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.)
28 February, 2022
Some Russian banks will be kicked out of SWIFT. What does it mean for Putin?
This "penalty" is no more than a fleabite. With SOME Russian banks still having access, routing transactions via those banks should be no great problem. And WHY are "some" banks still in the system? Because the West needs Russian, oil, gas, aluminium etc. But to keep that flowing it has to be paid for. So Russian banks are needed for that. What a farce!
Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch an invasion of Ukraine sparked global debate about whether Russia should be expelled from a once obscure part of the global banking system, known as SWIFT.
As Russian forces began their attack, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, made angry calls for Russia to be banned from SWIFT – but world leaders appeared divided. Now they have agreed to act, with the US, Britain and the European Union announcing that “selected” Russian banks would be removed from SWIFT, as part of a new wave of sanctions.
“We will keep working together to ensure Putin pays the price for his aggression,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Those pushing for Russia’s removal from SWIFT have argued it will deal a major economic blow to Russia and its president, Putin. But what exactly is SWIFT, and why is a ban from the network seen as such a serious penalty?
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a vital piece of the plumbing that connects the world’s banks. It is a messaging system that allows banks to move money quickly and securely, supporting trillions of dollars in flows of trade and investment.
Based in Belgium, the company is a co-operative owned by financial institutions from around the world, which was founded in 1973 to replace the telex network (a network of teleprinter machines that sent messages). SWIFT says it connects more than 11,000 banks and other corporations from more than 200 countries.
Normally, payment infrastructure is one of the most unsexy parts of finance. It’s something few of us notice or care about unless it messes up. However, SWIFT is making news because it could be a powerful financial weapon to use against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
It is seen as a particularly tough financial penalty because it sits at the heart of the banking system: restricting Russian banks’ access to global money flows would make it much harder for Russian businesses to export or import, or to finance themselves from overseas.
A spokesman for SWIFT has highlighted its neutrality, saying it was set up for the “collective benefit” of its global community. “Any decision to impose sanctions on countries or individual entities rests solely with the competent government bodies and applicable legislators,” the spokesman said.
What difference does it make to not have SWIFT?
The European Commission says the move is aimed at collectively ensuring the war in Ukraine is a “strategic failure”. “Cutting banks off will stop them from conducting most of their financial transactions worldwide and effectively block Russian exports and imports,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
She said the move was part of a range of sanctions that would “stop Putin from using his war chest”. The ban is not blanket one, though, which would effectively cut Russia out of the global financial system. The list of banks is still being worked out, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock saying they would be “targeted, functional restrictions of SWIFT”.
In practice, a US lawyer told Reuters, “getting kicked out of SWIFT doesn’t make transactions impossible, it makes them much more difficult”, and it bumps up transaction costs significantly.
“You need a functioning banking system to have a functioning economy,” an analyst explained. “This goes some way toward undermining the Russian economy.”
The targeted approach does mean that Russia can continue to sell some gas to Europe, The New York Times reported.
It also leaves room for further action later. Along with Boris Johnson, Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, last week was strongly backing kicking Russia out of the system, saying it is “all about ensuring they get cut off, and that is the price that is paid”.
Why the initial hesitation in taking action?
One reason some European nations are wary is because cutting Russia out of the world banking system may well come at a cost to their own economies. The European Commission says Russia is the EU’s fifth-largest trading partner (the EU’s biggest goods exports to Russia in 2020 were machinery and transport equipment, chemicals, and manufactured goods). The SWIFT ban on some banks could make at least some of this more expensive and difficult.
Italy and Germany had particularly baulked at SWIFT action since it could hit them hard but as this recent move was announced, Germany’s Baerbock said, “after Russia’s shameless attack ... we are working hard on limiting the collateral damage of decoupling (Russia) from SWIFT so that it hits the right people.”
Another fear attached to a total SWIFT ban was that Russia could find ways to get around it, falling back on their own system, which would make it harder for the US to keep tabs on payments. Russia’s central bank has developed its own alternative to SWIFT called the System for Transfer of Financial Messages, but it is nowhere near as large as the SWIFT network – the Bank of Russia’s website says its system is used by about 400 banks.
There are also concerns about the potential role that could be played by cryptocurrencies to get around any sanctions, at a time when Western central banks are already wary about the rise of crypto assets as an alternative to government-backed money.
Has this been done before?
There is a precedent for SWIFT kicking out some banks: in 2012 it expelled Iranian banks sanctioned by the European Union. It reconnected many of the banks in 2016 after the sanctions were lifted.
And allies on both sides of the Atlantic considered the SWIFT option in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. Russia declared then that kicking it out of SWIFT would be equivalent to a declaration of war. The allies, criticised ever after for responding too weakly to Russia’s 2014 aggression, shelved the idea.
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Fascist Western banks
In state legislatures throughout the country, lawmakers are introducing bills to protect the rights of their constituents concerning freedom of speech and freedom of association. Bank lobbyists are aggressively opposing these consumer protection bills, which raises the question: why? The banks say they do not use ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) metrics, so why oppose these consumer protection bills that merely erect some guardrails to ensure that the rights, freedoms, and choices of citizens are protected?
The banks and others opposing legislation to protect consumers and small businesses from ESG discrimination say the legislation interferes with the free market, that the government is meddling with how a private business operates. However, does a free market in financial services exist today? The aggressiveness of banks' opposition to these ESG bills hints that there may be more to the story.
When the biggest banks in the world partner with large businesses, federal regulators, the United Nations, and entities in Net-Zero 2050 alliances, we are no longer operating under a free market. Crony capitalism, corporatism, or fascism, but not a free market. Individual citizens and independent businesses are seeing their choices and their freedoms slip away.
For those who do not believe that government and banks would ever collude to discriminate against a legal business, look into Operation Choke Point, an early test run of the "public private partnership" to enforce a political ideology. From Forbes, "Newly unsealed documents show top FDIC officials running operation choke point," federal regulators conspired to shut payday lenders and firearms business out of the banking system. Is that how a free market operates?
Some say the ESG movement is just the latest bogeyman, that there is no proof that the movement is impacting individuals and businesses. That is false.
In North Dakota, the director of mineral resources, Lynn Helms, recently returned from an energy conference in Houston and reported that oil companies now see the Bakken in North Dakota as a mature oil play and are shifting capital elsewhere. Among the reasons Helms cited for the about-face: a surge in attention among oil industry operators to their carbon footprints. According to the article, "[w]ith financiers increasingly factoring climate consequences into their investments, achieving a gas capture level near 100% has become 'goal number one' for many oil producers, Helms said, even more than expanding output."
During the 2021 legislative session in North Dakota, representatives of the lignite industry testified that coal operations are seeing increasing insurance premiums and a drop in the number of insurance companies willing to write insurance for any price. This is the ESG movement in action, and it will not stop with oil and coal.
Bank lobbyists say that no one should tell bankers how to run their businesses. The reality is that bankers are already being told how to run their businesses by the federal government, international agencies, and other influencers, whether they admit it or not. And that is bad news for small businesses and individual citizens.
The bank lobbyists who testify in opposition to the ESG consumer protection bills should be asked if any banks they represent have joined the U.N. Net-Zero Banking Alliance. The Alliance website says banks representing more than 40 percent of global banking assets are committed to aligning their lending and investment portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050. In their own words: "The Alliance will reinforce, accelerate, and support the implementation of decarbonization strategies."
American banks that have signed on to the U.N. Net-Zero Banking Alliance to date include Bank of America, Blue Ridge Bank, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
The bank lobbyists should be asked how this alliance plans to meet the stated objective of reinforcing, accelerating, and supporting the implementation of "decarbonization strategies." Will the banks alter their business model? Will this alliance drive decisions on providing banking services to certain sectors, businesses, and individuals?
Also, does any of these seven large financial institutions have relationships with local state-chartered banks? If so, will the goals of the U.N. Net-Zero Alliance have an impact on how these large banks work with smaller community banks?
We can ask the same questions of the large insurers. Does any of the insurance companies doing business in your state belong to the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance? If so, what impacts will there be on businesses in the state as the goals of the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance are pursued? A recent Bloomberg article shows that some efforts of the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance had to be scaled back, for now, when attorneys working with the group said certain actions could raise antitrust issues. The solution they are working on with government allies? Simply rewrite the antitrust laws.
Government's role is to protect the rights, freedoms, and liberties of individuals. Lawmakers at the state level should understand what the companies, governments, and other entities signing on to the ESG movement, the Net-Zero 2050 alliances, and the Great Reset intend to do. Read their own words — they are not hiding anything. And take them at their word.
Of course, this is just another conspiracy theory, right? Governments and banks would never join forces to track the social media posts of individuals, their banking activity, their alliances, and occupations to crack down on freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. This isn't the Hunger Games, is it? Just ask the truckers in Canada and their supporters.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/why_banks_are_fighting_esg_legislation.html
*************************************************U.S.-Bound Migrants in Southern Mexico Are Counseled on Controversial 'Repressed Memories'
Two United Nations-sponsored groups in southern Mexico are reportedly coaching immigrants arriving there on “repressed memories” that would allow them to gain asylum cards in Mexico for passage northward and then illegal entry into the United States.
Both the Jesuit Society of Refugees and an outfit called Fray Matias de Cordova, based in the Mexican city of Tapachula near the border with Guatemala, are advertising “psychological" help in store windows there, according to Todd Bensman, a security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors greater restrictions on immigration.
At these sessions, in which thousands of immigrants have reportedly participated, people are helped to recover memories of alleged trauma they suffered in their home countries, Enrique Vidal of Fray Matias de Cordova told Bensman during a visit to the southern region last month. By claiming they are victims of such abuses, immigrants can qualify for asylum in Mexico even if, as in many cases, their initial application on economic hardship grounds has been rejected.
“With their newfound memories of more eligible claims,” Bensman wrote for his organization’s website, “the immigrants get asylum (a term many use interchangeably with refugee status) and Mexican residency cards, which many then promptly use to pass through Mexico and make illegal entry over the American border.”
The concept of repressed memory and its reliability as evidence has proved controversial in American jurisprudence. In the 1990s, several high profile cases involving day care centers made headlines, with stories of children subjected to bizarre sexual and satanic rites.
In the aftermath, some experts have sought to debunk the validity of “repressed memory” as a source of reliable evidence. While there is widespread agreement that a remembrance of horrific and traumatic experiences may sometimes be buried, such memories can also be created, according to academics who have delved into the psychology.
Bensman asked Vidal of the border aid group if “the people you are helping [have] already made the mistake of not telling the authorities their traumatic experiences that qualify” for asylum or refugee status, meaning on their appeals.
“Yes, that’s how it is,” Vidal replied.
According to excerpts transcribed from the interview, Vidal told Bensman that his group has achieved “a high percentage of success” – more than 90 percent – in helping clients overcome previous Mexican denials and obtain the necessary paperwork for immigrants from the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador; Haiti and other countries to continue traveling northward.
The Jesuit Society of Refugees did not respond to questions it requested in writing from RealClearInvestigations on its activities in Tapachula and, in particular, the psychological counseling sessions.
The United Nations and the Mexican embassy also did not respond to questions. RCI left a phone message for Vidal in English and Spanish but the call was not returned.
Bensman said he had travelled to southern Mexico in January because Mexican authorities were bottling up thousands of immigrants in Chiapas and Tabasco states at the request of the Biden administration, which wants to slow the torrent of people heading to and crossing the U.S. southern border.
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Britain's security services have gone woke
Spies and soldiers should not be promoting identity politics.
We live in an increasingly volatile and unpredictable world. There are many hostile foreign-state actors, eager to infiltrate British public institutions and undermine our democratic structures. And there are myriad terror-related threats, too, especially from Islamic extremists.
Yet while the threats to our national security grow, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ chiefs are reportedly encouraging spies to focus on checking their ‘white privilege’. According to media reports this week, back in December staff were issued with a dossier entitled ‘Mission Critical’, and told to avoid using words such as ‘manpower’, ‘strong’ and ‘grip’ because these words can ‘reinforce dominant cultural patterns’.
Not to be outdone, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has launched its very own woke offensive in the past few days. As Russia plunged Europe into war, the MoD’s blue-tick verified ‘LGBT+ Network’ Twitter account proceeded to explore the meaning of the terms ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘queer’ and, last but not least, ‘questioning’ – which, according to the MoD, is ‘the process of exploring your own sexual orientation and / or gender identity’. The account also celebrated the MoD’s ‘commitment and efforts to be a LGBTQ+ inclusive employer’, which have been recognised with a Stonewall ‘Workplace Index Silver award’.
These institutions are supposed to strengthen British national security, not to raise awareness of the latest progressive causes. The MoD surely has more pressing issues to concern itself with. Like the war that is unfolding in Europe, for instance.
Those who run our security institutions clearly lack seriousness. Their willingness to use these institutions to promote identity politics, even when our national security is threatened, is a sign of serious institutional decadence.
Moreover, the embrace of these woke concerns could actually impede the ability of the security services to perform their key functions. The MI5’s broader terror-related watchlist, for instance, contains 43,000 individuals, the vast majority of whom – as many as 39,000 – are Islamist extremists. Ordering agents to ‘check’ their ‘white privilege’ might actually inhibit their ability to deal with such militants (who tend to be from non-white, Muslim-majority communities). These attempts to make our security services more ‘inclusive’ could get in the way of protecting us.
In recent weeks, concerns have been raised about the influence of critical race theory and trans activism in our healthcare and education systems, and among civil servants. But the creeping influence of wokeness in our defence and security institutions is even more alarming. These institutions should have one priority only – the protection of our national security.
Britain continues to face many threats, both foreign and domestic. When those whose role it is to protect us are distracted by divisive identity politics, we are in deep trouble.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/25/the-security-services-have-gone-woke/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Sunday, February 27, 2022
Trump news – live: Ex-president’s intelligence chief ‘stunned’ by former boss’s praise for Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich has clearly outsmarted Joe Biden and the West generally. Western "sanctions" have been exposed as a paper tiger. Trump can see that and rightly notes the sad comparison between Biden and Putin. It is Biden his remarks are aimed at, not Vladimir Vladimirovich. Biden is very much a hopeless dummy. Trump does say that he is angry about the debacle in Ukraine
Trump does NOT say so but it might be noted that a lot of Western conservatives quietly admire the way old-fashioned values survive without much challenge in Russia. The American Left often is so extreme as to seem borderline insane. That doesn't wash in Russia. Conservative support for any action against Russia can therefore be expected to be reluctant and Trump's remarks may give some voice to that
Amusing, though, that Communist China is also supporting Russia. Strange bedfellows
Donald Trump’s former director of national intelligence has voiced his dismay at the ex-president’s remarks praising Vladimir Putin as he mounts a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Speaking to The Daily Beast, Dan Coats said he was “stunned” by Mr Trump’s remarks. “I cannot think of any other US president that would in a situation like this say what he said,” he told the site.
Twice in two days, the former president hailed Mr Putin as “smart” and blamed Joe Biden for what is happening. “He [Mr Putin] was going to be satisfied with a piece and now he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration,” Mr Trump said while speaking with Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham. “As an American I am angry about it and I am saddened by it. And it all happened because of a rigged election.”
In another video clip from Wednesday night that was circulated on social media, Mr Trump can be heard saying: “Trump said Putin is smart. He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.”
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'Left loves to deride capitalism' but also 'love what it creates for them,'
Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds said Friday that Democrats often “deride capitalism” but they also "love what capitalism does for them."
Donalds made the comment at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, and specifically target New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his remarks about Democrats seeming duplicity over capitalism.
"She literally believes that we can print whatever [money] we want," he said. "It doesn't matter how much we borrow. It doesn't matter how much we spend. But she can believe all that when she drives her nice little Tesla and lives in one of the most expensive apartments in Washington D.C. You see, the left loves to deride capitalism but they actually love capitalism.
The Florida lawmaker also said about Democrats: "They love what it creates for them but they want you and they want me and they want every hard working American to bend the knee but America has woken up. We've realized we're not going down a socialism road and we are going to fight them this November," he added.
Donalds attributed record inflation levels to the Democratic-led Congress passing President Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act last March. He said they said are still pursuing a way to pass their signature, multi-trillion-dollar renewable-energy plan known as the Green New Deal.
"They've killed the Keystone pipeline," Donalds said. "They've opened up our borders. They want to spend massively."
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The Reason White People Have Disappeared From Commercials Is Totally deranged
If you were someone from the past and you time-traveled to this time period and watched television, you would think that all white people disappeared.
This is not coming from a place of malice, but an observation.
Now, I am not one to watch a lot of television, to be honest, and when I do I prefer streaming services. Even with streaming services, there are commercials and truthfully, I didn’t even really pay attention since I mute them when they come on.
However, while watching some television with my father, he made the comment that white people in commercials seemed to disappear.
At first, I said to him that I didn’t think so, but my opinion changed.
It is sort of like when you get a new car and then you notice that particular car all over the roads. I started to pay attention and he was correct, as usual.
Now, I am of Hispanic and Sicilian descent, so I obviously have no issue seeing other ethnic people on television. That’s not the issue. It’s the erasing of white people/couples in commercials that has me wondering what the heck is going on.
If we’re supposed to be a great big, diverse society, why are advertisers erasing a huge chunk of it?
Here is what American Thinker had to say on this topic, and as usual, they nailed it:
In the United States today, the White population (not including Hispanics) is 57.8%. In real life, Caucasians are still in the majority, but now on TV and the Internet, they are swept under the rug like trash. Blacks comprise 14% of the U.S. population but appear in 50% of commercials. White actors now appear to promote health insurance, gold, loans, and some medicines. Moreover, if a White person appears in a commercial, he/she is usually old, sick, a freak, or at the very least, an appendage to a Black partner. If there’s a doctor on the screen, he’s usually Black, while the patient is usually White. Caucasian young men appear in only 4% of the commercials! If some aliens began to study the population of Planet Earth through our TV commercials they would have a somewhat distorted picture of Americans, to put it mildly.
So why do advertisers ignore the long-standing rules of marketing, and to the detriment of their own financial interests, fill the media space with content that displaces and degrades its biggest market segment? The answer is simple. At the heart of this nonsense is political correctness in a form even an Orwell could not have foreseen. Business executives go out of their way to publicly show their conformity with the universal “diversity” and “critical racial theory” (CRT), demanding that the White man be blamed for all the sins one can imagine. Replacing ancient, long-vanished oppression of Blacks with real oppression of Whites, overcompensating and planting racism-in-reverse.
[…]
Ordinary people keep their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs, not getting a holiday bonus, not getting promoted, or being socially ostracized This is understandable, and I wouldn’t blame them, although I wouldn’t respect them either. But what are people of higher position afraid of — the heads and owners of businesses? What is threatening them? Indeed, nobody is going to drive them out of their positions or take their business, though fear of boycotts can be realistic. They are afraid of various inconveniences: negative articles in the leftist press, social shunning, frivolous lawsuits, loss of state and federal licenses, government contracts, unexpected audits by the IRS, fines for alleged violations of minorities’ rights, and the like small and large troubles.
It’s a fascinating piece and really gets down into the nitty-gritty over how political correctness and social Marxism have rooted themselves in our society. To such a point now, where you wonder if we’ll ever break free.
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This Religious Prosecution in Finland Could Be ‘Harbinger’ for Other Democracies
A court in Finland heard final arguments this week in the prosecution of a member of Parliament and a Lutheran bishop for expressing opposition to same-sex marriage.
Charged under Finland’s “ethnic agitation law” are Päivi Räsänen, a member of Parliament who also is a medical doctor and former interior minister, and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. Each faces up to two years in prison if convicted.
Andrew Brunson, an American pastor who was imprisoned in Turkey for about two years, traveled to Finland on behalf of the Family Research Council, an educational institute focused on traditional values, for closing arguments that wrapped up Tuesday.
Brunson brought 14,000 pledged prayer requests for the two defendants, FRC President Tony Perkins told The Daily Signal, adding that the Finnish court likely would issue a decision in early March.
Räsänen, 62, published a pamphlet in 2004 about the Bible’s teaching on marriage. In 2019, she was on a radio program and tweeted a picture of a Bible passage.
She is charged with three counts of violating Finland’s ethnic agitation law.
Authorities charged Pohjola with one count of violating the law in connection with hosting Räsänen’s pamphlet on his church’s website.
This type of prosecution could come to other Western democracies, including the United States, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said.
“The idea of Christians being persecuted in America just for living out our faith is not far away,” Roy told The Daily Signal in a written statement, adding:
In fact, we have already seen it happen here to Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop out in Colorado, and a football coach in Washington state—Joseph Kennedy—being fired for praying after high school football games. Think about all the surveillance going on, about the persistent intrusions on our liberties.
Roy co-wrote an op-ed with Perkins for Fox News about the case, noting a prosecutor had said that “the Bible cannot overrule Finnish law.” The prosecutor also said that use of the word “sin” can be “harmful,” they wrote.
“In regards to the Finnish law at the center of this case, we face the possibility of having a similar problem with American law in the future, particularly if the Democrats succeed in passing the Equality Act,” Roy told The Daily Signal. “That’s why Republicans cannot be focused only on taking back the House or the White House; we have to fight to take back America. Our freedom depends on it.”
Early in the case, the prosecutor’s office said that Räsänen’s statements “violate the equality and dignity of homosexuals, so they transcend the boundaries of freedom of speech and religion.”
In her defense, Räsänen said:
Ultimately, the three charges brought against me have to do with whether it is allowed in Finland to express your conviction that is based on the traditional teaching of the Bible and Christian churches. I do not see I would have in any way defamed homosexuals whose human dignity and human rights I have constantly said to respect and defend.
Perkins said the Finnish prosecution could be a “harbinger” of similar laws in Western democracies.
“This could be a warning for what is coming even in liberal democracies if they have lost their way on religious freedom and Christianity,” Perkins told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
The Family Research Council chief said the Equality Act, which passed the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, poses threats to Americans’ religious speech and religious freedom.
That bill stalled in the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans each control 50 seats. If passed, the bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity as characteristics protected by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Critics assert that the bill would adversely affect parents, adoption agencies, religious organizations and schools, and girls and women’s sports.
“This is coming to America if we go down that path,” Perkins said, warning of a situation where “citizens just can’t express or act on [biblical] beliefs.”
“Finland says it’s fine to have beliefs in the Bible … as long as those beliefs stay between your ears. That’s not religious freedom,” he said. “Western civilization is a byproduct of a Judeo-Christian worldview.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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25 February 2022
Applause for Putin and Fears of War
In Taganrog, a port city in southern Russia, buses carrying hundreds of women and children from the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are arriving every day. The closest border crossing to the port city on the Sea of Azov is only about 70 kilometers (45 miles) to the north.
What do people here think about the crisis? Do they support Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has now recognized the breakaway territories in Ukraine’s Donbas after nearly eight years of fighting and has sent troops into the region? Will there be a new war?
DER SPIEGEL spoke with residents of the city:
Veronika, 25
"I think the fact that Putin has recognized the 'People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk’ isn’t a bad thing, it can help the people there. Normal men, who have tried for all these years to live in peace, have now been called on to fight in those regions. It is no secret that our army is well equipped, maybe it will save human lives if our military comes to their aid.
"Who Are We Supposed to Fight Against? Our Relatives?"
We live in a border city, what I want is peace for all. I see the situation not from a political perspective but from a human one. Politicians make the decisions way over our heads anyways. I feel for the people, especially the children, who really don’t deserve all this. There has been fighting for years. I live near the train station and every morning when I drive to work, I see the buses with the refugees from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions waiting. (Eds. Note: The refugees are transferred onto trains that bring them to other parts of Russia further from the border). To be honest, tears came to my eyes when I saw all the buses full of people, when I drove by on Monday. After all, they will clearly not be able to go back anytime soon and are leaving their homes for a long time. I read that some of them are even being brought to Kazan.” (Eds. note: Kazan is located about 1,500 kilometers away.)
Alexander, 60, retired train conductor
"Putin is doing things right. I’m not afraid of a new war, not at my age. I’m already retired, live in a village outside of the city, take care of my garden, the potatoes. The situation in the Donbas will now calm down. It will take time, but that’s what will happen, I’m convinced of it.”
Ilya, 18 years old
"Of course I’m in favor of recognizing the territories. Will there be a new war? There’s already been one for eight years, and I’m afraid its not going to be coming to an end any time soon. Plus, there’s the propaganda war, which is like a lever that constantly exerts pressure on people to change their opinion. We can see how the Western media haven’t revised history on just one occasion. In the U.S., they say that it was the Americans who won World War II, and not the Russians. Of course, if worse comes to worst, I would be ready to fight for my country, for our sovereignty. Together with other volunteers on the weekend, I helped bring refugees from the Donetsk and Luhansk region to the train and to find their seats.”
Yulia, 43, market fruit vendor
Our volodya (Eds. Note: a nickname for Vladimir Putin) is just great. I have always voted for him. He’ll take care of things. The main thing is that he ensures peace. All of this makes me anxious, all the buses arriving here behind us with the refugees. When you only read about it, it’s different than when you see it yourself. All this is terrible, I feel for the people, the children.”
Tonya Vzhyol, 59, pensioner
"The territories have finally been recognized by the Kremlin as independent. This should have happened eight years ago. Thank God! What a speech by Putin, I watched it live on TV. I am so happy about it, what a day of celebration it is for us! My friends and I sent each other congratulations afterwards. My son believes that now, after the recognition of the 'People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk,’ the danger of war will increase. I see it differently. I think we are one, one people, and I say that as someone who was myself born in Ukraine. I come from Zaporizhzhya region (Eds. Note: Area in southeastern Ukraine, west of the Donbas) and came to Taganrog after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that we belong together, not only the Donbas region, but also Kharkiv (a region in northeastern Ukraine), Dnipropetrovsk (in eastern Ukraine) and also my home region of Zaporizhzhya.”
Andrei Merkushkin, 28, train conductor from Rostov-on-Don
"To be honest, I try not to think about the issue at all if I can. I don’t want to be afraid of war and I try to block all of that out. Recognizing the 'People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk’ is really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s good for the people there, they are further integrated into the Russian state. On the other hand, it could go badly for us. By that I mean, there could be a new war. God forbid that should happen. And then, the economic consequences that we are now already feeling, the exchange rate for the ruble has already crashed.”
Ilona, 58, with her dog Luziya, retired economist
"Putin’s speech was commendable. Though I don’t really like him, I think it is time for him to make way for a successor. I have always voted for the communists. But I support the fact that he has now recognized the 'People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.’ It is simply very unpleasant to live in a border region, so close to Ukraine, where the nationalists are shooting (Eds. Note: this is how she refers to Ukrainians). They recently tried to push into Russian territory. How do I know that? I saw it on the news.
The Ukrainians want to go to war. I am convinced of that. There is some kind of hatred involved: They hate eastern Ukrainians and Muscovites and think we have annexed territory (Eds. Note: she is referring to the Crimea). But that’s not true. The land used to belong to us and was taken from us after the end of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and Ukraine itself were founded by Lenin. Without Lenin there wouldn’t be any Ukraine, as Putin correctly pointed out. Now, Ukraine has forced us to take these measures, to recognize the 'people’s republics,’ to send troops – after all, the Ukrainians don’t want the regions and all the people there.”
Vitaly, 27, works in a café
"My friends and I are all against the recognition of the 'People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.’ But many people are afraid to speak about it publicly, to criticize the leadership. There is a lot of pressure, along with the uncertainty and fear of what is coming. Repression in Russia has increased enormously recently.
I don’t like at all what’s happening now, Putin’s smugness, the feeling that everything we have seen recently seems very staged, as if this script had been written a long time ago. This is all very scary. I think that no matter what happens, it will not end well. I also don’t understand at all why Putin is acting like this – on what basis, based on what facts? His speech about Lenin, that everything was terrible back then, that is nonsense. He himself was a member of the Communist Party during the Soviet Union.
I like the fact that the EU and the U.S. reacted quickly with sanctions – and targeted at Putin’s entourage, not at all of us.”
Note: A further eight people did not want to speak or said they were not closely following the situation or only briefly said they supported Putin’s actions. Two people did not want to speak to foreign media, including an elderly lady who first said she wanted to award Putin the title Hero of Russia and then refused to be approached by a foreign journalist.
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Mission Creep: DHS and election officials should not control the narrative or free speech
People running for office have always bent opinion, lied and obfuscated about their positions, politics and facts. Often they believe their truths, which may be very different from someone else’s truth or the “real” truth. This is part and parcel of a democracy. One might even say, it is the “American Way.” It is not the government’s job, to determine what we believe, what we wish to vote for or to ensure accuracy of campaign speech.
That is mission creep.
They are constraining what is acceptable to discuss, what are approved opinions. They are purposefullly constraining the Overton window.
This is information control in the worst way.
It is not the job of the Department of Homeland, and local or national election officials to stop free speech, whether that “speech” is—on social media, TV or on a stage.
Conflating illegal foreign influences in elections, computer bots from foreign countries and free speech into the same governmental oversight is not ok. They are not the same.
This Politco article nicely demonstrates how election officials have seamlessly woven free speech with foreign influences can been seen in the following text:
Ten state chief election officials say in interviews they have had to refocus their positions to battle a constant flow of disinformation. This year, they say, will be no different...
“political candidates undermining the election systems that they still run for office in, and conspiracy theories that target even the most obscure parts of America’s election infrastructure”
The Politco article in question, goes on:
Voting for the 2022 midterms is already underway, and the nation’s top election officials are caught fighting a two-front war: Battling disinformation stemming from the last election, while simultaneously preparing for the next one.
The officials are no longer just running elections. They’ve become full-time myth-busters, contending with information threats coming from the other side of the globe—and their own ranks.
In interviews with 10 state chief election officials—along with conversations with staffers, current and former local officials and other election experts—many described how they have had to refocus their positions to battle a constant rolling boil of mis- and disinformation about election processes.
They’re dealing with political candidates undermining the election systems that they still run for office in, and conspiracy theories that target even the most obscure parts of America’s election infrastructure. And they say the country will face the same issues this year as it elects a new Congress and decides control of three dozen statehouses...
Election officials said they have increasingly been leaning on national partnerships—both with other secretaries and federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security—to help prepare local election workers.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said that she will soon host a workshop with CISA and local clerks in her state.
“It has exploded out of control,” Bellows said. “Disinformation can lead to people threatening harm” to election workers. She also said her office would work on further training for local officials, including de-escalation training, to help protect them in volatile situations.
Battling “mis, mal and disinformation” of American citizens is again mission creep. Free speech is free speech. It is our first amendment right.
Frankly, the idea that election officials are “leaning on” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security is downright scary. That election officials truly believe that people exercising their first amendment rights will cause others to “threaten harm to election officials” demonstrates the government’s authoritarian position on free speech rights in the 21st century. Only free speech that doesn’t impact on the government’s approved narrative is allowed.
Because we all know that elections in the USA are always fair and never corrupted, right?
Some good news!
Rumble Inc., The Neutral Video Platform, to go Public Through Combination With Cantor Fitzgerald’s CF Acquisition Corp. VI (Nasdaq: CFVI)
- Tremendous growth from 1.6 million average monthly active users in Q3 2020 to a record 36 million average monthly active users in Q3 2021
- 44 million monthly active users in August 2021
- Viewer engagement grew 44x from Q2 2020 to Q3 2021 to 8 billion minutes watched per month1
- Transaction is expected to provide approximately $400 million in proceeds2 to Rumble, including a fully committed PIPE of $100 million at $10.00 per share and $300 million of cash held in the trust account of CFVI
- Transaction values Rumble at an enterprise value of $2.1 billion3
- Rumble Founder and Chief Executive Officer to retain voting control to facilitate execution of Rumble’s neutral mission on behalf of all stakeholders
Youtube’s policies to censor speech are benefiting non-censored video platforms. Now we need to decrease Twitter and Facebook’s (“Meta”) online presence as well. Let’s make GETTR, GAB, MeWe and Substack continue to grow!
As I have been saying for many months now, Justin Trudeau has become a very wealthy man on his profits from the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. He is invested heavily in the Canadian company that holds the patents for the lipid nanoparticles. The Canadian government is also profiting nicely off of these companies—from their patent royalties.
Thanks to David Martin did the heavy lifting and has produced the documents and facts proving this point—that Trudeau and the Canadian government are tied in financially with the mRNA vaccine companies. Watch his video below (or on Rumble):
In my opinion: Trudeau’s conflicts of interest are vast. His vaccine mandates, authoritarian rule and use of emergency powers has benefited himself at the expense of Canadians. It is time for him to go.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14020&omhide=true&trk=title
************************************The state of California is introducing a new law that will allow activists to sue the makers of “Ghost Guns” and “Assault Weapons”
This new law has drawn the ire of 2A activists across the country and the press release from California Governor Gavin Newsom reads more like propaganda than a traditional press release.
From Newsom’s press release:
DEL MAR – Alongside California Attorney General Rob Bonta, legislators and local leaders, Governor Gavin Newsom today announced a new package of meaningful gun safety legislation to expand the state’s nation-leading protections against gun violence. The package includes a measure the Governor called for in December to help hold the gun industry accountable through private lawsuits, and a bill that would prohibit advertising of certain categories of weapons to children.
“California will continue to lead the fight to end gun violence with bold action to tackle the national crisis putting millions of Californians at risk,” said Governor Newsom. “It’s time to go on the offensive with new measures that empower individuals to hold irresponsible and negligent gun industry actors to account, crack down on shameful advertising that targets our kids and more. This is not about attacking law-abiding gun owners – it’s about stopping the tragic violence ravaging communities across the country.”
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision allowing Texas’s ban on most abortion services to remain in place, Governor Newsom directed his Administration to work with the Legislature to propose a measure like the bill that will be introduced by Senator Robert Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) today, modeled on the structure of Texas’s abortion law. The bill would allow private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, transports, imports into the state or sells assault weapons, .50 BMG rifles, ghost guns, or ghost gun kits.
The state of California is no bastion for the 2nd Amendment but this legislation will likely result in many companies pulling out of the state entirely. Companies are not going to want to risk costly court battles, it will be more cost-effective for companies to simply stop shipping products and selling firearms in the state entirely.
The made-up and highly subjective terminology in the legislation is what makes this measure such a monster. “Assault weapon” means whatever it needs to when it comes to gun grabbers. Pretty much every firearm made of polymer has been called an “assault weapon” and you can expect activist groups in California to play fast and loose with the term so they can deal the maximum amount of damage with this legislation.
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Australian broadcaster slams calls for Australia to allow 235,000 new immigrants a year claiming it would push up house prices and bring wages down
Ben Fordham has slammed a push to open Australia to hundreds of thousands of skilled migrants as a 'quick fix' to pay back debts.
The 2GB radio host questioned if enthusiasm surrounding foreign workers was prompted by the tens of millions of dollars owed by the federal government.
He explained the influx would mean more tax could be collected but claimed it would stretch public services, inflate house prices, and pull wages down.
This is despite Australia having virtually no immigrants for two years since Covid closed the borders, and accepting 200,000 net a year before that.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg recently called for 235,000 new arrivals every year.
'That's the population of Hobart arriving in Australia every year,' Fordham said on his 2GB radio show.
'Our leaders see this as a money tree but is this really in our best interests?
'We're not talking about government interests or the treasurer, we're talking about the best interests of everyday Australians.
'It may satisfy economists but it won't help those who are waiting years for surgery and it won't assist anyone who can only dream of buying a house.'
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce backed the push to bring skilled migrants Down Under but said they had to be prepared to settle down in regional areas.
'We have to say 'if you want to come to Australia you have to live in Tamworth. Sydney's full,' he said on the 2GB show.
'Sydney does not want more people but regional areas do.'
Fordham said though immigrants were crucial in building Australia, he worried housing, health services and transport would suffer.
He said a mass influx of 190,000 or even 235,000 skilled workers may satisfy economists but make life tougher for residents.
'For our political leaders it's a quick fix,' he said.
Fordham said Sydney was crippled by some of the worst traffic congestion in the world with 500 schools already crowded with too many students.
'Before Covid came along, one in three patients in our hospitals were waiting too long to be treated in emergency rooms,' he said, with 100,000 on the waiting list for elective surgeries.
House prices in the Harbour City also soared up to three times the rate of wages, faster than the rest of the country.
He said the demand for housing in Sydney would result in many having nowhere to live, putting pressure on public services to help the homeless.
The influx of skilled migrants would also put pressure on the 900,000 Australians currently surviving on unemployment benefits, he claimed.
Business leaders are complaining of a job shortage and there are fears employers will favour migrants to avoid paying higher wages to Australians.
'More needs to be done to put Aussies in jobs, before sending an SOS to the other side of the world,' Fordham said.
'You've got to show some tough love to those who refuse to work. And if you're a leaner and not a lifter you can't keep on collecting a cheque from taxpayers.'
Economists said the arrival of foreign workers would fill the gaps in high and low-skill jobs and contribute at least $1 billion a year to the economy.
Accounting giant KPMG has suggested bumping net migration levels beyond 350,000 a year to reverse a population decline and stimulate demand, increasing the size of the labour pool.
The report said pushing migration to 350,000 people a year - equivalent to adding a city the size of Brisbane every seven years - would boost GDP by 4.4 per cent.
However, the Grattan Institute said numbers alone would be counter-productive and the migration policy must tilt even more towards skilled workers, even though they far outnumber family reunion arrivals.
Business groups demanded the nation's cap on permanent skilled migration to be bumped up to 200,000 per year, rather than the current 160,000.
National wages growth has been stuck below the long-term average of 3 per cent since mid-2013 and last year grew by just 2.2 per cent, Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed.
Property prices in the year to January 2022 rose by 22.4 per cent, the fastest annual pace since June 1989, as professionals who could work from home took advantage of record-low interest rates to buy a bigger house or move to coastal regional areas.
The CoreLogic data showed an even more dramatic 29.8 per cent surge in Sydney's median house price to $1.39million, putting a home with a backyard beyond the reach of an average, full-time income earner on $90,329.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Thursday, February 24, 2022
Joe Manchin slams the door as another Biden nomination bites the dust
Joe Biden thought Americans gave him and his loony liberals a mandate to transform the country. Ironically, there’s an increasing amount of evidence that Americans didn’t really want Joe Biden to win the 2020 presidential election at all.
However, from day one in the White House, the Biden administration has been trying to cram radical progressive policies down American’s throats. It’s not working. Thankfully, there are a handful of reasonable moderates who are standing in the way.
The most visible of these few Democrats willing to stand up to the radical left is Joe Manchin. Manchin’s common sense objection to Biden’s insane tax and spend “Build Back Better” legislation buried it.
Now, Manchin is exercising that same type of moderate common sense to slam the door shut on another Joe Biden nomination. Biden nominated Robert Califf to run the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
What’s strange is why Biden thought he could ramrod through a controversial choice? Barack Obama nominated Califf for the same position. Califf did manage to get confirmed for a brief tenure as the head of the FDA.
According to Manchin, he failed miserably. Manchin harshly insisted, “In the five years since Dr. Califf was confirmed, more than 400,000 Americans, and 5,000 West Virginians have died from drug-related overdose.”
Manchin said, “Califf bears a great deal of responsibility for these deaths.” The long-time West Virginia Senator was puzzled over why Joe Biden would nominate someone who failed so miserably.
Manchin asked, “Why is this administration so committed to asking each of us in the Senate to reconfirm a person who had the opportunity to make a difference but show us who he really was?” Joe Biden continues to nominate highly controversial individuals for important positions.
He has crammed through a transgender for a high-ranking spot in the Department of Health Services. Recently, Biden announced another bizarre pick for a critical government job. Biden appointed a gender-fluid person to handle our nation’s nuclear waste.
Sam Brinton has some odd ?exual feti?hes as well, reportedly being into kinky animal diversions. Califf is just another in a long line of strange appointments and nominations by Joe Biden.
This time, however, it’s for a position that requires U.S. Senate approval. Joe Manchin has said no. Looks like the West Virginia Senator has slammed the door as another Biden nomination bites the dust.
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End Of ROE? Lawmakers Pass Laws For A Post Roe vs Wade America
In an interesting turn of events, the tide has definitely changed in favor of those fighting to protect babies in the womb. There are a few reasons for this, besides God intervening, which include the nomination and confirmed 3 Supreme Court Justices, made by former President Donald J.Trump.
With more conservatives on the Supreme Court weighing in on a high-profile case that could unwind Roe v. Wade—and, with it, the “Constitutional right to abortion”—conservative state lawmakers are proactively introducing bills aimed at limiting abortion at the state level.
Republicans in at least nine states have proposed six-week abortion bans that mimic Texas’s civilian-enforced law that led to a 60 percent drop in abortions in its first month. Two additional states proposed trigger bans, although none of these bills have been advanced.
At least three more, Florida, Arizona, and West Virginia are considering laws that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, modeled on the Mississippi law at the center of the Supreme Court case. The Mississippi law will be debated at the Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Each state has passed the ban in at least one chamber and appears set to sign it into law in the coming weeks.
Susan Liebel, state director of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said the bans show legislators in these states “have an expectation that the Supreme Court’s decision will, at a minimum, uphold a ban on abortion after 15 weeks.”
“An overwhelming majority of Americans reject abortion extremism and support these common-sense limits,” Liebel told the Washington Free Beacon. “We have great hope that all states will soon be able to enact the consensus of their people, while the pro-life movement continues striving for the day when all children and their mothers are protected in our laws.”
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, states would be able to restrict abortion prior to fetal viability, which is considered roughly 24 weeks, though recent research shows fetuses can feel pain as early as 12 weeks.
Even if the court only weakens Roe, it could be enough to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week ban. By setting viability at 15 weeks, the Court could keep Roe intact while still upholding the Mississippi law.
Republican-led states are prepared for either scenario. A dozen states have “trigger bans” in place that outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. Another five states have pre-Roe bans that would be reenacted if the decision is overturned.
Polling data show 65 percent of Americans believe abortion should usually be illegal in the second trimester, which begins at 14 weeks. At 15 weeks, fetuses have all their major organs and can respond to taste and touch.
In what is shocking to those on the pro-life side, Florida has remained one of the top states for late-term abortions, with nearly a thousand after 20 weeks in 2019. In 2020, the state had more than 3,000 abortions past 15 weeks, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said the passage of 15-week bans and the introduction of more aggressive restrictions show a “tremendous amount of excitement among the pro-life grassroots” ahead of the Dobbs decision.
“After five decades, a lot of frustration has built up among the American people and their elected representatives precisely because Roe robbed them of their say in protecting vulnerable life in their state,” Mancini told the Free Beacon.
The Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs is expected later this year.
https://trendingpolitics.com/the-end-of-roe-red-states-prepare-to-enact-abortion-restrictions-ethom
*************************************************A twisted Louisiana ex-teacher who admitted to giving her students cupcakes laced with her husband’s sperm has been sentenced to 41 years in prison
A well-deserved sentence for a disgusting act
Cynthia Perkins, 36, was sentenced Friday after pleading guilty to second-degree rape, production of child pornography and conspiracy of mingling harmful substances in Livingston, WTRF reported.
She has no possibility of parole for 40 years.
Perkins had faced 72 charges of various sex crimes, 68 of which were dropped in her plea agreement. As part of the deal, she agreed to testify against her husband, Dennis Perkins, a former sheriff’s deputy who is facing 150 criminal charges, many of which are also sex crimes, according to the indictment.
The couple were arrested in 2019 after they allegedly sexually abused a child together, among other crimes.
Perkins filed for divorce from her husband following their arrests and alleged that Dennis had manipulated her into committing the crimes.
