The primary version of "Political Correctness Watch" is HERE The Blogroll; John Ray's Home Page; Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Dissecting Leftism. This site is updated several times a month but is no longer updated daily. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing). See here or here for the archives of this site.


Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

****************************************************************************************




29 April, 2016

Spanking children 'does more harm than good' and leads to mental health problems and worse behaviour (?)

Elizabeth Gershoff has been plowing this field for a long time so there was never any doubt about what conclusion she would come to.  Meta-analyses are notoriously easy to fudge.  You find some reason not to include studies with inconvenient conclusions.  I have seen as many as a hundred "inconvenient" studies left out of a meta-analysis.  So there is no substitute for one good study.

The big fault in all the studies I have seen is that they treat children as one homogeneous blob. That different children might need different treatment seems to be a novel idea.  But it comports with the way Leftists think.  They can consider people in big groups only (Jews, blacks, women etc.).  Attention to the individual is too hard.

But it is perfectly reasonable to expect that some children may need a firmer hand than others.  An aggressive or over-active child may benefit from spanking whereas a quieter child might be traumatized by it.  Until such differences are taken into account no findings in this field are worthwhile or worth heeding.

I might note that my father never touched me and I have never touched my son.  But we are bright.  I have seem dimmer childen who are poorly influenced by words and who would therefore need something more.  So control for both intelligence and temperament would be needed if meaningful research into the subject is to be done.

Journal abstract follows the article below

It was a long held belief that smacking a naughty child was a parent's prerogative to keep them in line and teach them right from wrong.

But now half a century of research has found the now controversial past time actually does more harm than good.

The more children are physically chastised, the more likely they are to defy their parents, scientists have found.

They are also more prone to mental health problems, aggressive outbursts, cognitive difficulties and anti-social behaviour, according to the study.

Spanking - or corporal punishment - is usually defined as hitting a child with an open hand without causing physical injury.

Professors Elizabeth Gershoff, from the University of Texas at Austin and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, at the University of Michigan analysed 50 years of research involving more than 160,000 children.

They found children who were smacked as five-year-olds were slightly more likely to be aggressive and break rules later in primary school.

'The upshot of the study is that spanking increases the likelihood of a wide variety of undesired outcomes for children,' said Professor Grogan-Kaylor.

'Spanking thus does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do.'

Despite mounting evidence on the harms tied to it, it is 'still a very typical experience' for children, studies have found.

They looked at the association between spanking and 17 potential detrimental outcomes and found a significant link between the punishment and 13 of them.

'We as a society think of spanking and physical abuse as distinct behaviours,' said Professor Gershoff.

'Yet our research shows that spanking is linked with the same negative child outcomes as abuse, just to a slightly lesser degree.

'We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents' intended outcomes when they discipline their children.'

They found the practice was associated with poor outcomes across a wide range of studies of the five decades.

Children misbehaved more and were more aggressive when they had been smacked by their parents, they found.

Those who are spanked were more prone to act out and could be more distracted in the classroom, they found.

The researchers also investigated cases of adults who were spanked as children and found the more they were smacked, the more likely they were to experience mental health problems.

They were also more likely to smack their own children - perpetuating the negative cycle.

In the UK, current laws allow 'reasonable chastisement' to control a child, but parents can be prosecuted if their actions result in injuries such as bruises, cuts or scratches.

Debate was recently ignited over the subject in the US when presidential hopeful Ted Cruz suggested voters would deliver a spanking to Hillary Clinton for allegedly being dishonest– just like he does to his five-year-old daughter when she lies.

His comments reignited the old debate on whether it is reasonable to smack a child.

And recently, in Canada, following a call by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to prohibit spanking, the Liberal government has promised to abolish a parent's right to physically discipline children.

Along similar legal lines, in June 2015, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that the state was justified in denying foster parenting privileges to a couple who supported spanking or paddling children.

SOURCE

Spanking and Child Outcomes: Old Controversies and New Meta-Analyses.

Gershoff, Elizabeth T. & Grogan-Kaylor, Andrew

Abstract

Whether spanking is helpful or harmful to children continues to be the source of considerable debate among both researchers and the public. This article addresses 2 persistent issues, namely whether effect sizes for spanking are distinct from those for physical abuse, and whether effect sizes for spanking are robust to study design differences. Meta-analyses focused specifically on spanking were conducted on a total of 111 unique effect sizes representing 160,927 children. Thirteen of 17 mean effect sizes were significantly different from zero and all indicated a link between spanking and increased risk for detrimental child outcomes. Effect sizes did not substantially differ between spanking and physical abuse or by study design characteristics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Family Psychology, Apr 7 , 2016






Transgenders

Saying a he is a “he” is not what offends.

The political correction officer is playing a social dominance game with you.  He is making himself to be offended with you so that you will obey him.

He uses your desire to avoid offending him as a tool to establish social roles. You are supposed to assume the role as the inferior, the lower order, the ignorant, the follower, the benighted. He assumes the role as the superior, the higher order, the wiseman, the leader, the enlightened.

Of course he is offended and most deeply so!

He is offended at your insubordination. You are an uppity niggra. If the lower orders shoot off their mouths and starting thinking for themselves, why, there will be rebellion among the proles and slaves. So shut up.

He is not offended at your lack of courtesy. That is risible.

No politically correct person has ever displayed the courtesy of a swine since the beginning of the world: they neither doff their caps to ladies, nor ask if you need any comfort, nor listen to your point of view, nor salute you will courteous greetings, nor say “sir” and “ma’am” and “miss” and “missus” like anyone not raised in a barn would do.

Indeed, they go out of their way to cheat these forms of address, and will call God by the pronoun “She” and call the year “CE” just to see how often they can offend and insult Christians without being slapped in the mouth.

I have never known one not to use four letter crudities or to encouraging others to do so. Even their most grave politicians in public swear in a fashion former generations, who had a right view of the dignity of man, would never have had allowed.

No doubt the politically correct lunatics you’ve met really act vexed and hostile if you call Bruce Jenner “he” as logic, love of truth, common sense, common decency and good grammar demand, but you are utterly insane if you consider their insanity to be legitimate.

If I have a bit of paper I claim is the title deed to the Moon and I say by right you owe me money for getting light from my moon without paying me, my title deed has no legal force or effect, because, despite my claim, I have no legal right to moonlight. In reality, by international treaty, no man owns the moon and, by logic, no one can own the moonlight, since it is a free good.

Likewise here: if a man grows vexed and irate, and wets his pants and shrieks like a loon and rolls on the ground in a pool of his own spleenish vomit because you will not call a crazy person who cuts off his dick and dresses in girly clothing a “she”, his vexation is a sign of his witlessness, not a sign of his due righteous indignation. It is as phony as the alleged title deed to the moon. Even if I believe I own the moon with my whole heart, as strong as I can make myself believe what I want to believe, I am outside my rights, and my claim on you for money is invalid.

So here. A man has no right to demand you pretend him a woman, no matter how badly he wants it.

He has no right to be vexed if you do not give what he has no right to ask.

A man can act offended at anything he wishes, but if he has no right to be offended, he act is just an act. He should be chided, silenced, and, if he will not conform to the demands of polite society, be removed from it. If he grows violent, he should be confined, or killed. That is what you owe him.

He is the one being very offensive, not you.

Source






Nanny State to Regulate Daycare Foods

The Department of Agriculture is broadening its increasingly intrusive and unauthorized role of parent when it comes to daycares. The agency has officially enacted a new rule that lays down strict new boundaries on what foods millions of Child and Adult Care Food Program beneficiaries can and cannot eat. And who do we have to thank for that? Unelected first lady Michelle Obama and her Let’s Move scheme, of course.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, “The regulation will only allow daycare centers to serve juice once a day, will ban fried foods, and encourages centers to not add honey to a child’s yogurt.” Moreover, “The final rule will apply to participating organizations in USDA’s Child and Adult Care Food Program, which reimburses centers for meals and snacks. Over 3.3 million children and 120,000 adults participate in the program every day.”

The government claims it “recognizes that there may be times when a provider would like to serve foods or beverages that are not reimbursable, such as on a child’s birthday or another special occasion.” Therefore, “Providers still have the flexibility to serve non-reimbursable foods and beverages of their choosing. However, FNS [Food and Nutrition Service] encourages providers to use their discretion when serving non-reimbursable foods and beverages, which may be higher in added sugar, solid fats, and sodium, to ensure children and adult participants' nutritional needs are met.”

Hey, don’t say the government never did anything for you. Because nothing says liberty like the nanny state letting you eat what you want on your birthday. Or something.

SOURCE






Michael Brull just does not understand Australia's day of remembrance

Michael Brull is a far-Leftist Australian Jew.  So he hates Israel and Australia in roughly equal measures. But he is always good for a laugh.  His talent for missing the point is unfailing.  As with many Leftist articles, his article below is very long-winded. I have however reproduced it all so that people can see that he just doesn't get it.

Yet his basic point can be expressed quite simply.  He says that Leftist criticism of the ANZAC commemorations is somehow disallowed or suppressed.  But he quite spoils his own argument by listing towards the beginning of his article all the Leftists who HAVE criticised it, some of them quite prominent.

And if such criticisms have been suppressed, how is it that way back in the benighted early '60s my junior High School curriculum included a study of what is probably the most anti-ANZAC story ever written -- Seymour's "One day of the year".  And that was during the Prime Ministership of Sir Robert Menzies, an archetypal conservative.  Brull is talking through his anus.

He seems to have realized that his article lacked point and was  wandering all around the place like Brown's cows so he concluded it by saying:  "We are entitled to different values, and we are entitled to say so".  It's a conclusion that is quite detached from the rest of his article.  If he had shown that someone has denied him those entitlements, it might have made sense -- but he did not.  All he shows is that conservatives sometimes criticize  criticisms from Leftists.  Is it not allowed to criticize Leftist criticisms?  Is it only Leftists who are allowed to criticize? He seems to think so:  Typical Leftist bigotry.

The big thing that is totally missing from his article is any awareness that ANZAC day is a day on which we remember the premature deaths of our relatives.  I had relatives who died in both world wars.  I never knew them.  I was too young at the time.  But I know the families and know they must have been people like me who felt like me and I know how grievous their deaths were at the time. An uncle Freddie of mine in particular was much loved and I regret that I never got the chance to know him. 

And most people who attend ANZAC day ceremonies are like that.  Their degree of  closeness to the dead will vary but they will all be mourning relatives.  And the ex-servicemen who march will be remembering close friends who were lost.

And enlisting in the armed forces is an heroic act.  We walk into great danger.  We offer to put our lives on line to defend our families from an enemy.  And on ANZAC day we honour that heroism

And, Yes. I myself did voluntarily enlist and serve in the Australian army in the Vietnam era.  I never got to Vietnam but I did apply to go


Go beyond the tedium of mainstream Anzac Day coverage and you’ll see the meaning ascribed to the Day, and the way the history around it is constructed, remain hotly contested. In a fundamentally political disagreement, shutting sceptics out should be seen as an act of political correctness, writes Michael Brull.

Once again, Anzac Day has sneaked up on me. For those of us who are unpatriotic, it is easy to feel like we’re a negligible minority. It is easy to think that your feelings of ambivalence, indifference, or even hostility to Anzac Day are totally marginal and isolated. It is just you and a few of your friends, while the rest of the nation patriotically gets up early and cries on cue at the heroism of our diggers. Yet the truth is that there is plenty of dissent about Anzac. The only reason you don’t hear about it so often is that it’s usually shut out of the mainstream media.

Right-wingers are perfectly aware of this. Since 2009, right-wing historian Mervyn Bendle has been complaining about academics trashing the Anzac legend, in a series of long and tedious essays for Quadrant. The “intelligentsia and the Left”, he complains, offer a perfunctory nod to the bravery of the Australian soldiers in World War One, only to follow by emphasising what they think really matters: an approach which is “always critical, debunking and even denunciatory of the legend, applying a form of methodological nihilism to allege that at the core of the Anzac legend there is nothing—only meaninglessness, futility, error, ‘a nightmare happening in a void’ as George Orwell remarked of Great War literature. Alternatively, if there is something at the core of the legend, it is shown by the revisionist to be unworthy, wicked and iniquitous—militarism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, masculinism—and therefore can and must be condemned and ridiculed.”

One summary of a collection of academic writings by Adrian Howe, an Associate Professor at RMIT University, identifies the Anzac legend as “a masculinist and British imperialist military tradition”; a “nationalistic, militaristic tradition [that is]class-based, race-based, ethnocentric and male-centred”; while Anzac Day is “a day celebrating Anglo-Australian manhood, militarism and a bloody defeat in an imperialist war [and]should be abolished”.

The list of offending scholars is long. They include Anthony Burke, Mark McKenna, Henry Reynolds, Marilyn Lake, James Brown, and David Horner. Military historians come in for a particular scolding, including Joan Beaumont, Brown and Horner again, Peter Stanley, and two books edited by Craig Stockings. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating is also counted among the unpatriotic. Bendle grumbles that in a speech, Keating “largely regurgitated the nihilist view that the conflict was pointless and futile, which has long been the default ideological position of the Left.” Alas, Keating dismissed “the war as the lamentable product of European tribalism, ethnic atavism, nationalism and racism in which Australia had no stake”.

Bendle assures readers in the tiny, largely unread magazine of the aggressive, purportedly highbrow intellectual right that Keating’s “facile, unhistorical ramblings” are wrong: “the Anzacs who sacrificed their lives or their health in battle did so for a great cause. To pretend otherwise is to betray their memory.” Thus, to doubt the cause of World War One, 100 years later is to betray the soldiers. It turns out that to be properly patriotic, we must not just mourn the dead. We must also celebrate the reasons they were sent to die.

In a sense, Anzac Day isn’t just about remembering suffering of soldiers. The sanctification of their memory is done with a political intent, with particular political aims.

The parallels to today are not hard to find. Many people thought it was really terrific how there were such widespread demonstrations around the world before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even if they didn’t stop the war, at least they showed anti-war sentiment. Was there any precedent for such anti-imperialism?

Yes, there was. Adam Hochschild reminds us of the large anti-war demonstrations across Europe before World War One. As Austria declared war on Serbia, 100,000 protesters converged at the heart of Berlin against war. The French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès stood with his arm around Hugo Haase, co-chair of the German Social Democrats, before an audience of Belgian workers. In Britain, Keir Hardie spoke to an enormous crowd at Trafalgar Square, “the largest demonstration there in years”. To wild cheers, according to Hochschild, he urged a general strike in the event of war.

As is known, these protests more or less ended as the war started. As in 2003, the media decided to “support our soldiers”. Like Bendle, this support for the soldiers in practical terms meant stifling any doubts or criticisms about the cause for which they were sent. Though the interests of soldiers and the politicians who command them are not necessarily the same, they are conflated by leading political figures. The loyal scribes of these politicians assure the public that to doubt the politicians is to doubt the soldiers, and how dare anyone cast aspersions on those risking their lives to keep us safe and defend our freedom? How dare anyone belittle the sacrifice of the soldiers, by questioning the values and wisdom of the politicians who send them into harm’s way?

Last year, Scott McIntyre was fired from the SBS for his blasphemies about Anzac Day, at the behest of Malcolm Turnbull, then, judging by Turnbull’s own words, the Minister for Right-Wing Communications. Though McIntyre’s tweets were condensed due to the nature of the medium, his supposedly inflammatory comments were duly analysed by academic specialists on the Anzacs. Professor Phillip Dwyer, Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at University of Newcastle, agreed that the Anzacs were “no angels”, whose members included those who behaved in “overtly racist manner”, and also rapes and summary executions. Geoff Lemon observed that it was hard to argue that Gallipoli was “an imperialist invasion of a foreign nation that Australia had no quarrel with”.

Recording historical facts about wrongdoing by Anzacs makes it harder to valorise the soldiers. They shift from becoming our heroic diggers, to human beings, many of whom acted in the flawed ways armies often act in conflict zones. Yet historians have not just challenged the factual basis for hero-ising the soldiers. They are also resolutely sceptical about the value of worshipping the Anzacs. Frank Bongiorno commented that “Anzac’s inclusiveness has been achieved at the price of a dangerous chauvinism that increasingly equates national history with military history, and national belonging with a willingness to accept the Anzac legend as Australian patriotism’s very essence.”

Academics are not infallible. Academic specialists can be wrong, just as academic specialties can function to mostly serve power. Anyone who has too much reverence for academic specialists should revisit the performance of all the economists who failed to predict the 2008 crash. They may know more than the rest of us about what happened during the war, but that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily more right about the reverence with which the Anzacs should be treated.

My point in reviewing their Anzac scepticism is not to suggest that academics verify or vindicate such suspicion. It is to suggest that jingoism tries to pretend a moral or political disagreement is somehow inherently illegitimate. There are many different ways to approach history. Trying to sanctify one approach to one aspect, and acting horrified at those who dissent from this particular approach is a political act.

As noted by Jumbunna researcher Paddy Gibson, in response to Aboriginal protests of Invasion Day, Prime Minister Bob Hawke started to push Anzac Day as an alternative to Australia Day as a way to cement Australian nationalism. This support for Anzac Day since the late 1980s has revived and reshaped Anzac Day, as the government has sought to push Anzac Day, and the particular values of its modern incarnation, on the general public. This culminated in the extravaganza of last year, when the government spent over $300 million on Anzac commemorations. Yet there were signs this had limited effects. Australians didn’t tune in to the World War One documentaries. Attempts to flog Anzac merchandise were increasingly seen as tacky. Everyone tried to cash in. Woolworths and Target put the Anzacs in their marketing. Now folded soft-porn mag Zoo featured a woman in a bikini with a poppy to mark the special day.

This kind of marketing was seen by some as exploitative. But using Anzac Day as a way to promote the virtue of World War One while hiding behind the political sanctity of Australian soldiers who died seems comparably cynical.

If we’re going to remember the past, and celebrate parts of it, why single out Australian soldiers? Why not celebrate Aboriginal warriors, who died resisting the invasion of their land and the decimation of their peoples and cultures? Why not celebrate trade unionists, who secured some of the best working conditions and entitlements across the world, and kept Australia one of the more egalitarian Western countries until the 1980s? Why not celebrate the suffragettes, who earned white women the vote in Australia before most of the rest of the world? Why not celebrate the activists for Aboriginal rights, who fought for land rights, treaty and sovereignty? Or those who won Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the vote, and dismantled most elements of formal racial discrimination in Australia? Why not remember and celebrate the Australians who fought against World War One? Or those who successfully campaigned against conscription in Australia during World War One, or those who successfully ended Australian involvement in the war on Vietnam?

We can imagine a conservative response to these suggestions. Ah, but you see, these are political choices. Celebrating feminists, anti-imperialists, Aboriginal resistance and trade unionists doesn’t reflect the entire political spectrum. We couldn’t base nationalism on the political values of a segment of the population. It would leave out the rest of us.

Perhaps that’s fair enough. But what about those who feel left out by Anzac Day? Honouring those who fought in a war, while refusing to permit reflections on whether the war was unjust or not, is political. And so are nationalism and patriotism.

Some people may be proud Australians, who think ours is the greatest country on earth, with a largely, if not entirely unblemished history. Those who disagree are not committing a crime, they are simply engaged in a political disagreement. Australians who are horrified at Anzac sceptics are simply trying to enforce their political correctness on the rest of us. We are entitled to different values, and we are entitled to say so.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





28 April, 2016

The poor die sooner and that's not because of anything in their environment

So, by default it's genetic.  No amount of opportunity, information or education would help them.  The author below doesn't want to draw that conclusion (too politically incorrect) but that is what the findings of the very soundly-based research by Chetty et al show.  The excerpt below is presented as a convenient summary of the Chetty et al. findings.  The environmental factors considered and dismissed as causes of early mortality were described by Chetty et al. as: "access to medical care, physical environmental factors, income inequality, or labor market conditions"

Income, Life Expectancy, and Community Health. Underscoring the Opportunity

J. Michael McGinnis

In an impressive analysis based on mortality data and deidentified tax records with more than 1.4 billion person-year observations and nearly 7 million deaths among individuals living in the United States during the 15 years between 1999 and 2014, Chetty et al confirm the long-observed association between higher income and longer life expectancy, as well as the recent increase in the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 5% of the US population.1 Looking specifically at the lowest income quartile, Chetty et al also found little association between life expectancy and various measures of access to medical care, physical environments, employment conditions, or levels of income inequality.

SOURCE






Muslim immigrant faces years behind bars for series of indecent assaults on women on their doorsteps in 10-day reign of terror just months after he arrived from Algeria



Muslims have no respect for women

A serial sex attacker is set to be jailed after he was convicted of attacking a string of women over a 10-day spree in South London.

Mehdi Midani, 28, followed eight women as they walked home at night then groped some on their doorstep and slapped the buttocks of others.

He was apprehended after police raised the alarm about his behaviour and released CCTV footage of one of the attacks.

Midani was convicted of six counts of sexual assault and one count of common assault and pleaded guilty to a further count of sexual assault at Inner London Crown Court.

At 9pm on October 22 last year he followed a woman up the road in Brixton before touching her backside and reaching up her dress, prompting her to shout: 'What the f***, I don't know you!'

Four days later he attacked two women in the space of an hour - he put his hand between a woman's leg then ran off, and later followed another victim home, dragged her to the floor and tried to kiss her.

Two days later Midani - who moved to Britain from Algeria earlier in the year - attacked four women in a four-hour period.

At 7.20pm Midani followed a 28-year-old woman as she walked home in Brixton, before grabbing her inside the communal hallway of her property and groping her breasts.

Midani then carried out the common assault by grabbing a 29-year-old woman near her home at 9.24pm.

At 10.20pm he pushed a 31-year-old woman into a block of flats and sexually assaulted her before running away, and an hour later put his hand up the skirt of a 32-year-old.

Three days later on 31 October Midani attacked a woman in the same area, slapping her on the buttocks before fleeing when she called for help.

He is facing a hefty jail sentence when he is sentenced on May 26.

At a previous court hearing Charlotte Chirico, prosecuting said that Midani's immigration status was unknown but added: 'He's only been in the UK for a few months.'

The court heard that he had entered Britain via Ireland after leaving his native Algeria.

Detective Constable Tony Carr of the Metropolitan Police said: 'Midani caused enormous fear and distress to the local community as he carried out his spate of attacks, with four recorded in just one day.

'A public appeal was crucial to our investigation and led to information being provided that quickly led to Midani's arrest.

'I would like to thank the local community for their support and help during our inquiry and hope they are reassured by the news that Midani has now been convicted and faces imprisonment.'

SOURCE






How to Impose Personal Beliefs on Others

The Colorado State Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from a baker who was found guilty of discrimination for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony in 2012. By not picking up the case, the highest court in the state let stand an August 2015 ruling from the Colorado Court of Appeals that declared baker Jack Phillips did not have a right to free speech or the free exercise of religion whenever he picked up his piping bag.

“We all have a right to our personal beliefs, but we do not have a right to impose those beliefs on others and discriminate against them,” said ACLU attorney Ria Tabacco Mar, who dragged the cake baker to court. “We hope today’s win will serve as a lesson for others that equality and fairness should be our guiding principles and that discrimination has no place at the table, or the bakery as the case may be.”

Once again, a leftist displays a stunning lack of self-awareness. Imposing beliefs on others is exactly what the ACLU and the rest of the Rainbow Mafia are doing. In this case, they used the courts and the government of Colorado to strip Phillips of his rights and conscript his services for a cause to which he has conscientious objection. Not only that, but Phillips and his staff must submit to re-education, quarterly compliance reports and demands that he create cakes to celebrate other same-sex unions. The Rainbow Mafia is indeed “imposing its beliefs on others.”

In a statement after the ruling, Phillips' legal counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom, said it is “evaluating all legal options” in order to protect Phillips' First Amendment right to use his creativity how he chooses, and by extension everyone else who objects to state-endorsed same-sex marriage. One of those options might be the United States Supreme Court.

SOURCE






More antisemitism in the British Labour party

A Labour MP today has resigned as an aide to John McDonnell after sharing a graphic on social media that appeared to say Israel should be 'relocated' to America.

Bradford West MP Naz Shah shared an image that showed an outline of Israel superimposed on to a map of the USA.

The headline on the image said: 'Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States.'

Ms Shah then wrote with the post: 'problem solved.'

The Muslim MP today apologised for 'offence caused' before quitting as the shadow chancellor's PPS.

The resignation will reignite a bitter row within Labour about whether Jeremy Corbyn has done enough to combat anti-Semitism among some new members who have joined the party under his leadership.

Tory MPs today led calls for Ms Shah to be suspended from the Labour Party over the incident.

The Facebook post, shared by Ms Shah in 2014 before she became an MP, suggested the US has 'plenty of land' to accommodate Israel as a 51st state, allowing Palestinians to 'get their life and their land back'.

It added that Israeli people would be welcome and safe in the US while the 'transportation cost' would be less than three years' worth of Washington's support for Israeli defence spending.

Ms Shah added a note suggesting the plan might 'save them some pocket money'.

After the posting was highlighted by the Guido Fawkes website, Ms Shah released a statement in which she said: 'This post from two years ago was made before I was an MP, does not reflect my views and I apologise for any offence it has caused.'

In a second statement, she added later: 'I deeply regret the hurt I have caused by comments made on social media before I was elected as an MP.

'I made these posts at the height of the Gaza conflict in 2014, when emotions were running high around the Middle East conflict. But that is no excuse for the offence I have given, for which I unreservedly apologise.

'In recognition of that offence, I have stepped down from my role as PPS to the shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

'I will be seeking to expand my existing engagement and dialogue with Jewish community organisations and will be stepping up my efforts to combat all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.'

Oliver Dowden, the Conservative MP for Hertsmere, today wrote to the Labour leader demanding he expel Ms Shah from Labour.

He said: 'A failure to act would call into question the commitment of the Labour Party to deal with wholly unacceptable behaviour and would constitute a betrayal of the values that all those who believe in democracy should uphold.'

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen told the website: 'If Jeremy Corbyn was serious about tackling anti-Semitism, he would put his money where his mouth is and remove the whip her from Naz Shah immediately.'

Mike Freer, Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, told MailOnline: 'She is another example of the poison that is coursing through the Labour Party. She should have the whip withdrawn and she should recuse herself from the Home Affairs inquiry into Ant-Semitism.'

Ms Shah is a member of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the rise of anti-Semitism.

Jonathan Sacerdoti, director of communications at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said it would be 'hard' for his organisation to take the parliamentary committee's inquiry seriously if Ms Shah remained part of it.

Speaking before Ms Shah's resignation, he said: 'One cannot simply apologise for ''any offence caused'' and expect a evidence of gross and brazen anti-Semitism to disappear.

'Once again the Labour Party has been revealed to have within its ranks people who express extreme prejudice towards Jewish people in their public statements. Once again the party has failed to find these statements itself, and reject those who freely and willingly express them.

'How can we believe Labour when it says it takes the problem of Jew-hatred seriously when it repeatedly defends anti-Semitic MPs? It seems that Jeremy Corbyn's anti-racism policy only operates when convenient.'

He added: 'We have offered to assist the Select Committee in its work investigating anti-Semitism. However, if Naz Shah remains on the committee it will be hard for those of us giving evidence to take the inquiry seriously.'

Last night the Jewish Chronicle reported that in August 2014 she linked on Twitter to a blog where Zionism – the belief in a Jewish state – was likened to Al Qaeda.

The blog also claimed Zionism had been used to ‘groom’ Jews to ‘exert political influence at the highest levels of public office’.

In July 2014 she posted a link on Facebook to an online poll asking whether Israel had committed war crimes. She wrote: ‘The Jews are rallying to the poll.’

In another – eight months before she became an MP – she wrote ‘Apartheid Israel’ over a picture of Martin Luther King with the caption ‘Never Forget That Everything Hitler Did In Germany Was Legal’.

This prompted Sir Eric to demand she be stripped of the Labour whip. Mrs Shah is also under pressure to stand down as a member of the House of Commons home affairs committee while it conducts an investigation.

 Mrs Shah’s office could not be reached for comment. A Labour spokesman would not comment on possible disciplinary action.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





27 April, 2016

Why after this weekend I cry for England and St George

It's a funny old thing being English. We can't talk about death because it's upsetting, men die from prostate cancer because they would rather not show their bottom to a doctor, and we wait until we get in the car before yelling at our husbands for showing us up in front of our friends.

When something becomes a bit awkward or unsightly, we try to hide it away, replacing it with something better, more acceptable.

Politicians hide bad news behind major announcements or in the summer recess when journalists are on holiday and families are stuck in Sharm El Sheikh.

Girls hide their faces behind make-up and filters to better fit in with their friends, and women buy a new necklace when they feel frumpy, because jewellery doesn't judge you on last night's fish and chips.

Just look what we've done with Saint George — consigned him to the corners of our country where only a patriotic few celebrate him, and given his place to a new, more forgiving figure: Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was everywhere on April 23, the 400th anniversary of his death and, oddly, also the 452nd anniversary of his birth.

He managed to monopolise the attention of the BBC, take over Google Doodle, and focus the attention of a whole new generation in schools across the country.

Clearly we owe a lot to Shakespeare but as people gathered around open-air screens in the sleeting rain to watch Twelfth Night, dear Saint George was shoved unceremoniously into the wings.

Perhaps my view was skewed; I was in London, the multicultural Mecca, where, unless you are non-binary, a gender-fluid-Druid or an asylum-seeker from Syria, your credibility rating is on the floor, my friend.

If you need a visual reference for Acceptable Britain, the cherry-picked crowd fawning over President Obama (who almost bored himself to death talking to students) was a perfect example. That audience was more highly choreographed than Strictly Come Dancing.

Benedict Cumberbatch was there (nod to Shakespeare), Karren Brady was there (nod to leave EU), and so were a few hundred kids who learned English as a second language and speak to their mothers in Persian.

I appreciate that in far-flung corners of our beautiful island the stalwart few clung onto the ideals of our proud nation and flew the flag for Saint George.

In Liverpool and Manchester there were street parades to mark the occasion. Rural villages held tea parties, and Farage was wheeled out in UKIP country to demand a Bank Holiday.

My own children helped cement our flagpole into the garden and I invited my local Labour MP around to point at my flag and mock my intellect.

But all these efforts were slightly in vain. It seems Saint George is no longer the acceptable face of England – too nationalistic, too traditional, speaking to a pride it is no longer acceptable to feel.

My grandfather, who fought in the war, is still soldiering on at 98, but I am supposed to be more proud of a sexually 'non-binary' student who decided not to tell her parents about her choice not to identify as having male OR female sexuality but to announce it to the visiting President Obama instead.

Maria says s/he (depending on the day) has been overwhelmed by the support s/he has received. The Guardian says Maria is a true hero. I think of my grandfather and our forefathers and sigh.

Bristol City Council went for full disclosure and acknowledged they would not be celebrating Saint George's Day because the city was far too multicultural. They said: 'Bristol is a city with 91 different languages and cultures. It would be very difficult to commemorate them all.'

Which kind of misses the point. Bristol isn't in 91 different places, it's in England.  There's a clue in that big red cross on the Union Jack. Or should we be getting rid of that too?

I have no doubt the city finds the budget to pay for translation services for these individuals, and to celebrate events that are part of Acceptable Britain, but clearly Saint George is no longer a part of this picture.

And I wonder just how much this picture has been retouched to accommodate the new order of things.

For now Shakespeare is culturally acceptable, despite some questionable things he wrote about a Moor (Othello) and a Jew (Shylock). So, for how much longer?

In time, Shakespeare will undoubtedly give way to an even more multicultural face for Britain — Malala's, perhaps. Or Idris Elba's.

Just as Boris — now portrayed as a racist for not buying into the doom-mongering of Obamageddon — may be replaced by the Muslim mayor-in-waiting, Sadiq Khan. And the new Head of the National Union of Students is another Muslim, who is fiercely critical of other faiths.

As I resist the relentless imposition of Acceptable Britain, I believe we need to celebrate the pride we had in the country we knew and to push back on obligatory multiculturalism.  We need leaders who will challenge extremists and the communities who feed their brand of hate.

