This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
My Home Page. Email John Ray here. My other blogs: "Tongue Tied" , "Dissecting Leftism" , "Australian Politics" , "Education Watch International" , "Immigration Watch" , "Greenie Watch" , "The Psychologist" (A summary blog). Those blogs are also backed up. See here for details
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This page is a backup. The primary version of this blog is HERE
30 June, 2023
Yes, young men are losers. They deserve sympathy, not contempt
The article below lacks some context. Men who become unattached at any age can have a difficult time of it. Finding a new partner is notoriously difficult and the net is not much help.
There is a general failure of men and women to connect in today's world and women are losers from that too. How sad is it that many women who want a baby cannot find an acceptable father for one? They often leave it perilously late to team up. Some opt to become single mothers through artificial insemination. Are they not to be pitied for missing out on much of the joy of family life?
The destruction of age-old sex roles by feminists has much to answer for. There once was a system that teamed most people up fairly early in their lives but that is no more. It is not at all clear that the destruction of that system is on balance beneficial
I have been married 4 times to some gorgeous women but even I have found the gap between relationships to be difficult to manage
“The army of unfuckable hate nerds”—Marc Maron’s term for the mass of young men who pollute the internet with their misogyny. “They play video games all day,” the comedian said on his podcast, “then they watch MMA, then they spend the evening jerking off to … porn, then they put a few hours” into attacking women online.
He’s right, of course. There are hordes of these young men (and, no doubt, of not-so-young ones). They congregate on Twitter, in comment threads, on forums and platforms like Reddit, Discord, Kiwi Farms, and 8kun, the successor to 8chan. They trade in misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds. Their words are violent and vile.
But Maron is also wrong. I mean in his response, which is that of so many: to answer hate with hate, contempt with contempt. As opposed to what? As opposed to understanding, just like we extend, at least on the left (and I am on the left), to another set of violent young men, the ones who live in inner cities. Yes, I am calling for sympathy for my brothers in the army of unfuckable hate nerds.
My brothers: I was a young man once. And since there’s now an ever-growing genre of commentary in which feminists speak, with placid condescension, like so many anthropologists (if not entomologists), on the topic of men, especially young men, I thought it might be useful to hear from someone who actually knows what it’s like to be one.
Here’s what it’s like: It sucks. Male privilege? Absolutely, in many contexts, but there are important ways in which young men are clearly underprivileged.
Women are sex objects, goes the cliché, and men are success objects. But success requires many years to achieve, if you ever achieve it at all. Young men, in that respect, are much like older women: Society has little use for them, barely deigns to notice them. I’m not talking about the advertising industry, or the entertainment industry; I’m talking about the day-to-day experience of living in the world. Young women often have a lot of social power, whereas, except for the fortunate few—the born rich, the strikingly handsome, the 6-foot-3—young men have none. Socially speaking, young men are shit, and nobody gives a shit.
Socially speaking, young men are shit, and nobody gives a shit.
Any young woman who is even moderately attractive will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men. Young men, meanwhile—those losers, those loners, those apes—are left to pick their psychic zits on the periphery.
There’s more. Young women can have sex whenever they want. For most young men, persuading a woman to sleep with them is like trying to crack a safe. You understand that it’s theoretically possible, but you have no idea how to do it. Which means that you’re stuck with your hard-on. Unfuckable? No one needs to tell you that. You are unfucked: unwanted, unattractive; in the most literal sense, unloved.
The mental climate of the typical young man is three parts unrelenting horniness to one part self-disgust. Young women are not the only ones who are taught to hate their bodies. So, if less intensely, are young men. Why else would they lift all those weights? What you are really working out, when you go to the gym, is your dysmorphia. Aella, the OnlyFans star and online commentator, has said that what men look for when they come to her—and her clientele is mostly young—isn’t sex per se but “sexual acceptance.” They want to be assured, in other words, that they aren’t hideous. The fact they have to pay for this says everything you need to know.
Do I sound bitter? I’m channeling my younger self. It’s all worked out for me, I have no complaints, but I am intensely aware that it could have gone a different way. Turn this dial a click to the left, turn that one a click to the right—a little less privilege, a little more emotional instability—and I could have turned into a hate nerd myself. I suspect that a lot of men sense that. What does it feel like to be a young man? It feels like you are Kafka’s cockroach, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. It feels like you were drawn by Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb. You are an Untermensch, a particle, a stew of envies and resentments, a festering sore. You look, from below, at the happy and lovely and rich. You creep, alone, along a wall. You masturbate as if your life depended on it.
Yes, I made it out. I found success; I reached the fabled land of love. But many men do not; many recognize, and recognize quite early, that they never will. And I was young in the ’80s and ’90s. We know what’s happened since. Blue-collar wages have slumped. Men have lost the education race. Add to that the dating apps, which gamify sex and love and quantify desirability and value. Like everything else on the web, the distribution follows a power law curve, with a small fraction of alphas soaking up the lion’s share of female attention. Add further the misandry that has now become de rigueur wherever the liberal elite holds sway: the ritual (and often gleeful) man-hating, the pathologization of masculinity.
We also know how young men are responding. Some are opting out of manhood by becoming trans or nonbinary. Some are going the other way, reaching for an ersatz hypermasculinity and joining the army of unfuckable hate nerds. Their behavior is disgusting, it is inexcusable, but what do we think is going to make them stop? Telling them to comb their hair, to put down the Xbox, to get a life? Reminding them that they’re unlovable and worthless? They know that already; that is precisely the problem. Hate breeds hate. Revenge is not justice. The hate nerds are human, no less than you and me. We need to treat them like it.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/unfuckable-hate-nerds-william-deresiewicz
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How disgusting can the Left get? They Suggest Calling Women "Bonus Holes" So Not To Offend Transexuals
In recent years, the language used when discussing female anatomy has become increasingly politicized. Now, this politicization has reached a new low with the suggestion that people refer to vaginas as “bonus holes” in order to avoid offending transgender people.
This suggestion was made by Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust (based in the UK) and went viral after it was noticed and posted on Twitter.
It is important to note that this politically charged term was created in conjunction with the LGBT Foundation, a charity that campaigns for LGBT rights.
The concept of calling the vagina a “bonus hole” is an offensive one – not only does it disregard females completely by implying they are not women, but it also fails to recognize their anatomy as something unique and special.
The term itself implies that vaginas are nothing more than an accessory or bonus feature – something disposable and unimportant – which can be extremely damaging for women who already face discrimination in society due to their gender.
Unfortunately, this type of language isn’t just limited to referring to female anatomy; we have seen similar terms being used when discussing other aspects of female health care such as menstruation and childbirth.
For example, terms such as “birthing people” or “cervix owners” have been used instead of simply saying “women” or “mothers”.
These terms remove any sense of identity from females – they become nothing more than a collection of body parts rather than actual human beings with feelings and emotions.
This can be incredibly damaging for those who already feel marginalized due to their gender identity or who may be struggling with issues related to body image or self-esteem.
It is clear why using terms like these can be so problematic – they strip away any sense of personhood from women while simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes about them being less important than men or transgender individuals.
Not only does this undermine the progress made in creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels respected regardless of their gender identity but it could also lead people into believing false ideas about what constitutes acceptable language when talking about female bodies which could have serious consequences for how we view gender roles within society as a whole.
Using ridiculous terms like ‘bonus hole’ should not even enter into consideration when having conversations about female bodies or healthcare practices – let alone become commonplace enough that charities suggest its use.
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France erupts in violence after police shoot dead a Muslim teenager
Much of Paris was a battleground on Tuesday evening as scores of youths rioted following the fatal shooting of a teenager by police. The 17-year-old, Naël (some reports spell his name as Nahel), was stopped by police at approximately 8.30 on Tuesday morning because of his erratic driving. According to reports, Naël had previous convictions for failing to stop at a checkpoint and driving without a licence. As two officers questioned the teenager through the window, the vehicle sped off and shots were fired. One hit Naël in the chest and he died at the scene.
Riot police were drafted in and at least 20 arrests were made; among the buildings burned were a primary school and a leisure centre
Initially, the police suggested they had opened fire in legitimate defence; in other words the officers feared for their lives. But shortly after that statement, footage of the shooting – taken by a local resident – circulated on social media. It appeared to contradict the official line, showing the two policemen at the side of the car and in no danger of being run over.
The officer who fired the fatal shot has been arrested and an investigation has been launched into ‘possible intentional killing by a person holding a position of public authority’. A separate inquiry is being conducted into the actions of the driver.
The chief of the Paris police, Laurent Nunez, admitted that the actions of the policeman ‘raises questions’ and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin acknowledged in parliament the footage of the incident was ‘extremely shocking’. Darmanin also urged people to respect the ‘presumption of innocence of the police’ and also the grief of the family.
Anger was the overriding emotion of Naël’s family on Tuesday evening. ‘My grandson is dead, they killed my grandson,’ his grandmother told journalists ‘I’m against the government. They’ve killed my grandson…I’ll never forgive them for this in my life, never.’
Rioting broke out in Nanterre in the early evening and continued into the night. Riot police were drafted in and at least 20 arrests were made; among the buildings burned were a primary school and a leisure centre. Home-made rockets were fired at police and cars and scooters were torched.
There was unrest in other Parisian suburbs, including Mantes-la-Jolie, to the west of the capital, where the town hall was firebombed. People also took to the streets in anger in Colmar, Bordeaux and Marseille.
President Macron is currently on a three-day visit to Marseille, a city that has been the scene of a brutal drugs war this year, and his fear will be that the disorder spreads and intensifies as it did in 2005.
The catalyst then was the deaths of teenagers Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, electrocuted after they entered an electrical sub-station in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, allegedly to evade police. Rioting broke out on the evening of the tragedy and, in the course of trying to contain the trouble, a police tear gas grenade hit a mosque. Within a couple of days France was engulfed by mob violence and president Jacques Chirac was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing a curfew in some cities and restrictions on people’s movement.
The left has reacted with fury to the death of Naël. ‘Yes, refusing to obey the law is against the law, but death is not one of the penalties laid down in the Penal Code’, tweeted Manuel Bompard, an MP in La France Insoumise. The Green MP Sandrine Rousseau said that ‘a refusal to comply cannot be a death sentence.’
Jean-Luc Melenchon, the veteran figurehead of the French left, has a long-running animus against the police and last year accused them of killing indiscriminately. In response to the latest incident he declared: ‘No police officer has the right to kill except in self-defence… this police force, uncontrolled by the authorities, discredits the authority of the State. It must be completely overhauled.’
Last year 13 people were killed by police after refusing to stop for traffic controls and five officers face charges in relations to the deaths. The police say it is a result of an increasingly violent society but their critics, like Melenchon, believe that they are out of control.
It’s alleged that one of the policemen can be heard telling Naël that he’s ‘going to get a bullet in the head’ shortly before shots were fired. That is one of the claims that will be investigated in the coming days and weeks; in the meantime an anxious France must wait and see if last night’s rioting was a one off or the start of something more serious.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/france-erupts-in-violence-after-police-shoot-dead-a-teenager
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Conservative Strategist Behind Supreme Court’s College Affirmative Action Case Has Already Settled on a New Objective
The man behind Thursday’s Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in higher education admissions is nowhere near finished. Next on his target list: rules from the state of California and the Securities and Exchange Commission requiring diversity quotas for corporate boards.
Edward Blum, a conservative legal strategist whose Students for Fair Admissions nonprofit was plaintiff in both cases before the court, has been waging a one-man crusade against racial preferences for more than 30 years. He’s lost some cases along the way and won others, but Thursday’s victory was by far the most consequential.
“The opinion issued today by the United States Supreme Court marks the beginning of the restoration of the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation,” Mr. Blum said in a statement after the decision was announced. “The polarizing, stigmatizing and unfair jurisprudence that allowed colleges and universities to use a student’s race and ethnicity as a factor to admit or reject them has been overruled. These discriminatory admission practices undermined the integrity of our country’s civil rights laws.”
Mr. Blum has been personally involved in six cases that have come before the Supreme Court, three of which involved race-based admissions at universities. Two previous efforts challenging them at the University of Texas were unsuccessful. The two Students cases decided Thursday mark his first major victory on the topic.
While not a lawyer himself, the former stockbroker has connected plaintiffs who feel they have been discriminated against with legal teams funded by conservative donors to bring cases solely for the purpose of setting legal precedents. For his efforts, Mr. Blum has been assailed as a racist by left-wing ideologues and as a patriot by conservatives.
Before Thursday, his biggest case was a challenge to the widespread practice of gerrymandering congressional districts to favor one race over another known as Shelby County v. Holder. In it, Mr. Blum helped an Alabama county sue the federal government over a requirement in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that any changes to voting procedures by the states be pre-approved by the Department of Justice to ensure that they don’t suppress the votes of minority voters.
After hearing arguments in the case and by a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the relevant section of the Voting Rights Act — Section 5 — by invalidating the formula used to determine which states must obtain the so-called pre-clearance required by the Act.
Mr. Blum’s next target is recent moves by state governments and federal regulators that require companies to use racial quotas when appointing people to their boards of directors. Under the aegis of the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment, Mr. Blum is suing the SEC over a rule requiring companies listed on the Nasdaq to have at least one female board member and one who self-identifies as Black, Latino, Asian, Native American, or Alaska Native, two or more races or ethnicities, or as LGBT. The case is now pending before the Fifth Circuit.
“It is not only investors who will suffer if Nasdaq’s virtue signaling rule is allowed to take effect,” the group says. “AFFBR has members who, because of their race, sex, and sexual orientation are forced to compete on an uneven playing field because of Nasdaq’s quota requirements.”
Also in his crosshairs is a similar rule passed by California in 2020 requiring companies based in that state to have a minimum number of directors from what the state considers “underrepresented groups.” A federal court ruled earlier this year, in Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment v. Weber, that the rule violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, the same clause cited by the Supreme Court in Thursday’s higher education decision.
The 71-year-old Mr. Blum seems disinclined to slow down his efforts against racial discrimination. In press interviews, he has said his quest is motivated by a desire to uphold the tenets of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he believes explicitly forbid treating Americans differently because of their race. The spirit of the law, he says, seems to have been lost in the intervening years.
“I would like to see jurisprudence issued in which racial classifications are considered off-limits, except under the most extraordinary circumstances,” he told the Financial Times in a recent interview. “Police seeking to infiltrate a race-based drug gang could hire someone of the same background, but that’s about it.”
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"I exposed war crimes among Australia's Special Forces in Afghanistan"
The report below by a female sociologist is one in a long line that judges wartime behavior by peace time standards. As such, it is typically unjust. It is particularly egregious however in judging the highest risk military situations by civilian standards.
I am a former Army psychologist so perhaps have a keener awareness of the issues than some. I have no field experience. All I know is what I could learn from talking to people here in Australia. But one thing I have learned loud and clear is that military experience greatly reshapes attitudes.
One of the reasons miitary veterans often refuse to talk about their wartime experiences is that they know how their wartime actions were guided by different standards than civilian ones. The heat of battle alters attitudes and attitudes alter behaviour.
And nowhere is all the more so than in special operations. Such assignments are super high-risk and big pressure and survival instincts are at their highest there. The stress is great and anybody acting under stress is likely to make different decision from peacetime ones. And that is acknowledged throughout the military. And it is that acknowledgement that leads to "coverups". People who try to apply armchair standards to wartime behaviour are seen as missing the point and are therefore sidelined as much as possible. It is exactly such sidelining that the lady below experienced.
It would so wonderful if war could be waged like a game of chess but that is never going to happen. To use a common cliche, war is hell and there are many demons in hell. Democratic societies do their best to exclude or expel the demons but that will only ever be a campaign with limited success.
"Hypermasculinity" has got nothing to do with the problem. All that is at work is the attitudinal response to the military situation. In social psychologist's jargon, what we see are "the demand characteristics of the situation".+
It is rather regrettable that the sociologist lady below abandoned that obvious social explanation in favour of a pseudo-psychological one.
As the most frontline of SAS fighters, all that applies particularly to Ben Roberts Smith. He tried to explain his actions under the highest stress by civilian standards but inevitably failed.
It wasn’t long ago that I had been a successful business owner with a string of government contracts.
For me, it all began on Australia Day 2016. That was the day I submitted a report to army chief General Angus Campbell that would trigger the biggest inquiry into war crimes in Australia’s history. It would also be the day that David Morrison, chief of Army from 2011 to 2015, would be awarded Australian of the Year. Chair of the committee that chose the winner was Special Forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith.
The first time I heard mention of war crimes among Australian Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan was in 2014, in a small, partially furnished office in an Army barracks. I’m a sociologist and I had been contracted by the army to undertake a number of research projects. I was speaking with an army chaplain about domestic violence prevalence. The conversation went well beyond the initial topic. It was the first time I heard of the “serious misconduct” that was occurring within SAS patrols in Afghanistan. The chaplain described returning from deployment “a broken man”, having tried and failed to have his concerns taken seriously.
It wasn’t until late 2015, in one of the first interviews I did for a project in Special Operations Command, which oversees special forces units, that the chaplain’s story came back to me. That project began as an examination of Special Operations capability. It ended in a report on war crimes that led to the Brereton Report and news stories that resulted in Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith unsuccessfully suing this masthead for defamation.
The Federal Court last month found Roberts-Smith was a liar and murderer who engaged in war crimes. At the time of my initial report, I had no idea what that report would eventually cost me, personally and professionally.
For I now realise that what I was coming up against was more than the horrific acts of a few rogue soldiers. It was the cult of brand “SAS”; the cult of the male warrior. In this cult, unsanctioned violence is justified, encouraged and celebrated.
It seemed my report on the SAS had triggered a threat to some Australian men’s masculinity. I’d dared question their heroes. These loud voices would hound me for years. The attacks on me to be bashed, killed, tortured, and my livelihood destroyed came via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, email, text and phone call. Mostly the backlash came from those not in the military, but some were ex-military and younger white male soldiers – all of whom appear to idolise the SAS as a stronghold of hypermasculinity.
When the war crimes allegations emerged, then-defence minister Peter Dutton said he had made it “very clear” to Defence that I should not be awarded further contracts. That he did not want the military to be “distracted by things that have happened in the past”. My credibility was questioned repeatedly by Jacqui Lambie and reiterated in the Murdoch press.
It became politically inconvenient for me to keep speaking about the SAS issues. In 2021, I had written an essay about how misconduct becomes entrenched in organisations and how it spreads, and I used the SAS as a primary example. The Australian Government Solicitor unsuccessfully tried to stop my essay being published.
In a letter I received from the government solicitor’s office shortly after publication, I was told my conduct and public statements had “harmed the Commonwealth”. The result was that my ongoing work with the government was “terminated for convenience”.
The implications for me, my family, my business, and my staff were profound. The message had been sent to the department loud and clear that I was now a liability and a risk. No work would follow. Work in the pipeline was stopped indefinitely. I’d told the truth, so they cut me out.
After that my business collapsed and my mental health declined amid the endless stream of misogynistic threats through social media. Work from other organisations was not forthcoming. I gather this was because most businesses hire consultants to tell them what they want to hear, not uncover what is really at the heart of their problems.
I once heard Special Forces described as the “weeping sore” of the Army that no one was prepared to tend to. But there is a cost to organisations that leave issues to fester. It teaches others in the organisation that bad behaviour is acceptable, that those who engage in it will be protected, that to dismiss it is the norm. Such attitudes seep through an organisation and rot it. When the day finally comes that these problems must be addressed, the damage is far greater for all involved.
But the greatest takeaway from my experience is a personal one. That despite the cost, I would do it all again. I am grateful for the trust placed in me by soldiers and officers who gave accounts of egregious acts of violence and cover-ups. I have never taken it for granted and I have felt an unwavering duty of care to them.
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29 June, 2023
The allure of surgically enlarged breasts
Below is an example of it. I am not at all immune from finding larger breasts attractive. I like a D cup presence as much as any man. But the amazing thing is that enlarged breasts are still acclaimed when blind Freddy can tell they are not natural. Normal breasts are NOT hemispherical
I did once have a girlfriend who went from B to DD and I did like it at first but it ceased to excite me after a while. Focusing on the breasts tended to distract from focusing on the person and feelings about our relationship. The balance was all wrong. My girlfriend these days naturally takes a 12C bra, which I find entirely satisfactory
Ekin-Su Culculoglu turned up the heat in a distressed denim mini-skirt and low-cut dusky pink crop top in east London on Friday.
The Love Island star, 28, flaunted her perfect curves as she attended loungewear brand Blakely's store opening in Stratford's Westfields shopping centre.
Ekin-Su ensured all eyes were on her as her ample cleavage and toned stomach were on full display in the summery ensemble.
The TV personality also made sure to flaunt her endless legs in the super short skirt.
She added inches to her frame with a pair of cream heeled shin-high boots.
Ekin-Su finished off the outfit with a black leather Louis Vuitton handbag.
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Norway Has a Message for Democrats Pushing a Wealth Tax
With a higher wealth tax hitting, Norway’s rich are abandoning the Land of the Midnight Sun for countries that allow them to keep more of what they earn, a warning to the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, as she drums up support for her Ultra-Millionaire’s Tax.
“A small tax on the great fortunes of more than $50 million,” Ms. Warren says, “can bring in nearly $4 trillion to rebuild America’s middle class.” The operative word is “can,” as human beings are dynamic and react to factors such as a higher cost of living.
Norway is learning this lesson the hard way. It is one of the few nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that taxes not just income but net wealth. Its Labor Party increased the bite that the government takes out of nest eggs. Now the golden geese are roosting elsewhere.
The third-largest newspaper in Norway, Dagens Naeringsliv, found that more than 30 Norwegian multimillionaires and billionaires pulled up stakes last year, more than in the previous thirteen years combined.
“Even more super-rich individuals are expected to leave this year because of the increase in wealth tax in November,” reports the Guardian’s wealth correspondent, Rupert Neate, “costing the government tens of millions in lost tax receipts.”
Norway’s fourth-richest person and its highest taxed last year, Kjell Inge Røkke, relocated to Lugano, Switzerland, taking his $1.9 billion fortune with him. The move will allow him to keep $16.3 million each year and change the calculus of Oslo’s government.
Mr. Røkke’s open letter explaining his flight to the Alps from the fjords illustrated the fact that people and capital are more mobile than ever. While the city across the Italian border “is neither the cheapest nor has the lowest taxes,” he said, it has “a central location in Europe” and “for those close to the company and to me, I am just a click away.”
Like Ms. Warren’s “small tax,” the Norwegian increase sounds tiny, a 0.1 percent hike on the old top state bracket of 0.3 percent, which is combined with the 0.7 percent municipal tax rate for a maximum bill equaling 1.1 percent of an earner’s net worth.
The municipal wealth tax rate applies to single taxpayers with assets of $158,000 and $316,000 for married couples and the state rate — with the new, higher bracket — to net worths of $1.8 million and $7.4 million for single and married citizens respectively, the figures converted from Norwegian Kroner.
Those aren’t the “great fortunes” Ms. Warren and others describe when pitching their tax hikes, yet those citizens and others making even less are now left to pick up the slack for earners who fled. A projected increase in tax receipts on paper is now projected to bring in about 40 percent less in practice.
“The recent wealth tax increase in Norway was expected to bring an additional $146M in yearly tax revenue,” a management advisor and author, Luca Dellanna, tweeted. “Instead, an estimated $54B-worth of ultra-rich left the country, leading to a lost $594M in yearly wealth tax revenue, a net decrease of $448M.”
Norway’s pursuit of class warfare over common sense recalls many similar examples, the most infamous being the 10 percent luxury tax on yachts, private planes, and scores of other items, part of the 1990 budget deal championed by Massachusetts’ Democratic senator, Edward Kennedy.
Congress estimated that $31 million would gush into the Treasury. The actual sum was half that, not to mention losses when boatbuilders were forced to fire thousands and file for bankruptcy as customers shopped — and paid taxes — elsewhere, turning America from a net exporter of yachts into a net importer.
In 2003, the Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, Patrick Kennedy, sought to rescue the industry from his father’s legacy with a subsidy he called “exactly the opposite of a luxury tax,” but damage done by government is not so easily undone by it.
Democrats like Ms. Warren often cite Scandinavian countries as roadmaps for America’s path to a socialist utopia. On the wealth tax, Norway is flashing a stoplight, warning that you can only tax golden geese so much before they fly away, taking their golden eggs with them.
https://www.nysun.com/article/norway-has-a-message-for-democrats-pushing-a-wealth-tax
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'F*** them': Bill Maher denounces the liberal media for routinely attacking RFK Jr., whom 80% of Democratic voters want to see debate Biden
Bill Maher raged against the Democratic establishment and its allies in the liberal media Sunday for ongoing efforts to assassinate the character of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President Joe Biden is unwilling to debate.
"I want to take issue with the media because it incenses me how they write about you," Maher told Kennedy on the Sunday episode of his "Club Random Podcast."
The comedian zeroed in on a recent New York Times article entitled "Robert Kennedy Jr., With Musk, Pushes Right-Wing Ideas and Misinformation," stressing it had been presented as news contra opinion despite amounting to a hodgepodge of subjective claims and skewed characterizations.
"Right away, I'm pissed off because 'misinformation'? ... How about you're the newspaper, just tell me what he said and I'll decide what's misinformation," said Maher. "This arrogance of 'We know what the misinformation is about science.'"
"Whose misinformation? Because I seem to remember washing the mail for three days for about six months before they said, 'Oh, we got that wrong,'" said Maher, alluding to junk science peddled by the Times at the outset of the pandemic.
Maher then quoted a portion of the following from the Times piece: "Mr. Kennedy, 69, is a longtime amplifier and propagator of baseless theories, beginning nearly two decades ago with his skepticism about the result of the 2004 presidential election as well as common childhood vaccines. His audience for such misinformation ballooned during the coronavirus pandemic."
"This f***ing pisses me off," repeated the comedian.
After casting doubt on various assertions made in the article, Maher explained that it had been worth it, taking a closer look at the hit piece, because "they deserve richly to be mocked for that attitude. I just do not like the attitude," adding, "F*** them."
Certain that RFK Jr. will continue being misrepresented in the media, especially because the presidential candidate's views are relatively complex and not always easily reduced to sound bites, Maher stressed the need for Kennedy to publicly clarify his views for the benefit of prospective voters — possibly in a debate.
"Who do you think I'm going to debate?" Kennedy asked Maher.
"Well, if you're in the Democratic primary, you're going to debate Joe Biden," answered Maher.
The seasoned lawyer did not appear convinced, responding, "You think Joe Biden will ever debate me?"
A defeated Maher said, "Yeah, that's a good point."
Kennedy challenged Biden to a debate in April, writing, "I have known and liked Joe Biden for many years, but we differ profoundly on fundamental issues such as corporate influence in government, censorship, civil liberties, poverty, corruption, and war policy, among others. I look forward to engaging him in debates and town hall meetings, in a primary election that is honest, civil, and transparent. I invite him into a new era of respectful dialog in these times of division."
Kennedy told CNN's Michael Smerconish in late April that, "When you have so many Americans who are concerned about election integrity, we should be doing everything we can in our party to show that, you know, this is not rigged, rigged system. That it is actually democracy … people can run and that they can get to debate and that the public is gonna be able to see them, and they’re doing kind of the opposite."
A spokesman for the Kennedy campaign said, "Of course, there should be debates in a democratic system as a way to help voters choose the candidate that best represents their views. ... Debates can also help voters evaluate a candidate’s character."
A USA Today/Suffolk University poll revealed earlier this month that eight in 10 Democratic primary voters want to see a series of Democratic debates during the 2024 campaign, including 72% of Biden supporters.
Notwithstanding Biden's sense that "we can't take democracy for granted any longer," the president, netting a majoritively negative approval rating, is not interested in debating the issues per the wishes of the demos, and the Democratic National Committee will not sponsor any debates.
David Paleologos, director of Suffolk's Political Research Center, indicated that the "decision not to debate is ignoring the 82% of women, 84% of union households, 86% of independents, and 90% of young voters who are not only planning to vote in their state's Democratic primary or caucus next year but also would like to see a series of Democratic primary debates."
It appears that Biden allies, aware that the president's speechwriters and staff already have their hands full "embracing" his mental deterioration, are not overly keen on exposing the octogenarian to unscripted conversation and greater scrutiny.
Jim Kessler, a Democratic operative and executive vice president of policy at the think tank Third Way, told The Hill Biden should not debate Kennedy and Marianne Williamson.
"They are both gadflies who have done nothing to earn the right to debate a sitting president in an otherwise uncontested primary," said Kessler. "You have to earn your way to the debate stage."
Charlotte Clymer, a Democratic strategist supporting Biden, said, "Yes, I think presidential debates between qualified people, made in good faith, are only beneficial for democracy. A net good. ... But President Biden’s current opponents are neither qualified nor running in good faith," adding "RFK Jr. is a f***ing clown, full stop."
The Hill indicated that Democrats especially do not want dissenting opinions on COVID-19 vaccines, the Russia-Ukraine war, or other pressing topics elevated.
Nina Turner, former elected official from Ohio and co-chair on Sen. Bernie Sanders' most recent failed presidential campaign, told The Hill, "Biden risks being exposed for his administration not doing much to change the material conditions of everyday people in this country. ... He would be forced to answer to the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party."
Numerous liberal journalists and pundits have also recently argued on Biden's behalf against the free exchange of ideas on the national stage.
Esquire magazine's Charles Pierce begged earlier this month, "For the love of god, please stop trying to make this happen."
Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times insinuated that the best way for Biden to win an argument with Kennedy is to avoid the argument altogether.
"You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there's no real way to 'win' an argument," wrote Manjoo.
Manjoo went on to commend vaccine-promoter Peter Hotez for similarly cowering when presented with the opportunity to defend his position — a refusal that amounted to Hotez's denial of $2.6 million to the charity of his own choosing.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/bill-maher-denounces-the-liberal-media-for-routinely-blading-rfk-jr
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President Biden’s Inflation Malarkey
President Biden took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend his economic record. He claims that “as supply chains continue to unsnarl, company profit margins fall from historically high levels, and rents continue to moderate, inflation should decline further, creating more breathing room for working families.” There’s an implicit theory of inflation here—but not a good one.
The President believes in cost-push inflation: Rising prices resulting from transportation and shipping difficulties, as well as greedy corporations and landlords, cause the dollar to depreciate. He’s got it exactly backwards. Dollar depreciation is why prices are rising. The Fed’s monetary policy, aided and abetted by the President’s and Congress’s massive deficits, are the real cause. It’s old-fashioned, aggregate demand-driven inflation. By greenlighting excessive spending, which the Fed felt compelled to underwrite, the President is complicit in it.
Let’s tackle the three parts of the President’s explanation. Supply chain problems seem a likely cause of inflation. After all, as bottlenecks develop, prices rise. But what goes up must come down. COVID-induced bottlenecks have largely passed, and the relevant prices have accordingly fallen. Yet consumer prices overall have not fallen. The theory predicts deflation, when instead we’re experiencing disinflation. Strike one.
Next, the President blames corporate profits. Supposedly profit-hungry corporations are using their market power to hike prices. This “greedflation” hypothesis is very popular. It’s also astonishingly easy to disprove. Basic economic theory tells us that if firms are profit-maximizers, they can’t pass on the full value of cost markups to consumers. In fact, as costs rise, the markup falls. This is devastating for greedflation partisans because it uses the assumption of greed (profit maximization) to show the postulated conclusion (inflation) cannot follow. The most you can get is a one-time price increase, one that is smaller than the increase in business costs—and with reduced profit margins, besides. Strike two.
What about rents? Rent is a major part of consumer spending, and it’s certainly going up. But from 2020 to 2022, it’s only rarely risen faster than inflation (and even then, only if you parse the data in a certain way). If a particular component of consumer spending were behind surging prices, you’d expect that component to be larger than average, pulling inflation up. Not so in this case. Furthermore, there’s a conceptual confusion here. Inflation can cause rents to rise, but supply and demand in housing markets can, too. What we’re seeing is likely microeconomic forces in a particular segment of the economy, rather than a general macroeconomic trend. Strike three.
President Biden misses the obvious cause: massive monetary stimulus by the Fed during the COVID years. From January 2020 to 2022, the monetary base and M2 money supply rose 59 percent and 38 percent, respectively. The federal government also ran massive deficits over those years. COVID spending in excess of revenues was $6 trillion; $3.3 trillion of the resulting government bonds ended up on the Fed’s balance sheet. That means the central bank monetized more than half the deficit.
President Biden famously scoffed that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” The President can gripe about the great monetarist and Nobel laureate all he likes, but he can’t escape the implications of Friedman’s argument. Since inflation is a monetary phenomenon, the government’s excessive money-fueled spending is to blame.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14580&omhide=true&trk=title
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27 June, 2023
Women are more likely to survive a heart attack if they are accompanied to the hospital by a man
One for the feminists. At the risk of enraging feminists, I might point out that a woman with a man by her might actually be healthier and thus require less attention. Why would a woman with a man in her life be healthier? I am afraid good looks and good health are correlated. Work it out from there. Life isn't fair
It is a sad thing to admit – and no doubt what we’re about to say will be a shock to many – but as cardiologists with decades of experience, our advice to women is this: if you think you’re having a heart attack, take a man with you to the hospital. It may just save your life.
Research shows that women’s symptoms are often not taken seriously by emergency medics, but if there’s a man around to advocate the patient is less likely to be dismissed.
Even in our brilliant NHS, which has some of the most cutting-edge treatment available in the world, evidence shows women are much more likely to die from heart problems than men. We are 50 per cent more likely to be wrongly diagnosed – which can be fatal – and less likely to be treated promptly.
Women are 34 per cent less likely than men to get an angiogram – a type of X-ray used to diagnose a heart attack – within 72 hours of their symptoms starting. We’re also three per cent less likely to receive timely procedures using drugs or stents to restore blood flow. In fact, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) calculates that 8,243 women’s lives were lost in England and Wales between 2002 and 2013 because they didn’t receive the same standard of care as men.
The outcomes for women having heart operations – such as valve replacements and transplants – are also worse, largely because the procedures were developed for, and trialled on, men. Even after being discharged from hospital after successful treatment, women are less likely to be given the drugs recommended to prevent further heart attacks.
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MEGHAN MCCAIN: Mr. President - when will you realize that your nepo-baby scumbag son doesn't deserve to be an honored guest at the People's White House? You're spitting in the faces of Americans who pay taxes and earn an honest living
I couldn't have put it better myself
America's disgraced First Son was once again thrust into the center of White House festivities on Thursday night, dressed in a flashy tuxedo and hobnobbing with the most powerful people in the world at a state dinner in honor of India's prime minister.
In attendance were celebrities, powerful politicians, global leaders and – most pertinently – Attorney General Merrick Garland, who leads the Justice Department that just handed Hunter no more than a pathetic slap on the wrist for tax and gun crimes.
That's right, buried amid tragic news about the Titanic Five, it emerged that – following an arduous five-year investigation – the President's only surviving son cut a deal with prosecutors.
If he pleads guilty to two misdemeanors for 'failure to pay taxes,' as well as, lying on a firearm transaction record, he'll likely avoid jail time.
This is a man who appears to have concealed millions in income through tax dodging.
Who proudly brandished a gun on camera, as he snorted and smoked all manner of drugs alongside a coterie of prostitutes.
Whose lover - his dead brother Beau's widow – dumped his weapon in a grocery store trash can across from a school in 2018, only for the Secret Service to swoop in and seemingly launch a cover-up.
Top legal experts have since slammed the sweetheart deal as an aberration of justice.
So, you'll forgive me for saying it how it is: we're dealing with an elitist scumbag, the ultimate product of nepotism.
Yet according to our president, Hunter's a good boy worthy of representing the United States.
Enough! Hunter doesn't deserve the privilege.
Of course, I know what's going to be said: Hunter is an addict, and his father is protecting him as any parent would.
'I'm very proud of my son,' Joe repeatedly mumbles like a broken record. Would he please shut up with that nonsense! No one buys it.
What makes me truly sick to my stomach is that his father – our President and the leader of the free world – doesn't express one ounce of shame for his son's behavior.
This 53-year-old man won't even apparently allow his own daughter, Navy Roberts, the right to take his last name, for God's sake.
President Biden and the First Lady refuse to even acknowledge the four-year-old child, the offspring of a relationship - that Hunter claims he can't remember - with a former Washington DC exotic dancer.
This week, Hunter won a fight in court to slash his monthly child support payments to Navy's mother. The cruelty from the First Family is hard to fathom.
We have also now learned that Hunter was allegedly tossed out of a LA-based sex club, where members pay as much as $75,000 to join. 'Hunter was a member of SNCTM and I cancelled his membership after 1 party because he's a scumbag,' wrote the orgy club's founder in a since deleted post.
But, for Hunter – it's always bygones. Until this time.
We now have very good reason to believe Hunter's latest follies involve something far worse.
On Thursday, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee released new testimony from whistleblower Gary Shapley, a 14-year veteran of IRS and another anonymous agency source. It is potentially damning.
Shapley was tapped to oversee Hunter's IRS probe. He previously alleged that the Justice Department's Tax Division and the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office 'provided preferential treatment' toward Hunter and intentionally 'slow-walked' the investigation, which took a whopping 5 years to complete.
The first question is: why so long?
According to Shapley, the snail's pace allowed the statute of limitations on several potential charges to expire, purportedly allowing Hunter to skate on his failure to pay $400,000 in taxes on income from 2014 and 2015.
Now, Shapley's newly-released testimony alleges government investigators were blocked from pursuing a search warrant of Joe Biden's guest house, where Hunter once lived, and they were obstructed from pursuing leads that led to Hunter's adult children.
The allegations go on and on, but maybe the most shocking evidence, if true, is a WhatsApp message that Shapley says the government obtained showing Hunter seeming telling a powerful Chinese businessman and Communist Party official to pay up, or else he'll tell daddy.
'I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,' Hunter Biden reportedly wrote to Henry Zhao.
'I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.'
As of Friday, Hunter's lawyer wasn't denying the message's authenticity.
'Any verifiable words or actions of my client in the midst of a horrible addiction are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family,' attorney Christopher Clark said in a statement on Friday.
Here we go again. Nothing Hunter did or said during his addiction can be taken seriously, according to his defenders.
Yes, they can.
Joe has long claimed that he wasn't aware of Hunter's overseas dealings. He has said that he was oblivious to the fact that Hunter was raking in millions from a shady Ukrainian energy firm, called Burisma.
But now, the Biden administration appears to be hedging on that. 'As we have said many times before, the President was not in business with his son,' the White House said Friday.
Notice the subtle switch here?
No longer are they claiming that President Biden was unaware of Hunter's behavior. Now they're saying that father and son weren't 'in business' together.
At what point should any of this give the American media pause? At what point will they refuse to accept President Biden's claim that he's simply 'proud' of his son?
Keep in mind, Hunter is still trading on his family name.
He's selling artwork to anonymous buyers for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we all know the only reason that he can command those prices is because his dad is president.
But there's Hunter - slapping backs at the White House, sitting a few tables away from the attorney general, jetting off to Ireland on an official trip with pops, and showing up at numerous White House events.
A White House state dinner is not a family BBQ - it is a reflection of our nation. And Thursday night's image screamed: in America, as long as you're rich and powerful, anything goes.
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Politicized Science Can Be Dangerous to Your Health
The Lancet was once a leading British medical journal. It was sober and medically exacting. It was so respected that it was often cited to settle controversial issues in the field of medicine.
Today, it is a shell of its former self, shot through with leftist political ideology. A recent editorial called out the UK Home Secretary for her “appalling and shocking“ comments.