The couple were busted after authorities received a tip at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Investigators later found nude photos of them with the minor.
A lawsuit filed against Dennis Perkins and the Livingston Parish School System claims that Cynthia Perkins filmed her husband supplying semen for the cupcakes that were later fed to children at Westside Junior High School.
Count 15 in the original indictment against the couple alleges the semen was mixed into both the desserts and energy drinks before it was served to victims.
“These three [charges] we thought [were] representative of what she had done and by agreeing to the facts as we put them out on the record, she prepared herself to testify against Dennis Perkins,” Assistant Louisiana Attorney General Barry Milligan told WTRF.
The AG’s office said it had spoken with victims seeking approval for the plea deal before negotiating.
“They feel that this serves justice and better protects their children,” said Assistant Louisiana Attorney General Erica McLellan.
Cynthia resigned from Westside Junior High School the day after her arrest, while Dennis was fired from his deputy role at the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Perkins’ attorney, Paul “Woody” Scott, said his client looks forward to testifying against her husband, whose trial is expected to begin in May.
“He is the real monster. That’s what she wants to make clear. It’s not about shifting blame, she took responsibility today. I mean, that’s what she did, but, she looks forward going after the real monster,” said Scott
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Ted Cruz says Biden's plan to pick a black Supreme Court nominee is 'racial discrimination' and his bid should be 'illegal'
Sen. Ted Cruz stepped up his attacks on Joe Biden's strategy for picking a Supreme court nominee on Sunday, saying it would be illegal for anyone else to specify the race and gender of job applicants.
Biden has made clear he will nominate a black woman to replace Justice Stephen Breyer who announced his retirement lat month.
'Democrats today believe in racial discrimination,' Cruz told Fox News Sunday. 'They're committed to it as a political proposition. I think it is wrong to stand up and say, "We're going to discriminate."
Cruz said that made 94 percent of the population ineligible, including Merrick Garland, nominated by Barack Obama for a Supreme Court seat.
'If he happened to nominate a justice who was an African-American woman, great,' he continued. 'But you know what, if Fox News put a posting, we're looking for a new host for Fox News Sunday and we will only hire an African American woman or a Hispanic man or a Native American woman, that would be illegal.'
Biden has said he will make his announcement before the end of February and is believed to have narrowed his selection to three women.
Leading conservatives - including former Vice President Mike Pence - have expressed concern about Biden's promise, warning that he could be overlooking the best person for the job.
But supporters say it will help make the court a better representation of America.
And the White House has previously called out Cruz for hypocrisy over President Donald Trump's choice of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died in September 2020.
'Just over a year ago, the previous president also promised to select a woman for the Supreme Court,' said Press Secretary Jen Psaki earlier this month.
'Not only were there no complaints about choosing a nominee from a specific demographic, from the same corners, but there was widespread praise of now Justice Barrett on those grounds with Republican lawmakers widely highlighting that they thought this was positive for women in America.
'So take Senator Cruz himself, he had no objection to Donald Trump promising he'd nominated a woman in 2020. Repeat: No objection at all.'
Coney Barrett was confirmed in October 2020, hurried through by Republicans with one eye on the looming presidential election.
Psaki was responding to an episode of Cruz's own podcast where he said Biden's policy was offensive to black women. 'The fact that he's willing to make a promise at the outset that it must be a black woman – I gotta say, that's offensive,' he said.
'Black women are, what, six percent of the U.S. population? He's saying to 94% of Americans, 'I don't give a damn about you – you are ineligible
'And he's also saying – it's actually an insult to black women. 'If he came and said, 'I'm going to put the best jurist on the court', and he looked at a number of people and he ended up nominating a black woman, he could credibly say, "OK I'm nominating the person who's most qualified."'
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Brussels statue of colonial king could be melted and made into memorial for Congo victims, says report
There is no doubt the Belgians were very rough on the Congolese but it may have some relevance that the Congolese are very disordered and criminal to this day
A bronze statue of colonial Belgian king Leopold II in the centre of Brussels could be melted down and turned into a monument to the millions who died under his rule of the Belgian Congo in the 19th century, a group of experts have recommended.
The group, composed of historians, architects and other specialists, also suggested creating an open-air statue park in which the equestrian figure could be displayed in a historical context alongside other controversial memorials.
The regional government of Brussels commissioned the group to write a report on the “decolonisation” of public spaces in the Belgian capital after a backlash against monuments to its colonial past during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
Protesters targeted the statue of Leopold II, known for his brutal treatment of his colonial subjects.
The notorious monarch ruled what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo as his personal fiefdom for decades in the late 19th century. Experts say his brutal rule left as many as 10 million people dead.
The Belgian state took ownership of the huge territory in central Africa in 1908 and retained power over it until the DRC became an independent nation in 1960.
Brussels is filled with memorials of the Belgian empire that was built in Leopold's reign. Besides a wealth of statues, there are scores of streets, squares and public transport stops named after colonial figures.
The report said that public space in the capital had been shaped by a “one-sided and propagandist perspective” since the empire.
It does not recommend tearing down all statues but suggests a case-by-case approach that consults locals before taking a decision. Some could be renamed or put in context with information plaques.
The streets and public spaces with colonial names should all be renamed, the report said, warning against public consultation due to the controversial outcome of a recent referendum on the name of a Brussels tunnel.
The public voted for the Leopold II tunnel to be renamed after Annie Cordy, a recently deceased singer whose songs were littered with colonial stereotypes.
Pascal Smet, the minister with responsibility for urban planning for the Brussels region, said the report offered a nuanced approach to addressing colonial monuments. “The easiest thing would be to get rid of all the statues, but they didn’t choose that,” he said.
“Of course we all know for the individuals that are living in our city today, nobody is responsible for the colonisation, so there is no question of culpability, but it’s a question of a collective responsibility,” he said.
“I think it very important, especially in the times that we are living now … not to be stuck in history, but to understand history.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/leopold-ii-statue-brussels-belgium-b2019716.html
********************************************Supreme Court agrees to hear case of Christian graphic designer who refused to create websites for same-sex weddings because of her religious beliefs
The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to take up the case of a Christian graphic designer who has refused to create websites for same-sex marriage over her religious beliefs.
Lorie Smith, from Colorado, offers graphic and website design services and wants to expand to wedding website services, but she says her religious beliefs would lead her to decline any request from a same-sex couple to design a wedding website.
She also wants to post a statement on her website about her beliefs, but that would run afoul of a Colorado anti-discrimination law. Smith had argued the law violates her free speech and religious rights.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, indicated it would not look at the religious rights issue.
But the high court did say it would decide whether a law that requires an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment. The case is expected to be argued in the fall.
In a 2-1 ruling last year, the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Smith's attempt to overturn a lower court ruling throwing out her legal challenge.
The panel said Colorado had a compelling interest in protecting the 'dignity interests' of members of marginalized groups through its law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act.
The law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, was previously at the heart of Colorado baker Jack Phillips' case, which was decided in 2018 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court said at the time that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had acted with anti-religious bias against Phillips after he refused to bake a cake for two men who were getting married.
But it did not rule on the larger issue of whether a business can invoke religious objections to refuse service to LGBTQ people.
Both Smith and Phillips were represented by the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom.
'The government doesn't have the power to silence or compel creative expression under the threat of punishment. It's shocking that the 10th Circuit would permit Colorado to punish artists whose speech isn't in line with state-approved ideology,' said Alliance of Defending Freedom General Counsel Kristen Waggoner, Smith's attorney.
'Colorado has weaponized its law to silence speech it disagrees with, to compel speech it approves of, and to punish anyone who dares to dissent. Colorado's law—and others like it—are a clear and present danger to every American's constitutionally protected freedoms and the very existence of a diverse and free nation.'
Late last year a group of 45 Republican federal lawmakers signed an amicus brief in support of Smith's case getting before the Supreme Court.
Signatories included Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Senate Minority Whip John Thune, and Colorado Reps. Ken Buck and Lauren Boebert.
In the brief they accuse the 10th Circuit Court of using the law to force an act 'conflicting with an individual’s deeply held beliefs.'
They claim, 'an atheist musician could be forced to perform at an evangelical church service. Or a Muslim tattoo artist could be forced to write “My religion is the only true religion” on the body of a Christian.'
'Religious speech holds a uniquely important and protected place in American history and jurisprudence. Ms. Smith and others like her deserve the strongest possible First Amendment protection,' the court filing reads.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10539275/High-court-case-refusal-serve-gay-couples.html
************************************************NYC reforms aimed at tinkering with racial makeup of criminals created more Black victims
Progressive leaders have ushered in criminal justice reforms theoretically intended to rectify the imbalance of Black Americans who are arrested, convicted and incarcerated. But in practice, in cities like New York, these reforms have backfired, resulting in a spike in crime, with more Black Americans victimized and more Black Americans incarcerated, according to experts.
"A lot of these policies were designed explicitly around the idea that Blacks are so disproportionately represented in the people who are arrested and the people who are prosecuted and convicted and incarcerated — and trying to design criminal justice policy to back-engineer that number to be more on par with the racial demographics of everybody of society," Hannah E. Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Monday. "That in itself has created a bigger problem."
Meyers and Jim Quinn, a former executive district attorney in the Queens district attorney’s office, recently published an essay in the New York Times arguing that by "aiming for racial equity in criminal justice rather than focusing solely on deterring and responding to crime, policymakers seem to have neglected the foundational purpose of law and order."
"What has followed — a sharp rise in victims of crime, who remain disproportionately Black, and a slight increase in the percentage of Rikers Island inmates who are Black — is a racial imbalance of a more troubling kind," the authors wrote in the article.
New York City is grappling with skyrocketing crime. Murders went up 52% from 2019 to 2021, while shootings were up 104% and car theft 91%. In 2020, Black New Yorkers were victims in 65% of murders and 74% of shootings, the authors of the NYT essay wrote.
In New York, policing and incarceration policies have been at the forefront of debate and such policies took effect as Black Lives Matter protests and the defund the police movement hit a fever pitch in 2020.
Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017 supported releasing thousands of inmates at Rikers Island through the city’s "supervised release" program. In 2019, New York lawmakers passed sweeping changes to the state's bail laws that restrict crimes where judges can set bail. Also, in 2019, New York passed discovery reform, which required prosecutors to disclose their evidence to the defense earlier in case proceedings.
"I think you could talk to any prosecutor, especially any line prosecutor or anyone that's recently left a DAs office in a more senior role, and they will tell you … that discovery reform is having an enormous impact on crime," Meyers told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Monday.
The reforms were put in place as former Mayor Bill de Blasio moved to defund the police, which brought with it the end of the NYPD’s plainclothes unit and reassigning officers.
Meyers and Quinn wrote that such reforms are "harming Black New Yorkers" and they pointed to increasing crime levels in largely Black neighborhoods of NYC.
"In the police precinct that covers most of the Brownsville neighborhood as well as adjacent Ocean Hill, where around three-quarters of the residents are Black, shootings at the end of last year were up 144 percent, and murders were up 91 percent from two years earlier," they wrote.
Meyers said that "clearly there are issues we should be talking about, about why there's so much more criminality" in minority communities, but "you have to look upstream."
"You can't fix them necessarily by changing who you arrest or who you incarcerate. That's a colorblind system. That's not where you can insert the … do-gooder fixing of it," Meyers told Fox News Digital.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-city-reforms-race-created-more-problems-expert
*********************************************Nearly one-third of NYC bus riders aren’t paying the fare
Nearly 30 percent of NYC bus riders aren’t paying their fare — costing the transit authority $56 million in the last three months of 2021 alone, according to the MTA’s latest fare evasion survey.
Transit number-crunchers estimated some 29.3 percent of riders on local bus routes did not pay the fare in the final three months of 2021 — up from 25.2 percent in the three months before that, the report showed.
The troubling spike brings the reported local bus fare evasion to the highest it’s been in at least a decade, according to a source familiar with the agency’s survey methodology.
“The high rate is mostly being driven by [an approximately] 50 percent non-payment rate in the Bronx, and a jump in non-payment on Staten Island,” the source said.
Transit coffers lost more funding to bus fare evasion in the final quarter of 2021 than from subway fare beaters. Even though there are nearly three-times as many subway riders as bus riders, the evasion rate underground was below 8 percent over the same period, costing the authority $41 million.
“if you can get away with not paying your fare on the bus, chances are you’ll also try it on subways,” warned MTA board member Andrew Albert. “We’re talking about massive fare loss on buses, which hurts the people who need it the most — the poor and those who cannot afford massive fare increases.”
MTA leaders have been sounding the alarm about fare evasion since 2017, but with little success. An audit last year by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli noted that farebeating had actually increased since the $24 million-per-year enforcement effort began.
Two of the city’s five district attorneys, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, stopped prosecuting transit “theft-of-services” in 2018.
The NYPD however still gives tickets for the violation on subways — some 14,573 in the fourth quarter of 2021 — and occasionally makes arrests. Bus enforcement, however, is non-existent; the Transit Bureau did not issue a single bus fare evasion summons in all of 2021, according to publicly available stats.
https://nypost.com/2022/02/21/nearly-one-third-of-nyc-bus-riders-arent-paying-the-fare/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Seattle Ends Bicycle Helmet Requirement For Racial Equity
Ah, Seattle! Home of the mythical Chief Seattle
There are a handful of larger cities in the United States whose political leaders while trying to resolve issues, instead, make things worse, but are never held accountable by the voters. Seattle, Washington is a prime example.
In January, the Seattle Police Department due to racism and equity concerns announced that it would no longer enforce certain non-criminal traffic violations. They also de-prioritized expired vehicle registrations and bicycle helmet violations.
Now, King County home to Seattle is following suit by removing the helmet requirement for all county bicyclists.
Despite acknowledging that bike helmets “provide a 63-88% reduction in the risk of head and brain injuries for people who ride bikes,” the King County Board of Health voted, 11 to 2, to repeal the helmet mandate, originally passed in 1993, because of accusations that the law was disproportionately enforced against people of color and homeless people.
“Helmets save lives, full stop. But the disproportional enforcement of the requirement gives us concern,” said King County Councilmember Joe McDermot. “When the Board of Health first adopted a helmet mandate, helmets weren’t part of our social norms and our culture, and so the legal requirements for helmets was new and carried weight. But I think societal norms and expectations have changed significantly in the 30 years since.”
“Seattle Police Department data collected and analyzed by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and the Helmet Law Working Group shows that police disproportionately gave helmet law citations to black, indigenous, and people of color cyclists,” states the press release from the Public Health Insider for Seattle and King County.
“Their analysis found that black riders were nearly four times as likely to be cited by police for not wearing a helmet while biking compared to white riders,” the analysis reads. “Further, in Seattle, nearly half of the citations issued for biking without a helmet were given to people living homeless.”
“The recent action from the Board of Health removes a policy that has resulted in racist enforcement while re-emphasizing the importance of wearing a bike helmet coupled with County resources to make bike safety more accessible for all,” said Dennis Worsham – interim director for Public Health in Seattle and King County.
Worsham noted that the repeal was in line with the Board of Health’s 2020 “Racism is a Public Health Crisis” resolution that vowed to make the health agency a “vital player in dismantling oppressive systems that are grounded in white supremacy.”
The board said it would change its focus to other methods that don’t rely on law enforcement, such as educational campaigns and free helmet distribution.
“The Metropolitan King County Council recently budgeted more than $200,000 to buy helmets and expand education,” The Oregonian reported.
So the county, in spite of the fact that helmets work, but because black riders refuse to wear them, decriminalized the act.
https://trendingpolitics.com/crazy-seattle-ends-bicycle-helmet-requirement-for-racial-equity-ethom/
***********************************************House Republicans Reject Ridiculous Immigration Plan
Americans want less immigration, not more. While that’s true of legal immigration, it’s doubly true of illegal immigration, something that native-born Americans and those that legally immigrated here both see as a plague and flagrant violation of the law.
Well, normal Americans, right and left think that way. They see that immigration depresses wages, can see that illegal immigrants commit crimes, and want it to stop.
The elites, however, don’t. Whether RINO politicians, corporatist Democrats, or the corporate sponsors of both those groups, they like the cheap labor supply created by illegal immigration and want to keep that pipeline of unskilled workers flowing, whatever the cost to average Americans.
Hence the push for “amnesty” for illegals from RINOs and Democrats; amnesty would give their corporate backers the legal cover they need to keep hiring those illegals and would encourage yet more illegals to keep rushing here in the pipeline of cheap labor.
Well, House Republicans are finally taking a much more populist tack, buoyed by polls showing that voters want the GOP to take a tough stance on illegal immigration, and are rejecting the 2013 amnesty proposal that many RINOs were hoping would be the basis of an immigration policy platform moving forward. As Breitbart reports:
“Hispanic battleground voters think Republicans in Congress (42%) can do a better job of dealing with jobs and the economy than Democrats in Congress (35%),” says the February 17 report by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC)
[…]The report’s release marks the semi-populist GOP’s informal ditching of the establishment wing’s long-standing claim that more amnesty and more immigration is the way to win Latino votes.
The more amnesty and immigration claim was the centerpiece of the controversial Growth and Opportunity Project report pushed by establishment Republicans after Gov. Mitt Romney was soundly beaten by President Barack Obama in 2012. The report was frequently described as the “postmortem” or “autopsy” report, and it described the establishment’s extensive and detailed plan for winning future presidential elections.
By rejecting that proposal, House Republicans are, in effect, choosing to side with their voters and constituents over the interests of the massive corporations and farming enterprises that want cheap labor to exploit as a way of keeping their costs down and profits up.
That choice is important not only because it means amnesty isn’t really on the table, which is welcome news to Americans frustrated and furious about the illegal immigration situation, but also because it places them alongside Trump, a noted illegal immigration hardliner, and against the Paul Ryan crowd.
As the battle for the soul of the GOP moves forward, Trump, DeSantis, and the MAGA wing will need more than Twitter warriors and a few firebrands echoing their viewpoints. Having the House side with them on that key piece of policy is good news, showing that many GOP reps are done with Ryan and his RINO vision of what should be done if and when the GOP reclaims power.
https://trendingpolitics.com/house-republicans-reject-ridiculous-immigration-plan
**********************************************Staunch US Ally Singapore Boasts World’s Freest Economy in Annual Heritage Foundation Rankings
Singapore keeps punching above its weight, demonstrating to the world the concrete benefit of preserving transparency, openness, and efficiency, which are the hallmarks of economic freedom.
For the third year in a row since 2020, when Singapore eclipsed Hong Kong, the small but vibrant Asian country has been top-rated in The Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom, a global study that tracks economic governance and competitiveness based on the key pillars of the rule of law, limited government, regulatory efficiency, and market openness.
According to the just released 2022 index, Singapore’s economic freedom score is 84.4 out of 100, making its economy the freest in the world. As the scorecard notes, Singapore’s highly developed free market economy owes its success in large measure to its remarkably open and corruption-free business environment, prudent monetary and fiscal policies, and transparent legal framework.
Also notable is that the freedom to trade without imposing tariffs and to invest is very robust, with well-secured property rights facilitating entrepreneurship and innovation effectively. The overall rule of law is undergirded by a high degree of transparency and government accountability.
Singapore’s adherence to high levels of economic freedom has produced one of the world’s highest living standards—a feat few other nations in the developing world have been able to replicate. It’s worth noting that Singapore charted its free market path to prosperity at a time when many of the world’s most prominent intellectuals and political leaders were touting many other models.
Then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher welcomed Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, a fierce anti-communist and a stalwart friend of America, who was visiting the United Kingdom in 1990, noting:
Singapore has become a byword for excellence, whether it be in education, in commerce, in high technology, in your city administration and plans for traffic management, which others are now copying. …
Singapore is more important than ever now in the face of protectionism and the tendency to establish blocs of countries, which are more concerned with their internal trading arrangements than with keeping markets open to the whole world.
Those words ring more true now than they did back then.
From a broader foreign policy perspective, as America’s proven longtime partner in Southeast Asia and beyond, Singapore has consistently punched above its weight in regional and global affairs related to trade and security initiatives. Though only about three times the size of Washington, D.C., the city-state with fewer than 6 million people has been exerting economic and diplomatic sway on par with much larger countries.
Indeed, Singapore and the United States have a broad and deep partnership that has spanned decades. Although the two nations are not formal treaty allies, the bilateral security relationship between the United States and Singapore has been formalized and guided by a Strategic Framework Agreement, buttressed and further institutionalized by extensive trade and investment ties.
The U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in January 2004, was the first U.S. bilateral trade pact with an Asian country. The United States is by far the largest single-country investor in Singapore, with American companies accounting for more than 20% of foreign direct investment in the country. The cumulative level of American foreign direct investment in Singapore stands at over $300 billion, which exceeds the total of American foreign direct investment in India, China, and South Korea combined.
America’s latest Indo-Pacific Strategy defines its strategic ends to be to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific that is more connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.” To that end, the United States and Singapore have been already programmatically working together in a long-term partnership reinforced by shared values and a common desire for peace and security.
Indeed, as the global economy faces new challenges from expanding Chinese influence, a free and open Singapore matters more than ever to the United States and to the world.
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The Gap Between Political Correctness and Reality
The Democratic Party increasingly exhibits traits of a revolutionary party bent on obtaining control over thought and discourse. The potential ability to exercise this kind of power enables the progressives who run the Democratic Party to inevitably steer the country towards their objectives, having already defined the acceptable bounds of language and debate.
Lenin defined a revolutionary party as one that awakens and cultivates working-class consciousness that can supplant the bourgeois owners. The revolutionary party’s aim is to steer this consciousness toward the creation of a socialist regime that will rule in the name of the proletariat. The key element is to subdue the bourgeois, property-owning regime and bury it.
A different path, less violent but no less comprehensive in its aims, was set forward by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. His goal was for the left to obtain cultural hegemony by dictating the meaning of words and thus imagination giving the socialist rulers comprehensive power because they controlled people’s minds.
Gramsci did not favor violence and subjugation as Lenin did. Rather, he wanted to form alliances between different groups and factions within society in support of socialist objectives. This was best achieved by a combination of measures, hard and soft, aimed at reworking imagination, thought, and language.
In this way, the socialists would define what is possible. Gramsci did not exactly specify what would be required to do this. In practice, he left open a range of despotic possibilities. His frequent appeals to Machiavelli indicate the state would inevitably loom large in his methods of control.
The late Angelo Codevilla, the brilliant political theorist, who understood our ruling class in masterful fashion, brilliantly unpacked the behavior of progressives in a 2016 essay titled “The Rise of Political Correctness” by pointing out the difference between Lenin and Gramsci’s approaches to gaining power.
Codevilla’s analysis is greatly needed as we confront a Democratic Party that seeks Gramsci’s cultural hegemony but acts positively Leninist towards its opponents, aiming to inter them through aggressive state and corporatist machinations.
In functioning as an ideological party, the party, state, and regime are an interlocking unit that enforces norms, behavior, and thought. The Democratic Party is wedded to a set of ideological propositions that it means to force on the broader population, even at the expense of its electoral prospects.
On Build Back Better, critical race theory, Defund the Police, COVID-19 safety measures, transgender-mania, and the rise of violent crime, public opinion is turning against progressives. Their inability to begin moderating or foregoing these policies speaks to a dogged refusal to give up the progressive dream of reshaping reality by law.
On a national level, many have noted that Democratic representatives in Congress function as if they face no real constraints on their power. The push for vast expansions in spending, green energy regulations, transfer payments, voting reform, among others, would increase state power beyond that achieved by the Great Society. But this is no longer the days of the Johnson administration, and unlike then, Democrats do not run Washington with massive majorities.
Democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate currently operate with hair-thin majorities. Rather than moderate their agenda they instead favor large scale reforms reforms as seen in the Build Back Better bill, for example. The Democratic majorities depend on swing-district and swing-state members who cannot afford to support the party’s radical efforts—this similarly does not restrain the leadership of the party. These hard limits on their power have been dismissed.
In this, Democrats in both houses of Congress and in the White House express a firm adherence to their ability to alter reality, to force upon the country sweeping progressive change without taking stock of the means and ends needed for such an achievement.
Perhaps the best evidence is the attempt to nationalize election law in one piece of legislation. State control over election law was a key bargain made in our nation’s founding. The states did not want their rules dictated to them by Washington, and that remains largely true today. Any attempt to change election law by removing the locus of power to Washington would require tremendous power to effect it.
The Democrats obviously are far removed from such a moment. That their attempts here failed dramatically illustrates the point. The fact that President Joe Biden, among other prominent Democrats, infamously stated that opponents to election law reform were racists, Confederates, and Jim-Crow types, suggests that his own presidency, his conception of statesmanship, is firmly tied to ideology, even above the prospects of a substantive change. Could the end merely be to proclaim ideological superiority over opponents and much of the country?
Surely the answer is no to a question that ignores the realities of competitive party politics. However, we need to drill down to the core of progressivism itself. That core is egalitarianism confirmed by history and instantiated by policy.
Returning to Codevilla’s analysis of political correctness, the point, he says, is to define reality as “the point of the state and progressive party in power.” The progressive, Codevilla argues, is charged with creating new truths and is perpetually “at war against nature’s laws and limits.”
Codevilla’s masterful use of Lenin and Gramsci opens before us both the ends and means of progressivism. Both thinkers mean to rule us for revolutionary ends, the progressive chooses between intentional destruction of opponents via Lenin or the cooptation of them with Gramsci’s redefinition of language.
We might see Democrats using Gramsci’s soft coercion through its ability to tell us what to say and celebrate, but Codevilla sees the party as positively Leninist. America’s constitutional order and its preconditions of limited power, property, family, and civil society, held together by a Judeo-Christian morality must be wiped away.
When Biden excoriated his opponents as racists in his Atlanta speech, including those within his own party who would not end the use of the filibuster, his goal was to treat the party’s ideological interest as a reality “that ranks above reality itself” to use Codevilla’s stirring formulation.
This is the essence of political correctness: the party’s reality is the truth. Biden failed in the short term in this effort, and in his major social spending plans in the Build Back Better bill. But nothing is finally over, the progressives always return.
The progressive dilemma here is that in its perpetual war against nature, reality does not yield. There is always a gap between this reality and progressive political correctness. And in that sense, progressives must embody these realities which is achieved by wielding power over others.
People must be forced to speak and act as if these realities were real. And is the substantive policy goal what really matters, or is what matters the forced affirmance by the wider society of progressive aims? In other words, must we accept that male simulacra of females are really females and permit them in female athletic competitions with predictable results?
The failure to admit this reality results in expulsion from polite society. Or, as Codevilla notes, “cultural hegemony is the goal.”
The new addition to progressive power is its power to enlist corporations in its struggles. The party-state comes to mind as the Democrats use the state to enlist corporations and crucially the tech companies in their favor. You will recall the countless companies who insisted that support for the election reform bill was tantamount to ensuring the right to vote continued for minorities against a recalcitrant Republican party whose state legislative minions were surely angling to take their voting rights away.
Frequently, the Biden White House now makes open appeals to tech companies regarding speech that should be favored or rejected on their platforms. Tech, media companies, and the government increasingly operate in alignment with each other.
Perhaps the longer term thinking of the ideological party is that they can force opinions to change by the incredible nexus of power they hold throughout society. There are few institutions not dominated or heavily influenced by progressive opinion and its favored diktats.
Even if the Democrats lose an election, they are still able to speak into the minds of millions utilizing the federal bureaucracy, corporate media, and supplicant corporations to guarantee them repeated bites at the apple. When they return to power, the groundwork is further made for tremendous change.
On this score, the attempt to centralize election law may have been the attempt of an ideological party to rewrite the rules in its favor precisely as an ideological party, one that knows it can no longer win elections within the coasts, save for major metropolitan areas. As such, the sweeping goal is to break out of this trench warfare. Stalled for now, this legislation will return in subsequent iterations, and the foundation is always being laid.
The opportunity now for opponents of the ideological party is in the massive gap that has opened between political correctness and reality. Americans are not rushing to support the expansive platform of the Democratic Party. They are going to have to be dragooned into it. And the revolutionary party has a strategy to achieve that, one that will force reality through a state-created and Wall Street led green energy economy where we learn that energy is a luxury good.
The education system will ensure that the American founding and its truths are buried by a Marxist inspired pedagogy despite parental resistance because charter schools and educational choice will be curtailed. Voting reform will provide Democrats much more favorable rules for victory. And massive social spending consolidates progressive gains by making even more citizens dependent on government programs.
The moment for conservatives becomes quite clear. Expose the gap between reality and political correctness for what it is, progressive failure to make their preferred reality true. This can only be done with a set of proposals that speaks to the distrust and anxiety Americans have about the current moment by giving them the freedom and confidence to live their lives on their own terms apart from any number of government commands reinforced by corporate and social media.
The failure to do so will lead to the revolutionary party’s ability to consolidate us into their altered reality.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/11/the-gap-between-political-correctness-and-reality
*********************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Monday, February 21, 2022
Little girl trying to push back the Canadian cops
A truly wonderfuil picture for lovers of liberty from goverment dictatorship. Pretty Boy Trudeau is disgusting
Reason or belief – fact or fiction?
The Leftist establishment does not like reality so are trying to get us to ignore it
A British doctor who was dismissed from his government employment for not referring to a transgender, six-foot-tall, bearded man as ‘madam’ has taken his unfair dismissal to that nation’s High Court. While the grounds of his appeal – that the department’s requirement ‘coerced and threatened’ his Christian beliefs – is interesting enough, there is a more important question that immediately comes to mind.
When witnesses are called upon to give evidence they are asked to swear to the truth about their evidence and that truth needs to be related to objects, to what can be objectively verified. In a very practical way, a court would probably allow a transgender woman to describe himself as a woman while advising a jury to disregard that person’s belief while alerting them to the objective equivalence of a transgender woman and a man. In other words, the jury would be alerted to the difference between a person’s belief and a fact.
That would be a very practical approach. A jury might even be advised to decide whether the person was objectively a man or a woman. The problem is, however, that it is completely at odds with both what is taught in our schools and universities and the rules they have drafted to apply to these circumstances where belief is a substitute for fact.
Where once a man was a human being with observable male genitals and a female was a human being with observable female genitals, that has now been cast aside. It is now taught that a man is anyone who feels they are a man and a woman is anyone who feels they are a woman. The need to identify the relevant sexual organs has been dismissed.
With that teaching as a premise, there is no objective truth at all, something that Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated in 1890. While ‘truth’ depends on more than just a coincidence of sense perception and ideas, that coincidence is necessary as the objective support of speech. Our words need there to be an object to which they refer in order that the inferences upon which truth depends have a direct link to the objects of the senses.
If the truth depends only on our beliefs, it is logically true for a white man to believe that he is black, brown, red, yellow, green – or whatever colour he chooses. By the same logic, a man born in New Guinea might believe he is an Australian citizen. What do we do when a person announces that he is no longer a human being, but some other animal? Already, a Bristol university has invented a word to describe a person (only one so far) who identifies as a cat.
Each of these beliefs in relation to identity not only denies that an objective truth is possible but denies that an objective truth is knowable to human reason. It asserts that every evaluation is the product of a subjective feeling and is the foundational premise of modern social sciences. Paradoxically, it even denies the truth of natural science since every scientific experiment commences with an evaluation. Nietzsche pointed this out as well but he had already sped off in a different direction and we know where Nietzsche’s teaching led the world.
It is time, before it is too late, to tell the truth about these relativist topics even as we find laws and rules being drafted to force people to say only what is approved. The only way to know the truth about what is woke and what is not is to rely on reason to resurrect nature as our standard. Reason is the last line of defence against the madness that currently infects so much that was once just common sense.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/reason-or-belief-fact-or-fiction/
*************************************************Morgan Stanley goes racist
An advocacy group is pressing financial giant Morgan Stanley to end an internship program open only to gay students and select minorities.
The Project on Fair Representation on Tuesday sent a letter to Morgan Stanley and Princeton University warning that identity-based criteria for the bank’s 2022 Freshman Enhancement Program violate federal nondiscrimination laws. The internship is open only to "Black, Hispanic, Native American, and/or LGBTQ+ freshman undergraduate student[s]," according to Morgan Stanley’s website. Princeton has allegedly encouraged its students to apply for the program, according to the letter.
"Morgan Stanley and Princeton are leading institutions in our culture," the letter reads. "What you do matters not only because it affects the individuals involved, but also because you set an influential example for others. Pandering to activists with ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives like this internship program is actively harming and racializing our already divided country."
The program keeps with the uptick in race-based benefits in recent years. Following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, gig economy behemoths like Uber and Postmates waived delivery fees for black-owned restaurants. And public health agencies have encouraged providers to prioritize certain minority groups when distributing scarce COVID-19 therapeutics.
Morgan Stanley’s program appears to use race and sexual orientation in a wooden fashion. While a holistic review that considered race and sex among numerous other factors might survive a legal challenge, the bank’s website and outside materials that describe the program explicitly state that candidates must be gay, black, Hispanic, or Native American to apply.
Based on Morgan Stanley’s description, it appears that white and Asian applicants who are heterosexual are categorically ineligible for the program. Tuesday’s letter notes that federal law prohibits all forms of race discrimination in employment and contracting. Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
Lawyers for the Project on Fair Representation said in Tuesday’s letter that the program’s existence indicates a "broader dysfunction" at both Morgan Stanley and Princeton. A sound legal review would never authorize discrimination based on race or sexual orientation, they argued.
"It is difficult to understand how these programs passed internal legal review in light of the clear statutory prohibitions discussed above," the letter reads.
The letter is addressed to Eric Grossman, Morgan Stanley’s chief legal officer, and Ramona Romero, general counsel at Princeton.
The Freshman Enhancement Program is billed as a four-week program to help rising sophomores better understand Morgan Stanley’s operations. Interns are placed with one of four divisions—global capital markets, investment banking, wealth management, or sales, trading, and research—for both virtual and in-person training and networking.
A Washington Free Beacon review found that elite universities besides Princeton encouraged their students to pursue the program.
Harvard’s office of career services encouraged students to apply to the program. Guidance on Harvard’s website notes that the program is only open to gay and minority freshmen. Bates College’s Center for Purposeful Work flagged the program in a seven-page diversity internship handout that appears to be from the 2018 academic year, and highlighted the identity-based application restrictions.
The University of Michigan’s career center promoted an information session about the program set for Jan. 31, according to the university’s website. The materials did not mention the selection criteria. Denison University in Ohio also alerted students to the internship.
Tuesday’s letter also notes that institutions that receive federal dollars are subject to federal nondiscrimination laws like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on "race, color, or national origin in any program or activity that receives federal funds."
The Project on Fair Representation’s director is Ed Blum, a Texas-based activist behind a landmark lawsuit accusing Harvard of discrimination against Asian students. The group’s lawyer is Boyden Gray, the White House counsel to former president George H.W. Bush, who now leads a litigation boutique involved in conservative causes.
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Drug Use Shuts Down Transit System In Major City
Seattle’s transit system has been rendered useless due to reports of toxic fentanyl and meth smoke, volatile behavior, and dangerous work environments, which have scared off travelers as well as workers, local authorities said.
Active duty officers have been punched, spat on, and threatened while dealing with surging drug smoke from fentanyl and meth. Narcotic smoking complaints surged last summer, surpassing needles and marijuana complaints.
The city plans to release a new Safety, Security, and Fare Enforcement Initiative in February, incorporating surveys and comments from 8,000 people. The initiative is designed to improve the dangerous environment on transit while showing compassion, especially to homeless people.
The plan is “a necessary step on its journey to becoming an anti-racist mobility agency,” according to the King County website.
The Metro Transit Authority (MTA) has been reluctant to use law enforcement against the homeless population following widespread protests triggered by the death of George Floyds.
Unarmed Security personnel monitor the metro but have zero authority to arrest or remove people from public transportation. Seattle police officers do not regularly patrol the transit vehicles and illegal drug use is considered a “lower priority than violent crime,” Seattle Police Detective Patrick Michaud said.
The union representing transit workers endorsed Bruce Harrell who ran as a law and order candidate for Seattle’s mayor. But Harrell has been slow to address the growing crime and drug use in the city. Since the summer of 2021, over six operators had to stop driving mid-shift due to being severely affected by the smoke, while 14 others, reported headaches, dizziness, or irritated breathing.
Users place the drug on a small sheet of aluminum foil, wave a lighter on the underside of the foil to heat the drug, then inhale it using a straw. The smoke carries and many transit vehicles do not have windows that open.
“It smells like burnt peanut butter, mixed with brake fluid,” King County Metro Transit operator Erik Christensen said.
Seattle’s transit use rose roughly 50% in the 2010s, the highest rate of any U.S. city. Roughly 750,000 people used the transit system on a daily basis prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re after the criminal activity, the smoking drugs, the assaults, the deterioration of transit,” Local 587 Vice President Cory Rigtrup said. “The solution is to restore transit, make it welcoming, bring back passengers.
Seattle residents pay the country’s highest transit tax, spending roughly $1,200 yearly per capita. Meanwhile, ridership and fare income fell by over 50% during the pandemic.
“We should not be coming down on a totally punitive side,” Metro General Manager Terry White said. “We should figure out how we serve the community.”
“Hopefully we’ll be putting some things in place, where you’ll see more police on a coach,” White said, adding the city also plans to implement updated outreach programs for the homeless.
Crime has surged in Seattle recently, with shootings increasing by 46% in 2020, according to an annual report by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. A massive gunfight erupted on Feb. 7 in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood with over 40 shots fired.
A group of men kicked and punched a 23-year-old man and left him unconscious on Jan. 25, amid a string of violent assaults and robberies. Police also discovered a man near a city homeless encampment on Jan 20. with a crossbow sticking out of his chest following an altercation.
https://zerohourpatriots.com/contact-high-shuts-down-transit-system-in-major-city/
*****************************************British art gallery's Rex Whistler restaurant will SHUT to diners after gallery's ethics committee ruled the artist's 1926 mural featuring two black slaves is 'offensive'
Tate Britain's Rex Whistler restaurant will close after it was decided a mural featuring two slave boys that the artist painted nearly a century ago is too offensive for modern diners.
The venue, which first opened its doors in 1927 after Mr Whistler completed the works, had been closed since March 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
It emerged at the end of 2020 that its future was uncertain after it was slammed by a group of critics known collectively as 'The White Pube', sparking a review by the Tate's ethics committee.
The review, led by the committee's then-chair Dame Moya Greene, told the gallery board that members were, 'unequivocal in their view that the imagery of the work is offensive'.
On the back of this, the institution today confirmed that the restaurant will not re-open, but the mural - called 'The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats' - will remain.
The room containing the artwork, which was commissioned by the Tate in 1926, will instead be repurposed by a 'contemporary artist' who will create a new display to 'critically engage with the mural's history and content, including its racist imagery'.
Rex Whistler completed the piece aged 23, as a whimsical narrative charting an expedition in search of exotic meats.
The artwork features scenes showing two enslaved black children in chains, while another shows caricatured Chinese characters.
Rex Whistler was one of the most admired artists in book illustration, theatre and film design - and was known for creating a mural for the Tate restaurant.
One of his most famous projects was the mural at the Tate, which was labelled 'the most amusing room in Europe' when it opened in 1927.
'The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats' looks at seven explorers travelling by horse and cart and bicycles to save their people from living on dry biscuits.
The mural depicts the 'enslavement of a black child and the distress of his mother' and later shows the child 'running behind a horse and cart which he is attached to by a chain around his neck'
He died during the Second World War aged 39 on his first day of active service with the Welsh Guards in Normandy, France, in July 1944.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Sunday, February 20, 2022
Trudeau ignores REAL violent terrorism: 20 eco-terrorists armed with axes surround Gaslink pipeline workers, shoot flare guns at them and cut fuel lines in British Columbia - causing MILLIONS of dollars in damage
Ax-wielding eco-terrorists attacked a British Columbia gas pipeline Thursday, shooting flare guns at frightened workers and causing millions in damage, but the focus of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still seems to be on the Freedom Convoy truckers in Ottawa.
About 20 attackers, wearing camouflage and masks, surrounded Costal Gaslink workers in the early morning hours of February 17 in what the company called a 'highly planned and dangerous unprovoked assault.'
No injuries were reported, but Gaslink reported that the eco-warriors came from several directions and threatened the lives of several workers.
'In one of the most concerning acts, an attempt was made to set a vehicle on fire while workers were inside,' the company said in a statement. 'The attackers also wielded axes, swinging them at vehicles and through a truck's window. Flare guns were also fired at workers. Workers fled the site for their own safety and remain shaken by this violent incident.'
Meanwhile, Trudeau remains focused on the peaceful Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and used extraordinary powers under the Emergencies Act to clear the protester who have paralyzed the city for three weekss. Hundreds of officers have descended on the capital city to forcefully remove them from what is now a no-go zone.
Parliament was also suspended on Friday due to the massive police operation and MPs have been urged not to go into work for their own safety. No property has been damaged in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy protests, although police have arrested 70 protesters as they use Trudeau's Emergency Act to crack down on demonstrations.
In contrast, photos of Thursday's attack in British Columbia show smashed windows and overturned heavy earth-moving equipment. Trees were downed to block roads and a gaping hole was hacked into the side of a mobile office trailer.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police responded to the scene, but the attackers fled into the forest and no arrests were made. Smoke bombs and torches were thrown at police as they tried to make their way past fires set in the road way. One officers was injured, according to the Toronto Sun.
'This was a calculated and organized violent attack that left its victims shaken and a multimillion dollar path of destruction,' RCMP Chief Superintendent Warren Brown said.
In the capital, Trudeau remains focused on the Canadian truckers.
Police have descended on the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, making arrests and towing away big rigs that have formed a three-week blockade protesting the country's vaccine mandates.
Using his extraordinary powers under the Emergencies Act, Trudeau bid police to establish a 'no-go' zone around the demonstration in Ottawa's core, and on Friday morning a massive force of cops and a fleet of tow truck drivers descended to clear out the Convoy's final stronghold.
Citing the 'exceptional circumstances' of the police action, Canada's Parliament suspended Friday's debate on Trudeau's emergency powers, sparing the Liberal leader another day of uncomfortable speeches from MPs who fiercely oppose his use of the Emergencies Act.
As dawn broke on Friday, cops carrying automatic weapons and wearing tactical unit uniforms were seen going door to door along a line of trucks, campers and other vehicles parked on Ottawa's snow-covered streets.
Tow truck operators wore neon-green ski masks with their companies' decals taped over on their trucks to conceal their identities from protesters. They arrived under police escort and set to work removing the big rigs, campers and other vehicles parked bumper to bumper in the Parliament Hill blockade.
As the sweep unfolded, Ottawa Police Services threatened in a statement to arrest any journalists 'found within areas undergoing enforcement,' alarming advocates for press freedom.
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Canadian Premier Drops Truth Bomb on Trudeau’s Covid Dictatorship
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is losing allies left and right over his extreme motion to invoke the Emergencies Act to suppress the Freedom Convoy protest that is disrupting his plans for a perpetual Covid dictatorship.
Enter Ontario Premier Doug Ford. No fan of the Freedom Convoy protest, Ford has repeatedly denied that any of Ontario’s recent concessions on Covid mandates had anything to do with the disgruntled truckers.
“As of March 1, the province of Ontario will no longer require people show proof of vaccination to enter any indoor spaces, the premier, Doug Ford, announced on Monday morning,” the New York Times reported on Monday.
“Let me be very clear: We’re moving in this direction because it’s safe to do so,’’ Ford said. “Today’s announcement is not because of what’s happening in Ottawa, or Windsor, but despite it.”
