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
26 May, 2024
How junk food causes cancer - as Morgan Spurlock, maker of "Super Size Me", dies from disease aged 53
Ho Hum! Just the usual elitist scorn for anything popular, regardless of the evidence. They make a nod to the evidence but it is a pathetic nod. The Singapore study they mention was in vitro (cells in glass dishes) and the European study of mainly middle class ladies "excluded participants with extreme energy intake", failed to control for income and found only marginal hazard ratios. See below for links to the original studies:
and
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-023-03270-1#data-availability-and-materials
Studies of cells in glass dishes notoriously fail to predict effects in actual human beings and income is the most pervasive predictor of poor health and is hence a serious potential confounder
And the study is moreover a correlational one -- to which the old dictum "correlation is not proof of causation" applies.
Perhaps the most amusing thing about the European study is that it was based on questionnaires -- self reports of food intake. I have recently noted a case where food questionnaires predicted ill health while a more direct measure of the same food intake by the same peope did not.https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/05/salt-may-increase-risk-of-stomach.html
In other words, self reports are a poor predictor of actual behaviour. Psychologists have known that since the 1930s but it has yet to dent the faith of medical researchers, apparently
But it is a paradox of logic that while correlations are no proof of causation, their absence can be an excellent DISPROOF of causation. And I have recently noted a case where a correlational study produced strong evidence that ultra-processed food is NOT bad for you. Too bad about that bit of evidence, I guess
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/05/fresh-health-warning-over-ultra.html
And I will not waste words on the Spurlock stunt
To give hope to those who tend to eat whatever they like I will mention my own experience. I have always been a keen eater of "incorrect" food -- including many visits to McDonald's. Yet recent scans and tests of my splanchnic organs (liver, kidneys etc) have revealed them to be now in just about as a good a shape as they were when I was 18 -- and I am now 80. Don't let the panic-merchants get you down. It's your genes, not your food that dictate how healthy you are and will be
The link between junk food and cancer was put back into focus today after the death of Super Size Me documentary maker Morgan Spurlock - who died from the disease.
His family said Spurlock, 53, succumbed to 'complications' of cancer but did not reveal which type he had or how long he'd been battling it.
There is no indication his condition was linked to the 2004 movie, which saw him consume nothing but McDonald's meals for a month as a health experiment - even though he suffered a number of health issues in the immediate aftermath.
Piles of research in recent decades have shown that eating lots of processed foods is linked to at least 34 different types of cancers - even in people who are not obese.
Even though the link between ultra-processed foods - including fast food, soda, chips, ice-cream, sugary cereals and deli meats - and cancer is well established, the exact mechanism is still being understood.
One of the ways UPFs may cause cancer is due to their makeup. These foods often contain high levels of saturated fat, added sugars and sodium and are low in nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, and fiber.
If we eat too many ultra-processed foods, we may not eat enough of the foods in the diet that we know boost the immune system and help prevent cancer from forming, such as wholegrains, fruit and vegetables.
Secondly, consuming these foods regularly can lead to weight gain. Being above a healthy weight increases your risk of developing 13 different cancers, including cancers of the bowel, kidney, pancreas, esophagus, endometrium, liver and breast (after menopause).
Excess weight can trigger a host of hormonal changes that can cause tumors to grow.
A study earlier this year also uncovered a potential missing link between how eating junk food increases the risk of cancer.
The research out of Singapore found that a compound released when the body breaks down sugary and fatty foods switches off a gene that fights off cancer.
It could, at least in part, explain why cancers among young, ostensibly healthy Americans are becoming so prevalent, particularly tumors in the colon.
The academics looked at the effect of methylglyoxal, a compound released when the body breaks down sugary and fatty foods, on a gene that helps fight off tumors.
They found that methylglyoxal was able to temporarily shut off the BRCA2 gene's ability to protect against cancer forming and growing.
Repeated exposure, such as through eating processed foods, would increase the amount of damage to genes like BRCA2.
The research adds to a long list of studies suggesting that diet could have an impact on cancer risk, particularly colorectal cancer.
Research from the Cleveland Clinic, for example, found that people under 50 who ate diets rich in red meat and sugar had lower levels of the compound citrate, which is created when the body converts food into energy and has been shown to inhibit tumor growth.
Red and processed meat also contain compounds such as heme and nitrates, which, when broken down in the body, form compounds that can damage the cells lining the bowel, increasing the likelihood of cancer developing.
UPFs refers to items which contain ingredients people would not usually add when they were cooking homemade food.
These additions might include chemicals, colorings, sweeteners and preservatives that extend shelf life.
One example is phthalates - a group of chemicals used to make plastics more durable.
The chemicals get into food mainly through packaging and food handling equipment such as cellophane and plastic in contact with food. Exposure to phthalates has been linked to breast cancer.
Other research, including the biggest analysis of evidence to date involving 10million people, found that eating a lot of foods such as ready meals, sugary cereals and mass-produced bread is linked to an increased risk of 32 health problems, including cancer.
A 2023 study published in the European Journal of Nutrition found cancer risk shot up when people ate just 350g of ultra-processed food per day over the course of a decade - the equivalent of a large packet of chips or half a sharing bag of Skittles.
This amount was linked to a 20 percent higher risk of head and neck cancer and a 25 percent higher risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma, a type of cancer that grows in the lining of the food pipe.
The study said the disease could result from detrimental changes in gut flora, as well as potential hormonal effects.
Dr David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine who was not involved in the study, previously told CNN: 'If UPFs contribute to cancer risk, they do it to a small extent by contributing to obesity, and to a much larger extent by other mechanisms.'
'What might those be? Diet-induced inflammation; disruption of the microbiome; adverse epigenetic effects; and many other possibilities come to mind.'
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NHS charter to stress biological sex when placing patients in wards
A huge backdown for the Left. Edward Dutton is having some fun with it:
Transgender women should not be put on single-sex female NHS wards, the government is proposing.
The measure is part of a raft of changes to the NHS Constitution for England, the charter of rights for patients.
The proposals stress the importance of biological sex for the first time when it comes to same-sex accommodation and intimate care.
In both cases, the rights are available only where possible.
For example, same-sex accommodation rights, which have existed for years, can and are breached where there is a clinically urgent need to admit and treat a patient and do not extend to areas such as critical care or accident and emergency.
The guidance also means that trans men should not be housed on single-sex male wards.
Under the proposals:
transgender people, whose gender identity differs from their biological sex, may be provided single rooms, where appropriate
patients will have the right to request a person of the same biological sex delivers any intimate care
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said it was about making it clear that "sex matters".
"We want to make it abundantly clear that if a patient wants same-sex care, they should have access to it wherever reasonably possible," she said.
"By putting this in the NHS Constitution, we're highlighting the importance of balancing the rights and needs of all patients, to make a healthcare system that is faster, simpler and fairer to all."
What does trans mean and what is the Cass review?
'Trampled over'
Maya Forstater, of the Sex Matters campaign group, said the changes were "excellent news".
"The confusion between 'sex' and 'gender' in official policies like the NHS Constitution is what has enabled women's rights to be trampled over in the name of transgender identities," she said.
But Cleo Madeleine, of trans-led group Gendered Intelligence, said robust policies were already in place and the government had its priorities wrong.
"After 14 years of austerity, medical professionals are crying out for more funding, more resources, and better conditions for staff and patients," she said.
"The government seems hell-bent on pursuing its obsession with the transgender community instead of addressing these longstanding needs."
'Martha's rule'
The changes are part of a wider review of the NHS Constitution, which the government must complete every 10 years.
They also include a plan to embed patients and their loved ones' right to access a rapid review from outside the care team if the patient is deteriorating.
This is the right behind "Martha's rule", which is being introduced in the NHS, to ensure patients know they can ask for a second opinion, with the government providing funding to hospitals for posters and leaflets informing patients and their families.
All the changes will be consulted on over the next eight weeks, before the constitution is updated later this year.
Labour's shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: "Rights on paper are worthless unless they are delivered in practice.
"The NHS constitution already pledges that no patient will have to share an overnight ward with patients of the opposite sex, but that is not the case for too many patients."
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68923861
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Top academic accuses the British Medical Journal of 'abandoning science' after rejecting research 'because of their views on the trans debate'
The BMJ is HIGHLY political and has been for long time
The British Medical Journal has been accused of 'abandoning science' after it rejected research from top academics over their views on the trans debate.
One researcher had his paper rejected because he was 'opinionated' and had tweeted in support of author JK Rowling's gender-critical views.
The other's research was taken offline by BMJ staff who accused him of being 'transphobic' based on a student paper article about him. Both academics saw the discussions in BMJ staff emails after making Freedom of Information requests.
Dr Michael Biggs, an Oxford University sociologist, was blacklisted over a paper saying the official number of transgender people in the UK – 262,000 – is unreliable because of a confusingly-worded census question.
He said a number of people who don't speak English as a first language had answered 'no' to: 'Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?'
BMJ staff emails claimed Dr Biggs' piece 'portrays trans individuals as uneducated and implies they weren't able to understand the question on the census'.
The emails also revealed concerns about him 'being known for being transphobic' after a student paper in 2018 claimed he had tweeted critical views of trans people.
Dr Biggs said 'some journal editors... don't care if an article is true, but whether it helps disadvantaged or oppressed minorities'.
Dr John Armstrong, a mathematician at King's College London, submitted a paper to BMJ Open on findings that institutions with higher 'Athena Swan' ratings – an award given for promoting gender equality – had fewer women in senior roles.
After it was rejected, he found a member of staff had told a colleague his social media account had 'coloured our impression of the manuscript'.
One email said 'he's quite argumentative and opinionated', and highlighted how he retweeted a JK Rowling post supporting campaigner Maya Forstater, who lost her job after saying people could not change their biological sex.
Dr Armstrong said: 'If a journal censors findings because they don't like the results or the author, it has abandoned science.'
The BMJ denied it would reject a paper for 'political or ideological reasons'.
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Catholic Church shift marks ‘a step back in time’ for some
Madison: It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighbourhood finally began to realise what was happening.
The choir director, a fixture at St Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.
So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.
At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.
“It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.
It’s not just St Maria Goretti.
Across the US, the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernising tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of salvation replaced by casual indifference to doctrine.
The shift, moulded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.
The changes are not happening everywhere. There are still plenty of liberal parishes, plenty that see themselves as middle-of-the-road. Despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority.
Yet the changes they have brought are impossible to miss.
The progressive priests who dominated the US church in the years after Vatican II are now in their 70s and 80s. Many are retired. Some are dead. Younger priests, surveys show, are far more conservative.
At St Maria Goretti, once steeped in the ethos of Vatican II, many parishioners saw the changes as a requiem.
“I don’t want my daughter to be Catholic,” said Christine Hammond, whose family left the parish when the new outlook spilt into the church’s school and her daughter’s classroom. “Not if this is the Roman Catholic Church that is coming.”
But this is not a simple story. Because there are many who welcome this new, old church.
They often stand out in the pews, with the men in ties and the women sometimes with the lace head coverings that all but disappeared from American churches more than 50 years ago. Large families signal adherence to the church’s contraception ban, which most Americans have casually ignored.
Many yearn for Masses that echo with medieval traditions – more Latin, more incense, more Gregorian chants.
“We want this ethereal experience that is different from everything else in our lives,” said Ben Rouleau, who until recently led St Maria Goretti’s young adult group, which saw membership skyrocket even as the parish shrank amid the turmoil.
If this movement emerged from anywhere, it might be a now-demolished Denver football stadium.
Some 500,000 people descended on Denver in 1993 for the Catholic festival World Youth Day.
Pope John Paul II, who was beloved both for his kindness and his sternness, confronted an American church shaped by decades of progressive change.
The church had grown increasingly liberal since Vatican II. Confession was rarely mentioned, Latin largely abandoned. Catholic social teaching on poverty suffused churches.
On some issues, John Paul II agreed with liberal-minded Catholics, speaking against capital punishment and for workers’ rights. He preached relentlessly about forgiveness.
But he was uncompromising on dogma.
Catholics “are in danger of losing their faith,” he said in Denver, decrying abortion, drug abuse, and what he called “sexual disorders”.
Across the nation, fervent young Catholics listened.
Yet even today, surveys show most American Catholics are far from orthodox. Most support abortion rights. The vast majority use birth control.
But increasingly, those Catholics are not in church.
In 1970, more than half of America’s Catholics said they went to Mass at least once a week. By 2022, that had fallen to 17 per cent, according to CARA, a research centre affiliated with Georgetown University. Among millennials, it’s just 9 per cent.
As a result, those who remain in the church have outsized influence.
On the national level, conservatives increasingly dominate the US Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic intellectual world. They include everyone from the philanthropist founder of Domino’s Pizza to six of the nine US Supreme Court justices.
Then there’s the priesthood.
Young priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and 70s, have all but vanished.
In churches from Minnesota to California, liberal parishioners have protested changes introduced by new conservative priests. Each can seem like one more skirmish in the cultural and political battles tearing at America.
Looming above the American divide is Pope Francis, who has pushed the global church to be inclusive, even as he stands firm on dogma.
The orthodox movement has watched him nervously, angered by his more liberal views on issues like gay relationships and divorce. Some reject him entirely.
The US church has “a very strong reactionary attitude,” he said last year.
St Maria Goretti is a well-kept island of Catholicism tucked into one of America’s most liberal cities.
In 2021, a new priest, the Reverend Scott Emerson, was named pastor.
Parishioners watched the changes - some pleased, some uneasily. Emerson’s sermons are not all fire-and-brimstone. He often speaks about forgiveness and compassion. But his tone shocked many longtime parishioners.
Protection is needed, he said in a 2023 service, from “the spiritual corruption of worldly vices.” He has warned against critics – “the atheists, journalists, politicians, the fallen-away Catholics” – he said were undermining the church.
But those critics, he says, will be proven wrong. “How many have laughed at the church, announcing that she was passé, that her days were over and that they would bury her?” he said in a 2021 Mass.
“The church,” he said, “has buried every one of her undertakers.”
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23 May, 2024
My ‘Tribe’ Abandoned Me in Covid – But I Gained a New One That Loves Freedom
Early in the Covid outbreak, it became increasingly apparent that my tribe, a moderate, compassionate grouping somewhat ‘Left-of-centre’ and always ready to proclaim support for human rights and equality, had a problem with fascism. It was not that it disliked fascism, though its members proclaimed loudly that they did; rather they seemed disconcertingly comfortable in encompassing it.
Being wealthy, college-educated and more progressive than others, they were very clear that marching up and down in jackboots was a bad look. This for them was fascism, and they had seen the black and white newsreels and the raised fists that proved it. But beyond that, it rapidly became clear that they could not actually distinguish fascism from a vase of roses. They saw something commendable in keeping in check those unable to embrace their superior point of view, considering the exclusion of dissenting views a virtue. Best that I explain.
When People Face a Trial
A bunch of wealthy corporate authoritarians and the politicians who had dinners with them decreed that emergency rule was the preferred form of governance. All my progressive friends fell in line. The ‘greater good’ was a cause worth fighting for, and progressivism meant siding with the corporate masters who were, obviously, working for the same. Freedom was a luxury in a ‘global pandemic’ and only deplorables and the ‘far-Right’ believed in ‘freedumb’ now. There was, after all, a global emergency to deal with, and wiser people could see this.
Becoming an outcast of a tribe is not fun, especially when you are then considered to be allied with an enemy, an enemy inferior in morality and intelligence. It was at first depressing watching fellow admirers of Nelson Mandela now admiring home detention on a governor’s orders.
But refuge can be found among fellow refuseniks; a strange collection of those who, mistakenly or not, put truth over compliance – unwilling to comply with stupidity for appearance’s sake. People who would not put on a mask to walk 10 feet from restaurant door to a table, because signalling conformity with authority as a virtue in itself (fascism) was not an acceptable life choice. People who asked questions when those sponsored by a drugmaker told them to be injected. These were people who simply believed that each person had a right to make his own decisions concerning his body and health; bodily autonomy that went beyond correcting a misfortune to include suffering for the principle.
The Politics of Keeping the Right People on Top
My experience of this was in King County, Washington State, USA, a centre of world progressivism. King County’s population is overwhelmingly descended from European and Asian migrants. It is home to the wealthiest suburb in America, and some of the wealthiest individuals. A relatively small population descended from those forcibly brought to America as slaves is concentrated in its lower-income neighborhoods. The county and city governments compensate for this by further emphasising morphological differences between people. Frequent references to skin pigmentation, ethnic history and income defined community events, providing the more fortunate with an ability to feel, and project, virtue.
There are reasons for this ethnic-economic divide. The end of U.S. slavery did not include land reparations, but it did include continued discrimination. As a result, a large and readily identifiable segment of the population remains generally poorer. This is reinforced by an education system dependent on local land taxes, ensuring that wealthy kids in Greater Seattle retained far better opportunities than their less-wealthy counterparts. Coupled with the cost of a college education, this system ensures continued disparity, to the advantage of the wealthy (or progressive) class.
COVID-19 brought two and a half years of emergency powers, with rule by decree, whether legal or not, forcing the closure of small businesses and their replacement by a delivery system benefiting their larger corporate rivals. A move from in-person offices (supporting janitors and food stalls) to work online did the same. Online schooling compounded the advantage of kids with their own screens in their own bedrooms, further reinforcing this advantageous post-slavery inequality.
While low-income people became even lower-income, King County’s progressive class had a really good pandemic whilst magnanimously reminding the unemployed that ‘we are all in this together’.
In time, the Governor added vaccine mandates to sort the wheat from the chaff. That the descendants of slaves and other low-income people were overrepresented amongst those refusing was apparently lost on the masked warriors engaged in anti-fascist rhetoric or painting rainbows on pedestrian crossings. They didn’t need jackboots. And neither, in reality, did the same progressive class of 90 years earlier. All that is required is a sense of superiority and a greater good.
Both Mussolini and Hitler arose from the Left, both were considered progressive, and both had strong support from the health establishment, the wealthy, the Economist and the New York Times. We need to face this and understand why someone a few thousand years ago wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. Having always considered myself ‘Left’ (still do) but thinking fascism stinks, recent years have felt a bit like waking up and finding your village had moved on without you, but you really didn’t want to follow.
Not All Farce is Funny
Fascism is always accompanied by insanity because it requires the negation of truth. So for all its unpleasantness, it can be quite funny watching the lengths to which adherents go once they agree to give up their minds. Try walking the mountain paths high in the Cascades forests and encountering grown masked adults in fresh air, or hiding behind trees in fear of unmasked people. Or watch some heroic defender of society walking down a mountain path poking others with a four-foot stick to keep them at least six feet distanced.
Listen to a father screaming at his children to have ‘situational awareness’ in a playground because unmasked kids were coming too close, or watch council workers dutifully gravelling a skate park and cordoning off slides to stop children playing. Then recall that this was orchestrated by people who actually paid their own money for the college education that unravelled their common sense. However, while funny as individual incidents, such stupidity stinks when on a mass scale. And mass child abuse to assuage the insecurities of adults stinks even more.
Migration
After two years of living with obvious tyranny and orchestrated impoverishment of the less well-off in the name of the local ultra-wealthy, we left with some regrets for leaving a strong minority standing against the tide that we had the privilege to get to know. We migrated a couple of thousand miles southeast through some of the most spectacular, diverse and beautiful country on earth seeking a new tribe, to southeast Texas. A long enough drive to understand that, in the midst of this shallow and dismissive era, the beauty of God’s earth is still paramount.
Rural Texas is populated by people that the Progressive folks of the Northwest call rednecks and racists. We found ourselves in a very ethnically diverse town. It does not hold marches calling for inclusivity, plant meaningful billboards in the front lawn yards stating ‘Science is real’, and ‘Love is love’, or seek to find differences to divide us. It is tribal, but this seems more connected with the locale, rather than education, money or skin color. It is also particularly distinguished by a shared desire to ignore those who dictate. This is its most distinguishing feature, and what used to be called ‘“’enlightenment’.
Circuses still have their place rather than orchestrated ‘celebrations of diversity’, and (fully inclusive) county fairs and rodeos take precedence over Pride marches. People express an independent spirit without denigrating others, and delivery drivers actually stop on a doorstep to chat. Most importantly, people seem less willing to live a lie. Time will tell whether this persists when pressure is increased.
Facing a Future
There seems a growing dichotomy between Americans who consider themselves superior and righteous in imposing their views on others and those who accept that all should primarily control their own lives. History tells us that this dichotomy is not new. It also tells us where each direction leads. One positive arising from the Covid mess was to throw this in greater contrast, laying bare how devoid of truth and reason some dominant narratives are.
We have entered a time when the values we once thought fundamental to our societies are widely derided, as are those who hold them. We see this in the media mouthpieces of those who seek power for its own sake.
The dominant tribe in much of America, and much of the Western world, is a band of supplicants to their cause. They wish to censor, restrict, control and mandate because they have chosen a path of compliance and resent those who did not. There is nothing new in this, in historic terms, and the response is similarly established. Choosing humanity over rhetoric is the best way to prepare for whatever comes next.
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Theatre Seeks Chief Executive Who is Disabled, Gay, “Criminal Class” or “Global Majority” in Job Advert
A London theatre has said it is seeking a Chief Executive who is disabled, gay, from the “criminal class” or from the “global majority” in a job advert – sparking a backlash. The Telegraph has more.
The Camden People’s Theatre, which received £250,000 of taxpayer funding from Arts Council England during the Covid crisis, has attracted anger and mockery on social media over the wording of its job posting for an Artistic Director and joint Chief Executive.
The theatre, a charity, says in its advert that it encourages applications from individuals without formal education or who identify as “working-class, benefit class, criminal class and/or underclass”.
Social media users hit back at the advert, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that the wording was insulting and using “Victorian” terms associated with class.
“Working class being lumped in with criminal class is awful,” wrote one user. Another said it was “offensive to the point of reading like a parody”.
“The classification is reminiscent of Charles Booth’s 19th century poverty maps,” another wrote. Another said “who identifies as ‘criminal class?’ The Krays?”
Conservative MP Neil O’Brien pointed out that taxpayer money was being spent on the £45,000-£50,000 a year Chief Executive job, and asked “what if… being a criminal is bad?”
The theatre also said that applications from members of the “global majority” would be welcomed, which the organisation said included “people of Black Caribbean, Black African, South Asian, East Asian, South East Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab, Latinx, Jewish, Romany and Irish Traveller heritage”.
Candidates who self-identified as disabled would automatically get an interview if they met the essential criteria, the advert said.
Deaf and LGBTQ+ people were also encouraged to apply, as well as those who are neurodivergent, a term encompassing those with conditions such as autism.
Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch this week criticised the term ‘global majority’ – a replacement for ‘ethnic minority’ being pushed by the far Left – calling it “anti-white”.
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Catholic Group Knights Of Columbus Files Lawsuit Against Biden Admin For Blocking 60-Year Tradition
Members of a Knights of Columbus council in Petersburg, VA filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration Tuesday after being denied permission to hold their traditional Memorial Day Mass at Poplar Grove National Cemetery.
The members of the Catholic service organization are suing the Biden administration citing religious discrimination, according to the news release. This denial marks the second consecutive year that the group has been unable to hold the service, which had been a longstanding tradition for 60 years. Represented by attorneys from McGuireWoods, the organization filed a motion for a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service (NPS), challenging the decision.
“The policy and the decision blocking the Knights of Columbus from continuing their long-standing religious tradition is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” said John Moran, Partner at McGuireWoods, the release stated. “We urge the court to grant our restraining order and allow the Knights to hold their service this Memorial Day.” (RELATED: ‘Toxic’: Federal Judge Calls Out Discrimination Against ‘Religious Conservatives’ On College Campuses)
Alexa Viets, the superintendent of Petersburg National Battlefield, defended the cemetery’s policies.
“National Cemeteries are established as national shrines in tribute to those who have died in service to our country, and as such any special activities within the cemetery are reserved for a limited set of official commemorative activities that have a connection to military service or have a historic and commemorative significance for the particular national cemetery,” Viets told the Times.
The National Park Service has classified religious services and vigils as “demonstrations” since at least 1986, prohibiting them unless part of officially sanctioned commemorative events. This classification is the basis for denying permits.
“Conducting a special event or demonstration, whether spontaneous or organized, is prohibited except for official commemorative events conducted for Memorial Day, Veterans Day and other dates designated by the superintendent as having special historic and commemorative significance to a particular national cemetery,” the Code of Federal Regulations stated.
Representatives for the Knights of Columbus argue that the recent policy change leading to the denial is new and inconsistent with past practices.
“The National Park Service is way out of line. This is the kind of unlawful discrimination and censorship RFRA and the First Amendment were enacted to prevent,” Byron said, the news release stated. “Hopefully the court will grant the Knights the relief they need to keep this honorable tradition alive.”
A court hearing regarding the temporary restraining order requested by the Knights of Columbus is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, where the court will decide if the tradition can continue this Memorial Day, according to Fox News.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/05/22/knights-columbus-lawsuit-biden-admin-blocking-60-year-tradition/
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Age restrictions on social media are bound to fail
The rush by political leaders to rescue teenage Australians from the evils of social media is a simplistic solution to a problem too complicated to be resolved by good intentions.
While it goes without saying that not all social media is evil, there are sites best left to adults: Research from the eSafety commissioner found 75 per cent of Australian children aged 16 to 18 had viewed porn online. Nearly 40 per cent had first accessed it before they were 13 years old, and just under 10 per cent saw it before they were 10.
So governments across Australia are gearing up to explore banning social media for some young people to protect them from harmful content and the negative impacts of excessive time online. As a start, both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton are on the same page on the issue, after the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, recommended an age verification trial 14 months ago.
Albanese said at the weekend every Australian parent was concerned about the impact of social media. “I think it’s the number-one topic on the sidelines of football, netball and school sports that’ll be conducted on any weekend in any part of Australia,” he said.
Albanese has announced a $6.5 million age assurance trial aimed at preventing children from accessing pornography and harmful content as part of its broader response to gendered violence. It will assess the effectiveness of the technologies designed to verify the ages of social media users.
Further, NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia are united in a push for age minimums on tech platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. In fact, NSW Premier Chris Minns plans a social media summit later this year to discuss protecting children from online harm while SA Premier Peter Malinauskas had engaged former High Court chief justice Robert French to explore how his state could ban children under 14 from making social media accounts. The proposal would force 14- and 15-year-olds to gain parental consent.
But going down that road is a fraught undertaking. Not only do the proposals raise questions about privacy, but many will be concerned at what sort of penalty is appropriate and enforceable for a teenager or provider breaking such rules? Besides, surrendering personal information and documents is also open to such abuses as identity theft.
And as Elon Musk’s recent High Court victory over Canberra’s demand to remove offensive material from X following last month’s stabbing at Christ The Good Shepherd Church shows, social media owners do not take direction from foreign governments easily.
As it stands in Australia, platforms already require users to be 13 to create an account, but sign-up systems can often be circumvented. Some overseas jurisdictions, including the EU and some US states, have attempted age verification reforms to control access to some websites; the UK is currently trialling a scheme that only applies to adult sites, not social media. It requires sites to check with banks, mobile providers or credit card companies or requires users to provide ID or upload a photo for facial age estimation.
The pile-on in Australia over protecting under-16s from some social media has exposed the yawning gulf between politicians wanting to ban access to social media and explaining how their proposals will work. There is definitely a national discussion to be had on the impact of social media, but using the age of 16 as a blunt weapon is both blundering and simplistic and sets up reforms for a fail.
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22 May, 2024
Healthy adults who take fish oil supplements could be at greater risk of suffering heart attack or stroke for the first time, study finds
Amusing to see conventional wisdom reversed. This is actually not the first finding of ill-effects from fishoil but it is good to see it updated
Healthy adults who take fish oil supplements could be at greater risk of suffering heart trouble for the first time, a study suggests.
As a rich source of omega 3 fatty acids, fish oil is often recommended as a dietary preventive to ward off the development of cardiovascular disease. It is also credited with various other beneficial effects such as easing joint pain.
But new research suggests taking the popular supplement could in fact increase the chances of heart disease and stroke in healthy adults, while reducing the risk in those with a history of disease.
The study - which involved more than 415,000 Britons - looked at the associations between fish oil supplements and new cases of atrial fibrillation, heart attack, stroke and heart failure and death.
They assessed the potential of these supplements on the risk of progressing from good heart health, classed, to the secondary stage of atrial fibrillation, third stage major cardiovascular events such as a heart attack and death.
Nearly a third - 130,365 - of the participants, aged 40-69, said they regularly used fish oil supplements, including a high number of older and White people, and women.
Alcohol intake and the ratio of oily to non-oily fish eaten were also higher, while the proportions of current smokers and those living in deprived areas were lower.
During an average follow-up of 12 years, 18,367 developed the abnormal heart rhythm disturbance atrial fibrillation, 22,636 had a heart attack or stroke or developed heart failure, and 22,140 died - 14,902 without atrial fibrillation or heart disease.
Of those who progressed from good heart health to atrial fibrillation, 3085 developed heart failure, 1180 had a stroke, and 1415 a heart attack.
Some 2436 of those with heart failure died, alongside 2088 who suffered stroke, and 2098 following a heart attack, according to findings published in BMJ Medicine.
Regularly use of fish oil supplements had different roles in cardiovascular health, disease progression, and death, the findings indicated.
Those who regularly used them with no signs of disease had a 13 per cent higher risk of developing atrial fibrillation and a five per cent greater risk of stroke.
But among those who had cardiovascular disease at the start, regular use of fish oil supplements reduced the risk of progressing from atrial fibrillation to a heart attack by 15 per cent and from heart failure to death by nine per cent.
The risk of transitioning from good health to heart attack, stroke or heart failure was six per cent higher in women. It was also six per cent higher in non-smokers among fish oil takers.
Meanwhile, the protective effect of these supplements on the transition from good health to death was greater in men (seven per cent lower risk) and older participants (11 per cent lower risk).
Led by Sun Yat-Sen University, China, researchers admit limitations to the study including that dosage and formulation of fish oil was not recorded, which experts suggest could be key to the results.
Nevertheless, they conclude: 'Regular use of fish oil supplements might have different roles in the progression of cardiovascular disease.
'Further studies are needed to determine the precise mechanisms for the development and prognosis of cardiovascular disease events with regular use of fish oil supplements.' It is not the first study to make such conclusions with a Cochrane review of research in 2018 comparing 79 trials finding it made 'little or no difference to risk of cardiovascular events, coronary heart deaths, coronary heart disease events, stroke or heart irregularities'.
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Why Hitler Loved ‘Social Justice’
In August 1920 in Munich, a young Adolf Hitler delivered one of his first public speeches before a crowd of some 2,000 people.
During his speech, which lasted nearly two hours and was interrupted nearly 60 times by cheers, Hitler touched on a theme he’d repeat in future speeches, stating he did not believe that “ever on earth could a state survive with continuing inner health, if it were not based on inner social justice.”
This was one of the first times Hitler spoke publicly of social justice—perhaps the first time.
In his recent book Hitler’s National Socialism, Rainer Zitelmann makes it clear that “social justice” (soziale Gerechtigkeit) was central to Hitler’s social objectives.
What precisely Hitler meant by “social justice” is not easily understood, so perhaps it’s best first to understand what Hitler did not mean. Hitler was not interested in a state or society that simply treated people equally, or a state that simply left individuals alone.
This would not achieve the social change he sought. Like Karl Marx, Hitler saw the world through power structures, and the prevailing power structures made it too difficult for all Germans to rise, in his view.
Zitelmann makes it clear that Hitler talked a great deal about concepts like social mobility and meritocracy. His speeches contain phrases that talk about a German state “in which birth is nothing and achievements and ability are everything.” Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s longtime press chief, noted that Hitler supported “the abolition of all privileges” and a “classless” state.
To this end, Hitler expressed his desire to “tear down all the social barriers in Germany without compunction,” as he explained in a 1942 conversation with Dutch national socialist leader Anton Mussert.
In other words, privilege was so pervasive in Germany that Hitler would root it out by destroying the entire class structure.
‘Tear Down the Walls which Separate the Classes’
If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Social justice is an idea Americans hear virtually every day. It is praised in universities and advocated during NFL games. We hear the words “social justice” on the lips of politicians and in TV commercials.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that today’s social justice advocates are Nazis. I have no doubt they despise Hitler and his ideas, as we all should. But I am saying today’s social justice advocates share an important trait with Hitler: an obsession with class.
This should come as little surprise. Class is something instrumental in virtually all of the different strains of socialism—communism, national socialism, democratic socialism, Peronism, etc.
In traditional Marxist theory, the capitalist stage of history consists primarily of two classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalists, who own “the means of production”) and the proletariat (the workers). For Marx, class antagonism was the driving force of history, and his disciples share this view.
Defining social justice is a bit tricky, but you can see baked into the idea the notion that class must be rooted out.
“Social justice is justice in relation to a fair balance in the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society where individuals’ rights are recognized and protected,” Wikipedia explains.
This sounds reasonable. It appeals to our instinctive belief that society should be fair. Who likes “privilege,” after all? Who doesn’t want a more equal society?
Indeed, this is precisely what Hitler emphasized in his speeches: the creation of “equal opportunity” in society. Consider these February 1942 remarks from the Fuhrer:
Three things are vital in any uprising: to tear down the walls which separate the classes from each other in order to open the way for advancement for everybody; to create a general level of life in such a way that even the poorest has the secure minimum for existence; finally to reach the point where everybody can share in the blessings of culture.
A Problem of Means and Ends
In a sense, there’s nothing inherently wrong with many of the ends social justice advocates seek. There’s nothing intrinsically good about “privilege” or wealth concentration. The primary problem is one of means.
Social justice advocates—then and now—tend to seek to resolve what they see as structural inequities in society through illiberal and coercive means. In its most basic form, it means taking from those who have more (the privileged) and giving it to those who have less.
For Hitler, this meant confiscating the property of the wealthiest (most privileged) members of his society: the Jews. Wealth confiscation began in earnest after Hitler issued an order (“Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property”) in April 1938 requiring Jews to register their wealth with the state.
Property rights might be the foundation of human prosperity, but they proved of little use to Jews who found themselves obstacles to the Fuhrer’s quest of achieving social justice in Germany.
Such a policy would be illegal in the United States, of course, and something few social justice advocates today would ever support. Yet many have shown an appetite for using the government to “level the playing field” in more subtle ways, including unlawfully allocating federal grants based on race.
Indeed, perhaps the most notable characteristic of social justice today is the illiberal means used to advance it. More than a half century ago, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek observed the paradox of social justice, which seeks to create a more equal society by treating people unequally:
The classical demand is that the state ought to treat all people equally in spite of the fact that they are very unequal. You can’t deduce from this that because people are unequal you ought to treat them unequally in order to make them equal. And that’s what social justice amounts to. It’s a demand that the state should treat people differently in order to place them in the same position.… To make people equal a goal of governmental policy would force government to treat people very unequally indeed.
Hayek believed that treating people unequally was baked into the social justice cake, and recent historical events have proven him correct.
Since social justice was central to Hitler’s goals, he could not treat Jews, the bourgeoisie, and other privileged classes like everyone else. Only by abolishing “privilege” could he free the German people, he argued, and advance social progress.
“If we want to build a true national community, we can only do this on the basis of social justice,” he said in one 1925 speech.
Similarly, 21st-century social justice advocates can’t bring about social change by advancing the idea that all people should be treated equally regardless of their race or sex. If you read Robin DiAngelo (author of White Fragility) and Özlem Sensoy, who co-authored the book Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, it’s clear they are not interested in treating people equally.