Was it about a drop in research funding or disputed medical opinions or something else of direct relevance to medicine? No, the Secretary opined that new migrants to the UK possessed “values which are at odds with our country“ and brought “heightened levels of criminality“.
Some might dispute such statements and some not, but how is this discussion pertinent for a medical journal? Richard Horton, the editor, went on to call for “war“ on the other side of the ideological divide.
Horton and The Lancet are hardly alone in degrading medicine by politicizing it. Science and scientists are in reputational decline because, well, they deserve to be.
Physicians were once respected for their integrity. They could be stodgy and paternalistic sometimes, but they couldn’t be influenced or bought.
Now the medical doctors have morphed from being dedicated stewards of their patients’ health to “medical providers”, as government payers describe them. Most owe their professional loyalty to a hospital-based system that operates pretty much like any other business, with the bottom line always in view.
Meanwhile, on issues ranging from Covid to climate science to transgenderism we are urged to follow “the Science” as if Science were the collective pronouncements of the big shots rather than a process for rolling back the limits of knowledge. “The Science” is often determined by hacks who are especially successful at scoring research grants because they supply the answers our grant making elites want to hear.
Politicized science can lead to some bizarre and harmful conclusions. There is now a movement against randomized controlled trials (RCTs) because they didn’t produce the approved answer to the question of whether face masks prevent infection.
Scientific American stated “decades of engineering and occupational science” show they worked. So there. No silly trials needed to confirm what everyone knows anyway.
But RCTs are the only way to determine whether a premise is factual. They are the basis of the scientific method, which lifted us out of millennia of ignorance and produced the marvels of modern medicine. Exposing well regarded but ineffective practices are precisely why they are needed.
While real scientists encourage debate and discovery, pseudoscientists silence those who dissent from the status quo. For example, scientific journals demanded the retraction of research producing evidence that transgenderism can be a social contagion.
Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria“ after her research revealed that although sufferers from the malady are customarily entered into transitioning protocols including hormones and surgery, they often present for treatment in clusters of young women who together discovered their supposedly mistaken gender identity. Dr. Littman’s research was retracted by Brown soon after it was published, due to the outrage of the medical mob.
Yet other researchers like Abigail Shrier and institutions like the UK’s Tavistockstock Center noted the same phenomenon. Springer Nature, a journal noted for its scientific soundness, was set to publish a review of 1655 possible cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria but reversed course, deciding to retract it due to the suspiciously flimsy objection that “written informed consent” was possibly lacking in the study. Intellectual tyranny defeated open debate again.
We need a respected, honest scientific community more than ever. We need them to make more scientific advances, to train future scientists and to protect us from the befouling influence of politics on science. The antics of Dr. Fauci and others, bending the truth to seek political favor, did lasting damage to the reputation of the scientific community.
Climate science too has been hopelessly compromised by politics and the biased grant-making process. One of the results is an epidemic of existential depression among young Americans who believe their lives will end in devastation because of excessive carbon emissions (still wrong, no matter how many times it’s been predicted). It’s a shame.
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Giorgia Meloni Torches UN's LGBT Agenda, Instead Introduces Policy That Christians Will Celebrate
As the globalist LGBT agenda continues its aggressive campaign to gradually erode religious liberty in the West, Christians might finally have found a champion in one European leader.
That leader is Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who, according to Breitbart, recently torched the United Nations for advancing aggressive LGBT causes.
Earlier this week, Victor Madrigal-Borloz addressed the UN Human Rights Council saying that in situations where religious freedom conflicts with LGBT rights, then religious liberty must yield, saying that religious beliefs that come into conflict with the LGBT agenda are “beyond the scope of the right freedom of religion or belief.”
(Madrigal-Borloz is the UN’s “independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity.”)
In essence, the United Nations is saying that the LGBT agenda is more important than the freedom of Christians to practice their religion, a very disturbing statement by any measure..
Fortunately for Christians, Giorgia Meloni is having none of it, and has called out the UN for this blatant threat to religious liberty.
“Religious freedom is not a second-class right,” she said. “It is not a freedom that comes after others or can even be set aside for the benefit of new, so-called freedoms or rights.”
Meloni reiterated: “Religious liberty is a natural right and precedes every juridical formulation because it is written in the heart of man.”
Since her election victory in September of 2022, Giorgia Meloni has become a firebrand for international conservatism and a symbol of hope for many as they try to beat back the leftist globalist agenda.
Meloni made conservative values a cornerstone of her election campaign, and since then she has made good on her promises, showing herself to be someone who is truly willing to fight for Christian values.
One of her main priorities is to stand firm against the LGBT agenda. Perhaps the biggest way she has done this, according to Politico, is by pushing back against the use of surrogacy, or “renting the womb” for same-sex couples to have children.
Meanwhile, instead of going along with the UN’s anti-Christian agenda, Meloni is taking the exact opposite approach by showing a genuine concern for Christians around the world who are persecuted for their faith.
During the same speech in which she decried the UN, she also pledged that the Italian government would give more than ten million Euros in support of persecuted Christians around the world.
In short, Christians not only in the West but around the world finally have a major political leader who is fighting for them.
While other Western nations ignore the plight of persecuted Christians and engage in sinister acts on behalf of the LGBT lobby that threaten religious freedom, Meloni is taking steps to uphold the rights of Christians in Italy.
Meloni almost seems to be trying to turn Italy into Europe’s version of Florida. Like Gov. Ron DeSantis, she has taken real steps to stop the march of the woke agenda and keep the Italian people free.
The West needs more leaders like Meloni, who are willing to stand up for Christian values in the face of attacks from the LGBT movement.
This may be yet another sign that the tide in the culture war is finally shifting.
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26 June, 2023
The rise of autism
Diagnoses of autism have "exploded" in recent years. Why? There is a lot of doubt that there is a real underlying increase in cases of autism. Most psychologists would account for the rise as an effect of expanded diagnostic criteria. And that in turn is an aspect of what is often called the "medicalization" of deviant behaviour. That is the explanation that I incline towards. I am aware that there are some claims of a role for diet and pollution but I see no clear evidence of that
A friend of mine who is a most experienced practicing psychologist has however offered me a rather novel explanation -- an explanation that is both sociological and draws strongly on history. History is the only laboratory of sociology so it is undoubtedly the place to look for sociological explanations.
The starting point of the explanation is that the very first diagnosis of autism was by Kanner in 1943. Did he invent it? Why was it unknown before his work? Clearly, it must have existed all along but why did it come to attention as a recognized syndrome so recently?
My psychologist friend has come up with an explanation. He says he was recently reading a book about etiquette in the Victorian era and was amazed by the minuteness of the rules that governed social interactions at that time. The whole idea of social etiquette has become rather passe these days but the aim of the rules was to make social interactions easy and pleasant for all parties. It was not some authoritarian invention. It was a set of arrangements that had arisen through trial and error over time that most people were comfortable with. There was such a clear consensus about the rules that you could write books setting out the rules for those who needed to learn them. So the rules did have something of a straitjacket character
And that was GOOD for autistic people, or at least the less disabled element of the autism spectrum. Autistics did not have to feel their way towards socially acceptable behaviour. It was all very clearly laid down for them by society. The rules were made to ease social interactions and they had that effect for anybody who followed them So the social expectations of the day DRAGOONED autistics into adaptive behaviour They did not have work it all out themselves
That explanation will not of course cover the extremely withdrawn forms of autism but for the more articulate parts of the spectrum it makes considerable sense. It is only the breakdown of social mores resulting from two ghastly world wars that deprived social behaviour of much of its guidelines. The old order was destroyed and not replaced. And once Kanner had described juvenile autism, people began to see degrees of it elsewhere. And that is where we are today
This is not of course a glorification of Victorian society. Charles Dickens has convinced us all that Victorian society was thoroughly wrongheaded. It is simply an argument that Victorian rules had some benefit for some people, not all of whom were high and mighty -- people with poor social competence generally
This is not of course a theory about the origins and causes of autism but merely a theory about its visibility. So what are the causes of autism?
I remember when I was doing a seminar in abnormal psychology as part of my Masters degree in psychology in the department of psychology at the university of Sydney in 1968, Kanner was much mentioned, but the discussion centred around whether autism was a psychosis. I have never thought that
The long-running theory of autism traced the condition to "refrigerator mothers". I forget who first proposed that theory but I would shoot him if I could. To blame poor distressed mothers for the dysfunction of their child was extremely cruel and unforgivable to my mind. Fortunately that theory fitted so few actual cases that it was perforce eventually abandoned.
That led to an exploration of physical causes instead. I was a party to those debates and found one explanation persuasive: That autism was caused caused by excessive stimulus sensitivity which was in turn caused by an overdeveloped cerebral cortex. I still subscribe to that theory and believe that it is now the mainstream one. There is no complete consensus in any area of science, however, climate science excepted, of course.
As a small amusing note in confirmation of that theory, I have observed informally that autistic people tend to wear large size hats! And when I met my present girlfriend via a dating site she said that the thing she most liked about my photo was my high forehead. She is very bright, has an intense interest in psychology and believes herself to be a high functioning autistic -- a diagnosis with which I concur.
I have had many papers published in the academic journals on abnormal psychology topics but none on autism. My interest in it was however sparked by a recent realization that I too am a high functioning autistic. And that has benefited my social life. You can see from the early photo with my sister below below what my forehead has been like from the beginning. Plenty of room for a large cerebral cortex.
I have however had 4 marriages and three ladies still call on me regularly even though I am in my 80th year so I think that promotes the view that at least some autistics can have an interesting life
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Biden Admin Admits LGBT Lifestyle Produces Worse Mental Health, Addiction
Americans who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are far more likely to suffer from major depression and abuse illegal drugs, and are up to six times as likely to attempt suicide, according to a new report from the Biden administration.
Although the report admits it cannot “explain the reasons” for these differences, it opens by blaming LGBT “invisibility and erasure”—a leap critics say is “just bad science” that obscures the real causes for these Americans’ mental distress.
Adults who have sex with members of the same sex, or both sexes, experience a dramatically lower quality of life across numerous measures, the Biden administration reveals.
Women who have sex with members of both sexes (bisexuals) were six times as likely to have attempted suicide within the last year as women who identify as straight, and three times as likely to abuse opioid drugs. Bisexual men were three times as likely to have had a serious mental illness in the last year, according to the survey from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“A higher prevalence of substance use and mental health issues has been well-documented among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (also referred to as sexual minorities) than among those who identify as heterosexual or straight,” notes the report, which focuses on American adults’ behaviors during the 2021-2022 year.
Drug Abuse, Suicide, Depression
The Biden administration’s survey documents the high rates at which “sexual minorities” suffer from the intertwined pathologies of drug abuse and negative mental health outcomes.
Drug abuse rates, spanning from methamphetamines to tobacco, were multiple orders higher among gay- or bisexual-identified people than heterosexuals. Those who identify as bisexual, of either sex, had the highest levels of illegal drug use.
Half of all bisexual men and women (49.5% and 49.7%, respectively) had used illicit drugs, as well as 42% of women who identify as lesbians and 41% of men who have sex with men, or MSM—double the rates of heterosexual men and women (27% and 20%, respectively).
Those living the LGBT lifestyle had a strong propensity to abuse the hardest narcotics. Lesbians were twice as likely, and bisexual women more than three times as likely, to use “cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, and methamphetamine,” or to abuse prescription drugs (19.4% of bisexual women compared to 13.8% of lesbians, and 6.7% of straight women). Lesbians were 253% more likely to use cocaine than straight women.
Bisexual women were 360% more likely to misuse opioids than were straight women over the last year. Gay- or lesbian-identified adults were twice as likely to abuse hallucinogenic drugs than heterosexuals.
The trend continues to legal drugs, as well. “Sexual minority females” were twice as likely to smoke tobacco or “have been heavy drinkers in the past month,” according to the report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which is titled “Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Behavioral Health: Results from the 2021 and 2022 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health.”
Similar numbers held true for males—although men have higher levels of substance abuse in general.
“Gay males were about twice as likely as bisexual males and about 15 times as likely as straight males to have used inhalants in the past year,” the mental health agency reports. All men abused alcohol at the same rate.
Serious Mental Illness
Mental health also proved radically poorer among those who identify as LGBT. Although women admit to higher levels of mental health challenges than men, LGBT-identified individuals of both sexes suffered significantly elevated levels of serious mental illness, major depressive episodes, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.
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The 'Girl Scouts have lost their way,' asserts faith-based alternative for young women
The Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA), founded in 1912, has been in the spotlight this week — but not for its popular cookie sales.
An online form circulating on social media this week related to sleepaway camp reportedly asked parents of girls to specify if their kids go by masculine pronouns — and if they'd prefer "gender inclusive" sleeping arrangements for their children while the young ones are at camp.
The form, reportedly sent by a parent to the widely followed Twitter account End Wokeness, asked parents or caregivers to provide "basic camper information" regarding preferred pronouns, including "she/her," "they/them," "he/him" and "other."
A group that considers itself a faith-based alternative to the Girls Scouts spoke out on the topic.
Patti Garibay, founder and national executive director of American Heritage Girls, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday afternoon, "Straying so far from the vision of its foundress, GSUSA has once again entangled itself in the ever-shifting winds of today's culture."
Added Garibay, "As Alexander Hamilton once said, 'Those who stand for nothing fall for everything.'"
Garibay said, "Is today's GSUSA the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts — or something in between?"
She added that "so many alumnae have grieved that Girl Scouts have lost their way as they witness a true loss of a national treasure."
Garibay said she started American Heritage Girls "for this very reason."
The organization ((GSUSA) voted in 1993 to make the word "God" optional in its oath.
Garibay spent over a decade with the Girl Scouts in different parts of the United States. She then left the organization and formed American Heritage Girls in 1995, she said.
She felt she had to leave the Girl Scouts after the organization voted in 1993 to make the word "God" optional in its oath.
"This wasn't something that I came upon lightly, as in, 'Let's just start an alternative to the Girl Scouts because I'm not liking what's going on there,'" she told Fox News Digital previously.
Garibay founded American Heritage Girls as a Christian alternative to the Girl Scouts.
It "inspires girls to pursue a deeper walk with Christ and focuses on Christian values and family involvement."
Today, AHG is the largest faith-based scouting organization in the world, with over 60,000 members, according to Garibay's organization.
The group says it "inspires girls to pursue a deeper walk with Christ and focuses on Christian values and family involvement."
It also helps young girls and parents deal with social and cultural issues through a platform called "Raising Godly Girls."
The group shares on its website, "When a girl’s identity and her worldview lens are rooted in faith, the gospel message doesn’t stay neatly tucked in her Bible only to be taken off the shelf each Sunday … it impacts every part of her life!"
A biblical worldview, it continues, "shapes the way she understands herself, her purpose in the world, and how she can influence an unholy world for Christ using the God-given gifts bestowed upon her at the moment of her creation."
Garibay is author of the book, "Why Curse the Darkness When You Can Light a Candle?" She and her husband have four married children and nine grandchildren.
American Heritage Girls has troops in all 50 states, as well as independent "Trailblazers" in 15 countries. Troops can be found across a variety of Christian denominations.
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/girl-scouts-lost-way-faith-based-alternative-young-women
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As Corporate America Veers Left, the GOP Can Become the Party of Small Businesses
A recent Wall Street Journal lead story reported that “Republicans and big business broke up.” The amount of corporate donations to Republicans was cut sharply in the last election cycle to a lower amount than in nearly a decade.
The United States Chamber of Commerce has backed many Democrats running for Congress in close and competitive races, which puts the GOP slim majority in jeopardy.
The writing is on the wall: Corporate America is increasingly aligning itself with liberal Democrats, not Republicans.
Some of this shift in corporate allegiances is due to some bad decisions by Republicans. The GOP has shortsightedly pursued a “break up Big Tech” campaign, and the party’s slide toward tariffs and away from free trade, one of the pillars of prosperity, is worrisome to any free marketeer. We should have free trade with countries, unless they are like Communist China, threats to American security.
The real question is whether the GOP should want or even need support from the corporate boardrooms, which are increasingly going “woke.” Maybe it is time for a divorce.
Big business is increasingly siding with big government. Democrats are passing out Biden Bucks, and corporate America lusts for free federal money. Like field mice, they gobble up the morsels the Democrats spill out of their pockets.
Corporate welfare spending at Washington is at an all-time high, with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars pipelined into the coffers of the Climate Change Industrial Complex, semiconductor companies, and other Beltway Bandit industries.
Principled free-market Republicans should take a strong stand against runaway government spending and debt, against 19th-century antitrust laws enforced by super-regulators such as Chairwoman Lina Khan of the the Federal Trade Commission, against corporate welfare programs that cultivate big business dependency on the government, and against the self-serving Wall Street doctrine of “too big to fail.”
If corporate America is against that agenda, then don’t let the door hit your fanny on the way out of the party.
An alliance between big business and big government, after all, is simply a form of what used to be called “fascism.”
What is the alternative for the GOP? It’s obvious. Republicans must be the party of the 80 million small-business men and women who employ more than 60 percent of our employees.
The head of the indispensable Job Creators Network, Alfredo Ortiz, notes that “most small businesses don’t have PACs and lobbyists and fancy K Street Washington offices. They just want to be left alone.”
He’s right. My father ran a successful small business for 40 years outside of Chicago. He worked long hours and was gone often when I was growing up. I don’t think he ever visited Washington, D.C. He had disdain for politics and most politicians.
That’s a fairly universal attitude of employers. And who can blame them given the torrent of nosy regulations by Washington lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians who know nothing about running a business or making a profit?
If big business wants to bolt and make peace with the party that hates enterprise, entrepreneurship, and profit, that’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs in corporate America, not the GOP.
President Coolidge once said that “90 percent of people who come to Washington want something they shouldn’t have.” Too often these days, our Fortune 500 companies want your and my money, and that’s something they shouldn’t have.
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22 June, 2023
Toon day today
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Disgusting New Zealand racism
The NZ government is Leftist. The Left have never been able to let go of racial discrimination. Ever since Karl Marx, they have had a fascination for it. They condemn racism but they are the chief practitioners of it
In the name of equity, surgeons in Auckland, New Zealand, have been told to consider the ethnicity of their patients when trying to prioritise care, namely to specifically prioritise patients from Maori and Pacific Islander backgrounds, placing them ahead of those with European or Asian ancestry.
The policy, which is part of Health New Zealand’s ‘Equity Adjustor Score,’ aims to use several factors to determine the priority of patients waiting for surgeries, including if they live in isolated communities or how long they have been waiting for a procedure.
However, the rules also factor in the ethnicity of the patient, with a report from the New Zealand Herald newspaper explaining that surgeons have reacted particularly negatively to the new guidelines, with one even going as far as to say they were disgusted.
The surgeons, all of whom spoke anonymously to the newspaper, stated that patient priority should come down to how urgent the treatment was or how long they had been waiting, with one surgeon saying, “It’s ethically challenging to treat anyone based on race, it’s their medical condition that must establish the urgency of the treatment.”
Ayesha Verrall, New Zealand’s Health Minister, defended using ethnicity to prioritise health care saying, “The reformed health system seeks to address inequities for M?ori and Pacific people who historically have a lower life expectancy and poor health outcomes.”
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins also defended the guidelines saying, “Those who are arguing we should do nothing need to explain why they think we should expect those on low incomes, in rural areas and M?ori and Pacific to wait longer.”
“I’ve seen concerns that have been raised about the mechanism that they are using to do that, and I’ve asked the minister of health to look at that to make sure that there is a reassurance that we are not replacing one form of discrimination with another,” he added.
David Seymour, leader of the right-wing ACT party, accused the government of “promoting racial discrimination” saying “prejudice and discrimination” were becoming official government policy in New Zealand.
New Zealand is by no means the only country to factor in ethnic backgrounds for health care as the premise is seemingly common in several English-speaking countries, such as the UK, where the National Health Service (NHS) states that it also factors in ethnicity as part of a clinical prioritisation programme.
In Canada, Indigenous Canadians were prioritised for the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 and others urged the government to prioritise minority groups, known as “racialized” in Canada, claiming that “systemic racism” was one reason why black Canadians had high rates of hospitalisation in areas like Toronto during the pandemic.
In 2021, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article that claimed there is “systemic anti-black racism” in the Canadian healthcare industry and called for the industry “to dismantle systemic racism in its structures and institutions.”
Recommendations for change include training health care providers in anti-racism, anti-oppression and decolonialization, as well as routinely collecting race-based data in partnership with racialized communities. Finally, the Black Medical Student Association of Canada provides recommendations for medical schools to address anti-Black racism in medical education and admissions, and outlines the need for medical reform to be guided by critical race theory.
While Canada does not prioritise surgeries based on ethnicity, the country does prioritise them based on COVID-19 vaccination status.
In 2018, Alberta resident Annette Lewis learned that she had a terminal illness that would require an organ transplant but was refused the transplant last year because of her refusal to take the COVID-19 jab.
A court of appeal in Alberta later ruled that unvaccinated people like Ms. Lewis were ineligible for transplants stating, “Being vaccinated against COVID-19 is a necessary component of proper medical care for individuals, including Ms. Lewis, who are seeking an (organ) transplant.”
Earlier this year, Ms. Lewis attempted to take her case to the Canadian Supreme Court but the Canadian top court simply refused to hear her.
A similar case was seen in Australia, in which a woman was refused a heart transplant because she did not take the vaccine, as she feared that the established side effects of myocarditis could be too risky for her.
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A woman and horse were killed and another man injured after a semi truck rear-ended an Amish buggy in Wisconsin, according to WISC.
This is shameful
Two Amish siblings traveled along a state highway until they were hit from behind by a 39-year-old man from Oklahoma. The pair were ejected from the open-top buggy, with one passenger, a 30-year-old man, taken to a hospital. The buggy was destroyed and the semi truck reportedly sustained moderate damage, but the driver was not injured.
"I wouldn't say they're are uncommon, unfortunately," said Lafayette County Sheriff Reg Gill of buggy accidents. "Our dispatch center was called about a semi versus buggy crash that occurred out on State Highway 81," he continued.
"We do have a very large Amish community here in Lafayette County, and we do from time to time see these crashes," the sheriff added.
The sheriff explained that the siblings were believed to be returning from an Amish get-together where the elders and youth have separate parties.
The roads "see buggy traffic almost any time of day," Gill explained. "This particular evening there was a gathering up towards Platteville, Wisconsin, and these young people were traveling back home at that time. They have gatherings for the younger people and gathering for the elders and families, which usually ends sooner, and then these particular ones go a little later."
Wisconsin law states the buggies are required to have two red rear lights, two yellow or amber strobe lights, and "slow-moving vehicle" emblems on the vehicles' rear. The sheriff said the buggy did indeed have the LED lights but that the investigation was still ongoing.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/amish-buggy-rear-end-wi ?
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21 June, 2023
AI can predict person’s politics by their looks, whether they smile in pics: study
Artificial intelligence algorithms can help predict a person’s political ideology based on their facial characteristics, a study conducted in Denmark found.
The tech found right-wing politicians were more likely to have happy facial expressions in photos while people pictured with neutral facial expressions were more likely to identify as left-wing, the study said.
The study, "Using deep learning to predict ideology from facial photographs: expressions, beauty, and extra-facial information," found that AI can predict a person’s political ideology with 61% accuracy when analyzing a photo of a person.
Deep learning, a method in AI where computer scientists teach computers to learn and process information similar to humans, can be used to make predictions about people based on photographs alone, the researchers explained in their paper, which was published in Scientific Reports.
The scientists tried to pin down exactly "what information contributes to the predictive success of these techniques," according to researchers.
Humans are able to read another person’s face and make judgments almost immediately about personality, intelligence and even political ideology. Study author Stig Hebbelstrup Rye Rasmussen of Arhus University and his colleagues explored if computational neural networks – algorithms that mimic the structure and function of human brains – can predict a person’s political ideology based on a single photo alone.
Facial recognition
The scientists trained the neural network with thousands of photos of politicians from the nation’s 2017 municipal elections, noting the elections were not highly polarized nor competitive, and referred to the politicians as the "last amateurs in politics."
They did away with any photos of candidates who were not explicitly left- or right-wing, were not of European ethnic origin or had been photographed with a beard. The photos only depicted the facial features of the candidates, not photos with backgrounds that could alter predictions. The researchers were then left with 4,647 photos of political candidates, 1,442 of which depicted female politicians.
The researchers used facial expression recognition technology from Microsoft to measure the emotional state seen in the photos, as well as other algorithms to determine attractiveness and even masculinity of the candidates. They also used a handful of photos of Danish parliamentarians to test the algorithm’s accuracy.
Denmark elections
People vote during the European Parliament elections in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 26, 2019. (Ida Marie Odgaard via Reuters)
In all, the research found that the AI trained on the data could accurately predict ideology to the tune of 61% – showing the algorithms could predict political affiliation better than pure chance.
"Our results confirmed the threat to privacy posed by deep learning approaches," the researchers wrote. "Using a pre-developed and readily available network that was trained and validated exclusively on publicly available data, we were able to predict the ideology of the pictured person roughly 60% of the time in two samples."
The research found female politicians who were more attractive were more likely conservative, while attractiveness and masculinity for men was not tied to political ideology. Faces of both men and women who appeared happier were also more likely to be right-wing, while neutral facial expressions meant the politicians were more likely members of left-wing parties. The study added that though it was more rare, women who showed contempt on their faces were more likely left-leaning.
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AMC abruptly cancels film showcasing stories of detransitioners
Detransitioner Laura Becker, who was featured in the documentary, warns suppressing the film exposing the dangerous side of transgender treatment sets an 'incredibly dangerous precedent.'
AMC Theaters has abruptly canceled screenings of a documentary film showcasing the experiences of detransitioners following a campaign by a transgender group to have the film pulled.
"No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care" shares the stories of five young detransitioners and insight from a dozen medical experts on the "harm" being posed by health care providers pushing transitions.
Producers of the film claim AMC shelved screenings scheduled to begin June 21 after intense pressure from a group called the Queer Trans Project, which did not have access to view the full documentary.
Laura Becker, a detransitioner featured in the film, slammed the move Monday on "Fox & Friends."
"I think it's incredibly dangerous to set this precedent of suppressing free speech, suppressing viewpoints that basically are just unpopular or difficult to deal with," Becker said.
AMC did not offer "Fox & Friends" a statement on their decision not to screen the film, but a source familiar with the matter attested the move to poor ticket sales, claiming only 139 tickets had been sold nationally ahead of the release.
The Queer Trans Project, which sends "Build-a-Queer kits" to transitioning LGBTQ+ individuals including chest binders and tucking tape, launched an aggressive online campaign encouraging protesters to send letters to AMC executive leadership to stop the documentary.
The group then took a victory lap after the film's cancellation, posting: "We did it! Our community's swift action is a testament to the power of advocacy and the importance of raising our voices against harmful content. Your collective efforts have made a significant impact, and the decision to pull No Way Back from AMC theaters is a step towards fostering a more inclusive and respectful environment. Thank you for your dedication and commitment to creating positive change."
Becker defended the film, saying it shows the importance of addressing mental health issues rather than jumping to transgender medical treatment. She began transitioning to male as a teenager by taking testosterone and removing her breasts. She detransitioned at 22 years old after being evaluated with PTSD.
"I think that there is a large scale eradication of boundaries and common sense, especially when it comes to children's developmental health,"she said.
"They are being fast-tracked on a conveyor belt-like system to getting surgery and hormones which create permanent damages instead of addressing their actual mental health concerns."
Although Becker said the issue is nonpartisan, she is grateful conservatives are speaking up.
"There are many moderates, liberals and independents, such as myself and the filmmakers who are just trying to increase awareness about mental health issues and medical ethics. It's not political, it is pro-gay. It is pro, you know, neurodivergent acceptance, all sorts of so-called liberal or progressive values. But in this case, the boundaries are being crossed to harm people, and the liberals are afraid to speak up about it."
A statement from the film's distribution company Deplorable Films read in part: "It is quite evident that those undertaking this crusade against this film have not had the courtesy of seeing it before taking such extreme actions to silence it. We stand by our filmmakers."
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The website for the film says it will be made available for streaming and on DVD "as soon as possible."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/amc-abruptly-cancels-film-documenting-journey-detransitioners-backlash
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Dodgers Celebrate Hate
The Los Angeles Dodgers are one of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball (MLB), having won a total of seven World Series titles and twenty-four National League pennants since their founding in Brooklyn. The team is valued at $4.8 billion, second only to the New York Yankees in MLB.
Why would such a successful franchise honor a hate group, the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI)?” This detestable organization regularly mocks Catholics and offends all Christians by their blasphemous portrayals of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, using the cross as a stripper pole.
SPI is composed of men who sacrilegiously portray Catholic nuns by wearing gaudy make-up and outlandish costumes. On their website, the group claims they are a “leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns.” Their official motto is “go and sin some more” and in a recent statement maintained that their mission is to “expose the forces of bigotry, complacency, and guilt that chain the human spirit.”
After initially deciding to honor SPI at their “Pride Night” celebration, the Dodgers received justified criticism from Catholics and Christians, so they rescinded the invitation. Then, after receiving intense blowback from LGBTQ+ activists, the Dodgers reissued their invitation to honor the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence'' at their “Pride Night” celebration, which was held last Friday night at Dodger Stadium.
The Dodgers offered their “sincerest apologies” to the “Sisters,” who accepted their request for forgiveness and noted that the team “worked for 10 years with our community and as well they have asked us to continue an ongoing relationship with them.”
On Friday night, the group was represented by two “Sisters” who were acknowledged and honored well before the start of the Dodgers game. In front of a sparse crowd of supporters, the team made an announcement that the group was recognized for “their outstanding service to the LGBTQ+ community” and received a “Community Heroes Award.”
The power of the LGBTQ+ movement is obvious because the Dodgers decided to recognize a fringe organization, while offending a much larger group. The team must have made the decision that it was a better course of action to placate the LGBTQ+ community rather than the millions of Catholics throughout Los Angeles and the country.
As SPI was being honored inside the stadium, thousands of Catholics and Christians held protests outside. The crowds were so large that the front entrance to Dodger Stadium was briefly blocked. There was a rally and a mass for the demonstrators who were both peaceful and prayerful. It was inspiring to see so many people of faith protesting the incredibly unwise decision by the Dodgers.
Fortunately, not all the players supported the team’s actions. Two Dodger players, Clayton Kershaw, and Blake Treinen expressed their opposition to the “Sisters” being honored. Of course, everyone should realize that an MLB organization like the Dodgers should have only one priority, winning baseball games.
All other activities, such as affiliating with an organization that mocks a religion practiced by 1.3 billion people around the world is not only a distraction, it is also quite harmful. Certainly, among the fan base of the Dodgers, are millions of Catholics and only a handful of followers of the recognized hate group.
As noted by famed Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling in an interview on Fox News, the decision by the Dodgers to affiliate with the “Sisters” will only please “10,000 trans people” in Los Angeles and even that figure is “probably pushing it.” He believes that these activists are not fans and “will never step foot in Dodger Stadium again.”
Even worse, by honoring SPI, a much larger group, practicing Catholics and Christians, has been offended. The decision is perplexing for a team that has previously been quite successful. It will hurt the Dodgers both financially and with their fan base.
Nonetheless, the Dodgers are following a pattern established in recent years by many other major American corporations. Small groups, such as transgender activists, are being celebrated and championed, regardless of the impact on large numbers of consumers.
For example, the retail giant Target affiliated with a designer who featured satanic merchandise on his website. Bud Light chose to highlight a transgender activist, Dylan Mulvaney, in commercials and on a commemorative beer can. The results have been devastating with a combined loss of $40 billion in market value for Target and Bud Light.
Clearly, the Dodgers knew the negative impact of honoring SPI, but decided to proceed anyway. According to Brian Burch of CatholicVote.org, the Dodgers chose to affiliate with a hate group and “slap Catholics in the face.” Burch predicted that the Dodgers would become “the Bud Light of Baseball” for honoring such a “vile” organization.
Burch believes that the negative response to the Dodgers will grow as “more Catholics in Los Angeles learn about this” and more will become “ashamed” that the team decided to give such an “honor” to a group that engages in “sacrilegious” anti-Catholic activities.
Despite the horrific decision by the Dodgers, the response from faithful Catholics has been encouraging. Burch’s organization launched a massive advertising campaign criticizing the Dodgers for their decision. In addition, the group Catholics for Catholics organized the successful rally outside Dodger Stadium. On their Twitter page, the Catholic activists touted the “Massive outpouring” at the rally with an attendance over “5K Strong.”
The backlash has begun to these woke corporate decisions, whether it involves a brand of beer, a retailer, or a baseball team. Americans are starting to realize what is happening in corporations and are registering their strong disapproval, which can be expressed in ways such as rallies at Dodger Stadium or using their economic power as in the case of Bud Light and Target.
These are welcome developments, and it is appropriate that the “Silent Majority” of Americans start acting. Millions of Americans need to reevaluate what sports teams to support, where to shop and what products to purchase. Americans must no longer affiliate with any organization that mocks their values.
https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffcrouere/2023/06/19/dodgers-celebrate-hate-n2624657
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Attack of the MeToo zombies in Australia
"Me too" refers to claims by women that they have been victimized by men
What began as a soap opera has morphed into a zombie movie that refuses to die. With the Brittany Higgins saga now in its 28th month, we have learned more than we ever wished to know about the characters but the plot’s central question remains unanswered. It revolved around the sordid question of whether or not Higgins and her co-worker Bruce Lehrmann had had intercourse in the early hours of Saturday 23 March 2019 in the office of the then minister for defence industry, Senator Linda Reynolds, and if so, whether it was consensual. Higgins alleged she was raped. Lehrmann strenuously denied the allegation.
There was never any way of knowing beyond reasonable doubt what happened. There was no physical evidence, no eyewitnesses. Both parties have admitted to telling lies so both were unreliable witnesses. Both had consumed alcohol. But the burden of proof falls on the prosecuter and the accused remains innocent until proven guilty.
One might have hoped that the story would have ended there. One reason it didn’t was that both parties had committed a serious security breach by entering, without any justification, the Minister for Defence’s office, a place that contains highly classified material. In Lehrmann’s case, it was his second security breach and he was sacked but it was Higgins’ first breach and she was given a second chance.
Since then, the Higgins affair has spawned reviews, inquiries, an aborted trial, and ongoing defamation cases. It’s been fertile ground for the #MeToo movement. Former sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins inquired into the workplace culture at Parliament House. Walter Sofronoff KC inquired into the handling of Lehrmann’s trial, prompting ACT Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Shane Drumgold to admit to behaving badly. He’s not the only one.
Thanks to a trove of leaked text messages sent between Higgins and Sharaz and a mammoth five-hour audio recording of a meeting between Lisa Wilkinson, a former host of Channel Ten’s The Project, Angus Llewellyn, the producer of The Project, and Higgins and Sharaz, we know that all of the above behaved badly.
There has been much handwringing over the politicisation of the Higgins affair and the damage that it might do to Higgins. When Lehrmann’s trial was aborted, the ACT DPP dropped the charges against Lehrmann not because there was insufficient evidence but because of concern about Higgins’ mental health. But what the new information reveals is that nobody was more actively engaged in weaponising Higgins’ allegations than Higgins herself. She seems to rival only Prince Harry in her quest to breach her own privacy.
The texts expose what looks like detailed planning by Higgins and Sharaz to enlist Labor MPs in their bid to ‘tear down’ the Morrison government. Higgins appears jubilant that Morrison is about to be ‘f-cked over’. Just wait,’ she texts Sharaz. ‘We’ve got him.’
The texts also show that Finance Minister Katy Gallagher misled the Senate when she declared on 4 June 2021, that ‘no one (in the Labor party) had any knowledge’ of Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation before Higgins publicised it herself. With the confected condemnation of an antipodean Greta Thunberg, Gallagher turned on Reynolds and demanded, ‘How dare you?’ snarling that Reynolds’ remarks were ‘all about protecting yourself!’
This week, that particular chicken came home to roost and Gallagher found herself in the spotlight doing her best to protect herself. She claimed that she hadn’t misled parliament when she said ‘no one had any prior knowledge’ of Higgins’ allegations while also admitting that she had indeed had prior knowledge.
It is now clear that it was the late Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching who opposed the weaponisation of Higgins’ rape allegation and warned that if Labor’s skulduggery ever came to light, it would blow up in their faces. For her integrity and foresight, she was kicked out of Labor’s tactics group and mercilessly bullied by Gallagher, Senator Penny Wong, and then senator Kristina Keneally – the mean girls.
In another revelation, Llewellyn and Wilkinson encouraged Higgins to secretly record a conversation with Cash, which is illegal.
Wilkinson also mocks Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s name and claimed she was only preselected because of her race. Sharaz says, ‘It’s like, “I’m not racist. I have a black friend” – it’s that argument.’ Wilkinson adds: ‘And our cleaner’s black.’ Wilkinson didn’t even bother to apologise for her comments until she was publicly called out by Jacinta Price and even then only for any offence she ‘may have caused’.
Leftists have expunged from memory that it was the Labor party that created the White Australia policy, the Liberal party that abolished it and the first Aboriginal in parliament, Neville Bonner, as well as the first Aboriginal minister, Ken Wyatt, were both Liberals.
Higgins is recorded saying she was always acutely aware of the potential to ‘commodify’ her allegations. And what a valuable commodity it turned out to be. With the help of Sharaz, she turns a night of alleged drunken debauchery into a modern-day morality play in which she is ‘a national hero’ of the MeToo movement, as Australian of the Year Grace Tame put it, and her former employers – all women – are scheming villains who subject her to negligence, victimisation, sex discrimination, and harassment in the wake of her allegation against Lehrmann and discourage her from speaking with police.
There is no evidence to back these allegations. Reynolds and Cash and former chief of staff Fiona Brown, all strongly encouraged Higgins to go to the police. Brown wept as she recounted in court that Higgins sent her a message thanking her for all her help.
Higgins did go to the police but delayed pressing charges for two years until she had weaponised her allegations against the government and ensured Lehrmann would be judged in the court of public opinion.
Her strategy has been richly rewarded. Her claims were settled by Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus following a one-day mediation from which Reynolds and Cash were excluded. The payment was rumoured to be close to $3 million.
The saga is far from over but the zombie allegations have left a trail of victims. Reynolds lost her senior portfolio. Brown felt publicly demonised and suicidal. The government lost the election. Kitching was bullied, perhaps into an early grave. Will the zombie allegations now turn on those who made them? With Labor controlling both houses of parliament, the mean girls might not be losing too much sleep for the moment.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/attack-of-the-metoo-zombies/
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20 June, 2023
Homosexuality and the Bible
I am a great believer in letting the Bible speak for itself. And there is no doubt what it says about homosexuality. Even female homosexuality gets a blast. So for my own handy reference I have put together what I think is a full collection of the actual texts. I reproduce that list below in case it is of use to others than myself
The verses mostly benefit from being read in context but the quotes below should make a good start on that. I have used the King James Bible translation below as it is the most familiar but that can sometimes be a bit obscure. For instance, in the text about Sodom and Gomorrah you need to be aware that the word "know" was used as a euphemism for having sexual intercourse
Genesis 19:4-8 4 But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them. And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.
Leviticus 18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
Mark 10:6-9 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Matthew 19:4-10 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Romans 1:27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 7:2 Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
1 Timothy 1:8-11 But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust. For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.
Jude 7 Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
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Europe Envy: Few of Pathologies Destroying US Are Present in Any Comparable Degree There
Fewer blacks
This one of the saddest of the more than 1,000 columns I have written.
