé on Planned Parenthood, in which we documented their sale of baby body parts derived from abortions. They objected to our exposé on billionaire radical George Soros and his systematic efforts to undermine American laws and institutions. They even objected to our program on the spiritual life of George Washington.
At the same time the Lifetime Channel is giving us the back of their hand, we received reports from others in the community of Christian broadcasters that other major cable television channels and networks are cancelling entire blocks of religious programming. This is the new face of corporate responsibility in America—viewpoint discrimination, prior restraint, and outright censorship.
This spitting in the face of those with viewpoints differing from the new woke orthodoxy by broadcast and cable television is bad enough, but it gets worse. Others providing business services to those holding non-favored viewpoints are falling all over each other to demonstrate their woke bonafides, by denying services to those with the heretical temerity to hold views diverging from those permissible under Progressive woke-ism.
Mail Chimp knows best
Witness the good folks at wannabe-gatekeeper Mail Chimp, the simian-friendly email platform whose Standard Terms of Use were recently modified to include this language:
“Mailchimp does not allow the distribution of Content that is, in our sole discretion, materially false, inaccurate, or misleading in a way that could deceive or confuse others about important events, topics, or circumstances.”
How Mail Chimp is singularly qualified to adjudicate matters of truth or falsity across a wide range of cultural issues escapes the notice of most neutral observers. But herein lies the genius of Progressive thinkers: If the viewpoint in question is different than ours, it must be false. Case closed.
In a biblical context, many are familiar with the predictive prophecy that restricts buying and selling to those with “the mark of the beast.” What we see emerging today is a secular version in reverse order. Instead of everyone having the mark, those with disfavored viewpoints and ideals are anointed with a latter-day scarlet letter. More like the “No soup for you” pronouncements from Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi.
However it’s characterized, at base the progressive cancel culture is less about deplatforming extreme ideas and more about persecuting people with whom they disagree. Their aim is not correction but destruction. If the Southern Poverty Law Center were true to their own disingenuous and defamatory definition of hate, they would have to include two-thirds of the Progressive left (and themselves!) on their infamous map. Today’s Progressives more resemble Orwell’s dystopian epic 1984, where Winston Smith, who was outed as non-conforming, is brainwashed back to Oceanian orthodoxy and awaits his execution.
More speech, not less
One might argue that the foundational question here is: Why are Progressives so deathly afraid of the free marketplace of ideas? They are in urgent need of reading—perhaps for the first time—John Milton’s Areopagitica. In his polemic against the state-sponsored cancel culture of his day, this Puritan(!) declared: “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
Milton argued that the best defense of freedom of speech and expression was the debate and discussion of ideas—where good ideas would tend to rise and bad ideas to fall. Perhaps the cancel culture is a latent acknowledgement that Progressive ideas suffer under the weight of scrutiny.
Whatever the case, it’s self-evident that the solitary idea nearest to the Progressive heart is to make sure nobody hears your ideas. This is nothing less than Jefferson’s “tyranny over the mind of man.” For those who understand how hard-won freedom actually is, we too must swear eternal hostility against the efforts of those who would steal it.
https://townhall.com/columnists/frankwright/2021/02/21/when-truth-is-the-enemy-n2585010
***************************************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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20 February, 2021
Mediocrity's Envy of Genius: The Dirty Secret of Cancel Culture
David Goldman below is obviously right about the idiocy of a "racist" approach to classical music. And Ewell equally obviously misses the point of such music.
Our esteem for Beethoven and other classical composers is no function of anything other than the pleasure that they give us. If they give you no pleasure you should have nothing to do with them. They are not for you. They are not for most people in fact. In the Western world only something like 2% of the population like classical music.
But if you have been so moved by a performance of Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto that you have been moved to tears with the beauty of it then you know what it is all about. I have so wept
And most people have a favorite piece of music of some kind that they like to listen to repeatedly. I do. It is Polina Osetinskaya playing the Bach piano concerto no. 1 in D minor.
The Cultural Revolutionaries at the New York Times this week reviewed the witch hunt against classical musicians, who stand accused of racism simply because the great Western composers happened to be white. Cancel culture is despicable in all of its manifestations, but I take this particular instance personally: I trained in the school of musical analysis founded by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). My principle teacher was Carl Schachter, who also taught Prof. Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas, the target of this particular witch hunt.
It’s all about envy.
My childhood piano teacher kept a recording of Florence Foster Jenkins, the deluded society lady portrayed by Meryl Streep in a 2016 comedy, as a horrible example for youth. Her voice would de-feather a screech-owl, but no-one was allowed to tell her she couldn’t sing. The only classical musician still active who bears comparison to Ms. Jenkins is a certain Philip Ewell, now a professor of music theory at Hunter College, who posts videos of himself torturing a cello until it squeals in pain. Prof. Ewell is African-American and has won his fifteen minutes of fame by denouncing whiteness in classical music.
All this would be of scant interest except that Prof. Ewell has become the scourge of alleged racism in the classical music world, and may have succeeded in extirpating from the academy a grand tradition of musical analysis that began with Beethoven. Ewell also dismisses Beethoven as merely “an above average composer” whose prominence erases the contribution of composers of color. Thanks to Ewell’s rampage against supposed white supremacy in classical music, the living chain of teacher-to-pupil transmission of this aspect of Western civilization may be broken irreparably.
For the strong of stomach (or hard of hearing), I refer to the fugue of Bach’s 5th Cello Suite as performed by Prof. Ewell (at minute 3:25) in a video posted on his personal website. It is hard to find a single note in tune; it is the sort of butchery that would earn an aspiring high school musician a condescending pat on the shoulder and a suggestion that he switch to the triangle. No-one was allowed to tell Florence Foster Jenkins how awful she was because she was rich and connected; it is a complete mystery to me why no-one has had the courage to stop Prof. Ewell from humiliating himself in public. Unlike the deluded Mrs. Jenkins, Ewell surely knows that everyone is laughing at him behind his back. The work he has put into his performances shows that he wants to play well, but is condemned to sotto voce ridicule.
To have played Bach this way is a humiliation. To push it into the public’s face is an act of unadulerated rage: You, my listeners, will have to suffer along with me, the talentless Prof Ewell thinks. This isn’t the Emperor’s new clothes so much as the Emperor as flasher. And Ewell is entirely right; the music world must bite its collective tongue and suppress a laugh on pain of excommunication.
Whatever our musical preferences, these are moments in which we need the classical style of composition. The musical style we inherit from the great composers is a continuing presence in our lives through film. The classical style of composition will never go out of fashion, my teacher Carl Schachter liked to say, because the movies need it; it is the only kind of music that can tell a story. “There are those,” intoned Ewell in a recent blog post, “who would actually take issue with me saying the Ninth Symphony is no more a masterwork that Spalding’s 12 Little Spells simply because we are told by whiteness and maleness that this couldn’t be the case. Beethoven was undoubtedly an above-average composer and he deserves our attention. But to say he was anything more is to dismiss 99.9% of the world’s music written 200+ years ago, which would be unscholarly, and academically irresponsible.”
Wrote the New York Times:
Professor Ewell, who also is on the faculty of the City University of New York Graduate Center, declined an interview with The Times. He is part of a generation of scholars who are undertaking critical-race examinations of their fields. In “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” the paper he presented in Columbus, he writes that he is for all intents “a practitioner of white music theory” and that “rigorous conversations about race and whiteness” are required to “make fundamental antiracist changes in our structures and institutions.”
For music programs to require mastery of German, he has said, “is racist obviously.” He has criticized the requirement that music Ph.D. students study German or a limited number of “white” languages, noting that at Yale he needed a dispensation to study Russian. He wrote that the “antiracist policy solution” would be “to require languages with one new caveat: any language — including sign language and computer languages, for instance — is acceptable with the exception of Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French or German, which will only be allowed by petition as a dispensation.”
Last April he fired a broadside at Beethoven, writing that it would be academically irresponsible to call him more than an “above average” composer. Beethoven, he wrote, “has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for 200 years.”
The grudge that mediocrity bears against genius is the purest form of evil. Thomas Mann’s postwar reworking of the Faust legend tells of the failed composer Adrian Leverkuhn who, in the final phase of syphilitic dementia, has written a cacaphonous cantata “to take back Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.” Leverkuhn had made a deal with the Devil and suffers the consequences. If the Devil has any taste in music, he won’t be in the market for Ewell’s soul.
Black Americans have a splendid history in classical music. The great Marian Anderson, who sang the national anthem at both the second Eisenhower inauguration and the Kennedy inauguration, had the voice of the century according to Toscanini, as well as sublime musicianship. Hear her in this arrangement of Brahms’ song “Of Eternal Love.” The soprano Kathleen Battle is the best coloratura of my generation, a far cannier interpreter than, say, Joan Sutherland. Battle used high intelligence and unerring musicianship to turn a rather small natural voice into a virtuoso instrument. Anderson became an icon of the civil rights movement by showing that a black contralto could produce authoritative interpretations of the Western classics. Ewell’s envy-ridden rampage is a disgrace to her legacy.
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The deletion of womanhood: Once, it was just noisy protests from a tiny minority. But now a new age of intolerance threatens our very identity, argues BEL MOONEY
George Orwell must be grinning grimly in his grave. In the terrifying, controlled world of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘Thoughtcrime’ is any belief that goes against accepted political ideology.
And ‘Doublethink’ means simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct — a crime against intelligence that is now mainstream.
A row has been sparked by draft maternity rights legislation that has failed to include a single use of the word ‘woman’ or ‘female’. Instead the draft bill, set to give ministers access to maternity leave, talks only about ‘persons’.
Why are public-sector institutions so willing to erase the lived reality of my sex? How have we reached the point where intelligent people, charities, businesses and governments are forced to accept without question that ‘Trans women are women’?
Like any civilised person, I believe in tolerance and kindness, and understand that some people do wish to live as the opposite sex. But there I should stop, because Big Brother is watching my thoughtcrime. You are not allowed to question the orthodoxy — or offend the bullying thought police who wear liberal masks.
To placate a vociferous minority within a minority, doublethink reigns supreme. As a result we are witnessing attacks on both the identity of women and on language itself.
But there is something equally worthy of serious thought. I believe the ‘woke’ obsession with the rights of the trans community — which has now penetrated every level of society (as far as the President of the U.S. and the First Minister of Scotland) — is doing terrible harm to the very people it claims to speak for. People who don’t want to fight. People who aren’t baying for revolution. People who just want to be left alone to live anonymous, peaceful lives.
But reason is challenged by meaningless slogans, and when the thoughts and identities of ordinary men and women are challenged and disallowed, it becomes open season on hate. When precious words such as ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ are threatened, then angry, intolerant voices are raised. And that hurts trans people, too.
Last week, a British hospital became the first in the country to introduce ‘trans-friendly’ language guidelines to follow when dealing with trans people who decide to become parents.
This includes replacing the word ‘woman’ with the phrase ‘woman or person’ and swapping ‘breast milk’ for ‘breast/chest milk’. ‘Maternity care’ should be called ‘perinatal care.’
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust revealed the new phrases in an attempt to alleviate ‘mainstream transphobia’. Its statement contains gems such as ‘…not only pregnant women, but also pregnant trans, non-binary and agender people’. If you’re confused as to how an ‘agender’ person can get pregnant, then you’re not the only one.
It is easy to dismiss this nonsense and just get on with your life. But note that only an estimated one per cent of the population in Britain identifies as trans or non-binary, and yet precious NHS resources are being used to tell midwives how to address mothers-to-be.
The term ‘pregnant people’ was first used around four years ago, when the United Nations was lobbied to start using it on the grounds that trans people might feel excluded by the term ‘pregnant women’.
Wait! In order to become pregnant, a body has to be fitted out with ovaries and a womb — right? And if you have those perennially useful bits of machinery, you are called a woman.
If a trans man gives birth, their name may have become masculine, but the body is still, in many respects, female. The organs used to conceive, gestate and ultimately give birth are female, ie. they are something only women have.
Likewise, women don’t have prostate surgery and men don’t have hysterectomies. That, I’m afraid, is the driving force of nature, and it’s called biology.
It should be noted, too, that there have been just a few UK cases of trans men who retained their uteruses and have given birth, but that’s enough for a total rethink of the vocabulary used.
Just wait for other hospital trusts to follow Brighton, at heaven knows how much expense. The madness is everywhere.
What possessed my favourite charity Sands (stillbirth and neonatal death) to use the term ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother’ last year? As a founder-patron of this valuable organisation, I was as upset as the many women who protested. Because when you have a stillborn child you are still a grieving mother, and to erase that term becomes a double heartbreak.
I’m pleased that Sands retracted its wording, yet their error (probably a result of over-zealous attention to minority groups) did much damage.
And here I must repeat my vital point — a lot of the damage caused by well-meaning wokery is done to trans people themselves.
The great 17th-century philosopher John Locke, often called the father of liberalism, wrote this about minority views: ‘…if they do not tend to establish domination over others …there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.’ Exactly. This is ‘live and let live’ — the principle of general consent.
But it falls down when terms such as ‘birthing parent’ and ‘chest milk’ are used — because those crimes against language and meaning do seek to establish domination.
I believe it is disrespectful and dehumanising to lump all trans people together. It removes sympathy, understanding and respect from those people who choose to undergo painful medical and cosmetic procedures to help their process of change, and who nonetheless accept their own valuable difference.
Those quiet, necessary voices are drowned out by the aggressive self-absorption of militants.
I call myself a feminist and yet I have nothing in common (except biology) with screaming harridans who loathe men.
So it is absolutely vital to underline the distinction between the serious problems and struggles of those with gender dysphoria (a sincere, often desperate, wish to live as the opposite sex) and the aggressive hectoring of the trans brigade. I was horrified to read some of the obscene abuse directed at J. K. Rowling last year, which began when she mocked use of the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ instead of ‘women’.
Rowling identified the double insult to female identity and to accuracy in language — and was vilified by other women (mainly on the Left) who shockingly collude in the expression of visceral dislike under the guise of virtue.
To avoid potential hurt, major charities seem to feel they have no alternative but to bend over backwards to accommodate everybody — everybody, that is, except the quiet majority of men and women which acknowledges sexual differences and rather likes them.
The powerful ideology of ‘inclusion’ excludes our feelings, as well as reason.
How can we fight the propaganda? By proclaiming that the idea of womanhood has meaning. Not that it’s superior, just that it exists.
The fundamental experiences and understandings we learn from childhood will not be erased. If we allow a man to call himself ‘woman’ for as long as it suits him, whenever he likes, the meaning of the word is negated. And all the struggle and pride inherent in that definition is cancelled.
Of course not all women want to be mothers, or can become mothers, or are good mothers. What’s more, some men display wonderfully ‘motherly’ qualities, and homosexual men and women can become marvellous parents.
But the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ contain identity. Something indescribably precious within human consciousness — a nurturing, a caring, a sense of self-sacrifice, a profound joy, an unconditional love. Yes, of course there are exceptions — but they only prove the rule.
I have known many women who, after having a first child, feel their lives transformed. Yes, they may become tired, ratty and disappointed, yet in embracing motherhood they step up to join a long line of miraculous women.
They inhabit a glorious bundle of timeless ideas, from the Great Goddess, the essential feminine, the mother ship, the motherland, the matriarchy, the grandmother, the mother. So it was — and so it will always be.
No politician, no health authority, no civil servant, no kneejerk virtue-signaller can be allowed to tell me that I am not a woman, a mother and a grandmother. When what we cherish as sacred truth is seen by others as a heresy, it is time to stand up and say ‘No’.
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UK: The totalitarian creep of hate-speech laws
The Law Commission wants people prosecuted for speech used within their own homes.
UK home secretary Priti Patel’s recently announced intention to reform so-called hate-speech laws is most welcome. At the Free Speech Union, we have been calling for this for a while – especially because demands for even greater speech control have increased over the past year.
But some of the most extreme demands for censorship now come from quangos the government itself sponsors. Like cultural ‘sockpuppets’, these organisations are paid by the state to find reasons to control even more of our lives.
Such demands for speech control are now cultivating a culture of grievance. Indeed, as David G Green writes in We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now (2006), ‘many people want to be classified as victims’.
As Green explains, the idea of group victimhood – the patronising assumption that ethnic and other minorities are destined to oppression and need special legal protections – is incompatible in the long-run with democracy because it undermines the legal equality on which a democratic state depends.
One quango, the Ministry of Justice-sponsored Law Commission, is especially keen to sweep more people into these categories of victimhood. The commission is currently working on chilling proposals for a ‘hate-speech bill’ (expounded at length in a 533-page consultation). The proposals are, in reality, an attempt to push a new anti-free speech bill on the government.
The proposals include expanding the current number of ‘protected characteristics’, currently comprising race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity. As things stand, hate speech includes ‘demonstrations of hostility’ to one or more of these groups. If you’re found guilty of, say, sending a malicious communication to a member of one of them you might receive a stiffer penalty than for committing the same crime against someone else.
The commission has proposed to expand the number of protected characteristics, suggesting all women could be a protected group, as well as ‘age’. Even ‘sex workers’ could become a protected identity. If the commission gets its way, you could be convicted for ‘stirring up hatred’ against any of these groups.
Green suggests that as the apparatus of the state becomes more coercive, ‘group victimhood’ becomes an understandable ‘strategy for gaining political power’, or at least a necessary defence. The commission’s other proposals show why designation as a victim may be the only way to be safe from a state that seems determined to grant different rights to different groups.
The commission does not simply want to protect more groups from ‘hatred’. It also wants to expand the prosecutorial net so that it includes people who have stirred up hatred by disseminating ‘inflammatory images’, referring repeatedly to Muhammad cartoons, like those in Charlie Hebdo. To enforce these rules, the state will need to ramp up its surveillance of the population. Police already have online ‘portals’ to help us inform on each other for speechcrimes. But the commission believes there are still too many ‘barriers’ and wants to make denunciation even easier.
A totalitarian state cannot tolerate privacy, even and especially within the family, the last redoubt of dissent. Hate-speech laws do not yet cover what you say in the privacy of your own home – you can’t be prosecuted for stirring up hatred at your dining table or in the bedroom.
The commission, however, finds this idea of privacy intolerable. So, if it gets its way, any words you use in your own home that are ‘likely’, even by accident, to ‘stir up hatred’ against a vast array of ‘protected’ groups – including ‘punks’, if you can believe it – could get you sent to prison for seven years. These proposals will make parents fear their own children – and children fear their siblings.
There is a 20th-century precedent for turning families into mechanisms of surveillance. Stalin’s 1936 Soviet Constitution guaranteed free speech as long as it ‘strengthened’ socialism. In 1948, Moscow fought ‘blanket support’ for free speech in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, pushing an amendment stating ‘freedom of speech… should not be used for the purposes of propagating fascism, aggression [and] provoking hatred’. ‘Fascism’, noted a Canadian participant, ‘was appl[ied] to any person or idea which was not communist’, expanding with terrifying speed to mean almost any dissent.
Similarly, our state has made sure never to define ‘hate’ clearly in law. Last year, ex-policeman Harry Miller was questioned by police, recorded in a crime report and deemed guilty of a ‘non-crime hate incident’ without any legal process, then publicly denounced by a chief constable – all for retweeting a feminist verse that contained a joke about transgenderism. Stalin’s head of psychological warfare Dmitri Volkogonov would have approved. ‘Who could have imagined how many [wreckers] would be discovered?’, he wrote. ‘It was almost as if they were not living among us, but we among them!’
As the Stalinist collectivisation of agriculture required food terror, the collectivisation of thought required mind terror, the ever-present threat of denunciation. In Koba the Dread, Martin Amis describes how collectivising farms, itself made possible through suppressing dissent, created a world-historical catastrophe without precedent in peacetime. Four million children were killed. In Ukraine, where five million died, the Italian consul in Kharkov described the Kholodnaya buildings, where a constant population of 8,000 discarded children ‘lies dying on straw’. As the starving masses turned against their masters, this terror famine became the crucible of intra-family surveillance.
A story taught to all Soviet children involved a 13-year-old Ukrainian peasant named Pavel Morozov. At the height of the famine, they were told, Pavel heroically denounced his own father Trofim for cooperating with ideological enemies of the state (aka ‘fascists’). Trofim received the inevitable sentence: nine grams (of lead). Stalin, making plans to rename the Moscow Palace of Culture in Pavel’s honour, whispered: ‘What a little swine, denouncing his own father.’ To grasp why Russian civil society has struggled to recover from Stalinism is to understand that there is no greater poison to the human capacity for trust than the knowledge that one’s own child might be a spy.
Chillingly, the commission’s plan to invade the private sphere, by scrapping the ‘dwelling’ exemption, has appeared at the same time as the government’s Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) Bill, which will formalise state powers to employ children as spies against parents suspected of crimes. It is not just the police or intelligence sources that will get this power, but quangos too.
The British state is not Stalinist, of course – not yet, anyway. But the commission’s proposals tell us that parts of it are beginning to think in totalitarian ways. When the Law Commission publishes its consultation response later this year, what the government does with it will tell us a lot about its intentions for free speech.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/01/the-totalitarian-creep-of-hate-speech-laws/
*******************************Proof NO ONE is safe from the woke war on free speech
The police phone call to Margaret Nelson came one Monday morning around breakfast time. It was as unexpected as it was unwelcome.
An officer from Suffolk police was investigating an anonymous tip that the pensioner had committed a hate crime by posting on Twitter her personal view that you die the same sex as you are born.
The force later dropped their inquiries — apologising and saying they 'got it wrong'.
Yet controversy surrounding this 76-year-old former teacher did not end with that police call two years ago.
She is at the centre of a fresh Twitter brouhaha because British soft drinks giant Innocent took umbrage over her tweets too.
The new complaint against Margaret originated from an anonymous person — just as the original one did: a Twitter user called only Andrew?, and using the tagline @leftist_rage. Andrew? had asked Innocent why it followed her account — she is something of a Twitter star with more than 9,000 followers — when it was run by a 'clear transphobe'.
Innocent, a company majority-owned by Coca-Cola, thanked Andrew? 'for the heads up', then made a public statement apologising. A formal announcement from the company under a headline 'We stand against discrimination' declared that Margaret's comments on trans people were out of line with 'our values on inclusivity and respect'.
Innocent said there was a duty 'on all of us' to make sure 'everyone can live happy, free lives in a world where that is a reality'. And who wouldn't dream of this utopia?
Andrew? — who has just 45 followers — later boasted on Twitter of persuading Innocent to castigate Margaret publicly: 'Hehe! I did that' said this shadowy character with obvious glee. This week he was back online wondering why Margaret wasn't banned from Twitter.
Yet others were less impressed with Innocent's dramatic response. Debbie Hayton, herself a trans woman, was incensed, writing in the Spectator magazine: 'This, it seems is how the internet works. A false accusation of transphobia is made. And a person, an ordinary pensioner in this case, is condemned.
'Non-entities on the internet make false accusations all the time: what's astonishing — at least where 'transphobia' is cited — is the way corporations react. You might be forgiven for thinking Innocent ignored the allegation, or maybe even challenged it. But you'd be wrong.'
Margaret Nelson normally tweets about far-from-controversial subjects: her quiet life in a Suffolk village where she lives in a neat bungalow, her two cats, how lockdown has treated her (she is rather enjoying the peace), and how milk used to be delivered to the doorstep in bottles with foil tops that birds would peck into to get at the cream. Her quaint views and memories have been increasingly popular during the pandemic.
But, occasionally, she taps out a post on more contentious issues. A self-avowed feminist, she is also a humanist celebrant who conducts funerals and is, therefore, she says, interested in death. Which is what led to her brush with the police.