But that is not what it looks like based on Ford’s recent presser, which drops so many ‘truth bombs’ on Trudeau’s rationale for effectively declaring martial law, it might as well have been written by the Freedom Convoy itself. Watch:
“You know, you can go to Costco, you can go to Walmart, you can go shopping,” Ford said. “You know, you don’t know if the person has a shot beside or not, but we also know that it doesn’t matter if you have one shot or 10 shots, you can catch COVID.”
“See, the prime ministry has triple shots,” he continued, referring to Trudeau’s recent alleged bout with Covid. “And I know hundreds of people, three shots that caught COVID. We just have to be careful. We gotta always make sure we wash our hands and, and move forward.”
“We can’t stay in this position forever,” he added. “We gotta learn to live with this and get on with our lives. I bet if I ask every single person in this room, do you want these damned masks? Or do you want ’em off? They want ’em off. They want to get back to normal. They want to be able to go for dinner with their families.”
“And there’s every single person, including myself, knows people that are unvaccinated, you know?” he added. “Sure. There’s, there’s the rabble-rousers. And then there’s just hardworking people that just don’t believe in it. And, and that’s their choice.”
“This is about, again, a democracy and freedoms and liberties,” he continued. “And I hate as a government telling anyone what to do.”
“We just gotta get moving forward and, and get out of this and protect the jobs,” he went on. “You know… I think a lot of people call ’em, probably yourself too. Everyone’s done with this. Like we are done with it. Let’s let’s start moving on and cautiously and you know, we’ve followed the rules, all of us, 90% of us for over two years, the world’s done with it. So let’s just move forward.”
Hear, hear.
Meanwhile, Trudeau is getting shouted down in the parliament, and at least five provinces have moved forward with plans to roll back vaccine passports and other Covid mandates.
It took nearly two years to get to this point, but it’s finally truth-telling time when it comes to Covid: People everywhere have had enough.
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Progressivism has become a religion with a passionately proclaimed creed
I live in a blue city in a blue state, meaning I can’t so much as walk to the CVS without seeing a certain sign in half a dozen front yards. You know the one: “IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE: BLACK LIVES MATTER, SCIENCE IS REAL, WAR IS PEACE, MY LIFE FOR AIUR” and whatever the hell else they’re on about these days.
The sign has become so commonplace, so utterly oblivious to its own irony, that it feels less like a show of defiance than a profession of faith. Think of it as the left’s very own Nicene Creed, the statement of belief that Catholics recite every time they go to mass. One imagines a congregation of the pink-haired standing in pews: “I believe in Science, and in xis only son Dr. Fauci, creator of BIPOCs and TERFs…”
Then again Fauci has said he is the science, so we may have some issues of Christology to work through here.
How did this happen? How did a leftism that once encouraged freethinking end up chiseling its own Ten Commandments? In spite of its writerly triteness, the “IN THIS HOUSE” sign was first conceived of by a librarian. The day after Donald Trump was elected, Kristin Garvey of Madison, Wisconsin, was feeling dispirited. So she decided to, as Slate reported, gather “a number of quotes she found from activists, liberal politicians, and different social justice movements and inscribed them in Sharpie on a white poster board.” A photo was then posted online where it caught the attention of a budding MS Word artiste, and the rest is (1619-approved) history.
There is an apparent power to the sign that’s lost on right-wing unbelievers like me. A writer at Mashable describes her reaction to seeing it as “a fist-pumping ‘fuck yeah’” and “oh, I gotta take a picture of that.” Amanda Hess at the New York Times sighs that she was “seduced by its chaotic jumble of typefaces, its lifestyle-blog-adjacent aesthetic, its sanctimonious final line and its curious staying power.” Having never been ravished by an Arial typeface before, I can’t possibly comment. But there’s a word for those who find transcendence in rote recitation: not liberals or scientists but believers.
The idea that progressivism has become a religion is by now so familiar as to be unremarkable. The so-called New Atheists who had hoped the decline of Christianity would usher in an age of perfect rationality have been disappointed. Instead one faith appears to have replaced another. The apocryphal old Chesterton quote hangs in the air: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” Emphasis on anything: racist highways, de-gendered Spanish words, you name it.
Delve deep enough into all this and you arrive at a very dark philosophical corner. Carl Schmitt was a German theorist who savagely critiqued classical liberalism and its attendant ideas like individual freedom. He also happened to be a Nazi who heaped praise on the Night of the Long Knives, a fact waved away by his legions of reactionary admirers on Twitter. Yet if Schmitt today is mostly the province of very-online creeps, he did espouse at least one interesting and challenging idea: that all politics is rooted in theology.
By this, Schmitt didn’t necessarily mean there ought to be a Christian state. He meant rather that politics is in essence religion repackaged, that the concepts of the latter lurk beneath the former. And inevitably at a time of crisis, the absolute sovereignty attributed to gods will be assumed by a more earthly manifestation, a ruler. Classical liberalism, then, is futile because it attempts to constrain this all-powerful dictatorship.
The obvious objection here is that this doesn’t have to happen, that theology and politics can be split into churches and a limited government respectively, as has happened in countless countries. Yet we also shouldn’t dismiss the idea that the political can become theological, that politics can be exalted to the level of dogmas and absolutes. A society must derive morality from somewhere, and if the old ideas of Christ and cross fall away, those of identity politics and public-health commandments might very well take their place.
This is what’s happened on the left (and on the Trumpist right to an extent, though that’s another story for another time). Hence the yard signs. In addition to their confessional tone, it’s their gray-faced literalmindedness that gives them away. Even the most devout Christian doesn’t hammer his entire litany into his front lawn; that takes a special kind of zealot.
So what does THIS HOUSE believe? First, that “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” and major points for creativity there. “WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS,” though we’re still awaiting comment on unborn rights. “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL” — that’ll stick it to all those human-banning politicians in Washington. “SCIENCE IS REAL.” One imagines flabbergasted neighbors spewing half-chewed barbecue across the lawn: “I thought everyone in this development believed science was fake!!” “LOVE IS LOVE.” A = A. “KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING.” Now when will the police mow down those Canadian truckers?
So while progressivism might be religion, it’s stupid, hypocritical bad religion. We Catholics sometimes get tongue-tied mumbling words like “consubstantial,” but I’ll take that over a wan sloganeered imitation any day of the week.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/the-lefts-nicene-creed
************************************************Karma: Shark gets soft-hearted man
A diving expert killed by a monster great white shark was never able to marry the love of his life because of Covid lockdowns.
British expat Simon Nellist, 35, was engaged to Jessie Ho when he was mauled to death at Buchan Point, near Little Bay in the city's east, on Wednesday afternoon.
Heartbroken friends revealed the expat, from Cornwall in the UK, had met Ms Ho not long after he went travelling in Australia six years ago.
Mr Nellist had finished a two year stint with the Royal Air Force and quickly fell in love with the wildlife and Ms Ho during his tour around the country.
The pair were madly in love and planned to marry last year, but were forced to push back their wedding because of the pandemic.
'It's just horrendous,' one close friend told The Sun. 'We spent most of yesterday just hoping and praying it wasn't him. It's still incredibly raw.'
Friends say they were unable to see Mr Nellist because of the lockdowns and described the expat as the 'nicest, kindest human being'.
They said Mr Nellist had a massive love for the wildlife and described his mauling by the great white as a 'freak accident'.
Experts say the killer shark has likely already swam at least 100km away, and it's understood that even if it was found - it wouldn't be culled - and instead encouraged to leave the area.
Mr Nellist's social media feed was littered with photos and footage of him on his ocean adventures, which included diving expeditions and swimming with sharks.
He was also an advocate for the predators and expressed strong views about shark nets and drumlines - which are used to alert authorities about their presence - just six months ago.
The diving instructor regularly shared memories of his ocean adventures with fellow enthusiasts online.
'Lots of sharks today at Bushrangers Bay diving with the Scubathlon team. Vis wasn't too bad, a bit patchy but good at the gravel loader. We counted around 10 Grey Nurse Sharks,' he captioned footage he filmed while diving with sharks.
Shortly before Sydney was plunged into Covid-19 lockdown, Mr Nellist and his fiancée headed north to dive with sharks off Rainbow Beach near Fraser Island, an experience he highly recommended to others.
'We had a great couple of dives today. Awesome and professional crew, and a couple of lovely dives,' he wrote.
'Lots of pregnant grey nurse heaps of different schooling fish, whip ray, bull ray, puffers, snapper, crocodile needle fish chilling near the surface. We could hear the humpbacks singing and watched them on the surface interval.
'A great day out, check it out if you come up this way!'
Other posts revealed his caring nature for all marine life.
'A friend of mine saw this rather sick looking turtle at the steps, Kurnell today. I've contacted Australian seabird rescue as they also rescue turtles,' he wrote.
Since the attack, six drumlines have been put in place between Little Bay and Malabar as part of a shark incident response plan.
It's an issue Mr Nellist felt strongly about.
The experienced ocean swimmer and dive instructor knew of the potential dangers every time he did the swim, and expressed his disgust with controversial techniques used to keep sharks out of swimming areas.
'Shark nets and drumlines protect no one and kill all kinds of marine life each year,' Mr Nellist posted on Facebook six months ago.
Shark nets and drumlines are usually deployed near popular swimming beaches with the aim of reducing sharks in the vicinity.
Authorities have since revealed Little Bay Beach was scheduled to have the SMART drumline technology installed within two weeks as part of the NSW government's new shark management program.
The technology is designed to provide greater protection to swimmers by alerting authorities to a shark's presence.
The system involves a bait dangling in the ocean attached to a buoy, so that when the shark takes the bait it triggers a magnet which sets off a solar-powered beacon to alert officials on the shore.
The communication unit, attached to the drumline, sends an email and text message to researchers and contractors within minutes of a shark tripping the line.
'We're rolling SMART drum lines out in the Sydney region, around where this incident happened, in about two weeks,' DPI principal research scientist Paul Butcher told The Australian.
'Our biggest priority is getting those drumlines in the water straight away.'
Other shark enthusiasts urged people to not blame the predator as they paid tribute to Mr Nellist.
'He was an instructor, he knew how to handle sharks but you know your expertise doesn't always work on animals,' one wrote on Facebook.
'It was neither his fault nor the shark's.
'It was the fault of greed. They put drumlines so close to shore & that's the price they paid today.
'Hope they learn not to mess with the nature.'
Mr Nellist was remembered by shocked friends as a man who loved adventure and was adored by all of those around him
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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18 February, 2022
Men are the most privileged women of all...
The insane hierarchy of privilege sponsored by the Left
If you watched the National Press Club address by Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins – which I did – and you blinked – which I didn’t – you may have missed the question that was asked by Shuba Krishnan from SBS World News, the answer to which qualifies sexual assault survivors in this country to have a voice.
Krishnan asked, ‘When you look at the debate over lesbian, gay, and trans students do you think the parliament is doing enough to protect their rights?’
Women in Australia are not allowed to talk about themselves without acknowledging that there is a more vulnerable type of woman than those women who have a vagina … and that is a male woman.
In reality, walking around in possession of a vagina is the single biggest risk to rape and sexual assault anywhere in the world. This risk is most certainly exacerbated by being Indigenous, by being poor, and by being unable in some way to protect your body from males. This is why disabled women are especially vulnerable. We know this because of aggregate statistics and because we understand reality.
Women like me – who have survived sexual abuse and campaign for safeguarding around sex primarily, and gender secondarily – are shouted down and called bigots and transphobes.
My testimony is framed as a type of hatred that is exactly the same as racism because I ‘demonise’ trans-identified men by not including them in the category of women. Indigenous women are silenced because they are told they will ‘demonise Indigenous men’.
What we end up with are protected categories of men that feminists can’t touch.
The only conversation about violence against Indigenous women that we are allowed to have in Australia places the driver of violence in colonisation and white men, which completely removes agency from Indigenous men. This is an example of adapted American Critical Race Theory, just as gendered speech is controlled by gender theory. The imposition of these American systems of ideological control is itself a form of cultural imperialism – a point our media is unlikely to raise.
The reality for all women is that we are most in danger from sexual assault by men in our own communities, men we are in relationships with, and men with whom we share intimate physical space. Not all men, but they are almost all men.
Of course, Tame and Higgins passed the ideology test with flying colours, otherwise their platform would be taken from under their feet. Tame answered Krishnan’s question with a very sweet and innocent question: ‘Why does one group of people have more of a right to be themselves than another?’ I am very disinclined to attribute malevolent intent to Grace Tame, even toward our Prime Minister, of whom she is clearly not a fan. I think Tame is a young woman who is doing her best within the cultural limitations her supporters have given her.
The more politically savvy Brittney Higgins said that there has to be a ‘sensitivity around the dialogue’ and that during the same-sex marriage referendum people were deeply re-traumatised just by having a debate. She said that these ‘are people’s lives and identities and it’s a deeply triggering and difficult time for them’.
And here we get the crux of the issue.
The legislation around LGBTQ rights are key tools in the Left’s armoury that it desperately needs to gain and maintain power – not just in government – but its stifling control over language, speech and culture. Under the cultural language control dominating the media white, upper-middle class, professional, left-wing, educated women are permitted the loudest voice in the conversation around sexual violence in Australia because those women can be trusted to stay within the boundaries they are given.
Compliant women in this country have exchanged truth for power. A series of purity tests will make sure that they will not gain a platform if they fall outside of the advocacy space they are permitted. They are permitted to advocate only for cultural change in ‘gender’ or policies that will protect and empower the most privileged of Australian women against the most privileged of Australian men.
Internationally left-wing governments are re-enforcing speech control with hate speech laws that aim to silence women who raise concerns about redefining women or the sexual boundaries of protective infrastructure.
In Britain, women are bearing the brunt of this legislation, many of them lesbian. Some women are being arrested (Marion Millar) and harassed by police (Ceri Black), others have faced ongoing legal expenses to fight workplace discrimination and sanction (Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey), and more have been hounded out of their jobs (Dr Kathleen Stock). All of these women are feminists who are concerned about the failure of female and child protection mechanisms from gender identity legislation.
Just a few weeks ago, a disabled middle-aged woman in Wales was arrested and held in a prison cell for over ten hours for placing feminist stickers around her town. Jenni Swayne’s stickers read, ‘3+ women killed by men each week’ and ‘Domestic violence kills’. The stickers were called ‘transphobic’ by police.
Early critics of gender identity legislation feared that removing words that describe women as a sex would lead to a situation where women are not allowed to speak about male violence in meaningful ways. The evidence that this is happening is met with nauseating claims of the virtue of those who hold the correct opinions.
This virtue is gained in the way all dictators gain virtue – by shielding themselves with the most vulnerable. Evil dictators will store their weapons in the children’s hospitals. If you attack, you destroy the innocent, validating the virtuous claim of the dictator. If you expose the weaponry, they will claim the weapons are there to protect the children. Either way, the dictator mines virtue from vulnerability and uses it to shield the most sinister type of power.
Unfortunately, there is a segment of the right who have such little value for women and gender non-conforming children that they happily attack the vulnerable or cede the cultural and political ground around the protection of the vulnerable to those who have no intention to provide the protections that women have fought and paid for.
In the new political space that is not left and not right, we must fight this stifling authoritarian control over what belongs to us; our language, our space, our bodies, and our rights to contend with each other in open and honest dialogue.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/men-are-the-most-privileged-women-of-all/
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As a woman, I can say men today have never been so diminished... and it’s high time we stood up for them: Philosopher Nina Power says masculinity is in crisis
Growing up in a little village in Wiltshire, my lovely dad, Clive, was always there. I remember him making dinner and giving fatherly advice to my brother and me, a constant, reassuring presence, frequently telling us he loved us.
My father worked for 40 years as a dentist, never going private as he wanted to provide free, or at least affordable, care for everyone. Now 75 and retired, he knows all the neighbours, he’s very practical and good at fixing things, and spends much of his time building fold-up dental chairs to send to countries that need them.
As my dad reminds us, life’s not always fair. Even so, perhaps life was more straightforward for men of my dad’s generation, who came into adulthood before the economy shifted away from industry.
I think it’s not overstating the case to say that in the current climate many men, especially young men, feel lost and alienated. They struggle to establish themselves in a job market which increasingly values ‘feminine’ skills like communication over manual labour; they have also lost the respect that being a strong provider and protector — ‘head of the family’ — traditionally conferred.
And they have to contend with the fear that any romantic move they make may be misinterpreted and used to publicly shame them, too.
In my new book, What Do Men Want? I look at masculinity in crisis. Modern-day realities such as capitalism, consumerism and constant interconnectedness mean that the values that once held us together — family, religion, service and honour — are in retreat. Some women have thrived, economically at least, in this brave new world, but in righting historic injustices I believe we have somehow tipped the balance toward the idea that men as a class are inherently oppressive.
That’s just not true. In my experience, in my personal life and during my time as a philosophy lecturer at university, the majority of men are kind, thoughtful, self-aware, interested and loving, as friends and as partners. Perhaps I have been lucky. But I suspect most women would say the same.
Now, thanks to Harvey Weinstein and his like, all men stand charged with ‘toxic masculinity’. In the popular imagination, men are now violent, selfish, greedy, misogynist and entitled.
So many headline-making stories of recent times have concerned crimes by men against women: not just Weinstein but Jeffrey Epstein and others. For example, the killing of Sarah Everard, murdered by a police officer who should have been her protector. These stories are appalling. Hearing them, it’s hard not to feel alarmed that such men seem to fear or hate women. But we must not start to believe that all men do.
There’s another old idea that says feminists hate men. Neither is true. What is true is that life for the average man is confusing.
Men are subject to a series of contradictory instructions: they are told to take charge, to be responsible, to show initiative; but at the same time warned that their version of masculinity might be exhibiting privilege.
Once, we knew what we prized as manliness. To call a man ‘virile’ today is to limit the word to its sexual sense. Etymologically, we also get the word ‘virtue’ from the word vir, an ancient term across several languages meaning ‘man’.
Thus, virility is not just what a man does with his manhood. To the Ancient Greeks, to be a man was not to display one’s sexual prowess, nor was it to enact brute force. It was instead a question of noble behaviour. To be virile was to be self-possessed, and to take care of oneself, the better to support others. So virility was associated with goodness. Perhaps one day it will be again.
You could say we now live in a post-virtue world where desire is everything. As an individual, you put your wants and needs above everything else. Virtue, like self-sacrifice, is seen as old-fashioned, anachronistic.
Our ancestors were not stupid. The fact that we’ve got sophisticated technology such as mobile phones does not make us superior in the art of understanding human nature. If anything, our addiction to social media has undermined our judgment.
Remember, patriarchy is not all about oppression — it also denotes responsibility. A patriarch should be someone who looks after everyone else. In our self-obsessed world, where you’re encouraged to be a child forever and everyone’s having fun, no one wants to be the adult in the room, not even the prime minister.
So we might want to think about creating a new kind of culture in which authority and taking responsibility are valued. This goes for women as well as men — no one benefits from an irresponsible culture. Meanwhile, other aspects of men’s lives have also changed.
Many very serious incidents were exposed through #MeToo, but I can’t help thinking that others could have been resolved by a simple conversation. There is a paranoia among men because the internet has become a terrifying potential weapon. If a date goes wrong, you can get online and slag someone off to the entire world.
Dates sometimes go wrong. It’s not always harassment or abuse, it could be a misreading of a situation. I think everyone’s probably had that experience, but we live in a very punishing culture.
Young people are afraid of making a mistake: it’s perhaps why many millennials don’t drink. They don’t want to become disinhibited. When we had a more Christian culture, it was more accepted that people were flawed, but there was forgiveness and atonement. Today, though, there is a false sense of moral superiority — accompanied by a punitiveness that does not allow for an awareness that people mess up.
Let us be clear. This is nothing to do with male violence at its most extreme, when women are hurt or killed by men. I’m talking about everyday, minor skirmishes or flirtations, where unfairly casting men as predators means seeing women as victims. We’re not victims: many women not only value but enjoy a little carefree flirting and admire the qualities traditional manliness represents.
As a riposte to the ripples of fear created by #MeToo, the actress Catherine Deneuve was one of a number of signatories to a letter published in France, arguing a woman’s right to be ‘bothered’ (ie to be flirted with):
‘As women, we don’t recognise ourselves in feminism that, beyond the denunciation of abuses of power, takes the face of a hatred of men and sexuality . . . Incidents that can affect a woman’s body do not necessarily affect her dignity and must not, as difficult as they can be, make her a perpetual victim.’
In other words, there are flirtatious games that men and women play that are a part — often a delightful part — of life. But no wonder men now fear getting it wrong. It is far safer to stay away.
In that sense, the relationship between the sexes lies in a kind of no man’s land.
We still talk about it being a man’s world, but it’s not the case that men hold all the power.
Some rich men are powerful, of course — but if you look at life expectancy in deprived areas, or at the opioid crisis in America where it’s essentially working class men who die incredibly early, it’s manifestly obvious that some men have little power.
Men occupy 90 per cent of the world’s most dangerous jobs, including roofing, logging and piloting helicopters. Of the 144 people killed in the workforce in the UK in 2017-18, 96 per cent were men. Conversely, there are areas of life where women’s roles are undervalued. Ultimately, men and women complement each other. We are not enemies.
So how can we help men to regain the respect they deserve? I think they need to band together, not in opposition to women, but in appreciation of one another.
Many men already do — sports and gym culture are very popular for a reason. The pendulum of history that has swung women forward into the post-war economy will settle. Men and women will call a truce.
Meanwhile, young men growing up need mentors. My father supported a boy who had no father.
I believe women-only spaces are a good thing. Could the reintroduction of men-only spaces be of benefit too? Keeping fit helps many men stay focused. Looking after yourself and mentoring young boys to show them what it is to be a man. More talking, more listening and more understanding is the way to get along better.
After all, in the real world, millions of men are getting on with being kind, loyal partners and good fathers, just like my dad.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10520439/Top-female-philosopher-asks-time-stood-men.html
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Polls suggest New England could lead the country in a rebirth of freedom
Growing evidence shows the increasingly radical modern Democratic Party is pushing young people away. Nowhere is this more evident than in New England where recent polls show young people ages 18-26 are embracing conservative candidates and principles.
This runs contrary to the narrative Democrats have long held that young voters are the future of the progressive movement and will cut sharply into Republican victories as they enter the voter pool.
Data For Progress, a left-leaning think tank, just released a survey of young New Hampshire voters showing Republicans hold a strong enthusiasm advantage over Democrats entering the midterms.
The survey, conducted among Generation Z (ages 18 to 26) and young millennials (27 to 36), also found Republican Governor Chris Sununu holds a significant favorability advantage over the state’s two Democratic female senators.
Data For Progress reports that 67% of New Hampshire young people are either as enthusiastic as usual about voting this year or more enthusiastic about voting than usual. Young Republicans are twice as likely as young Democrats to say they are more excited about voting this year.
These level-headed New England youth are also far more focused more on strengthening the economy than on climate change, with 31 percent of young New Hampshire voters naming the economy as their top priority compared to only 13 percent who named climate change their number one issue. Just 12 percent identified student debt as their top concern. While zero percent of those polled say creating a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens is their highest priority.
Data For Progress also reports New Hampshire young people strongly favor Republican Governor Chris Sununu over the state’s two female Democratic Senators. Sununu earns +19 points of net support from young voters 18 to 36, while Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan earn +5 and +2 points of net support, respectively.
Interestingly, it is New Hampshire’s youngest voters in the eighteen to twenty-four age bracket who drag down the Democratic Senators’ favorability ratings.
According to Data for progress, GOP Governor Sununu has a +22 point margin of support from New Hampshire’s youngest voters, while Sens. Hassan and Shaheen earn -14 and -13 points net favorability, respectively.
While high school and college students holding more conservative views than young professionals may sound odd, exit polls from the 2020 presidential election show eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds supported Trump at significantly higher rates than other “young” voters.
According to CNN’s New Hampshire exit poll, Trump won 48% of New Hampshire’s eighteen to twenty-four-year-old voting bloc, compared to just 35% of voters twenty-five to twenty-nine, and 42% of voters thirty to thirty-nine. In other words, voters under twenty-five supported Trump at substantially higher rates than all other age groups under 40.
These findings are in line with research conducted by Market Research Foundation (MRF), showing young Americans in their teens and early twenties may hold more conservative views than Millennials, the oldest of whom are now 40 years old.
Market Research Foundation conducted a comprehensive survey of 1,500 members of Gen Z in 2018, and found that Gen Z is widely supportive of conservative policies including limited government, non-intervention, cuts to foreign aid, and strict immigration laws. MRF also found that young people from predominately White New England hold these views the strongest.
According to MRF, 48% percent of Gen Z believe people should strive to solve their own problems, compared to 39% who think government should solve them.
Gen Zers from New England show the highest support for the idea that people should strive to solve their own problems, instead of looking toward the government to do so. Fifty-seven percent of young New Englanders say people should think about what they can do to help themselves, rather than looking toward government, the highest share by region to express this preference as shown below.
Young New Englanders are also the most likely to say that it doesn’t matter if an illegal immigrant isn’t causing problems, if they came here illegally, they must leave or go through the proper procedures to stay. As shown below, 70% of young New Englanders agree that it doesn’t matter if an illegal immigrant isn’t causing problems, if they came here illegally they must leave or go through the proper procedures to stay.
MRF’s research also shows young New Englanders staunchly defend American independence and reject the idea that the United States is obligated to take care of the rest of the world financially or militarily. Over three-quarters of young New Englanders say they agree with the fundamental principle of the America First movement, that the primary goal of any law or policy must be to focus on the needs of Americans.
Eight in ten young New Englanders say if the United States government spent as much time dealing with economic problems at home as it does on the problems of foreign nations, our economy would be much better off. Seventy-three percent of Young New Englanders say they don’t like seeing U.S. taxpayer dollars that could be used domestically given to other countries.
As of early February, President Biden’s favorability rating with young people nationwide is in serious jeopardy, having fallen 25 percentage points since he entered office. Biden took office with a lukewarm 56% approval rating among young voters but that number has fallen to just 31%. In addition, favorability of the Democratic Party has fallen 13 points since last year.
It is easy to assume young people are a lost cause for conservatives when the mainstream media highlights the woke-est amongst them, but that conclusion is premature. President Biden did end up winning the youth vote by 25 percentage points in 2020, but Biden’s margin with young whites was just 6 percentage points, and Trump won young White men by six percentage points.
Gen Z’s views are a lot more nuanced than the mainstream media would have us believe, and many are open to conservative policies, especially in culturally distinct New England.
https://dailytorch.com/2022/02/polls-suggest-new-england-could-lead-the-country-in-a-rebirth-of-freedom/
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Mark Levin: Jan. 6's 'Real Travesty Is the Injustice Taking Place in Our Courts'
On a recent episode of LevinTV on The Blaze network, host Mark Levin sat down to speak with Brandon Straka, the founder of the WalkAway Campaign. This was Straka’s first in-depth interview since he was arrested for his alleged participation in the now notorious Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. After a thirteen-month court battle, including five continuances and a legally-imposed silence, he is finally free to tell his side of the story about what he saw and did that infamous day.
Straka begins the interview by freely admitting he was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He insists, however, that he didn’t take part in nor did he see any of the violence the radical Left claims he did. “There are four sides to the Capitol Building: north, south, east, and west,” Straka explains. While the violence and destruction occurred “almost exclusively on the west side of the Capitol,” Straka and his small crew were only ever on the east side of the building. They never went inside the doors of the Capitol, and they have the video to prove it.
Nonetheless, three weeks after Jan. 6, Straka was unceremoniously arrested at his home and held without charge, while the MSM smeared him with impunity as an insurrectionist and domestic terrorist.
Straka goes on to tell Levin his side of the story in great detail, and his unedited personal video from that day is also played. Unsurprisingly, Straka appears both flabbergasted and shellshocked over his experience of being viciously targeted and attacked by the radical left.
Surprisingly though, throughout the interview, neither Straka nor Levin acknowledges Straka was likely targeted by the radical left specifically because he “walked away” and continues to encourage others to do the same. We all know the left can’t have dissent; all dissenting voices must be silenced. It’s clear that Straka is being displayed as an example of what happens to those who have the gall to “walk away” from the Democratic Party. And do we really think it’s a coincidence Straka’s trial was delayed five times — not only to make the entire experience more painful and drawn-out but also to have its outcome and thus Straka’s own telling of what he went through that much closer to the upcoming elections? I think not.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and their footmen in the MSM continue to push The Narrative that the events of Jan. 6 were a riotous insurrection and “a stain on our nation’s history.”
“But the real travesty is the injustice taking place in our courts,” says Levin. More than 700 hundred people were charged with so-called crimes perpetrated on Jan. 6. Many of them are being held in inhumane conditions, such as solitary confinement, that go well beyond the severity of their alleged crimes in an effort to break their spirits and deter others.
For Straka, this “horrific situation” has strengthened his “conviction and resolve to move forward” in his faith and belief “that America is worth fighting for and that this is a country that must be saved.” Straka declares, “Our values and our cherished freedoms must be defended, must be preserved. And so, as much as they tried their hardest to destroy me, to try to break me and to push me in a corner where I’m too scared or too broken to continue to defend the things that are so important to me … you did not win. … I’m coming back.”
“The Walkaway campaign is coming back, and I am never going to stop fighting for America,” promised Straka.
https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/gwendolynsims/2022/02/14/mark-levin-jan-6s-real-travesty-is-the-injustice-taking-place-in-our-courts-n1558551
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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17 February, 2022
'People are just uncomfortable with a black woman in a power position': Texas A&M basketball coach defends her outfit choice after being criticized
Rubbish! Wearing "f**k me" clothing while in the public eye was bound to be distracting during a game she was attending
A Texas A&M women's basketball assistant coach hit back after facing backlash for wearing pink leather pants and stilettos to a game.
'I'm unapologetically myself every day, I could care less if anybody thinks that I'm being extra,' Sydney Carter said in response to her critics. 'I'm not gonna turn up turn my light off because somebody else is offended or intimidated by the fact that I embrace myself.'
The 31-year-old Aggies assistant coach believes race plays a major factor in the criticism.
'I just think that people are uncomfortable with a black woman being in a power position,' she told Yahoo. 'When you see a black woman who is actually confident and embracing herself, I think that that's very intimidating.'
The furor began when Carter shared photos of herself at the February 6 game against the Kentucky Wildcats. She was wearing the tight pink leather pants paired with a white turtleneck, clear heels and a pink breast cancer awareness pin at her chest.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10519443/Texas-M-coach-Sydney-Carter-defends-wearing-pink-leather-pants-game.html
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Justine Trudeau is reprimanded in Parliament for accusing Jewish Conservative Party MP of standing 'with people who wave swastikas'
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sparked anger on Wednesday when he accused a Jewish MP of 'standing with people who wave swastikas' after she criticized his handling of the Freedom Convoy truckers' anti-vaccine protests.
Melissa Lantsman, a 37-year-old Conservative MP for the Toronto suburb of Thornhill, confronted the prime minister in Parliament about the draconian Emergency Act, which he invoked on Monday for the first time in 50 years in a bid to end 19 days of chaos.
Trudeau responded with scorn to her complaints, saying: 'Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas, they can stand with people who wave the confederate flag.
'We will chose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs, and get their lives back. These illegal protests need to stop and they will.'
His comments were greeted with uproar, and forced the Speaker of the House to reprimand Trudeau and others, reminding them of rules against using 'inflammatory' language in Parliament during the debates.
After being reprimanded, Trudeau refused to apologize and again repeated that the blockades were illegal, and the measures to repress the protests were necessary.
Lantsman later tweeted: 'I think the Prime Minister should think long and hard about his own history before singling out a Jewish Member of Parliament and falsely accusing me of standing with a Swastika.
'What a disgraceful statement unbecoming of anyone in public office - he owes me an apology.'
Trudeau has stepped up his crackdown on Freedom Convoy demonstrators, with police now visiting the homes of people who post in support of the protests on Facebook and a woman forced out of her government job after donating to the demonstrations.
Trudeau on Wednesday was considering using his extraordinary powers under the Emergencies Act to establish 'no-go' zones in Ottawa to dispel the remaining protests in the nation's capital. Ottawa police fanned out among the demonstrators on Wednesday afternoon, distributing pamphlets saying protesters faced fines, arrests and vehicle seizures, and reading: 'You must leave the area now.'
As the blockades in Alberta and Manitoba ended peacefully, all focus came to bear on the protest in Ottawa, now in its third week, with demonstrators paralyzing the streets over their demand for an end to vaccine mandates.
Frustration with the failure of Canadian police to lift blockades at the border and in the capital, along with scenes of protesters lounging in hot tubs near Parliament, ultimately drove Trudeau to seek emergency powers earlier this week, sources told Reuters.
Trudeau has been slammed by critics who accuse him of imposing 'martial law' to crush the protests over vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions.
Lantsman had earlier during the Parliament session on Wednesday quoted Trudeau's October 2015 victory speech, when he was elected prime minister.
'A positive, optimistic, hopeful vision of public life isn't a naive dream; it can be a powerful force for change,' Lantsman quoted. 'If Canadians are to trust their government, their government needs to trust Canadians,' she quoted. Lantsman added: 'Those are the words of the prime minister in 2015.
'"These people - very often misogynistic, racist, women hater, science deniers, the fringe," - same prime minister, six years later, as he fans the flames of an unjustified national emergency.
'So, Mr Speaker, when did the prime minister lose his way? When did it happen?'
Trudeau said that his government was 'following to the letter' the Emergency Act, and it was needed.
Dane Lloyd, an MP for Sturgeon River in Alberta, accused Trudeau of making 'shameful and dishonorable' remarks.
He added: 'For the prime minister to accuse any colleague in this house of standing with the swastika is shameful.'
Lloyd called on Trudeau to 'unreservedly apologize' - and Trudeau refused.
He countered: ‘Canadians deserve their freedoms back.
'These illegal blockades that continue to interfere with people’s daily lives.'
Amid the catcalls, the Speaker intervened to 'ask everybody to calm down'.
Trudeau continued: 'The measure put forward are proportionate, responsible and completely folded into charter of freedoms. These steps are proportionate.’
Lloyd replied that the 'lack of apology speaks volumes' and urged Trudeau again to apologize.
Trudeau said: ‘These members continue to stand with illegal blockades. Canadians are watching carefully and … we will stand will stand on the side of Canadians who want their livelihoods back.’
For a third time, Lloyd demanded: 'Mr Prime Minister, apologize.'
And Trudeau said: ‘These illegal blockades have been going on in Ottawa for 20 days now. 'People are made to feel fearful, miss shifts at their work, these are things that cannot be stood for.
'That’s why we are moving forward with measures. We continue to defend freedom of expression, freedom to protest, as long as they are peaceful.'
Candice Bergen, the opposition leader, told Trudeau that the threshold for invoking the Emergency Act had not been met - pointing out that the three bridges into the United States have now been cleared.
'It's not something done lightly,' Trudeau replied. 'It was necessary to give local law enforcement the tools to lift these illegal blockades, to ensure law and safety and to ensure Canadians are able to get back to their daily lives.'
Bergen accused Trudeau of overreach.
'Why is the prime minister using this hammer on Canadians?' she asked. 'Isn’t it true that he’s using it just to save his own political skin?'
Trudeau insisted that the threshold had been met, adding: 'Now across the country, police have the tools necessary to keep people safe.'
Bergen said that the mandates must end, saying that continued lockdowns were harming the mental health of the country.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10519215/Canadian-police-charge-four-plotting-murder-cops-trove-guns.html
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Rock Star Truckers
Donna Laframboise
Members of the public are showering the truckers with thanks. And with food, fuel, and cash
I just spent a week in Ottawa. Talking to protesting truckers, attending their daily religious services, breaking bread with them in restaurants (usually small, ethnic places) that demand neither masks nor papers.
I spent a week watching these truckers being treated like rock stars by the public. People walk up to the cabs of these vehicles. They reach up to shake hands and announce some variation of: “We’ve just arrived in town for a few days. Thank you for starting this movement.”
Long before it was Valentine’s Day, people were tucking red cardboard hearts beneath the windshield wipers of these parked trucks. Strangers routinely pass cash, gift cards, thank you notes, and children’s drawings to the drivers. They offer them warm hats, sandwiches, chocolate, and home baked treats. A local adopt-a-trucker program is providing access to showers, and is doing laundry.
One of the earliest anecdotes I heard from a trucker, an oldtimer himself, was about a ‘little old lady’ who’d asked if a nearby Jerry can belonged to him. After he said she was welcome to it, she informed him her intent was to fill it with petrol and to wheel it back in a baby stroller covered with a blanket.
It’s a sweet story. But with a serious undertone. The French Resistance did that sort of thing. While living under Hitler’s boot.
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2022/02/14/rock-star-truckers/
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Priti Patel hires Australia's migrant guru in bid to help solve Channel crisis
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/02/16/21/54287195-10520925-image-a-16_1645047824711.jpg
A former minister who played a key role in Australia's controversial asylum seeker 'pushback' policy has been hired to shake up Britain's border measures.
Priti Patel will announce today that Alexander Downer, ex-minister for foreign affairs Down Under, will carry out a thorough review of the UK Border Force.
His remit will include looking at the influence of unions over the agency's effectiveness.
It comes after the union that represents the majority of Border Force staff joined forces with a migrant charity to launch a legal challenge against Miss Patel's plans to turn Channel boats back to France.
It is understood that Mr Downer will cover all of Border Force's work – including immigration checks at ports and airports, counter-smuggling operations as well as dealing with asylum claims.
His report will be due within months, and is expected to influence ministers' decisions on the next stages of immigration reform. It opens the possibility of a complete overhaul of Border Force.
Proposals could include a merger with a separate Home Office agency – Immigration Enforcement – which deals with foreign criminals, visa-breakers and organised crime gangs.
The Home Secretary's appointment of Mr Downer will be controversial because he has been a leading advocate of Australia's long-standing policy of blocking asylum seekers' boats off its coastline.
Introduced in 2001, it sees boats from Indonesia and other Pacific islands stopped at sea, refuelled and redirected away from Australian shores.
Last September Mr Downer, writing in the Daily Mail, said: 'Priti Patel has been widely ridiculed on both sides of the Channel for suggesting that boats carrying migrants be physically 'pushed back' towards the French coast.
'Yet, from my experience as Australia's former minister for foreign affairs, I know that a 'pushback' policy can work.'
He set out how Australia took 'direct action' during its own migrant crisis, intercepting vessels and deploying naval forces to turn them away.
'As word spread around Indonesia that we were determined to stamp out the trafficking, it soon stemmed the numbers,' he wrote. 'I see no reason why this cannot be done in the Channel.
'My advice to Miss Patel would be to introduce the 'pushback' policy without fanfare, and to keep the French informed on a need-to-know basis only.'
Australia has conducted its turn-back policy for most of the last two decades. Initially called the Pacific Solution, it was dropped by the country's Labour government in 2008 but later re-introduced after a series of migrant boat disasters. Since 2013 it has been codenamed Operation Sovereign Borders.
Mr Downer, 70, was the Liberal Party's minister for foreign affairs – Australia's equivalent of the Foreign Secretary – under Australian prime minister John Howard from 1996 to 2007.
He was also Australia's High Commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018.
Concern over trade union opposition to Miss Patel's immigration plans came to a head last month when the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) joined forces with migrant charity Care4Calais to launch a judicial review of her Channel pushback proposals.
The PCS described the powers, which are currently going through Parliament, as 'morally reprehensible'.
Its general secretary Mark Serwotka said at the time that his organisation 'strongly opposes this policy, on moral and humanitarian grounds, and we will not rule out industrial action to prevent it being carried out'.
The legal challenge is yet to be heard. Last year more than 28,300 migrants reached Britain from northern France – triple the total in 2020.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10520925/Priti-Patel-hires-Australias-migrant-guru-bid-help-solve-Channel-crisis.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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16 February, 2022
The Left are the real enemy of blacks
In Africa, in Australia and elsewhere. Leftists are angry people and love to create anger and destruction in others. "Protests" by blacks are often egged on by white Leftists behind the scenes
Robert Glyne
As a boy growing up in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, I was used to seeing violence and cruelty.
My first major impression came one day when I was on the front porch reading a book not long after the uprising had been officially put down. I was surprised to see an African walking up to the house. He stopped nearby and after the formal greeting in Swahili, he asked if he could speak to the Memsahib.
I went inside and told mother that there was an African outside who wanted to speak to her.
She went outside and, seeing who it was, gave a shout of joy and went over to the man and gave him a great big hug.
This man’s name was Mugo and he was from the Kikuyu tribe.
During the Mau Mau, the terrorists tried to force their own people, the Kikuyu, to kill and murder their white employers. They did this by holding what was known as ‘oathing ceremonies’ which were rather cruel and bound the people through superstition and witchcraft. Many of these Africans, rather than be forced to kill their employers, went back to their tribal lands and waited until the uprising had been put down. Later, they returned to regain their employment.
Mugo was one of nature’s gentlemen. He was cheerful and stuck by the family through thick and thin. Mugo was an extremely decent man in every sense of the word.
There were several reasons why many Africans remained loyal to the Europeans.
One, was that they had employment and they were provided with accommodation. Two, they were given free medical treatment and their kids were given free education. More importantly, the money earned often went to their families who remained in their traditional villages. Lastly, most of the Africans realised that the modern world was arriving and they had to learn to deal with it.
Sadly, the British governments of the time found that it was very expensive to keep their army in Kenya, so they dropped Kenya like a hot potato.
Fast forward to the Rhodesian Terrorist war.
Many people are amazed when I tell them that 70 per cent of the Rhodesian security forces were, in fact, Africans who were extremely loyal to the Smith regime – not to mention the many Africans who worked in cafes and hotels and mechanical shops.
I asked many Africans why they did not support the terrorists; their answer was this. ‘We have seen what is happening in the rest of Africa. It is f***ed. we don’t want to end up like that.’
The percentage of black people who fought on the side of the terrorists was actually minute compared to the population as a whole, and many of them were only there because their families were threatened by the terrorists if they did not comply.
When protected villages were set up and the Africans felt safer, many of the terrorists actually changed sides and fought with the security forces.
A classic example was the Selous Scouts, who were a pseudo terrorist unit. The aim of the unit was to infiltrate the terrorist gangs and report them to the army. Many of these pseudo terrorists were in fact ex-terrorists who had willingly changed sides.
As an ex-SAS friend of mine stated: ‘If the blacks hated the whites as much as the media portrays, then all the four million black people had to do was to pick up a rock or a machete and kill the few hundred thousand whites. It would have all been over in a few days.’
Then, as now, the politicians were not interested in what the ordinary people think or want, they only listened to the noisy minority.
If anyone hated the Ian Smith regime, it was not the black people, it was the British government under the Labour idiot, Harold Wilson. Wilson tried to order parts of the British army and Air force to go and fight with the terrorists against the Rhodesians.
It is a little-known fact that the military refused to do as ordered, their reply was, ‘We will not fight against our own brothers, especially as they fought with us during the war.’
The British army had mutinied against their own government. (There is an ongoing story to that as well.)
One aspect of this is the reality that the Colonials realised that they had a duty of care to the African people and that was to help them adapt to the modern world, something which has been ignored.
The fallout of this stupidity is all too plain to see today.
Africa was thrown to the wolves in the name of political expediency. This has resulted in a return to tribalism, violence, and cruelty – not to mention the descent back into superstition and witchcraft.
In Australia, the duty of care that should have applied to the Aboriginals has been cast aside.
The biggest act of racism towards the Aboriginals was not the concoction and falsity of the ‘attempt at genocide’, it was the marginalisation of these people with welfare, only to be replaced later with empty gestures and false praise.