Most people still (just about) know the story about Saint George and the dragon.  What is less talked about - and no doubt does him no favours - is the fact that his mother came from Palestine and that he was also venerated by the Crusaders.

To this day he is known and feared by Muslims but loved by Christian cultures throughout the Middle East as a symbol of protection against persecution and jihad.

Nobody is calling for a new Crusade.  But as we watch the extremists burrow ever deeper into our Muslim communities, and brace ourselves for the next Isis atrocity in Europe - perhaps on a Mediterranean beach near you this summer - maybe we need St George now more than ever.

As Shakespeare wrote: 'Follow your spirit and upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England and Saint George'.

SOURCE






Demonizing Christianity as a Global Menace

By David Limbaugh

Can you believe anyone even organizes a "white privilege" conference these days — seven years into Barack Obama's presidency? Well, you'd better believe it, and you should also know that at least one of the speakers at this conference is militantly Christophobic.

The 17th annual White Privilege Conference was held in Philadelphia from April 15 to 17. Blake Neff of The Daily Caller attended the conference and reported that "activist and author Paul Kivel" actually claimed that "almost every dysfunction in society, from racism and sexism to global warming and a weak economy, is united by the ideology of 'Christian hegemony.'"

What's the problem, you ask? Well, in the United States, according to Kivel, between 7,000 and 10,000 predominantly white Christian men run the major institutions and "colonize our mind" with Christianity's core ideas, which leads to most of the world's problems.

Kivel identified three particularly severe problems in the modern world that are caused or worsened by Christianity. First are wars in the Middle East, which he says are a result of Christianity's effort to spread Western ideas and influence.

The Bible does direct Christians to spread the "good news" to the ends of the earth (Matthew 28:18-20). But Christianity started in the Middle East and spread outward from there. By A.D. 100, the Christian church had been established in regions throughout the Mediterranean, largely because of the Apostle Paul's missionary journeys (Acts 16-20) and the evangelism of Peter, John and others.

The Middle East has switched hands countless times throughout history — Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottomans, British, French, Italians and others.

Perhaps Kivel had in mind America's wars with Iraq in the past quarter-century and our effort to plant self-rule in the region. Though the wisdom of our nation-building effort can certainly be debated, our involvement is hardly the reason for the age-old conflicts in the Middle East, which, in all likelihood, will continue as long as the world does.

The second problem Kivel attributed to Christianity is the economic destruction it has caused because, wrote Neff, "it provides that God-like 'invisible hand' that supposedly drives market forces within a flawed capitalist system."

It is tragic that the left has successfully rewritten history to demonize capitalism as the source of poverty rather than the great engine of unprecedented prosperity it has been for the United States, the Western world and beyond.

Kivel identified the third problem as Christianity's conflict with "global warming," wrote Neff, "because under Christianity mankind has dominion over the Earth, rather than requiring that humans treat the Earth itself as 'sacred.'" Interestingly, Kivel is lexiconically challenged, as he failed to use the proper terminology for this vexing menace — "climate change."

The Bible gives man dominion over all other living things (Genesis 1:28), but it does not sanction man's abuse of the environment or other creatures. The Bible does not exhort mankind to deify "Mother Earth" as radical environmentalists do. But it does promote prudent stewardship, from the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) to God's commanding that the fields and vineyards be sown and harvested for six years but left fallow in the seventh year to replenish the soil's nutrients (Exodus 23:10-11 and Leviticus 25:1-7).

Christianity, argued Kivel, also orients us to distinguish between good and evil, which forces us to adopt a "with us or against us" mentality. "There's nothing inherently good or bad about the weather or about people," Kivel insisted.

I'll concede that though the weather can be a destructive force, it is not capable of good or evil. But yes, the Bible definitely distinguishes between good and evil, and it is quite clear that all men are fallen.

Next, Kivel made the irrational leap that to distinguish between good and evil leads to condemnation of various things as worthy of destruction. From my perspective, however, it is not Christians but leftists such as Kivel who are most intolerant toward people and ideas of other religions or secularists.

Finally, Kivel castigated Christianity's "hierarchical" views that place "God over people, men over women, parents over children, (and) white people over people of color," which, in his view, inevitably leads to systems that justify or glorify oppression.

The Bible does — big surprise — place God (the Creator) over man (the creature), and it places parents over their children for the purpose of raising them through their formative years — an idea no doubt shocking to such leftists. But it does not teach that there are differences in human dignity; all people (male and female) are created in God's image (Genesis 1:27), which is intrinsically irrespective of race. It is rich for Kivel to argue that the Bible glorifies racial oppression when Christians were the leaders in the anti-slavery movement.

Before you dismiss all this as the thinking of a fringe leftist, please consider that it is a logical extension of "progressive" thinking that liberals, especially in the universities and the media, engage in every day. Indeed, it would be intellectually dishonest to deny that leftist race- and gender-baiting, as well as capitalism-bashing, permeate our university curricula throughout the United States. Everything involves identity categories — race, gender, income and the rest. Ironically, the left's obsession over race, gender and the like tends to diminish, rather than promote, human dignity and individuality.

Despite the skewed thinking and propaganda of leftists such as Kivel, Christianity, as abundant evidence demonstrates, has been a force of good in this world and continues to be.

SOURCE






Your Daughter Must Share a Restroom With a Man, and You Will Be Compelled to Agree



By Ben Shapiro

The rules of bigotry, according to the left, represent a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of nonsense.

This week, we learned that if you don't want your small daughter sharing a restroom with a man who thinks he is a woman, you are a bigot; if you are a woman who is uncomfortable with a man who thinks he is a woman whipping out his male genitalia to urinate in front of you, you are a bigot; if you are a religious person who doesn't want to participate in an activity you consider sinful, you are a bigot.

Conversely, if you are a man who thinks he is a woman and you want to force a small girl to pee next to you, you are a freedom fighter; if you are a large man who thinks he is a woman and you want to be one of the girls, right down to hulking into a Macy's ladies room, you are a hero; if you are a gay man and you want to force a religious person to serve you, you are a hero.

If all of this seems odd, that's because it is.

It's obviously logically incoherent, to begin with. The left insists that a man who believes he is a woman must be treated as one, even if his biology dictates that he is a male. However, if a man believes he is a man, he cannot discuss vital issues of national import (like abortion) since he lacks the vital prerequisite: a womb. Men cannot understand women, the logic seems to run, unless they are women.

But men cannot be women, of course, except in the fevered imaginations of people on the left. Even the left doesn't believe that: Leftists simultaneously want to enshrine unchangeable sexual differences (although, according to them, men and women are inherently and unchangingly different with regard to their abortion perspectives) and deny that these differences exist in the first place. (Caitlyn Jenner's twig and berries are irrelevant to the issue of gender, they say).

"This is nonsense," you say.  "Shut up," they say.

In the end, leftists don't have to be coherent — they just have to control the government gun.

The baseline definition of freedom in Western Civilization has been this: You do not get to force me to serve you, and you do not get to force me to think the way you want me to think. As follows, you cannot force me to think that you are a woman if you are a biological man. You cannot force me to spend my taxpayer dollars to pretend along with your mental illness. You cannot force me to run my business as you see fit because I have no affirmative duty to you.

But the left doesn't believe in freedom — except the freedom to destroy the right. Thus, leftists believe that Bruce Springsteen has an absolute right to cancel concerts in North Carolina, but that bakers in North Carolina can't stop baking wedding cakes for same-sex couples. The left believes that the government must compel elevated pay rates for women, but government should compel men to be treated as women based on their subjective feelings on the subject.

The kaleidoscope of leftist morality never stops shifting. But in the end, only one moral counts: the left's ultimate insistence on use of government force to compel obedience to their kaleidoscopic morality.

SOURCE





Deconstructing Greer

Now the Left are turning on a feminist icon

By Dominic Perrottet, a minister of the crown in NSW, Australia

Recently I received a letter, as NSW Finance and Property Minister, demanding that I urgently remove the ‘Germaine Greer’ plaque from the Sydney Writers Walk in Circular Quay.The reason for the demand, sent from a concerned, vigilant citizen, was that Ms Greer holds horrifically bigoted views on transgender issues, so her name can no longer defile public places in NSW.

Although it was just one letter, it’s a telling example of the Left’s ruthless totalitarian reflex. As Stalin erased Trotsky from Soviet photographs, so Ms Greer must be expunged, our public places sanitised – that’s progress, comrade.

Ms Greer is a particularly interesting target for the Left because she was once its darling; a feminist pioneer at the vanguard of the gender revolution. She stuck it to the man, and is still sticking it to him.

Unfortunately for Ms Greer, these days the man sometimes identifies as a woman, which means the once-celebrated feminist is now guilty of le thoughtcrime du jour: transphobia. Explaining her position on Q&A last week, Greer didn’t retreat: ‘If you’re a 50-year-old truck driver who’s had 4 children with a wife and you’ve decided the whole time you’ve been a woman, I think you’re probably wrong.’ See, this insolent fuddy duddy refuses to grasp that such thoughts are no longer ‘acceptable’. In the ever-shifting hierarchy of progressive issues, the trans-agenda now trumps feminism. So for Ms Greer, it’s confess, recant, conform, or you’re out.

That anyone would think it appropriate to denounce Ms Greer to a Minister of the Crown came as a shock to me. But this is the world we are in: public office holders are under increasing pressure to use state power to enforce the ‘progressive’ agenda. Sadly, too many are caving.

Take Germany, where a comedian is now the subject of a government-approved criminal investigation – for making jokes about the president of Turkey. Or Tasmania, where the Catholic Archbishop is being dragged before the anti-discrimination commission for publishing a pamphlet explaining his own Church’s teaching on marriage. Or Scotland, where the Glasgow police – providing locals with some helpful advice on the perils of social media – recently tweeted: ‘Think before you post or you may receive a visit from us this weekend…’

That’s right McDougall: you’re just one Facebook post away from hearing the friendly local constabulary’s jackboots crunching up your driveway.

Defending freedom doesn’t mean agreeing with every offensive statement anyone makes. A case in point: a few weeks ago some unruly footy fans unfurled a banner at the MCG emblazoned with ‘STOP THE MOSQUES’.

The reaction was swift and ruthless. Eddie McGuire told the ABC that those responsible should be banned from footy. AFL boss Gillan McLachlan got busy ‘talking to the Victoria Police to see how they may prosecute’. No matter that there are no grounds for prosecution: where there’s a will, there’s a gulag.

When a similar banner was unfurled at a game in WA, the police jumped straight in, marching the fans out and banning them from the ground.

When I’m watching a match, I prefer not to be distracted by louts with offensive banners trying to stir the political pot. But if footy codes are going to politicise games with statements about refugees and rounds where players wear rainbow bootlaces and the like, it’s not clear to me why one set of political statements is permitted, and another isn’t; why we’re free to use the game to spruik (invariably left-wing) political views on some issues, but get bundled away by cops for voicing opinions on others.

If you’re banning the Sydney University Evangelical Union for the unspeakable crime of requiring its executive to believe in Jesus (Marx forbid!), more power to you. If your target is George Pell, or Tony Abbott, or some other conservative punching bag, go ahead and spew your hate-filled bile from the rooftops. You’ll be lauded as brave and a hero and get interviewed on ABC, and maybe even nominated for Australian of the Year (or at the very least a Logie).

But if you want to use your freedom to challenge the dogmas of the new orthodoxy, I’m sorry comrade, that’s not what freedom’s for, so put a sock in it. Or else.

As Ms Greer’s cautionary tale illustrates, conservatives aren’t the only ones liable to find themselves on the wrong end of a progressive truncheon.

The revolution always eats its own, because there is no rhyme or reason to the opinions ‘progressives’ endorse from one day to the next. Their beliefs – no matter how ruthlessly enforced – may be useful in advancing ‘progress’ to some fabled utopia, but once their utility has expired, those beliefs can be discarded like last season’s flared corduroys. That’s where serious thinkers like Ms Greer run into trouble. Because serious thinkers have serious arguments rooted in serious principles that can’t simply be jettisoned.

When you abandon your principles, it’s hard to see the point of debate, other than to see who can shout the loudest. Contests of ideas degenerate into contests of fists. That’s not progress.

True progress demands a truly free exchange of ideas, because the best ideas are forged in the furnace of fierce disagreement – the battle of ideas, where wits are sharpened, arguments blunted, minds expanded, and gradually, truth revealed.

Nothing has made this clearer to me than the responsibility of legislative decision-making. Free debate is simply indispensable in that process. But I have felt the chill setting in – the reluctance to speak out, even among colleagues, on matters of huge importance, for fear of falling foul of the PC police.

This is the path to dead-end, unthinking government. If democracy is to survive, we must defend freedom. We must resist the growing pressure to deploy the state’s firepower to enforce a ‘progressive’ agenda that criminalises dissent. Because you can only have progress with a contest of ideas. And you can only have a contest of ideas if you are free.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





26 April, 2016

Another perverted Muslim



A pervert doctor who groped female patients 40 years ago and robbed one of the chance of ever finding love has been sent to prison for his crimes.

Justice finally caught up with retired GP, Mohammed Haq, from Hornchurch, Essex, when the frail 74-year-old was led from the dock of St Albans Crown Court to begin his 18 month sentence.

Before, the court heard how a young single woman - who was pregnant at the time - was left so traumatised by what Haq did to her that she never felt able to let a man to touch her again.

As a result, St Albans crown court was told, the woman has never had a 'relationship' with a man since. In a statement that was read to the court, she said: 'Since that evening I have not been in any relationship. I didn't want to be touched by any man.'

The woman said she had been looking forward to being a mother until Haq groped her at his surgery one evening.

Even as the time approached for her son to be born she couldn't bear the thought of a doctor touching or examining her. She insisted she be allowed a Caesarian birth as a result.

Her statement continued: 'Everything changed in my life that evening... I have never felt safe to have a relationship'. 'He took from me the ability to love and he's a wicked man who got his kicks by abusing women,' she said.

Haq appeared in court having been found guilty earlier this year of fondling the breasts of a teenage girl and three female patients during unnecessary clinical examinations in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The married father-of-two indecently assaulted the women while he worked as a GP at the Burvill House Surgery and Hilltop Surgery in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

Prosecutor Miranda Moore QC told the jury at the start of his trial: 'There were inappropriate breast examinations and there was no clinical justification for what happened.'

The youngest victim was 15 when she went to see the doctor because she had swollen neck glands.

Ms Moore added: 'He asked her to take her top, her bra and her trousers off. She was standing in her pants alone in the room with no chaperone.  'He cupped her breasts and twiddled with her nipples. He told her to bend over. She felt stunned.'

One patient went to see Dr Haq for a repeat prescription of slimming pills.  'He told her to take her top off and pulled her right nipple to make it erect. Then he made both nipples erect and plucked them. He did not weigh her or give her the weight loss pills,' said the barrister.

Another woman, who is now in her 60s, went to Haq with a bad back and he touched her breasts unnecessarily.  The victim told the jury: 'He told me to take my jumper and bra off and lie on the couch. There was no second person in room.  'He started touching the breast area. He was not examining me for problems he was just fondling.  'He asked me to stand up and touched my breasts again. I suppose I was young and naive.'

She said she saw Dr Haq again in 1980 when she had a rash on her neck. 'He asked me to take my jumper and bra off. I did.

'I felt shocked, having only gone with a rash on my neck. He didn't say why he was touching my breasts. He said he did not know what the rash was and gave me a prescription for some cream.'

When another woman went to Haq to find out if she was pregnant he told her to strip and squeezed her breasts. The woman is said to have complained to the surgery receptionist who 'laughed at her'.

Haq, of Parkstone Avenue, Hornchurch denied ten offences of indecent assault on four women in the 1970s and early 80s.

During the course of the trial Judge Andrew Bright QC ruled that he had no case to answer on two charges of indecent assault.

He was convicted by the jury of eight women and four men unanimously on three counts. They convicted him on two other charges by a majority of ten to two. The jury cleared him of two others. They could not agree on the remaining charge.

Sentencing had been adjourned for medical reports to be prepared and he was ordered to register as a sex offender.

Haq had committed the offences on the women when he was in his thirties, but the court was told he now suffers from heart problems and is profoundly deaf. He has diabetes, eye problems and is waiting for an operation to remove a large kidney stone. He is also suffering from depression.

In the early 1980s he was been suspended for 9 months by the General Medical Council after complaints from patients, but there was never any criminal investigation into his activities.

Years later his victims finally found the courage to tell Hertfordshire Police what Haq had done to them and he was arrested and charged.

Following his suspension in 1981, he was allowed to resume practicing as a doctor and eventually retired in 2014.

Julian Woodbridge, defending, described what Haq had done as 'the opportunistic touching of breast'.  He went on 'Even 35 years on what is obvious is that his behaviour has had an effect on the women.'

Passing sentence on Friday, Judge Bright said that because of the age of the victim, the most serious offence had been the fondling of the 15-year-old.  As a result of what he did to her, which had been for his own 'sexual gratification,' the judge said her life had been blighted by panic attacks.

The judge told Haq his victims had placed total trust in him as their GP.  'It was complete and total trust and you abused that trust with all your victims including a 15-year-old who was in no position to speak up for herself.'

Judge Bright said by contesting the allegations and forcing the victims to go to court and relive their ordeals, it was clear Haq felt no remorse for his crimes.

He jailed him for 18 months and ordered him to pay £7500 towards the cost of the prosecution.

SOURCE






One in six BBC stars 'must be gay or lesbian or disabled' by 2020 says new staff-hiring guidelines

One in six of all on-screen BBC roles must go to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender or disabled people by 2020, the corporation's new diversity targets state.

In a bid to deter criticism that it has been failing to reflect its audience, the BBC has pledged that LGBT and disabled people will each make up eight per cent of all on-air and on-screen roles.

The new targets follow a heated debate in the House of Commons led by David Lammy MP on the issue of the broadcaster's diversity.

Fifty per cent of all on-screen and broadcasting roles will go to women, who already make up 48.5 per cent of the BBC's total workforce.

However, the BBC will still be able to commission shows where the main roles are more likely to be male-dominated.

Radio 2, which has a particularly male-dominated line-up of broadcasters, including DJs and presenters Chris Evans, Simon Mayo, Jeremy Vine and Bob Harris, faces an overhaul.

Last year, a review by the BBC Trust, the corporation's watchdog, found that six stations - including Radio 2 - raised concerns that they were failing ethnic minority audiences.

Radio 2 was highlighted as having particular difficulties in attracting non-white listeners. It was said to reach an average of only 12 percent of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) adults each week, compared to 35 percent for all adults.

The BBC's target for 15 per cent of on-screen and on-air representation, including lead roles, to be people from BAME backgrounds will not be increased by 2020, as the current percentage reflects the UK's population. Currently 13.1 per cent of the BBC's workforce is from a BAME background, with the same target of 15 per cent by 2020.

A statement from a BBC spokesperson said: 'We are making good progress in our work to make the BBC a truly diverse organisation, but there's more to do and we're always keen to improve.

'Almost half of our workforce is made up of women and the proportion of our workforce who are black, Asian and other ethnic minorities is at an all-time high.

'We'll continue doing what works but also develop new and innovative ideas to do even better, and we'll set this out in our new diversity strategy shortly.' 

In a statement on the BBC's website, Tunde Ogungbesan, head of diversity, inclusion and succession at the BBC, said: 'The BBC is a diverse organisation, whichever way you look at it.

'Almost half of our workforce is made up of women and the proportion of our black, Asian and other ethnic minorities in our workforce is at an all-time high.

'But there is more to do and we know the challenge we face so we’ll be building on this strong platform by continuing doing what works.

Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy Ed Vaizey confirmed that diversity will be prominent in the White Paper on the BBC's new charter, which will be unveiled by Culture Secretary John Whittingdale in May.

The BBC's royal charter, due to expire this year, is currently under Government review.

SOURCE






Be a 'fattipuff' if you like, but don't expect my NHS to save you!

By RACHEL JOHNSON

A little while ago I sat next to Jeremy Hunt at a work dinner in Westminster. Mouth full of Parma ham, the Health Secretary spoke movingly about the challenges the NHS faces as the country grows up in terms of age, and out in terms of size.

He ate his fish but declined pudding (I ate his lemon tart for him). He grazed at the cheese and then jogged out, his blue shirt tucked flat into his waistband, and all this wasn’t just his manly pride in maintaining a bella figura.

Hunt knew then what was coming. At the Italian restaurant that evening, he talked a lot about obesity, and how the fatberg threatens to sink HMS NHS.

And last week, we learned that our NHS’s many captains are already being forced into taking evasive action. According to the Royal College of Surgeons, the overweight and smokers (let’s call them fattipuffs for short) are becoming ‘soft targets’ for savings.

In a third of health trusts in England, treatment is being withheld or delayed for up to three million patients presenting with those conditions.

Now, according to the president of the RCS, who rejoices in the name of Clare Marx, this is not on. Not at all. ‘Blanket bans that deny or delay patients’ access to surgery are wrong,’ she says.

Well, I’m sorry, Miss Marx, but the surgeons and clinicians aren’t wrong. They are right.

I admit this makes me sound like an unsympathetic, horrible, fattist person. I know that the very founding principles of our sacred NHS are that it should be free at the point of delivery, and treatment should be based on need, not the ability to pay. In an ideal world, these principles would still hold.

But we do not live in an ideal world. And, as we don’t, those who take more care of their health – like our slimline Health Secretary, a man who dances a mean lambada on a specially sprung floor in his London home – should be first in the queue, pushing a blubber mountain who sits and smokes himself into oblivion further down the list.

Politics is about choices, and so is healthcare. Resources are finite, whereas demand is unlimited. Inevitably, the NHS has been forced into exercising Darwinian natural selection, and helping those who it thinks have most chance of survival into the lifeboat first.

When my husband needed a liver transplant, he had to undergo a week-long battery of tests, and also complete a sheaf of forms, to prove he wasn’t a George Best character, depriving another more deserving patient of a desperately needed organ. And quite right too.

In fact, I think healthcare ‘leaders’ have to send out a firmer signal that those who self-inflict damage should not expect rapid and automatic service.

They have no other choice if the NHS itself is going to survive or sink beneath the waves of flab or go up in smoke.

According to Public Health England, in 2014-15 almost a fifth of children in Year 6 (those aged ten and 11) were obese, while for children in Reception (aged four and five), the figure was one in ten.

Just think of the NHS staggering under the weight of their case notes alone in a few decades.

Jeremy Hunt should come out and explain why such rationing is not just important and necessary, but right. As a nation, we are digging our own graves with our teeth, and burying the NHS as we do so.

If he won’t say it, I will. Go ahead and smoke and drink and eat yourself to death. Knock yourselves out, fattipuffs.

But don’t expect preferential treatment at my expense.

SOURCE






Limbaugh: 'Obliterating Morality Has Been What the Culture War is All About'

"How in the hell did this happen?" conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh asked his audience on Thursday.

"We have men's and women's restrooms for a reason, just like we've always had marriage, and it's always been defined as a specific thing for...time-honored and time-tested reasons.  They were not the result of people who had power lording that over other people.

 "These are processes and behavioral patterns that established over the millennia as proper, just, moral, correct, sensible, you name it.  Now all of a sudden that gets thrown out, and it's all up to how somebody feels about themselves at a particular moment in time as to which bathroom they want to use."

Limbaugh said none of it makes any sense within a "right versus wrong" framework. He said it's all about "us versus them."

"And, see, I don't think the culture war has been about right versus wrong for a long time.  And people haven't figured that out.  They continue to fight it on a moral or a morality battlefield, but that's not it at all.

"In fact, obliterating morality has been what the culture war is all about, not asserting it and not having it triumph.  The whole point of the culture war is an us-versus-them framework now, and the 'us' is all of the disparate minorities of the world versus the 'them,' which is people they claim to be the oppressive majority."

Limbaugh said liberalism is determined to wipe out the concept of morality, believing that no one has the right to define it.

"Nobody can write laws that are based on morality and have them apply to everybody, because your morality may differ from mine, and there isn't any universal morality; there isn't any universal right and wrong...

"So something as simple as morality and right and wrong has now become politicized, and therefore illegitimate, 'cause you don't have the right to tell somebody what's right and wrong. You don't have the right to define morality -- and if you do, then you're a problem. You're the problem. You're the oppressive, old fogey, fuddy-duddy problem. Meanwhile, you think you're just standing up for what's right and justice and wholesome and good, and their whole objective has been just to erase all of that."

Limbaugh said the cultural and political battles we face are no longer rational.

"None of this LGBT stuff is rational.  Not a single thing happening is rational.  It's all irrational.  None of it makes any sense.  It's got everybody scratching their heads, but they don't know how to stop it. They don't know how to oppose it. Anybody who tries is shouted down, targeted for destruction or what have you, on Twitter."

Limbaugh described the ongoing battles as "tribal."

"We are stunned. How many of you, how many of you are literally shocked and stunned that logical arguments do not persuade people anymore?  How many of you have found yourself in an argument with people and you're using logic, inescapable logic?  As far as you're concerned, there's no question the difference in right and wrong in terms of whatever it is you're discussing.  And it doesn't persuade anybody.  And you end up at your wits' end over this.

"The problem, you see, is that the left has shifted this entire culture battle or culture war from right versus wrong to us versus them.  There isn't any right versus wrong.

"The only way they can win this war is by obliterating the concepts of right versus wrong, 'cause they are wrong, and they know it, and they don't want to be thought of that way.  So they just obliterate the whole concept of right versus wrong, and it gets replaced by something we could call us versus them, where it becomes more important to be on the right side of an issue, quote, the correct side, the popular side of any issue than it is to be right, as in correct."

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************




25 April, 2016

For now, Ched Evans is an innocent man again but whatever happens at his new trial the Jessica Ennis lynch mob will NEVER forgive him for being successful

I thought from the beginning that the conviction was a monstrous injustice.  It took a British court to convert consensual sex into rape. The Crown Prosecutors stretched the law in order to appease feminists with a high profile conviction. Feminists had been complaining that there were "not enough" rape convictions. Evans is the victim of feminist hate

KATIE HOPKINS rightly says below that those who condemned and shunned him will have egg on their faces for a long time -- JR

Right, Charlie Webster, you pouting fool, are you going to apologise?  How about you Jessica Ennis-Hill, Miss Strop-A-Lot? Perhaps we should take your name off the football stand at Sheffield for being too quick to judge.

And how about the rest of the blithering idiots, feminazis, slopey-shouldered board members and vindictive fools who said Ched Evans should never be allowed to play football again?

He served two and a half years of his five-year sentence, was released from prison to be ostracised from society, and now a senior judge has finally quashed his guilty verdict pending a retrial.

Given a man is innocent unless proven guilty, that makes him innocent where I am sitting. And I'd be pretty mad if I was Ched Evans right now.

Upset at the football profession who failed to stand by him even after he had served his sentence (possibly as an innocent man). Where is the leadership and loyalty of the board?

And livid at those who once were friends and have no doubt distanced themselves from him and his cash faster than a they'd run from a hooker with herpes.

And somehow, through all this anger he has had the strength to continue to fight, to display loyalty and gratitude to his girlfriend and new baby, and release a respectful statement thanking the court for restoring his faith in justice.

I am now mad on his behalf.

Mad that some woman is sober enough to go back to her hotel with strangers but too drunk to be accountable for her actions.

Outraged that these 'victims' get anonymity whilst the lives of the accused are torn apart, even destroyed - and those of their family around them.

Isn't it time these accusers were made to face up to fact they are about to ruin someone's life?

Surely if you are certain you are the victim and your attacker is guilty, you should be prepared to show your face. I would be - in defiance and as a show of strength. Why do the accusers always get away with chucking a hand grenade into someone's life and legging it?

And it is beyond evil that certain wanna-be celebrities and recognisable faces want their slice of the action to virtue signal their solidarity for some drunken girl from Rhyl.

Jessica Ennis-Hill, I love it when you are running home to heptathlon glory for Great Britain. I'm addicted to the way you hurdle, grazing your girl-bits as you go. But don't tell me how to treat Ched Evans. You can stop telling me where to bank as well whilst we're at it.

And to all those rival football fans and feminists who decided he didn't deserve to return to his football career after serving his sentence (for a crime he is no longer convicted of committing), do you still stand by your jealous words?

Whatever you views on Ched, drunken sex and footballers - if we don't give people a second chance to work and earn money, what sentence are we really handing out? Life every time?

Most people objected to him returning to work as a footballer. He was allowed to be a binman. But not a sportsman. How does that work? Is there an unspoken sliding scale of shame to which criminals are intrinsically attached?

I've been a cleaner, a burger flipper and a bar maid. Have I paid my dues for the sins of my eventual success?

If the cases of Ched Evans and Adam Johnson have taught us anything, it is being in the public eye comes at a price, especially if you live a lifestyle of excess.

Your trial will be a public spectacle, and the wish to see you in the stocks for people to throw tomatoes (or rocks if you follow the Religion of Peace) clearly lives on.

Public shaming is our new national sport for the YouTube generation.

The higher you rise, the greater people enjoy watching you fall - for jealousy, envy and some peculiar, skewed notion of social justice.

I still stand by Ched Evans and his family.

He will have to face another trial with fresh evidence presented and could well be found innocent.

But whether his name will be cleared in the court of public opinion by braying mob who cannot think for themselves, is a great deal less certain.

We all have secrets we would prefer to hide. I would remind those on the moral high ground that when I look up, I can see their dirty knickers. You'd best sit down.

SOURCE






Not another U.N. "Rapporteur!

A couple of previous ones have been completely off the planet in their criticism of Britain -- and this one is no better

An unelected United Nations inspector, whose job is funded by UK foreign aid cash, provoked outrage last night after he attacked Britain's crucial new counter-terror laws.

Kenyan human rights chief Maina Kiai condemned the Home Office's flagship scheme aimed at stopping young Muslims joining Islamic State and calling on teachers to report suspicious activity.

He also criticised crucial powers needed by security services to track terror suspects and plans to ban extremist groups.

The grandly titled Special Rapporteur On The Rights To Freedom Of Peaceful Assembly And Of Association launched his attack on Britain during a three-day visit to London last week.

He met contentious figures including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a radical students' leader accused of anti-Semitism, and members of a prisoners' rights group who called Jihadi John a 'beautiful young man'.

Last night former Defence Secretary Liam Fox hit back at Mr Kiai saying: 'With the level of oppression, abuse of human rights and terrorism around the world, I would think the United Nations would have better things to do with its resources and manpower than investigating one of the most peaceful, liberal and free countries.

'We don't make contributions to the UN to have them stick their noses into our country – we give them to improve the lot of people who don't know what freedom and security are.'

Mr Kiai is a Harvard-educated lawyer from Kenya which, its critics say, has far worse problems with human rights and terrorism than Britain does.

The capital Nairobi is home to the world's biggest slum, the Kenyan president has been accused of crimes against humanity, and Islamist group Al-Shabaab killed hundreds of people in massacres at a shopping mall and Garissa University.

In his role as Special Rapporteur, Mr Kiai was invited by the Government to observe freedom of association in Britain in 2013, and returned last week for an update. On the first day of his visit he met charities and members of 'civil society'.

He was pictured shaking hands with Ibrahim Mohamoud, communications officer for CAGE, the prisoners' rights group that described IS executioner Mohammed Emwazi – known as Jihadi John – as a 'beautiful young man' who was 'extremely kind and gentle', and blamed his radicalisation on MI5.

Mr Kiai was also photographed with his arm around Malia Bouattia, the newly elected president of the National Union of Students. She has caused a split in the union as she once claimed it was Islamophobic for the union to pass a motion condemning IS, and described Birmingham University, where she studied, as a 'Zionist outpost'.

Mr Kiai is unpaid, but his visits and reports are paid for by the UN, to which the Foreign Office contributed £518 million last year.

A spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said: 'The funding for the Special Rapporteur On Freedom Of Peaceful Assembly And Association comes from the United Nations regular budget, which is approved by the General Assembly every two years.'