For DiAngelo, the privileged class in America is white people, all of whom were born “into a racialized hierarchy,” a socio-economic system that is racist and must be dismantled.
“This system of structural power privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group,” says DiAngelo.
Precisely how social equality is to be achieved is unclear, but it’s safe to say DiAngelo does not believe the march toward equity will be achieved by embracing the idea that all humans are unique individuals who deserve equal treatment, or without using the power of the state.
The mistake DiAngelo and many other social justice advocates make is a common one in modern times. They prioritize the ends they seek over the means they use.
The philosopher and FEE founder Leonard Read understood the folly of this approach. This is why, in his 1969 book Let Freedom Reign, Read argued that a “hard look” at the means we use is far more important than the ends we seek:
Ends, goals, aims are but the hope for things to come… not… reality… from which may safely be taken the standards for right conduct…Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some “noble” goal. They illustrate the fallacy that the end justifies the means.
Hitler, of course, disagreed.
He didn’t worry about means; they were entirely justified (in his mind) by the ends he sought. And his grandiose vision for “social justice” in Germany conveniently came with a perk: it allowed him to use the immense power of the state to “correct” the inequities in German society, which had become a hotbed of resentment and decadence following World War I and years of hyperinflation.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/05/21/why-hitler-loved-social-justice/?omhide=true
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Are Traffic Signals Necessary?
Traffic calming measures, as we wrote in our last column, have grown popular recently as a way to improve the pedestrian experience. It’s an article of faith that traffic signs and signals also keep pedestrians (and other transportation modes) safe. Yet there’s growing evidence that they make life more dangerous, while increasing congestion, raising costs, and confusing all parties. It turns out that engineering roads through heavy government involvement just strips away the intuition that drivers would otherwise use.
While this notion may seem absurd, there are multiple examples of how traffic signaling does more harm than good.
Highway safety data show that 40% of American car collisions occur at intersections, reports a study in the Journal of Safety Research. One study from New York City found that installing traffic signals caused a 65% spike in collisions.
Countdown timers—which tell pedestrians how long they have to cross a street and when to stop—particularly fail the safety test, the Journal of Safety Research study found. Where green signal countdown timers have been installed, they “appeared to lead [to] an overall increase in rear-end crash risk at intersections” because drivers would speed up more quickly and brake faster when they perceived that they had the unchallenged right-of-way.
There are a few reasons for this. One is the increased complexity that these signals often cause, making driving more hazardous. Ben Ross writes for Greater Greater Washington that at complex intersections, “demands on the driver’s eye and brain increase, and the inevitable moments of inattention do more harm.” This also applies to the allowance of right turns during red lights at some intersections but not others.
Road design is another issue. U.S. roads are designed for high speeds (unlike European ones, which are older and narrower), and this encourages fast driving.
But another issue is more fundamental, and speaks to why social engineering can have negative consequences. Renowned traffic expert Tom Vanderbilt detailed the experience of Drachten, a Dutch town which all but eliminated signs and signals, instead using street design measures to slow traffic. The transformation was the brainchild of traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who questioned signals because they conditioned the driver to follow the letter of the law rather than make their own observations. Dratchen replaced its traffic signals with roundabouts, for example, as well as installing structures that appeared as physical barriers.
“Monderman envisioned a dual universe,” wrote Vanderbilt. “There was the ‘traffic world’ of the highway, standardized, homogenous, made legible by simple instructions to be read at high speed. And there was the ‘social world,’ where people lived and interacted using human signals, at human speeds.”
Drachten began this transformation in 2002, and while overall traffic increased, car crashes dropped in the same period. A similar redesign was performed on London’s Kensington High Street, leading to fewer collisions.
I saw a more organic, anarchic version of this many times during my 1.5-year trip through the Global South. Here, traffic signals are rarer than in the West. Both pedestrian and automobile traffic are high, with motorbikes and mini-buses regularly weaving around each other and around pedestrians.
Some would argue that this is why traffic fatalities are higher in the Global South. I would counter that there are other factors: poor road quality, older vehicles that don’t have modern safety bulwarks, and the fact that there’s just far more pedestrians walking about.
But on a day-to-day basis, a spontaneous order rises in response to the chaos. Because pedestrians occupy the roads, rather than being physically isolated on sidewalks, drivers are alert to them. And because drivers must negotiate space without the help of timed, sanctioned right-of-way rules, they stay more aware of each other, too, navigating slowly.
I saw an example of this at a crowded intersection in Kathmandu, Nepal. There were no lights or signs, so vehicles from all four directions mosied into the intersection, weaving through space as it freed up. It seemed safer, because vehicles coming from any one direction could not just speed through the intersection, as none of them had a green light. And it was most definitely faster, because cars didn’t have to wait their turns lined up at stop signs or red lights.
Kathmandu and other Global South cities lack these signals because they don’t have the money. But that’s another reason why they shouldn’t exist to the extent they do in U.S. cities. Installing electronic signals can cost in the high-6 figures at intersections, and that doesn’t include maintenance costs. Signals are impractical for many cash-strapped and low-traffic American municipalities, especially if they don’t provide obvious safety benefits.
Traffic signs and signals are yet another case of what happens when central planning and paternalism overtake personal decision making. They in fact eliminate a sense of responsibility, causing people to put faith in abstract processes to guide them. As Vanderbilt concludes: “Traffic signs [are] an invitation to stop thinking, to stop acting on one’s own volition. In streets designed to safely handle the actions of the riskiest participants, everyone slips into riskier behavior.”
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/05/15/are-traffic-signals-necessary/?omhide=true&trk=title
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Major Pharmacy Chain Settles With Christian Nurse Over Contraceptives Case
CVS Health Corp. settled with nurse practitioner Robyn Strader after she sued the company after it stopped providing religious accommodations regarding “pregnancy prevention services.”
Strader said she had been granted a religious exemption for six years permitting her to not prescribe contraceptives and filed the lawsuit in January 2023 after having been fired following the policy change in 2021, according to the press release. First Liberty Institute, which represented Strader, announced Monday that CVS had agreed to a settlement of which the terms “were not made public.”
“We are thrilled that Robyn was able to reach a resolution with CVS,” Stephanie Taub, senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, said in the press release. “We are hopeful that companies across the country will recognize the religious liberty of their employees and work to protect those rights.”
“We can confirm a settlement was reached. We are pleased that this matter has been resolved,” Mike DeAngelis, CVS executive director of corporate communications, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Strader had worked at a CVS Minute Clinic in Texas since 2015 and had been able to send patients requesting contraceptive services to another practitioner either at the same location or nearby, according to the lawsuit. She argued that the company had retaliated against her for her religious beliefs.
Strader’s lawsuit requested that CVS be stopped from enforcing its policy and provide “compensation for past and future pecuniary losses.”
“Respecting the religious beliefs of workers and providing reasonable accommodations is not optional under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. We are pleased for Robyn,” Jonathan Berry, a managing partner at Boyden Gray PLLC, which also represented Strader, said in the press release.
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21 May, 2024
PETRONELLA WYATT: I'm single, childless and alone. Feminism has failed me and my generation
She has had a most privileged life so if she feels she has missed out it is a lesson on what an important part of life relationships are. She once had a pregnancy to which Boris Johnson was the father. Had she had saner values then and not aborted it, that baby would now be a undoubtedly talented adult who would be the joy of her life.
I cannot talk. In my youth (late '60s) I too was betrayed by the values of my life in an academic environment and arranged an abortion of a pregnancy attributed to me by a very bright and blonde teenager, Janet Bellis, whom I met via Mensa. That baby may have been the daughter I have always wanted and never had. I have had better luck than Petronella with relationships, however and I do have a high-achieving son
Every Monday I meet with a group of female friends in a London restaurant. We sit at a table near the window and discuss our lives.
We have many things in common. We are all in our mid-50s and highly educated career women. But there is a vacuum in our lives. We are all single and childless.
I increasingly feel, as do many of my intimates, that feminism has failed our generation. I grew up with its beliefs. No, strike that. I was force-fed them.
By the age of 13, Christmas presents from my Women's Lib aunt were books by Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir, considered the mother of modern feminism. (My aunt was one of those militants who had famously disrupted the 1970 Miss World contest).
My peers and I watched Mary Poppins, idolising the determinedly single nanny (never noticing the occasional sadness behind her eyes), and sympathising with suffragette Mrs Banks, while wondering why she didn't leave her dullard of a husband.
Our heroine was Margaret Thatcher, who, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto. In one of those encounters that make life instructive, I met Lady Thatcher at my late father's house (my father was the politician Woodrow Wyatt) when I was 15. She was our first woman prime minister and, after our introduction, she began to address me on the subject of life.
The gist of her address would have been greeted with hosannas by every feminist of the age: in summation, a woman's career superseded by far her relations with the opposite sex. (Her own union might well have been to a cipher as opposed to a husband. Indeed, when the Thatchers dined with us, Denis withdrew to the drawing room with the women).
At my private school, St Paul's, we children of Thatcher were similarly educated out of marriage and femininity.
One of my unmarried school friends recalls: 'My teachers made me feel as if marriage was shameful. My English mistress once teased me for looking at a bridal magazine, but then she was an arch feminist who demonised men.'
We both recall being told that 'Paulinas do not cook, they think'. This is all very well when you are young and aspire to greatness, but not all girls grow up to be executives or high court judges, something that feminism perilously forgot to tell us.
Historically, the feminist argument had its points. In the old days, when members of my sex were bound first to their fathers and then to their husbands, they led unenviable lives. If a woman had a good education, however, she could make a comfortable living and remain independent of male approbation. When the desire for marriage and children overwhelmed her, she would almost certainly lose her job.
The world has now changed in a way the early feminists would find incomprehensible. I sometimes think, and so do my friends, that the West has outgrown the feminist philosophy, and that it has become pernicious.
Where, for instance, does it leave women like us, when we have reached our mid-50s, and find ourselves alone?
One of the chief causes of unhappiness is the feeling that one is unloved, whereas companionship and the feeling of being loved promotes happiness more than anything else.
One in ten British women in their 50s has never married and lives alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.
My friend Sally, a lovely 55-year-old with eyes the colour of Eau de Nil, once said to me: 'I constantly feel unwanted as a woman because feminism taught us that the traditional female was a stereotype invented by men to keep us down. Accordingly, I was anti-men to the point of driving them away. Now, I'm paying for this.'
According to a recent study by an American medical institute, loneliness is the leading cause of depression among middle-aged females. I should know, as I recently fell prey to the unforgiving maw of mental illness.
Many of my single friends suffer from depression, springing from a solitary existence that would be eschewed by a race of alley cats.
Moreover, there are the economic factors involved. It is a truism that two incomes are better than one, and many of the unattached women I know work in low to middle-paid professions.
A university professor chum bemoans 'as a single woman, it has been increasingly difficult to pay the bills with no assistance from a partner. For every J K Rowling, there are millions of women who get by on a pittance.
'Feminism kept drumming into my head that financial independence was the ideal, but in practice it doesn't happen unless you are managing a hedge fund or are able to write best-selling novels.'
Equally depressingly, many single women feel they have failed at life. Far from empowering us, feminism has made us insecure. 'My career has stalled, I've never married and I feel worthless as a person,' observes my pretty 53-year-old friend Rachel.
General self-confidence comes more than anything else from being accustomed to receiving love, particularly from the opposite sex. The woman with a husband and children accepts their affection as a law of nature, but it is of great importance to her mental health and success.
Yet of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past, none is so derailed by feminism as the family. Many women with feminist ideals feel parenthood is a far heavier burden than their grandmothers did, due to long working hours and the vilification of the housewife. Is it any wonder that the birth rate has declined?
Says another of my Monday group: 'I was conditioned to have no encumbrances, particularly children. Or at least to wait until I was established in my career, but now I'm too old and that boat has sailed.'
Recently, after my depression became debilitating, I had a 20-year-old student living in my home. After a week of acquaintanceship, it dawned on me that the notion of not marrying and giving birth before the age of 30 was anathema to her, and she rejected it completely.
In short, she wanted to conduct her life like a woman.
'Yes, I believe in women's rights,' she ruminated, 'but I don't believe in the militant feminism my mother grew up with. It went too far.' Out of the mouths of babes.
The feminism I was spoon-fed in my youth made the error of telling members of my sex to behave and think like men. This error was a grave one, and women like me are paying for it, like gamblers in a casino that has been fixed.
It's time for a cultural reset. It may be too late for me and my friends, but feminism should not be allowed to ruin the lives of future generations as well.
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A Signal That Oakland Is Slipping Further Into a Doom Loop
This is such an Oakland story. The city of Oakland, California, known for its extreme leftism, is replacing some traffic lights in the city with a four-way stop sign, according to CBS News
The city isn’t taking this step to improve the flow of traffic or anything like that.
Instead, city officials decided to remove the traffic signal because copper theft has become rampant, and thieves keep tampering with the electrical boxes that control the lights.
Amusingly, the city put up a stop sign to replace the traffic light at the E. 12th St. and 16th Ave. intersection. Locals say that even though it looks strange it’s a huge improvement because usually the traffic light is broken and is causing accidents.
However, as with many cases of dysfunctional blue city governance, the deeper problem is that the city won’t address the most fundamental issues: repeat criminality and general lawlessness.
According to the locals CBS interviewed in the story, most of the people tampering with the traffic signals are coming from a nearby homeless encampment.
Tam Le, owner of an auto repair shop at the corner of the intersection, said of the city’s “solution” in an interview with CBS: “It’s just telling us that the city is giving up on us.”
Pretty much, yes.
City officials said that the stop signs are temporary and that the traffic lights will come back. But they put no timeline on when that will happen so good luck.
Maybe, just maybe, the issue isn’t with the traffic signal or even with the thieves.
“If you really want to fix the stop sign, I think you really have to clean up this homeless encampment,” Le said, delivering the kind of commonsense solution to the problem that has apparently escaped the people who run the city.
And therein lies the problem.
For those who haven’t traveled to a West Coast city recently, homeless encampments have taken over urban landscapes. Oakland is particularly bad. It’s become so bad that the city requested help from the state to start clearing the encampments out.
Plenty of other cities have found solutions a lot quicker, but places like Portland and Oakland are slow on the uptake. This is mostly due to the ideology of government officials and the activist organizations who pressure them. They really think that the problem with homelessness is just a “housing” issue and that pushing people off the streets and into shelters is oppressive.
Cities like Oakland have only begun to act when it’s become obvious that large, perpetual homeless encampments and open-air drug markets create a climate of criminality and disorder.
And even when the city does eventually do something there is typically no follow-up enforcement to ensure that the problem doesn’t simply manifest itself again once the coast is clear.
Le, whose auto business has been affected by the homeless encampment, said in the CBS story that the city has moved some of it in the past, but it keeps coming back and getting bigger.
He then said if it continues to grow, he will shutter his business like many other people have in the area.
So, the city will keep the encampment and lose the dutiful business owner. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?
It’s this sort of governance that contributed to the so-called doom loop that places like Oakland and downtown San Francisco are stuck in. It should be no surprise that the In-N-Out fast-food restaurant that closed in Oakland—the first In-N-Out to close, ever—was close to where the problematic intersection is.
In almost all these cases of urban decay we see a similar pattern. Lax enforcement of laws—or predictably terrible laws, a retreat from proactive policing, and mind-boggling recidivism.
A man apprehended by Oakland police for robbing an ATM in Oakland in January had 25 arrests since 2014.
According to Crime Voice, a California crime journalism media outlet, the 39-year-old repeat offender had “previous arrests for kidnappings, robberies, motor vehicle thefts, possession of a controlled substance, and for shootings.”
Is it any wonder crime is out of control?
In July of last year, the Oakland chapter of the NAACP called on the authorities in the city to start taking its crime problem seriously.
“Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities,” the NAACP wrote in a letter. “There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime.”
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price responded insultingly, “We are disappointed that a great African-American pastor and a great African-American organization would take a false narrative on such an important matter. We would expect more from Bishop Bob Jackson and the Oakland Chapter of the NAACP.”
What cities like Oakland have done is create a situation where the burden of disorder has been placed on innocent, helpless citizens who have little recourse other than to leave—if that’s even possible.
Even when these cities have begrudgingly rediscovered the value of the police post-George Floyd riot crime boom, they haven’t exactly recovered.
Restoring order and creating a healthy, thriving city environment is difficult once anarchy becomes the norm. For some places like Oakland the road back is a long one. Maybe a combination of failure and outraged citizens will get city leaders to wake up to reality.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/20/a-signal-that-oakland-is-slipping-further-into-the-doom-loop/
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The miserable death of multiculturalism
We see the experiment of multiculturalism completely falling apart in the UK and many European countries. The US is awash with illegal migrants and the notion of one big happy family pursuing the great American dream is completely dead, having been on life support for many years. The idea of one big (and growing) diverse family in Canada is also now an open joke.
Most Asian countries are explicitly racist in their governance – Malaysia, Japan, China and India being stand-out examples. The very idea of multiculturalism makes no sense to them.
I could go on, but while everything might be relative, Malcolm’s boast about Australia being the most successful multicultural country was still misleading even when he started saying it. There are vastly more examples of warring tribes living here, constantly at each other under the surface, than the fairytale dreamt up by the gazillionaire from Point Piper.
Let’s face it, multiculturalism was always a device to ramp up migration while securing the votes of particular ethnic groups. In Australia, it goes back to the days of Petro Georgiou, who became the Liberal member for Kooyong at some stage. He persuaded both Andrew Peacock and John Howard to jump on board.
Arguably, that rogue, Al Grassby, Labor member for Riverina and immigration minister in the Whitlam government, set the ball rolling. It has to be said that Gough himself was no fan of the idea.
He never denied saying, ‘I’m not having these f–king Vietnamese Balts coming into the country with their religious and political prejudices against us.’ In that sense, Whitlam was more a traditionalist – you know the thing, we’re all Australians with a common set of values.
But multiculturalism always required bipartisan support and, of course, government funding. All sorts of ethnic-based groups popped up, supported by the taxpayer. We even had the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs and then the Office of Multicultural Affairs.
Compared with today, however, the policy of multiculturalism last century looks fairly tame. This was prior to the widespread uptake of post-modernism and cultural race theory. Nowadays, it’s all about oppressor versus the oppressed, white supremacy and the pernicious impact of colonialism.
New migrants are not expected to leave their ancient grievances behind; they are encouraged to prosecute their cases here, often with taxpayer funding, and to enlist their children and grandchildren in their causes. Gone are the days when the leaders of the day might draw lines in the sand – the edge of Australians’ tolerance.
Now migrants can suit themselves. They pick up the benefits of living in a high-income country – copious government payments, close to free education and health and the like – while clustering with members of their tribe and demanding more.
It’s worthwhile at this point recounting a personal story to illustrate how much has changed. One of my mother’s best friends was born in Germany. She met her Australian businessman husband – he had actually been born in Austria – in Europe in the early 1960s and she happily moved to Melbourne to be with him.
They had four children and lived a regular suburban life, interrupted by the usual stresses and strains. They always spoke English at home and became fully integrated into the communities in which they were involved. Her adult children were subsequently very annoyed that they could not speak German.
I’m sure Speccie readers can recount numerous examples of migrant families in the past doing their darndest to fit in while working hard and doing their best for their children. Of course, they retained some of their traditions, but the accepted rule was that we were all Aussies first. Learning English was generally seen as a high priority. It now seems like a different world.
It is estimated, for instance, that over one million people living in Australia do not speak English. The proportion of the population who speak no or little English has been rising rapidly.
If you want a driver’s licence, you can take the test in the language of your choice. Migrants can demand translators for a range of government-provided services. It’s not one rule for all, but a splintering of rules for different ethnic groups.
Australia has one of the highest proportions of the population born overseas – around 30 per cent. It has been growing strongly this century as the floodgates have been opened to temporary migrants, in particular. If we add to those born overseas those with at least one parent born overseas, we are over 50 per cent.
Of course, there is nothing right or wrong about these figures, although the rate of change makes a difference. It’s how migrants are absorbed into the population and how they then seek to fit in. We have seen a marked concentration in the destinations of recent migrants, to Melbourne and Sydney and to parts of these cities as well. This makes a difference.
It is no surprise that recently arrived migrants stick together; they did in the past but quickly became part of the wider community. The evidence now points to persistent clustering, in part because of the much larger flow of migrants leading to critical masses of ethnic groups.
This in turn potentially leads to voting blocs that can influence the substance of government policy, including foreign affairs. We see this in the disproportionate number of people of the Muslim faith in several seats in western Sydney and the weak response of the Labor parliamentarians to rising anti-Semitic behaviour that has been clearly on display. This development is the antithesis of constructive multiculturalism.
When the Department of Home Affairs can describe the migration program as recognising ‘the strong contribution all migrants make to social cohesion… by focusing on strengthening family and community bonds in Australia’, we know we are trouble.
Leaving aside the possibility of sloppy drafting, does anyone in their right mind believe that all migrants contribute to social cohesion? Only in the dreams of Canberra’s bureaucrats. It would be better to acknowledge that multiculturalism has died here and to get on with a more cohesive model in which the same standards are expected of us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/05/the-miserable-death-of-multiculturalism/
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Australia: Teen had been previously convicted of 84 offences but had not spent a day in custody until he killed someone
The grieving husband of a mum-of-two stabbed to death during a home invasion has recalled the haunting moment his life changed forever.
Emma Lovell, 41, and her husband Lee spent Boxing Day 2022 baking treats and playing games with their young daughters Scarlett and Kassie before the North Lakes couple enjoyed a few cocktails and went to bed early.
Several hours later, she was fatally stabbed in the heart after two teens, then both 17, broke into her home north of Brisbane at about 11.30pm.
Her partner of 22 years was also stabbed in front of their horrified daughters.
The teen, now 19, who killed Ms Lovell had been previously convicted of 84 offences but had not spent a day in custody until that night.
Mr Lovell has opened up about being attacked in his own home - and how he didn't realise his wife was gravely injured until his daughter saw she was bleeding.
'By the time I looked back at Emma, she was, like, just, like, passed out on the floor,' he told A Current Affair on Monday night.
'And when Kassie came back, she was like, 'Mum's bleeding', I'm like, 'what do you mean?'
'She's bleeding and looked at her left side and I know it was just, like, soaked with blood, you know, and then that, like, panic sets in.'
As he was rushed to hospital, other paramedics performed open heart surgery on his wife on their front lawn.
'To be at the hospital and be told that she hadn't survived was a major shock,' he recalled.
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20 May, 2024
‘Love or lust’: Travelling chastity preacher at schools sparks parent backlash
I would once long ago have agreed with this and I do at least agree that marriage is the ideal relationship. I have been married 4 times so I do put my money where my mouth is on that matter!
But the times now are definitely ones of of sexual libertarianism, so much so that abstention from sex seems unrealistic. Among young people (and some not so young people) everybody is doing it. To opt out of premarital sex is to opt out of modern life.
I have always been pretty fussy about whom I slept with and I have always looked for long-term relationships but I think that is the most one can hope for today
I note that Catholics have never been very faithful to church teachings on sex anyhow. From what I see and know, Catholic women who do NOT use contraception are rare
And there is a sense in which the church teachings are futile. Nature continues to assert itself -- to the point where even celibate priests often transgress -- often in regrettable circumstances
A planned lecture on the virtues of virginity, chastity and modesty to be delivered to Catholic high school students next week has prompted a backlash from some parents who do not want “outdated” views pushed on their daughters.
The Chastity Project founder Jason Evert is set to deliver his talk entitled “love or lust” next week at St Leo’s in Wahroonga, St Joseph’s in East Gosford as well as MacKillop Catholic College in Warnervale.
Parents were told Evert, who is based in Arizona but travels the world telling teenagers about the dangers and consequences sex before marriage, would also tell stories about the negative effects of pornography.
“Importantly, Jason discusses relationships in a non-judgemental way and encourages young people not to feel pressured into a sexual relationship,” a letter to parents at the three schools said.
But when some parents researched Evert online, they did not like what they found: one of his books from 2006 said homosexual acts were disordered (Evert has said he removed that quote from the book over a decade ago); online videos show him saying “most women do not want” to take the contraceptive pill.
The Sydney Catholic Diocese’s Centre of Evangelisation last year hosted a talk by Evert with the same title as the one to be delivered next week, in which he cited statistics which said those who abstain from sex before marriage had much lower divorce rates. He also outlined how a lack of modesty can lead to objectification and disrespect. “I didn’t even know how to treat a girl until I dated one in college who dressed modestly,” he said.
In another anecdote, he recounted how a basketball player had asked him: “‘When you’re with a girl and she says she’s ready for sex, how do you say no to that?’ I said: ‘If she thinks she’s ready for sex, and she’s not ready to be a mother, then she has no clue what she’s talking about.’”
St Joseph’s mother Alison Read said: “I sent my daughter to the school to help her become a strong, independent and capable woman, not to have her taught out-of-date views about keeping herself ‘pure’.”
In response to questions from the Herald, Evert said parents have the right to choose what kind of information their children receive on the topic of sexuality, and that was one reason why many choose a Catholic education for their children.
“To any concerned parents, I would say that I have spoken to tens of thousands of young people in Australia, and the only reason why I am being invited back now for the seventh time is because the presentation is not about hate, bigotry, or medical misinformation,” he said.
“It’s a positive message that focuses on chastity as a virtue that frees us to love, regardless of what has happened in the past.
“And in terms of the subject of modesty, I think it’s a virtue that men as well as women would do well to rediscover. ”
Another parent at St Joseph’s, Sarah Greenaway, said she believed Evert’s views did not “align with many of the teachings of modern Catholicism”.
“He has also described homosexuality as ‘disordered’. These perspectives can be harmful and alienating to students, particularly those who may already feel marginalised,” Greenaway said in a letter to the Catholic Diocese of Broken Bay.
A group of year 10 students have also written to the school to voice their concerns.
“We are concerned about the topics he is passionate about and therefore may present to us,” they wrote.
“Healthy and respectful relationships are obviously very important in our lives as young women. We strongly believe that to bring in a speaker who encourages this is a great way to motivate us to value positive relationships,” the students said. “We believe that Jason Evert’s specific messages, approaches and morals, are backwards.”
A spokeswoman for Catholic Schools Broken Bay said it had multiple initiatives in place including opportunities to invite guest speakers, especially those aligned with Catholic Church teachings.
“Given the many mixed messages our young people are faced with today, we are seeking to provide some reassurance and certainty in a challenging and complex world about relationships and sexuality,” she said.
She said they were conscious of ensuring the safety and wellbeing of all. “For this reason, while
students are encouraged to participate, the session will not be compulsory,” she said.
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Argentina’s Trump Card?
All eyes are on Argentina since the election of an eccentric libertarian as the beleaguered nation’s President, writes economics consultant Andrew Russell.
For libertarians, endlessly frustrated at how rarely people of their ideological inclination actually get elected, Javier Milei’s recent victory in Argentina’s Presidential election has given them a chance to finally see what having one of their own with substantial political power might be like. For the rest of us, who may not be card-carrying libertarian pundits, what are we to make of this chainsaw-wielding seemingly radical figure? Who is Javier Milei? What kind of libertarian is he? What has been made of him so far? And crucially, what are his real-world chances of combatting the ‘new socialism’ that Milei has deemed the biggest threat to the West?
A 53-year-old economics professor, author, and political commentator, Milei has described himself as a Hayekian ‘in the short term’ but is noted for advocating free-market anarchism and can be more accurately understood as a Rothbardian libertarian. Rothbardians are followers of the economist Murray Rothbard, the most famous theorist of anarcho-capitalism or Austrian School free-market anarchism, and argue that the State’s core functions of defence, courts, and law enforcement could be replaced by private security and arbitration agencies. In this way Rothbardians are distinct from anti-capitalist anarchists, in that they reject the Labour Theory of Value and, consequently, do not believe profit is inherently expropriative. Hayekians are followers of the economist Friedrich Hayek, who was not an anarchist and took a more conventional (yet still radical relative to real-world governments) minimal-government position. So far, the policy reforms Milei is seeking are substantially more modest than what a Hayekian would desire, and far from what a Rothbardian free-market anarchist would ultimately consider ideal. However, the fact such a radical figure was elected Argentina’s President is remarkable in itself, and when taken with his messy hair, penchant for dressing up as a superhero named ‘Captain Ancap’ (short for ‘anarcho-capitalist’), and proclamations of his enthusiasm for threesomes, one is somewhat taken aback when outlets in the liar press insist on referring to him as an “extreme social conservative”.
Indeed, Milei’s anarcho-capitalism, while radical, has been somewhat sidelined and confused by his unorthodox character, and across the board, and a bit like the man himself, the reactions to Javier Milei’s ascension to the Argentine Presidency have been theatrical. They have ranged from hysterical conniptions and prophecies of the apocalypse to joyous celebrations and loud chants of ‘¡Afuera!’, which is Spanish for ‘Out!’ (in the sense of ‘cast out’ or ‘get rid of’) and used in this context to refer to Milei’s theatrical slashing of ministerial bureaucracy on his first day in office. Unsurprisingly, most of these reactions map neatly onto left-right political positioning, with persons-on-the-left broadcasting their psychological meltdowns on social media and persons-on-the-right triumphantly cheering that Milei will Make Argentina Great Again.
Politics is not just about policy but also about personality.
In a world of mass media, broadcasted campaigns, and voters who can be moved by charisma just as much as tax cuts, politics is not just about policy but also about personality. Milei’s personality, at least on the campaign trail, has been consistently passionate, bombastic, and iconoclastic. Despite being from a nation where the majority are Roman Catholics, Pope Francis is one of Milei’s favourite targets. Milei has described his fellow Argentine as a “son of a bitch”, a “filthy leftist”, a “communist turd”, and an “imbecile”, alongside further criticisms that are probably too harshly worded to print in the IPA Review.
Predictably, Milei’s bluntness and bombast have invited comparisons to Trump, who unfortunately functions as the elephant in the room in discussions such as these. Trump is no one’s idea of a free-market anarchist and, consequently, it can be fairly argued that the only valid comparisons are on the basis of style. But the grievances aired by Milei often echo those aired by The Donald and other ‘right-wing nationalist populists’, and while his response to these issues identified by other prominent figures on the right is distinctively libertarian, Milei’s popularity—indeed his election as President of Argentina—speaks to just how loud the pushback against the ‘status quo’ has become.
Like Trump in the US, Nigel Farage in the UK, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Pauline Hanson in Australia, Milei has been outspoken on issues of immigration, climate change policy, the public service, education, and the mainstream media. That is why it is useful to summarise these larger, more general complaints about the state of the West, before looking at the Argentine context and Milei’s policy proposals.
The first charge that Milei and other ‘right-wing populists’ level at the establishment is that immigration policy is being used as a kind of gerrymandering whereby the politicians of the centre-left import constituents that will vote for them, as opposed to immigration policy based on the interests of the nation as a whole. Climate change policy is likewise called out for what it is really doing: degrading living standards and social mobility. In both cases reasonable criticism of policy is silenced, with any dissenters from the orthodoxy being deemed ‘racists’ or ‘science deniers’.
When we turn to the question of those who enforce the orthodoxy—the civil or public service and the educated elite—the former are revealed as a self-interested special interest group that has become increasingly metropolitan, authoritarian, and partisan-left, while the latter are accused of turning credentialism into the new classism. Further, the vast majority of the mainstream press has become a megaphone for that same trendy woke or social justice orthodoxy and is complicit in the active persecution of dissenters. Together, these charges combine and reveal that society is becoming further dominated by an increasingly unaccountable woke credentialist bureaucrat-academic-managerial class that exists primarily due to government largesse yet believes itself to be morally and intellectually superior to those it governs. Milei gives the loudest voice to this charge.
https://ipa.org.au/ipa-review-articles/argentinas-trump-card
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Will therebe a repeat of the 1968 Democrat Convention?
Given that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is a big mouth in an empty head, there will likely be no restraint on huge clashes over Israel etc
Will we see a repeat this summer of the infamous 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention that devolved into chaos and anarchy? This year’s convention is, like 1968, set to take place in Chicago and social unrest is percolating on the Left, to say the least.
In a recent interview on Fox News, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.—who challenged President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party presidential primary—said that given our current course of events, history is likely to repeat itself.
“I’m afraid this is looking awfully like 1968 with a lot of anger and angst and disenfranchisement that I think are going to play out on TV this summer, and it’s going to be awfully contentious,” Phillips said on Wednesday.
In 1968, anti-Vietnam War and various other far-left protesters descended on the Windy City to protest the party’s presidential nominating convention.
The situation escalated when then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, had enough and unleashed the Chicago Police Department on the protesters.
The media at the time strongly criticized the Chicago Police Department, but many Americans strongly sympathized with the authorities, who desperately sought to restore order. The events of the convention likely swayed a lot of voters concerned about violent radicals taking over their cities. Many in the media sided with the protesters, while the American people largely sided with the police.
The chaos was likely one of the reasons Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in November 1968. Preelection chaos created by the Left led to the “silent majority” delivering Nixon a resounding victory.
Given the protests we’ve seen across the country in recent months and the pressure the Left is putting on Democrats over Israel’s war in Gaza, it’s hard not to think that this year’s Democratic convention could see similar protests.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said that safety is a “top priority” for the convention, but he’s hardly the law-and-order mayor that Daley was. In fact, Johnson has supported defunding the police, has openly sympathized with the anti-Israel protesters, and even made it clear that he’s nothing like Daley.
As my colleague Tony Kinnett noted, Johnson has said he’s a different kind of Democrat. In a certain sense, Johnson’s attitude is a sign that in the long-term, the New Left factions that protested in Chicago in 1968 “won.” (More on that later.)
While prominent Democrats and members of the media insist that 2024 won’t be like 1968, it’s difficult not to see that a storm is potentially brewing.
There have already been significant protests at Chicago universities, pro-Palestine groups have sprung up around the city (some spouting chants like “Death to America!”), and a large group of anti-Israel protesters raised a Palestinian flag near where the Democratic convention is set to take place Aug. 19-22.
There’s no question that Democrats are already getting nervous about what might happen.
The 1968 convention was a seminal moment in both the history of the Democratic Party and the United States. It signaled a long-term takeover of the party and various other institutions by the New Left.
Given that the comparisons will continue to be made, it’s worth looking back at what happened 56 years ago.
New Left Organizes to Sow Chaos
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson had elected not to seek a second term despite winning a landslide in 1964. Even though the Vietnam War had been conducted by Democratic presidents, the party had turned in an antiwar direction. This became a flashpoint for a party that had become increasingly divided.
The common narrative of the Chicago Democratic National Convention in the years that followed was that it was a “mostly peaceful” protest of the Vietnam War, broken up by a brutish and out-of-control Chicago police force.
That’s not exactly accurate.
The reality is that the well-organized protesters were looking to pick a fight to bolster their cause, as historian Stephen F. Hayward described in his book, “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980.”
“The Chicago police reacted to a calculated provocation,” Hayward wrote. “And, like the case of fighting schoolchildren, where the second child to strike a blow is the one usually caught by the teacher, the media caught the police reaction and attributed it as the cause of the violence.”
Hayward explained how plans to disrupt the convention began as early as December 1967 and were the product of three main groups.
Those groups were the Youth International Party, or the “Yippies”; the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, or “Mobe”; and the Students for a Democratic Society, the SDS. The factions had slightly different agendas for what they wanted to pull off in Chicago.