In response to what she calls a 'transgender person's' tweet that 'Trans women ARE women fact', she reacted indignantly: 'These absurd beliefs are nonsensical and deny the evidence to the contrary.' In another post, she wrote: 'Death doesn't misgender. You die as you were born.' And then the police phoned her.
This week she told the Mail she had got off lightly. 'They [the police] act as conduits for complaints from trans activists who spend a lot of time trawling through the internet on the look-out for anything to complain about.'
As for being slapped down by Innocent, she brushed it off. 'I am not transphobic,' she said.
'But I do regard the transgenderism ideology as destructive, negatively affecting . . . women whose rights are being ignored and everyone else who is expected to walk on eggshells. I don't have to worry about losing my living over it as others have.'
If this seems like a Twitter storm in the proverbial teacup, think again. Such is the effect of the new culture war sweeping Britain — in which vigilantes like Andrew? scour people's every comment to deem whether or not they are offensive — a new service, Counterweight, has been launched to support people caught out by it.
Led by British author and self-confessed Left-leaning liberal Helen Pluckrose, Counterweight has been described as a citizens' advice bureau and anti-woke helpline.
Her small team, based in London and the U.S., has advised 300 or more tripped up by the woke gospel. 'They come from every walk of life and it is happening to people every day.'
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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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19 February, 2021
Bristol University sociology professor who quit Labour party amid anti-Semitism row calls for an 'end' of Zionism in online debate - sparking calls for him to be sacked
This is the Leftist "underdog" obsession at work. Sociology is full of far Leftists and sympathy for Palestine can lead them into the usual Leftist truth denial
A Bristol University professor called for the 'end of Zionism' and said Israel is 'trying to exert its will all over the world' during an astonishing Zoom tirade that sparked calls for him to be sacked.
Professor David Miller, who was suspended from Labour last year and later quit after an antisemitism row sparked by his claims that Sir Keir Starmer had taken 'Zionist' money, made the comments at an online campaign event.
The sociology lecturer was accused of 'Soviet-style antisemitism' and 'proselytising hatred towards Jews' with his assertion that there is a 'global Zionist conspiracy against the left'.
In the video, filmed on Saturday, he also complained about being 'attacked and complained about' by Bristol University's Jewish Society and the Union of Jewish Students.
Professor David Miller, who was suspended from Labour last year after accusing its leader Sir Keir Starmer of taking 'Zionist' money, made the comments at an online campaign event +4
Professor David Miller, who was suspended from Labour last year after accusing its leader Sir Keir Starmer of taking 'Zionist' money, made the comments at an online campaign event
Professor Miller, speaking to an online audience on the weekend, said: 'This is an all-out onslaught by the Israeli government on the left globally.
How conspiracy theorist was suspended from Labour for claims Keir Starmer was swayed by 'Zionist money'
Bristol University lecturer David Miller was suspended from Labour last year after he claimed Sir Keir Starmer did not want to conduct a proper probe into a leaked antisemitism report because he was 'he was in receipt of money from the Zionist movement'.
The report slamming the party's handling of antisemitism complaints under Jeremy Corbyn was leaked to the media prior to being submitted to an inquiry by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).
In a YouTube video, Professor Miller said: “We are obviously not going to get a proper investigation of this by Comrade Starmer or by Lisa Nandy – who have been in receipt of money from the Zionist movement, from Trevor Chinn.
“And connections between the Zionist movement and the current leadership of Labour Party – it’s not the only people they have connections with.
“Many other super rich people have given them money, hedge fund owners and the like – but a significant element of support has come from the Zionist movement.”
He was suspended from Labour and later quit.
'It's not just something that's happened in Britain. It's also happened in France and Germany before it got to the UK, and also in the US.
'The Labour Party is a mere detail in this attempt by Israelis to impose their will all over the world.
'It's not enough to say Zionism is racism, Israel is a settler colonial society...
'The aim of this is not only to say things but to end settler colonialism in Palestine, to end Zionism as a functioning ideology of the word.'
The comments - which were made at a Campaign for Free Speech event on Saturday - immediately provoked an outcry.
'This is Soviet antisemitism, the assertion that there's a global Zionist conspiracy against the left,' one Twitter user wrote.
David Glover Roberts tweeted: 'Racism! This person is proselytising hatred towards Jews. If his employer has any moral fibre, they will fire him immediately.
'If they fail to fire him, then this becomes an institution profiting on racism.'
Meanwhile, a third Twitter user wrote: 'This would not be out of place in a 1930 antisemites playbook. It's utterly abhorrent - is this hatred spread in your name?'
Professor Miller also went on to complain about students who had complained to Bristol University about his comments, the Jewish Chronicle reported.
'Those kind of complaints are being made over the country – one against me in Bristol and there's been one made in Warwick, again by UJS [university Jewish society] and several others.
'We will continue to see this drive to stop anyone speaking out against Palestine or having any critical account of Zionism as racism, as settler colonialism.…'
In 2019, he was criticised by an antisemitism charity after giving a lecture to students which identified the 'Zionist movement (parts of)' as one of the 'five pillars' of Islamophobia.
A University of Bristol spokesman said: 'We are committed to making our University an inclusive place for all students. We have been working closely with Jewish students to understand their specific concerns and worries.
'A key outcome from these discussions was the adoption, in full, of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
'We also seek at all times to abide by both our Free Speech Policy and our Public Sector Equality Duties. Specifically, we are steadfast in our commitment to freedom of speech and to the rights of all our students and staff to discuss difficult and sensitive topics.'
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Historic Christian university drops Crusader mascot due to 'negative connotation'
Valparaiso University, an historic Christian institution in Valparaiso, Indiana, is dropping its Christian "Crusader" mascot out of concerns that retaining it might promote violence and other undesirable associations.
The school finalized the decision this week "after what has been a decades-long debate that has intensified during the past several years," the university said in a blog post.
"The negative connotation and violence associated with the Crusader imagery are not reflective of Valpo’s mission and values, which promote a welcoming and inclusive community,” school Interim President Colette Irwin-Knott said of the decision.
The school "will retire its Crusader imagery and logos over the coming months, while simultaneously forming a committee to engage the campus community in considering and adopting a new mascot," the blog post announced.
Referring to the decision—supported by resolutions from the faculty and student senates—Student Body President Kaitlyn Steinhiser said: “The Student Senate feels that the purpose of a school mascot is for school spirit and to represent Valpo values, and the Crusader does not do that effectively.”
Black female civil servant was paid £52,000 more than white male colleague for same job because Home Office was concerned about 'reputational damage'
A senior civil servant has accused the Government of seeking to avoid 'reputational damage' by paying a black female colleague £52,000 more than him.
Matthew Parr is suing the Home Office for sex and race discrimination after discovering he was earning less than his counterpart for doing the same job.
He claims that being a white man meant he was paid a £133,983 salary, plus £7,904 living allowance, while Wendy Williams took home £185,000.
Both are one of five HM Inspectors of Constabulary (HMIs) who act as watchdogs for the UK's police forces.
Mr Parr, a former rear admiral, was appointed in 2016 during Theresa May's tenure as Home Secretary when Whitehall was driving down the salaries of top officials.
An employment tribunal heard that at the time of Ms Williams' appointment 15 months earlier, the Treasury was also trying to reduce pay packets.
But it heard that mandarins agreed she would be paid the top £185,000 salary as awarding her less than existing HMIs could open the Government up to a discrimination challenge.
Mr Parr said in a witness statement: 'Documents disclosed by the Respondent make clear that Wendy Williams was paid the top of the band then in force, because of concern that to pay her less than her fellow HMIs presented the Government with a risk of legal challenge on the grounds of discrimination and of reputational damage.'
He claims his 'race and sex had a clear influence' on the decision to pay him the substantially less £133,983 when he came into post.
The Government denies sex and race discrimination and maintains that plans to lower salaries were always going to come into force regardless of the person who took the position.
Mr Parr, is responsible for police forces in London, Bedfordshire, Northern Ireland, the National Crime Agency, the Counter Terrorism Policing Network, national forces such as British Transport Police and forces in Overseas Territories.
He also looks after the London Fire Brigade and five other services, while Ms Williams oversees forces in Wales and the west of England.
Mr Parr said it was 'a question of fairness' that he should be paid the same as Ms Williams.
He told the Central London Employment Tribunal said: 'The Respondent, upon my appointment, and after an appeal, has refused to extend to me the same favourable treatment.
'I am a white man. I recognise that I am not the typical claimant to the Employment Tribunal in cases of equal pay and discrimination.
'I also recognise that I am paid a relatively high salary. Indeed, were all HMIs to be paid the salary currently paid to me I would be entirely satisfied.
'This is, for me, principally a question of fairness. 'I have been a public servant for more than 35 years and have, until now, worked in organisations determined to treat people equitably.
'But the Respondent has a different approach: it is fundamentally unfair to pay people wildly different amounts for doing what is, by any measure, identical work.
'I understand that the Respondent has a responsibility for prudent stewardship of public money.
'The consistent and long-term aim of the Respondent, in concert with HM Treasury, has been to reduce the pay of HMIs; I do not assert that this is an unreasonable or illegitimate aim.
'But the means by which the Respondent has attempted to drive down pay have been ham-fisted and badly thought through; they have involved treating people unfairly and, I assert in this claim, unlawfully.
'They have involved defending some indefensible positions, and, on occasion, behaviour which reflects badly on some senior people.'
The tribunal was told that in January 2016 Ms May wrote to Sir Thomas Winsor HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary to introduce a scale of £134,000-£191,000 with 'an explicit presumption that any increase beyond the bottom has a considered justification'.
A few weeks later Mark Sedwill, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, now Sir Mark, wrote to Sir Nicholas Macpherson, his counterpart at the Treasury, who now sits in the house of Lords as Baron Macpherson of Earl's Court, proposing the £134,000-£191,000 scale.
The tribunal was told that the letter acknowledged that during Wendy Williams' appointment the Home Office was under pressure from the Treasury to apply downward pressure on salaries.
The Treasury had advised that appointments should be made on a scale of £165,000-£186,000 and that a salary at the lower end of the scale should be negotiated.
Ms Williams was appointed at the top of the range because, according to the letter: 'The Home Office was concerned that to pay her less than her fellow HMIs presented the government with a risk of a legal challenge on the grounds of discrimination.'
At the request of Ms Williams and the Home Office, the tribunal had asked to keep details of her pay negotiations secret - but the tribunal refused, saying the salaries were a matter of public record and the machinations behind them should also be public.
Current Home Secretary Priti Patel took the case to an Employment Appeal Tribunal to try to get the decision overturned. But her case was rejected by Mr Justice Griffiths on the grounds of open justice.
The full tribunal hearing heard that Mr Parr only accepted the pay in June 2016 because he was concerned the Brexit referendum would cause government upheaval and disruption to the hiring process.
It was only when he entered the position that he became aware of discrimination, he alleges, and that the pay of a Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police was £1,447 higher than his salary including allowances despite his role being responsible for inspecting many forces.
Mr Parr claims that, from May 2014, the Treasury advised Ms May to lower salaries for pay packets of HMIs. Appointment terms are between three to five years and can be re-appointed.
As Ms Williams' previous pay as a high-ranking official in the Crown Prosecution Service was £107,000, it was first considered that her pay as an HMI would be £165,000 - which she appeared to be happy with according to tribunal evidence.
Sir Thomas Winsor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, said at the tribunal that this pay was 'unjustifiable' considering a white man had been appointed at £185,791 in a similar position only six months earlier.
The judge is expected to announce his verdict in a few weeks.
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Australia: Governor General's staff to be asked to do woke 'privilege walk' so they can identify how entitled they are
Encouraging humility in people is fine and dandy. It's an important part of Christian teachings. But centering it on race is obnoxious. It is our personal characteristics we need to feel humble about. Making us feel humble about our race is a distraction. Like people, races can have both their good and their bad sides but no individual is responsible for either
It seems like only yesterday that Leftists were loudly condemning racism. Now they seem determined to bring it back. Condemning a person solely because of his/her skin colour was always stupid and obnoxious and it still is, whether the colour is black, white or brindle
The bureaucrats have been signed up to do bizarre activity which may require them to identify how privileged they are, but it has been criticised by previous participants as being too personal.
The exercise will require staff to step forward or backwards depending on their answers to prompts such as whether their parents have been arrested or addicted to drugs.
The training is run by Charles Sturt University (CSU), with over 330 staff at the Australian institute completing the exercise in 2019 and offering mixed feedback, reported The Daily Telegraph.
One participant remarked 'facilitators need to acknowledge some people may find the issues raised in the privilege walk (and open disclosure) too personal'.
Another said 'I think the walk of privilege needs more work - questions should be contextualised a little more'.
Some staff members described it as 'confronting but valuable', 'very effective', and 'interesting and revealing'.
In variations of the activity, attendees have been asked whether parents told them they were 'beautiful, smart, or successful', if they feel comfortable with others knowing their sexuality or if they worry about crime or drugs in their neighbourhood.
Questions around family may include whether parents have been incarcerated, been addicted to drugs or alcohol or are still married.
The exercise was developed from a 1998 essay by academic Peggy McIntosh titled 'White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack'.
The article used a backpack full of tools and maps as a metaphor for the advantages Ms McIntosh said white people have over others.
Psychologist Michael Mascolo wrote in Psychology Today that the activity can backfire and make people at the front of the 'privilege line' feel defensive.
He said while some people 'experience an enhanced awareness and appreciation of how they have been advantaged' others are offended and feel 'personally blamed'.
The exercise is one component of unconscious bias and inclusivity training run by CSU.
A spokesperson from the Office of the Official Secretary to the Governor-General told The Daily Telegraph the 'training is not mandatory.'
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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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17 February, 2021
The Science-Denying Woke War on Women and Girls Is Speeding up
The war on men and boys has been underway for nearly two decades, and now the woke Left is waging war on women and girls. The woke activists are determined to erase the lines that biology draws between men and women. Decades of research documents physical, biological, genetic, and biochemical differences between the sexes, but woke activists expect us to ignore this evidence in service of the concept of gender. Gender used to be a linguistic device to denote biological sex.
In several foreign languages, such as Spanish, the article for “the” has feminine and masculine versions. “La” and “el” mean something. Perhaps the woke will cancel the Spanish language next. They have already tried with “Latinx,” which only 4% of Hispanic Americans prefer. Only 3% use it, and less than 25% are even aware of it. Sixty-one percent of those polled prefer the term “Hispanic,” and 29% prefer “Latino” to describe the population. Yet, Latinx is pervasive in the corporate media and popular culture.
Similarly, the woke are forcing things women have never asked for in service to the near-zero portion of the population that is trans activists. According to The Times in Britain:
Midwives have been told to say “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding” and to replace the term “mother” with “mother or birthing parent” as part of moves to be more trans-friendly.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is the first in the country to formally implement a gender inclusive language policy for its maternity services department, which will now be known as “perinatal services”.
Staff have been instructed that “breastmilk” should be replaced with the phrases “human milk”, “breast/chestmilk” or “milk from the feeding mother or parent”.
Women need and deserve health care providers who understand their unique physical and emotional needs, the challenges of motherhood, and the distinct physiological changes that occur in our bodies during pregnancy. Ignoring biological sex in medical treatment poses risks to trans individuals when assessing physical symptoms. No medical provider who agrees to “first do no harm” should be subverting physical health to a language preference or political ideology.
This woke ideology was embraced by the Biden administration on day one via executive order. Titled “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” it opens the door for biological boys and men to compete with girls and women in sports, educational opportunities, and the boardroom. It also appears to require their admittance to women’s spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, sororities, barracks, and even prisons.
How confident is the administration that their woke declaration is acceptable to Americans? Not very, if Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s answer to a reporter is any indication. The reporter questioned whether the White House’s message to girls is that they are now forced to compete against biological boys in high school sports. She responded:
The president’s belief is that trans rights are human rights and that’s why he signed that executive order. In terms of the determinations by universities and colleges, I would certainly defer to them.
The reporter was explicitly asking about the administration’s guidelines for local school districts when scholarships could be on the line in high school and pointing to the potential for lawsuits. Psircle-Back Psaki™ didn’t even have the courage of the administration’s convictions to answer the question asked.
Now, Planned Parenthood is joining the war on women and girls. It is quite possible taxpayers are funding the abortion giant’s new line of business, which is providing testosterone to girls 18 and younger depending on the state. In an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, said that Planned Parenthood claims that it is the second largest provider of transition services in the nation. Carlson shared a chilling quote from a former employee:
“Trans-identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook…in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation.”
Abortion has fallen to the lowest level since Roe v. Wade in 1973. To support its extensive infrastructure, Planned Parenthood is providing transition services in 201 of its clinics. These transition “services” are often provided without a consultation with a doctor and without requiring a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Carlson asked Shrier what medical professionals know about the long-term effects of testosterone. Shrier responded:
Well, some of them include infertility, vaginal and uterine atrophy, they are at risk of cardiac events. And of course, the great unknown which is that we’ve never done this to biological women for decades. And that is what we are doing now. So, we really don’t know all of the long-term effects.
As an example, Washington State already gives children as young as 13 the right to consent for mental health, substance abuse, and withdrawal management. Their parents’ insurance must cover this treatment, but the services provided must remain confidential. This consent includes gender transition services even though some effects of testosterone are permanent for young women. Now they are trying to establish in-school clinics for children to access.
Too many stayed silent while the Left waged war on boys, classifying perfectly normal behavior in little boys as toxic. It will only become apparent in decades to come how many young boys were diagnosed with ADD and ADHD at a young age and what prescriptions for Ritalin and other drugs did to their full development. That drug was suggested to me when one of my sons was in 4th grade, and I just laughed. Many parents didn’t, as our increasingly woke educators dubbed a young boy’s behavior as “problematic.”
Real-Life Victims of the Transgender ‘Cult’
As Shrier noted, we have no idea what the long-term consequences of administering testosterone to adolescent girls will be. As mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and women, we must stand up for our girls and their right to continue to have equal opportunities in education, sports, career, and private spaces without competition from biological boys. Compassion does not require acquiescence, and to protect girls, we must loudly proclaim the unique, extraordinary, and essential role biological women play in society in a word gone mad.
Ponder a prescient passage from Douglas Murray in his book The Madness of Crowds and take up the courage to fight this particular madness:
“Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So, unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at and say, “What the hell were they thinking?”
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Liberals 'Heart' Murderers
Ann Coulter
I assume it's overkill to continue listing the evidence against death row inmate Kevin Cooper, duly convicted of committing a quadruple murder back in 1983. The blinding proof of his guilt was covered in last week's column.
To review, this included shoeprint evidence, footprint evidence, cigarette and tobacco evidence, blood evidence and DNA evidence, proving that this violent rapist and mental hospital escapee:
-- hid out in a house next to Doug and Peggy Ryen's Chino Hills, California, home for two days after escaping from prison;
-- used a hatchet and hunting knife taken from his hideout to hack to death two adults and two children at the Ryen home and critically wound a third child;
-- stole the family's station wagon and later abandoned it in Long Beach, along with his DNA on prison-issued cigarettes, before escaping to Mexico;
-- returned to California, where he raped a woman at knifepoint, leading to his capture.
This week, we'll consider the specific claims made by The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof purporting to raise doubts about Cooper's guilt.
Kristof's special pleading proves that no one on death row is innocent. I didn't pick this case. The anti-death penalty zealots picked it, splashing it across the "Newspaper of Record." I have to believe they didn't choose their worst example to showcase, so let's look at the honesty of their arguments about Kevin Cooper.
KRISTOF:
"Although Josh [the 8-year-old who miraculously survived the hatchet attack] had indicated that the attack was committed by several white men, the sheriff announced just four days after the bodies were found that the sole suspect was Kevin Cooper ..."
First of all, eyewitness testimony is the least credible evidence, particularly in the case of children -- as the child molestation hysteria of the 1980s demonstrated -- and even more particularly in the case of a child who's found lying in a bloody mess surrounded by his murdered family members after having his throat slit and being attacked with a hatchet.
In any event, Josh never said he saw three men. He said he initially "thought" it must have been the three "Mexicans" who had stopped by the house looking for work earlier in the evening. But even in his initial interviews from his hospital bed, he said he only saw one assailant in the house: "a man with bushy hair."
KRISTOF:
"Sadly, a tan T-shirt believed to have been worn by one of the killers didn't produce enough DNA to provide a profile. ..."
That IS sad. Luckily, it's also not true. The Department of Justice DNA lab at UC Berkeley did find Cooper's DNA on the tan T-shirt discarded near the murder house, which also contained partial DNA profiles of two of the victims, Doug and Peggy Ryen.
KRISTOF:
"Could the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office really have planted evidence, including placing Cooper's blood on the tan T-shirt? We do know that the sheriff's office had a history of going rogue. Floyd Tidwell, the sheriff, was himself later convicted of four felony counts for stealing 523 guns from the evidence room" ... [further denunciations of the sheriff's department].
The "planted evidence" ruse is a popular one for springing murderers, except -- oops! -- the T-shirt tested by the Berkeley DNA lab wasn't in the possession of the sheriff's office. The tan T-shirt, along with the cigarette butts from the Ryens' station wagon, had been in the custody of the San Diego Superior Court Evidence Clerk from the end of the trial right up until 2001, when they were shipped directly to the Berkeley DNA Laboratory for testing.
KRISTOF:
"Likewise, hairs found clutched in the victims' hands weren't Cooper's (no hairs from an African-American were found at the crime scene) but didn't lead to a match with a suspect, either."
While I love the idea of a 10-year-old girl ripping an African American's hair out by the root as he came at her with a hatchet, the "clutched hair" nonsense has already been thoroughly investigated and dismissed by the courts.
A team of DNA experts spent weeks testing hairs from Jessica's hands, as well as two hairs found on Doug Ryen's right hand and one hair from Christopher Hughes' arm. Their conclusion? "The testing failed to identify another assailant and confirmed that all tested hairs most likely came from one or more of the victims."
As U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn L. Huff explained:
"This should not be surprising. The hairs adhered to the victims' bodies, including their hands, because there was a large amount of blood on the victims and a large amount of hair on the debris-ridden carpet. Also, the victims each sustained hatchet wounds to the head, causing clumps of cut hair to fall to the ground. Both animal and human hair were recovered from the hands of the victims. Just as with the animal hairs, the cut and shed human hairs adhered to the bloodied victims' hands because the victims came in contact with the carpet when they were dying on the floor."
Finally, Kristof tries to pin the murder on other "suspects" (whom we know aren't guilty or he'd be defending them).
KRISTOF:
"A different longtime suspect in the case recounted, not long after the murders, how he had killed the Ryens and Chris Hughes."
I guess "confessions" are only questionable in the case of the Central Park rapists. Kristof doesn't say who the confessor is specifically, but it sounds like the one repeatedly put forward by Cooper's lawyers. Courts have characterized this so-called "confession" as "a mental patient's secondhand version of a confession."
KRISTOF:
"This other suspect is a white man whom I'll identify just by his first name, Lee, for he must be presumed innocent ...
"Lee came to the attention of the authorities during the investigation after his girlfriend, Diana Roper, fingered him as the killer: She reported that he had returned home late on the night of the killings wearing bloody coveralls, in a car that resembled the Ryens' station wagon.
"Roper turned Lee's bloody coveralls over to the sheriff's office -- which eventually threw them away without testing them. By then, the sheriff's office had arrested Cooper, and deputies didn't want a complication."
Don't be fooled by Kristof's fake humility -- "he must be presumed innocent" -- all that blather about what Roper said was invented by defense attorneys.
Roper was not technically Lee's "girlfriend": She was his bitter ex. Far from "bloody," the few red splotches on the coveralls were most likely paint (along with manure and dirt). Roper told investigators that she didn't even know if the coveralls belonged to Lee.