SOURCE






Fury as the Bard is dragged into refugee row: BBC accused of using Shakespeare celebrations to push 'Left-wing, pro-immigration agenda'

The BBC was accused last night of using its Shakespeare celebrations to push a 'Left-wing, pro-immigration agenda'.

An obscure passage known as the 'immigration speech' was never performed in the playwright's lifetime, yet it was selected as one of the excerpts on BBC2's Shakespeare Live! last night.

Tory MP Peter Bone said: 'They've gone out of their way to find a piece of writing which fits the Left-wing establishment's pro-immigration agenda and it's a shame.

'You'd have thought they could at least have found something which was published under Shakespeare's name for a start.'

Read by Sir Ian McKellen, the speech appears in a play called Sir Thomas More, originally written by Anthony Munday about Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor.

Shakespeare is thought to have inserted 17 lines which quote More trying to calm an angry mob looting immigrant businesses. The statesman asks them how they would feel if they were 'wretched strangers forced to seek refuge in a modern land'.

The choice of text was made by Gregory Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Doran, who married his partner, actor Sir Antony Sher, last year, claimed last week that Shakespeare was gay.

SOURCE






Georgia Bureaucrats Listened to a Doctor’s Sermons, and Then Fired Him

On March 28, Georgia governor Nathan Deal capitulated to threats from the social-justice warriors at Apple, Disney, and the NFL and vetoed HB 757, the “Free Exercise Protection Act.” In his self-righteous statement justifying his veto, Deal claimed that Georgia didn’t need new religious-liberty legislation. Rather, he claimed that these laws enable discrimination, and his veto was thus about the “character of our State and the character of its people.”

Perhaps he should look to the character of his own government. This morning, the First Liberty Institute filed a lawsuit in federal court that makes chilling claims against Georgia’s Department of Public Health, claims backed by a host of damaging documents.

The Institute represents Dr. Eric Walsh, a California physician and former director of public health for the city of Pasadena, Calif. Walsh is also a devout Christian, a Seventh-day Adventist who sometimes preaches in his spare time.

Walsh, a former member of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, had accepted a job in Georgia as a district health director when Georgia officials became aware that he’d delivered a number of “controversial” sermons on his own time — sermons where he articulated orthodox Seventh-day Adventist positions on, among other things, human sexuality, Islam, evolution, and the corrupting influence of pop culture.

In California, Walsh had been attacked by student activists who objected to his selection as a commencement speaker at Pasadena City College. To these activists, working for former president Bush and President Obama to combat AIDS, serving as a board member of the Latino Health Collaborative, and starting California’s first city-run dental clinic for low-income families dealing with HIV/AIDS wasn’t sufficient to overcome the horror at Walsh’s Christian views.

Under fire, Walsh canceled his commencement speech — while the city, incredibly, put him on administrative leave. The college replaced him with a gay screenwriter.

When Georgia officials learned of Walsh’s California controversy, they responded by immediately violating the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits government employers from considering an applicant’s religion in employment decisions, but Georgia officials not only evaluated Walsh’s religious views, the director of human resources wrote an e-mail to department employees giving them the “assignment” of listening to his sermons. And so they did. E-mails indicate that health-department employees split the sermons up, listened to Walsh’s religious views, and took notes.

 Walsh asserts that one department official called and told him that “you can’t preach that and work in the field of public health.” The very next day, Walsh claims that department officials held a “hastily arranged” meeting to discuss Walsh’s employment.

Not everyone supported the witch hunt: Walsh claims that the health department’s own lawyer twice warned department officials that Walsh’s religious beliefs “could play no role” in the department’s employment decisions. One health-department employee issued his own stark warning, saying: “If we do not hire this applicant on the basis of evidence of job performance and disqualify him on the basis of discrimination by those who seek to advance their own agenda and do him harm, I believe we are no better than they are.”

These warnings went unheeded, and two days after health-department officials carried out their “assignment” to watch his sermons, they terminated Walsh — informing him through a mocking voice-mail message that a termination letter was on its way.

The health department has since claimed that the sermons that officials were “assigned” to watch had nothing at all to do with Walsh’s termination. Instead, they claim they fired him because they believed Walsh failed to disclose outside income while working in California — an assertion that Walsh contests and asserts never came up at any stage of the Georgia interview process.

Walsh’s case is now the second major federal lawsuit challenging the conduct of Georgia public officials. In February, I reported on former Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran’s case against Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed. The city fired Cochran after they discovered he’d written a book on his own time that — gasp! — articulated an orthodox Christian view of sexual morality.

Both Cochran and Walsh were African-American men raised by single mothers. Both Cochran and Walsh relied on their faith to fuel careers of incredible achievement. The faith that sustained them now condemns them — at least in Nathan Deal’s Georgia.

The Left used to say that it wasn’t concerned with Christian speech in houses of worship. Instead, it was only focused on “ending discrimination.” But now the Left is the discriminator, seeking to purge vocal Christians from public life. Now, even sermons are not safe from government scrutiny, and a man who’s never been accused of workplace discrimination finds himself unable to find a job in the public-health sector.

Governor Deal described Georgia as a place where “our people work side-by-side without regard to the color of our skin, or the religion we adhere to.” But his own government refutes his words. In some parts of Georgia, persecution is the practice.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





24 April, 2016

The kids really ARE all right: There are no differences between children of same-sex parents and heterosexual couples, study finds

What complete and utter garbage.  There was no objective gauge of child wellbeing at all.  They took the parents' word for it.  And it was all done over the phone.  The researchers did not even see the children concerned.  Anybody see a problem with that?  The journal article is "Same-Sex and Different-Sex Parent Households and Child Health Outcomes: Findings from the National Survey of Children's Health"  It's a vivid demonstration that you can get the most rubbishy "research" published if it validates current political correctness

Traditionalists may worry about the impact of same-sex parenting on children, but a new study adds to a growing body of evidence that there's no problem at all.

Researchers say the children of same-sex parents are just as healthy - both mentally and physically - as those of heterosexual parents. The only difference noted was that lesbian parents found raising their children more stressful.

It's estimated there are 690,000 same-sex couples living in the United States and that 19 per cent of such couples and lesbian, gay or bisexual individuals are raising children under the age of 18.

There is growing acceptance of different-sex parents, as portrayed in the 2010 film The Kids are All Right, in which Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play committed lesbian parents.

Child development experts from the universities of Amsterdam, Columbia and UCLA, used the US' National Survey of Children's Health and matches 95 same-sex female households to 95 different-sex parent households with children between the ages of six and 17.

They took the parents' age, education and location into account, as well as their child's age, race and gender to get the best matches possible.

One parent from each couple was interviewed by telephone about their experience, such as whether raising a child is stressful.

To gauge their child's wellbeing, parents were asked questions such as: 'How often during the past month was your child unhappy, sad, or depressed?' and 'Does he or she do all required homework?'

They were asked to plot their answers on a scale of one to five, with one meaning 'never' and five meaning 'always'. The results were then weighted and analysed.

Nanette Gartrell at UCLA told CNN: 'It is the only study to compare same-sex and different-sex parent households with stable, continuously coupled parents and their biological offspring.'

The experts wrote in the study published in the journal Cell Press: 'Children with female same-sex parents and different-sex parents demonstrated no differences in outcomes.

SOURCE






Canadian public broadcaster won’t name swimming pool sex assault suspect — because he’s a Muslim migrant

Terrible mass sexual assault in a Lethbridge hotel swimming pool on Saturday. Two young girls, and a grown woman, were attacked in the Holiday Inn.

The CBC story has all the basic facts. They don’t disclose the names of the victims — makes sense.

But what else is missing?  The name of the accused.

I don’t get $1.2 billion a year from the Liberal government like the CBC does, but I know how to use Google. It took me less than thirty seconds to find the Lethbridge Police department’s press release. It actually seems to have been the basis for the CBC story, almost line for line.

Except for this line: "Wijdan Yasir, 28, of Calgary, is charged with three counts of sexual assault and two counts of sexual interference.”

Oh. That’s why. Because he’s a Muslim migrant, in his case, from Pakistan.

It’s the same reason why the CBC helped in the cover-up of the Syrian migrant kids in a Halifax elementary school beating up the Canadian girls. If the roles were reversed, it would be huge news.

The mainstream media pretends to care about bullying and rape culture and sexism. But they don’t if it’s a Muslim migrant behind it.

SOURCE






How Democrats Win Debates by Corrupting English

Humans have been using euphemisms ever since Adam first “knew” Eve. In politics especially, obfuscating and twisting the meaning of words has been going on forever. But today’s debates aren’t only littered with rhetorical distortions; in some ways, many of Democrats' most potent arguments are built on corrupt language.

One word that’s really getting a workout this cycle is “loophole.” Basically, all of life is a giant loophole until Democrats come up with a way to regulate or tax it. In its economic usage, “loophole” — probably more of a dysphemism — creates the false impression that people are getting away with breaking the law. It’s a way to skip the entire debate portion of the conversation and get right to the accusation.

So when Hillary Clinton promises to close the loophole of corporate inversion, what she means to say is that Democrats disapprove of this completely legal thing that corporations do to shield their money from the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. Loopholes are like giveaways, monies that D.C. has yet to double and triple tax.

It’s one thing for Democrats to try and set the parameters of a debate before the debate is even had, but it’s quite another to watch the press participate.

Here’s CNN: “Clinton to push closing corporate tax loopholes.” Here’s The Hill: “Obama calls for Congress to close corporate tax loopholes.” Here’s how Halimah Abdullah and the Associated Press reported the issue on NBC: “President Obama on Tuesday criticized loopholes that help protect offshore tax havens and U.S. companies that move abroad for lower tax rates.”

But Bernie Sanders, bless him, just skips the entire perception game and just comes out with it by Tweeting: “The offshore tax haven network isn’t something that we need to reform or refine. It’s a form of legalized tax fraud that must end.”

“Legalized tax fraud” is a revealing statement about the progressive belief system. For progressives, taxation is moral. So when you fail to pay an imaginary tax that doesn’t exist but Democrats think should, you are by default engaged in fraud. The law has just to catch up with sin.

Take “access,” formerly meaning having the ability to approach, enter or use. In today’s liberal parlance, when the state doesn’t give you something for free, it’s taking something from you. It’s denying you access.

When there’s a lack of access to birth control, it doesn’t, as the dictionary might lead you to believe, mean that Walgreens and CVS have been dissuaded from selling condoms, or that someone is bolting the door when women attempt to purchase birth control at the local pharmacy. It means that government has not made condoms free for anyone who desires them.

To oppose the latter — whatever you make of the position — is not tantamount to a ban or outlawing. Yet Clinton has accused Cruz of attempting to “ban” contraception. Neither Cruz nor any Republican in office today has ever tried to ban — prohibit, forbid, proscribe, disallow — contraception altogether. This is a fairy tale with a thriving political fan fiction community.

Voters who pay only marginal attention to political debates (most) are probably left with some vague notion that men are working to deny women access to birth control. It would be understandably disconcerting if this were true. The idea of a War Against Women loses a bit of its bark when it’s really The War on Having Taxpayers Pay For Everyone’s Pill.

“Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all,” Clinton recently lamented as she spoke about the prevalence of the anti-abortion movement’s activism. Women won’t have a true right on this issue, she says, “As long as we have laws on the book like the Hyde Amendment (a provision pretending to bar federal funds for pay for most abortions) making it harder for low-income women to exercise their full rights.”

By “extraordinary measures,” Clinton means walking past anti-abortion protestors who might say something that makes a woman uncomfortable. Any genuine attempt to hinder a person from walking into a Planned Parenthood is already illegal, after all. Some of us, you see, are imbued with special rights, or full rights. Women who support the right to an abortion, for instance, have full rights — not women who want to express themselves in opposition.

There are plenty of other distortions. “Disenfranchisement” once meant revoking the rights gained through suffrage, but has been corroded to mean asking a person to provide a picture ID or to wait in a line before voting. Today, a country that deports hundreds of thousands of people every year has open borders, while millions of illegal immigrants are called everything but illegal. Today, tax cuts cost Americans something, but state spending is an investment.

And so on.

This is just a small taste of the war on meaning, of course. And to allow them this falsification language is to surrender a debate before it even begins.

SOURCE






Politically correct rubbish preached at Independence Hall

Independence Hall, Philadelphia — If you paid a visit, you’d expect to experience the gravitas of the room where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were created. But it turns out you might get a dose of misinformation with your tour as well. That’s what happened recently when a group of tourists listened to a tour by a National Park Service Ranger. According to former DOJ lawyer J. Christian Adams at PJ Media, the ranger told the group, “The Founders knew that when they left this room, what they had written wouldn’t matter very much.” She added that the “most important part of the Constitution written at Independence Hall was the ability to change it.” Sounds like someone thinks the Constitution is simply a document of historical curiosity.

That’s not all. The ranger also told the tourists that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery. Has she even read the document? “The text of the Constitution in 1787 did not mention slavery even once,” writes Adams.

Last year, the ranger spoke at a workshop for school teachers whose goal was to explore “perspectives on Independence Hall and the Meaning of Freedom.” When she rose to speak, she delivered a lecture titled “Remember the women.” What did those teachers take back to their classrooms? Differing perspectives are one thing, but the National Park Service should not tolerate providing inaccurate, biased and plain wrong information. It’s a dereliction of one of the core duties of a ranger.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************




22 April, 2016

Another Mohammed at work

The latest way of showing your hate for others



Disgraceful CCTV shows drunk 62-year-old man slashing multiple cars with craft knife causing almost £50,000 in damage. Mohammed Qureshi, 62, went on a scratching spree for four days last year.  Teesside Crown Court heard the total figure for damage was about £47,000

Mr Baker said the damage included deep scratches to the bonnets and along the length of the vehicles, some measuring eight feet.

When police arrived at the scene, Qureshi 'started to run away and proceeded to get into his motor vehicle for which he had no insurance.'

'At 3.40am he was stopped by police officers and found with the Stanley [boxcutter] knife with him,' Mr Baker said.

When interviewed it was found that Qureshi  had been drinking but was under the legal limit and said he did not remember causing the damage.

Mr Baker said some victims were unable to claim against their insurance because the damage caused was less than their excess.

He was given a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years and was ordered to undergo mental health treatment.

Because of Qureshi's circumstances, compensation was not ordered for the victims.

SOURCE






Rep. Mark Walker: Liberals Exploiting Bathroom Bill Controversy for Political Gain

GREENSBORO—A bathroom bill, a rock star, and competing claims of privacy have catapulted North Carolina into the center of a national debate over transgender rights. And Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., says he knows why.

The freshman legislator argues that Democrats are manufacturing outrage over the law for political gain in the Tar Heel state.

"Why is North Carolina in the crosshairs?" Walker asked more than 60 local pastors gathered in a church gymnasium for a prayer breakfast Monday. "The reason why is that North Carolina is supposed to be a purple state."

Walker interprets the Democrat outrage over the issue as part of a calculated strategy to retake control of the Senate, turn the state blue, and establish a base of support for the presidential election. "North Carolina is the battleground state in the South," he said.

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory called the General Assembly into a special one-day session on March 23 to pass H.B. 2 into law. That legislation overruled a local Charlotte ordinance that allowed individuals to choose public bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, not their biological sex.

Supporters argue that the bill is necessary to preserve privacy and safety rights of women.

"The question I’ve asked several times, that can’t be answered, is, what if you have a sexual predator posing as transgender who wants to use the girls’ restroom?" Walker asked Monday. "How do you resolve that in the girls’ showers and locker rooms? I don’t know if that question can be answered."

Opponents have quickly condemned the law as bigoted and charge that it places LGBT individuals in danger. In a national letter coordinated by the Human Right Campaign, more than 100 companies registered already their disapproval of the "anti-LGBT law."

The protest came to a head last Friday, when Bruce Springsteen nixed an upcoming concert in North Carolina just two days before the show. Afterward, Walker gained national attention after an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where he accused The Boss of being "a bully."

Walker told The Daily Signal that Springsteen "has every right to do that, but there’s a hypocrisy here."

The Baptist minister turned lawmaker criticized Springsteen for canceling on short notice, doing harm to the local economy, and then continuing his tour in other states that "have no more stringent anti-discriminatory laws than we do."

And Walker believes that Democrats have "intentionally" ginned up opposition for a calculated and political end. "I think that’s ultimately some of the reasoning behind it."

It’s not historically unusual for the Tar Heel State to waver between red and blue during both Senate and presidential races. In the 2008 general election, Democrats carried that state four years before Republicans did in 2012.

Another Republican member of the North Carolina congressional delegation, Rep. Mark Meadows, agrees that the issue has been blown out of proportion. He said it doesn’t deserve national headlines and shouldn’t be trending on social media.

"Men need to use the men’s restroom. Women need to use the women’s restroom," Meadows told The Daily Signal. "For over 200 years, we haven’t had a problem defining that."

North Carolina isn’t the only state grappling with bathroom bills. In South Dakota, Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard vetoed legislation that would ban students from using restrooms opposite from their biological sex. Tennessee is considering similar legislation that would require public school students use restrooms that match sex at birth.

SOURCE






The Communists are back -- in the British Labour party

John McDonnell has vowed to back all protests as he urged anti-austerity protesters to help him 'bring this Government down' before the 2020 election.

In an incendiary speech to activists in Trafalgar Square, the shadow chancellor said Labour under Jeremy Corbyn would offer 'solidarity' with the 'struggle' against the Conservative government.

Mr McDonnell, an avowed Marxist, praised disabled protesters for 'storming Parliament' on a regular basis.

Mr McDonnell was plucked from obscurity last year after Mr Cameron's unexpected majority win at the general election thrust Mr Corybn to an improbably landslide victory in the Labour leadership contest.

He appeared on the picket line with junior doctors in January to the frustration of many moderate Labour MPs.

But his latest remarks are set to reignite tensions within Labour over the direction Mr Corbyn is taking the party, which is lagging behind the Tories in most polls ahead of crucial local and devolved elections in little more than two weeks time.

Mr McDonnell said: 'For too long Labour leaders in the past have sought to be embarrassed by their association with struggles on the street or industrial action. That era is over.'

'I give you this commitment - whether it is in Parliament or on the picket or on streets, this Labour leadership will be with you.'

The shadow chancellor continued: 'When they come to academise our schools, if the teachers wish to take industrial action we will be with them in solidarity.

'And the same with nurses and their bursaries - it's the same every other struggle as we go forward now, because above all else now we need solidarity.'

SOURCE







Australian hospital accused of 'incompetence or racial profiling' in  treatment of Aboriginal singer

It's possible that a black may have been negligently treated by white staff.  I have lived in Darwin and the way many Aboriginals live around Darwin would put most people off, leading to a reluctance to have much to do with any one of them.

But, as it happens, I see what happened as the sort of routine negligence that you get in most over-worked government hospitals. Getting into surgery only 8 hours after arrival is in fact pretty good by such standards. 

And making a mistake over his diagnosis is also a routine feature of government medicine.  Staff seldom have much time to sit down and take a detailed history.  And diagnosis is guesswork anyway.

And it takes time to look at a patient's notes too.  This guy had quite a history so the notes would have taken a while to digest.  So the most probable diagnosis -- Aboriginal alcohol problem -- was made and staff went on to other demands on their time. 

This was government medicine, not racism


The doctor and manager for Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu have accused a Darwin hospital of either being incompetent or racially profiling the Indigenous singer during a recent medical incident.

Gurrumul was taken to the emergency department on Easter Sunday, with internal bleeding complications known as oesophageal varices, resulting from liver disease. His manager, Mark Grose, and specialist doctor, Paul Lawton claim Gurrumul was not adequately treated for eight hours, causing his health to deteriorate and him being placed in intensive care where he then received the necessary surgery.

Gurrumul has been battling liver disease related to having hepatitis B as a child, Lawton said, and hospital staff should have responded immediately. He said Gurrumul’s life had been risked because doctors did not perform the surgery in a timely manner.

Gurrumul had previously been hospitalised a month ago for the same reason, Lawton said.

In a published letter to the NT health department, Grose, who accompanied Gurrumul to hospital with nurse Michele Dowd, accused the hospital of leaving Gurrumul in A&E “for over eight hours, it seems, without any real attempt to treat the problem”.

“Why was he left for over eight hours when the reason for his admittance was clearly evident in Michele’s explanation to A&E staff and was clearly in all of his notes?” Grose wrote.

“There are two assumptions I can make which are both very disturbing but which need answering: Was Gurrumul Yunupingu’s level of A&E care related to assumptions based on his race or is there a serious fault in the system which allows someone to be largely ignored in A&E while seriously ill?”

The Top End Health Service categorically rejected the assertions.

Executive director of medical services, Professor Dinesh Arya, said a review was launched as soon as the concern about Gurrumul’s care were raised and he was “satisfied that care provided at RDH was timely and appropriate”.

“I will also be offering an opportunity to the patient and his carers/friends to meet with the clinical teams who were involved in providing care to the patient so that they have an opportunity to understand assessment findings, treatment provided and ask any questions. This will also enable clarity in relation to ongoing care and treatment of this patient.”

Arya said he and the RDH patient advocate also met with Gurrumul on Monday to ask him if he was satisfied with his treatment.

“It is concerning it has been suggested that some care assumptions may have been made based on the patient’s race,” he said.

“The hospital has a proud multicultural staff and more than 60% of patients admitted to Royal Darwin Hospital identify as Aboriginal. Claims of poor treatment due to a patient’s race have never been raised at the hospital and RDH will continue to provide the best possible service to all patients requiring treatment.”

Dr Lawton said the treatment of Gurrumul was not timely, and concurred with Grose’s assessment.

Lawton, who has been outspoken on issues of race in the treatment of kidney and liver disease, suggested the incident illustrated systemic issues with care of Indigenous people in hospitals.

He said someone had written on Gurrumul’s chart that he was a drinker, when he is not. “Someone has made that assumption initially and then it has been repeated and amplified based on no evidence whatsoever,” he told Guardian Australia.

“It’s assumed people with liver disease have alcohol problems. Which is, to use Mark’s term, racial profiling.”

Arya said no chart or medical record notes about a patient’s history were made without being confirmed. “Questions about use of alcohol and/or other substance use are part all clinical assessments,” he said.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************






21 April, 2016

Another disgusting Muslim



A New Jersey woman who was molested while she slept by a male passenger on a 13-hour flight testified Monday in court about the shocking incident where she woke up to find that her body and private parts were covered with hand lotion.

The 25-year-old victim recounted the horrifying incident that took place on an Emirates flight from Dubai to Kennedy Airport last October.

The woman, who is only known to the jury by her first name, Stephanie, had to identify the dress and the thong underwear she had been wearing as well as the bottle of Nivea lotion during court on Monday, The New York Daily News reported.

Nadeem Memhood Quraishi has been charged with sexual contact without consent and could be deported back to Pakistan if he is convicted.

Stephanie, who had taken an anti-anxiety medication after boarding the plane and fell asleep, said that Quraishi sat in the seat next to her on her right side.

She testified that 'I love you, you're pretty' was whispered in her ear before she woke up. He also asked her if she had 'slept well.'

'My entire body felt sticky. I could smell the lotion,' she testified in Brooklyn Federal Court according to the Daily News. 'I was shocked. My heart dropped into my stomach.'

She immediately got up and went to the bathroom on the plane, where she noticed that her thong had been pushed aside as lotion covered her shoulders, breasts, arms, inner thighs, calves and vagina.

In addition, she said that her 'vaginal area was sore', according to court filings.

When she returned to her seat, the woman asked Quraishi where her lotion was. When the man handed her to bottle, she alerted the crew that something happened to her while she slept.

The court documents stated that when flight attendants asked Quraishi about what happened, he allegedly admitted to rubbing lotion on his fellow passenger’s 'arms, shoulders, and legs, and used the lotion in her vaginal area.'

The 42-year-old Staten Island man, who reportedly manages a Subway eatery, allegedly told the cabin crew he thought the woman 'needed it' and 'enjoyed it.'

'The defendant also told the flight attendants that he liked it and that it happened to him as a child,' the complaint read.

During the court session, his defense lawyer Mark Macron questioned Stephanie about the medication she had taken on the flight and how it was possible for his client to rub lotion on her body while she wore a belted dress, was covered by a blanket and had her seat belt on.

However, Gunjon Mangia, a flight attendant working during the flight, testified on the stand that Quraishi admitted that he applied the lotion on the victim's body, the Daily News reported.

'When I asked him why he did such a thing, he said, 'Well, I thought she needed it and she didn't offer any resistance so I thought she enjoyed it,'' Mangia said in court.

SOURCE






James Woods: 'The World is Fighting Islamic Terrorism... Democrats are Fighting for Men to Pee in Ladies' Rooms'

Actor James Woods thinks that while there are global issues of terrorism, starvation and disease to address, "democrats are fighting for men to pee in ladies' rooms."

On April 17 Woods tweeted:

The world is fighting Islamic terrorism, starvation, and disease, but democrats are fighting for men to pee in the ladies' room. #insanity

In recent weeks there has been a debate in several states about "bathroom bills" that would require a person to use the restroom that corresponds with their biological gender. Critics have characterized the bills as hostile to transgender people, while defenders argue that the bills are necessary to keep people safe from predators.

The Washington Post recently reported that when lawmakers in North Carolina passed such a bill, "incensed state Senate Democrats walked out of the vote in protest." On March 31, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) released a statement:

As we celebrate the International Transgender Day of Visibility, we need to recommit ourselves to fighting against the discriminatory laws that Republican-controlled legislatures have passed or are trying to pass. Our nation has worked too hard to distance ourselves from the ugliest chapters in our history when discrimination was codified by our laws. We cannot move forward as a people or as a nation if we design laws that seek to diminish or demean people because of who they are or who they love.

SOURCE






Gov't Admits Violating Little Sisters' Religious Freedom

The Little Sisters of the Poor scored a significant point before the Supreme Court when the Obama administration essentially admitted that it could have respected the nuns' religious liberty and not required the group to buy an insurance plan that also funded contraception. It took the government long enough. As Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Torre notes, the plight of the Little Sisters — which has the potential to give the government the ability to decide just how someone can practice their faith — has cost the group five years of legal battles in the face of a state that will not relent. But after the two sides made oral arguments, the justices made a request that they haven’t made since 1953: They asked the two sides to propose compromises.

In the brief it submitted in April, the government beat around the bush and finally admitted that yes, it probably violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) by threatening millions of dollars in fines if Little Sisters didn’t cave into Big Brother’s demands. The Supreme Court is probably looking for a solution to the case to avoid a 4-4 decision, according to Stanford University law professor Michael McConnell. The professor writes that an initial compromise could have been very simple: Allow Little Sisters and any other organization who hold religious objections to contraception coverage to purchase contraception-free plans. If one of their employees wants that feature with their health care coverage, they shop on the ObamaCare exchange.

The government’s arguments before the highest court in the land don’t look good — especially because it was Little Sisters who the government pressured. As another petitioner in this case pointed out, large companies like Chevron, Exxon, Pepsi and Visa received exemptions from the government to exempt abortifacients from their health care coverage. Why not a group of nuns?

SOURCE






Leftist misrepresentation of slavery support

Walter E. Williams

During Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign visit to Liberty University, he told the students that our nation was created on racist principles. Students at a Christian-based university, such as Liberty, do not often hear the founders-as-racists argument. But it is featured at many other universities, as well as primary and secondary schools. Most often, the hate-America teachings are centered on the fact that slavery is a part of our history. What is left untaught is: Slavery was a routine part of human history. Blacks were the last people to be enslaved. Plus, our Founding Fathers struggled mightily over the issue of slavery. Let us look at some of that struggle.

George Washington said, "I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it." Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Patrick Henry and others were highly critical of slavery, describing it as a "disease of ignorance," "an inconsistency not to be excused" and a "lamentable evil." George Mason said, "The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind." James Madison, in a speech at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, declared, "We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man." Benjamin Rush said: "Domestic slavery is repugnant to the principles of Christianity. … It is rebellion against the authority of a common Father."

In their effort to create a union, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention had to negotiate many contentious, deal-breaking issues. Slavery was chief among them. Southern states made clear that they would not vote to ratify a constitution that abolished slavery or ended the slave trade. Northern delegates wanted to end slave trading and did not want slaves counted at all for congressional apportionment. Southern delegates wanted slaves counted as whole people. That would have given the South greater political power in the House of Representatives.

Convention delegate James Wilson offered a compromise whereby each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining the number of representatives a state would have in the House. This rule applied only to slaves. Freemen, whether black or white, would be counted as whole people. Another compromise was to set 1808 as the year to abolish the slave trade.

Contrary to what academic hustlers teach, the Three-Fifths Compromise was not a statement about human worth; it was an attempt to reduce the pro-slavery representation in Congress. By including only three-fifths of the total number of slaves in congressional calculations, Southern states were actually being denied a greater number of representatives in Congress and hence electoral votes for selecting a president.

There’s little question that slavery is an abomination and a gross violation of human rights, but the founders had to decide whether there would be a union or not. Had morality been their sole guide, they might have taken a hardened, nonnegotiable stand against slavery, but then the Constitution would have never been ratified and a union would not have been formed.

A question that we might ask those academic hustlers who use slavery to attack and criticize the legitimacy of our founding is: Would black Americans, yesteryear and today, have been better off if the Constitution had not been ratified — with the Northern states having gone their way and the Southern states having gone theirs — and, as a consequence, no union had been created? I think not.

Ignorance of our history, coupled with an inability to think critically, has provided considerable ammunition for those who want to divide us in pursuit of their agenda. Their agenda is to undermine the legitimacy of our Constitution in order to gain greater control over our lives. Their main targets are the nation’s youths. The teaching establishment, at our public schools and colleges, is being used to undermine American values.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************



20 April, 2016

Multiculturalist  beheaded his wife then crushed her skull and flushed it down the toilet in act of 'grotesque savagery' is jailed for at least 21 years



A jealous husband was jailed for life today after beheading his estranged wife before crushing her skull and flushing it down a toilet.

Crane driver Dempsey Nibbs, 69, will serve a minimum of 21 years after being found guilty at the Old Bailey of murdering 60-year-old Judith Nibbs at their flat in Hoxton, east London.

She had told him she was having sex with at least eight other men - and he had also found chat records from Skype which showed how she had flashed her breasts to an online suitor.

The cancer sufferer has admitted that his ill health means he will die in jail, and the Recorder of London Nicholas Hilliard QC told him: ‘I'm sure you don't regret your wife's death save for its effect on your own comfort and well-being.’

Judge Hilliard rejected Mr Nibbs's claim he only initially 'tapped' his wife on the head with a metal bar to get her attention, and noted her tooth had been knocked out and swallowed with the root attached in the attack. He added that he left her breasts exposed to ‘humiliate her even in death’.

During a row in April 2014, he battered the Meals On Wheels worker over the head with an iron bar in an act of 'grotesque savagery' for ruining his plans to retire by the sea.

The court in London was told that Mrs Nibbs, who had two children with him, could have still been alive when he beheaded her because he could not stand the sight of her face.

Mr Nibbs had admitted killing Mrs Nibbs but denied murder, despite having no mental health issues. He showed no emotion as a jury found him guilty of the charge last Tuesday.

During the trial, the court heard how Mr Nibbs had become enraged after his vivacious partner of 30 years taunted him as their relationship fell apart by saying she had been seeing other men.

The fatal attack came just two days after mother-of-five Mrs Nibbs predicted her own killing after an earlier row, chillingly telling her colleagues as she left work: 'If I'm not in Friday, I might be dead.'

The pair had never married, but regarded one another as husband and wife and she had taken his last name. The court heard Mr Nibbs knocked her out with an iron bar before cutting her head off.

Then, when he realised the head was took big to flush away, he smashed it up with a hammer as he attempted to dispose of the pieces in the lavatory.

Afterwards, Mr Nibbs wrote a note to his 30-year-old son Kirk, who lived with the couple, and called 999 to say police would find two bodies at the property. They also had a daughter, Lauren, who was autistic and later went to live in a care home.

A police officer broke down the door when he saw Mrs Nibbs's headless body through the letterbox and bravely grappled a shotgun and knife from Mr Nibbs as he attempted to stab himself in the bathroom.