The Mobe generally wanted a peaceful protest to take place, though it wasn’t exactly averse to causing mayhem—and potentially, violence.
“It would be a mistake to think that the fight against the war can be won in the ballot box,” said Mobe leader David Dellinger. “It still has to be won on the streets.”
The Yippies wanted something more like a giant street festival. They announced a plan to put LSD in the Chicago water supply. Chlorine treatment of the water would have neutralized any threat to the Chicago population, but the Chicago police took the threat seriously enough to put officers in front of the city’s filtration plants.
The Students for a Democratic Society were looking for a fight. Hayward noted that the reasons the SDS was looking to ratchet up violence is that they saw liberal antiwar presidential candidates like Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy as a threat.
For leaders of this movement and others on the far Left, the entire American system needed to be overthrown. They weren’t looking for peace in Vietnam; they were looking to overturn the American way of life and government.
While the three factions plotted different tactics to achieve their goals, they were nevertheless united behind a larger agenda.
They wanted to sow chaos as much as possible so that they could eventually shove their more moderate cohorts on the Left aside and take the reins of power. They wanted to agitate, disrupt, and put the most pressure possible on Democrats to bend to their will.
Humphrey frequently mentioned on the campaign trail that he wanted to bring the “politics of joy” to the country. The activists were having none of it.
“We are coming to Chicago to vomit on the ‘politics of joy,’” SDS leader Tom Hayden wrote before the convention, “to expose the secret decisions, upset the nightclub orgies, and face the Democratic Party with its illegitimacy and criminality.”
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Australia: A long stint in prison for an innocent woman
I was one of those who from an early stage saw the conviction of Kathleen Folbigg as a gross miscarriage of justice.
The law failed her so often that it is the justice system that has ultimately been convicted as not fit for purpose. It has not only been Kathleen Folbigg that has been failed in this case. It is the whole commmuity that as been failed. For an innocent person to have been REPEATEDLY been found guilty is deeply destructive to any faith in the system.
And, as in the Bruce Lehrmann case, it is a rogue official who ignored informed advice on the matter to set in train a huge and regrettable series of events. At least Shane Drumgold has suffered heavy consequences for his actions as a prosecutor in the Lehrman case. But I suppose there is no hope that the official in this case will suffer in any way.
As Lenin once asked: "What Is To Be Done?". I am afraid I have no good answers to that, any more than Lenin did. All I know is that if anybody close to me got into trouble with the law, I would use all my resources to get them from the outset the best possible legal representation. That initial conviction is the dangerous one
When Kathleen Folbigg had her long-standing convictions for the deaths of her four infant children quashed last year, Rhanee Rego was right by her side. The young lawyer had started working on her case while still at uni – and never stopped.
In June 2017, at the age of 24, when most young people are drinking too much, dating the wrong people and otherwise avoiding adulthood, Rhanee Rego, a fourth-year law student at the University of Newcastle, took up a part-time placement with a barrister named Robert Cavanagh. Tall and lanky, with the lugubrious manner of a country undertaker, Cavanagh is well known for campaigning against wrongful convictions. One of the cases he was looking into at the time was that of a convicted child killer named Kathleen Folbigg.
Folbigg, who was also from Newcastle, had been found guilty, in 2003, of murdering three of her young children and the manslaughter of a fourth, and sentenced to 40 years in prison (later reduced to 30). She had become known as the country’s worst female serial killer and was widely reviled. She had been bashed in jail and placed, for her own safety, in solitary confinement. There seemed little doubt about her guilt. Her former husband, Craig, had given evidence against her, as had her foster sister. But Cavanagh believed Folbigg was innocent and set Rego to work reviewing the case.
“I had no idea what I was signing up for,” says Rego, who I met in Newcastle recently. “I knew almost nothing of Folbigg’s case growing up. I was just 11 when she was convicted.”
By the time Rego became involved, Folbigg had already been the subject of a trial, two appeals and a petition for review, initiated by Cavanagh and fellow barristers Isabel Reed and Nicolas Moir, not to mention investigations by journalists and justice advocates. But Rego came to the case with voracious intent. For the next two months, whenever she had time, she would drive from Swansea, just south of Newcastle, where she was living with her grandmother, to Cavanagh’s chambers in the city, and read everything about the case that she could get her hands on – the trial transcripts, witness statements, police and expert reports, formal submissions and Folbigg’s diaries. “The diaries were possibly the hardest part,” Rego says. “Kathleen’s handwriting is terrible.”
Cavanagh believed Folbigg was innocent, but Rego was determined to come to her own conclusion. “I didn’t want to help a woman who’d potentially killed four of her kids, especially pro bono,” she explains. But as she made her way through the material, she became increasingly alarmed. “There was simply no direct evidence anywhere to say Folbigg was guilty,” she says. “The case was entirely circumstantial. It was like clouds. You could see them, their shape and formation, but when you went to grab them, there was nothing there.”
When she mentioned her concerns to friends, they warned her against getting too involved; Folbigg was a figure of hate. But as a novice lawyer, it seemed clear to Rego that Folbigg’s convictions had been a mistake, and that, once the facts were re-examined, she would be released. “Surely the judges wanted to correct this?” she thought. “Surely politicians were worried they had put an innocent woman in prison?”
But that’s not the way it worked out. Folbigg would remain in jail for another six years. Rego, meanwhile, still wet behind the ears, would become her most unlikely advocate, a key player in reversing the worst miscarriage of justice in recent times. Now she’s working to secure what is expected to be one of the biggest compensation payouts in Australian legal history.
Much more below:
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19 May, 2024
In the 'Nordic paradox', high rates of gender equality does not equal safety for women
I don't think there is much of a mystery about this. I suspect that the alleged low "gender gap" is a product of a lot of feminist legislation. And a high prevalence of feminist thinking in the society is the obvious precursor to heavy feminist legislation. And feminism is often anti-man. If you are constantly being put down and called "toxic" just for being a man you could feel pretty angry about that -- and anger does predict violence. And that violence could well turn against those who are promoted as superior beings
As ever, the real problem is the Leftist compulsion to see everyone as members of a class -- racial, economic, sexual etc. And when they do that they want to wipe out the group differences concerned. They replace the conservative ideal of equality of opportunity with an aim for equality of results. But people are different so pushing for equality of results will always be oppressive of someone
And the concept of any form of overall equality is rubbish anyway. What are we to make of the great female advantage in lifespan? Should we euthanize a lot of old ladies to equalize the sexes? Obviously not. We counterweight that advantage against female disadvantage in some other sphere. But the weight we assign to each of the different factors is purely a matter of opinion with no objective basis. The "gender gap" is an arbitrary statistical creation only but a lot of effort goes into reproducing it in the real world
It's supposed to be the world's "most gender-equal" country. But behind that title a devastating problem remains.
For 14 years, the small Nordic nation of Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum gender-gap rankings, considered to have closed 91.2 per cent of the male-female divide.
The survey considers the gender gap on four metrics: health, education and political empowerment and economic participation.
But statistics on violence in the country, paint a vastly different portrait of the nation's treatment of women.
About 40 per cent of Icelandic women experience gender-based and sexual violence in their lifetime, according to a landmark 2018 study by the University of Iceland.
"It doesn't matter even here in the one of safest countries in the world, your life is threatened for only being a woman," gender-based violence survivor Ólöf Tara Harðardóttir said.
"If 40 per cent of all women in Iceland are survivors of physical and or sexual abuse, that's no feminist paradise."
This phenomenon has been labelled the "Nordic paradox", where equality-focused Scandinavian countries experience higher-than-expected rates of violence.
Possible theories range from female advancement leading to male backlash to problematic alcohol consumption patterns and a lack of public discussion around family violence.
Many in the field accept there are challenges with comparing and collecting data, but repeated studies have shown rates of violence are higher than other European countries.
Ms Harðardóttir now co-leads a not-for-profit organisation, Ofgar, which campaigns for legal and social reform for women in Iceland.
"I decided that I needed to speak up … because I felt for too long our country silences victims," she said.
Last year, tens of thousands of Icelandic women — including the country's female prime minister — took part in a 24-hour stop-work demonstration using the slogan "you call this equality".
The strike intended to highlight the persistent gaps in women's pay, domestic workload and rates of gender-based violence.
"People say we are an equal country, but I say equal for who?" Ms Harðardóttir said.
Tanja Mjöll Ísfjörð Magnúsdóttir, another survivor who also co-leads Ofgar, said she felt let down by Iceland's legal system.
"I did everything by the book, I pressed charges, I went to the police and everything," she said.
"[But] my case got dismissed and my family, my home town they turned their back on me and and I had to look elsewhere to find help.
"I realise this happens to many survivors of abuse in Iceland."
Along with many others involved with Ofgar, she is campaigning for changes to Iceland's age of sexual consent, sentencing laws and treatment of survivors of sexual assault.
"Despite the female politicians, I still do not feel we get the answers we want," Ms Magnúsdóttir said.
The Scandinavian countries of Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland all rank in the top five of the World Economic Forum's gender-equality rankings, with scores of 81-91 per cent.
The gender gap is not closed in any of these countries but, based on these statistics, these nations have come closer to levelling the disparities than many others.
Yet, Nordic countries with strong legal and social empowerment frameworks for women appear to have rates of gendered violence above the European Union (EU) average.
"The work with gender equality doesn't fix the problem with violence," said Anneli Häyrén, a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden.
"The Nordic paradox is hard to explain … but I would say that we do not have gender equality, and we clearly still have a problem with the balance of power between men and women.
"We have a problem with violence, men's violence against women and children and men's violence against other men as well."
In Sweden, 46 per cent of women have experienced violence, which is 13 per cent higher than in the EU overall, according to a major 2014 study by the European Centre of Gender Equality.
These figures are 10 years old, but a 2019 European Agency for Fundamental Rights survey also showed the prevalence of physical and sexual-partner violence against women in the EU was substantially higher in the Nordic countries than the continent's average.
It was about 30 per cent in Finland and 29 per cent in Sweden.
Dr Häyrén said the problem had for too long been framed as a "women's issue".
"The good guys are very silent in Sweden and I would say, and we would need them to be a lot more active," she said.
What to say to a victim of intimate partner violence
I fled intimate partner violence. Here's my advice for what to say to support someone going through the same thing.
The EU's main data collection agency says more work is needed to accurately capture information on violence against women, and that it is difficult compare data from different countries.
The EU does track a series of "gender equality" indexes — including statistics on work, money, knowledge, time, power and health — and has identified violence as a future metric.
"People really think that, men and women are equal and we don't need this kind of discussion," said Dr Juha Holma, from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
"We don't think that men or other professionals need to help women because they are strong …
"It's a cultural image about how Finnish women manage by themselves."
Despite women experiencing levels of empowerment and advancement in the workplace and society, many Finnish households may operate with different attitudes, Dr Holma suggests.
"We have been looking also at how people who have been violent in their close relationship, with their intimate partner, and it seems that there still are quite traditional gender roles in those families," he said.
"Women and men are still playing very old-fashioned roles sometimes at home."
A lack of public discussion around violence has led to a poor understanding of the issue, which is preventing a pursuit of solutions, Dr Holma said.
"In Finland, [violence against women] it's not topic, a theme in public, in media and so on.
Hulda Hrund Guðrúnar Sigmundsdóttir, another co-lead of the organisation, said she was assaulted by a close family member as a child.
She said growing up felt she could not disclose it as this would bring "shame to her family".
"We are trying to pave the way for our future so that our daughters and our sisters, can be safer than we were because when we were growing up," she said.
"We understand that many countries have it worse than us, but that does not mean that we have to settle."
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Sunsetting Section 230 is an attack on free speech and will end the free and open internet as we know it
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging Congress to reject legislation by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) that would sunset Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:
“Congress is treading into dangerous territory with the announced sunset of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act being considered. Section 230 guarantees free speech on the internet. Without it, old-style bulletin boards like Free Republic and other alternative voices would have never been allowed to exist in the first place.
“Section 230 allows interactive computer services including e-commerce stores and other small businesses to operate without fear of liability from their user networks collectively consisting of millions of individuals, who also can freely post content, products and communicate with their peers. This is essential infrastructure for interstate commerce and for the free and open internet that the bill fails to offer any alternative for consideration.
“Before Congress acts, they need to understand that neither Truth Social, X nor Rumble would survive in their current forms if this bill passes. Passage of this legislation would have a chilling effect on free speech by demanding censorship of all non-government-sanctioned points of view.”
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Nakba, where Palestinian victim mythology began
On Wednesday, “Nakba Day” was commemorated around the world with even more vehemence than usual as outpourings of hatred against Israel, sprinkled with ample doses of anti-Semitism, issued from screaming crowds.
What was entirely missing was any historical perspective on the Nakba – that is, the displacement, mainly through voluntary flight, of Palestinians from mandatory Palestine. Stripped out of its broader context, the event was invested with a uniqueness that distorts the processes that caused it and its contemporary significance.
It is, to begin with, important to understand that the displacement of Palestinians was only one facet of the sweeping population movements caused by the collapse of the great European land empires. At the heart of that process was the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire, which started with the Greek war of independence in 1821 and accelerated during subsequent decades.
As the empire teetered, religious conflicts exploded, forcing entire communities to leave. Following the Crimean War of 1854-56, earlier flows of Muslims out of Russia and its border territories became a flood, with as many as 900,000 people fleeing the Caucasus and Crimea regions for Ottoman territory. The successive Balkan wars and then World War I gave that flood torrential force as more than two million people left or were expelled from their ancestral homes and sought refuge among their co-religionists.
The transfers reshaped the population geography of the entire Middle East, with domino effects that affected virtually every one of the region’s ethnic and religious groups.
The formation of new nation-states out of what had been the Ottoman Empire then led to further rearrangements, with many of those states passing highly restrictive nationality laws in an attempt to secure ethnic and religious homogeneity.
Nothing more starkly symbolised that quest for homogeneity than the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed on January 30, 1923. This was the first agreement that made movement mandatory: with only a few exceptions, all the Christians living in the newly established Turkish state were to be deported to Greece, while all of Greece’s Muslims were to be deported to Turkey. The agreement, reached under the auspices of the League of Nations, also specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality along with any right to return, instead being resettled in the new homeland.
Underlying the transfer was the conviction, articulated by French prime minister (and foreign minister) Raymond Poincare, that “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war”, and that the “unmixing of peoples” would “remove one of the greatest menaces to peace”.
That the forced population transfers, which affected about 1.5 million people, imposed enormous suffering is beyond doubt. But they were generally viewed as a success. Despite considerable difficulties, the transferred populations became integrated into the fabric of the recipient communities – at least partly because they had no other option. At the same time, relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely, with the Ankara Agreements of 1930 inaugurating a long period of relative stability.
The result was to give large-scale, permanent population movements, planned or unplanned, a marked degree of legitimacy.
Thus, the formation of what became the Irish Republic was accompanied by the flight of Protestants to England and Northern Ireland, eventually more than halving, into an insignificant minority, the Protestant share of the Irish state’s population; that was viewed as easing the tensions that had so embittered the Irish civil war.
It is therefore unsurprising that further “unmixing” was seen by the allies in World War II as vital to ensuring peace in the post-war world. In a statement later echoed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill made this explicit in 1944, telling the House of Commons he was “not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before”.
The immediate effect, endorsed as part of the Potsdam Agreements and implemented as soon as the war ended, was the brutal expulsion from central and eastern Europe of 12 million ethnic Germans whose families had lived in those regions for centuries. Stripped of their nationality and possessions, then forcibly deported to a war-devastated Germany, the refugees – who received very little by way of assistance – gradually merged into German society, though the scars took decades to heal.
Even more traumatic was the movement in 1947 of 18 million people between India and the newly formed state of Pakistan.
As Indian novelist Alok Bhalla put it, India’s declaration of independence triggered the subcontinent’s sudden descent into “a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy”, with Lord Ismay, who witnessed the process, later writing that “the frontier between India and Pakistan was to see more tragedy than any frontier conceived before or since”. Yet in the subcontinent too, and especially in India, the integration of refugees proceeded to the point where little now separates their descendants from those of the native born.
All that formed the context in which the planned partition of Palestine was to occur. The 1937 Peel Commission, which initially proposed partition, had recommended a mandatory population exchange but the entire issue was ignored in UN Resolution 181 that was supposed to govern the creation of the two new states.
When a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed that resolution on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed partition, despite it being vastly unfavourable to them. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan, they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal.
At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot.
While those atrocities continued a longstanding pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it.
A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months.
It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the Dalet plan in March 1948 that ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees that was well under way before it came into effect.
Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a very high proportion of the Jewish population.
Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”.
Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand.
Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”.
Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians discussed above. There was, however, one immensely significant difference: having precipitated the creation of a pool of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Arab states refused to absorb them.
Rather, they used their clout in the UN to establish the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which became a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ refugee status.
In entrenching the problem, the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jew-hatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide.
Nor did it end there. Fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, the Arab states proceeded to expel, or force the departure of, 800,000 Jews who had lived in the Arab lands for millennia, taking away their nationality, expropriating their assets and forbidding them from ever returning to the place of their birth. Those Jews were, however painfully, integrated into Israel; the Palestinian refugees, in contrast, remained isolated, subsisting mainly on welfare, rejected by countries that claimed to be their greatest friends. Thus was born the myth of the Nakba.
That vast population movements have inflicted enormous costs on those who have been ousted from their homes is undeniable. Nor have the tragedies ended: without a murmur from the Arab states, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait after the first Gulf War, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s support of Saddam Hussein. More recently, Myanmar has expelled 1.2 million Rohingya.
But the greatest tragedy associated with the plight of the Palestinians is not the loss of a homeland; over the past century, that has been the fate of tens of millions. Rather, it is the refusal to look forward rather than always looking back, an attitude encapsulated in the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
That has suited the Arab leaders, but it has condemned ordinary Palestinians to endless misery and perpetual war. Until that changes, the future will be a constant repetition of a blood-soaked past.
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DEI Hits the VA: Biden's Veterans Affairs Department Offers Race-Based Training Programs That Exclude White Vets
The programs are taking place in at least four states, a Washington Free Beacon review of online offerings found.
In Battle Creek, Mich., for example, the VA offers a "BIPOC Support Group," an "8-week curriculum designed to provide support for Veterans that identify as people of color/BIPOC, or as multiracial or biracial," according to a program description. The Battle Creek VA also offers a "Race-Based Stress/Trauma and Empowerment" program, a "weekly group, tailored to our Veterans of color, to address race-based stress and trauma in a safe and validating environment."
In Long Beach, Calif., the VA also offers a "Race-Based Stress/Trauma Empowerment Group," which it says is for "Veterans who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and who are interested in addressing issues of race-based stress, trauma, resilience, and empowerment." A similar program in Palo Alto, Calif., invites "Women Veterans of color" to join a "10-week group to explore [the] impact of racism on your well-being."
In Minneapolis, meanwhile, a VA-sponsored "Black Veterans peer support group" welcomes "all Veterans who self-identify as Black" to learn "skills that help protect against the negative impact of racial stress and trauma by increasing feelings of belongingness, connectedness to racial/ethnic identity and empowerment." And the VA's Central Ohio Health Care System advertises a "Minority Stress & Empowerment" group, an eight-week series "open to Black, Indigenous and all Veterans of color who are interested in addressing race-based stress and trauma."
Under Biden, the federal government has made "equity" a guiding principle thanks to a June 2021 executive order instructing agencies to beef up their diversity programming. "Such training programs," the order said, "should enable Federal employees, managers, and leaders to have knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias" as well as an "increased understanding of implicit and unconscious bias."
In other settings, however, race-based offerings have landed private entities in hot water. Last year, amid legal scrutiny, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer quietly amended a fellowship program to remove a provision that barred whites and Asians from applying. Now, University of San Diego law professor and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Gail Heriot is expressing similar concern over the VA's programs.
"It seems like every time you turn around there's another race-exclusive government program of dubious constitutionality and legality," Heriot told the Free Beacon. "Race exclusivity should raise red flags. Yet for the past four years, we've been seeing more and more of this kind of thing."
The VA did not respond to a request for comment.
Agency officials have discussed their "equity" offerings on the VA's Ending Veteran Homelessness podcast. Communications official Shawn Liu said the department began "a lot of our racial equity work" in the spring of 2021, around when Biden issued his executive order on diversity. He said the race-based offerings prompted internal pushback, which he dismissed, arguing that "treating everybody the same might not be enough."
"I remember early on, I want to say spring 2021, especially when we were starting to launch a lot of our racial equity work within the Homeless Programs Office, that was a pretty common bit of feedback," Liu said during a February podcast episode. "I would probably also categorize it as a little bit of criticism, right? Which was very well meaning, you know, dedicated staff who were grappling with this idea that the values that were instilled in them were you treat everybody the same, right? That discrimination is bad and you treat everybody the same. And if you treat everybody the same, that's the morally righteous thing to do."
"And those folks who had that feedback … you could see in like real time," Liu went on, "they were kind of grappling with that concept because in many ways what we're talking about today is, number one, providing tailored different solutions for different things, but also this understanding that because people are situated in society differently, they come from different barriers, they come from different challenges."
VA Veteran Justice Programs national training director Matthew Stimmel, who was also on the podcast, agreed.
"I think we can treat all veterans the same, and we should in terms of the amount of respect and dignity and compassion that we show them," he said. "But that doesn't mean we have to just blanketly offer the same exact services in the same exact way to everyone, as a matter of fairness."
Stimmel also serves as an assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Both Liu and Stimmel forwarded Free Beacon requests for comment to the VA's public affairs office, which didn't respond.
The VA has a history of implementing left-wing cultural initiatives under Biden.
In 2021, internal agency training included the "genderbread" diagram, which is also featured in some elementary school curricula. The diagram points to the brain, heart, and pelvic area of a gingerbread "person" to distinguish "gender identity," "sexual orientation," and "biological sex," respectively. The full body of the gingerbread "person" represents its "gender expression," the diagram says.
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Homelessness Surging in Blue City Despite Doling Out Hundreds of Millions
The number of homeless people in San Francisco jumped compared to two years ago, despite the city spending hundreds of millions of dollars to address the issue, city data shows.
The total number of homeless people in San Francisco rose 7% to 8,328 in a one-night measurement in January 2024 compared to the same in 2022, reversing the 3.5% decline recorded from 2019 to 2022, according to the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Funding for homelessness from the city increased to $676 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year, up from $284 million in 2018-19, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Despite the total number of homeless people rising, the number of unsheltered people fell 1% in January compared to the same time in 2022 as the city prioritizes providing housing, increasing the number of beds available by 28% since 2019, according to the department. The number of people living in their vehicles in January has jumped 37% since 2022, and the number of people living in shelters has spiked 39%.
“We are working every day to move people off our streets and into shelter, housing, and care,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a press release following the survey. “This is safer and healthier for people on our streets, and it is better for all of us that want a cleaner and safer San Francisco. Our City workforce is dedicated to making a difference, and we will keep working to get tents off our streets, bring people indoors, and change the conditions in our neighborhoods.”
Breed is facing a tough reelection bid coming up in November later this year, holding just a slim lead over her more moderate opponents, according to The San Francisco Standard. The mayor’s unfavorability numbers are currently high and could rise higher if homelessness remains an issue.
San Francisco had a smaller jump in homelessness than the state of California as a whole, which had a 20% increase in the total number of homeless people compared to 2019, according to the department. California voters narrowly approved $6.4 billion in funding across the state for the construction of housing and treatment beds to accommodate homeless people with mental illnesses.
The increase in funding for homelessness follows a new business tax that was approved by San Francisco voters in 2018 and is specifically designed to provide funding for new housing units, rental subsidies, and mental health services, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. An individual or family needs to earn $51.25 per hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
To address low housing availability and high costs, Breed has launched an initiative called “Housing for All” that aims to build 82,000 new homes over the next eight years through expediting housing approvals, reforming housing regulations and more. The city approved just seven new housing permits in the first two months of 2024, well behind what it would need to reach its goal.
There were just 2,024 new housing units built in all of 2024 in the city, the worst gain in a decade and a 30% drop from the year before, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. High interest rates and elevated construction costs are among the reasons for the slow growth.
San Francisco has relied heavily on nonprofits to combat homelessness despite concerns about how effectively the funding is being used, with the city’s attorney in early May accusing one nonprofit, the Providence Foundation, of stealing $100,000 of public money meant to address the issue. The Providence Foundation has received around $100 million in contracts from the city.
The city has faced recent criticism for piloting a “Managed Alcohol Program” costing $5 million that gives free beer, wine, and vodka to the homeless to help recovering alcoholics.
Breed’s office deferred the Daily Caller News Foundation to previous statements.
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16 May, 2024
Should You Believe Faulty U.S. Crime Stats or Your Own Lying Eyes? It's a Tough Call
Americans can be forgiven for suffering from whiplash regarding law and order.
In recent weeks the Biden administration and many news outlets, including USA Today and The Hill, have touted declines in violent crime statistics to argue that America is becoming a safer place.
“Right now, with 2023 figures and early 2024, the trends are all pointing down, in a positive direction,” Jeff Asher, whose New Orleans-based AH Datalytics is developing his own “Real-Time Crime Index,” told RealClearInvestigations.
Conservative outlets, including City Journal and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, assert that minor declines in headline grabbers like homicides fail to capture what is really happening in the U.S.
From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had an average of 16,641 homicides a year. In 2021 and 2022, however, the country saw considerably more bloodshed, with an average of more than 22,000 annual homicides. Even if the 2023 number drops slightly, it will still represent a large increase over the recent past, before the pandemic and racial upheaval set in motion in 2020.
Many criminologists say this illlustrates one of the problems with the official numbers that are at the center of public debate: They give a distorted impression of true levels of crime. They note that crime stats have become notoriously incomplete in recent years. In some years many big cities did not report their numbers to the FBI, and there are such wide discrepancies in these tallies that the picture they provide has more blur than clarity.
Declining arrest rates and slowing police response times to 911 calls also help explain why polls show Americans believe crime is rising. The experts say the numbers only give some sense of lawbreaking, while most Americans – the vast majority of whom are not crime victims in a given year – are influenced by their largely media-driven perception of whether society feels orderly.
“There are social media videos of people walking into a CVS and walking out with a shopping cart full and there seems to be no consequences – that’s part of the problem,” said Jay Town, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “And then you have people arrested a dozen times and they’re out with no bail. There are no consequences, and thus there are more criminals in the street.”
Americans may fall back on such perceptions in part because the official reports are incomplete and rife with error. “I don’t think with any crime statistics we can ever be precise,” said Asher.
For decades, the traditional gold standard for criminologists was the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, annual compilations by the Bureau of stats provided to it by state and local law enforcement agencies. The FBI’s data, which currently show declines in several criminal categories, especially homicide, provide the basis for many of the stories arguing that, in terms of crime, the U.S. situation is improving.
But the FBI statistics aren't what they used to be, according to several criminologists who pointed to gaps in coverage and apparent errors. The problem began in 1988 when the bureau began to move toward a complex new system of reporting – the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). It promised to provide more comprehensive detail and enable authorities to pinpoint high-crime areas, criminals, and victims more accurately.
But the transition proved to be a herculean task, so much so that the FBI allowed departments to delay their full adherence to the program even after the feds doled out $120 million to agencies to assist with compliance. Still, in 2020, 2021 and 2022, either all or some of the biggest police forces in the U.S. -- New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles -- did not provide data.
There have also been problems with the data that was submitted, including the news in 2022 of major problems with the St. Louis Police Department data, and more recent revelations that figures for sexual crimes provided by the New Orleans Police Department were wrong.
In Baltimore, the Police Department and various news reports put the total for 2022 homicides between 332 and 336, but the FBI’s dataset puts the number at 272. Baltimore police officials did not reply to RCI’s inquiries about the wide spread in the reported numbers, and if anyone in the city’s police department had brought the matter to the FBI’s attention.
The Baltimore department acknowledges its numbers may not be the same as those it submits to the FBI, but states on its website that “any comparisons are strictly prohibited.”
Similarly, the police departments in Milwaukee and Nashville did not respond to questions about divergences between their stats on robberies and those from the federal bureau. Milwaukee police reported a 7 percent increase in robberies in 2023, but the FBI recorded a 13 percent decline.
An FBI spokesperson told RCI, “It is the responsibility of each state UCR [Uniform Crime Reports] program or contributing law enforcement agency to submit accurate statistics and correct existing data that are in error.”
Criminologists cite other discrepancies in the official measurements they use to assess the situation. While FBI stats show declines in violent categories, the Department of Justice’s survey reports more people saying they have been victims of such crimes. The Centers for Disease Control figures for homicides, which have long moved in the same direction as the FBI’s, started exceeding the FBI’s in 2020 and the gap has widened since then.
“I wouldn’t say the FBI is cooking the books, but that the data they are putting out is half-baked,” said Sean Kennedy, the executive director of the Coalition for Law, Order and Security, which has pushed back against recent media reports that crime is falling noticeably in the U.S.
“So it’s not a conspiracy but a rush job, and it’s giving people a false picture,” he told RCI. “They infer something is true, and then because it’s politically expedient they don’t bother correcting it.”
A Sharp Decline in Arrests
Some criminologists say there is another, hidden dynamic within the crime statistics that helps explain why most Americans think crime is on the rise – the dramatic decline in arrests. Scouring FBI data, John Lott, the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found that arrests for reported violent crimes in major cities fell 20 percent in 2022, from 42.5 percent in 2019 – the year before the COVID pandemic and BLM protests in response to George Floyd’s death while in police custody.
The percentage of murder and rapes cleared by arrests fell to 40.6 percent from 67.3 percent in those years; for rapes from 33.8 percent to 17.4 percent, and arrests for reported property crimes in major cities dropped to 4.5 percent in 2022 from 11.6 percent in 2019.
It is not clear how much of this decline is due to reductions in the size of many departments – New Orleans, for example, reportedly lost 20% of its force between 2020 and 2022.
“There are lots of issues here, and I’m in disbelief about some of them,” said Lott. “It’s mind-boggling to me – we already know many crimes have always been underreported and now it seems to be, ‘Why bother reporting a property crime’ to the police? The bottom line is our law enforcement system seems in some ways to be falling apart, especially in the big cities.”
The plummeting arrest rates contribute to the general sense of lawlessness, a feeling compounded by surging increases in response times to calls. Comparing data for 15 law enforcement agencies from 2019-2022, Asher found only one city – Cincinnati – that reduced its response time, and that by 0.7 minutes. In New Orleans, the average response time nearly doubled, from 50.8 to 145.8 minutes, while Nashville saw a rise from 44.2 minutes to 73.8 minutes and New York City a 33-minute increase.
Some cities are even worse.
“If it’s not a shooting or a stabbing we’re up to about two hours for responding to property calls,” Jared Wilson, president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, told RCI. “As a result, we’ve seen a significant problem with reporting of crime right now.”
Wilson said auto thefts better capture the state of crime and perceptions of it: As thefts of essential registered property, they tend to be reported. In San Diego, Wilson said, those have risen year-to-year, with a whopping 27% jump in 2021, all of which contribute to people’s perception of increased criminal activity.
Betsy Branter Smith, a retired cop and spokeswoman for the National Police Association, said such issues contribute to a deteriorating relationship between citizens and the police. That unraveling, along with increasing hostility between police departments and district attorneys in some big cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles, has made some cops less pro-active on the job.
“It’s not so much hostility’’ toward cops, but frustration and resignation,” she said. “It’s time-consuming to be a crime victim, and if prosecutors aren’t going to do anything, why report it?”
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Behind-Scenes Recordings Reveal What Top Gender Doctors Really Think About Sex-Change Procedures
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, is the leading authority in the field of gender medicine. Its guidance is routinely used by top medical associations in the U.S. and abroad, while its standards of care inform insurance companies’ approach to coverage policies.
But behind closed doors, top WPATH doctors discussed, and at times seemed to challenge, the organization’s own published guidelines for sex-change procedures and acknowledged pushing experimental medical interventions that can have devastating and irreversible complications, according to exclusive footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
WPATH published highly influential clinical guidance called “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8,” or SOC 8, which recommends the use of invasive medical interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex change surgeries, calling them “safe and effective.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation filed a series of public records requests to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s SOC 8 co-authors who are employed at taxpayer-funded institutions, making their emails subject to open records laws.
Buried in more than 100 pages of responsive records from the University of Nevada was a series of emails sent in 2022 among prominent WPATH members and leaders, including WPATH Global Education Institute Co-Chair Gail Knudson.
In one email, Knudson sent a colleague the link to a folder containing nearly 30 hours of recordings from WPATH’s Global Education Institute summit in September 2022 in Montreal, Canada, which included sessions on mental health, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change surgery.
These sessions provided WPATH members with in-depth education on the clinical application of topics addressed in the SOC 8 treatment guidelines. However, the footage reveals WPATH-affiliated doctors advocating that children undergo risky sex-change procedures and even pushing for these treatments for patients struggling with severe mental health issues.
Several sessions were dedicated exclusively to treating children and included recommendations for minors to receive puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
For instance, WPATH guidance recommends addressing a patient’s mental health issues before giving him or her sex-change medical interventions. However, in one recorded session, a WPATH faculty member and gender doctor claimed that mental health issues don’t necessarily affect a patient’s ability to receive cross-sex hormones.
In another video, a doctor told attendees that children should be informed that cross-sex hormones will likely make them infertile. but admitted that he would prescribe them anyway if a child says he or she wants the treatment, regardless of future consequences.
A surgeon euphemistically referred to a phalloplasty procedure, a surgical series that includes obliterating the vaginal cavity and creating a fake penis with harvested tissue, as an “adventure” for young people. He did this despite later admitting that those same procedures “definitely” will have “complications,” such as permanent issues with bladder function and tissue death.
One physician called the entire field of cross-sex hormones “off-label,” referring to the concept of drugs being used for alternative purposes than what they were approved for. The doctor went on to say that female patients might actually appreciate drug side effects that cause them to lose hair, because they’d look “more like men.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that when it approves a drug, health care providers generally may prescribe that drug for an unapproved use, or off-label, when “they judge that it is medically appropriate for their patient.”
In several other videos, doctors argued in favor of transitioning patients who experience psychotic episodes. One admitted that some of his patients with schizophrenia have to be careful how much cross-sex hormones they take or they can’t “keep the voices down.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation consulted medical professionals from respected organizations, such as Do No Harm, who all argued that the comments from WPATH-affiliated doctors show that the transgender medical industry doesn’t have patients’ best interests at heart.
While the average person, nationally and internationally, likely never has heard of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the modern medical industry is deeply tied to the organization and relies on it to dictate the standards of care for transgender medicine.
WPATH’s guidelines are cited as criteria for obtaining insurance coverage by both private insurance companies and tax-funded insurance plans, positioning them as a lynchpin of the sex reassignment industry.
Additionally, WPATH’s guidelines help inform policy statements from major medical and professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the Endocrine Society.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is being sued by Isabelle Ayala, a former patient who was medically transitioned as a child and claims she was rushed through sex-change medical procedures.
There’s been an explosion in the number of young people, including children, being put on hormones and puberty blockers and getting sex-change surgeries, according to a study published in August 2023 by the JAMA Network.
This surge has been fueled, in part, by groups such as Planned Parenthood, which distributes cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 16. Planned Parenthood saw a roughly 125% jump in the number of transgender services it provided between 2020 and 2022.