I am writing in Budapest after spending four days in Warsaw last week and four days in Munich two weeks before that.
To put this in context: I have traveled abroad every year since I was 18 years old—except for 2020, because of the “experts”-induced destructive, irrational, police-state lockdowns.
Thanks to all that travel, I have visited 130 countries.
All of my life, traveling abroad prompted ever more appreciation of America and ever more gratitude for living here. Every time I returned to the USA, I felt a surge of patriotism when I saw the American flag at passport control.
Something I could never have imagined has happened in the past few years. I have begun to envy Europeans. With few exceptions—most notably the U.K., the one English-speaking country in Europe—few of the pathologies that are destroying America are present to any analogous degree in Europe.
Here is an example: My wife and I and another couple hired a driver and an English-speaking guide in Warsaw. The guide was a woman of the left. Though we never raised any political subject, like leftists tend to do, she let us know her negative feelings about Poland’s conservative president, Andrzej Duda; Hungary’s conservative prime minister, Viktor Orban; and, of course, America’s former president, Donald Trump. She let us know that she hated all three of them.
But when I asked her if anyone she knew would say that men give birth or that children should choose their own sex, she gave me a confused look. “Who does that?” she asked.
Europe’s leftists loathe conservatives as much as the left in America does, are as anti-nationalism, are just as prepared to shatter the economic life of their countries in the name of environmentalism, support ever-growing state and EU power, and supported mandatory COVID vaccinations as much as the American left. But they are not prepared to tell first-graders they can choose their “gender,” remove the healthy breasts of girls who say they are boys, or have “all-gender” (as distinguished from unisex) bathrooms.
Few, if any, European countries are wracked by the trans tensions—such as whether sex is binary, whether children should be exposed to drag queens and whether they should be given hormone blockers—that are wracking American life. Even England has barred trans “women” swimmers from competing against women swimmers. As reported by Openly News, an LGBTQ news organization, “Swim England follows similar rulings by World Athletics, Scottish Rugby, FINA, England’s Rugby Football Union and the International Rugby League, all of which have banned trans women who transitioned after puberty from competing in female categories.”
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a male JetBlue flight attendant wears a skirt while working on flights. That is also the policy of the British-based airline Virgin Atlantic, though I have not seen a photograph of a male Virgin Atlantic flight attendant wearing a skirt as I have a JetBlue flight attendant. And surely other U.S. airlines will follow. Will this take place on board European airplanes? Perhaps. But if you people-watch on the streets of European capitals, let alone in small cities, you will find that far more European women—including young women—dress as women than do women in America.
In other words, no matter how left the politics of European countries, few deny the male-female distinction as much as America does. In fact, in Europe, they appear to value it.
There are other ways in which life in Europe seems less tense than in America. In Munich, Warsaw and Budapest, I saw virtually no homeless people—and certainly no homeless encampments, no tents pitched on city sidewalks. Nor are children in European countries taught to loathe their own society as American young people are. And Europeans still venerate their statues.
Two years ago, even the woke New York Times acknowledged that Europe’s Left is different. Under the headline “Will American Ideas Tear France Apart? Some of Its Leaders Think So,” the article began:
The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,” said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas—specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism—are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,” warned Macron’s education minister.
During the lockdowns in states such as California that were ruining small business, the economy in general, and the precious and irretrievable years of children’s youth in particular, I wrote a column about how I, a Californian, felt on a visit to Florida, where businesses were open, people ate in restaurants without masks, and my grandchildren attended school and other activities of normal childhood. I wrote that in Florida, I felt like I did during the Cold War, when I returned to the West after spending time in communist countries.
And now, for the first time in my life, I feel freer in Europe than in America.
That’s why this is one of the saddest columns I’ve ever written.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/06/why-i-feel-better-europe/ ?
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Modern feminism or Stone Age sexism? The Miss England contest sparks uproar by saying it might bring back the controversial bikini round
When I learned yesterday that the organisers of the Miss England beauty pageant have decided they 'won't bow to the woke brigade' and could bring back the competition's famous bikini round, I was thrilled.
It was the most female-empowering piece of news I have read for a very long time. When women are under attack from all quarters — from a lunatic gender ideology which dictates that we no longer have the right to call ourselves 'women' or 'mothers', to girls dying in custody in Iran after not wearing the hijab correctly and showing too much hair — it's about time we came out fighting.
And while some may see the reinstatement of the controversial swimwear round as a step back for the cause of feminism, I see it as a crucial step forward in preserving our culture and our freedom to choose exactly what we wear and when.
Women have posed in bikinis or swimsuits — and thereby displayed their freedom and femininity — since the very first Miss Universe was held in 1952.
In fact, two of the world's oldest beauty pageants — Miss World and Miss Universe — were actually created with the purpose of promoting swimwear: Miss World was originally called the Festival Bikini Contest.
So, quite apart from representing a woman's choice to wear what she likes, the swimsuit round is a crucial component of the beauty pageant tradition.
Older feminists argue that making women strut up and down a stage wearing anything, but especially a bikini, is demeaning and sexist.
But perhaps, before they start making decisions on behalf of these poor, defenceless and exploited women, they should ask them what they want.
That, after all, is what Angie Beasley, the female organiser of Miss England, is proposing to do. Crucially, this is no longer a decision made by and for men, nor an event run by them.
Indeed, support for re-instating the swimsuit round comes from a very surprising quarter: the very woman who campaigned to have it cancelled.
Former Miss England winner Katrina Hodge — dubbed the 'Combat Barbie', having served in the Army for 11 years, including tours of Afghanistan and Iraq — regrets toeing the party line back in 2010, when the most popular section of the competition was scrapped.
'I was young and naive and felt like a bad feminist for enjoying posing in swimwear,' Katrina says now.
'We were constantly being told by the 'feminists' trying to close down beauty pageants that it was wrong and objectifying us, and I felt pressured to go along with it.' Now, however, she feels that the campaign against the bikini round was 'misguided'.
'By successfully ending it, I took away women's choice and freedoms — I also made the competition highly boring,' Katrina admits.
It's a change of opinion that represents just how far feminism has come in the past decade — from condemning the display of female bodies to celebrating their strength and beauty.
Indeed, what old-school feminists don't acknowledge is the way the ideal female form has changed in the past 50 years — from soft and passively voluptuous in the 1950s and 1960s to powerful and muscle-bound today.
Look at the abs on women such as Gwyneth Paltrow, JLo and Davina McCall, or the lean, muscular strength of the Princess of Wales.
From the unapologetic sexiness of the Love Island contestants to the body-positive gorgeousness of pop stars including Beyonce and Adele, all of them deserve to be seen and displayed on their own terms.
Yet according to those who want to censor how women present themselves, they are being humiliated.
Would they rather all women were covered from head to toe? Maybe they should ask the women of Iran (and Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the list goes on) what they would prefer?
And before some bore complains that beauty is only skin-deep and women are far more than their looks, well of course we are! But we are talking about a beauty parade here, which means, by definition, women are judged mainly on what they look like.
They have to prove they have a brain, too, but since when did simply wearing a bikini make you a bimbo?
Ironically, removing the swimsuit round felt to me rather like a radical form of mansplaining. Campaigners thought they knew better than the contestants themselves, when really they had no idea what the women taking part felt about it.
Well, now it is time to listen to the contestants. Any curtailment of our freedom of speech and choice is a dangerous thing.
Former Miss England Katrina Hodge says she felt like a 'bad feminist' for enjoying the way she looked and felt in a swimming costume.
But is there anything more anti-feminist than taking away a woman's joy and pride in her own body?
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Disney Never Learns: Another Expensive, Woke Animated Film from Studio Flops Hard
Once again, the company, through its Pixar subsidiary, is releasing a woke animated film aimed at kids — the third in roughly a year’s time. Once again, there were high expectations for it, so much so that the studio debuted it at the Cannes Film Festival. And once again, Disney looks to have a bomb on its hands.
According to a Saturday report from The Hollywood Reporter, “Elemental” — a Pixar-produced film with a thoroughly unsubtle message about social inequality in urban America — will only take home between $28 million and $32 million at the box office on its opening weekend.
This is even lower than the flop that had already been predicted for the film.
Last week, the entertainment news site The Wrap noted that projections for the film were in the $35 to $40 million range on opening weekend, which was still astoundingly low for a Pixar product. This is despite the fact “Elemental” also shared roughly the same exorbitant budget level as “Lightyear” — another expensive Pixar disaster, although one that didn’t flop as hard as “Elemental” is expected to in its first week at the box office.
The current numbers, if they end up on the low end of estimates, could make it the worst Pixar debut ever, even in non-inflation adjusted dollars. (The original “Toy Story” debuted at $29 million in 1995, long before Disney purchased the studio in 2005. In 2023 dollars, that calculates to $58 million in 2023.)
And no, let’s be clear: It’s not just because people are used to streaming movies now, they don’t want to go back into the theater, blah blah blah. Even another film with wokeness issues, superhero movie “The Flash,” was on track to generate $58 to $60 million over the weekend, according to The Hollywood Reporter — although this too was below estimates.
(While the legal issues facing the nonbinary star of “The Flash,” Ezra Miller, may have had something to do with it, both critics and audiences seemed to be confused and put off by the film, according to metrics cited by THR.)
Furthermore, Disney had put in an all-out effort to ensure audiences went to the theater to see “Elemental” in person.
“The studio has invested heavily in marketing campaigns, positioning Elemental as a must-see event for families in theaters. It’s one of the first films Disney has been trying to recruit theater-watching individuals for following the end of the pandemic,” geek-centric outlet Giant Freakin Robot noted.
“Premiering Elemental on the closing day of the Cannes Film Festival was another attempt by Disney to create buzz around the film. However, the movie received lukewarm reviews from the few critics who saw it at Cannes, failing to generate the desired audience excitement.”
So, why the flop? This time, critics and other box-office watchers seem willing to admit that pushing social messaging in viewers’ faces doesn’t make for good art.
“Set in a world where natural elements — earth, fire, water, air — coexist in a New York-style metropolis, each representing different social classes, the film—directed by Peter Sohn, from a screenplay by John Hoberh, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh — aims high with that central metaphor but is set immediately off-balance by its unwieldiness as racial allegory, an issue compounded by haphazard pacing and writing so flatly predictable it suggests a Pixar film authored by an AI algorithm,” wrote Isaac Feldberg in a two-star review at RogerEbert.com.
“At times bordering on the nonsensical, the film feels under-developed rather than universal, a colorful missed opportunity.”
Or, as a writer at DecentFilms put it: “When a significant part of the conflict in a cartoon about talking elemental beings turns on urban infrastructure problems, building code violations, and city bureaucracy, something has gone off the rails.”
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19 June, 2023
Queering Jesus: How It's Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools
Jesus was an orthodox and reverent Jew and would as such have regarded homosexuality as "an abomination" to the Lord -- Leviticus 18:22. So the stuff below is rubbish, nothing to do with Jesus
Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:
A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. This traveling minister, who describes drag ministry as a “divine duty,” is lauded by a Florida pastor as “an angel in heels” after appearing in that church in a sequin dress to deliver a children’s sermon and denounce the privilege of Whiteness and cis-ness.
At Duke University’s Methodist-affiliated divinity school, pastors-in-training and future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: “You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.”
And the Presbyterian News Service offers online educational series such as “Queering the Bible” (2022) and “Queering the Prophets” (2023) during Pride Month. A commentary in the former refers to Jesus as “this eccentric ass freak” who challenged first-century gender norms.
These examples from this year and last are just a few illustrating how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of "queer theology." Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
Thus it is in the presence of the sexually marginalized – such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon – where we find the presence of Jesus. In the language of queer theology, queerness is a sign of God’s love because “queer flesh is sacramental flesh,” and authentic “Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise,” whereas traditional Christianity has been corrupted into “a systematic calumny against hedonist love.”
Such claims may seem outrageous and offensive to the uninitiated, as do the antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group of provocative drag queen nun impersonators scheduled to be honored at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night” on June 16 -- this coming Friday.
But queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors, said Ellen Armour, chair of feminist theology and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
Back in 2018, Duke divinity students walked out in protest during the divinity dean’s State of the School speech to demand a queer theology course. Today Duke Divinity School offers a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, Theology, and Ministry, “where we privilege questions of gender and sexuality in the academic study and practices of theology, ministry, and lived religion.”
Queer theology is punctuated by a penchant for the outrageous and the scandalous, deploying graphic, carnal – and at times pornographic – imagery for shock value and dramatic effect, but its core religious claims are dead serious.
“Critics will say that a ‘Queer Jesus’ is a perverse or blasphemous fiction, invented by queer folks for reasons of self-justification, or accuse me and other LGBTQI Christians of being deviant,” queer minister and author Robert E. Shore-Goss wrote in 2021.
Shore-Goss is an ordained Catholic Jesuit priest who fell in love with another Jesuit, resigned from the Society of Jesus, and worked as a pastor in the MCC United Church of Christ in the Valley, in North Hollywood, Calif. MCC stands for the Metropolitan Community Church, reputedly the world’s most queer-affirming denomination that includes churches that perform polyamory nuptial rites to marry multiple partners.
“Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present,” Shore-Goss wrote. “Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders. … Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power. “They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
Shore-Goss initially agreed to a phone interview for this article, then canceled with a rushed email: “Wait a second I searched Real Clear Investigations and it is a GOP organization, and I will not help you in the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people. They are full of grace and healthy spirituality.”
Isaac Simmons, the Methodist drag queen known as Penny Cost, also initially agreed to an interview, excited to hear that this reporter had read six queer theology books, sections of other books, along with other materials: “Just about all of those books are on my bookshelf!! You are definitely hitting the nail on the head!” But Simmons/Cost never responded to follow-up emails to set up a phone call. Other queer theology experts either declined comment or did not respond. One, based in England, requested a “consultation fee.”
Encountering the established scholarly oeuvre of queer theology is an introduction to titles like “Radical Love,” “Rethinking the Western Body,” “Indecent Theology,” “The Queer God,” and “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a tome co-edited by Shore-Goss that “queers” every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, exceeding 1,000 pages. Queer theologians invite readers to see God as a sodomite, Jesus as a pervert, the disciples as gay, the Trinity as an orgy, and Christian unconditional love as a “glory hole.”
By “queering” holy writ and “cruising” the scriptures – two of the ways in which queer theologians use gay slang to describe their hermeneutical strategy – God’s revelation is “coming out” (of the closet), and those who opt to transition their gender experience the power of Christ’s resurrection. In the apocalyptic proclamation of the pioneering queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid: "The kenosis [self-emptying] of omnisexuality in God is a truly genderfucking process worthy of being explored."
Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news.?
“Thus queer theology is a call to return to a more fully realized anticipation of the Kingdom," states a 2007 overview, “Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body.” The queer theology movement has been likened to a "a rehearsal for the end times," and a “new Pentecost” that allows the Holy Spirit to “blow where it chooses," according to “Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theory,” a 2011 book.
Linn Marie Tonstad, professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School who for the past decade has taught the nonsectarian divinity school’s first queer theology class, has no patience for conventional, outmoded assumptions about sex and gender.
“Like, if you think that, I’m fine with you doing your thing and calling that Christianity,” Tonstad said on a podcast. “You are allowed to live your life in a way that I think is deeply misguided and incredibly sad.”
For Tonstad, queer people and queer culture are where the future lies.
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Detransitioning woman, 18, suing Kaiser Permanente for 'pushing her' into gender-changing surgery aged 12
A detransitioned woman who is suing the medical professionals responsible for her transition claims doctors spent just 75 minutes vetting her before setting out on the life-altering ordeal - back when she was just 12 years old.
Now 18, Kayla Lovdahl filed the lawsuit last week in California's San Joaquin County Superior Court, accusing multiple Bay Area professionals of fast-tracking her treatment - while flouting factors such as her poor mental health.
The suit specifically names doctors Lisa Kristine Taylor, Winnie Mao Yiu Tong, Susanne Watson, and Mirna Escalante as defendants, for providing Lovdahl with puberty blockers, testosterone, and a mastectomy in the span of just a few months.
Instead of warning Lovdahl about the finality of the treatment - or advising her to explore her gender issues through psychotherapy - the providers automatically, and erroneously, declared the youth to be transgender, the suit claims.
Also named in the sensational suit - which comes amid a growing chorus of 'detransitioning' youths expressing regret over their life choices - is the hospital who removed her breasts, and the provider who presided over the six-month process.
It specifically names Kaiser doctors Susanne Watson, Winnie Mao Yiu Tong, and Lisa Kristine Taylor as defendants, for providing Lovdahl with puberty blockers, testosterone, and a double mastectomy by the time she was 13
'This case is about a team of doctors who decided to perform a damaging, imitation sex change experiment on [Lovdahl], then a twelve-year-old vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health co-morbidities,' the 35-page filing reads.
'[Lovdahl] needed care, attention, and psychotherapy,' it continues of the NorCal medical officials supposed mishandling of the situation. 'Not cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.'
The lawsuit goes on to lay out how Lovdahl - who goes by the pseudonym Laya Jane - would detransitioned last year at the age of 17, ultimately regretting her and her doctors' decision.
Forced to undergo psychotherapy sessions to undo the mental damage wrought by the procedure, Lovdahl and her lawyers write their prognosis was premature - and gave the then-impressionable preteen the 'erroneous belief' she was transgender.
To come to that conclusion, the suit states, clinical psychologist Watson - who also serves as the clinical director of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals' 'Transgender Clinic' at the Oakland Medical Center - held a single, 75-minute transition evaluation.
During the sit-down, Watson is said to have not disclosed any of the lasting health risks associated with a young child taking 'off-label puberty blockers and high doses of powerful male hormone drugs' - after discerning Lovedahl was transgender.
Taylor and Tong, a endocrinologist and plastic surgeon employed under the Oakland-based hospital system's umbrella, all agreed with their colleagues' assessment, starting her on puberty blockers and testosterone at age 12.
The double mastectomy happened a few months later, and left Lovedahl without the ability to breastfeed at any point in the future.
The trio, the suit claims, 'immediately, and negligently, affirmed [Lovdahl's] self-diagnosed transgenderism without adequate psychological evaluation,' and 'failed to inform [Lovdahl] of the significant increased suicide risk' that follow such treatments.
The suit also states that after Taylor's meeting, the three 'coerced' Lovdahl and her parents to undergo the treatment regimen - in part by warning the family 'it is better to have a live son than a dead daughter,' in reference to her potential suicide.
DailyMail.com has reached out to them for comment - as well as a fourth Kaiser doctor named in suit, pediatric endocrinologist Escalante, who referred the family to the trio in the first place.
The lawsuit went on to condemn Kaiser Permanente for allowing the invasive surgery at such a young age.
'There is no other area of medicine where doctors will surgically remove a perfectly healthy body part and intentionally induce a diseased state of the pituitary gland misfunction based simply on the young adolescent patient's wishes,' it said.
After detransitioning, she says she began regular psychotherapy sessions to help her mental health, 'which is the care she should have been receiving all along', the lawsuit states.
'The vast majority of cross-gender identified children, if medically treated in early adolescence, risk regretting the decision after they are old enough to realize their losses,' Lovdahl added.
She said the ordeal left her with 'deep physical and emotional wounds and severe regrets'.
She also claims the hospital and doctors did not provide her and her parents proper 'informed consent', which would have introduced therapy sessions, something she says was never offered.
In a statement, her lawyers criticized the procedures as 'an insane form of child abuse'.
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'Soviet style intimidation': Armed IRS agents raid, close gun shop, U.S. lawmaker says
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) is demanding answers after he says a group of armed IRS agents raided and temporarily closed a Montana gun shop in Great Falls Wednesday.
"This event is another example of President Biden weaponizing federal agencies to target and harass hardworking Americans for exercising their constitutional rights," Rosendale said in a letter to leaders of the Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Twenty heavily armed federal agents pulled in behind Highwood Creek Outfitters' owner Tom Van Hoose as he arrived at his shop Wednesday morning, KRTV reported.
IRS agents confiscated background check forms from the store that contained sensitive personal information about all customers who ever purchased a gun at the shop. The forms do not include financial information, Rosendale said, calling the act an "egregious breach of privacy" that "showed no regard for federal law."
"There is no circumstance in which 4473s would be necessary in an investigation spearheaded by the IRS," Rosendale said in a letter addressed to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
Rosendale asked the ATF and IRS to "cease conducting these Soviet-style intimidation raids." He also included a list of questions about what spurred the action, setting a June 23 deadline for response.
Van Hoose told the outlet his shop has been surveilled by state and federal agencies for the past two years. He says he believes the actions are part of a pattern. "The current administration seems hell bent on getting those guns out of the hands of average Americans," Van Hoose said, referring to the style of weapons he sells.
Van Hoose said that though the agents were cordial and professional, he felt "invaded" and lost nearly an entire day's business.
"Given the positions of the Biden Administration, this raid appears to be an attempt to intimidate firearms dealers and owners," Rosendale said in his letter to the leaders of the ATF and the IRS.
"This pattern [of intimidation and harassment] appears to be orchestrated directly from the White House," Rosendale also wrote.
"This is yet another example of the Biden Administration weaponizing federal agencies to target and harass hardworking Americans," Rosendale tweeted Wednesday.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/highwood-creek-outfitters-atf-irs-gunshop-raid ?
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How To Liquidate Poverty
Primaily stop holding the poor down. Also offer them an investing mechanism with immediate and perpetually growing returns
It seems to me, if we want to eliminate poverty, subsidizing it hasn’t worked, so why not try giving the poor a few ladders? Why is it that most poor people have no house, investments or even a bank account, yet sport tattoos that cost over fifteen grand? Because there are no investments geared to them and their needs. Without savings, the down payment to a home might as well be a trillion dollars. Of course, to protect us from “terrorists,” the government has made it more and more difficult to get a bank account. It is easier to vote than to get banked. So why not invest in tats? If there is no mechanism to get out of poverty they might as well look the part. I think that instead of holding the downtrodden down, stepping on them, it might be advisable to take our collective jack boot from their throats.
Capitalist social security, as I call it, would be an investing mechanism that would appeal to the poor. With immediate and perpetually growing returns, many poor people might forego a full body tat, for everlasting income. The industrious might even invest in capitalist social security rather than in a pound of cocaine. People are self interested, including the poor. We all take the path of least resistance, and if that path leads to poverty, that is where we will go. Provide a path that leads out of poverty however, and the children of privileged will have to compete with poor kids, with greater merit. That is obviously unacceptable, so the poor are held down with regulations, taxes and laws. Capitalist social security is a mechanism to create generational wealth… for everyone.
Education is the single best ladder there is, or it can be an anvil, depending on what is taught. When the kids are taught with the goal of their achieving prosperity, fecundity and health, there will be more prosperity, health and people will be more fecund. If instead children are confused if they are a boy or girl, taught that math is impossible, reading irrelevant and writing a waste of time, then you will get a society filled with impoverished, obese people, who aborted their kids. While this is a problem for society, mankind and humanity, it is a boon for the elite. Their half witted brats, who deserve to be in shirtsleeves, will not have to compete with sharp, enthusiastic go getters. Instead, their peers will be hopeless drug addled homeless people, who don’t know of they are a boy or girl.
Terrorist laws have ground up the few ladders that still exist to get the poor out of poverty. Regulation has effectively de-banked the poor. If you don’t have a dozen pieces of ID and bills addressed to you from public utilities, you can’t get a bank account. Even a Christmas account. How is someone supposed to save the money for a down payment on a home if they are barred by law from saving? The poor don’t have access to lawyers either. That’s why criminals know, steal a penny from the elite and you go to prison, while you can steal everything a poor person has, putting them onto the street, and the government wont lift a finger to prosecute you. The assumption must be the poor didn’t deserve the few things they did have. Poverty in America is regulated, subsidized and husbanded by the elite.
Instead of making it harder to get out of poverty, by subsidizing it, regulating away the ladders and taxing small businesses to death… perhaps a more effective strategy, to creating wealth among the poor, would be to let their heads above water, and maybe even throw them a rope. Capitalist social security and a voucher system would be all the rope most need. Especially if they are coupled with cutting small business strangling regulations, the laws that bar the poor from banks, and cutting taxes. The only reason we have any poor in the US today is because it’s public policy. The elite want more poor and so we will get more poor. On the other hand, if everyone’s abilities are applied to the economy, the availability of everything will go up, while the cost goes down, and poverty will be liquidated.
https://www.thinkspot.com/discourse/npu6ym/post/numapepi/how-to-liquidate-poverty/dQtPaNK
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18 June, 2023
The collapse of civilization under black rule
I visited SA both during and after apartheid. During apartheid, Johannesburg was truly a garden city: A most civilized place. No more
Africa’s Richest City Is Crumbling Under Chaos and Corruption. Johannesburg was built on gold. It’s now such a mess that homeless people direct the traffic
Solomon Owa’s fingers work quickly as he speaks over the hum of his sewing machine. That’s because the hum of his sewing machine might stop at any moment. “In a few minutes, the power will go,” he said.
The 51-year-old runs a tailoring business from his garage in Johannesburg. Outages leave him idle for up to 10 hours a day. Surrounded by piles of colorful material, he needs to work while he can.
It’s a rush that South Africans have begrudgingly become accustomed to as they’re forced to use more and more ingenuity to navigate daily life: Charge devices, take a shower before the hot water goes off and leave the house before the traffic lights go out. Schools, hospitals, restaurants and businesses rely on backup generators to keep running. Homeless people guide vehicles through potholed streets for cash.
The continent’s richest city was built on gold, but it’s now defined by chaos, crime and corruption more than ever. It encapsulates the wider collapse of basic services across South Africa. From a broken railway network disrupting trade to archaic sanitation that triggered a recent cholera outbreak near the capital, Pretoria, parts of the country increasingly look like a failing state.
At the heart of the dysfunction in Johannesburg is a governance crisis. Since the country’s governing national party, the African National Congress, lost control of the city in 2016, unstable coalitions have resulted in six mayors in four years. The current leader is a member of a party that holds 1% of the municipality’s 270 seats.
Services and maintenance are the most visible casualty. Then there are the rolling blackouts implemented by Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd.
The state-owned power utility, which has become a byword in recent years for South Africa’s troubles, has a fleet of coal-fired power stations that are old, poorly maintained and badly designed. The shutdowns are known locally as “loadshedding” and last for up to four and a half hours at a time.
The country still functions, but the hurdles are getting higher. “We may not be at a point in South Africa where we are a failed state, but we are certainly a failed government,” said Tessa Dooms, director of policy at Rivonia Circle, a non-profit organization whose stated aim is to transform South Africa into a “robust, sustainable democracy.”
“We don’t feel the effects of having a failed state because of other sectors of society continuing to function,” she said. “But we certainly are feeling the effects of failed governance.”
Johannesburg needed 300 billion rand ($16.3 billion) to build new infrastructure — power, water, sanitation — and make repairs, according to former Mayor Mpho Phalatse, who was voted out of office in January. The current administration plans to spend the lion’s share of its latest budget on “sustainable services” to help clear the backlog of improvements.
That’s about 60 billion rand, according to the plan unveiled on June 13 by Dada Morero, another former mayor and now an ANC member of the finance committee. “While we are cognizant of the growing backlogs, we are limited in our ability to respond due to the suppressed revenue performance in recent years,” he said.
Johannesburg became Africa’s richest city thanks to a gold rush that started in the late 19th century and continued through the apartheid era. The metropolis of more than 5 million people then became the economic dynamo of Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation” and the hope for prosperity that came with it.
Almost half of the population is unemployed and living in poverty. Nationwide, the jobless rate stands at 32.9%. Around 18 million people rely on some form of social aid, which makes the number of beneficiaries twice as many as registered taxpayers.
Meanwhile, crime has proliferated. The once flourishing central business district is an eyesore where derelict buildings are hijacked by criminal syndicates, forcing out major commercial operations from the area. For more petty criminals, in vogue are cables and metals that can be stolen from electricity substations and sold on the black market. Others just try to connect to the grid illegally.
The power cuts make the morning and evening commute an obstacle course as motorists weave around gaping holes, uncovered manholes, unattended sinkholes and exposed power cables. Seeing homeless people in groups of up to 10 control traffic when the lights go out is now a common occurrence.
Given Masiyendi, a self-appointed traffic controller, moved to Johannesburg eight years ago from his village in Venda more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) away. Things didn’t go his way and he found himself on the streets. His latest gig has proven more lucrative than begging.
In the morning, Masiyendi goes to a corner shop where the owner gives him the loadshedding schedule for the day so he can position himself by the traffic lights when they go out.
Motorists embrace the makeshift solution to keep traffic moving, given a trip that should take 15 minutes can end up being two hours. On an average day Masiyendi says he can make up to 300 rand in tips from drivers.
Officials are less happy. “Police have been the most hostile towards us,” said Masiyendi, 32. They get picked up and dumped on the outskirts of the city, he said. “Our only crime is directing traffic.”
The outages also provide the cover of darkness for more serious misdemeanor. In Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg, 12 mini local substations costing 700,000 rand each, have had to be replaced in the space of two weeks.
Residents in the suburb of Fleurhof went without power for six days after a transformer was stolen during loadshedding between 10 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. one night. Local resident Sipho Masigo, 45, said he had to rely on a small gas cylinder to heat water and barbecue what they could.
“All of our food for the month was spoilt,” he said on his street near the vandalized electricity station, eerily quiet except for the buzz of a generator coming from the only house with lights. “On day four we had to take out all the meat, braai it, eat it and give the rest away.”
City Power, which procures electricity from Eskom and distributes it in Johannesburg, reckons it lost more than 500 million rand over the past year as a result of materials damaged or stolen during loadshedding. The infrastructure is unable to cope with the surge that comes with the return of power, which damages cables and substations, prolonging darkness for days at a time.
There’s also the question of whether they can get hold of the supply in the first place. “As a business we pay around 19 billion rand to Eskom for electricity annually, but half the time we don’t get that electricity,” said City Power spokesman Isaac Mangena. “It means that we have wasted that money and we are not making any profit.”
Eskom Chairman Mpho Makwana said in an interview with Bloomberg on June 9 that a change in management structure has helped improve performance and blackouts are being reduced.
That’s probably little conciliation to Justice Ikechukwu Oparaugo. His small restaurant in the inner city has been hit by both crime and power outages.
The once lucrative business is now on its last legs because of energy insecurity. Oparaugo, 52, was forced to dismiss half his staff and move to a smaller premises, but he is still losing money. On a day last month, he had cooked 2,000 rand worth of food and sold only a fifth of that. A local gang also demanded that he pay 350 rand a week in protection money.
“In the morning I can no longer start cooking early like I used to because they take electricity,” said Oparaugo, who added that he couldn’t afford to buy a generator or switch to gas like some larger restaurants. “When you wake up, it’s not there.”
A number of business leaders have raised the alarm over the nation’s current trajectory. The central bank estimates that power cuts cost the economy 900 million rand a day and will shave two percentage points off this year’s growth rate.
In recent weeks, they met with President Cyril Ramaphosa and pledged their support in the three critical areas of energy, logistics and law and order, according to Cas Coovadia, chief executive officer of lobby group Business Unity South Africa.
For Solomon Owa, the tailor, it feels like he’s been here before. Now married with two children, he moved to South Africa 23 years ago from Nigeria’s Delta state as the country faced energy insecurity that crippled the economy.
The first sign of decay he noticed was the dirt, how he needed to polish his shoes more often, he said. Then came the rest. “What happens when the lights go out? Vandalizing starts,” he said. “My country went the same way, the same route. After some years, things fall apart. Everything is gone.”
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Flag Day and the New State Religion
Yesterday was Flag Day, an annual occasion to celebrate Old Glory, the Star and Stripes under which men and women of every color and creed have served and for which many have paid the ultimate price. The American flag holds deep and profound meaning for millions of us, and we’re eternally grateful that it still stands for Liberty and justice for all.
That’s why we’re so outraged at how Democrats treat our flag nowadays. Perhaps their apparent contempt for Liberty and anything but two-tiered justice is why they treat it so poorly.
Joe Biden and his party use flags as political agenda rags. For example, Biden orders flags at half-mast every time there’s a politically expedient mass murder, though it is disgraceful to use the flag as emotional manipulation for pushing violations of our Second Amendment rights.
Worse, the display of pride flags from government facilities arguably represents an unconstitutional “establishment of religion.” Doubt that? Replace any of those pride flags at the White House or State Department facilities with a Christian flag and see what happens. Doubt that pride is a cult? Try speaking against the groomers who recruit new disciples in schools.
This past weekend, Biden hosted a pride celebration that predictably devolved into utter debauchery when a social media influencer decided to bear his surgically implanted female breasts on the White House lawn strip club. He supposedly won’t receive any more White House invites, and the administration condemned behavior that “is not reflective of the event,” but it was exactly reflective of the prideful and hyper-sexualized movement Biden and crew were ostentatiously celebrating.
Ask the drag queens Biden and Co. think should be performing in schools.
During that event, two American flags were hung between columns at the White House, and they flanked the new “progress pride flag” — the garish eyesore of a banner that features the typical rainbow and additional colors, from the “transgender” pastels to black and brown to represent only some skin colors and also AIDS victims. It was designed five years ago by a guy who uses “xe/xym” pronouns and calls himself a “queer non-binary celestial object having a human experience.”
Whatever dude.
Many folks argued that Biden’s White House display was a violation of the law. According to U.S. Flag Code §7 (e), “The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.”
Biden supporters claim “from staffs” is the operative phrase, and they note there was a U.S. flag flying atop the White House. Yet there’s no question the president and his prideful staffers violated the spirit of the law — and spat in the face of veterans and their families — all in service to the gender cult.
“The administration was proud, again, to display the pride flag,” said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, whose only apparent qualification for the post she holds is that she’s a black lesbian represented by that pride flag. She added that she was “certainly not going to get into protocols” regarding the legality of the display.
By contrast, the House, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, honored Flag Day by hanging three American flags between its columns.
The Senate, under Chuck Schumer, was not so patriotic. No flags were displayed outside the Senate side of Congress. Likewise, most of the flags were gone from the White House on Flag Day.
Back to the idea of establishing religion. Yes, the First Amendment begins with some key words — “Congress shall make no law.” Displaying flags at the White House wasn’t based on a law passed by Congress, so no harm, no foul, right?
Not if you compare it to other displays or behavior the Supreme Court has ruled constitute unconstitutionally establishing religion.
We’re not trying to build an ironclad legal case here. We’re just making the argument that the Rainbow Mafia is the vanguard of a cult, and hanging this group’s insignia from government buildings is a bad idea.
The U.S. flag represents our nation and every citizen under its jurisdiction. Pride flags represent maybe 7% of the population and probably considerably less, all based on behavior or orientation. Even if you agree with the Left’s insistence that it’s about identity, not behavior, this is still a tiny minority, and that justification wouldn’t fly in virtually any other circumstance.
The only reason pride flags fly on government buildings is that leftists are religiously devoted to dividing Americans rather than uniting us under our national banner.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/98114
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Pride Month and the Left’s Fairytale Villains
Leftists are always the victims in their fairytale about oppression. The latest kerfuffle over “pride” merchandise and marketing is no exception.
Just take a look at the media headlines:
“Target stores in at least five states receive bomb threats over Pride items” —The Hill
“Target stores see more bomb threats over Pride merchandise” —The Washington Post
“Experts warn against canceling Pride campaigns after extremists threaten Target” —ABC News
“How major brands were forced into the conservative plan to target LGBTQ people” —NBC News
To be clear, after some Target stores moved or removed some pride merchandise (some of which was designed by a Satanist and some of which was targeted at small children), prominent Democrats accused the retail giant of “selling out” and the Rainbow Mafia issued bomb threats, causing some stores to temporarily close. This, the Leftmedia propagandists want you to know, is the fault of conservatives.
In The Hill and The Washington Post, you have to read several paragraphs into their respective stories to learn that it was leftists who issued the bomb threats after their headlines implied the opposite. The same goes for ABC:
“Target reported that its employees faced threats over its new Pride collections celebrating the LGBTQ+ community and responded by pulling some of the merchandise that had caused the most ‘significant confrontational behavior’ to protect the safety and wellbeing of its employees.”
What were these threats? Saying mean things like “I won’t buy your products” on Twitter? ABC doesn’t say.
It did, however, report: “Several Targets also received bomb threats over Memorial Day weekend related to the controversy. … The threats reportedly called for the return of LGBTQ+ items to the shelves [emphasis added].”
None of the aforementioned media outlets even hint at the idea that maybe issuing bomb threats is a bad idea, even when their allies do it. In fact, all of them fret over and lecture conservatives for provoking anger.
ABC’s story then immediately quoted an academic “who researches the white nationalist movement.” She thinks “this will embolden alt-right actors.” After that, ABC appealed to an “expert” at the disgraced hate-baiting grift organization known as the Southern Poverty Law Center. He clicks his tongue over the “bigots” who will “feel emboldened” by any company that slightly backs off on pounding pride propaganda.
Again, to be clear, the bigots in his mind aren’t the Rainbow Mafia clowns issuing bomb threats and demanding “inclusive” compliance. The bigots aren’t the social media censors silencing anyone who still believes in basic biology or traditional American values — you know, like Joe Biden did until five minutes ago. No, according to The Narrative, the only villains are conservatives who object to having rainbow garbage shoved in our faces by every corporation and media outlet in the country.
NBC tells us how this game works. “Bud Light and Target were not always political punching bags,” its story begins. “But both companies have been drawn into the center of a long-brewing conservative battle after the brands released campaigns supporting or featuring LGBTQ people.”
Starbucks, says The New Republic, “has banned Pride decorations in stores,” which is “a stunning cave to far-right anti-LGBTQ fury.”
See, here these innocent companies were just minding their own business and trying to “be more inclusive” when suddenly mean conservatives decided to hate them.
Fact-check: It wasn’t conservatives who drew anyone into this battle. It was the Alphabet People compulsively demanding to be celebrated and affirmed every moment of every day all year long. It was companies deciding they’d rather send loud and flamboyant political messages on behalf of 5% of the population than simply sell beer or clothing to every American.
Leftists are virtually always the aggressors in the culture war. Conservatives are merely trying to conserve what nearly everyone agreed was desirable just a few short years ago. For that, we’re labeled “extremists,” “bigots,” and “haters,” even when the Rainbow Mafia is literally issuing bomb threats.
Historically, leftists have been the ones using boycotts to great effect, forcing conformity with their views or destroying businesses that don’t go along. Conservatives are beginning to learn to fight back in the same manner.
That’s why Bud Light sales continue to plummet since partnering with a “transgender” influencer. Sales are down more than a quarter and the brand is no longer the top-selling beer in America.
Millions of Americans don’t hate anyone. We just don’t want our beer, baseball, and bathing suits to have to reflect the sexual decisions of a tiny minority. We hate to be crass, but we just can’t understand why literally everything has to be about affirming someone’s choice of genitals or what they do with those body parts. We don’t get why “inclusivity” means being forced by even conservative news outlets to see pictures of a man flaunting his surgically implanted feminine breasts on the White House lawn.
Forget pride, which is hardly a virtue in any case. Whatever happened to basic decency?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/98089
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Teen Accuses Doctors Of Madly Rushing Her Into Child Gender Transition
Another detransitioner is suing Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Permanente Medical Group, and the doctors who pushed her along the path to hormonal and surgical transgender procedures.
In a lawsuit filed June 14 in California’s San Joaquin County Superior Court, Kayla Lovdahl and her attorneys with the Center for American Liberty are accusing medical professionals of fast-tracking young Lovdahl through her gender transition, one that she now deeply regrets.