The message is clear… ‘We do not want you as part of our future, stay in the dirt whilst we hand you money from the working taxpayer.’
It is a known fact that reliance on welfare creates boredom, frustration, and resentment which in turn leads to alcoholism, drug use, and a drift towards crime – especially when there is no accountability due to too many people profiting from other people’s misery.
As one Aboriginal told me, ‘Whilst they have got us like this, they own us.’
Over the years, there have been many public meetings to address the problems of crime and violence within our community in Townsville.
In the lead-up to these meetings veiled threats were made to us from the Labor party and council. Undercover police were sent to the meetings, they were told to look for any evidence of racist comments. We were even told that the Aboriginals would attack us, and that the police were instructed to do nothing.
At the meetings however, we found a totally different scenario.
It was the Labor politicians who verbally abused us and tried to intimidate us. What we found from the Aboriginals was also different. The Aboriginals who did attend the meetings were actually on our side.
A comment from one woman said it all.
‘Hi mate. Even though it is some of our people who are causing these problems, we are not your real enemy. Our real enemy is those people.’ She was pointing to the Labor politicians who were strutting around trying to intimidate people who had attended the meeting.
Once again, it is up to ordinary people to realise what is going on and how stupid many of our so-called leaders are.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/the-false-propaganda-of-racism/
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It's all about looks! Attractive people have better immune systems, study of blood tests finds
Beauty may not be only skin deep as it seems good-looking people appear to have a better immune system.
Traits traditionally linked to attractiveness, such as a symmetrical face and bright eyes, may be signs the body is better at fighting infection, a study of blood tests has found.
Researchers believe we may be drawn to such looks because our brains are hardwired to seek out healthy partners.
Summer Mengelkoch, who led the study at Texas Christian University, said: 'People who go out to a bar looking to talk to someone attractive are often dismissed as being shallow and told, 'It is not all about looks'.
But they are really just following their instincts to find a high-quality mate.'
The study of 152 men and women was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Scientists photographed 152 young adults without make-up and with neutral expressions. Then 492 people in an online survey were asked to rate their attractiveness.
The most handsome men and beautiful women – according to those of the opposite sex who rated 25 pictures each for the survey – were found to have higher rates of phagocytosis.
This is the process by which white blood cells 'eat' and destroy bacteria before it can make someone ill.
Men judged as more attractive by women had more effective 'natural killer' cells which can destroy virus-infected cells in the body, so could help to fight off coronavirus.
It has long been suggested that good-looking people are healthier. Those with symmetrical faces are unlikely to have had developmental problems in the womb or during childhood.
Clear skin and bright, wide eyes indicate good health, because ill people's eyes tend to become narrower and darker, some experts suggest. And the importance of red lips and rosy cheeks might explain why women wear make-up.
Miss Mengelkoch said: 'With modern medicine, infections are not as deadly as they used to be, so perhaps it's okay if people lower their standards and start to give people who are less attractive a shot.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10517117/Its-looks-Attractive-people-better-immune-systems-study-blood-tests-finds.html
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New Zealand votes to ban gay conversion therapy and makes practising it punishable with five years in prison
New Zealand have passed a law that will ban the cruel process of conversion therapy, under which gay people are pressured to be straight.
The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill, which was introduced last year, was passed on Tuesday in Wellington after its third and final reading following the support of 112 MPs in parliament.
Only eight national MPs opposed the bill and it received nearly 107,000 public submissions - making it the highest number of public submissions ever received on any legislation.
The Minister of Justice, Kris Faafoi, said: 'This is a great day for New Zealand's rainbow communities.'
Under the bill, it will be an offence to perform medically illegitimate conversion practices on a child or young person aged under 18, or on someone with impaired decision making capacity.
Such offences would be subject to up to three years imprisonment and up to five years where it has caused serious harm, irrespective of the person's age.
During the third reading, Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, made an emotional speech about growing up in a 'churchgoing household'. He said: 'When I finally gathered the courage to come out to my parents I was met with love'.
But he went on to talk about those who are most vulnerable in society - and recalled a friend he had called James, who ultimately took his own life because he was met with 'anger, rejection and derision'. He added: 'In any law, there needs to be access to justice and appropriate penalties, but I believe the select committee has got the balance right here.
'To James and the many like him from all parts of rainbow community this legislation is for you.'
'We cannot bring you back, we cannot undo all the hurt, but we can make sure for the generations to come we provide the support and love you did not get and protect you from the harm of those who seek to try to stop you from being who you are. We will never forget you.'
Conversion therapy has been banned in the Queensland, Victoria and Australian Capital Territory, with other countries seeking to change its laws to outlaw the archaic practice.
Labour MP Kiri Allan posted on Facebook this morning about how she went through conversion therapy at age 16 at her church.
She wrote: 'At 16, I went through conversion therapy (it wasn’t called that, but that’s what it was) through my church.
'I desperately tried to "pray the gay away" - to be accepted by my family, community and church. My “illness” & “weakness” to temptation was etched as sin into my skin.
'It took a long time to shake that shame and trauma. Tonight our Parliament will ensure this practice is banned in our country for good. For our next generation of babies, I am so incredibly relieved. Thank you to everyone that championed this change.'
In October 2020, Jacinda Ardern's Labour party committed to banning gay conversion therapy if they were re-elected in New Zealand's October 17 election.
In an interview with Express magazine, the 41-year-old Labour leader said she was moved to oppose the practice after watching a Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie.
'I still remember watching the film Latter Days at the film festival in Wellington some years ago. That film never left me,' she said.
'It's one of the reasons I feel quite strongly about this policy.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10515281/New-Zealand-votes-ban-gay-conversion-therapy-makes-punishable-five-years-prison.html
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Australia: Nurses feared for their lives, as town of Bourke grapples with rising crime by Aboriginal youths
It is getting towards a refusal by nurses to go there. There have been examples of that elsewhere. But the young thugs don't care. In such situations an enhanced police presence is often the only thing that keeps medical services available
The nurses told the ABC's The World Today program that they fear for the safety of their colleagues and patients due to a lack of security and staff.
All of the nurses who spoke to the ABC shared their stories on the condition of anonymity.
Steve, not his real name, said he feared a nurse could lose their life if security was not improved. "I can get stabbed any time of the day, that can happen at any time," he said.
In one of the most recent incidents, several student nurses were allegedly threatened and robbed by young offenders armed with a knife.
The escalating threat of violent crime has had an effect on staff at Bourke's hospital and their ability to care for patients, according to the nurses, and they fear some patients could even die due to a chronic lack of hospital staff.
Helen, another nurse, said staffing and security had to be improved before it was too late. "Are they going to wait for someone to die before they do something?" she said.
Mark Spittal, the chief executive of the Western NSW Local Health District, which has responsibility for the hospital in Bourke, said the safety of staff was of the highest priority. "We have zero tolerance for threatening or criminal behaviour that affects our workforce," said Mr Spittal.
But the town, 800 kilometres west of Sydney, is still struggling to end the threat of crime.
On Sunday night, a visiting magistrate experienced crime first-hand. Police say several young offenders allegedly broke into a Bourke motel room where the 66-year-old woman was sleeping and tried to steal her handbag, after wrestling her to the ground.
Three juveniles, including a 10-year-old, were arrested.
Abuse 'every single day', says nurse
The nurses who spoke to the ABC shared details of several times they had felt unsafe during their time in the community.
Nancy worked as a nurse at Bourke hospital for more than two years, before leaving in 2020. "They just abuse us, every single day," she said. "I've had colleagues who were physically harmed by the patients, one of them was punched in the face."
She said there were not enough staff at the hospital to deal with patients with mental health and drug and alcohol issues, which she said were common.
"A mental health patient, he was brought in by the police, they said they already frisk searched him for any dangerous items," she said.
But quickly a violent and dangerous scene broke out in front of her. "Right in front of me, right in front of the hospital, he just took out a blade and started slashing himself," she said.
"He went out of the hospital and grabbed a rubbish bin and he smashed it, he smashed it on the front door and the glass front door, it was broken."
Incidents such as this have led the University of Sydney to suspend its student nurse placements in Bourke.
The situation is exacerbated by the lack of adequate security staffing, according to Steve. "It's pretty scary because we don't have like a proper security guard on duty at night," he said.
He said he had been told by violent patients that they would stab him if they saw him outside the hospital.
While he worked in the town, he feared going to authorities and having to testify in court, because of potential reprisals.
"Bourke is just a small town and if I appear in court or something like that, I don't know what will happen, I'm just also scared of my life if I do that," he said.
Another nurse, Helen, said general staff at the hospital had tried to help with the security situation, but with only one security guard who was not always on shift, protecting nurses was impossible.
"The gardeners, the cleaners, the kitchen staff [tried to help but], they don’t hold a licence as security," she said.
She left Bourke in 2020, after three years at the hospital.
Mr Spittal from the Western NSW Local Health District told the ABC that after a recent security audit of the hospital, changes have been made since the incidents described by the nurses.
"A number of measures have been established or expanded, including a 24/7 presence of security personnel and improvements to infrastructure, including lighting," he said.
"Further improvements and measures will be put in place in the coming days."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-12/bourke-nurses-attacked/100818520
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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15 February, 2022
To Fight Wokeness, the GOP Should Embrace Immigrant Voters
A lot depends on the immigrants concerned but East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) tend strongly to be culturally conservative and good citizens generally -- low crime rate etc. The GOP should reach out to them
The rise of ultra-progressive ideologies and the decline in patriotic sentiment are two broad cultural trends that worry American conservatives. Some may be tempted to imagine that these two phenomena are connected to immigration and the resulting ethnic and racial diversity—especially since opposition to immigration is common among conservatives for security, economic, and cultural reasons. Contrary to conservative worries, however, immigration and diversity can actually reduce the impact of wokeness while boosting American patriotism.
It is true that most immigrant families require two or three generations to achieve total or near-total cultural assimilation into American life. But it is during this transition period that immigrants and their children are most likely to hold conservative values. Ultra-progressive beliefs such as Critical Race Theory and esoteric concepts of gender are not immigrant imports, but rather reflect the beliefs (or professed beliefs) of long-settled US-born natives.
A long running General Social Survey (GSS) question about race, going back to 1977, has asked: “On average, blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most blacks just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves out of poverty?” A progressive person will obviously be inclined to answer “no,” while a (very) non-woke person will answer “yes.” Overall, 35 percent of respondents said no in 1977, a figure that almost doubled to 63 percent in 2018. (See Figure 1, below.)
This general trend shouldn’t come as a surprise. But when you break down the data, surprises do emerge. Only 34 percent of native-born Americans gave the progressive response in 1977, a number that soared to 65 percent in 2018. For immigrants, however, the share delivering the progressive response—47 percent—was the same in 2018 as it was in 1977 (though it fluctuated during the interim).
When it comes to avant-garde ideas about identity, non-white immigrants tend to be less woke than the progressive (and largely white) Americans who often purport to speak or act on behalf of non-whites. At a Loudoun County, VA school board meeting in June 2021, for instance, the fiercest critic of the (mostly native-born Americans) who’d championed the decision to teach Critical Race Theory was Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese immigrant who fled to the United States after living through Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “I’ve been very alarmed by what's going on in our schools,” she said. “You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.” A school-board recall election targeting San Francisco’s wokest board members, similarly, was co-led up by Siva Raj, an immigrant from India awaiting permanent residency.
Of course, there are outliers on both sides. Hari Kondabolu, a second-generation US-born child of Indian immigrants, produced a documentary that resulted in the cancellation of the fictional Indian-American character Apu in The Simpsons. On the other wing is Vivek Ramaswamy, the Ohio-born son of Indian immigrants. The title of his book, Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam, tells you all you need to know about his views.
The divide between native-born progressives and immigrants is expressed in language usage. According to Pew Research, only 16 percent of immigrant Latinos have even heard of the now-fashionable (but entirely unnecessary, and widely mocked) term “Latinx” as a substitute for Latino or Hispanic; and only two percent of them use it—a percentage smaller than the 2.9 percent margin of error in the Pew survey. (Of native-born Latinos, 32 percent have heard of the term Latinx and four percent use it.)
https://quillette.com/2022/02/11/to-fight-wokeness-the-gop-should-embrace-immigrant-voters/
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Scientists at leading US, UK universities slam Australia’s expulsion of Novak Djokovic, urge leader to dump mandates
Scientists at leading American and British universities have slammed Australia’s expulsion of tennis star Novak Djokovic as “authoritarian” in new research that condemns Northern Territory’s “lockdown of the unvaccinated” as “punitive, discriminatory and coercive… and counter-productive”.
Amid growing protests against vaccine mandates throughout the world, including in Paris, Ottawa and Canberra, nine leading scientists from universities including Oxford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, have urged mandates be dumped in light of evidence they were “scientifically questionable, ethically problematic, and misguided”.
“Denying individuals education, livelihoods, medical care, or social life unless they get vaccinated does not appear to coincide with constitutional and bioethical principles, especially in liberal democracies,” they added in a research paper published last week.
Singling out Australia, Austria and Germany for locking down the unvaccinated, the authors warned the “risks and harms” from mandates to combat Covid-19 had reached a point where they “far outweighed the benefits”.
Australia deported Mr Djokovic from Melbourne in January on public health grounds after the tennis number one refused to reveal his vaccination status, prompting an international furore.
“The explicit characterisation of Mr Djokovic as a threat to Australian ‘civil order and public health’ underlines concerns of vaccine mandates
“Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport, and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and wellbeing.”
The scientists said governments had systematically overplayed the effectiveness of the vaccines, underplayed the risks, ignored natural immunity, and mislead populations by not following through with promises to ease restrictions once targets had been reached, fuelling anger that might not quickly subside.
“They have become a source for collective rage and anger, notably for those who have been fired from their jobs or isolated and barred from social life,” they said, suggesting mandates were fuelling extremism on both sides of the debate and did little to lift vaccination rates among vulnerable who most needed to be vaccinated.
European nations and some US states including have dropped or planned to drop Covid-19 restrictions entirely in recent weeks, amid falling infection rates and polling suggesting voters had become tired of restrictions as the pandemic enters its third year in March.
The research condemned Northern Territory chief minister Michael Gunner, who drew international attention in January, ordering a lockdown of unvaccinated residents following similar policies in Germany and Austria a month earlier.
“If you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely anti-vax, I don‘t care what your personal vaccination status is. Your personal vaccination status is not relevant. If you campaign against the mandate…If you say ’pro-persuasion’, stuff it, shove it. You are anti-vax,” the territory leader said at the time.
Protests in Canada against mandates, originally centred in Canada’s capital, which has been in gridlock for weeks as thousands of protesters, many with trucks, blocked city streets, have spread to key crossings between the US and Canadian border, prompting calls for the military to intervene.
On Friday Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who has blasted the protesters as racists, promised US president Joe Biden “quick action” to unblock the Ambassador Bridge, the world’s largest suspension bridge, which links Michigan and Ontario.
Evidence in the UK and Israel had shown passports that require vaccination to participate in public life increased anger, fuelled mistrust and did little or possibly even reduced, uptake of vaccines which had saved millions of lives.
“Forcefully implemented vaccine policies may entrench existing beliefs of distrust by creating a strong confirmation bias that governments and corporate powers are acting in an authoritarian manner,” they said, noting out some regulatory agencies appeared to be protecting the interests of pharmaceutical companies.
In December 2020, before vaccine were widely available, the World Health Organisation’s immunisation department stated: “I don’t think we envision any countries creating a mandate for [COVID-19] vaccination”.
The scientists said governments had become progressively more authoritarian throughout the pandemic, paving the way for a greater surveillance of individuals’ movement and health choices in the future.
“Will unvaccinated people face exclusions in society for years to come? Will we return to new mandates, and street battles between protesters and police, each time a new variant emerges?”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/scientists-at-leading-us-uk-universities-slam-australias-expulsion-of-novak-djokovic-urge-leader-to-dump-mandates/news-story/1cdd4c41c52cd42a103a6ca2b4c36df7
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How the liberal media outlets that relentlessly pushed 'Russian collusion' smear have totally ignored Durham's revelation that Hillary SPIED on Trump. CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, NBC and CBS all pass
The mainstream media is under fire again for ignoring the bombshell claims Hillary Clinton's campaign spied on Donald Trump while he was President - while they show no hesitation in heavy coverage of the discredited Steele dossier and allegations he was colluding with Russia,
DailyMail.com found no links or references to the latest revelations by Special Counsel John Durham in his probe into the origins of the Russia investigation on the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS.
The story has even been picked up global news organizations, including The Times of London, but has seen little in comparison to the wall-to-wall coverage of the so-called 'dirty dossier' that turned out to be Democrat-funded opposition research used as a basis for the FBI to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The authenticity of the Steele dossier crumbled when Russian-born analyst Igor Y. Danchenko was arrested and indicted in November for lying about his contact with a Bill and Hillary Clinton crony, who supplied some of the information.
Even on Monday, days after the alleged scandal broke, CNN's top story on its digital site was about pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman handing nearly 8,000 documents over to the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.
At the time of Danchenko's arrest, it appeared that the same outlets giving the dossier oxygen before it could be further verified were poised to re-examine their coverage. However since the weekend they have also been silent about Durham's findings.
A 2020 interview Trump sat for with CBS News host Lesley Stahl resurfaced amid the fallout, in which the veteran journalist dismissed claims that political opponents spied on Trump's campaign.
His son Eric Trump called on Stahl to apologize. Trump himself previously called the heated October 2020 interview a 'vicious attempted takeout.'
Trump jumped on the lack of stories published in outlets over the weekend, said it is proof the media is corrupt and claimed 'all hell would break loose' if Republicans faced the same accusations.
He added that the lack of coverage on the matter on more liberal-leaning networks was a 'scandal' itself, in contrast with the steady stream of pundits and Republican officials weighing in on right-wing outlets.
'Can you imagine that, what should be the biggest story of our time, bigger than Watergate, is getting absolutely no mention, ZERO, in the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, ratings-dead CNN, and MSDNC,' Trump said through his Save America PAC.
'This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful, and so important for the future of our Nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.
Just like they wouldn’t talk about the many Biden corruption scandals prior to the Election, (or for that matter now!), they won’t talk about this, which is potentially even bigger. It shows how totally corrupt and shameless the media is.'
The Democrat-funded opposition research that suggested Trump was in the Kremlin's pocket was found to have been used as the basis for the FBI to surveil ex-Trump campaign aide Carter Page, before key claims in it were debunked and one of its key sources, a Russian analyst named Igor Danchenko, was charged with lying to that same agency.
Meanwhile, conservative pundits and current and former Republican officials have come down on the Clinton team, some even agreeing with Trump's accusation that the Democrat's actions amounted to 'treason.'
Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland said the reason mainstream media outlets were ignoring the story was because they were complicit in conjuring a false narrative around the Trump administration, which she was part of for four months in 2017.
From Bill Barr's confirmation hearing to indictments and the crumbling of the Steele dossier: The timeline of Durham's investigation leading up to bombshell Hillary claims
May 17, 2017 – Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints Robert Mueller as special counsel. Among other things, Mueller is directed to investigate 'any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with' Trump's presidential campaign.
After leaving the National Security Council McFarland was briefly considered for the US ambassador post in Singapore.
However her nomination was derailed in the Senate after she was ensnared in former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. McFarland had previously told senators that she was not aware of communications between ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russia, though Mueller's probe later uncovered a 2016 email discussing a meeting between Flynn and a Kremlin official.
She told Fox & Friends on Monday that the media's coverage of the matter 'destroyed' her career and suggested they would try to do the same to Trump.
'All the other media was in on the con, they were all in on it. They were the ones that did Russia, Russia, Russia,' McFarland said.
'I mean, they destroyed my career, my reputation, cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees with the Mueller investigation. So the media, they don't want to touch this because they're complicit in it. They don't want to have to be called before a grand jury and have to say where they got the fake story and why they continue to peddle it.'
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan suggested on Fox program America's Newsroom that Democrats and the media were working together to gin up a narrative.
He compared it to reports from late last year that the National School Boards Association worked in tandem with the Biden White House and Justice Department (DOJ) in a letter to the Attorney General comparing parents protesting Critical Race Theory and COVID-19 mandates to 'domestic terrorists.'
'They were creating the very news they were then tweeting about and trying to get the media to write about. Frankly, it's is no different, it's the template that the left uses, the Democrats use,' Jordan said Monday morning.
'It's the same thing that happened four months ago when we found out the Department of Education went out and solicited the letter from the National School Boards Association so they could to what they wanted to do, namely, spy on parents. And the same thing happened here.'
Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise shared a compilation of online news front pages on Twitter Sunday, pointing out that none of them -- CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC -- made any mention of Durham's findings.
'Yesterday it was revealed that the Clinton Campaign paid a tech company to infiltrate Trump Tower/White House servers and drum up the now-debunked phony Russian collusion hoax that the media ran with,' Scalise wrote.
'Now that same media is silent on this massive scandal. They're complicit.'
Trump reacted to the bombshell news with a stunning suggestion that Clinton should be executed over the allegations.
He released a statement on Saturday evening that began by mis-identifying the special counsel as 'Robert' rather than 'John.'
'The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert Durham provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia,' Trump said through his Save America PAC.
He added, 'In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.'
Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan agreed with Trump during an appearance on Fox & Friends Sunday morning.
'We've never seen anything like this in history,' Jordan said.
'So President Trump's statement yesterday, I think is right on target. This is truly unprecedented, truly something that has never happened in the history of our great country.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10511459/Trump-tears-corrupt-media-IGNORING-claim-Hillarys-campaign-paid-spy-him.html
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Mob hysteria over the claims of two vocal Australian women
Kevin Donnelly
While both Grace Tame, a victim of sexual abuse, and Brittany Higgins, who was allegedly raped in Parliament House, have every right to argue men are misogynist and their mistreatment of women is motivated by a thirst for power – their appearance at yesterday’s Canberra Press Gallery cannot go unchallenged.
While the woke commentariat attending responded to every criticism and attack with applause and nods of approval, the reality is what occurred represents an appalling lack of journalistic impartiality and objectivity while serving as an example of mindless group think and mob hysteria.
In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, set at the time of the Salem witch hunts but also reflecting the anti-communist inquisition led by Senator Joe McCarthy, mob mentality and unchecked emotion rule the day.
A play where Abigail and her accomplices conjure the devil to accuse the innocent, including John Proctor, and where the court betrays any sense of justice and a commitment to the truth.
A play where Miller reveals a deep-seated, primitive side of human nature and where once the laws are trounced there is nowhere to hide.
While Grace Tame is no Abigail, anyone who saw her performance yesterday witnessed somebody accomplished in working the audience by using every utterance, every pause and inflexion, and every movement to reinforce her message that Scott Morrison and the Liberal government are beyond redemption.
A partisan performance, where an alleged phone call by an anonymous senior bureaucrat is used as evidence to prove the Prime Minister is insensitive and callous and consumed by a thirst for power.
Although Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations have yet to be tested in court, she also swayed the audience to abandon any sense of objectivity. Reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts, an unproven accusation was taken as truth with no attempt to question the events surrounding the alleged crime.
Higgins, working in concert with Tame, also accused the Prime Minister of insincerity and an unwillingness to admit his complicity in what both characterised as a parliamentary atmosphere riven with misogyny and sexual abuse.
As argued by the American feminist Camille Paglia, such is the pervasive influence of the cultural-left’s political correctness and cancel culture. We are living in a time ‘where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group’.
A time where primitive emotion trumps reason, language is weaponised to enforce mindless group think, and where conservative men – condemned as white, male and stale – are especially targeted and forever guilty.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/mob-hysteria
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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14 February, 2022
Inflation nation: US consumer prices surge to 40-year high
This is an outrageous attack on the savings and incomes of the average American. It means that your greenbacks are devalued. They buy less. And that loss can not be made up. It is permanent. Raiding people's savings in particular is completely reprehensible. And its cause is a government that issues new money to finance its spending rather than raising taxes to cover the expenditure
If you’ve noticed your dollars don’t seem to have the same purchasing punch as they did a year ago, there’s a very good reason for that.
Consumer price inflation in the United States rose at an annual rate of 7.5 percent in January, the Bureau of Labor Statics said on Thursday. That is the fastest pace since July 1982.
On a monthly basis, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) – which measures price changes in a basket of goods and services – increased 0.6 percent in January compared with the previous month.
Surging prices for groceries, electricity, and rent led the charge higher, with the food index rising 0.9 percent in January, after increasing 0.5 percent in December.
The energy index also rose 0.9 percent in January compared with the previous month, as soaring electricity prices were partially offset by falling prices for gasoline and natural gas.
The so-called “core” index, which strips out volatile food and energy, rose 0.6 percent in January – the same rise as December.
January marked the seventh time in the past 10 months that the core index rose at least 0.5 percent.
Inflation is placing an increasingly onerous burden on American households but is especially tough on low-income ones because it eats up a larger share of their financial resources.
Economists over at Moody’s Analytics estimate that annual inflation is costing the average US household $250 a month based on December’s CPI figures. Americans aged 35 to 54 are spending $303 – $305 more a month, according to Moody’s, while pensioners aged 65 and older, are spending $194 a month.
To place that burden and the financial fragility it feeds into perspective – some 36 percent of Americans do not have enough cash or cash its equivalent to cover a $400 emergency expense, such as a car repair or medical bill, according to the US Federal Reserve.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/2/10/inflation-nation-us-consumer-prices-surge-to-forty-year-high
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What the Canadian Truckers Want
In a word Freedom: Freedom from an oppressive Leftist government. Vaccine mandates are being discontinued worldwide but not in Canada under Pretty Boy Trudeau
For two weeks, the 18-wheelers, the semis, the tractors and the pick-up trucks streamed through the snow and ice into the center of Ottawa, the Canadian capital.
They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.
It dipped to 4 degrees. The mayor declared a state of emergency. And they didn’t budge.
The truckers were scared of running out of gas—freezing to death in their little truck beds in the middle of the night. The city threatened to arrest anyone who brought it to them. In response, hundreds of Ottawans did just that. The truckers stayed put.
They are a city inside a city whose inhabitants—there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000—were outraged with a country that seemed to have forgotten they existed. This past Sunday, as if to confirm that suspicion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has yet to meet with Freedom Convoy leaders, took a personal day. On Monday, during an emergency debate at the House of Commons, he called them “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.”
??I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist.
Katie Hepburn from Owen Sound, Ontario. (Dan Aponte)
They sound like Ivan, 46, who emigrated, with his wife, Tatiana, from Ukraine to build a new life in New Brunswick, in eastern Canada. "We came to Canada to be free—not slaves,” he said. “We lived under communism, and, in Canada, we’re now fighting for our freedom.” (Like so many truckers, Ivan refused to share his last name.)
B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the Freedom Convoy, is vaccinated, and he estimates that many—maybe most—of the truckers at the protest are, too. “I’m Jewish. I have family in mass graves in Europe. And apparently I’m a white supremacist,” he told me on Wednesday.
Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.)
So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.
One thing was indisputable: There was this electricity coursing through the streets, and it felt like it could get out of control. It didn’t help when a handful of protesters sported swastikas and Confederate flags. Or when GoFundMe shut down the convoy’s fundraiser, announcing that donors had two weeks to reclaim their money before it was sent to “established charities” chosen by Freedom Convoy organizers. Or when the cops started arresting locals, including the elderly.
It is hard to capture how thoroughly Trudeau has misjudged the moment. “This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians,” he said Monday. As for the protest? “It has to stop,” declared the prime minister.
If he sauntered down to the mess of rigs on Wellington Street, across from the Parliament building, opposite the mall and the war memorial, if he talked to these people for a few minutes, he would understand: It will not stop.
What’s happening in Canada right now is bigger than the mandates.
The convoy is spearheaded by truckers, but its message of opposition to life under government control has brought onto the icy streets countless, once-voiceless people declaring that they are done being ignored. That the elites—the people who have Zoomed their way through the pandemic—had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. Or else.
Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”
Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario, told me that a divide had opened up all across the country. Pointing to the gleaming, ritzy condominiums near Parliament, he said he used to deliver the concrete stairs in those buildings. Since the cross-border vaccine mandate kicked in in mid-January, he’s been out of work. He refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. He refused to give his last name, he said, because he didn’t want the government coming after him, and he wanted to work again.
I heard this over and over from the truckers. And it was not entirely crazy. The CTA, which has publicly criticized the Freedom Convoy, said in a January 29 statement addressed to the truckers in Ottawa: “Your behavior today will not only reflect upon you and your family but the 300,000 plus fellow Canadians that, like you, take great pride in our industry.”
If you pointed out to people like Peter—and I did—that almost every doctor in the country had been vaccinated, it didn’t matter. There was bodily autonomy. And privacy. And religious exemptions. And anyway, how could you know what the doctors were thinking? You couldn’t trust the press or politicians, he said, recalling that in the fall of 2020, then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed skepticism of any vaccine approved under President Donald Trump. Now, they were being ordered to get this vaccine developed . . . under President Donald Trump.
“If you’re not vaccinated,” Peter said, “they treat you like garbage lying on the streets.”
Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. He’d been vaccinated for other things. But he had a hereditary heart condition that, he said, made the Covid vaccine inadvisable—but he couldn’t get a medical exemption. At work, they made him mask up constantly. He felt like he was being publicly shamed. So, he quit.
Theo’s brother, Lucas, who’s 21, is also unvaccinated for similar reasons. He’d planned to go to law school, but, being unvaccinated, he had to take only online courses, but some of the courses he’d need to graduate were only available in person. Now, his future was uncertain.
A lot of the truckers who had driven in from Vancouver and Winnipeg and Quebec City expressed this same uncertainty. It was getting really expensive to get by: rent, utilities, groceries, everything. Almost everyone who was poor or even middle-class was mired in debt. They told me that they expected this sort of wealth gap in America, but not in Canada.
The divide that already existed between the haves and have-nots largely mapped onto the new chasm between those who supported the mandates and those who did not. And that was creating this huge, weird fracturing everywhere.
Mackenzie, 24, from Ottawa, works as a bartender at a popular downtown restaurant near Parliament. She had Covid, got better, and believes it’s her choice not to get the vaccine. She isn’t an anti-vaxxer. She’s been vaccinated for other things. But Covid wasn’t the same as malaria or the flu. And there were European countries, like Germany and Switzerland, that recognized recovery from infection as an alternative to vaccination. Canada, like the United States, does not.
It was ironic, she said that she could serve but couldn’t dine at the restaurant where she worked. She’d lost a close friend over her vaccination status. When I asked her why she wouldn’t tell me her last name, she said she didn’t want to upset her parents. “Not many people know this side of me,” she said.
Chris, a 40-year-old trucker from Toronto, said that he’d gotten vaccinated so he could keep his job, but that his participation in the protest had torn his family apart. “My father has spat in my face and disowned me as his son. Told me I’m not worth the family name because I will not vaccinate my children,” he said. “My mom and I have battled back and forth.”
Matt Sim, 43, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea, is director of operations of an IT start-up in Toronto and came to Ottawa with his wife to join the protests. He’d had Covid, and then he’d recovered, and he was skeptical of all the hysteria surrounding the vaccines. His family, back home in Korea, had lived through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and that had made him skeptical of the media, the government, and powerful people in general. “There’s a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds,” Sim said.
The Freedom Convoy came as a surprise. Unlike the United States, Canada had never seen mass protests and civil disobedience on this scale.
And it is not dying down. Since Monday, truckers have blocked the main route linking Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan—a route that some 8,000 trucks use each day and accounts for 25 percent of trade between the two countries.
The protesters feel the mood shifting. On Tuesday, the premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, announced the end of his province’s proof-of-vaccination policy. “It is time for us also to heal the divisions in our communities over vaccination,” he said.
Joël Lightbound, a leading member of Parliament from Quebec and a member of the Liberal Party, Trudeau’s party, slammed the federal government. The government, Lightbound said, had gone “from a more positive approach to one that stigmatizes and divides people.” The truckers say they won’t leave Ottawa until the mandates, the lockdowns—everything—are dropped.
There was a new consciousness, too, a feeling among the truckers that they weren’t as alone as they’d thought. Blake, a contractor who had driven in his pickup to Ottawa from his home in Toronto, called the protest a “diesel-fueled hippie commune.” We met one night, very late, in the freezing cold, while Blake, in beige overalls, danced with 50 other protesters on a makeshift dance floor. There was a D.J. playing Gloria Estefan’s “Conga.”
The solidarity was infectious. There were copycat protests popping up in Helsinki, Finland, and Wellington, New Zealand and Nice, France (they planned to hit Paris and Brussels). There were truckers organizing in the Netherlands, Australia and the United States. Among the Americans who had driven up to Ottawa there was talk that soon the big rigs would descend on Washington, D.C.
“Seeing the country fall apart like this is heartbreaking,” Sim said. “For me, this is the line in the sand. If we lose this battle, I’d like to move out of Canada.” He said that he was thinking of maybe heading to Florida. A lot of the truckers were thinking about the States. But not yet. “I feel that I owe it to me and others that share my values to, at least, fight for this.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-the-truckers-want
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An Obama photograph proves the lies of 'climate change' and COVID
The left is built upon a mountain of falsehoods. Two of the biggest are that humankind is trembling on the brink of destruction because of "climate change" and that onerous COVID restrictions are the only things keeping us alive. So what are we to make of an unmasked Obama standing around construction workers, very grumpy about work on his multimillion-dollar beachfront Hawaiian mansion? What I make of it is that both "climate change" and COVID restrictions are huge parts of that mountain of lies.
Here's the picture that is a microcosm of all the lies:
The Cult of Climate Change tells us that, unless we abandon all fossil fuels, the oceans will rise and every coastal community will be destroyed. When Obama bought his coastal Martha's Vineyard house, it was pretty clear that he didn't believe a word of this narrative. This was peculiar, considering the vast amounts of taxpayer money he funneled to green energy initiatives as part of the 2009 "stimulus" spending following the recession.
Heck, going back farther, that first beachfront purchase was even more peculiar when you consider the speech Obama gave when accepting the Democrat party nomination in 2008:
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
While the rise of the oceans may not have slowed for those of us suffering through the horrors of the green movement (vastly increased energy prices, inconvenient and expensive electric cars, low-flow showers, and more), they certainly seem to have slowed for Obama. Indeed, they've slowed so much that he's confident buying beachfront property on an island. I don't know about you, but I would think islands would be even more affected by "climate change" than a whole big continent.
Then there's the COVID mask narrative. Across America, parents are waging heroic battles to get masks off their children's faces. One of the major weapons in that battle is pictures of celebrities flouting those same mask rules. (Local politicians, teachers, and school board members tend to do the same.)
With the Obama picture, we have the perfect example of how the rich, famous, and political flout the rules. It's not just that they don't wear masks. It's that they expect the little people around them to wear masks. The reason for this double-standard is obvious: these self-styled "elite" aren’t afraid of the virus; they're disgusted by you. Just think back to the Met Gala, when all the famous people waltzed around unmasked while the help scurried by wearing masks.
Or how about this picture of Stacey Abrams protected from all those nasty, ordinary, germy little children, who, unlike overweight adults, are at almost no risk from COVID?
Not The Bee has a collection of a few other "masks are for the little people" moments.
Obama knows that the oceans won't rise in any significant way over the next decades or even centuries, just as he knows he's not at serious risk of dying from COVID. (I imagine that, should he catch it, he'll have special flights sent his way filled with monoclonal antibodies or ivermectin.) Obama, though, knows something more important than the truth: he knows that he and his party will keep complete control over America if Americans remain terrified of the all-purpose "climate change" narrative and of COVID.
In other words, America, you're being played.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/an_obama_photograph_proves_the_lies_of_climate_change_and_covid.html
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The antivax movement is taking over the Right
Lee Haywood got the Covid-19 Vaccine. He’s seen friends lose their lives to the virus and watched others struggle to recover. A longtime smoker, he believes the medical evidence showing that the shot sharply reduces the chances of a severe infection. Yet on the frigid afternoon of Jan. 23, Haywood was near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, standing among signs that read Vaccines kill and stop the Vaccine Holocaust.
“I’m against the forced vaccinations or forced wearing of these masks by these bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the government,” says Haywood, a 61-year-old Republican running for a North Carolina congressional seat. “These mandates just slap everybody in the face.”
Haywood’s presence at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally illustrated how the antivaccine movement is uniting groups across the right. Once a fringe cohort, it has repositioned itself as an opponent of mandates and government overreach. The distinction has attracted legions of new supporters by tapping into the anger, exhaustion, and frustration of millions of Americans as the pandemic drags on.
At the D.C. demonstration, right-wing conspiracy theorists and vaccine skeptics mingled with libertarians, critics of “Big Pharma,” and conservative politicians like Haywood. Clusters of teachers and nurses stood alongside firefighters and church groups. The yellow Gadsden flags adopted by the Tea Party more than a decade ago mixed with trump 2020 placards and stop the steal signs. Men wearing the insignia of the farright Proud Boys lingered on the edges of the crowd, near a group of women wearing flower crowns and snapping selfies with a mama Bears against mandates board.
For this motley cross section of the right, the issue has become a defining marker of political identity. “There’s no going back now,” says Addie Johnson, 43, who drove in from Virginia and says she has lost friends and family relationships in the past year over her anti vaccination stance. “You’re either with this movement or against it.”
The coordination in the days before the rally illustrated the reach of the anti mandate message. The event was promoted on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the most popular show on Spotify, as well as on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Calls between organizers and attendees on the social audio app Clubhouse often stretched on for several hours. Supporters shared information on Facebook and Telegram, offered to pay for one another’s bus tickets to Washington, and swapped advice on which restaurants and hotels wouldn’t require proof of vaccination.
The growing U.S. antivaccine movement is part of a global effort. The Washington rally featured speakers from Israel and the U.K., who frequently referenced lockdown measures abroad. Photos and videos of the event were widely shared in large international antivaccine and farright Telegram groups. The D.C. demonstration was scheduled to coincide with global antivaccine protests organized by a far-right German group, under the banner “World Wide Rally for Freedom.” It was a reflection of how the opposition to mandates, like other right-wing movements, has crossed borders in recent years.
On stage, a host of antivaccine celebrities, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to right-wing doctors promoting alternative COVID-19 treatments, compared U.S. vaccination policies to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Physicians in white coats falsely claimed that vaccines are “not working.”
The overarching goal is “to create a populist movement through the propagation of disinformation and to undermine well-respected American institutions,” says Nick Sawyer, an emergency-room physician who runs the group No License for Disinformation, which advocates for state medical boards to revoke the licenses of doctors who spread disinformation and prescribe unproven treatments. This “antiscience, anti government movement” is taking advantage of a fringe group of doctors’ medical credentials to amplify and legitimize a harmful agenda, Sawyer says.
The shadow of the Jan. 6,2021, protest—which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters—lingered over the “Defeat the Mandates” rally. “Unfortunately, many people who wanted to come were scared to join because of it being so close to Jan. 6,” says Kaitlin Derstine, who organized a bus to Washington from Pennsylvania, filled with nearly 50 people from a conservative parents’ group.
Rally organizers cast the event in the tradition of the civil rights movement, complete with peace signs and tambourines. Yet experts warn that the growth of the joint anti vaccine and anti mandate movements could also provide cover to darker forces. In the context of the Capitol riot and the rising number of threats leveled against public officials nationwide, the calls to action at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally included some disturbing warning notes.
Some of the speakers at the rally threatened the press. Others inveighed against Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, invoking the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis. Leaning against a tree, a woman in a pink headband and sunglasses held a sign declaring in bold black and red letters: Shoot those who try to kidnap and vaccinate your child.
Organizers are trying to funnel the movement’s growing number of adherents toward the political process. They directed supporters to contact their members of Congress and local government officials. Each of the three dozen rallygoers who spoke to TIME said the issue would be their top priority when they next go to the polls.
Already, opposition to vaccine and mask mandates has become a purity test for Republican officials. Just 26% of Republicans say they consider vaccine mandates acceptable, according to a poll conducted by CNN in December, compared with 82% of Democrats. This partisan divide is evident in the vaccination data itself: unvaccinated adults are three times more likely to lean Republican than Democrat, according to an analysis last November by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Last summer, nearly half of House Republicans refused to say whether they had been vaccinated when asked by CNN. In Georgia, neither of the Republican front runners for the U.S.
Senate nomination will say whether they received the vaccine. In January, a GOP city council member in New York City refused to disclose her vaccination status, even though doing so barred her from entering the chamber. The opposition to mask and vaccine mandates has become so powerful with many Republicans that some of the rallygoers expressed frustration toward Trump, who has acknowledged receiving his COVID-19 booster.
The movement’s “us vs. them” language has the potential to make it a powerful political force, says Renee Diresta, who leads research on anti vaccine disinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Diresta predicts a push to sink candidates who don’t malign vaccine mandates in upcoming GOP primaries. “That is the strategy I think we’ll see in 2022,” she says. Meanwhile, by uniting under an anti mandate umbrella, those who are antivaccine or espouse extremist views may be able to evade moderation by social media platforms, Diresta says. “The ‘vaccines are tyrannical government overreach’ argument is still a permissible one that can be made, because [social media companies] don’t want to look like they’re putting their thumb on the scale of a political issue.”
Haywood, the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina, says standing up against vaccine mandates will be a key part of his campaign platform. “It’s about taking a stand against the government,” he says. “They need to be routed out and brought to justice.”
https://blendle.com/i/time/the-antivax-movement-is-taking-over-the-right/bnl-time-20220204-a92c317a4c4
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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13 February, 2022
Trucker update: Win on funding
The Ontario government says it has successfully petitioned a court to freeze access to millions of dollars donated through online fundraising platform GiveSendGo to the convoy protesting COVID-19 restrictions in Ottawa and at several border crossings.
The province obtained an order from the Superior Court of Justice that prohibits anyone from distributing donations made through the website’s “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “Adopt-a-Trucker” campaign pages, said a spokeswoman for Premier Doug Ford.
Ivana Yelich said the order binding “any and all parties with possession or control over these donations” was issued Thursday afternoon. She cited a section of the Criminal Code that allows the attorney general to apply for a restraint order against any “offence-related property.”
However the platform is fighting right back. GiveSendGo tweeted,
Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo. All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.
In other words, they’re not complying with whatever the government is going to tell them to do because as they said they have zero jurisdiction over how they manage their funds which is true.
https://uafreport.com/daniel/boom-another-win-for-the-canadian-truckers/
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Gender dysphoria is often in fact autism
This is interesting to me as a high functioning autistic. But there are of course many varieties of autism. The tale below sounds partly familiar. I have always had male friends but not so much. I have always got on best with women. But I didn't want to become one, however. I just wanted to get into their pants! It led me to much happiness. And it continues. Even at age 78 I have just acquired a bright and attractive new girlfriend
How many trans-identified children “desist”? That is, how many identify as transgender for a time, and then eventually stop doing so, prior to medical intervention (as distinct from detransitioners, who return to identifying with their natal sex after undergoing some form of medical transition)? The answer is that no one knows, in part because few experts are keeping track, and in part because what research does exist is highly politicized.
Some trans activists and advocates, for instance, object to the very idea of measuring “desistance” in the first place, on the argument that this approach may discourage a child from embracing a transgender identity. One Canadian trans activist and researcher insists that research in this area is simply “not relevant when deciding between models of care.” Others claim that the idea of desistance is rooted in transphobic “myth,” though research often shows otherwise.