Twenty-three states, however, have enacted legislation preventing doctors from performing sex-change surgeries on minors amid backlash from concerned parents and doctors who don’t subscribe to the WPATH-endorsed “gender-affirming care” model. Gender-affirming care is another euphemism used by medical professionals to describe the idea that doctors should affirm a patient’s wish to live as the opposite biological sex through social transitioning, hormone therapy, and even surgery.
The SOC 8 was released just days ahead of the 2022 symposium and contained several significant changes to how doctors and medical institutions implemented transgender medical treatment. For instance, WPATH removed minimum age requirements that established when a child can or should receive transgender medical services such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-reassignment surgeries.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s previous guidelines recommended that hormone therapy be given once a patient was over the age of 16, but the updated version removed this barrier and suggests hormone therapy begin at the first signs of sexual maturity.
The videos obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation give the first glimpse at how doctors and mental health professionals discussed implementing the new guidelines. To highlight the most significant portions of the content obtained in the records requests, the foundation has decided to publish a series of articles collectively called “The WPATH Tapes.”
Following this release, the Daily Caller News Foundation intends to publish all of the videos in their entirety to provide the public with necessary information about WPATH’s approach to medical care and shine a light on an influential organization that has largely remained anonymous until now.
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Biden DOJ ‘Unjustly’ Persecuting Pro-Lifers, ‘Turning a Blind Eye’ to Leftist Crime
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee accused President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice on Tuesday of “unjustly” persecuting pro-life activists exposing the “horrors of abortion.”
“The Biden administration is using the FACE Act to give pro-life activists and senior citizens lengthy prison terms for non-violent offenses and protests—all while turning a blind eye to the violence, arson, and riots conducted on behalf of ‘approved’ leftist causes,” Lee told The Daily Signal in a Tuesday statement.
The senator added: “Unequal enforcement of the law is a violation of the law, and men and women who try to expose the horrors of abortion are being unjustly persecuted for their motivations.”
Lee’s comments come after news that pro-life activist Lauren Handy has been sentenced on DOJ charges to almost five years in prison for attempting to stop abortions of unborn babies from taking place at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic.
Handy will spend 57 months in prison and is the first person sentenced for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 law that supposedly protects both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers, but has been heavily enforced by Biden’s DOJ against pro-lifers since the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Those efforts are led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, who recently admitted following a report from The Daily Signal that she hid an arrest and its subsequent expungement from investigators when she was confirmed to her Justice Department post.
The president’s critics have accused Biden and the DOJ of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-lifers while failing to charge pro-abortion criminals for the hundreds of attacks on pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating Roe would soon be overturned.
Some, among them Lee and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, have called for the repeal of the FACE Act.
“Today’s outrageous 57-month sentence for a progressive pro-life activist is a stark reminder: Biden’s DOJ is fully weaponized against pro-life American citizens, and they are using the FACE Act to do it,” said Roy in a statement following Handy’s sentence. “House Republicans should defund the DOJ weaponization, repeal the FACE Act, and stand up for the freedoms that we campaign on.”
Handy is being represented by lawyers with the Thomas More Society, which said Tuesday that it is preparing to proceed with an appeal seeking to overturn her conviction and challenge the constitutionality of the FACE Act.
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Australian Leftist PM says Leftist senator Fatima Payman’s use of Israel ‘genocide’, ‘river to the sea’ was inappropriate
Another Muslim bigot
Anthony Albanese says it’s “not appropriate” a WA Labor senator used a controversial chant when she broke ranks with the government’s position on Palestine, as the Coalition heaps on pressure on him to “take action” against her.
Fatima Payman on Wednesday accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and questioned how many more deaths would be needed before the Prime Minister declared “enough”.
In a significant split from the Labor Party’s position, the Muslim senator called for sanctions and divestment from Israel, and declared “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a phrase Mr Albanese has previously condemned as a violent opposition to a two-state solution.
She said the phrase was a call for “freedom from the occupation, freedom from the violence, and freedom from the inequality”.
Senator Payman criticised Mr Albanese and her Labor colleagues for failing to condemn Israel and “stand up for what is right”, accusing her government’s leaders of making “performative gestures” while defending the “oppressor’s right to oppress”.
Mr Albanese on Thursday morning was asked if he had spoken to Senator Payman since she made the comments, to which he gave an emphatic “no”.
He said he did speak to her regularly, as he does all his Labor Party colleagues, and their last conversation was “very pleasant”.
But he said her use of the politically charged phrase was “not appropriate” and did not reflect the Labor Party’s position.
“What is appropriate is a two-state solution, where both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to live in security and peace and prosperity,” he told ABC Radio.
“It is not in the interests of either Israelis or Palestinians to advocate there just be one state. That is a forerunner of enormous conflict and grief.”
Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the Prime Minister “has to take action”, noting Senator Payman had “laid down the gauntlet” to Mr Albanese.
“She’s used a phrase the Prime Minister himself has agreed is a violent statement. She’d endorsed the phrase, and in the Prime Minister’s own analysis, people who make this statement are in opposition to a two-state solution,” Senator Paterson told Sky.
“She’s not just undermined decades of bipartisan foreign policy, she’s undermined decades of Labor Party policy.
“The Prime Minister has said this phrase has no place in Australia. Surely he cannot (have) a member of his caucus saying this.”
Senator Payman gave a statement to a small selection of media on Wednesday on Nakba day – the anniversary of Israel’s 1948 establishment – where she acknowledged there was “disillusionment” in the community with the political parties.
“Today, more than ever, is the time to speak the truth – the whole truth – with courage and clarity,” she told SBS News and Capital Brief.
“My conscience has been uneasy for far too long. And I must call this out for what it is. This is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise.”
Mr Albanese said the scenes coming out of Gaza were “very traumatic”, but said Jewish Australians were also experiencing “a lot of trauma” due to rising anti-Semitism.
“People who happen to be Jewish are being held responsible here for the actions of the Netanyahu government. I don’t believe that is appropriate,” he said.
Senator Paterson said Senator Payman’s call for Australia to end trade with Israel especially at a time of rising anti-Semitism would “further undermine and test social cohesion”.
Former Labor minister and ALP Friends of Israel co-convener Mike Kelly labelled Senator Payman’s comments “disappointing” and “completely wrong”, while opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham said the slogan had “no place” being uttered by members of the government.
Jewish leaders have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the “river to the sea” chant, which they argue calls for the destruction of Israel.
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15 May, 2024
I broke an 'unspoken rule' while ordering at a café and now my wife won't speak to me
It is not clear where this happened but I suspect Britain. I have been eatng out for over 60 years and always order my drink and food together. And I have never heard of this "rule". But almost all my dining has been in Australia. I in fact usually order my food first and as soon as the server has taken that down, they ask: "and what do you want to drink?"
A husband has revealed the 'innocent' comment that got him in hot water with his wife - and she refused to speak to him for two days afterwards.
The couple went to a café for brunch but he never expected his request to order food and coffee at the same time would see him labelled 'arrogant' and 'selfish'.
'It wasn't an evening meal to sit back and enjoy the experience; it was a place to get some food, hang with my wife and catch up, then go to work. Nothing fancy,' he said on Reddit.
The man and his wife had already discussed what they wanted to eat, so he told the waitress they were ready to order food when she came up to them.
'The waitress hesitated and said that they were supposed to only take food orders after the drinks had been delivered. But I asked to order at the same time because I had to get to work and I knew what I wanted - I didn't even need a menu,' he said.
The waitress eventually took their orders and left, which caused the man to turn to his wife and share his thoughts on the bizarre policy.
'I always order both at the same time and wait until the food comes to sip my drink. It's also a shorter time from arrival to leaving as I order as soon as I get there rather than being made to wait ten extra minutes.'
However, his wife saw red.
'My wife called me arrogant for [ordering coffee and breakfast at the same time]. She's a waitress and said what I did meant I was jumping the queue and making others wait for their food longer,' he said.
'I said I wasn't jumping any queue as if there were others who hadn't ordered yet, they weren't in line. I didn't demand my food be made before everyone else. I just wanted to be in and out of the café as fast as possible to get to work.
'My wife was furious I didn't see it the same way. I think I'm ordering my food and waiting for it, but saving myself ten unnecessary minutes.'
Still, the couple couldn't see eye-to-eye on the matter.
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California High-Speed Rail Celebrates Completing Bridge to Nowhere
Unbelievable
If critics wanted proof California’s bullet train is a zombie project, they got it straight from California’s High-Speed Rail’s publicity department last week.
A zombie project occurs when government officials refuse to acknowledge that their ambitions have failed. Instead of killing the project because it has become a monstrous waste, they pump more and more money into it. They do that even though they know that throwing good money after bad is a sure recipe for fiscal disaster. They do it because they aren’t willing to admit their failures and because they personally benefit from the wasteful spending.
In the case of California’s zombie bullet train project, the state government’s central planners have been fighting reality itself. That makes California High-Speed Rail’s latest publicity effort to celebrate their “success” stand out. Here’s what they tweeted on X on May 1, 2024:
The pictured Fresno River Viaduct is an impressive concrete structure. It is indeed one of the zombie bullet train project’s first completed high-speed rail structures. A structure featured on Wikipedia, complete with photos of it “nearing completion” in 2017. California High-Speed Rail’s tweet is celebrating an over six-year old achievement.
Does that sound like a healthy construction project making lots of visible progress? Or does that sound like California High-Speed Rail is digging up old stories to make it seem like they are?
If you look closely at the photos, you’ll see some other tip-offs that things are going as well for it as they want it to appear. The viaduct doesn’t connect to anything on either of its ends, making it not a bridge to the future, but a bridge to nowhere. Nor is there any evidence of any current construction to connect it to anywhere in the photos.
Running Out of Taxpayer Money
It also doesn’t help that the project, already billions over budget and years behind schedule, is running out of taxpayer money—again.
California’s high speed rail authority’s business plans include requesting the state deploy its rainy day funds to plug an $8 to $10 billion funding gap. Due to population decline, ridership estimates declined over the past year for the main Los Angeles to San Francisco segment from 31.3 million per year to 28.4 million per year.
The San Francisco to Anaheim high speed rail plan, approved by voters in 2008 with a $9.95 billion bond, is expected to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes via high speed rail. The California High Speed Rail Authority estimates this project will cost between $89 and $128 billion and may be complete by 2040.
The initial Merced to Bakersfield 171 mile segment is estimated to cost between $30 and $33 billion and be completed between 2030 and 2033. $18 billion has already been spent on the total HSR project, including securing land and environmental approvals for the project—422 of 463 miles of the train between downtown San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles have already been cleared....
However, with a major funding gap, and a sunset of California’s cap-and-trade program in 2030—“the only means of ongoing state funding” for the project, the financial future of even the first operating segment is in jeopardy.
Does that sound like a well-managed state government project? Or does it sound more like the plot for a really bad movie featuring slow-moving zombies that won’t die?
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Arizona Should Not Look to California for Housing Solutions
“Don’t California my Arizona”—these words can be found on everything from T-shirts to tire covers. The slogan speaks to the fear that the Californians fleeing to Arizona will bring with them the very policies that propelled their exodus.
California’s housing shortage tops the list of troubles that Arizonans wish to avoid. The cost of a home in Phoenix is still modest compared to, say, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but the lack of affordable housing is nonetheless a growing crisis in Arizona’s capital. If legislators are hoping to save Arizona from California’s failures, why are they trying to replicate its policies?
The Arizona House of Representatives recently passed House Bill 2815, affectionately nicknamed the “Yes In God’s Backyard” (YIGBY) bill. It replicates California’s SB 4, which seeks to make it easier to build affordable housing on lands owned by religious institutions.
Don’t get me wrong—both YIGBY bills would loosen zoning and eliminate discretionary permits for qualifying projects. Onerous zoning and permitting policies are the primary culprits behind California’s high housing costs, and they ought to be liberalized, if not eliminated.
When I wrote about California’s SB 4 for The Orange County Register, I argued that these provisions constitute a tacit admission that zoning and permitting reform are vital to solving the housing crisis. So why does the legislature limit these reforms to certain landholdings?
Put differently, we might ask why Arizona is following California’s practice of granting rights discriminately to privileged groups instead of extending equal rights to all citizens?
Even worse, Arizona’s YIGBY bill also seeks to impose some of California’s most counterproductive housing regulations by requiring every qualifying development to reserve at least 40% of units for low-income housing. This policy, known as “inclusionary zoning,” allows developers to build higher-density residential structures if they cap the rent on some of the units.
California cities began enthusiastically adopting inclusionary-zoning policies in the 1970s, and it has continued to double down on these requirements for the past half-century. Yet housing costs in California are higher than ever, and affordable units remain so scarce that college students sleep in their cars.
Economic research repeatedly finds that inclusionary zoning is not merely ineffective, but actually exacerbates the shortage of affordable housing. The studies show that the cost of affordability mandates outweighs the benefits of upzoning, leading to the construction of fewer affordable units than in areas that were upzoned without strings. The studies also reveal that even high-income housing developments make all housing more affordable by creating vacancies in the existing stock.
Arizona’s YIGBY bill, in short, reflects the irrational habit among lawmakers of addressing problems by duplicating the policies of states where those problems are most acute.
Arizona must instead start learning from those areas of the country where housing is more affordable, not less. Rather than modeling solutions on the recent reforms of failed states, we should follow the blueprint provided by the longstanding policies of places that have kept housing prices below the national average.
Houston is the perfect example to look to when crafting reforms. It has long been among the most affordable major cities for housing, despite rapid population growth, because it never adopted zoning and it issues by-right permits within 10 days of receiving an application.
If Arizona truly wants to solve its housing crisis, the legislature should require cities to dramatically liberalize their zoning and building regulations and provide a simple, transparent, and expeditious system of by-right permitting—for everybody, not just churches. It must also resist the temptation to burden these reforms with impractical affordability requirements that have long proven to do more harm than good. California should be an example to avoid, not imitate.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14924&omhide=true&trk=title
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The (Other) Cost of Inflation
Across the world, people are struggling under the specter of inflation.
In Venezuela, the inflation rate is 360 percent. In Argentina, it’s 160 percent. In Turkey, inflation is about 50 percent, about 10 percent higher than its neighbor Iran.
In Europe, inflation of the euro has finally cooled to about 3 percent, down from more than 10 percent a year ago. Canada and the United States have witnessed a similar pattern.
Even if Europe and North American countries can continue to rein in inflation — and that’s a very big if — the consequences of governments’ inflationary policies have already been realized. The value of people’s earnings and savings has been severely (and likely permanently) eroded.
The depreciation of real income causes serious pain for consumers and families, particularly poorer families who spend a higher percentage of their income on food and housing, commodities that tend to be disproportionately impacted by inflation.
“Lower-income households experienced above-average inflation because of their higher proportional spending on food and housing, categories for which prices were rising more rapidly at the time (especially during 2020, with the onset of the pandemic),” a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York concluded earlier this year.
While the pernicious effects of inflation have been exhaustively detailed in recent years, one effect of inflation has received little attention: its impact on morality.
‘During Every Great Inflation’
The idea that inflation could affect morality might sound strange to some readers; It certainly did to me when I first heard the hypothesis. Yet, one of the most famed economic writers in history saw a clear link between inflationary policy and corruption (both public and private).
“During every great inflation there is a striking decline in both public and private morality,” Henry Hazlitt, the author of Economics in One Lesson, once observed.
One of the authorities Hazlitt cites is the historian Andrew Dickson White (1832–1932), author of Fiat Money Inflation in France. White, an abolitionist and graduate of Yale University who cofounded Cornell University weeks after the conclusion of the Civil War, had a deep interest in monetary policy and French history.
During his European travels, which stretched back to before the American Civil War, he collected an impressive array of primary sources from Revolutionary France — “newspapers, reports, speeches, pamphlets, illustrative material of every sort, and, especially, specimens of nearly all the Revolutionary issues of paper money” — which he used to publish his book in 1912.
In his work, White discusses how money printing in France led to not just monetary decay, but moral decay, and explains how it happened:
Out of the inflation of prices grew a speculating class; and, in the complete uncertainty as to the future, all business became a game of chance, and all businessmen, gamblers. In city centers came a quick growth of stockjobbers and speculators; and these set a debasing fashion in business which spread to the remotest parts of the country….In this mania for yielding to present enjoyment rather than providing for future comfort were the seeds of new growths of wretchedness: luxury, senseless and extravagant, set in. This, too, spread as a fashion. To feed it, there came cheatery in the nation at large and corruption among officials and persons holding trusts. While men set such fashions in private and official business, women set fashions of extravagance in dress and living that added to the incentives to corruption…
Harvard Researchers: ‘A Positive Relationship Between Corruption and Inflation’
White’s book, which is freely available online courtesy of Project Gutenberg, is worth reading for anyone interested in history or monetary policy. While I find his thesis persuasive — White offers copious examples to show how loose money creates loose behavior — many readers will argue there’s an obvious problem: It’s unfalsifiable.
In one sense, they have a point.
While there’s no shortage of academics who argue morality can be measured — see Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory and the Schwartz Value Survey — I’m skeptical that humans can agree on a universal moral code, let alone accurately quantify morality in human populations.
Still, like just about anything, morality can be studied, and empirical evidence can be gathered. And there’s persuasive evidence that supports the idea that inflation corrupts.
For example, a prominent 2004 study conducted by Harvard researchers Miguel Braun and Rafael Di Tella found that higher levels of inflation variability tend to lead to more government corruption (and less capital investment).
“We document a positive relationship between corruption and inflation variability in a sample of 75 countries,” the authors wrote.
‘A Nursery of Tyranny, Corruption, and Delusion’
Corruption is just one way to measure public morality, of course. Crime levels are another.
The hyperinflation Weimar Germany (1918–33) experienced during the early 1920s is well known. Less well known is the surge in crime during the inflationary period, though it’s something Hazlitt discussed.
“It is no coincidence that crime rose sharply during the German inflation,” he wrote. “On the basis of 1882=100, the crime rate, which stood at an index number of 117 in 1913, rose to 136 in 1921 and 170 in 1923. It declined again in 1925, when the inflation was over, to 122.”
The rise in crime, however, was just one example of a much broader collapse in virtue and stability during the Weimar period. The historian Richard Evans touched on this topic in his 2005 book The Coming Third Reich:
Money, income, financial solidarity, regularity, economic order, and predictability had been at the heart of the bourgeois values and bourgeois existence before the war. A widespread cynicism began to make itself apparent in Weimar culture… It was not least as a consequence of the inflation that Weimar culture developed its fascination with criminals, embezzlers, gamblers, manipulators, thieves and crooks of all kinds. Life seemed to be a game of chance, survival a matter of the arbitrary impact of incomprehensible economic forces.
Evans’s description of the consequences of inflationary policy is but a longer, more artful version of that offered by the esteemed French statesman Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau, who at the dawn of the French Revolution warned, in a private letter, that inflationary policy was “a nursery of tyranny, corruption, and delusion.”
Mirabeau was right, but this didn’t stop him from pushing paper notes to finance public works while a Member of the Constituent Assembly, a policy that no doubt contributed to France’s descent into tyranny.
Mirabeau died of pericarditis early in 1791 at just 42 years of age, not long after yielding to pressure to pass a paper-money scheme. He never witnessed the full tyranny he predicted (and his own policies helped bring about): the Reign of Terror.
‘Developed in Obedience to Natural Laws’
White’s point is that the tyranny in France did not come about accidentally. It stemmed directly from its monetary policy.
Figures from the French Revolution are hard to come by (especially if you don’t read French), but a new paper published in European Economic Review described France’s monetary policy as “an explosion of paper money called the assignat,” which resulted in a hyperinflation Europe would not experience again until the twentieth century.
White goes so far as to suggest that the horrors of the French Revolution were an unavoidable consequence of France’s inflationary policies.
“Thus was the history of France logically developed in obedience to natural laws,” he writes.
This is similar to Hazlitt’s thesis that bad money will inevitably result in bad behavior. This might be a tough thesis to swallow — particularly for those who live in the age of fiat money — but other historical examples are easily found. Henry VIII’s lavish lifestyle and many wars were enabled by expansionary monetary policy — what historians refer to as The Great Debasement. Even the Bible hints at a link between inflation and moral decay.
“Your silver has become dross, your best wine mixed with water,” the Prophet Isaiah chided (1:22).
Isaiah was preaching at a time during which the people of Israel, particularly its leaders, were morally wretched, or so we’re led to believe.
I’ll leave it an open question for readers to decide whether the United States’ own expansion of the money supply has resulted in a collapse of private and public morality. Though I’ll point out that Hazlitt, writing during the Carter administration, argued that the rise of public immorality was already well underway, and that it stemmed directly from its debauched currency.
I also suspect that White, if the great scholar was alive today, would look at American society — its endless wars, public corruption, and questionable taxpayer-funded initiatives — and simply say, “I told you so.”
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/05/14/other-cost-inflation/
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14 May, 2024
A wonderful example of an angry lady
It was at a High School LaCrosse match in Utah
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Time is running out for Congress to fix the looming financial insolvency of Social Security, the program's own trustees say
In just nine years, the oldest Gen Xers will reach Social Security’s normal retirement age of 67. But they will have a rude awakening when they learn that the program’s trust fund is empty, leaving it able to pay out only as much in benefits as it takes from the paychecks of those then working.
That’s straight from the Social Security trustees 2024 report. It also notes that without congressional action, benefits will have to be cut by 21% across the board—including for those already retired—beginning in 2033.
Cuts or Taxes
For the average beneficiary, who receives about $22,000 a year from Social Security, that 21% cut will translate into a loss of $4,600 per year. As Social Security benefits will grow faster than payroll taxes for the foreseeable future, benefit cuts will reach 31% at the end of the trustees’ 75-year projections.
Simply maintaining currently scheduled Social Security benefits would require large tax increases. The program’s trustees estimate that payroll taxes would have to rise immediately from 12.4% to 15.7%, adding $2,500 to the median household’s annual Social Security taxes.
Even that projected hike may be too conservative. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 17.5% tax, or an extra $3,800 per year for the median family, is necessary to maintain current Social Security benefits.
Such high tax rates are a far cry from Social Security’s original intent. The program started out as a 2% tax, and its founders promised it would never take more than 6% of workers’ paychecks.
And for a program that currently replaces about 40% of workers’ earnings during retirement (and will decline to 32% beginning in 2033), the current 12.4% tax is a hefty price to pay. If workers invested that amount in a conservative mix of stocks and bonds, they should have enough at retirement to replace at least 75% of their earnings.
Even as Social Security was never intended to be the sole source of income in retirement, its rising taxes have made it increasingly difficult, particularly for lower- and middle-income workers, to save for retirement.
In fact, Social Security’s growing size and scope could be exacerbating wealth inequality because the hard truth is that Social Security is not a savings program, and workers have no ownership of the Social Security taxes they pay.
Despite Social Security’s original intent to be a predominantly prefunded and effectively a forced-savings program, it now functions as a pure intergenerational transfer program. That happened because Social Security’s benefits increased more than its tax hikes.
A Bad Deal
In every year since 2011, Social Security has paid out more in benefits than it has received in tax revenues. This means that workers’ payroll tax “contributions” aren’t saved and don’t earn a positive rate of return over time.
Although the formula that determines retirees’ benefits is based on what they paid in Social Security taxes, their actual benefits come directly from younger workers’ paychecks. After 2033, retirees’ benefits will be entirely dependent on how much future lawmakers are willing to extract from workers’ paychecks.
The fact that Social Security taxes aren’t saved makes the program a bad deal for most Americans. It can also exacerbate wealth inequality among low-income and minority Americans who have lower life expectancies.
One out of every four black men dies between the ages of 45 and 64, having paid tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in Social Security taxes. But because they have no ownership of their contributions, they and their family members receive little or nothing in return.
What could have been a $350,000 retirement account that a low-income worker would have to pass on to his family is often just a $255 death payment instead.
With less than a decade left before Social Security runs out of money and automatic 21% benefit cuts ensue, lawmakers must act now to prevent insolvency and to improve the program for future generations.
Some commonsense solutions include gradually shifting to a universal benefit based on years of work instead of total earnings, automatically updating the program’s eligibility age to align with changes in life expectancy, and using more accurate statistics to adjust benefits.
Not much time
These reforms would translate into bigger paychecks for all Americans by allowing Social Security’s tax rate to decline over time.
Moreover, if coupled with a personal ownership option, Social Security reform could help more Americans build wealth that could increase their retirement incomes and provide a leg up to help their children and grandchildren pursue goals like education, homeownership, or starting a small business.
Whatever lawmakers do, they must act soon. Time isn’t on our side.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/13/someones-going-have-pay-lot-your-social-security/
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Businesses Destroyed by Rampant Crime
The iconic Macy’s department store on Union Square in the heart of San Francisco is closing because of rampant theft and the societal rot that have infected the city.
The massive 400,000-square-foot flagship building, which anchors an entire side of Union Square, has been in business for more than 70 years at this spot, and Macy’s has been in San Francisco for more than 100 years.
Employees at the store told the Daily Mail that thieves take “at least four blazers, 10 wallets, and 20 packs of underwear every day.” Another employee said that thieves routinely steal “men’s Ralph Lauren Polo, women’s North Face, and Levi’s clothing.”
With dozens of store closures in and around Union Square, and the dangerous conditions caused by open-air drug use and mentally ill people living on the streets, fewer and fewer people come downtown to shop.
See the Daily Mail’s map of store closures.
The closures are caused in large part because of lax enforcement of petty-theft laws by rogue prosecutors George Gascon and Chesa Boudin, who served as district attorneys in San Francisco from 2011 to 2022.
Read more about their rogue pro-criminal, anti-victim policies here, here, and here. For a deeper dive, read our book, “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Cities.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/13/societal-rot-part-1-businesses-destroyed-rampant-crime/
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‘We Ceased Being a Democracy’: Former Australian PM Calls for COVID-19 Royal Commission
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has raised fears Australia could be placed under lockdown again if a full Royal Commission investigation into the pandemic response is not held.
Mr. Abbott, who served in the top job from 2013 to 2015, said Australia stopped being a democracy for a couple of years during the pandemic.
The former Liberal Party leader spoke to his former Chief of Staff Peta Credlin following the release of a submission from the former Liberal Health Minister Greg Hunt to the current government’s COVID-19 inquiry.
Then presiding federal health minister during the pandemic questioned the measures implemented by state and territory leaders at the time, who rolled out vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and domestic border closures
Mr. Abbott told Sky News Australia said the cure was worse than the disease.
“The policy to deal with COVID turned out to be far worse than the disease itself. And when you go back and look at this honestly and dispassionately, you'd have to say that the first mistake that governments made was throwing out the carefully prepared pandemic plans that we all had in panic in early March 2020 because of the dire photos coming out of overwhelmed Italian hospitals,” Mr. Abbott said.
“But I think that had a lot more to do with the Italian hospital system than it did with the severity of the disease itself.”
Mr. Abbott also echoed calls from several Australian senators for a Royal Commission, raising fears the country could experience lockdowns again.
“My fear is that without a fair dinkum Royal Commission-type inquiry into the whole response to COVID, next time a pandemic happens, and it will, we will take the over-the-top response to this one as the model for all future actions.” Mr. Abbott said.
“But the last thing we'd want to be is locked up for several years, again, in response to a disease that turned out to be relatively mild.”
While he supported the medical advice, Mr. Abbott felt this should not come at the expense of Australia’s democracy.
“I’m confident that inside the Coalition a lot of these issues would have been more debated than they seemed on the surface, but there’s no doubt for a period of time we ceased being a democracy and became a kind of a ‘doc-docracy,’” he said, in reference to the influence of doctors and medical experts on public policy.
“Now I am all in favour of taking expert advice seriously, but in the end, we’ve got to remain and open, transparent accountable democracy, and I am afraid we weren’t for a couple of years during the pandemic.”
Liberal National Party Senator Matt Canavan and One Nation Senators Malcolm Roberts and Pauline Hanson have pushed strongly for a COVID-19 Royal Commission, following news that the AstraZeneca vaccine was being withdrawn globally.
Despite calls for a Royal Commission, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese instead opted for a COVID-19 Response Inquiry to examine federal actions during the pandemic.
More than 2,000 submissions have been received so far, chaired by Robyn Kruk, as well as panel members Professor Catherine Bennett, and Dr. Angela Jackson.
Victoria’s Pandemic Restrictions Against Medical Advice: Hunt
Former Health Minister Hunt revealed in his submission that the then-Victorian government’s decision to restrict movement to five kilometre (3.1 miles) radius from home, and implement curfews went against medical advice.
Former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews introduced these measures during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns in metropolitan Melbourne.
However, Mr. Hunt said the curfews and restrictions were not subject to federal advice, or to the best of his knowledge, medical advice.
“National Cabinet developed a series of step-up and step-down distancing measures as part of the COVID Roadmap. This included nationally agreed restrictions on gatherings following medical advice,” Mr. Hunt said (pdf).
“Subsequent unilateral decisions of some states outside of the National Cabinet framework, such as Victoria’s curfews or five kilometre movement restrictions were not the subject of Commonwealth advice, and nor to the best of my knowledge has the medical advice for such restrictions been either released or affirmed at state level.”
In the future, Mr. Hunt recommended states commit “not to take unilateral decisions” against National Cabinet decisions unless there is published and signed medical advice to the contrary at the deputy chief health officer level or above.
He also suggested that a Memorandum of Understanding should be signed between the Commonwealth and states that commits to the continuous use of the National Cabinet for future pandemic management.
World’s Longest Locked Down City
During the pandemic, Melbourne became one of the world’s longest locked-down cities.
“The strengthened settings will see a curfew imposed from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. every night. There will be increased police presence across metropolitan Melbourne to ensure public health measures are enforced,” the former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said in August 2021.
“Exercise and shopping are still limited to five kilometres from your home. If there’s no shops in your five kilometre radius, you can travel to the ones closest to you. You are also able to travel more than five kilometres to get a vaccine if you need to.”
Mr. Andrews said at the time that the restrictions were hard work for every Victorian, but the rules were in place for a reason.
“Everyone wants this pandemic to be over, but the rules are in place for a reason—we know they work and if we follow them together, we’ll be able to lift them sooner,” he said at the time.
Economically the city and state continues to recover from the impact of lockdowns with 7,606 businesses de-registering from the state in 2022-23.
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13 May, 2024
Salt may increase risk of stomach cancer by 40%, study suggests
Groan! Another witless attack on salt below. The journal article is here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10120-024-01502-9
I have written previously on the salt phobia here:
http://jonjayray.com/short/salt.html
And here:
http://jonjayray.com/short/salt2.html
And here:
http://jonjayray.com/saltsum.html
And for what it is worth, I have always been a keen salt user but I had a gastroscopy recently which showed my stomach to be completely notmal, which is pretty good for an 80-year-old guy.
OK. On to the latest bit of nonsense. Once again it was an extreme-groups analysis in which they had to throw away half of their data to find something to talk about. So it seems probable that there was in fact NO significant linear relationship between illness and salt consupption.
And it's almost amusing that they found the association only with REPORTS of salt usage not with an estimate of actual salt usage. Bleah!
The one undisputable finding of salt research is that LOW salt can kill you. There is even a name for that: Hyponatremia
A new study might make you think twice before reaching for the salt shaker at your next meal.
Nutritionists from the Center for Public Health at the University of Vienna discovered that people from the UK who added salt to most of their meals were 41 percent more likely to develop stomach cancer than those who used the topping sparingly.
Previous studies in China, Japan and Korea have linked a salty diet to stomach cancer - but this is one of the first to show the link in Westerners.
Though the Austrian study was merely observational, older studies have suggested that excess salt might erode the protective coating on the stomach, causing damage to the tissue there and leading to cancerous mutations.
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You can't win: diet soft-drinks are just as likely to lead to heart problems as sugary ones
The hazard ratios were all very low, indicating that there was only a tiny chance of any of the drinks being responsible for anything. The lowest "risk" was for people who mainly drank pure fruit juice. My favourite drink is cold water, followed by iced coffe, followed by pure orange juice so I kinda liked this article. The journal article is here:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCEP.123.012145
Drinking artificially sweetened beverages, such as sodas and juices, has been linked to a slew of dangerous health conditions, the United Kingdom-based study has concluded this week.
Published in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, the research follows the drinking habits of roughly 202,000 adults aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, examining the results of a 24-hour diet questionnaire.
Specifically, the findings of the study suggest a strong correlation between adults drinking no to low-sugar beverages and their risk of developing atrial fibrillation.
According to the Heart Foundation, atrial fibrillation is the most common recurring arrhythmia found in clinical practice, prevalent in two to four per cent of the population in developed nations such as Australia.
Individuals who reported consuming more than two litres of artificially sweetened drinks in the 24-hour time period were found to have a 20 per cent higher chance of developing the condition (that’s roughly six standard cans).
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a serious cardiovascular disease defined by having a heartbeat that is too slow, too fast or irregular. Additionally, patients diagnosed with AF report symptoms such as lightheadedness, chest pain, extreme fatigue, and shortness of breath. Most notably, atrial fibrillation has been found to be the leading cause of stroke in the United States.
Additionally, the findings indicated that the individuals who reported consuming beverages with added sugars had an increased risk of the disease by up to ten per cent. On the flip side, consuming unsweetened juices, such as natural orange juice, was associated with a reduced risk of up to eight per cent.
“Our study’s findings cannot definitively conclude that one beverage poses more health risk than another due to the complexity of our diets and because some people may drink more than one type of beverage,” says lead study author Dr Ningjian Wang, a professor at the Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.
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Why the End of the Boy Scouts Matters
The Boy Scouts are no more. The organization, once well known for helping shape boys into good men, allowed girls to join in 2017. Now the group is going a step further, announcing its new name as of February will be Scouting America.
What a loss for Americans—both men and women.
In recent days, we’ve seen examples of good American men. Fraternity brothers at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill protected the American flag from pro-Palestinian protesters.
And Mario Torres, a 45-year-old custodian at Columbia University, said he tried to “protect the building”’ and ended up in a physical altercation with a protester. “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face,” Torres told The Free Press.
Unfortunately, though, our modern culture largely doesn’t value manly virtues—or men.
It would be one thing to see the further gender neutralizing of the Boy Scouts of America if the boys and men of America were thriving. But they are not.
Fewer men than women attend college. Among men deemed prime working age, those ages 25 to 54, 11.4% were not in the workforce as of 2022, according to the San Francisco Fed. That’s up from 5.8% in 1976.
“In 2020, only 25% of men ages 17-24 … qualified for military service; the majority were disqualified for being overweight, having issues with drug abuse, for mental health and medical/physical reasons, or for a combination of those factors,” writes Brenda Hafera, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Simon Center for American Studies.
The data doesn’t suggest that men are happy with the status quo. In the United States, around four times as many men die by suicide as women do. Men are two to three times as likely to die of a drug overdose than women. They’re also more likely to binge drink or be hospitalized in relation to alcohol use. Among men ages 18 to 45, a horrifying 44% have thought of suicide in the past two weeks, according to a 2023 Equimundo survey
“Many of the young men who came to see me were struggling,” writes Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in his book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” recalling his time working as law professor. “Some lacked confidence, some lacked direction; others could not seem to get motivated.”
“They were afraid to fail, to venture out and take a risk, but felt at the same time dissatisfied with their lives as they knew them,” Hawley continues. “One after another said … I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with my life. And yet they felt they were failing at whatever that was.”
Perhaps the politically correct expungement of male-only spaces is part of the reason why men are struggling so.