It specifically names medical professionals Lisa Kristine Taylor, Winnie Mao Yiu Tong, Susanne Watson, and Mirna Escalante. Several of these individuals are similarly named in the lawsuits of detransitioners Chloe Cole and Layla Jane, also represented by the Center for American Liberty.
“This case is about a team of doctors,” the lawsuit begins, “who decided to perform a damaging, imitation sex-change experiment on Kayla, then a twelve-year-old vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health comorbidities, who needed care, attention, and psychotherapy, not cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery.”
Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and the Permanente Medical Group did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lovdahl grew up struggling with mental health issues and was eventually exposed to trans-identifying influencers online who pushed her to believe that she was trans. So, Lovdahl told her parents she was a boy, her lawsuit says. Her parents didn’t know what to do and “promptly sought guidance” from doctors (the defendents in the case).
Three individual Kaiser doctors (including Escalante) reportedly advised the young girl’s family that she was too young for hormones. But her family was ultimately referred to Watson, Taylor, and Tong, “who immediately, and negligently, affirmed Kayla’s self-diagnosed transgenderism without adequate psychological evaluation,” “promptly placed her on puberty blockers and testosterone at age 12,” and “performed a double mastectomy within six months at age 13.”
“This all occurred after Dr. Watson determined in a single, 75-minute transition evaluation that Kayla was transgender,” the lawsuit says.
The complaint alleges that Lovdahl’s doctors didn’t question her about the psychological events or comorbidities involved in her belief that she was trans.
Instead, Defendants assumed that Kayla, a twelve-year-old emotionally troubled girl, knew best what she needed to improve her mental health and figuratively handed her the prescription pad. There is no other area of medicine where doctors will surgically remove a perfectly healthy body part and intentionally induce a diseased state of the pituitary gland misfunction based simply on the young adolescent patient’s wishes.
Defendants were horribly, and inexcusably wrong, as Kayla was not transgender and was not a person that any reasonable physician could ascertain would permanently maintain a transgender identity. Consequently, she detransitioned when she was 17 years old, and she eventually started regular psychotherapy sessions for her mental health symptoms, which is the care she should have been receiving all along.
The suit also accuses the medical professionals of failing to properly provide Lovdahl and her family with proper informed consent and properly disclosing the significant health risks associated with a young, biologically female child, taking “off-label puberty blockers and high doses of powerful male hormone drugs.”
The family was also told that her dysphoria wouldn’t resolve unless she chemically or surgically transitioned, and “that she represented a high-risk of suicide unless she transitioned.”
“These were material, false representations,” the suit says. “Defendants’ coercion, concealment, misrepresentations, and manipulation are appalling and represent an egregious breach of the standard of care. This misconduct also constitutes fraud, malice, and oppression.”
Escalante put her on puberty blockers in 2016, causing Lovdahl mood swings and severe hot flashes, her complaint says. Taylor allegedly started her on testosterone in June 2017, at the age of 12.
“Two days later on June 8, 2017, Kayla’s mother reported to Dr. Watson increased anger and frustration and related issues. Her mother expressed concern that this indicates bipolar illness, but said that she thought that it was more likely related to gender dysphoria.”
“Dr. Taylor and Dr. Watson did not evaluate or treat these mood swings. In the next few months, Kayla was seen by about four different mental health providers. Kayla’s mood was noted to be improved at various times, but her preexisting complex array of mental health issues was noted to continue to include suicidal ideation, cutting, anger, depression, mood swings, and related issues,” the suit says. “Kayla was also being forced by her mother to attend pride clinic events, but she didn’t want to do so, and said she didn’t feel ‘pride.’ She expressed this lack of ‘pride’ to her providers.”
Lovdahl, who had never had a sexual relationship before, told doctors at the age of 13 that she didn’t know whether she cared about being a parent in the future. And on Sept. 22, 2017, according to the lawsuit, Tong performed a double mastectomy on her.
When she was 17, Lovdahl began detransitioning. She no longer “identifies” as a man, but because of the hormonal and surgical “treatments” she received, she “now has deep physical and emotional wounds and severe regrets.”
“Defendants were not ‘caring’ for Kayla,” the suit says. “They were experimenting on her.”
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16 June, 2023
Amazon Just Locked A Man Out Of His 'Smart' Home Because they Thought He Made a Racist Remark
When the power of big corporations becomes so great that they can control your very own home, it’s a chilling reminder of the dangers of unchecked authority.
Such is the case with a recent incident involving Amazon and a homeowner who found himself locked out of his smart house, as if he were living in the days of the Soviet Union or under the rule of a dictator.
According to reports, an Amazon delivery driver mistakenly believed he heard a racist remark coming from the homeowner’s doorbell while the owner was away.
The driver promptly reported the alleged incident to Amazon, which wasted no time in locking down the homeowner’s account, effectively denying him access to his own residence.
This Kafkaesque situation is both alarming and indicative of a society where individual liberties can be swiftly curtailed based on the whims of an overreaching corporation.
In his account of the ordeal published on Medium, the homeowner expressed his bewilderment and frustration: “When I connected with the executive, they asked if I knew why my account had been locked. When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my ‘Ring doorbell.'”
However, upon reviewing the surveillance footage from his property, the homeowner discovered that his innocence was undeniable.
The cameras captured no such racist remarks, but rather an automated response from his doorbell innocently asking, “Excuse me, can I help you?” It appears that the delivery driver, wearing headphones and walking away at the time, misinterpreted the message.
Nevertheless, Amazon had already taken swift action, leaving the homeowner locked out of his own home from May 25 to May 31, 2023.
The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated.
In an era where we pride ourselves on technological advancements and personal freedoms, it is disconcerting to realize that a corporate giant like Amazon possesses the ability to wield such power over an individual’s life.
The homeowner’s account was eventually restored, but the lack of a follow-up email from Amazon, informing him of the resolution, leaves a bitter taste of indifference.
We find ourselves in 2023, where mammoth corporations like Amazon and Google hold an alarming level of control.
The ability to lock someone out of their own home and disrupt their entire life based on unverified accusations raises fundamental questions about the balance of power and the preservation of individual liberties.
Are we unwittingly living in a disguised dictatorship, where faceless entities govern our lives and determine our fates?
As we reflect on this disquieting incident, it is crucial to ponder the implications it carries for our society.
We must ask ourselves whether we are comfortable relinquishing our autonomy to corporations, allowing them to dictate the boundaries of our lives based on subjective judgments.
Our collective future hinges on our willingness to safeguard the principles of limited government, free markets, and individual freedoms that have long defined conservative values.
The time for vigilance and thoughtful consideration is now, as we navigate this brave new world where even our homes are subject to the capricious whims of corporate behemoths.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/amazon-just-locked-man-smart-home-thought-made-racist-remark
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Marijuana really is is dangerous for your health
Big Pharma may appear to be the zenith of craven greed and duplicity with their billions made off vaccines they knew were not up to standard, but they are conspicuously matched by their same financial backers who are pushing another product just as hazardous and ineffective.
Massive US-wide and European population studies were published in 2021 and 2022 which demonstrated what research had portended decades before – that cannabis used medicinally or recreationally is causal for cancers and birth defects.
The studies used new computer geo-spatial-temporal software with a methodology described in one of the world’s top scientific journals – Nature Scientific Reports. They found it causal in 33 cancer types, more than double the 14 of tobacco, and causal in 89 of 95 birth defect types tracked by the European Medicines Agency. These birth defects include non-deadly as well as potentially fatal birth defects such as cleft-lip palate and hole in the heart. In a pre-2020 universe, these findings would have led to medicinal cannabis products being immediately withdrawn from the market, but in an environment of cashed-up institutional investors, captured regulators, and media organisations that parrot their talking points and guard their priorities, there is a deafening silence where previously they would have fallen over themselves to sound the alarm.
From in vitro and animal studies, cannabis has been known for decades to severely damage human chromosomes (genotoxic), cause mutations (mutagenic), and cause birth defects (teratogenic), the effects all of which have now been verified in spades at the population level. Yet any cursory glance at medicinal cannabis advertising paints the picture of the substance as God’s herbal gift to mankind, with miracle cures promised for virtually any malady, making it the 21st century snake oil. Front and centre is the non-psychoactive and ostensibly benign Cannabidiol or CBD which the population studies have demonstrated to be more causal for cancer than any of the other cannabinoids, being causal in 12 cancer types. It is not exempt from birth defects where it is fortunately less implicated than some of the other cannabinoids.
This newly confirmed destruction only adds to the doubled chance of psychosis and schizophrenia, the substantially elevated rates of suicide, violence – including domestic violence – and even homicide, which Alex Berenson’s Tell Your Children documents so well. Add to that the cognitive disorders and a motivational syndrome afflicting our young people and there is no redeeming reason to defend cannabis.
62 per cent of Australians have it prescribed for chronic pain yet a sweeping review of 104 journal studies comprising almost 10,000 medical cannabis patients found that it only competently alleviates pain at the 30 per cent level, making it only useful as an adjunct to other forms of pain relief such as opiates with no adequate effect on its own. Those activists pressing politicians to allow drivers to legally drive 6 hours after using medical cannabis don’t wish to concede that cannabis used with opiates works synergistically, multiplying the levels of cannabis intoxication and thus multiplying the dangers to other drivers and pedestrians.
Our media appears to not want the facts to get in the way of a nice little earner. Since a Taskforce of Australian drug prevention organisations disseminated a media release on the newly verified linkages between cannabis and cancer, a media release that fortunately got airplay in over 100 media outlets, the legacy media there has gone dark on any emerging science since that time. Nothing is found in the media about cannabis being causal in 70 per cent of pediatric cancer types, nor that it prematurely ages a 30-year-old user by 30 per cent. Most alarming of all is that the media won’t mention that the mutations deriving from the mechanism of chromothripsis which causes those cancers and birth defects are genetically or epigenetically passed down to a cannabis user’s children and grandchildren. Cannabis, whether used medicinally or recreationally, does not discriminate.
In 2020 the Australian TGA advertised a willingness to downgrade CBD from prescription-only to ready availability on supermarket shelves. In May of that year, the preventionist organisation Drug Free Australia submitted an 87-page document spelling out the decades-long research on cannabis and its genotoxic, mutagenic, and teratogenic nature. The submission described the chromothripsis mechanism, asserting that CBD was not exempt from the deleterious effects of cannabis use. Written communication was also forwarded from the Australian researchers responsible for the then soon-to-be-published population studies indicating that CBD was more causally implicated than THC in autism and another birth defect gastroschisis. All indicated that CBD was not at all benign. It is my belief that before 2020, a once cautious TGA would have urged more study.
Most Australians wrongly believe that medicinal cannabis is somehow different to recreational cannabis. But every damaging cannabinoid in recreational cannabis is present in medical cannabis preparations, often in an even more concentrated form. The upshot is that this substance will wreak health havoc amongst an unwitting population, as well as coming generations. All the result of unbridled greed and the immorality of powerful financial forces.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/21st-century-snake-oil
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Once Again, Never Talk to the Cops
The disgraceful frame job against Donald Trump teaches us many lessons – including that the country we used to live in is, if not dead, in a coma – but perhaps the lesson of most practical use to all of us in the crosshairs of political persecution (and even routine prosecution) is that you never talk to the cops.
Never.
Not to help out.
Not to clear up the big misunderstanding you’ve gotten involved in.
Not because you are a good citizen.
Never.
Shut-up, assert your right to remain silent, and demand your attorney.
Repeat after me: “I invoke my rights. Stop talking to me. I want my lawyer.”
Every. Single. Time.
This applies equally if you are guilty or innocent – in fact, more so if you are innocent because nothing has done more to jam up innocent people than those naïve, innocent people trying to explain their innocence. The cops are all Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive, except less butch – believe them when they say “I don’t care.”
They don’t care. So shut the hell up.
Now this common sense rule goes for every lawman, lawwoman, or in the case of the pride flag-waving modern FBI, lawnon-binary. But let’s focus on the FBI because this aspiring Stasi is not the sparkly collection of model-attractive and diverse (Look, there’s one of the team in a wheelchair! Hey, that one is a Maori and there’s another wearing a burnoose!) special agents fighting for justice that mindless network TV viewers see on “FBI: Woke Squad.” It’s a cheesy collection of gender studies majors and striving bureaucrats selected for the job because they can be relied upon to hate people like you – Christian, patriotic, not Democrat. Even other cops detest the FBI for its shady antics and unearned self-regard.
The idea that law enforcement is against us normal people is hard to swallow, but swallow it anyway. That’s how it is now. We are honest people. We want to help. We want to believe that law enforcement are the good guys. Once upon a time, they were. But wake up – that time has passed. These are not fighters for freedom but grubby Democrat catspaws. Many of them are essentially DMV clerks with badges and guns who will not hesitate to ruin your life. Look at the FBI’s track record of late. When they are not kneeling in solidarity with BLM, they are launching SWAT raids against people for kneeling in prayer at abortion clinics. They chose a side, and it is not ours. They are not your friends and they will do can do anything to hurt you. No, it was not always this way, but it is now.
So don’t help them. Remember, like all government bureaucrats, these are mostly lazy and unaccomplished people with delusions of competence. The quintessential modern FBI agent is not TV’s Inspector Erskine; it’s Robert Hansen who sold out his country because he did not feel he was getting his props. But they have an endless budget and they do not care if they wreck your life. In fact, they enjoy it.
So, repeat after me: “I invoke my rights. Stop talking to me. I want my lawyer.”
Film it if you can. One of their little tricks is not recording interviews – any interaction with them is an interview – and this frees them to transcribe whatever they want later. Am I saying the FBI will lie? I don’t have to. From the Boston scandal where they framed four guys for murder to the FISA warrant perjury, the FBI has demonstrated its commitment of honesty. And it’s on par with Bill Clinton’s commitment to his marriage.
What’s the big deal anyway? First, anything you say truly can and will be used against you. As a trial lawyer, I understand that your explanation of what happened will almost always change slightly every time you tell it. That’s not necessarily intentional or deceptive – it’s perfectly normal – but it sure as hell will be portrayed as deceptive by the fuzz. This is a reason they ask you the same thing multiple times, to get you to seemingly change or contradict your story. It doesn’t matter that maybe you remembered something new that you inadvertently left out before, or corrected something you were unclear about before – they will use it to argue that you are lying.
Second, there is a specific statute, 18 United States Code § 1001, that provides (in pertinent part) as follows:
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation…
So, what’s that mean? Well, basically that that they can charge you with a crime if they say you lied to them or even “concealed” the truth. And they charge it every chance they get. Both Donald Trump and his aide got hit with it; almost everyone dumb enough to talk to them gets hit with it. Note that it applies even if the victim did not commit the underlying crime. It’s a process charge. The penalty is five years, so it’s a great bludgeon to force guilty pleas on otherwise innocent folks.
Again, this is not to protect liars. This is to protect innocent citizens from being falsely accused of being liars. How do you avoid getting framed for making a false statement? Don’t make any statements.
Trump’s aide did. General Flynn did. The FBI guys came by, all informal, just chatting, and the victims tried to help. They helped themselves to a criminal charge.
Never help.
The Founders put a right to remain silent in the Constitution for a reason. And while the ruling caste the FBI serves is trying to tear down the Constitution, the right against self-incrimination remains (for now). Use it.
So, repeat after me: “I invoke my rights. Stop talking to me. I want my lawyer.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/06/14/once-again-never-talk-to-the-cops-n2624411
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White former Starbucks regional manager awarded $25M after jury determines she was fired because of her race
A white woman who formerly worked as a regional manager for Starbucks has won a civil rights lawsuit in which she claimed that she was fired because of her race.
On Monday, a federal jury awarded Shannon Phillips a whopping $25 million in punitive damages and an additional $600,000 in compensatory damages after members unanimously agreed that Starbucks had fired her on racial grounds. "I was terminated because I am white," Phillips said in court documents filed in 2019. "If I was black, I would not have been terminated. I was terminated because I complained of and objected to race discrimination."
The circumstances surrounding Phillips' termination began five years ago, when two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were infamously arrested at a Starbucks store in Philadelphia after employees told them they could not use the store restrooms unless they first made a purchase. The men refused to leave or purchase anything, insisting that they were still waiting on a third party. Because of their intransigence that day, an employee eventually called the cops, and the two were arrested, though they were never charged with any crime.
Starbucks executives appeared to panic in the immediate fallout over the men's arrest, which made national news. Kevin Johnson, who was CEO at the time, rushed to Philadelphia to apologize to the men. He also ordered 8,000 Starbucks stores to close for an afternoon so that nearly 175,000 company employees could undergo racial sensitivity training.
Phillips, who worked for Starbucks for 13 years, was not the manager on duty when the arrest took place, nor was she involved in the decision to call police on Nelson and Robinson. In fact, she was a regional director responsible for overseeing 100 stores spanning parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and had little input in the day-to-day operations of those establishments.
Yet she alleged in the lawsuit that she and other white employees became scapegoats, suspended or let go from their jobs "to convince the community that [Starbucks] had properly responded to the incident." Soon after it happened, Phillips claimed she was ordered to place a white manager, who had been with the company for 15 years, on administrative leave for supposed racial discrimination, even though Phillips did not believe the man had done anything wrong.
Senior officials had received a complaint that non-white employees working at the man's store were paid less than white employees, but Phillips countered that, even if the accusation were true, the manager could not be held responsible since local managers have no say in employee compensation, per company policy. After Phillips refused to suspend the man, she was fired with the explanation that "the situation is not recoverable," the complaint said.
Phillips also noted in court documents that the district manager of the store where the arrests occurred is black but that he had not been reprimanded or otherwise penalized for his connection with the incident.
After she was fired, Phillips said she was replaced with "substantially less qualified employees who had not complained of race discrimination." Starbucks denied the accusations at the time and claimed that Phillips had been terminated for demonstrating poor leadership during the incident, which the company characterized as a "crisis."
After the jury rendered its verdict on Monday, Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson expressed disappointment and told CNN that the company would soon be evaluating its next steps.
By contrast, Phillips is celebrating the decision, claiming she is "very pleased" with the outcome. However, she also indicated that she is still going to seek back pay from Starbucks. According to the Daily Mail, Phillips may have earned up to $200,000 a year during her time with the company.
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15 June, 2023
Forza Berlusconi! Silvio in Sardinia
A brilliant essay below by Boris Johnson. As one rather expects of a Latinist, Boris is a past-master at English writing and he magnificently turns his talent below to writing humorous and vivid prose. You have to know what an inflorescence is, though.
I grew up among Italians and tend to like them and Berlusconi was enormousely Italian -- something that Italians recognized well and rewarded with their votes. I miss him and am pleased that the essay below encapsulates him so marvelously
My favourite Silvio anecdote is when he congratulated Barack Obama on his suntan. The American media were beside themselves with horror over it but Italians laughed
Silvio Berlusconi, who had three spells as Italian prime minister, has died at the age of 86. Boris Johnson, at the time editor of this magazine, and Nicholas Farrell were summoned to interview him in 2003.
It is twilight in Sardinia. The sun has vanished behind the beetling crags. The crickets have momentarily stopped. The machine-gun-toting guards face out into the maquis of myrtle and olive, and the richest man in Europe is gripping me by the upper arm. His voice is excited. ‘Look’ he says, pointing his flashlight. ‘Look at the strength of that tree.’ It is indeed a suggestive sight.
An olive of seemingly Jurassic antiquity has grown from a crack in the rock, and like some patient wooden python it has split the huge grey boulder in two. ‘Extraordinary,’ I murmur. My host and I stand lost in awe at olive power. If Silvio Berlusconi, 67, Italian Prime Minister, is secretly hoping that a metaphor will form in my head, he is not disappointed.
What does it show, this outrageous olive, but the force which through the green fuse drives Berlusconi himself? And what does it stand for, this colossal cracked stone? You could try the Italian political establishment; or the European liberal elite; or just civilised Western opinion: all things which Silvio has scandalised and divided. Only last week the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, anathematised not just Berlusconi, but Italy itself.
Under the government of Forza Italia, she claimed, Italy could no longer be said to be part of the Western European tradition or share its values. You may think that a flaming cheek, given that Europe’s founding text is the Treaty of Rome. Where was Sweden, hey, at the 1955 Conference of Messina? You may find, like me, that at the sight of Berlusconi being monstered by Anna Lindh, your sword instinctively flies from its scabbard in his defence. But it was the attack by the Economist newspaper that, I suspect, got in among Berlusconi and his team, not least because it is read in — or lies inert on the coffee tables of – American boardrooms.
Twice now, this distinguished paper (motto: the wit to be dull) has given Silvio a frenzied kicking. It has said that he is not fit to govern Italy, and in a recent edition it laid 28 charges against him and said that not only was he unfit to govern Italy, he was also unfit to be president of the EU — an office he holds until December. It is the Economist attack which may have contributed to the presence of The Spectator here amid the wattle and rosemary of his 170 acre Costa Smeralda estate. Nick Farrell, our Italy correspondent and biographer of Mussolini, has flown in from Predappio. I have been summoned from the other side of the island where, coincidentally, the Johnson family has also been staying in infinitely less splendid accommodation.
When Farrell and I meet for a tactics talk in a Porto Rotondo bar, we decide that the charges must of course be raised with signor il presidente, as the Prime Minister is confusingly called. But we know that we are unlikely to reach a verdict on the key questions, relating as they do to the abortive 1985 sale of a state-owned biscuit company to Buitoni, the spaghetti kings. Let us leave those matters to the lawyers and the desiccated calculators of the Economist. We have a broader and higher purpose: that is, to establish whether or not we feel that Sig. Berlusconi is on the whole a force for good in Italy, Europe and the world.
For three hours we have been in his presence. We have sat at a table in his drawing room, Berlusconi at the head, nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pyjama-suit, and from time to time that table has been pounded vigorously enough to shake the glass bibelots and naked female figurines that dot the room. We have drunk pints of sweet iced tea, brought silently and unprompted, as he has outlined his robust, neo-conservative view of the world. At one stage, after about an hour, the Prime Minister has vanished into the kitchen himself, and caused the appearance of three plates of vanilla and pistachio ice cream, as if to refuel his torrential loquacity. We have heard him extol Thatcher, praise Blair (I have never known us to disagree on anything), laud Bush and damn the Italian magistracy as ‘anthropologically diverse from the rest of humanity.’
It has been, says Valentino, his charming interpreter, the most detailed and generous interview that the leader has ever given, and by 7 p.m. Farrell and I are feeling, frankly, a bit limp. But there is no stopping the balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire. He had a brush with cancer a couple of years ago; his skin is a little sallow for a man who has spent August in Sardinia; he looks less like a million dollars than a million lire. But he is the fizziest old dog you have ever seen. ‘Facciamo un giro,’ he says, by which he means, let’s go for a ride.
When Berlusconi takes the wheel of a golf buggy, he does not trundle: he prefers to whang it and weave it down the swept paths of his estate, like Niki Lauda on the Monza hairpin. And as his passengers sway like sea anemones, he gestures at a landscape which is, of course, naturally lovely, with the sun setting and the Tyrrhenian sea turning from indigo to faded denim. But everywhere he sees signs of his own handiwork and everything seems somehow the product of his own imagination. ‘There’ he says, pointing to a bank of blue plumbago. ‘This is the flower of Forza Italia. The flower doesn’t know it, but I know it.’
Forza Italia! Come on, Italy! The very name, with its football-terrace echo, is enough to wrinkle the nostrils of Anna Lindh and the Euro-nomenklatura. Forza Italia was the movement he founded in 1994 with his $12 billion fortune, and with which he first seized the premiership, only to lose it when his right-wing allies ratted on him, and the lawyers closed in. He was indicted on various charges of bribery and corruption. He struggled on in opposition. But the forza was strong in Berlusconi and in 2001 he came storming back. From port to port went the Forza Italia cruise ship — not unlike the one on which the 17-year-old Berlusconi had sung — and adoring crowds were produced for the cameras. At a cost of $20 million he peppered 12 million Italian households with his magnificent, 128-page all-colour Berluscography, An Italian Life. In it they found a story of fantastic, volcanic American self-propulsion; the early skill in Latin and Greek, a facility he hired for cash to less able pupils; the devoted friends who have remained with him as he expanded his empire, beginning with the town he built in 1960 in a swamp outside Milan which has 4,000 inhabitants and which seems from its photographs to be agreeable in a Milton Keynes-ish way.
We have sat at a table in his drawing room, Berlusconi at the head, nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pyjama-suit, and from time to time that table has been pounded vigorously enough to shake the glass bibelots and naked female figurines that dot the room
They learnt of his first wife and how their feelings for each other turned ‘from love to friendship’ before he acquired his second wife, knock-out blonde soap-star Veronica Lario. There was news about his suits (Ferdinando Caraceni), his cook, his cancer and, above all, the testimony of his mother Rosella. Silvio’s mother said Silvio was a hell of a guy, and whatever Silvio’s mother said, other mothers took very seriously. Studded on every page were his cheery chipmunk grin and his Disneyish nose. To every small Italian businessman he stood for optimism and confidence and an ability to get things done. And here, in the first stop of our wacky races golf-cart tour, is a lesson in his can-do approach.
One day Silvio came along and found they had flattened the trees, in a 50-metre radius, to make a helicopter pad. He didn’t want a helicopter pad. He was devastated. He went to sleep on Easter night, wrestling with the problem. ‘At a certain point I decided that out of each evil you must find a good thing. I thought I could create a labyrinth, and then I decided to make something which had never existed before — a museum of cacti!’ We dismount and admire this bizarre amphitheatre in which an audience of 4,000 prickly customers, comprising 400 species from seven countries, looks down from circular terraces on to a beautiful blue pool facing out to the bay. It is cracked but somehow brilliant.
‘This is the brain of my finance minister,’ says Silvio, pointing to a thing looking like a wrathful artichoke, ‘ideas everywhere.’ He caresses the powdery flanks of another plant to show its ingenious defence against climbing ants. ‘And this,’ he says, pointing to a villainous set of spines, ‘is the mother-in-law’s cushion. This rock came from Lanzarote!’ Why did it come from Lanzarote? Was it really essential, this red pumice? Perhaps not: but it showed that Silvio could move mountains.
He has certainly moved Farrell, who is evincing signs of rapture. ‘Bravo, Signor Presidente’ says the biographer of Mussolini. Veramente bravo!’
Berlusconi waves aside our enthusiasm but cannot resist the moral. ‘See,’ he says, ‘this is what the private sector can do! I did this! I did it in three months!’ I did this: the boast of every alpha male. Thus the three-year-old to his doting mother; thus Agrippa on the frieze of the Pantheon.
The Italian population liked him for his energy and they handsomely returned him. In 2001 he achieved an unprecedented majority, commanding both houses of parliament. He had a huge opportunity to enact what he proclaimed was his vision: a Thatcherian tax-cutting reform of Italy. His enemies went into spasms of indignation and, in truth, one can see the cause of their unease. It is unsettling that one man should have such a concentration of commercial and political authority. It does make one queasy to think that this charming man is not only the biggest media magnate in Italy, owning Mondadori, the biggest publisher, AC Milan, the biggest football club, several newspapers and a huge chunk of Italian television — but is also Prime Minister.
We put these concerns to him and Berlusconi bats it all back in phrases honed with use. No, he didn’t go into politics to protect his own commercial interests, as Enzo Biagi, a columnist, has alleged that he privately confessed. ‘I couldn’t work all my life in Italy with a communist, left-wing government,’ he says. No, there is no conflict of interest. People can write what they like in his papers. ‘I am the most liberal publisher in history.’ And no, the Economist charges are old, footling, groundless, and the table incurs a good thudding as he iterates his defence.
It is quite the done thing, he protests, to pass a law exempting himself from prosecution for the term of his office. Chirac has done the same. But it was never our goal, in this interview, to establish the dodginess of his business practices. We were trying only to judge whether he was on balance a good thing. Our answer, when the trolley ride finally ends and we are sitting like a pair of oiled guillemots over a beer in Porto Rotondo, is an unambiguous yes.
It is hard not to be charmed by a man who takes such an interest in cacti and who will crack jokes at important EU gatherings, not only about Nazi camp commandants but also about whether or not his wife is running off with someone else. There is something heroic about his style, something hilariously imperial — from the huge swimming pool he has created by flooding a basin in the Sardinian hills, to the four thalassotherapy pools he has sunk for Veronica, powered by computers more advanced than those used on the moon shots.
It may or not be important that he claims never to have sacked any of his 46,000 employees. We scan closely the faces of his cook and a butler as they pass us in another golf cart and hail him matily. ‘Where are you off to?’ asks Berlusconi. ‘We’re off for a ride!’ they say. Yes, they seem happy. His appeal, for me, is that he is like so many of the things he has brought to this Sardinian coast. He is a transplant.
Suddenly, after decades in which Italian politics was in thrall to a procession of gloomy, portentous, jargon-laden partitocrats, there appeared this influorescence of American gung-hoery. Yes, he may have been involved in questionable business practices; he may even yet be found out and pay the price. For the time being, though, it seems reasonable to let him get on with his programme. He may fail. But then, of course — and this is the point that someone should write in block capitals, fold up and stuff in the mouth of Anna Lindh, Swedish foreign minister — he can be rejected by the Italian people.
She may not like it but he was democratically elected and can be removed by the very people Anna Lindh insults. If we are obliged to compare Silvio Berlusconi with Anna Lindh, and other bossy, high-taxing European politicians. I agree with Farrell: as the narrator says of Jay Gatsby, a man Berlusconi to some extent resembles, he is ‘better than the whole damn lot of them’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/forza-berlusconi-silvio-in-sardinia/
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California Keeps Shooting Itself in the Foot on Affordable Rental Housing
Why would any property-owner risk renting out his place in CA? You will get treated like a public enemy
It is universally acknowledged that housing affordability has reached crisis levels in California. This crisis has only gotten worse in recent years as state and local officials have continued to double down on failed policies. The Golden State will not significantly improve the situation until it stops shooting itself in the foot.
For starters, if you want more properties for housing, you need strong property rights protections. But that has not been the case in California, particularly in recent years. Extended eviction moratoriums are a case in point.
State and local prohibitions on evictions were rationalized largely due to other harmful government policies: the lockdowns and other stringent economic regulations imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. These laws, which contravened prior public health standards and responses to outbreaks, proved to be wholly ineffective, but they did succeed in destroying countless people’s livelihoods, stunting children’s educational growth and preventing people from visiting dying loved ones in hospitals and nursing homes. California’s COVID-19 laws were notoriously among the strictest in the nation.
After eliminating millions of people’s incomes unnecessarily, governments compounded the error by enacting eviction moratoriums so that people could not be evicted for failing to pay rent due to economic hardships experienced during the pandemic. Taxpayers were further sapped to pay for rental assistance programs to cover some of this lost income (which, again, government policies were largely responsible for creating).
But many landlords never received what they were owed, particularly since the programs generally required the cooperation of deadbeat tenants. In major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles County, San Francisco and Oakland, eviction moratoriums persisted three years after the onset of the pandemic, long after the vast majority of people returned to work. There are now billions of dollars in unpaid rent in California, and many landlords, who still must pay mortgages and property taxes even as their own incomes have disappeared, have lost their properties as a result, some of which also served as their personal homes.
It is hardly the only insidious policy that the state and local governments have adopted, however. In 2019, Assembly Bill 1482 limited rent increases to five percent plus inflation, up to a maximum of 10 percent; made it more difficult to evict tenants from certain types of properties; and required landlords to provide relocation assistance equal to one-month’s rent to tenants in “no fault” evictions.
A current proposal, Senate Bill 567, by state Sen. María Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, sought to further restrict landlords’ control over their own properties by lowering the rent cap to 5 percent (even less than inflation the past two years); eliminating the existing exemption for single-family houses and condominiums; prohibiting eviction if the property owner or their relative wants to move into the unit and if the tenant is aged 60 years or older, disabled, or terminally ill; require that if there is an eviction to enable the owner or their relative to occupy the residence, the owner or relative must use the unit as their primary residence for at least three years; and mandate that if a tenant is evicted because the owner is withdrawing the property from the rental market, the property must remain off the market for at least 10 years. In addition to the obvious violations of private property rights and the right of contract, it should be noted that this would have led to discrimination against the elderly and disabled, as property owners would fear renting to them because then they may not be able to move back into their own properties in the future!
Fortunately, these measures were eventually stripped from the bill (though owners or their relatives would still have to remain in a property for one year, instead of the original three years, if they evicted the previous occupants). The bill now is mostly focused on providing greater enforcement of the AB 1482 measures by allowing wrongfully evicted tenants to sue landlords for triple the amount of actual damages, plus punitive damages and attorneys’ fees.
While the most radical provisions of SB 567 were ultimately stripped out this time, there is a strong likelihood that they will be pushed—and possibly adopted—next year or the year after that. The prospect hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of property owners in California.
It is no wonder then why, despite a significant housing shortage, developers and landlords are reluctant to provide more housing. If the state and local governments continue to demonize landlords, allow tenants to steal from them through unpaid rent and force them to endure costly and lengthy legal processes to get rid of nightmare tenants, more and more current and potential landlords and developers will rationally conclude that it just is not worth the hassle and risk—and the housing supply will shrink further, making the affordability crisis worse.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14545&omhide=true&trk=title
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Tide Turning Against Biological Men Competing in Women’s Sports, New Poll Finds—Even Among Democrats
The tide appears to be turning against radical gender ideology in a big way. Just this Saturday, a transgender cyclist won a North Carolina race by more than five minutes. Retired tennis star Martina Navratilova said of the result: “What a joke.”
A joke, indeed. It seems many Americans agree with Navratilova.
A new Gallup poll, released Monday, showed a marked shift in how Americans view transgender issues, especially in regard to sports.
“A larger majority of Americans now (69%) than in 2021 (62%) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender,” Gallup noted. “Likewise, fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26%, down from 34%.”
The poll indicates that a wide swath of Americans is turning against the transgender movement, at least as it applies to men participating in women’s athletics. In fact, the shift was noticeable in almost every political and demographic group. Republicans, independents, and even Democrats all increasingly oppose biological males competing against girls and women.
Since 2021, the percentage of Democrats who think that biological males shouldn’t compete in female sports has risen from 41% to 48%. The new poll shows that 47% of Democrats say they should be allowed to participate, so it’s sharply divided—even in the political party that’s been relentless in promoting the transgender issue.
Americans familiar with transgender people on a personal level had an even more dramatic shift. Among those who say they know a transgender person, 64% say that males shouldn’t be able to play sports against females. That’s an increase from 53% in 2021.
Most of the respondents to the poll said that “changing one’s gender” is morally wrong, up from 51% in 2021 to 55% in 2023.
As my colleague Tyler O’Neil pointed out, Gallup’s numbers may even underestimate the shift on this issue, inasmuch as the phrasing of the poll questions muddied the water of what was being asked. For instance, it asks whether transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that “match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their gender?”
Whether understated or not, the polling trend is encouraging.
Transgenderism has become an epidemic among young people, but many Americans are turning against the extreme ideological claims. There’s still some common sense left in this country, even if it no longer manifests itself in our cultural and ruling elites. The shift over the past few years is noteworthy because it has occurred despite a relentless campaign by the liberal media and the Biden administration to push the ideology to the absolute limit.
It’s not working. In fact, it may be actively turning many Americans against them.
It must also be said that a handful of brave people—most notably Riley Gaines and Chloe Cole, alongside other female athletes and detransitioners who have had experience with this issue—may be breaking through to the larger public with their message.
Courage can be infectious. Their stories have opened eyes to the breadth and depth of the problem.
This is mostly good news, but a word of caution is in order here. This is likely only the beginning of the fight. The Left isn’t sitting still and letting waning popularity for this issue dissuade it from codifying gender ideology into law.
For instance, California legislators are trying to pass a law to make parents who don’t affirm transgenderism for their child guilty of child abuse. The Biden administration aims to change Title IX law to prohibit states from banning biological males from competing against biological females.
The Left hopes that by changing the law, it can browbeat Americans into accepting the ideology, whether we like it or not. That strategy has worked for them in the past on other issues.
It’s up to Americans to put their foot down to stop this madness while the question is still being decided. The tide has turned in our favor, but that tide could go out again.
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The mass media used to publish perspectives on Ukraine they would never publish today
The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.
I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.
I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.
Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”
Milne says “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” and says the US and its allies have been “encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.” He correctly predicts that “one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese ‘pivot’ to Asia,” and presciently warns of “the threat of a return of big-power conflict” as Ukraine moves toward war.
To be clear, Milne was not some fringe voice who happened to get picked up for one Guardian op-ed by a strange editorial fluke; he published hundreds of articles with The Guardian over the course of many years, and kept on publishing for a year and a half after this Ukraine piece came out, right up until he went to work for Corbyn. He was on the left end of the mainstream media, but he was very much part of the mainstream media.
This article would of course have drawn controversy and criticism at the time; there were many people who were on the opposite side of the debate in 2014, though they would’ve had a fraction of the numbers of the shrieking conformity enforcers we see on all matters related to Ukraine today. Milne himself says that “the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage” after the Crimea annexation, so his article would have been an outlier to be sure. But the fact remains that it was published in The Guardian, and that it would never be published there today.
Seriously, try to imagine an article like that about what happened in Ukraine in 2014 appearing in a mainstream publication like The Guardian in 2023. Can you imagine the hysterics? The histrionic garment-rending from the establishment narrative managers? The social media swarming of Zelenskyite trolls? This is after all the same media environment that pressured CBS to retract its story about how arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t getting where they were supposed to, and pressured Amnesty International to apologise for saying anything about Ukrainian war crimes.
Or how about this Guardian article by John Pilger titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia,” subtitled “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world,” published two weeks after Milne’s?
Pilger’s article is somehow even more heretical than Milne’s, saying Washington “masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev” and that “Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”
As with Milne, Pilger criticises the media environment at the time, saying “propaganda” about what’s happening in Ukraine is happening in an “Orwellian style”. But again, his article was published in The Guardian, whereas today it never would be.
Pilger has actually provided some background for this shift in mass media reporting, saying that there was a “purge” of dissident voices from The Guardian’s ranks around 2014-2015.
“My written journalism is no longer welcome in The Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what The Guardian no longer says any more,” Pilger reported in a January 2018 radio interview.
Interestingly, a 2019 Declassified UK report found that British intelligence services began aggressively targeting The Guardian after its 2013 publication of the Edward Snowden documents, and found their in when the outlet’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was replaced by Katharine Viner in March 2015. After that point The Guardian began moving away from critical investigative reporting and began publishing softball “interviews” with MI5 and MI6 chiefs and willingly participating in the west’s information war against Russia.
Once the western world plunged in unison into blinkered Russia hysteria after Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential election in 2016, we began seeing things like that time a BBC reporter admonished a guest for voicing unauthorised opinions about Syria because “we’re in an information war with Russia.”
Whether or not you agree with the perspectives authored by Milne and Pilger is irrelevant to the very important fact that they could say things in the mainstream media in 2014 that they could never say in the mainstream media in 2023. The dramatic shift from a media environment where criticism of establishment Russia narratives is permitted to one where it is not permitted is worth noting, because it means there was a conscious shift toward converting the mass media into full-fledged cold war propaganda outlets.
A lot of things have happened since 2014, but nothing about what happened in 2014 has changed since 2014. It’s still the same year it always was, because that’s how time works; nothing has changed about 2014 other than the thoughts you’re permitted to voice about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian.
This bizarre historical revisionism has been occurring not just in The Guardian but throughout the mainstream media. Last year Moon of Alabama published a piece titled “Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned” which compiles many, many instances in which the mass media have reported on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem over the years, and contrasts this with the way the mass media now whitewashes those paramilitaries and pretends they’re just fine upstanding patriots. In the years prior to the Russian invasion there were neo-Nazis in Ukraine; now there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there never have been and you’re a treasonous Putin puppet if you say otherwise. Nothing actually changed about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem; all that changed is the narrative.