Mr Nibbs, who suffered from prostate and bladder cancer and had to wear a colostomy bag, said he killed his wife because he thought she was a 'snake' but jurors heard he had shown no signs of mental illness.

Prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC said the couple's relationship soured in spring 2014 when Mr Nibbs suspected his wife of having affairs, and he had begun drinking heavily after his cancer diagnosis.

Their son said that since his mother no longer had to care for his younger sister, Mr Nibbs felt she had changed and was not 'the housewife' she used to be.

Mr Nibbs had moved into the spare room and an 'undercurrent of violence emerged' as the relationship fell apart.

In early March, Mr Nibbs opened his own bank account after discovering she had transferred £20,000 out of their joint account into her account in May 2012.

Later that month, while Mrs Nibbs was visiting her sister in Preston, Lancashire, he asked Kirk to investigate her computer for evidence she was having an affair.

He found videos of her blowing kisses and saying 'I love you' as well as sexually explicit pictures which he stored in a file entitled 'Mum Slut'.

Mr Nibbs searched his wife's drawers and discovered bank transfer slips from their joint account to one in Morocco in the name of a close male friend and neighbour with whom she had gone on a road trip to Rabat in 2013, and stayed at his family home.

She had told Mr Nibbs she was visiting Europe with old school friends but then refused to show him any photos of the trip.

An examination of her computer was to show that she went on to exchange sexually explicit messages on Skype with another man called Khalid in Morocco, including chat logs which revealed she had flashed him images of her breasts.

Mrs Nibbs had confided in her sister and a colleague at Meals On Wheels that her husband - who was regarded as a model employee at Balfour Beatty - had threatened to kill her and grabbed her by the throat.

During a row on April 7, Mrs Nibbs, who was originally from Kirkham, near Preston, admitted seeing other men, taunting Mr Nibbs by saying: 'I have had sex eight times.'

The following day she made the grim prediction of her death to her colleagues at the Hackney Council-run meal delivery service.

He said he intended to kill himself and got in a bath with a shotgun after calling the police. But the gun misfired and he was stabbing himself in the chest when the police arrived.

Prosecutor Crispin Aylett, QC, said: 'Quite why the defendant decapitated Judith and then disposed of her head is not entirely clear but it may well be that he did it out of pure hatred at the sight of his wife's face.'

Mrs Nibbs's sister Frances described her as a ‘very kind and caring person’ in a statement on behalf of the family.

They were all ‘shocked and devastated’ by her murder, she said, adding: ‘Whatever problems there were in her relationship, Judith did not deserve to die in such a callous and brutal way.’

Her son Kirk had been greatly affected by the trial and did not feel able to submit a victim impact statement, the court heard.

Detective Chief Inspector Dave Whellams from the Metropolitan Police, who led the investigation, said following the verdict last week: 'Dempsey Nibbs believed his wife was having an affair and used this misplaced jealously to launch a ferocious and brutal attack on Judith.

'I am pleased that the court has found Dempsey Nibbs guilty and I can only hope this verdict can bring some closure to Judith's family.'

SOURCE






Angela Merkel is warned by her 'mentor' Helmut Kohl that Europe cannot become home for millions of migrants whose beliefs are different to 'the foundations of our values'

Helmut Kohl, the former mentor of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has warned his 'golden girl' that Europe cannot become 'a new home' for millions of migrants.

Kohl, who was German leader for 16 years and oversaw the country's reunification, took a swipe at the woman he chose as his successor after remaining silent on the issue since the crisis began.

He commented in a newspaper at the weekend: 'Europe cannot become a new home for the millions of people in need throughout the world. 'National policies of the lone-knight variety must be left in the past.

'For the most part they have a belief which is different from the Judeo-Christian beliefs which form part of the foundations of our social order and our values.'

He never mentioned Mrs Merkel, who he championed for greatness over more conventional rivals, but no-one is left in any doubt that his criticisms were aimed at her.

His comments came just before a controversial meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that he will hold this week.

Kohl, 86, said the continent's peace and freedom could be at stake through mass immigration.

The social fabric in his own country has worn increasingly thin due to the open-door policy of Merkel who has allowed in more than 1.2 million refugees in 16 months.

This has pushed voters into the embrace of right-wingers like the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party which scored big in regional elections in March and which now threatens Merkel's CDU conservatives at the general election in the autumn of next year.

'The solution lies in the affected regions,' said Kohl of the migrant crisis. 'It does not lie in Europe. Europe cannot become a new home for millions of people in need around the world.'

Kohl is to meet with Orban, who has drawn criticism for his resistance to taking in refugees, including the erecting of a razor-wire fence along his country's border.

'We are aware that we have something to lose and that it is worth fighting for the European project for peace and freedom,' Kohl wrote in a reference to Orban.

His aides deny his meeting with Orban is an affront to Merkel.

Mr Kohl rarely leaves his home following a stroke in 2008. He is said to be 'estranged' from the woman he propelled to the heights of power.


SOURCE






When Hostility to Religion Means Making Christian Kids Less Safe

by DAVID FRENCH   

The most revealing cases can sometimes come from the most boring facts. Last week, my former colleagues at the Alliance Defending Freedom filed their opening brief at the Supreme Court in perhaps the most important case about recycled tires in American constitutional history.

Yes, I said recycled tires. Missouri — because it purports to love children and the environment — created a program that uses scrap rubber from old tires to resurface playgrounds to make them safer. The program is funded through a surcharge on new tires, rubber that would otherwise pack landfills is put to good use, and kids bounce when they fall.

Everyone wins, right? Well, not everyone. Missouri excludes religious organizations from the program. Christian kids at Christian schools don’t get to bounce. So when Trinity Lutheran Church submitted a request for rubberized flooring for a playground that is used not just by the children at its Early Learning Center but also — after-hours and on weekends — by children in the community, the state denied its application.

It relied on the state’s expansive version of the odious Blaine amendment to give it license to discriminate. “Blaine amendments” are a short-hand term for state constitutional provisions inspired by former speaker of the House James Blaine. The intent — motivated by anti-Catholicism — was to pass a federal constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of any taxpayer funds to aid any schools “under the control of any religious sect.”

While the amendment failed in the Senate, it swept like wildfire through the states, and now at least 36 states have some form of Blaine amendment on the books. The staunchly Protestant legislators who passed the amendments could hardly imagine the world we live in today. American public schools were often chock-full of religious sentiment — Protestant religious sentiment — and the legislators despised Catholic competition.

Now, public schools are a religion-free zone, and Blaine amendments are wielded as a club to block religious access even to otherwise entirely neutral government programs. Not even the bigot Blaine would approve.

The lower courts ruled against Trinity Lutheran, with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals noting that Missouri didn’t have to exclude the church from the program, but that it could if it wanted — in part because of the state’s “long history of maintaining a high wall between church and state.”

Yes, because there’s no telling the religious oppression that will occur if Christian kids enjoy the same safety benefits as kids at the public playground down the street. Nothing says “established religion” like a rubberized playground.

Yet Missouri is part of the United States and is governed by the First Amendment — which mandates neutrality in religious matters. Missouri simply can’t decide that it dislikes religion more than other states and then drain its religious citizens of their tax dollars while at the same time shutting those same citizens out of neutral, non-religious programs.

The combination of the “high wall” of separation between church and state and the expanding regulatory state creates two classes of citizens — the non-religious who enjoy full access to every government program or opportunity, and the religious whose access even to scrap rubber is restricted because of their faith.

But this is exactly what some on the left want. When you combine cases such as Trinity Lutheran with the far-more-publicized sexual-revolution cases such as Little Sisters of the Poor or Hobby Lobby, you see the profound impact of expanding government in an era of hostility against the faithful.

When government grows, there will always be those who say that religion must therefore recede. In the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a traditional zone of liberty is snatched away — with the radical Left arguing that the Sisters objections are rooted in a demand for “special favors.” In the case of Trinity Lutheran, even the request for mere equality is too much.

The result is a “heads I win, tails you lose” political philosophy that always leaves religion in retreat. The Left loves the First Amendment — when it’s distorting the Establishment Clause and screaming to “get your rosaries out of my ovaries.” The Free Exercise Clause, by contrast, is a dead letter — as meaningless (in their eyes) as the hated Second Amendment. Indeed, given the tenor of the times, if a lawmaker tried to propose the Free Exercise Clause today, he’d likely face the full wrath of the entire social-justice coalition — from Apple to PayPal to even the NFL.

If Trinity Lutheran can prevail, it will strike a blow for constitutional sanity. Christians pay taxes too, and rubberized playgrounds no more establish a state religion than asking the fire department to extinguish a church fire endorses the Baptist faith. When it comes to faith, If the First Amendment can’t at least guarantee neutrality, it can’t guarantee anything at all.

SOURCE






This Prestigious Military College Might Bow To Sharia Pressure

The Citadel, Charleston's military college with a rich history reaching back almost two hundred years, is considering allowing an upcoming freshman to break uniform regulations the Washington Post reports.

The upcoming student, a Muslim woman, reportedly wants to be able to wear a hijab while in uniform, and cover any skin when a shorter uniform is required, like when wearing summer or physical fitness uniform. This would be the first time that a uniform exception has been put in place. A senior at the Citadel, Nick Pinelli, wrote an entire Facebook post exposing this farce for what it is. Why should a university, who's core values include discipline and homogeneity, open the door to radical politically correctness?

The Citadel already accepts women and Muslims, and no reports of anyone seeking exemptions has come up. Pinelli even recounts the story of a cadet suffering cerebral palsy who, instead of seeking accomodation, held himself to the same standard as everyone else and eventually succeeded.

One has to wonder if the Obama administration is putting pressure on the Citadel. Will the government attempt to impose its radical PC notions based on the whims of one student, or will this fine conservative bastion of education preserve its core values of equal treatment for all?

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************






19 April, 2016

Socialism at work in Venezuela

First no toilet paper, now no phones and TV: Cash-strapped Venezuela faces yet more shortages in day-to-day basics. Other countries with little or no oil provide well for their people so blaming Venezuela's problems on the oil price is just an evasion

Venezuela faces yet more shortages in day-to-day basics as the global drop in oil prices causes a cash crisis in the country. 

People in the South American nation have already suffered daily, unscheduled water and electricity cuts and now many are going without the use of television and phone-lines.

Venezuela is heavily dependent on the sale of petrol and the negative change in the market has drastically effected its debt-ridden government.

Ministers say oil revenue went from $37.2bn in 2014 to $12.6bn this year, while President Nicolas Maduro owes private telecoms and cable firms $700million.

The mammoth debt means companies cannot pay their international suppliers, resulting in services in certain parts of the country being cut.

To make things worse, Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica has announced it will temporarily suspend its long distance phone service for calls to countries such as the United States, Spain, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Colombia and Panama, this week.

Mobile phone company Digitel, which is privately owned, has also halted long distance calling services and international roaming since April 9, because it cannot reach an agreement with providers on new payment timetables.

While the idea of not being able to make calls is bad enough, other Venezuelans have also been unable to watch their favourite shows.

State-run television company, Cantv, has stopped broadcasting as it says it must review contracts with providers of both local and international content.

Subscriber Isael Gonzalez, 46, said: 'For two weeks now, I have lost six of my favorite channels.

'They were the ones showing movies and cartoons - so I decided to unplug the whole thing. What use is it if the channels I like are off air?'

Drisley Petaquero, 36, also said several channels had been cut from her father's Directv pay-TV service. She said: 'Especially the ones showing comics - there used to be five and now there are just two'  'He complained to the company and they told him they were performing maintenance work.'

The state regulator, the National Telecommunications Commission, admits there is a problem blames the country's financial crisis.

Phone firms are desperate to raise their rates in order to recoup cash and industry sources say Telefonica's mobile branch Movistar won a 35 percent rise, with inflation at 181 percent, last year.

While phone and TV firms are in chaos, Maduro said that from May 1, he planned to change Venezuela's time scheme in a bid to save the country's energy. In a further effort to save electricity, he also decreed Monday a holiday, on top of a Tuesday national anniversary.

The president had already given public workers Fridays off, and raised eyebrows by urging women to cut usage of hair dryers.

The power problems have added to suffering from the world's highest inflation, shortages of basic goods such as toilet paper, and lengthy lines at shops around the nation.

One opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, said the president was giving holidays not because of the power situation but to delay the formal steps needed to trigger a referendum.

'He will end in the rubbish-bin of political history,' Capriles scoffed on Twitter. 'As he has never liked working, he wants the whole country to be like that.'

SOURCE







Under government medical care it's too bad if your illness requires an expensive drug to treat it

The whole original rationale for Britain's National Health Service was that ill people should not be restricted by cost when they needed treatment.  In fact, the NHS practices severe rationing on the basis of cost -- an outcome the opposite of the original intention -- the common fate of Leftist ideas,

A drug hailed as a ‘breakthrough’ that could transform the lives of people suffering from the debilitating lung condition cystic fibrosis has been rejected as too costly by the NHS medicines watchdog.

MPs and charities have condemned the decision by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to reject Orkambi, which has been shown to reduce infection and can cut the number of hospital admissions by more than 60 per cent in those with the lung condition.

The twice-a-day tablet thins mucus build-up in the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) sufferers, preventing further damage and allowing the lungs to heal.

But in draft guidance, NICE says that at £104,000 a year, the drug isn’t cost-effective.

It adds that while Orkambi reduces a sudden worsening of symptoms requiring hospitalisation, benefits to lung function – a marker of how CF patients are improving overall – are ‘modest’.

Experts say that while not a cure, Orkambi could allow many to lead near-normal lives without the need for a transplant.

MPs have called for a reform of the way drugs are approved for NHS use. Labour Shadow Health Minister Andrew Gwynne said: ‘It’s no surprise NICE is having to make this type of decision when the NHS is facing financial crisis. Ministers need to give patients the assurance that reform of drugs pricing will finally happen.’

Fellow Labour MP Ian Austin says the ‘massive’ quality-of-life improvement Orkambi offers for sufferers – such as his constituent Carly Jeavons, who is taking the drug – must be considered.

'The Government has to work with NICE to ensure the rules on commissioning new treatments take account of the longer and more productive lives that these drugs offer.’

About 10,000 Britons have CF. A transplant may be necessary if the lungs become extensively damaged, and average life expectancy is 41.

Orkambi is licensed to treat people who have a specific genetic defect known as the F508del mutation. About 2,750 people in England have this genotype.

The drug works to correct a faulty gene which causes a sticky mucus build-up in the lungs, causing infection, breathing difficulties and loss of lung function.

Global trials involving 1,100 CF patients found that lung function improved after 24 weeks in all patients taking Orkambi.

SOURCE






Why Corporations Oppose Religious Liberty

Georgia state Senator William Ligon asks but does not answer a question on today's Wall Street Journal op-ed page: “Why Are Companies Taking Sides Against Religious Liberty?” The question is raised by the ferocious corporate response to attempts in Georgia and other states to reinforce at the state level religious protections already guaranteed by federal law. The New York Times, a former newspaper, has scurrilously and dishonestly labeled these "Anti-Gay Laws," because they would prevent priests and pastors from being forced to perform gay marriages against their faiths and consciences.

Ligon notes that businesses have been quick to bring pressure to defeat such laws:

Disney and Marvel threatened to pull production of the “Avengers” film franchise from the Peach State, and the cable channel AMC vowed to take its “Walking Dead” series elsewhere. The NFL warned that it might drop Atlanta from consideration to host a Super Bowl. Dozens of Georgia companies urged Gov. Nathan Deal to veto the bill, which he did on March 28.

This is, by now, a familiar playbook. Last year the furor was enormous after Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a religious-freedom bill. Indiana employers called for its repeal, and the NCAA threatened to pull the Final Four tournament from the basketball-crazed state. Under intense pressure, the legislature quickly passed a “fix” that undermined standard RFRA [federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act] protections.

North Carolina finds itself targeted over a common-sense new law blocking cities and counties from forcing businesses to give transgender people access to the bathroom of their choice. If a restaurant owner wants to allow transgender people to use their preferred bathroom, that’s no problem. The new law simply prevents local governments from forcing business owners to adopt such a policy.

Yet the Tar Heel State now faces an onslaught. More than 120 corporations have demanded the law’s repeal, and the Obama administration is reviewing federal aid to the state. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has banned travel there by state employees, even as he promotes travel and trade with communist Cuba.

Apparently puzzled by all this, Ligon quotes a study showing "economic competitiveness is stronger in countries with fewer government restrictions on religious liberty." But what on earth makes him think corporations are interested in competition? Corporations and other successful businesses love big government precisely because it stifles competition. The big guys can pay lawyers to cut through government red tape while the little guy with a better idea and a cheaper price is crushed beneath taxes and regulations.

What big corporations hate is freedom of the individual conscience, internally governed families, and churches powerful enough to stand up to the make-believe righteousness of government decrees. All of these things tend to generate independent action and thoughtful morality which can get in the way of profits. People who think for themselves and pray with others tend to be a little less quick to watch the latest soul-degrading film or half-time show or to buy a product simply because it's the going thing.

Freedom is good for business in general, but it is not good for an individual business that has already made it to the top. Where freedom and competition thrive, prices fall and good ideas rise. Where government coerces, where government pays the freight, where government grants you "rights" to the labor and products of others, prices soar and good ideas that threaten the status quo are trampled under and left behind.

Virtually every founding father declared that American-style freedom could not exist without true religion. "It is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand," as John Adams put it. As true religion fades, as families cease to operate as independent governing units, the power of the powerful to coerce grows stronger. And when the powerful can coerce the powerless, big business profits.

Thus the left — which always accomplishes exactly the opposite of what it says it intends — serves big business with its ethos of "inclusion," which is really an ethos of coercion in disguise. Of course corporations will fight to defend that. It's meat and potatoes to them.

SOURCE






Australia: Protect kids from Marxist sexualisation programs

There are few forms of predation that offend our common morality more than child sexual abuse. During the 1970s, pedophile groups capitalising on the sexual liberation movement sought to redefine their exploitation of youth as an expression of children’s sexual rights, self-determination and autonomy. Groups such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association claimed children were sexual beings and sought to repeal age of consent laws to liberate their sexuality. They were welcomed by fringe elements of the neo-Marxist minorities movement that advocated sexual libertarian ideology under Queer and “sex positive” politics.

Today, the discourse on children’s sexual rights and the belief they are sexual beings are invoked to justify school programs that sexualise youth at ever younger ages.

Daniel Andrews’ Labor left government in Victoria invokes neo-Marxist rhetoric to defend highly questionable school programs that encourage the sexualisation of children. The Safe Schools Coalition and Building Respectful Relationships programs were introduced using minority politics as the rationale. In each case, a state-designated minority group and political cause are aligned in a program of social change that uses youth as change agents. Program designers create an urgent health case for government funding without causal evidence to validate a linear relationship between program activities and core objectives.

The Safe Schools program was created for the state-designated minority group LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) for the cause of anti-bullying with the stated objective to improve health outcomes. The program encourages young people to become change agents for the cause of sexual ­diversity. When the program was criticised by conservative Senator Cory Bernardi, Labor leader Bill Shorten accused him of homophobia. After community outrage following revelations that program co-founder Roz Ward designed Safe Schools as part of a Marxist social change strategy, the liberal coalition withdrew commonwealth funding beyond 2017. Despite the Marxist objective of the Safe Schools program — or perhaps because of it ­­­— Daniel Andrews continues to defend it.

His education minister James Merlino vilified politicians concerned about the hard Left’s indoctrination of children, calling them “bigots”. It is uncertain what pejoratives Merlino, a heterosexual married man, has devised for the lesbians, gay men and bisexuals who oppose Queer politics and the Safe Schools program.

Unfortunately, the SSC debacle is not isolated. Last week, it transpired that the Andrews government had produced another school program that sexualises children. As with the SSC program, Building Respectful Relationships began with a state-designated minority group, women, aligned with the important cause of domestic violence prevention. The case for government funding was again framed as a health imperative, namely, the prevention of violence against women. And once again, the program was introduced in schools without causal evidence linking its exercises to the stated objective.

Like Safe Schools, the BRR program promotes a radical agenda divorced from its stated program objective. It promotes the sexualisation of children by inculcating techniques and beliefs centred on the premise that children are sexual. Instructors are encouraged to sexualise children, and children to sexualise themselves and their peers. They are asked to view highly sexualised personal ads and write their own, discuss transgenderism and anal sex. Program authors acknowledge that one exercise may cause “disassociation” in children.

Sexualising and inducing a dissociative state in children are methods of pedophilic predation. They are not methods of domestic violence prevention.

It is increasingly common to find the sexualisation of very young children promoted as part of sex education in schools. In 2009, the United Nations produced International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education. The first iteration met with controversy after conservatives revealed it sexualised prepubescent children by promoting masturbation. The offending sections were removed only after public outcry.

NGOs have joined the UN in a push for radical sexual programs aimed at youth under the auspices of sexual diversity and sexual health. The International Planned Parenthood Foundation claims that “the taboo on youth sexuality is one of the key forces driving the AIDS epidemic”. In fact, the premature sexualisation of youth, especially the exploitation of girls for prostitution and other harmful cultural practices, have been key drivers of HIV transmission in Southeast Asia and Africa for ­decades. Despite the fact, the IPPF asserts repeatedly that “young people are sexual beings” and criticises the Catholic Church for imposing barriers on young people, denying “pleasurable and positive aspects of sex”. Its solution is comprehensive sexuality education, which it describes as perhaps “the single most important gift that parents can offer to their children”.

The Netherlands government promotes comprehensive sexuality education in what some call the Dutch model. Under the Dutch CSE model, schoolchildren begin sexual programs at four years of age. Modules for young children include “what feels nice” and “does bare make you blush?” Lessons marketed under the “Spring Fever” package include “being naked”, a module that explores nudity, undressing and being in the bath.

It is unclear why any adult would solicit an account of how a child undresses or why the Dutch state would mandate such discussion in schools. CSE advocates defend their programs with studies that indicate efficacy, but mainly in comparison to abstinence programs. There is a more moderate middle path that provides children requisite knowledge in biology, safety from violence and mutual respect without encouraging their sexualisation in activities that resemble grooming.

The sexualisation of childhood by governments and NGOs should be a source of broad community concern. The state has no business interfering in childhood by conditioning children’s sexual responses. As a whole, parents remain the best arbiters of their children’s morality and guardians of their development. Australian children are ranked 14th in literacy and 19th in mathematics according to OECD reports. Governments should take remedial classes in teaching kids the basics of reading, writing and arithmetical instead of indulging messianic pretensions to parenting by proxy.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





18 April, 2016

Food correctness: Nutrition researchers are undermining science with censorship

The censoring food scientists below demonstrate that they are food faddists and  not scientists at all.  The faddist has beliefs that he is invested in and which must be defended.  A scientist just wants to find what the truth is.  As far as I can see there is no such thing as a "healthy" diet.  Many people remain healthy on quite extreme diets.  So I have no dog in the fight below

In the past couple of years, debate about attacks on free speech has focused on university campuses and the willingness to prevent the discussion of certain ideas. Certain ideas are offensive, we are told, and the feelings of students need to be protected. Far from university being a home for the unencumbered exchange of ideas, anything outside a narrow mainstream is now regarded as verboten.

But things are just as bad within academia itself, particularly at the point where research and policy meet. This has long been the case in the highly politicised world of climate science, but a recent incident involving nutrition science and policy shows that the notion of catastrophic manmade climate change is not the only issue regarded as too important to be debated.

Nina Teicholz is the author of The Big Fat Surprise (read spiked’s review), which argues against the idea that eating fat, particularly saturated fat, is a major cause of heart disease and other illnesses. Teicholz argues that the claim that eating fat is killing us was promoted aggressively by a handful of researchers who lobbied and bullied their way on to a range of policymaking committees until ‘fat is bad’ became official policy and unquestioned orthodoxy. In reality, there has long been plenty of evidence that eating fat is not a problem, and Teicholz argues that the effect of fat’s demonisation has been to push our diets towards an excess of carbohydrate, which she believes is the true culprit in the rise of obesity and diabetes.

Given that this view is a significant challenge to mainstream thinking, it would be valuable for it to be widely discussed. That’s the way science is supposed to work – existing ideas are challenged and either refined or overthrown as new evidence and thinking emerges. Yet those in the nutrition-research establishment, who vehemently disagree with Teicholz, have preferred to close down debate rather than challenge her ideas.

The latest example of this came at the National Food Policy Conference in Washington, DC last week. Teicholz was due to speak on a panel titled ‘Turning nutrition science into policy’. She was planning on criticising the revamped 2015 Dietary Guidelines for America (DGA) for ignoring recent evidence that calls into question previous advice. As she told me by email, in her view, ‘the guidelines themselves, by shifting consumption from fat to carbs, actually played a role in causing the obesity/diabetes epidemics’.

But rather than having the debate out in public, she was no-platformed by the other speakers. ‘I was told that all three members of the panel refused to participate with me’, she said. The conference organisers, who had previously been keen to have her speak, disinvited her a couple of weeks beforehand and replaced her with Maureen Storey, president and CEO of the Alliance for Potato Research and Education – hardly someone who would argue that carbohydrate is a cause of health problems.

Who gets invited to speak at a conference or write in a publication is not a free-speech issue in itself. Event organisers and editors have every right to decide what kind of discussions or articles they want. But disinviting someone under pressure from their critics, and simply for holding views they have already expressed in public and were the basis of the original invitation, is worrying. The organisers should have held their nerve and let Teicholz speak, even if her fellow panellists refused to join her.

As Teicholz tells me: ‘In nutrition science, the mainstream has been very reluctant to embrace debate on issues of fat and carbs. Alternative points of view are not represented in conferences and very little in most of the mainstream press.’ Indeed, she says, those who are open to debate are bullied into pulling back, making it difficult for those researching low-carb diets to get published.

This was not the first time Teicholz had been on the receiving end of censorship. After the DGAs were announced in 2015, she wrote a long article for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) criticising both the content of the guidelines and the manner in which they were prepared. After an exchange of responses (all on the BMJ website), the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a high-profile lobby group, organised a letter demanding that the BMJ retract the original article. Rather than encouraging the widest possible debate about Teicholz’s theory, the CSPI and others, including leading researchers at Harvard and Yale, seemed more interested in suppressing it.

There is a clear public interest in trying to understand why obesity rates spiked upwards from the early Eighties onwards, and why there has been a rapid rise in the diagnosis and prevalence of type-2 diabetes. The orthodox view is that we live in an ‘obesogenic’ environment, combining easy access to the wrong food pushed by profit-obsessed corporations with fewer opportunities for meaningful exercise. Teicholz argues that it is the shift in our eating habits, driven by official advice, that is to blame. That’s an interesting idea and one that deserves discussion and scrutiny.

Of course, Teicholz might be wrong, but by shutting down debate, we don’t get the chance to decide for ourselves. The nutrition-science establishment has decided to protect us from such dangerous thinking, lest we foolishly eat the wrong things or – heaven forbid – start to question their authority. This closing of ranks and shutting of minds in the highest echelons of academia and policymaking is as dangerous as the current shenanigans of censorious students.

SOURCE







A new low in feminist imbecility:  They think that sexually transmitted infections are to be proud of

 It’s Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) Awareness Month, and what better way to promote awareness than... being loud and proud by sharing "I have an STI" with the public?

This liberal trend hasn’t hit the media just yet. Silly me for thinking STI Awareness Month (I wasn’t aware there was such a thing) would have something to do with the education of STI’s and prevention. Instead, we have feisty feminists claiming "victimhood" because they have an STI and are tired of the "stigma" surrounding it. Welcome to the strange-pride generation. 

In light of STI Awareness Month, some feminists took to issuing a Twitter hashtag campaign #ShoutYourStatus, where women can declare they have an STI because…courage or something.  Yes, there’s actually an entire page devoted to "…the amazing reason women are telling the world they have STIs."  The #ShoutYourStatus campaign was a creation of writer Ella Dawson, along with social work student Kayla Axelrod, freelance writer Britni de la Cretaz, and writer/activist Lachrista Greco Their goal is to promote a more open conversation about living with STIs.

In a recent interview with Revelist, an online publication that "media publication delivering quality content to millennial women," de la Cretaz stated, "The truth of the matter is, many people are living, and living happily, as STI+ people… "Being able to be publicly open about my status as someone with genital herpes is a privilege and I want to use that privilege to help other people feel less alone." She even tweeted the following:

That’s news to me – there are more people that have STI’s than don’t?  I did a quick Google search on "how many people have STI’s" and it shows the answer to be in the millions, so it’s safe to say de la Cretaz has no idea what the heck she’s talking about.

As Robert Stacy McCain points out on his blog, The Other McCain, "Britni de la Cretaz is a recovering alcoholic who has described substance abuse as a way women 'cope with the weight of living in a white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy.' De la Cretaz has argued that sexually transmitted diseases 'should be destigmatized' because people infected with these diseases suffer 'discrimination . . . fueled by harmful stereotypes . . . rooted in misinformation and scare tactics.' De la Cretaz says the 'myth' that women with sexually transmitted diseases are promiscuous involves 'sex-shaming and a whole lot of misogyny'.

Even more outrageous than women giving Twitter a shout out that they have an STI, is the fact that there’s a woman going around teaching 7th graders that her STI didn’t keep her from having a "fulfilling sex life" and actually made her sex life "healthier and more satisfying than before." That woman’s name is Emily DePasse, a graduate of Salisbury University where she majored in Gender and Sexuality Studies -- of course she did. McCain writes:

DePasse designed her own sex education curriculum, after she said the opportunity to teach the class "fell into my lap…" and "kicked off" her celebration of STI Awareness Month by talking about her "herpes story" with her students. She reflected: "Teaching sex ed this week has taught me that it really, really, REALLY needs to happen over the course of childhood."

DePasse apparently got her assignment to teach sex to seventh-graders at Baltimore Friends School through an internship with "If I Knew," which describes itself on Facebook as a "prevention education project of Jewish Community Services" in Baltimore.

What prevention? There’s no teaching of prevention when there are women like DePasse and her feminist posse who advocate that having an STI is like wearing a red badge of courage, but in reality, it’s the equivalent to wearing the scarlet letter.

SOURCE







Germs Greer under fire for her transgender comments

Controversial feminist and author Germaine Greer has come under fire after she suggested people who identify as transgender have no way of 'knowing' they have been born the incorrect sex.

The host of ABC's Q&A Tony Jones, interrupted Greer to question why she continued to 'dig herself a hole' after she said men who feel 'uncomfortable in the masculine system' do not necessarily belong 'at the other end of the spectrum'.

'If you're a 50-year-old truck driver who's had four children with a wife and you've decided the whole time you've been a woman, I think you're probably wrong,' she said on the program on Monday night.

Greer then went on to suggest the achievements of transgender woman Caitlyn Jenner makes the 'rest of the female population of the world feel slightly wry.'

Jenner was named one of Glamour magazine's 25 Women of the Year in 2015 and Greer accused the former Olympian of 'wanting the limelight' her other family members were enjoying.

'Women are constantly being told that they are not satisfactory as women, that other people make better women than they do,' Greer said on the program.

'The woman of the year may be Caitlin Jenner which makes the rest of the female population of the world feel slightly wry.

'I don't believe that a man who has lived for 40 years as a man and had children with a woman and enjoyed the services - the unpaid services - of a wife, that he then decides that the whole time he's been a woman

'You believed you were a woman but you married another woman. That wasn't fair, was it?'

Tasmanian Labor Senator Lisa Singh and Jones interrupted Greer to ask her view on individuals who know they have been born the wrong sex.

The 77-year-old shot back by saying Australia has a problem with the word 'know' as a transgender person cannot 'know what the other sex is'.

'At the beginning of your answer I thought you were digging yourself out of the hole and now I wonder if you've just shovelled it back in,' Jones said.

The panel - which included retired psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, Liberal MP Sharman Stone and Aria award winner Joseph Tawadros - then went on to discuss the European Commission's ruling sex assignment surgery on newborn babies was deemed unethical.

Greer agreed with the ruling, claiming a baby should be 'left without interference' until they could make a decision about which gender to align with.