In recent decades, even as women-only spaces have remained popular (and accepted), male organizations have drifted into inclusivity. Richard V. Reeves, who heads the American Institute for Boys and Men, notes that that the Boys Clubs of America became co-ed in 1990. Reeves adds: “In 1978, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) banned all gender discrimination, and now focuses on the wellbeing of children, young people and the wider community with no specific orientation towards boys or men.” A total of 25 women’s colleges exist, but for men, only three single-sex colleges remain.
Why are we so against these men-only spaces?
As a woman, I’ve long valued female-only spaces. Attending a conservative Catholic college, I lived in a women-only dorm. Men darkened the doors only to fix things and even then, like lepers of old alerting townspeople with a bell, they had to bellow “man in the dorm” at regular intervals to make clear their intrusion.
It was fantastic: The dorm truly became a refuge, a place where I and other women were free to commiserate, study, and have fun together in a way many of our romance-addled brains could not quite manage when our crushes were potentially present.
Post-college, I’ve appreciated girls’ nights and girls’ trips with friends. I’ve been grateful for those moments of unique solidarity I’ve sometimes found with female colleagues, some of them fellow journalists.
Why should men be denied these joys, these delightful moments of shared understanding and interests?
Furthermore, there’s real evidence that the Boy Scouts, in its male-only incarnation, did help boys become good men. In 2012, Baylor University researchers compared Eagle Scouts—the highest level of Boy Scouts—to non-scouts and found that Eagle Scouts were:
34% more likely to have donated to a nonreligious charity in the past month.
53% more likely to have donated to a religious charity.
62% more likely to have volunteered for a nonreligious organization.
56% more likely to have worked with a neighbor to address a problem or improve the community.
55% more likely to have held a leadership position in their workplace.
In addition to these findings, which showed how Eagle Scouts truly contribute to their communities, Baylor researchers also found evidence that Eagle Scouts enjoyed better social relationships than their peers. Compared to non-scouts, Eagle Scouts were 38% more likely to be close with siblings, 37% more likely to be close with friends, and 87% more likely to belong to four or more groups.
That’s important—because too many men these days lack crucial social support.
Among men, 15% had no close friends in 2021, up from 3% who said so in 1990. That’s significantly higher than the percentage of women who say they have no close friends (10%), according to The Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Over half of men are unhappy with the size of their friend circle.
About a quarter of younger men (ages 18 to 45) said they saw no friends or family during the past week, and 22% said they had no one locally they are close to or could depend on, according to a 2023 Equimundo survey. Almost half of these younger men said they found their online lives more fulfilling than their actual lives, while about 60% said they viewed porn once or more a week.
So, sure, let’s kill one organization that had successfully helped men socialize with each other.
Of course, the Boy Scouts of America isn’t a perfect organization. The revelations about the organization’s sexual abuse crisis have been horrifying. Far too many boys weren’t protected from predators. A lawsuit was settled for $850 million in 2022 after tens of thousands of men said they had been abused as Boy Scouts.
And although the Boy Scouts laudably resisted much of the woke culture longer than many, they too waved the white flag. In 2011, Kathleen Arnn, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, compared the 2009 Boy Scout Handbook with the original from 1910.
“[D]ecades of aggressive political correctness have had their effect, and the Scouts have lost some of the confident American boyishness that loves heroes and makes for heroes,” wrote Arnn.
The original Boy Scott Handbook told boys: “A good Scout must be chivalrous” and “[H]e should be as manly as the knights or pioneers of old. He should be unselfish. He should show courage. He must do his duty.”
The handbook also profiled American heroes, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, and even Betsy Ross.
But by 2009, the “chapter on Chivalry has been completely removed,” wrote Arnn, adding: “American heroes, so numerous and colorful in the original handbook, are almost absent. Washington and Lincoln are each mentioned one time.”
Perhaps someone can resurrect a new version of the old Boy Scouts, complete with the old handbook. Or start an entirely new organization, one that cultivates manly virtues in a boys-only space.
But what’s clear is we need to do more to support our boys and men. No (sane) feminist benefits when men fail; this isn’t a zero-sum game. Both men and women lead happier lives when men are living up to their potential, holding down jobs, and being great husbands and dads.
Our current society isn’t working for men. It’s time to change it—and bring back, for both boys and men, male-only spaces where they can connect and, hopefully, flourish.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/11/a-womans-plea-bring-back-the-boy-scouts/
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Leftists want to force their faith on Christians
A religious civil war is raging but only one side understands that it is a battle over theology.
At stake is whether the ascendant state morality will drive deeper into the ancient institutions of faith and force believers to submit to its temporal commandments.
Nationally, the Australian Law Reform Commission’s final report on religious exemptions from anti-discrimination law is just another sortie in a long campaign over what the state will allow you to believe and how far it is prepared to go to force apostates to heel.
Queensland’s proposed anti-discrimination bill also seeks to narrow the rights of the faithful. Alex Deagon, from Queensland University of Technology, argues it will “significantly undermine the ability of religious organisations to employ persons in accordance with their faith”.
The ALRC admits one of its recommendations may limit “the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others, and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of one’s children in conformity with one’s own convictions”. This, it says, is balanced by the overall effect, which “would be to maximise the realisation of human rights”.
The ALRC wants section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act, which allows religious schools to hire those whose lives and ideas accord “with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed”, to be abolished.
When you lose the freedom to manifest your faith, abide by your beliefs and the liberty to ensure your children are educated in your creed, what is left? The commission is erasing the right of a religious school to organise around its own ethos.
This is an extreme form of laicism, driven by a fierce “progressive” crusade against Christianity. In a multifaith society that means all believers are on this battlefield, as the institutions of government are mobilised against them. Like many things dubbed progressive, it is the latest incarnation of the despotic tendencies of the Bureautoracy (n): the ubiquitous, unelected technocratic blob bent on imposing its notion of utopia on the mob. Its relentlessly mutating dogma has spread like Paterson’s curse through all the institutions.
In a profound irony we are witnessing the final metamorphosis of Christianity as zealots torch the last idol: belief in a power that transcends the state.
The child has turned on a parent it does not recognise because the source code of this secular faith is the notion of universal human rights. That idea was born with the belief that each individual is valued by God, an avowedly Christian concept and part of a set of revolutionary beliefs that the early faithful simply called “The Way”.
Warnings religion’s role in Australia is ‘under attack’
Universal equality is captured in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Another epoch-changing idea rings from the first sentences of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word (logos). And the word was with God. And the word was God.”
The New Testament was written in Greek and logos means both word and reason. So, in the Christian tradition, God is reason itself. Christianity is the singular encounter between Greek philosophy and Jewish mysticism, the marriage of reason and faith. The theology that evolved was a thoroughly different way of thinking. Let’s call it wisdom.
This wisdom elevated the poor, the meek, the righteous, the merciful and peacemakers. Faith in God demands you “treat others as you would like them to treat you”, and not to act with reason is contrary to the nature of God.
Christianity is born in the East, informed by the West and takes on its historically decisive character in Europe. Europe is defined by its faith and its faith is defined by reason. Faith and reason set Europe on the road to liberal democracy.
Through all its failures, and its many crimes, reason pushes the West forward and demands that it learn and evolve. And the excesses of both church and state always had to contend with its Christian conscience.
The savage colonisation of the Americas was fiercely denounced by Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, the evil of slavery collapsed when it confronted the faith of William Wilberforce. Despite often spectacularly failing to abide by its ideals, Christianity demanded the West slowly bend towards realising the radical demand of the central tenet of its faith. The new commandment to “love one another” excludes no one.
As historian Tom Holland demonstrates in his epic work Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society that is utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”
It is, of course, a heritage that the zealots of the New Way deny. To them their belief system is self-evident because it just is. It is neutral. It is agnostic. That is a delusion. The New Way exhibits some of the best and all the worst features of a proselytising religion. It looks to uplift, to guide, to build a better, more just world. It is also deeply intolerant of dissent and has established the institutions of inquisition to police heresy, in state and federal human rights commissions.
It’s hard to criticise anti-discrimination laws but the growth of objective penalties for subjective crimes should trouble those who care about liberal democracy. Such penalties are how American journalist Robert Wargas defines totalitarianism.
What standards will be applied? The notion of transgender identity, for example, is a rapidly moving target. Even the Australian Human Rights Commission’s website admits the “terminology is strongly contested”.
So, this latest assault by the state on the faithful is a battle of competing theologies, as the disciples of Caesar seek to mount his image in every temple. And the insurgents know nothing of faith because, as anyone who has any dealings with religious schools knows, most have no desire to discriminate and are far more tolerant of difference than “progressives”.
What religious institutions don’t want is to be forced to submit to state diktats that deliberately undermine the ethos of their institution. Here let’s recall that the Labor Party pledge demands its members not be a part of any other organisation that is inimical to its ideals. Why shouldn’t religious schools enjoy the same right?
The arc of history has bent out of shape. Those who claim the heritage of reason have discounted the role of faith in their enlightenment. They discriminate and call it equality. They unreasonably seek to force the faithful to heel.
This is not wise.
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12 May, 2024
Fresh health warning over ultra-processed foods as 30-year study warns they marginally raise your risk of an early death
The academic source of the article below is:
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj-2023-078476
Its conclusions are utter rubbish, reflecting the biases of the authors rather than what their data shows. It is an extreme quartile study -- meaning that they had to throw away half of their data before they could show any correlations. And even then only very weak associations were shown in only some cases.
And given the large number of possible correlations examined, an experiment-wise error-rate approach to significance testing should have been used, as in a Bonferroni correction, which would have reduced ALL relationships in this study to a nullity.
The study is good evidence therefore that ultra-processed foods are NOT harmful to you. Pathetic!
Conservatives are used to Leftists ignoring facts in favour of their theories and epidemiologists are much the same. Both groups show a common human tendency to adopt simple generalizations to explain their world. Sadly for us all, reality is complex and unforgiving so simple theories can lead to conclusions that are radically contrary to the truth -- e.g. Affirmative action has not removed black failure and simple foods are not safer than complex ones
Eating too many ultra-processed foods (UPFs) may send you to an early grave, a study suggests.
Ready meals, fizzy drinks and ice creams appear to pose the greatest danger to human health.
Harvard University researchers tracked 115,000 healthy US adults over the course of three decades.
Four per cent more deaths occurred among participants who ate around seven servings of junk a day, compared against a group who ate half as much.
While the risk was only small, the team argued their findings echoed calls to limit certain types of UPFs.
The umbrella term is used to cover anything edible made with colourings, sweeteners and preservatives that extend shelf life.
Ready meals, ice cream and tomato ketchup are some of the best-loved examples of products that fall under the umbrella UPF term, now synonymous with foods offering little nutritional value.
They are different to processed foods, which are tinkered to make them last longer or enhance their taste, such as cured meat, cheese and fresh bread.
Yet dietitians argue this sweeping judgement wrongly fingers 'healthy' options like fish fingers and baked beans.
Ultra-processed foods, such as sausages, cereals, biscuits and fizzy drinks, are formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives.
They contain little or no unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as fruit, vegetables, seeds and eggs.
The foods are usually packed with sugars, oils, fats and salt, as well as additives, such as preservatives, antioxidants and stabilisers.
Ultra-processed foods are often presented as ready-to-consume, taste good and are cheap.
The new paper adds to growing evidence illustrating the health risks of UPFs, which have been vilified for decades over their observed links to cancer and dementia.
Over the 34-year follow-up period, the researchers recorded 48,193 deaths, including more than 13,000 due to cancer and just over 11,000 attributed to cardiovascular diseases.
However, no specific relationship between total UPF consumption and cancer or heart disease deaths was observed.
Instead, the elevated risk — amounting to an extra 64 deaths per every 100,000 person-years — was only seen for deaths from all causes.
They also found no link between premature death and condiments, sauces and savoury snacks.
Even with sugary drinks and ready meals, the risk was less pronounced after researchers factored in the overall diet quality of the participants, who were quizzed about their eating habits every four years.
The risk was up to 13 per cent for some UPFs.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, the scientists said: 'The findings provide support for limiting consumption of certain types of ultra-processed food for long term health.'
But experts today criticised the research.
Sir David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, said: 'This study shows weak associations of ultra-processed foods with overall mortality.'
Dietitian Dr Duane Mellor, spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, said: 'It is also noticeable that those who consumed most ultra-processed foods tended to eat few vegetables, fruit, legumes and wholegrain.
'It might not be as simple as that those who ate more ultra-processed foods are more likely to die earlier — it is quite possible that these foods might displace healthier foods from the diet.'
He added: 'Not all groups of UPFs are associated with the same health risks, with sugar and artificially sweetened drinks and processed meats being most clearly associated with risk of an early death.'
Professor Gunter Kuhnle, an expert in nutrition and food science at the University of Reading, said it was 'impossible to know how reliable the results are' because of how the study was carried out.
He said: 'Results, therefore, should be treated with a lot of caution. 'I don't think this study provides evidence suggesting limiting certain foods just because of their level of processing.
'Public health policy should be informed by evidence, and there is very good evidence about the health effects of foods based on their composition — which is largely confirmed by this study.
'In contrast, there is still virtually no robust evidence for an effect of 'ultra-processing' specifically on health.'
The UK is the worst in Europe for eating UPFs, which make up an estimated 57 per cent of the national diet.
They are thought to be a key driver of obesity, which costs the NHS around £6.5billion a year.
Often containing colours, emulsifiers, flavours, and other additives, they typically undergo multiple industrial processes which research has found degrades the physical structure of foods, making it rapid to absorb.
This in turn increases blood sugar, reduces satiety and damages the microbiome - the community of 'friendly' bacteria that live inside us and which we depend for good health.
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The People Setting America on Fire
Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed “autonomous zones,” clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish students, and issued demands for their universities to divest from Israeli “genocide.”
Politically, moreover, the protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.
Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7.
This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago.
Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades.
At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by antifa.
These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall.
Recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.
“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”
The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag.
On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.
These groups, Shideler says, typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies. “If you look at Fithian,” he says, “she has consulted with hundreds of groups on how to do these things: how to organize, how to protest, how to make sure your people don’t go to jail, how to help them once they’re in jail.”
There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs. This can create an impression of centralized planning. Shideler cites the matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, They all have the same tent!,” he says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So they all went out and bought the same tent.”
In fact, it is a mistake both to view the campus protests as a “student” movement and to regard the outsiders as “infiltrators” or somehow separate from the movement. Rather, student activists have been working together with outsiders, with whom they are linked via overlapping activist networks and nationwide organizations. The “student” revolts, in turn, exist on a continuum with the broader anti-Israel protest movement. The campus encampments, for instance, began immediately after the nationwide “economic blockade” on April 15, which saw protesters block the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and “flood” Wall Street in New York City. Calls to participate in the “A15 Action” were disseminated widely in anarchist and far-left networks, while Palestinian and Islamist groups—SJP, AMP, CAIR, and Within Our Lifetime—simultaneously called for an April 15 “Strike 4 Gaza.”
Given reporting that nationwide campus “liberation zones” and “encampments” were planned as early as November 2023, it seems likely that the timing of the university protests was decided by “the movement” well in advance.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/people-setting-america-on-fire-soros-tides-wespac
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What is Happening with the Catholic Vote? Polling Shows Biden’s Numbers Plummeting Especially with Hispanics
A brand-new study on Catholic voters has alarming news for President Joe Biden when it comes to courting the Catholic vote in November. Catholics – particularly Hispanic Catholics – are expressing a significant decline in support for Biden compared to four years ago.
According to an April 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center, former President Donald Trump now leads Biden among Catholics as a whole by twelve points, 55 percent to 43 percent. This marks a significant shift compared to 2020 when Trump won Catholics by a single percentage-point, 50 percent to 49 percent.
Hidden among this striking shift is the real group Biden has to worry about – Hispanic Catholics. White Catholics voted for Trump by a comfortable fifteen-point margin in 2020 and show a moderate increase in support for Trump now. However, Hispanic Catholics supported Biden by 41 points in 2020 but plan to split there votes nearly evenly in November.
Pew’s survey shows that Hispanic Catholics, who make up close to 40 percent of the American Catholic population, say they plan to support Biden in November by just two percentage points after supporting Biden by 41 points in 2020. Hispanic Catholics are now planning to support Biden by a razor thin margin of 49 percent to 47 percent, after supporting Biden by a margin of 67 percent to 26 percent in 2020.
According to Chad Pecknold, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America, Hispanic Catholics are shifting away from the Democratic Party, despite the left’s best attempts to court them. “They [Hispanic Catholics] were once reliable votes for Democrats, but they are now splitting down the middle”, Pecknold told the National Catholic Register. “What this suggests is that, despite their best attempts at buying their votes through political favors, Democrats are losing one of the identity groups they’ve worked hardest at keeping.”
As Hispanic Catholics have made a pivotal turn away from Biden in the last four years, white Catholics have further consolidated behind Trump. According to Pew’s survey on how Catholics plan to vote in November, Trump secures around 61 percent of white Catholics to Biden’s 38 percent.
While recent polls shows that economic issues in particular are pushing Hispanics and blue-collar voters away from Biden, social issues also play a significant role when it comes to the Catholic vote.
Catholics are less likely to support the left-wing cultural agenda, opposing both transgender ideology, abortion, and same-sex marriage at high rates according to survey data. A 2022 poll from RealClear Opinion Research found that Catholics hold distinctly traditional views on a wide range of social issues including abortion, transgender ideology, and parents’ rights in education.
The survey found a full 82 percent of likely Catholic voters support some form or abortion restrictions, and 58 percent reject the idea of forcing doctors to perform procedures which violate their moral convictions, including abortion.
On transgender issues, American Catholics are significantly opposed to forcing biological males into female environments. Sixty-seven percent of Catholic voters reject the idea of biological males competing against biological females in school sports, and 67 percent reject allowing transgender males to use girls’ bathrooms and showers.
The Catholic population as a whole firmly believes that parents’ rights should be respected regarding the curriculum their children are taught as well. The Real Clear survey shows that 90 percent of Catholic voters say parents deserve more information on what their children are learning in school, and 65 percent believe parents deserve to play a role in deciding what is taught in public schools.
It is important to note that regular church attendance among Catholics is highly predictive of holding more conservative social views, and the opposite is true as well. Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey of American Catholics finds that those who attend church at least weekly are significantly less likely to favor the church recognizing LGBTQ marriages or encouraging women to become priests.
Practicing Catholics who attend church at least weekly say by a 32-point margin, 65 percent to 33 percent, that the church should not recognize gay marriage. Less-practicing Catholics who attend church less than weekly say the exact opposite. By a 24-point margin, 61 percent to 37 percent, those who attend church less than weekly say the church should recognize gay marriage.
The Biden Administration’s corrosive social agenda, driven by the most radical elements of the cultural left, is turning off a variety of voters, including independents, swing voters, parents, and Hispanics. Hispanic Catholics are further distancing themselves from the left after favoring Biden by double-digits in 2020. The radical left’s transgender ideology, infiltration of the school system against the will of parents, and violent abortion agenda is only further isolating Catholics from the Democratic Party.
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How did our anti-racist left become so openly anti-Jew?
I have never before felt shame in my country. Frustration, irritation and incomprehension, occasionally, but never shame.
Now I am ashamed of our opportunist anti-Semitism, cynically tolerating Hamas murders by weaponising the appalling plight of ordinary Palestinians in Gaza. I am ashamed of fellow citizens, openly or snidely anti-Jew; of universities too frightened to let Jews speak; and Pontius Pilate governments, washing their hands of dead Jews out of political convenience or fear.
What really bemuses me is that modern anti-Semitism in Australia comes from the left when it traditionally has been a product of the populist right. After all, Adolf Hitler was no social liberal.
But our own Jew-baiters now cluster visibly on the left. Bits of the Labor Party, various trade unions and innumerable faux-Trotskyist committees peddle propaganda, supposedly just anti-Israel but founded in a deeper racial and religious loathing. Most visibly the correct thought that offspring of privilege demonstrate enjoyably on university campuses, routinely eliding the old convenient distinction between Israel and Jewry.
This progressive anti-Semitism is easy to observe but much harder to explain. Why are people who endlessly propound human rights, revile racism and foster gender diversity so negatively obsessed – at best – with one of the smallest, historically most persecuted minorities in the world?
Part of understanding is to accept that, while Australia and its British tradition have inflicted less persecution on Jews than almost any other Western society, our record is not perfect. Way back, the Plantagenet kings milked, murdered and banished Jews. The Victorians who produced our liberal Constitution also manufactured that Semitic monster Fagin.
But in the new colonies of Australia anti-Semitism was beside the point. The troops were much more worried about Indigenous guerrillas, convicts and the feckless Irish. They may not positively have liked Jews but had little interest or energy to persecute them.
Famously, by the 1930s Australia had enjoyed a Jewish army commander in John Monash, a Jewish chief justice of the High Court in Isaac Isaacs, and a Jewish governor-general, also the irrepressible Isaacs. What was left was a limited, legacy anti-Semitism. Some people thought the Jews were too clever, too grasping, too sharp. But as the nation developed, it became reprehensible to talk like this. Good, ordinary people were not even passive anti-Semites.
A critical factor here was the Holocaust. The two Great Generations saw its consequences live on horrific newsreels. They were revolted beyond revulsion. They passed their horror to their children, and they to theirs. Anti-Semitism was a brand name for mass murder. But, incredibly, even the Holocaust has faded. A 66-year-old Australian (like me) was born only a decade and a bit after Auschwitz, and was minutely instructed in its meaning. Younger millennials were born 50 years after the Holocaust. It is remote history, not part of ethical family upbringing.
The consequence is that younger people do not understand the Jews as a nation reared in utter horror. They are just another minority, to be liked or deprecated as circumstances demand. Which contributes to our current confronting circumstances.
A pro-Israel protest at Sydney University to address the safety of Jewish students. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Swift
A pro-Israel protest at Sydney University to address the safety of Jewish students. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Swift
First, anti-Semitism is entrenched in the left as an instinctive, sometimes unwitting default position. Second, with the horrific chaos in Gaza, anti-Semitism suddenly is chic. People now routinely utter race libels that until recently would have had them ejected from any decent cocktail party. Correspondingly, anyone contradicting them will be abused or frozen into silence. Third, and chillingly, anti-Semitism is strongest among those who are young, trendy and left.
The same university students who ostentatiously agonise over climate change and social housing protest about the Jews. They do this through a self-confirming lens on the horrors of Gaza. If questioned, they smile pityingly, wave their banners and move on to the couscous. As the mayor of Gomorrah doubtless remarked on that fatal night, what on earth is going on? When did being left mean being an anti-Semite?
One obvious point is that if the state of Israel is conflated with the Jews, both are natural targets of the left as proxies for the US. Rent-a-Trots wanting to condemn the evils of modern liberal capitalism can take Israel and its difficulties as a bitter case in point.
Interestingly, the old nostrum that “I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel” seems to be waning. In the current Gazan atmosphere of fear and loathing, the claim is not only implausible but unnecessary. Casual anti-Semitism is the new black.
The other odd thing about targeting Israel as the servant of the Great Satan is that other running dogs receive far less attention. Washington has numerous client states around the world. What, other than the obvious, automatically selects Israel?
For many years Israel could counter this type of argument with an entirely different narrative. What we saw was a band of plucky Jews in army uniforms, repeatedly invaded by bully larger nations, yet invariably victorious in improbable circumstances. But as Israel has succeeded, not only militarily but economically, its status as a David against Goliath has dissipated. As demonstrated in Gaza, right or wrong, Israel is a superpower in the Middle East. Yes, it is beset by intractable enemies such as Iran, and yes, groups such as Hamas are vicious murderers who hold the whole Palestinian people as hostages. But Israel as the underdog is a slogan that no longer flies.
The reality of Israel’s success is that it has augmented the armoury of the left. If Israel is no longer the 97-pound weakling, it can be portrayed as a bully. The international terms for a nation-state bully are invader, oppressor and aggressor.
Jews must wonder at these terms, all of which are highly personal. Not only states but people can be aggressors and oppressors. If Israel has these qualities, it follows that its people have the same, and most of those people are Jews.
Everyone loves to hate a stereotype. In the Middle Ages, Jews were thieves, cheaters, carriers of disease and killers of Christian babies. Today they are rightist brutes, genocidal murderers and ethnic cleansers. The current language of the left is a recognisable translation of medieval charge sheets. Where are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion when you need them?
Funnily enough, the idea of Israel as rogue state primarily composed of recently arrived Jews feeds directly into the grand obsession of the Australian crazy left. This is the devalidation of the Australian nation-state.
You know the trope. The first Europeans in Australia were mere invaders who warped into settlers. They had no right to inhabit the continent. Crucially, their collective posterity was no better, as they were tainted settlers by blood. The result was a perpetual settler state.
It follows that nothing done by our own settler state – such as making a constitution, let alone uncongenial laws – can be valid. Where this deconstruction of Australia leads is hard to guess but it certainly means that European Australians collectively are perpetually nasty, brutal, exploitative invaders. We are racially invalid occupants of the continent. Sound familiar?
Israel is constantly derided as a settler state. The Jews who came to their historic homeland during the past two centuries are dismissed as invaders. As articulated by Hamas, Israel should be destroyed and “the Jews”, not the Israelis, driven into the sea. This narrative is deeply attractive to the loopier Australian left because it validates their own national narrative.
This type of analysis is greatly assisted by the collapse of substantive education in our schools and our universities. Into the 1970s, kids would come out of school with at least a smattering of history and geography. They would know which river and which sea, and the reality of a historic Israel. Today, most students have never heard of King David, let alone Philistines or Moabites. They could not point out Jerusalem on a map. In this puddle of ignorance, prejudice and shallow leftism can wallow together.
In Mosman and Paddington, we can discuss the Jews and Israel quite free of content. It helps that the Carlton set’s dislike of the Jewish state is exactly the type of cause that delights the cultural left. They have no actual skin in the game. There is lots of flag-waving, lots of chanting. Naturally, there is no risk you will ever have to do anything.
But there are satisfyingly identifiable enemies. As Jewish students and speakers are harassed at universities, and Jewish schools have armed guards at their gates, the argument that this is all anti-Israel but not anti-Semitic is as implausible as the Loch Ness monster.
All of these intellectual failures are standard components of the leftist rejection of Jews, Jewishness and a Jewish state. But there are at least three concepts grounding the structure of Australian progressive anti-Semitism that are rarely identified. The first has been mentioned: the direct identification of European Australians and European Australia with Jews living in Israel and a Jewish state.
This is not playing for peanuts. In Australia, there are people who routinely deny our nation and nationality. Lidia Thorpe is merely a technicolour example. But these sorts of views are expressed routinely in most universities and sympathetic parts of the media.
This type of rhetoric has the potential to undermine national confidence when we need to confront a new and dangerous world. When we hear there is no valid state of Israel, that Jews in Israel are merely settlers, and Jews generally are problematic, we should understand that the bell tolls for us, too.
The second confronting reality is that there are some fundamental characteristics of Jews and Jewishness that are abhorrent to the left – including the Australian left – and will never be accepted by “progressives”. The point of being a progressive is a desire for constant, sweeping change. Everything is wrong and I know how to fix it. From climate change to home ownership, our country is detestable, but I am here to help you.
Psychologically and practically, however, Judaism is adamantly opposed to a culture of constant goyim transformation. Despite the best efforts of Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Richard the Lionheart, Jews have remained Jews. If the laws of the Medes altereth not, the law of Moses is unkillable. This is an enormous ideological difficulty for progressives. The concept of values and teachings that are immutable is an assault on their existence. Jews are a problem for progressives in much the same way as the Catholic Church: each exists outside time and temporary relevance. Little wonder that when the Australian Catholic Church was deservedly flattened by its child abuse scandal, ordinary Catholics who patently had no role in the horror were astonished by the personal vilification they received. Now, with Israel in Gaza, our local Jews can receive just punishment.
The third crucial element in the disdain of the Australian left for all things Jewish has been the development of a soft anti-Semitism. Particularly mastered around the conflict in Gaza, this is the practice of constantly professing sympathy for Jews, in the Middle East or domestically, but consistently refusing to recognise their rights, interests, realities and sensibilities.
This technique is important for governments as it allows them to avoid charges of anti-Semitism while holding and occasionally expressing views fundamentally hostile to Jews. It is particularly important in practical politics, where some electorates are dominated by large numbers of people hostile to Israel, and realistically to Jews. But you cannot simply come out and yell “Three cheers for Hamas!” The Albanese government, occasional wriggling aside, has been a master of this sort of calculated nuance. Nervously condemning the Hamas murders, it seems almost relieved whenever some semi-plausible account of Israeli atrocities emerges.
With the horrifying deaths through an Israeli drone strike on aid workers delivering desperately needed food in Gaza, genuine horror seemed faintly tinged with relief that Israel finally had attracted a degree of opprobrium. That Foreign Minister Penny Wong almost simultaneously was ventilating the possibility of a two-state solution, without current practicality or principle, was entirely fitting. It certainly was a thoughtful Easter gift for Hamas.
Perhaps it is unfair to call these behaviours even soft anti-Semitism. Probably we need a new term, such as “Asemitism”. This describes a dead-eyed refusal even to see Jews in any dire situation such as Gaza. Just as agnostics and atheists disbelieve in God, Asemites cannot accommodate the actual possibility of a Jew. If I were an Australian Jew, I would be musing along this same dirty track.
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9 May, 2024
MAGA voters are moving to Russia 'because it feels like America during the 1950s and 20% of local women look like supermodels'
I too once had a positive view of Putin but his decision to invade Ukraine was clearly a disastrous overreach and I no longer feel any support for him.
The Americans who commented on the good looks of Russian women are right. I particularly admire Polish women but all Slavic women are at an advantage. My girlfriend is Slavic and I think she is unusually good-looking for her age
MAGA voters have explained why they turned their backs on the US for a new life in Russia, claiming the former communist state is a 'positive vision of 1950s America'.
Conservative men have cited the country's Christian values, beautiful women and stunning scenery as the reasons behind their move.
After losing faith in their hero Donald Trump, some have moved as far east as Siberia, unfazed by the prospect of being led by an autocratic dictator.
They have even expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin, choosing to believe his narrative about his decision to invade Ukraine.
'I think he's a good man,' ex-pat Peter Frohwein, 62, told the Free Press. 'This lie that he's somehow a dictator — just because he was in the KGB doesn't mean he's ever killed anybody.'
Frohwein is divorced with no kids, but has hopes of starting up a family. He moved from Atlanta to Yalta in the Crimea in July 2023.
'Twenty percent of the women could be supermodels,' he said, explaining he anticipates his children would speak three languages: English, Russian and Mandarin.
'I wouldn't seriously consider starting a family in the U.S. today,' he added. 'The U.S. is a political mess. Socially, things are a mess. Spiritually, things are a mess.'
Bernd Ratsch, 56, agrees with this assessment of US politics and moved to Moscow from Texas in 2019.
'Is Trump better than Biden? Of course. But do I want him? Would I vote for him again? No. It's just, "Boy, shut your mouth for a while,"' he explained.
Meanwhile, family man Joseph Rose has managed to carve out a career with his YouTube channel documenting his new life in Moscow.
'I would say that Russia is becoming a bastion of Christianity and that America is becoming the opposite of this,' Rose explained.
'I do think it was God leading me to where I needed to be right now. I was put in a spot where I could be used.'
Rose, 49, relocated to Russia from Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife and children and has not looked back since.
'I often say it feels like our positive vision of 1950s America,' he explained.
One program manager from Texas, who wished to remain anonymous, suggested Russia offered a simpler way of life.
'People are running around in America wondering why we have so many problems with suicide and depression, and they’ll virtue signal and talk about the phones, and it’s this and that, and the reality is children are not allowed to be children,' the father-of-six said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13396031/MAGA-voters-moving-Russia-conservative-values.html
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Seattle Regretting Minimum Wage for Delivery App Drivers
As a regular Doordash customer myself, I hope this folly does not spread. I get excellent service at the moment
Seattle became one of just two cities across the nation to impose a minimum wage for delivery app drivers in January—and now it is having a bit of buyer’s remorse.
The Seattle ordinance mandates that such workers receive the equivalent of at least $19.97 an hour. In a completely predictable fashion, delivery app companies such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Instacart decided that they could not absorb these added costs and reacted by passing the costs onto consumers in the form of additional customer fees ranging from $5 to as much as $25 per delivery.
As I noted in a column for The Hill earlier this year, New York City’s latest minimum wage increase, to nearly $18 an hour, similarly prompted delivery app companies to impose higher delivery fees, and food delivery workers realized smaller tips and reduced hours and flexibility as a result. The same thing is happening in Seattle.
A recent NPR story noted that many restaurant owners, and some drivers who realize how the law may negatively affect their income, have raised concerns and made their opposition to the ordinance known. Peter Pak, who owns a Korean restaurant in the city, testified against the new minimum wage law at a city council meeting, explaining that orders at his restaurant had dropped by around 40 or 50 percent since it went into effect.
While Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson indicated that she sympathizes with such concerns and wants to find a way to reduce costs, she still does not seem to grasp basic concepts of economics and running a business.
“My interest is to come to an agreement that makes those fees go away so that the cost of deliveries is lower, so that it drives demand up,” Nelson told NPR.
But her proposed solution is to get the delivery app companies to agree to reduce their delivery fees in exchange for compensating drivers less for their time and mileage.
As the saying goes, however, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” The costs must be borne by someone. You can’t use the force of government to impose significantly higher costs on businesses and then simply wish them away. So Nelson and her ilk are trying to fix things by micromanaging businesses even further by telling them to foist more of the costs on drivers and less on consumers (as if that would solve the problem).
Of course, if she were genuinely interested in making the “fees go away so that the cost of deliveries is lower, so that it drives up demand,” all Nelson and others on the city council would need to do is repeal the costly mandates that they imposed on businesses in the first place. But that would be far too sensible.
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Miss Israel is branded a 'war criminal' and threatened with a KNIFE for wearing sign saying 'I'm an IDF soldier' while walking through New York City
A face of hate
Miss Israel Noa Cochva has been blasted as a 'war criminal' and had a knife pulled on her in New York while inviting people to ask her questions about being in the IDF.
The beauty queen filmed herself carrying a poster that said 'I am an IDF soldier. Ask me anything' around Washington Square Park on Monday.
One onlooker slammed Cochva telling the 25-year-old, 'You are a war criminal.' 'How do you sleep at night,' one person asked.
Cochva responded, 'I sleep really well because I know that I'm in the right side of history.'
'I heard there was a Zionist here,' said a woman wearing a camouflage crop top and pants.
She then pulled out a knife and bite off the cover in front of Cochva saying she works on boat.
The woman put her face in the camera saying 'you little Zionist' as the crew tries to backway.
'This is f*****g stupid. You guys should go home,' said one man. 'I don't think there can be peace now,' another said.
An American Air Force soldier asked Cochva how she felt about being required to join the military at a certain age.
'It's the best thing ever. When I served my duty, I felt like I had a really big purpose,' Cochva said. Many people approached the beauty queen and thanked her for her service.
'I'm with your people and I thank you for being so brave and showing that,' a woman said.
Cochva posted the video to Instagram along with an emotional response to the critics.
'The amount of hate that people had for me today. I was just trying to have peaceful conversations with them,' she said.