Everyone should be aware that the mass media have drastically changed the perspectives they’re willing to publish on Ukraine, because it proves that these outlets are not working to help create a well-informed populace and facilitate important conversations, but are in fact knowingly operating as war propaganda firms. They’re not trying to inform people about what’s going on in the world, they’re trying to manipulate the way people think about the world. These two goals could not possibly be more different.
Power is controlling what happens; true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They’re re-writing history to influence control over what people think about the present. As old Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
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13 June, 2023
Statue honoring Revolutionary War hero removed after nearly a century
It seems we are not allowed to revere people for their good deeds if they have any imperfections as judged by later generations. Let him who is without sin ...
A statue dedicated to Revolutionary War hero Gen. Philip Schuyler that has stood over Albany's city hall for nearly a century was removed on Saturday morning. The statue was removed because Schuyler owned slaves.
A moving crew hoisted the 9-foot-tall statue from its pedestal and loaded it onto a trailer around 8 a.m. on Saturday. The pedestal and a plaque were also removed from the site in New York state's capitol. The removal of Schuyler's statue took about three hours and reportedly cost the city $40,000.
The Gen. Philip Schuyler statue will be temporarily housed inside an undisclosed storage facility until a permanent location is determined. The city council will launch a monuments commission to decide where the statue will be relocated to.
The statue, which was originally erected in 1925, was removed because Schuyler was one of Albany's largest slave owners.
The decision to remove the statue was first announced in the summer of 2020, which was a response to the death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots that ravaged U.S. cities. Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan, a Democrat, ordered the removal of the statue in June 2020. However, the removal was reportedly held up because an engineering study took years.
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Sheehan said, "All of that took time, it took longer than I wanted it to."
Mary Liz Stewart, the co-founder of the Underground Railroad Education Center, told WRGB, "I was glad action had been taken, I know it was pre-COVID when the issue of what to do, as we say 'what to do with Phil' actually started to percolate in the community. It was an outgrowth of what was going on in other cities around the country."
Dr. Alice Green of the Center for Law and Justice said, "The statue is a continuing reminder that we were enslaved. It's painful to have that reminder every time I go down to city hall or drive past it."
Albany county legislator Jeff Perlee argued, "This isn’t to say that Schuyler was a perfect historical figure. He owned slaves, as was the unfortunate reality of the time for many – including President Washington. It was unquestionably wrong. But nobody is calling for Washington Avenue or Washington Park in Albany to be renamed."
Schuyler served as a major general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He was also a U.S. Senator representing New York. Schuyler was the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/statue-honoring-revolutionary-war-hero-removed-after-nearly-a-century
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Why Does the Left Want No Future For Any of Us?
Policies and attitudes on the Left favor having no children or modifying existing children to be unable to breed. The question is why?
Let’s look at the accepted wisdom on the Left as it relates to having children or propagation of the human race.
*The Left supports unlimited abortion. They have no interest in time-based limits, and one British professor suggested extending the option for an abortion until after birth, where the health of the child could be examined.
*The Left supports same-sex marriage. On its own, without some adoption or surrogacy, same-sex couples cannot make offspring.
*The Left supports “transitioning,” not just in adults but also in children. Surgeries and/or chemicals to effect the supposed change from man to woman or boy to girl and vice versa will all but prevent the person in question from being able to have children.
* The Left has pushed a dire end-of-the-world climate crisis theme that has led many young couples to not want to have children, so that their offspring should not suffer in the future inferno/hell that has been promised since the days of Gore.
* The Left has not expressed any support for marriage and the traditional family. Black Lives Matter (BLM) specifically said that one of their goals was the destruction of “the nuclear family.” They kind of walked that one back but one sees lower levels of marriage and higher levels of divorce in younger generations.
* The Left, until it left women in the dust for trans guys, always supported women working and advancing professionally. In every Western country where women go for advanced education and professional fulfillment, numbers of births per woman are well under replacement levels of 2.1. Having a family was generally considered an impediment to career advancement.
Most ideological movements focus not only on the here-and-now but also plan on propagating so as to continue the program. The Nazis famously had hotels where they mated good Aryan soldiers with chosen women to make babies so as to ensure the future of the German race. But with the Left, we see that many of their policies lead individuals to either not have children, not to want to have children, or not be able to have children. The missing generations are supposed to be supplied by generally illegal immigrants. For Europe, the future workers not supplied by the locals come primarily from Turkey and the Middle East, while in the US millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico and points further south make up for the lack of American babies.
So why do Left-leaning people not want to have kids and for others not to have kids? On the one hand, their focus is on the individual—a woman’s body is her responsibility, so she alone can decide whenever she wishes to have an abortion. The same argument would be made about gay marriage and trying to push boys to be girls: this person has needs, and those needs outweigh all other considerations. But what about the future? If gay couples cannot reproduce and many women choose abortion over letting a child be born, where will we have future Americans to run the country? Apparently, that thought does not reach a level of consciousness for Democratic and left-leaning policy makers. One has to remember that the Biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply” no doubt rubs non-religious Left-leaning thinkers the wrong way. One blaspheming fellow at Davos claimed that the Creator was “dead” and now the effort was in “getting rid of the body.” Since child birth and child rearing are so closely tied with religious commandments and lifestyle, it would be no surprise that Left-focused policies would encourage not having children. Throw in many MSM articles about how much money one saves by not bringing a baby into the world or how much a carbon footprint is reduced or how much more freedom to do whatever you want there is when there are no diapers to change at 3 in the morning—and the pull of not having children becomes stronger and stronger.
In previous, more religious generations, having children was considered a sacred obligation. The expenses, worries, loss of sleep, and end of personal time, were all worth the joy of bringing a new life into the world. Most of what we as humans do is to fashion one thing into another. One can take bauxite from a mine and make it into an aluminum ingot, and from there it can become part of a plane or a window frame or beer can. On the other hand, bringing a new life into the world is the closest that we can come to being like G-d, the Creator of everything. There is no greater joy than in adding a new family member and no greater reward in watching a child grow up to become a responsible member of the society in which he or she lives. The Left does not want any of this. They support policies that all but prevent future generations from being born. “Just bring them in from other countries!” Their nihilist approach is the reason that they are insistent on access to your children—they don’t want anyone to bring more generations into this supposedly overcrowded world. The fight is not just over tax rates or mileage requirements for new cars; rather, the fight is for the future of the United States. Part of the fight is at the ballot box; the more important part is at the home—bringing up children to be able to succeed in society and bring up their own children.
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Hair Salon Fires Christian Stylist for ‘Homophobic’ Post Criticizing Disney+ on Facebook
A Virginia hair salon fired a Christian stylist over a Facebook post criticizing the streaming movie service Disney+.
“My Facebook is my page,” Sidney York, the fired stylist, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “I understand it’s a touchy subject and people may be offended over it, but it had nothing to do with my job.”
York had worked at Hair We Are in Virginia Beach since July 2021. She said she knew her colleagues likely wouldn’t appreciate her Christian views, but decided she had to speak up.
“The hair industry—the beauty industry—is a very woke industry, and I’ve kind of kept my ideas silent for a while,” she said.
On Friday, June 2, she shared on Facebook, “I can’t take this anymore, I stand with Jesus.”
York was responding to the National Geographic special “Pride from Above,” which she saw advertised on Disney+. She condemned the LGBT movement for subverting the symbol of the rainbow.
“This is MOCKERY of the covenant God made with his people—that He would not destroy the earth again by water. It’s not okay & it’s not acceptable,” she wrote. “Pride from above? Is pride claiming to be the prophet? Is Disney spelled upside down look like Jezebel (the name God calls intolerable) to you? Does the ‘+’ look like it could be an upside down cross? Should we tolerate her?”
Jane Pryor, the salon’s owner and manager, texted York on Sunday morning, writing that she was firing the stylist for “insubordination.”
“I asked you to take the post down yesterday afternoon at 3:15,” Pryor wrote. “You chose not to. You leave me no other choice but to let you go from my company immediately for insubordination.”
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The tedious obsession with compulsive praise of women -- even mediocre ones
The crowd gathered in the open-air tourist bus were overwhelmed by the massive granite wall towering over us in the Yosemite Valley. This was El Capitan, one of the most iconic and challenging rock-climbing destinations in the world, the setting for the movie Free Solo’s nail-biting documentary of Alex Honnold’s infamous climb.
The bubbly female ranger working as our tour guide had a clear agenda when it came to outlining the history of climbing this imposing rock face. Her attention was focused on a particular climber back in 1993 who became the first person to free climb the tough ‘Nose’ route of El Capitan. With great fanfare the ranger announced that climber was a woman – the well-known Californian sports climber, Lynn Hill. The ranger’s excitement at this announcement prompted cheers from the females in our midst.
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the awesome achievement of this inspiring athlete but what riled me was how little effort the ranger then made to put Lynn Hill’s historic climb into a broader context – namely the astonishing efforts of male climbers who’ve tackled the same climb since then. Like Alex Honnold who remains the only person to do the climb ‘free solo’, gripping to the face like Spiderman using none of the ropes or protective gear that assisted Hill. Honnold and Tommy Caldwell have climbed El Capitan in less than two hours – compared to the fastest woman doing a free climb up the face, Emily Harrington, who managed it in a single day.
Yes, women are doing remarkably well but their accomplishments pall compared to the very top male climbers. Remember British poet Samuel Johnson’s famous observation of Quaker women preachers in 1763: ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.’
We are so stuck on the miracle of women partaking that woe betide anyone who points out that even when women do it well, sometimes men still do it better.
Celebratory claims about women’s achievements are becoming the only permitted public discourse, with women’s greatness constantly reinforced and emphasised. It’s utterly tedious having to put up with the constant crowing about women’s triumphs but even more maddening when bit players become the story simply because they are women.
On a previous trip to California, I was astonished when our tour of the spectacular Hearst Castle paid almost no attention to the extraordinary career of the man who made it all possible – newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Most of the gushing commentary was focused on the female architect, Julia Morgan, who was responsible for the castle design. Look at the women running the place happily boasting that Morgan’s efforts are all tourists need hear about when touring this ironic building, instead of learning about the man whose career success enabled the whole edifice to be created.
With feminists having succeeded so effectively in elevating women’s place in the world, you might have hoped there would come a time when we could afford a little perspective, acknowledgement that women are excelling whilst admitting there’s still territory where men will continue to shine. Remember six years ago when an employee was fired by Google for writing a memo asserting women are underrepresented in the technology industry because ‘preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes’?
After that kerfuffle, naturally the tech industries have been making strenuous efforts to prove him wrong by improving the female representation in their companies. Here’s the Apple boss boasting now of 35 per cent female staff across America. But what they don’t dare talk about is the fact that most of the increased female participation is in sales, admin, or HR. The engineers who actually come up with the goods that make the company so profitable are still 80 per cent nerdy young men – like my nephew.
My visit to California was to attend the wedding of this brilliant relative who spends his days working with his Silicon Valley team to invent incredible new products. Funnily enough, I heard from one of his elderly relatives at the wedding reception that he’d been part of the team who’d developed the alarm system in her Apple watch that called 911 when she had a fall, leading to the ambulance taking her to hospital.
After seeing what happened to Damore after his perfectly sound observations about why women are less likely to make it into the tech world, no one dares point out that for all the strenuous efforts to recruit more women into STEM careers using women-only scholarships and promotions, the numbers making it into the engine room of these world-leading industries have barely changed over the last decade.
It makes me wonder if all the cheering and enthusiasm for women’s achievements masks feminist disappointment in the stubbornly gendered reality – there are areas in life where mainly men remain destined to excel. We are very deliberately being taught to avoid this reality – look at the historical record is being rewritten to exalt female scientists. Naturally, no one dares voice any objection.
There was a very cheeky article published in The Spectator eight years ago entitled, There’s a good reason why there are no great female composers. The author, Damian Thompson, was responding to a push to change the music syllabus to include female composers. He dared to suggest it is important to ask how good the music of female composers is compared to that of men. Here’s a man prepared to stick his neck out, declaring the first movement of Clara Schumann’s concerto is a dud: ‘The first phase is a platitude – nothing good can come of it and nothing does,’ and her G Minor Piano Sonata is ‘embarrassingly banal’. He finds Fanny Mendelssohn’s G Minor Piano Sonata ‘bloody awful’ and describes Judith Weir’s stark scores as sounding ‘as if crucial instrumental parts have gone missing.’ (Funny how we cringe at someone having the effrontery to criticise women in this way but few people seem to mind when men’s work is savaged.)
Thompson rightly points out, ‘If there are no great women composers, that’s because creative geniuses are rare and, in the past so few women wrote music.’ But he concludes, ‘We are stuck in a situation where the barriers to women becoming composers have been removed but they’re still honoured for being women.’
That’s the real point. Must we continue to honour women composers simply for the novelty of them doing this work.
To me this is all rather close to home because my partner is a double bass player in a community orchestra and one of the many thrills in our almost decade-long relationship has been to gain a real appreciation of classical music through attending their concerts.
At least that is what used to happen. But now the wonderful classical pieces are under threat of being frozen out of the programming, to be replaced by all manner of diversity offerings including didgeridoo and smoking ceremonies. The wind section really struggled in the recent outdoor concert when trying to perform through that murky haze.
Then there are the many beaming female composers, delighting in having their undistinguished and indistinguishable pieces performed by a full orchestra. I can’t help but wonder how many in that grey-haired audience are, like me, sitting there yearning for the great music of the past that used to provide such a thrill. I’m pushing for the orchestra to put together some Dead White Male concerts – celebrating the music of the great male composers whose music has delighted audiences for century after century.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-elevation-of-women-to-male-peaks/
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12 June, 2023
The new face of extremism unmasked: The UN and Republicans are watching 'Trantifa' - the hard-left transgender activists who flirt with violence to promote their radical agenda
It sounds like the violence-prone fringe of the Left are putting on dresses these days
Pull away the black mask, and political extremism has a new face: 'TRANTIFA'.
The portmanteau of 'trans' and 'ANTIFA' is exactly what you'd expect — far-left transgender activists willing to intimidate, harass and even use violence to advance their radical new ideas about gender.
Much like ANTIFA, they're not a formal group of card-carrying members, with the term 'Trantifa' coined on social media to highlight the strong transgender presence within the anarchist outfit.
So-called Trantifa members are a small group of trans activists on the edges of the movement who post angry rhetoric online and gather at rallies.
UN investigator Reem Alsalem told DailyMail.com 'screaming trans activists' were a worrying and 'increasing trend' that must be tackled.
Julio Rosas, an author who recently testified to House lawmakers about leftist extremism, cites a series of trans extremist incidents, including trans shooter Audrey Hale's bloody rampage in a Christian elementary school in Nashville.
'Trans activists gravitate towards these very far-left groups, because they share their anarcho-communist type ideology,' Rosas told DailyMail.com.
'They view the US as systemically racist, that it's subjugated queer people, and that states passing laws against child mutilations is part of a trans genocide. And they're fighting back.'
He described a radicalized group of trans activists concentrated on the East and West coasts who coordinate via messaging apps to stage rallies, confront rivals and push their ideas into the mainstream.
The FBI declined to comment on whether it was monitoring violent trans activism, but Rosas, Alsalem and some Republican politicians refer to ever-more incidents that make headlines.
In March, Hale shot and killed three children and three adults at Nashville's Covenant School. The 28-year-old had started using he/him pronouns and going by the name Aiden.
Police are still studying the 'manifesto' Hale left behind. A court will decide whether to make it public.
Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines was in April punched by a trans woman activist at San Francisco State University, after she made a speech against allowing female trans athletes to compete in women's sports.
In May, US cyclist Hannah Arensman revealed she'd quit the sport because she was harassed over her opposition to competing against biological males, including by members of the John Brown Gun Club, a pro-trans antifa group.
Meanwhile, trans women increasingly post online TRANTIFA videos about armed self-defense.
TikTok creator Tara Jay recently shared a menacing video clip with her 2,400 followers about using guns against anyone who dares to 'stop me from going into the women's bathroom.'
'It will be the last mistake you ever make,' she warned in the now-deleted post, in which she urged LGBTQ people to arm themselves.
Likewise, blogger Kayla Denker, a trans woman, posted footage of herself toting a military-style weapon, warning any 'transphobes' who 'come for me.'
She later said she advocates for non-violent self-defense.
TRANTIFA activists use the acronym 'TERF' to disparage their opponents as trans-exclusionary radical feminists. They frequently threaten 'TERFs' with violence on social media and wear 'punch a TERF' t-shirts.
Other shirts sold online say 'trans rights … or else' alongside images of guns.
Alsalem, a UN special rapporteur, is tasked with monitoring violence against women and girls globally. She said women who speak up for women-only sports contests, bathrooms, or prisons face harassment or worse.
She threw her weight behind Gaines, who she says was 'ambushed and hit' by 'screaming trans activists' in San Francisco after speaking out against biological males competing in female-only sports contests.
'There is an increasing trend that I have been observing,' Alsalem told DailyMail.com.
Officials in the US and other western countries affected by this problem must 'ensure that the freedom of speech and thought, including on the issues of sex, gender, and gender identity be protected and upheld,' Alsalem said.
The National Center for Transgender Equality and other trans campaign groups did not answer DailyMail.com's requests for comment.
They say trans people are more often victims of rape, beatings and other violence than they are perpetrators.
The Human Rights Campaign, America's biggest LGBTQ group, this week declared a 'state of emergency' for members of the community.
Kelley Robinson, the group's president, described a 'tidal wave of increased homophobia and transphobia' that was forcing 'families to uproot their lives and flee their homes in search of safer states.'
Erin Reed, a prominent trans campaigner, says trans people face a 'genocide', pointing to many bills Republicans are pushing through state legislatures this year, outlawing puberty blockers for trans kids and other measures.
The 'legislative assault … seeks to remove us from public life, remove all legal protections, remove our trans children from parents, remove their medically necessary care,' Reed tweeted. 'It will kill people.'
Reed, like most trans campaigners, powerfully argues the case for trans rights, but does not advocate violence. Rosas, the author of Fiery But Mostly Peaceful, said TRANTIFA operates on the fringes of the same movement.
Rosas says he encountered many trans activists among the antifa groups he monitored during the racial justice protests that erupted in the summer of 2020.
He relayed his experiences to members of the House Homeland Security Committee at a hearing on left-wing violence last month.
To put TRANTIFA in context, DailyMail.com spoke to the old-school feminists who have been ideologically opposed to trans activists for decades, and seen some evolve into a more hardline, even militant, group.
They describe what was once a small group of trans women becoming increasingly radicalized, better organized and more dangerous. Nowadays, members frequently don antifa-style combat gear and masks when they pile in on feminist rallies.
April Morrow, a disabled 58-year-old woman, is one of them. She says she was attacked by a 27-year-old trans woman activist at a feminist rally she arranged in Tacoma, Washington, in October.
There, trans activists 'encircled' the feminists, who were 'totally outnumbered,' said Morrow. Her attacker, a young trans woman, came 'out of nowhere and grabbed my hand' as she filmed the chaos on her cell phone.
The activist wrenched Morrow's wrist and pushed her to the ground. It hurt, and the injury has kept her out of work, she said. The incident was captured on video, police arrested the attacker, who may face assault charges.
Kara Dansky, a feminist author and president of Women's Declaration International in the US, was protesting in Oakland in December against California's prison system, which lets trans women convicts serve their sentences in women's prisons.
She and other feminists were attacked by a group of black-clad TRANTIFA activists. The women described being startled, shaken and slightly roughed up. Dansky describes the masked attackers as 'men' who could easily overpower them.
'It's inevitable that one or more women who stand up for women's sex-based rights is going to be killed,' said Dansky.
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Charges dropped against man arrested after trying to quote Bible to Pride rally attendees; official reportedly says legal action may come against police
Charges have been dropped against a Pennsylvania man who was arrested over the weekend after trying to quote the Bible to Pride rally attendees.
"After a review of the incident which took place on June 3, 2023, in the 800 block of Washington Street in the City of Reading, the District Attorney’s Office has withdrawn the charges of disorderly conduct filed against Damon Atkins," a Tuesday Facebook post from the Berks County District Attorney reads. "The charges were withdrawn after the District Attorney’s Office reviewed the videos of the incident along with applicable case law."
According to the Lancaster Patriot — which initially covered details of the arrest — an email from Berks County Commissioner Christian Leinbach said "from what I have seen thus far I believe this was an unlawful arrest and could open the City of Reading and their police department to legal action."
What's the background?
The incident took place Saturday outside City Hall at 815 Washington Street where the first annual Reading Pride March & Rally was underway. Reading is about 90 minutes northwest of Philadelphia.
The Patriot spoke to Atkins as well as the man who recorded video of his arrest, Matthew Wear.
Wear told the Patriot he'd been preaching to the Pride rally attendees prior to Atkins’ arrival, and the same officer who arrested Atkins also told Wear to knock it off. “A cop got in my face, laid hands on me, and threatened to arrest me if I didn’t stop," Wear says on video.
The outlet said Atkins was standing on the public sidewalk holding signs just after 10 a.m. when trouble began for him, too. Wear's video camera was on, and he captured the interaction between Atkins and the officer.
“This is public property," Atkins told the officer — identified by the Patriot as Sgt. Bradley McClure — who agreed it was public property but still insisted that Atkins "let them have their event” and “respect it."
Atkins replied, “You know who’s cheering for us? The people that are in hell.”
The Patriot said Atkins later explained he was referring to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke, in which a rich man begs Father Abraham to send someone to warn his brothers about the place of torment he's in.
As the officer turned and walked away, Atkins said, "So you do you, and I'm gonna do me."
With that, Atkins began speaking, hollering, "You!" across the street and then uttering the words, "God is not" before the officer interrupted with, "That's it! You're done!" and arrested Atkins. The Pride rally attendees applauded.
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Game-Changer: UK Stops Routine Prescribing of 'Gender Affirming' Drugs For Children
The United Kingdom’s shift away from prescribing puberty blockers to children marks a significant development in the ongoing global debate surrounding gender dysphoria treatment for minors.
While progress is being made across the pond, there remains much work to be done in the United States to ensure the well-being of vulnerable children.
The National Health Service (NHS) recently announced that it will only administer puberty suppressing hormones as part of clinical research, aligning with the recommendations of an independent review conducted by Dr. Hilary Cass.
The report highlighted the uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments and proposed that puberty blockers should not be routinely prescribed to children and adolescents with gender incongruence or dysphoria, except within a research context.
Moreover, NHS England has taken an important step by establishing a national oversight board dedicated to researching the effects of puberty blockers.
This new board has approved a study on the impact of puberty suppressing hormones on gender dysphoria in children and young people with early-onset gender dysphoria.
The consultation report provides further information on the board’s objectives and the upcoming study.
The report also emphasizes the need for a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to assessing and addressing the individual needs of patients with gender dysphoria.
By involving the child or young person and their family, the integrated multidisciplinary team (MDT) will determine the most suitable clinical pathway in the best interest of the child.
This shift in the UK’s approach is a positive sign, demonstrating that European nations like the United Kingdom, Finland, and Sweden are recognizing the limitations of puberty blockers and other forms of “gender-affirming care.”
Research has indicated that these treatments can have irreversible consequences and potential long-term harm to children, which should be taken into account when considering their use.
Regrettably, the United States has not fully grasped the risks associated with “gender-affirming care” for American children.
Many medical professionals continue to prescribe these drugs without sufficient evidence supporting their mental health benefits.
However, an increasing number of detransitioners are speaking out against the hasty transition of transgender children, sharing their personal stories of the detrimental impact it has had on their lives.
Nonetheless, progress is underway. The majority of the American public opposes the administration of puberty blockers and surgical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria.
Media coverage has played a crucial role in shedding light on this issue, allowing for greater public awareness.
Several states have even passed legislation prohibiting “gender-affirming care” for minors, eliciting disapproval from progressive factions who seem eager to support widespread transgender interventions for children.
While there is still work to be done, it appears that the tide is turning in the right direction.
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Major Australian ndewspaper fires star columnist Julie Szego after ‘disparaging comments’ over trans article furore
The editor of The Age has sacked one of the masthead’s star columnists after she called out the publication over its refusal to run an article she wrote on youth gender transition.
According to The Australian, journalist Julie Szego posted on social media last week that while she had been commissioned to write a feature-length story about the contentious issue by The Age’s former editor Gay Alcorn, the newspaper’s current boss Patrick Elligett refused to run it.
Szego, a freelancer who has written for The Age on and off for more than two decades, then chose to self-publish the 5000-word piece on her own Substack page.
She told her social media followers her new blog will be a site where: “I’ll be writing about gender identity politics … without the copy being rendered unreadable by a committee of woke journalists redacting words they deem incendiary, such as ‘male’.”
Szego later told The Australian that the post about her colleagues at The Age was “a vague and cheeky comment that was not intended to put anyone down”, but it had been cited by Elligett as a reason to sack her as a columnist.
“I love my former comrades at The Age,” Szego said in the exclusive interview. “I have no bitterness whatsoever, but this issue of gender identity politics is causing tensions in newsrooms around the world and The Age is no different.”
Szego said she believed her story was “measured”, and that despite suggestions to the contrary she does not hold a firm view one way or another on paediatric transition.
Szego also said the fact that she attended the controversial Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne in March had been used as part of a whispering campaign against her.
“I attended the rally, I was conspicuous with notebook and pen,” she said, The Australian reports. “I attended as a journalist because I wanted to get some colour from the event as I’m hoping to write a book on the wider debate. “My attendance at the rally caused great suspicion in there (The Age’s newsroom).”
The Australian also spoke to editor Patrick Elligett, who said he explained to Szego why he would not publish the article, and said The Age “continues to cover the issue of gender policy with balance, nuance and accuracy. It is an issue many of our competitors will not touch.”
Szego’s interpretation of that conversation differs. “Patrick told me he could not publish my piece under my byline because it would damage the reputation of the masthead,” she told The Australian on Sunday. “I would suggest he’s damaged the masthead more by not publishing it.”
Szego said she received a text message from Elligett last week, informing her that she would no longer be writing for The Age because of her social media post about her “woke” colleagues.
“Obviously we can’t have our columnists publicly disparaging the publication like that so we won’t be commissioning further columns from you,” she claimed Elligett said.
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11 June, 2023
Nazism is alive and well in Ukraine
The New York Times has been forced to very, very belatedly deal with something which had long been obvious and known to many independent analysts and media outlets, but which has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for obvious reasons.
The surprising Monday Times headline said that "Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History." This acknowledgement comes after literally years of primarily indy journalists and geopolitical commentators pointing out that yes indeed... Ukraine's military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east since at least 2014, have a serious Nazi ideology problem.
This has been exhaustively documented, again, going back years. But the report, which merely tries to downplay it as a "thorny issue" of Ukraine's "unique" "History" - suggests that the real problem for Western PR is fundamentally that it's being displayed so openly. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover those Nazi symbols please!--as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.
NBC News report in 2014: "Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past on Monday night, when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast."
The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing frustration over the optics of Nazi symbols being displayed so proudly on many Ukrainian soldiers' uniforms. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs which have in some cases been featured in newspapers and media outlets worldwide (typically coupled with generally positive articles on Ukraine's military) are merely 'unfortunate' or misleading, the NYT report says, "In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups."
The report admits this has led to controversy wherein news rooms actually must delete some photos of Ukrainian soldiers and militants. "The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II," continues the report.
So it's merely "thorny" and "complicated" we are told. Below is a small sampling of the kinds of patches that appear on Ukrainian military uniforms with "some regularity" - in the words of The New York Times:
NATO itself has in the recent past been forced to delete images on its official social media accounts due to Nazi imagery being present among Ukrainian troops during photo shoots.
The following line from the report says everything you need to know about the so-called "paper of record" and its one-sided and ultra-simplistic coverage of what many are finally waking up to realize is a war with a deeply complex reality (to say the least), and far from the MSM's goodies vs. baddies Hollywoodesque narrative of Putler vs. the free world which is typical of networks from CNN to Fox to NBC...
From the NY Times:
"In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs."
Oops!
And now we might expect some significant efforts at damage control, or even perhaps we're witnessing the beginnings of evolving definitions and the moving of goalposts. More from NY Times [emphasis ZH]:
But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
Only very recently Ukraine's Defense Ministry and even President Zelensky's office was caught in the act:
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
To be expected, the Times still tries to run cover while desperately seeking to 'reassure' its audience by writing that "In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be 'de-Nazified' — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish."
But then still, the NYT concedes awkwardly, "More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate."
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Ted Cruz TORCHES Leftist Group for Demonizing Moms for Liberty
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed the Southern Poverty Law Center, focusing on the SPLC’s decision to place parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty on a “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is going on offense and they’ve decided to target Moms for Liberty,” Cruz said on his podcast Wednesday. “Let me say Moms for Liberty, they are phenomenal women—they are moms who are standing up for their kids.”
The SPLC released its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” on Tuesday, plotting 523 “hate groups” and 702 “antigovernment extremist groups” on a map of the United States.
As The Daily Signal reported, the list of “hate groups” names numerous parental rights organizations, including 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education (based in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania), and many state-based chapters of Parents Involved in Education.
“And you want to know the power of Moms for Liberty?” he asked. “Let me tell you, someone who would not have the first name in his title, and that would be Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Without Moms for Liberty, Gov. Glenn Youngkin would be Glenn Youngkin. There’d be no ‘governor.’ We’d have Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Because Virginia, which Biden won by nearly 10 points, Virginia flipped red.”
Cruz noted that Virginia “flipped red because moms stood up and they were ticked off at the left-wing takeover of their schools, they were ticked off at the woke ideology…. And what has the Southern Poverty Law Center said? Moms, they’re defending their kids, are a hate group.”
“I’m gonna say right now the SPLC is a radical left-wing hate group,” the senator declared. “I’m going to use that term. They hate you. They hate me. They hate America. They hate conservatives. They hate the Constitution. They hate the Bill of Rights. They hate families. They hate moms. They hate dads. They hate anyone who stands up for this country. And I gotta say for the SPLC to go after Moms for Liberty is disgusting.”
Virginia, which as Cruz mentioned was ground zero for the parental rights movement in 2021, includes many such groups. Parents Against Critical Race Theory in Ashburn; Parents Defending Education in Arlington; Virginia Moms for America; and Virginia Parents Involved in Education all appear on the SPLC’s new list of “antigovernment extremist groups.” The SPLC does not specifically brand them “hate groups,” although they do appear on the “hate map.”
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced many scandals. In 2019, it fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment tracing back decades. Amid that scandal, a former employee came forward as having been “part of the con.” He wrote that the SPLC’s hate accusations are a “highly profitable scam.”
The SPLC’s accusation against the Family Research Council inspired a terrorist attack in 2012. A shooter targeted the council’s Washington, D.C., office, using the “hate map.” He intended to kill everyone in the building, but a brave security guard prevented him. The shooter is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Cruz mentioned these scandals on his podcast.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center, unfortunately, is a profoundly dishonest, rabidly partisan left-wing organization,” he said. “It has a business model, where it gets very wealthy left-wing billionaires to write them big checks in order to try to tar anyone right of center and to call them hate groups.”
“Among other groups, they’ve called the Alliance Defending Freedom—which is one of the most important organizations nationally for defending religious liberty, for litigating and winning national, Supreme Court victories in front of the Supreme Court—so you literally have this organization of public interest lawyers who are winning religious liberty victories before the Supreme Court, the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group like the Nazis or the KKK,” the senator said.
Cruz also noted the attack on Family Research Council, which he called “a fantastic organization that is pro-life, is pro-traditional values, that fights for family values across this country.”
“In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of the FRC as a hate group led one radical, deranged, angry leftist to show up with a gun trying to murder people at the FRC, and thankfully there was a security guard who heroically stopped this crazed attempted murderer from carrying out the hate that was inspired by the SPLC,” he said.
Cruz also noted that police arrested an SPLC lawyer, charging him with domestic terrorism following a destructive “Stop Cop City” riot in Atlanta in March.
“The SPLC is so radical, they had a lawyer just recently that worked for them who was arrested for being an Antifa terrorist in Atlanta and participating in terrorist riots against law enforcement,” the senator said. “Mind you, SPLC said when their own employee was indicted as being an Antifa terrorist, said we stand by our employee. That’s who they are.”
In March, the SPLC acknowledged that police arrested an employee, but claimed that he had been acting as a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild. The guild condemned every police arrest as an example of “ongoing state repression and violence against racial and environmental justice protesters,” and the SPLC condemned escalating “policing tactics against protesters.”
At first, neither organization explicitly stated that the observer had not engaged in violence against police. In a second statement, the SPLC insisted, “We are confident that the evidence will demonstrate he was a peaceful legal observer.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/07/ted-cruz-torches-leftist-group-demonizing-moms-for-liberty
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Korean Women’s Spa Forced To Erase “Biological Women” From Policy After Human Rights Complaint From Trans-Identified Male
A Seattle court has ruled that a female-only nude spa lacks the “constitutional right” to bar males from their facilities. The decision comes after the spa sued the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which had forced them to change their sex-exclusive policy due to the complaint of a transgender patron.
In May of 2020, a trans-identified male submitted a complaint to the WSHRC alleging discrimination on the basis of his gender identity.
Haven Wilvich had sought a membership at the Olympus Spa in January of 2020, but had been denied on the basis that he had not undergone “gender reassignment” surgeries and his penis was fully intact.
In the complaint, Wilvich alleged his application to use the facilities at the spa had been rejected after staff told him that “transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it could make other customers and staff uncomfortable.”
The Olympus Spa, which has locations in Lynnwood and Tacoma, is a Korean-style health and wellness facility. The spa requires nudity in some of the areas, and, as such, has been reserved for female clientele.
The owner of the spa, Myoon Woon Lee, and the spa’s president, Sun Lee, are of Korean heritage and modeled the spa after the tradition of jjimjilbang. They are also Christian, and cited their faith as a reason why they did not wish to accommodate males in the facility.
In March of 2021, the WSHRC served the spa with a Notice of Complaint of Discrimination and asked the owners to respond to the claim they had acted in a discriminatory manner. Sun Lee drafted a statement standing by their women-only rule.
Sun Lee explained that Olympus was a “family-owned women’s Korean traditional health spa” and noted that that nudity was required for certain procedures.
“We firmly believe it is essential for the safety, legal protection, and well-being of our customers and employees that we maintain adherence to this adaptation of a females-only rule,” Sun Lee wrote, also providing education on the cultural traditions of the jjimjilbang.
He concluded the response by indicating that Olympus Spa was “willing to consider a review of [its] current biological females only policy,” but that “we are unwilling to remake the ‘jjimjilbang’ haven we have worked so hard over many years to build and preserve, simply for the sake of promoting gender neutrality.”
Two weeks later, the WSHRC ruled that the spa had violated Washington anti-discrimination law, stating that the female-only policy “denies services to transgender women who have not had surgery … because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.”
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Australia: Senior child psychiatrist stood down after questioning gender medicine
The suspension of a senior staff psychiatrist over her approach to transgender patients has thrown the Queensland Children’s Hospital into turmoil, casting a spotlight on widespread concerns among doctors at the treatment of children with gender dysphoria.
The case of Jillian Spencer – stood down from clinical duties apparently accused of transphobia – has exposed a culture in which clinicians are unable to employ medical discretion or a neutral therapeutic stance and are bound by their employment to affirm children’s gender transition.
Dr Spencer, a senior staff specialist in the QCH’s consultation liaison psychiatry team, was removed from clinical duties in mid-April following a patient complaint in an unusual response from a public hospital that followed months of conflict over affirmative gender medicine and trans identity politics within the hospital.
The case has prompted other doctors to raise concerns about the operation of the hospital’s gender clinic and the lack of co-ordination with its adolescent mental health service, the young age at which vulnerable patients with complex presentations are being prescribed cross-sex hormones, and the advocacy role of the gender clinic’s nurses who are running education sessions for public school nurses on chest binding.
Some staff members employed at the QCH have spoken of their concern at the way Dr Spencer’s case was being handled after the hospital drew upon its powers to compel staff under employment law to use children’s preferred pronouns, even though doing so was regarded by the Cass review as an active treatment measure as part of a social transition process that could lead to a cascade of medical interventions.
The hospital has also banned any discouragement of referrals to the gender clinic.
Some doctors at the hospital hold concerns that children are being prescribed hormone treatments after only two consultations at the Queensland Children’s Gender Service, with teenagers being approved for cross-sex hormones, which carry side-effects of sterility and loss of sexual function, sometimes at just 14 years old. This is despite the UK and several European countries adopting a more cautious approach to the prescription of such drugs amid concerns – also expressed by NSW’s Westmead gender clinic doctors – the evidence base was lacking.
The QCGS has 922 patients on its books and, according to FOI documents, prescribed cross-sex hormones to 102 adolescents in 2022 – more than twice as many as the Melbourne Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic. However, the true number of patients on hormones may be significantly greater as many are referred to private clinicians who prescribe to children under the care of QCGS.
Nurses employed by the gender service have been running “chest binder fitting sessions” for patients, as well as providing training to public school-based health nurses on chest binding.
The hospital not only actively pushes pronouns compliance by staff but also enters patients in the medical records as the gender they identify as, rather than their sex-based gender. Some doctors are opposed to this as it renders sex-based measures such as growth charts inaccurate among other medical implications.
QCH management did not respond to specific questions concerning all of these issues. A spokesperson for Children’s Health Queensland said: “The safety and wellbeing of children and young people in our care is always our highest priority.”
“All treatment and care provided by the Queensland Children’s Gender Service is guided by the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People (8th edition),” the spokesperson said. “In line with Children’s Health Queensland’s universal person-centred care approach, we respect the individual needs and preferences of every child … and their right to feel safe and supported while receiving clinical care through our services.”
The hospital operates on the basis that gender dysphoria results in serious mental health problems if not treated early and in accordance with internationally recognised practice.
Dr Spencer is prevented from speaking about her employment, but a number of Queensland medics aware of the circumstances of the psychiatrist’s case have spoken to The Weekend Australian.
The matter that led to Dr Spencer’s removal from clinical duties is understood to relate to an assessment she carried out in the hospital’s paediatrics ward of a mentally troubled 14-year-old who was under the care of the hospital’s gender clinic and had been taking puberty blockers.
Following the consultation, an apparent complaint of transphobia was levelled by the patient, and it was deemed by the hospital executive that Dr Spencer represented a risk to the safety of trans and gender-diverse children. Sources familiar with the matter said the psychiatrist has not been provided details of the complaint by the hospital.
“This is completely unusual,” said Dylan Wilson, a Queensland paediatrician informed of the situation. “This is not standard in terms of managing complaints.”
Dr Spencer is a signatory to the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists’ guide to managing gender dysphoria and incongruence in young people, which advocates a cautious approach and comprehensive mental health assessment. Her concerns about the lack of an evidence base underpinning gender-affirmative medicine and the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children were well-known within the hospital.
“Doctors in no way should be punished for expressing any concerns about a treatment pathway in any speciality in any form,” said NAPP’s president, psychiatrist Philip Morris.
“It would be completely outrageous if expressing concerns which are echoed by international organisations resulted in any form of disciplinary action.”
Children’s Health Queensland said it was, by law, unable to comment on employment matters but noted all employees were bound by public sector codes of conduct.