But let me quote from the court that reviewed the coveralls evidence: "[I]ssues of guilt, innocence and sentence should never be decided on information obtained from persons who believe they are witches and believe an article of clothing is connected to a crime because of a 'vision' they receive during a 'trance.'" (Emphasis mine.)
Yes, Roper's evidence was based on a vision she had during a trance because she believed she was a witch. These facts are exhaustively detailed in court orders and opinions -- but are entirely absent from the vast news coverage of Cooper's case. Might distract from the claim that the sheriff's office tossed the coveralls only to avoid "a complication" in their single-minded pursuit of the wrong man -- as Kristof claims.
No one on death row, not one person, is innocent. Believe nothing you read in the media about their putative "innocence." It's always lies and nonsense, as with Kristof's pet murderer, Kevin Cooper.
https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2021/02/03/liberals-heart-murderers-n2584188
****************************************Black Clergyman called celebration of Captain Sir Tom Moore 'cult of white British nationalism'
A clergyman who described the clap for Captain Sir Tom Moore as the "cult of white British nationalism" is being investigated by Church of England officials.
Captain Tom, a World War Two veteran, raised £32 million for the NHS during the first national lockdown by walking 1,000 laps of his garden. Following the 100-year-old's death on Tuesday, people across the country clapped to commemorate his life and achievements.
But a London-based reverend was criticised for "unacceptable, insensitive, and ill-judged" behaviour after criticising Captain Tom on social media in remarks which have prompted an internal investigation.
In a now-deleted tweet which sparked a fierce backlash, Jarel Robinson-Brown, 29, wrote: "The cult of Captain Tom is a cult of White British Nationalism. I will offer prayers for the repose of his kind and generous soul, but I will not be joining the 'National Clap'."
Rev Robinson-Brown, who was last month appointed to serve in the parish of All Hallows-by-the-Tower, the oldest church in the City of London, later offered "an unreserved apology for the insensitive timing and content of my tweet regarding the clap for Captain Tom". He also deleted his Twitter account.
He said he had now read and would sign the Church of England's Digital Charter, a voluntary pledge that the clergy is encouraged to adhere to in order to "help make social media and the web more widely positive places for conversations to happen".
Rev Robinson-Brown, who is black, has since been the subject of racist abuse online.
More than 6,500 people have signed a Change.org petition calling on the Church of England to remove him from his post "on the basis he is a divisive and damaging figure that has insulted the memory of a national treasure and true hero of this country".
A spokesperson for the Diocese of London said: "Jarel Robinson-Brown's comments regarding Captain Sir Tom Moore were unacceptable, insensitive, and ill-judged.
"The fact that he immediately removed his tweet and subsequently apologised does not undo the hurt he has caused, not least to Captain Tom's family. Nor do Jarel's actions justify the racist abuse he is now receiving."
The statement confirmed that an investigation, led by the Archdeacon of London, was under way.
Rev Robinson-Brown, a former Methodist minister and chaplain at King's College London, converted to Anglicanism and is currently training to become a priest in the Church of England. He was appointed to his current role as a curate last month by Rt Rev Dame Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London.
According to his King's College London profile, Rev Robinson-Brown studied classical music as a pianist and organist at the London College of Music. He is a the author of the book "Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer: Church and the Famine of Grace".
In previous social media posts, he has criticised "ignorant White Christian men" amid growing debate over LGBTQ+ rights within the Church of England.
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California ‘Hero Pay’ Ordinance Forces Kroger Closures
Leftist blockheads again
“Ralphs and Food 4 Less, both owned by the parent company Kroger, announced Monday that they will be closing 25% of their stores in Long Beach after the city council passed an ordinance requiring companies with over 300 employees nationwide to pay employees an extra $4 per hour,” local news outlet Fox 11 reports. Two stores in the area will be shut down.
A company spokesperson directly cited the city council’s ordinance mandating higher wages as the reason they are closing down.
“The irreparable harm that will come to employees and local citizens as a direct result of the City of Long Beach’s attempt to pick winners and losers, is deeply unfortunate,” the spokesperson said. “We are truly saddened that our associates and customers will ultimately be the real victims of the city council’s actions.”
The ordinance was passed with the stated intention of rewarding hard-working grocery store employees who have kept a vital service running throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia was a key proponent of the measure and signed it into law. He argues it is justified because grocery store workers “have been on the frontlines of this pandemic and deserve this support.”
Similarly, Garcia and other supporters of the mandated wage hike argue that companies are just being selfish by closing down rather than paying their workers more. They point to the fact that Kroger has seen high levels of profit this year.
In truth, whether the company is being selfish and whether it’s really flush with cash (Kroger says these specific stores were already financially struggling) are both beside the point. This mandatory wage hike “honoring heroes” was passed by politicians eager to spend other people’s money and claim the credit. But like any minimum wage law, it was always going to have the unintended consequence of eliminating some jobs altogether.
The minimum wage in Long Beach is already $14 per hour for employers with 26 or more employees. A $4 increase would therefore be $18 an hour, a nearly 30 percent raise for every employee. This amounts to an enormous spike in a grocery store’s labor costs, which are already one of the biggest expenses an enterprise usually faces.
Whether do-good politicians feel workers “deserve it” or not, the reality is that some grocery store employees don’t provide labor that is worth $18 an hour, and some stores cannot afford to pay such an artificially high price. The basic laws of supply and demand tell us what comes next: the government’s supposed benevolence will leave a significant number of workers unemployed.
This specific instance of wage mandates backfiring is just one example of a much broader trend. On the national level, the “Fight for $15” movement demanding a $15 federal minimum wage ostensibly seeks to help workers. In reality, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that this policy would eliminate 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs. A wealth of economic research similarly shows that minimum wage hikes cause unemployment.
The moral of the story is clear.
Sweeping government price controls and labor market interventions will always have vast unintended consequences, no matter how noble the stated intentions are or how sympathetic the intended beneficiary may be. Indeed, unintended consequences are an inherent feature of big government programs.
“Every human action has both intended and unintended consequences,” economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explain. “Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.” The more complex the underlying situation and the more sweeping the rule or regulation, the more pronounced the unintended consequences will be.
Long Beach lawmakers may truly have hoped to help front-line workers by mandating higher “Hero Pay” under the law. But their naïve good intentions will mean little to the grocery store clerks left unemployed as a result. Is this any way to treat heroes?
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/02/05/california-hero-pay-kroger/
***************************************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 February, 2021
‘Transition’ Treatment Harms Kids, Veteran Psychiatrist at UK Gender Clinic Says
Children “have been very seriously damaged” in receiving treatment at the United Kingdom’s premier gender identity facility, a former psychiatrist there says in a bombshell interview.
Dr. David Bell faced disciplinary action after writing an internal report in 2018 raising concerns about procedures at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which operates the U.K.’s sole “Gender Identity Development Service.”
After working with Tavistock and Portman for 24 years as a consultant psychiatrist, Bell recently retired. In the interview with London-based Channel 4 News, he speaks openly about his observations about giving children puberty blockers, treating every girl with a gender or sexual issue as “conversion therapy,” and politicizing support for transgender children.
Right away, Bell isn’t shy about relating the concerns of parents and others about Tavistock’s treatment plans. He tells reporter Cathy Newman:
I was a representative of the clinical and academic staff. The concerns that were brought to me were very, very serious. The main concerns were issues that had to do with … lack of consent. Many of the people who spoke to me did not think their children were able to consent to the treatment.
Then there were concerns of children being inappropriately pushed through to transition, where they had a lot of complex problems that really needed thinking about. The whole attitude of what’s called ‘affirmation’ instead of neutrality and inquiry caused considerable damage to the capacity of the service and clinicians to take on the full complexities of the cases they were dealing with. As a result, children have been very seriously damaged.
Newman asks the psychiatrist in the interview whether children are at risk while receiving treatments at Tavistock.
Bell replies: “They’re less at risk now because the puberty blockers have been stopped. The puberty blockers have been stopped because there is no evidence base for them at all. … By putting them on that pathway, it rather becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In December, a panel of three judges on the High Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling restricting Tavistock from issuing puberty blockers to children under 16. The High Court is one of the U.K.’s three senior courts under its Supreme Court.
The judges made their decision in part because of the testimony of Keira Bell, who is known in the U.K. for speaking out against the use of puberty blockers, which Tavistock prescribed to her when she wanted to become a male.
Channel 4’s Newman asks Bell about the High Court ruling in that case regarding kids under 16.
The psychiatrist calls the decision “really important because it acts to protect them.”
Bell later says that the “positioning of these girls as only having a gender problem acts to prevent them from developing in a normal way and their own nonconforming gender identity or sexuality” and adds: “This is a form of conversion therapy among people that are gay or lesbian.”
Newman asks Bell whether he “might be on the wrong side of history” in failing to be as vocally supportive of the transgender movement as one might expect from someone who worked at a gender clinic for decades.
He appears to have no qualms about tying the gender debate to politics, saying later that “one of the things gone terribly wrong in the Tavistock and elsewhere is the invasion of the clinical domain by the political ideology.”
Bell articulates the very phenomenon that has grown in the United States as well:
This is a very highly politicized area. And leaders from movements with a very powerful ideological commitment have managed to capture policy both medically, professionally, in the media, and in government with no evidence basis, a purely highly politicized movement; we just have these consequences.
All I’m saying … is [the children] need to wait. There needs to be a thoughtful engagement with them as opposed to motoring them through to treatment pathways that have irreversible consequences for their bodies. We’re talking about not doing harm to children.
Bell is at his most compelling when he discusses a real-life example of someone who is struggling with her sexuality.
“Let me put it very simply. A girl of 12 may find that she is sexually attracted to other girls,” Bell says, adding:
It may go through her mind: … Maybe I’m not a girl. Maybe I’m a boy. If that happened 10-15 years ago, that would have been a passing phase and things would have moved on. But now because of hugely changed cultural context and the penetration of social media, such a girl may go online and she may easily come to the belief … that she is a boy. And that having reached that [conclusion] … there will be lots of forces around her that will support it, and all her other difficulties will be repositioned through that prism.
Although Bell says he doesn’t believe that Tavistock tried to push him toward retirement or “hound him out,” he says the facility made it clear “that people like me that spoke out will come under the scrutiny in this very negative way.”
“I think it’s like a message to everyone else who don’t have my seniority, my safety: Oh, my God, I better not speak out, they’ll think I’m transphobic.”
Bell’s comments during this interview confirm that the High Court made the right decision when it ruled that Tavistock must stop giving puberty blockers to children under 16.
The psychiatrist’s articulations about gender ideology as a political movement, whether in the U.K. or the United States, are spot on. He was courageous to speak out on an issue that has become so controversial in such a short time.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene marks third anniversary of Parkland shooting by asking for more guns in schools - weeks after parents of victims called for her to resign over 'false flag' conspiracy theories
The Republican made the inflammatory comment after President Joe Biden called for a 'common sense' approach to gun reform as he commemorated the 17 lives lost in the massacre.
Greene wrote: 'Joe Biden had 30,000 armed guards at his inauguration, he clearly believes in good guys with guns. The best way to prevent school shootings is to repeal all gun free school zones and protect our kids like he protects himself.'
The 46-year-old has previously suggested that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were staged and has refused calls to resign over those comments.
It comes after Biden put out a statement saying his administration 'will not wait for the next mass shooting' before pushing forward legislation.
'We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer,' the president said on Sunday.
Parents of the children killed in the rampage last month demanded that Greene resign over her comments that the February 2018 massacre was staged.
In May of that year, she posted online a story about disgraced Broward County sheriff's deputy Scot Peterson - who ran away when the Valentine's Day shooting began - receiving a retirement pension.
In the comments section, someone wrote: 'It's called a pay off to keep his mouth shut since it was a false flag planned shooting.'
Greene replied: 'Exactly.'
Another commented: 'Kick back for going along with the evil plan. You know it's not for doing a good job.'
Greene responded: 'My thoughts exactly!! Paid to do what he did and keep his mouth shut!'
Gun rights activists frequently claim that school shootings are 'false flag' events, orchestrated by Democrats with paid actors, rather than real victims. They believe the scenarios are staged to spur gun control.
Relatives of the 17 students and staff killed in the massacre furiously demanded she resign, and David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting, called on her to apologize.
'Apologize Now or continue to spread these conspiracies and we will be sure to make the next 2 years of your life not only your last in Congress but a living hell as well,' he said.
He added they would 'also accept your resignation in place of an apology.'
Earlier this month, Democrats voted to remove Greene from her committee duties, in part due to these remarks.
Biden on Sunday said he wants Congress to pass laws that would require background checks on all gun sales and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The confessed school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, who was 19 at the time, was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and fired between 100 and 150 rounds in a rampage that killed 14 students and three adult staff at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Biden said Congress must also eliminate 'immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.'
Cruz was able to buy the assault rifle legally, despite having known mental health problems.
Even in a country that has grown inured to mass shootings and gun violence, the Florida shooting sparked outrage across the US and prompted fresh demands for firearms control.
But with Donald Trump in the White House and the Republicans controlling the Senate at the time, legislation approved by the Democrats in the House of Representatives went nowhere.
Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday said the House would try again.
'We will enact these and other life-saving bills and deliver the progress that the Parkland community and the American people deserve and demand,' she said in a statement.
Despite polls finding most Americans in favor of some sort of gun law reforms, successive US administrations have been powerless to pass legislation.
'The time to act is now,' Biden said.
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Americans Should Have the Freedom to Choose Their Medicines
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America spends $3.5 trillion a year to manage the symptoms of incurable diseases. The National Health Council estimates 133 million Americans suffer from a chronic illness, about one in three Americans.
If there is a better way to bring drugs to market sooner, why aren’t we using it? Perhaps we could mimic the model used during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) created an expedited process to approve drugs and treatment options for patients afflicted with the deadly disease. On May 21, 1990, the Public Health Service (PHS), the division of Health and Human Services under which FDA operates, announced in the Federal Register and sought public comments “on a proposed policy to make promising investigational drugs for AIDS and HIV related diseases more widely available under ‘parallel track’ protocols.” If we were able to create a pathway for AIDS drugs, we ought to consider extending this same model to other diseases.
Today, millions of Americans are suffering from debilitating and deadly diseases while potentially lifesaving drugs remain stuck in FDA’s approval bottleneck.
Currently, it takes on average 12 years and $2.9 billion to bring a drug from lab to patients. This is loo long and too expensive. As such, Americans are demanding a streamlined process to bring drugs to market. Because of FDA’s bloated bureaucracy and labyrinth approval process, there is an invisible graveyard of patients suffering and dying while treatments remain in efficacy trials for years. No one wants to discuss this awful truth, but it is necessary to enact real change.
FDA should act as a bridge to innovation, but often is a barrier. Too many resources are consumed when efficacy testing takes a decade to complete. We all want safe and effective drugs to come to market sooner, but when drugs have already been deemed safe by FDA they ought to be marketable to those who have exhausted all other options. The market will indeed respond if a drug is ineffective, just like it does in all other industries. Health care is no exception. Patients should be given the option to save their own lives, but government red-tape and nearly endless safety testing makes that impossible.
Free to Choose Medicine (FTCM) is a viable solution to this problem. In short, FTCM would expand upon the same expedited approval process used during the AIDS crisis.
FTCM would offer patients a sense of hope and by allowing drugs that have passed initial safety testing to be available to patients right away. Instead of the current FDA process, which would move that same drug to clinical trials where select patients suffering from said disease are offered a chance to get the drug, and then studied like lab rats, FTCM would inject commonsense into the antiquated drug approval process. Unfortunately, under the current system, half of patients in clinical trials are only exposed to a double-blind placebo. FTCM would do away with this as well.
It is unethical for FDA to offer sugar pills to patients who are dying, when a potential cure is available. If a drug is safe enough to offer to patients in clinical trials, it should be safe enough to offer to all patients suffering from the disease in question. Of course, patients should be aware that these unapproved medicines don’t have the FDA gold stamp of approval.
And doctors would play a vital role throughout the FTCM pathway, ensuring their patients are properly monitored throughout the duration of their treatment program.
FTCM puts patients in the driver’s seat of their own care. In America, patients and their doctors should make health care decisions, not FDA busybodies. In a nutshell, this is exactly what FTCM does. As Operation Warp Speed demonstrated, it is possible to expedite drug approval.
During the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. government put onerous FDA regulations aside in order to accelerate treatments and a vaccine. This commonsense approach, which is the core of FTCM, should be the norm, not the exception.
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UK: What’s really driving Labour’s patriotism problem
Not for the first time, I can’t work out which of Labour’s two warring factions is more tragic.
On one side you have the Starmerites, who are apparently convinced that sticking the Union flag on the Labour letterhead and mouthing some platitudes about patriotism is a surefire way to win back Red Wall voters. On the other, you have the left-wingers, formerly known as the Corbynistas, who seem to think doing so is not the cringey rebranding exercise that it is, but a sop to the forces of racism.
Indeed, Labour’s unending patriotism debate – sparked this week by an internal strategy presentation that was leaked to the Guardian – reminds us that for all Labourites’ infighting, when it comes to being woefully out-of-touch they are as one.
Patriotism has been a hot-button issue since Labour’s historic defeat at the 2019 election, in which it lost many of its former heartland seats in the Midlands and the North leading to its worst result since 1935. According to pollster Lord Ashcroft, Labour defectors at the last election lamented what they saw as then leader Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘lack of patriotism’.
This puts Corbyn and his party out of step with a clear majority of voters. A recent YouGov poll found that 61 per cent of the UK public say they are ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ patriotic. And for all the blather about patriotism being code for racism, many ethnic minorities don’t seem to have got the memo. As British Future director Sunder Katwala has pointed out, ethnic minorities tend to feel slightly more British than their white counterparts.
That British patriotism and national identity appear to be increasingly benign and ethnically inclusive phenomena makes the revulsion they provoke from certain Labourites even more absurd. One unnamed Labour staffer told the Guardian that watching the now-leaked patriotism presentation put him in mind of the recent storming of the US Capitol, and mad old Clive Lewis MP likened the strategy to ‘Fatherland-ism’.
Breathless reactions like this would lead you to believe leader Keir Starmer was being advised to go full-on blood-and-soil. In reality, the worst the presentation recommended was that he make ‘use of the [Union] flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly’. In response, Labour officials reportedly sent out edicts to ‘prioritise the Union Jack header images’ on promotional materials.
Where Starmer’s critics do have a point is in how cringey and inauthentic all this is. At the start of his leadership, Starmer said Labour should not ‘shy away from displaying national pride’ and touted himself as a patriot. Yet the statement his spokesperson has put out in response to the presentation leak this week is so hedgy that it has somehow been written up as both a defence of the strategy (in the Guardian) and a denial of it (in The Times).
Labour’s patriotism problem now seems baked in, despite the change of leadership. This is striking, given Labour’s most consequential leaders had no problem speaking its language, and patriotism today is not the carnival of imperial nostalgia some seem to think it is. The NHS, an institution closely associated with the Labour Party, often tops polls of what makes Britons most proud to be British. Still, routine chatter over the years about the need to carve out a modern, ‘progressive’ patriotism has never gone anywhere.
One can’t help but think that the real issue here is less Labour’s (obvious) discomfort with patriotism, and more its discomfort with ordinary people. The two at least are interlinked. As Labour has drifted away from working people, its ranks drawing more and more from the metropolitan middle classes, so it has become increasingly alarmed at the national identity which many of its former constituents still hold to.
The sacking of Emily Thornberry from the Labour frontbench in 2014, after she snobbily tweeted that photo of a house draped in the St George flag with a white van parked outside, reminds us that hysteria about nationalism goes hand in hand with plain old snobbery.
Starmer may not be as explicit as Thornberry, or the more hysterical Corbynistas, in his distaste for ordinary people. But as Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit secretary, and chief architect of his party’s second referendum policy at the last election, he did front Labour’s campaign to overturn millions of working-class people’s votes. He was the posterboy for a policy that basically said they were fools who shouldn’t be indulged.
The problem here isn’t so much that Labour hates this country — it’s that it hates the people who live in it.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/04/whats-really-driving-labours-patriotism-problem/
******************************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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15 February, 2021
Food Network Star Denied Bail in Murder Case of Foster Care Victim Victoria Rose Smith
The little girl must have cried her heart out at the pain being inflicted on her but these heartless black monsters must have ignored that. How could they?
Victoria SmithWinner of Food Network’s America’s Worst Cook, Ariel Robinson and her husband were denied bail on Friday in the death of Greenville, Alabama Department of Social Services (DSS) ward Victoria Rose Smith.
Earlier news reports and the DSS had claimed that Smith was adopted by the Robinsons, who were both arrested for her murder but that turned out to be false. DSS was in custody of Smith at the time of her death and the biological family alleges that they never bothered to check on Smith and her brothers who were in the care of abusers.
Fox reported the gruesome details that emerged at the bond hearing about how the three-year-old toddler died.
The toddler suffered from extensive injuries, including deep purple bruising on her abdomen, bruising on her ear, abrasions on her face, bruising down her back, and bruising up and down both legs after her death on January 14, prosecutors told the judge. The coroner ruled that the child died from blunt force trauma, but prosecutors said Ariel had told first responders she believed the girl had drowned from drinking too much water.
Prosecutors revealed during the hearing that Ariel claimed Victoria, referred to as Tori, was having stomach issues after eating something and then drinking several cups of water. Ariel claims the child suddenly went limp and that she began attempting to perform the Heimlich maneuver on the child, fearing that she was choking. Ariel also claimed she started pressing on the girl’s stomach, which likely caused the bruising to the abdomen, as she asked Jerry to call 911.
When asked about the bruises to the other parts of Tori’s body, Ariel reportedly told them that the child’s 7-year-old brother, who was also in the Robinson’s care along with another sibling, hand anger issues and caused those injuries. Prosecutors said they asked the boy’s principal if the child boy had anger issues, and the principal reportedly told them he was a happy child who never showed any outward signs of aggression.
PJ Media reported that DSS had stonewalled the biological family that wanted custody of the body in order to bury her. After much public pressure, DSS relented and allowed the biological family and former foster parents to bury the child.
If the justice system was fair, DSS would be under arrest and on trial as well as the Robinsons for their role in this child’s death. It was DSS that placed her with the Robinsons in the first place with what seems like very little investigation into who they were. The family spokesperson Michelle Urps told PJ Media that the family believes DSS was negligent in Smith’s death.
We are standing firm that we do not feel proper vetting of this family was done. Clearly, there was some psychological testing that could have found she was not going to be a fit parent as well as we have discovered that their home was put into foreclosure the month [the children] were placed in their home.
Due to COVID-19 the foreclosure had not been finalized. We also found out that when they were moved into this home they had only known them for two hours. There were two one-hour visists with [the Robinsons] and then they were moved into the home.
The family wants DSS investigated. Unfortunately, the only thing that will happen—if history teaches us anything—is DSS will conduct its own “investigation” into itself and will find no wrongdoing. There is no other agency that supervises social services but the Department of Health and Human Services, which is the same cast of characters that all operate on the same budget. They are neither objective nor independent. A true investigation should be done by US Marshals or a police force that is not connected to the state budget.
This is the real issue with America’s child welfare system. The fox is guarding the hen house and no one has any motivation to change it. It is likely the American public will never see the file on Smith and what actions DSS took or what evidence they had to remove her from her mother and put her in the care of the Robinsons, where she died a horrific death. The government allows DSS to keep all their files on children, even dead ones, a secret from the public. They claim this is for the privacy of the child. When the child dies, all concerns of privacy should be moot.