'But it's a whole different experience to witness something like that. We can't let things like this happen.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13397337/Miss-Israel-Noa-Cochva-New-York-City-IDF.html
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Judge Blocks Suspensions of Middle School Female Athletes Who Refused to Compete Against Male Student
A West Virginia judge granted a preliminary injunction allowing several middle school girls to compete after the school district banned them from competition after refusing to play against a biological male, according to 12 WBOY, a local media outlet.
Five middle school female athletes forfeited their positions at a track meet in April after they were informed that they would have to compete against a biological male, prompting the school district to allegedly bar the girls from future competitions, according to WDTV News. The students sued and Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia filed an amicus brief in support of the students.
A Harrison County judge ordered that the school’s decision be temporarily halted while the lawsuit plays out, according to 12 WBOY.
“I want to say to these students and their parents: I have your backs,” Morrisey said in a press release. “You saw unfairness and you expressed your disappointment and sacrificed your personal performances in a sport that you love; exercised your constitutionally protected freedom of speech and expression.”
The Harrison County Board of Education argued during the injunction hearing Thursday that it had not targeted the female students but that the district’s rules dictate that athletes who voluntarily remove themselves from a meet will also have to skip the following competition, according to 12 WBOY News. The board reiterated this in a statement following the judge’s decision.
“The students were permitted to engage in their selected form of protest without issue,” the board said in a statement, according to a press release. “In fact, the coaches and principal were aware of the likelihood of the protests and permitted the students to remain on the roster for their events. Those students, like all of the other students on the team, however, were subject to a team rule that any player who scratches in an event cannot participate in that event at the next track meet. This neutral, school-specific rule was in place before the students’ protests and has nothing to do with those protests in any way.”
Two of the students claimed, however, that they had never been made aware of the rule and that they had been made to do additional drills at the following practice as punishment, according to 12 WBOY News.
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8 May, 2024
Boy Scouts of America changes name after 114 years to 'boost inclusion'
Given their track record of child-abuse, normal and well-informed parents would not now send their kids there anyhow. There are various Christian alternatives. The Scouts were once Christian too. Goodness knows what a mixof oddball kids and leaders they are now
The Texas-based organization is set to become Scouting America as it hopes to improve participation amid flagging membership.
The historic change is the latest in a series designed to take the troop into the 21st century, including allowing gay youth and welcoming girls throughout its ranks.
It comes as the organization is emerging from bankruptcy following a flood of sexual abuse claims.
'In the next 100 years we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs,' Roger Krone, who took over last fall as president and chief executive officer, said in an interview before the announcement.
The announcement came at its annual meeting in Florida on the fifth anniversary of the organization welcoming girls into Cub Scouting.
Boy Scouts of America began allowing gay youth in 2013 and ended a blanket ban on gay adult leaders in 2015.
In 2017, it made the historic announcement that girls would be accepted as Cub Scouts as of 2018 and into the flagship Boy Scout program - renamed Scouts BSA - in 2019.
The move has been met with some backlash, with calls to boycott the institution in the same way that Bud Light customers chose to stop supporting the company after they partnered with a transgender influencer.
'Boy Scouts are removing the word boy from their name after 114 years. Now they will be called Scouting America,' one irate X user wrote.
'Bud light them too. Seriously, BUD LIGHT every piece of garbage institution in this country that is doing everything they can to tear down and torch our culture, our traditions, common sense, biology, and our way of life.'
'"Everyone can be their authentic self and they will be welcomed here" This is antithetical to Boy Scouts,' another fumed.
'The boy is to be shaped by scouting, HE should change, that's the point. Not the other way around. This is little more than a humiliation ritual.'
Radio presenter Dana Loesch pointed out that a separate organization for Girl Scouts already exists.
There were nearly 1,000 young women in the inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts in 2021, including Selby Chipman.
The all-girls troop she was a founding member of in her hometown of Oak Ridge, North Carolina, has grown from five girls to nearly 50, and she thinks the name change will encourage even more girls to realize they can join.
'Girls were like: `You can join Boy Scouts of America?´' said Chipman, now a 20-year-old college student and assistant scoutmaster of her troop.
Within days of the announcement that girls would be allowed, Bob Brady went to work.
A father of two girls and a proud Eagle Scout himself, the New Jersey attorney eagerly formed an all-girls troop.
At their first weekend gathering with other troops, the boys were happy to have the girls involved but some adult leaders seemed concerned, he recalled.
Their worries seemed to melt away as soon as the girls led a traditional cheer around the campfire.
'You could see a change in the attitude of some of the doubters who weren´t sure and they realized, wait, these kids are exactly the same, they just happen to have ponytails,' said Brady.
His daughters are among the 13 girls in his troop and 6,000 girls nationwide who have achieved the vaunted Eagle Scout rank.
Like other organizations, the scouts lost members during the pandemic, when participation was difficult.
After a highpoint over the last decade of over 2 million members in 2018, the organization currently services just over 1 million youths, including more than 176,000 girls and young women. Membership peaked in 1972 at almost 5 million.
The move by the Boy Scouts to accept girls throughout their ranks strained a bond with the Girl Scouts of the USA, which sued, saying it created marketplace confusion and damaged their recruitment efforts.
They reached a settlement agreement after a judge rejected those claims, saying both groups are free to use words like 'scouts' and 'scouting.'
While camping remains an integral activity for the Boy Scouts, the organization offers something for everyone today, from high adventures to merit badges for robotics and digital technology.
'About anything kids want to do today, they can do in a structured way within the scouting program,' Krone said.
The Boy Scouts´ $2.4 billion bankruptcy reorganization plan took effect last year, allowing the organization to keep operating while compensating the more than 80,000 men who say they were sexually abused as children while scouting.
Angelique Minett, the first woman chairperson of Scouts BSA, is excited about the future of scouting and the engagement from the group's youth council on issues ranging from sustainability to the fit on some of the uniforms.
'When we think scouts we think knots and camping, but those are a means to an end,' Minett said.
'We are actually teaching kids a much bigger thing. We are teaching them how to have grit, and we´re teaching them life skills and we´re teaching them how to be good leaders.'
The organization won't officially become Scouting America until February 8, 2025, the organization's 115th birthday. But Krone said he expects people will start immediately using the name.
'It sends this really strong message to everyone in America that they can come to this program, they can bring their authentic self, they can be who they are and they will be welcomed here,' he said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13392279/Boy-Scouts-America-changes-inclusion.html
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I’m about to turn 90, and I didn’t want to give up my licence. One moment changed my mind
I sympathize with this. I gave up driving shortly after I turned 80 and I am glad of it. I am pretty un-co-ordinated and shaky and I too did not want to be one of the old people who mistakenly hit the accelerator instead of the brake. I now have no fear that I will ever do that. Not driving is a weight off my mind even though I drove for 60 years without once hurting myself or anyone else. That record will now stand. Fortunately, I have a wonderful carer who makes that decision easy. A long time ago I made life easy for her so she now is happy to make life easy for me
As someone about to turn 90, driving has been an important part of my life for more than 70 years. I have regularly tested my skills in courses at the RACV, and I am quite well with no health issues. There was no reason to think my time behind the wheel should come to an end, or so I thought.
I’ve driven across much of Australia and around a countless number of Victoria’s marvellous little towns. Each of my cars over the years – a GT Ford, Holdens, a Simca and my very first car, a Raleigh – have been my right-hand man, there to help me whether I needed to pick up life’s essentials, simply get out of the house, or transport the kids and then grandkids around. (One thing I’ve learnt is that if you want to know what is going on in a teenager’s life, there is no better way than to put one on the back seat of a car with two of their friends and take them for a long drive.)
And yet, I’ve made the heartbreaking decision to give up driving, and to sell my car. I respect driving too much, and I too well understand the responsibilities that go with controlling your own weapon of mass destruction.
I was 17 when my car enthusiast boyfriend took me to Bathurst, where he taught me how to drive on Mount Panorama. He really put me through my paces. When I came back to Melbourne and passed my driver’s test my examiner said he wished more people had my control of a vehicle – a story that I dined out on for many years afterwards!
I’m convinced those skills saved my life. Some years later I was driving under a bridge when a semi-trailer came barrelling through on the wrong side of the road. If I hadn’t had the reflexes to take evasive action in that moment, I would have been flattened.
But I’m haunted by a more recent encounter. I was returning home from shopping and about to turn right at an intersection when something, I’m not sure what, stopped me. I looked around and saw through my side mirror a young boy crossing the road. I immediately realised that I had completely failed to see him and if I hadn’t stopped, I would have hit him. My peripheral vision was not working properly, which was why I hadn’t seen him until the very last moment.
I drove through the intersection when it was safe to do so and parked a little way down the road to settle down, as I was shaking with the shock of such a close call. Throughout the rest of the day I could think of nothing else but that boy carrying his backpack, doing absolutely nothing wrong as he walked home from school, and how easily I could have hit him and destroyed his life.
I immediately made the decision to quit driving. To resist any temptation, I sold my car. It was hard to accept. As my friend drove my cute little 2004 Mazda 2 out of my driveway I cried my eyes out.
Last week I read about the shocking numbers of accidents being caused by elderly drivers. Not long ago, I had believed I could keep driving, but I was wrong.
Someone was watching out for me and that boy that day. I’m now convinced it should be mandatory for the elderly to have their driving ability tested from the age of 75. Like a car, your body wears out, and there are no spare parts.
I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever and yet, this decision has been hard to deal with. I can’t go anywhere by myself. At times, I feel I am virtually confined to home. I need to ask for help to go anywhere and while family and friends have congratulated me for my courage, I’ve had to sacrifice my independence.
While nobody wants to give up their keys, I had long been confident I would not be one of those people whose days of driving come to an end because they put their foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and crash through the front of a shop.
But too many people don’t realise that driving a car is much more than just about looking after yourself. You have a responsibility to look after all the other people on the road, whether they be drivers, passengers, cyclists or pedestrians.
To all those elderly people who think they’re OK to keep driving as their skills diminish, I ask them to have a rethink. Yes, giving up your licence is hard to do, and diminishes your independence, but I can now sleep at night knowing I’ve done the right thing.
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Could age verification for porn actually work?
I think the answer is a clear No. Censorship of various sorts is already widely practiced by the Left and people have got used to evading it -- by VPNs and other means. And if a kid is not up to evading it themselves a smarter classmate will be able -- and will enjoy the prestige of sharing that wisdom and its product
In a way, it's weird that it's taken this long for age verification to catch fire in Australian politics.
Stopping literal children from accessing porn online, something they're not actually allowed to do anyway, seems like a slam dunk for any politician within cooee of Australia's mythic political centre — somewhere above sausage sizzles and below kissing babies.
The fact that it did take until May (May!) in 2024 is incontrovertible proof that it's not as easy as it sounds.
Still, here we are, standing on the brink of a pilot for age verification technology, which will receive $6.5 million in next week's federal budget.
Coalition push to trial social media block for children
The federal opposition urges the government to trial age verification schemes that would lock children out of social media platforms, as X's feud with Australia escalates.
It's a very similar proposal to the one contained in a November 2023 private members bill from the Coalition's communications spokesman, David Coleman, who has now been restricted to complaining about a "baffling" delay.
So far, the main difference seems to be that the Coalition was offering a fraction more money — $200,000 — but there's otherwise not much observable daylight between them.
On their similarities, both proposals can be traced back to the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who recommended a pilot like this back in March 2023 as part of her roadmap towards mandating age verification for online porn.
It took the government five months to respond with a longer version of the answer: "not yet".
At the time, Labor was citing the commission's advice that the technology was "immature", saying "the roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not ready to be taken".
Tech years are a bit like dog years though, and a lot can happen in 11 months. So in February 2024, when the eSafety Commissioner was asked at Senate Estimates whether there were any technological barriers to the pilot going ahead, she replied: "No. None whatsoever."
"The age assurance industry is maturing … I think the time is right now that we all move forward," she said.
So how could a porn website reliably check a person's age?
In its roadmap, the eSafety Commissioner recommended a "double-blind tokenised approach".
As the name suggests, the system would involve anonymised digital tokens, issued by a third-party provider accredited to securely receive and verify personal data.
The token could then be presented as proof of age without a person ever having to hand over personal information to the porn site.
It sounds simple enough, but tech barriers are only the beginning.
The commissioner's roadmap also stated that "at this stage, there is likely no existing regulator or accreditation body that has the … capability to provide all the necessary functions".
Tokens aren't the only way, but at first glance, many of the methods currently on offer seem somewhat riskier for users.
After years of struggling to establish a scheme, the UK passed an "age assurance" law last year, and has made several suggestions to companies:
Allowing banks, mobile providers or credit card providers to confirm a user is over 18
Asking users to upload a photo to the site that is then matched with photo ID, and
Using of facial recognition tech that's trained to assess age.
France and Germany are also making their own attempts.
But a senior public servant in the Department of Communications, Bridget Gannon, told Senate Estimates in February that international experiences "don't provide us with a clear way forward".
Put another way, no one has figured this out yet.
Seven US states have passed similar laws and in the places where they've kicked in, it looks like a whole lot of people are using Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, to dodge them.
"Accessing porn has declined to such an extent that it doesn't look like people have stopped looking at pornography; it looks like they are bypassing the technology," Ms Gannon said — and she didn't just mean children.
In case you haven't done the maths on this yet, age verification laws would also affect the millions of Australian adults who legally access porn online.
Under an Australian scheme, every one of them would be asked to participate, and it doesn't take an expert to point out the gargantuan data honeypot that might be created in the process.
As Ms Gannon told Senate Estimates, any scheme will need to "consider Australians' willingness to participate".
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Sydney’s Cumberland Council courts Anti-Discrimination Act over same-sex book ban
But because Muslims want it, it will probably stay. Muslims matter a lot more than Christians
Western Sydney’s Cumberland City Council is at risk of breaking the Anti-Discrimination Act after voting to ban same-sex parenting books in its libraries.
The ban will affect eight libraries across the LGA and was put forward by city councillor and former Cumberland City mayor Steve Christou.
He alleged that parents were “distraught” upon seeing the book Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig in libraries.
Mr Christou spoke to Channel 9 on Wednesday, arguing that the parenting books were “sexualised” and that the ban was an effort to “let kids be kids”.
“You have to understand that at Cumberland City Council, about 60 per cent of the community was born overseas and they have deep conservative values, family values and religious values, it doesn’t matter whether they’re Christian, Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic or Hindu,” Mr Christou said.
“We’ve had consistent complaints on these kinds of books and similar issues infiltrating our libraries from local residents.
“Our community doesn’t want any form of sexualised books or our kids being opened up to any form of sexualisation in the libraries.
“Let kids be kids, they are innocent, let them enjoy reading a book.”
The NSW government has warned that this vote may be in breach of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act, with a potential funding pull at the relevant libraries threatened.
Auburn MP Lynda Voltz has reportedly passed on the matter to NSW Arts Minister John Graham for review.
“If the government wants to take away funding from one of the most socially disadvantaged communities in NSW because their democratically elected council stood up for the values which they believe represents their local community, well shame on them,” Mr Christou said.
‘I would urge them not to do that.”
In January, Mr Christou said he would ban Welcome to Country ceremonies in Western Sydney. A month later he called for a ban on drag story time sessions in the council area.
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7 May, 2024
How mindfulness and therapy may be making our children MORE depressed and anxious
In a time when mental health is talked about more than ever, there is a camp of experts who are afraid we may have gone too far.
Schools across the country are implementing mental health awareness campaigns and pushing mindfulness and meditation techniques in classrooms.
But, there is some evidence heightened awareness and focus on mental health is having the opposite effect and isn't helping children at all, but is making anxiety and depression worse.
The My Resilience in Adolescence, or MYRIAD, trial followed thousands of students who practiced mindfulness exercises in schools and results showed not only did the exercises not improve teens' mental health, but those at higher risk of mental health problems fared worse after training.
Researchers attributed the results to multiple reasons, but said one explanation was that mindfulness brought 'awareness to upsetting thoughts.'
However, the study did find that mindfulness practices had a positive effect on teachers in the school.
Researchers pointed out there are many things that can impact the mental health of a younger person still developing, including their environment, socieconomic status, family dynamics and parenting, genetics and schooling, such as homework, exams and social aspects.
In a similar Australian study, researchers found students who had taken a course on cognitive behavioral therapy reported higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms six and 12 months later.
In both studies, researchers were concerned with something called co-rumination, which is when a person repeatedly discusses problems with others rather than searches for solutions.
This excessive dwelling on problems appeared to be higher among females.
Dr Jack Andrews, who led the Australian study and is a fellow at the Wellcome Trust - a UK-based health research organization - told The New York Times: 'It might be that they kind of get together and make things a little bit worse for each other.'
He added that he believes schools should proceed cautiously with mental health curriculum until 'we know the evidence base a bit more. Doing nothing is better than doing something.'
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 13.8 percent of children and adolescents ages five to 17 received counseling or therapy in 2022.
Colorado-based psychologist Dr Shawn Smith previously told DailyMail.com therapy may be harming America's youth by 'encouraging kids to spend, frankly, too much time staring at their own belly button, and not being involved in the world and developing meaningful relationships and activities.
NHS psychiatrist Max Pemberton explains characteristics of those who’ve had too much therapy - and says Harry should turn difficulties into something positive
'To whatever extent, therapy contributes to that. It's a problem.'
Dr Smith added: 'The way we know people are depressed is, there's this turning inward... and usually, you will see a relentless scrutiny of the self, of one thoughts, and one's feelings and one's presentation.'
Over-therapizing can contribute to this: 'If we have kids, just pointlessly scrutinizing themselves, then we are setting them up to turn inward and collapse within, collapse in on themselves and become depressed. '
Despite the hesitancy by some, Dr Jessica Schleider, an associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University, argued it should be a priority for public health agendas to address mental health issues in young people.
She told the Times: 'The urgency of the mental health crisis is so clear.
'In the partnerships that I have, the emphasis is on the kids truly struggling right now who have nothing — we need to help them — more so than a possible risk for a subset of kids who aren’t really struggling.'
She cautioned against interpreting study results as a reason to 'forget all of it.' Instead, she said experts should be asking 'What about this intervention was unhelpful?'
Dr Schleider said experts should move from the 'universal, school-assembly-style approach' to more individualized and targeted interventions, which research has shown can be effective at helping improve mental health.
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Middle School Girls Banned for Taking a Stand
The woke Left loves protesters who do so in favor of opinions and ideologies with which they agree. However, as has become patently clear over the last several years, the Left has a double standard when it comes to the right to protest. Indeed, the Left has a double standard when it comes to most civil rights.
Recently, we observed the story of five brave girls from Lincoln Middle School in West Virginia. These five girls, who are on their school’s track and field team, engaged in a silent protest over having to compete against a boy who identifies as a girl.
Their protest occurred during the shot put competition, with each stepping into the thrower’s circle at their turn and then stepping away without an attempt, thereby registering an intentional scratch. It was their way of expressing their objection to the boy’s presence in the girls’ competition. To no one’s surprise, the gender-bending boy won the competition, but the girls’ protest was caught on video and spread on social media.
Unfortunately, the girls’ protest was not well received by the Harrison County Board of Education, which proceeded to ban them from any future competition. One of the girls’ parents also said the track coach informed them that she had been barred from meets because her job was to “score points for the track team.”
Four of the girls’ parents have since filed a lawsuit against the board of education, alleging that its decision to ban the girls amounted to punishing them for “exercising their rights to freedom of speech and expression under the Constitution of West Virginia.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is joining the parents in the lawsuit. The girls’ actions “were not disruptive or aggrandizing,” he noted. “They were the quiet demonstration of the student-athletes’ evident unhappiness with the competitive consequences of a federal appellate court’s decision.”
Morrisey added: “The only thing this decision does is teach these children to keep their mouths shut and not disagree with what they saw as unfairness. That is outrageous and it tramples these students’ rights to freedom of speech and expression.”
Former SEC champion swimmer and women’s rights activist Riley Gaines has also registered her support, posting on social media: “These girls stood up for what they believed and their coach barred them from competing. Insane.”
The girls’ objective is simply fair play in girls’ sports, and Morrisey seems willing to take the issue to the Supreme Court if necessary. “I will do everything in my power to defend these brave young girls,” he promised. “This is just wrong. We must stand for what’s right and oppose these radical trans policies.”
Indeed. Thankfully, we are seeing more of these types of protests. Fighting for what’s right is not always easy or comfortable, which is why we need to encourage everyone who dares to do so.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/106466-middle-school-girls-banned-for-taking-a-stand-2024-05-02
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Coddled Kids Become Depressed, Anti-Social College Students
The narcissism and unruly protests of today’s college students have been recent topics for us. But why are the kids not alright? What happened along the way? Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, has some answers.
She starts with reports that college students “are so lonely, sad, and socially anxious that they grab their dining hall food to go — preferring to eat in their rooms.” They’re attending sports events less frequently, and they’re reducing participation in class and completing assignments.
It’s no surprise that mental health on campus is reportedly decreasing. One in seven students has considered suicide this past year, according to a Healthy Minds study cited by the [Wall Street] Journal. In fact, so many students are demanding therapy that hundreds of colleges have contracted with a telehealth company that promises to find students a therapist within five minutes of their call.
Experts are debating the cause of all this misery, and there are plenty of potential culprits: COVID-19 closures, political extremism, and even the advent of the “like” button. But could one unnoticed factor be the fact that this generation spent so little time unsupervised as kids?
A recent University of Michigan study found that the majority of parents of kids ages 9 to 11 will not let them walk to a friend’s house, play at the park with a friend, or trick-or-treat unchaperoned. Only half will let their kids go to another aisle at the store by themselves.
It’s easy to see how a generation that was never allowed to play, walk around the neighborhood, or even drift over to the dairy section without anxious adults watching and assisting them…might just be unprepared for the real world — or even eating in the dining hall.
She continues and concludes with a solution:
When kids play unsupervised with other kids of different ages they learn important skills: creativity, communication, compromise, compassion, and leadership. When they successfully complete tasks on their own, they understand that they are helpful, capable, and resourceful.
When young people lose out on those experiences as kids, they become socially awkward and afraid as adults.
Until we give kids back some independence to run around, play, explore, and expand, they will arrive on campus unprepared — clinging to the rope like a toddler, because that’s how they have been treated all their lives.
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Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women
Behold the “frat boys” unapologetically saving Old Glory, singing the national anthem, chanting “USA, USA, USA,” and rudely ridiculing the campus freaks who parade around in Hamas colors and barricade themselves in university buildings.
God forbid! They look like Trump voters.
This display of irrepressible masculinity erupting in Gen Z is an affront to the grand societal feminization project of the left, which has only itself to blame.
Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women who have been coddled all their lives and think they’re smarter and more important than they really are.
It is a manifestation of the growing political divide between men and women that has been evident in opinion polls for some time. There is a 10-point gap on most issues between men and women.
Young unmarried women, in particular, skew very left, while young men are becoming markedly more conservative.
It’s a nightmare scenario for Biden, who has been counting on the youth vote to win him the election like it did in 2020. Hence his desperate pandering to Gen Z.
The president is splashing around billions of taxpayer dollars on student debt relief, relaxing cannabis legislation, championing “trans kids” as the greatest heroes of their generation and inviting gender-fluid young TikTok influencers to VIP events at the White House. This is not your granddad’s Joe Biden.
But none of it can close the growing ideological gulf between the sexes, which has its roots in the unjust treatment of boys and young men in recent decades.
The college gender gap was a crisis when men outnumbered women up until the 1980s, but now that there are three women for every two men in college, we must rejoice. You go, girl!
Now there are 1 million fewer men in college than in 2011, according to Pew Research, with one-quarter of male Ivy Leaguers identifying as LGBT. It’s sexual reparations in which nobody had a say.
There is a cohort of women who are giving the fairer sex a bad name. These toxic femmes gobbled up the unjust privileges of affirmative action and the punitive fakery that the #MeToo movement became and then found they were more miserable than ever.
So they doubled down, offloading blame onto the patriarchy or toxic masculinity or whatever excuse they could find to avoid looking in the mirror.
During the pandemic, they were given the name “Karen” as they marched around in masks enforcing petty rules or flew into aggressive rages during minor parking lot encounters.
When accountability occasionally finds them, they are flabbergasted beyond belief, while the rest of the world quietly revels in their comeuppance.
Karine Jean-Pierre is the avatar of the entitled female.
The White House press secretary is simply horrible at her job. She’s not on top of her material and never provides a coherent answer to reporters’ questions.
But instead of showing a little humility and upping her game, she does interviews boasting about how awesome she is at “the hardest job in the White House … I’m an historic figure and I walk in history every day.”
The current campus protests have showcased the narcissism of these delusional damsels on social media for all to see:
The females at the University of Virginia whining, “It’s raining!” when finally told to pack up their tents.
The campus radical who held a press conference to demand that Columbia University supply food and water to her comrades who had barricaded themselves inside a building. “This is like basic humanitarian aid,” said Johannah King-Slutzky, a PhD student who sported the latest in terrorist chic, a keffiyeh around her neck.
The academic at Emory University who screamed, “I am a professor!” when she was arrested for assaulting a cop. “I hit him on the head very lightly to get his attention and they grabbed me, threw me to the ground and arrested me,” Caroline Fohlin whined as she was carted away.
The activist in California who stood up at a city council meeting and threatened to kill councilors who opposed a Gaza cease-fire resolution: “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you,” she fiercely vowed. Next time we saw Riddhi Patel, she was bawling her eyes out in court after being arrested and charged with threatening state officials.
These are not people anyone can admire. They believe they are entitled to privileges and protections they did not earn and do not deserve.
The losers in the equation have been young men, especially if they are white and heterosexual and wish to remain male with their genitalia intact.
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Art gallery heads to Supreme Court in fight to keep Ladies Lounge for women
Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art has lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court of Tasmania in its fight to keep its women-only Ladies Lounge open.
Last month, Mona was ordered to close the lounge after a man launched an anti-discrimination case against the museum, as he objected to being refused admission to the space.
The NSW man, Jason Lau, won his case in the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal and Mona was given 28 days to stop refusing entry to men. That deadline ended today (Tuesday) and the Ladies Lounge will be closed until further notice.
But the lounge’s creator, artist Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to Mona founder David Walsh, is not giving up on the lounge’s right to exist and lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court of Tasmania on Tuesday. Her motives go beyond the lounge itself – she wants to challenge the law’s very relationship to and understanding of the arts.
“I think it’s worth exercising the argument, not only for Ladies Lounge, but for the good of art, and the law,” Kaechele said.
“We need to challenge the law to consider a broader reading of its definitions as they apply to art and the impact it has on the world, as well as the right for conceptual art to make some people (men) uncomfortable.
“Ladies love the lounge – a space away from men – and given what we have been through for the last several millennia, we need it! We deserve both equal rights and reparations, in the form of unequal rights, or chivalry – for at least 300 years.”
Secluded behind green silk curtains, and featuring art by Sidney Nolan and Pablo Picasso, the opulent Ladies Lounge has welcomed about 425,000 visitors since it opened on Boxing Day in 2020.
The hearing at Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last month was a highly theatrical event with Kaechele arriving with some 20 supporters, uniformly dressed in officious navy suits, hair pulled back, and donning red lipstick, a la 1988 Robert Palmer music video Simply Irresistible.
Inside the hearing room, the group performed a silent choreography and read feminist texts – behaviour that the tribunal member overseeing the case, Richard Grueber, later described as bordering on contempt.
In defending its case at tribunal, Mona’s counsel Catherine Scott argued that the Ladies Lounge provided equal opportunity to a group of people – women – who had been historically discriminated against and excluded from many spaces.
Scott relied on the exception provided by Section 26 of the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act 1998, which states: “A person may discriminate against another person in any program, plan or arrangement designed to promote equal opportunity for a group of people who are disadvantaged or have a special need because of a prescribed attribute.”
But the argument did not fly with Grueber, who ruled that while the Ladies Lounge “may have a valid or ethical or pedagogical purpose … it cannot reasonably be intended to promote equal opportunity”.
Mona’s appeal will be lodged on the grounds that the tribunal took too narrow a view of women’s historical and ongoing societal disadvantage and did not recognise how the experience of the Ladies Lounge could promote equal opportunity.
In typically mischievous fashion, Kaechele added: “I am grateful to have received so many wonderful ideas for the future of the Ladies Lounge, and possibilities for its reformation. This encouragement has reassured me that I am indeed appealing.”
A sign saying “closed for reform” now sits at the reception desk of the lounge.
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6 May, 2024
Understanding the empathy deficit
The article below by VIRGINIA TAPSCOTT is a long one but overlooks an important issue: Lack of care for the feelings of others is a feature of both autism and psychopathy. But the two syndromes are very different in other ways and the difference is important. I have argued that the difference is that the psychopath is aware of other people's feelings but doesn't care about them whereas the autistic is simply unaware of other peoples feelings. There may be more than one reason for an apparent "empathy deficit"
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/2024/04/do-autism-and-psychopathy-overlap.html
And muddling those two very different syndromes, as she appears to do below, renders her conclusions very dubious. She needs to re-work her thinking from the beginning, I suspect.
But taking the research she presents into account does suggest that she is talking about psychopaths only, not autistics. Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen's submission that we should stop talking about autism and refer instead to the syndrome as "non-neurotypical" has generally been enthusiastically embraced both by the people concerned and by health professionals.
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.12703
But the implication of that view is that non-neurotypical people are born that way. And there are certain features of such people that support that conclusion. An unusually large cerebral cortex, for instance. I hear that autistics tend to take big hats!
Ms TAPSCOTT, in contrast, is talking about an acquired condition, not an inborn one.
But do the findings she describes even fit psychopaths? Her implication is that non-empathetics are both unaware of how other people work psychologically and uncaring about any hardships that they inflict on others. But psychopaths are often very clever people manipulators. To be good at that they surely have to have a very good awareness of how other people work psychologically. So we are left with the claim that psychopaths are not empathetic but are nonetheless somehow very good at understanding and manipulating other people's feelings! That is probably not impossible but seems very unlikely.
So who is Ms Tapcott talking about? It seems that the non-empathetic people she describes don't fit neatly into any established psychiatric category. They are a new category of persons all of its own. A best fit to what she describes would probably be to say that egregious harm to others can emanate from more than one person type -- the non-empathic people she describes and classical psychopaths
An additional level of complexity may follow from my previous article on the subject referenced above. I am clearly a high functioning autistic but I noted that I have very little emotional response to reports of suffering in others. But as I have recently also pointed out, I have a not-insubstantial claim to being a philanthropist!
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2024/05/am-i-philanthropist.html
So, in autistics a non-empathic response can even go with pro-social behaviour! Autistics are confused and shut out but are not malevolent. Who said that people have to be simple?
Rapists, murderers, religious extremists and even your garden variety nasty colleague have one thing in common: an empathy deficit. The part of their brain that imagines how others think and feel is anywhere from stunted to easily ignored. This allows them to dehumanise others to varying extents and prioritise their own gratification or agenda above all else, regardless of the pain this may cause those around them. They can be all charm one minute and conveniently deaf and blind to the suffering of another the next.
We all exist somewhere along the empathy spectrum from slightly selfish to complete psychopath. Harmful belief systems about women embedded in our culture can be tempered by healthy empathy function or become unbridled by an empathy deficit.
Empathy isn’t some vague feel-good notion of kindness; it is a specific part of our brain architecture. Neuroscientists understand in detail its place in our emotional brain circuits, how we come to develop empathy and to what extent.
A review of neurobiological research published in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in 2016 traced the emergence of empathy deficits in detail from birth right up to violent adult offending, specifically intimate partner violence. The authors describe how empathy development starts at birth, when newborns will do whatever it takes to engage a caregiver. They mimic movements, search for faces, reach for skin and cry as a last resort. They have mirror neurons that enable them to tune into caregivers’ behaviours as early as 72 hours old.
A baby’s earliest attempts to engage another normally elicits a positive response from the caregiver that results in the baby being held or fed and flooded with relaxing, feel-good hormones. The baby repeats the process of engaging a carer, building increasingly complex and well-trodden empathic neural pathways. It is from this biochemistry and brain architecture that they develop pro-social behaviours, emotional regulation and an intuitive understanding of how to relate to another.
Where things go wrong is if an infant’s attempts to engage are not rewarded and empathic neural pathways become underdeveloped. If your parents or carers don’t love you or have difficulty showing it you will have a hard time developing empathic abilities.
The neurobiology review analysed almost 200 of the most significant sources establishing a link between empathy deficit or dysfunction and violence. The authors argued the empathy patterns in offenders explained why far fewer women, with neurobiology that predisposes them to increased empathy, were perpetrators of violence.
Research in empathy development surged in 2001 when Yale University researchers worked out how to scan healthy infants and toddlers in magnetic resonance imaging machines that required them to be still. Instead of using sedation, which blunted brain activity and posed ethical problems, researchers scanned babies in natural sleep and flung open the doors on a whole field of unexplored territory.
While researchers had been using neuroimaging for decades to unravel the mysteries of adult brains, it is only in recent years that infant brains have come under the microscope and only since the 2000s that we began studying longitudinal cohorts. Perhaps the most striking finding has been that the emotional brain circuitry of infants is far more advanced and sensitive than initially thought.
“We know that brain circuits for mood, depression, anxiety, addiction and resilience are all built between conception and age three and last for life,” Canadian neuroscientist Greer Kirshenbaum writes in her book The Nurture Revolution. “After three years of age the most frequently used brain circuits are covered in protective cells and the circuits that were not used frequently are eliminated by pruning.”
As neuroimaging was applied in the fields of neurobiology, genetics and behavioural science, the lasting effects of early life stress became undeniable. While our emotional brain is influenced by genetics and continues to develop into early adulthood, the foundations of emotional health are laid by our earliest experiences and relationships. We know in chronic states of prenatal and infancy stress the brain develops abnormally. In 2019, researchers from the Infant Brain Imaging Study Network demonstrated that the amygdala, the part of the brain that identifies threats and controls emotional processes, had started to overgrow at six months of age in children who later would be diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders. It has been shown that environmental stress combined with a genetic vulnerability to stress can increase the risk of developing autism.
While we have not yet discovered genes for any specific mental illness, in the 1990s researchers began uncovering the relationship between genes that determine our dopamine receptivity, how much of the feel-good hormone we can access, and children characterised as ultrasensitive or resilient.
University of California, San Francisco pediatrics and psychiatry professor Thomas Boyce brought into the mainstream the theory that about four-fifths of all children were born “dandelions” with genes that increased dopamine receptivity and made them more resilient to stress.
Boyce found the remaining children carried a gene morphism that rendered them less receptive to dopamine and categorised them as “orchids” for their ultrasensitivity to growing conditions. Orchids can flourish in ideal conditions or be affected by poor conditions.
High-quality care and reliable early relationships have been found to mitigate the orchid and dandelion effect. Kirshenbaum explains nurturing care as a crucial way of “turning the volume down” on genes less favourable to psychological resilience. Nonetheless, orchid children are more sensitive to stress in infancy and face a greater likelihood of their brain being hypersensitive to stress later in life.
Stress is at the seat of the development of all mental illnesses because it interferes with normal brain development and the naturally resilient emotional circuits that come with it. If stress is shaping the brain from infancy, the makings of a narcissist, schizophrenic, addict or psychopath are well under way in the cradle.
Unthinkable acts such as those we have witnessed in recent weeks are undeniably rooted in terrible brain architecture and resulting poor moral formation. Emotional deficits impede moral formation, which usually develops through an intuitive understanding of our actions in relation to others. Being able to share or imagine the feelings of another is a deterrent for treating them horribly. A brain imaging study in The Netherlands in 2013 found psychopathic criminals lacked automatic empathic processes. The line between right and wrong becomes blurred if we lack an intuitive sense of how another may feel or to share the feeling.