High-end estimates of desistance tended to arise from longitudinal studies of children who first reported gender dysphoria at an early age. The vast majority of those children resolved their gender dysphoria before, or early in, puberty. In one 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, for instance, 88 percent of boys with gender dysphoria were found to have desisted by their teens or adulthood (and more than 63 percent were same-sex attracted). These results are consistent with established research; yet, in the current ideological climate, they often are seen as suspect. That’s because the traditional “watchful waiting” approach used by clinicians to treat children who present with gender dysphoria—which tends to be associated with a high rate of desistance—has largely been supplanted by a policy of encouraging social transition, an approach associated with an increase in observed dysphoria. Indeed, several studies show that nearly all children on puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones.
Behind these numbers lie individual stories. Here, I share one—that of a brilliant and insightful young man who struggled with gender issues for several years. His harrowing journey to self-awareness will be instructive for many of those talking and teaching about gender issues to children and young adults.
It was clear to Ash from an early age that he was different from other boys. Their world seemed to revolve around their bodies, while he was in his mind. They were sporty. He was scientific. They roamed in packs together, while he gravitated toward the girls. They were rowdy. He was gentle. And he had a vague sense that other people could connect emotionally in some way that eluded him.
Puberty was particularly hard on him. He’d had a high, clear tenor voice—unusual and strong and something he’d liked about himself—which descended into an unfamiliar bass. He grew body and facial hair that upset him on some visceral level—the thickness and coarseness of it. The pace of change unnerved him. He came out as bisexual in eighth grade, and his classmates responded by calling him a faggot—though they’d called him that in seventh grade, too, simply because of his not being traditionally masculine.
In ninth grade, he transferred to a new school where, for the first time, he found a group of friends. But something happened—he had no idea what, since it was so hard for him to understand social cues—and soon enough they abandoned him. In the winter, he had what he described as “a psychotic break,” and surrounded himself with imaginary friends.
Ash asked Google why puberty had been so unpleasant for him. Why he had trouble making friends. Why it was so hard for him to befriend boys, in particular, and why he felt different from them. Was it bad if your whole friend group was girls? “Very, very quickly I found different websites talking about being trans and how people had similar experiences to me,” he said. “And then they had transitioned and were happy now. And I thought that, wow, this is an easy way out. I love the idea of this.” He came to the conclusion that perhaps he was a woman.
He went to his therapist, whom he’d been seeing since the psychotic break, and told her that he’d hated puberty and his body hair, he didn’t fit in with other boys, he was mostly friends with girls, he didn’t like being a boy. All true things. She suggested that perhaps he was transgender, confirming his suspicions.
Because of his negative experience coming out as bisexual, Ash didn’t tell many people that he was identifying as trans besides his pediatrician and his therapist. Only they used she/her pronouns when addressing him.
“How did that feel?” I asked him.
He thought about that for a moment. “It felt … exhilarating,” he finally said. But despite the euphoria, his identity was still in flux. When school ended, and he went to summer camp, Ash asked people to use they/them pronouns.
Being science-minded, Ash scoured reputable medical websites for information about transition. He found that they either didn’t talk about the side effects of medical interventions, or that they would be mentioned in passing near the end of the article, without citations, or with citations to articles that he didn’t scrutinize. Later on, he came to wish he had done so.
When Ash finally told his parents that he believed he was trans, they were skeptical—not because they were bigots, but because they didn’t think the treatments Ash wanted were safe, nor that he fit the description of earlier generations of kids with gender dysphoria. Ash had never been particularly feminine or previously expressed any desire to be a girl. Ash wanted to get hormones right away, but his parents were determined to wait.
Rather than confront Ash directly over gender issues, they focused on strengthening their connection with him in other ways, through music, board games, and intellectual pursuits. “When I brought it up, they were happy to talk with me, but they didn’t engage or aggravate me, which was, I think, the best thing to do,” Ash recalls.
Still, their relationship became strained, because many of the websites Ash was reading encouraged trans kids to detach from their parents if they were not affirming. “There was a part of me that started to vilify them,” he told me. “[The sites] said, ‘Oh, if your parents aren’t ‘with it,’ they’re evil people.’”
This, too, was hard on Ash, who’d valued his relationship with his parents. There was also part of his mind that didn’t actually buy into the material he was reading online. Ash describes this period as being one of “cognitive dissonance.”
The next year, Ash got a new therapist, one who diagnosed him as autistic. And this, he says, was like a ray of sunshine: enlightenment.
The therapist “didn’t focus on the issues I was having with gender, but focused on the anxiety, depression, and living as an autistic person in this world, which were much, much more important, and I think [the discussion] relieved a lot of the distress that was fuelling my dysphoria,” Ash said. “I sort of came to a place where I thought, you know, just very internally, that perhaps I am not born in the wrong body … I found [an] identity of non-binaryness.”
Ash’s therapist had been working with him on seeing nuance in the world—something autistic people, prone to black-and-white thinking, sometimes struggle to do. The goal was to be “able to take a step back, to get a bird’s eye view in the stoic tradition and try to see things from other people’s points of view.”
His father, he learned, had been part of an online support group for so-called “gender-critical” parents of kids identifying as trans—i.e., parents who reject the model of instant affirmation and are aware of the uncertain science behind youth medical transition. Ash asked his father for data to back up his position. “I’m very amenable to concrete scientific evidence to an extent which most people are not,” he told me. “I think that the fact that my dad was there to have a conversation with me when I was ready was very important.”
After listening to his father and conducting his own research, Ash concluded that he’d been “misled.” He also learned about desisters and detransitioners from social media and Reddit, and read Keira Bell’s story. Bell had been an unhappy young lesbian with a traumatic childhood. She medically transitioned with a double mastectomy and testosterone, regretted it, and later petitioned the UK gender-identity development service to stop allowing vulnerable under-16s to make such life-altering decisions without adequate counselling. Her court victory was partly overturned, but an evidence review spurred by the case, concerning the effectiveness of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, showed that the “quality of evidence for these outcomes was assessed as very low certainty.”
Ash found out about other kids who were certain their struggles were located in their gender identity and who had undergone medical treatments, only to regret them and realize that their problems navigating the world were connected to autism. From there, he dove deeper into the side effects of those medical treatments—the effects on bones, heart health, and fertility, among other things. He came to feel grateful that his parents had drawn a hard line on medicalization.
Ash went to college early, but his social struggles followed him, and he found the woke culture that silenced debate about controversial social issues to be confusing. On several occasions, he was called out or humiliated, forced to apologize when he legitimately didn’t understand that what he had said was wrong. In time, he became afraid to speak.
For a while at college, Ash was still continuing to identify as transgender, even after coming to terms with his autism and the reality of transition. In part, this was because his transgender self-identification gave him entree into his school’s large LGBT social scene.
Yet at the same time that this peer group was providing Ash with a social landing pad, there also were aspects of it that unnerved him. “There were a lot of people talking about trans ideology quite a lot, and they were very adamant about it,” he said. It dawned on him that he needed to start thinking about himself in a holistic way, and not through the lens of a popular ideology.
What helped him finally leave that identity behind, he said, was interacting more with his sexuality: using his body for pleasure, understanding his sexual orientation, and coming to terms with the idea that nothing was wrong with his body or his way of being in the world. “Then I realized, why would I want to get rid of this?” he said. “This [body] is so cool and does interesting things.” (He still does not like his body hair, but now understands this to be a sensory issue related to his autism, one that can be addressed with shaving, not estrogen.)
Ash has become an advocate for autistic children. Around one in 44 kids is diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum these days, and some studies show that as many as five percent of them will identify as transgender (compared to about 0.7 percent of non-neurodiverse children).
“Currently, I do prefer to use they/them pronouns, but I’m not a Nazi about it because it’s a linguistic adaptation that is difficult for many people to make,” he told me. “I’m not responsible for affirming other people’s identities, and they shouldn’t be responsible for affirming my identity … For me, the way I am functioning in this society, the way people treat gender and categories and stuff, I just happen to fit into that [they/them] category.”
These pronouns do a lot of work. They not only signal to people that you’re cool, Ash said, but they signal a desire not to be subject to traditional gender norms. That was one of the things Ash desperately needed in the first place.
But that’s not how he thinks it should be. The boy category should be wide enough to accommodate him. Boys should be allowed to wear dresses—as young boys did in the 19th century. “I think people have gotten more sexist,” he said. “The trans ideology says, if you act and feel this way, then you’re just not in the right body.” It sends a message to effeminate gay men and butch lesbians that there’s something wrong with them as they are.
At the same time, Ash believes that the experience of being transgender is real for many people and that, for some, transitioning is the best way to ease their pain.
“A lot of gender critical people fall into this trap of thinking all trans people are fake, which I don’t believe is proper … I do believe that there are people who are legitimately transitioning and it is the best thing for them.”
“[Yet] I also know that there are people [for whom] that is a terrible thing. But whenever you’re talking to a person who’s identifying as trans, you don’t know which one they are.”
This strikes at the heart of the debates about desistance: There is no surefire way to know who will desist and who won’t. The only way to render evaluations is on a case-by-case basis through good-faith clinical care guided by fact, not ideology. Children must be made aware that many in their position do end up ultimately desisting. We owe it to these children not to pretend, for the sake of “affirmation,” that their current mental state about gender is a surefire indicator of how they’ll feel in the future.
Children and their families should know about the desistance literature, and that the way they feel now, no matter how intensely, isn’t necessarily a sign of how they’ll feel in the future. By exposing them to a diversity of stories, including Ash’s, we can restore balance to the discussion in a way that may help many distressed young people navigate a difficult and confusing time.
https://quillette.com/2022/02/11/a-desisters-tale/
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A working-class liberty movement
We begin today in the Canadian Parliament, which has its own version of prime minister’s questions. And while it isn’t as entertaining as the famously unruly UK Parliament or the gem that is the Australian Parliament (“the honorable membah is a grub, Mistah Speakah!”), it can still get pretty rowdy.
So it was that last week, Candice Bergen, the interim leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, rose to ask a simple question of the ruling Liberals: would they work with the truckers who have been protesting Covid restrictions in Ottawa to resolve the impasse? She may as well have been talking to a Speak & Spell. The Liberal minister Chrystia Freeland chided and patronized. She condemned swastikas and Confederate flags. What she never did was to answer the question.
This finger-wagging approach to the most serious political strife Canada has seen in a generation was also adopted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Last week, as the protests began, he was scurried away to an undisclosed location where he railed against the truckers like some blow-dried Lear. Trudeau did return to Parliament on Monday, but he still refused to extend any kind of olive branch. To the demonstrators outside, he said only: “This has to stop.”
The problem is that no one seems to know what stopping this would look like. The same Canadian left that regularly suffers heart palpitations over police brutality in America is now demanding that the cops clear out Ottawa like it’s some kind of Tim Hortons-spangled Fallujah. But the city’s chief of police says his force can’t just do that, that they’re overwhelmed and outmanned. Towing experts warn it would be all but impossible to remove the big rigs. And Trudeau himself has ruled out sending in the military, an unthinkable move in a country that prides itself on politeness and peace.
So what then? Some in the Canadian establishment seem to think the trucker protest will eventually buckle under the sheer weight of public opinion. They point to an industry estimate that 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, before daintily clearing their throats and asseverating that unlike those rubes down south, Canadians don’t tolerate divisive politics. Americans might be uppity libertarians, but Canada’s founding values are “peace, order, and good government.” Emphasis on the “order” part: assault rifles and Gadsden flags are nothing but gauche up north.
Let’s assume for a moment that all this is true. The problem is that the single biggest threat to any “order” is a disenchanted and capable minority — like, say, truckers able to snarl downtowns and blockade highways. If the consensus that underpins an order crumbles, if the mass buy-in that’s needed to sustain an order is no longer there, then the order itself can also give way. This is why Trudeau has no choice but to talk to the truckers: there is no other way out and they wield more power than he seems to think they do.
Yet beyond that, it’s also worth asking: do Canadians really subordinate liberty to order? Do their leaders really imagine that one of the most reliable impulses in human history, the desire to be free, suddenly goes dormant north of Buffalo? Yes, Canadians are more likely than Americans to be vaccinated and to support vaccine rules. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t grown weary of all the hectoring and bullying, the isolation and the depression and the enforced gloom, just like the rest of us have.
Protests often begin in response to specific policies only to grow into something larger. And just as the Tea Party in the United States blossomed out of opposition to Obamacare, just as the gilets jaunes in France exploded out of a fuel tax, so too do the Canadian truckers appear to be expanding their brief beyond cross-border vaccine mandates and into grander ideas of freedom and choice. The demonstrations have become a kind of primal honk against the entire dismal public health regime. And as another winter quarantine drags on, it’s not unforeseeable that they could garner mass support.
There’s another dimension to this too: political movements are very often mobilizations of one class against another. This appears to be the case with the truckers. I haven’t gone outside in days! white-collar remote workers wearing their Succession snuggies cry, neglecting to mention that their public-health staycations are made possible by those who must go out, by cooks and grocers and deliverymen and, yes, truckers. This is what the class divide looks like in the year 2022.
It may be that those who procure our food for a living have finally had enough of being pushed around. And the class identity here is enjoined to the ideology. It has been most absurdly suggested in some conservative circles of late that individual liberty is mainly a concern of elites. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s the ambitious bureaucrat and the gooey-eyed professor of theory who think they can remake society through force; the working man covets his freedom. The real divide over liberty runs not down the American-Canadian border but between the managerial class and the hardhats.
And so, thanks to those hardhats, things are now moving quickly. The truckers’ latest move has been to blockade the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, responsible for much of the commerce between Canada and the United States. Another border crossing into Montana has also been corked up. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan have responded by announcing they’re ending all Covid restrictions. Copycat protests have popped up from Australia to New Zealand to France to Belgium.
Trudeau has thus backed himself into a corner. Against such a mighty adversary, he has no choice but to negotiate, yet by sneering at the truckers, he’s ensured that any overture will look like a humiliating about-face. And that’s not even touching on the trainwreck of optics he’s created: this spoiled dauphin, this ludicrous Kennedy of the tundra, talking down to workers who want only to make decisions for themselves. After months of gray austerity imposed by heavy-handed government, a cheerful spirit of liberty is in the air.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/a-working-class-liberty-movement/
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Tesla sued by California civil-rights agency for alleged racial discrimination, harassment
If this prosecution goes ahead, Musk could well move his car factory to a more friendly State. He is already half-way down that path. He also has a factory in China that could be expanded. And that would largely complete the de-industrialization of California, with the resultant loss of working-class jobs and an expanded welfare bill
A California regulatory agency has sued Tesla for alleged racial discrimination and harassment, saying the electric-vehicle maker turned a blind eye to years of complaints from Black factory workers.
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s complaint filed Wednesday targets alleged workplace issues at Tesla’s principal US car plant, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“After receiving hundreds of complaints from workers, DFEH found evidence that Tesla’s Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion creating a hostile work environment,” Kevin Kish, the agency’s director, said in a statement.
Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The company criticised the civil-rights agency’s investigation in a blog post that pre-empted the lawsuit. “Tesla strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment and has a dedicated Employee Relations team that responds to and investigates all complaints,” the company said Wednesday.
Tesla, in the blog post, also cited its status as a manufacturing employer in the state. “Tesla is also the last remaining automobile manufacturer in California. The Fremont factory has a majority-minority workforce and provides the best paying jobs in the automotive industry to over 30,000 Californians,” the company said, adding that legal action was “unfair and counter-productive.” Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas from California last year, though it still makes a large portion of its cars in California.
The auto industry has long faced issues of discrimination on the factory floor. For instance, in 2017, Ford agreed to pay as much as roughly $US10m to settle sexual- and racial-harassment claims brought by individuals at two Chicago-area plants. The settlement followed an investigation by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which said it found female and African-American employees had been subject to harassment. Unlike at Tesla, factory workers at other US automakers are organised by the United Auto Workers union, which represents them in their dealings with the companies, including on workplace issues.
The Department of Fair Employment and Housing, in its lawsuit against Tesla, is seeking unspecified monetary damages, as well as relief including job reinstatement and payment of lost wages and benefits.
The agency said in its lawsuit that Black workers routinely heard Tesla supervisors and managers using racial slurs and were confronted with racist graffiti in the factory. One Black worker heard racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day, the agency said.
Black workers also reported being assigned to more physically demanding roles, experiencing more severe discipline and being passed over for professional opportunities, the agency said. Black workers were severely under-represented in managerial and other professional roles, the agency said.
Tesla said in a 2020 diversity report that Black employees made up 10 per cent of its US workforce and 4 per cent of people in leadership roles. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing said in the lawsuit that Black workers make up roughly 3 per cent of professionals at the Fremont, California plant and about 20 per cent of factory operatives.
“Tesla’s brand, purportedly highlighting a socially conscious future, masks the reality of a company that profits from an army of production workers, many of whom are people of colour, working under egregious conditions,” the agency said in its lawsuit, adding that Tesla’s investigations of complaints aren’t compliant with the law.
Shares in Tesla fell 3 per cent to close at $US904.55 on Thursday.
A federal jury in San Francisco last year found that Tesla had subjected a Black former contract worker to a racially hostile work environment, awarding him roughly $US137m in damages. Tesla has said it doesn’t believe the verdict is justified and has asked for a new trial or for the damages to be reduced.
Another Black former Tesla worker, Melvin Berry, won a $US1m judgment last year after an arbitrator found that his supervisors at the Fremont factory called him a racial slur. Tesla was obligated to investigate and stop the racial discrimination and failed to do so, the arbitrator said in her order. Tesla said that any actions the company took weren’t racially based, according to the order.
Tesla has also faced allegations of sexual harassment in California. More than half a dozen current and former Tesla workers sued the company late last year alleging that Tesla failed to prevent sexual harassment at its facilities, among other claims. Tesla has said it intends to try to move those cases into private arbitration, court records show.
The Department of Fair Employment and Housing has brought other high-profile cases. The California regulator last year sued Activision Blizzard, accusing the video game company of paying female employees less than their male counterparts, among other claims. The company pushed back against the allegations. Microsoft in January agreed to buy Activision.
This isn’t the first time Tesla has clashed with California officials. Nearly two years ago, early in the coronavirus pandemic, Chief Executive Elon Musk took aim at a high-ranking county health official in California over government orders that the company’s Fremont vehicle-assembly plant remain temporarily closed to slow the spread of Covid-19.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/tesla-sued-by-california-civilrights-agency-for-alleged-racial-discrimination-harassment/news-story/b72e2bc3a37cbc420bcd47ff27037b61
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Ontario government freezes Freedom Convoy funds
The Ford government has gone to court to freeze the funds of the Freedom Convoy, according to the Toronto Sun's Brian Lilley. The order was issued by the court today and all funds are frozen until further notice.
It is worth noting that the funds have been frozen, not seized.
According to a statement: "Today, the Attorney General brought an application in the Superior Court of Justice for an order pursuant to section 490.8 of the Criminal Code prohibiting any person from disposing of, or otherwise dealing with, in any manner whatsoever, any and all monetary donations made through the Freedom Convoy 2022 and Adopt-a-Trucker campaign pages on the GiveSendGo online fundraising platform.
"This afternoon, the order was issued. It binds any and all parties with possession or control over these donations."
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-ford-govt-freezes-freedom-convoy-funds
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New Canadian Law Could Send Parents to Jail for Not Affirming Gender Identity
It’s a conversation many have had at least once in their life. A friend or family member shares that he or she is struggling with same-sex attraction.
No doubt there are countless opinions on the most loving way to respond in these moments, but a new law in Canada mandates the response to be given. Affirm the same-sex attraction—or risk jail time.
Yes, Canada’s “conversion therapy” ban requires parents, pastors, counselors, friends, and others to affirm a person’s gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation, or face jail or prison time.
Canada has surrendered “to the political sphere to let them decide how we can counsel, how we can love our LGBT neighbors in the name of Jesus, and how to teach our own kids what a biblical view of sexuality and gender looks like,” says Jojo Ruba, the communications director for the Calgary, Alberta-based Free to Care.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/11/new-canadian-law-could-send-parents-to-jail-for-not-affirming-gender-identity
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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11 February, 2022
Smug Australian radio host mocks 'conspiracy theorist' Joe Rogan - before her own colleague Josh Szeps offers a blistering defence of the American podcaster
ABC Radio presenter Josh Szeps has defended Joe Rogan once again after the American podcaster was mocked by The Drum host Ellen Fanning.
In an episode of the ABC talk show that aired earlier this month, Fanning called Rogan a 'conspiracy theorist' and a 'cage-fighting guy who does no research' while grilling Szeps over his decision to appear on the comedian's podcast.
Speaking to The Australian on Monday about the contentious interview, Szeps doubled down on his defence of Rogan.
'He’s a polarising figure because he’s not a newscaster, and he interviews dissident figures,' said Szeps, who is friends with Rogan even though they disagree on certain issues.
'But he also interviews people who represent the orthodox view. Tens of millions listen to him. Are we going to win the hearts and minds of people by not talking to him?'
Szeps explained he was on Rogan's show to represent 'the orthodox view when it comes to the safety of vaccines', adding that he 'stood his ground' against him during their heated discussion.
The 44-year-old has appeared on Rogan's podcast seven times over the years.
Szeps was grilled by Fanning on The Drum earlier this month, with the ABC hosts disagreeing on how much research Rogan should be expected to do for his twice-weekly three-hour podcasts.
Fanning mocked Rogan, 54, before complaining about his popularity and some of the controversial guests that have appeared on his podcast.
'Here's this guy with all this money from Spotify and he says, "This is going to be intellectual jousting about Marxism and the history of the world and, y'know, I'm just a cage fighting guy," but he does no research!' she said incredulously.
'He says this is going to be an intellectual jousting exercise, that's what you're gonna see, he's going to have the stogy [cigar] in his mouth, he's going to be all this kind of razzle dazzle,' she continued as she waved her arms around in the air.
'And at the same time, he kind of has all these edgy people on and he doesn't bother to do any research about them.'
Szeps responded: 'How much research would you have to do to have a three-hour conversation, twice a week, with people all over the political spectrum?'
Fanning shot back: 'If you gave me a hundred million bucks, I'd probably hire some pretty fine producers!'
She continued to complain about Rogan during the interview, repeatedly claiming he 'doesn't do any research' and adding that 'sometimes he's stoned'.
Rogan, an advocate for the legalisation of certain drugs, often smokes marijuana while recording his podcast and famously once got high with Elon Musk.
Fanning also said Rogan has 'a head full of alternative facts' and was negatively influencing his listeners by spreading 'misinformation'.
Szeps continued to defend Rogan, as did AFR columnist Jennifer Hewitt, who was also appearing on The Drum as a panellist that night.
'He's not trying to be journalist or a gatekeeper or profess to have the answers,' Hewitt said.
'First of all, I'll point out that you can do an awful lot of research and get in vicious disagreements about all sorts of things,' she continued.
Last month, Szeps praised Rogan in an interview with Mediaweek and claimed his podcast has far more reach than a mainstream show like NBC's The Today Show.
He went on to call Rogan a 'ferociously curious, very engaged, highly disciplined puppy dog'.
'He and I disagree about a lot, but I would rather engage with deeply enthusiastic, deeply curious people who I think are mistaken about many things, than only ever hear from people whose opinions I already understand,' he added.
The Joe Rogan Experience is the world's most popular podcast. In 2020, it moved exclusive to Spotify in a deal worth $100million, making Rogan the world's highest-paid podcaster.
Szeps has appeared on Rogan's show multiple times over the years, and the pair have socialised off camera too.
His most recent appearance made headlines when they got into a debate about Covid vaccines and potential side effects.
Rogan argued vaccines increase the risk of heart condition myocarditis, but Szeps said the real risk of developing myocarditis is actually from contracting Covid-19.
At first, Rogan tried to say this was incorrect, but then his own producer stepped in to say Szeps was right.
The podcaster, who some have accused of being a vaccine sceptic, later tweeted a video of the moment and was happy to acknowledge Szeps was correct.
'If anyone was going to make me look dumb on the podcast I’m glad it’s Josh Szeps, because I love him, and he’s awesome,' he wrote.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10500247/The-moment-smug-ABC-host-mocks-conspiracy-theorist-Joe-Rogan.html
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Indian state’s hijab ban in school sparks religious freedom furore
Bengaluru: A request by a group of high school girls to wear the hijab in class has snowballed into dulling protests between Hindu and Muslim students in India, deepening religious polarisation as regional elections approach.
Debate over the hijab in schools took off last month after students at a pre-university college in Karnataka state’s Udupi district began protesting against a rule barring them from wearing the Muslim head covering in classrooms.
In late January, the girls petitioned the state’s high court, challenging the restrictions. But protests quickly spread across the state, as more educational institutions began banning Muslim students from wearing the hijab. Hindu activists have staged counterprotests, demanding that the saffron shawl - a Hindu religious symbol - be allowed in schools.
The opposing movements have deepened festering religious polarisation in the region and prompted the state to temporarily close secondary schools this week. On Tuesday, protests turned violent, with reports emerging from some cities of stone-throwing and arson, according to the BBC.
Muskan Khan, a student in the city of Mandya in Karnataka state who wears the headscarf, became the face of resistance to the hijab bans after a video of her went viral this week.
The clip showed Khan, 19, pumping her fist and shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) at a group of men who were heckling her as she entered her college. The men wore saffron scarves and chanted “Jai Shri Ram” - “Victory to Lord Ram,” a call popular among Hindu nationalist groups.
“All that I want is to stand by my rights and education,” Khan told the BBC after the incident.
Demonstrations have spread to India’s capital, Delhi, and cities including Kolkata, where students blocked roads in protest of hijab prohibitions in Karnataka. On Thursday, women in two cities in neighbouring Pakistan protested in solidarity.
Unlike some European countries that have fiercely debated the right to wear the veil, there are no nationwide restrictions on wearing the hijab in public places in India. But a growing number of schools and officials in Karnataka have begun saying that religious garments should not be worn in the classroom.
“Government is very firm that the school is not a platform to practice dharma [religion],” Karnataka education minister BC Nagesh told CNN affiliate CNN News-18.
Officials have also said saffron scarves are forbidden in class.
A student identified as Al-Rifa told the Indian news publication Scroll.in that her school in Karnataka was “forcing us to choose between studies and the hijab” and that female Muslim students feel unsafe on campus.
“I was made to realise that I am a Muslim. Someone who dresses differently,” she said. “I have never thought about these things before.”
The protest movement got a high-profile endorsement on Tuesday, when Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani advocate for girls’ education who also wears a headscarf, condemned the hijab ban on Twitter.
“Refusing to let girls go to school in their hijabs is horrifying,” she wrote. “Objectification of women persists - for wearing less or more. Indian leaders must stop the marginalisation of Muslim women.”
The All India President of the Students’ Federation of India also criticised the ban, writing on Twitter that the hijab was being “cited as reason to deny Muslim women’s right to education.”
Human Rights Watch also decried the ban as discriminatory.
The rival protests between hijab-wearing Muslim students and saffron scarf-wearing Hindu students has deepened communal tensions in the region.
Karnataka authorities closed high schools and colleges for three days this week as the threat of violence mounted. Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai announced on Thursday that classes would resume on Monday. The state’s high court had ordered the government to reopen schools but prevent students from wearing any religious dress until it delivers a verdict on petitions seeking to overturn the hijab ban.
Muslims make up about 13 per cent of the population in Karnataka, which is a stronghold of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu right-wing BJP party. Since coming to power in 2019, the regional government has passed orders tightening the slaughter of beef in the state and introduced a controversial bill that would make it more difficult for interfaith couples to marry and for people to convert to Islam or Christianity.
Five other states in India head to the polls to kick off a high-stakes election season and identity politics are taking centre stage.
Experts say the BJP has sought to benefit from polarisation between Hindus and Muslims. Across India, anti-Muslim hate speech is on the rise. And police have taken little action against those involved in events where crowds pledged to kill Muslims.
Aliya Assadi, 17, who has worn the hijab since she was 7 years old, said she and her classmates sat in the hallway of their all-girls secondary school in Karnataka all day after they were barred from attending classes.
Initially, their Hindu classmates were supportive. But that soon changed, Assadi said.
“It breaks my heart to see my classmates and friends change so fast and speak on communal lines. It simply makes my cry,” she said. “I know they are not bad people. I know they are being used by politicians. But still, it is painful to see your friends endorse hatred.”
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/indian-state-s-hijab-ban-in-school-sparks-religious-freedom-furore-20220211-p59vlz.html
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UK: The Highway Code to hell
I did a speed awareness course on Monday. For the uninitiated, you have the option of doing one of these if you’re caught speeding and want to avoid getting three points on your licence. It only lasts two and a half hours and there’s no test at the end, so it’s a no-brainer, although you have to do it again if you’re spotted playing on your phone at the back. I’ve never heard of anyone choosing the three points instead.
Like most people forced to undergo this humiliation, I was convinced I had nothing to learn. We all know about the laws of motion: the faster you’re going, the longer it takes to stop. And, inevitably, I found myself silently correcting the poor English of the two trainers. It’s either ‘more safe’ or ‘safer’, not ‘more safer’, and what are ‘road signages’, for Pete’s sake? But they won me over — and, I suspect, the other 12 arrogant ne’er-do-wells in the basement of Ealing’s Crowne Plaza hotel — by quizzing us about the meaning of different road signs in the Highway Code. I suspect they deliberately include this at the beginning to persuade their reluctant students that there’s actually a good deal about speed restrictions they aren’t aware of.
For instance, did you know that the meaning of the ‘national speed limit applies’ sign varies according to which part of the United Kingdom you’re in? The maximum speed for HGV drivers on single carriageways is 10mph lower in Scotland and Northern Ireland than in England and Wales.
Maximum speeds also vary according to what sort of vehicle you’re driving, as the owner of a Transit van discovered to his astonishment. No sooner had we finished laughing at him — ‘No wonder you’re here, mate’ — than we were introduced to the ‘street light rule’, whereby a national speed limit of 30mph applies to all roads with street lights, including dual carriageways. Who knew? And when the trainers asked us how fast you’re allowed to go if an electronic sign outside a school says ‘Max speed 20 when lights flashing’ — and the lights are flashing — every single one of us got it wrong. The correct answer, astonishingly, is 30mph.
The Highway Code, it turns out, is like the tax code: incomprehensible to everyone except paid experts. Einstein said the hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax, but I’m guessing he wasn’t a British road-user. Which brings me, finally, to the point of this column: the Highway Code is about to get even more mind-bogglingly complex.
As it stands, it includes 307 rules, and eight annexes, but from 29 January it will be longer still. The new Code is the result of a consultation process that began in October 2018 and didn’t conclude until last month, and it reads as if it’s been written by the same crack team that covered Britain in cycle lanes, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and pop-up one-way systems during the lockdowns.
Its great innovation is to create a hierarchy of road users, with pedestrians at the top, cyclists below them, and drivers at the bottom. So if a pedestrian is waiting to cross at a junction, drivers must give way, even if it causes a ten-car pile-up. Worse, on quieter roads cyclists are advised to ride in the centre of their lane to make themselves more visible and, if it’s a narrow country road, they should ride two abreast. Talk about incitement to road rage! And here’s the kicker: that guidance applies even if there’s a cycle lane running alongside the road. They are entirely optional, apparently. The town-hall Sir Humphreys who’ve spent tens of millions of ratepayers’ money disfiguring Britain’s roads must have had a good laugh at that.
It’s hard to dismiss the suspicion that the new Highway Code is designed to make life even more miserable for motorists. It’s not enough to force us all to switch to Priuses from 2030; for the net-zero zealots, all drivers will have to be constantly humiliated. And if that doesn’t ‘nudge’ us into abandoning our vehicles, other measures will be called for.
It won’t be long before you’re given an instant lifetime ban if you’re done for speeding — and more and more of us will be, as our society approaches Chinese levels of surveillance. Indeed, it’s already beginning: since 2019, any driver who’s had a licence for less than two years has been required to take the test again if they rack up six points.
I felt a bit miffed about having to do a speed awareness course, but soon we’ll look back on them as belonging to a golden age.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/01/highway-to-hell
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Australia: Muslim men awarded $61,755 in costs after court played police bodycam vision
Five men who were wrongly accused of assaulting police have been awarded $61,755 in legal costs after a magistrate noted there were “glaring and serious discrepancies” between the police version of events and video footage of the incident.
Khaled Zreika, 21, and Hussein Zraika, 22, had just bought disposable face masks at a petrol station at Guildford in Sydney’s west on September 24 last year when police entered the store and arrested them for failing to wear masks.
The situation rapidly deteriorated when the men followed police outside and questioned why they were being arrested, with the officers from Raptor Squad wrestling the pair to the ground and calling for assistance.
Noah Obeid, 19, Fadi Zraika, 20, and Zachariya Al-Ahmad, 20, who approached police to criticise them for the arrest, were also arrested as scores of officers responded.
The five were charged with various offences including assaulting police, harassing police, hindering police and resisting arrest, however all charges were later withdrawn apart from a breach of the public health order.
On Thursday, Magistrate Greg Grogin said it was “abundantly clear” there was a “major” discrepancy between vision of the incident and the officers’ claims.
He found the proceedings against the men were initiated without reasonable cause, and ordered police pay $61,755.80 of legal costs.
Police had earlier conceded there was no reasonable cause to bring the charges and agreed to pay costs, but argued the amount sought by the men was manifestly excessive.
In bodycam footage played to Parramatta Local Court on Thursday, Constable James Katsetis and Constable Dylan Leyshon from Raptor Squad can be seen walking into the service station, with one of the officers greeting the men by saying “hey brother, how you going”.
“No mask, both you boys,” Constable Katsetis continues. “You’re both under arrest ... can you hop outside for us?”
The officer, who initially admonishes Hussein Zraika for swearing in a public place, is depicted a short time later wrestling with him on the ground before telling him, “you f---ing move, I’ll knock you out c--t”.
Constable Katsetis then moves to where Khaled Zreika is being restrained nearby and knees him multiple times, causing him to shout in pain, before telling him: “don’t f---ing move c--t”.
Mr Grogin said lawyers representing the men had criticised the actions of police, but the award of costs could not be viewed as being a punishment.
“The fact that costs are not punitive does not require this court to come to a decision as to the actions of the police on the day,” he said. “Suffice to say, a picture paints a thousand words.”
Mr Grogin said he had viewed the facts sheets prepared by police, as well as CCTV footage and bodycam vision, and “there are obvious, glaring and serious discrepancies, to my eyes”.
“It would be obvious to anybody involved with the criminal law and the criminal courts the reason why these charges were withdrawn,” he said. “To say that the video showed nothing but a very serious physical altercation between police and the defendants would be an understatement.”
Police prosecutor Lachlan Kirby told the court he has not been informed why charges against the five men were withdrawn, but there is a “clear inference, having watched that footage, that this matter was not going to end in favour of the prosecution”.
“I’m drawing the same inference as everyone else as to the reason the matters were withdrawn” Senior Sergeant Kirby said. “I’m not an idiot.”
Mr Grogin said the lawyer for the men, Abdul Saddik, began to carry out his own investigation including sourcing CCTV from the petrol station due to fears the footage would not be disclosed by police.
“It would appear his concerns were well-founded,” Mr Grogin said.
The court heard police did not serve a brief of evidence containing CCTV or statements, in defiance of a court deadline, before the charges were withdrawn. Some documents were given to the men for the first time on Thursday.
Mr Grogin said the costs proceeding was “not a forum for criticism” or the “airing of grievances” and “I am not determining the actions of anybody, particularly any police officers involved”.
It is understood that lawyers for the men will ask for police to investigate the officers’ actions and consider criminal charges. If this is not done, the lawyers will consider a private prosecution.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/men-paid-61-755-in-costs-after-court-played-police-bodycam-vision-20220210-p59vga.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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10 February, 2022
Joe Biden and the Uses of Nihilism
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed.
Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.
Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.
Of course, that is what the elites celebrate, as people struggle to buy food, gas, and cars. The police are under attack and being killed on the street. The public is bewildered about criminals not being punished, workers paid to stay home, and biological men commandeering women’s sports.
Abnormal is normal; normal is despised and discarded.
Friends and associates of all races and ethnicities are increasingly suspicious of each other. They are fleeing to the ancient refuge of tribal solidarity. Red states are hated, although they function, and are sought out; blue states are praised, even as they fail and residents flee. Our “leaders” are doing their best to confirm the age-old invective of our enemies that e pluribus unum simply cannot work.
Americans keep being pounded with “Vaccination! Vaccination! Vaccination!”—but never with commensurate advice on therapies, affordable drugs, and pragmatic protocols to survive COVID-19, as it often breaks through to the already thrice vaccinated.
Americans could tolerate the misinformation and the contradictions emanating from the CDC, the NIH, and NIAID. But only if the deceptions were issued with some humility and qualifiers, reminding us of our shared ignorance about the mysterious virus. Instead, pompous and insufferably sanctimonious bureaucrats sent out flurries of false knowledge, as if they were religious edicts, with implied medieval punishments for the apostates. Apologies never follow.
The public cannot fathom the border. Prior presidents hunting for cheap political gain (Republicans for more labor, Democrats for new constituents) were lax on immigration enforcement. Yet no president has ever deliberately invited in more than 2 million foreign nationals—entering illegally, impoverished, unvaccinated, untested, and without background checks. No prior president has not only violated his oath of office to enforce the laws of the United States, but simply and intentionally destroyed the law as it was written. Apply the Left’s 2019-2020 impeachment standard to Joe Biden’s first year, and he would be impeached the minute a Republican majority captured the House.
Americans sense the United States is losing all influence abroad, as allies gravitate to or appease China and Russia. The public does not lament the loss of global clout and prestige alone. Rather, the people also fear the end of the ancient American strategy of keeping foreign enemies far distant from the homeland.
As they figure out the themes of the present madness, Americans become troubled as they attempt to fathom the characteristics of the ongoing nihilism.
One, they see much of the sudden anarchy as self-induced, deliberate, agenda-driven, and as correctible as it was avoidable. In other words, the catastrophe of 2021 was no accident, but a tactic in service of a strategy.
Two, they conclude that the nihilism intentionally targets the despised middle class—those who tend to obey the rules, who pay their taxes, who don’t get arrested, who largely keep quiet—and who are standing in the way of a revolution. These Americans are underrepresented in crime, in upward mobility, and on most college campuses, but overrepresented in suicide rates and the death tolls in optional wars abroad.
For their part, the hoi polloi conclude that the more that they are libeled as “victimizers,” the more they are becoming the actual victims. Indeed, the heroic “victimized” are the ones most often flouting the law, committing violent crimes, and tearing down the institutions that in bygone days provided security and prosperity for everyone.
Three, ordinary citizens feel the law has utterly vanished. Sometimes it simply is ignored, as we see with revolving-door criminals who kill, maim, and loot with near impunity. Sometimes the law simply is asymmetrically applied. The administration correctly jails those convicted of illegally entering the Capitol and trashing the chambers of government, but it then grants de facto amnesties to the thousands who deliberately injured, torched, and looted for 120 days of riots, death, and mayhem in 2020.
Joe Biden meanders through his photo-ops indifferent to American civilization collapsing around him. His first year was the most disastrous of any presidency in history. Should that calamity continue, Biden will be known by posterity as the most inept president to have held office.
So why does he not take to the bully pulpit to deplore the current smash-and-grab, carjacking, and murder epidemic now reaching either all-time highs or levels not seen since the 1970s? Does Biden have a shred of empathy for the widow of a murdered policeman, the spouses and parents of those mowed down in Waukesha, the children shot dead in Chicago?
Joe Biden defended his policies by saying that automobile price spikes account for one-third of the spiraling consumer price index. So what? Does that mean inflation is somehow tolerable—as if citizens don’t drive cars most days of their lives?
Is Biden aware that his administration’s core inflation definition and the consumer price index itself exclude energy as well as food price increases? What the real inflation rate is no one knows—but all understand that what we see and feel every day is far worse than what we are told.
Biden has never explained to us the humiliation in Afghanistan—other than to whine that the generals failed to warn him of his own folly. Does he know why now Vladimir Putin again ponders attacking his neighbors—but did not between 2017 and 2020?
Did Biden ever consider the fast-tracking of pipelines, more fracking, a restoration of 2020 levels of oil and gas production, and more leases granted to avoid America’s continued dependence on the Russians and the Middle East? Instead, Biden begged Russia and the Saudis—both of whom he has derided—to pump more of the oil he despises, and which we have in abundance but will not use.
Did Biden once say stop the new racial tensions, or argue that Americans should worry first about the content of our character not the color of our skins? Has he ever worried about the racial cauldron he has lit and fueled? Not at all.
Instead, Biden has done his best to inflame race through his own vile racist slurs. The recent “you ain’t black,” “junkie,” “boy, “negro,” are added to his prior inflammatory repertoire of “clean African-American,” “put y’all back in chains,” and the racist Corn Pop saga.
Second, Biden demagogues race to win the support of his base of racialists. Has any president ever announced ahead of time that only those of a particular race and gender would be eligible for selection as his running mate and first Supreme Court nomination? At least Harvard keeps quiet about its racialism and does not flaunt the idea that it systematically discriminates against Asians.
So, in a vast multiracial democracy of tribal competition and tensions, Biden has done his best to turn Americans against each other—and has succeeded in a fashion that would have made his old Dixiecrat Senate mentors Robert Byrd and James O. Eastland proud.
The mystery is perhaps not that nihilism has swept through America as effectively as Omicron, but why the president and the Left unleashed it. So, what explains the madness?
First, Biden is cognitively challenged to the point of not being physically or mentally able to meet the challenges of the presidency. His handlers know it. The media knows it. And the public knows it, too.
Irony has become the Left’s enemy. After screaming that Donald Trump should be removed under the 25th Amendment, that he should take a mental competency test, and that everyone from the acting director of the FBI to Ivy League psychiatrists must scheme to prove he was nuts, they all have grown silent. The Left’s quiet reflects that they are terrified that anyone else might successfully do to a genuinely enfeebled and failed president what they themselves attempted to do to a cognizant and successful president.
Biden’s assigned task in 2020 was to put a familiar “centrist” veneer on a radical agenda. Thereby, the hard Left, with the help of COVID-19 and Silicon Valley, could push that agenda past an unsuspecting public. Upon election, Biden would not revert to old Joe from Scranton deploring the leftist tool that he had become.
The movers of the agenda are the hard Left of the Democratic Party, those who circle around Bernie Sanders, the Obamas, Elizabeth Warren, and “the squad.” The shock troops are Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the millions on the campus, and the internet mob. The more confusion, chaos, and anarchy that follows, the more of their agenda they hope to push through, if not by legislative vote, then by executive edict, court decision, or simply ignoring the law.
The third catalyst of the woke chaos are the hyper-rich—the franchise owners of the Left. These are the huge donors who nourish the think tanks, the media, the PACs, and the legal teams—the Zuckerbergs, the Soroses, the Bezoses and the rest of the Silicon Valley plutocracy.
Equally important are the hypocritical professional classes—the tech upper-echelon, the media cohorts, the corporate lawyers and CEOs, the various university professoriate and administrations, the celebrities, the professional athletes, and the bicoastal movers and shakers. On the one hand, they are assuming that Americans won’t actually vote for their neosocialist utopias, which can be enacted only by changing the rules or demography or both. And on the other hand, they are hedging that their money, influence, and power will insulate them and their own from the stampede at the border, the growing criminality in the cities, price hikes that batter the middle classes, and the tribalism and racialism they helped to greenlight.
In normal times, such hard-left agendas have no resonance. But during a plague, lockdown, riots and arson, during murder and mayhem, chaos and anarchy?