Jones suggested Greer's argument was flawed and asked if a child is deemed to be a boy by his parent's and decides to transition later in life, whether she believed it should be allowed.

'No, I'm not saying that at all. That not what I said,' Greer responded.

Social media erupted following Greer's comments with many labelling her as 'transphobic'.

'Germaine Greer is not a true feminist. A true feminist cares about the rights of all women, not just cisgender women,' one woman wrote.

'Someone please tell Germaine that it's 2016. My gender is not up for you to decide Germaine,' another said.

SOURCE 

    




UK: 72% of struck off doctors are from overseas

Nearly three-quarters of doctors struck off the medical register in Britain are foreign, according to shocking figures uncovered in a Mail on Sunday investigation.

Medics who trained overseas have been banned from practising for a series of shocking blunders and misdemeanours.

Cases include an Indian GP who ran an immigration scam from his surgery, a Ghanaian neurosurgeon who pretended he had removed a patient’s brain tumour, and a Malaysian doctor who used 007-style watches to secretly film intimate examinations with his female patients.

The revelations come just a week after it emerged health bosses want to lure 400 trainee GPs here from India, to help ease short-staffing in the NHS.

Last night Julie Manning, chief executive of think-tank 2020 Health, said: ‘The NHS has thrived on many international doctors coming to work in the UK – but the public needs reassuring they are all truly fit to practise in the first place.’

Figures obtained by The Mail on Sunday via the Freedom of Information Act reveal that 460 doctors were struck off from January 2010 to December 2015.  Of those 330 (72 per cent) trained abroad, and 130 in the UK (28 per cent). Foreign-trained doctors now make up a third of NHS doctors.

Indian GP Bhajanehatti Lakshminarayana, 71, was struck off after being caught abusing his position to help refugees and asylum seekers stay in Britain – for cash. He charged them £80 a time to write letters containing false information supporting immigration applications.

Brain surgeon Dr Emmanuel Kingsley Labram, 61, from Ghana, repeatedly told a woman he had removed a tumour during an operation at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary when he had not.

He actually only extracted four small fragments for biopsy. He hid the truth for two years. She only found out the tumour was still in her head after she went private – and was told it was inoperable.

Malaysian GP Davinder Jeet Bains used a ‘Spy Watch’ to covertly video consultations with female patients, some of whom he sexually violated while pretending to examine them.  He is currently serving a ten-year jail sentence for offences against 27 women, aged 14 to 51.

Sudan-trained Dr Ashraf Kamal Elnazir, 55, swindled Kensington neighbour Gabriella Adler-Jensen out of £820,000.  The widow was ‘in poor mental and physical health’ but he manipulated her so she bestowed ‘virtually the entirety of her estate’ on him.  He was struck off in 2013 for ‘disgraceful misconduct’, but never convicted of a criminal offence.

Other cases involve appalling incompetence. Italian-trained GP Dr Alex Ihekwoaba Chimezie was struck off after he failed to spot heavily pregnant Donna Hunt, 22, had pneumonia and sent her home with paracetamol.

Three days later, she was rushed into hospital. Doctors performed an emergency caesarean and saved the baby – but Miss Hunt died the next day.

Of the foreign trained doctors who were struck off, by far the largest contingent came from India, followed by Pakistan and Nigeria.

Dr Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, admitted ‘there is a problem’ with the high strike-off rate among foreign doctors. But he claimed racism played a part.

Complaints about ethnic minority doctors tended to get ‘escalated and formalised’ very quickly, he said, while complaints about white British doctors were more often dealt with by ‘sitting down and sorting it out’.

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the GMC, said: ‘International medical graduates make a huge contribution to healthcare in the UK and the overwhelming majority provide safe and compassionate care.

‘But we do recognise that doctors from overseas can find it difficult to adapt to practising here.  ‘We expect employers to support doctors from overseas and to make sure they are familiar with local policies, procedures and customs.’


SOURCE






Strong women don’t need to whine about sexists calling us ‘totty’

["Totty" is British slang for a good-looking person, usually a woman:  From "Tot".  Similar to the American "Babe"]

At a glitzy party recently, I was making small-talk with a group of Westminster types when somebody pinched my bum. Surprised, I swivelled round to identify the offender and saw the grinning face of Sir Alan Duncan MP, one-time Tory minister of state, now knight of the realm.

As everyone in political circles knows, Sir Alan is gay and happily committed to his other half in a civil partnership, so there was no suggestion that his cheeky gesture was a come-on.

Nonetheless, it prompted some entertaining banter among fellow guests about the interaction between politicians and female journalists, and the unwritten rules of the game.

‘I can’t get away with anything like that these days,’ was the rueful response of a Cabinet minister who witnessed the incident. He was right to exercise caution, for as the unfortunate MP who dared to describe political reporter Isabel Hardman as ‘totty’ this week has found, not all female journalists take flirtatious behaviour in good part.

Like Hardman, I thought carefully before wading into this debate. I have the greatest respect for her as a journalist and commentator, and am loathe to criticise a colleague, particularly another woman. There are precious few of us ladies in the lobby (the club of officially accredited political journalists based at the Houses of Parliament) and we should stick together.

That said, I was amazed by the way Hardman handled the incident and fear she may come to regret it.

Hardman, who is assistant editor of the Spectator magazine, took the drastic decision to complain to party whips after an unnamed MP remarked that he wanted to ‘talk to the totty’ after bumping into her near the Houses of Parliament. (She has since received a private apology from the unnamed individual, who is described as being ‘of the older generation’.)

On social media, she said she had decided to take a stand on behalf of other women in the parliamentary lobby. It is a sensitive matter, so I am treading carefully but, in this case, she certainly does not speak for me: I do not think she should have complained to whips, over what seems to have been a trivial incident.

The interaction between MPs and political journalists at Westminster is governed by a plethora of unwritten rules, the simplest and most serious of which is that casual conversational exchange is ‘off the record’. If MPs cannot take this for granted and relax with journalists, the whole system (which serves politicians and the media extremely well) is undermined.

She had many other recourses to deal with the MP in question. For a start, she could have taken him to task herself. I have no doubt he would have been mortified and would never make the same mistake again.

Perhaps she felt this would be too embarrassing (though in my experience, it is perfectly possible to get such messages across with charm). If so, she could have dropped him a line, or given him a call, making it plain that she felt his comment was inappropriate.

The Westminster grapevine would have been an even more effective tool. She could simply have put it about that the old git had offended her and it would have quickly got back to him.

Instead, she did the equivalent of running to teacher to tell tales. The MP concerned was hauled before the whips for a dressing down and, as a result, in the corridors of power, there has been more than a little muttering.

If Hardman wanted to send out a wider message, it certainly worked. The trouble is, at best, her reaction looks humourless. At worst, it looks attention-seeking and I know she is not like that.

Of course, I don’t condone sexism in the workplace or anywhere else. In theory, Hardman certainly has the moral high ground.  I can quite see why, with her intelligence she bristled at being described as ‘totty’.

As she has not divulged any other details of the exchange, we do not know the tone in which the remark was made. If it was meant lasciviously or dismissively, of course it would be insulting.

Having had numerous such experiences over the years, I strongly suspect that the ‘culprit’ was being mildly, if clumsily, flirty. Westminster is full of old buffers who fancy their chances - indeed, another political journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, said yesterday that a Tory MP who is now a ‘senior member of the Cabinet’ repeatedly put his hand on her knee during dinner some years ago.

My guess is the MP meant it as a light-hearted compliment to Hardman, rather than a slight to her impressive professional credentials. There is a case to be argued that she should have been pleased. After all, he expressed the inclination to talk to her, over and above whoever else was there.

As journalists, our business is information-gathering. If a handful of male MPs are a little more forthcoming because we wear skirts, who are we to complain? I am not for a minute suggesting female political journalists flaunt themselves for the sake of a story - though it has been known.

Years ago, a Telegraph journalist (who has long since moved on to other things) used to make a point of being scantily-clad and positioning herself in the middle of the lobby (an area of the Commons restricted to MPs and journalists) where male MPs would ‘queue’ to talk to her.

The lobby is a competitive environment and she used her gender to her advantage. It happens every day in workplaces up and down the country. What’s the big deal?

What surprises me most is that Isabel Hardman is a well-established political journalist, with nothing to prove. Had the remark been directed at a new kid on the block, I could have understood the fuss.  Surely she is too clever a writer to be offended by a flippant comment from some old fart?

The sadness is that male MPs will be a little more guarded next time they talk to her and, no doubt, to the rest of us. That’s the last thing we journalists want.

I don’t suppose anyone will call her ‘totty’ again but if they do, I suggest she smiles sweetly, issues a cutting rebuke and remembers that when it comes to interactions between politicians and journalists, one way or another, we usually have the last laugh.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





17 April, 2016

Moron feminist takes two small incidents and hangs huge generalizations on them

Widely-read Australian feminist, Em Rusciano, below, takes two slightly off-colour incidents and claims that they prove what a bad lot "men" are. If that's feminist logic, it sure discredits feminism.  I can find two incidents that will prove anything and everything by her criteria. 

Generalizations need to be founded on representative sampling, not one-off incidents.  If you like unrepresentative sampling, just stand outside a divorce court for half a day and you will find a stream of men who will give you chapter and verse to prove that WOMEN are a bad lot

TO THE people raising the future men of the world: I’ve been forced to contact you, because the level of online douchery and quite frankly predatory behaviour aimed at young women, has this week hit an all time dickhead high score.

By now, I’m sure you’ve read about the man who took a creep shot of a woman doing her fruit and veggie shopping at Woolies. He thought it would be romantic to post it on their Facebook page and then say he’d turn up everyday in the same spot until she acknowledged him.

It was also a huge week for prestigious higher education institutions.

Male students at Sydney’s UNSW filmed themselves on a bus trip chanting the following: "I wish that all the ladies were little red foxes, and if I were a hunter I’d shoot them in the boxes."

Not since Lennon and McCartney have such lyrical heights been reached.

The delightful Melbourne University crew were found to have a Facebook page that rates female students’ looks, tells you where you can find them, and provides delightful photo captions such as: "I bet some vibrato on her G-string would sound nice". Hint: the woman they were rating was a musician.

I have two daughters, and when I read these kinds of things, I completely despair as to what kind of world I’m sending them into.

You see, I can teach them all manner of things about life. I can arm them with the tools to deal with certain challenges. But in this particular scenario, I’m completely impotent.

I can’t stop men from taking photos of them without their consent. I can’t teach boys that chanting words that glorify acts of rape and violence against my girls is gross and wrong.

So, I’m asking you to have higher expectations of your sons’ behaviour. I’m asking all fathers to model their own behaviour in a manner that shows their sons how to respect women. Hey, lets not stop there. Why not be respectful of all humans in general?

I’m asking that all mothers be courageous enough to squash any inequality, should it pop up even in the tiniest way. As women, I’m sure you never want to be objectified, so don’t accept it from your sons or their fathers.

Teach them to be in tune with their own feelings. Allow them to explore a range of negative emotions, not just anger.

Tell them that it’s OK to be sad, vulnerable and sensitive. I believe forcing young men to repress emotions leads to frustration and bad behaviour down the track.

I don’t think it’s right that I have to tell my girls that they need to adjust their behaviour and actions to compensate for the possibility of a man not being able to control himself.

Realistically I’m going to have to, but I’d rather not.

Finally, remind them that girls are their equals and are people first. Remind them that no­ one is better than them — or less than them — because of what gender they are.

I have no doubt that a lot of you already do this. I am in no way saying that all your sons will behave in this manner.

I’m just a mother trying to help shape and change the world in which her daughters are growing up, so that they may be the best humans they can be.

SOURCE






What do British Muslims Really Think? Now we know. And it's terrifying

I sat down to watch 'What British Muslims Really think' with my best multicultural head on.

I cleared my mind of all preconceptions; grubby Rochdale cabbies passing white girls round for sex like a fried chicken bargain bucket, Imams beating kids into devotion, and the truly indoctrinated, blowing up Brussels to get 72 virgins in paradise.

Putting my feet up on the recycling bin, channelling my inner Polly Toynbee, I waited to sit corrected - prepared to accept the most dangerous Muslim in Britain is Bake Off's Nadiya Hussain armed with a Victoria Sponge.

But, much as it pains me to say it, I have been right all along. British Muslims are not part of some rich tapestry of urban life. It's a myth, dreamed up by the BBC, and perpetuated by the Islington elite.

It is them and us. And THEY have no wish to be anything like US.

The reason Muslims enjoy our country is because it is tolerant. Not the bits where we are tolerant of each other, you understand. Not the fact we respect your right to be Jewish or utterly ungodly. Or our warm embrace of those who identify as straight, gay, lesbian or as gender-fluid as a snail.

No. They enjoy our country because we are tolerant of their right to be as as prejudiced against Jews and as homophobic as they please.

52% disagree homosexuality should be legalised. Even more oppose gay marriage. Years of British acceptance, now rolled back under a Neanderthal rock because the Koran has come to town. And no one appears to have the moral fibre to point out the hypocrisy of it all; Islamic Societies are proliferating across every University campus, the same safe spaces where any view not militantly pro-LGBTQ is rightly petitioned into silence.

Catholic bakers in Ireland are persecuted if they don't wish to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage, the law demanding their compliance. But UK Muslims - they can be as homophobic as they choose.

This tolerance they enjoy in the UK is not valued for their ability to assimilate as open-minded citizens. But tolerance of a new virulent strain of Islam which is perversely segregationist and intolerant of our ways.

Having watched what British Muslims think of women, I am relieved my daughters were in bed. I have already written to their schools asking for my children to be exempt from any further trips to the local mosque. I stand against any segregation of my girls from boys.

But Muslim girls are not afforded such liberty, considered to be fortunate to be educated from the back of the room in subjects deemed appropriate for their uses - like cooking and sewing.

Where are the strident feminists fighting for the rights of Muslim girls; their genitals mutilated yet defended as a cultural thing and forced into marriages with ugly uncles?

Unbelievably, one in three British Muslims support the right of a man to have up to four wives. And that's young Muslims as well. 18-24 year olds are utterly backwards in their thinking - defended by progressives and liberals.

Why would women share husbands like a field full of flighty deer, waiting for one mangey rutting stag to mount them with his measly Muslim member?

One Muslim woman describes it as a privilege. Well I've been there, and it didn't make me feel special.

My first husband - allegedly a Catholic - thought he would try the polygamy thing, informally, with busty women up and down the country. We had a feisty divorce but I kept my children.

If I were a Muslim, British Sharia courts would have taken my children from me by now at the advent of my second marriage, tying my hands and crushing my heart.

Sitting there on my sofa, listening to women say there is no such thing as rape within Muslim marriage, my pelvic floor is in spasm in disgust. 39% of British Muslims - men and women - say a woman should always obey her husband.

Extend this thinking a little further and you end up with a women in utter subservience, hidden from the world, shrouded in a burqa. For many this submission undoubtedly extends to a good beating.

From there it's only a short sandal-footed shuffle into Sharia Law where women's evidence is worth half of that of a man's, and only two in three British Muslims think stoning a woman to death for being raped is wrong.

UK Muslims can be as sexist and violent as they choose.

Imagining this new breed of Muslims want to assimilate into our country is farcical. There is no integration. They do not want to assimilate into our increasingly secular ways.

They want to practise a more radical form of Islam, taught by Wahhabi Imams, living under Sharia law, rejecting homosexuality, promoting the subservience of women, supporting jihad.

Multiculturalists are determined to distance Muslims from Islamic extremism, imagining it to be the acts of the alienated few.

But the reason we so seldom hear Imams and leaders in the Muslim Community speaking out against terrorists is that in truth, many are right behind them.

25% had sympathy for the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. 20% have sympathy for the 7/7 suicide bombers. Over 100,000 Muslims in the UK have sympathy for terrorist acts. Many support a future attack on the very country which showed them tolerance, allowed them to practise their particular brand of hate, and gave them a home.

I have heard what Muslims really think and it is clear multiculturalism has never existed.

Through no fault of our inclusive culture, it is them and us. And British Muslims expect us to change our ways to fit in with them.

SOURCE






Woman who grew up wanting to be a boy says she's glad she didn't change sex - as she's now happy in her own skin

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a boy. I felt deep down that I'd be far happier that way and had a nagging suspicion that life as a male would be more fun than being female.

Aged just four, I remember my father, older brother and a group of his friends all lumping bricks around the garden to fire up a barbeque on one of the first warm days of summer.

I'd been helping all morning by gathering smaller sticks for kindling – although my efforts were largely ignored and met with an eye roll and a pat on the head.

Wiping the sweat from their brows and taking a five-minute break, the men took their tops off to bask in the sun and I followed suit. 'JEN!' they cried in unison, 'Put your T-shirt back on! You can't do that… You're a girl!'

I stomped off, peals of the boys' laughter ringing in my ears, feeling anger and embarrassment prick at my cheeks as I bristled with irritation at how unfair it all was.

It was something I grappled with throughout my childhood. But before long, my parents relaxed and accepted the way I was. I spent blissful days out in the woods on adventures, getting muddy, or riding my bicycle as fast as I could.

One time, when I was eight, I came flying off over the handlebars and skidded along the road near our house on my arm and face – causing a scab to form across my top lip that looked like a moustache and joined my permanently scuffed knees.

I didn't care though and was back out on my bike the next morning.  I loved being a tomboy and nagged my mum to let me get my hair cropped short.  I hated having my hair tugged, plaited and tied with ribbons before school every day.

I was only ever forced into dresses against my will, for example if my mother insisted that I should wear them to go to church on Sundays, but I would rush upstairs and change the second I got home – feeling much more comfortable in jeans, wellies and a scruffy jumper.

At school, I had friends who were girls but I was drawn to hang out with the boys. Like me, they wanted to get outside and go sledging in winter or dunking each other at the local swimming baths in summer.

I looked down on my younger sister Angie who held tea parties for her dollies, had an arsenal of perfumed beauty potions and loved to wear frilly pink dresses.

I accepted that I was a girl but I looked and often acted like a boy and I know that had I been offered the chance to become a real one at the age of ten and given hormones I would have leaped at the chance – not grasping the consequences of such a life-changing and massive decision.

I found the idea of having periods one day soon terrifying and I loathed the thought of developing breasts and having to wear an uncomfortable bra.

But, as I grew into my teens and puberty kicked in, I completely changed. I slowly started to understand the power of being a woman and finally became happy in my own skin and began to love make up, fashion and fully embracing my femininity.

It's clear that transgender children need love, support and – crucially – understanding – not just from their parents, teachers and their peers but from all of us. If they feel depressed, confused and are struggling, then therapy is a fantastic tool that must be available to all children and their parents.

Ideally, childhood should be a magical time where kids are free from the labels and constraints that adults must deal with as they're the brief, brilliant years when we discover the world and start the long journey to fully developing our personalities.

If a girl feels like she is a boy at heart and wants to play football, cut her hair short and run about in what might be traditionally seen as 'boys' clothing, or if a boy wants to wear pink, grow his hair long and play with dolls, then let them enjoy it.

Gender is becoming much more fluid these days, and people are much more free to switch back and forth and dress and act as they please without judgement.

There's not a lot of data out there yet, but I do know that I'm a different person at 40 than I was five years ago and I'm nothing like the child I was in 1986.

I wonder if hormone therapy had been available to me as a ten-year-old - and I had taken it - if it would have turned out to have been a gigantic mistake?

SOURCE






The feminising of justice that makes it hard for men charged with rape to get a fair trial

Of course, rape is a terrible crime and gang-rape is one of the worst things that human beings can do to another person.

So, had four young men who were arrested after a group sex session at a student ball been found guilty of sex crimes, they would have been jailed for many years.

But the case against the quartet collapsed this week after detectives were accused of 'cherry-picking' evidence to support the prosecution, while 'airbrushing' anything that suggested the men were innocent.

Lawyers for the four students (who had been charged after the drunken sex session during a May Ball at the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire) argued that evidence had been 'withheld' by officers before the trial. This included messages taken from the victim's phone hinting that she may have consented.

It also emerged that the alleged victim had given 'different accounts' as a witness in another rape case involving an Army officer — also acquitted.

How could the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have got it so wrong?

I have worked for many years as a human rights and civil liberties barrister and I'm afraid that I do not think this case can be dismissed as a one-off. Sadly, it illustrates a deeper problem in our justice system when it comes to sex crimes.

Having once been deplorably insensitive to the problems that rape victims face, I believe that our criminal justice system has swung too far the other way. It now assumes that an accusation by a woman is tantamount to proof of guilt.

Even worse, it has encouraged sharp tactics on the part of the police and the CPS who are keen to have a more positive image as being tough on sex offenders and winning more successful prosecutions.

The most grotesque example recently involved Scotland Yard's VIP paedophile murder inquiry — and investigation into claims that a string of Establishment figures were responsible for killing three boys in the Seventies and Eighties.

Though the probe collapsed, the police refused to say sorry to those whose lives had been ruined or reputations shattered by a suspected fantasist called 'Nick', whose claims triggered the investigation. Most controversially, one of the investigating officers, Det Supt Kenny McDonald, had described Nick's delusional ramblings as 'credible and true'.

The fact is that our criminal justice system is supposed to be founded on two critical principles. First, the presumption of innocence. Second, due process: the belief that criminal accusations must be proven beyond reasonable doubt, by fair procedures.

However, when it comes to sexual assault, decades of campaigning by feminists and more strident members of the victim lobby have browbeaten judges and policy-makers into a change of approach.

The prevailing attitude seems to be that it is unfair to anyone claiming to have been the victim of a sexual attack that they should have to accept that their alleged attacker is 'innocent until proved guilty' and that the case has to operate under due process.

As a result, the system has been re-engineered to make it more difficult for the accused to defend himself.

Even the definition of rape has been changed. Previously, it was a defence for a man to show that he honestly believed the woman was consenting. But the Sexual Offences Act 2003 — passed by the Labour government — introduced a so-called test of reasonable belief in consent. This means that the accused has to show he took reasonable steps to ensure that the woman consented to sex.

This has led to the ridiculous situation whereby some students demand 'affirmative consent'. This means that consent has to be sought and given at every stage of any sexual encounter.

Most ridiculously, students at one U.S. high school have been told that men should obtain consent every ten minutes during sexual activity. A further worrying development is that the police and CPS seem to see themselves as advocates for complainants — though they should be acting impartially.

The result is that they appear to shut their eyes to any evidence that might complicate their plans to bring a prosecution. This phenomenon is known as 'confirmation bias'. This was confirmed by the absurd admission of one Manchester barrister who said: 'If someone complains, we prosecute.'

I'm sorry, but such a perverse attitude is highly dangerous. No one benefits when innocent people are wrongly accused.

The fact is that this creates a new class of victim: the falsely accused, or those who are prosecuted, who are presumed guilty until they can prove their innocence.

Some high-profile examples of those wrongly accused of sex offences are Nigel Evans MP, radio presenter Paul Gambaccini, war hero Lord Bramall and former MP Harvey Proctor.

Significantly, the legal authorities' attitude was outlined by former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer.

In an article for the Criminal Law Review in 2014 written after he had left the post, he explained how changes were needed to improve the way the credibility of alleged victims was assessed.

He called for 'a more sophisticated approach that starts with the assumption that the victim is telling the truth'.

Sir Keir has since been elected as a Labour MP. But the pressure to believe all complainants began before he was appointed DPP.

Back in 2002, the Metropolitan Police issued a Special Notice 11/02 entitled 'A policy for the investigation of rape and serious sexual assaults'.

It began: 'Principle 1. It is the policy of the Met to accept allegations made by any victim in the first instance as being truthful. An allegation will only be considered as falling short of a substantial allegation after a full and thorough investigation.'

This approach encapsulates the problem. When the word 'victim' is used before a crime has been proved in court, it means there is a presumption of guilt. Equally, what happened to the promise of a 'full and thorough investigation'?

I am aware of many sex attack cases in which defendants and their lawyers have complained that when they provided the police with evidence suggesting that a complaint of sexual assault was false, the police simply ignored it.

For example, there was a case in which a teenager was accused by a girl of a similar age of raping her. As part of his defence, the accused boy's mother went through social media postings that her son and the girl had made during the time in question.

They showed that every time the girl claimed she was being attacked, she and the boy were in different locations. Yet despite this research being given to the police, the officers later returned it as 'unused material'.

Though the case went to trial, the accused's mother handed her dossier to the CPS barrister, who said they had never seen it before. Separately, it became clear that the girl's story didn't add up.

Within 24 hours, the prosecution barrister told the judge that the complainant was no longer regarded as a witness of truth and the trial collapsed.

However, things should never have been allowed to reach that stage. The boy's family incurred very substantial legal costs, which they were unable to recover from the CPS.

I believe that such people who are falsely accused and who are put through unnecessary and traumatic experiences should be able to sue the police for damages — compensation for negligent investigations. This is allowed in Canada.

Should those who have been falsely accused have even more right to redress? For example, ought they be able to sue the CPS if they feel their case has been mishandled?

Theoretically, it's already possible to sue public officials for misfeasance, but that requires proof of bad faith — something that is a very high threshold to cross.

Regardless of the redress that might be available to those who are wrongly accused, there is a much more important principle at stake.

Namely, that it is imperative that our judicial system is fair to both accuser and accused.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





15 April, 2016

Australia:  Actor and Aboriginal elder Uncle Jack Charles refused taxi in Melbourne, again


I wouldn't pick him up either.  And I speak as a former taxi driver.  He looks like a hobo. His race has got nothing to do with it.  He needs to smarten up if he wants to be treated with respect.  Most people present themselves fairly well before they hop into a taxi.  It's just ignorant to do otherwise

Aboriginal elder and renowned actor Jack Charles has again been refused a cab in Melbourne because of what he calls systemic racial discrimination against Indigenous Australians by taxi drivers.

The 72-year-old was with two artists visiting from Turkey when they tried to catch a taxi from outside Flinders Street Station about 3pm on Wednesday.

"Uncle Jack" said a taxi pulled up and the party started to get inside when the driver told them he would not accept the fare.  "My mate Ibrahim jumped in the front and started to explain where we were going and I started to jump in the back," Charles said.

"The driver said that he'd knocked off once he saw me. So I believe it was me, [that's] why he refused to pick us up.  "Drivers that have knocked off don't actually pull in to pick up a fare."

Artist Ibrahim Koç, who is working on an art project about similarities between Aboriginal Australians and Turkey's Yörük people, was with Charles at the time and said it was an "ugly" event.

"The taxi driver saw Jack and he doesn't want to take us. Why? I don't understand."

Charles has forged a prolific acting career over more than 50 years, co-founded Australia's first Indigenous theatre group and starring in films including The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith, Blackfellas and Pan. He has also performed in many stage plays across the country and toured internationally.

But despite his stellar career, being refused a taxi has become a regular occurrence for the veteran actor.

Charles was told he couldn't catch a taxi unless he paid the fare upfront moments after being named Victorian Senior Australian of the Year in Melbourne in October last year.  On that occasion, another taxi driver told him drivers were allowed to request pre-payment from Aboriginals.

Just two days later, a taxi allocated to collect him at Melbourne Airport sped off without him.

Charles said on Wednesday that regularity did nothing to lessen the pain caused by such acts of discrimination.  "I won't sleep tonight, I'll be writhing in pure agony of the mind… this really impacts on me, totally," he said.

Charles said many taxi drivers came from overseas and industry education was needed to stamp out discrimination.  "These incidents are repeated over and over again," he said.  "It's illegal, it's racist, it's racial profiling and it shouldn't be done, so we need to educated this mob."

Charles said he approached the taxi industry after last year's incidents to arrange a round-table discussion about discrimination against Aboriginal passengers, but it had not eventuated.

He intends to sue the driver who refused to pick him up on Wednesday and his driving company for racial discrimination.

The Taxi Services Commission said it would investigate the incident "pending further information being provided about the taxi involved".

"Racial discrimination is totally unacceptable," a commission spokesman said.

SOURCE







Germany and a sinister bid to hide the truth about migrant sex attacks: Politicians pressurise police into removing word 'rape' from mass sex attack report

The medieval city of Magdeburg in the east of Germany is a quaint place where pensioners feed birds in their gardens and students pedal to the university on trendy sit-up-and-beg bicycles.

Yet its residents are scarred by the memories of a dreadful event in November, when a 19-year-old female university student was ambushed at 4am and dragged into the bushes where she was gang-raped.

What particularly disturbed the locals was that three Afghani men from a block being used to house migrants were later arrested and questioned, though it is unclear what has happened to them since.

It was the fourth sexual attack in the city, including the rape of a 24-year-old woman in Magdeburg’s cemetery, which implicated migrants in just a few months.

The student’s rape was fresh in the mind in this capital city of the Saxony-Anhalt region when news began to leak out of Cologne after New Year’s Eve that as many as 1,000 women were saying they had been groped or raped by men of north African and Arabic backgrounds.

Extraordinarily, it emerged yesterday that a high-ranking politician, who said he was acting on behalf of the German state, pressured the police to remove the word ‘rape’ from their report on the night’s mass sex attacks in order to hide the truth from the public.

The police refused, said a respected German newspaper yesterday, and prepared an account stating accurately that ‘a large group of foreign people’ had, indeed, carried out rape, sexual harassment and thefts.

Such alarming reports have had a profound effect on many people in this increasingly fractured society, which has seen a huge influx of young Muslim men from a host of countries after Chancellor Angela Merkel invited migrants from Syria to come to Germany last year.

And their minds will not have been put at ease by the news that a German train operator has announced it is introducing women-only carriages on its trains following the New Year attacks.

The introduction of the carriages, which will be next to the conductor, has already led to heated debate on German social media. The hashtag #imzugpassiert (which translates as ‘it happened in a train’) has become a talking point on Twitter, with women giving examples of when they have been accosted by foreign-speaking men on trains.

The train company, Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn, says it will provide women-only carriages on routes out of Leipzig, an hour’s drive from Magdeburg, with a spokesman explaining: ‘They are designed to make solo female travellers or women with young children feel safer.’

He denied, improbably, that the move was because of the widespread sex attacks on women in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany, yet it will have done little to assuage the fears of many who have seen countless thousands of newcomers arrive from a different cultural background to be housed in their midst in 2,000 hostels, hotels, tented camps and newly-built blocks across Germany.

The depth of unease here at the numbers was spelt out all too starkly in recent regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt, when nearly a quarter of the population, many aged under 40, voted for the anti-immigration, Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AFD), which has sprung from nothing in just three years.

In the country’s wealthy western states of Baden-Wurttemburg and Rhineland Palatinate, where elections were also held, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s middle-of-the-road Christian Democratic Party (CDU) also lost considerable ground.

It was in Saxony-Anhalt that her ruling party only just managed to cling to power.

The results were a stark condemnation of Merkel’s open-door migration policy, which has caused chaos across the EU.

Many Germans complain that the most powerful female politician in the world has ignored their views by inviting in more than a million people in less than a year from the war-shattered Middle East, impoverished Africa and numerous other parts of the globe besides.

So, what of those migrants who have made the journey and now face deep antipathy from so many in their adopted country?

In a modern block in a leafy neighbourhood of Magdeburg, close to where the student’s rape took place in November, I found Mahmood Atafar, 28, a Kung Fu boxer from Iran’s capital Tehran.

The place has two uniformed security guards at the gatehouse, who sign in all visitors.

A few feet away from them is a high, wire fence and locked gate, protecting the block’s 200 migrants, mostly single and male, from rising resentment (and worse) towards them among locals.

With the help of Piruz, a 38-year-old Iranian fellow migrant who is also living in the block, Mahmood told me in broken English: ‘I came to Germany because lots of other men from my country heard of the welcome by Mrs Merkel.

‘I would never have set off on such a difficult journey on my own. I tore a tendon in my leg on the way to Europe, but I can go to the doctor here for treatment without paying. I am also given 330 euros a month and Germans are kind to me.’

This is the just the type of statement that would enrage the 24 per cent of Saxony-Anhalt residents who voted defiantly for AFD and its leader, the charismatic 40-year-old Frauke Petry.