Dr Spencer has become so concerned at what she believes are the harms to children of the affirmative medicine model – which came under heavy scrutiny during a review in the UK by paediatrician Hilary Cass, who concluded there is a lack of evidence underpinning it – that she has appeared at women’s rights rallies and detailed her concerns at the “massive health risks” from hormone drugs and surgeries.
She told a recent rally in Canberra she was deeply concerned at the current culture in which “anyone’s child will be encouraged at school, online, during extra-curricular activities, by their friends and by health professionals to contemplate their gender”.
“Even little kids are being encouraged to contemplate their gender,” Dr Spencer said. “For some children this turns into an enduring preoccupation and they start to believe that the solution to any difficulties that they are facing lies in changing their bodies. From this point on the nightmare for families begins.
“Because they slowly come to realise that there is collusion going on between teachers, health professionals, child protection services and even the courts to ensure that all children are affirmed even if their parents disagree with that approach.
“Suddenly you’ll see what you never had cause to notice before: rainbow lanyards around the necks of health professionals and teachers, trans pride flags … in the waiting room at the health clinic, adults asking your child their preferred pronouns and using them … Wherever you try to move there is a professional there ready to trans your child.
“It will suddenly dawn on you (you) are not in with a chance to protect your child. These people you are relying on for help in the village it takes to raise a child are not actually interested in the long-term welfare of your child. They don’t suffer if your child becomes infertile or never experiences sexual pleasure or lives with debilitating side-effects from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
“But they feel like really good people because they’re being inclusive.”
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8 June, 2023
Houston, We Have a Cult
As we look at some of the most extreme ideas being accepted in today’s society, many of us are scratching our heads as to how insanity has become the new normal and normal has almost become a criminal offense.
Look at what drives humans to actions and behaviors that demonstrate an utter lack of reason and understanding. Sarah Steel, author of the book Do as I Say, which provides an in-depth look at cults and how people get sucked into them, writes: “Cults prey upon vulnerabilities that are core to our species: our need for acceptance, to be part of a group, to connect, to feel safe. Cult leaders themselves manipulate, dominate and control because, sadly, those are also very human behaviors. If you know where to look, you’ll see cult-like behavior showing up in other parts of society, too.”
Generally we associate “cult-like behavior” with infamous groups like the Branch Davidians. David Koresh had large groups of people believing he was the final prophet of the Seventh Day Adventist religion, and in that dedicated belief he used the tactic of mixing religious text and ideas that were already familiar to his followers with just enough deception to convince them to view him as their savior.
The Jonestown cult, led by Jim Jones, pulled people in who were motivated by his promises of social justice, fixing racism, and building a utopia by implementing the ideas of communism and control that he had learned from early study of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Vladimir Lenin.
Both Koresh and Jones demanded that the men in their groups sacrifice their wives to them and that the mothers hand over their babies to the community. The children were to be raised by people who were determined to be the most dedicated and qualified to ensure that every minute of every day would be spent enforcing and repeating only the ideology of the belief system to these young cult members.
As recently as 1998, a group called NXVIM (pronounced “nex-ee-um”) was established by narcissistic, sociopathic, sex offender Keith Raniere, who sold the idea of being a part of a women’s empowerment group to women from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures. They were heavily indoctrinated into his ideas of what truly gave women their value and strength in the world — only to find themselves demonstrating that empowerment by calling Raniere “master.” They joined an exclusive group within the organization called DOS, which stands for “Dominus Obsequious Sororium” and in Latin translates to “Master Over Female Slave.”
At its peak, NXVIM had over 700 active members — young women, many of whom were being starved and sexually preyed upon by Raniere himself and completely isolated from their families.
Yet somehow these women would preach to each other and potential cult recruits about how lucky they were to have found this community, attempting to inspire more of their peers to join.
From the rational perspective of spectators on the sidelines, we can observe the behaviors and actions that members of these groups are expected to perform. We see the harm that they seem to be willing to inflict on others, on themselves, and even their own children. We wonder how on earth people can be convinced to participate in things that are so obviously destructive, by people who clearly have no concern for their wellbeing, despite repeatedly and emphatically expressing otherwise.
Yet, in 2023, it doesn’t take familiarity with The People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate to recognize the signs and symptoms of the “cult-like behavior” spreading through society as we speak.
The schools on Warren Jeff’s compounds were really hours-long, daily classes filled with teachings that affirmed him as a prophet. Similarly, some very bad apples in today’s public schools are slowly replacing actual academics with rooms filled with books that “affirm” that, as human beings, our gender is meaningless and that we can be whatever we want.
In place of the American flag, children are encouraged to pledge their allegiance to the Pride flag.
Instead of ideologically neutral clothing and goods that we expect to find in the local supermarket, shoppers are instead blasted with gender ideology in the form of Pride displays, clothing that supports queer theory ideas, and decor to encourage us to set up our own “Pride” shrines in our homes.
If you’re familiar with Scientology, children are taught and raised in an environment where even the entertainment they consume must be produced by a team of fellow members — which might sound reminiscent of the Disney movies, Nickelodeon cartoons, and ideology-friendly celebrities used to assist in creating a new reality for the next generation of devotees.
Maybe the most disturbing aspect of this rapidly spreading ideology is that the destruction of the body and mind is encouraged and reinforced by “experts” and proposed as the way to elevate human beings to some kind of mental and physical utopia. Parents readily hop on board, and as a symbol of their undying allegiance to the cause, they fight to be the first to offer their child to the hormone and scalpel lords.
As with all of the previously mentioned groups, dissent is punished, people are bullied and intimidated if they question ideas, and anyone who chooses to leave and discuss the realities of the inner-workings is immediately called a liar — by the same people who were their family and community just minutes before.
No matter how horrible the stories are, and how much personal destruction happens, the group is programmed to see what they’re told to see and ignore what they see with their own eyes.
A suffering and depressed child who has been denied an actual education has been convinced to be a victim of their own body. They’re told that the outside world hates them, even though they don’t interact with people who do not believe.
Individuals dealing with unaddressed trauma, anorexia, anxiety, or loneliness are diagnosed with “gender dysphoria,” and those around them refuse to acknowledge the harm of a one-size-fits-all assessment. That’s devastating, and potentially fatal.
I guess the old adage “actions speak louder than words” is easy for us to say when our brains haven’t been thrown into a blender and rebuilt into a mechanism for unquestioning devotion toward bizarre and alarming concepts.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/97875-houston-we-have-a-cult-2023-06-07
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Kathleen Stock and the rejection of gender reality
By Debbie Hayton (Deb is trans)
Last night, Professor Kathleen Stock told the Oxford Union that we need to talk about ‘reality’. She is absolutely right.
Make no mistake, Stock is a reasonable voice in a political debate where many appear to be living in some sort of fantasy world. Her views are what many would consider to be mainstream. For example, that human beings are sexually dimorphic, and it is sometimes appropriate to provide separate services for each sex.
But by voicing those ideas, Stock has been subjected to opprobrium. In 2021, she was hounded from her job at Sussex University. The scenes surrounding Stock’s talk last night were depressingly familiar. Young people – who seem to think that disagreement is hate – made lots of noise to disrupt the event. In an astonishing fit of petulance, student activist Riz Possnet (pronouns they/them) glued themselves to the floor directly in front of Stock and Union president Matthew Dick. Emblazoned across Possnet’s t-shirt was the slogan, ‘NO MORE DEAD TRANS KIDS’.
In a statement, Possnet added,
We will fight for trans rights and trans futures. We will not let the trans youth of the future suffer as we have. We will fight for justice for trans youth, healthcare for trans youth, dignity for trans youth, and joy for trans youth. No more dead trans kids.
Let’s be clear, Stock was addressing students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. A place where ideas should be debated to deepen understanding and advance knowledge. In a remarkable intervention, Rishi Sunak asserted, ‘Agree or disagree with her, Professor Stock is an important figure in this argument. Students should be allowed to hear and debate her views.’ The Prime Minister added,
A tolerant society is one which allows us to understand those we disagree with, and nowhere is that more important than within our great universities.
Some debates can be contentious, and perhaps become heated, but children were not at risk from what Stock had to say last night. Amidst all the noise from the demonstrators, the focus on children is, in my view, the most worrying.
Words like justice, healthcare, dignity and joy might roll easily off the tongue, but what exactly is going on? Until very recently, the cohort of young people distressed with their sex was vanishingly small. In 2011-12 only 210 children were referred to the now-controversial Tavistock Clinic. Ten years later, that number had ballooned to 3,585.
But that is only part of the story. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that around 5 per cent of young American adults identify as transgender or non-binary – whatever that means. To me, it sounds less like transsexualism and more like an attempt to escape from a mundane ‘heteronormative and cisnormative’ existence.
But fantasy is a poor foundation on which to build a life. The danger to young people comes not from Stock but influencers on social media and elsewhere who sell promises that can never be delivered.
Stock is right: sex matters and single-sex services and spaces are important. Hormones and surgery can perhaps give the impression of the other sex, but human beings can never change sex.
Despite that rather fundamental truth, the UK is an agreeable society in which to live as a transsexual. People are tolerant and accepting of me, and other transsexuals I know. They care rather less about our gender reassignment than our ongoing contribution to the communities in which we live and work. If, that is, they even notice.
However, that’s not the way some members of the Oxford University LGBTQ+ society see things. Zoë-Rose Guy (pronouns she/her), the society’s vice-president, told the BBC that it was ‘exhausting’ as a trans person to be ‘constantly expected to justify your existence’.
So it would be. I don’t suppose Guy will be keen to take advice from me, but nobody – trans or otherwise – needs to justify the fact they exist. It is self-evident. But I don’t think that’s what Guy means. Perhaps it is exhausting to require that everyone else believes that you are the other sex or thinks that your sex does not matter? Then, to make the fantasy work, you need to convince yourself that everyone else really does believe it and isn’t just paying lip service.
That futile endeavour is so much harder when an eminent professor of philosophy rocks up, armed with evidence, examples and reasons, which she can use them to adeptly argue her case. It might explain why Guy and Possnet were so worked up about Stock’s visit to Oxford.
They, and the rest of the rainbow brigade, need to get over themselves and find real meaning in life that extends beyond their transgender identities. Unless they go around imposing their implausible ideas on others, and influencing vulnerable children, nobody else really cares how they choose to identify.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/kathleen-stock-and-the-rejection-of-gender-reality
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They’re Conditioning Americans to Hate White People
Under the guise of good social medicine, liberals and leftists have poisoned the culture with the colossal lie that “whiteness” is the culprit behind a “400-year pandemic of foundational racism” that’s keeping America sick. It’s being perpetrated by whites through “antiquated systems of oppression.”
Whiteness, the creation of white people of European descent, they say, is a lopsided “system of privileges and advantages” that favors whites at the expense of people of color “through government policies, media portrayal, decision-making power with our corporations, schools, judicial systems, etc.”
To cure the country, people with big mouths, big money, and big plans are wildly swinging sledge hammers at America’s load-bearing walls to destroy what they see as a “white system,” to replace it with – God knows what.
With the most dehumanizing epithets against white people, they’re pushing anti-white government policies, anti-white media portrayals, anti-white corporate decision-making, anti-white curriculums in schools, and an anti-white oppression narrative onto the judicial systems.
Slithery politicians groveling in black grievance is nothing new. But what is new – and extremely dangerous – is a ruthlessly corrupt administration, wielding the immense machinery of American power, to demolish fundamental institutions by demonizing white people, while daring anyone – black or white – to disagree.
Never in my lifetime have so many institutions conspired, all at once, to slop twisted narratives onto imaginary issues to force free Americans into orgies of unwanted political intercourse against their deepest convictions. “If you don’t like what we’re doing, too bad,” they spit. “You’re going to lay there and take it, or else.”
This is not politics. This is not a revolution. This is political rape.
Just recently, the same guy who told a black audience that, if elected, Republicans “gone put ch’all back in chains” and launched his 2020 campaign on the provable lie that Trump called Nazis “great people,” told a black audience at Howard University that “white supremacy … is the most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland.”
Biden’s transportation secretary sees racism in America’s infrastructure. His defense secretary sees it in the military. Outgoing Gen. Mark Milley wanted his “Milley-tary” to learn about white rage. Biden’s treasury secretary said “the U.S. economy has never worked fairly for black Americans.” A Biden education official once said that school discipline is part of a “racist system” of “whiteness,” especially for black girls.
“Black girls are more likely to be disciplined, frankly, because black girls experience race and sex-based discrimination in classrooms, and they are disciplined often for simply being black,” said Kayla Patrick, a special assistant, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the DOE.
Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Al Sharpton’s group that “… the threat of white supremacy … is something that we are equipping law enforcement in better addressing.”
Does this stuff sound familiar?
How is it so different from the way anti-Semites conditioned Europe to hate Jews? Hitler’s horrors would never have been possible without people at the centers of influence, for decades, normalizing the demonization of the Jews.
Decades before Hitler’s Great Action and Final Solution, Lithuanians, for instance, were slowly being conditioned to treat Jews as expendable. And expendable didn’t always mean that Lithuanians hated Jews; it also meant that when bad things happened to them, people just didn’t care.
Over time, mass social conditioning wore down their moral inhibitions. When mass murders began – much of it by Lithuanian partisans sympathetic to Germany – a populace that was initially shocked by the butchery was numbed into collaborating with outright genocide.
“Only two days prior, we were free and equal citizens in our hometown,” wrote William W. Mishell in Kaddish for Kovno (1988) of his firsthand account of being rounded up by heavily armed Lithuanian partisans when Nazis took the city. “… and now suddenly, we were totally devoid of any rights, prey for any hooligan. … [W]e were suddenly more afraid of our neighbors yesterday's neighbors, people whom we had lived with for generations, than of the Germans.”
Of the roughly 30,000 Jews in Kovno, Lithuania, 90 percent were “liquidated,” many of them by former neighbors.
That’s the same poison being peddled by the Biden administration, Big Tech, and woke media propagandists, along with their organized mobs. Under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” they’re using intimidation and public ridicule to force-feed the illusion that “whiteness” – not behavior – is the culprit behind disparities in lagging groups. And if hating others were not enough, they’re institutionalizing systems that teach whites, and their children, to hate themselves.
This demonization garbage is not just a difference of opinion – it’s a crime. And Americans, panging for things to get back to “normal,” are being conditioned to become numb to it. We may not deal with the worst consequences, but unopposed, our children and grandchildren will.
“The greater the crime perpetrated by the leadership,” Hitler once wrote, “the less likely it is that the people will ever believe their leaders to be capable of perpetuating such an event.”
With the do-nothing responses to the Russian Collusion hoax, the calculated opening of the border, the overt censoring of free speech, the deadly suppression of early treatments to COVID, and the methodical demonization of the “white culture” for political ends, rotten politicians are banking on Americans to believe that their leaders may be bad, but too good to perpetuate outright crime.
That’s impossible. We’re not stupid.
Tens of millions of common-sense Americans – of every color – see the rhetoric of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and “equity” exactly for what it is: a concoction of social and political poison that’s being used to slowly kill America as we’ve known it.
And judging from the swift reactions to Bud Light, Fox News, and Target, there is a subterranean rage simmering beneath the Oz-like theater of today’s media, where patriots of all colors – battered and utterly betrayed by their elected “representatives” – are chomping at the bit to make their voices heard.
How or when, who knows? But as sure as gravity, Americans who are beyond sick of this stuff will sooner or later find a way. At some point, there will be no choice
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A Return to Fidelity: Princeton Professor’s Brilliant Move to Flip ‘Pride Month’ on Its Head
On June 1, businesses, government, and even churches will erect rainbow flags and publish proclamations about the importance of “Pride Month,” a celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities. (Of course, the little plus sign means the list goes on and on, including queer, questioning, intersex, two-spirit, and more. One version even includes “friends and family.”)
This rush to celebrate LGBTQ+ lifestyles is both exclusionary and offensive to conservative Jews and Christians who follow the Bible’s teaching that God created humans male and female, that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that pride is a cardinal sin, not a virtue.
Rather than merely complaining, Princeton professor Robert P. George decided to do something about it. He launched an effort to flip “Pride Month” on its head—dedicating the month not to a specific interest group, but to a moral virtue, fidelity. (George is a member of The Heritage Foundation’s board of directors and The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
“Fidelity” derives from the Latin word “fides,” meaning “faith” or “trust.” The word implies “strict and continuing faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty,” according to Merriam–Webster.
George freely acknowledged that “absolutely no one” gave him any authority to declare June “Fidelity Month.” Nonetheless, he has done so, and I believe we as conservatives should join him in this effort.
George proposed dedicating June to “the importance of fidelity to God, spouses and families, our country, and our communities.”
I have often joked that June should be considered “humility” month because in the Western Christian worldview, pride constitutes the great sin of rejection of God in favor of yourself, while humility represents a great virtue. Humility entails surrendering yourself to God and reenacting in a small way the humbling of Jesus, who gave up the presence of the Father to take on human form and become a servant among us, even becoming obedient to the point of death.
The great Christian hope rests in the fact that God exalted Jesus after this great humility, and he will also exalt those who humble themselves in the way Jesus did (Philippians 2:3-8).
Yet humility carries a negative connotation. “Pride” has succeeded because the LGBTQ+ movement associates it with the message that human beings have inherent worth, and no matter your sexual orientation or gender identity, you can take ownership of yourself.
The proper response isn’t just to negate what the LGBTQ+ movement promises, but to take the positive view of humanity and ground it in something more noble.
Ownership of yourself means little without the ties that bind us to one another. Loneliness creeps into our hearts, whispering that social media or entertainment will satisfy us, but pleasures often ring hollow unless they are shared. The deepest friendships and relationships require a give-and-take, a context where each person loves and serves the other. These bonds are familiar to us because we experience them all the time—even if we don’t want to admit that the best word for them is “duty.”
“Fidelity” acknowledges your inherent dignity, but it forces you to consider the dignity of your neighbor as well. We must be faithful not just to ourselves, but to our families, our communities, our nation, and the God who created us.
The LGBTQ+ movement encourages people to take pride in their identities, but Fidelity Month encourages us to fulfill our obligations to one another. It recognizes the inherent dignity of all people and encourages us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
Pride views the world through the lens of self, and each person is indeed a magnificent image of the ineffable God. No person becomes himself without the help of others, however.
I can only take pride in my accomplishments because my mother and father raised me. My success relies upon the many who invested in my education and the country that established a culture of opportunity. My very breath relies upon the God who established an ordered universe and fashioned me in his image.
The “Pride” of the LGBTQ+ movement often entails a rejection of each of these obligations. The movement denies parents’ rights to educate their children on matters of sexuality, attempting to use gender and sexuality as a wedge to separate children from their parents. The movement denies the goodness of America, preaching that the United States is an oppressive place for people whose very notion of individual worth comes from a Declaration of Independence.
Of course, the pinnacle of “Pride” is the claim that God holds no authority over us—that we can choose our own lifestyles and even rewrite biology to tell the One who made us male and female that he placed “transgender” people in the wrong body.
“Pride” is all about infidelity, breaking vows and duties to spouses, to children, and to God. Sexual liberation rests on the idea that marriage only lasts as long as feelings of love do, and family courts will decide who takes care of the children.
Fidelity Month does not come with a political program. It merely represents a response to the endless barrage of rainbow flags as June approaches.
It offers representation for those who are tired of seeing a constant reminder that America’s institutions are in lockstep with the sexual revolution, for those who are tired of having their faith demonized as “anti-LGBTQ+,” for those who truly do want to live and let live, but who see any dissent from rainbow orthodoxy quashed in the public square.
Finally, it offers a subtle reminder that Christians are not to strut about as though we are holier than the “Pride” brigades. We are redeemed sinners, called to faithfulness—not a mean-spirited “Pride” of our own. As St. Peter urged us, we should make a defense, giving the reason for the hope within us, “with gentleness and respect, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good name in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:15-16).
Let us strive to live out the fruit of the Holy Spirit this Fidelity Month, and thank God that Robert P. George has crafted a fitting answer to the world’s unfaithfulness.
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7 June, 2023
A anonymous recent posting
I once was a normal person... I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person, but I was born white, into a two-parent household which now, whether I like it or not, makes me privileged, a racist, and responsible for slavery.
I am a fiscal and moral conservative, which by today's standards, makes me a fascist because I plan, budget, and support myself.
I went to school for many years and have always held a job. But I now find out that I am not here because I earned it, but because I was "advantaged".
I am heterosexual, which according to gay folks, now makes me a homophobic.
I am not a Muslim, which now labels me as an infidel.
I am older than 60, making me a useless dinosaur who doesn't understand Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat.
I think, and I reason, and I doubt most of what the ‘mainstream’ media tells me, which makes me a Right-wing conspiracy nut.
I am proud of my heritage and our inclusive culture, making me a xenophobe.
I believe in hard work, fair play, and fair reward according to each individual's merits, which today makes me an anti-socialist.
I believe our system guarantees freedom of effort not freedom of outcome or subsidies which must make me a borderline sociopath.
I believe in the defense and protection of my nation for and by all citizens, now making me a militant.
I am proud of our flag, what it stands for, and the many who died to let it fly, so I stand during our National Anthem - so I must be a radical.
Funny - it all took place over the last decade! If all this nonsense wasn't enough to deal with, now I don't even know which toilet to use!
GOD BLESS ALL OF US NORMAL PEOPLE!!!
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Oxfam is a toxic charity that has shifted so far from its original aims as to be almost unrecognisable... Its new video is a vile, misogynistic attack against JK Rowling
I'm no stranger to the bile spewed at feminists like me by trans-activists online, but the Oxfam video I watched yesterday left me deeply disturbed.
It is a vile, misogynistic attack against JK Rowling, simply because she has so bravely championed the rights of biological women.
And it speaks volumes about Oxfam, a charity which still trumpets its primary purpose as a desire to 'help end poverty' but which today is captured to such an extent by extreme political ideology and trans-lunacy that it is no longer fit for purpose.
It's a deeply sad demise for the charity, founded in 1942 with the noblest of aims to send food supplies to starving mothers and children in Nazi-occupied Greece.
From these simple beginnings it expanded to provide international aid around the world, helping to combat poverty and hunger, as its fuller name, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, makes clear.
For decades, all manner of people have been pouring their hard-earned cash into this worthy project, in the belief that they were helping those in real need.
But priorities at the charity have changed. Should you click on Oxfam's website today, the first thing you will see – against a backdrop of rainbow flags and banners – is the slogan 'diversity makes us'.
What on Earth, you may think, has this got to do with those starving in Somalia, currently in the grip of a catastrophic famine; or Ethiopia, where millions are tormented by drought and conflict?
Or for that matter Afghanistan, where an entire population has been pushed into poverty?
Nothing, of course. Instead, it is a cloak of worthiness which conceals some ugly truths.
Under the leadership of its highly-paid executives, Oxfam has succumbed to an offensive agenda that is damaging to its reputation – as well as to those of its staff who dare to publicly disagree with its stance on trans issues and diversity.
Let us not forget that behind those friendly rainbow motifs lies a charity that in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti launched an investigation into reports that its own employees, including senior figures, sexually abused local women, hiring prostituted women and girls for orgies.
Seven members of the Oxfam team in Haiti, including the head of the operation, Roland van Hauwermeiren, resigned or were sacked for sexual misconduct in 2011.
And yet disgracefully, Oxfam declared such behaviour was not a case of exchanging 'sex for aid' because the prostitutes weren't actually beneficiaries of aid. What is more, it failed to publish its 2011 report of the investigation, whose contents only became known in 2018.
A whitewash then, and one which concealed an undeniable truth: that those employed by Oxfam exploited the desperate and damaged people they are meant to protect. The furore that followed should alone have been a wake-up call and a push for major grassroots change.
Instead, even as the Charity Commission imposed a 19-month supervision order on Oxfam to investigate what it called 'safeguarding failings', and the charity introduced cuts and laid off staff, its LGBT+ network miraculously found the money to produce a training manual called 'Learning About Trans Rights and Inclusion'.
Among the 2021 manual's claims was that 'mainstream feminism is supporting the root causes of sexual violence' because it 'centres privileged white women and demands that 'bad men' be fired or imprisoned'
In other words, rather than accepting that sexual violence is a problem that Oxfam ought to combat, it seemed to be saying that women who complained about it were the issue. It was another deeply concerning insight into the nonsensical world view of Oxfam's senior executives, who have latterly travelled so far through the looking glass that they are no longer remotely in touch with the real world.
How else can you view it when a female employee I know called Maria (not her real name) was effectively hounded out of her job for coming to the defence of JK Rowling? A member of staff had asked on an internal forum whether, given her 'transphobic views', it was right to sell Rowling's books in Oxfam's charity shops.
Responding, Maria pointed out that Oxfam's shops stocked books by people with all kinds of different outlooks, and asked for evidence of this supposed transphobia. It was – is – a legitimate response in a nation which purportedly protects free speech.
Yet in a now wearyingly familiar modern version of the Salem witch trials, Maria was instead subjected to a gruelling internal investigation which, ultimately, led her to have a nervous breakdown. While Oxfam eventually offered a grovelling apology – there's a pattern here – for what it called 'procedural mistakes', she felt she had no choice but to leave a job she loved.
Despite this apology, I am under any no illusion that any lessons have been learned. In fact, I know of many more female employees in the charitable sector who live in terror of expressing their belief that sex-based rights matter, knowing that even an accusation of transphobia can lead to them being blacklisted from employment.
Oxfam's obsessive focus seems no longer to be its founding mission of alleviating poverty and helping the most vulnerable but instead a culture war. Earlier this year, it published an 'Inclusive Language Guide' during which, over the course of 92 self-flagellating pages, it apologises for the English language, describing it as 'the language of a colonising nation', and offering a lengthy list of words that should be avoided.
Among them are 'mother' and 'father' which they claim ascribe 'gendered roles' which could upset transgender people.
Again you might ask what any of this has to do with the dispossessed women in developing countries? Striving to survive in places with no access to contraception and abortion, and where rape and male brutality is a daily reality, they have no choice but to face the punishing reality of their biology.
These are the women for whom Oxfam are meant to advocate and create meaningful change. Instead, they are pouring resources donated by a well-meaning public into nonsensical pamphlets and nasty, virtue-signalling videos that only serve to highlight that this toxic organisation has shifted so far from its original aims as to be almost unrecognisable.
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Washington Post article accuses 'bigoted' right-wing 'extremists' of inciting 'anti-democracy' Target boycott
Being opposed to Target is being opposed to democracy???
The Washington Post is receiving pushback for publishing an article painting conservatives who support the Target boycott as "extremists" and opponents of democracy.
The article about supposed right-wing extremism stemming from a retail boycott begins with the account of a female customer allegedly upset because Target was "carrying Pride month merchandise." The woman reportedly using her own scissors to cut her Target credit card in front of the guest services at a Target location in South Florida, and informed employees, "I am never shopping here again."
The manager of the store told the outlet that there were "several tense encounters that workers have reported over LGBTQ+ items." Ticked-off customers allegedly accused Target of "shoving your woke agenda down our throats," and employees were reportedly called "child groomers."
The article touched upon bomb threats that targeted several Target stores in multiple states. However, local news reports said the bomb threats were made by an individual who claimed to be angry that Target was cowardly for turning their back on the LGBTQ community and "decided to cater to the homophobic right-wing redneck bigots who protested and vandalized their store."
The article written by a retail reporter and a business reporter noted that Target decided to pull some items because of the backlash. Queer and transgender designers blamed "domestic terrorists" for Target taking their controversial products off the shelves.
The article painted the Target boycott with a broad brush that conservatives were upset that the national retail chain was selling LGBTQ merchandise. However, the article did not mention that the boycotts really took off after it was revealed that the big-box chain was selling "tuck-friendly" bathing suits, LGBTQ onesies for babies, and products from a transgender designer promoting Satanism, violence, and drug use.
"Though Pride month and other inclusivity initiatives have been around for years, they’ve increasingly become litmus tests for consumers, forcing companies to fully commit on social issues or yield to critics," the article read. "Target, one of the largest American general-merchandise retailers, said it has offered products celebrating Pride month for more than a decade."
The article cited "experts on extremism" to point the finger at right-wing influencers for inciting an "anti-democracy movements."
Lindsay Schubiner, who studies violent movements for the anti-extremism watchdog Western States Center, told the Washington Post, "It's not like any of this is all that unpredictable. We don’t always know exactly where these sort of anti-democracy actors are going to point to next, but the increase in threats and harassment from anti-democracy movements in the U.S. has become so frequent that this is something that absolutely just needs to be planned for."
Schubiner claimed that "bigoted and anti-democracy groups" will attempt various boycott tactics to "see what will stick."
Sarah Kate Ellis, president and chief executive of LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, said, "As soon as you cede ground to extremists, you give them more permission."
Ellis claimed that Republican lawmakers such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) "demonize" the LGBTQ community.
The WaPo article stated, "According to experts on extremism, the boycotts — and the threats and harassment that have extended from them — are part of a diffused but focused campaign that’s inflamed by influential conservatives exploiting TikTok and right-wing media."
The article named conservative commentator Matt Walsh as an "anti-LGBTQ" rabble-rouser who stirs up boycotts against woke companies.
A sizeable number of Twitter reactions to the Washington Post article laughed off the accusations that the Target boycott was based on extremism of any kind.
A person explained, "Today in the Narrative: if you stop shopping at places that endorse child sex changes, you’re an extremist."
One Twitter user said, "Parents not wanting their children being exposed to a satanic sex cult while they’re shopping at Target is not an example of extremism. Real extremism is offering LGBTQ-themed onesies for babies."
Another user stated, "You're calling a normal and fairly muted response to a corporate-sponsored upheaval in our social norms extremism."
Target has lost billions in market value since the boycott began, and the retailer's stock is recently down 14%.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/washington-post-target-boycott-right-wing-extremists
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The malign influence of "Mermaids" is becoming increasingly clear
While I was writing about the latest scandalous revelation involving the children’s charity Mermaids and the Tavistock Gender identity development service (GIDS) it occurred to me that readers of these pages will already be familiar with the key planks of this terrible tale. You will doubtless have seen countless articles critiquing gender ideology and the medical treatments on vulnerable children over the years that have become normalised, and will be aware that gender ideology has seeped into pretty much every key institution in the land.
The consequences of gender ideology for women as well as children have been grave, as it has led to the push for men to legally be able to self-identify as women and invade single sex spaces such as refuges and Rape Crisis centres, prison wings, and changing rooms. It has also led to gender clinics handing out toxic hormones to children as though they were Haribos.
There should be real consequences for those that have allowed so many children to be pushed through this medical conveyor belt
Now it has been officially revealed what many of us have known for some time: the Tavistock has been taking instructions from the charity Mermaids. But bearing in mind the Tavistock has been treating many patients for what many now regard as an imaginary condition, it makes sense that it deferred to the maniacs who created it.
Hannah Barnes, the BBC journalist and author of Time to Think, says she had known since 2019 of emails between Susie Green and GIDS director Polly Carmichael because they were part of Mermaids’ data breach in 2019. This made it somewhat surprising when the Tavistock claimed to have no such emails when requested by way of a Freedom of Information request.
If only those that have become increasingly convinced that distressed and disturbed children have undergone unnecessary surgeries and irreversible hormone treatment had listened to those who had been warning of what was to come.
Twenty years ago, having become increasingly concerned about the notion that children could be trapped in the wrong body, I contacted the Tavistock to ask to speak to its then clinical director. I explained to the communications officer that I had assumed the diagnosis of ‘transsexuality’ would have been discredited by now, as many feminists and other people with common sense had recognised that it was based on a toxic form of sexism that dictates femininity for girls and masculinity for boys.
I was never granted an interview with the Tavistock. Nevertheless, my investigation was published in the Telegraph magazine and I recall several people that have since banged the drum for ‘trans rights’ and now consider me to be a raging Terf saying they thought it terrible that surgery and hormones were being used to correct what is clearly a mental health condition.
The following year, I published a piece in the Guardian Weekend magazine in which I reported on a trans-identified man that was demanding access to a female rape crisis centre in Canada. At the time of publication, the trans rights movement in the UK was gathering pace, and they were emboldened by a grovelling apology by the Reader’s Editor for publishing it in the first place. The consequences for me have been horrendous and continue to this day.
In the meantime, the feminist (and lesbian and gay) resistance to gender ideology and medical experiments on children has grown in strength and conviction. But this has come at a huge cost to those of us that have spoken out.
Women have been hounded out of their jobs, had their reputations trashed, become unemployable, lost friends, and colleagues, been silenced, publicly cancelled and shamed, made to feel like pariahs and bigots when all we were doing was trying to expose the biggest medical scandal in the past century.
Mermaids is but one player in this horror story. Unfortunately, there are many other ideologues, facilitated by the likes of Stonewall. Individual misogynistic men that claim to be on the left have promoted this ideology and in turn attempted to ruin the lives and reputations of the feminists that spoke out about the harm to women and girls.
While this has been going ahead, female prisoners – some of the most vulnerable women in society – have been raped and sexually assaulted by trans identified males, girls have been frightened in changing rooms when seeing male genitalia in what was supposed to be a safe space, and let’s not forget that countless children have undergone irreversible harm.
During evidence at a tribunal brought by Mermaids, it was stated that they were not medical experts and therefore did not advise anyone on healthcare. These emails show though the way in which Mermaids helped draft a service specification used by the NHS to treat children.
Those that push this dangerous ideology have been lauded by many liberals as the greatest social justice warriors. As this war comes to an end, and the trans extremists prepare to be defeated, let’s not forget the sacrifice of all of us that have fought to expose this monstrous situation. There should be real consequences for those that have allowed so many children to be pushed through this medical conveyor belt.
I won’t hold my breath, but I think it would be fair and proper for those that have supported and defended the practices of Mermaids and GIDS and have thrown insult such as ‘bigot’ at those of us that have attempted to expose the truth to offer their abject apologies. But those children harmed as a result of this pernicious set of beliefs are owed the biggest apology of all.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-malign-influence-of-mermaids-is-becoming-increasingly-clear/
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6 June, 2023
Democrats Abandon Working Class, Become Party of Freeloaders
The Democratic Party, long known as the party for working people, is now for freeloaders. Democrats want taxpayers to support people who refuse to get off the couch and get a job.
That's the major reason Democrats and Republicans in Washington were locked in a stalemate for weeks over hiking the debt ceiling. The biggest sticking point was whether people should be allowed to collect government assistance indefinitely to finance their nonworking lifestyle.
For everyone who toils for a living, the idea of paying taxes to support healthy people who won't work feels like a slap in the face.
House Republicans proposed requiring food stamp recipients and people on Medicaid to work 20 hours a week or participate in some job-readiness activity such as training, high school equivalency courses or substance abuse treatment. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy explained that government assistance programs are supposed to be "temporary, not permanent" and "a bridge to independence" rather than a lifestyle.
This isn't about denying benefits to children and their mothers, or the disabled, or pregnant women. This is about childless adults who are do-nothings. "Remember what we're talking about: able-bodied people with no dependents," McCarthy said. On Sunday, the two parties struck a compromise, giving Republicans a small victory. Food stamp recipients up to age 55 will have to work or participate in work readiness for 20 hours a week. Veterans and the homeless are exempt.
Democrats held firm against any work requirement for Medicaid. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called it a "nonstarter." Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) bashed the work requirement as "just cruel."
But count on Republicans to fight for it another time. About half of all Americans -- 156 million -- get their health insurance through a job. They or someone in their family has to work for it, and many stay in jobs largely for the health coverage. Why should able-bodied adults who choose not to work be handed Medicaid? It makes people who punch a clock for their coverage look like saps.
The new Democratic Party is repudiating its own history and the work ethic that has made America a land of opportunity even for people who start out poor.
In 1996, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed a reform that required welfare recipients to work or participate in work readiness. Then-Sen. Joe Biden voted for it. That reform slashed poverty among single-parent households by a staggering 62% by 2016. Childhood poverty was slashed more than 75%, proving that the best anti-poverty program for children isn't a handout. It's a working parent.
But in recent years, Democrats watered down Clinton's reforms, making it easy to collect cash assistance, housing subsidies, food benefits and healthcare that add up to more than what many unskilled jobs pay. A nonworking parent with two kids can get $24,000 or more in federal benefits. Work doesn't pay.
In 2021, Democrats pushed for the Build Back Better bill, which would have made monthly checks to parents -- $300 per child -- a benefit with no strings.
Thanks to holdout Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), it didn't pass. Manchin objected that "there's no work requirement whatsoever." Rep. Gwen Moore ( D-Wis.) denounced Manchin's emphasis on "the so-called dignity of work -- that's like hearing a fingernail on a chalkboard."
Millions of migrants are coming across the southern border looking for a chance to work, not freeload. But how long will their work ethic last? New York City Mayor Eric Adams and other Democratic mayors are offering them free hotel rooms, meal service, healthcare and legal assistance for up to four months.
That's sending these newcomers the wrong message, that there are in fact two American ways: work hard for success, or join the moochers and live off the welfare-industrial complex the Democrats are erecting.
Democrats argue that all human beings deserve dignity. Of course they do, but that shouldn't mean a lifetime seat on the taxpayer-funded gravy train.
Democratic mayors in dozens of cities are pushing for just that -- a guaranteed monthly income for the nonworking poor. Literally sending out checks to people for merely breathing.
The debt-limit showdown is a preview of a bigger fight to come.
Tell Democratic politicians that working people deserve respect, too.
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King James Bible pulled from multiple Utah schools 'due to vulgarity or violence' after petition called it 'sex-ridden'
The King James version of the Bible has been removed in several Davis School District schools in Utah, after it was determined that it contained "vulgarity or violence." A petition was made in response to state law that resulted in the removal of many books containing sexual content from school libraries.
Fox 13 Salt Lake City reported that the King James Bible was removed from an estimated seven or eight elementary and junior high schools after a district review committee decided to pull the Bible from all non-high schools. The committee found it contained "vulgarity and violence."
However, a district spokesperson reportedly said that the Bible "does not contain sensitive material as defined by Utah Code," but decided to pull it anyway because it was found to be inappropriate for some ages.
In March 2023, a Utah parent petitioned to have the Bible removed from schools and called it “one of the most sex-ridden books around." The parent claimed the historical book included “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide."
“You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition," the parent said. The King James Bible was then removed from the aforementioned schools upon the subsequent review.
A law passed in Utah in 2022 is the source of the controversy, as it sought to ban books that were sensitive to certain age groups. The law says that if a parent has made a formal request, schools must remove books that contain:
"Human genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal";
"Acts of human masturbation or sexual intercourse";
"[or] fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals or pubic region."
Republican State Representative Ken Ivory remarked that characterizing removing some books as book-banning is really "an attempt to simply, you know, hyperbolize what's going on; we're simply clarifying age-appropriate limits."
However, Michele Edgley, president of the Utah Educational Library Media Association, told Fox 13 that she didn't think that parents had the right to get books banned.
“I don't think that most parents have either the right or the knowledge of the student bodies to be banning books for the entire school," she explained.
The decision to remove the Bible was swiftly appealed by another person who wants the book returned to every school. The decision now lies with the appeals committee to determine whether it is suitable to return.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/king-james-bible-utah-schools ?
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Chicago's crime crisis and the 'progressives'
This past Memorial Day weekend was a bloodbath in the streets of Chicago. Over the three-day holiday weekend, 53 people were shot, 11 fatally, as violence continues to plague the Windy City.
According to newly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson, "The violence our city experienced this weekend is intolerable. It produced pain and trauma that devastated communities across Chicago, and my heart breaks for everyone affected. That's why as mayor, I am committed to leveraging every single resource at our disposal to protect every single life in our city."