The only way for this family to get any answers is to sue DSS and get discovery which would force open the internal documents to scrutiny. This is very expensive. Attorney Shawn McMillan, who has successfully sued child services all over California to the tune of millions of dollars, needs a $10,000 retainer just to take a case. The costs go up from there. There are very few families targeted by DSS who have that kind of money. On the contrary, most victims of DSS are living at or below the poverty level which is what alerted DSS to their family in the first place. In America, being poor is often confused with “neglect.”
Instead of helping families, social services rip them apart. Families that do try to raise funds to fight DSS are labeled by the DSS attorneys as “attention-seeking” and their efforts are used against them in court to prove they are bad parents.
These are the lost families of America who have no hope of recovering their children or seeking justice because our justice system is set up to punish the poor by disallowing access to the remedies they need to fight for their rights. McMillan’s cases prove that when a family has access to DSS records they find falsified warrants, false allegations, cover-ups, and corruption that leads to families being destroyed and lives lost.
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Race-faker Rachel Dolezal who now goes by African name Nkechi Amare Diallo says she hasn't been able to find a job in SIX years after being exposed
Race faker Rachel Dolezal has claimed she has been unable to find a job over the past six years after it was revealed that she was a white woman pretending to be black.
Dolezal, 43, told TV host Tamron Hall that even after changing her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo - a West African way of saying 'gift from the gods' – in 2017, she is still recognized and never gets past the interview stage.
The former NAACP leader, who says she still sees herself as black, claimed it has been 'really tough' and that she wishes 'people could see me more for who I am than the what'.
Even after moving to Tucson, Arizona, last year where her teenage son was going to college, the single mother-of-three said she has been forced to 'create my own job and find my own ways to provide for my children' as she braids hair, writes grants, paints and delivers 'pep talks'. She moved from Spokane, Washington.
In 2015, a local news reporter in Washington 'outed' Dolezal after revealing her Montana parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, were both white. High school pictures emerged of Dolezal - before she had made attempts to cast herself as a black woman - with blond hair
Hall questioned Dolezal about her hair and the former NAACP leader claimed that she was wearing it in braids to advertise her business of hair braiding as she had not been able to find other jobs.
'I'm in braids right now - and for a practical reason: advertising what I do to provide for my children,' Dolezal said, as she appeared on the show with a map of Africa in the background. 'I've been braiding for over 20 years.'
'I started with applying for all of the things I was qualified for,' she said of her job prospects, 'and after interviews and getting turned down, I even applied to jobs that didn't even require degrees ... being a maid at a hotel, working at a casino. 'I wasn't able to get any of those jobs either.'
'A mother, an activist, and an artist … that's really who I am,' Dolezal continued. 'When it comes to race and identity, I've always identified racially as "human" but have found more of a home in black culture and the black community, and that hasn't changed.
'I'm still the same person I was in May of 2015 I'm still doing the work I'm still pressing forward but it has been really tough for sure.
She was previously married to a black man, Kevin Moore, who she divorced in 2005. The mother of three sons claims she was 'too black' for him.
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Actor James Dreyfus slam trans activists as 'misogynistic guys in skirts' for waging war of hatred on JK Rowling and sending death and rape threats to women as part of campaign to 'put them back in their place'
The Gimme, Gimme, Gimme star, 52, claimed those involved were 'angry, young, anarchist people' who harboured a deep hatred of women and 'what they represent'.
He also accused them of being behind an alleged campaign of threats to kill and rape women in order to 'put them back in their place'.
Dreyfus today told an 'In Discussion' Zoom meeting organised by the Campaign for Common Sense that society appeared to be 'going backwards'.
He said: 'These people speak for nobody but themselves. All my trans friends are as horrified and embarrassed as me. They want none of this having to label everything.
'Women are going "please listen to us" but the response is "No, we won't listen".'
A group of trans activists condemned Dreyfus last year when he was among 50 actors, writers and journalists to sign a letter in support of JK Rowling following backlash to her views on trans people.
The Harry Potter author hit headlines in June after she mocked an online article using the words 'people who menstruate' instead of 'women'.
She was hit by what she described as 'relentless attacks' after she wrote: 'I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?'
The acclaimed novelist then penned a deeply personal essay to address the controversy, revealing she was sexually assaulted in her 20s and saying she still feels the scars of 'domestic violence' from her first marriage.
Rowling's remarks sparked backlash from a range of stars including actors Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Eddie Redmayne.
She has since been involved in several transphobia rows, including when she directed fans to a website selling badges and stickers saying 'transwomen are men' in September.
Critics branded the author a TERF - a slur meaning a trans exclusionary radical feminist - in response, while urging Rowling to 'understand the damage and hatefulness you have caused a group of people.'
Dreyfus said he had been 'cancelled' after showing support for the author in the letter as he criticised social media as 'a monster we have created'.
He said people used it as an 'echo chamber' of their views, adding: 'Silicon Valley has a lot to answer for. 'Everything has become so polarised. It is a big boil growing and growing. One day it will burst but I don't know when.'
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Mississippi, Tennessee and Utah consider laws that would ban transgender girls from women's sport because they have an 'unfair advantage'
Under a bill that advanced in the Republican-controlled Mississippi Senate late Thursday night, transgender athletes would be banned from competing in girls' or women's sports in the state's schools and universities.
Many critics have objected to transgender women competing in female sports, arguing that they have an unfair advantage because they typically have greater strength, bone mass, and muscle volume.
Studies have shown that the women often retain their physical advantages inherited from birth, even if they take testosterone-lowering medication.
Speaking last week during a Senate committee hearing, Utah Senator Mitt Romney said he felt transgender girls should not participate in girl's sport.
'I've got pictures of my eight granddaughters amongst grandsons behind me,' Romney said. 'They shouldn't be competing with people who are physiologically in an entirely different category.
'I think boys should be competing with boys and girls should be competing with (girls) on the athletic field.'
However there is often fierce debate over the subject, and President Joe Biden signed an executive order on January 20 - the day he took office - that bans discrimination based on gender identity in school sports and elsewhere.
And LGBTQ rights organisations have accused the proposed bans of being attempts to 'sow hate' and say they are driven by the 'far right'.
Sports scholarships gained from high school sports often give students free tuition to university, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.
In Mississippi, Republican Sen. Angela Hill of Picayune said: 'I've had numerous coaches across the state call me and believe that they feel there's a need for a policy in Mississippi because they are beginning to have some concerns of having to deal with this,' said the bill's sponsor.'
No senator asked whether any transgender athletes are currently competing in Mississippi, and Hill did not volunteer such information. The bill will go to the Republican-controlled House for more work in coming weeks.
Mississippi is one of a dozen states with lawmakers proposing restrictions on athletics or gender-confirming health care for transgender minors this year.
Mississippi Republican governor Tate Reeves, the father of three daughters, tweeted on February 4: 'I am so disappointed over President Biden's actions to force young girls like them to compete with biological males for access to athletics.'
Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, condemned anti-transgender bills in Mississippi and other states.
'These bills are not addressing any real problem, and they´re not being requested by constituents,' Human Rights Campaign said in a statement Wednesday.
'Rather, this effort is being driven by national far-right organisations attempting to sow fear and hate.'
In Utah, Senator Mike Lee introduced a bill with 13 other Republican colleagues that would also ban transgender girls from playing women's sport at schools.
Lee said the bill would protect 'opportunities of girls throughout America to athletically compete against other girls.'
Supporters of bills such as the one in Mississippi argue that transgender girls, because they were born male, are naturally stronger, faster and bigger than those born female.
Opponents say such proposals violate not only Title IX of federal education law prohibiting sex discrimination, but also rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In Tennessee, a day after the governor said transgender athletes would 'destroy women's sports,' Senate GOP leaders on Thursday offered tepid support for legislation that would ban them from participating in girls' sports.
'I think we need to adequately review the issue in committee and if it's not occurring in Tennessee (we should) probably not address it,' Senate Speaker Randy McNally, a Republican from Oak Ridge, told reporters.
The comments add some uncertainty to the bill's prospects one day after Republican Governor Bill Lee entered the debate.
He said transgender athletes would 'destroy women's sports' and stressed that transgender athletes would put 'a glass ceiling back over women that hasn't been there in some time.'
However, as the legislation is debated inside the GOP-dominant General Assembly, neither Lee nor legislative leaders have revealed how many transgender students are participating in public school sports in Tennessee - sparking criticism from opponents that prioritising the proposal is offensive when the state continues to be wracked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the bill, student athletes would be required to prove that the student's sex matches the student's 'original' birth certificate in order to participate in public school sports.
If a birth certificate is unavailable, then the parents must provide another form of evidence 'indicating the student's sex at the time of birth.'
The proposal has already made some early traction in the House but it remains unknown how far it will advance in the Senate after McNally's remarks.
Like Lee, McNally also said he opposed transgender girls participating in girls sports but said he's unsure it's an issue that should be a top concern for the state.
'We need to move very carefully. I think probably that issue is best addressed on the local level and allow the locals to address that issue,' he said.
Senate GOP Caucus Chairman Ken Yager added that he expects questions on how widespread transgender athletes are currently participating in Tennessee's middle and high schools when the bill is debated in a committee hearing.
In contrast, Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton told reporters Thursday that the state should take a 'proactive approach' regardless of whether transgender athletes were actually participating in middle and high school sports in Tennessee.
'Whether it is now or not, it could very well be in the future. You've seen national things happening,' Sexton said. 'I think we're being more proactive knowing that it could be a problem today or in the future.'
Sexton added that he believed the legislation is supported by his Republican caucus and that it will likely pass the House.
Currently, a similar 2020 Idaho law has been blocked by a federal judge as a lawsuit makes it way in court.
In 2019, 18-time Tennis grand slam singles champion Martina Navratilova was heavily criticised for her comments on transgender inclusion in sport.
She wrote in a newspaper column, she referred to trans woman as men who 'decide to be female,' adding that it is 'cheating and unfair' to allow them to compete with women who were assigned female at birth.
'To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organisation is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires,' she wrote.
'It's insane and it's cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.'
Her comments were slammed for being 'disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic', with rights group Trans Actual tweeting: 'We’re pretty devastated to discover that Martina Navratilova is transphobic.
'If trans women had an advantage in sport, why aren’t trans women winning gold medals left, right and centre?'
In the case of the Olympics, under guidelines introduced by the International Olympic Committee in 2016, trans men are allowed to compete without restriction.
However, trans women must demonstrate that they testosterone level has been below a certain cutoff point for at least one year before their first competition.
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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 February, 2021
Hit-job journalism misses the target again
Jordan Peterson's critics continue to ignore the most interesting thing about him
The hit-job interview is a staple of British journalism. There is, I suppose, an obvious attraction to it: while it can destroy its subject, it can also make the career of a journalist. And yet for the reader, listener or viewer, it can also be deeply boring — for the simple reason that if the journalist makes clear their conclusion from the outset, there’s no chance of having a reasonable discussion. People who agree with it rejoice, those who don’t switch off. Nothing gets learned; no ideas are properly discussed.
Such was the case with an interview published in last week’s Sunday Times by the journalist Decca Aitkenhead. Her subject was Professor Jordan Peterson, and, like everything to do with Peterson, the interview has kicked up a fair amount of fuss — principally because it was so mean and hostile.
Peterson has been exceptionally ill of late. Since he withdrew from public life 18 months ago, he has almost died a number of times. He has since recovered, and will next month publish the sequel to his phenomenal bestseller ’12 Rules for Life’.
A fortnight ago, we spoke together publicly for the first time since his illness and discussed a number of themes, ranging from last month’s storming of the Capitol to the meaning of life. Despite the terrible health issues he has had to endure, I was relieved to find Jordan in fine working order. As ever, he was thoughtful, engaged and intricately knowledgeable.
Our conversation lasted just under two hours, but — as is usually the case with Jordan — it left me wanting more, as is the way with any serious discussion. Although hers was an interview with Peterson, rather than a discussion, it is obvious that Aitkenhead, who has spent much of her career at the Guardian, had a very different aim.
In the fallout since the interview, the Peterson family have made public the messages that The Sunday Times sent in an attempt to persuade Peterson to do the interview. These communications talked of the sympathy that the journalist felt towards Peterson after his ill-health. A commissioning editor at the paper wished him well and described how the profile piece “would cover his life and career to date”. The paper promised: “We run longform features, telling the whole story, rather than short flashy headlines.”
The resulting piece was headlined: “Jordan Peterson on his depression, drug dependency and Russian rehab hell” — which while not “short” is hardly the opposite of “flashy”.
The same standards appear to have been applied to the piece’s accuracy. During the interview, Aitkenhead made a number of serious errors — including the claim that Peterson had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was immediately repeated in newspapers around the world, before the Peterson family posted a recording of the interview, showing that it was incorrect. Ordinarily accusing someone of schizophrenia would be a major issue; that it has only formed a part of the discussion surely says something about the relentless hostility of the rest of the interview.
Atikenhead seemed unsympathetic to Peterson’s illness. And a considerable portion of the interview is dedicated to disparaging Mikhaila, who had helped to facilitate the interview. As is clear from the recording, a number of Aitkenhead’s claims — such as that Mikhaila at one point “interrupts sharply… raises her voice and waves her arms” — are what a benevolent editor might call “colour”, but what other people might call “exaggeration”.
And it is the ‘colour’ that Aitkenhead pumps into the piece that is so revealing. For example, we are told that Mikhaila talks “with the zealous, spiky conviction of a President Trump press spokeswoman”. Why — of all the women in the world — might that imprecise example come to mind, other than to try and force a link between Trump and Peterson? Elsewhere, there is little subtlety: “Parallels with Donald Trump come to mind; another unhappy man closed off from his emotions, projecting strong man mythology while hunkered down in a bunker with his family against the world.”
Such a comparison is so inexact as to be wilful. Regardless of whether Donald Trump is “closed off from his emotions” — and that never seems to have been his problem — Peterson’s connection to his own emotions, and indeed his fragility while speaking in public, is one of the traits that makes him most unusual. I have seen large auditoriums hold their breath as they have heard Peterson’s voice teeter on the edge of tears. But that needn’t bother Aitkenhead, who seems more intent on carrying out hits.
That would certainly explain her diagnosis of Peterson’s recent battle with various prescription drugs: “I wonder whether toxic masculinity might have been a culprit.” But how does such a claim bring any value to her piece? Why use the term “toxic masculinity”, as though it is a genuine medical condition which can only be diagnosed by journalists of a certain political persuasion?
The problem with all this is that not only does it reveal an interviewer’s ideological motivations, but, more importantly, it means that the reader doesn’t learn anything of value. Of course, the fact that Jordan Peterson has been ill is of some interest. But it is the least interesting “interesting thing” about him.
Yet the same mistakes continue to be played out over and over again — each time being replicated almost exactly. In her piece, Aitkenhead refers in passing to the now infamous exchange between Peterson and Channel 4’s Cathy Newman: “His explosive confrontation with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News in 2018 resulted in the network calling in security experts after some of his supporters posted abuse and threats online.”
In fact, that exchange was a rare glitch in the media matrix. Channel 4 sent their interviewer in to do the usual, crass and ill-informed hatchet job. She was meant to put words into her interviewee’s mouths, deliberately misrepresent his thoughts and then send him packing, only for Peterson to expertly turn the tables, reducing his interviewer to silence. But as this latest incident demonstrates, Channel 4’s failure seems to have done little to discourage journalists from burnishing their portfolios with hit-jobs.
In the end, what’s most striking about Peterson’s Sunday Times interview is how it proves that a certain type of journalist simply won’t give up. Even after all these years, the attempt to bring Peterson down continues. But by continuing their crusade, his detractors continue to ignore the most interesting thing about him: why it is that Peterson has made such a difference to peoples’ lives.
For that is an unusual phenomenon; unusual on such a scale that you’d think a journalist might care to find out what is going on here. Yet once again, the person sent to do over Peterson was not acting as a journalist, but as an ideological opponent hoping to finally take him out. And once again, the person who came off worse was not the subject of the interview, but its author.
https://unherd.com/2021/02/hit-job-journalism-misses-the-target-again/
*****************************Woke Pentagon Attacks Skepticism and Extremism
It’s good to know the adults are back in charge. Otherwise, we’d lie awake in bed at night, wondering what we’re going to do about those twin scourges of global warming and white supremacy.
Naturally, the architect for this new approach to national defense will be Joe Biden’s man at the Pentagon. As The Washington Times reports, “Across the armed forces, climate change and its ripple effects are taking center stage. … The military’s climate change mitigation efforts certainly did not stop during the Trump administration, but the issue was pushed to the political back burner. Top leadership in the Defense Department rarely spoke out on environmental matters despite mounting concerns behind the scenes that it remain a top priority.
Now, analysts and military insiders say, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has an opening to reshape the climate change debate fundamentally and permanently, perhaps putting an end to any remaining internal skepticism over whether the issue is deserving of time and resources.”
Got that? The Pentagon will no longer tolerate climate skeptics. Because, well, the science is settled.
Austin, 67, is our nation’s first black secretary of defense and therefore the perfect embodiment of the Biden administration’s obsession with race. A West Point graduate and former commander of U.S. Central Command under Barack Obama, Austin retired in 2016 and therefore needed a waiver from Congress to override the law that says a member of our military must wait seven years from active service to take the top civilian post.
“Given the immense and urgent threats and challenges our nation faces, he should be confirmed swiftly,” Biden wrote in a predictably hagiographic Atlantic op-ed. “The fact is, Austin’s many strengths and his intimate knowledge of the Department of Defense and our government are uniquely matched to the challenges and crises we face.”
Austin got his waiver, and he was quickly confirmed on a 93-2 vote in the Senate. Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Utah’s Mike Lee were opposed.
Once confirmed, Austin didn’t waste any time getting to the crux of what ails our nation’s military. As The Hill reports, “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday ordered a U.S. military-wide ‘stand-down’ to address extremism in the ranks, an issue that has long stumped Pentagon leaders but came to the forefront after the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. The Defense Department is still scant on details on Austin’s decision, which came after he met with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and the service secretaries and chiefs on Wednesday morning. Leaders are expected to hold ‘needed discussions’ with subordinates about extremism in the next 60 days, top department spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon.”
The Washington Examiner adds, “The FBI is reportedly investigating 25 individuals at the riot who might be active service members or veterans, according to the Military Times. Almost nothing is known about the status or details of any of the investigations. The only service member who authorities have fingered as part of the siege on the Capitol is Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, an Army reservist.”
Lloyd Austin, said Joe Biden, “is the person we need in this moment.” We’re to assume, then, that this moment demands that our military focus on the non-calamity of climate change and the white supremacist “extremism” that has infected its rotten ranks. If those two initiatives don’t build troop morale, it’s hard to imagine what will.
But here we thought the mission of our Department of Defense was “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security” — you know, like it says right here on its website.
We can only hope that our military readiness doesn’t suffer, and that our failure to focus on war-fighting doesn’t prove provocative.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77524-woke-pentagon-declares-war-on-warmism-and-extremism-2021-02-05
****************************************Religious freedom threatened by the proposed “Equality Act"
You might expect churches and religious schools, of all places, to remain safe from the government’s meddling hands.
Our Constitution does guarantee religious freedom, after all.
But if the “Equality Act” is passed—which President Biden has promised to push for in the first 100 days of his administration—not even churches and religious schools will be safe from the government’s reach.
The deceptively named “Equality Act” would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classes to existing laws banning discrimination in places of public accommodation, employment, housing, and by recipients of federal financial assistance.
And while its name may sound nice to some, the “Equality Act” actually poses devastating and unprecedented threats to religious freedom.
We’ve already seen examples of these threats where similar legislation has been passed at the state and local levels. Now, let’s take a look at what the “Equality Act” would mean for churches and religious schools.
Forcing churches to abandon biblical teaching on human sexuality
In Massachusetts, state officials declared that churches are subject to state public accommodation laws. That meant if churches host public activities – something as simple as a spaghetti supper – they would be forced to open women’s private changing areas and restrooms to biological men. If a church refused, it would face crippling fines and even jail time.
This impacted people like Pastor Esteban Carrasco and House of Destiny Ministries. Esteban and his church wanted to open a women’s shelter for survivors of domestic violence. But according to this interpretation of the law, they would be forced to allow men who identify as female to use the same changing rooms, restrooms, and living facilities as these vulnerable women.
Thankfully, in response to an ADF lawsuit, state officials reversed course and admitted that the First Amendment protects a church’s freedom to operate consistently with its faith even when it hosts community outreach events.
But situations like this will multiply if the “Equality Act” is imposed on the whole country.
Demanding Christian schools act against their beliefs
In South Euclid, Ohio, city officials passed a city ordinance that adds sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression as protected classes under the law.
This deeply concerned The Lyceum, a classical, Catholic school, so it spoke out against the ordinance from the very beginning. Still, the city voted to pass it.
The Lyceum operates according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, including its beliefs on human sexuality and marriage – and it asks its employees to do the same. It also asks its students to abide by the school’s faith-based conduct policies while the student attends The Lyceum.
The Lyceum was concerned that the ordinance could force it to employ people whose actions conflict with the school’s beliefs, and might force the school to abandon its faith-based standards for student conduct. The Lyceum reached out to the city multiple times to find out if it would face substantial fines and even jail time for its administration if it operates according to its religious beliefs. But the city refused to say.
That’s why ADF filed a lawsuit on behalf of The Lyceum.
Thankfully, in response to the lawsuit, the city admitted that The Lyceum has the right to hire employees that share its beliefs. But the school would likely not have that same freedom if the “Equality Act” becomes the law of the land.
The “Equality Act” also threatens religious colleges and universities, forbidding college students from using their federal tuition assistance at schools that “discriminate” on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. That means any Christian university that has a code of conduct prohibiting sex outside of marriage or that declines to let biological males compete on women’s sports teams could lose federal student aid.
While you might expect churches and Christian schools to be safe from such government overreach, experience tells us that this will not be the case if the “Equality Act” is made law.
The bottom line is that our laws must respect freedom and promote justice for every citizen, no matter who they are. But that is not what the “Equality Act” does. Instead, it threatens Americans’ fundamental liberties. And that is something no American should stand for.
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When the Hateful Think They Are the Virtuous
This week, Virginia Heffernan, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, unleashed the most perverse column in recent memory. The title: “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?”
Heffernan wasn’t lamenting neighbors who had tagged her house with pro-Trump graffiti, or who had participated in the Jan. 6 riots, or who had even held an election watch party and turned the music up too loud.
No, Heffernan was lamenting the travails of living next door to Trump supporters … who had cleared her driveway of snow.
Heffernan writes, “Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway … just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.” This simple act launched Heffernan into a journey of angst and rage.
“How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?” she laments. “I realize I owe them thanks—and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro—but how much thanks?”
In order to justify the answer she wants to give—as little thanks as possible, because, after all, these are Evil Trumpites—Heffernan proceeds to speculate as to her neighbors’ motives: Perhaps they only cleared her driveway because she and they were white.
Or perhaps this whole event was a reminder that members of evil groups sometimes do good—she compares them to the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and the Nazis.
If she treats her neighbors with too much decency, she reminds herself, that might make her like an upper-middle-class family from France who collaborated with the Nazis and lamented the Nazis’ defeat because of their commitment to being “polite.”
Heffernan seethes with the agony of cognitive dissonance. “My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans,” she writes. “They kept him in business with their support. But the plowing.”
In the end, Heffernan’s solution is to be nice—but not that nice. She will offer a “wave and a thanks,” but she is “not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.”
She’s unwilling to give her neighbors “absolution,” ignoring the fact that they have not asked for absolution, nor do they require absolution for the great sin of voting differently and clearing her driveway of snow.