An elfin but sharp-tongued scientist with a PhD in chemistry (she studied at Reading University), she has been caricatured by her critics in the German pro-Merkel political establishment as ‘Frau Dr Strangelove’ after the deranged Nazi scientist played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 anti-war film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

Her picture has been plastered over the media after she said that police should shoot illegal migrants at the border as a last resort to stop them entering Germany.

But this did not seem to put off voters in Magdeburg, who cannot forget the sexual assaults that have been carried out in their city.

While concrete figures of rapes and sex attacks by migrants are hard to find (the ethnicity of perpetrators are not routinely published), bureaucrats in Berlin are said to be shocked at the number of reports on such crimes reaching them on a daily basis.

The police have also warned of a potential breakdown of public order this summer, when women are more lightly dressed, and they are confronted by young male migrants, now being given Government pamphlets on how to conduct themselves correctly with women in the West.

As I have discovered this year, it is not only in Germany that mass arrivals of men from cultures where women are second-class citizens has caused such problems.

Sweden, which last year took in 163,000 migrants, again mostly single and male, has faced similar sex attacks, many by migrants against girls and even boys on the streets and at swimming pools.

Reflecting the changing mood there, too, a poll by newspaper Aftonbladet found nearly half of all Swedish women are scared to jog or to walk alone at night.

The result of such concerns is that, in former East Germany especially, a strong anti-migrant sentiment is growing among many people.

As a Pakistani-born security guard in his 50s at the Magdeburg migrants’ block told me this week: ‘I’m married to a German woman, but my children have dark skin like me.

‘They face racial prejudice in this part of eastern Germany every day. Foreigners are not popular and my job is to keep the new migrants safe.’

It was in this febrile atmosphere that the AFD mounted its successful campaign to capture voters’ support.

Andreas Roedder, contemporary history professor at Germany’s Mainz University, says the astonishing AFD election result marks the ‘normalisation of Right-wing populist movements’ in Germany for the first time since World War II.

Reflecting the changing mood there, too, a poll by newspaper Aftonbladet found nearly half of all Swedish women are scared to jog or to walk alone at night.

The growing xenophobia in modern Germany is manna from heaven to the AFD, founded by a group of academics as a fringe party in 2013 to protest not against immigration but Mrs Merkel’s handling of the Eurozone financial crisis and, in particular, her decision to bail out the teetering Greek economy.

Yet as the unending arrivals into Germany began to fray tempers, the AFD seized its moment. The party swept out the old guard, and last year made businesswoman Ms Petry, who founded a chemical manufacturing company, its leader.

The new politician on the block, who was brought up in the former Communist city of Dresden, soon steered the party rightwards and transformed herself into one of the most vocal — and dangerous — critics of Angela Merkel.

Almost immediately, she caused controversy with her comments about border police shooting migrants trying to enter the country illegally from Austria. ‘If necessary, they should use firearms,’ she told a regional newspaper. ‘I don’t want this, but the use of armed force is there as a last resort.’

Ms Petry, a mother-of-four whose marriage to a Lutheran pastor foundered recently when she began a relationship with an MEP from her party, unashamedly forged links with a controversial grassroots movement called Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West — which has run increasingly well-supported anti-migrant protests in east Germany demanding exactly the same as AFD: border controls and a halt to migration.

For now, AFD seems unstoppable, at least in this area of Germany. At the party’s offices in Magdeburg, local leader Andre Poggenburg, 40, wearing a brown designer suit and a broad smile, told me proudly: ‘We are a new party with fresh visions. The older parties are no longer respected and many Germans, particularly the young ones, think Mrs Merkel has gone crazy.

‘We view migration as a great problem for Germany. Migration must drop to zero immediately. The people will not tolerate so many bringing in the culture of Islam. They are worried about the migrants’ attitude to women after the sex assaults in Cologne and here in Magdeburg.

‘We believe there is the likelihood of Islamic terrorists and jihadis being slipped into Germany because we have not vetted arrivals at the borders, so the Government has no idea who it is letting in.’

If this sounds like a xenophobic rant, it chimes exactly with the warnings of Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, who said recently that Islamic State is planting jihadists among migrants flowing into Europe.

This view was confirmed by Frontex, the EU border agency, two days ago in a worrying report, which said: ‘Islamist extremists will exploit . . . migration flows whenever such movements fit their plans.’

So how Right-wing is AFD? Before I leave, I put a piece of paper in front of Herr Poggenburg with a rectangle on it. I ask him to draw a line through it to describe where the party stands. He places it a little to the right of centre.

‘It is not true that we are Far Right, we are Middle Right,’ insists the politician, who no longer dares tell journalists about his family or where he lives because his home and car have been fire-bombed by Left-wing activists. Last Christmas, his dog was kidnapped and strangled with a piece of rope and its collar.

Not far away, I visited Leipzig (where opinion polls show a dramatic rise in AFD support), the home town of AFD leader Frauke Petry, where I met her close colleague and chairman of the city’s AFD, Siegbert Droese.

At his office, decorated with election posters, the 46-year-old told me: ‘In the past, Germans stayed at home on their sofas and didn’t bother to vote. This time they came out to the polls because they don’t like the migration policies of Mrs Merkel.’

What seems undisputable is that AFD is splitting opinion in Germany over the migrant crisis.

Herr Droese, a hotel owner with four children, said: ‘There is a wind of change here, particularly among the young. They see migrants sitting in camps or hostels with nothing to do but gaze at their phones or TV, and they think that’s not fair. Yet they know that under Mrs Merkel there will be at least 500,000 more migrants entering Germany this year.’

Meanwhile, the migrants at their housing block in Magdeburg, built, perhaps unthoughtfully, next to mixed-sex student accommodation, seemed unaware of the election results or the growing hostility to them among ordinary Germans.

When I explained the groundswell of support for AFD, Mahmood’s friend Piruz said: ‘There are lots of migrants here who are pretending to be sick so they can get free medical treatment.

‘One Indian woman brought her disabled son. He is taken by ambulance to special school or to hospital appointments every day, which costs money. This is the kind of thing that makes Germans worried about us.’

This former dental technician then added defensively — and revealingly — that few of the migrants at the hostel are genuine refugees.

‘Most of us could go home to our countries tomorrow if we wished. Why not? Many of the places we come from are not dangerous. I have no quarrel with the Iran regime, but wanted to work in the West. When Mrs Merkel said come over, I set off with everyone else; it was an opportunity for us.’

With the arrival of every new economic migrant like him — and with stories of rapes and the need for women-only train carriages — increasing numbers of Germans will grow more disenchanted, more angry.

And in a country that has spent 60 years trying to bury the legacy of Nazism, it is not, I believe, being alarmist to predict that the march of the new Right will gather pace.

SOURCE






German Police swoop on illegal North African migrants: 470 'fake asylum seekers' found hiding in Germany could be sent home following raids in 33 towns and cities

Police mounted massive raids in 33 towns and cities in a German state early yesterday hunting for illegal North African refugees in their asylum centres.

The swoops were carried out with military precision shortly before dawn. Some immigrants tried to hide but were discovered in toilets, under their beds or covered in blankets in linen cupboards.

Two young men even tried to hide in the basement of an asylum home in the industrial city of Duisburg but were found and arrested.

It comes just days after it emerged the number of 'missing' migrants in Germany continues to grow with nearly 9,000 children unaccounted for.

The raids in North Rhine-Westphalia were aimed at capturing the biometric data of North African immigrants throughout the state to ensure lawful refugees are registered and not making duplicate applications for asylum with false names or fake national identities.

Police said that North African refugees have been known to use as many as ten different aliases and claimed to come from multiple countries.

A total of 471 Algerians and Moroccans not truthfully registered with the authorities were discovered.

The two national groups are cited by police as being responsible for most of the crimes committed by asylum seekers in Germany and were heavily involved in the New Year's Eve sex and robbery attacks on hundreds of women in Cologne.

An official told Bild newspaper: 'We created pressure to get people to disclose their personal data. And now we have the chance to reject their applications for asylum if they come from safe countries of origin.'

Both Morocco and Algeria are now considered safe countries and people from them seized in the raids will be sent home.

According to the state interior minister Ralf Jäger criminal charges of illegally staying in the country were launched against 15 people. More are likely in the coming days. Four people wanted on outstanding arrest warrants for criminal offences were also caught up in the police operation.

The collected personal data was matched with that of other EU States to prevent duplicate asylum application in the EU as well as the use of multiple identities.

One example is the asylum-seeker from Recklinghausen who was shot before a Paris police station in January. He had made an application for asylum within the EU in seven countries and used up to 20 identities.

Officials say many more such raids are likely in the coming weeks.

SOURCE






UK: Jeremy Corbyn is blasted by Jewish leader for a 'deeply disturbing' response to claims his brother Piers 'belittled' anti-Semitism allegations rocking Labour

Jeremy Corbyn was slammed by a leader of British Jews today for defending his brother's 'belittling' of anti-Semitism.

Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the response of the Labour leader was 'deeply disturbing'.

The intervention represents a new escalation in a growing row within Labour about alleged anti-Semitism among some new members.

Labour MP Louise Ellman has come under anti-Semitic attack in her Liverpool Riverside constituency and joined calls on the Labour leader to do more to tackle anti-Semitism in the party's ranks.

But the demand prompted Piers Corbyn to tweet: 'ABSURD! JC+ All Corbyns are committed Anti Nazi. Zionists can't cope with anyone supporting rights for Palestine.'

In response, Mr Corbyn told The Sun his brother 'isn't wrong', adding: 'My brother has his point of view, I have mine and we actually fundamentally agree - we are a family that were brought up fighting racism from the day we were born.'

Mr Arkush rejected the statement today. He said: 'Jeremy Corbyn's defence of his brother's belittling of the problem of anti-Semitism is deeply disturbing.  'We cannot imagine that any other minority's concerns would be dismissed off-hand in this way.

'In the last few weeks we have witnessed a stream of clear-cut cases of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which can't just be fobbed off as differences over Israel.

'Most of the Jewish community, numerous Labour MPs, Labour peers, and Labour's London mayoral candidate are crying out for the leader to take action on anti-Semitism. 'It would be incomprehensible for Mr Corbyn to remain inert and refuse to take this form of racism in his party seriously.'

Speaking at a campaign visit in Norwich, Mr Corbyn said: 'If anyone reports any form of anti-Semitism within our party, it is investigated immediately and cracked down upon.  'That message is unequivocal - we are a multi-faith, multicultural Britain - let's respect each other and move on from there.'

A Labour spokesman earlier insisted: 'It is Jeremy Corbyn who is taking action on anti-Semitism.  'He has consistently condemned anti-Semitism and all forms of racism and under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Labour is clamping down on anti-Semitism and taking clear action against offenders.'

Ms Ellman had used a Sky News interview to call for stronger action on anti-Semitism by the Labour leader.  She said: 'Most members of the Labour party are not anti-Semitic but some are and some are being allowed to get away with posting anti-Semitic comments in tweets and on their websites.'

She added: 'The leader has spoken out clearly, he says he is against anti-Semitism.  'But it's not just about words – there has got to be some action and we haven't seen enough of that.'

Sadiq Khan yesterday admitted he wears a 'badge of shame' because of the problems the Labour Party has with anti-Semitism.  The London Mayor candidate said Mr Corbyn 'could have taken a tougher stance and needs to take a tougher stance'.

The party has been dragged into a series of rows about anti-Semitic members which some MPs have warned are not being kicked out of the party swiftly enough.

Jewish Labour MPs have also claimed they have come under attack from anti-Semitic individuals online.

Mr Khan, a Muslim, said he knew what it was to suffer 'hate crime' and added: 'I also know it's unacceptable in 2016 that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour party.  'It's with sorrow that I wear that badge of shame.'

Mr Khan added: 'If it means members of my party, senior members of my party including members of [Labour's ruling National Executive Committee] being trained about what anti-Semitism is, then so be it.'

Speaking at a hustings organised by the London Jewish Forum, Mr Khan said: 'I have said at the outset, I'm embarrassed and sorrowful about anti-Semitism in the party.  'I think the Labour leadership could have taken a tougher stance and needs to take a tougher stance.'

SOURCE






More Muslim rejection of reality

British Muslims have moved faster than the Conservative Party or the Church on social issues such as gay rights, a former Tory chairman said yesterday.

Sayeeda Warsi hit out at claims that Muslims are failing to integrate into British life.

And she attacked former equalities chief Trevor Phillips, who said this week that many Muslims ‘do not accept the values and behaviours that make Britain what it is’.

Baroness Warsi, who served as Conservative Party chairman for two years from 2010, accused him of ‘pandering to populist prejudice’ and said many religious groups had conservative social attitudes.

‘The Muslim community is conservative in its views, but that is no different to most other religious communities,’ she said. ‘If you compare attitudes to a group of evangelical Christians or Hasidic Jews you would find similarities.

‘There is social conservatism, maybe even social intolerance, but most religious communities on the issue of homosexuality have been on a journey on this. So has my own party, so has the Church of England.

‘There is no reason to say that Muslims are so different they have to be treated in a completely different way.

‘Attitudes around women’s rights and gay rights are changing. But our community in Britain is 50 or 60 years old – we have moved faster than my party, which has been around much longer, or the Church.’

In an article in the Daily Mail on Monday, Mr Phillips warned that a ‘nation within a nation’ was developing in Britain’s Muslim community and quoted research to back his claim that many Muslims are not interested in integrating.

He was also concerned about the creation of Muslim ‘ghettos’ and raised the possibility of a cap on the proportion of Muslim pupils in schools.

But Lady Warsi said most British Muslims lived in much more mixed communities. And she said other groups were not always keen to mix with them.  ‘When I grew up in Dewsbury, white parents took their children out of my middle school because they felt there were too many Muslims there,’ she said. ‘Integration is a two-way street.’

Lady Warsi has been a fierce critic of some attitudes in her community, but she warned that portraying British Muslims as being uniquely different was a ‘dangerous path to go down’.

‘You are effectively saying they are so different to any group that has gone before we are going to have to treat them in a totally different way,’ she said. ‘That is just not right or helpful.’

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





14 April, 2016

Multicultural pervert, 35, sexually abused a teenager with learning difficulties and photographed her bound and gagged



A teenager with severe learning difficulties was bound, gagged and sexually abused by a 35-year-old man after he watched the film Fifty Shades of Grey.

Joseph Maxwell Spencer took photos of the girl in a red and black basque and made film clips that showed her crying out in distress, Bradford Crown Court heard.

He was jailed for seven years after a judge said he ruthlessly exploited the girl to gratify his own pleasures.

Following a trial, Spencer was convicted by a jury of causing or inciting the girl to engage in sexual activity and eight charges of making indecent photos of her.

He was cleared of three allegations of having sex with the girl when she was 15.

Judge Peter Benson said the girl's learning difficulties meant she behaved like a child of seven or eight when she was 15.

He told Spencer: 'You exploited her vulnerability in a ruthless way and acquired a bondage kit based on the film Fifty Shades of Grey, and she was forced to dress up in it. 'It consisted of a gag, handcuffs, a red and black basque and a whip.'

During his trial at Bradford Crown Court, West Yorkshire, the jury was shown photos Spencer had taken of the bound and gagged girl posing indecently in the red and black basque.

Two film clips showed him having sex with her as she cried out in distress.

He tormented her on video while having sex with her when she was bound and gagged, the judge said.

'It was a most disgusting picture and you were acting with a degree of brutality which I am sure the jury found quite shocking,' added Judge Benson.

During the trial, the court heard that Spencer ordered the Fifty Shades of Grey bondage kit on the internet after watching the film.

He was arrested after one of the girl's schoolteachers saw him walking hand-in-hand with her and police found the photos and film clips on his computer.

Spencer's barrister, Nicholas Barker, said he was previously of good character and had suffered trauma and tragedy fighting as a child soldier in Liberia.

Detective Constable Donna Hector, of the Bradford District Safeguarding Unit, said: 'Spencer befriended his victim and her family then took advantage of her vulnerabilities to sexually exploit and degrade her'.

The images of the girl dressed in bondage gear were all taken on one day after she had turned 16.

Judge Benson made a Sexual Harm Prevention Order banning Spencer from approaching or contacting the girl and from having unsupervised contact with children. He must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

'I hope the sentence he has received today will be of some comfort to her and help her to move forward with her life.

'We would also like to thank our partners in education who first brought Spencer's inappropriate behaviour to our attention.

'Police in Bradford District are committed to protecting the vulnerable and would urge anyone with concerns about exploitation to report them to our specialist officers, who will investigate every report with the aim of bringing perpetrators to justice.'

Spencer, who had been held in Leeds Prison for a year, wept loudly as he was led down to the cells at Bradford Crown Court.

SOURCE





Why Do LGBT Radicals Want to Cleanse the Counseling Profession of Christians?

David French

You can always count on the Huffington Post to get hysterical. Last night — under a blaring headline that simply read "Hatewave" — it took aim at one of the more common-sense pieces of religious-liberty legislation ever proposed. The Tennessee legislature has passed a bill protecting from liability "counselors and therapists who refuse to counsel a client as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the counselor or therapist."

In other words, Tennessee wants to protect counselors from being drafted into facilitating behaviors they find morally repugnant such as, for example, adulterous affairs, sexual promiscuity, or — yes — same-sex relationships.

At first glance the bill seems superfluous. After all, who would want to be counseled by a therapist or counselor who believes your lifestyle is immoral? To paraphrase John Kasich, do we have to "write laws" for everything? Won’t the market sort this all out?

Well, no — not when the Left is intent on cleansing orthodox Christianity from the so-called helping professions. Two legal cases I worked on immediately come to mind. The first involved a young woman named Emily Brooker, a social-work student at Missouri State University. Emily’s academic "crime" was refusing a professor’s demand that she sign her name to a letter to the state legislature advocating gay adoption.

Rather than recognizing that teachers can’t compel students to engage in political advocacy, the professor accused her of a "Level 3" grievance (the university’s most serious academic offense). The department then subjected Emily to a Star Chamber–style political inquiry, where a panel of professors demanded to know whether she was a "sinner" and kept her from having a lawyer, an advocate, or even her own mother in the room.

The panel convicted her of the offense and required her to change her beliefs as a condition of graduation. One university official actually held it against Ward that she ‘communicated an attempt to maintain [her] belief system.’

In the second case, I represented Julea Ward against Eastern Michigan University. Julea was in the final stages of her graduate counseling program when she was asked to counsel a gay man about his same-sex relationship. She declined and referred the file to another counselor who had no moral objections. The client was counseled without incident. Indeed, he didn’t even know his file had been referred.

The university, however, found her referral intolerable and subjected Julea to a "formal review," accusing her of "imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals" and of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Once again, a student was summoned to the Star Chamber, and once again public officials probed a private citizen’s religious beliefs. She was expelled from the program just weeks before graduation. 

While I was litigating those cases, my colleagues at the Alliance Defending Freedom and I were contacted by social workers and counselors from across the country. Some were students, some were in private practice, and all of them were facing actual or potential complaints because they were not willing to facilitate relationships they found immoral.

In some instances, it was clear that the requests for help were the result of attempts to "troll" counselors — where activists would seek counseling for the purpose of filing a complaint. To be clear, these students and counselors weren’t engaged in sexual-orientation discrimination. They’d happily counsel an LGBT person through a work conflict, bankruptcy, or personal loss, for example, but they would not counsel any person — gay or straight — in a manner that facilitated immoral actions.

Indeed, there is a longstanding professional ethical practice of referral when a client’s values conflict with their counselor’s. Otherwise, as the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals noted in Julea’s case, absurdities result: Surely, for example, the ban on discrimination against clients based on their religion +

(1) does not require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct if the conversation takes a turn in that direction and

(2) does not require an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God if the client is wrestling with faith-based issues. Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.

Yes, tolerance is a "two-way street." But for the Left, these cases were about anything but tolerance. Instead, the goals were clear — establish absolute ideological uniformity in sexual morality and purge dissenters.

If counselors are required to facilitate immoral relationships, could a Christian lawyer be disbarred for refusing to sue a church that won’t perform gay weddings? Where is the line? And if you think the First Amendment adequately draws that line, think again.

Emily and Julea prevailed in their lawsuits, but judges have bowed to the Left in similar cases. Why should we not fight for effective state laws that can preempt the need for costly and lengthy federal litigation?

SOURCE






Liberals’ Double Standard on Bathrooms, Boycotts, and Religious Freedom

If it wasn’t for double standards, some liberals would have none at all. That seems to be the lesson from the past few weeks, where liberals have displayed three distinct forms of hypocrisy.

Liberal governors and mayors signed travel bans to North Carolina and Mississippi, CEOs of major corporations pledged boycotts and relocations, and Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams have canceled scheduled concerts in those states.

At issue are a Mississippi law that narrowly and carefully protects the rights of religious charities, small businesses, and select public servants and a North Carolina law that reasonably protects privacy and safety in public restrooms, while leaving private institutions free to set their own bathroom policies. These laws, apparently, are now unacceptable to some voices on the left.

But are they really? The hypocrisy in their opposition suggests otherwise.

Liberals decry the influence of big business and big money in politics. They denounce, as a direct threat to democracy, the ability of corporations to engage in issue advocacy. They argue that politicians must answer to the people, not the highest corporate bidder.

Or at least that’s what they used to say. Liberals are now cheering Apple, PayPal, Salesforce, and countless other giant corporations threatening legislators and governors with boycotts if they pass popular laws that the left disapproves of.

These corporate elites didn’t win an argument about good public policy. Instead, they threatened to boycott and transfer jobs out of states if the politicians didn’t do as they insisted.

This economic coercion is a form of cronyism—cultural cronyism. Big businesses use their outsized market share to pressure government to do their bidding at the expense of the will of the people and the common good. And, hypocritically, the left cheers it on.

Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams Get to Follow Their Consciences, but the Baker and Florist Don’t?

Many of us think that what these corporate giants are doing is bad for representative democracy and self-government. But they have a right to do it. And yet, they want to deny the rights of bakers, florists, photographers, adoption agencies, and marriage counselors who only want the same liberty to follow their conscience.

Big business is using its market freedom to deny small businesses and charities their religious freedom. The hypocrisy is astounding.

Take the cases of Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Adams. They said their consciences require them to deny their artistic gifts and talents to citizens of states that have enacted policy they disagreed with. And, of course, they have that right.

Adams wrote: "I cannot in good conscience perform in a state where certain people are being denied their civil rights."

He’s wrong about the laws —they don’t deny anyone civil rights. Instead, they protect civil rights. They protect religious freedom, which, as the liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) once acknowledged, is a civil liberty.

So Springsteen and Adams are exercising their freedom of conscience by boycotting states that sought to protect the consciences of adoption agencies, religious schools, bakers, and florists. Do they not see the hypocrisy?

Finally, if these boycotts are really a matter of principle—and not just grandstanding—then why do so many of these same companies do business in foreign countries with terrible records on human rights in general, and for LGBT people in particular?

The governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, pointed out this hypocrisy. After New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a travel ban for state employees to North Carolina, Gov. McCrory asked how it was consistent with Gov. Cuomo’s trip to Cuba—with state business leaders—to promote trade with that country.

Is Cuba better on human rights than North Carolina? Or is Cuomo being a bit hypocritical?

Others have pointed out the hypocrisy of PayPal. The CEO of PayPal announced that the company wouldn’t expand in North Carolina because of "PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect."

Really?  Then PayPal might want to explain why its international headquarters are in Singapore, where people engaged in private consensual same-sex acts can face two years in jail. It might also want to explain why it announced in 2012 that it would open offices in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While North Carolina placed some commonsense limits on public bathrooms, the UAE reportedly jails gay and transgender people.

What’s Next?

The left knows it can’t win on the merits in the debate about religious freedom and bathroom privacy. These bills enjoy strong public support—that’s why elected representatives are voting to pass them. And it’s why corporate elites have to target governors to veto them.

Missouri is likely the next state to move a religious freedom bill, and we can expect the same cast of characters to come out in opposition. But this time, the left and big business are entering the debate with one big disadvantage—they’ve been beaten. Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi and Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina have stood up to the bullies and shattered their aura of invincibility.

SOURCE






Islam is Colonialism, Palestine is Colonialism

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting "colonialism" by fighting Jews. Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn't exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape". This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

You can't colonize Palestine because you can't colonize colonizers. The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can't colonize it.

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That's the definition of colonialism. You can't colonize and then complain that you're being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

The Muslim conquests and invasions are well-documented. The Muslim settlements fit every historical template of colonialism complete with importing a foreign population and social system that was imposed on the native population. Until they began losing wars to the indigenous Jewish population, the Muslim settlers were not ashamed of their colonial past, they gloried in it. Their historical legacy was based on seizing indigenous sites, appropriating them and renaming them after the new conquerors.

The only reason there's a debate about the Temple Mount is because Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and ordered a mosque built on a holy Jewish site. The only reason there's a debate about East Jerusalem is because invading Muslim armies seized half the city in 1948, bombed synagogues and ethnically cleansed the Jewish population to achieve an artificial Muslim settler majority.

The only Muslim claim to Jerusalem or to any other part of Israel is based purely on the enterprise of colonial violence. There is no Muslim claim to Israel based on anything other than colonialism, invasion and settlement.

Israel is littered with Omar mosques, including one built in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, because Islam is a colonial entity whose mosques testify to their invasive origins by celebrating colonialism as their true religion. The faith of Islam is the sworn religion of the sword.

Islam is a religion of colonialism that spread through invasion, settlement and conquest. Its caliphs, from the original invaders, including Omar, to the current Caliph of ISIS, wielded and wield religious authority in the service of the Islamic colonial enterprise.

Allah is the patron deity of colonialism. Jihad is just colonialism in Arabic. Islamic theology is nothing but the manifest destiny of the Muslim conquest of the world, colonial settler enterprises dressed up in the filmy trappings of religion appropriated from the culture of conquered Jewish and Christian minorities. Muslim terrorism is a reactionary colonial response to the liberation movements of the indigenous Jewish population.

Even "Allahu Akbar" did not originate as a religious sentiment. It does not mean "God is Great", as it is often mistranslated. It was Mohammed's taunt to the Jews he was ethnically cleansing. His purge of a minority group proved that "Allah was Greater". Islamic colonialism is used to demonstrate the existence of Allah. And the best way to worship Allah is through the colonialism of the Jihad.

Islam would not have existed without colonialism. It still can't exist without it. That is why the violence continues. The only way to end the violence is for Muslims to reject their theology of colonialism.

But instead of taking ownership of their real history, the Muslim settler population evades its guilt through propaganda by claiming to be the victims of colonialism by the indigenous Jewish population. This twisted historical revisionism is backed by bizarre nonsense such as claiming that Jesus was a Palestinian or that the Arabs are descended from the Philistines. The Muslim settlers insist on continuing to celebrate colonialism while claiming to be an indigenous population that was always living in Israel.

You can have one or the other. You can have your mosques celebrating the conquest and suppression of the indigenous population or your claims of being the indigenous population. But you can't switch from being the indigenous population to being its conquerors whenever it suits your pseudo-historical narrative. You can't claim to be the Philistines, the Jews and their Islamic conquerors at the same time.

From its Roman origins, Palestine has always been a colonial fantasy of remaking Israel by erasing its original Jewish identity. The Arab mercenaries who were deployed by the Romans in that original colonial enterprise continued it by becoming self-employed conquerors for their own colonial empire. The name Palestine remains a linguistic settlement for reimagining a country without a people and a past as a blank slate on which the colonial identity of the invaders can be written anew. That is still the role that the Palestine myth and mythology serves.

Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh complains about "linguistic colonialism". When Muslims rename the Spring of Elisha, a Jewish biblical figure, Ein as-Sultan in honor of an Islamic colonial ruler, that's linguistic colonialism. When Jews restore the original indigenous names that Jewish sites held before Muslim colonialism, that's not colonization. It's the exact opposite. It's decolonization.

Promoting mythical claims of a Palestinian state isn't decolonization, it's colonization. Or recolonization. Advocates for "Palestine" are not fighting colonialism, but promoting it. They are advocating for a discredited Muslim settler fantasy and against the indigenous Jewish population of Israel.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





13 April, 2016

The psychology of prejudice

At least since 1950, psychologists have been associating prejudice with mental problems.  You are allegedly maladjusted if you are prejudiced about anything.  Although I sometimes do, I have a strong prejudice against driving through a red light.  Does that make me prejudiced?  I think it is apparent that not all pre-judging is bad and may even be wise on occasions.  So their psychologizing of prejudice has always been uphill for them and mostly now seems to have been abandoned.  For some decades now, many psychologists have accepted it as normal.

So I was interested to look at an encyclopedic account of what we now know about prejudice -- one published in a book called The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology, in 2012.

The article was written by two very experienced researchers in the field --  Cohrs and Duckitt  -- and is generally moderate and cautious, as an encyclopedic article should be.

But because there is clearly "good" prejudice (such as opposition to the KKK) as well as "bad" prejudice, the authors soon hit a rock.  They recognize that value judgments intrude at that point.  Rather heroically, however, they avoid value judgments and define prejudice simply as a "negative attitude".  I hate to do this to two earnest people but my background in analytical philosophy immediately makes me get critical about that.  The definition overlooks the time element in prejudice.  It is something you do before you do something else.  For instance, I certainly have a negative attitude to ill health but does that mean I am prejudiced against ill health?  We are in deep waters there, I think.

But let me be indulgent and overlook that. I am pleased that they agree with something that has repeatedly emerged in my own research:  "Thus, while tendencies to favor and identify with one’s  own group may be universal, intergroup prejudice is not a universal consequence".  In other words, you can be patriotic without being a racist.

So is there a prejudiced personality?  Is the prejudiced person rigid, intolerant of ambiguity, lacking in openness and all that old guff?  Cohrs and Duckitt reject all that and say that there are only two real predictors of prejudice:  SDO and RWA.  Which is quite hilarious.

The SDO scale CONTAINS expressions of group prejudice so it is no wonder that it predicts it!  In statistician's terms, the correlations are artifactual.  I am disappointed in John Duckitt for not knowing that.  I am pretty sure I have pointed that out to him in the past.   In 2003 I put online  some fuller comments on the SDO scale.  It is a mess.

And as for the RWA (Right-wing Authoritarianism) scale, who knows what it measures?  In Russia the people who get the highest scores on it are former Communists, so it certainly is not a measure of anything Right-wing.  Our present authors describe it as measuring "a combination of traditionalism, support for authorities, and favoring coercive social control".

That's probably as good a description as any but it makes the RWA scale sound very Leftish.  Who are they who ignore the obvious facts and rely on appeals to authority to justify their belief in global warming?  It sure isn't conservatives.  And if you want to hear the conservative attitude to authority, just listen to GOP hero Donald Trump.  He rubbishes all the main authorities: The Congress, the political party organizations, the Supreme Court, the President, big business.  He trusts only the people, which is exactly right in a democracy. 

Marxists have often talked about "the people" but have never represented them.  Trump does.  From Marx and Engels on, Marxists have always been low wattage bourgeois intellectuals  -- confirmed ivory tower denizens.

And as for coercive social control, who is it who wanted to "fundamentally transform" America?  Hint: His surname begins with an O.   So it is a type of Leftism  that engenders racism?  It fits.  Aside from the Muslims, all the antisemitism in both Britain and America today is coming from the Left -- particularly in Britain.  And Hitler was a socialist.

Cohrs & Duckitt did not draw that inference, however, perhaps due to a general political naivety.  There also seems to be an underlying political naivety in this statement:

"Simply categorizing people as members of one’s own social category or as members of another social category seems to automatically generate identi?cation with one’s group and a motivational tendency to positively differentiate it from other groups"

So you are always positive towards your own group?  Hardly. Many  American Leftists HATE America and lots of Jews are very negative about Israel.  Even Leftist Israelis are very critical of Israel. 

I think Cohrs and Duckitt need to get out into the fresh air a lot more.  There's a different world out there






How evolution made us xenophobes

The article below is fairly typical of modern psychological thinking.  It treats prejudice as inborn and universal

All the evidence suggests that migrants boost economic growth. So why don’t we just fly people who want to work to countries where there are jobs and welcome them with open arms?