The unimaginable can become the possible.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13972&omhide=true&trk=title
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Formula One puts an end to taking the knee at races
Formula One will stop drivers taking the knee before races this season and instead focus on “action”.
The opportunity for drivers to take the knee was introduced in 2020 after Lewis Hamilton pushed for F1 to show its support for the anti-racism movement.
The sport decided to set aside time before the race for drivers to show their support, or make any gesture they wanted, as part of its “We Race As One” initiative.
The initiative was broadened for the 2021 season to allow drivers to express support on other subjects. Sebastian Vettel wore rainbow T-shirts and race boots in countries in which homosexuality is illegal.
While most drivers joined Hamilton in taking the knee, it was not universally adopted, and several remained standing during the allotted time.
Stefano Domenicali, chief executive of F1, has now said that the time set aside before a race has been removed, although the We Race As One video, in which all 20 drivers talk about inclusivity, will still be shown.
The Italian said it was time to move away from “gestures” and towards “action”. It is understood that the teams supported the change of direction.
“I think that what we said [is] we do not have to do politics,” Domenicali said in an interview with Sky Sports News. “Now it’s the matter [of moving] from gesture to action [and] now the action is the focus on the diversity of our community and this is the first step. The gesture has been important for the ones that believed it was an important gesture, because we need to respect everyone as always. But now is the time to move on and take some other action.”
Hamilton, who remains F1’s only black driver, has been a leading voice in pushing for greater equality in the sport. His Mercedes team have painted their car black for the past two seasons, though it is understood they will return to silver livery this year.
The winner of seven world championships ended his silence last week, and with it speculation that he would retire after losing out on the title last season in controversial circumstances. He has set up a commission to look at the reasons for the lack of diversity and what action can be taken to improve it.
F1 has also decided to set up its own program, introducing university scholarships, work placements, internships and apprenticeships for aspiring workers from under-represented backgrounds.
Yesterday F1 announced that it would fund engineering scholarships for under-represented groups until 2025.
Ten scholarships will be offered to students across six universities, with a placement at every F1 team available during their studies. The cost covers full tuition as well as living expenses.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/the-times-sport/formula-one-puts-an-end-to-taking-the-knee-at-races/news-story/dc10103bc3cea670b19d28f8b1be8bc0
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After GoFundMe Betrays Freedom Convoy Donors, Truckers Emerge Victorious Under New Crowdfunding Site
Last week, the website GoFundMe decided it would no longer support the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which meant $9 million in donations would never reach the Canadian truckers whose convoy transfixed freedom-lovers everywhere.
By Sunday morning, it no longer seemed to matter.
A page on the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo dedicated to the Freedom Convoy had surpassed $2.5 million in donations Sunday morning. The page said all money raised would go to the Incorporated Freedom 2022 Human Rights And Freedom Association.
The page contained a clarion call for freedom.
“To our Fellow Canadians, the time for political over reach is over. Our current government is implementing rules and mandates that are destroying the foundation of our businesses, industries and livelihoods. Canadians have been integral to the fabric of humanity in many ways that have shaped the planet,” the site read.
“We are a peaceful country that has helped protect nations across the globe from tyrannical governments who oppressed their people, and now it seems it is happening here. We are taking our fight to the doorsteps of our Federal Government and demanding that they cease all mandates against its people. Small businesses are being destroyed, homes are being destroyed and people are being mistreated and denied fundamental necessities to survive. It’s our duty as Canadians to put an end to this mandates. It is imperative that this happens because if we don’t our country will no longer be the country we have come to love. We are doing this for our future Generations and to regain our lives back,” the post continued.
The site said that donations will be used for fuel, lodgings and food to support truckers as they put pressure on Canadian leaders in Ottawa to hear the voices of the people.
“It’s a small price to pay for our freedoms. We thank you all for your Donations and know that you are helping reshape this once beautiful country back to the way it was,” the site said.
On Friday, GoFundMe decided the protest was beyond the pale and said it would no longer send donations to the purpose for which they were intended. In it’s initial statement, the company suggested any unrefunded donor money could be spread around to GoFundMe’s chosen recipients.
In the end, after a vast outcry, GoFundMe went into reverse and decided to simply refund everyone’s donations.
The Freedom Convoy descended on Ottawa last weekend after traveling across Canada. The protest was designed to draw attention to the devastating impact of vaccine mandates imposed by the Canadian government on unvaccinated truckers.
https://ijr.com/freedom-convoy-donors-truckers-new-crowdfunding-site/
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Facts come second for journalists partial to ‘worry porn’
Positive news rarely mentioned
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins uses the term “worry porn” to describe what this column has called “catastrophist” journalism – the sensationalising of every story.
Much political reporting of the Covid-19 pandemic by the ABC and Guardian has been catastrophist, with the media outlets seldom acknowledging Australia has done better than most of the world with 120 deaths per million of population since the start of the pandemic, compared with more than 2600 per million in the US and more than 2000 in much of western Europe.
Writing in the WSJ on January 8, Jenkins ridiculed as “worry porn” the over-hyping by the US left media of the anniversary of the storming of Washington’s Capitol building by supporters of former US president Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. Our own ABC treated the anniversary as if it really did mark history’s greatest threat to US democracy.
US Vice President Kamala Harris launched into rhetorical “hyper-drive”, claiming the Capitol march was worse than the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
In Washington last year, one law enforcement officer died of stroke the day after the protest. One protester, a female former air force veteran, was shot dead. Another died of a drug overdose and two of heart attacks. Pearl Harbour it most certainly was not.
Journalistic “worry porn” allows the media to profit from the clicks of consumers who love to read this kind of confirmation bias. In Australia, journalists, politicians and media consumers of the left seem to have a ravenous appetite for stories suggesting the federal government has bungled its pandemic response for the past two years.
According to the trade union-owned New Daily, the government’s poor performance is down to “neoliberalism”. This charge ignores the fact the Morrison government is running the largest deficits in our history, and a bit more “neoliberalism” might help differentiate the conservative side of politics.
Still, the government does give the appearance of being slow to act as circumstances change, and of repeatedly failing to learn the same lessons. For example, after more than 600 deaths in aged care in Victoria in the winter of 2020, the federally regulated sector should have been on the front foot last winter and again with booster vaccines during this summer’s Omicron wave. Yet federal Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck seems unable to anticipate anything about a sector in which 1124 residents have died with Covid since March 2020, almost half the national toll.
This column suggested in May last year that part of the issue was the overly cautious approach of the nation’s medical establishment, and particularly ATAGI (the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation). Here’s the problem: as the media and political left chant that governments should never ignore the science, how do political leaders deal with scientific advisers who can be slow and sometimes just plain self-interested?
The Australian Financial Review, in an editorial and in reporting by Aaron Patrick and Jill Margo, has done a good job fleshing out the issue – indeed a much better job than our politicians who seem flat-footed trying to explain the problems to voters.
Patrick, in a fascinating piece on January 12, analysed the role of the influential OzSAGE group that advocates extreme health measures and virus elimination. Its members are often at odds with national and state chief medical officers.
OzSAGE members Kerryn Phelps and Raina MacIntyre are prominent on the ABC, and the wider OzSAGE group clearly influences the opinions of ABC health reporter Norman Swan.
On January 11, Margo reported the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia had between October 2020 and December 2021 released “five media statements to caution the public about RATs”.
“In its promotion of PCR testing, the college was doing what was scientifically correct to control the virus in a country with a low prevalence of cases. Unfortunately it was talking down RATs which were playing an important role in other countries and could become important in Australia too,” Margo wrote.
How would critics in the media have reacted had Morrison and the premiers ignored such advice? Truth is medical and political leaders cannot know what they do not know until a situation changes. With Delta in the ascendancy throughout November and much of December there was little reason to foresee the swamping of PCR testing with the arrival of the just-discovered Omicron variant.
The AFR on January 12 editorialised “opposition to allowing the use of less sensitive RATs is another example of the medical establishment’s failure to appropriately weigh the trade-offs between health outcomes and wider societal benefits”.
This is the sort of analysis of a political problem that is missing from the national broadcaster as senior journalists there unleash their personal hatred of Morrison, and reporters simply give voice to every interest group with a complaint.
“Worry porn’’ certainly applied to much of the reporting about a hot day at Onslow in Western Australia. In much of the media, every hot day is used to bang the climate change drum.
Yet, several experts were willing to point out that the 50.7C recorded at Onslow on January 13 had been equalled on January 2, 1960, in Oodnadatta in South Australia. Temperatures over 50C had also been recorded in Wilcannia, NSW, in 1939, Oodnadatta again on January 3, 1960, and at Mardie Station in WA in 1998.
But the actual highest recorded temperature in Australia, though no longer officially recognised by the Bureau of Meteorology, was 53.1C at Cloncurry in Queensland on January 16, 1889.
Retired meteorologist William Kininmonth, who ran the BOM’s national climate centre for 12 years, refers to a graph of maximum mean temperatures back to 1887 that clearly shows “the early 1900s were hotter than recent decades”.
“Worry porn” generates consumer interest and is easier than hard-nosed reporting. It’s also much more exciting for activist reporters who want to change the world. Who wants to bother with digging out difficult facts when you can earn “likes” on social media just for writing about your fears?
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/facts-come-second-for-journalists-partial-to-worry-porn/news-story/32711ed7e98396daf415913d5a18166c
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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9 February, 2022
The religion of peace at work
What a misnomer for Islam! As we see below. Their inability to get on well with women shows what pathetic creatures these barbarians are. Women give Western men problems too but almost always we at least live with them if we don't adapt to them. I am at present in a relationship with a woman from a totally different culture from mine but it is a warm relationship because we are big enough to tolerate our differences and enjoy what we have in common
A shocking video has shown an Iranian man grinning as he walked through the streets clutching the severed head of his 17-year-old wife, after he allegedly decapitated her in an “honour killing,” the New York Post reports.
The gruesome footage shows Sajjad Heydari strolling through a neighbourhood in Ahvaz, a city in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, on Saturday with Mona Heydari’s head in one hand and a blade in the other, East2West News reported.
Mona, who was also Sajjad’s cousin, had been forced to marry him when she was just 12 years old, according to the Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
She reportedly suffered domestic abuse but was pressured to stay in the marriage for the sake of their three-year-old son.
Mona did manage to escape to Turkey, but her family brought her back, Iran International reported.
A few days later, Sajjad and his brother allegedly tied her hands and decapitated her. Her body was dumped before her husband was seen walking through the streets holding her severed head.
A police official said the motive for the murder was “family differences”.
The two men have reportedly been arrested, but it was unclear what punishment they are likely to face.
Abbas Hosseini-Pouya, prosecutor general of Ahvaz, the provincial capital of Khuzestan, said Mona had sent photos of herself to her husband from Turkey that had fuelled his “negative emotions,” according to Iran International.
The Women’s Committee said that “not a week goes by without some form of honour killing making headlines.
The regime’s failure to criminalise these murders has led to a catastrophic rise in honour killings.
“In a report published in 2019, the state-run Sharq daily newspaper wrote that an annual average of 375 to 450 honour killings are recorded in Iran,” the resistance council said.
“The catastrophic rise in honour killings in Iran is rooted in misogyny and the patriarchal culture institutionalised in the laws and society,” the group continued.
“Although the father, brother or husband holds the knife, sickle or rifle, the murders are rooted in the medieval outlook of the ruling regime.
“The clerical regime’s laws officially denote that women are second-degree citizens owned by men,” it said.
Meanwhile, the state-run news agency Rokna was reportedly shut down after it published the shocking video.
https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/shocking-video-shows-iranian-man-carrying-wifes-head-after-honour-killing/news-story/59b669d00d54d605f828ad92cbe28d23
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On Collectivism
Les Bates
Many of the things taught to American children are simply wrong. American children are taught to fear firearms.
This is simply wrong.
American children are taught the doctrine of Collectivism.
This is simply wrong.
The doctrine of Collectivism has been shown to be wrong over and over again. In all forms of the doctrine of Collectivism an Individual is a form of property and may be used as such. All forms of the doctrine of Collectivism justify the use of coercion. I once attended a folk music concert held at the Cedar Art Center. The Cedar Art Center was built in the closed single screen Cedar Theater. One thing I remember was that the snack bar was proudly serving Nicaraguan coffee. At the time the nation of Nicaragua was under the rule of Collectivist Sandinista Regime. In effect the production of the coffee required the use of coercion to produce.
American children are also taught that right is wrong and that A is non-A.
This is clearly wrong.
The SS-Totenverbande believed they were the good guys with their victims and opponents being evil.
This was clearly wrong.
We’re seeing the same phenomena. Collectivist groups such as Anti-FA and BLM believe they’re the good people. They believe that their victims and opponents are evil. The fact is that Collectivist groups like Anti-Fa and BLM are evil.
https://otherles.livejournal.com/2022/02/08/
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Top US economist Larry Summers hits back at MMT
Larry Summers, one of America’s top economists, has blasted Modern Monetary Theory as the US braces for another month of record inflation and debate heats up over the controversial idea governments shouldn’t worry about budget deficits and soaring debt.
Stephanie Kelton, the queen of Modern Monetary Theory, whose book The Deficit Myth shot to the bestseller lists worldwide in 2020, said on Monday MMT had “obviously proven correct”, in the midst of the biggest US inflationary spike in 40 years that critics say arose from excessive deficit spending.
“It’s big claim was that massive deficits would not lead to runaway interest [rates] via bond vigilantes or insolvency. Huge win,” she said on Twitter, prompting a barrage of criticism and support.
Mr Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary in the 1990s and former President of Harvard University, hit back, calling the idea the equivalent of “fad diets, quack cancer cures or creationist theories”.
“I am sorry to see the New York Times taking MMT seriously as an intellectual movement,” he added, referring to a recent article in the New York-based journal about Kelton’s ideas titled “Is this What Winning Looks Like?”
MMT, which has been derided by central bankers including Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe and former Bank of England governor Mervyn King, posits that governments can and should spend without limit using newly created central bank money until economies reach full employment.
It’s had a frosty reception from traditional economists. “Modern monetary theory has a record of failure that only left-wing intellectuals, politicians, or journalists could be bamboozled by,” Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University, told The Australian.
High inflation, which reached 7 per cent in 2021 after hovering above 5 per cent for 9 months in a row, has become Americans’ number one economic worry, according to surveys, and a political headache for the Biden administration, which has blamed pandemic “bottlenecks” and profiteering by big companies.
In a series of stimulus packages, the Trump and Biden administrations spent US$5.1 trillion on largely cash handouts to families since March 2020 from funds created by the Federal Reserve, whose balance sheet has more than quadrupled since the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2009, to almost US$9 trillion.
“It would be valuable for the Senators to verify that Fed nominees are not in the thrall of MMT,” Mr Summers said, referring to Joe Biden’s as yet unconfirmed three nominees for the Federal Reserve Board, including Lisa Cook who will make history as the first black member of the powerful interest rate setting committee.
Economists expect annual consumer price inflation to rise to a new high of 7.3 per cent in January, including “core inflation, which strips out volatile energy and food items, of 5.9 per cent, a level that would be highest since the early 1990s.
The US jobless rate dropped to 4 per cent in January, almost back to where it was in January 2020, following a year of record jobs creation as pandemic restrictions eased. American wages grew 4 per cent in 2021, the fastest pace in two decades, fuelling concerns the economy, pumped with record stimulus was overheating.
“Macro policies that push demand well past the economy’s capacity, do not just lead to inflation but rather to increasing inflation,” Mr Summers said. “Super tight inflationary labour markets like the ones we have now are like driving 100 mph. Great while it lasts, but imprudent and dangerous”.
Andrew Luboski, a bond trader in New York for Citi, suggested it was too quick to condemn MMT, pointing out 10 year US government bond yields, currently around 1.9 per cent, were still at “historically low levels despite huge levels of government spending”.
“The picture is likely to become complicated as the Fed starts to unwind its balance sheet via Quantitative Tightening, as well as if inflation doesn’t fall quickly”.
The Federal Reserve, which slashed the federal funds rate to zero almost two years ago to bolter an economy crippled by government lockdowns, is set to embark on up to seven interest rates increases this year, according to some analysts, to bring inflation back to the central bank’s 2 per cent target.
“For whatever reason, when it comes to MMT, people will literally just make stuff up,” Ms Kelton tweeted, dismissing criticism that a core tenet of MMT – that politicians should raise taxes to snuff out inflation – was politically naive.
Record and rising inflation isn’t solely a US phenomenon. The Bank of England lifted its benchmark interest rates to 0.5 per cent in December for the second time in a row, predicting consumer price inflation, 5.4 per cent over the year to December, would rise above 7 per cent this year.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/top-us-economist-larry-summers-hits-back-at-mmt/news-story/b5d4a744d9efb16670eef1ee8ef9a2e0
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Why This Feminist Is Taking the University of Bristol to Court
Raquel Rosario Sánchez
Next week, I am taking my university to court. To my knowledge, it is the first time an academic institution has been forced, at trial, to justify why it prioritises trans rights over women’s rights. The other party in the case is the University of Bristol, which one might suppose to be an unlikely defendant given its distinction as the first higher-education establishment in England to have admitted women on an equal basis to men. Unfortunately, the university has more recently become known as a hotbed for anti-feminist militancy.
The university’s Victoria Rooms once served as ground zero for suffragettes in the city of Bristol, and in the larger southwest area of England surrounding it. Beginning in 1908, the Women’s Social and Political Union branch of the suffrage movement would host its meetings on campus. The University also hosted leading lights of the British feminist movement, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughter Christabel Pankhurst, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.
All of this history will provide an ironic backdrop to next week’s legal proceedings, in which the university stands accused of sex discrimination and negligence for failing to protect a feminist scholar. I will argue that the University of Bristol has engineered a number of practices and policies that prioritise the demands of trans activists over women’s legal rights. This institution-wide pattern, I allege, includes a failure to properly investigate complaints of bullying, harassment and intimidation committed by trans activists on campus, even while targeting feminists who defend sex-based rights, such as myself.
My ordeal began with an action so benign that is seems laughable. I agreed to chair a meeting held by the campaigning organisation Woman’s Place UK, which featured a discussion of proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, a UK law. These changes would have allowed any person’s biological sex to be trumped, without any checks, delays, or safeguards, by their own gendered self-identification. Woman’s Place UK’s concern over such amendments is rooted in its mission, which is to ensure the availability of “reserved places, separate spaces and distinct services” on the basis of biological sex.
My participation should have been entirely unremarkable, as Gender Studies have been my academic field for the past decade—right up to my PhD work at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Gender and Violence Research. Outside of academia, all my professional experience has been in the women’s sector, mostly working in shelters and refuges for women and children escaping male violence. People shouldn’t need this level of experience to voice an opinion on the sex-and-gender debate. But to the extent the question was, “Is she qualified to speak on this?,” then I don’t think the answer was in much doubt.
But the radicalized activists who denounced me don’t seem to care much about facts. The moment that details of the meeting were announced in late January 2018, I was denounced as a TERF (a term of abuse that signifies “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). In response, I filed a complaint with the university on February 1, 2018, as I believed that the school’s stated anti-harassment policies were clearly on my side. But university officials dragged their feet on my case for the next two years and, in late 2019, dismissed it entirely. I was invited to leave the university and my PhD programme.
When we go to court next week, I expect that university lawyers will argue that the school did nothing wrong, and that any impact the bullying and harassment had on my health and academic studies were my own fault because I am, as they see it, a deficient student who is being dishonest about her state of health. My legal team will argue otherwise.
Anyone who has followed this issue will know that I am hardly the first female academic to be bullied in this way. In the UK, women’s legal rights remain rooted in sex, not self-declared “gender identity,” and sex is considered a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. This means that single-sex services, facilities, and spaces are legally permitted, even if they exclude biological men who demand full treatment as women. Yet many institutions—including, apparently, the University of Bristol—believe that they may put these laws to one side as a matter of political expediency, so that they may appease a tiny, but often aggressive, constituency.
Consider the “women-only gym sessions” that the University of Bristol launched in April 2021. In the press statement introducing this policy, the school declared:
In 2019, our two-hour female-only #ThisGirlCan ‘gym takeover’ was attended by 230 students. Feedback from session attendees identified that the women-only environment provided a “safe” and a “non-judgmental” space for women, with many reporting feeling “intimidated” when using the gym at other times. It has also been acknowledged that members of our #WeAreBristol community, for religious and cultural reasons, require a women-only space for exercise.
In fact, these gym sessions weren’t restricted to females, but rather were open to anyone who announces, with no further elaboration, that they “self-identify” as female. And so while female students who attend the sessions may believe they will be entering a female-only space, that’s not what they may find on any given day. It’s an insult to women who desire safety, privacy, and dignity.
Another protected characteristic under the Equality Act is “pregnancy and maternity.” But ideological puritans staffing the university’s Diversity and Inclusion office have sought to erase virtually any term that communicates the reality of female biology. I know this because I have been contacted by several female employees facing career implosion after they expressed support of sex-based rights, including one who’s responsible for writing family policies for staff members. She had already been pressured to remove all references to words such as “woman,” “she,” and “her” from the maternity policy. But over time, she was instructed that even this was not enough. According to this whistle-blower:
In a recent meeting, the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team required further changes. Among other things, they were arguing that the word “maternity” itself is exclusionary and problematic. In the meeting, I stated, “you have to have a uterus to give birth.” I said it worried me that the word “maternity” is deemed problematic in a maternity policy. I said we had a duty to consider the needs and rights of women accessing the policy, and not only the transgender community. As a result, a written complaint was made to the senior HR team accusing me of transphobia and abuse.
As ridiculous as this may sound, she was in fact investigated, and forced to apologize for standing up for the reality of human biology, and for the letter of UK law as it now stands.
In some ways, British feminists are more fortunate than their counterparts in other countries, because the backlash against hardcore gender ideologues began earlier in this country. The public has started paying attention to battles that once played out only in college classrooms and gender clinics. And in almost every part of the UK, it seems, the tenets of gender orthodoxy (not to mention the unsettling strongarm tactics used to advance them) have been shown to be at odds with public opinion. Several figures within this resistance movement have now become well-known figures, including former University of Sussex philosopher Kathleen Stock, writer Helen Joyce, litigant Keira Bell, and educator Debbie Hayton. And so, even as I have been bullied and isolated at my university, I have been able to find kindred spirits who could offer support and brainstorm about the best way to fight back at gender radicalism on campus.
These include Nicole Jones, co-founder of the youth-led XX Feminist Network, whose members believe that “freedom of assembly, association, opinion and expression are fundamental principles of women’s liberation.” Like many young women at university, she became baffled by the disconnect between the postmodernist-infused theories presented to our generation as feminism and what she knew to be day-to-day material reality. Nicole told me:
I first became aware of this issue through reading second-wave [feminist] texts, and finding mainstream feminism to be increasingly in conflict with the materialist analysis of women as a sex class. I was then alarmed to see the women attempting to address the questions raised by this conflict being aggressively silenced and smeared. Intelligent, thoughtful, and evidence-based contributions to the discussion were being shut down in favour of meaningless mantras and ideological conformity.
Nicole knows first-hand what it feels like to want to escape your female body as you’re overwhelmed by the pressure associated with feminine expectations. But sharing these feelings earned her no sympathy from trans activists. Just the opposite:
The worst aspect has probably been the social isolation. I have been threatened, refused service, and subjected to dehumanising comments, all on the basis of my feminist beliefs. I found that the solution to this treatment has been to withdraw and keep to myself, but this has taken an intense personal toll and impacted my university experience. I’m an art student and find myself avoiding speaking to peers, participating in group shows, and fearful to make contributions in class…I’m careful to avoid situations where there might be conflict. But this has meant lost friendships, networks, and opportunities. The silence from the art world on these issues has meant that these opportunities now only seem to exist outside of what I originally intended to do with my life. When you’re young and at the start of your career, there is less that can immediately be taken from you, as you have yet to build what the backlash might seek to destroy. Instead, it feels like a series of doors closing.
But rather than sulk and cry, Nicole began organising on a grassroots level, co-creating a national network for female students concerned about the takeover of gender-identity theory in academia. “Stop waiting for permission to challenge the new orthodoxy,” she told me. “It won’t come. [But] organising with the XX Feminist Network has shown me that the so-called ‘generational divide’ is a myth: plenty of young people share these concerns, and are willing to have these conversations. We just need to create the space for them.”
Although the majority of people advocating for sex-based rights are female, there are some male academics in this fight as well. And things can be similarly grim for them as well. At the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs, a sociology professor, has found himself at the centre of controversy for expressing opinions critical of gender identity, including such basic propositions as the idea that one “can’t actually change from a boy to a girl.”
https://quillette.com/2022/02/06/why-im-taking-the-university-of-bristol-to-court/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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8 January, 2022
GoFundMe and How the Left Came to Despise the Working Class
The left-wing anthem “Which Side Are You On?” is no longer about whether you’re a “union man” or a “thug for J.H. Blair.” It’s about the size of your stock portfolio or when to go public with your start-up.
The oh-so-progressive GoFundMe crowd-funding site—run by about as pure a group of upscale lefty elitists as you could invent, with its CEO being a former a consultant for the multimillion-dollar drug pushers at McKinsey—has turned against those lowly 16-hour-a-day working-stiffs, the Canadian truckers, for deigning to risk their jobs and livelihood to protest vaccine mandates.
At first, calling the truckers occupiers and accusing them—without the slightest proof—of violent acts, GoFundMe essentially absconded with the US$8 million donated to the truckers through its site and peremptorily decided to distribute the money to charities of its choice (one can only imagine).
Sounds like “misappropriation of funds,” at the minimum, and possibly fraud. Don’t these people have lawyers? But worse than that, it was one of the more clueless readings of public sentiment in recent years—and there have been many.
Maybe it’s because those lefty elitists on their board don’t do much shopping on their own, send assistants to the supermarkets for food, and don’t see the empty shelves, so they think they can push the truckers around. That’s an explanation, anyway, but blowback happened fast enough that GoFundMe quickly rescinded its “charitable” decree and promised to return the money to the donors.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called for an investigation of GoFundMe (when are we going to start calling him “America’s governor”?), as have officials in Georgia.
Good for them, but what interests me here is how it came to be that supposedly left-leaning organizations, indeed basically the entire modern-day American left, came to be so anti-working class.
It could be a “Just So Story” in a style reminiscent of “How the Camel Got His Hump” or “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” although far less beguiling and humorous than Rudyard Kipling would have made it. (Kipling, whose stories many of us enjoyed as children, has become a particular target of those fun suckers known as the “woke.”)
GoFundMe versus the truckers may prove to be a paradigm case for our time—and it’s about class.
To understand it, you have to go back to the man who started it all, Karl Marx, who expected his communist revolution to begin in heavily industrialized Germany.
He was wrong, of course. It began in the much less developed and largely agrarian Russia. In Germany, the working class was not nearly as attracted to his theories as he had hoped. The majority rejected them.
This trend continued as communism did better in poorer countries (China, Cambodia) than it did in the industrialized West, where it was supposed to take hold.
This failure was not lost on a group of intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School, who brought their revised Marxian theories designed to succeed where the working class approach had failed—notably via the so-called march through the institutions (media, entertainment, education)—to the United States at the end of World War II.
This indeed was an intellectuals-first revolution, and it has succeeded almost completely in our university system, where their “critical theory” dominates. They also succeeded, to lesser but still powerful degrees, in turning the media and entertainment, pretty much destroying Hollywood in the process. Why would the Chinese object?
This was clearly a top-down revolution, with elites dictating to hoi polloi what they should think and how to behave. In the way of the world, those elites also became increasingly rich, richer than anyone else in the history of the human race (the likes of Bezos, Zuckberg, Gates, et al.). They knew best. (Someone should write a book about that.)
In the process, the working class, what Amity Shlaes earlier called “The Forgotten Man,” was forgotten.
Which brings us to the truckers. This time—I think, hope, and pray—these elites have gone too far. The yawning gap between them and the people they lord over has become too great. People are sickened, as they should be, by the arrogance.
Thank you, GoFundMe, for blowing it. This is a teaching moment. Let’s use it.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/gofundme-and-how-the-left-came-to-despise-the-working-class_4260011.html
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Time to End Affirmative Action
More than three-quarters of Americans believe President Joe Biden should consider “all possible nominees” to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, rather than only Black women, according to a new poll.
Likewise, nearly three-quarters of Americans, including a majority of Hispanic and Black people, oppose affirmative action. They don’t want Black and Hispanic college applicants favored over other applicants who have higher test scores and grades, according to Pew Research.
A group of Asian victims of Harvard’s affirmative action are suing, represented by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions. The Supreme Court announced last week it will take the case.
That announcement has provoked woke outrage and predictions about the return of Jim Crow. Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler warns the Court will “take this country back to the time where straight White men ruled everything.” There isn’t a shred of truth to that warning.
Court papers document how Harvard rigs the admissions system to disqualify as many Asian applicants as possible. It systematically gives Asian teens low “personal” scores for subjective qualities such as courage and personality in an attempt to offset their higher scores on standardized tests.
A black student with a Preliminary SAT score above 1100 might get invited to apply to Harvard, but a white student from the same area of the country would have to get a score above 1310; an Asian girl would need at least 1350, and an Asian boy at least 1380. Unfair? You bet.
It’s a repeat of what Harvard did in the 1930s to keep Jews out, according to Kenneth L. Marcus, assistant secretary for civil rights in the Trump administration’s Education Department. “Just as Harvard in the 1930s thought that Jewish students lacked the character to make them good Harvard men, so today they often view Asian students as lacking the appropriate character,” Marcus said.
The Supreme Court never intended affirmative action to be permanent. In 2003, when it upheld the University of Michigan Law Schools’ use of race to promote diversity, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”
Fast forward, and the evidence is clear that affirmative action failed and should be replaced by programs that give a leg up to the poor, regardless of their skin color.
When the University of California tried affirmative action, Black and Hispanic students admitted with low scores floundered and graduated at far lower rates than non-affirmative action students.
In 1996, California voters — usually left-leaning — banned affirmative action. Afterward, the University of California showed how to promote economic mobility without using race, explains UCLA law professor Richard Sanders. UC recruited at inner city high schools and counseled students on the nuts and bolts of applying to college. UC targeted teens determined to study hard and succeed, never mind their skin color.
Harvard could do the same. Only 4.5% of students admitted to Harvard come from households with incomes in the bottom fifth of the nation. Many Black students admitted are children of academics and professionals. Yet they’re pushed ahead of Asian applicants whose parents are first-generation unskilled workers.
Diversity the way Harvard and many other universities practice it is a scam. In reality, it gives privilege to Black students.
Take Biden’s two leading candidates for the Supreme Court: federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and California Judge Leondra Kruger, both Harvard College graduates, Jackson’s father is a lawyer; Kruger is the daughter of two physicians. Both women are cookie-cutter duplicates of the court’s current makeup — Ivy Leaguers who once clerked for the Court.
For real diversity and fairness, Biden should consider a broad field, including Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the District Columbia Court of Appeals, who has not only a law degree but also a business degree. That’s something none of the current justices has, though business cases dominate the Court’s docket.
It’s time for America to end affirmative action. It’s a polite euphemism for an ugly process — reverse discrimination. It hasn’t made the U.S. economically fairer, and another 25 years won’t change the results.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/85997-time-to-end-affirmative-action-2022-02-03
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Radical liberals enjoy painting everything as racist. They play the race card at every opportunity. Most of the time, what they’re talking about has absolutely nothing to do with race
But this constant shift to a racist narrative isn’t a coincidence. It’s their strategy. Democrats and liberal progressives thirst for a racially divided America. Every time they push their racial narrative, it grows more nauseating. Millions of Americans are tired of it. It’s not true.
When Joe Biden watched his failed legislative attempt to take over federal elections get squashed, Scranton Joe went all racially nuts. Biden actually had the audacity to accuse anyone who disagreed with the liberal agenda to uproot constitutional state election laws as being racist.
In a feverish speech in Atlanta, Georgia, Biden referred to anyone advocating for election integrity as being like a “Bull Connor” or a “George Wallace”. His comments were low-blows, even for Joe. He embarrassed himself and the nation.
However, he’s at it again. Biden was in New York City recently, supposedly to address a horrific crime wave that is engulfing NYC and dozens of other cities across the nation. Like clockwork, Biden managed to infiltrate race into a situation that has nothing to do with race.
What’s even more disturbing about Joe’s racially loaded comments is that most of them are either not logical or not true. During his New York speech, Biden moaned, “I said, Mom, why are all those kids, it was then called colored, why are all those COLORED KIDS in that bus?”
Here we go again. Sleepy Joe is a never-ending bombardment of boneheaded clips and spoken blunders. Sometimes we have to wonder if Joe is lying or if he is just so far out of touch that he can’t help it.
These fiasco happen invariably when he doesn’t have a teleprompter to use as a crutch or swerves off script. Both are ill-advised for this clown. So, what can we make of Joe’s cute little “colored kids” reference? Number one, it more than likely never actually happened.
Joe’s good at making up things that never really happen. He’s an expert fabricator of the truth. To clarify his odd reference, Joe talked about “Section 8 housing”. Let’s be clear. He waxed poetically about colored kids on a bus who lived in Section 8 Housing in Scranton, PA.
There’s only one problem with that analogy. When good old Scranton Joe lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Section 8 housing didn’t exist. It didn’t materialize until 1974, long after Scranton Joe became the “Delaware Dunce”. Biden is either a habitual liar, or he’s totally lost it.
Sometimes we’re not sure which. Nevertheless, these feeble attempts to make himself appear somehow all racially conscious are pitiful. Remember, please, that this man has a documented history of being more racist than any of those he’s accusing of being “Jim Crows”.
Even his chosen running mate gut-punched him on the Democrat primary debate stage. Kamala Harris fired off a barrage of racial accusations against her eventual boss. Harris nailed Biden’s history of support for segregation and school busing. It was a bad look for Joe.
But those aren’t the only incidents of Biden’s true “colors”. Biden once shrieked that he didn’t want his children to “grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle.” When it fit his narrative, Joe insisted his home state of Delaware supported the South during the Civil War.
Joe Biden has no clue what he stands for. His racial comments are tiresome and boorish. In fact, this constant racial narrative, one used by virtually every spoiled liberal, is like a broken record. We hear it over and over again. Everything is racist for them. It’s nauseating.
Don’t they realize the incessant repetitiveness makes the underlying lie even more obvious? These self-entitled elites scream for racial justice. But their policies create violent crime waves in minority communities. They stand on a soapbox and cry racism while making racism worse.
These blowhards insist that they support minority communities while they make the lives of these people worse. Joe Biden is really nothing but a racist old coot. Worst of all, like the constant racial narrative, he’s a tired old coot who America is growing wearier of by the day.
https://uafreport.com/daniel/biden-quickly-goes-full-racist-in-speech-that-liberals-would-have-crucified-trump-for/
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'JK Rowling is a gold-plated hero': Writer Anthony Horowitz blasts cancel culture and says writers are 'under siege' and should not be punished for expressing their views
Writers are ‘under siege’ from cancel culture and should be able to express their views ‘without the world falling in on you’, according to best-selling author Anthony Horowitz.
The man behind hit children’s book series Alex Rider and ITV series Foyle’s War said Harry Potter creator JK Rowling, who has been targeted by trans activists, was a ‘gold-plated hero’ who had done a lot for children’s literacy and charity.
Horowitz, 66, admitted that when writing a character who had a different ethnicity, sex or gender to his own he started ‘worrying’ what the reaction would be.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, the author also raised concerns about fellow novelist Sebastian Faulks’s statement in October, in which Faulks revealed he had left physical descriptions of female characters out of his latest novel.
Horowitz said: ‘There is a sense of writers under siege at the moment and that does bother me. JK Rowling is a gold-plated hero in the world who has done an enormous amount for children’s literacy and charity, and she is under attack.
'Writers must lead the agenda, not be cowed into following it. ‘You must be free to write what you want, and to express the views you want to express without the world falling in on you.’
Horowitz, who has also written for TV shows Midsomer Murders and Poirot and novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, admitted he got nervous about causing offence.
He said: ‘There are moments when I’m writing a character, who might be from a different ethnicity to mine, or a different sex or gender or background. I start worrying about what the reaction might be because it’s so unfathomable.’
Horowitz added: ‘That is scary because writers shouldn’t be following the agenda, they should be setting it. But that’s not happening any more.’
When Faulks talked about not describing women, ‘all writers have to begin to tremble’.
He said the comments were ‘extraordinary statements
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10483263/Anthony-Horowitz-blasts-cancel-culture-says-writers-siege.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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7 February, 2022
Workers of the World Unite, and the Left Hates It
The workers are uniting against government mandates and the left now calls it fascism.
What began as a GoFundMe campaign for Canadian truckers who lost their jobs due to COVID-19 mandates for cross-border travel turned into a massive “Freedom Convoy” that drove across Canada and into the capital, Ottawa.
Left-wing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dismissed the truckers as a “small fringe” with “unacceptable views.”
This is how Trudeau addressed the protest:
“I have attended protests and rallies in the past, when I agreed with the goals, when I supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues,” Trudeau said. “Black Lives Matter is an example of that. But I have also chosen not to go anywhere near protests that have expressed hateful rhetoric, violence towards fellow citizens, and a disrespect, not just of science, but of the front-line health workers, and quite frankly, the 90% of truckers who have been doing the right thing to put food on our tables.”
Let’s break this down.
Canada’s prime minister supports protests he agrees with. How brave!
Are we really to believe that the Black Lives Matter protests didn’t include “hateful rhetoric” and violence? They certainly didn’t practice social distancing or universal mask use when that was demanded by the capital “S,” science.
Unlike those “mostly peaceful” protests that ended up in many cases burning down large sections of cities, no arrests or police incidents have occurred so far as a result of the Freedom Convoy.
Trudeau concludes that these workers—the same ones he effusively praised in 2020—should just shut up, keep their heads down, and keep feeding us, even though many will be out of work and won’t be able to feed themselves because of his policies.
To double down on this remarkable rhetoric and leadership, Trudeau suddenly abandoned his country’s capital, citing “safety concerns,” and came to the United States.
All that honking was just too much.
Trudeau, who has been vaccinated and boosted, then tested positive for COVID-19.
The Canadian prime minister wasn’t alone in his lambasting of the truckers. The media, always eager to bring truth to power and all that, jumped in on the put-downs.
Media outlets portrayed the whole operation as some kind of dark, pernicious plot by deplorable people and sinister foreign actors. Some touted the high vaccination rates of Canadian truck drivers as evidence that this protest is somehow not genuine.
Is it so ridiculous to think that truck drivers are simply banding together as a sign of solidarity against what they see as an unjust mandate that affects fellow workers in their industry?
As videos of the convoy attest, this isn’t a small group. It’s thousands of trucks and tens of thousands of people. The line of trucks that drove into Ottawa was likely the longest convoy of vehicles ever. It was certainly one of the longest.
It’s a genuine outpouring of frustration from truckers who have worked to keep the economy and supply chain of their country, to say nothing of the global economy, moving in troubled times.
When countless people were able to switch to remote work and other arrangements when the pandemic began, these men and women stayed on the roads to make sure the necessities and comforts of life kept moving and got to where they were wanted and needed.
Again, Trudeau and many on the left acknowledged that until the truckers broke with the narrative.
What the protesters have received in response is derision from the Canadian government and sneering and smearing by media outlets.
A Washington Post cartoonist depicted the convoy with the word “fascist” drawn on the side of each truck. Everything the left doesn’t like is fascist, you see.
What’s notable about the left’s response to the Freedom Convoy is how it completely undermines the idea that the left is on the side of the worker.
Sometimes The Babylon Bee, the satirical website, really gets to the heart of a matter better with comedy than anything else.
The left has morphed into the political movement of an elite, global managerial class that believes it has the right to rule and govern in any way it sees fit.
It believes that any policy—no matter how repressive—that suits its cultural beliefs, tastes, and general political milieu must be made mandatory.
Opposition is inherently illegitimate as the left sees it.
And those who stand in opposition are not to be reasoned with. They are to be dismissed, ridiculed, bullied, and smashed into submission by the state and the Big Tech companies that do their bidding. Opponents deserve neither sympathy nor decency from the global movement of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But, as one trucker wrote for Newsweek, this movement in Canada is unlikely to fade. The truckers won’t stay quiet, and people are becoming aware that something is rotten in the heart of the presumably free societies of the Western world.
The petty tyrannies of a failed ruling class are becoming as difficult to ignore as the honking in Canada’s capital.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/02/workers-of-the-world-unite-and-the-left-hates-it
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Now We Know Why Capitol Police Won’t Release Any of Those 14,000 Hours of Jan. 6 Footage
The U.S. public is purposefully being kept in the dark about what actually happened on January 6. But it isn’t Donald Trump or his associates that stand in the way — it’s the Democrat-led Congress.
The Capitol Police are seeking to shut down a legal request for its communications and surveillance video on January 6, as was requested in connection with a Judicial Watch lawsuit.
The Congress that oversees the Capitol Police has blocked it from releasing the footage, because it is preposterously not in the “public interest,” nor is it a matter of “public record.” It is also claiming “sovereign immunity.”
The Speaker Pelosi-led House “has argued that the videos and emails are not public records, there is no public interest in their release, and that ‘sovereign immunity’ prevents citizens from suing for their release,” Judicial Watch pointed out.
On January 21, 2021, Judicial Watch issued a request for the following:
Email communications between the U.S. Capitol Police Executive Team and the Capitol Police Board concerning the security of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The timeframe of this request is from January 1, 2021 through January 10, 2021.
Email communications of the Capitol Police Board with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concerning the security of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The timeframe of this request is from January 1, 2021 through January 10, 2021.
All video footage from within the Capitol between 12 pm and 9 pm on January 6, 2021.
According to Judicial Watch, the Capitol Police provided the following rationale to the court for continuing to withhold the requested information:
The USCP’s camera security system, including footage recorded by it within the Capitol and sought by [Judicial Watch], is solely for national security and law enforcement purposes.
Access to video footage from the USCP’s camera security system is limited to narrow circumstances and strictly controlled by USCP policy.
The USCP has not made any public disclosures of video footage from January 6 from its camera security system.
There are currently pending criminal investigations and prosecutions of individuals involved in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
There are currently pending congressional investigations into the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Capitol Police’s excuse for not providing transparency to the public, more than one year after the highly controversial and politically consequential incident, did not satisfy Judicial Watch.
“In ‘the courts of this country’ – including the federal courts – the common law bestows upon the public a right of access to public records and documents … the Supreme Court was unequivocal in stating that there is a federal common law right of access ‘to inspect and copy public records and documents’,’ Judicial Watch wrote. “[T]he general rule is that all three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, are subject to the common law right. The right of access is a precious ‘common law right … that predates the Constitution itself.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton added: “The Pelosi Congress (and its police department) is telling a federal court it is immune from all transparency under law and is trying to hide every second of its January 6 videos and countless emails.”
“The hypocrisy is rich, as this is the same Congress that is trying to jail witnesses who, citing privileges, object to providing documents to the Pelosi rump January 6 committee,” he added.
The January 6 event is being weaponized by the Democratic Party ahead of the 2022 midterms, but the Congress it runs is simultaneously blocking the American public from fully knowing what actually happened. The partisan January 6 committee’s track record not one where it is making an honest effort to uncover the truth, but one where it is evidently trying to bury it.
https://trendingpolitics.com/now-we-know-why-capitol-police-wont-release-any-of-those-14000-hours-of-jan-6-footage-congress-is-blocking-it-knab/
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Black Lives Matter (BLM) Goes Quiet After Blue States Question Their Financial Activity
Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, nor do corrupt people become moral on their own, especially when millions of dollars are accessible for the taking.