“Free driveway work, as nice as it is,” Heffernan states, “is just not the same currency as justice and truth.”
The only way she’ll be able to truly treat her neighbors decently is if they recognize “the truth about the Trump administration” and work “for justice for all those whom the administration harmed.” Then, she’ll be decent to her neighbors.
Heffernan’s neighbors should immediately pile as much snow as humanly possible back onto her driveway, hose it off, and let it freeze.
The nasty snootiness Heffernan evidences is all too common these days. Heffernan obviously judges her neighbors not on the basis of what she knows about them but on stereotypes she holds about all Trump voters.
When faced with the reality that those who disagree with her can be nice and decent people, she simply dismisses the possibility altogether, justifying her own viciousness by referencing their supposedly radical political beliefs. Which, of course, makes her the villainess in this particular morality play.
But she’s too blind to see it. These days, tens of millions of Americans are. And so, the social fabric continues to shred, all in the name of depraved, unearned moral superiority.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/02/11/when-the-hateful-think-they-are-the-virtuous-trumpites
***************************************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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9 February, 2021
A Tsunami of Hate
There is one party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent.
Everybody agrees that our country is in crisis – and agrees that it is the worst crisis since the Civil War. But at the same time, we tell ourselves a comforting tale about the source of the crisis that perpetuates the problem instead of providing a path to ending it. We say our politics are “divisive” and talk about “unity and healing” as though that would miraculously be achieved if everybody stopped … what? Disagreeing? All politics is divisive. That’s the healthy basis of our constitutional order: the freedom to disagree. To suppress disagreement, to outlaw it - as many Democrats and their Big Tech and media allies are demanding these days - is to end democracy as we know it.
The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result – something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 - is now “insurrection” and “domestic terrorism,” or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed.
You can’t have a democracy if this is the attitude of a party that controls all three branches of government, is enabled by a corrupt and compliant media, and is determined not just to defeat, but to humiliate, destroy and expunge from the record an ex-president who is supported by a greater segment of the American electorate than any American leader before him.
There is Democrat-sponsored legislation pending that would prevent any public building or artifact, even a “bench” from being named after the 45th president of the United States. There is a farcical witch-trial to impeach the same villain even though he has left office and is now a private citizen. There is even Democrat talk of stripping Trump of his pension, despite the fact that he gave his entire $1.6 million salary as president to the American people - something no president before him has done. If ever there was a public lynching, short of stringing the victim from the nearest tree – and there are no lack of leftwing calls for that – the Democrats’ unrelentingly vindictive assault on the defeated Donald Trump down to the last petty detail is it.
But what is in effect a total war is not merely a war to cancel Donald Trump. If it were, it would be reprehensible enough, but not a threat to the nation itself. This demonic hate directed by the Democrat Party towards Trump is also hate for the 75 million Americans who voted for him. And there is no shortage of reminders of that. Ordinary Americans in all walks of life who happen to think that Trump’s presidency – which included record employment and record economic growth, delivered benefits for all Americans, particularly American minorities, secured America’s borders, defeated America’s terrorist enemies and led to an unprecedented reconciliation between Arab nations and the State of Israel – was a worthy achievement are treated as social pariahs, have their careers destroyed and (shades of the Kremlin) are regarded as mentally unfit and in need of deprogramming.
In a March 2020 interview with Axios, James Clyburn – the third ranking Democrat in the House and the political figure most responsible for Biden’s primary victory - raised the specter of Hitler when speaking about Trump, calling the president a racist and likening modern-day America to Germany during the Nazi Party’s rise to power. “I used to wonder how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist,” said Clyburn. “But with each passing day, I’m beginning to understand how. And that’s why I’m trying to sound the alarm.”
A Tsunami of Hate – not “divisiveness” – is the root cause of our political crisis and the most existential threat we have faced since the war to end slavery.
The fact that the threat posed by the Democrats’ Tsunami of Hate is not just to Trump and his supporters, but to America itself, was evident in one of Biden’s first directives as president, declaring that a war on America’s “systemic racism” would be a priority of his administration: “The fact is systemic racism touches every facet of American life.”
This is one of the Big Lies that have become articles of faith for Democrats, and is easily refuted. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed “systemic racism.” Here is the Wikipedia description of the law:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations...
If systemic racism or institutional racism were a serious problem in America – let alone touched “every facet of American life,” - as Biden says, what do you think would happen? Assume, as Biden and woke Democrats generally seem to think that all white people are racists, there are thousands of black attorneys, attorneys general, prosecutors, judges, legislators and occupiers of the highest seats of government. If there was a scintilla of truth in this statement there would be thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lawsuits filed under the Civil Rights Act. There are no such lawsuits. The claim that “systemic racism touches every facet of American life” is itself a racist lie, whose evident target is white people, since according to the woke, “people of color” can’t be racist.
Not surprisingly, one of Biden’s first week initiatives was a systemically racist plan to provide financial assistance to small businesses whose owners were black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American. Only whites were excluded. But Asian Americans as an ethnic group have higher incomes than white Americans. So what rationale for this policy is there but anti-white racism?
How virulent is the anti-white and anti-American racism of the Democrat Party? Consider this unhinged but also unchallenged statement by Vice President Kamala Harris defending the Black Lives Matters rioters whose “protests” caused billions in property damage, led to 25 deaths and injured 2000 police officers in the summer of 2020: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human… It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets [to protest]. And I support them.”
In other words, the 44th president of the United States, the “most admired man in America” for over a decade wasn’t treated as “fully human,” or Martin Luther King – the only American with a national holiday in his honor (courtesy of President Ronald Reagan). This lunatic hatred of white America is now not only acceptable in the Democrat Party but the hateful creed of its leaders.
To be fair, there are two main areas of systemic racism in America today, but both are supported and enforced by the Democrat Party which is why they exist. The first is the systemic racism that traps inner city children – mainly ethnic minorities – in inferior schools that for fifty years and more have failed to provide 80 percent of them with the skills that are necessary to succeed. Every year 40% of inner city children drop out of school without graduating, and 40% of those who do, are functionally illiterate. The Democrat teacher unions – the same which went on strike during the pandemic with full pay at the expense of children who could not afford to miss school – exert absolute control over these school systems and have stifled all attempts at reforms. They are unalterably opposed to every alternative to their racist policies from charter schools to vouchers give inner city kids the same privilege as their middle-class counterparts, which would allow their parents to enroll them in schools that will teach them.
The other nationwide systemic racism is affirmative action programs which discriminate against all ethnic groups but those designated “oppressed” – a convenient leftist fiction used to justify all manner of injustice. If you’re black or Pacific Islander or Hispanic, go to the head of the line for a job, a promotion, a place at Harvard, a coveted training position to become a surgeon or other medical specialist. If you’re white or an ethnic minority whose community supports educational values and scores well on exams, like Asians, forget that place at Harvard, you’re screwed.
How racist is that? And how readily is this racism supported by a president and an administration, which like our most dedicated foreign enemies thinks America is a nation of slavers and racist oppressors, while at the same time our borders are under siege by black, brown and Asian minorities desperate to become citizens of the most tolerant, inclusive and egalitarian society on earth.
America will not be healed until the Democrat Party returns to its senses, repudiates its current racist attitudes, and stops demonizing its opponents as what Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called “enemies of the state.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/tsunami-hate-david-horowitz/
***********************************SCOTUS Says California Can't Completely Ban Indoor Worship Services
The Supreme Court is telling California it can’t enforce a ban on indoor church services because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The high court issued orders late Friday in two cases where churches had sued over coronavirus-related restrictions in the state.
The high court said that for now, California can’t ban indoor worship in areas where virus cases are surging, but it can cap indoor services at 25% of a building’s capacity. The justices also declined to stop the state from barring singing and chanting at services.
Predictably, the three liberal justices dissented.
This is a start but there is a long way to go. Save for a couple of SCOTUS interventions, the liberal war on religion in the name of COVID-19 has gone on pretty much unchecked.
The singing thing is beyond petty and proof positive that this really is about exercising control rather than public health. In places where indoor worship is allowed — my parish here in Tucson included — social distancing is being practiced and masks are being worn. Despite these precautions, we’re supposed to believe that the virus is going to develop super powers and bust through the masks while the one-quarter capacity congregation is belting out How Great Thou Art.
Let the people congregate and pray. The world needs it.
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Biden Reinstitutes 'Catch and Release' Along Texas-Mexico Border, Inviting Chaos and Disaster
Texas law enforcement authorities said that, with little fanfare, the Biden administration has reimposed the “catch and release” policy of releasing illegal aliens into the United States while they await their immigration proceedings.
The U.S. Customs and Border protection told local authorities of the coming changes last week.
Before being released, each illegal must be tested for the coronavirus. Charity organizations and illegal immigration advocates are scrambling to try and test the border-jumpers as quickly as possible so they can be released into their new homes.
Border Report:
McAllen Mayor Jim Darling on Tuesday told Border Report that city officials met with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, who told them last week that family units — undocumented migrants traveling with children who cross into South Texas — are now being paroled into the United States as they await their asylum proceedings. This is what occurred during previous border security apprehensions known as “catch and release,” when migrants were allowed to remain in the United States during their immigration proceedings however many years that may take.
Biden on Tuesday also ordered a top-to-bottom review of the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” by his newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. Nearly 70,000 migrants seeking asylum since 2019 have been forced to remain in Mexico or other countries during their U.S. immigration hearing process under MPP.
Ending the MPP program invites unmitigated disaster. The migrant wave is building across the region as hope is kindled that Joe Biden will not only allow them into the United States but grant them amnesty and give them green cards to work.
There will be no order to the migration. U.S. authorities won’t be able to control it. Once they start coming, they’re not going to stop unless someone keeps them from coming. That’s what the MPP policy accomplished.
Ending it would result in chaos:
Darling said that adult migrants traveling with children who were apprehended illegally crossing the Rio Grande into South Texas were being released by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the bus station in downtown McAllen.
After release, city officials are immediately taking the migrants across the street to the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley’s Humanitarian Respite Center, where they are receiving a free COVID-19 test. Once cleared by the tests, the migrants are boarding buses bound for cities elsewhere with the promise of appearing for scheduled U.S. immigration court hearings.
“They are doing testing at the Respite Center before they get on buses,” Darling said. “We also have reached out to Greyhound and are working to get more buses because we expect a jump in numbers.”
The Biden administration is telling people to wait. A lot of good that will do. Trump’s deals with Mexico and Honduras are the only things standing in the way of a humanitarian disaster. Biden risks derailing his immigration plan before it even starts if he looks to end those deals.
Maintaining those agreements won’t sit well with his radical base that’s already celebrating the end of several Trump immigration policies. They won’t stop until the U.S. borders are imaginary lines on a map with no meaning and no purpose.
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Australia: Leftist olive branch to Christian voters
OPPOSITION leader Anthony Albanese will seek to offer an olive branch to religious voters who turned their back on Labor in 2019, saying “respect of their views” and potentially conscience votes on some contentious issues would be a part of a Labor Government led by him.
Mitochondrial donation, a cutting edge treatment for a rare disease also known as “three-person IVF”, would be an example of where conscience votes could be offered.
Labor’s election post-mortem found religious voters and Christians in particular had been turned off the party, with party insiders having said “they were scared of us”.
In the wake of the review, Labor members including Deputy Leader Richard Marles began holding began holding roundtables with religious organisations, but the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions curtailed much of this.
Mr Albanese told The Courier-Mail that he had continued to meet with leaders of different communities, including Catholic, Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches.
“People are looking for respect and for respect of their views,” he said. “I’m someone who, I don’t try to go out there and put my views out there. But I was Catholic raised and engaged there. “But I also engage with religious leaders across the board.”
He said he was support of conscience votes on appropriate issues. “I’ve been a strong supporter of conscience votes and have argued that consistently within the Labor Party and publicly for a long period of time,” Mr Albanese said.
The Mitochondrial donation was an example of where he would support a conscience vote for the Labor Party. Mitochondrial disease is a potentially fatal genetic disease in children which robs the body’s cells of energy.
Mitochondrial donation is an assisted reproduction treatment which uses DNA from three people, with donated eggs, to prevent parents transmitting the disease to their children.
Health Minister Greg Hunt told the Coalition party room last week that a laws to legalise the process would be coming up in the parliament and they would be allowed a conscience vote on the issue.
Mr Albanese said he too believed it was an issue that should be appropriately dealt with through a conscience vote.
The UK in 2015 became the first country to legalise the process.
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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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8 February, 2021
We must abandon expectations of sexual fidelity
Since the arrival of the contraceptive pill, expectations of sexual relationships have steadily changed. We now see frequent mentions of WAGs (wives and girlfriends) as if the two were equivalent. And they largely are. And for both types of relationship, breakdowns are common. Some WAGs stay together for less than a year and others last for many years.
The notable thing is that permanence of any relationship is always uncertain. Couples who have been together for most of their lives can still split up.
So what is going on and what can we do about it? The first thing to say is that the splitups are often very painful to at least one of the partners involved. So the problem is an urgent one. Must we give one-another so much pain?
I think the first thing to acknowledge is that splitups will always happen so we have to expect them and arrive at the best way of dealing with them.
My solution is not necessarily easy but I believe that the solution is tolerance. It is absurd to blame one another for infidelity if you accept that infidelity is a normal part of life -- which it clearly is. At age 77 I have had plenty of breakups in my times and what I do is quite the opposite of blaming the partner concerned. I say: "I have clearly not been meeting your needs so I don't blame you at all for our breakup. You must meet your needs and I am sorry that I was not doing that. I hope we can at least remain friends".
I realize that for most people that reaction will sound unnatural and I am perhaps unusually blessed by being able to see points of view other than my own. But it works a treat. What exactly you say does not matter. The fact that you remain peaceful and unaccusing is the key.
Perhaps some evidence of that from my own life may be that I have had four marriages and divorces without suffering any significant financial penalty from the divorces. That is pretty striking, I think.
It is not entirely to my credit. I actually think it is partly because I marry nice women. But in this day and age when women work, a separation may not create a great need to seek money from an ex-partner. Demands for money are often a form of anger and if the anger is absent both parties may be content simply to go their own way financially. Continuing friendship can cause both parties to consider the financial welfare of the other
That will of course sound crazy blue-sky talk to many readers here but if one has a reasonably kindly nature it can work. One does not have to be totally unselfish but a considrable degree of unselfishness will be a big help. Selfishness is normally self-defeating in any case.
And the big bonus from a peaceful and friendly approach to a breakup is that the other party is there to help you cope with the new circumstances. I have had two breakups in my life that were very painfulto me but in both cases the ladies concerned continued to have friendly contact with me and so did not make me feel deserted and alone. Friendship is in any case an important part of a good relationship so not losing that part of it is a big part of being able to adjust well to the new reality.
I don't want to make this post an exercise in self-congratulation but showing that a theory works well in practice tends to be persuasive so let me give a little detail of my life in relationships.
I have never been good-looking but I have nonetheless ended up in bed with a lot of women. I have often said that I am attractive to only about 2% of women -- but that is a lot of women. So when I have a breakup I have usually been able to avoid much pain by going on to a new woman. A new love is undoubtedly the best cure for a broken heart.
But there were two long-term relationships that DID cause me much pain when they ended. One was the ending of a 10-year marriage when I was 49 and the other was the ending of a 14 year relationship about a year ago when I was 76. Both relationships had been very satisfactory to me and I had given them unreserved committment -- so they were not easily replaced.
But to skip to the conclusion, I will be dining with the first lady mentioned tonight and the other lady tomorrow night. I have succeeded in keeping warm friendships alive despite substantial changes in our circumstances. At my age, I am lucky just to be alive so I am in an advanced state of decreptitude which makes it unlikely that I will be able to form any new relationship. But I still have excellent emotional support from the two most special ladies in my life so I am not suffering at all and still enjoy a lot of my life. With the right approach, one can sometimes turn a disaster into an asset.
I hope that my stories will give hope and guidance to someone else but, if not, I am still convinced that we must expect and accept changes in our relationships. Permanence is nice but it is unreasonable to expect it. When a person changes partners we must see it as natural and not to be condemned -- JR.
UPDATE
A reader has written that my approach above abandons all morality and ethics in relationships. I can see his point. There is one very common circumstance wherein considerations of ethics intrude: Where promises have been made which get broken. That is clearly distressing and may lead to a justified claim of an ethical lapse.
But biology is stronger than ethics and I think we have to back the strong horse. The most realistic way of looking at it is to say that promises made at one point in time refer only to that point in time. If circumstances and situations change -- as they do -- the promises cease to be binding.
If a man (for instance) meets an available woman who suits him in various ways much better than his wife does, the outcome is virtually foreordained. The instinctive wish for a different partner can be so strong that much will be sacrificed in order to achieve it. The change is inevitable and the only issue is how to deal with it constructively. Railing at the change is a mug's game. Accusations will mainly tend to jeopardize the friendship.
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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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7 February, 2021
Crazy b*tch doubles down on her claims of near-death experience in Capitol riot and accuses skeptics of 'minimizing the experiences of survivors' - even though she was in a different building
AOC Is Still the Biggest Lunatic in Congress
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has slammed critics who accuse her of exaggerating her experiences in the riot at the U.S. Capitol, saying they are 'minimizing the experiences of survivors.'
Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, appeared on CBS This Morning on Friday to defend her account of the January 6 riot and slam those who suggested she's making a 'mountain out of a molehill'.
The controversy has spanned the week, after Ocasio-Cortez described her stark terror and fear of death in an Instagram Live video on Monday, while critics, including Republicans in the House, pointed out that she was in the Capitol's office complex during the attack, not in the domed Capitol Building building itself.
'You know, so many survivors fear being publicly doubted. But the fact of the matter is, is that the account is accurate,' she said in the interview.
'And you know, when it comes to minimizing the experiences of survivors, that is extremely damaging as well,' Ocasio-Cortez added.
'I think it's unfortunately kind of the spring to deny and to politicize our accounts with something that I sat with,' she said.
'And it was a big reason why, you know, on top of making sure that we could clear our story due to security concerns, there's also a reason why I sat on my story, as well,' the congresswoman continued.
Democrat Rep. Jason Crow appeared along side of her in support, calling attempts to cast doubt on their account of the assault 'horrific.'
'There's no other way to describe it. This re-victimization, this minimization of survivors. This is a big part of the problem, and it has to stop,' he said.
It comes after Ocasio-Cortez spoke on the House floor Thursday night in a speech dedicated to her 'lived experience' of the riot.
'Sadly, less than 29 days later, with little to no accountability for the bloodshed and trauma of the 6th, some are already demanding that we move on,' Ocasio-Cortez said. 'Or worse, attempting to minimize, discredit or belittle the accounts of survivors.'
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Lawyers Are Facing Reprisal for Representing Trump. This Is Un-American
“So … you represented Trump?” That question is unfairly haunting a number of the former president’s lawyers.
Because of his legal counsel to former President Donald Trump, constitutional scholar and law professor John Eastman—the former dean of the law school no less—was pushed out of Chapman University, where he spent his entire, very distinguished academic career.
The same thing happened to Cleta Mitchell, a well-known and highly respected Washington, D.C. lawyer who had practiced with Foley and Lardner for decades.
Now, Michigan lawyers Greg Rohl, Scott Hagerstrom, and Stefanie Junttila, who represented the Trump campaign in election litigation in the state, are being unfairly and unjustly targeted for disbarment by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and state Attorney General Dana Nessel.
These lawyers find themselves in the all-too-familiar position today of being punished for carrying out their professional duties to the best of their abilities—as required by the codes of conduct that govern all attorneys—by representing a client who is politically unpopular with those in power.
This is not just wrong, but un-American—something we don’t say lightly. This country is fundamentally based on the rule of law, which depends on protecting the ability and independence of lawyers to take unpopular clients and unpopular cases, something that has been done by brave, principled lawyers throughout our nation’s history.
This is one of those lessons that people on both sides of the political aisle selectively defend and selectively forget.
Unfortunately, we’ve been here before.
Hillary Clinton was attacked for defending a child rapist as a court-appointed attorney. Lawyers who represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay were also attacked for defending terrorists.
Some progressives deride prosecutors for enforcing laws they view as unjust, and some conservatives deride defense attorneys for defending dangerous or unsavory individuals charged with committing heinous crimes. And just about everyone derides divorce lawyers.
But we are, as John Adams said, a nation of laws and not of men. That means that we insulate our justice system from the fickle whims of human nature with processes and procedures. These are designed to minimize human error and to diminish the influence of the court of public opinion.
The independence of lawyers is one of the most important parts of that system. Adams himself put his famous line into practice when, in 1770, he defended British soldiers accused of killing American colonists during the Boston Massacre. A more unpopular representation could hardly have been imagined, but Adams risked his reputation and career because he believed in the rule of law.
The right to counsel is one of the most precious rights we have because it is essential to an individual’s ability to assert any other right. As distinguished law professor Geoffrey Hazard Jr. once said, the adversarial system “stands with freedom of speech and the right of assembly as a pillar of our constitutional system.”
Harassing or punishing lawyers who represent unpopular clients or take unpopular cases undermines the rule of law.
That is exactly what the governor and attorney general of Michigan are trying to do by calling for the disbarment of several of Trump’s lawyers, who did exactly what rule 1.3 of the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct directs them to do, which is practice “zeal in advocacy upon the client’s behalf.”
They claim that the lawyers should be disbarred because they “undermine[d] the faith of the public in the legitimacy of the recent presidential election, and lent credence to untruths that led to violence and unrest.”
But a commitment to the rule of law separates a lawyer from the implications of the cases he undertakes. If not, then Clinton “protected a child rapist,” and Guantanamo defense lawyers “undermined our national security and tried to free terrorists.”
Nonsense. In each of these cases, the lawyers upheld the rule of law by playing their proper role in the process. The same goes for Trump’s lawyers. They made legal claims under applicable laws that were reviewed by the courts, which is just as it should be.
That is not only an absurd claim but a dangerous one. Under that bizarre theory, all of the lawyers who represented Al Gore in 2000 in his election contest should have been disbarred.
So too the lawyers who represented Democratic congressional candidate Dan McCready in North Carolina in 2018 in an election contest that the state’s Board of Election overturned due to absentee ballot fraud.
And Democrat lawyer Marc Elias should also be disbarred for claiming that voting machines produced incorrect results that favored Republican Claudia Tenney in the race for New York’s 22nd District.
When lawyers violate their ethical obligations by, for example, filing a meritless lawsuit, the courts already have rules and procedures to deal with them. The justice system is designed to do that. But taking on an unsavory client or a client that state officials don’t like for partisan reasons does not amount to litigating in an unethical manner.
When people intentionally blur that line, as Whitmer is doing, they undermine the rule of law, the fair administration of justice, and access to the protections of our legal system.
Elections are decided at the ballot box and, in some cases, issues arising from an election and potential recounts may require legal resolution. Punishing the lawyers who represent candidates and their campaigns in these cases is not only wrong, it is disgraceful.
No matter which candidates you supported in the last election, no matter which political party you believe represents your points of view on how this country should be governed, everyone should agree that the retribution, reprisals, and payback being imposed on lawyers involved in the 2020 election have no place in our civil society.
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Ideological Imperialism Is Leading to a Bad End
When it was learned in 2016 that Russia may have hacked the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and passed the fruits on to WikiLeaks to aid candidate Donald Trump, mighty was the outrage of the American establishment.
If Russia's security services filched those emails, and a troll farm in Saint Petersburg sent tweets and texts to stir up rancor in our politics, it was said, this was an attack on American democracy and its most sacred of rituals -- the elections by which we chose our leaders.