Prejudices rooted in humanity’s evolutionary past may be partly to blame.  "Perceptions of competition drive a lot of our thinking and are difficult to avoid," says Victoria Esses at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Humans think of their support systems as a zero-sum game – so if one person gains, another must lose out.

Such perceptions were accurate during our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers when the appearance of others on our patch meant fewer mastodons or mushrooms for us. If they were close relatives they might share – or at least our common genes would benefit from their success.

But anyone displaying different cultural markers was likely to be a competitor. A modern capitalist economy is not a zero-sum game – if you add more workers, it grows. Regardless of this, our evolutionary hang-ups make it difficult to accept the economic sense in welcoming immigrants.

That’s not all. We are instinctively wary of close contact with strangers because in our evolutionary past this helped us guard against infectious disease, says Mark Schaller at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Separate groups of people often have different histories of exposure and acquired immunity to pathogens. A disease carried innocuously by one might devastate another, as happened to the Native Americans after Europeans arrived.

Steven Neuberg at Arizona State University in Tempe notes that groups also evolve different survival-enhancing practices. "Foreigners with different rules might interfere with the social coordination you need to do important tasks, or might get members of your group to follow their rules instead," he says. "Chaos could emerge if your group makes decisions by consensus but theirs is authoritarian."

Schaller and Neuberg believe that for both these reasons, human cultures evolved to be wary of close interaction with people who were different from their group.

This xenophobia persists, says Neuberg, who has found that people feel threatened by groups with different values of many kinds. Ethnic groups in modern cities often form enclaves rather than mixing randomly – which can foster strong local communities but also engenders wider mistrust. To live in multicultural societies, we will need to learn to get past such evolved tendencies.

SOURCE






Witch Hunt Against Pro-Lifer David Daleiden Continues

The state of California truly is a quagmire. This week David Daleiden, the pro-life activist who heads the Center for Medical Progress — the organization that’s under attack for exposing Planned Parenthood’s practice of fetal harvesting — suffered another major setback when his home was raided by California Department of Justice agents. According to The Washington Post, the devices that were confiscated "contained all of the video Daleiden had filmed as part of his 30-month project, ‘including some very damning footage that has yet to be released to the public,’ he said." Purely coincidental, surely.

Suffice to say, this is a bizarre development. As Ed Morrissey observes, "The only charges announced against Daleiden are in Texas, where a grand jury indicted him and colleague Sandra Merritt on the heinous charge of using a fake ID." But this is no ordinary witch hunt. The abortion lobby wants to make sure this never happens again, which explains why California officials are now raiding his home. "It’s clearly intended as an intimidation technique, and a warning pour encourager les âutres who might want to call a politically protected industry to account for its actions," adds Morrissey.

Former federal prosecutor Matt Heffron chimed in too, saying, "To storm into a private citizen’s home with a search warrant is outrageously out of proportion for the type of crime alleged. It’s a discredit to law enforcement, an oppressive abuse of government power."

Recall that late last year thousands of prisoners were freed by Obama’s Justice Department. Meanwhile, their Democrat enablers want felons' voting rights restored, yet they believe, as Hillary Clinton recently argued, that "the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights." When we leave what constitutes crime to the eye of the beholder, it’s the wrongdoers who walk free. And it’s the whistleblowers — like the people exposing Planned Parenthood’s gruesome death mill — and the victims of abortion who pay an insufferable price.

SOURCE





It's Come To This: NPR 'When Is It OK To Profit From Cooking Other Cultures' Food?'

Progressivism’s stupidity has no boundaries. We all know that, but when we have to debate whether we have to segregate food because…culture, you know that we’ve entered a state of decay. Yes, only white people can cook "white food," Asians can only cook their cuisine, and blacks are master chefs in their realm. National Public Radio weighed in on this neo-apartheid regarding food asking last week "when is it OK to profit from cooking other cultures’ food?"

Folks, even by cooking other cultures’ food, and dare I say try to make a living off of it, could be cultural appropriation and a triggering of epic proportions. Or, if you’re an adult, it could be an area where you can enjoy a culture’s cuisine, learn more about it if it was mind-blowing, and really not give a flying you know what about who cooks it. Seriously, are progressives going to enter, say, a Thai restaurant and have anxiety attacks over the ethnicity of the chef? Apparently, that's a legitimate question in this LSD-laced nightmare (via NPR):

    "Recently, we started a conversation about food and race. Specifically, we wondered out loud, who gets to cook — and become the face of — a culture's cuisine?

    Our question was prompted by a recent Sporkful interview with Rick Bayless, who has faced criticism over his long career. Although he is an Oklahoman with no Mexican ancestry, he has become one of the most prominent ambassadors for Mexican cuisine in America....

    As with many things involving race and class in America, there are no easy answers — and we're not expecting to find any clear-cut ones. We're more interested in starting a conversation.

Newsbusters’ Tim Graham wrote that Bayless fed the First Couple Mexican food while in Chicago. Are they traitors to the cause? Probably not, but he did warn that Bayless could get some protesters coming his way:

    This is mildly amusing, since Bayless loves feeding the Obamas some Mexican food in Chicago. Some thought it was fine, it's a free country, and some did not, so Bayless might want to watch out for protesters:

    "when white people do this, they're inspired. when others do this, they're knockoffs. that's the reality"

    "And is it OK that people perceive the food the white chef adopted as worth more than they would pay for the original?"

Students at Oberlin College have similar gripes about their cafeteria food.

Yet, I’m going to trust the American public. I think the vast majority of people who aren’t miserable and self-righteous are perfectly fine with Bayless serving up awesome Mexican food. As a Korean American, I couldn’t care less if the ambassador of Korean cuisine to America is a white, black, or Hispanic. It’s good food, and it originated in the region of my birth. Other folks just cook it. Those recipes are centuries old. I just don’t see where a conniption fit is warranted. And I’m pretty sure other people, of all races, feel the same. Just relax, shut the hell up, and enjoy the Kimchi … you sad, sad* people.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





12 April, 2016

Multiculturalist jailed for keeping wife 'in servitude'



A man was handed a two year jail sentence Friday after becoming the first in England to be convicted of keeping his wife "in domestic servitude".

In what the Crown Prosecution Service said was the first case of its kind in England, London's Woolwich Crown Court heard that Safraz Ahmed, 34, imprisoned and beat his wife after an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

The mechanic from Charlton in southeast London forced his wife, Sumara Iram, to cook, clean and look after his mother from 5am to midnight every day after she moved to Britain in 2012.

He also slapped her in the face when she asked him to consummate their marriage, throwing tins of cat food at her head and covering her face with a cushion in other attacks.

Iram, 28, who had a master's degree in Islamic Studies, was forbidden from leaving the house alone and took an overdose before eventually calling the emergency services in 2014, the court heard.

Sentencing Ahmed to two years in prison for holding a person in domestic servitude, Judge Christopher Hehir told him: "She was bullied and controlled by you, given little money and expected to cook, clean and look after your family as if she was a skivvy.

"She described your behaviour as physical and mental torture and in my judgement, she was right."

Damaris Lakin, a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer who worked on the trial, said it was a "ground-breaking case which demonstrates how far we have come in tackling modern-day slavery".

The couple are now divorced.

SOURCE






Bigoted homosexuals

Must not associate with conservatives

A leading gay and lesbian business group that was set to honor Governor Charlie Baker at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., this month has abruptly pulled its invitation after learning Baker will speak at a GOP conference in Las Vegas this weekend with top conservatives.

The National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce said Thursday night it has dropped its plan to celebrate Baker at its "Best of the Best Awards Dinner" on April 26 unless he decides to avoid the Las Vegas gathering and also embrace a bill that would protect transgender people in Massachusetts from discrimination in malls, restaurants, and other public accommodations.

The announcement came after US Representative Joe Kennedy III, a Massachusetts Democrat, balked at being an honorary co-host of the gala because of Baker’s refusal to take a stand on the transgender bill, which Kennedy strongly backs.

The episode underscores the difficulty Baker faces in attempting to both build bridges to national Republicans and also maintain his moderate image back home. A popular figure who supports gay marriage and abortion rights, Baker has repeatedly emphasized that his Massachusetts brand of Republicanism is different from the national GOP’s.

The Globe reported Wednesday that Baker is planning to speak at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s spring leadership meeting in Las Vegas, along with conservatives such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and controversial pastor John Hagee, who vociferously opposes gay marriage.

A spokesman Thursday night said Baker will still attend the Las Vegas confab. Baker issued a statement blaming the decision to disinvite him from the gay and lesbian chamber event on "partisan politics.’’

Baker and his administration have worked closely with the chamber on an initiative to boost gay and lesbian businesses that was trumpeted as groundbreaking by both groups.

In November, Baker announced the expansion of a program that helps businesses owned by minorities, women, and veterans gain better access to a portion of an estimated $4 billion a year the state spends buying goods and services. The changes are poised to aid state vendors that contract with businesses certified as being owned by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people.

And chamber officials say they’ve been quietly pushing the Baker administration to support the transgender bill.

But Thursday, the two top officials at the chamber, president Justin Nelson and chief executive Chance Mitchell, issued a sharp statement.

They said they were not previously aware he planned to attend the Las Vegas conference, and that the gathering has "speakers whose values and positions" on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, community, are "antithetical to everything for which the Best-of-the-Best awards, the NGLCC, and our partners stand."

The officials said their group informed the governor Thursday that "until he pulls out from this conference and publicly commits to full LGBT inclusion in Massachusetts, he will not receive the previously announced recognition, which would have allowed him to be present alongside our esteemed partners committed to dignity and respect for all Americans."

Kennedy was originally a co-host for the chamber event, which is also slated to include House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat.

But after the Globe reported that Baker was going to be honored as well, Kennedy balked because the governor has not gotten behind the transgender public accommodations bill.

"Congressman Kennedy is proud to consider himself a friend to the NGLCC," Kennedy spokeswoman Emily Kaufman said in a statement before the group’s announcement. "However he has respectfully asked the organization to remove his name from the list of honorary co-hosts for this event, given his strong support for transgender rights and Governor Baker’s refusal to support the public accommodations legislation currently before the State House."

Late Thursday, Kaufman said Kennedy will now, once again, be an honorary co-host of the gala.

Baker portrayed the chamber’s decision as partisan.

"As the only governor in the country to recognize gay- and lesbian-owned businesses and as the only sitting Republican governor in the nation to sign the Supreme Court amicus [friend of the court] brief endorsing marriage equality, I am disappointed that some are putting partisan politics ahead of the sound public policy of treating gay and lesbian business owners with dignity and respect," Baker said in a lengthy written statement.

The governor, who has a cordial relationship with the heavily Democratic Legislature, said he takes pride in making efforts to "reach across the partisan divide to find common ground with people who may not always agree with me and believe some elected officials’ reluctance to do the same is what ails our political system and does a disservice to the people we work for."

And, in reference to the pending transgender legislation, Baker said he continues to "believe no one should be discriminated against based on gender identity, which is why I supported the transgender protections enacted in 2011 and look forward to reviewing further proposals should they reach my desk."

Thursday marked a shift from the November announcement of the new state vendor program, heralded by both the chamber and Baker as a first-in-the-nation accomplishment.

At the time, Nelson, the cofounder and president of the chamber, lavished praise on Baker, thanking him for his "commitment to the LGBT community in Massachusetts."

SOURCE






PayPal Hypocrite, Does Business in Countries Where Homosexual Behavior Is Illegal

In response to PayPal’s decision to not open a new center in North Carolina because of the state’s law against men using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, Rev. Franklin Graham said PayPal is a "hypocrite" and noted that PayPal does business in countries where homosexual behavior is illegal, but it decided to fault North Carolina.

"PayPal gets the hypocrite of the year award!" said Rev. Graham in an April 6 post on Facebook. "This company says they’re not coming to North Carolina because the legislators and Gov. Pat McCrory have passed a law to protect women and children against sexual predators by not allowing men to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms." 

Graham continued,  "Congressman Robert Pittenger made a great point yesterday: ‘PayPal does business in 25 countries where homosexual behavior is illegal, including 5 countries where the penalty is death, yet they object to the North Carolina legislature overturning a misguided ordinance about letting men in to the women’s bathroom? Perhaps PayPal would like to try and clarify this seemingly very hypocritical position.’"

"PayPal operates in countries including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Yemen for Pete’s sake," said Rev. Graham, son of world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham.  "Just last month PayPal announced they would be expanding in Cuba, a country in which homosexuals and transgender people have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed."

"[U]nder the current law [in North Carolina] that they are so strongly protesting, PayPal could have chosen their own corporate bathroom policies," said Rev. Graham.

In his post, Rev. Graham noted that North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, in response to PayPal, said on April 5:  "If our action in keeping men out of women's bathrooms and showers protected the life of just one child or one woman from being molested or assaulted, then it was worth it. North Carolina will never put a price tag on the value of our children. They are precious and priceless. If a corporation wanting to do business in North Carolina does not see the worth of our children in the same light, then I wish them well as they do business somewhere else."

"We need more politicians across the country with this kind of backbone," said Rev. Graham. "Pray for the NC governor, lieutenant governor, and legislators that they stand strong against the attacks of this wicked agenda."

Two weeks ago, the North Carolina legislature passed a law that says biological males must use men’s rooms and biological females must use women’s rooms (and locker rooms). The law allows transgenders to use unisex bathrooms, and transsexuals, post-surgery, can use the bathroom that their new anatomy matches.

PayPal, a pro-homosexual company, objected, however, and CEO Dan Schulman issued a statement saying the company would not now open a new operations center in Charlotte, which would employ about 400 people.

"The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture," said Schulman. "PayPal is known to be a supporter of LGBT rights. The company earned a 100% ranking on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2016 Corporate Equality Index, a national report on corporate policies related to LGBT workplace equality."

SOURCE






Leftist inability to accept reality

Conservative Los Angeles filmmaker, journalist and playwright Phelim McAleer has provided a great deal of insight into the denialism that forms the heart of the progressive mindset.

Last year, McAleer penned "Ferguson," a play about the deadly confrontation between police officer Darren Wilson and teenager Michael Brown. As stated on the play’s website, "The purpose of FERGUSON is to reveal the truth about what really happened on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO and to look at why and how the Grand Jury came to the decision they did."

Moreover, in an industry currently roiled by a lack of diversity, it was a play "that offered ten roles for black men and women and even three significant roles for black women over 40 — which everyone agrees can be a career death zone for women (of all races)," McAleer explained in a recent editorial for The Daily Wire.

The device McAleer used to construct the play is something called "verbatim theater," meaning the entire drama was constructed from the exact words spoken by those interviewed about a particular event or topic. McAleer revealed exactly what that meant in this case, stating "this was to be no whitesplaining of the issue. I wrote, or rather curated, the play only using actual Grand Jury testimony of witnesses (most of them black). I didn’t change their testimony at all. Not a paragraph, word or comma was added. It was to be a minute by minute account by multiple eyewitnesses of the last hours of Michael Brown’s life."

An initially "enthusiastic" cast of 13 signed up for the staged reading over four nights at the Odyssey Theater in Santa Monica, California. But they apparently brought a lot of assumptions with them. Assumptions GQ Magazine described as expecting a play that "would proclaim Darren Wilson, the officer who shot the unarmed 18-year-old dead on August 9, 2014, to be in the wrong."

Most of the cast’s enthusiasm lasted as long as the first rehearsal. After that, nine of the original 13 actors quit.

Some of the would-be cast members illuminated the reasons for their discontent. "It felt like the purpose of the piece was to show, ‘Of course he was not indicted — here’s why,’" stated Philip Casnoff, who admitted he hadn’t read the full script before arriving for the rehearsal. Following his discovery that McAleer was the playwright, the self-professed "very liberal, left-wing-leaning," actor decided, "Whoa, this is not the place for me to be."

Actress Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of civil rights movement leader Ralph David Abernathy, also quit when McAleer refused to edit the play to her liking. "We were all concerned because the testimony made Michael Brown look like a villain and a big bully and some drugged-out kid who was a bad guy," she said before quitting. "Omitted from the script was the autopsy and the medical examiner’s report about how many times Michael was shot." Abernathy wanted the drama to include the part of the medical examiner’s report indicating Brown was shot in the top of his head — because it apparently suggested to her that Wilson was standing over Brown when he shot him.

Actually, there were three autopsies performed on Brown. One was done by St. Louis County, another was privately commissioned by Brown’s family and a third was undertaken by medical examiners from the U.S. military. Media and advocate "theories" abounded as to what those autopsies actually indicated, but there is no dispute Brown was shot six times. Yet there was also physical evidence that included DNA samples taken from the "interior left front door handle" of Wilson’s police vehicle indicating Brown was the "source of the major male contributor profile," ballistics evidence proving the gun had been fired into the door of the vehicle, and several eyewitness accounts reporting a "tussle" in Wilson’s car, prior to the shooting.

All of the physical evidence is consistent with Wilson’s grand jury testimony. In addition, that grand jury heard from more 60 witnesses, whose testimony ran to several thousand pages of transcripts. The grand jury declined to indict Wilson, leading to an investigation by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice. They also declined to indict Wilson because there was "no evidence" to disprove Wilson’s testimony that he feared for his safety, or evidence proving Brown had his hands up when he was shot. The report further noted that witnesses who asserted otherwise were "inaccurate because they are inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence," or that "some of those accounts are materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no explanation, credible or otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time."

In other words, some of the witnesses lied.

Despite all this, Veralyn Jones, a black cast member who also resigned, offered the ultimate fallback position progressives take when reality conflicts with their carefully crafted narrative. "He claims that he wrote this to try to get to the truth of it, but everybody’s truth is totally subjective," she said. "When you come to the matter of what really happened, nobody really knows for sure, because everybody has a different take on it. … It just didn’t feel right to me."

"Subjective truth," which is nothing more than flat out denial of reality, forms the heart of the progressive movement. From the "hands up, don’t shoot" lie that remains the principal impetus of the Black Lives Matter movement, to the leftist EU leaders who deny importing millions of Middle Eastern "refugees" is tied to increasing numbers of terror attacks and rapes, the "narrative" is all that matters.

With regard to the choices he made for his play, McAleer stood by his selection of the particular accounts he chose from more than 5,000 pages of transcript. "I picked the most dramatic chronological descriptions, the biggest liars and the biggest truth-tellers," he said at the time. "It should be remarkably simple, but it’s not. It’s very complex."

In reflecting on that stand last week, McAleer noted the quitting cast members "did not want to hear the genuine voices — even if they were black and under oath," further observing their walkout "made a mockery of claims that there is a need for more diverse roles in the entertainment industry. This was a predominantly black cast in a play about a topic that was about an issue — police shootings of black men — that was of enormous interest to the black community."

Enormous interest maybe — but only under certain circumstances. "In reality what activists obviously meant was that they wanted black roles that pushed a left/liberal agenda," McAleer stated. "They may have wanted the actors faces to be a diverse color but they so did not want diversity of thought or ideas to be presented on the stage. No — those ideas had to be shut down."

Shutting down the truth has disastrous consequences. Chicago leads the multi-city upsurge in violent crime more than likely attributable to the "Ferguson effect" that makes police officers hesitant to do their jobs. The city is on track to top 500 homicides for only the second time in the last seven years. Unfortunately, most of the murder victims will be black Americans.

That’s the truth. And there’s nothing remotely subjective about it.

SOURCE






Mississippi Is on the Right Side of History

Lawmakers in Mississippi took a stand for the First Amendment this week, and the usual suspects aren’t happy.

Liberal politicians, LGBT activists, and big business are all in a tizzy, claiming discrimination where absolutely none exists and completely misrepresenting this commonsense law in hopes of bullying the state to reverse its decision.  

Here’s the scenario: Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last summer, same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. The new Mississippi law does nothing to change that. As a matter of fact, this new law does not take away any right from anyone.

Instead, it protects something we used to cherish in this country—our rights under the First Amendment.

To be clear, the law does not ban any form of marriage. The law does not stop or delay the granting of wedding licenses to gay couples. The law does not ban gay adoption. Et cetera. Et cetera.

It simply says the government can’t force ministers or religious organizations or private business owners to participate in such activities if doing so violates their religious beliefs.

But apparently the whole "live and let live" mantra we’ve heard from the left for years doesn’t go far enough. They don’t just want their rights, which they now have; they want to strip away the religious freedom rights of fellow citizens and force them to approve and participate.

Some liberal governors are now saying they won’t allow their state employees to travel to Mississippi on official business. Well-known companies are threatening economic sanctions and boycotts because they don’t like the law.

Gov. Phil Bryant and the Mississippi state legislature should be applauded for not caving to such pressure and for not selling out the First Amendment rights of their citizens for a pot of "intolerance" porridge.

Mississippi is on the right side of history. By standing up for our Constitution and the First Amendment, the state is fighting to protect our rights of free speech and religious freedom—the very rights that throughout history have made the difference between a free society and one that isn’t.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************






11 April, 2016

New England Journal of Medicine increasingly targeted by critics

Their editor's oppposition to data sharing is inexcusable.  Lots of articles in medical journals cry out for reanalysis of their data.  All the extreme quintile studies, for instance, cry out for a re-exploration of what actually went on in the data. Throwing out four fifths of your data in order to demonstrate something is a recourse of desperation and worthy of no confidence in what is reported.  And calling people who do reanalysis "research parasites" is just abuse and evidence of a weak case.  "Research symbionts" might be justifiable but that is obviously not abusive enough.  NEJM is clearly out of step with current concerns about research integrity

The New England Journal of Medicine is arguably the best-known and most venerated medical journal in the world. Studies featured in its pages are cited more often, on average, than those of any of its peers. And the careers of young researchers can take off if their work is deemed worthy of appearing in it.

But following a series of well-publicized feuds with prominent medical researchers and former editors of the journal, some are questioning whether the publication is slipping in relevancy and reputation. The journal and its top editor, critics say, have resisted correcting errors and lag behind others in an industrywide push for more openness in research. And dissent has been dismissed with a paternalistic arrogance, they say.

In a widely derided editorial this year, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, the journal’s editor-in-chief, and a deputy used the term "research parasites" to describe researchers who seek others’ data to analyze or replicate their studies, which many say is a crucial step in the scientific process. And last year, the journal ran a controversial series saying concerns about conflicts of interest in medicine are oversimplified and overblown.

"They basically have a view that . . . they don’t need to change or adapt. It’s their way or the highway," said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and chief academic officer at Scripps Health in La Jolla, Calif.

Topol and another cardiologist were criticized by Drazen and his co-authors last year after they wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times saying the data behind a groundbreaking study about blood pressure treatment should be made available to doctors right away — not delayed for journal publication.

"Most people are afraid to say anything about the New England Journal because they’re afraid they won’t get something published there," said Topol, whose work last appeared in its pages in 2011. "That’s part of this oppression."

In an interview, Drazen said the recent criticisms are misguided. The goal for the research the journal publishes is to be accurate, he said, while its editorials are sometimes designed to be "controversial" as a means of triggering discussion.


"If there’s anything that I have a passion for, it’s getting it right," he said. "We work very hard at that. We’re not arrogant. We’re not dismissive."

Brooding over the New England Journal of Medicine’s future comes at a pivotal moment for medical journals more broadly.

Like the larger publishing world, their traditionally slow pace and often imperious control have been jolted by the freedom and brashness of the Internet. So-called open-access journals, which publish online and don’t charge for subscriptions, are proliferating, as are websites that allow researchers to post their results before they have been externally vetted. Respected academics, including Harvard’s medical school dean, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, are calling for fundamental changes in the way research is reviewed and published, even proposing that peer reviewers give up their historic anonymity.

This push for transparency tracks the rise of research watchdogs who hunt for evidence of fraud and misconduct, then publicize their findings, often blasting out viral bombs via social media. There’s even a popular website called Retraction Watch, whose main goal is to flag such lapses, which had largely gone unnoticed even a few years ago.

In response, some top journals, including The BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, have begun moving toward more openness in their operations. The BMJ now requires researchers to share the underlying data that forms the basis of their clinical trials and allows comments on all of its articles, upending the strong hand editors previously had to determine which dissent was worthy of airing. It has even had outsiders examine questions raised about controversial studies.

The New England Journal, in contrast, its critics say, has steadfastly clung to an increasingly antiquated view of medical journals as sole arbiters of what should be made public and whether dissenting views should be heard.

"The BMJ wants to take us forward in the new century and the New England Journal of Medicine is trying to take us backwards," said Dr. Vinay Prasad, an expert in evidence-based medicine and an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, who has become an outspoken critic of the New England Journal.

The publication Drazen inherited was initially launched as a quarterly in January 1812 with the less pithy title of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery and the Collateral Branches of Medical Science. Today, it is read each week by more than 600,000 people in 177 countries, according to the journal’s website.

In 1984, the journal was at the forefront of a nascent effort to respond to the potential bias arising from financial ties between pharmaceutical and device makers and physicians. Editor Arnold S. Relman established a new policy, calling on doctors and researchers to disclose their funding and commercial interests. Six years later he went a step further, prohibiting authors with ties to companies from writing editorials or reviews of medical literature relating to their products.

Drazen’s own ties to the pharmaceutical industry presented something of an obstacle when he was named editor in May 2000. A well-known pulmonologist, he had received money for consulting or research into asthma and its treatments from nine drug companies. Because of those ties, he recused himself for two years from editing or personally selecting any papers related to asthma or those companies.

Two years into his editorship, Drazen loosened the journal’s conflict policy. He wrote that the policy Relman had put in place — and that his successors had affirmed — had constrained editors from publishing the best information for doctors. The new guidelines said authors of editorials and reviews couldn’t have "significant" ties to a company, which are defined as receiving more than $10,000 annually from a single company.

The journal dug into the topic again last May with a three-part series of articles questioning efforts to curb financial conflicts of interest among doctors and researchers.

"Although, by definition, a conflict of interest represents a risk that judgment will be compromised — not a determination that such a lapse has occurred — the pharmascolds’ narrative about conflicts of interest often conflates the two," author Lisa Rosenbaum wrote, using a pejorative word some have used to describe those who lament the influence of industry on medical decisions.

Drazen’s predecessors Jerome P. Kassirer and Marcia Angell, and former senior editor Robert Steinbrook took to the pages of The BMJ to criticize their former home. "Judges are expected to recuse themselves from hearing a case in which there are concerns that they could benefit financially from the outcome. Journalists are expected not to write stories on topics in which they have a financial conflict of interest," they wrote. "Yet Rosenbaum and Drazen seem to think it is insulting to physicians and medical researchers to suggest that their judgment can be affected in the same way."

Asked whether the journal had plans to further revise its policy on conflicts of interest, Drazen said, "We always continually evaluate what we do to make sure we’re doing the best job possible." None of Rosenbaum’s pieces, he added, "mentioned anything about us changing our policy."

Since 2010, ProPublica has written extensively about conflicts of interest in medicine and has created a tool called Dollars for Docs that allows users to look up payments to doctors by drug and medical device companies. A second tool, Surgeon Scorecard, which includes complication rates, was criticized by Rosenbaum in a perspective piece in the journal last year.

Rosenbaum, in an e-mail, said the reaction to the series on conflicts of interest was much as she had hoped. "One of the primary goals of the series was to start a conversation so that we could move beyond what has become a very reflexive (and typically negative) response to physician-industry interactions," she wrote.

Some researchers and doctors have also decried what they perceive as the journal’s resistance to becoming more transparent about the research it publishes.

In February, a group of British scientists faulted the journal, as well as some of its peers, for failing to disclose that the questions being answered in certain studies were not the same as those in the researchers’ original protocols. Changes are normal and sometimes to be expected, but they need to be disclosed, the group believes.

When the group shared its findings in a series of letters to the editor, the journal’s editors sent dismissive responses, they said, declining to make any changes to the papers or publish the team’s criticisms.

In an interview, Drazen said his staff initially reviewed a couple of the group’s claims, found them without merit and moved on. Through a spokeswoman, he e-mailed documents that he said rebutted the group’s contentions regarding two of the studies.

Drazen also noted that in recent years, the journal began posting the protocols and statistical analysis plan for all clinical trials it publishes.

Shown the journal’s rebuttals, British researcher and author Ben Goldacre and his team said it not only failed to rebut their contentions, but showed that the editors may not have fully understood the studies’ findings and metrics.

The critiques of the journal have moved onto the pages of competing journals and mainstream news sources, with several recently questioning why it has been slow to correct or clarify studies.

A piece last month in The BMJ reported on mounting concerns over the journal’s handling of a major 2012 study that compared the risks of two products — saline and hydroxyethyl starch — that boost blood volume in critically ill patients. Though the results were not conclusive, the study suggested that starch solutions were more dangerous, leading to a warning from the Food and Drug Administration and a precipitous drop in sales.

The company that makes starch solutions wrote a letter skeptical of the study’s methodology and results. The journal, according to The BMJ article, wouldn’t correct the article or publish the company’s letter.

Within days of The BMJ article, the New England Journal appended a correction to the study about the values in a table, but editors otherwise stood by the findings.

Drazen said that when concerns are raised about a study, the authors are asked for a response, which is analyzed by statistical reviewers.

"Recently we got another query about the same issue," Drazen said. "When we went back to requery the author, there, in fact, was an error in the paper that was published."

The incident that has provoked the biggest storm came in January, when Drazen and a deputy editor wrote an editorial that some interpreted as critical of burgeoning efforts to share data on clinical research so others can assess the findings and perhaps replicate the analyses.

"There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as ‘research parasites,’" Drazen and deputy editor Dan Longo wrote.

The criticism was immediate, fierce, and widespread — probably more than for anything else the journal has done in many years. In an editorial in the journal Science, titled "#IAmAResearchParasite," editor Marcia McNutt wrote: "No more excuses: Let’s step up to data sharing."

Barry Marshall, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, wrote on Twitter: "Plenty of Nobel prizes came from a new look at other people’s data."

Drazen quickly published a second editorial in which he appeared to backtrack somewhat (he used the word "clarify"), saying he and the journal did support data sharing.

The worry he was initially trying to articulate, Drazen said is that scientists not involved with original research will swoop in, conduct additional analyses (perhaps without understanding the data) and then take credit from those who spent months or years working on the underlying research.

"The data sets are very, very, very complex," he said. "You don’t want someone to analyze the data set not fully understanding it."

For his part, Drazen said he doesn’t see the controversies that have arisen in recent months as any different from those of other periods of his tenure. He is one of the longest-serving editors of a major medical journal at this point.

"In the 16 years, I can’t say that I think this particular last 12 months has been different by a lot," he said. "When issues come up we pay attention to them, and there are always issues coming up."

SOURCE






Russian women who decide against having an abortion can SELL their babies to the state for $3,700 under proposed new law

This is in line with ideas expressed by G.W. Bush and Vatican Cardinal Pell, who urge more support for pregnant women as an abortion preventative

Russian women who decide to sell their babies instead of having an abortion will receive $3,700 under a proposed new law.

Officials are hoping the measure, which was put forward by a MP for the country's nationalist party, will boost the country's birth rate and give children 'a chance to live'.

Around 200,000 women are expected to take part in the proposals, which has not yet passed through government.

Aleksandr Sherin, State Duma MP, wrote in a note accompanying the proposal that it will help 'children who were doomed to die before being born', according to RT.com.

He added: 'Currently only about 20 per cent of women who want an abortion abandon their intention. 'Material stimuli could help to significantly improve this figure.'

The women will have to hand authorities details of their pregnancy - including due date and a letter saying they will not have an abortion - if they want to receive the money.

The money is expected to be given out at a set rate to start with but will be recalculated in line with inflation.

In Russia, abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy is legal. Women who have been raped can request an abortion up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. In the UK, an abortion can be legally carried out if it is within the first 24 weeks.