Unfortunately, Johnson's words ring hollow for Chicagoans who have been living in abject fear for several years while so-called progressive leaders constantly tout that they are doing all that they can to fight the steep rise in crime that has made the city practically unlivable.
Johnson's predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, echoed similar sentiments throughout her tenure as mayor. However, as the record shows, her progressive policies made matters far worse, not better.
Consider: over the past four years, according to the Chicago Police Department (CPD), the murder rate has increased by 23 percent, robberies are up by 28 percent, thefts have gone up by 46 percent, and motor vehicle thefts (also known as carjackings) have skyrocketed by an astounding 236 percent.
Since Lightfoot became mayor in 2019, Chicago has seen an uptick in criminal complaints every single year. And during Johnson's short time in office, this trend has continued. So far, under Johnson, every single category of criminal complaints has risen, including an 11-percent uptick in murder, a 16-percent surge in robberies, and a mind-boggling 137 percent increase in carjackings.
Both Lightfoot and Johnson have clearly stated that they favor defunding the police. For instance, Lightfoot slashed the CPD budget by $80 million in 2021, following national calls for less police funding in the wake of the George Floyd/BLM protests.
In 2020, Johnson articulated his stance on police defunding, saying, "I'm absolutely confident that we will be the generation that responds and reacts to the global movement that is calling for redirecting money away from policing and militarizing police forces and directing dollars into job opportunities, transportation, health care and housing for people."
Over the past few years, Johnson has doubled down on his defund the police rhetoric, declaring before the election, "I don't look at it as a slogan. It's an actual political goal."
Well, actions have consequences. And words carry weight. Since 2019, the CPD has lost 13 percent of its active-duty officers, which equates to 1,700 fewer police officers on the streets.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/chicagos_crime_crisis_and_the_progressives.html
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Do not surrender to feminism’s dystopia
Janice Fiamengo
‘The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side.’
So begins Joel Kotkin’s National Post op-ed Women have won the “war between the sexes”, but at what cost? It is a welcome but disappointing analysis that starts with a show of defiance and ends in quiet desperation. Of course, it’s good to find anyone in a major newspaper willing to cast a less-than-adulatory eye on The Future [that] is Female or to write sympathetically about men. Kotkin, a prolific author on cities and technocracy, proves his good faith on the strength of that opening statement alone. Aside from the wishful thinking of believing feminism to be winding down (was #MeToo a prelude to a ceasefire?) or ever having envisioned a cooperative future (he should take a look at Kate Millett’s incendiary Theory of Sexual Politics), Kotkin is to be commended for daring to name as a war the decades of post-1960s activism in which all the decisive victories have been claimed by feminists against men.
Kotkin, however, isn’t able to continue in the take-no-prisoners style he chose for his opening salvo.
The article stops short of targeting feminist ideology and policies, failing to name a single piece of debilitating feminist legislation or make reference to the many expressions of anti-male contempt that are now deeply embedded in our public culture. The result is a curiously disembodied discussion in which serious social problems linked to male decline are pointed to without saying exactly how they came about or how they might be reversed.
‘The crux of the problem,’ Kotkin tells us to start off, ‘lies in the fact that as women rise, men seem to be falling.’ The phrasing makes male decline sound like a natural phenomenon, an illustration of the primordial principle of Yin and Yang. Or perhaps it is simply that men, with their allegedly fragile egos and hegemonic masculinity, haven’t been able to compete against all that female ability, once dammed up by the patriarchy, now finally being let loose on the world (though always with calls for more to be done to assist women).
At least we are not told, as feminists are wont to do, that what seems like ‘falling’ is just the reality of life without ‘male privilege’. Men really are falling, but we are left with the impression that nobody can determine why (in fact, ten years ago, two researchers at MIT provided a sober accounting of the decline, pinpointing fatherlessness as one of the main drivers of male disadvantage).
The rest of the article sets out to analyse the effects of a decades-long feminist campaign – a war, indeed, on male achievement, status, and self-respect – without naming specific feminist policies or legislative changes. Many articles on the subject are similarly concerned with ‘shifting rates of educational achievement’ that see fewer and fewer men attending college, but most pass over the feminist takeover of the college system, which has created an academic milieu in which the superiour achievements and abilities of women, as well as the predatory danger of men, are constantly asserted, or the hysterical Title IX legislation that has made college campuses hazardous for the dwindling number of men who are still venturing onto them.
Men are frequently referred to as being ‘left behind’ in the economy, but few acknowledge the decades of affirmative action in higher education and hiring (detailed by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in Legalizing Misandry, pp. 81-124) as well as draconian sexual harassment legislation that has made work life unrewarding and often punitive for men.
In Kotkin’s case, he stresses the loss of sexual amity and of willingness to marry, but avoids discussing the nightmare of family law that has made marriage or even cohabitation perilous for many men.
The sins of omission on this topic are widespread in the industry. Perhaps working on the assumption – not without basis – that any discussion of social problems will need to focus on women at least as much as on men, the article appears to backtrack on its earlier claim about women’s victory in the sex war, outlining instead a downbeat portrait of women’s troubles. Citing research by Jonathan Haidt, we are told that adolescent girls have been severely affected by depression and self-harm, that many young women, without reliable men to support them, have had to fend for themselves in a difficult economic climate, and that single mothers, left with few options, are unable to offer stability to their children. In my opinion, it looks as if the decline of men mentioned early in the article has mainly hurt women and their children.
Neglected by the wider community is the sad reality adolescent boys commit suicide at 4-times the rate of girls; that women are the ones who choose divorce in approximately 70 per cent of cases; and that divorced fathers are too often denied a real role in their children’s lives while being burdened past endurance by exorbitant support payments. In other words, for every sad woman held up for our concern, there is a plurality of equally sad men rendered invisible in the conventional reporting. The staggering statistics on male suicide provide a stark illustration regarding the casualties of the sex war – yet society has shifted to the now-obligatory concern about the trans threat to women’s sports.
Perhaps most importantly, is the suggestion from the community that the data on men is limited to ‘trends’, occurrences that came about through economic and demographic factors independent of the sex war initially evoked. But they aren’t. They flow directly from a feminist vision in which the family – explicitly understood by feminist leaders to be a source of abuse and oppression – must be transformed and women liberated from reliance on the fathers of their children. Under this vision, a more just and equitable world will be ushered in by women’s superior leadership once they are freed from their unpaid labour in the home and the many sexist barriers that hold them back. That freedom must be aided, according to conventional wisdom, through abundant contraception, unfettered abortion, collectivised childcare, no-fault divorce, programs and propaganda to urge men to do more housework, and non-stop encouragement to women – in movies, sit-coms, advertising, articles, and government equity programs – to give up on their men.
The whole process has been carefully, relentlessly engineered, not only by feminists, though certainly by them, but also by those who believe generally that families and the self-reliant men who lead them stand in the way of a preferable social order in which deracinated individuals, unmoored from family bonds and cultural traditions, can be increasingly directed, for their own good and that of the planet, by wise leaders. The result is, in Kotkin’s words, ‘…a dystopian future in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed.’
Kotkin sees this nightmarish world coming into existence but doesn’t offer a concrete remedy for it; in fact, he leaves us with the impression that the approaching doomsday may well be inevitable.
It isn’t. It can be defended against by dismantling the destructive policies that weaken men and families, which include no-fault divorce, inequitable child custody decisions, affirmative action, and the sexual harassment industry; and by returning to fundamentals such as the presumption of innocence, meritocracy, free speech, due process of law, and fathers’ rights. I’m under no illusions about the monumental difficulty of pushing back against radical feminist victories; but I also know that if we’re unable to name what has brought us to our present moment, in which men and women regard each other warily across a divide of hurt and bitterness, we’ll be left with little to do but join in elegiac surrender.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/do-not-surrender-to-feminisms-dystopia/ ?
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5 June, 2023
Brexiteers and Right-wing voters are dismissed as 'gammon',
What in Australia is called "ham steaks" is called "Gammon" in Britain. Gammon is red and the British Left refer to conservatives as gammon on the rather amazing presumption that only conservatives ever have red faces. Typical Leftist loss of reality contact
The swinish multitude is back. Only we call them gammon now, not swine. A couple of centuries ago, at the dawn of the modern democratic era, the rabble that wanted more of a say in public life were looked upon as pigs. Today, they're looked upon as pig meat.
I'm fairly sure that's a demotion. At least pigs are alive, and pretty intelligent, too. Gammon, in contrast, is inanimate flesh, unfeeling, unthinking, liable to decay. That's us, apparently. That's the throng now.
Gammon has become the insult du jour of the British left in recent years.
They use it to refer to a certain kind of voter. Right-wing, pro-Brexit, angry, red about the face — hence 'gammon'.
These gammon-cheeked scourges of electoral politics, who are normally working class or lower-middle class, are held responsible for all the supposed political ills of our time, especially populism.
These 'flushed, middle-aged Brexiteers' look like cuts of a 'hearty pork steak', says one observer, and they're ruining the political life of the nation with all their 'ranting about Brexit and immigrants'.
People with some knowledge of British history, and in particular of the historical struggle for democratic rights, might find all this talk of pig meat a little familiar.
The metaphor of pigs has stalked the debate about democracy in Britain for hundreds of years. Indeed, one of the great democratic journals of the 1790s was actually called Pig's Meat.
Why? Because it was a response to the anti-democratic prejudices of the establishment and in particular to the political thinker and philosopher Edmund Burke's handwringing over 'the swinish multitude'.
Burke viewed the revolutionary masses as the hoofish destroyers of culture, and radical pamphleteers responded with satirically piggish indignation. We demand 'The Rights of Swine', said Pig's Meat in 1794.
Burke introduced the pig trope in 1790 in his Reflections on the Revolution in France — a deeply conservative attack on the tumult across the English Channel.
'Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude', Burke warned.
There it was. The nightmarish vision of the swine, of the pig-like, unlearned crowd, overpowering what Burke described as 'the spirit of [the] gentleman, and the spirit of religion'.
Radicals in England, stirred rather than horrified by what was happening in France, responded with great ferocity to Burke's piggy jibe.
In 1793, there was the publication of an anonymous pamphlet titled An Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude.
It giddily ran with the pig metaphor, contrasting the economic difficulties of the 'poor porkers' of England with the lives of luxury enjoyed by 'lordly swine' such as Burke. It was hugely popular, sold under the counter in bookstores and pored over in taverns.
There was also Hog's Wash, published by radical journalist Daniel Isaac Eaton between 1794 and 1795. He revelled in giving voice to the swine. Imagine pigs, he wrote, 'demanding that political liberty shall be the same to all — to the high and the low, the rich and the poor — what audacity!'
He also published a piece in Hog's Wash that said we should 'rid the world of tyrants'. It was interpreted as an attack on King George III and Eaton was hauled off to court. But the jury acquitted him, to wild public acclaim. People celebrated in the streets and even cast medallions in honour of this spokesman for swine.
Alas, the law eventually caught up with the swinish rebels. As the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman describes it, 'by the end of 1795, the government [of William Pitt] had got its act together'. It passed two new laws against the heresy of radical agitation.
Radicals recognised the jig was up for the swinish multitude. One poetically wrote: 'Having destroyed the best men in the nation, / we SWINE if we are not mistaken / must screaming and gnawing our tongues for vexation; / be butcher'd and made into bacon.' Bacon — that's how the swine of England ended up during the Age of Revolution, fried and sizzled by the reactionary rulers of the day.
Fast forward a couple of centuries and now they're gammon. Pig talk is back.
Of course, today's fretters over democracy, and especially populist democracy, are too sophisticated, or at least too politically correct, to use phrases like 'the swinish multitude'. And yet, strikingly, they have been drawn back to swine-like language.
They have reached, once again, for the metaphor of the hog. They are, in a repeat of history as farce, talking about the plebs as pig meat. Gammon, like Burke's swines, are viewed as the enemies of culture: unrefined, insensitive, lacking in due regard for the expert class. So widespread was the use of the gammon slur in liberal and Leftish chatter post-Brexit that, in 2018, the Collins English Dictionary chose it as one of its words of the year. 'Gammon: a person, typically middle-aged and white, with reactionary views, especially one who supports the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union.'
Pig meat became a byword for what the metropolitan elites view as those small-village Little Englanders who make deficient democratic choices.
And however much the deployers of the gammon jibe say it's only a reference to a person's complexion, so calm down, the fact is it echoes the old loathing of swine remarkably well.
Gammon, like swinish multitude, is fundamentally a reference to people lower down the social ladder: culturally stunted, uneducated, too dim for politics.
One Left-wing writer describes encountering a 'nest of gammon' on social media — nest: are they pigs or insects? — and says these soulless creatures require 'regular spoon-feeding from the trashy tabloids' to tell them what to think. Gammon '[spit] out talking points found in fascist organs like the Daily Mail — or, for those preferring something less intellectual, the Daily Express', runs a much-quoted online definition.
Brexit may only have been a ballot box revolt rather than a full-on revolution and it might not reshape our epoch quite as thoroughly as the French revolutionaries did theirs. But it was a historic democratic moment and one which, yet again, reanimated the pig phobia of the establishment.
It is striking that for all of today's discussion about so-called cancel culture, about whether it's acceptable or not to 'cancel' the speech of the offensive and the ignorant, one of the most terrible acts of cancel culture is rarely mentioned — the cancellation of democracy.
We are living through a furious carnival of reaction against the democratic ideal. The populist moment has dragged into public view the cultural elites' extant terror of entrusting political decision-making to the people.
The fallout from the British people's vote for Brexit and the American people's vote for Trump was extraordinary. Views that were once only expressed in the privacy of a boozy dinner party exploded into public life.
People who once would only have dared to hint that the masses are pig-like in the comfort of their own homes, while clinking glasses with a like-minded highbrow, were now giving utterance to such corrupt thoughts in the public sphere.
We are no longer successfully keeping 'the mob from the gates', said Matthew Parris. We now know, he said, that 'huge numbers of voters' can be 'horribly if temporarily misled by false prospectuses, by lies, by unreasonable hopes and by sudden fears and hatreds'.
A pro-EU former adviser to the UK Conservative Party wrung his hands over the 'democratic extremism' of the Brexit era, for it 'takes a noble idea, that everyone's political views should count equally, too far'.
What an interesting concept — democracy going too far.
More here:
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The truth about transgender surgery... in numbers: Just 16% of gender dysphoria patients go through with the operation, but up to half suffer life-threatening complications
Only a small number of people with gender dysphoria have surgery to align their bodies with their desired sex — but the rate of complications is high.
One of the largest surveys of trans adults earlier this year indicated that one in six (16 percent) go under the knife to alter their physical appearance.
But research suggests that up to half of trans men and women suffer post-op issues or pain so severe they need medical attention or additional surgery months later.
The complex operations involve crafting the genitalia of the opposite sex using veins, arteries, muscles and skin from other body parts. The surgeries are risky due to surgeons having to connect delicate and complicated networks of blood vessels, as well as creating the ability to urinate.
For trans men, devices are often implanted to allow them to achieve erections and more enjoyable sexual experiences.
Patients are often left with infections, pain and difficulty using the toilet or having sex post-surgery.
One of the biggest studies of its kind by the Women's College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario, Canada, earlier this year found that more than half of trans women who had 'bottom' surgery were in so much pain years later they needed medical attention.
For trans men who often have a mechanical device implanted, studies suggest a fifth need the implant removed within a year.
Sex change operations have been at the center of political debate in recent years amid concerns that patients who get them are vulnerable and not fully aware of the risks.
For example, studies suggest those who are transgender are six times more likely to suffer from autism, and up to 70 percent of trans youths are depressed.
But some studies, including one by the National Institutes of Health, suggest patients are happier after the surgery, further complicating the issue.
A large study last year found more than a third of penis implant procedures to give an erection had complications so bad further surgery was required.
Nine months after the procedure, more than a fifth of patients had had their devices removed, either due to infection or mechanical failures.
Some 67 of the prosthetic penises were inflatable, and 13 were semirigid.
An inflatable implant involves a silicone pump inserted into the scrotum, which can be squeezed to generate an erection.
A semirigid implant uses two flexible rods which keep the penis semirigid so it can be easily bent down or up during sex.
The rods are made of metal wire and wrapped in a silicone jacket. The implants may also be used in biological males who have erectile dysfunction.
For male-to-female transition, the procedures on offer include breast augmentation, where breast implants are inserted into the chest.
Voice feminization and facial feminization surgery include operations such as forehead and brow bone reshaping, jaw and chin contouring, nose reshaping (rhinoplasty), hairline advancement, and tracheal shave — a procedure to reduce the size of the Adam's apple.
Trans women can also get an orchiectomy to remove the testicles and a vaginoplasty to create a vagina, clitoris, labia majora and labia minora using a patient's existing genital tissue.
John Hopkins University found that up to 30 percent of transgender women who have had a vaginoplasty suffered an infection linked to the operation.
Dr Richard Santucci, an experienced surgeon at the Crane Center for Transgender Surgery who carried out a study on penis implants to give an erection, told DailyMail.com that in transgender patients, the procedure has 'a crazy high complication rate compared to cis males'.
Bottom surgeries such as vaginoplasties and phalloplasties — genital reconstruction undergone by women transitioning to men — cost around $25,000.
'It is quite clear from the most up-to-date studies that vaginoplasty and other genital surgeries don’t work in the way that people hope they will,' said Stella O'Malley, psychotherapist and director of campaign group Genspect.
'The reason why there is so many problems is because this is an incredibly difficult surgery. Young vulnerable people need to know about the challenges they will face post surgery but few of them do.'
As gender-affirming surgery becomes more popular, an increasing number of 'detransitioners' who regret having the irreversible procedure have come forward.
One such de-transitioner, who goes by the name of Shape Shifter claimed he regretted his mastectomy and vaginoplasty after they led to fistula and other painful consequences.
He said woke doctors did not warn him of the negative consequences of surgery because it would be 'bad for business'.
The surgery itself was performed by Dr Sherman Leis of The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery. Leis is regarded as the United States' most experienced gender reassignment surgeon.
But soon after the operation was completed in 2015 in his mid-20s, Shape Shifter quickly realized he had made a terrible mistake and that he was just a gay man who enjoyed presenting in a feminine way.
The procedures he has undergone — which include the removal of his penis and the creation of a 'neo-vagina' — are irreversible.
They have left him with osteoporosis, scoliosis, a 'vagina' that his body believes is a wound and which it tries to close up, as well as a host of mental health conditions, including depression and a reduced sex drive.
Shape Shifter believed that making the initial switch to a woman would make him finally feel happy in his own body, but he ended up feeling even more depressed than before the surgery.
Meanwhile, Canadian detransitioned woman Michelle Zacchigna, 34, who goes by the pen name Michelle Alleva, had a mastectomy 11 years ago.
She wrote in a blog post: 'I have met so many people who have been irreparably harmed by that same "treatment".'
She said: 'I know people with ongoing vocal pain from testosterone use. I know people who are devastated by their inability to ever breastfeed their children.
'I know people who might never enjoy sexual intimacy again, either because they are horrified by their own bodies — because their libidos are completely shot — or because sex is now physically painful.
'I know people who have been made infertile by this 'treatment.' (I, myself, have sat sobbing as I process the reality that, during the darkest years of my life, I was insistent on eradicating one of the last indicators of 'female' I had, when I had resolutely wanted to bear children my entire life before then.)
Much more here:
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Fans are Outraged After Beloved Children's Cartoon Features Lesbian Clip
A children’s cartoon beloved not just here, but all across the world, is taking heat after a year-old radical gay episode began making the rounds on social media again, angering parents who are wondering why paeans to the LGBT movement have to be shoved into shows aimed at toddlers.
In the episode of the popular “Peppa Pig” cartoon series, Peppa Pig learns that one of her friends is part of a “two mothers” family, a storyline that is an effort to indoctrinate little ones as early as possible with the gay agenda.
In the LGBT episode entitled “Families,” which originally aired in September of last year, Penny Polar Bear is shown in the kitchen of her home as her “two mothers” are feeding her spaghetti.
In the clip recently re-shared to Peppa Pig’s TikTok channel as a “pride month” post, Penny Polar Bear says, “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti.”
The LGBT episode came on after a petition campaign started about three years ago that urged the writers of the series — which at that time had already become an international hit with more than 250 episodes produced — to include radical gay content which, until then, had not shown up to corrupt the series.
“Children watching Peppa Pig are at an impressionable age, and excluding same-sex families will teach them that only families with either a single parent or two parents of different sexes are normal. This means that children of same-sex parents may feel alienated by Peppa Pig, and that other children may be more likely to bully them, simply through ignorance,” the petition exclaimed.
Indeed, the clip above with the “two mums” was barely enough for the radical gay lobby. The LGBT site Mombian.com insisted that the episode selling lesbianism to tiny children was “a little uninspired.” Mombian feels that one episode grooming tiny children is not enough and that Peppa Pigs needs “ongoing representation.”
It’s never enough for the radicals.
Remember, Peppa Pig is aimed at kids from ages four to six, and that says nothing of even younger children and toddlers who may watch the show just for the colors and music.
With that age group being so young, many parents are wondering why “representation” needs to be pushed on tiny tots at all? It’s bad enough they were showing a child character being forced to eat spaghetti without any sauce, but some wondered why toddlers need to be indoctrinated by the extreme left’s LGBT agenda?
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A troubled retirement lies ahead for most Americans
Social Security is toast. So is Medicare.
Too many of us old people live longer, so there are not enough working people to support us.
Soon both Social Security and Medicare will be broke.
Our politicians don't have the guts to do anything about it. Or even talk about it.
It's easy to see why.
Recently, France's president, trying to keep his country's pension system from going broke, raised France's retirement age from 62 to a measly 64.
People have been protesting ever since.
In America, politicians who even hint at such solutions get screamed at by misinformed seniors: "Don't touch my retirement funds! You took money from my paycheck for years; that's my money I'm getting back!"
But it's not. It's young people's money. People my age rarely realize that most of us now get back triple what we paid in.
When Social Security began, a government retirement plan made financial sense. Most Americans didn't even live until age 65. Social Security was just for the minority who did.
But now Americans live, on average, to age 76. I'm 76. Henry Kissinger is 100. Since most of us live so long, there are just not enough workers to pay for us.
Yet our vote-hungry politicians won't say that in public.
Even Donald Trump cowers, saying, "No one will lay a hand on your Medicare or your Social Security."
The most clueless, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, even deny the obvious truth. He shouts: "Social Security today is not on the line going broke!"
But it just is. Reserve funds are projected to run out by 2034. Medicare's reserves will run out even sooner.
Of course they will. When I first got Medicare, I was surprised how no one even pays attention to costs. Everything seems free.
"Get an MRI," says my doctor. I immediately do. I don't ask the cost. The MRI people don't mention it either.
Months later, I get a complex notice that says my MRI cost $2,625 and I must pay $83.65. Or sometimes, nothing. Who did pay? Blue Cross? Taxpayers? The paperwork is so complex that I don't even know.
Old people who scour supermarkets to save a dollar on groceries never comparison shop for MRIs or heart surgery. "Why should I? Someone else pays."
As my new video illustrates, Medicare is a bomb with a burning fuse moving closer.
"Sooner or later, it will blow up," says economist Dan Mitchell of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. "Politicians figure oh, well, maybe it blows up in five years or 10 years or 20 years. I won't be in office anymore."
Some claim raising taxes on rich people would solve the deficit, but it won't. There just aren't enough rich people. Even taking all the money from every billionaire wouldn't cover our coming bankruptcy.
The only solution is cutting benefits, raising the age when benefits start (sensible, since we live longer) or, Mitchell's preference, privatizing retirement plans, like Australia and Chile did.
America's politicians won't do any of those things.
So what will happen?
"The only other alternative is printing money," says Mitchell.
"I suspect that's what America will do," I tell Mitchell. "We'll be like Zimbabwe." Zimbabwe's president printed money to fund his deficit spending. When the currency collapsed in 2009, Zimbabwe was printing hundred trillion-dollar bills.
Yet politicians don't learn. In the current debt ceiling deal, Speaker Kevin McCarthy got President Joe Biden to "claw back" unused COVID relief funds and keep two years of non-defense discretionary spending roughly flat.
That's a little progress. But Biden wants to spend a record $7 trillion next year.
McCarthy said Medicare and Social Security were "completely off the table."
So the programs are still doomed.
"Sooner or later bad things will happen to senior citizens," explains Mitchell. "The government will either cut their benefits or all of a sudden start rationing health care. Or reimbursement rates will be so low that you won't be able to find a doctor or hospital to treat you."
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/05/31/time-bomb-n2623867
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4 June, 2023
The latest Google censorship of this blog
They have deleted a post that appeared on May 5. It was under the heading "Defining "woke"", so one understands that sensitivities might have been trampled on. The post remains available in my backups. To read it go to
http://jonjayray.com/pcmay23.html
and scroll down to 5th
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I’m a ‘passport bro’: We want 'traditional' wives, not feminists
I can identify with this to some degree. I have twice gone overseas in to meet a prospective partner -- but with no success. I am also these days in a relationship with a woman from a more traditional culture -- but she sure is not submissive
“Passport bros” are looking for love, but not just any gal will get the entry stamp into their hearts.
Eligible bachelors in the US dubbed “passport bros” are flocking to foreign countries after ditching the American dating pool in search of love overseas — much to the disgust of women on the internet.
On TikTok, the tag #passportbros has scored more than 422 million views, featuring clips of men parading their far-flung lovers online while advertising the growing trend.
The draw of dating abroad, according to unsatisfied singletons in the US, is finding a “traditional” wife.
That is, women who are “raised to be good wives,” dress modestly and submit to their partners.
Austin Abeyta is just one of many in the brotherhood who flaunts his prowess online, fondly referring to his travels as “the adventure of a lifetime.”
Remote worker Abeyta has gone viral as the self-styled “Digital Bromad,” scoring more than 413,000 followers on TikTok, all while he travels to Colombia, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines, allegedly in search of a blushing bride.
“A lot of women overseas are taught from a young age from their mothers and other members of their family how to treat a man and how to make their future husband happy,” the Colorado native, who is looking for a “kind” and “cooperative” partner with “a positive view on men,” told The Post.
“But in America, I think a lot of women were taught ‘Men aren’t s – – t’ or ‘I don’t need a man.’ “
In his videos, Abeyta gloats about the myriad of benefits that accompany dating overseas.
For one, men from the US are “exotic,” he claims in a TikTok post with 1.8 million views, adding that playing into the stereotype of a “rich” American will take single men far.
“The truth that a lot of people don’t want to admit is that dating overseas is absolutely different,” the digital analyst, 32, told The Post. “There are very few men that will tell you that dating outside of America isn’t [five times] better.”
The larger collective of passport bros, or those who hold similar beliefs, champion Abeyta in the comments section of his viral videos while denouncing the dating landscape and American women in one foul swoop.
“A lot of American women are bitter [because] they have a s – – tty attitude and don’t understand that most men believe in a Patriarchy [sic] relationship,” one user commented.
“The difference is that women from other countries actually APPRECIATE being treated well, unlike A LOT of women here in the USA,” another scoffed.
Wannabe hubbies can certainly find a “quality partner” in the US, Abeyta admitted, but dating overseas has been a “10/10” experience — “and the majority of men who have left will tell you that,” he added.
But the allure of a foreign fling isn’t just reserved for men: On the flipside, women are also heading overseas in an attempt to meet a match, escaping the “toxic” dating pool in the US, according to the New York Times.
Women explained how they didn’t feel “seen” by men until traveling abroad, and were swept off their feet in other countries.
Ceppe Tabibian, 35, fled Austin, Texas, for Madrid after growing tired of swiping on dating apps.
“I felt like every guy was the same guy,” she said. “I felt like if I stayed there, I’m probably going to be single forever.”
However, it appears that while American bachelorettes are searching for more “serious” suitors who will put in the “effort” to woo them, the self-proclaimed “passport bros” are sniffing out a housewife.
Online, fellow passport bros tout women abroad for their distinctive qualities, such as, according to one TikToker, cooking, cleaning and being “feminine,” “submissive,” “not argumentative” and giving “sexual access when you ask for it.”
The arguably misogynistic “movement” has also been met with online vitriol, with critics panning their online propaganda as “disgusting,” “predatory” or “just sex tourism with a less offensive name.”
“They really rebranded ‘mail order brides’ to sound even worse than it did before. This is not new,” one user said on the social media site Reddit.
“In terms of how it impacts women in the US: There is an expression of letting the trash take itself out,” wrote another, in part. “In terms of supply and demand — there is little demand for men who think and behave like this, and clearly an oversupply.”
But Abeyta, who is currently trawling for potential spouses in Tokyo, shrugs off judgment, saying it’s “disappointing” to see Americans bash people in other countries, and calling the haters “jealous.”
“People need to paint passport bros as these losers or predators because then they can ignore the state of the dating culture in America and how they contributed to it,” he said.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/02/im-a-passport-bro-we-want-traditional-wives-not-mail-order-brides/
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Children's Choir Silenced By Capital Police While Singing the Star Spangled Banner
An elite children’s choir was abruptly silenced while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” inside the U.S. Capitol due to concerns from Capitol police that the song could be interpreted as a “protest” and may offend someone.
On May 26, the Rushingbrook Children’s Choir, believed to be a Christian choir from South Carolina, visited Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol as part of a planned tour.
After receiving approval from several Republican congressional representatives, including Russell Fry, William Timmons, and Joe Wilson, the choir was also invited to perform a selection of patriotic songs in the hall.
However, as the choir approached the completion of the third verse of the national anthem, a guide interrupted the director, notifying him that the Capitol police had ordered an immediate halt to the singing.
A video capturing the incident was shared on social media, quickly gaining viral attention.
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How I exposed the DARK SIDE of Facebook: FRANCES HAUGEN was hired to police fake news at the social networking site but when she saw how their algorithms helped stir up anger, hatred and even genocide, she turned into a whistleblower
Facebook’s headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, on the shores of San Francisco Bay, once looked like Disney World’s Main Street USA. Stylised storefronts offered a cartoon-like assortment of charming services, many at no cost.
Within a five-minute stroll, you would pass an ice-cream shop, a bicycle mechanic, a Mexican kitchen, an old-fashioned barber’s shop and other mainstays of a typical American small town. But when the company outgrew that campus, it commissioned a monolithic building with security posts at every entrance. More a fortress than a village.
Somewhere between its birth as a website for rating the attractiveness of college girls and its ascent to become the internet for billions of people, Facebook faced a choice: tackle head-on the challenges that came with their new reality, or turn inward. Even on my first day on campus it was clear they had chosen the latter.
After more than two years of working for Facebook, in a bid to expose some of those emerging dangers, I decided to become a whistleblower. Even the role I stepped into was itself an admission of Facebook’s shortcomings. Despite drawing extensive media attention to their ‘independent fact-checking’ of fake news and blocking misinformation spread by ‘bad actors’, Facebook’s network of third-party journalists touched only two or three dozen countries and wrote at best thousands of fact-checks a month for Facebook’s three billion users around the world.
I was tasked with figuring out a way to reduce misinformation in places fact-checkers couldn’t reach — the rest of the world, in other words. Within days of my arrival, it was clear that my role was nothing more than a token, a sop. Facebook wanted to look as though it was tackling the problem in earnest, when in fact it had an active incentive to allow lies to spread unhindered.
As proof of what was really going on, I secretly copied 22,000 pages of documents which I filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to the U.S. Congress. I testified before more than ten congresses and parliaments around the world, including the UK and European Parliaments and U.S. Congress.
Hundreds of journalists spent months reporting the shocking truth Facebook had hidden for years. These findings have proved cataclysmic for the company. Its stock price, in the week before I went public in 2021, stood at $378. By November 2022 it had fallen to $90, a decline of more than 75 per cent.
Shortly after the congressional hearing, Facebook hastily rebranded themselves Meta, proclaiming the future of the company would be ‘in the Metaverse’. It appeared to be an admission that their brand had become too toxic to keep. I was unsurprised. During my two years there, we were told by corporate security that T-shirts, hats or backpacks bearing the Facebook logo made us targets for the public’s rage and we were safer if no one knew we worked there.
I marvelled at the cognitive dissonance required to consider such a way of living to be acceptable.
I didn’t set out to become a whistleblower. I’ve never wanted to be the centre of attention — in my whole adult life, I’ve had just two birthday parties and, when I married my first husband, we eloped to a beach in Zanzibar to avoid the spotlight.
Originally, I had zero intention of revealing my identity. My goals were simple: I wanted to be able to sleep at night, free of the burden of carrying secrets I believed risked millions of lives in some of the most vulnerable places in the world. I feared Facebook’s path would lead to crises that would be far more horrific than the first two major Facebook-fanned ethnic cleansings in Myanmar and Ethiopia.
Coming forward was the solution to a dilemma that had plagued me and many of my co-workers who wrestled with their troubled consciences. I wasn’t an outlier — far from it. But it felt as though we all faced three options, every one of them bad:
Option 1: Ignore the truth and its consequences. Switch jobs inside the company. Write a note, documenting what you’ve found, and tell yourself it’s someone else’s problem now. Give yourself a pass because you raised the issue with your manager and they said it wasn’t a priority.
Option 2: Quit, and live knowing the outcomes you uncovered were still going on, invisible to the public.
Option 3: Do your best to solve the problems, despite knowing the Facebook corporation lacks the genuine will to fix anything.
Until I became a whistleblower, I had been subscribing to Option 3. I felt like I was making progress, it just didn’t feel like it was enough.
When Facebook approached me in 2018, I had been working in the tech industry for more than a decade — part of a select group of experience designers that create user experiences out of algorithms. With a degree from Harvard Business School, I’d worked at Google, Pinterest and Yelp.
But my first encounter with the dark underbelly of Facebook was not a professional one. It came via my assistant, Jonah.
I met him in March 2015 when he was living with my brother in a rented room in Silicon Valley with about a dozen male housemates, all trying to make it in tech. Their home was a converted industrial garage full of bunk beds and desks, with a bathroom and a kitchen tacked on.
My first marriage had ended and I was recovering from a serious illness that had left me sometimes unable to get around without a walker. So I offered Jonah a trade. In exchange for 20 hours a week as my assistant, he could use my apartment as an office while I was at work. Jonah was smart, empathetic, and a dedicated gym-goer. But, as the 2016 U.S. election loomed, I began to notice alarming changes in his personality. He had been an enthusiastic supporter of Left-winger Bernie Sanders and took it badly when Hillary Clinton emerged as the Democrat candidate instead.
His nugget of grievance grew as he lost himself online in social media. This anger was fuelled by the algorithms, the software that directed his attention to stories, news items and people who only served to exacerbate his sense of injustice. As America prepared to vote, Jonah was bombarding me with long emails detailing tortuous conspiracy theories. I tried to reason with him but he was slipping beyond my reach.
Watching our realities drift farther apart made me acutely aware of the misinformation I saw whenever I logged into Facebook. A glance was enough to warn me that too few people were holding back this tide of lies, propaganda and malicious false narratives. When Jonah read one rant about how Sanders was robbed of the Democratic nomination, Facebook found more just like it and served them up to him. When he followed one delusional activist, others were recommended to him. He had been sucked into an echo chamber, where every screaming voice was saying the same thing.
Two weeks after the election, Jonah moved out — packing up to live with some people he’d met on the internet. The echo chamber had become his real world.
So when a Facebook recruiter approached me in late 2018, I wasn’t excited. The company already suffered from a bad reputation, and everyone in Silicon Valley above a certain seniority level was getting peppered with emails from the company’s headhunters.
This was the era immediately after Facebook had been outed by a whistleblower, Christopher Wylie. He revealed they had let Cambridge Analytica steal the personal information of 87 million users. It was my impression that taking a gig at Facebook wouldn’t add value to my resumé. If anything, it would leave a dent.
I told the recruiter I would only be interested in a role that dealt with combating fake news. An invitation quickly came back, to apply for an open position as a ‘civic misinformation product manager’.
I equivocated for months. Ultimately, what decided for me was thinking back on the experience of having watched Jonah lose his connection to reality. If an emotionally intelligent, intellectually curious young man could disengage from reality because of lies the internet fed to him, what chance did people with far fewer advantages have?
On my first day at Facebook in June 2019, I began a two-week primer course on how to be effective at Facebook. Three days later, my manager told me to abandon the training and start work on my team plan for the next six months.That was my first red flag that something was profoundly wrong. They told us plainly at the start of the bootcamp that these two weeks were set aside to get us up to speed, because few product managers figured out how to be successful at Facebook by just jumping in feet first on their own.
But here we were regardless. An entirely new team. My engineering manager had joined six weeks earlier, and our data scientist was a similarly fresh recruit. We didn’t know much, if anything at all, about how Facebook’s algorithms worked or what the causes of misinformation were.
Six of us made up the civic misinformation team. Confusingly, we were not what you probably think of when you think of Facebook fighting misinformation. That was the separate, main, misinformation team with 40 staff. Their job was to commission freelance journalists to fact-check a small number of ‘hyper-viral stories’ — that is, news reports spreading like wildfire that might or might not be true. Facebook’s top executives did not want the platform to be an arbiter of truth. They delegated that role to journalists who would provide judgments about which stories should be removed from (or demoted within) the newsfeed.
In January 2020 a Facebook statement proudly declared it was working with more than 50 fact-checking partners in 40 languages worldwide. Simple maths told me that this was like trying to mop up a dam burst with a handful of tissues. Most of the partners were able to check a monthly maximum of 200 stories. But suppose that’s an underestimate, and all 50 were somehow able to track down the truth on 1,000 fake news items each month.
That’s 50,000 posts at most, for the entire world of three billion Facebook users.
In reality, seven of the 50 partners in 2020 were focusing on the U.S., leaving most other countries, if they had a fact-checker at all, with only one. It seemed obvious to me that an unstable country in Asia, Africa or South America, teetering toward ethnic violence, must have an even greater need for fact-checking budgets — but Facebook is a U.S. corporation and it doesn’t allocate safety resources by need. Rather, it allocates based on fear of regulation in the United States.
The policy makers in Washington DC have the power, after all, to limit Facebook’s activities. Governments in the developing world certainly do not. Since the main misinformation team was concentrating on fake news largely in the U.S. and Europe, it fell to my unit of six to figure out how to cover the rest of the world without using fact-checkers. If that was not farcical enough, we realised that at Facebook, there was no such thing as misinformation unless it had been specifically researched and denounced by a third-party fact-checker.
By definition, given the focus of our team, nothing investigated by the civic misinformation team could be misinformation in Facebook’s eyes.
It was now that I began to understand how truly dangerous the Facebook strategy was of giving away its service for free.
To ensure nothing short of dominance, Mark Zuckerberg had adopted a strategy of making his platform available in even the most impoverished nations, to make it difficult (even impossible) for competitors to emerge.
By 2022 the programme, termed Free Basics, served 300 million people in countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan. Across the developing world, most data comes at a price. Free Basics opened the door to the internet for some of the world’s poorest people. In countries where the average earnings are a dollar a day, that makes Facebook the natural choice.
I began to understand how truly dangerous the Facebook strategy was of giving away its service for free
It also makes the operation highly unprofitable. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the company made $58.77 (£47.20) annually from each American user, and $17.27 (£13.87) per European user. But in Pacific Asia, that sum fell to $4.61 (£3.70), and in the rest of the world an average user was worth just $3.52 (£2.83) a year to Facebook.
As a consequence, Facebook decided it didn’t have the budget to prevent misinformation or build equivalent safety systems for a wide range of dangers in loss-leader countries. Most people reading this article don’t realise how much cleaner and brighter their experience of Facebook is in English. A minimum level of user safety is only available to a choice few.