In this way, empathy is a crucial moderator of our behaviour in real time but also shapes our humanity. It is a kind of panacea to societal ills. External moderators of behaviour such as judicial and governance guardrails can get us only so far before internal motivation to do the right thing must take over.
Empathic dysfunction is the breeding ground for a raft of mental disorders because our ability to connect with others is our lifelong emotional mooring. Without empathy and the relationships that spring from it the world becomes disorienting and meaningless. Without a web of healthy connection around us, people who can act as a sounding board or offer different perspectives, we also become more vulnerable to radicalisation and conspiracy theories. We fill the void created by lack of interpersonal relations with consumerism, extreme interpretations of religion and political outrage.
Empathy deficits are clearly an enabler when it comes to men being able to dehumanise women and subjecting them to shocking violence. We cannot hope to reduce violence against women without interrogating the formative experiences of perpetrators. This is not an excuse for the behaviour, this is cut-and-dried science. We must go back to the beginning.
The good news is empathy deficits are preventable. If we are raised in nurturing and responsive environments where empathy is modelled to us we are likely to develop healthy levels of empathy. Known inhibitors of empathy development include reduced face-to-face human interaction, caregivers who lack empathy and toxic stress. We have to feel safe and connected most of the time to be able to adopt empathic behaviours.
The bad news is empathy is difficult to teach later in life and deficits are difficult to reverse. We can train our empathy “muscles” later in life, but it is far less effective than having it in the first place. It may never be automatic or intuitive. It is unclear whether former prime minister Scott Morrison’s empathy consultant employed in 2019 had any lasting influence.
The availability of empathy training courses has accelerated in response to a well-documented decline in empathy levels across the board. A study of American students published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review found levels of empathy fell by 48 per cent between 1979 and 2009. It seems unlikely a one-hour online minicourse in empathy will do much to counter the broader trend.
Short-term emergency responses to public outcries about violence is warranted, but we are also missing the point. Prevention is much more effective. Our outrage should be equally, if not more so, directed at the way we deny children the basic conditions for healthy emotional development: social interaction, proper food and the presence of invested, loving and consistent caregivers.
Parents are often time poor and stressed, which means they lack the emotional resources to respond to their children. They increasingly rely on screens to regulate themselves and their children. You don’t have to be a behavioural scientist to see this is a chronically stressful arrangement.
Adult mental illness and resulting behaviours become a complex question when we consider that as a baby that offender was exposed to conditions they had no control over. We don’t get to choose our parents or circumstances. Our individual responsibility is to come to understand our emotional circuitry and manage it, but we will continue to contend with limitations posed by the brain circuitry laid in our earliest years. Some will be more disadvantaged by this than others. Some will be rendered incapable of helping themselves.
Without a complete overhaul in our cultural and policy approach to the early years we cannot hope to address mental illness effectively. If more people understood the significance of support to ensure the healthy development of babies and children we could transform society as we know it. We underestimate the importance of this at our peril.
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Not in my name or His: The wilful damage all in the name of faith
This is an old, old fallacy: Judging Christiaity by people who DON'T follow it. We all "fake good" to some extent and in our society that often takes the form of of a pretense to Christianity. In Japan alleged followers of the peaceful Buddha committed atrocities during WWII. And despite the very first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Hindus often attack Muslims.
Most people will do what they will regardless of their religion. The sad part is that those who do evil are often excused and justified by their priests and elders
In her poem Magdalene on Gethsemane, Marie Howe narrates an imagined interaction between Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth in the Garden of Gethsemane.
From Jesus’ agony on the night before his crucifixion, in the voice of the Magdalene, Howe writes:
“When he was in the garden the night beforeAnd fell with his face to the groundwhat he imagined was not his torture, not his own deathThat’s what the story says, but that’s not what he told me.”
The three lines that follow burn the reader. They resonate deeply with the un-power and non-violence of Jesus. The poet invokes Jesus’ anguish, claiming:
“He said he saw the others, the countless in his nameraped, burned, lynched, stoned, bombed, beheaded, shot, gassed,gutted and raped again.”
It is hard not to turn away from the ghastly list of verbs. The poet encapsulates the horror of what continues to happen “in his name” and other names by which the Holy One is known.
But in the telling of the poem, there is an implied witness to these atrocities – the suffering is seen. The term “the countless” freights blatant injustices repeated mercilessly. The three words “in his name” carry the weaponising of belief.
Often when I name myself as Christian, I recoil from the wilful damage caused by practitioners of my faith. And not just my faith tradition, others as well. So many things are not OK, are deeply wrong, are horrors in themselves. These violations occur under the watch of religions that espouse values of peace and human dignity in the name of the divine.
Theologian Gordon Kaufman suggested the most ethical thing a person can say is “I might be wrong”. When we are too sure that we are on the side of right, that we know the mind of God, there is a diminishing and hardening of hearts.
In his life and teaching, Jesus was far more interested in how people treated each other than in setting up institutional loyalty. Before his state-sanctioned murder he repeatedly feasted with, and offered healing to, people whom no one else valued. He ticked off the disciples when they tried to become influencers.
In the telling of the poem, there is an implied witness to these atrocities – the suffering is seen.
In Australia, periodically we hear voices of indignation championing Christianity as if defending a brand. This defensiveness is not necessarily a witness to faith, often it looks like posturing.
The life, death and risen life of Jesus of Nazareth were and are subversive. The task of re-imagining and understanding anew how the biblical stories can resonate allows an ongoing dialogue with them.
In Magdalene on Gethsemane, Marie Howe suggests a new possibility, that Jesus’ agony was on account of what would follow, “in his name”.
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Sorry, Team Biden: Lower capital-gains taxes aren’t racist — higher ones are
By Stephen Moore
I’ll bet you didn’t know that cutting the capital gains tax or the death tax is “racist.”
Believe it or not, that’s the latest contention by the Biden administration, which seems to view every policy issue through the prism of not what’s best for the American economy but race and victimhood.
In a new report, “Advancing Equity through Tax Reform,” the Biden Treasury Department examined stock and home ownership in America by race.
The study concludes lower tax rates on capital gains income “disproportionately benefited White families relative to Black, Hispanic, and other racial/ethnic groups.”
It found more than 90% of the benefits went to whites.
Why does the government need to know the race or ethnicity of who owns stock or businesses or homes?
The answer is obvious: The Biden administration is resorting to a blatant race-baiting argument so it can raise wealth and capital gains taxes in the name of “equity.”
Yet there are two good reasons why we’ve traditionally kept tax rates on investment low.
The first: Every time we’ve lowered the capital gains or corporate tax, we’ve seen a burst of investment, which helps everyone.
Just listen to John F. Kennedy, who endorsed a preferential tax rate on capital gains while president by declaring: “The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions. . . . the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.”
The second reason: A lower tax on capital gains is not a “giveaway” to the rich because taxes on investment income are levied not just once, but multiple times, via corporate income tax, the small-business pass-through tax, the dividend tax and even the death tax.
The Treasury study calculated that roughly two-thirds of white households own stock, but only 39% of blacks do, and 28% of Hispanics, to suggest lowering capital-gains taxes mostly benefits whites. (The Treasury conveniently omits stock owned by much larger numbers of Americans in pension and 401k plans.)
If so, though, let’s try to expand minority ownership.
That’s a worthy policy goal, allowing more Americans to become workers and owners.
And one way to achieve that would be to reduce the tax on investment and savings.
Another would be to allow young Americans of all races to put the 10% to 12% of their paychecks that now disappears into the black hole of the Social Security system into a personal 401k Own America account invested in an index fund of all stocks.
This plan would drive stock ownership in America up to perhaps 80% or 90%.
Many of the ownership disparities would then disappear.
Under this plan, the typical young black or Hispanic worker could accumulate millions of dollars of wealth over their working years and have much higher retirement benefits.
We would become a nation of worker-owners.
Yet Democrats strongly oppose such a share-the-wealth plan.
Instead, the Biden administration proposes to nearly double the capital-gains rate to 44% and introduce a new tax on unrealized capital gains.
This would raise the tax on the returns from stock ownership to well over 50%. How in the world would a higher tax on ownership expand minority ownership?
Recall that if you tax something you get less of it — which is why we tax cigarettes to get people to stop smoking.
Do we really want to encourage people to stop investing?
The Biden plan would deter blacks and Hispanics from becoming owners by making ownership more expensive and the reward lower.
Indeed, this scheme would only concentrate more of the wealth in the hands of the already rich, while making most of the rest of Americans — especially blacks and Hispanics — poorer and more dependent on government.
Sounds pretty racist to me.
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Protesters seek to wash away the ‘sin’ of their own privilege by donning keffiyeh
Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? You remember that wacky idea. It involved blue-haired woke activists raging against anyone who dared to “appropriate” the culture of a different ethnic group. On campuses across the Anglo-American world, “cultural appropriators” were forever being called out.
Whether it was a white dude sporting dreadlocks or a drunk student putting on a sombrero, the cry would go up: “Stop stealing other people’s culture!” I’m not joking about the sombreros. Student officials at the University of East Anglia in England went so far as to ban non-Mexican students from donning Mexican headgear on the basis that it’s “racist”.
Pop singer Katy Perry was accused of “appropriating black culture” after wearing her hair in cornrows. Even the sainted Beyonce got it in the neck after sporting a sari in a Coldplay video. Is she “misusing Indian culture”, pondered the lunatic BBC?
Cultural appropriation, declared the Oxford Dictionary, refers to “Western appropriations of non-Western (culture)”. You must never do this, barked PC finger-waggers. Yet fast forward to today and cultural appropriation seems to be acceptable again. In fact, it’s all the rage.
Right-on campuses are awash with upper-class white kids wearing the garb of “non-Western” people. No, not the sombrero or forbidden Afro hairstyles but the keffiyeh. Everywhere you look, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney, students are adorned in these checkered scarfs from the Middle East.
The kind of people who just a few years ago would have harangued some white girl for getting a Japanese-style tattoo now spend their days decked out in Arab attire.
They call it solidarity, of course. We wear the keffiyeh to show our support for the beleaguered Palestinians, they say.
I’m not buying it. Since when did solidarity involve fancy dress? I don’t remember those 1960s kids who protested against the Vietnam war putting on bamboo conical hats in mimicry of the Vietnamese peasants who often felt the heat of US bombs. Or Western supporters of the Quit India Movement wearing white dhotis in the style of Mohandas Gandhi.
The keffiyeh craze feels more like radical chic than meaningful activism. The Arab cloth has become an essential fashion item for the woke, the mandatory uniform of the self-righteous. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to “you”. Pulling on a keffiyeh is a shortcut to the moral high ground. Hipsters will smile at you in the street. Your local craft coffee house may even give you your macchiato for free.
When I see students camping out for Gaza with keffiyehs wrapped around their necks and faces, I don’t think: “Now that’s solidarity” – I think: “Now that’s showing off.” It’s an act of moral distinction, a way for the educated elites to differentiate themselves from the supposedly indifferent throng.
These keffiyeh wearers are plundering foreign culture far more egregiously than some legless bloke in a sombrero propping up the student bar. For they don’t only dress up like Gazans, they creepily mimic their living conditions, too.
Witness the student leader at Columbia University in New York City – in a keffiyeh, of course – saying that she and her fellow campers required “humanitarian aid”. Do you want us to “die of dehydration and starvation”, she crazily asked university bosses.
There is something gross about privileged kids on an Ivy League campus cosplaying as victims of a humanitarian crisis. These people could have pizza Deliverooed at a moment’s notice.
In one truly cringe-worthy clip, a group of Columbia students could be seen receiving “humanitarian aid” through the college gates. I say humanitarian aid – it was probably just their Starbucks order or a blueberry muffin from a local bodega.
It came off as a crass re-enactment of the scenes we’ve seen in Gaza: hyper-privileged Ivy Leaguers masquerading as the wretched of the earth.
When mainly Jewish counter-protesters confronted the Gaza camp at the University of California, Los Angeles, the campers denounced them as “Zionist thugs”.
This is what life must be like for the Palestinians, some said. These people have no shame. It’s not enough to appropriate Palestinian scarfs – they want to appropriate Palestinian suffering, too.
This is a new, strange and unsettling kind of activism. It’s not ’60s-style solidarity with foreign struggles. And it actually goes beyond radical chic, beyond politics as fashion statement.
No, this is about coveting suffering. These activists, it seems to me, crave the moral rush of oppression, the thrill of persecution. They pull on the garb of a beleaguered people to escape, however fleetingly, the spoilt, pampered reality of their own lives, to taste that most prized of social assets in the woke era: victimhood. In draping the keffiyeh around their shoulders, they get to be someone else for a while. Someone less bourgeois, less white. Someone a little more exotic, a little more interesting.
It’s not politics – it’s therapy. They seek to wash away the “sin” of their own privilege through mimicking what they consider to be the least privileged people on earth: the Palestinians. It’s not Gaza they want to save but their own souls. It feels as if they’re more interested in what Palestine can do for them than in what they can do for Palestine. Palestine becomes little more than a source of meaning, a fountain of purpose, in the lives of bored youths on leafy campuses.
It’s a toxic mix of narcissism and racism, with Arabs reduced to the lowly role of soothing the white guilt of privileged Westerners.
Listen, that’s not solidarity, it’s the opposite – selfishness.
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5 May, 2024
Homosexual women die sooner
Riskier lifestyle? More use of drugs and alcohol? More domestic violence? Hormonal imbalance?
Disparities in Mortality by Sexual Orientation in a Large, Prospective Cohort of Female Nurses
Question Do bisexual and lesbian women have higher risks of premature mortality than heterosexual women?
Findings Bisexual and lesbian participants in the Nurses’ Health Study II died an estimated 37% and 20% sooner, respectively, than heterosexual participants.
Meaning Lesbian, gay, and bisexual women experienced earlier all-cause mortality, highlighting the need to address upstream individual and structural determinants of health disparities.
Abstract
Importance Extensive evidence documents health disparities for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) women, including worse physical, mental, and behavioral health than heterosexual women. These factors have been linked to premature mortality, yet few studies have investigated premature mortality disparities among LGB women and whether they differ by lesbian or bisexual identity.
Objective To examine differences in mortality by sexual orientation.
Design, Setting, and Participants This prospective cohort study examined differences in time to mortality across sexual orientation, adjusting for birth cohort. Participants were female nurses born between 1945 and 1964, initially recruited in the US in 1989 for the Nurses’ Health Study II, and followed up through April 2022.
Exposures Sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual) assessed in 1995.
Results Among 116 149 eligible participants, 90 833 (78%) had valid sexual orientation data. Of these 90 833 participants, 89 821 (98.9%) identified as heterosexual, 694 (0.8%) identified as lesbian, and 318 (0.4%) identified as bisexual. Of the 4227 deaths reported, the majority were among heterosexual participants (n = 4146; cumulative mortality of 4.6%), followed by lesbian participants (n = 49; cumulative mortality of 7.0%) and bisexual participants (n = 32; cumulative mortality of 10.1%). Compared with heterosexual participants, LGB participants had earlier mortality (adjusted acceleration factor, 0.74 [95% CI, 0.64-0.84]). These differences were greatest among bisexual participants (adjusted acceleration factor, 0.63 [95% CI, 0.51-0.78]) followed by lesbian participants (adjusted acceleration factor, 0.80 [95% CI, 0.68-0.95]).
Conclusions and Relevance In an otherwise largely homogeneous sample of female nurses, participants identifying as lesbian or bisexual had markedly earlier mortality during the study period compared with heterosexual women. These differences in mortality timing highlight the urgency of addressing modifiable risks and upstream social forces that propagate and perpetuate disparities
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2818061
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The ruins that could prove the Bible was TRUE: Stretch of wall in ancient Jerusalem vindicates the holy book's account, archaeologists claim
The more archaeologists discover, the more the Bible is revealed as good history
A scientific breakthrough has exposed the truth about a site in ancient Jerusalem, overturning expert opinion and vindicating the Bible's account.
Until now, experts believed a stretch of wall in the original heart of the city was built by Hezekiah, King of Judah, whose reign straddled the seventh and eighth centuries BC.
He had seen his neighbours to the north, the Kingdom of Israel, destroyed by the Assyrian Empire, and it was thought that he built the wall to defend against the invaders.
But now an almost decade-long study has revealed it was built by his great-grandfather, Uzziah, after a huge earthquake, echoing the account of the Bible.
The wall is in the City of David – the historic archaeological site that formed the original town of Jerusalem, according to the Bible.
Who was Hezekiah?
Mentioned in the books of Kings, Isaiah and Chronicles in the Bible, King Hezekiah is regarded as one of the greatest kings of Judah.
He is thought to have ruled between 715BC and 686BC following the death of his father King Ahaz. According to the Hebrew Bible he was 25 when he assumed the throne.
Following the death of the Assyrian king Sargon II, Hezekiah took the opportunity to throw off the subservience of his kingdom to the Assyrians.
He ceased to pay the tribute imposed upon his father and instead allied himself with Egypt.
Sargon's son Sennacherib embarked on a series of attempts to suppress this rebellion which culmulated in the siege of Jerusalem.
Hezekiah's reign is thought to have brought about a notable increase in the power of Judah in the region and it became an important state on the frontier between Assyria and Egpt.
The Hebrew Bible also describes how Hezekiah made a miraculous recovery from a sickness after praying to God. He went on to live for another 15 years.
Joe Uziel of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said: 'For decades, it was assumed that this wall was built by Hezekiah, King of Judah.
'But it is now becoming clear that it dates back to the days of King Uzziah, as hinted at in the Bible.
'Until now, many researchers assumed that the wall was built by Hezekiah during his rebellion against Sennacherib, King of Assyria, in order to defend Jerusalem during the Assyrian siege.
'It is now apparent that the wall in its eastern part, in the area of the City of David, was built earlier, shortly after the great earthquake of Jerusalem, and as part of the construction of the city.'
The Old Testament describes the construction in the Second Book of Chronicles.
It reads: 'Uzziah built towers in Jerusalem at the Corner Gate, at the Valley Gate and at the angle of the wall, and he fortified them.'
Scripture also attests to the seismic activity – with the Old-Testament Book of Amos dating itself to 'two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah'.
The study, a joint project between the IAA, Tel Aviv University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, revealed the provenance of the ancient wall using carbon-14 dating.
Also known as radiocarbon dating, this technique uses the decay of a radioactive isotope of carbon (14C) to measure the time and date objects containing carbon-bearing material.
According to the IAA, this period of history was previously considered a 'black hole' for carbon-14 dating, due to fluctuating levels of the isotope in the atmosphere at the time.
But using ancient tree rings from Europe, scientists were able to chart these fluctuations year by year.
Elisabetta Boaretto of the Weizmann Institute said: 'The resolution of c-14 was very bad – 200-300 years; it was impossible to distinguish anything else.
'With the work we've done in the City of David, we succeeded to reach a resolution less than 10 years, which is really something very very new and dramatic.'
The scientists took their samples from organic artifacts found at four different excavation sites in the ancient heart of Jerusalem – sometimes called the City of David.
Among these were grape seeds, date pits and even bat skeletons.
All were cleaned, converted into graphite, then put into a particle accelerator at speeds of 3,000km per second to separate the carbon-14 from other organic material.
Measuring the carbon then revealed the sample's true age.
Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University said the method had also pushed back the westward expansion of the city by five generations.
He said: 'Until now, most researchers have linked Jerusalem's growth to the west, to the period of King Hezekiah – just over 2,700 years ago.
'The conventional assumption to date has been that the city expanded due to the arrival of refugees from the Kingdom of Israel in the north, following the Assyrian exile.
'However, the new findings strengthen the view that Jerusalem grew in size and spread towards Mount Zion already in the ninth century BC.
'This was during the reign of King Jehoash – a hundred years before the Assyrian exile.
'In light of this, the new research teaches that the expansion of Jerusalem is a result of internal-Judean demographic growth and the establishment of political and economic systems.'
What's more, it shows that the city was larger than thought during the reigns David and Solomon.
Dr Uziel said: 'During the 10th century BC, the days of David and Solomon, this research has shown that the city is occupied in different areas, and seems to have been larger than we thought previously.
'We can pinpoint specific buildings and relate them to specific kings mentioned in the Biblical text.'
The Kingdom of Judah would last until 587 BC, when the Babylonians besieged and destroyed its capital Jerusalem, along with Solomon's Temple – often called the First Temple.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13378663/ruins-Jerusalem-prove-Bible-wall.html
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Whistleblower Tells Of Damaging Transgender Surgeries
Television psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw recently interviewed “gender transition” industry whistleblower Jamie Reed, exposing mainstream apolitical audiences to a harrowing array of details about its harms to children and medical professionals’ indifference to them
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Jamie Reed identifies as a “queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.”
She is “married” to a woman who identifies as a man and is the founder of the “LGBT Courage Coalition,” a group of self-described “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults who are concerned with the current state of gender medicine for children & the silencing of diverse viewpoints.”
In early 2023, she went public about her resignation the previous November from her job as a case worker at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where she said she “had the broadest perspective on our existing and prospective patients,” through which she witnessed how “the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’”
On April 11, Reed appeared on Dr. Phil Primetime to tell her story and share details of what she saw.
Young girls who picked up their interest in “transitioning” from social media, she said, “would come in, and they would almost have the exact same storyline, too, like they learned what to say from a video to explain, ‘Oh, no, really, I’ve felt this way from early childhood,’ but a lot of their parents couldn’t remember anything like that.”
Despite the U.S. medical establishment’s aggressive defense of so-called “gender-affirming care,” Reed described there being “very few written protocols or guidelines,” with one practitioner even describing their “work” as “flying the plane as we built it.”
Reed summarized the doctors as “acting like they’re God when it comes to medically ‘transitioning’ children.”
“I saw a young person who was begging to have their breasts put back on after having surgery,” she recalled, which was far from an isolated incident. “We were encouraged not to make a big deal out of it and definitely not to tell other families. I couldn’t continue to be silent on it.”
“We started to see patients who were experiencing very significant medical harms being rushed to the emergency room with lacerations requiring stitches,” she told McGraw. “We had patients contact us who were begging to have body parts put back on within months of having surgeries.”
“The thing that kept happening is every time I would raise concerns and ask about the protocols and ask about the guidelines — this is just how the industry works, if a child says they’re ‘trans’ there’s no questioning it,” she went on. “We just say, ‘Yep, you’re trans, what would you like?’”
A stunned Dr. Phil asked, “you’re telling me that a 12- or 13-year-old, who can’t decide which pajamas to wear, can come in and say, ‘I’ve decided that I want to transition,’ and with no more than a couple of hours or two visits — not even a couple of hours, two visits — they say ‘Okay, start taking this, start doing this,’ which alters their biochemistry in a way that you can’t come back from?” Reed confirmed that was correct.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
In summer 2023, the Biden administration’s own U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report that acknowledged “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
Some such physicians have been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an exposé last year about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
Yet while mounting evidence against youth “gender transitions” is prompting European nations such as the United Kingdom and France, which are normally to the left of the U.S., to move away from the practice, in America, the Biden administration continues to dig in its heels, insisting that surgical and chemical mutilation are “best practices,” calling the denial of such procedures to minors “close to sinful,” and baselessly blaming the suicides of gender-confused children on failure to promote young people’s “fundamental right and freedom to be who they are.”
https://principia-scientific.com/whistleblower-tells-of-damaging-transgender-surgeries/
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2 May, 2024
Man, 28, sparks fierce debate after revealing he has been cheating on his wife who has REFUSED to have sex in two years - and instead urged him to 'go get it elsewhere'
I have no sympathy with the unhappy woman in this matter. I was in a similar position to her. I no longer wanted sex with my beloved. It was a case of my ‘resting libido’ – the amount of sex we want in a relationship a year or so in -- being very low in my case. So I told her that what she did when she was out of my sight was her business, not mine -- as long as I did not have to hear about it. And she did go on to have a number of affairs. It was not ideal but our love for one another endures to this day -- 18 years after we first met
A 28-year-old man has sparked fierce debate after revealing he slept with another woman after his wife told him to 'go get it elsewhere.'
The unnamed lothario took to Reddit's popular AITAH - Am I The A**hole - thread to ask whether he was in the wrong for straying from his marriage because his wife 'didn't want to have sex any more.'
He said that his spouse had told him to 'go get it elsewhere because you are not getting it from me' - which is exactly what he did.
In the post, which was shared earlier this week, the man began: 'Basically my wife has decided unilaterally that we are done having sex.
'She found out that she cannot have kids due to a choice she made before we met. And kids, apparently, are the only reason she was willing to have sex.
'I love my wife and I enjoy being intimate with her. But it was making our marriage untenable after two years of this.'
He admitted that he had tried to talk to his wife and had even started going for counseling - but was still running into difficulties.
'No matter how I approached her about our situation she would not try and see it from my point of view. Every discussion would end with her crying and screaming in my face that I am trying to emotionally manipulate her.
'I then wrote her a letter outlining my feelings and asking her to come with me for counseling, to seek it for herself, perhaps to go see a doctor. I was kind and loving in the letter.
'The last thing I wanted to do was set her off. I worked on the wording with my counselor to make sure I wasn't saying anything aggressive that could be misinterpreted.'
The man said that his spouse read the letter but 'scrawled across it with her red Sharpie, "go get it elsewhere because you are not getting it from me."'
He explained: 'Then she walked out. I sat there for about an hour doing nothing. Then I told myself that was what I was going to do.
'We are both fairly successful in our jobs, I'm not super attractive but I'm fit and a good talker. It took a while but I met someone. We started out as just friends but it became physical. I made sure she knew I was married. She is not interested in a relationship so I guess I am a safe option for her.
'My wife found out because I did not try and hide it. She was crying when I got home one night. When I came in she asked if I was going to leave her. I said no.
'She asked if I was cheating on her and I said I was getting sex elsewhere. She said that was cheating and I did not disagree. I asked her what she wanted to do. She said I had to stop. I asked her if we were going to start having sex. She said I was an irrational a**hole if I thought that she would have sex with me after I cheated.
'I went to my desk and pulled out a photocopy of the letter I wrote with her answer in it.'
The exasperated husband continued: 'I went to have a shower and go to my room to sleep. When I woke up she was sitting on the couch waiting to talk.
'She said that she reread the letter and that she realized she had not before. She assumed it was just a letter begging for sex. She said she would go for counseling alone and with me. All I had to do was stop having sex elsewhere.
'I said I would be willing to pause my friendship until we saw a counselor. And that if I saw progress in our relationship I would break it off. She said she would not agree to counseling without me leaving the other woman.
'It almost turned into a fight so I just went for my run. Before I left I asked her what would compel her to go to counseling if I stopped having sex elsewhere. When I got back she still did not have an answer. She couldn't even say that our relationship was worth saving.'
He concluded: 'I don't want a divorce. But I am willing to leave over this. I am 28 I am not going the rest of my life without sex. She refuses to see my side.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13368525/man-sleeps-woman-wife-told-elsewhere.html
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California’s Politicians Determined to Bring ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to Life
The plot of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged can be briefly summed up as follows: the productive leaders and innovators of the country go on strike by disappearing from society to protest the cronyism, corruption, and oppressive taxes that have made living a virtuous life unbearable. The nation is then on the brink of an economic collapse as the remaining politicians, intellectuals, and mediocre businessmen are only able to take from others and have no capability to create or add value.
Atlas Shrugged is very popular with those whose views lean toward libertarianism, while those who lean to the left react to it like a vampire does to a crucifix, despite never even reading a page.
Concerningly, the state of California seems determined to bring Rand’s novel to life.
During the 20th century, California was the jewel of America. Beautiful weather, diverse landscapes, access to the Pacific Ocean, and other features made it the leading state of the nation. There is a saying that says “As California goes, so goes the nation” because to many Americans this seemed like the best place in the entire country to live and raise a family.
Things seem to have changed in the 21st century though. When times were good, the government of California grew and spent more money than it had. In the short term, most people ignored this problem, but as time went on the deficits grew and grew. By the year 2000, the government had run up a debt of $57 billion. Twenty-two years later that number had almost tripled to $145 billion dollars. Since California is a state and not a nation they couldn’t print money to make up for the downfall, so their only options were to either cut spending or raise taxes. They chose the latter.
For state income taxes, California has the highest rates in the entire nation. They also have a declining population, with a loss of more than half a million people since a peak population of 39.5 million in 2019—and they did not all die of Covid. The majority are people who left to live in other states that did not have oppressive taxes and draconian Covid restrictions.
While wise leaders might look at this indicator and see it as a sign that they should change course, wisdom seems to be in short supply for the political elite in this state. Rather than move towards freedom, they are instead moving to erode and attack property rights even more through the form of a wealth tax. Of course, the people proposing this are trying to sell the idea to the public by saying only the super wealthy will be on the hook for this. The rest of us in the ninety-percent will benefit thanks to the rich paying their “fair share”.
The 16th amendment was sold to the American people under this promise too, and had people back then known that income taxes would lead to the system we have today, where the majority of the people use the majority of their income to pay taxes (federal, state, local, property, sales, etc), then this proposal would have been dead on arrival. Today’s politicians are trying to use the same tricks to pass a wealth tax, but the difference between now and then is that now we should know better.
What makes California’s proposed wealth tax even more disturbing is that they wish to still collect the tax for years after a person moves out of the state, like a feudal lord persecuting a serf for moving off his land. They also wish to impose the wealth tax on “part time residents” for the portion of the year that they “reside” in the state. In other words, a family vacation to Disney Land might come with a tax bill from the State of California. And when tourism declines, I wonder who the politicians will blame?
While the wealth tax has not become law yet, it is already prompting some of the mega-rich to move away, depriving California of their portion of the income tax and increasing the deficit. And it’s not just individuals who are leaving the state. National corporations are also deciding not to do business there as well.
As inflation rages across the nation, the costs of everything have gone up, and building materials are no exception. It costs more to replace a house now than it did five years ago. To meet this new reality, home insurance premiums everywhere have increased. California’s Department of Insurance has responded to the new reality by placing new regulations on the insurers to prevent them from raising rates on their customers. The logic here is that the state has the largest population so if insurers wish to do business in the largest market in the United States, then they must abide by our rules.
The reaction has essentially been a boycott of the state by the companies. In addition to normal risks, California is also prone to natural disasters like wildfires, earthquakes, and even mud slides from heavy rains. With these new regulations limiting what prices could be charged, the cost of doing business in the state increasingly outweighs any potential profits. As a result, many of the largest insurance companies in the nation like Allstate and Hartford are no longer issuing new policies in the state.
California government policy has created an insurance desert in the state and with private business unwilling to respond because the once free market is no longer free, the politicians have solved the problem with a government insurance system called FAIR so that homeowners can comply with the insurance requirements for their mortgage. Under this state-owned enterprise, California residents get to enjoy reduced coverage at a higher premium than they would have been able to get before the politicians stepped in to help. This is a clear cut, black and white example of the standard of living decreasing.
The theme of Atlas Shrugged is that the freedom of American society is responsible for its greatest achievements. The book warned that as freedom declined, so too would the standard of living. California’s politicians seem determined to recreate the dystopian world of the book with oppressive taxes, attacks on personal property, and regulations that drive away private businesses.
Someone really ought to tell them that the world of Ayn Rand’s novel was not meant to be aspirational.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/04/30/california-atlas-shrugged/
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The cost of a cashless society: the most vulnerable will pay
It's not often that I agree with "The Guardian" -- and I remember it from when it was the "Manchester Guardian" -- but I applaud their support in this matter
One of the idiosyncrasies of China’s huge appetite for luxury goods has been the high sales of man bags – a niche item in the west. Their popularity initially reflected not just the fondness of the newly rich for conspicuous consumption, but also the practical need to carry large wodges of banknotes in a country that hadn’t truly embraced credit cards. Early last decade, it was unremarkable to pay a quarter’s rent or buy a car in cash.
Yet even vegetable sellers in small markets, or people begging on the streets, now use QR codes. By 2020, 98% of people in a survey said they most commonly paid using smartphone apps. The advantage, for the consumer, is convenience. For the authorities it offers not only efficiency but oversight, in a country which is battling corruption and which closely surveils its citizens. Beijing has also been promoting a “digital yuan” developed by its central bank.
Now, however, it has announced measures to support the use of cash, such as ordering local authorities to make sure that markets and stores accept banknotes, aware that the reliance on payment apps makes life harder for both foreign tourists and for poorer, rural and elderly Chinese people struggling to access or adapt to new technology.
China’s shift to cashless payment was particularly dramatic. But the transition is happening around the world, accelerated by the pandemic – and is raising similar concerns about exclusion. Last month, campaigners in Australia organised a Draw Out Some Cash Day to show that people still care about access.
In 2021, only 15% of UK payments were in notes and coins, with the vast majority on credit or debit cards. A forecast the following year suggested that figure would drop to 6% by 2031. In fact, cash rebounded in 2022 to 19% of transactions, reflecting people’s return to physical stores, but also the impact of the cost of living crisis. Cash can help with budgeting: you can’t spend money you haven’t got.
It is also easy to use: cashless parking machines are easier for those collecting revenue, but can be infuriating and alienating for users unaccustomed to them. Cutting out cash hits the vulnerable hardest: according to a 2020 survey by the Financial Conduct Authority, 46% of the digitally excluded, 31% of those without educational qualifications, and 26% of those in poor health rely on it to a “great or very great extent”. Mencap warned the Welsh Senedd that people with learning disabilities can find it hard to manage money without cash. And there are good, as well as nefarious, reasons to value its anonymising quality: women whose abortion rights have been restricted might find it life-saving.
Businesses should think carefully before refusing cash payments. Governments must ensure that people reliant on cash can continue to use it: in the UK, where thousands of bank branches and ATMs have vanished, the Financial Conduct Authority now has powers to protect access. But even if the supply of notes and coins can be assured, authorities must also ensure that services accept them. The onward march of digital payments won’t stop, but cash still counts.
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Australia’s foreign policy is being driven by minority influence
In a new and disturbing first, immigrant communities are now driving Australia’s foreign policy in ways that are at odds with the national interest.
The Albanese government’s changing policy towards the Middle East is the result of pressure from Muslim activists. There are now three websites, which this paper reports are “circulating among political and community circles”, seeking to mobilise the country’s almost one million Muslims to use their local voting power to force the government to change Australia’s long-held and previously bipartisan support for Israel as the only liberal, pluralist democracy in the Middle East.
This was most memorably expressed in Bob Hawke’s immortal statement that if the bell tolls for Israel, it tolls for all mankind.
Labor frontbenchers, such as Tony Burke and Jason Clare (whose electorates are more than 30 per cent Muslim), failed to condemn unequivocally the October 7 atrocities, have supported local councils flying the Palestinian flag and have told local Muslims that they’re advocating for them in cabinet. The Albanese government only briefly suspended aid to the UN agency active in Gaza, despite clear evidence that much of it has been channelled to Hamas and that staff were involved in the October 7 killings.
Anthony Albanese was very slow to make a solidarity call to his Israeli counterpart after October 7, despite the terrorist murder of an elderly Australian, but was almost immediately in critical contact when an Israeli drone strike mistakenly killed an Australian aid worker.
Worst of all, our Foreign Minister has called for the recognition of Palestine even though this would reward the apocalyptic death cult that has been running Gaza.