Some called it an "act of war." Others compared it to Pearl Harbor. Almost all agreed it was intolerable interference in the internal affairs of the United States which called forth both condemnation and retribution.
Yet, when it comes to interfering in the affairs of other nations, how sinless, how blameless, are we Americans?
During the Cold War, the United States regularly dumped over regimes we believed imperiled our cause -- Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in the 1960s. After the Cold War, the United States was a major mover in the "color revolutions" that changed regimes in Ukraine and Georgia.
According to Victoria Nuland, then of the State Department, now back again, $5 billion was pumped in to effect the overthrow of the democratically elected pro-Russian regime in Kiev and its replacement by a pro-American one.
This was the triggering event that caused Vladimir Putin to annex Crimea to secure his country's Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol.
Consider the reaction in this capital to the arrest and imprisonment of dissident Alexei Navalny, following his return from Germany, where he had been treated for chemical poisoning, allegedly by Putin's security services.
In an editorial, "Nothing But a Poisoner," The Washington Post thundered: "Western governments should be doing what they can to help this unprecedented challenge to Mr. Putin's autocracy survive and grow... "Mr. Putin has dedicated himself to exploiting the weaknesses in democratic systems. Now is the time to return the favor."
Consider what the Post is calling for here:
The U.S. and NATO nations should openly side with protesters in Russia's cities whose goal is the overthrow of Putin and of the internationally recognized government of Russia.
How, one wonders, would Americans react if Putin openly urged worldwide support for the "Stop the Steal" mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election?
Though Americans are divided over racial, cultural, social and moral issues, liberal interventionists still talk of our "universal values" that represent the future toward which all nations should aspire. Among these are the values of democracy as practiced in the United States.
These are the standards by which other nations are to be judged. And nations that do not conform to these standards are candidates for U.S. interference in their affairs. Ours is an ideological imperialism of a rare order.
Where did we Americans acquire the right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations -- be they autocracies, monarchies or republics -- that do not threaten or attack us?
When we have intervened in these nations militarily, disaster has most often been the result. It was partly because the regimes of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen did not comport to our ideas of good governance that we went in militarily to change them. Result: millions of dead, wounded and displaced Arabs and Muslims all across the Middle East. A historic calamity.
When the Arab Spring arose, we embraced it. The democratic revolution was here! And what happened in the largest Arab nation that responded as we insisted, Egypt?
An ally of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, was ousted. The Muslim Brotherhood was voted into power. It was replaced a year later by a new general, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, a man more ruthless than Mubarak.
This week, the generals in Myanmar (Burma) ousted the civilian leadership of the country and assumed full power. President Joe Biden reacted reflexively, calling it a "direct assault on the country's transition to democracy. In a democracy," said Biden, "force should never seek to override the will of the people or attempt to erase the outcome of a credible election."
Derek Mitchell of the National Democratic Institute, a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy, explained: "Democracy is one of the pillars of the Biden Administration's foreign policy agenda. They recognize they have to address this pretty seriously. The question is what to do."
Actually, the larger question, the basic question is why the internal affairs of Burma, a nation 10,000 miles from the United States, are the business of the United States.
The post-Cold War world, where America stood in moral judgment of the democracy credentials of all other nations, and acted against those that did not sufficiently conform, is coming to an end.
And if we do not give up this ideological imperialism, that end, especially where Russia and China are concerned, could come sudden and soon.
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Newsflash to the ACLU: Boys Are Different Than Girls
In a series of tweets posted on February 3, the ACLU alleged that “trans girls are girls” and that “the idea of sex being rooted in biology is a ‘myth.’” Yes, the ACLU affirmed, “Biological sex and gender are not binaries,” and, “Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports.”
Accordingly, the only reason to deny a trans-identified student the right to play on the sports’ team of his or her choice is “pure discrimination.”
To this I say – with love and compassion to these young people who struggle with their gender identity – this is a lot of bunk.
Of course boys are different than girls.
Of course there are biological distinctions.
Of course males, on average, have biological advantages over females when it comes to strength, size and speed.
That’s why we have girls’ leagues and boys’ leagues, from little league through college through professional sports.
That’s why we have men’s and women’s competition in the Olympics, and that why we have men’s and women’s world records.
That’s why the fastest mile run by a high school male was 3.53.43 (by Alan Webb in 2001) while the fastest mile run by a high school female was 4.33.87 (by Katelyn Tuohy in 2018). What an extraordinary gap between the sexes.
That’s why a 17-year-old male cleared 19 feet in the pole vault while the world record for a female of any age stands at a little over 16 feet 5 inches.
That’s why there is no comparison in weightlifting records between men and women as “men’s ability to produce maximal force and thus levels of limit strength are much greater than those exhibited in women.”
This holds true whether we’re dealing with 16-year-olds or 26-year-olds. Males are different than females and, when it comes to athletic competition, they have distinct advantages over women.
But of course that’s the case.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know all this. You just need common sense. Or do you actually think that an All-Star team from the WNBA could compete with a team of the worst players in the NBA?
Someone might say, “But over a period of time, when a transwoman has been on hormone treatments for a period of years, those advantages disappear.”
Actually, those advantages might lessen, but they do not all disappear unless you think that a 6'8" male who identifies as female will lose five inches in height after years of hormone therapy. Or unless you think that a male’s additional body and muscle mass will completely vanish with enough hormones (especially if that person is an athlete who continues to exercise).
Last December, the British Journal of Sports Medicine released a major study on the “effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen: implications for sporting organisations and legislators.”
What were the results? “Prior to gender affirming hormones, transwomen [meaning biological males who identify as females] performed 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in 1 min and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than their female counterparts. After 2 years of taking feminising hormones, the push-up and sit-up differences disappeared but transwomen were still 12% faster. Prior to gender affirming hormones, transmen [meaning biological females who identify as males] performed 43% fewer push-ups and ran 1.5 miles 15% slower than their male counterparts. After 1 year of taking masculinising hormones, there was no longer a difference in push-ups or run times, and the number of sit-ups performed in 1 min by transmen exceeded the average performance of their male counterparts.”
Based on these findings, the study questioned whether the Olympics’ standard of a one-year waiting period for a trans-identified athlete was sufficient.
But this is actually a moot point when it comes to children’s sports, since many, if not most, of the students in question are not taking hormonal drugs. In other words, a “transgirl” has all the physical advantages of a male, which is why boys who competed poorly against other boys are now coming in first when competing against girls.
As I and others have repeated for years, this is not a question of discrimination. It is a question of fairness.
In the words of a high-school senior who missed out on her chance to go to the state track finals because she was beaten by two biological boys, “It’s coming down to common sense and realizing that men are physically superior to women. That’s just science. It’s not subjective. It’s objective.”
As she said in a viral video, “When I’m at the start of the race, when I’m lining up and getting into my blocks, everyone already knows the outcome. Those two athletes are going to come one and two and everyone knows it.”
That’s because they are biological males running against biological females. Boys are simply different than girls.
That’s why a 2017 study conducted by researchers in the Molecular Genetics Department of the Weizmann Institute discovered that of the 20,000 genes analyzed, “6,500 of them are expressed differently in men and women in at least one of the body's tissues.”
To say this is not to deny the existence of intersex individuals who have biological or chromosomal abnormalities. Nor is it to minimize the internal struggles experienced by many who identify as transgender.
But it is to say that biology is not bigotry and that it is outright discrimination against women and girls to force them to compete against biological males.
That’s a simple fact of life whether the ACLU likes it or not.
***************************************
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)
*****************************************
5 February, 2021
Schools Have Responsibility to Let Biological Males in Girls Sports If They’re Trans, Biden Pick for Education Secretary Says
President Joe Biden’s pick for Education Department secretary said Wednesday that schools have a responsibility to let biological males participate in girls sports if they identify as transgender.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned Miguel Cardona, the current Connecticut education commissioner, Wednesday on whether Cardona supports “boys running in girls track meets.”
dailycallerlogo
“If confirmed, it’s my responsibility and privilege to make sure that we are following the civil rights of all students, and that includes activities that they may engage in in high school or in athletics,” Cardona said.
“I think that it is critically important that education systems and educators respect the rights of all students, including students who are transgender, and that they are afforded the opportunities that every other student has to participate in extracurricular activities,” he said.
Paul asked Cardona whether it bothered him that “girls are being pushed out” of their own sports, telling Cardona that allowing biological males in girls sports would “completely destroy girls athletics.”
“I recognize and appreciate the concerns and frustrations that are expressed,” Cardona said, adding that he has had conversations with families who felt similarly to Paul.
“I understand this is a challenge, and I look forward to working with you and others,” he added, as Paul interrupted him to ask: “Do you think it’s fair to have boys running in the girls track meet?”
“I think it’s the legal responsibility of schools to provide opportunities for students to participate in activities, and this includes students who are transgender,” he said.
Biden signed an executive order in January that sets the stage for rolling out transgender protections—a move that critics protested through the hashtag “Biden erased women.”
“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” Biden’s executive order said, calling for “all persons” to receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.
“It is the policy of my Administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation,” the executive order continued. “It is also the policy of my Administration to address overlapping forms of discrimination.”
The order gives agency heads the authority to carry out these concepts by considering “whether to revise, suspend, or rescind such agency actions, or promulgate new agency actions” in order to comply with the policies set forth in the order.
Biden had previously pledged a number of times to sign the Equality Act, which would force public schools to allow biological males who identify as transgender girls into female athletics.
“President Biden’s executive order has directed federal agencies to eviscerate legal protection for women and roll back nearly 50 years of gains for women,” Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Christiana Holcomb told The Daily Caller News Foundation in January. “We’re going to have to wait and see how each agency either revokes current protection for women based on their sex or issues new policy guidance that allows biological males to, for example, compete in women’s sports.
“We’re going to see impact in the sports context, but far beyond that as well,” she added. “Especially in health care and women’s shelters, and restrooms and locker rooms. In fact, the executive order itself specifically called out school restrooms, locker rooms, and sports competitions. So we know that these things are coming. It’s a really scary prospect for the future of women’s sport.”
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The Quest for Unity
President Joe Biden in his inauguration speech called for “unity,” promising he’d be the president for all Americans, even the ones who didn’t vote for him. I was reminded of the words of the noted philosopher Inigo Montoya (from “The Princess Bride”) to his associate, Vizzini. The criminal mastermind Vizzini kept using the word “inconceivable” over and over until Montoya finally replied, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
Apparently, unity doesn’t mean the same thing to Biden’s supporters or his party. Since then, we’ve heard nothing but what the Left wants to do to Republicans who supported President Donald Trump. I’m not feeling the love!
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC the Republican Party is filled with white supremacist sympathizers, racists, misogynists, and insurrectionists who nearly killed her, don’t you know. And “they” are not suffering any consequences for their behavior, she complains.
John Brennan, the former head of the CIA, told MSNBC that the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” is much more dangerous than foreign terrorists. There are more of us than the foreign terror groups and we have “weapons” to carry out deadly attacks, he said, referring to the storming of the Capitol.
CNN’s Don Lemon likewise called Republicans domestic terrorists who frighten him more than foreign terrorists. He cites online radicalization, demonization of the “enemy” (anyone who disagrees with the Left) to justify their violence, and devotion to a “cult leader.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed, “The enemy is within the House of Representatives.” She’s frightened by the evil Republicans. She needs more money to protect Democrats from the Republicans.
I’m only scratching the surface of the insane, inflammatory rhetoric coming from leftists. They want Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton impeached because they asked questions about possible voter fraud. How dare they?!
We’ve seen social media partnering with mainstream media to eliminate any point of view that doesn’t support the Left’s cause. Now that Biden has won, they feel free to completely block anyone they want. Having the “wrong” opinion will get you canceled. Having worked for the Trump administration could cause you to never be able to find a job to provide for your family.
The First Amendment will only apply to those who have the “correct” opinions. The Second Amendment will be next in line to eliminate. It happens whenever socialism takes power. Communism is not far behind. Hello 1984!
Everyone condemned the assault on the Capitol. The media refuses to investigate any influence of antifa and how protesters were shown into the Capitol. And yes, some Trump supporters, stuck on stupid, were a factor.
But the Left’s hyperventilating over January 6 in DC when it was silent during the “Summer of Love” is hypocritical. Nearly $2 billion dollars of property was destroyed, several dozen people were killed, hundreds of law enforcement officers were injured, and the Left said NOTHING!
I’m not seeing anything that would indicate Biden or his supporters are the least bit serious about bringing unity to our country. They’re fully aiming to turn this country into something our Founding Fathers could never have imagined.
As Patriots, now is not the time to let discouragement take over. Thomas Paine said it better than I can: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77455-the-quest-for-unity-2021-02-03
Why Are Progressives So Illiberal?One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism.
To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.
Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.
The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.
Silicon Valley apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to see Big Pharma in their rants against it.
Wall Street donated markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.
The insurrectionist GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.
When small investors at Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.
One subtext was: Why would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely lost.
Surveys of “diverse” university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates. The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity” applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to prove them.
We are also currently witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process, in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.
Students charged with “sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who promulgated the myths.
Indeed in these cases many argued that false allegations in effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still committed a thought crime.
Almost all media surveys of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not seen as sufficiently woke.
No major journalist or reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion” hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment, backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.
A George W. Bush or Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?
Andrew Cuomo’s policies of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks, herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump Administration room.
It would be difficult for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will likely have no immediate successors.
Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist, homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.
Hollywood, we learn, has been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.
Ditto the political warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee, not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians. Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.
Again, what is common to all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course, progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.
Many progressives professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was necessary for “progress.”
Even contemporary progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living, and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a “wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.” In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.
So it is understandable that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us, sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.
The new Left sorts, rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools, largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.
Absolute Power for Absolute Good
There are various explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.
More commonly, progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.
Progressives also believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic world.
Progressivism patronizes the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers; those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were romanticized or contextualized.
Abstract humanitarian progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies. They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.
There is no dichotomy in insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become rich—like themselves.
The working classes can always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
There is no such thing as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.
In sum, the new tribal progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests” run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”
Self-righteous progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities spring from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly worship their betters.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13400
The United States of Racial Quotas and PreferencesOn Tuesday, six days into Joe Biden's administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice -- unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday show lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack -- ventured into the White House press room to preview Biden's "equity" initiative.
With one possible exception, the specific policies announced were less important than the word "equity," invoked 19 times by Rice and nine by Biden. Ending federal private prison contracts, and strengthening relations with and combating "xenophobia" against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, are small potatoes as federal policies.
Not so, perhaps, with the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative, started under former President Barack Obama, repealed under former President Donald Trump and now due for spirited revival. The idea is for the feds to reverse local zoning laws and plant low-income housing in suburbs deemed insufficiently diverse.
Actually, racial discrimination in housing has been reduced since the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, to the point that in metropolitan areas from Washington to Atlanta to Los Angeles, most blacks now live in suburbs, not in the central cities to which they were tightly confined in postwar America.
But for Rice and Biden, "equity" requires not equality of opportunity but equality of results. That's one of the fundamental tenets of critical race theory training banned by outgoing Trumpites and reinstated by Biden on day one.
A lower-than-population percentage of blacks in any desirable category, explains critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi, must be the result of "systemic racism" (a term Rice used twice and Biden six times Tuesday). If you don't agree, you're guilty of "white fragility" and you must be a "white supremacist."
As Andrew Sullivan trenchantly observes, "to achieve 'equity' you have to first take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Equity means treating individuals unequally so that groups are equal." This is exactly contrary to the central thrust of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It could easily be judged, in particular cases, to violate the 14th Amendment. Individuals discriminated against might have standing to go to court.
And there will surely be many such individuals. Rice made clear that the policies mentioned Tuesday are just a start. "Every agency," she said, with no suggestion of exceptions, "will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design, and program delivery to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color and all marginalized communities -- rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ+, religious minorities, and so many others."
That's a lot of preferred categories, but one suspects that, as in George Orwell's "Animal Farm," some preferred groups will be more preferred than others. What we're being promised is racial quotas and preferences in every conceivable program, in every possible corner of American life.
It may be objected that the United States is already well on its way to such a state of affairs. Racial quotas and preferences are firmly, almost fanatically, ensconced in higher education, at least in admissions to programs, if not in numbers of graduates. Corporate America's human resources departments, Kendi's most eager clients, revel in imposing racial quotas and enforcing "equity" orthodoxy.
Even so, something still sticks in the craw of most Americans about treating some people differently from others on account of race or ethnic identity. "You don't get to unite the country by dividing it along these deep and inflammatory issues of identity," Sullivan writes.
Proof of this came from the unlikely precincts of California last Nov. 3. Democratic politicians under the influence of critical race theory asked voters to vote yes on Proposition 16 to overturn the 1996 Proposition 209 referendum barring state government, including universities, from discriminating on the basis of race.
Some $20 million, with corporate elites happily kicking in, was spent to pass this Proposition 16, versus only $1 million to uphold Proposition 209. Yet Prop 16 -- and the legalization of racial quotas and preferences -- was rejected by California voters 57% to 43%. That's an even wider margin than the 55% to 45% by which 209 won in 1996, even though California has become far more Democratic since then: Bill Clinton carried the state by 13 points, Joe Biden by 29. That suggests that the Biden and corporate elite project to create a United States of Racial Quotas and Preferences is in conflict with a strong underlying current of American opinion that favors equal rights under law.
https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2021/01/29/creators-oped-n2583866
***************************************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 February, 2021
Olympics boss says women talk too much, make meetings ‘drag on’
There is something in what he said. In my observation, many women do often go into unnecessary and tedious detail in making their points. They don't seem to know when they have made their point and need to give the floor to someone else
The boss of the Tokyo 2020 Games risked sparking a sexism row after it was reported on Wednesday he said women made meetings drag on because they “have difficulty” speaking concisely.
Yoshiro Mori, an 83-year-old former prime minister known for public gaffes, told members of the Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) that “a board meeting with plenty of women will make it drag on”, according to the Asahi Shimbun daily.
“When you increase the number of female executive members, if their speaking time isn’t restricted to a certain extent, they have difficulty finishing, which is annoying,” he said, as some members of the council reportedly laughed.
“Women have a strong sense of rivalry,” Mori reportedly added. “If one (female) member raises her hand to speak, all the others feel the need to speak too. Everyone ends up saying something.”
JOC director Kaori Yamaguchi, who has worked to increase the presence of women in the male-dominated sports world, criticised Mori for his comments.
“Gender equality and consideration for people with disabilities were supposed to be a given for the Tokyo Games. It is unfortunate to see the president of the organising committee make such a remark,” she said.
While ranking highly on a range of international indicators, Japan persistently trails on promoting gender equality, ranking 121 out of 153 nations surveyed in the 2020 global gender gap report of the World Economic Forum.
The JOC itself decided last year to aim for more than 40 per cent of female members at the board, but as of November, there are just five women among the board’s 24 members.
“We have about seven women at the organising committee but everyone understands their place,” Mori added at the Wednesday meeting, which was open to the media, the Asahi said.
Tokyo 2020 did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the remarks.
Mori’s remarks come with increased scrutiny on organisers as they insist the pandemic-postponed Games can go ahead despite surging virus cases around the world.
On Tuesday, Mori said the Games would go ahead “however the coronavirus (pandemic) evolves” as organiser unveiled the first of a series of “playbooks” aimed at holding the event safely.
Sports officials will be allowed to skip quarantine as long as they monitor their health for 14 days after arriving in Japan, according to the 32-page document.
During those 14 days, however, the officials will not be allowed to travel outside the Games bubble or watch events as a spectator.
The playbooks are aimed at building confidence that the Games can go ahead even if the pandemic is not under control by the opening ceremony on July 23. The rules are set to be updated in April and again in June.
The first of the guides is aimed at sports officials, with versions for athletes, fans, media and others to follow in the coming weeks.
Doubts about the Games have grown as countries have been forced to re-enter lockdowns, with large parts of Japan currently under a state of emergency.
Japan’s government approved a month-long extension of its state of emergency on Tuesday, with measures now running through March 7 in parts of the country.
Tighter border restrictions imposed after infections surged have already forced the postponement of some sporting fixtures in Japan, including this year’s first Olympic test event, an artistic swimming qualifier that was scheduled for March.
The nationwide Olympic torch relay is still due to begin on March 25.
Tucker Carlson slams NYU study that claims there is NO censorship of conservative social media as 'farcical' after they admit 'there is no data' to support that assertion
On Monday NYU researchers published 'False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives.'
In their report, the authors stated that claims of anti-conservative bias are 'a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.'
But he highlighted how, on page 16 of the 28-page report, they also state there is insufficient evidence to make conclusions.
'Conservatives do get suspended or banned for violating Twitter's rules against such things as harassment, hateful conduct, or, as in Trump's case, glorifying violence,' the authors write.
'But liberals are excluded in this fashion, as well. 'Pinning down precise proportions is impossible because Twitter doesn't release sufficient data.'
A livid Carlson turned on the study. 'So, to be clear: This NYU study has proven there is no censorship from the tech monopolies,' he said, with heavy sarcasm.
'But if you persist in complaining about this censorship, which does not exist, you may be spreading disinformation. 'It almost reads like a press release from Silicon Valley, and that's because it is.'
Carlson pointed out that Twitter's press office sent round an email promoting the findings.
'I wanted to be sure you saw a report out today from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights,' the spokesperson wrote, according to Carlson.
'It found there is no evidence to support claims of anti conservative censorship on social media and that these claims are 'a form of disinformation'.'
Carlson also said the study could not be taken seriously because it was came from an organization funded, in part, by the philanthropy of Craig Newmark, the Craigslist founder.
Carlson said he was 'one of the many Silicon Valley billionaires who paid for the Joe Biden for President campaign'.
The researchers, Paul Barrett and J Grant Sims, concluded that social media platforms have, through algorithms, amplified rightwing voices, 'often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators'.
Carlson, however, dismissed their conclusions.
Conservatives have been increasingly vocal about censorship since Donald Trump and thousands of spreaders of the conspiracy theory QAnon were removed from social media, amid fear of inciting violence ahead of the inauguration.
Many moved to the platform Parler, but the plug was pulled on that by Amazon Web Services amid concern that the unmoderated forum would stir up potentially dangerous conflicts.
Carlson's segment came hours after conservative rival Newsmax was forced to cut off MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell live on air, when he started spouting election fraud conspiracy theories during a segment about MyPillow being permanently banned from Twitter.
Bob Sellers, an anchor for the right-wing news outlet, ended up storming off camera Tuesday night as he tried to fact-check Lindell and stop him pushing unfounded claims about Dominion Voting Systems rigging the presidential election.
Lindell was appearing on the show after Twitter banned the corporate account for MyPillow Monday, citing 'repeated violations of our Civic Integrity Policy'.
The ban came after Lindell appeared to use the company account to call for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to be jailed for 'election fraud' - one week after Lindell himself was barred from the platform for supporting Donald Trump's claims of election fraud.
Lindell was asked about the ban on Newsmax Tuesday night but instead launched into a rant spewing out unfounded claims of fraud in the presidential election and claiming he had '100 percent proof' that Dominion had committed mass voter fraud.
Dominion Voting Systems has already threatened to sue both Newsmax and Lindell over them pushing conspiracy theories about its ballot counting machines.
Majority of Australians in favour of multiculturalism but also integration, survey finds
This is another Scanlon report so you can be sure that the data from the survey was twisted to within an inch of its life to deliver a pro-immigration finding. They are past-masters of leading questions
Australians overwhelmingly think that having a multicultural society is a good thing, but only if people who immigrate here adopt "Australian" values and integrate, a report has found.