The real-world consequences of these language gaps could be seen in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. In 2014, the country had fewer than half a million Facebook users. But two years later, powered by Free Basics subsidised data, it had more users than any other South East Asian country. Usage had risen at an exponential rate — and so had lethal misinformation.
Myanmar is predominantly Buddhist with a Muslim minority, the Rohingya. In 2017, the Myanmar government unleashed its security forces on a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Facebook served as an echo chamber of anti-Rohingya content. Propagandist trolls with ties to the Myanmar military and to radical Buddhist nationalist groups inundated Facebook with anti-Muslim content, falsely promoting the notion that Muslims were planning a takeover. Posts relentlessly expressed comparisons between Muslims and animals, calling for the ‘removal’ of the ‘whole race’, turning on a fire hose of inflammatory lies.
Investigators estimated as many as 24,000 Rohingya were massacred and more than a million were forced to flee their homes. The misinformation spread on social media played a very significant role in this slaughter.
Most people in the U.S. were only vaguely aware of it, if at all — in part because the news stories that flowed through their Facebook news feeds rarely highlighted the plight of the Rohingya. It wasn’t in the algorithm.
The same is true today. We cannot see into the vast tangle of algorithms — even if they exact a crushing, incalculable cost, such as unfairly influencing national elections, toppling governments, fomenting genocide or causing a teenage girl’s self-esteem to plummet, leading to another death by suicide. Facebook has been getting away with so much because it runs on closed software in isolated data centres beyond the reach of the public.
Senior executives realised early on that, because its software was closed, the company could control the narrative around whatever problems it created.
In myriad ways Facebook has repeatedly failed to warn the public about issues as diverse and dire as national and international security threats, political propaganda and fake news.
It didn’t matter if activists reported Facebook was enabling child exploitation, terrorist recruitment, a neo-Nazi movement, or unleashing algorithms that created eating disorders and provoked suicides. Facebook had an infallibly disingenuous defence: ‘What you are seeing is anecdotal, an anomaly. The problem you found is not representative of what Facebook is.’
I began to understand that I had access to documents, thousands of them, that could prove what Facebook really is. I just didn’t know yet what to do with them.
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Severe Legal Penalties for Physicians Providing Gender-Affirming Care are Justified
Young mothers and fathers ask me how any doctor can prescribe life altering hormones and remove the normal breasts in a young girl with gender dysphoria and confusion around the time of puberty? The published data demonstrate “gender affirming” care does not cure gender dysphoria and it is sterilizing in ~80%. Commonly kids with autism are targeted.
Sadly, these procedures increase the rates of homicide, suicide and death from all causes. Because the medical profession is not policing itself, states are stepping in with severe consequences for doctors who prescribe gender changing hormones to perform disfiguring surgery.
Mallory et al., published this sobering report for doctors in transgender medicine: “The policy landscape on gender-affirming care has significantly changed within the past decade, with high variability in access to care between states. By 2022, approximately half of US states had implemented protective state-level health policies related to gender-affirming care coverage in private and public insurance"
However, despite consensus between professional medical associations regarding gender-affirming standards of care, bans on this care, particularly for minors, have gained legislative traction within the past 5 years.
Proposed bills related to bans on gender-affirming care for minors increased from 4 in 2018 to 43 in 2022, with a total of 4 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona and Texas) enacting laws or policies banning access during this period. In the ongoing 2023 legislative session, 118 bills have been proposed across 31 states related to restricting access to gender-affirming care.2 By April 2023, 11 of these bills had been passed into law (in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia) and 1 administrative rule was enacted in Florida.
Thus, in total, 15 states have laws and policies that ban gender-affirming care for minors. Within the stipulations of state bans, physicians who continue care face 4 major direct penalties: (1) medical license disciplinary action; (2) a private right of legal action against physicians, which can include extensions on malpractice statutes of limitations; (3) civil legal action the state can take against physicians; and (4) felony provisions that enable criminal penalties against physicians.
Many of these states’ laws deem the practice of providing gender-affirming care for minors as “unprofessional conduct.” The laws in Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia hold that physicians are subject to discipline by the appropriate review board. The enacted laws in Kentucky, Mississippi and South Dakota further state that physicians who violate these laws will have their license to practice medicine revoked by the state medical board.
Laws in 8 states (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah) provide a private right of legal action, allowing citizens to bring lawsuits against physicians for providing gender-affirming care. In addition, these states extend medical malpractice statutes of limitations for claims related to providing gender-affirming care for minors. Some states allow malpractice action against a physician until the patient is 25 years old (South Dakota and Utah) and other states allow lawsuits to be filed from 10 to 30 years after the patient reaches 18 years of age (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee).
In addition to creating a private right of action, laws in 5 states (Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, and Tennessee) provide that the state may take legal action against physicians who provide gender-affirming care to minors. For example, Tennessee allows the attorney general to bring action against a physician for providing gender-affirming care for a minor within 20 years of the violation, with a civil penalty of $25?000 per violation.
Last, 3 states have criminalized the provision of gender-affirming care. Both Alabama and Idaho made it a felony for physicians to provide gender-affirming treatments for patients aged 18 years and younger, punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of $5000 to $15?000. In Texas, a governor’s directive issued in February 2022 defined certain gender-affirming services for youth as “child abuse” and stated that health care professionals facilitating access to these services are subject to criminal penalties, as are all licensed professionals with mandatory reporting duties for “failure to report such child abuse.”3
In summary, the writing is on the wall for transgender medicine. As quickly as academic and community hospitals opened up gender change clinics, they better shut them down and issue parents and children an apology. Harming children with hormones and mutilating surgery is not good clinical practice nor is it welcome in the house of medicine.
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Moving to France Showed Me True Cost of ‘Free’ European Health Care, Child Care, and Retirement
An oft-repeated phrase among those favoring taxpayer-funded health care, day care, and pensions is that such programs are “free.” However, I recently moved to France, and paying my social charges and taxes proves these services are anything but.
I expected taxes to be higher, but I was unprepared for the limitations that France’s system places on individual choice.
In reality, France’s “free” social programs cost more than higher taxes. There’s a non-financial cost when it comes to access and control. Health care and child care are extremely personal choices, and Americans may not realize the degree to which Europeans sacrifice control to government bureaucrats.
Let’s begin with the financial cost of France’s “free” health care, child care, and retirement. These programs are funded by France’s “social charges” taken from everyone’s paychecks. Social charges, separate from taxes, pay for “free” day care, maternity leave, unemployment, retirement, and health care.
Keep in mind that the French pay taxes in addition to social charges. By way of example, I pay roughly 1,300 euros (nearly $1,500) per month in mandatory social charges (which does not include my husband’s social charges), and we still pay taxes, too.
France’s taxpayer-funded health care system indeed covers wellness checkups and serious medical issues like chronic illness almost in full. One may not receive a large bill after these services, but calling it “free” ignores the facts and insults the millions of French residents paying social charges.
France’s social charges also fund day care, or “creche,” and each neighborhood has a day care center. This may seem idyllic, especially to working parents, but day care quality levels vary. Contrary to picturesque TikTok videos, some day care centers are poorly run, have mediocre food, and few enriching children’s activities. Furthermore, even if your day care is good, your child is not guaranteed a spot in the day care for which you pay social charges, as day care spots are largely income-based.
If you live in an area rife with housing projects (France requires that cities allot 25% of residencies to public housing), your child may not get into the day care center because low-income families get priority. If that’s the case, you must find another day care center or pay out of pocket for child care, even though you paid social charges.
Everyone pays, but only some get access. In other words, the government takes 20% or more of your monthly paycheck and then determines if you are worthy of receiving the services it forces you to pay for.
It bears mentioning that some wealthy neighborhoods pay a fine instead of creating social housing. In doing so, those neighborhoods avoid public housing, thereby reducing the number of needy families in their communities and allowing their children to go to the best day care centers.
The closest comparison in America is the wealthy who oppose school choice, while sending their own children to expensive private schools.
There are better ways to give families access to child care than government-mandated programs that create financial and social burdens.
Speaking of one-size-fits-all, that brings us to France’s pension system.
France’s pension system dates back to 1945 and is organized into categories, such as train operators, opera singers, dentists, and teachers, each with different retirement ages and requirements. All workers, salaried employees, and freelancers pay into their respective categories.
Somewhat like America’s Social Security, those working now fund the retirements of the elderly. In that regard, it’s not dissimilar from a Ponzi scheme, the investment scam that landed Bernard Madoff in prison.
France’s pensions, like American Social Security, are government-controlled. Government officials determine when and how much money you receive upon retirement. Imagine paying into a system your entire life, only to have French President Emmanuel Macron issue the French equivalent of an executive order and delay your retirement age—which happened recently with France’s pension reforms.
So, why don’t the French invest in private retirement accounts?
France’s crippling progressive income tax and social charges leave little money to invest. Moreover, high investment taxes make investing less advantageous for those with modest to middle-class incomes. It’s a progressive tax code, so the more you make, the more the government takes.
Moreover, French salaries are roughly half those in the United States. This, coupled with taxes and social charges, leaves little money left to invest, let alone spend on food, clothing, or life’s little luxuries. By the way, all goods are subject to a 20% value-added tax.
Some argue, “But at least in Europe, you get something for your taxes.” The United States spends 46% of its federal budget on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. In the U.S., someone gets something, but that person may not be you. Imagine not getting something, but with half your income and double your taxes; that’s France.
Americans also idealize European labor protections, but those laws, too, come with downsides.
Most French workers are entitled to generous benefits, including unemployment, maternity leave, and vacation days. To be clear, everyone deserves access to gainful, dignified employment free of exploitation. France seeks to achieve that through government-mandated worker benefits and strict government control. Like most government policies, that negatively impacts the most vulnerable and creates a thriving black market.
France’s onerous labor laws and employment taxes push workers into “off the books” employment, and consumers tend to gravitate toward cheap labor. That’s especially common in industries where people pay other people directly, like for domestic work.
Imagine Marianne, a housekeeper. If Marianne does so as a “full employee,” the family employing her pays 28-40 euros ($30-$43) per hour, of which she keeps roughly 12-15 euros. ($13-$16). If Marianne is “off the books,” however, she charges what she wants and keeps every cent. As such, some workers, especially immigrants and refugees, work “off the books.”
Studies show that off-the-books labor represents more than 10.8% of France’s gross domestic product. Given the nature of off-the-books labor, it’s difficult to know exactly how many workers are paid off the books in any country. But in general, the higher the tax and regulatory burdens of employment, the greater the incentive to evade them.
Workers, especially those who are vulnerable or economically disadvantaged, ought keep as much of their paychecks as possible. But France’s bloated government is more interested in protecting people from themselves and, in the process, limits flexibility and freedom for those who need it most.
There’s no simple answer to providing the best services to the greatest number of people. But France shows that government one-size-fits-all policies are not the answer, nor are they “free.”
Americans on the right and left call for “free” services like health care. President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Families Plan boasted “free” education, including universal preschool. The conservative CEO of Americans United for Life called for making childbirth “free,” but I hope she is prepared to spend the money needed to make it “free” and is aware of the effect that government funding can have on access to resources, individual choice, and quality of care.
From across the Atlantic, I see America moving toward a European model, in which services are government-controlled. But for America to live up to its promise of being conceived in liberty, we must put responsibility in the hands of individuals and families.
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2 June, 2023
Inside the CEI system pushing brands to endorse celebs like Dylan Mulvaney
This would seem to be a very important article. The sudden arrival of the transgender madness does seem to need explanation. The CEI would seem to have a large role in it. There is also a video below on the topic
https://www.bitchute.com/video/pgxmnbNduVfO/
Executives at companies like Nike, Anheuser-Busch and Kate Spade, whose brand endorsements have turned controversial trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney into today’s woke “It girl,” aren’t just virtue signaling.
They’re handing out lucrative deals to what were once considered fringe celebrities because they have to — or risk failing an all-important social credit score that could make or break their businesses.
At stake is their Corporate Equality Index — or CEI — score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world.
HRC, which has received millions from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation among others, issues report cards for America’s biggest corporations via the CEI: awarding or subtracting points for how well companies adhere to what HRC calls its “rating criteria.”
Businesses that attain the maximum 100 total points earn the coveted title “Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.” Fifteen of the top 20 Fortune-ranked companies received 100% ratings last year, according to HRC data.
More than 840 US companies racked up high CEI scores, according to the latest report.
The HRC, which was formed in 1980 and started the CEI in 2002, is led by Kelley Robinson who was named as president in 2022 and worked as a political organizer for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The HRC lists five major rating criteria, each with its own lengthy subsets, for companies to gain — or lose — CEI points.
The CEI is made up of several main scoring components.
The main categories are: “Workforce Protections,” “Inclusive Benefits,” “Supporting an Inclusive Culture,” “Corporate Social Responsibility and Responsible Citizenship.”
A company can lose CEI points if it doesn’t fulfill HRC’s demand for “integration of intersectionality in professional development, skills-based or other training” or if it doesn’t use a “supplier diversity program with demonstrated effort to include certified LGBTQ+ suppliers.”
James Lindsay, a political podcaster who runs a site called New Discourses, told The Post that the Human Rights campaign administers the CEI ranking “like an extortion racket, like the Mafia.
It doesn’t just sit back passively either. HRC sends representatives to corporations every year telling them what kind of stuff they have to make visible at the company. They give them a list of demands and if they don’t follow through there’s a threat that you won’t keep your CEI score.”
The CEI is a lesser-known part of the burgeoning ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) “ethical investing” movement increasingly pushed by the country’s top three investment firms. ESG funds invest in companies that oppose fossil fuels, push for unionization, and stress racial and gender equity over merit in hiring and board selection.
As a result, some American CEOs are more concerned about pleasing BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Bank — who are among the top shareholders of most American publicly-traded corporations (including Nike, Anheuser-Busch and Kate Spade) — than they are about irritating conservatives, numerous sources told The Post.
This week, Mulvaney’s new ad campaigns with Bud Light and Nike ruffled the feathers of critics from country star Travis Tritt and Kid Rock — who tweeted a video of himself shooting cases of Bud Light — to female Olympians and even Caitlyn Jenner, who said of Nike: “It is a shame to see such an iconic American company go so woke! … This is an outrage.”
Mulvaney, 26, who transitioned from male to female in the beginning of March 2021, has reportedly earned more than a million dollars from endorsements including fashion and beauty brands that also include Ulta Beauty, Haus Labs and CeraVe, as well as Crest and InstaCart.
She’s also gained 10 million followers on TikTok.
But neither Kid Rock nor even Mulvaney are who America’s top execs are trying to impress, experts say.
“The big fund managers like BlackRock all embrace this ESG orthodoxy in how they apply pressure to top corporate management teams and boards and they determine, in many cases, executive compensation and bonuses and who gets re-elected or re-appointed to boards,” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for president as a Republican and authored “Woke Inc.: Inside America’s Social Justice Scam,” told The Post. “They can make it very difficult for you if you don’t abide by their agendas.”
In 2018, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who oversees assets worth $8.6 trillion and has been called the “face of ESG,” wrote a now-infamous letter to CEOs titled “A Sense of Purpose” that pushed a “new model of governance” in line with ESG values.
“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” Fink wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”
Fink also let it be known “that if a company doesn’t engage with the community and have a sense of purpose “it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”
In December, Florida pulled $2 billion worth of state assets managed by BlackRock. “I think it’s undemocratic of major asset managers to use their power to influence societal outcomes,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the time.
Fink has denied that ESG is political, but key staff managing his ESG operations worked in the Obama administration and donate to Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
In his first veto, President Joe Biden last month rejected a GOP-backed bill that sought to block ESG investing — especially in pension funds where, critics say, American retirement funds will be sacrificed to a radical left-wing agenda.
Protesters in Paris targeted BlackRock’s office there this week due to the company’s role in managing and privatizing pensions, which are at the heart of the French government’s recent retirement-age reforms.
ESG and CEI proponents say that adhering to socially conscious values when investing and managing a company will make the world a better place. Not everyone agrees.
Derek Kreifels is the co-founder and CEO of State Financial Officers Foundation, one of several financial officers fighting ESG on a national level.
He calls ESG itself a “highly subjective political score infiltrating all walks of life, forcing progressive policies on everyday Americans [and] resulting in higher prices at the pump and at the store.”
The Corporate Equality Index is an ominous cog in ESG’s wheel, Kreifels told The Post.
“The problem with measures like CEI, and its big brother ESG, is that it introduces an incentive structure outside of the bounds of business, often in ways contradictory to fiduciary duty,” Kreifels said. “Whether Anheuser-Busch was trying to cash in on Dylan Mulvaney’s TikTok following or chasing higher CEI ratings for inclusivity, the backlash has been significant, and the stockholders to whom the company is obligated will feel the pinch.”
https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/inside-the-woke-scoring-system-guiding-american-companies/
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‘It’s time to admit remote work doesn’t work’, tech entrepreneur David Sacks says
Working from home is the equivalent of a “two-day work week” making it a “great lifestyle” but bad for companies, according to one tech executive who says it’s “time to admit that remote work doesn’t work”.
Entrepreneur David Sacks, a close ally of Tesla boss Elon Musk, is one of a growing number of business leaders making a stand firmly against the work-from-home trend, which has emerged as a major flashpoint between companies and employees in the aftermath of Covid.
“It’s time to admit that remote work doesn’t work,” Mr Sacks wrote in a viral Twitter thread which has been viewed more than 4.5 million times.
“WFH Friday is a four-day work week. Full WFH is a two-day work week. Every interaction has to be scheduled, which means a lot of information-sharing doesn’t happen. Remote is a great lifestyle, not a way to build a great company.”
Mr Sacks was responding to earlier comments by tech executive Florent Crivello, who wrote in an April memo to staff at his AI start-up Lindy that he had “made a 180º on remote”.
“I think everyone here can attest to the fact that we tried harder than anyone else. And I’m more bummed out about it than anyone,” he wrote in the memo, which he later shared as a blog post.
“Remote is more comfortable from a lifestyle standpoint. You save on commute, have your own office, can work from anywhere, and get more flexibility on your schedule (especially important for folks with families). But it makes it harder for a start-up to succeed or find product / market fit. That’s especially so if you’re building something very new, like we are doing.”
Mr Crivello went on to explain that remote work “raises co-ordination costs”, outlining a few reasons why it was less efficient — such as people not being online at the same time and online meetings being less effective than face-to-face due to the technology — all of which “causes us to be less aligned”.
“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this misalignment,” he wrote.
“We in tech are building pure thought-stuff — the things we build are like icebergs, 99 per cent invisible. The quality of our work is a function of the alignment of our mental models about the stuff below that water line. And remote makes it harder to reach that alignment.”
Mr Crivello added, “Colocation is more fun too. You get to have lunch with your team, grab beers on Friday nights, play video games at the end of the day in the office, etc.”
Mr Sacks expanded on his thoughts in a lengthy Twitter post.
“In the earliest days of a start-up, it’s possible for a small team to remain continuously connected electronically,” he wrote. “This [creates] false confidence in remote. It doesn’t scale. By the time the start-up has hundreds of employees, full remote completely breaks down.”
He suggested “maybe 10 per cent of the roles in a company can naturally be remote”, such as engineers “whose code check-ins are obvious” or “field sales reps who live in their territories and close large enterprise deals”, the dollar value of with were “also obvious”.
“What makes these remote cases justified is that achievement is largely individual and fairly obvious,” he said. “By contrast, the contribution of most employees is often subtle to measure and depends on a team dynamic. Hence the importance of being together in an actively managed environment.”
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Biden’s ‘White Supremacy’ and ‘Assault Weapons’ Dog Whistles
Joe Biden is a consummate race hustler and the most reprehensible “lying dog-faced pony soldier” ever to dupe his way into the White House. In his recent 2023 commencement address at the distinguished historically black Howard University, his mastery of lies shined.
It was a great platform for “President Unity™” to roll out his retread “racism” and “white supremacy” rhetoric.
How ironic that Howard gave this platform to the titular leader of the political party that is the historic architect of white supremacy and that continues to advance policies that keep millions of black and brown Americans enslaved by their poverty politics nationwide. And what a disgrace that Howard invited a serial prevaricator to preach his now-tiresome sermon of hate and division to warp the perspective of their graduates at what was otherwise a distinguished commencement.
As for Biden’s qualifications to stand before this esteemed student body, let’s recall his own “academic record.” He has falsely and repeatedly claimed he graduated “top half of my class” from law school, when he was actually near the bottom — and cheated to get that ranking. He has also repeatedly claimed he has three undergraduate degrees from the University of Delaware, though that too has been debunked.
But he gets a pass by the leadership at Howard.
Biden declared to all present, “I thought, when I graduated, we could defeat hate. But it never goes away. It only hides under the rocks.”
Of course, Democrats bank on keeping the hate they created on life support to make sure “it never goes away,” especially after a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that Biden’s approval rating among black voters was at a mere 52%.
Biden was blowing his “poison of white supremacy” dog whistle hard when he absurdly insisted, “The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
Nate Jackson wrote of that colossal canard: “It’s an utterly false and divisive charge coming from a pathological liar. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the crowd from applauding because for decades blacks have marched in lockstep with the Democrat Party and its divisive racial narrative. That’s exactly what Joe ‘You Ain’t Black’ Biden is counting on.”
Biden also repeated the lie that Donald Trump said Nazis in Charlottesville were “fine people.”
Yeah, this is the same guy whose first White House stint was as understudy to the corrupt Barack Obama, whom Biden infamously described as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Of his divisive hyperbole, The Wall Street Journal noted, “It was a low, dispiriting affair, one that aptly captured the low, dispiriting nature of his presidency: acerbic rhetoric from a partisan who demonizes opposition and divides Americans from one another; bottomless self-unawareness from a politician elected president almost accidentally in a moment of crisis, who continues to see himself as some sort of historical savior; cynical cant from a serial fabulist whose distortions are becoming as loathsome as the endless malign fictions of the predecessor he despises and whom he desperately needs as a foil.”
Of course, Biden could not get off the Howard soapbox without referencing “gun violence,” claiming he wanted to resurrect “the most significant law on gun violence … the most significant law in 30 years.” He added, “I got the Assault Weapons Ban passed 30 years ago, and we’re going to pass it again.”
The arrogance of that unchallenged assertion raises a serious question: Just how dumbed-down are the faculty at Howard and, by extension, their students?
For the record, rifles and shotguns of any description combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides. In fact, a homicide victim is far more likely to be murdered by an assailant using a knife, blunt object, or fists than by a rifle or shotgun. And despite the rare high-profile mass murders that both the Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists constantly churn, more than 99.5% of murders in the U.S. are not from mass attacks — thus aren’t useful for their gun control narrative.
What Biden would not dare say before his Howard audience is that on any day across our nation, the average victim count of black-on-black and black attacks on people of other races far exceeds the death totals of any high-profile mass murder this year.
Biden and his Demos want to avoid any mention of the inconvenient truth about race and violence: A grossly disproportionate number of violent crimes nationwide are committed by black assailants, and black-on-black assault is the most prevalent violent crime in the nation. The suspect in 88% of murders of black people is also black.
According to Manhattan Institute fellow and renowned crime researcher Heather Mac Donald: “Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic murder victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. Blacks between the ages of ten and twenty-four are murdered at twenty-five times the rate of whites between those same ages. Their assailants are not the police, not other whites, but other blacks.”
When considering that the young black males who committed most of those crimes represent less than 3% of the population, that racial disparity is staggering.
Furthermore, according to Pew Research, “In 2021, 46% of all gun deaths among children and teens involved Black victims, even though only 14% of the U.S. under-18 population that year was Black.”
Democrat politicos steadfastly avoid any discussion of this data because it would require studious consideration of the Democrat policies that have created these conditions. If Democrats actually believed that “black lives mattered,” they would not propagate failed urban policies that proliferate black-on-black violence.
If Biden and his ilk were really interested in public safety, they would, as I suggested earlier this month, ban alcohol.
There were 26,031 homicides in the U.S. in 2021, the latest year of record. But more than 140,000 people — five times the number of homicides — died from alcohol-related causes in the same year. Drunk drivers are responsible for 28 deaths per day, and, notably, it is estimated that alcohol is also a key factor in at least 30% of homicides involving firearms. (Include drugs, and that number jumps to about 60%.)
What a deep disservice by the academic cadre at Howard University to avoid these inconvenient truths and invite Joe Biden to launch graduates’ careers on an insidious raft of lies.
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/97727
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Philosophers cry freedom in gender wars
Leading Australian philosophers have waded into the gender wars engulfing university campuses here and the United Kingdom, calling for stronger protection of academic freedom and robust debate of issues relating to sex, gender and gender identity.
Writing in response to a boycott campaign by student and trans rights activists against University of Melbourne feminist Holly Lawford-Smith, a group of 20 academics from seven universities backed her right to teach from a gender critical perspective without harassment or interference.
A group of fellow academics are backing the right of Holly Lawford-Smith to challenge transgender ideology.
A group of fellow academics are backing the right of Holly Lawford-Smith to challenge transgender ideology.CREDIT:JOE ARMAO
“Our support for Lawford-Smith’s right to teach and research in this field is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of the substance of her views,” the group wrote in a column published this week by The Times Higher Education.
“But, in relation to this issue, it seems clear that university leaders and academics need to do more to foster climates of genuine academic freedom.
“Lawford-Smith is one of several academics globally who have faced censure, campaigns of harassment and deplatforming for their gender-critical views. Likewise, the University of Melbourne is one of several universities globally that has had legal claims lodged against it by gender critical scholars.”
Gender critical scholars argue that women are defined by sex, rather than gender or gender identity.
“When it comes to debates about sex versus gender identity, people in positions of authority must avoid conflation of a rightly non-negotiable commitment to LGBT inclusion with endorsement of the view that gender identity is more important than sex,” the authors wrote.
“This conflation lies behind claims that those who hold or express gender-critical views are de facto ‘transphobic’ or make campus unsafe for trans people.”
The authors of the column include philosophy professors at the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, Monash University, ANU and Charles Sturt University.
Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown said views that “deny the lived experience of trans and gender diverse people” do not allow for informed and respectful discussion.
“There is always an opportunity to engage with people and ideas with respect and compassion, but it makes it very hard to do this when one side denies the existence of the other or mischaracterises them as threats and frauds,” she said.
This masthead last month revealed that Lawford-Smith, the target of a two-year campaign by trans activists which escalated following her involvement in the Let Women Speak event gatecrashed by neo-Nazis, has lodged a WorkSafe complaint against the University of Melbourne claiming she has been bullied and not provided a safe workplace.
In her complaint, Lawford-Smith claims that a university investigation into her attendance at the rally and comments on social media undermined its commitment to academic freedom. The investigation found she had no disciplinary case to answer.
University of Melbourne provost Nicola Phillips last month said the universities had to balance their “resolute” commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression with the responsibility they had to provide a workplace free of harassment and intimidation.
Vicki Thomson, the chief executive of the Group of Eight – also known as the sandstone universities – said all her members strongly asserted the importance of academic freedom.
“Progress depends on our capacity to develop and challenge new ideas, to discuss, debate and at times disagree as we endeavour to contribute to a more cohesive and inclusive society,” she said.
“Upholding freedom of expression is, at all times, essential to the core mission of our universities, as is the right of students and staff to feel and be safe on our campuses.”
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1 June, 2023
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez celebrate engagement with $4,000 wine
Her boob job has been a great investment for her
You can’t expect a billionaire to toast his engagement with Bartles and Jaymes.
Jeff Bezos, 59, and Lauren Sanchez, 53, celebrated their new relationship status with some very pricey and rare booze in the South of France on May 22.
Specifically, they ordered a $4,285 bottle of Dugat-Py Grand Cru from Domaine Bernard at La Petit Maison in Cannes, France, a source told People Magazine.
According to the magazine, the happy couple sat with Bezo’s sister Christina Bezos Poore and her husband Steve Poore in a vine-covered gazebo overlooking the Mediterranean.
A source said they were in good spirits but “didn’t want to make a fuss” with an insider adding that the Amazon founder is usually a low-key customer at the exclusive restaurant, which regularly features a late night cover band.
Last week, The Post broke the news that Bezos popped the question to his lady love of five years. At the time, they were in southern France for the Cannes Film Festival, but TMZ reported that he asked for her hand in marriage somewhere near Mallorca or Ibiza, Spain.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/29/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-toast-engagement-with-4000-wine/
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Honest Science on Transgenderism Revoked
Sad when science becomes subservient to politics. Very Soviet
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a 1954 speaking engagement at Columbia University, said, “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
This concern was shared by multiple presidents and other thinkers who lived through World War II, all of whom warned repeatedly of what happens when people silence honest discussion and instead force an ideology on everyone. It only leads to great suffering.
Now, scientific journals are blocking and/or discrediting scholarly research and papers that point to issues like transgenderism being a social contagion. American psychologist J. Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz coauthored a paper entitled, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases.” It was set to be published in Springer Nature, a supposedly trusted resource for scientific data and “the development of new ideas.”
However, Springer Nature decided to retract the paper because it said the methodology was suspect. That questionable methodology? Well, according to Springer Nature, the paper had a concerning lack of “written informed consent” from the participants in the study.
This, as National Review points out, is likely just a ruse. The paper provides more solid proof that the transgenderism craze that is raging through our society right now is the result of social pressure or the “monkey see, monkey do” effect. In other words, it’s a social contagion.
Dr. Lisa Littman coined the phrase “rapid onset gender dysphoria” in 2018. Writer and journalist Abigail Shrier also put forward this theory in her book Irreversible Damage. The recently closed Tavistock Center in the UK also has posited that the insane rise in patients presenting with gender dysphoria is the result of social contagion.
But this fairly logical conclusion is actively shut down in the United States by the powers that be.
It’s not loving, we’re told, to say that people cannot be the opposite of their biological gender. Because transgenderism ideology has taken root in our culture, what started out as gender dysphoria — the honest-to-goodness mental disorder — that affected a minuscule percentage (less than 0.02%) of the population has grown into a staggering 2.1% of Gen Z’s sexual declaration.
Transgenderism is a logical conclusion of leftist liberalism. If individual freedom is the highest good, then being whatever gender you decide is freedom from the sexual binary (and also freedom from earthly reality). Transgenderism is certainly having its trendy moment.
That is an incredibly destructive thing to have happen to our society.
Adults who would otherwise be getting help for other needs like autism, depression, severe anxiety, or porn sickness are instead declaring themselves transgender. Their other underlying mental health conditions are suddenly being shrugged off. These adults are then destroying their bodies in the form of drugs and mutilating surgeries.
For children and teens, there are added complications. Not only are they navigating the same challenges that affect adults who conform to this ideology, but they are also contending with peer pressure and the normal discomfort that comes with a changing body.
Back to Eisenhower’s warning against shutting down honest dissent. When purportedly scientific journals are dismissing and retracting studies because the truth about transgenderism isn’t copasetic to the zeitgeist, then we have a problem. Springer Nature reportedly caved to angry activists and ironically ignored the experts. So much for “Trust the Science.”
If the inmates are running the asylum, then what are the sane people to do?
On a positive note, the people protesting Target and Bud Light are having a pivotal effect. Both have lost billions due to their outrageous promotion of transgenderism. Lawmakers in many states are presenting anti-child-mutilation legislation. Transgender activists are loud and oftentimes violent, but they do not represent the vast majority of Americans.
God willing, the transgender ideology has hit its threshold and will wane into the preposterous footnotes of American history. That doesn’t mean those of us who see transgenderism for what it is should rest on our laurels.
In the meantime, pray for those who are deceived by this ideology. They are believing a lie. Continue to love them, but use their correct biological pronouns, not the assumed ones under their trans delusion. Lying to them is not loving. Allowing them to remain deceived by a lie is also not loving.
Transgenderism leaves no room for honest discussion. In fact, it is adversarial to any who refuse to coddle their delusion. Therefore, we would do well to pay attention to those who are trying to suppress the truth, for they are no longer credible.
People who are following this social contagion are living in darkness. It’s time to turn on the light of reality.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/97631-honest-science-on-transgenderism-revoked-2023-05-30
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The Left’s Military ‘Extremism’ Hoax
Remember the military-wide “stand-down” that took place shortly after Joe Biden took office? The one ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for the purpose of rooting out the right-wing extremists that were poisoning the ranks?
You remember. When Austin delivered the military-wide message that read, in part:
We need your help. I’m talking, of course, about extremism and extremist ideology — views and conduct that run counter to everything that we believe in, and which can actually tear at the fabric of who we are as an institution. … I want you to revisit the oath that you took when you joined the military. … Read those words again. Consider what they really mean. And think about the promise that you made to yourselves, and to your teammates, and to your fellow citizens. I also want you to share with your leadership your own personal experiences with encountering extremists and extremist ideology in the military … and I want your leadership to listen to those stories. And I want them to listen to any ideas that you might have to help us stamp out of the ranks the dangerous conduct that this ideology inspires.
It was all a hoax. And a smear.
A new survey from the RAND Corporation indicates that our military veterans are less likely than American civilians in general to support radicalism and extremism.
That’s right. Instead of our military being a breeding ground for “extremism and extremist ideology,” as Joe Biden’s defense secretary insisted, the exact opposite is the case. As The Washington Times reports: “The study from the RAND Corp. surveyed nearly 1,000 veterans late last year. The report’s release comes amid a concerted push inside the Pentagon to identify and weed out potential extremists in the ranks, an effort that began in earnest after the Jan. 6, 2021, protest at the U.S. Capitol. Dozens of veterans and several active-duty troops allegedly took part that day, fueling fears that right-wing political violence could emanate from within the armed forces and threaten the stability of the country.”
According to the survey’s authors, “There was no evidence to support the notion that the veteran community, as a whole, manifests higher rates of support for violent extremist groups or extremist beliefs than the American public.”
Among the study’s key findings: “Support for extremist groups — including white supremacism, Proud Boys, black nationalism, and Antifa — ranged from 1 percent (White supremacists) to 5.5 percent (Antifa) and was generally lower than rates derived from previous representative surveys of the general population.”
Imagine that. If we’re to believe all the garbage being promoted by the Biden administration, we’d think that our veterans — having just left their active-duty military brotherhood — would be more likely to fall in with extremist groups. In fact, they’re less so. As the study notes, even the minority of those who did express support for extremist groups didn’t endorse political violence.
Come to think of it, we had a pretty good sense of this a year ago.
Joe Biden, though, is unimpressed. In fact, last Thursday he announced at a Rose Garden ceremony that he’s nominating Air Force Chief of Staff C.Q. Brown to succeed the awful Mark “White Rage” Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“While General Brown is a proud, butt-kickin’ American airman,” said Scranton Joe, “first and always, he’s also been an operational leader in the joint force. He gained respect across every service from those who have seen him in action, and have come to depend on his judgment. More than that, he gained the respect of our allies and partners around the world, who regard General Brown as a trusted partner and a top-notch strategist.”
Uh-huh. To get an idea of the sort of leadership that Brown will bring to the Joint Chiefs, we need only revisit a video he posted in the wake of the George Floyd riots — a video showing the general to be overly fixated on racial grievance and not sufficiently focused on war-fighting.
For those counting by race, Brown would be the second black to serve as Joint Chiefs chairman — Colin Powell having been the first. And, with Brown joining Austin at the Pentagon, this would also be the first time that our Department of Defense’s top uniformed and civilian leaders were black.
Summing up, then: Our woke military is adrift, troop morale is low, reputation and readiness are suffering greatly, and we’re unable to hit our recruiting numbers. But, hey, at least we’re “diverse.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/97630-the-lefts-military-extremism-hoax-2023-05-30
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The French academic paying a heavy price for probing the Muslim Brotherhood
Liam Duffy
I am meeting: Dr. Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who’s been living under police protection for the last six weeks since the reaction to her book on the Muslim Brotherhood took a turn.
The Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps the most significant Islamist organisation in the world. A political party founded against the backdrop of 20th century colonialism in Egypt, it arrived in the West via students and exiles fleeing repressive regimes in the Arab world. It is also obsessively secretive. So an anthropologist probing and writing about the group’s activities doesn’t go down well.
The rumblings began before the book was even published. When the book came out in January though, Bergeaud-Blackler, no stranger to sensitive subjects, could not have anticipated the response. The denunciations came thick and fast, some from Islamist sympathisers in the media and academic sphere, some from those who believed they were defending Muslims against a bigoted screed. The author’s conference at the Sorbonne was cancelled (since rescheduled) without a proper explanation. As the controversy grew, death threats arrived.
He is there on behalf of the French state to prevent an assassination
In a tribute to his friend, Martin Amis once joked that if the Rushdie affair were the Amis affair, he would have soon become a drug-addled recluse (although put more poetically). Bergeaud-Blackler doesn’t strike me as the sort, but with this in mind I ask if she wasn’t tempted to abscond to a beach in Mexico and put all this behind her?
No. She is defiant, but the anthropologist is most obviously dismayed when describing how some other academics implied the death threats were fabricated or exaggerated to promote the book. The death threats were very real, and they were credible – and not just because she inhabits a post-Samuel Paty France. Besides, I very much doubt la république would provide the big bloke outside to help book sales.
Bergeaud-Blackler has found a sympathetic hearing in parts of the media, allowing her to come out swinging. To date, she insists she has not received a genuine rebuttal of her work. Instead, she says, the reaction has consisted of accusations of Islamophobia, and of promoting conspiracy theories, alongside denunciations of her character and motive. Some has been all these things, but with the veneer of academic critique.
Among the more hysterical accusations against Bergeaud-Blackler’s study, are those that have compared it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged plans for Jewish global domination designed to stir up antisemitic sentiment. The parallel is over the top but useful for opponents to make. The Muslim Brotherhood is an organisation that seeks to gradually transform state and society into its vision of an Islamic one. ‘Islam is the solution,’ is its most famous slogan.
Perhaps the most influential Brotherhood ideologue until his recent death, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, outlined a comprehensive plan of priorities for the movement. But, all too often, the organisation can be opaque. One formerly prominent UK-based member left because of its excessive secrecy: ‘We are not selling opium,’ he complained, ‘we are propagating dawa (conveying the message of Islam to non-Muslims.)’
Is there a relationship between the Brotherhood and terrorism, specifically the jihadist kind, I ask Bergeaud-Blackler. It’s a question that has been doing the rounds in European policy circles since the early 2000s: ‘They are really embarrassed by the jihadists,’ she almost laughs back. I note this is less of a moral objection than a strategic one: jihadists bring bad press. On the other hand, she believes that the Brothers’ political narratives and grievances inadvertently contribute to radicalisation.
I clumsily point out that while Bergeaud-Blackler the academic must strive for objectivity, Bergeaud-Blackler the person makes no secret of her opposition to the Brotherhood and Islamist politics.
‘I don’t oppose them as a human being, I oppose them as a democrat, as a scientist,’ she fires back, ‘in a theocracy, science as we know it can no longer be practiced. So, I must oppose them.’
It strikes me that the idea of the Muslim Brotherhood installing a theocracy any time soon is ludicrous, something all too absent from analysis over the years. It’s easy to be spooked by the group’s grand plans, something that has led to some quarters vastly overstating their influence and conflating ordinary Muslims with the ambitions of a small cohort of political activists. But it also occurs to me that they don’t actually need to be successful. It is in merely trying to implement this utopian vision that the damage may be done.
If an academic must face a campaign of denunciations and even death threats for investigating Islamism in Europe, then the next academic, or journalist, will never pick up their pen. As we get up to leave and the police officers I never spotted emerge, it’s clear that both science and democratic freedoms can come under threat, long before any hint of a theocracy.
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