This is not the first time that foreign fights have seeped into Australian politics and it’s not the first time that religious activists have influenced our public life. But it is the first time in our history that religious pressure has been put on our leaders to take a position that’s at odds with our national interests and our national values. And this eruption of ethnic politics into what’s best for Australia should be a reminder that migration doesn’t just build the country; it can change it, too, sometimes in unwelcome directions.
It’s hardly surprising that cultural roots should play a part in people’s contemporary attitudes. Think Irish Australians and the 1916 conscription debates and the involvement of the Catholic hierarchy in the anti-communist campaigns in the union movement of the 1940s, later playing out in the ALP split in 1955. What’s new now, though, is this unabashed appeal to a transcendent religious loyalty, with partisans in a foreign quarrel trying to drive a change to our national policy.
Exhibit one is the Muslim Votes Matter website: “The Muslim community,” it declares, “is the largest and among the fastest growing minority groups in Australia. Our collective voting bloc is the most valuable, yet under-utilised asset we have.” Muslim Votes Matter aims to unlock “this highly influential tool”, as the website call it, in the “over 20 (federal parliamentary) seats where the Muslim community collectively has the potential deciding vote”. That may not sound like much, says the website, but “in the last 25 years no federal government has been elected by a margin of more than 15 seats”.
It specifies 32 federal seats (all bar two currently Labor held) where Muslim votes “have the potential to move the needle” and for each one shows the Muslim vote against the seat’s margin.
Unsurprisingly, the MVM website claims discrimination against Australian Muslims, complaining that “Islamophobes” have protested against the opening of mosques and declaring that Australian Muslims “have had enough” and “will no longer tolerate bias and veiled racism”.
Harnessing religious solidarity with Marxist militant minority tactics, and cleverly pitched to culturally adrift adolescents and young adults, the aim is to have the 4 per cent of voters who are Muslim change the national position, not just on Palestine but “on a broad range of issues … which resonate most with the Australian Muslim community”.
The most critical, of course, is “Australia’s foreign policy response to the growing atrocities in Gaza”. “A more engaged Muslim voter base,” says the website, “benefits all Australians, and in particular those from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds.” Even though the website also claims to be politically independent and “solely dedicated to serving the best interests of the Muslim community in Australia”.
Then there’s My Vote Matters, a website run by the Islamic Council of Victoria that says it has “run four successful campaigns”. It says 70 per cent of Muslims are “extremely” or “very concerned” about right-wing extremism and 82 per cent of Muslims think their political representatives “don’t care” about Islamophobia. Its 2022 Victorian election scorecard heavily preferred the Greens and Labor over the Coalition.
As well there’s The Muslim Vote, urging Muslims to vote in accordance with MPs’ position on the “genocide” in Palestine. Those stated to have shown “support for Palestine” include Labor’s Ed Husic, Graham Perrett, Tony Zappia, Julian Hill, Maria Vamvakinou and Anne Aly. The “our campaign is backed by” section of the website merely says “coming soon”, although it also says “our supporting organisations enjoy the support of hundreds of thousands of Muslims”.
Muslim leaders and community organisations are not the only recent immigrant groups seeking to change Australian government policy and, sometimes, foster grievances against broader Australian society. A decade or so back, the local Indian community felt not enough was being done to protect Indian students against attacks by gangs. There are various “united front” groups active inside the Australian Chinese community in support of Beijing that were thought to have used their influence strongly against the Morrison government, particularly in online Chinese language spaces.
What’s striking, though, in this push by Muslim leaders to change Australia’s policy on the Middle East is that there’s no attempt to appeal to Australia’s long-term national interest. It’s taken for granted that what matters most is local Muslims’ solidarity with their fellow Muslims abroad.
Australia’s Muslim leaders (and also much of their communities), it seems, aren’t thinking as Australians who happen to be Muslims but as Muslims who happen to reside in Australia. If they were thinking as Australians, there would be at least as much emphasis on the return of the hostages as on an immediate ceasefire. Perhaps this is to be expected given Islam’s lack of any notion of the separation of church and state and its “death to the infidels” instinct that many local leaders seem to be playing up rather than down.
Most troubling has been the pressure put on politicians and law enforcement to change the language on Islamist terrorism: first to drop any mention of “Islamist” and call it “religiously motivated extremist violence”, and now, as advocated by an alliance of peak Islamic groups, to drop any mention of religion at all and refer to it as ”politically motivated extremist violence”.
Even when the teenagers arrested in connection with the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel quote the Koran and have images idolising Osama bin Laden. Coupled with the hate speech spewing from influential mosques and websites, we can’t pretend away the links between radical Islamist theology and terrorism.
Right now, at 765,900 last year, immigration is far too high. It is depressing wages, boosting housing costs and clogging infrastructure. And without a much greater stress on the importance of migrants joining Team Australia, we’re at risk of importing all the troubles of the wider world, of which the Gaza conflict is just the most obvious immediate example.
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1 May, 2024
Man, 28, sparks fierce debate after revealing he has been cheating on his wife who has REFUSED to have sex in two years - and instead urged him to 'go get it elsewhere'
I have no sympathy with the unhappy woman in this matter. I was in a similar position to her. I no longer wanted sex with my beloved. It was a case of my ‘resting libido’ – the amount of sex we want in a relationship a year or so in -- being very low in my case. So I told her that what she did when she was out of my sight was her business, not mine -- as long as I did not have to hear about it. And she did go on to have a number of affairs. It was not ideal but our love for one another endures to this day -- 18 years after we first met
A 28-year-old man has sparked fierce debate after revealing he slept with another woman after his wife told him to 'go get it elsewhere.'
The unnamed lothario took to Reddit's popular AITAH - Am I The A**hole - thread to ask whether he was in the wrong for straying from his marriage because his wife 'didn't want to have sex any more.'
He said that his spouse had told him to 'go get it elsewhere because you are not getting it from me' - which is exactly what he did.
In the post, which was shared earlier this week, the man began: 'Basically my wife has decided unilaterally that we are done having sex.
'She found out that she cannot have kids due to a choice she made before we met. And kids, apparently, are the only reason she was willing to have sex.
'I love my wife and I enjoy being intimate with her. But it was making our marriage untenable after two years of this.'
He admitted that he had tried to talk to his wife and had even started going for counseling - but was still running into difficulties.
'No matter how I approached her about our situation she would not try and see it from my point of view. Every discussion would end with her crying and screaming in my face that I am trying to emotionally manipulate her.
'I then wrote her a letter outlining my feelings and asking her to come with me for counseling, to seek it for herself, perhaps to go see a doctor. I was kind and loving in the letter.
'The last thing I wanted to do was set her off. I worked on the wording with my counselor to make sure I wasn't saying anything aggressive that could be misinterpreted.'
The man said that his spouse read the letter but 'scrawled across it with her red Sharpie, "go get it elsewhere because you are not getting it from me."'
He explained: 'Then she walked out. I sat there for about an hour doing nothing. Then I told myself that was what I was going to do.
'We are both fairly successful in our jobs, I'm not super attractive but I'm fit and a good talker. It took a while but I met someone. We started out as just friends but it became physical. I made sure she knew I was married. She is not interested in a relationship so I guess I am a safe option for her.
'My wife found out because I did not try and hide it. She was crying when I got home one night. When I came in she asked if I was going to leave her. I said no.
'She asked if I was cheating on her and I said I was getting sex elsewhere. She said that was cheating and I did not disagree. I asked her what she wanted to do. She said I had to stop. I asked her if we were going to start having sex. She said I was an irrational a**hole if I thought that she would have sex with me after I cheated.
'I went to my desk and pulled out a photocopy of the letter I wrote with her answer in it.'
The exasperated husband continued: 'I went to have a shower and go to my room to sleep. When I woke up she was sitting on the couch waiting to talk.
'She said that she reread the letter and that she realized she had not before. She assumed it was just a letter begging for sex. She said she would go for counseling alone and with me. All I had to do was stop having sex elsewhere.
'I said I would be willing to pause my friendship until we saw a counselor. And that if I saw progress in our relationship I would break it off. She said she would not agree to counseling without me leaving the other woman.
'It almost turned into a fight so I just went for my run. Before I left I asked her what would compel her to go to counseling if I stopped having sex elsewhere. When I got back she still did not have an answer. She couldn't even say that our relationship was worth saving.'
He concluded: 'I don't want a divorce. But I am willing to leave over this. I am 28 I am not going the rest of my life without sex. She refuses to see my side.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13368525/man-sleeps-woman-wife-told-elsewhere.html
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California’s Politicians Determined to Bring ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to Life
The plot of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged can be briefly summed up as follows: the productive leaders and innovators of the country go on strike by disappearing from society to protest the cronyism, corruption, and oppressive taxes that have made living a virtuous life unbearable. The nation is then on the brink of an economic collapse as the remaining politicians, intellectuals, and mediocre businessmen are only able to take from others and have no capability to create or add value.
Atlas Shrugged is very popular with those whose views lean toward libertarianism, while those who lean to the left react to it like a vampire does to a crucifix, despite never even reading a page.
Concerningly, the state of California seems determined to bring Rand’s novel to life.
During the 20th century, California was the jewel of America. Beautiful weather, diverse landscapes, access to the Pacific Ocean, and other features made it the leading state of the nation. There is a saying that says “As California goes, so goes the nation” because to many Americans this seemed like the best place in the entire country to live and raise a family.
Things seem to have changed in the 21st century though. When times were good, the government of California grew and spent more money than it had. In the short term, most people ignored this problem, but as time went on the deficits grew and grew. By the year 2000, the government had run up a debt of $57 billion. Twenty-two years later that number had almost tripled to $145 billion dollars. Since California is a state and not a nation they couldn’t print money to make up for the downfall, so their only options were to either cut spending or raise taxes. They chose the latter.
For state income taxes, California has the highest rates in the entire nation. They also have a declining population, with a loss of more than half a million people since a peak population of 39.5 million in 2019—and they did not all die of Covid. The majority are people who left to live in other states that did not have oppressive taxes and draconian Covid restrictions.
While wise leaders might look at this indicator and see it as a sign that they should change course, wisdom seems to be in short supply for the political elite in this state. Rather than move towards freedom, they are instead moving to erode and attack property rights even more through the form of a wealth tax. Of course, the people proposing this are trying to sell the idea to the public by saying only the super wealthy will be on the hook for this. The rest of us in the ninety-percent will benefit thanks to the rich paying their “fair share”.
The 16th amendment was sold to the American people under this promise too, and had people back then known that income taxes would lead to the system we have today, where the majority of the people use the majority of their income to pay taxes (federal, state, local, property, sales, etc), then this proposal would have been dead on arrival. Today’s politicians are trying to use the same tricks to pass a wealth tax, but the difference between now and then is that now we should know better.
What makes California’s proposed wealth tax even more disturbing is that they wish to still collect the tax for years after a person moves out of the state, like a feudal lord persecuting a serf for moving off his land. They also wish to impose the wealth tax on “part time residents” for the portion of the year that they “reside” in the state. In other words, a family vacation to Disney Land might come with a tax bill from the State of California. And when tourism declines, I wonder who the politicians will blame?
While the wealth tax has not become law yet, it is already prompting some of the mega-rich to move away, depriving California of their portion of the income tax and increasing the deficit. And it’s not just individuals who are leaving the state. National corporations are also deciding not to do business there as well.
As inflation rages across the nation, the costs of everything have gone up, and building materials are no exception. It costs more to replace a house now than it did five years ago. To meet this new reality, home insurance premiums everywhere have increased. California’s Department of Insurance has responded to the new reality by placing new regulations on the insurers to prevent them from raising rates on their customers. The logic here is that the state has the largest population so if insurers wish to do business in the largest market in the United States, then they must abide by our rules.
The reaction has essentially been a boycott of the state by the companies. In addition to normal risks, California is also prone to natural disasters like wildfires, earthquakes, and even mud slides from heavy rains. With these new regulations limiting what prices could be charged, the cost of doing business in the state increasingly outweighs any potential profits. As a result, many of the largest insurance companies in the nation like Allstate and Hartford are no longer issuing new policies in the state.
California government policy has created an insurance desert in the state and with private business unwilling to respond because the once free market is no longer free, the politicians have solved the problem with a government insurance system called FAIR so that homeowners can comply with the insurance requirements for their mortgage. Under this state-owned enterprise, California residents get to enjoy reduced coverage at a higher premium than they would have been able to get before the politicians stepped in to help. This is a clear cut, black and white example of the standard of living decreasing.
The theme of Atlas Shrugged is that the freedom of American society is responsible for its greatest achievements. The book warned that as freedom declined, so too would the standard of living. California’s politicians seem determined to recreate the dystopian world of the book with oppressive taxes, attacks on personal property, and regulations that drive away private businesses.
Someone really ought to tell them that the world of Ayn Rand’s novel was not meant to be aspirational.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/04/30/california-atlas-shrugged/
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The cost of a cashless society: the most vulnerable will pay
It's not often that I agree with "The Guardian" -- and I remember it from when it was the "Manchester Guardian" -- but I applaud their support in this matter
One of the idiosyncrasies of China’s huge appetite for luxury goods has been the high sales of man bags – a niche item in the west. Their popularity initially reflected not just the fondness of the newly rich for conspicuous consumption, but also the practical need to carry large wodges of banknotes in a country that hadn’t truly embraced credit cards. Early last decade, it was unremarkable to pay a quarter’s rent or buy a car in cash.
Yet even vegetable sellers in small markets, or people begging on the streets, now use QR codes. By 2020, 98% of people in a survey said they most commonly paid using smartphone apps. The advantage, for the consumer, is convenience. For the authorities it offers not only efficiency but oversight, in a country which is battling corruption and which closely surveils its citizens. Beijing has also been promoting a “digital yuan” developed by its central bank.
Now, however, it has announced measures to support the use of cash, such as ordering local authorities to make sure that markets and stores accept banknotes, aware that the reliance on payment apps makes life harder for both foreign tourists and for poorer, rural and elderly Chinese people struggling to access or adapt to new technology.
China’s shift to cashless payment was particularly dramatic. But the transition is happening around the world, accelerated by the pandemic – and is raising similar concerns about exclusion. Last month, campaigners in Australia organised a Draw Out Some Cash Day to show that people still care about access.
In 2021, only 15% of UK payments were in notes and coins, with the vast majority on credit or debit cards. A forecast the following year suggested that figure would drop to 6% by 2031. In fact, cash rebounded in 2022 to 19% of transactions, reflecting people’s return to physical stores, but also the impact of the cost of living crisis. Cash can help with budgeting: you can’t spend money you haven’t got.
It is also easy to use: cashless parking machines are easier for those collecting revenue, but can be infuriating and alienating for users unaccustomed to them. Cutting out cash hits the vulnerable hardest: according to a 2020 survey by the Financial Conduct Authority, 46% of the digitally excluded, 31% of those without educational qualifications, and 26% of those in poor health rely on it to a “great or very great extent”. Mencap warned the Welsh Senedd that people with learning disabilities can find it hard to manage money without cash. And there are good, as well as nefarious, reasons to value its anonymising quality: women whose abortion rights have been restricted might find it life-saving.
Businesses should think carefully before refusing cash payments. Governments must ensure that people reliant on cash can continue to use it: in the UK, where thousands of bank branches and ATMs have vanished, the Financial Conduct Authority now has powers to protect access. But even if the supply of notes and coins can be assured, authorities must also ensure that services accept them. The onward march of digital payments won’t stop, but cash still counts.
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Australia’s foreign policy is being driven by minority influence
In a new and disturbing first, immigrant communities are now driving Australia’s foreign policy in ways that are at odds with the national interest.
The Albanese government’s changing policy towards the Middle East is the result of pressure from Muslim activists. There are now three websites, which this paper reports are “circulating among political and community circles”, seeking to mobilise the country’s almost one million Muslims to use their local voting power to force the government to change Australia’s long-held and previously bipartisan support for Israel as the only liberal, pluralist democracy in the Middle East.
This was most memorably expressed in Bob Hawke’s immortal statement that if the bell tolls for Israel, it tolls for all mankind.
Labor frontbenchers, such as Tony Burke and Jason Clare (whose electorates are more than 30 per cent Muslim), failed to condemn unequivocally the October 7 atrocities, have supported local councils flying the Palestinian flag and have told local Muslims that they’re advocating for them in cabinet. The Albanese government only briefly suspended aid to the UN agency active in Gaza, despite clear evidence that much of it has been channelled to Hamas and that staff were involved in the October 7 killings.
Anthony Albanese was very slow to make a solidarity call to his Israeli counterpart after October 7, despite the terrorist murder of an elderly Australian, but was almost immediately in critical contact when an Israeli drone strike mistakenly killed an Australian aid worker.
Worst of all, our Foreign Minister has called for the recognition of Palestine even though this would reward the apocalyptic death cult that has been running Gaza.
This is not the first time that foreign fights have seeped into Australian politics and it’s not the first time that religious activists have influenced our public life. But it is the first time in our history that religious pressure has been put on our leaders to take a position that’s at odds with our national interests and our national values. And this eruption of ethnic politics into what’s best for Australia should be a reminder that migration doesn’t just build the country; it can change it, too, sometimes in unwelcome directions.
It’s hardly surprising that cultural roots should play a part in people’s contemporary attitudes. Think Irish Australians and the 1916 conscription debates and the involvement of the Catholic hierarchy in the anti-communist campaigns in the union movement of the 1940s, later playing out in the ALP split in 1955. What’s new now, though, is this unabashed appeal to a transcendent religious loyalty, with partisans in a foreign quarrel trying to drive a change to our national policy.
Exhibit one is the Muslim Votes Matter website: “The Muslim community,” it declares, “is the largest and among the fastest growing minority groups in Australia. Our collective voting bloc is the most valuable, yet under-utilised asset we have.” Muslim Votes Matter aims to unlock “this highly influential tool”, as the website call it, in the “over 20 (federal parliamentary) seats where the Muslim community collectively has the potential deciding vote”. That may not sound like much, says the website, but “in the last 25 years no federal government has been elected by a margin of more than 15 seats”.
It specifies 32 federal seats (all bar two currently Labor held) where Muslim votes “have the potential to move the needle” and for each one shows the Muslim vote against the seat’s margin.
Unsurprisingly, the MVM website claims discrimination against Australian Muslims, complaining that “Islamophobes” have protested against the opening of mosques and declaring that Australian Muslims “have had enough” and “will no longer tolerate bias and veiled racism”.
Harnessing religious solidarity with Marxist militant minority tactics, and cleverly pitched to culturally adrift adolescents and young adults, the aim is to have the 4 per cent of voters who are Muslim change the national position, not just on Palestine but “on a broad range of issues … which resonate most with the Australian Muslim community”.
The most critical, of course, is “Australia’s foreign policy response to the growing atrocities in Gaza”. “A more engaged Muslim voter base,” says the website, “benefits all Australians, and in particular those from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds.” Even though the website also claims to be politically independent and “solely dedicated to serving the best interests of the Muslim community in Australia”.
Then there’s My Vote Matters, a website run by the Islamic Council of Victoria that says it has “run four successful campaigns”. It says 70 per cent of Muslims are “extremely” or “very concerned” about right-wing extremism and 82 per cent of Muslims think their political representatives “don’t care” about Islamophobia. Its 2022 Victorian election scorecard heavily preferred the Greens and Labor over the Coalition.
As well there’s The Muslim Vote, urging Muslims to vote in accordance with MPs’ position on the “genocide” in Palestine. Those stated to have shown “support for Palestine” include Labor’s Ed Husic, Graham Perrett, Tony Zappia, Julian Hill, Maria Vamvakinou and Anne Aly. The “our campaign is backed by” section of the website merely says “coming soon”, although it also says “our supporting organisations enjoy the support of hundreds of thousands of Muslims”.
Muslim leaders and community organisations are not the only recent immigrant groups seeking to change Australian government policy and, sometimes, foster grievances against broader Australian society. A decade or so back, the local Indian community felt not enough was being done to protect Indian students against attacks by gangs. There are various “united front” groups active inside the Australian Chinese community in support of Beijing that were thought to have used their influence strongly against the Morrison government, particularly in online Chinese language spaces.
What’s striking, though, in this push by Muslim leaders to change Australia’s policy on the Middle East is that there’s no attempt to appeal to Australia’s long-term national interest. It’s taken for granted that what matters most is local Muslims’ solidarity with their fellow Muslims abroad.
Australia’s Muslim leaders (and also much of their communities), it seems, aren’t thinking as Australians who happen to be Muslims but as Muslims who happen to reside in Australia. If they were thinking as Australians, there would be at least as much emphasis on the return of the hostages as on an immediate ceasefire. Perhaps this is to be expected given Islam’s lack of any notion of the separation of church and state and its “death to the infidels” instinct that many local leaders seem to be playing up rather than down.
Most troubling has been the pressure put on politicians and law enforcement to change the language on Islamist terrorism: first to drop any mention of “Islamist” and call it “religiously motivated extremist violence”, and now, as advocated by an alliance of peak Islamic groups, to drop any mention of religion at all and refer to it as ”politically motivated extremist violence”.
Even when the teenagers arrested in connection with the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel quote the Koran and have images idolising Osama bin Laden. Coupled with the hate speech spewing from influential mosques and websites, we can’t pretend away the links between radical Islamist theology and terrorism.
Right now, at 765,900 last year, immigration is far too high. It is depressing wages, boosting housing costs and clogging infrastructure. And without a much greater stress on the importance of migrants joining Team Australia, we’re at risk of importing all the troubles of the wider world, of which the Gaza conflict is just the most obvious immediate example.
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1 May, 2024
‘Economic Suicide’: Biden Admin Justifies Tax Hike Based on Racial Criteria
The Biden administration’s analysis of its revenue proposals for fiscal year 2025 argues targeted tax hikes that disproportionately affect white people would ease racial wealth inequality.
Increasing taxes on capital gains and income-based wealth would reduce racial wealth inequality for black and Hispanic families, the Treasury Department outlined in the analysis published in mid-March. The Treasury points out that white families disproportionately hold assets subject to capital gains tax or are in a higher tax bracket, meaning a hike in those taxes would benefit black and Hispanic families.
The Biden administration argues for taxing capital income for high-income earners at “ordinary rates,” increasing the top rate from 37% to 39.6% for those who earn more than $1 million a year. Taxes on net investment income would also be hiked by 1.2 percentage points to 5% for those who make over $400,000 per year, bringing the total top marginal rate to 44.6%.
“Taxing capital gains at 44.6% at the federal level—not to mention state taxes—would be economic suicide,” Preston Brashers, research fellow for tax policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, adding:
Before the tax ever took effect, investors would rush to pull their money out of equities subject to such exorbitant tax rates. U.S. businesses would be starved for capital, and business activity would slow to a crawl. Ultimately, corporate income and capital gains income would fall off a cliff, so the net result would be less tax revenue, not more. The middle class and working class would be slammed with mass layoffs and lower real wages.
The Treasury estimates that white families are the recipients of 92% of the benefits of preferential rates on capital gains and qualified dividends, compared to 2% and 3% for Hispanic families. Only 0.4% of white families, less than 0.05% of black families, and 0.1% of Hispanic families will be affected by the proposed rule change on capital gains.
“So, if President [Joe] Biden’s goal of redistribution is to make the rich poorer, his proposal would be successful,” Brashers told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But if the goal is to lift up the middle class, the plan would fail spectacularly. Note, even the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center uses estimates that imply that the revenue-maximizing long-term capital gains rate is about 28%, so it’s clear that Biden’s proposal is on the wrong side of the Laffer curve.”
The proposal also calls for establishing a minimum 25% income tax that includes unrealized capital gains for those with wealth over $100 million. The Biden administration argues that the wealthiest taxpayers utilize their stake in unrealized gains to lower their total income and reduce their tax liability, but taxing unrealized gains may force many business owners to sell stakes in their company if they are not liquid enough to pay the burden.
“The wealthy already pay far more than their fair share, while the tax burden on large corporations ends up landing on individuals across the economy, including low-income individuals,” Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Biden administration also calls for ending a “loophole” that allows families to postpone their estate tax burden by creating trust assets that benefit multiple future generations and are not taxed on the death of the beneficiary. Around 30% of white families receive an inheritance that would qualify as of 2019, compared to 10% for black families and 7% for Hispanic families.
“Left-wing Biden economists seem unable to appreciate that raising taxes on capital hurts labor. Capital and labor work together to produce economic growth,” Edwards told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They are complements. The Biden economists seem to hold the Marxist view that capital and labor are bitter enemies, and that the only way that labor can win is for the government to crush capital.”
The Biden administration is also proposing to expand the child tax credit, temporarily increasing the amount given per child and permanently restoring the full refundability provision. The Treasury argues that it will ease racial disparities since a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic kids have benefited from it in the past.
“These proposals would also increase the fairness of the tax system by addressing some of the features that have historically reinforced racial disparities,” the proposal reads. “Over time, these proposals are expected to increase wealth accumulation by low- and middle-income families and reduce racial wealth gaps.”
The proposal was released in conjunction with calls from the Biden administration to drastically increase spending for fiscal year 2025, adding at least $14.8 trillion to the national debt by the end of a presumptive second term for the president.
The national debt has continued to grow rapidly under President Joe Biden, totaling more than $34.55 trillion as of April 26, up from $34 trillion at the beginning of the year, according to the Treasury Department.
Huge government spending is also putting the U.S. economy at risk of stagflation, with first quarter growth only totaling 1.6% while inflation remains high at 3.5% in March year-over-year.
“This hints at the false view that sadly underlies much of the Biden administration’s economic policy: high-earners only achieve success through luck, and low-earners can only achieve success through government handouts,” Edwards told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That is an appalling, un-American view.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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‘Harassment’: Feds Impose Trans Agenda on Employers for Pronouns, Bathrooms
Under new federal guidelines, an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a pronoun the person doesn’t want used.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the guidance on Monday. The guidance passed on a 3-2 vote, along party lines on Friday, a source familiar with the EEOC confirmed.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new enforcement guidance says.
The guidelines would affect most employers, private or public.
The EEOC announced last fall a proposed update of its harassment policy affecting to include sexual orientation and gender identity rules. This prompted opposition from 20 state attorneys general, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.
In November, the attorneys general contended what was then the proposed “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” updates would threaten the First Amendment rights of employers, employees, and possibly customers.
“Here, the proposed guidance would require employers to affirm or convey to employees and customers—often against religious conviction or deeply held personal belief—messages that a person can be a gender different from his or her biological sex, that gender has no correlation to biology, or that they endorse the use of pronouns like ‘they/them,’ ‘xe/xym/xyrs,’ or ‘bun/bunself,” the letter from the attorneys general says.
“This mandate flouts First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech—yet EEOC rejects any role for accommodation of contrary religious beliefs or speech,” the attorneys general add. “Further, EEOC’s for-cause insulation from direct presidential supervision unconstitutionally blurs the lines of accountability for this overhaul of workplaces nationwide.”
In 2021, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows attempted, in a statement, to unilaterally include these actions under harassment without public comment or a vote by the full commission. However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. A separate federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The commission did not appeal the rulings.
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer with more than 15 employees.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Burrows, a Democrat, of the new guidelines in a public statement issued Monday afternoon. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
Women’s rights are under attack by the EEOC, said Lucas in a statement issued Monday.
“Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary (male and female) and is immutable,” Lucas said in a public statement. She added, “It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. Relatedly, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”
In 2020, the Supreme Court held in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that a firm violates Title VII if it fires an employee “simply for being … transgender.” But, the Republican state attorneys general argued in the November letter, “Bostock gives no license to these and other of EEOC’s novel proposals.”
“Nor, in all events, can EEOC permissibly require these deeply controversial gender-identity accommodations without express congressional authorization—authorization not found in Title VII,” the letter continued.
The guidance does not carry the same weight as a law passed by Congress or a regulation imposed by an agency. However, the guidance essentially states the position of the EEOC. This means an employee inclined to claim harassment regarding a restroom or pronoun dispute would have the guidance to refer to. Also, under private litigation, a plaintiff could refer to the formal position of a federal agency.
“If you still believed that the Biden administration’s pedal-to-the-metal advancing of gender ideology is all about freedom and individual rights, this new EEOC ‘guidance’ should dispel that myth,” Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
“Employers may now find themselves in legal hot water if they prefer to use language, including pronouns, and preserve private spaces that comport with biological reality rather than the bizarre canons of gender ideology,” Richards continued. “We’re dealing with a totalitarian ideology that wants to destroy the present order. The sooner normal people understand that, the sooner we can dispatch this ideology to the history books.”
The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”
“The Biden administration is no stranger to twisting federal law to suit its aims, and the publication of the EEOC’s final rule on workplace harassment is a prime example,” Sarah??? Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Perry added:
According to the Biden administration, gender identity and expression are tantamount to ‘sex’ in federal law and require an employer to facilitate an employee’s ‘preferred pronoun’ use and requested bathroom use or face a possible complaint for sexual harassment.
This is both an untenable conclusion, and not supported by the underlying Supreme Court decision on which the Administration so greatly relies: Bostock v. Clayton County. What’s more, biological women are again rendered to second-class citizens under the EEOC rule and forced to give up any vestige of privacy and security they previously enjoyed.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the mandatory use of an employee’s requested name and pronouns—those which differ from that employee’s biological sex—is a patent violation of the 1st Amendment, and creates an unavoidable conflict between gender ideology, and freedom of speech and religion. I expect the swift filing of multiple legal challenges against the new rule.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/29/eeoc-harassment-to-not-give-trans-employees-preferred-bathrooms/ .
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Germany Allows Parents to Change Their Baby’s Gender
When it comes to gender politics, many in opposition acknowledge that adults have the ability to choose for themselves whether they pursue hormone therapy or body-mutilating operations, because adults can better weigh the risks of their decisions.
Children, on the other hand, are quite different from adults. Opponents of gender ideology are steadfast in the fight to keep these ideological procedures away from children because they understand how vulnerable children are to the manipulative nature of so-called gender-affirming care. Far too many kids have already become victims of medical experiments as it is.
This is what makes a law recently passed in Germany even more infuriating.
On April 12, the Bundestag, or the German parliament, “passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies,” Reduxx reported. This radical legislation, it added, “establishes ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth.”
Under the Self-Determination Act, citizens may be fined 10,000 euros ($10,719) for “deadnaming,” which is a term LGBT activists use when someone, without his or her permission, is referred to by the name given at birth rather than the name he or she chose as part of this identity façade.
And just when it appears it can’t get any more drastic, the Self-Determination Act also “permits parents to alter the recorded sex of children beginning from birth. From the age of 5 years old, it allows for name and sex changes if there is ‘mutual consent’ between the child and their parents.”
Physicians have emphasized that Europe is ahead of the U.S. in terms of how far gender ideology has gone. Some countries, though, such as the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and Norway have begun backtracking as more evidence comes to light of the harmful nature of such procedures.
Thankfully, the battle is strong in America from the side of those determined to keep children safe by preventing legislation such as the Self-Determination Act, known in Germany as SBGG, from happening in this country.
But several questions come to mind when analyzing this recent development: What implications does a law such as this in Germany offer for what’s next in the gender politics wars? Will similar laws pass elsewhere in Europe? How will America respond?
To help give insight to some of those questions, Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for strategic engagement and biblical worldview, commented to The Washington Stand.
“If we describe ‘radical’ as something far outside the lines of decency, this is definitely a radical policy,” Backholm insisted. “The idea that parents would be allowed to change the sex of their child from birth is outrageous. Any parent who wanted to treat their son as a girl from birth should lose their parental rights, not do so with the support and encouragement of the government.”
Addressing the details of the law passed in Germany, Backholm noted, “The name is ironic but perfect, much like their flagship holiday, Pride. The Self-Determination Act reflects their desire to define their own reality, but reality will never stop pushing back and will never lose.”
This, of course, is exhibited in the mountains of research and evidence that proves the biological reality of the two-sex binary, as well as the reality that biological sex cannot be altered by hormones and surgeries.
“Why is a child’s sex the only thing the parents can change?” Backholm asked. “Why can’t they change their birth year to make them immediately eligible for retirement benefits? Why can’t a child who feels like an old soul identify as a retiree?”
In answer to those questions, Backholm contended: “If we allow this logic to prevail, there’s simply no point in having identification documents. Germany should get rid of any attempt to describe someone’s characteristics and simply give every life (we shouldn’t assume their species) an identification number and let them make up the rest. That’s the only way to be consistent.”
However, he clarified, “that would be insane.” But the sad reality is that “it’s not more insane than this law is.”
For Backholm, the irrational possibility that “the elites” might decide we can “choose our own birth year … may be coming.”
As to how believers should respond, Backholm helpfully observed, “The correct response for Christians to madness like this is to say what we know to be true without fear.” Ultimately, he said, “The more people hear the truth spoken, the more likely they are to speak the truth.”
“These ideas cannot prevail over time,” he insisted, “but they can do a lot of damage before we come to our senses. Our job is to minimize that damage and encourage a return to reality as quickly as possible.”
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Deadly nitazenes drugs spark testing centres push
I hate to sound hard-hearted about this but I am not sure that testing rooms do any good overall. They may encourage involvement with drugs and thus lead to MORE deaths rather than fewer
Drug decriminalisation advocates are pushing for more supervised drug taking centres and testing facilities to be established to curb deaths caused by a synthetic opioid up to one hundred times stronger than fentanyl.
Nitazenes, a family of synthetic opioids that can be more addictive and potent than heroin and morphine, is contributing to an epidemic of drug fatalities across North America, and is now on the rise in Australia, having been detected in Victoria, South Australia and NSW.
The drug is already having deadly effects in Victoria, with the Coroner’s Court warning the opioid had been involved in at least 16 overdose deaths in the state since 2021.
Evidence suggests that nitazenes are coming from labs in China, although its origin is not restricted to one country, and are being sold off the dark web.
Experts, including Monash Addiction Research Centre deputy director Suzanne Neilson, used the World Health Summit to call for supervised injecting facilities, drug checking sites and public education on the benefits of naloxone, a medication that can reverse overdose effects, to help battle the infiltration of the drug and its deadly impact.
“We understand that in most circumstances, people are not intentionally purchasing nitazenes, what is most common is that people are purchasing other drugs,” Ms Neilson told The Australian.
“We do have some early warning systems in place, for example nitazenes that are detected in some emergency department settings … but it is quite limited at the moment in terms of testing for nitazenes. And because we don’t have widely scaled-up drug testing, we do get sort of limited information about what’s out there at the moment.”
Ms Neilson said nitazenes can be made to be similar to fentanyl or even 50 to a hundred times stronger.
“In Australia we have had a massive increase in overdose deaths … I think there is a significant threat of a future epidemic if we do follow in the path that we’ve seen in North America and the UK,” she said.
“Once (synthetic opioids) start to enter the market, what we’ve seen is a dramatic rise in deaths. We’d really like to know what’s going on before that happens to prevent those deaths if possible.”
Global Commission on Drug Policy chair and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark endorsed the controversial medically supervised injecting rooms in Melbourne.
“This is the kind of service that people need to stay alive, to stay healthy,” Dr Clark said.
“When you go to a centre like the safe injecting room, people bring in the stuff they’ve bought on the street corner (and it’s) tested, no one is going to die.”
She voiced her support for a second supervised injecting room in the CBD to go ahead, a measure the Victorian government committed to in 2020 but that has been met with backlash from the community and local businesses.
“The bottom line is that people that are using drugs need to be safe, and that’s why the centre is so important,” Dr Clark said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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