The once-thriving social justice movement organization that uses the black community and angry white radical women to riot and drive donations, had another reality check knock on their organization’s door today.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) shut down all its online fundraising streams late Wednesday afternoon, just days after California threatened to hold the charity’s leaders personally liable over its lack of financial transparency. The donation button that used to be featured prominently on BLM’s website was nowhere to be found as of Wednesday evening.
The charity’s registration is also out of compliance in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The national Black Lives Matter organization, which has acted as domestic terrorists for the past 2 years, has received a massive amount of donations from far-left activists and WOKE corporations, leading to mounting evidence of corruption and self-enrichment in the top leadership.
In the spring of 2021, Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of BLM and a self-described Marxist, stepped down from the leadership after it was revealed that she had gone on a multi-million dollar home-buying spree. Her purchases include an affluent property in Topanga Canyon, CA. California.
Washington recently ordered BLM to cease all fundraising activities in their blue states due to the failure of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, to report information about its finances in 2020, the year it raised tens of millions amid the racial protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s killing.
“We take these matters seriously and have taken immediate action,” an unidentified spokesperson for Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation told the Washington Examiner. “We have immediately engaged compliance counsel to address any issues related to state fundraising compliance. In the interim, we have shut down online fundraising as we work quickly to ensure we are meeting all compliance requirements.”
The California Department of Justice told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that “BLMGNF is prohibited from soliciting donations so long as its status is listed as delinquent.” Despite the notice, the BLM accepted a $1 donation from a Washington Examiner reporter based in California on Wednesday morning.
Even though BLM also received notice from the state of Washington on Jan. 5 to “immediately cease” all fundraising activities in the state, the charity accepted a $1 contribution from a Washington resident on Tuesday.
So there you have it, folks, I think BLM’s days are numbered, or at the least, they will be forced to restructure in an attempt to remain open.
https://trendingpolitics.com/real-justice-black-lives-matter-blm-goes-dark-after-ca-demands-they-stop-taking-donations-ethom
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Wokeism Is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult
Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past.
Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness.
Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism.
But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is.
Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden.
Woke’s Victims
Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs.
Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity.
The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy.
They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.
We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences.
The packages thrown along the ground by thugs and gangsters represent, among other things, lost COVID-19 test results of the ill. Presumably, they unknowingly are waiting still by the window for the delivery of results that never arrive. The package in the dirt was, perhaps, a key tractor part eagerly awaited, in vain, by the broke farmer in the Central Valley. The mess included the life-saving medicines shipped to the sick that disappeared.
And our elected leaders did what in response? Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for using the insensitive word “gangs” to describe those who plunder, loot, and trash railcars.
Always In Search of Targets
It is a cruel thing to indoctrinate children with the lie that they are innately guilty of oppression due to their skin color. One accurate definition of racism is collective ill-treatment of an individual due to his innate appearance—on the pretext that such bias is deserved, given the target is deemed mentally, spiritually, or morally inferior because of said traits. But that, in a nutshell, is the essence of critical race theory: the destruction of all human traits and unique characteristics, as demonized individuals are reduced to stereotyped, faceless members of a collective.
For over a half-century, female athletes have sought to achieve parity in society’s attitudes to sports. Title IX forced universities to ensure rough equality for both female and male sports.
But the woke effort to redefine transitioning biological males as identical to biological women will assuredly destroy the life work of thousands of pioneer athletes.
Ironically, the sexist woke movement has allowed men to take hormones and undergo surgery to become females—even as their immutable skeleton frames, muscularity, or organ characteristics ensure an unfair and asymmetrical contest.
The lives of thousands of young female athletes will likely be diminished. Each sprinter, every swimmer, and all female pole-vaulters will now inevitably at some future date have a rendezvous with career implosion—defined by losing to a transgendered female/biological male.
Records are being rewritten, the very nature of individual women’s sports changed, and soon there will no longer remain an idea of “women’s sports” at all.
The Forgotten Broken Eggs of the Woke Omelet
The green wokeists postulate that they are saving lives by radical efforts to restrict gas and oil production, to raise fuel prices. They want to force Americans to buy high-priced alternative sources of wind- and solar-generated power and battery-powered cars. But away from the faculty lounge, millions of Americans are colder and less mobile this winter, paying far more to heat their homes and to drive to work.
Most of the woke climate change activists rarely see the poor trying to empty their purses to scrounge combinations of cash and credit cards to leverage over $100 to fill their cars’ gas tanks. Tesla drivers might be the architects of last year’s war on carbon fuels. But real-life victims pay for their piety—those who have no such options to buy high-priced electric cars.
For the cosmopolitan woke, the border is many things: a mere xenophobic construct, a racist barrier, a nationalist tic.
But the thousands who live near the Mexican border see their homes and farms overrun with drug traffickers—and during a pandemic thousands of unvaccinated and possibly sick illegal aliens. They suffer firsthand from daily violence as all security disappears.
For the American poor, who rely on government health clinics and state entitlements, the influx of thousands of illegal aliens into their communities becomes a zero-sum game. The more noncitizens put demands on such already oversubscribed services, the fewer citizens there are who will have access to quality care.
The woke lecture that colleges and universities must now go beyond their former de facto racial quotas for admissions and hiring, already mostly based on proportional representation and disparate impact. But now a sort of reparations system emerges. It is what the Left itself used to call in derision “overrepresentation.”
Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback. Again, it is the idea of making the current generation pay for the supposed sins of the long dead of centuries past.
Aside from the destruction of merit by the substitution of racial criteria, millions from a discarded generation will have doors slammed on their careers—simply because of the color of their skin. And they will never forget that.
The woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as, or more than, race. By doing so, they doom millions of poor white and Asian students, who managed in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores, from being admitted to top-tier schools. Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little.
Once a morally bankrupt society—for naïve, utopian, or ignoble reasons—begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to. And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans.
Power, Not “Equity,” Is the Creed
In sum, wokeness is not about kindness, equality, fairness, or morality.
It is the power agenda of the elite of all races. For differing reasons, they rig the game in their own interests, without a care about who suffers.
Rich white people assume that they possess the money, the influence, the networking skills, and the connections to navigate around the very exclusionary rules they make for others. For them, there are seldom costs. But they win apparent psychological gain at feeling spiritually superior while driving a Range Rover.
They get high on the sense of power they wield to engineer the lives of millions deemed less important than they. And to the degree they feel guilty about their own monopoly of wealth and leisure, such transient superficial remorse is alleviated by abstract caring for the “other.”
If they can ensure that 50 percent of TV commercials highlight African Americans, then they worry little about the nation’s existential crisis of 800 blacks murdered in Chicago this year. And no such television execs have a clue—or likely a concern—about how to stop it.
The woke take out a medieval contract that all their material indulgences can be balanced by virtue-signaling caring for the less fortunate—although always at someone else’s expense.
Woke = Wealthy Careerists
And for the millions of the affluent, elite nonwhite? The resurgence of racial obsessions conveniently destroys the old idea of class, even though now it is the far more precise calibration of inequality.
For all the woke talk about “constructs” of gender, race is somehow alone exempted and declared innate, definable, and immutable. One’s appearance becomes the permanent victimized refuge—even of NBA multibillionaires and billionaire rappers alike.
A Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren can desperately seek to leverage a career in becoming Native American, apparently as if they were almost trapped in their own white bodies. Yet they can still not manage to construct such assumed identities in the manner of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
If race is now the sole immutable barometer of who is a victim, who a victimizer, then LeBron James, Jay-Z, Kayne West, Chris Rock, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are always to be among the eternally oppressed. The enormous influence, power, status, and wealth they wield never negates their victimhood, despite a nation three generations into affirmative action.
In the immoral calculus of woke, the poor white or Southeast Asian offspring of poorly paid high-school dropouts constitute “the privileged.” And a multimillionaire racist like the TV anchorwoman Joy Reid claims to be the perpetual victim, not the inner-city African American retiree who in 2021 has lost local police protection.
No wonder the woke elite and the affluent leftists fixate on race, given they are now the ruling class. Otherwise, their own privilege would be the obvious target of the once-beloved “Revolution.”
So, they fear that by their own prior left-wing standards, they too could end up on the wrong side of their moral Maginot Line. Wokeism’s obsessions with ferreting out “white privilege” are a way for rich people to head off (so to speak) the fate of Marie Antoinette.
Totalitarian Wokeism
A final note. We know wokeism is both contrary to human nature and antithetical to democracy and constitutional government.
Without public support, it has instead embraced an entire array of cruel, Soviet, and Maoist means to achieve its own self-interested ends. Woke talk about “racists” eerily emulates Soviet boilerplate about “counterrevolutionaries.” Today’s wokeist spouts things that could come right out of the mouth of the novelist Boris Pasternak’s character Army Commissar Strelnikov, or Mao’s Little Red Book concerning “suppression of counterrevolutionaries.”
No wonder the woke, so-called “humanists” are the first to resort to Trotskyization and iconoclasm. They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring.
Wokeism’s logic is the eternal one of the bully Jacobin with his guillotine lists of the revolutionary unpure, the 19th-century lynch mob storming the frontier jail, the Red Guards hounding the counterrevolutionary, and the forced mental hospitalizations of the Soviet Union.
But above all, wokeism is a cruel cult—created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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6 February, 2022
GoFundMe bows to Trudeau and CANCELS the Freedom Truckers: Donation site refuses to return $9M
GoFundMe officially cancelled the Freedom Convoy fundraiser on Friday and plans to distribute the remaining $9million of donated funds to 'credible and established charities'.
The crowdfunding platform claimed the fundraiser - which raised $10million Canadian dollars ($8 million USD) in support truckers protesting against COVID-19 vaccine mandates - violated its terms of service 'which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment'.
'GoFundMe supports peaceful protests and we believe that was the intention of the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser when it was first created,' the company said in a statement released Friday evening.
'We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.'
GoFundMe issued a statement Friday night saying the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser violated its terms of service 'which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment
The decision comes one day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said a military response to the protests was 'not in the cards right now' and the House of Commons Public Safety and National Security Committee called on GoFundMe to detail how it would ensure donations weren't being used to promote extremism and hate.
Meanwhile, Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich announced Friday night that they have teamed up with GiveSendGo, another online platform, to continue raising funds for the truckers.
'GiveSendGo is going to to enable us to get donations into the hands of truckers much, much quicker,' she said in a video published by Rumble.
'If you can donate and help us keep these truckers going - we plan to be here for the long haul, as long as it takes to ensure that your rights and freedoms are restored.'
GoFundMe suspended the Freedom Convoy fundraiser for internal review on Wednesday after it had accrued more than $10million in donations.
The company had previously released $1million to organizers after they 'provided a clear distribution plan… and confirmed funds would be used only for participants who traveled to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest.'
The organizers claimed the funds would be used for expenses such as fuel, food and lodging, with any leftover donations being gifted to a 'credible Veterans organization which will be chosen by the donors.'
GoFundMe announced Friday they will no longer be releasing funds to the organizers because of 'how this situation has evolved'.
'No further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organizers,' the company statement read. 'We will work with organizers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers and verified by GoFundMe.'
The company said donors have until February 19 to request a refund.
Freedom Convoy organizers claim the protest began because of 'the federal government's restrictions on truckers' freedoms'
Trudeau and some of his his Liberal Party allies have accused the convoy demonstrators of extremism and racism, a charge that Lich strongly denied on Thursday.
'We are here out of love for our families, our communities and our nation. These past two years, the covid mandates have divided us,' she said in a statement.
'This protest began because of the federal government's restrictions on truckers' freedoms. Our movement has grown in Canada and across the world because common people are tired of the mandates and restrictions in their own lives that now seem to be doing more harm than good,' she added.
'We are therefore calling on all levels of government in Canada to end all covid mandates and restrictions. We will continue our protest until we see a clear plan for their elimination.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10478989/GoFundMe-cancels-Freedom-Convoy-distribute-9M-donations-charities.html
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Facebook in trouble
Facebook’s user base has shrunk for the first time in its 18-year history, with half a million users logging off in the last three months of 2021. For a company obsessed with growth — Facebook went from 1 billion monthly active users in 2012 to 2 billion by 2017 — a slowdown was inevitable but its unclear where the next crop of users are going to come from.
It’s not the first time Facebook has been challenged by a rival platform, or even by a new content format, but it was entirely unprepared for the short, rapid-fire videos and aggressive algorithms of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance. Last year the video platform became the first non-Facebook app to be downloaded more than three billion times, and analytics firm Apptopia dubbed it the most popular app of 2021.
TikTok is not that dissimilar to other social media, filled with paid product endorsements, web celebrities and viral trends, but it’s composed entirely of short video clips. As users flick through them, the algorithm learns their interests and uses it to serve more and more engaging videos. One person might get a lot of videos of quaint houses being built in forests, and another might get mostly cheap recipe “hacks”, but they both might get the latest comical dance trend.
TikTok has many imitators, including new offerings from Google, Snap and Meta itself, but none have managed to become as engaging. A core problem with these bolted-on imitators, like Facebook’s Reels, is that even if they do become popular the format doesn’t allow for the kind of ad revenue the traditional News Feed does.
They also don’t feel as natural. “Me personally, I’ll create a TikTok and then repost it on Instagram Reels, like the exact same video,” Cao says.
No wonder then that Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on the virtual world of the metaverse. Real life isn’t a lot of fun when you see $US31 billion ($43 billion) go up in smoke in a session.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/no-easy-fix-to-meta-meltdown-as-teens-log-off-facebook-20220204-p59tt6.html
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U.S. Imam: ‘Islamists Have The RIGHT To Take The Property Of Christians And Jews’
Yasir Hadh, a prominent American Imam and college professor was described in a 2011 New York Times Magazine essay as “one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam.”
Well, he just went on television to warn Christians and jews of what will happen to them if they do not convert.
Hadhi publicly said that Christians and Jews are the “filthy,”“impure,” and basically no different than “feces” and “urine.”
He claimed that “if [Christians and Jews] don’t [convert to Islam,] their life andproperty are halal [free for the taking] for the Muslims.”
https://theinformedamerican.net/u-s-imam-islamists-have-the-right-to-take-the-property-of-christians-and-jews-2/
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The year left-wing ideas came home to roost
2022 is proving to be the year in which progressives’ genius ideas come home to roost. Instituting far-left policies in cities across America has resulted in disastrous outcomes. All this raises the question: which Democrats will stay loyal to the far-left “transformational” agenda and which will jump ship?
Most liberal politicians have enjoyed this country’s tidal wave of wokeness up until now. Posting Instagram infographics and hash-tagging activism on Twitter plays well with younger voters.
Real news has become almost indistinguishable from the Babylon Bee’s satire. In a single day, you can read about snowplow equity, M&Ms becoming more inclusive and students identifying as cats. Say what you will about the perpetually offended, they certainly are entertaining.
But the left’s willingness to appease the insane whims of the most radical people in our country has also had serious consequences for public safety.
As dumb as the “Defund the Police!” slogan sounded back in May 2020, try promoting it now when the murder rate in this country is nearing a 25-year high.
In February 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced $120 million in cuts to her city’s police and sheriff’s department. Ten months later, she stood in front of a podium and declared that she was requesting more money from the city board of supervisors for the police. “And it comes to an end when are we more aggressive with law enforcement and less tolerant of all the bulls–t that has destroyed our city,” she said. While she did not admit that her own irresponsible policies had enabled said “bulls—t” to surge, her sudden about-face was admission enough.
The painful results of the Squad’s dreams coming true are hard for some politicians to ignore and rationalize. The senseless killings and organized robberies are bound to separate the men from the boys in the progressive movement.
But when it comes to talking the talk and walking the walk, there are a few stalwarts. The district attorneys in San Francisco and Manhattan are perfect examples.
In NYC, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “Day 1” memo decriminalized a range of crimes from trespassing to marijuana possession to prostitution. Charges were also reduced for a number of crimes, while sentences of life without parole were banned except in “exceptional circumstances.”
These soft-on-crime policies were at the forefront of Dominique Luzuriaga’s mind as she delivered a eulogy for her husband, NYPD officer Jason Rivera, on Friday.
Officer Rivera died in the line of duty while responding to a 911 call in Harlem on January 21.
Through tears, his widow said, “This system continues to fail us. We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”
It was a powerful rebuke of Bragg and even more so of the anti-police attitude that the left has encouraged for years.
In Los Angeles, a petition to recall progressive District Attorney George Gascón has just been approved. Many critics blame Gascón for a rise in crime thanks to his own lenient policies and bail reform.
But will all of this backlash fall on deaf ears?
Democrats are learning the hard way that these “catchy slogans” (as Obama once called them) and radical movements don’t just inspire puff pieces in the Washington Post. They lead to real crime and real hurt. We are going to find out very quickly which liberals were merely going along for the radical ride until the reality became too much to bear. Some politicians are already reversing course.
We are also going to find out which progressives are the true believers and stay the course. That might be the scariest discovery of all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/01/the-year-left-wing-ideas-came-home-to-roost/
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OnlyFans model facing prison time over revealing church photo
Not a great bottom. I've been behind better
An OnlyFans model is facing up to a year in jail after she showed off her naked bum by lifting up her dress outside a church.
The young woman, identified as Natalia Maslennikova and who goes by the online name 'Trikotasha', was photographed in the provocative pose outside a church in the Russian city of Kaluga.
Prosecutors confirmed they had "approved an indictment against a 26-year-old woman who, through her actions, committed public acts expressing clear disrespect for society and committed in order to offend the religious feelings of believers."
They said the action came about after the accused "posted naked photos against the backdrop of the Temple on her Instagram and Twitter pages on the social network" in July last year.
They added that the punishment can include up to a year in jail for the snaps, which were taken outside the Transfiguration Church in Kaluga.
In total, three snaps from the photo session were shared online. However, they were not widely picked up until they were suddenly highlighted by ultra-right-wing and anti-feminist movement blogger Vladislav Pozdnyakov.
He is the founder of the Male State group, which is regarded as an extremist organisation in Russia over its activities often targeting women online as well as businesses and minority groups.
He was even given a suspended sentence in 2018 for "actions aimed at humiliating human dignity in relation to women". The conviction was, however, later overturned.
Mayor says 'something wrong with her mind'
The investigation then followed in November, at the same time as Kaluga Mayor Dmitry Denisov condemned the stunt, but said he was not sure if prosecuting the young women who carry out such stunts was the right way forward, as it risked "getting the legal system bogged down".
He added: "I am sure there is definitely something wrong in their minds and souls. These girls could become caring mothers and loving wives."
https://au.yahoo.com/news/only-fans-model-facing-prison-time-over-revealing-church-photo-001534430.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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4 February, 2022
Naomi Wolf embraces reality
“The rest of the world, at least on the progressive side in the United States, became increasingly cult-like and insular in its thinking, since March of 2020.” At that time, “lifelong critical thinkers, journalists, editors, researchers, doctors, philanthropists, teachers, psychologists—all began to repeat only talking points from MSNBC and CNN, and soon overtly refused to look at any sources—even peer-reviewed sources in medical journals—even CDC data—that contradicted those talking points.”
That may sound like Tucker Carlson but—surprise(!)—it’s feminist author Naomi Wolf, in a January 9 essay headlined “Is it Time for Intellectuals to Talk about God?” In this 3,868-word cri de coeur, Wolf calls out “my people, my tribe,” all those “feminist health advocates” who were “silent in view of HHS warnings that the spike protein from mRNA vaccines may accumulate in the ovaries.”
These “luminaries of feminist health activism,” Wolf wrote, failed to speak out and “two or three of us who did were very visibly smeared, in some cases threatened, and in many ways silenced.” And this was all part of the “edifice of evil” now prevailing. As Blanche DuBois might say, this is not the feminist her readers have been expecting.
After graduating from San Francisco’s exclusive Lowell High School, Wolf moved on to Yale (B.A.) and Oxford (D.Phil.). In 1991, Wolf authored The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, praised by professional feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. That brand of feminism is the women’s auxiliary of the Left and hostile to women otherwise inclined, whatever their distinction. Consider, for example, Jeane Kirkpatrick, best chronicled in Peter Collier’s Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick was one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, among the first female tenured political scientists at Georgetown, and the first woman U.N. ambassador to hold cabinet rank. She also stood up to the all-male dictatorship of the Soviet Union, a Stalinist regime Friedan openly admired.
Gloria Steinem called Kirkpatrick a “female impersonator,” and Naomi Wolf once called her “a woman without a uterus,” though Kirkpatrick had three children. Since March 2020, Wolf has shifted her wrath to the feminists who once proclaimed “my body, my choice” but now support government mandates.
“Where were all the responsible feminist health activists,” Wolf wonders, “in the face of this global, unconsenting, uninforming, illegal experimentation on women’s bodies, and now on children, and soon, on babies?” People who had been “up in arms” about eating disorders and such, “were silent about an untested injection that was minting billions for Big Pharma; an injection that entered, according to Moderna’s own press material, every cell in the body, which would thus include involving uterus, ovaries, endometrium.”
For the Yale and Oxford alum, also the author of Misconceptions and Vagina, it’s more than a medical matter.
“This infection of the soul,” she writes, is “not even partisan.” It involves an abandonment of classical liberalism, the “sudden dropping of post-Enlightenment norms of critical thinking” Wolf also decries “this dilution even of parents’ sense of protectiveness over the bodies and futures of their helpless minor children, this acceptance of a world in which people can’t gather to worship, these suddenly-manifested structures themselves that erected this demonic world in less than two years and imposed it on everyone else.”
For Wolf, this “edifice of evil is too massive, too quickly erected, too complex and really, too elegant, to assign to just human awfulness and human inventiveness.” We are engaged in spiritual combat and stand in need of help from a Being, “better armed to fight true darkness than ourselves alone.” And even with that Wolf might be understating the forces of darkness we now face.
At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, controlled by China’s Communist Party, scientists deployed gain-of-function research to make viruses more transmissible, and more lethal. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, funded that research then lied about it. In early 2020, Fauci opposed President Trump’s ban on travel from China and recommended destructive lockdowns that caused untold suffering and loss.
During the AIDS crisis, Fauci authorized trials of the cytotoxic drug AZT on foster children in New York. Children are at low risk for COVID but Fauci wants to vaccinate them beginning in the first grade. Those children are also subject to racist indoctrination that teaches them to hate themselves and their country. If parents saw that as evil, it would be hard to blame them.
“The line separating good and evil,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discovered, “passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”
The line separating good and evil, Naomi Wolf now understands, does not divide progressive feminists from everybody else. Whitecoat supremacy is oppressive and also evil. In this spiritual combat, Naomi Wolf has proved herself a brave ally. To adapt Victor Laszlo in “Casablanca,” maybe this time our side will win.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13970&omhide=true&trk=title
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American swimming bosses have announced new rules after transgender swimmer Lia Thomas sparked controversy with her incredible results
Weak-kneed response
A transgender American swimmer’s controversial career hung in the balance on Thursday after the collegiate body governing the sport announced new rules, including testosterone limits, that could impact her ability to race competitively.
Lia Thomas has dominated US women’s college swimming as a student athlete at the University of Pennsylvania, where just a few years earlier she had competed on the men’s team.
Now, amid an uproar fuelled by anger among American conservatives who accuse Thomas of an unfair advantage, USA Swimming unveiled guidelines that do not mention the 22-year-old by name but will impact her swimming future — although exactly how remains unclear.
The policy said that because swimming is “an important vehicle for positive physical and mental health”, it remains committed to “greater inclusivity” at the non-elite levels of the sport.
For the elite level, however, the body said it created a new set of guidelines for transgender athlete participation that “relies on science and medical evidence-based methods to provide a level-playing field for elite cisgender women, and to mitigate the advantages associated with male puberty and physiology”.
USA Swimming said that a three-member panel comprised of medical experts and a veteran athlete was being established to implement the new policy and to rule on specific cases.
A key criterion the panel will look for is that “from a medical perspective, the prior physical development of the athlete as a Male, as mitigated by any medical intervention, does not give the athlete a competitive advantage over the athlete’s cisgender Female competitors”.
In addition, a swimmer is ineligible “unless the athlete demonstrates that the concentration of testosterone in the athlete’s serum has been less than 5 nmol/L (as measured by liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry) continuously for a period of at least 36 months before the date of Application”.
Doctors measure testosterone in nanomoles per litre (nmol/L). According to New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, the healthy range of testosterone in a woman is 0.5 to 2.4 nmol/L.
Thomas followed National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules and is eligible to swim, having undergone a year-long testosterone suppression treatment.
But some organisations, such as the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, have deemed these rules insufficient, especially in cases where an athlete has begun her transition after puberty.
The NCAA, which governs US college sports, said in January it would enforce rules set forth by USA Swimming, which has the authority to bar swimmers from competitions.
A swim meet for the Ivy League of mostly northeastern American colleges is scheduled for February, and the NCAA National Championships are in March.
Thomas said she began her transition in May 2019 with hormone replacement therapy — a combination of oestrogen and testosterone suppressants.
In early December, in Akron, Ohio, she recorded the best performances of the year at the university level, in the 200-yard (183m) freestyle (1 min 41.93 seconds) and in the 500-yard (457m) freestyle (4 min 34.06 seconds).
Her performances have renewed a long-running debate about the fairness of a transgender woman competing against biological females.
Members of the Penn swimming team and diving team issued a statement supporting their transgender teammate.
“We want to express our full support for Lia in her transition,” they said in the statement released late Tuesday, apparently after one teammate spoke out about Thomas.
“We value her as a person, teammate, and friend. The sentiments put forward by an anonymous member of our team are not representative of the feelings, values, and opinions of the entire Penn team, composed of 39 women with diverse backgrounds.”
https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/rules-change-after-transgender-swimmers-domination-sparks-uproar/news-story/f6d04ba5af2d9fb050e18674da7ed1ed
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Ottawa Police Chief Threatens to Call in Military on Freedom Truckers
Because his cops won't act
“Canada’s military may need to be deployed to clear Ottawa of protesters from the self-described ‘Freedom Convoy’ of truckers and their supporters opposed to coronavirus vaccine mandates,” WaPo reported, citing the city’s chief of police.
Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly said menacingly that “every single option” is being considered to end the “intolerable, unprecedented” protests against immoral vaccine mandates and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The police chief admitted that such extreme action would “come with massive risks.” But he added, without providing credible evidence, that “the range of illegal, dangerous and unacceptable activities is beyond the ability to list.” On Friday, Sloly demanded that the truckers “remain peaceful"
The coordinating actions are being taken to ensure that the draconian and effectively meaningless vaccine mandates remain in place. However, there are signs that the truckers’ pressure is working, as the Toronto Sun hinted in a pre-emptive denial regarding a story that the “anti-vaccine tax” that was being planned may soon be dropped.
A Canadian elected official in Ottawa deleted a tweet on how to target the millions of dollars raised to support the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers who are protesting the vaccine mandate.
https://trendingpolitics.com/ottawa-police-chief-threatens-to-call-in-military-on-freedom-truckers-every-single-option-is-on-the-table-knab/
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Offence archaeology
Here’s a delightful expression I have just encountered: ‘offence archaeology’. This is the practice of going through the social media history of a public figure to take offence at things they have said in the past. Many millions of social media users at one time or another have posted something about which someone, somewhere will be huffy. And, since the Internet is forever, you can bet an offence archaeologist is digging into it, particularly if you are a public figure.
According to the Urban Dictionary this involves: ‘Examining the digital past of a contemporary public figure to unearth any statements that might be offensive to the ruling class. These offences are best presented devoid of context or intent, which maximizes the potential for self-righteous virtue signalling among the people who are pretending to be outraged.’ And anyone who has ever posted on social media is a potential target.
The late Sir Roger Scruton was a distinguished English philosopher who specialised in traditional conservative views. He became a victim of offence archaeology after he was appointed to advise the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as the unpaid chairman of a new public body to champion beautiful buildings. The offence archaeologists—who are notably left-wing—began digging. Politically incorrect phrases were unearthed, torn from their original context, and passed around like a shame file. Sir Roger was also one of the most brilliant, articulate, and wide-ranging intellectual figures in the English-speaking world—a man of intelligence, sensitivity, and political courage. In the 1980s, he worked tirelessly and at great personal peril behind the Iron Curtain to help those fighting against the totalitarian jackboot of communist tyranny. Which made his attackers appear ridiculous to everyone but themselves. But where so many other victims of offence archaeology eventually apologise for past statements, Scruton did not, although he did resign from the body to which he had been appointed. Offence archeology wins again. That is the ugliness of the world in which we live.
The Economist ran an article about the over-use of the irritating word ‘like’, except that—strangely—the magazine didn’t seem all that irritated. The article made the point that ‘like’ is used by the younger generation as a ‘discourse particle’. That means it is just a small bit of language used to hold a sentence together. Which is fair enough. But it is the way it’s used that can become annoying. The so-called ‘Valley Girls,’ from the San Fernando Valley in California, are supposed to have started the craze by saying such things as, ‘It’s like five miles away…’ or ‘He’s like a consultant…’. Sometimes ‘like’ is used to introduce a quote. That gives us such deathless prose as, “She was like, ‘You can’t do that’, and I’m like, ‘Yes, I can’”. (That use of ‘like’ was popularised in Australia by the character of Kylie Mole played by Mary-Anne Fahey on The Comedy Company.) It is sometimes thought to go back to the Beatnik era of the late 1950s and early 1960s — the days when Maynard G. Krebbs, played by Bob Denver on The Doby Gillies Show, was saying things along the line of, ‘Like, wow, man’.” All of us use discourse particles from time to time such as ‘so’, ‘but’, ‘then’ and others. The problem with like is that it appears to be the only discourse particle the younger generation knows and so it is like used over and over and over again. I suspect they’ll grow out of it as they grow older.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/01/aussie-language-44/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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3 February, 2022
Israeli policies against Palestinians amount to apartheid, Amnesty International report says
There have been better replies to this nonsense than I can give but think I should note that there IS a lot of apartheid in the Middle East. Most Arab countries have official discriminatory policies against non-Muslims. That is where the real apartheid lurks. All inhabitants of Israel, by contrast, have equal rights under Israeli law.
It is true that Arabs in Erez Israel suffer hardships in various ways but such problems are self-inflicted. Israel has to protect its people from the actively hostile attitudes to Jewish Israelis that are common among Palestinians. Israel has had to deal with murderous attacks from Israeli Arabs so wall-building and other measures have been imposed
Amnesty International has accused Israel of subjecting Palestinians to a system of apartheid founded on policies of "segregation, dispossession and exclusion".
The London-based rights group said its findings were based on research and legal analysis in a 211-page report into Israeli seizure of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer of people and denial of citizenship.
Amnesty argued those measures, as well as restrictions on Palestinian movement in Israeli-occupied territory, underinvestment in Palestinian communities in Israel, and preventing the return of Palestinian refugees, created a system of "oppression and domination" over Palestinians.
"We didn't come to this conclusion lightly," Amnesty's director for the Middle East and North Africa Heba Morayef said.
"What that means is that Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group, and they are kept that way."
Mr Morayef said Amnesty International spent four years forensically researching the report based on Israeli policies, documents and directives.
The report is the second by an international rights group in less than a year to accuse Israel of pursuing a policy of apartheid, after Human Rights Watch came to a similar conclusion in April.
Previously Israel has been accused of apartheid in occupied Palestinian territory, but the scope of this report goes further and includes any Palestinian anywhere in Israel.
The report drew a swift and sharp rebuke from Israel, which said the report "consolidates and recycles lies" from hate groups and was designed to "pour fuel onto the fire of anti-Semitism".
"This report crosses the line because it undermines the existence of the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people," Lior Haiat, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, told the ABC.
"This is a pure anti-Semite report," he added.
In a statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said: "Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy committed to international law and open to scrutiny." He added that the country had a free press and a strong Supreme Court.
"I hate to use the argument that if Israel were not a Jewish state, nobody in Amnesty would dare argue against it, but in this case, there is no other possibility," he said.
On the other hand, the report drew praise from Palestinians.
Bassam Al-Salhe, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said it "confirms and supports the long-standing Palestinian position towards the nature of the Israeli occupation measures. It reflects the real status on the ground."
Israel has cited security concerns in imposing travel restrictions on Palestinians, whose uprising in the early 2000s included suicide bombings in Israeli cities.
Palestinians seek a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital. Gaza, a tiny coastal strip that Israel also took in 1967 but left in 2005, is run by Hamas, considered by the West to be a terrorist group.
Israel and Egypt have imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza since 2007.
The last round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014.
Amnesty said the UN Security Council should impose an arms embargo on Israel for killing scores of civilians during weekly protests on the border with Gaza in 2018-19.
Israel has said those protests included attempts by Palestinian militants to breach its border fence.
Amnesty also called on the International Criminal Court to consider the accusation of apartheid in its investigation into possible war crimes committed by both sides during several bouts of conflict in the Palestinian territories.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-02/amnesty-international-accuses-israel-of-system-of-apartheid/100797384
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French journalist, 34, is given police guard over her report on radical Islam in town where shops sell FACELESS DOLLS, restaurant has cubicles for women to eat and Muslim who spoke out was threatened with beheading
Poisonous Islam in metropolitan France
A French journalist has been given police protection after fronting a documentary about the impact of radical Islam on a poor town in the north of the country.
Ophélie Meunier, 34, has received death threats in the wake of documentary Zone Interdite - or 'Restricted Zone - that aired in France on January 23 looking at the influence of hardline Islamic views in the town of Roubaix, on the Belgian border.
Meunier found a restaurant where women are given cubicles to eat away from men, and a toy shop selling faceless dolls to comply with strict interpretations of Islam that forbid depicting facial features.
She also spoke to Amine Elbahi, 26, a Muslim lawyer from Roubaix who helped expose an educational institution that received £53,000 of public money to teach poor children, but was accused of spreading Islamic teachings instead.
Elbahi spoke out against the influence of radical Islam in the film, and has now been branded an 'infidel' and threatened with beheading. He is also under police guard.
News that the pair have been threatened has caused outcry in France, where many feel the secularism on which the modern-day republic was founded is under threat from religious ideologies brought in by overseas migrants.
Emmanuel Macron, a centrist who is gearing up to fight a presidential election in April where he is likely to face off against a right-wing challenger, has been accused of being soft on immigration and of failing to defend French values.
Eric Zemmour, a far-right commentator and Macron rival who has twice been convicted of hate crimes for statements about Islam, was quick to align himself with Meunier after it emerged she had been threatened.
'Ophélie Meunier is in mortal danger,' he tweeted on Saturday, as the documentary began garnering widespread attention.
'This is what happens when you show the French the Islamization of our country. Millions of patriots thank her for her courage.'
Valerie Pecresse, another right-wing challenger to Macron, tweeted: 'Full support for ?Ophélie Meunier? threatened and placed under protection after the courageous investigation on Islamism.'
In a clip shared on Zone Interdite's official Twitter page ahead of the release of the full documentary, specialist in radical Islam Professor Bernard Rougier holds the faceless dolls and teddy-bears as he explains: 'It's a way to show that from childhood, you will be a better Muslim than others, and implies, others are not good or true Muslims.
'And so it is the introduction of an ideological principle into the world of childhood... in that sense it is quite worrying, yes.'
The hidden-camera footage shows the undercover reporter going into the shops selling the dolls, which also offer books with the same imagery.
A Muslim lawyer from Roubaix, Amine Elbahi, who spoke out about radical Islam in the programme, has also been placed under police protection after saying he was threatened with decapitation.
Mr Elbahi, 26, appears in several sequences of Zone Interdite - translating to Restricted Zone - which aired on the private French TV channel M6.
He has told French news channel BMFTV that his phone number circulated on social media, and 'several murder calls were broadcast'.
'I am threatened with beheading, slitting, attacking me because I held a speech of truth with my face uncovered, and in particular on the inaction of the mayor of my commune', he said.
'What I said upset people. Given the threats I am receiving my aim must have been right.'
Books for sale in the toy shop in Roubaix included titles such as 'who is Allah?' and 'Zayd, the little prince' which also featured faceless depictions of human characters
But interpretations of Hadith and what exactly constitutes a depiction likely to attract worship vary widely between different branches of Islam and between scholars and clerics.
The most hardline interpretations teach that any depictions of humans are haram - or forbidden. In Afghanistan, clerics recently declared shop mannequins to be haram and ordered that they be beheaded so as to remove the faces.
And during ISIS's 2014 conquest of vast areas of Syria and Iraq, fighters were often seen defacing religious monuments of other Islamic sects which they believed to be idolatrous.
But others take a more-relaxed view.
Shia Muslims, who ISIS and other extremists view as apostates, sometimes depict Husayn - grandson of Mohammed - though not the prophet himself.
Mr Elbahi tipped off the criminal investigation into Roubaix-based 'association' featured in the programme by M6, Ambitions et Initiatives pour la Réussite (Ambitions and Initiatives for Success).
His lawyer, Mr Jean Tamalet, says that Mr Elbahi received threats on social media, particularly on Twitter, but also texts, WhatsApp messages, and voice recordings.
In the threatening messages, he is described as 'Kafir', which translates to 'nonbeliever' or 'infidel' in Arabic.
'Kafir' has been a word used by supporters of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other Islamic extremist groups, to refer to 'Muslim and non-Muslim adversaries' through 'various propaganda materials', according to the Counter Extremism Project.
Lawyer Jean Tamalet told AFP: 'He is told that he is going to be beheaded and slaughtered. We won't let a single threat pass.
'We will file a complaint against anyone threatening this gentleman.'
Three members of the charity association, which received the council payout of €64,640, accused by prosecutors as being used for offering Islamic education, are to appear in court alongside the mayor of Roubaix on Wednesday.
French legislation states that public bodies are prohibited from contributing to religious charities, a law which is designed to uphold the secular values and views of the state.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10459219/French-journalist-police-protection-documentary-radical-Islam.html
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Affirmative action has not helped us one bit
Affirmative action should be done away with once and for all, Pastor Brooks says
CHICAGO – On the 72th day of his 100-day rooftop vigil to build a community center designed to provide opportunities for his community, Pastor Corey Brooks wished to share his thoughts on the two affirmative action cases pending before the Supreme Court.
What follows has been lightly edited. We strongly encourage you to watch the accompanying video so you may hear the pastor in his own words:
Today, I want to talk about a controversial topic: affirmative action. And I know some of you are asking, "what the heck does affirmative action have to do with my community?" Well, I'm here to tell you, a whole lot.
Right now, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging admissions policies, one involving Harvard and the other involving the University of North Carolina. I'm not going to go into all the details of both cases because that is not the point of this Rooftop Revelation. But both cases generally ask if racial preferences can be used in college admissions. My answer is a simply flat out no.
For those of you wondering, no, I have never used affirmative action. I've never benefited from it. I'm one of those folks in the 2019 Pew Research Center poll that found that 62% of blacks said that race should not be used in college admissions. We all know it's a sham. I'm proud that I got to where I am because I worked hard and gave it all that I had. I know that many of my fellow brothers and sisters feel the same way.
My problem with affirmative action is that it helps nobody in our community. Our schools are so bad that even our smartest students struggle to get the education that they rightfully deserve.
What bothers me about affirmative action is that it is essentially the government saying, "we will help you when you're 18. You can struggle from pre-K to 12th grade in a crappy school, and we will not help you. But when you apply to college and turn 18, we are here to help you."
How in the world does that make any sense at all? We're so far behind in this neighborhood that it's not funny. When they graduate 12th grade, some [students] are really at ninth grade levels [or worse]. So we give them affirmative action, and all of a sudden, our students are years behind in college.
Many of these students aspire to be doctors or scientists. They choose those majors in college, but many simply cannot compete with students from other schools and what happens? They drop out or they switch to easier majors.
Why are we doing this? We could have easily had those same students take a slower path upward, community college, state college and then graduate school. Let them catch up. Let them keep their dreams.
Several years ago, I saw a documentary called "How Jack Became Black." (Full disclosure, Rooftop Revelations producer Eli Steele made this film.) What struck me about the documentary is that it explained that the original purpose of affirmative action. The original purpose was to go into poor, underdeveloped communities and provide better teachers, better funding, a pathway to opportunities. The problem was that this development would take time, though.
University presidents wanted blacks on their campus now so they [could] show diversity, and they switched from the original purpose of affirmative action to racial preferences. They wanted blacks no matter what. They wanted blacks no matter where they came from, and the ugly truth is that most blacks that benefited were middle to upper class blacks, not the blacks from this neighborhood.
So affirmative action has not helped us one bit.
Here's an even uglier truth. The top colleges in America are fighting over a small pool of very talented black applicants who could have gotten into colleges on their own. These colleges had no interest in development. They wanted the quick, easy fix. They wanted to look good and brag about how many blacks they had on campus. It's simply tragic. Tragic. We need better schools, not affirmative action. We don't need handouts anymore.
The Bible says you reap what you sow. Because our nation chose the path of racial preferences, we're now in a racial war of sorts. What bothers me about these lawsuits is how they discriminate even against Asians. I've been discriminated against, and I would not wish that on any person, not even my worst enemy.
Why in the world would they discriminate against Asians that have worked hard and paid their dues? What kind of America are we becoming?
See, what I'm getting at [is that] affirmative action is poisonous because it uses race as its primary principle. This has allowed Americans to overlook underdeveloped black communities. This has allowed Americans to discriminate against Asians simply because they look different, the color of their skin.
This is why we need to do away with affirmative action for once and for all. And if we do, then we will have nothing between us and our problems. We won't have the lies. We won't have the lies, the lies, the lies of affirmative action to hide behind.
The problems will be all naked and right in front of us. We will have to address them for once and for all. And that is why I support banning affirmative action.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rooftop-revelations-affirmative-action-has-not-helped-us-one-bit
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Company Loses 40,000 Customers After CEO Called All Republicans “Racist”
Over the last couple of years, there has been a growing number of companies who have gone woke and it usually leads to more problems than benefits.
Too often they think that this is a good thing and that they’re on the right side of history by standing with liberals who live in a fantasy world of what they want to believe is true.
I genuinely hope that all businesses that go woke and treat people who don’t agree with them poorly would go out of business. I mean that with every fiber of my being.
If they want to embrace hateful behavior and speech, I want them to lose that business because that’s not how you become successful. I don’t care if it’s a liberal company not serving “cis” men, or a conservative business not serving black people. Both are hateful and ignorant.
However, this is basically what one company in Wisconsin did and now they are suffering majorly for it.
Last month, Penzeys Spices CEO Bill Penzey sent out an email in which he called all Republicans racists.
“Remember how Republicans, going against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, once again lied and said BLM wasn’t a peaceful movement but instead terrorists inciting violence throughout the country and then raced out to buy a crapload of guns because maybe they were finally going to get their chance to sh**t a Black person? What a bunch of racists,” the email said.
Penzey also claimed that the Republican Party “does everything it can to make it harder for Black people to vote.”
As a result, the company lost 40,000 subscribers instantly which makes up approximately 3% of their base. I think more will unsubscribe as more people learn about this as well.
Now the company is begging customers to purchase gift cards in order to try and save their sinking ship.
Some people are just idiots. Why would you alienate half of your customers? It’s a stupid thing to do from a business standpoint.
It just goes to show you how far from reality these liberals really are. They honestly live in a world of delusion where they have convinced themselves of what we are as conservatives regardless of our words and actions.
https://uafreport.com/daniel/they-had-it-coming-company-loses-40000-customers-after-ceo-called-all-republicans-racist/
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The rise of the new autocracy
Taki -- at Gstaad
Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with talking about privilege is that the discussion goes around in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than about the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question to my son’s friends. There were no straightforward answers.