As the nation was in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Scanlon Foundation conducted two national surveys to assess the state of Australian society and resilience when faced with a crisis.
One survey was held in July and another in November, involving more than 2,500 and 3,000 individuals, respectively.
The report found 84 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that "multiculturalism has been good for Australia", while 71 per cent believed that "accepting immigrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger".
But it also found "substantial negative sentiment" towards people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with a majority of respondents opposed to the Government providing assistance to ethnic minorities to maintain their own customs and traditions.
"Endorsement of multiculturalism does not extend to majority support for cultural maintenance," the report found. "Irrespective of the exact question wording … majority opinion continues to favour the ideal of integration."
This year's results showed that 60 per cent of people agreed with the statement that "too many immigrants are not adopting Australian values", which is slightly higher than 2019.
It found 47 per cent of respondents held negative views towards Chinese Australians.
Asian Australians also expressed the highest level of concern about discrimination, with 39 per cent of participants born in an Asian country reporting that it had increased during the pandemic.
Nearly half of all participants also expressed negative feelings towards Iraqis and Sudanese, and above 40 per cent held negative attitudes towards Lebanese Australians.
When it comes to religion, intolerance towards Muslims remains far higher than any other faith group with 37 per cent indicating a "negative view" towards those who follow Islam.
Minister for Immigration and Multiculturalism Alex Hawke acknowledged that racist attitudes persisted in Australia. "There are too many racist views … that we see towards particular communities, particularly Asian communities and still Muslim communities," he said on Sky News. "The Government rejects racism and racist views.
"Overwhelmingly there has been an increase in support for immigration and support for multiculturalism and I welcome that.
"The Government's got a lot of measures in place to enhance social cohesion and this year we will be announcing more measures to enhance social cohesion."
Opposition multicultural affairs spokesman Andrew Giles has used the findings to demand the Morrison Government implement a national anti-racism strategy.
The Scanlon Foundation has conducted research on social cohesion, immigration and population issues for 13 years.
This year's surveys were both conducted with participants randomly recruited via their landline or mobile phone through Australian National University's Social Research Centre.
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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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3 February, 2021
Did Communist regimes have their virtues?
This is a much expanded version of something I wrote recently elsewhere
For many people the appeal of socialism is a form of idealism. As many writers over the years have pointed out (e.g. Carvalho) its underlying vision is a dream of a new Eden, where people live in simple harmony together and where resources are available to all, like apples off a tree. And that Edenic dream is a persistent one. The story of Eden may well be the most influential of all the Bible stories.
So efforts to turn that dream into reality have often been made, with Communism being the most determined effort in that direction. There are always some lamentable people who think that the dream is so good and important that it should be forced into existence at any price. "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" is the way they excuse their brutal and arrogant thinking
As all passably informed people know or should know however, attempts to force that dream into existence always degenerate into a gory despotism, with the original attempt in that direction -- the French revolution -- exemplifing that all too well. And notable subsequent attempts under the aegis of Stalin, Mao etc have added many more years of life to such tyranny. So we now know well how ghastly that ill-informed or grimly determined idealism can become
But has nothing become of that idealism? Is there still some good in Communist regimes? Westerners have observed and commented at length on the great Commuinist experiments of the 20th century. And we know what they saw. Most people were horrified but substantial elements of the Western Left saw in the Communists just "socialism in a hurry" They perceived an idealism that was similar to their own and systematically denied the murderous and tyrannical actual nature of those regimes.
But reality denial is the stock in trade of the Western Left. They make a fine art of the human talent for self deception -- of perceiving only what they want to see. So are there realistic grounds for seeing some good things in the vast and tragic experiments that Communists have inflicted on the world? There may be.
I am very pro-Russian but even I could see nothing good about the Soviet system. Was I missing something?
Several older ladies of Russian ancestry inhabit my social environment. One I get on particularly well with is very Right-wing. She admires Donald Trump and thinks Muslim refugees should be sent back to the hellholes where they came from, for instance. So I was a little surprised to hear her express great regret for the loss of the Soviet system in Russia. What was that about?
Her reasons were in fact straightforward. As a Russian-speaker, she watches the Russian news so is much more aware of what is going on there than most Westerners. And she also has Russian relatives in several parts of the old Soviet empire with whom she keeps in touch.
And what particularly grieves her is the loss of the peace and unity that prevailed in the Soviet system.. There were no race riots, Muslim uprisings or nationalist mini-wars in the old days. People from different ethnicities could and did live anywhere in the Soviet empire and lived their lives in peace together with the people around them. Russians could live in places like Kazakhstan and still live normal Russian lives there without fear of hostility towards them. And it worked the other way: Muslim Chechens could and did move to Moscow for the economic opportunities there without harassing Russians about Jihad.
In more recent times that has all changed. Eastern and Western Ukraine are at war with one-another, Georgia is openly hostile to its Russian minority, There was a brutal war of independence in Chechnya which is still bubbling beneath the surface. And Chechens have carried out grave atrocities in Russia itself. So Russia is now not much better than the United States when it comes to huge disharmony and violent upheavals. The urban riots of Black Lives Matter and Antifa would have been unthinkable in the Soviet Union.
So what my friend mourns is the loss of social harmony. Departures from social harmony were simply not allowed in Soviet times. Regardless of what might be bubbling beneath the surface, social peace and order was maintained.
So is she being unreasonable? Is she overlooking the limitations of Soviet life? She is not. She knows perfectly well how the material circumstances of Soviet life differed from the consumer society she now inhabits. But she is quite simply not materialistic. She thinks that people in Soviet society had "enough" materially for a satisfactory life and that the calm and order there were much more important to a happy life.
A peaceful and relaxed life is not necessarily opposed to a materially prosperous life. Both she and I live in Australia, where we have both those things. But Australia is something of an outlier. Australians hear with horror stories about the seething hatreds of American society but nothing bothers us much on our way to the beach. So you CAN have it all but not so much in the USA or Russia
This whole discussion reminds me of the East German experience, something I have previously written about. East Germans too tended to regret the loss of their old Communist system and its predictabilities.
East Germany, a brief account
The Communist State of East Germany (the DDR or Deutsche Demokratische Republik) has something to tell us about change. The regime is now long gone but its demise is particularly instructive.
When the Gorbachev reforms in Russia allowed it, thousands of East Germans breached the Berlin wall, leading to the downfall of the East German regime and a peaceful takeover of the Eastern lands by the West Germans in 1990.
Easterners had not generally foreseen any negative consequences of reunion but some soon emerged. In particular, the businesses and industries of the East were not remotely competitive with their Western counterparts and rapidly went broke. This led to very high levels of unemployment and economic depression generally in the East and there very soon emerged among some people "Ostalgie" -- a longing for the old Communist regime, a longing that continues among some to this day
What Easterners miss from the old regime was stability, particularly stability of employment, but they also missed the orderly and predictable availability of goods and services as well. You didn't have to compete for anything. All was provided, albeit at a low level. So there was a brotherly feeling among Easterners and that is missed by some too.
So it is clear that some of the aspects of extreme socialism were and are appreciated by some people. The entire developed world does have a degree of socialism (welfare measures etc.) so there is clearly something basic in the appeal of socialism.
East Germany gives us a clue. The one thing that "Ossis" particularly liked was stability, the absence of change. In particular they liked economic stability -- confidence that you would have a job tomorrow and that the job is easy to do.
That is in fact a thoroughly conservative wish. Stability and an absence of change are good conservative values. So where have we gone wrong? Why did it take a Communist state to put conservative values into practice? The answer is that all of life is a tradeoff. Only feminists think you can have it all. And we have traded too much for economic liberty. East Germany was poorer but more secure and relaxed and that tradeoff suited many people.
For fuller comments on East Germany, see here
Another Muslim-American Soldier Turns Terrorist Traitor
Cole Bridges, a 20-year-old American who joined the U.S. Army in late 2019—and who was earlier described as “a polite, responsible and trustworthy teen”—was recently arrested and faces two federal charges: “attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group and the attempted murder of U.S. military service members.”
Earlier, in October 2020, Bridges, a convert to Islam, came into contact with an FBI online covert employee (OCE) posing as a Muslim supporter of and in contact with the Islamic State. In their communiques, Bridges made clear that his allegiance was to Islam and jihad, not America and its soldiers. According to the criminal complaint against him:
BRIDGES then provided training and guidance to purported ISIS fighters who were planning attacks, including advice about potential targets in New York City, such as the 9/11 Memorial. BRIDGES also provided the OCE with portions of a U.S. Army training manual and guidance about military combat tactics, for use by ISIS.
In or about December 2020, BRIDGES began to supply the OCE with instructions for the purported ISIS fighters on how to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East. Among other things, BRIDGES diagrammed specific military maneuvers intended to help ISIS fighters maximize the lethality of attacks on U.S. troops. BRIDGES further provided advice about the best way to fortify an ISIS encampment to repel an attack by U.S. Special Forces, including by wiring certain buildings with explosives to kill the U.S. troops. Then, in January 2021, BRIDGES provided the OCE with a video of himself in body armor standing before a flag often used by ISIS fighters and making a gesture symbolic of support for ISIS. Approximately a week later, BRIDGES sent a second video in which BRIDGES, using a voice manipulator, narrated a propaganda speech in support of the anticipated ambush by ISIS on U.S. troops.
On being asked by the OCE what he would do if his army unit engaged Islamic State fighters in combat, Bridges responded, “I would probably go with the brothers,” meaning the jihadis. On Dec. 27, after the OCE told the young convert to stay safe and avoid being “compromised,” he responded by saying he’d “either become a martyr or somehow escape the country” if that happened.
In their complaint, all of the prosecutors involved underscored the traitorous nature of Bridges’ crime: “Cole Bridges betrayed the oath he swore to defend the United States by attempting to provide ISIS with tactical military advice to ambush and kill his fellow service members,” said one, adding, “Our troops risk their lives for our country, but they should never face such peril at the hands of one of their own.” “This alleged personal and professional betrayal of comrades and country is terrible to contemplate,” said another. “Cole Bridges violated his oath and used his position of privilege against his fellow citizens,” said yet another.
This shock is unwarranted; Bridges is hardly the first American Muslim to betray his nation and fellow brothers-in-arms.
Recall Major Nidal Hasan, who was “very upfront about being a Muslim first and an American second.” Instead of being deployed to a Muslim nation—his “worst nightmare”—in 2009, he went on a killing spree in Fort Hood, where he murdered thirteen fellow soldiers.
Then there was Nasser Abdo, an American soldier arrested in 2011 for planning on using a “weapon of mass destruction” to massacre his fellow soldiers. In 2010, he had applied for conscientious objector status pending his deployment to Afghanistan, and the Army approved his discharge. “I don’t believe I can involve myself in an army that wages war against Muslims,” he once said. “I don’t believe I could sleep at night if I take part, in any way, in the killing of a Muslim…. I can’t deploy with my unit to Afghanistan and participate in the war — I can’t both deploy and be a Muslim.”
And of course, there was sergeant Hasan Akbar, who was convicted of murdering two American soldiers and wounding fourteen in a grenade attack in Kuwait: “He launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq.” Previous to the attack, he confessed to his diary: “I may not have killed any Muslims, but being in the army is the same thing. I may have to make a choice very soon on who to kill.”
All of this goes back to one pivotal Islamic doctrine, known in Arabic as al-wala’ w’al bar’a. Perhaps best translated as “loyalty and enmity,” this inherently tribalistic doctrine calls on Muslims to maintain absolute loyalty to one another while hating and seeking to undermine all non-Muslims—“even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin” (Koran 60:4; 58:22).
In the words of Koran 3:28, “Let believers not take for friends and allies infidels rather than believers: and whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.”
The words translated here as “guard” and “precaution” are derived from the Arabic word taqu, from the trilateral root w-q-y—the same root that gives us the word taqiyya, the Islamic doctrine that permits Muslims to deceive non-Muslims whenever under their authority.
Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), the author of one of the most authoritative commentaries on the Koran, explains taqiyya in the context of verse 3:28 as follows: “Whoever at any time or place fears … evil [from non-Muslims] may protect himself through outward show.” As proof of this, he quotes Muhammad’s close companion Abu Darda, who once said, “Let us grin in the face of some people while our hearts curse them.”
Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (d. 923), the author of another standard commentary on the Koran, interprets verse 3:28 as follows:
If you [Muslims] are under their [non-Muslims’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue while harboring inner animosity for them … [know that] Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels rather than other believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. Should that be the case, let them act friendly towards them while preserving their religion.
The significance of Islam’s doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity—which is as ironclad in Islam as the so-called Five Pillars—concerning questions of national allegiance and security can hardly be clearer.
Elon Musk targreted by Federal agency
The Department of Justice filed a request for a court order to enforce an administrative subpoena in an investigation into Space X on a charge of discrimination in hiring. According to the filing, the DOJ’s Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) said it received a complaint from a non-citizen in May, and Space X had not fully complied with information requests:
The charge alleges that on or about March 10, 2020, during the Charging Party’s interview for the position of Technology Strategy Associate, SpaceX made inquiries about his citizenship status and ultimately failed to hire him for the position because he is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.
While I am not an attorney, I worked in human resources for 15 years, and this request for additional information seems strange. Most often, requests from the government are to ensure employers are complying with employment law that requires them to confirm a new employee’s status as a U.S. Citizen, permanent resident, or holder of an appropriate authorization to work in the United States.
Employers document this information on an I-9 form. If the employee is on a visa, the employer takes on financial and other obligations to renew these work authorizations as required. The employer is under no obligation to incur these burdens. Most job applications have a question that asks if an applicant is authorized to work in the United States. Job postings can also inquire whether an applicant will require sponsorship for a visa. Where applicants with the required skills who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents are available, an employer’s decision to hire someone with a U.S. work authorization, thus avoiding administrative and legal costs, is understandable.
Before hiring a foreign national without an appropriate visa, employers must take several steps. Generally, this includes demonstrating that you are paying the employee a competitive wage and have exhausted the options for hiring an employee from the United States. Having documented this process for more than one employer in cooperation with an immigration attorney, I was required to carefully document the advertising of the position, the applicants, and the specific reasons candidates from the U.S. did not meet the job requirements.
Space X would have additional requirements related to foreign nationals because of the industry they are in. International Traffic in Arms Regulations applies to the company. These regulations require companies who work with technologies that have defense applications to maintain strict data controls. Security measures include limiting the access of foreign nationals to sensitive technologies. Space X falls under the ITAR because of its rocket and launch technologies:
Intercontinental ballistic missiles and orbital rockets have a lot in common. They rise from the ground, drop empty fuel tanks called boosters, and release their payloads into space. Musk launches satellites in this way. It’s also the way you launch a nuclear warhead across the planet.
To be sure, the science behind these launches are different and they are by no means identical problems for engineers. In other words, it would take a lot of modding to launch a warhead from a Falcon 9. But the rocket stages, engines, and even guidance can inform a ballistic weapons program. So these items are on the ITAR list.
The applicant in question applied for the position of Technology Strategy Associate. While it is not clear what specific data a person in this position would have access to, it implies that he may have access to design and materials information and future product plans. As one compliance website notes:
Understanding ITAR as it relates to your own employees can be a challenge. Imagine you hire someone for your IT department that was born outside the United States. They have an excellent resume and would be an asset to your team. But because they work in the IT department, they could easily access sensitive materials. This is a violation of ITAR regulations, even though the employee is on U.S. soil, working for a U.S. company, and isn’t working directly with classified data.
A company may pursue an export license for a non-U.S. citizen or resident to work with ITAR information. However, the license will be denied if the applicant is from a list of nearly 30 embargoed countries. Nowhere does it appear that an employer is required to pursue such a license.
Space X had provided a spreadsheet with I-9 information under the original subpoena and refused to produce the documents that support an employee’s status. This information would include photocopies of driver’s licenses, social security cards, passports, and work visas. It is unclear exactly why the IER is investigating a pattern or practice of discrimination when Space X is required to discriminate against broad categories of non-citizens for ITAR compliance reasons.
The investigation into this complaint began under the Trump administration, and the request to enforce an administrative subpoena occurred under the Biden administration. It is unclear if this is just another example of how overregulation puts undue burdens on organizations when agencies have conflicting mandates or if CEO Elon Musk’s recent critical statements could have spurred these actions. He has criticized the FAA for delaying a Space X test flight, questioned the response to the GameStop stock drama, and asserted that the complete transition to electric vehicles by 2035 is not feasible.
Legal Coalition to Sue to Stop Feds’ Critical Race Theory Training
One of President Joe Biden’s new executive actions is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to a coalition of legal foundations and lawyers, which is planning to take legal action to stop it.
On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order reversing former President Donald Trump’s ban on critical race theory training programs within the federal government.
Christopher Rufo, director of the nonprofit Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, says Biden’s action will not only lead to further division in the nation, but is also unconstitutional.
“ … Critical race theory-based programs—which perpetuate racial stereotypes, compel discriminatory speech, and create hostile working environments—violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the United States Constitution,” Rufo said in a Jan. 20 statement announcing formation of a legal coalition called Stop Critical Race Theory.
Rufo, who has conducted extensive research on the harmful effects of critical race theory training, says his findings led to Trump’s decision to ban the programs in the federal government at the end of last summer.
Critical race theory is the belief that white people use their economic, legal, and social status to create and maintain elitism over people of color.
The Trump administration announced an end to the programs when it became aware of the fact that the federal government was spending millions of taxpayer dollars on training programs that “undercut our core values as Americans and drive division within our workforce,” according to a memorandum announcing the ban.
In his research, Rufo uncovered that the Treasury Department “held a training session telling employees that ‘virtually all white people contribute to racism’ and demanding that white staff members ‘struggle to own their racism.’”
Howard Ross, who led the training at the Treasury Department, has “billed the federal government more than $5 million for diversity training over the past 15 years,” Rufo said.
Ibram X. Kendi, author of the book “How to Be an Antiracist,” has also benefited financially from giving critical race theory training. Last September, the school district in Virginia’s Fairfax County, a suburb of Washington, D.C., paid Kendi $20,000 to give a one-hour anti-racism online lecture to teachers and school leaders.
Rufo’s new Stop Critical Race Theory coalition has already filed three lawsuits against public institutions conducting the progressive training program and plans to file more suits in the coming months, according to a statement on Twitter.
“The Constitution is very clear. The government has to at least aspire to treat Americans equally,” Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday.
“Any of these trainings that do not treat Americans equally violate the Constitution,” said Gonzalez, author of the book “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free.”
The legal coalition hopes one of the lawsuits will make its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, at which point it will argue that the training programs violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
“Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” Rufo said in a statement. “It divides Americans by race and traffics in the pernicious concepts of race essentialism, racial stereotyping, and race-based segregation—all under a false pursuit of ‘social justice.’”
In addition to the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, members of the coalition include the Southeastern Legal Foundation; the Upper Midwest Law Center; Jonathan O’Brien with Schoolhouserights.org; the Los Angeles-based Pivtorak Law Firm; Wally Zimolong of the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Zimolong LLC; and Eric Early and Peter Scott of Early, Sullivan, Wright, Gizer & McRae, a law firm with offices in six U.S. cities.
The coalition’s ultimate goal is not only to ban critical race theory programs at the federal government, but to abolish the training, which has expanded into secondary school and college classrooms, as well as corporate boardrooms.
“The conservative legal movement and a network of private attorneys are gearing up for war against critical race theory,” Rufo said. “We will fight, and we will win.”
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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 February, 2021
Tulsi Tells an Inconvenient Truth
No other Democrat will admit it, but the Left poses a far greater threat to Liberty than the Right.
Tulsi Gabbard is, in a word, interesting. A retired congresswoman and a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, she was a thorn in the Democrat Party’s side throughout its presidential primary, and she continues to be as much. Why? Because she’s a woman of color who obliterates the stereotype of the down-the-line leftist, and because she’s wildly unafraid to tell inconvenient truths.
Truths like this one: “The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 to try to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities were behaving like domestic enemies of our country. But let’s be clear: The John Brennans, Adam Schiffs, and the oligarchs in Big Tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style surveillance are also domestic enemies — and much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob that stormed the Capitol.”
So, from Tulsi, a pox on both your houses: the fringy far-righters who went to Washington and stormed the Capitol, and the mainstream Left that thinks silencing a sitting president and his like-minded supporters is somehow acceptable in a constitutional republic.
Yes, this is the mainstream Left — which we might also now dub the authoritarian Left. That’s where lying scoundrels like Representative Adam Schiff and commie sympathizers like John Brennan make their living, and it’s where the damage to our civil liberties is now being done by all manner of cancel-culturing foot soldiers, from Internet service providers to book publishers to hotel chains to insurance companies to global banks to professional sports leagues.
Schiff, we know, is an easy target for Gabbard, even if he was, until just a few weeks ago, her congressional colleague. But if you think we’re being too hard on Brennan, ask yourself how many folks you know who, during the height of the Cold War, voted for the Communist Party USA’s candidate for president as a way of signaling his “unhappiness with the system.” Let’s see … Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, or the commie?
And one look at Brennan’s recent remarks — the remarks that prompted Gabbard to call him out — indicate that his authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. “The members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed,” he said, “are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength, and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians.”
Even libertarians? Yes, John Brennan just smeared millions of Liberty-loving Americans by lumping them in with authoritarians, fascists, bigots, and racists. Thus, if you appreciate lower taxes and less government, John Brennan’s people would like to have a word with you.
“President Biden,” Gabbard concluded, “I call upon you and all of Congress from both parties to denounce efforts by Brennan and others to take away our civil liberties endowed to us by our Creator and guaranteed in our Constitution. If you don’t stand up to them now, then our country will be in great peril.”
We’re not sure what the future holds for Tulsi Gabbard, who’s just 39 and seems far too young and far too engaged to be without some sort of political future. In the meantime, though, we’re happy to have her on the right side in the fight for civil liberties.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77328-tulsi-tells-an-inconvenient-truth-2021-01-28
UK: Now the supporters of cancel culture are being cancelled: We warned you this would happenBrendan O'Neill
‘Freeze peach!’ That has long been the mocking, infantile cry of the middle-class left whenever anyone complains about clampdowns on freedom of speech. There is no ‘free-speech crisis’, radicals insist. No Platforming right-wingers on university campuses is not censorship – it’s just students freely choosing not to associate with people who have horrible views. And alt-right types being turfed off Twitter and Facebook is not censorship, either – that’s just private companies enforcing their terms and conditions. (Who knew lefties were so supportive of private property rights?)
Will these censorship deniers change their tune now that the left itself is coming under censorious attack? Amazingly, probably not. But perhaps there will be a smidgen of self-reflection. Some of the left-wing architects and cheerleaders of contemporary censorship, including Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, which has backed the No Platform policy for decades, are now being No Platformed themselves. ‘This is a disgrace!’, they cry, which would be funny if censorship were not so serious. These people helped to build the infrastructure of modern censorship, with its determination to crush ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensive’ views, and now they’re shocked to find themselves falling victim to it? Have they not read any history books at all?
On Friday, the SWP, one of the largest left-wing organisations in the UK, was taken off Facebook. The party’s own page was removed and so were the pages of dozens of SWP activists. The SWP described FB’s actions as a ‘silencing of political activists’. They’re right. This was a unilateral act of ideological censorship carried out by the capitalist elites of Silicon Valley against a perfectly legal party based in the UK. It demonstrated the terrifying power of the Big Tech oligarchy, which clearly has no respect whatsoever for borders, territory or democratically made national laws and feels that it can reach into any nation state it chooses and switch off the oxygen of publicity to any party, group or individual it disapproves of. The attack on the SWP was indeed a disgrace, and it’s good that the SWP’s FB pages have now been restored.