Let’s face it, privilege is so enjoyable that the beneficiaries are mostly seen as undeserving, spoilt lightweights — by the underprivileged, that is. Envy has always been around, as has the urge to take away wealth from those not seen as having earned it. After the defeat of communism, socialism has become the goal, and a war against the affluent is being waged, led by the American mainstream media and academia. In this, hacks and academics are aided and abetted by Silicon Valley freaks who pose as humanity’s saviours rather than acknowledging that they are among those reaping the benefits of economic inequality.
My son’s friends’ answers did not surprise me. They were all in their late thirties, well off, educated and girl-crazy. And they kept it very light: ‘Privilege means an immense pressure to be incredibly charming and funny. I don’t think the strain is sufficiently recognised,’ said one charming Italian. A Frenchman decided that privilege is literally being above the law. A Monaco resident said: ‘An American once told me he’d be able to perform wonders with my name,’ and that was the last time he spoke to Jeffrey Epstein. The response I liked most came from an Italian, a noble one at that, Raimondo Gaetani, nephew of a great friend of mine who is no longer with us: ‘The bottom line is that no one does anything worthwhile with their privilege.’ The dinner deteriorated as we all got pissed, and one youngster proclaimed to this privileged group that ‘if someone has slept rough for the last six months, he is a bum’. But the response that intrigued me was the one I got when I rang Austrian Countess St Julien-Wallsee, who happens to be my daughter: ‘I have two screaming children and a large freezing house and no time for your mind games.’
OK, enough already, as they say in the Bagel. Personally I don’t care to comment on privilege because I see it as the luck of the draw. Some are born ugly and others beautiful, some weak and others strong, some smart and some dumb; Lady Luck is to blame. But is there luck involved when it comes to who among us reaps the benefits of our economic system? The left screams to high heaven that the dice are loaded in favour of the few. Serious people know otherwise. Enterprise and hard work will almost always win, even under communism or African dictatorships. The trouble is that envious lefties depict enterprise and success as privilege. When was the last time you saw a movie where the rich character was a goodie?
Never mind. It gets better. Those who are lucky enough to inherit must be listed as the baddies. At least according to a hack writing in the Bagel who categorised them as the ‘ostentatious bad rich’, as opposed to the ‘good rich’ who earned their moolah. From experience, I can state that it is the other way round: ostentation is a mark of the nouveau riche. Economic disparity exists everywhere, nowhere more so than in China, Russia and the United States. Which brings me to the point I’m trying to make.
In the January issue of the best monthly in America, The Spectator World, our very own Dominic Green has come up with a real winner. An article by Joel Kotkin signalling the end of democracy really hit home (read it at www.spectator.co.uk/endofdemocracy). Unlike the ludicrous Bagel Times, which lures readers via envy — by playing on a fabricated sense of victimhood on the part of the not so rich — Kotkin points out that very few multi-billionaires — down to 26 from around 400 five years ago — own half of the world’s assets. The writer calls it the end of democracy, and I agree. The digital economy is 90 per cent controlled by a few overlords and ‘curates’ the news. Small businesses are disappearing, including nearly half of all black-owned enterprises. According to Kotkin, climate-change policies will nurture the new autocracy, with huge opportunities for mega-billionaires such as Elon Musk and the three witches, Dorsey, Bezos and Zuckerberg.
The new policy of ‘degrowth’ will hit the poor and enrich the already mega-rich. In no time, surveillance technology will make us westerners more like our Chinese cousins. Big Brother is here and he’s staying. While fools like the Bagel Times and the networks are forever chasing non-existent racists, our digital elites are anointing themselves as our masters, deciding what news we are allowed to read and hear, as they cement their powers. The green economy that is being shoved down our throats does not have the technology to sustain it. But the Silicon Valley oligarchs are fixing the news in order to achieve their top-down progress.
Although I am what the French call ‘parti pris’, I think this is the most important and revealing article I’ve read since the Rolling Stones still had their own teeth. The freaks are pulling a number on us while we sit around discussing privilege. We’ll still be talking about it when the freaks have got us exactly where they want us.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/01/high-life-134
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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2 February, 2022
Why America is dangerously polarised — and Europe is not
I think this article outlines a genuine difference -- but the author mainly describes it rather than explaining it.
And I think it is rather clear why Europe is different: Leftists have won there. In America conservatives are still fighting
Contrast two leaders. Donald Trump’s approval ratings barely budged during his presidency, and his supporters dismissed every scandal as “fake news”. But when Boris Johnson turned out to have doubled as a party host during lockdown, his supporters fled: his net favourability rating went from +29 per cent in April 2020 to -52 per cent last week, according to pollsters YouGov.
Here, in microcosm, is the uniqueness of American polarisation. People often discuss polarisation as a global problem, but in fact, in most western European and even Latin American democracies, rival camps aren’t deeply entrenched or always entirely serious.
Western polarisation peaked between 2016 and 2018, with the victories of Brexit, Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the violent clashes over Catalan independence, and the entry of the anti-system Five Star and nativist League into Italy’s government.
Today the US remains dangerously polarised — more like Turkey or India than western Europe. Among Republicans in particular, ethnic, religious and ideological identities are often perfectly aligned. Many believe God supports their party. Egged on by Trump, they fear their tribe is under existential threat. In a survey by George Washington University, most Republicans said, “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it”. They have enough firearms.
The US is also handicapped by its constitution, which among other things has made the Supreme Court — arguably the country’s mightiest political institution, given congressional gridlock — a past-winner-takes-all prize. (Poland has a similar problem.) The step back from democracy is short in the US, since southern states impeded many black people from voting until the late 1960s.
But western Europe is tamer. Divides are deep, but most of its citizens just aren’t very interested in political issues and cannot stay angry about them for years on end. Europe’s history is about forgetting past polarisation, or else Finland would still be brooding over its 1918 civil war and the heads of Protestants would be hanging from the gates of French towns.
Today’s British depolarisation is a case in point. Most Leavers celebrated victory in the Brexit referendum less as a revolution than as a sort of football match: “You lost, get over it!” They don’t believe God wants Brexit. Nor do Leavers lie awake at night afraid that Remainer hordes will slaughter them in their beds. Indeed, these labels are peeling off as Brexit loses salience and drifts into impenetrable negotiations over something called Article 16. Last year, Britons conducted more Google searches for Aston Villa Football Club than for Brexit.
Helpfully too, most elected leaders other than Trump seek to reduce tension. Democracy is a conflict-management system that usually tends towards tedium. Chile’s new leader, Gabriel Boric, promises to be “president of all Chileans”. In Spain, prime minister Pedro Sánchez has lowered temperatures over Catalan independence by pardoning nine jailed separatist leaders. In Barcelona recently, I noticed far fewer Catalan flags than before hanging from apartment balconies.
Sánchez had another motive for his pardons. He wanted Catalan parties to back his other policies. The need to build coalitions is a force for unity in many European democracies. In Italy, the League and Five Star now sit in Mario Draghi’s technocratic government. Some polarising parties such as Eric Zemmour’s in France or Vox in Spain still try to identify society’s faultlines and then sit on top of them, but they attract few followers — many of whom understand that there’s no risk of these outfits ever taking power, and just want a bit of excitement. Mathieu Lefevre, director of the anti-polarisation NGO More in Common, warns that there’s more danger of certain societies sliding into apathy than of electing extremists.
One thing holding European societies together is that most people still get their news from state broadcasters. In Britain, nearly 100 per cent of adults use the BBC every month. People moan about BBC news, but most of them trust it. When scandals broke around Johnson, hardly anybody said it was all just “fake news”. Even in Brazil, many of Bolsonaro’s supporters see him clearly: his poll ratings collapsed after he mishandled Covid-19. Anti-system politicians outside the US generally pay a price for misrule.
There’s a broader lesson here. Pundits often extrapolate from the US case, whereas in fact it’s an outlier among western democracies. Its polarisation, filter bubbles and economic inequality are unusually bad. Yet because international debate is disproportionately driven by anglophone media and academics at US universities, we sometimes end up discussing American problems as if they afflicted the whole developed world.
Instead, in a new version of American exceptionalism, we should recognise the US as a special case, and make plans to cope should its democracy collapse.
https://www.ft.com/content/5655ab7c-1152-414e-bd22-67acd06c5c51
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What’s Driving the Witch Hunt Against Joe Rogan
If you were to conjure an archnemesis for leftists, you probably wouldn’t think it would be Joe Rogan.
After all, Rogan, who hosts an insanely popular podcast, is hardly some Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh clone. He endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2020. He openly talks about using marijuana.
And while he seems to think it’s a little unfair for biological women to have to compete against biological males in women’s sports, Rogan otherwise appears to hold the usual liberal pro-LGBT views.
The comedian also has a long track record in Hollywood—not exactly a safe space for conservatives—due to his career as a “Fear Factor” host, among other gigs.
But apparently none of that is enough to offset his fatal flaw: Rogan is interested in finding out what’s true.
How dare he.
Now, for the crime of talking to those who don’t endorse “right think” on COVID-19, Rogan, whose podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” reportedly averages around 11 million listeners, is apparently unfit for polite society.
Singer-songwriter Neil Young, who apparently missed the memo that rock ’n’ roll is about fighting The Man and not helping The Man squash others, said either Rogan’s podcast was kicked off Spotify, the platform that exclusively hosts Rogan, or he wanted his music off.
Rogan’s crime? Spreading “misinformation” on COVID-19. Spotify, to its credit, took down Young’s solo music.
But others, seeking to prove their leftist bona fides, jumped on Young’s bandwagon. Fellow singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell also demanded her songs be removed, and Brene Brown, a popular researcher and author who has two exclusive podcasts with Spotify, announced she wouldn’t be releasing new episodes “until further notice.”
Prince Harry and Meghan, duchess of Sussex, who have a Spotify deal that thus far has resulted in one podcast episode in 2020, also wrung their hands, with a spokesperson for their foundation agonizing over the “all too real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on [the Spotify] platform.”
So what, you ask, is Rogan doing? Is he saying that taking a COVID-19 vaccine will reduce your lifespan by 10 years? Is he claiming that COVID-19 hasn’t killed anyone? Is he advocating COVID-19 patients be sent to nursing homes to infect other elderly people? (Oh whoops, sorry, that last one was former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.)
No, here’s Rogan’s real crime: He’s listening to people besides the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In recent weeks, Rogan has hosted doctors Peter McCullough and Robert Malone on his podcast. But as Rogan notes in a video he posted to Instagram on Sunday, both men, while perhaps wrong on certain matters, are hardly random idiots ranting about something they can’t comprehend.
“Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history,” Rogan says. “Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology, and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to mRNA vaccines.”
Furthermore, if we’ve learned anything in the past two years, it’s that the science is so not settled when it comes to COVID-19. As my colleague Mary Margaret Olohan ably documented, plenty of claims made by the “right people” about COVID-19 ended up being untrue in the long run:
Or as Rogan himself says in his Instagram video: “The problem I have with the term misinformation, especially today, is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact.”
He continues:
Like, for instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘If you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID,’ you’d be removed from social media—they would, they would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact.
If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,’ you would be banned from social media. Now that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN.
If you said, ‘I think it’s possible that COVID-19 came from a lab,’ you’d be banned from many social media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.
Preach it.
Spotify and Rogan have agreed to start slapping a disclaimer on certain COVID-19 episodes he does, telling the listener to talk to their own doctor and advising if the interviewee holds controversial views.
It’s a disappointing concession. Where is the pressure for CNN to have disclaimers? What about advisories before Fauci interviews? (Plus: If the real goal here is to persuade more people to get a COVID-19 vaccine, you’re more likely to achieve that by engaging in open debate, not by silencing alternative views.)
But it’s certainly better than Spotify deplatforming Rogan. There are already too many examples of Big Tech censorship, whether it’s Twitter and Facebook banning President Donald Trump or Amazon refusing to sell Ryan T. Anderson’s book on transgenderism.
I’ve dabbled in listening to Rogan’s podcast over the past couple years or so. It’s not without its irritations: I could do without ever hearing Rogan talk about the theory of comedy again, and it’s clear his live-and-let-live notions of morality don’t really jibe with my own views.
But here’s what I do appreciate about the podcast: Rogan is a true journalist. He’s skeptical, he’s questioning. In his long episodes, he’s clearly thinking out loud at points.
He asks his producer, who he refers to as “Young Jamie,” to fact-check certain claims in real time. And in a world where everyone, from the politicians to the person who needs a job to support his family, is terrified of being canceled, Rogan is hosting long, wide-ranging interviews where people are talking seriously, frankly, and honestly.
That’s a real risk to take, for both Rogan and his guests.
It’s an act of courage—and it’s something that threatens leftists everywhere. Because if people are allowed to think freely, they won’t embrace leftism.
“I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations with them,” Rogan says on Instagram, adding: “Whenever I get something wrong, I try to correct it because I’m interested in telling the truth.”
“I’m interested in finding out what the truth is,” he continues. “And I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions.”
The fact that those views make Rogan an archvillain doesn’t say anything new about the left. But it does say something very troubling about the state of our country in 2022.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/31/whats-driving-witch-hunt-against-joe-rogan-on-spotify
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Covid restrictions and other overreach bring America toward a libertarian moment
The rising fear among American conservatives since the early days of the Covid pandemic has been that the nation would emerge from the crisis significantly less free.
It’s an unease rooted in the historic reality of one of the most powerful laws of human governance: the ratchet effect. Once introduced, rules almost always get more expansive, seldom more limited. Taxes levied for a temporary exigency become perpetual obligations. Government agencies built to administer some specific function are absorbed into the permanent bureaucracy.
When a crisis is over, authorities may relinquish some of the powers they assumed during the emergency, but you can be sure that the government’s writ will run permanently larger than before. Wars, depressions, public-health emergencies lead to bigger government, more rules, more-onerous regulations.
You can see the pattern again as we approach the second anniversary of the pandemic: officials musing publicly about permanent mask mandates, blue-state leaders who evidently have no intention of lifting restrictions, public-health professionals seeking to extend their ambit even as the crisis wanes. Leading Democratic politicians continue to insist on their “Build Back Better” proposition — that what we have learned these past two years has been the essential role of new trillion-dollar government programs to cushion society from its ills.
Worst of all, the authoritarian instinct this time has reached deeper into the once-sacred field of free speech, and we have the marginalizing and even outright ostracizing of heretics who dare challenge the authorities’ narrative. When elderly rockers who once thought of themselves as rebels believe it’s their responsibility to banish “misinformation” from major entertainment platforms, you know the controlling impulse has burrowed its way deeply — perhaps permanently — into the culture.
But let’s indulge a radical thought for a moment. What if the opposite is true this time? What if the ratchet slips, and rising popular hostility to arbitrary, petty, overbearing and ineffective rules induces a popular backlash? Isn’t it possible that the inconsistency, arrogance and mendacity of the people attempting to order our lives will produce the opposite of their desired outcome?
It’s too soon to call this a libertarian moment. Some conservatives of a populist bent are themselves embracing the supposed opportunities of bigger government. But we seem at least to have reached a point where doubts about the wisdom of growing state control are salient.
We have seen it most powerfully at the political level in Virginia, which holds statewide elections the year after the presidential vote. Voters explicitly rejected the attempt to make their children wards of the state, and the new Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, is in a classic struggle with overweening bureaucrats desperate to maintain their reign of pointless mask-mandate authority.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis appears to be cruising to re-election on a record of actively resisting the authoritarian demands of experts, Democrats and the media.
The judicial system offers reason to be optimistic that the efforts to extend control over our lives may be losing. A solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s legally baseless mandates requiring private employers to compel employee vaccinations and landlords to let tenants live rent-free.
There are even encouraging signs in popular culture. Bill Maher, who has spent a career lampooning conservatives, is probably the most influential comic in the country. It was striking that last week his audience applauded raucously as he made fun of, among other things, new safety regulations in the bipartisan infrastructure legislation that require alarms in case car interiors get too hot, and California rules warning people about the dangers of inhaling wood dust.
Perhaps the biggest cause for optimism is that this time people don’t have much cause for faith in the omnipotence of the state.
You may not have approved of the massive expansion of the state under the New Deal, but it was at least achieved with almost brutal efficiency, and it could at least plausibly be claimed to have had a significant and positive economic impact. Big government was seen to work most effectively in World War II, when the state mobilized the entire country to defeat an unprecedented menace.
It’s hard to see how the current crop of government leaders can make similar claims. Instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, we have Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky. If people of this caliber had been in charge in 1942, we might all be speaking German.
“I have seen the future; and it works” was journalist Lincoln Steffens’s notorious verdict on the Soviet Union in 1919. With luck, this time it won’t take 70 years to prove that the forward march of an ever larger state is not so inevitable after all.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/covid-restrictions-and-other-overreach-bring-america-toward-a-libertarian-moment/news-story/05b8589405d7711daf4cbf03cfd7e56c
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Wikipedia corruption
I have myself found wrong information on Wikipedia -- JR
You’re sitting at your computer, or searching across your mobile device, for information about someone or something. Logically, you’ll navigate to the world’s most popular research tool. Wikipedia is almost everyone’s go-to site for information. It’s a massive online encyclopedia.
With over 18 billion viewers each month, you’d probably feel confident in the authenticity and accuracy of what you find, right? But what if you found out otherwise? What if the information you uncover is purposefully manipulated to push an underlying agenda?
That’s exactly what Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger says is happening at the giant research portal. Sanger sat down for an interview with Lockdown TV. He clearly thinks that much of the information presented on Wikipedia is manipulated.
Sanger says, “Wikipedia gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power.” Steven Crowder and Dave Landau orchestrated some experiments to test for bias within Wikipedia’s pages.
What they found was a perfect setup to allow internal restrictions to control how Wikipedia pages could be edited. For example, certain pages require a preset number of acceptable edits by the editor to make changes.
“Ten successful edits” is not an uncommon guideline for many pages. However, other pages have suspiciously rigid restrictions. If you want to correct inaccurate information on Joe Biden’s Wikipedia page, you must have a 30-day minimum active account and 500 successful edits.
Now let’s look at a really suspicious Wikipedia editing parameter. The COVID-19 Wikipedia page can only be edited by administratively approved accounts. Crowder says that there are only 1,000 such accounts worldwide.
Now, these so-called Wikipedia editors are required to be neutral. Some investigation proves this theory to be untrue. If you search for Mao Zedong, the infamous Chinese tyrant, you will find some very strange omissions.
A Wikipedia quiz to determine “editor neutrality” insists that the mention of Zedong as a barbarian, devoid of compassion for human life, cannot be stated on Wikipedia as fact. However, the facts indicate that Zedong starved over 40 million people to death.
That would meet most people’s definition of barbaric. However, Wikipedia won’t allow such an accurate portrait of the communist tyrant. The researchers produced an hour-long YouTube video exposing the truth about Zedong’s torture chambers and other Wikipedia manipulations.
Wealthy elites are growing increasingly more brazen. Attempts to manipulate the minds of the masses are gaining traction every day. It’s happening in the mainstream media and across a wide range of public interactions.
However, most people would hope that researching something through an encyclopedia would produce unbiased and honest information. Think again. Even the world’s most popular research portal is part of this manipulative scheme. Using Wikipedia today? Better check your facts first.
https://steadfastclash.com/the-latest/wikipedia-cofounder-makes-startling-revelation-about-worlds-most-popular-research-portal/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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1 February, 2022
Salvation Army Silent on Impact of Race-Based Training on Fundraising
A lot of Salvationists are serious Christians who believe in the gospel of love and follow the apostle Paul in his saying (Galatians 3:28) "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus". Paul explicitly denounced racial consciousness and group identity thinking generally.
So the current policy will clearly be seen as the heresy that it is and will drive many erstwhile supporters away
The Salvation Army is also now very wishy-washy on homosexuality, despite clear Bible teachings that it is an abomination to God. See Romans chapter 1. The Army has given into secularism. It is no longer Christian. It follows popular beliefs, not the Bible
Salvation Army chapters across the country saw a significant drop in donations in the weeks before Christmas because of fallout over a racially charged training curriculum, according to a nonprofit group that advocates “colorblind” policies.
Chapters in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan are among Salvation Army locations cited by Color Us United as affected by its campaign against training materials, called “Let’s Talk About Racism,” that include tenets of critical race theory and anti-racism teachings.
The church’s national headquarters has yet to announce fundraising figures for 2021, but it is evident that financial contributions to The Salvation Army have been “tanking,” Color Us United spokesman Christian Watson told reporters.
“It’s very clear their numbers have been hit hard,” Watson said of The Salvation Army during a virtual press conference Jan. 19. “You can either chalk it up to COVID or economic turmoil, or you can do what we claim is the probable cause—and that is Color Us United’s particular efforts against The Salvation Army’s woke curriculum.”
As previously reported by The Daily Signal, one session includes definitions of individual, structural, and institutional racism that claim whites are the beneficiaries of discriminatory policies. Another session makes the case that the larger Christian church, as well as The Salvation Army itself, has been infected with racism.
“What has not changed is that racial groups are placed into a hierarchy, with White or lighter skinned people at the top,” a sentence on Page 2 says.
Watson cited news reports that point to a steep decline for The Salvation Army’s annual fundraising drive, called the Red Kettle Campaign. Boston.com, for example, found that donations to the Massachusetts division were down 20% from 2020.
The chapter in Sacramento, California, also missed the mark: Its end goal for 2021 was $320,000, but it had raised only about $93,000 by Dec. 6, according to KTXL-TV (Fox 40).
Kenny Xu, president of Color Us United, read to reporters a text that he said he received Dec. 21 from a Salvation Army officer in central Michigan who refers to an infusion of sarcastic “apologies” from white residents for being white:
Locally we are down in our fundraising by about $100,000 to date. My kettles get flooded by these white apology papers daily. I will need to face the budget realities of all this come January. But I don’t blame you guys. The army put itself in this situation regardless of where the push came from to correct it.
The Daily Signal last week sought comment on the church and charitable organization’s fundraising from David Jolley, communications director for The Salvation Army’s national headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
Jolley did not respond until late Thursday afternoon, when he emailed to say that “because of reporting timelines around the country, we won’t have overall fundraising totals until mid- to late-February.”
“We’re happy to share those totals once [they are] finalized in a few weeks,” he added, and said that Salvation Army officials had not responded earlier because they “were at our National Advisory Board meeting last week.”
The fundraising figures could become available when The Salvation Army releases its next annual report in March. The charity raised $2.3 million in 2020, up from $1.9 million in 2019.
Founded in London in 1865 as a Christian church, The Salvation Army is widely known for its charitable work for the poor. The church is organized in a military-style structure that includes officers, soldiers, and other volunteers. Collectively, church members are known as Salvationists.
Gen. Brian Peddle, a Canadian who is CEO and international leader of The Salvation Army, first announced the church’s “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum for members in a May 2021 Facebook message.
In November, weeks after Xu and Color Us United began to publicly condemn the material, the church said that its New York-based International Social Justice Commission had withdrawn the documents for “appropriate review.” They are not currently available online.
In a separate interview, Xu told The Daily Signal that The Salvation Army has a vested interest in revealing its fundraising numbers.
“If their donations aren’t down, they should be excited to tell you that, because they could turn around and say we didn’t have any effect,” Xu said of Color Us United’s campaign against the training curriculum. “But if their donations are down, it’s in their best interest to report that too, because that means they should make some major policy changes.”
Watson also told reporters that Color Us United wrote Jan. 12 to The Salvation Army’s Board of Advisors, National Commander Kenneth Hodder, and the charity’s four U.S. territorial commanders.
The letter identifies “four instances” of other woke activities outside the “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum, he said without giving details, and calls on the church to “lead the charge in saying America is not a racist nation.”
“We are asking The Salvation Army to reconsider their ideology and to embrace what their true calling is, and that is to serve Christ and to serve the world by serving Christ,” Watson said.
An op-ed by Xu that appeared in December in The Wall Street Journal followed his similar piece Oct. 3 in The Daily Signal and criticized The Salvation Army for what he called “an internal coalition of woke ideologues.”
The church responded with a letter to the Journal and a YouTube video from Hodder, the national commander. The Salvation Army repeatedly has denied the allegations from Color Us United in press statements and media appearances.
Color Us United’s nationwide petition has attracted more than 18,000 signatures calling on the church to revoke the “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum.
The nonprofit advocacy group had set a Christmas deadline, which came and went, for The Salvation Army to apologize and state plainly that America is not a racist country.
“The deadline for their apology was for their sake, not for our sake,” Xu told The Daily Signal, adding:
Because that was when the media attention was at its highest. If they released something that said we fully do not believe America is a racist country, we fully renounce CRT [critical race theory] and we are going to get rid of our DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] programs because they don’t help any people in the inner-city communities or white coal miners—if they did something during that media cycle before Christmas, they would have a much likelier chance of recovering the support that they lost.
Xu said he estimates that Color Us United has spent about $90,000 in its efforts to change The Salvation Army’s mind. His group made use of Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms in November and December to create public awareness about what it called the church’s adoption of tenets of critical race theory and support for other “woke policies.”
About 300 of those who signed the petition are Salvation Army officers, according to Color Us United.
The church’s annual report says it has 3,317 officers in the U.S. and more than 27,000 worldwide.
“Our goal in 2022 is not to beat up on The Salvation Army,” Watson said. “Our goal is simply to help them to make the right decision and to stand on their history of charity and biblical foundations and endorse the fact that America is not a racist nation, endorse the fact that their employees are not racist or privileged, and endorse the fact that we all do better when we embrace a colorblind mentality.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/27/salvation-army-silent-on-impact-of-race-based-training-on-fundraising
The Salvation Army isn’t commenting on how much exposure of "Let's Talk About Racism," a racially charged training document, hurt the church's year-end fundraising. Pictured: A Salvation Army worker seeks donations Dec. 23 outside Grand Central Station in New York City. (Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images)
Salvation Army chapters across the country saw a significant drop in donations in the weeks before Christmas because of fallout over a racially charged training curriculum, according to a nonprofit group that advocates “colorblind” policies.
Chapters in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan are among Salvation Army locations cited by Color Us United as affected by its campaign against training materials, called “Let’s Talk About Racism,” that include tenets of critical race theory and anti-racism teachings.
The church’s national headquarters has yet to announce fundraising figures for 2021, but it is evident that financial contributions to The Salvation Army have been “tanking,” Color Us United spokesman Christian Watson told reporters.
“It’s very clear their numbers have been hit hard,” Watson said of The Salvation Army during a virtual press conference Jan. 19. “You can either chalk it up to COVID or economic turmoil, or you can do what we claim is the probable cause—and that is Color Us United’s particular efforts against The Salvation Army’s woke curriculum.”
As previously reported by The Daily Signal, one session includes definitions of individual, structural, and institutional racism that claim whites are the beneficiaries of discriminatory policies. Another session makes the case that the larger Christian church, as well as The Salvation Army itself, has been infected with racism.
“What has not changed is that racial groups are placed into a hierarchy, with White or lighter skinned people at the top,” a sentence on Page 2 says.
Watson cited news reports that point to a steep decline for The Salvation Army’s annual fundraising drive, called the Red Kettle Campaign. Boston.com, for example, found that donations to the Massachusetts division were down 20% from 2020.
The chapter in Sacramento, California, also missed the mark: Its end goal for 2021 was $320,000, but it had raised only about $93,000 by Dec. 6, according to KTXL-TV (Fox 40).
Kenny Xu, president of Color Us United, read to reporters a text that he said he received Dec. 21 from a Salvation Army officer in central Michigan who refers to an infusion of sarcastic “apologies” from white residents for being white:
Locally we are down in our fundraising by about $100,000 to date. My kettles get flooded by these white apology papers daily. I will need to face the budget realities of all this come January. But I don’t blame you guys. The army put itself in this situation regardless of where the push came from to correct it.
The Daily Signal last week sought comment on the church and charitable organization’s fundraising from David Jolley, communications director for The Salvation Army’s national headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
Jolley did not respond until late Thursday afternoon, when he emailed to say that “because of reporting timelines around the country, we won’t have overall fundraising totals until mid- to late-February.”
“We’re happy to share those totals once [they are] finalized in a few weeks,” he added, and said that Salvation Army officials had not responded earlier because they “were at our National Advisory Board meeting last week.”
The fundraising figures could become available when The Salvation Army releases its next annual report in March. The charity raised $2.3 million in 2020, up from $1.9 million in 2019.
Founded in London in 1865 as a Christian church, The Salvation Army is widely known for its charitable work for the poor. The church is organized in a military-style structure that includes officers, soldiers, and other volunteers. Collectively, church members are known as Salvationists.
Gen. Brian Peddle, a Canadian who is CEO and international leader of The Salvation Army, first announced the church’s “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum for members in a May 2021 Facebook message.
In November, weeks after Xu and Color Us United began to publicly condemn the material, the church said that its New York-based International Social Justice Commission had withdrawn the documents for “appropriate review.” They are not currently available online.
In a separate interview, Xu told The Daily Signal that The Salvation Army has a vested interest in revealing its fundraising numbers.
“If their donations aren’t down, they should be excited to tell you that, because they could turn around and say we didn’t have any effect,” Xu said of Color Us United’s campaign against the training curriculum. “But if their donations are down, it’s in their best interest to report that too, because that means they should make some major policy changes.”
Watson also told reporters that Color Us United wrote Jan. 12 to The Salvation Army’s Board of Advisors, National Commander Kenneth Hodder, and the charity’s four U.S. territorial commanders.
The letter identifies “four instances” of other woke activities outside the “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum, he said without giving details, and calls on the church to “lead the charge in saying America is not a racist nation.”
“We are asking The Salvation Army to reconsider their ideology and to embrace what their true calling is, and that is to serve Christ and to serve the world by serving Christ,” Watson said.
An op-ed by Xu that appeared in December in The Wall Street Journal followed his similar piece Oct. 3 in The Daily Signal and criticized The Salvation Army for what he called “an internal coalition of woke ideologues.”
The church responded with a letter to the Journal and a YouTube video from Hodder, the national commander. The Salvation Army repeatedly has denied the allegations from Color Us United in press statements and media appearances.
Color Us United’s nationwide petition has attracted more than 18,000 signatures calling on the church to revoke the “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum.
The nonprofit advocacy group had set a Christmas deadline, which came and went, for The Salvation Army to apologize and state plainly that America is not a racist country.
“The deadline for their apology was for their sake, not for our sake,” Xu told The Daily Signal, adding:
Because that was when the media attention was at its highest. If they released something that said we fully do not believe America is a racist country, we fully renounce CRT [critical race theory] and we are going to get rid of our DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] programs because they don’t help any people in the inner-city communities or white coal miners—if they did something during that media cycle before Christmas, they would have a much likelier chance of recovering the support that they lost.
Xu said he estimates that Color Us United has spent about $90,000 in its efforts to change The Salvation Army’s mind. His group made use of Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms in November and December to create public awareness about what it called the church’s adoption of tenets of critical race theory and support for other “woke policies.”
About 300 of those who signed the petition are Salvation Army officers, according to Color Us United.
The church’s annual report says it has 3,317 officers in the U.S. and more than 27,000 worldwide.
“Our goal in 2022 is not to beat up on The Salvation Army,” Watson said. “Our goal is simply to help them to make the right decision and to stand on their history of charity and biblical foundations and endorse the fact that America is not a racist nation, endorse the fact that their employees are not racist or privileged, and endorse the fact that we all do better when we embrace a colorblind mentality.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/27/salvation-army-silent-on-impact-of-race-based-training-on-fundraising
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Will We Ever Eradicate the Cancer of Identity Politics?
Not if Leftists have their way. They revel in all the hate that goes with it.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally granted a writ of certiorari in two now-consolidated affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
The cases will be jointly argued during the next Supreme Court term, and they place directly in their crosshairs the court’s noxious precedents in the thorny area of race-conscious university admission policies.
As presented to the court, the leading question the justices will consider is “whether the Supreme Court should … hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions.”
The court should of course do so posthaste. The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling, pan-institutional “systemic racism” is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism.
Fortunately, there is reason for optimism that the justices will do their job. It was the mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts himself who, in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
But by Wednesday afternoon, Monday’s propitious step forward toward an America no longer obsessed with race and identity politics was abruptly undermined by a severe step backward toward a race-centric polity. Justice Stephen Breyer, an octogenarian Jewish male and the senior statesman of the court’s liberal bloc, announced his retirement, effective at the end of this court term and contingent upon the successful confirmation of his successor.
The announcement was hardly surprising; given Breyer’s long-standing Democratic ties, his liberal jurisprudence, and the fact that Republicans are poised to retake control of the U.S. Senate this fall, it would have been more surprising if Breyer had not retired this year.
The more interesting twist came after news broke of the impending retirement: President Joe Biden affirmed that he intends to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to nominate a black woman—not a black man, not a Hispanic woman, but specifically a black woman—to replace the retiring Jewish male justice.
There is only one way to describe crass identity politics operationalized at this high a political level: evil.
The nine justices of the Supreme Court are the most important jurists in the country. They swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and the American rule of law, which has the equality principle at its very core.
From the Declaration of Independence to the 14th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, genuine equality under the law and an eschewing of the centrality of something as arbitrary as race has always been the American lodestar.
Americans have often fallen short of our enunciated ideals, but the equality ideal of race neutrality has often provided American statesmen succor during our darkest hours. For Abraham Lincoln, the equality-centric declaration was an “apple of gold” for which the Constitution was but an enveloping “frame of silver.”
Biden’s affirmation of his campaign-season promise to nominate such a specific population subgroup is a dagger to the telos—the overarching orientation of true colorblind equality and justice—of the United States.
Even holding aside the lunacy, from a sheer sample size perspective, of announcing at the outset of a Supreme Court justice search that one intends to limit that search to roughly 2% of the national lawyer pool, the higher-level message Democrats telegraph by doubling down on such an identity politics obsession is extraordinarily pernicious.
How can a justice who knows she was selected purely on the basis of race and gender reasonably be expected to adjudicate cases during her court tenure that implicate issues of race and gender?
Furthermore, consider the impact Biden’s announcement surely has on young lawyers all across the nation who do not fit into the narrow sliver of the intersectional pie that he has now proclaimed will comprise his entire prospective talent pool.
Hold aside white men; that ship seems to have sailed. What kind of message does this send to young liberal lawyers who are black men? Or how about the message it sends to young liberal lawyers who are Hispanic women?
And why stop at the intersectional sliver of black and female? Why not preemptively announce that his next two hypothetical court picks will be a Muslim and a homosexual, respectively? (Jews and Mormons, two religious minorities who nonetheless sit low on the left’s intersectional hierarchy pyramid, of course need not apply.)
The juxtaposition of the court’s colorblind certiorari grant on Monday and Biden’s color- (and sex-) centric announcement on Wednesday is nothing if not ironic. Perhaps Republicans might be galvanized to make opposition to identity politics a key part of their 2022 midterm election platform.
And regardless of who replaces Breyer, the court next term will hopefully take us closer to a society that is race-blind—and not besotted by cancerous identity politics—by gutting affirmative action in America.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/28/will-we-ever-eradicate-the-cancer-of-identity-politics
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Meet Alvin Bragg, Rogue Prosecutor Whose Policies Are Wreaking Havoc in Manhatt
We all know Batman’s backstory: A young Bruce Wayne watches in horror as muggers murder his parents.
Lawlessness ran rampant in Gotham City because police and prosecutors couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hold criminals accountable.
Like their fictional counterparts, today’s residents of the real-life Gotham, New York City, face a constant barrage of lawlessness. Stories of violent crime abound, with these heinous acts increasing exponentially.
Against this background, a new mayor, police commissioner, and district attorney have all taken office within the past several weeks. The mayor ran on tackling the crime problem, and he appointed a police commissioner who pledged to do the same.
Yet, Manhattan’s new district attorney has implemented new pro-criminal policies that undercut the mayor’s and police commissioner’s mandate—just like all the other rogue prosecutors we have been warning about for almost two years.
Bragg’s policies are so bad—and dangerous—that the new police commissioner—Keechant Sewell—felt compelled to warn about their dire consequences.
Sewell knows, as we have been warning, that cities that have elected rogue prosecutors have seen a dramatic increase in violent crime and crime overall, and her city will look like those others if Bragg acts like the other rogues.
Bragg’s policies are likely to lead to the same mayhem in Manhattan, at a time when the borough and the city can least afford it.
Following in the footsteps of Los Angeles’ rogue prosecutor, George Gascon, Bragg sent a memo shortly after taking office to his entire staff detailing his “key principles” and policies. They took effect that same day.
To be clear, those policies are not the result of serious study or debate within the district attorney’s office or with his senior advisers—though Bragg would like you to think that his policies are pure common sense.
Instead, they are simply copycat policies other George Soros-supported or inspired prosecutors have enacted. Just look at the policies Gascon implemented in Los Angeles, the ones Kim Foxx imposed in Chicago, and the ones Larry Krasner put in place in Philadelphia, just to name a few.
Those prosecutors are implementing a top-down agenda funded by Soros and other left-leaning billionaires—either directly or indirectly—by carrying out the diktats of richly funded (and ironically named) pro-criminal organizations such as Fair and Just Prosecution, which is neither fair nor just, at least not to crime victims.
In an effort to create some distance between Soros and some of these rogue DAs, Soros or his affiliated entities contribute to political action committees, which then make “independent expenditures” on behalf of the candidate. That’s what happened with Bragg.
Soros representatives have made a point to say that none of the $1 million Soros pumped into the race was funneled to Bragg. The Color of Change PAC expended funds as an independent expenditure supporting Bragg.
Oh. Thanks for the clarification.
The Color of Change PAC financially supported several prosecutors, each of whom we have highlighted in our “Rogue Prosecutor” blog series: Kim Gardner (St. Louis), Foxx (Chicago), Gascon (Los Angeles), and Krasner (Philadelphia), all of whom were elected. The PAC also supported Genevieve Jones-Wright, a public defender who ran for San Diego district attorney, but (thankfully) lost.
It beggars belief that Soros and his billionaire friends did not know precisely how their donations would be used, and funneling those donations through a difficult-to-decipher web of companies and organizations—presumably created for the very purpose of providing plausible deniability if things go poorly—cannot hide that fact.
Regardless, Bragg’s key principles—driven, he writes, in large part by the experiences he had growing up in Harlem in the 1980s—are virtually identical with those of other Soros-backed district attorneys:
Investing more in diversion and alternatives to incarceration.
Reducing pretrial incarceration.
Focusing on accountability, not sentence length.
Limiting youth being prosecuted in adult court.
Actively supporting those reentering society (which sounds good, but in practice means, among other things, seeking little to no probation or post-conviction supervision for offenders).
Superficially, those principles might sound reasonable. But they’re not. Bragg and his fellow rogue prosecutors mean something different—and totally unfathomable—to the majority of individuals who hear those talking points.
For the record, many conservatives have supported appropriate rehabilitation and reentry programs, including strong support for the federal First Step Act, among other things.
But when Bragg talks about ideas like “diversion and alternatives to incarceration,” in practice, he really means the elimination of accountability and prison altogether for most offenders.
His push to “reduce pretrial incarceration” is more like a shove—shoving aside the possibility of pretrial incarceration for even dangerous defendants in many cases. What’s particularly astonishing is that Bragg is making this push in the face of New York state’s already widely criticized and problematically lax bail policies.
When Bragg says he will “focus on accountability, not sentence length,” he actually means that he will work to eliminate jail and prison sentences for most convicted criminals and in many cases will cajole victims to sit down with their perpetrator to talk about “restorative justice.”
While that might be appropriate in a few very limited circumstances, it’s not for the vast majority of crimes and certainly not on the scale that Bragg proposes.
Just imagine a crime victim being told that: (1) the violent perpetrator who altered her life forever isn’t going to jail or prison, even though he was convicted; and (2) that, under the office’s “restorative justice” model, she has to sit down with the criminal so they can “talk it out.”
Unfortunately, that’s one of the key features of rogue prosecutors: Their policies are pro-criminal and anti-victim.
Bragg, in a tone-deaf comment that defies logic, said that his policies are “going to make us safer.”
“It’s intuitive. It’s common sense,” he said. “I don’t understand the pushback.”
We do.
And others are catching on, too, as they have seen this nightmare play out in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, and everywhere else there’s a rogue prosecutor.
Riddle us this, Batman: Why are Bragg and his fellow “progressive prosecutors” so determined to pursue this problematic path even in the face of bad consequences?
It’s because the rogue prosecutor movement is an outgrowth of the same radicals that created the Black Lives Matter movement, as detailed in our colleague Mike Gonzalez’s book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.”
As we have detailed in our major research paper on the topic, the rogue prosecutor movement is not shy about its beliefs, which are twofold: (1) the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist, and (2) the criminal justice system must be “reverse-engineered” to eliminate the racist rot that supposedly infects the entire system.
Of course, the entire criminal justice system is not “systemically racist.” As one columnist recently wrote, race relations in America are better than ever, even though many liberals won’t admit it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/28/meet-alvin-bragg-rogue-prosecutor-whose-policies-are-wreaking-havoc-in-manhattan
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More splits appear in NATO as Hungary says it doesn't want UK troops 'for now' and leader Viktor Orban travels to Moscow for one-on-one talks with Vladimir Putin
Both Hungary and Russia are former Communist countries so tend to have some things in common
Hungarian Defence Minister Tibor Benko today declared that there is no need for NATO to deploy its troops in Hungary amid tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine.
Benko said the Hungarian government is not explicitly against NATO deploying troops in central and eastern European countries closer to Ukraine, but stressed that Hungary is able 'to perform this task on its own' in its territory.
Benko's reluctance to accept a deployment of foreign NATO troops in its territory comes as UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace said it was vital to discourage Putin from invading Ukraine by showing NATO's willingness for combat as a deterrent.
Wallace said it was 'important to signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine... This is why the UK offered NATO more ground forces, more readiness as a deterrent.'
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is expected to travel to Russia tomorrow for talks with Vladimir Putin in which he is likely to ask the Russian President for an increased gas supply.
Downing Street confirmed meanwhile that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will travel to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and to show support in the face of perceived Russian aggression.
Moscow denies planning to attack Ukraine and is demanding security guarantees including a promise by NATO never to let Kyiv join the alliance.
Hungary, an eastern-European member state of NATO, enjoys relatively strong relations with Russia despite tension between the alliance and Moscow.
In his talk with Putin scheduled for tomorrow, Orban will seek to increase the amount of gas it receives from Russia, after Hungary agreed a new long-term gas supply agreement with Russia's Gazprom GAZP.MM in August.
Orban is also expected to discuss an ongoing expansion of Hungary's Paks nuclear plant, where Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom is building new reactors.
Hungary's reliance on Russia for gas imports and Russian intervention in its nuclear plant may be behind the eastern European nation's reluctance to receive foreign NATO troops.
Fears of an imminent Russian incursion in Ukraine have grown in recent days, despite denials from Moscow and pleas from Zelensky to avoid stirring 'panic' over the military build-up on the border.
Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday accused NATO of trying to pull Kyiv into the alliance, despite Russia massing 100,000 troops on Ukraine's borders. Moscow wants NATO to rule out Ukraine ever becoming a member as a condition for its withdrawal.
The head of Russia's security council, Nikolai Patrushev, said talk of a Russian invasion was 'completely ridiculous' and claimed: 'We don't want war and we don't need it at all.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10460467/More-splits-appear-NATO-Hungary-says-doesnt-want-UK-troops-now.html
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