But there is something spectacularly hollow about the SWP’s complaints. The SWP has played a key role in promoting No Platform policies on campus, which essentially blacklist certain groups and individuals from speaking to students, whether that’s leaders of actual racist organisations, like Nick Griffin, or decent, liberal securalists like Maryam Namazie (perversely branded ‘Islamophobic’).
What’s more, the ideological justifications that the SWP and other leftists have put forward for these acts of censorship – the idea that ‘hateful’ speech must be suppressed, the idea that offensive ideas are wounding, the nasty patrician notion that minority groups need to be protected from difficult discussion by the authorities – have helped to shape the broader, off-campus culture of censorship. Modern ‘hate speech’ laws and police interference in discussions about genderfluidity and other difficult topics, as well as Silicon Valley’s embrace of ever-tighter restrictions on ‘hate speech’ and its No Platforming of right-wing presidents or feminists who say ‘he’ when referring to someone who has a penis – all of this has been influenced by the modern left’s cultivation of a new form of therapeutic, paternalistic censorship that is designed to protect allegedly vulnerable individuals from the hurtful ideologies of right-wingers, critics of Islam, ‘transphobes’, etc etc.
So for the SWP now to complain about being No Platformed is rich indeed. Did these people seriously believe they could nurture a policy of No Platform and that it would only ever be applied to people they dislike? To think in that way shows a grave ignorance of history. It is more than 200 years since the great radical Thomas Paine observed that, ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will one day reach to himself’. SWP, you established a precedent, a precedent of platform removal, and now it has reached you. Why are you shocked? Tom Paine told you this would happen. So did many other warriors for liberty over the centuries.
Or surely our friends in the SWP have read some Trotsky. In 1938, he ridiculed leftists in Mexico who were seeking to ‘curb’ reactionary right-wing voices, ‘either by submitting [them] to censorship or by banning [them] completely’. Any leftist who ‘arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion’ is a fool, said Trotsky. Worse, he is a ‘traitor’. Why? Because he should know that powers used against your enemy might one day be used against you. We should know from ‘historic experience’, he said, that ‘any restriction to democracy in bourgeois society is eventually directed against the proletariat’.
What would he have made of the buffoons in the Socialist Workers Party who failed to see that empowering university authorities, governments and even capitalists to curb ‘extremist’ right-wing voices would one day backfire and lead to the curbing of ‘extremist’ left-wing voices too? Once you accept the logic of censorship – the logic that says some ideas are too dangerous for public expression – you immediately open yourself up to censorship. It is astonishing that some people still don’t realise this.
Much of the left has actively cheered Silicon Valley’s growing willingness to banish ‘problematic’ voices. They ignored those of us who pleaded with them to recognise the folly of empowering unelected, unaccountable capitalist elites to exercise such control over what is essentially the public square of the 21st century – social media. Left-wingers celebrated the removal of everyone from alt-right loudmouths to principled feminists like Meghan Murphy, from nobodies spouting abuse from their bedrooms to the freely elected president of the United States, never twigging that they were laying the foundations for their own censorship.
And it isn’t only the SWP. Many other lovers of cancel culture now find themselves cancelled. Some Antifa pages are being removed from social media. Will Wilkinson, a contributor to the New York Times, was sacked from the think-tank the Niskanen Center after joking on Twitter that ‘If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence’. Mr Wilkinson has previously made light of cancel culture; now he is swallowed up by it. Meanwhile, YouTube has taken down the channel of La Marea, a leading left-wing website in Spain, on the grounds that its critiques of anti-refugee campaign groups were ‘inciting hatred’. Again, one must ask the left: did you really think that handing the powers-that-be the moral and technological power to censor and punish ‘hatred’ wouldn’t blow back against you?
It’s tempting to engage in Schadenfreude. Agitators for censorship being censored. Supporters of No Platform having their platforms removed. Mockers of the idea of cancel culture being cancelled. But of course, this is too serious for Schadenfreude. What we need to do is reiterate, loudly, this very simple point about freedom of speech: it is either enjoyed by everybody or it is enjoyed by nobody. The clue is in the name: freedom of speech. All must have it, from the ‘dangerous’ to the polite, from the right to the left, from fascists to saints, from American presidents who claim the election was stolen from them to Iranian theocrats who say menacing things about Israel, from trans activists to feminists who think transgenderism is a load of bollocks. Everyone.
The freedom to say only things that the state, Silicon Valley or the SWP approves of is not freedom at all. We need full freedom of speech, unfettered by state interference, capitalist-class meddling and cancel-culture mobs, in order that everyone may express themselves and, more importantly, that everyone else may weigh up what is being said and decide for themselves if it is right or wrong, good or bad. As the SWP and others must surely now realise, if you set the trap of censorship, it will one day ensnare you. The solution is clear: defend liberty of thought and speech for all, including your enemies.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/25/now-the-supporters-of-cancel-culture-are-being-cancelled/
Cancelled for having a Parler accountSimply using Parler is now enough to get you fired.
A literary agent has lost her job after her employer discovered she had accounts with Parler and Gab.
On Monday, in tweets seen by Newsweek, the president of the agency said: ‘The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency was distressed to discover this morning, 25 January, that one of our agents has been using the social-media platforms Gab and Parler. We do not condone this activity, and we apologise to anyone who has been affected or offended by this.’
‘The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency has in the past and will continue to ensure a voice of unity, equality and one that is on the side of social justice’, she continued, before concluding that Colleen Oefelein, the agent in question, was no longer part of the company. There is currently not any suggestion that Oefelein actually posted anything objectionable on either of these platforms.
Parler and Gab have become associated with the political right, largely because they have become a refuge for those who have been censored on more mainstream social-media sites, or who object to the censoring of others. Oefelein is essentially being punished for guilt by association: her crime is to have used the same social-media platforms as other, perhaps objectionable, people.
Increasingly, it is not the actual things that people might say on Parler but Parler itself that is being targeted for censorship. Earlier this month, Parler was removed from the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store and, crucially, from Amazon Web Servers, meaning it can no longer properly function.
The Big Tech firms insisted that Parler was not doing enough to tackle objectionable content on its site. But according to its chief policy officer, Amy Peikoff, even Parler’s job adverts for content moderators were censored when it was banned from advertising on the jobs app, Workable. You couldn’t make it up.
It’s a similar story in the UK. After Parler was taken offline, numerous British media outlets ran exposé-style articles reporting that some Conservative MPs used the app – as if that was in itself a problem.
Now anyone who merely uses an app is automatically tarnished thanks to the content others might have posted on it. We have reached the stage of cancel culture where you can be cancelled for what others might have said. This is sinister.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/28/cancelled-for-having-a-parler-account/
Donald Trump: The Last-Second RacistWhy would the "most racist president ever" pardon a bunch of blacks on his way out?
What a benevolent racist. A racist white man with power on his way out of the most powerful position in the free world took the time to pardon black rappers, black politicians, black drug dealers, and black hip-hop moguls. What kind of racist would go out of his way after being robbed of an election to reach back and free the very ones who, generally speaking, considered him a racist? Enter, or should I say, exit, President Donald J. Trump.
Even on his last leg, with 1.2 seconds left on the clock, President Trump pardoned a friend of his enemy, Snoop Dogg. The famous Snoop Dogg made no qualms about his hate, as he depicted himself in a video shooting President Trump in the face. He depicted the president with a toe tag on his foot, pronounced dead in an assassination.
No matter what, Trump will get no credit in forgiving the prison debt many owed to society because, somehow, he’s still racist. If Trump is a racist for pardoning black inmates from prison after serving hard time, then tell me, what is Joe Biden for implementing ways for black “super predators” to be put on a conveyor belt into prison? Doesn’t this sound absurd to anyone except me?
The former president even pardoned a local former drug dealer, Darrell Frazier, who was serving over 30 years and counting for drug conspiracy. Today, Frazier, a black man, dons the “Make America Great Again” hat made famous by the Donald. He formed a nonprofit in prison called the Joe Johnson Tennis Foundation, which he established in 2005. He named it after his stepfather. Will local Chattanooga leftists send their regards to Trump? I doubt it.
With everything around the seemingly “black community” crumbling like American apple pie crust, President Trump began his first campaign by telling black folks to “Try Trump.” His campaign for a second term literally ended with him giving people from the urban community one more chance.
I don’t know what else to tell you, but Trump wasn’t a racist until he ran as a Republican candidate. This four-year cyclical magic trick that Democrats pull off is a sight that creates sore eyes. Just like that, abracadabra, the white liberal made the world believe the Republican candidate was the scum of the earth. Mission accomplished. Nonetheless, ever since the Klu Klux Klan was founded in Tennessee, raiding my ancestors for their voting power under the Republican ticket as they were becoming free, the Democrats have continued to intimidate blacks into voting against their own personal interests.
Ask an average black person why he or she voted for Biden and I guarantee you he or she will mention Trump. They are unable to articulate purposeful, political, or intelligent dialogue about how Biden has or will benefit America or even the black community.
The great delusion is happening, and I believe it has been happening for the past 65 years in America. When you see the truth, but it’s still portrayed as a lie, you know the end is closer. Welcome to 2021. The illusion doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77356-donald-trump-the-last-second-racist-2021-01-29
***************************************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 February, 2021
American Authoritarianism
Emmett Tyrrell
If there was one dominant theme to President Joe Biden's inaugural address, it was unity. All Americans -- left, right and middle-of-the-road -- are to come together in unity, Joe said. On his theme of unity, Joe was emphatic, and the media cheered him on. Yet shortly thereafter, his perfumed rhetoric evaporated in the wintry air, and reality intruded. It began with Joe's executive orders.
One of them rescinded President Donald Trump's August ban on mandatory anti-bias training throughout the federal government. Now we are going back to the Obama-era period of racial indoctrination according to the diktats of critical race theory, one of which is that all white people are racists by virtue of their birth. Black people are apparently immune to being born racists -- and probably Chinese Americans, too -- but white people are born with racism in their DNA. It is, for them, a second original sin.
Yet now they can be liberated from the sin of being born white, thanks to Critical Race Theory. If you think this contradicts Joe's belief in unity, I think you have a point, but be careful how you make that point because there are people out there who will call you a racist, and they are experts on the subject.
One of them is an attorney named M.E. Hart, who leads diversity sessions for corporate clients and the federal government. He told The Washington Post recently: "These classes have been very powerful in allowing people to do that (I think he means take more of his 'classes'), and we need them more than ever. There's danger here." You will perceive a note of desperation in his voice, but now he is back in business by virtue of Joe's contradictory call for unity and diversity classes. Possibly, Hart will be leading the diversity programs for the whole federal government. Now that we are free from the Trump curse, diversity courses are going to flood into our government and poof, racism is going to disappear from the scene. Moreover, the M.E. Harts of this world are going to make a killing.
The ultimate point of Hart's diversity sessions is to get young people in grammar school and older people in the federal government -- say, at the National Security Council -- to admit after lengthy (and expensive!) sessions that they have benefited from their white culture but they now will ... well, what? What are you supposed to do about being born white? On that point, I do not quite understand Hart's swindle. Perhaps we shall have to wait until it is all thrashed out in a court of law, which is what another lawyer, Christopher Rufo, has in mind.
Rufo is the head of Stop Critical Race Theory, a coalition of lawyers who are going to take their case to court. "Critical-race-theory training programs have become commonplace in academia, government and corporate life, where they have sought to advance the ideology through cultlike indoctrination, intimidation and harassment," Rufo told the Washington Times last week.
It appears Rufo has a broad coalition reflecting how other countries have been haunted by reeducation programs such as critical race theory, for instance, the Cultural Revolution of Mao's China and the Sovietized nations behind the Iron Curtain.
David Pivtorak, an attorney in Los Angeles, was born in Ukraine and has joined Rufo's coalition. He says, "I think at root what we are seeing is something that my parents and grandparents have been warning me about since I was a little kid." He has become a coalition director and plans to lead his team in a lawsuit against the California wildlife department that could land in the Supreme Court. I shall watch the progress of his case and the others begun by Rufo's coalition with avidity.
Looking back over the history of this country, nothing like critical race theory has ever been tried. It is utterly foreign to the American spirit. Those who are its adepts are bringing an authoritarian project into a country that refers to itself as "the land of the free" and "the home of the brave." One has to wonder how Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden could countenance such alien ideas.
What is more, when one thinks about the areas of American life that that critical race theory is aimed at -- the corporate world, the educational world, the federal government -- what kind of people populate these areas? Are they as balmy as Hart?
https://townhall.com/columnists/emmetttyrrell/2021/01/28/american-authoritarianism-n2583808
Congress Has Finally Acted on Surprise Medical Billing: It’s a StartThe Left's Ongoing Campaign to Denigrate Trump Supporters
One of the most significant problems facing patients and their access to quality healthcare is the threat of a surprise medical bill or balance billing. Between 2018 and 2020, 41 percent of insured Americans received an unexpected medical bill with two-thirds of Americans worrying they will be unable to afford an unexpected medical expense. Recognizing that the existence of surprise medical bills prevents people from receiving quality care as well as plunges patients into medical debt, the U.S. Congress has finally taken the first steps toward protecting patients from a market failure both Democrats and Republicans agree needs correcting.
In its simplest form, surprise medical bills are the difference between what an out-of-network provider's fees exceed and what an individual's health insurance is willing to cover. Between 2014 and 2017, it is estimated the average surprise medical bill could be anywhere from $220 to $628. The problem is particularly pronounced in emergency care and surgeries as surprise bills reach an average of $19,600 and insured patients are often unable to select a provider.
Recognizing the serious problem surprise medical billing presents to patients, the federal government finally enacted the No Surprises Act to take the first step toward ending the practice. The No Surprises Act prohibited out of network providers from billing patients out of network rates at in-network hospitals unless the patient is informed and consents, and the act also prevents air ambulances from charging more than in-network charges.
While the No Surprises Act does offer comprehensive protections to patients, and further legislation needs to be passed to eradicate the practice, the bill marks an important step forward for consumers and patients. The failure of Congress to act earlier on surprise medical billing is particularly perplexing given its issue that enjoys broad bipartisan support.
Aside from protecting patients from unexpected bills, the passage of the No Surprises Act could benefit the wider economy by lowering the federal deficit. In its economic impact assessment of H.R. 5826 and HR.5800, previous iterations of the No Surprises Act, the Congressional Budget Office estimated reforming surprise billing could reduce the federal deficit between $17.8 billion or $23.9 billion over 10 years. Economic studies also suggested reforming surprise billing could save Americans between 0.5 percent and 1 percent on their insurance premiums.
According to American Action Forum, much of these savings will occur because “providers would be expected to move toward the median in-network rate under the legislation and away from the average overall payment, which is higher generally.”
While the U.S. Congress was slow to enact reform on surprise medical billing, several states have enacted legislation to reform the practice. Washington state, for example, recently enacted the Balance Billing Protection Act that prohibits patients from being billed out of network provider costs for receiving emergency care at an in-network facility.
New Mexico enacted the Surprise Billing Protection Act that requires insurance companies “pay for all out-of-network emergency services necessary to evaluate and stabilize the patient,” requires insurers to fully reimburse for out-of-network care provided at an in-network facility, and requires providers notify patients if they are out of network for non-emergency care.
While some states have taken steps toward ending surprise billing at a faster rate than the federal government, not all have followed suit. Currently, 13 states do not protect patients from surprise medical bills, leaving millions of consumers liable for unexpected medical bills. The failure of these 13 states to pass protections also serves to highlight the need for further federal action on surprise billing to ensure a baseline of protection that is not dictated by a patient's residency.
For consumers and patients, the passage of the No Surprises Act will go a long way to ensure they are protected from expensive unexpected medical bills and ensuring the healthcare market works for patients, providers, and insurance companies. Despite this laudable effort, it is also important to recognize more needs to be done at both the state and federal level to protect patients and ensure they are able to access critical and routine care without the threat of bankruptcy.
Nazis Everywhere
Americans have a shockingly low history IQ, with a low percentage of adults not possessing even basic knowledge of the country and its founding. One would be hard-pressed to find a person on the street who can name the country's first president. Or who fought in World War II. Or who won it, for that matter. But everyone seems to know a lot about Nazis.
Former President Donald Trump and the people who voted for him are routinely labeled as Nazis in the American media. It has become a charge that is repeated so often that it's hardly even challenged anymore. Leftmedia apparatchiks like Jonathan Chait post fabricated chronicles about how Trump introduced Nazism into the Republican Party, and those who don't know better are left to simply believe his supposition unquestioned. Trump brought Nazis into the Republican Party? Of course not. But few are questioning that this actually took place. They merely ponder how he supposedly did it.
Even our current president, Joe Biden, Mr. Unity himself, has labeled Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley as "part of the big lie." That's an implicit reference to a statement attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that people will believe a lie, no matter how big, if you tell it often enough. This is ironic considering how the Left is throwing around the terms Nazi and fascist lately.
There are a couple of big lies being floated in the American media, but neither has anything to do with how the Republican Party was supposedly hijacked by Nazis, or how Trump was supposedly the second coming of Adolf Hitler.
The first big lie is about fascism itself, and it's based on a completely false view of the political spectrum. This view, embraced by a vast majority of pundits and educators, is that fascism is a far-right ideology, while communism is on the far left. According to this view, totalitarian control lays at both ends of the spectrum, with humble Liberty-loving folks in the center. This is not true. On the real political spectrum, the far left is dominated by totalitarian control, regardless of how it's packaged. The far right is a complete absence of control (anarchy). Responsible self-government exists somewhere in between.
How is it that so many people have a completely erroneous view of the political spectrum? It started before World War II, when communist apologists in the Western media searched for a way to create daylight between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in order to engender sympathy for the latter and derision for the former. In reality, there was no big difference between Joseph Stalin and Hitler or how they ran their countries. They both ruled over their citizens with an iron fist, maintained complete control over their economies and industries, and sought to expand their power through military means. The only difference was in how they conducted their parades.
Theirs was a turf war, not an ideological one.
Yet the lie about fascism being a far-right ideology has stuck ever since, and now it's being used to bolster another big lie — that Donald Trump and his followers are fascists. Follow the twisted logic for a moment. Republicans are on the right side of the political spectrum, therefore rabid Republicans must be fascists, because fascists are on the extreme right.
Wrong. Republicans and conservatives are on the right side of the political spectrum because they want constitutionally limited government, not unbridled government. Fascists want total government control of approved private enterprise. If Trump were a true fascist, then he's the worst fascist in modern history. He cut hundreds of government regulations to shrink the reach of the federal bureaucracy. He's the first president in recent memory to go through an entire term without bringing America into a new war. And he spent much of his foreign policy capital fostering peace treaties and trade deals with other nations.
Yet the media has condemned Trump as a fascist in the court of public opinion, and leftists everywhere are hoping that this second sham impeachment trial will finally prove it to the public for all time. Their lie has become so big that many Republicans have parroted this view, demonstrating more interest in saving their political hides than standing up against the tide of ignorance. Even former California Governor and sometime Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger bought the line about Trump as a Nazi. And Schwarzenegger's father actually was a Nazi. You'd think at least he'd know the difference.
Leftists had to defeat Donald Trump by any means necessary because he stood between them and greater power. They lied, cajoled, browbeat, stuffed ballot boxes, and engaged in all manner of dirty deeds to achieve that aim, because they insisted he was the fascist. The trouble is, their behavior is exactly what real fascists do.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77330-nazis-everywhere-2021-01-28
Biden’s Gifts for Illegal AliensPresident Joe Biden is the illegal aliens’ best friend. He is asking Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for the more than 11 million illegal aliens presently living in the United States. And to make the illegal aliens feel better about themselves, Biden is seeking a change in U.S. immigration laws to replace the phrase “illegal alien” with “noncitizen” to describe them.
Unless the Democrats eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, Biden is not likely to get his complete legislative package passed by Congress. “A mass amnesty with no safeguards and no strings attached is a nonstarter,” said Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.
However, Biden decided not to wait for Congress to act. He signed an executive order halting border wall construction. He also signed another executive order reversing the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” program for so-called asylum seekers waiting for U.S. hearings on their asylum pleas. “Remain in Mexico,” worked out with the cooperation of the Mexican government, was implemented as a practical solution to a vexing problem. It was designed as an alternative to either detaining the ostensible asylum-seekers in the United States until their amnesty applications could be heard by U.S. immigration judges or releasing them into communities across the country under the infamous “catch and release” policy of prior administrations. Biden’s executive order brings back the “catch and release” policy, endangering the safety of law-abiding Americans.
Open-borders President Joe Biden is creating through such executive orders and his pro-amnesty legislative agenda a super-strong magnet to pull many more illegal migrants into the United States.
Biden also signed an executive order that violates his presidential obligation under the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This order put in place a policy to unilaterally suspend removals of most illegal aliens for 100 days. It was a show of defiance against enforcing the immigration laws as written.
An advisory memorandum was issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on January 20th to guide the immigration agencies in carrying out Biden’s deportation suspension executive order. Couched dishonestly in the language of reprioritizing immigration law enforcement actions, the memorandum said that the immediate 100-day “pause on removals” would help "ensure we have a fair and effective immigration enforcement system focused on protecting national security, border security, and public safety."
Biden’s 100-day “pause on removals” does precisely the opposite. Even illegal aliens who were convicted of serious felonies and were already ordered to be removed from this country following a full and fair hearing would stand to benefit from the removal suspension.
Fortunately, a federal judge in Texas said not so fast, in response to a complaint filed by the state of Texas. U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton had the good sense and fidelity to the law to issue a temporary restraining order on Tuesday, blocking for now the implementation of Biden’s removal suspension edict nationwide for 14 days. Judge Tipton said that the Biden administration had failed “to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations.” That’s an understatement.
The Biden DHS memorandum was so far out in left field that it refused to use the words “illegal alien,” which appear more than 30 times in U.S. immigration laws that the DHS is supposed to enforce. As far as the Biden administration is concerned, “illegal alien” is already expunged from the statute books even without any congressional action. Instead, the Biden DHS memorandum used the term “noncitizens.”
The DHS memorandum’s instructions on pausing compulsory removals of illegal aliens (apologies to the enforcers of political correctness for using the legally correct phrase ) did contain a few narrow exceptions. The pause did not apply to suspected terrorists, spies or others deemed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pose a danger to the national security of the United States. Also, individuals illegally in the country who were “not physically present in the United States before November 1, 2020” would be out of luck under the DHS memorandum’s implementation guidelines. And there could be some scattered cases where an individualized determination is made that removal is absolutely required by law. But public safety is given short shrift.
Biden’s executive order suspending removals, along with the implementing DHS memorandum, contained no pause exception addressing generally the class of illegal aliens still in the United States who have been convicted of violent aggravated felonies such as murder or rape. Even many of those dangerous criminals already subject to removal orders issued prior to Biden’s executive deportation suspension would have been entitled to protection from immediate removal.
Judge Tipton has come to the rescue at least for now, temporarily stopping Biden’s deportation suspension from taking immediate effect. Judge Tipton needs to go further and stick a fork in Biden’s reckless deportation suspension executive order for good, which the Supreme Court will hopefully uphold.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/biden-pushes-forward-his-open-border-agenda-joseph-klein/
***************************************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. 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
Most pictures that I use in the body of the blog should stay up throughout the year. But how long they stay up after that is uncertain. At the end of every year therefore I intend to put up a collection of all pictures used on the blog in that year. That should enable missing pictures to be replaced. The archive of last year's pictures on this blog is therefore now up. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here
My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal); My Home page supplement; My Alternative Wikipedia; My Blogroll; Menu of my longer writings; My annual picture page is here; My Recipes;
Email me (John Ray) here.