SOURCE






UK: Labour councillor, 20, suspended over claims she called Hitler 'the greatest man in history'

A labour councillor has been suspended for shockingly offensive anti-Semitic tweets, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The discovery of Aysegul Gurbuz’s vile comments is the latest in a series of anti-Semitic scandals to hit the Labour Party. The 20-year-old student is alleged to have called Adolf Hitler the ‘greatest man in history’ and said she hoped Iran would use a nuclear weapon to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

Miss Gurbuz, who is Muslim, became Luton’s youngest councillor when she was elected to the High Town ward last year.  But last night Miss Gurbuz was suspended after the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism found a series of disturbing posts on her Twitter account from 2011 to 2014.

One tweet, written in January 2013, said: ‘The Jews are so powerful in the US it’s disgusting.’   Another post, in October 2012, said: ‘Ed Miliband is Jewish. He will never become prime minister of Britain.’ And Adolf Hitler was praised as the ‘greatest man in history’ in a tweet in October 2011.

Miss Gurbuz last night denied she had written the tweets and claimed her sister may have posted them.

A Labour spokesman said: ‘Councillor Gurbuz has been suspended from the Labour Party pending an investigation.’

Miss Gurbuz is in her final year at Warwick University, where she is also events organiser for the student union’s Friends of Palestine society.

She told the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism: ‘It was a joint account I had with my sister so I don’t know if she’s gone out and tweeted that, but I’m absolutely appalled right now. ‘Where I live we’ve got very good cohesion with the Jewish community... I’m absolutely shocked.’

Miss Gurbuz did not respond to our calls for comment last night.

Jonathan Sacerdoti, from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, said: ‘These tweets are anti-Semitic. They appear on Aysegul Gurbuz’s personal account and there is no defence for that.

‘Anti-Semitism is rising in Europe and the UK, and the regular anti-Semitic tweets and opinions emanating from the Labour Party have failed to elicit any meaningful response from Jeremy Corbyn. How many more cases must we see before Labour take action?’

Trevor Holden, chief executive of Luton Borough Council, said: ‘This will be referred as a matter of urgency to the council’s independent standards committee to allow a full investigation to take place.

‘The council expects the highest standards of councillors and will not accept any behaviour which could undermine community cohesion.’

SOURCE







More Muslim hate in Britain

A Channel 4 reporter has been reprimanded by the broadcaster after claiming British Muslims are 'sell-outs and Uncle Toms' if they attend government-organised Islamic events.

Investigative journalist Assed Baig, 34, who was born in Birmingham but now lives in London, has also used the pejorative term ‘house Muslim’ on Twitter in relation to moderate Muslims.

And the former BBC reporter referred to any Muslims who attend British government iftars as ‘Uncle Toms’, which is a derogatory term meaning a black person showing obedience to whites.

Although Mr Baig posted the tweets prior to his Channel 4 days, he has been reminded by the broadcaster ‘of his responsibilities as a journalist to be fair and impartial’ when representing it.

In 2011, he tweeted: ‘Anyone that attends a British government iftar is a sell-out and an Uncle Tom.’ And he said in 2012 that the 'term Uncle Tom should be readopted in media and political circles'.

In the same year Mr Baig also insisted on Twitter that the phrase - along with 'choc-ice' and 'coconut' - is not racist, but rather something 'used to described fake and sell-out people.'

Also, in reference to a video of British Muslims dancing to the Pharrell Williams song ‘Happy’, he wrote in April 2014: ‘A man dances for hos master because he's a house Muslim [sic].’

Mr Baig later clarified his views the next day by saying: 'I do not believe everyone in that video to be a house Muslim

Mr Baig, whose tweets were reported by the Guido Fawkes political blog, was criticised by some on Twitter today, but backed by others who said 'keep up the good work' and praised his 'excellent reporting'.

But Fiyaz Mugha, founder of Tell Mama, a Government-backed group which tracks anti-Muslim crimes, told MailOnline: ‘The term "house Muslim" effectively is synonymous with someone using house and using the N-word.

‘It means that people are subservient to a white master or a power structure. We think it actually has some racial connotations to it and also in many instances is used to provide a "them and us".

‘It really reinforces a "them and us" regarding the racial connotations around the term. So actually it's a deeply problematic term and one we've actually been saying should not be used.’

However a spokesman for Media Diversified, a group promoting ‘writers of colour’, tweeted: ‘We are in full support of Assed Baig and the work he has done for both Vice UK and Channel 4 News.

‘Tweets made when there was no verified tick and in conversation are his business to resolve - nobody else’s - and we know he will. So [we] suggest others back off unless they have some other agenda, then that should be revealed.’

A Channel 4 News spokesman told MailOnline this afternoon: 'We are aware of the tweets in question by Assad Baig which pre-date his employment by Channel 4 News.

'They are clearly a personal view relating to that particular period in time. However, he has been reminded of his responsibilities as a journalist to be fair and impartial when representing Channel 4 News at all times.'

Mr Baig can speak Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic - and has worked in countries including the Central African Republic, Myanmar and Libya.

He has also reported from nations including Pakistan, Bosnia and Somalia - and has lived in countries such as Syria and Mauritania. He has not yet responded to a request for comment.

SOURCE






Ray Lewis Tackles Black Lives Matter

Legendary Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis posted a powerful video on Facebook challenging the followers of the Black Lives Matter movement to actually care about black lives. The timing of his post is related to the upcoming anniversary of the Baltimore riots over the death of Freddie Grey.

Although the video was posted April 2nd, it is finally coming to national attention because of its content:

"I’m trying to ask the question to the organization of black lives, if they really mattered, why not riot now? There were 141 murders, 82 murders last year at this time. I’m trying to figure out in my mind why no one is paying attention to black men killing black men. Why we always find ourselves half the victims, and now we have the separation once again that we’re being victimized because of one bad white cop, two bad white cops, three bad white cops, killing a young black brother, but every day we have black-on-black crime, killing each other."

You can watch the full video by clicking here.

Often known as the "reverend" or the "preacher" for his intense, inspirational speaking style that combines morality and religion, Lewis is trying to address the problems affecting our inner cities that are being ignored. As Lewis points out, the murder rate of black men in Baltimore City and Chicago are increasing while politicians and activists ignore them.

Lewis has had his own troubled past, but his youthful indiscretions led to a radical spiritual change in the mid-2000s. Allowing God to shape his life, he began to use his fame and money to help the less fortunate and make great changes. He became a leader on and off the field, and he has continued that path following his retirement.

There has been some backlash to these words, but most of that backlash has come from the more radical of the political activists. Lewis has undermined their efforts and exposed that they are paying lip service to their communities. He has upset their position and forced truth to come to light.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





10 April, 2016

Liz Conor's blindness



Greenie Liz Conor is a very angry lady. She absolutely pours out vituperation at Westerm society generally and her fellow Australians in particular. And she uses a lot of unusual words, in an apparent attempt to sound learned and profound. Race and racism is her shtick and like all Leftists she has a genius for telling only half the story about that. 

She even seems to think it a credit to herself that she is married to a Ceylonese burgher.  But although the burghers tend to be brownish, they  have a lot of European descent and have largely European characteristics. A burgher lady I knew at one stage was pretty assertive too. They even speak English, mostly.  So she hasn't really put her money where her mouth is.

I knew two blonde anti-racist women who did:  Barbara M. and Christine A.  Both married Aboriginal men and just accepted the limitations that imposed on them -- including syphilis in the case of Christine.

Under the heading "A Little Brown-Eyed Babe Washed Ashore", she is very good at blaming the death of Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi on the wrong people.  She completely ignores that fact that he was already dead before he arrived in Europe.  But if he was dead before he arrived in Europe how are "we" to blame?  Liz seems to think "we" are. She even takes it personally.  When she saw a picture of the boy, she found herself "erupting in shame and anger". The fact of the matter is of course that he was one of many victims of Muslim fanaticism.  He and his family were driven from their homeland by the incredibly barbarous ISIS.

And Liz OF COURSE does not mention that his family already had refuge in Turkey when they set out.  They could have stayed in Turkey in peace if they had wanted to.  Their journey was a journey in search of money.  They hoped to exploit Western kindness to get a better standard of living. The very risky journey was motivated by greed, nothing else. The father even put the safety of his children at risk to get more money. The death of the boy was a horror but the Western world had nothing to do with it.  "We" are not to blame.

The person I grieve most for is the mother.  She showed such loving care for her little boy, only to have it all thrown away by a scum father.

I could go on to fill out other incidents that Liz misrepresents but I think you get her typically Leftist strategy of mentioning only those bits that help to fuel her hatred for the rest of us.

But I want to address  another one of her articles in the far-Left "New Matilda".  She is even critical of the Australian Left's favourite Muslim:  Waleed Aly.  Aly had an article in "The Australian" that described Australians as "weird" because we are generally unbothered by the fact that there were Aborigines in the country when white men first arrived.  The fact that we make extensive welfare provision for them cuts no ice, of course.

I have already pointed out at length that Aly's article is just an extended exercise in fantasy so does Liz think similarly?  No. She sees his fantasies as fact.  So how has he raised her ire?  He did something that is a great unforgivable sin to Leftists, including American Leftists:  He praised America!  How heinous can you get?  The bounder!  The cad!

So Liz coped with that by accusing Aly of having ignored the raw deal that American Indians got from white settlers. And there is no doubt that there were real atrocities and betrayals during white settlement of America.  But that is all of the past.  The past is a different country.  The only thing we have any control over is the present.  And in the present there is extensive welfare provision and concessions that benefit the American Indians of today.

Like Australian Aborigines, they have big problems with alcohol but to deny them alcohol would be "paternalist" and "authoritarian", would it not?

So Liz is deliberately blind to most of the things she writes  about.  I guess she hopes that she can deceive a few naive people into sharing her hatreds. She completed her doctorate in Australian cultural history at La Trobe University so she cannot masquerade as simply ill-informed.






Oh dear. Is the fact my wife was a bus driver the final proof I'm stupid? 

By TOM UTLEY

An item in yesterday’s paper brought back a fond memory of my late mother, one winter evening in our London flat in the early Seventies.

My journalist father had arrived home from a marathon session in his favourite Fleet Street pub, and had promptly fallen fast asleep in his armchair. My mother was sitting in hers on the other side of the fire, knitting him an Aran sweater. Home from school, I was sprawled on the sofa, reading a book.

After ten minutes of silence, my father began to snore as only he could — a stentorian, earth-shaking roar of a snore, to rattle the windowpanes and awaken the dead. (My wife tells me I’ve inherited this ear-splitting attribute, but I refuse to believe her.)

My mother and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. After a deafening snort from the figure slumped in the armchair, silence reigned again — only to be broken a few minutes later when the snoring resumed. And so the evening wore on.

Suddenly my mother laughed. ‘I’ve just remembered something your grandfather said when I got engaged to your father,’ she told me. ‘He looked at me sadly and said: "Oh well, my darling daughter, at least with him you’ll never be bored!" ’
 
The report that reminded me of this scene was yesterday’s finding, by U.S. researchers, that women who fancy brainy boyfriends are less likely to be interested in male-dominated careers, such as science, technology or engineering.

I thought of it because my mother was the most home-loving and traditionally feminine of women, without any sort of worldly or career ambition. She loved nothing more than cooking, knitting, sewing, cats, the odd gin and tonic, going to church and generally looking after her husband and four children.

My late father was exceptionally brainy (stop me if I’ve told you this before, but Margaret Thatcher was to describe him on his death as ‘quite simply, the most distinguished Tory thinker of our time’).

True, as his many friends and admirers in politics and journalism will testify, he had enormous charm and a life-enhancing sense of humour — when he wasn’t snoring in his armchair, that is.
But I’ve often thought his chief attraction to my mother, the quality which convinced her this was the man she had to marry, was the stunning brilliance of his mind.

I’ve read several surveys suggesting that most men are terrified of dating highly intelligent women (though I hasten to assure my wife that I’ve never been among that majority).

But what no one can surely deny is that a certain sort of woman just can’t resist a clever man, no matter how little else may appear to be going for him. Think of the romantic successes enjoyed by Stephen Hawking, Andrew Neil, Bernard Levin or Salman Rushdie — hardly matinee idols, let’s agree — and I rest my case.
What I do know, because my mother told me, is that her parents were shocked when she fell in love with my father.

My maternal grandmother in particular — a crashing snob, if truth be told — had very different ideas about the sort of man her beloved and beautiful daughter ought to marry. Grandma had dreamed of a handsome war hero, at the very least, preferably of the rank of earl or above, with plenty of money in the bank and a stately pile to call home.

The heir to the Duke of Norfolk, as a Roman Catholic like her, would have suited her nicely as a son-in-law.

But instead my mother presented her with my odd-looking father-to-be — Anglican, frighteningly skinny, a chain-smoker with awful teeth and not a bean to his name, who lived with an aunt in a pokey flat in Bloomsbury.

Worse even than this, in my grandmother’s book, he spoke with the distinct trace of a Liverpool accent. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he was blind, having lost his sight to infantile glaucoma at the age of nine.

Indeed, the only thing that seemed to be going for him was his extraordinary brain, which had won him a dazzling starred double-first at Cambridge.

But this cut no ice with my grandmother, who would have preferred even the most gormless baronet to this poverty-stricken brainbox who couldn’t see. She foresaw nothing but misery for my mother and tried desperately to make her change her mind.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, my parents’ marriage was one of the happiest I’ve come across. Yes, they had plenty of healthy rows (don’t most couples?). But they adored each other — she, endlessly proud of him, he blissfully content to be dependent on her for everything except the family income, which was his department.

When he left her a widow at 61, she found his memory companion enough for her remaining 24 years. No one else would do.

I have a strong feeling that the researchers from the University at Buffalo, who compiled the survey reported yesterday, wouldn’t have approved at all.

True, my parents’ marriage conformed exactly to their finding that women who go for brainy men tend to favour traditionally feminine occupations, such as home- making or the caring professions. But the scientists make no secret of their belief that it’s a very bad thing for the fairer sex to avoid careers chiefly seen as masculine.

Professor Lora Park, the study’s author, says: ‘Women who had a preference of wanting to date someone smarter than themselves were the ones who distanced themselves the most from STEM fields,’ (she means science, technology, engineering and maths).
‘In general, women have made many advances, but in certain fields of STEM they haven’t made much progress.’

The reason could be, says her team, that women on the hunt for intelligent men are ‘limiting their STEM talents’, deliberately or subconsciously, in order to make themselves seem attractive.

But isn’t there another possibility, quite as plausible? Could it not be many women avoid traditionally masculine occupations because they genuinely prefer those considered to be traditionally feminine?

Indeed, I often feel sorry for today’s girls, under constant pressure to believe there are no psychological differences between the sexes. A whole generation is growing up, encouraged to think there is something to be mildly ashamed of in preferring stay-at-home motherhood or nursing to, say, soldiering or heavy engineering.

We seem even to be reaching the absurd stage where we have to pretend there are no physical differences between men and women. Witness how novelist Ian McEwan has been made to apologise for making the straightforward, if banal, observation: ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.’

After a barrage of abuse from the forces of political correctness, he now says: ‘That the transgender community should want or need to abandon their birth gender or radically redefine it is their right, which should be respected and celebrated.’

Strewth! At this rate, what hope will there be for boys who just want to be boys, or girls who want to be girls?

But back to that American study, and a thought that has been troubling me from the moment I read it. If it is really true, as the survey finds, that women who don’t fancy clever men are drawn to traditionally masculine occupations, then what does this say about me, as the husband of a former bus driver?

In defence of my intellect, I will say only that it was not so much from choice as from pressing financial necessity that my wife drove London double-deckers for two-and-a-half years. I confess it was a miserable time for me, because I felt in my old-fashioned way that her slightly manly job rather undermined my manliness.

Though she never made a fuss, she can’t have been all that happy about it either. I say this because on the very day I moved to the Mail, ten years ago next month — with a hefty pay rise that meant we no longer needed her wages — she handed in her notice at the bus depot.

Now she works part-time, for a lot less money, as secretary to the head of a pro-life campaign group. She’s much happier in her more distinctively feminine occupation. I’m much happier in my masculine role as chief breadwinner.

Heaven knows, I wouldn’t wish to discourage any woman who wants to pursue a career in a field traditionally dominated by men.  But are we really adding to the sum of human happiness by constantly telling those who don’t want ‘masculine’ jobs that they ought to?

SOURCE






British social workers will take your children away from you if they don't like your opinions but ignore children actually suffering harm

Social services were last night accused of failing a little girl who was murdered by her mother stamping on her chest.

Ayeeshia Jane Smith, who was just 21 months old when she died, was handed back to her violent drug-addicted mother Kathryn despite grave concerns about the toddler’s care.

In a shocking case with echoes of the Baby P tragedy, the child’s biological father twice reported injuries she had suffered to social workers but claimed they ‘weren’t interested’.

The toddler, who weighed just 20lbs when she died, was attacked with such force she suffered a fatal heart injury, three broken ribs and bit through her own tongue.

Experts said her injuries were so severe she resembled a high-speed car crash victim.

Social services had been supervising Ayeeshia and she was taken away from Smith for five months and placed with foster carers, during which time she gained weight and her health improved. But she was given back to her mother seven months before her death following a ‘positive risk assessment’.

Campaigners say it was one of a series of missed opportunities by social services to save the little girl. Social workers discussed taking Ayeeshia into care again three weeks before she died, then held another meeting just 24 hours before she was killed – but did not remove the child.

Smith, 23, wept uncontrollably in the dock yesterday after a jury found her guilty of murdering Ayeeshia as she cried ‘stop mummy, stop daddy’. Her ex-partner, Matthew Rigby, 22, was convicted of causing or allowing the child’s death, but cleared of murder.

Last night, Derbyshire Council pledged to investigate after Ayeeshia’s father Ricky Booth, 21, said she had been ‘let down’ by the system. It can also be disclosed that:

Concerns were raised about Smith’s ability as a mother even before Ayeeshia was born;

Ayeeshia suffered a number of ‘concerning’ injuries in the run up to her death, including a life-threatening brain injury, which apparently went unnoticed by doctors;

Smith’s social worker, Stephen Crean, 61, took early retirement last year while facing serious questions over his handling of the case;

Ayeeshia’s godmother said the youngster scavenged in bins after being starved by her mother.

Ayeeshia, who was known as AJ, died from a tear to the heart which triggered a fatal heart attack on May 1, 2014.

Paramedics had been called to Smith and Rigby’s maisonette, in Stretton, Burton-on-Trent, shortly after 4pm that day.

The couple were arrested when a post-mortem examination revealed her injuries.

It also found she had suffered a number of previous injuries in the run up to her death, including bruises to her back and buttocks, head, neck, left eyelid and left leg, as well as a ‘life-threatening bleed to the brain’.

The prosecution said there was a ‘consistent pattern of non-accidental bruising’ which ‘must have happened when one or both were looking after Ayeeshia and about which both must have known’.

Smith and Rigby, both violent drug addicts, had denied having anything to do with the child’s death throughout their six-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court.

They initially tried to claim Ayeeshia had suffered a seizure and the child’s horrific injuries were caused when they attempted CPR. But experts said this simply was not possible.

The couple then turned on each other in the dock, with each saying the other must have been responsible for the toddler’s death.

But a jury convicted Smith of murder after hearing Ayeeshia had been subjected to months of abuse before the final fatal attack. Smith was also convicted of child cruelty after the court heard she was more interested in buying cannabis than feeding her young daughter.

Ayeeshia had eaten just a yoghurt, a chocolate biscuit and a packet of Quavers on the day she died and was ‘very thin’, with her weight in the bottom 2 per cent for her age.

Last night the child’s godmother Esta Barrett, 25, recalled visiting Ayeeshia three months before her death.

She said: ‘I had seen AJ picking food out of the rubbish bin and I told Kat who just told her off. But why would any child take food from the bin if they weren’t hungry?’

Officers who searched Smith’s flat found the toddler had been kept in squalid conditions and skunk cannabis was stashed in her Tommee Tippee drinking cup. When the jury cleared former warehouse worker Rigby of murder, he mouthed ‘Thank you,’ but broke down in tears as they found him guilty of the lesser charge. The pair will be sentenced on Monday.

Smith, who was adopted, fell pregnant in November 2011 when she was 18 but separated from Mr Booth before Ayeeshia was born.

Ayeeshia was taken into care in June 2013 amid concerns about Smith’s relationship with another violent man. The court heard that during this time in care, the little girl thrived and started to put on weight and saying a few words.

Social worker Mr Crean told the court the decision to give Ayeeshia back to her mother was based on a ‘positive risk assessment’ and the fact she had attended five out of 12 sessions of a domestic abuse workshop and ‘now understood what domestic abuse was’. Ayeeshia was returned to Smith in October 2013, by which time she was in a relationship with Rigby, who had previous convictions for assault.

The court heard the couple were ‘two peas from the same pod’ who had a volatile relationship but thrived on the turbulence and their love of cannabis.

In the months leading up to Ayeeshia’s death, Rigby was accused of smashing up their flat and setting fire to the child’s cot.

On the day of Ayeeshia’s death, Smith was said to be ‘annoyed’ because her father had borrowed £40 from her and not paid her back. Neighbour Tracey Roberts said she heard screaming and shouting coming from the couple’s flat and a child’s voice saying ‘stop mummy, stop daddy’ at around 3.10pm.

An ambulance was not called until after 4pm and by the time it arrived Ayeeshia was ‘incredibly pale’. Smith initially told police her daughter was covered in bruises because she had fallen off her potty.

The tragic case echoes that of Baby P, Peter Connolly, who was just 17 months old when he died after suffering more than 50 injuries – despite being on Haringey Council’s at-risk register.

Child cruelty campaigners said Ayeeshia’s murder showed lessons had not been learned from Baby’s P’s death and the subsequent Lord Laming report.

Claude Knights, of charity Kidscape, added: ‘It is extremely depressing to discover that one more vulnerable infant well known to children’s services suffered fatal non-accidental injuries while she was subject to a child protection order.’

The NSPCC called for Smith and Rigby to be ‘severely punished’.

SOURCE






Being born broke doesn’t make you a better person so why do we hate the wealthy so much? Without them we’d all be the poorer

Please give yourself a point for all the following phrases that apply to you:

I don't know my dad.

My dad was a bus driver.

My family arrived in the UK from Pakistan in 1966.

I grew up in a council house.

I went to a failing state school on a sink estate.

I was the first child in my family to go to university, even if it was East Anglia.

I have mixed-race heritage.

If you scored more than one, congratulations. You have all the makings of an underdog. You came from nothing and identify with those who feel life owes them something to compensate.

No one will question whether you know the next stop on the Central Line after Tottenham Court Road or ask you in which month Glastonbury takes place. Because you know what it's like to be poor. You identify with the people.

In fact, you are the perfect politician. Look at Sadiq Khan. He's Labour's candidate for Mayor and front-runner for the role — mainly because his dad was a bus driver.

Did I mention his dad was a bus driver? Because Sadiq certainly did, around four-hundred times in the last three months whilst simultaneously standing by buses, riding on them, and even pretending to drive one for full proletariat points.

This blue-collar lark is all the rage amongst the Tories, too. Take a peek at Steve Crabb, who racks up a terrific 4 points in the Hopkins Proletariat Poll.

He was sent outside to play football when other kids were making Father’s Day Cards in class, and grew up on a sink estate in Wales, probably tying Weetabix to his feet in place of shoes.

If you were looking for a guy to head up Welfare and understand what it means to be poorer than the lawyer — sorry — bus driver's son, Sadiq Khan, Steve's your man.

Even if you aren't an underdog now, it helps if you can still remember times when you were the daughter of Jamaican migrants, and talk about them a lot. Or even pretend to still be one of the poor whilst doing things rich b*stards do.

Diane Abbott is the Queen of Poverty Misappropriation. She slated the rich for their elitist ways in seeking out unfair advantage for their children, while happily packing her own kid off to the private City of London School.

Happy to leverage her Jamaican heritage to its fullest extent, Diane has suggested the world is so stacked in favour of the rich, white and wealthy that even black cabbies won’t pick her up. I don't know if that is irony or just crass.

You see, if you can make people believe you are a bottom-dweller in the great pond of life, you are owed solidarity from the masses when you pretend to look up with a sneer.

Our schools are full of it. Classrooms are crammed full of kids moving at the pace of the slowest, judged against a downwards-sliding national average which focuses on the lowest common denominator.

I gave up attending parents evening at our local state school after one particular mongrel was given extra golden time for not throwing the brick through the window of the classroom.

It's no longer good enough to be an underdog. Now only complete failure will do. Young white males are achieving this in quite spectacular fashion, falling behind ten other ethnic groups here in the UK.

Young people have interpreted the British love of the underdog into a belief that success will make you a social pariah.

And woe betide you if that success comes easily, if you are from a private school or privilege. Worse still if your father worked in a more lucrative profession than bus driving and saved his money for you to inherit.

Try being a politician in this new era where wealth is a dirty word. For Zac Goldsmith, who inherited an estate worth between £200 and £300 million, it involves endless persecution, including trying to catch him out with questions about who plays at Loftus Park.

Is that where we are at? If you don’t score one or more on my test above you have to prove you watch football to compensate? My, how we all laughed at the posh boy.

In America wealth is celebrated. Donald Trump is revered for his success, for funding his own campaign. Whether he had a hand up the ladder from his father is not relevant in the US. What matters is he made it to the top.

Here in the UK the very opposite is true. David Cameron is being persecuted over his father's money and his own subsequent success - both professional and personal.

He only has 'posh boy' credentials, and these don't stack up when success requires siding with the poor or at least having points on The Proletariat Poll.

Why can't we celebrate the fact our rich fund this country. One in six pensioners is an asset-rich millionaire, passing on wealth, time and help with childcare to their family.

Do you begrudge them their success, too? The top 1% of earners pays 30% of all national income tax. Wealth, like Panamanian sunshine floods downwards.

The clear, deplorable message in the UK is this: if you want to lead, support the race to the bottom from where poverty, like damp, seeps upwards.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************






8 April, 2016

Offensive Muslim officer in the Australian navy being cosseted



Note the Muslim headgear.  A believing Muslim cannot fully integrate into mainstream Australian culture and it's just a pretence to present her as having done so. Both she and Christian Maj. Gaynor disapprove of homosexuals.  Maj. Gaynor was fired from the army.  He must be watching this with great interest

The military establishment launched into a flurry of alarmed and secretive activity over incend­iary social media posts by its most senior Muslim officer late last year, with Chief of Navy Tim Barrett ordering a subordinate to ­investigate and "keep close hold".

Emails between senior officers, released under Freedom of Inform­ation laws, reveal they considered whether Captain Mona Shindy should be sacked, with a legal assessment comparing her case to another in which a ­reserve officer had been expelled from the service for speaking out.

The crisis reached the top, with the Chief of the Australian ­Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, asking "did she ­actually say what is alleged?" and "did she really re-tweet this?".

The moves followed a wave of controversy, detailed in The Australian, over articles, tweets and re-tweets by Captain Shindy, who is Vice-Admiral Barrett’s strategic adviser on Islamic affairs.

The tweets included remarks mirroring claims of Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed after the Paris terror attacks in November, in which he said factors such as Western foreign policy in the Middle East, the media and lack of ­opportunity were fuelling Islamic extremism. Captain Shindy mocked Tony Abbott after the leadership coup in September by pointing to pro-Muslim statements by Malcolm Turnbull, and tweeting: "Looking forward to a #PM that unites #auspol & #OZ".

The emails, released on the ­Defence website following an FOI request, show Air Chief Marshal Binskin took an intense interest in the issue, often seeking updates, with one email asking: "Any feedback?"

In another email in relation to a letter of complaint about Captain Shindy, Air Chief Marshal Binskin wrote "any answer is going to have to be well crafted".

The emails show that apart from having her official ­Defence Twitter account closed down, and being "counselled", Captain Shindy has been cosseted by ­Defence spin doctors in her role as Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year, so that on the speaking circuit her message can be, in Vice-Admiral Barrett’s words, "cleared and controlled".

The emails also include ones from Captain Shindy to her ­superiors in which she attempted to ­explain her actions, complained about a "bombardment" of ­adverse emails and social media attacks on her, which she ­described as "ill informed, misguided and offensive ranting", and asked for a personal assistant.

In an email with the subject line "External Email Bombardment and Request for Support" to Vice-Admiral Barrett and his chief of staff, dated December 4, Captain Shindy wrote: "I would very much appreciate a dedicated media, communications savvy personal assistant who can help me selectively accept high-impact engagements, assist with speech writing and effective messaging, help manage my diary to balance work commitments and my personal wellbeing, and protect my personal and professional interests when it comes to managing me as a ‘commodity’ and addressing the inevitable vitriol."

Captain Shindy also once wrote in a published article that Western governments had a "double standard" of not bringing ­Israel to justice over its occupation of Palestinian territories while being quick to go to war in Iraq, and retweeted Mufti Musa Ismail Menk, the top Islamic cleric of Zimbabwe, who had taunted gays as being lower than animals, ­describing him as "always a source of wisdom".

The documents show Captain Shindy sent an email to Vice ­Admiral Barrett, saying she had "no idea" about the "totality" of the Mufti’s Twitter feed, and that now that she knew of his comments about homosexuality being "filthy" she did not agree with them.

But she said a line she quoted from Mufti Menk following the Paris attacks, which said in part "the noise around us often makes it hard to know what’s going on ... So speak less & listen more", was "to my mind ... a pretty harmless piece of commonsense".

Captain Shindy is a respected 26-year veteran of the navy and until recently the head of its ­Guided Missile Frigate Program.

The documents include what appears to be a legal assessment comparing Captain Shindy’s case with that of a reservist officer whose name was redacted, but who is thought to be Major Bernard Gaynor Jnr, who was sacked for what Defence said were unacceptable remarks relating to gay and transgender people.

Major Gaynor won a wrongful dismissal case, which Defence is appealing. The assessment says that in both cases, "Defence determined that public comments were being made and social media used that was not in accord with ­Defence Policy" and the officers were ordered to stop making them.

But it says a key difference is that while the unnamed officer "did not desist from making further comments", Captain Shindy "has ceased making inappropriate public comments". The assessment concluded that no further action against her was required.

In another email Vice Admiral Barrett wrote of the "need (for) a review of our own social media products". A Defence spokesman said yesterday a communications manual that would include policy on social media use was under ­development.

SOURCE





Illegal Immigration Boosts African-American Unemployment

While the Obama administration continues to brag about the drop in the national rate of unemployment, it ignores a glaring contradiction in the president’s policies: Illegal immigration is a key factor in the high rate of unemployment among African-Americans.

The national unemployment rate for March came in at 5 percent. For African-American men above the age of 20, the rate was 9.2 percent; for African-American women above the age of 20, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. For African-American men and women age 16 to 19, the unemployment rate soared to 21.4 percent.

Testifying before a Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow documented the disproportionate negative effect of illegal immigration on African-Americans, particularly African-American men. Kirsanow testified in a personal capacity.

Kirsanow pointed out that illegal immigrants and African-American men often share the same disadvantages of low skills and low levels of academic achievement. Therefore, they compete in the same labor market. In the hospitality, service, construction, and agricultural markets, African-Americans can be excluded by employers who favor illegals for jobs that pay cut-rate wages in substandard working conditions.

SOURCE






The Rainbow Mafia's Corporate Hitmen

PayPal canceled its plans this week to create a global operations center in Charlotte, North Carolina, after the state passed a law requiring people in the state to use the bathroom appropriate for the equipment God gave them. In doing so, the company joined the legions of other big corporations that have become hitmen for the Rainbow Mafia. More than 120 corporations have demanded that North Carolina repeal its bathroom law, a number unheard of nearly a decade ago, according to Washington Post columnist Jena McGregor. "Corporate America’s evolution on gay rights appears to have reached a tipping point, one where so many companies have taken a stand on the issue that the risk of speaking out has been superseded by the risk of not doing so," McGregor wrote. "What was once exceptional has become, in other words, almost expected."

These corporations wield real power to do the bidding of a tiny fraction of the population. It was the corporate influence sitting on the board of the Boy Scouts of America that overturned the scouts' longstanding ban on homosexuals serving as leaders. The mafia took out Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for supporting traditional marriage in California, after having attempted to do likewise with Chick-fil-A. Such examples brought to heel big-brand monoliths like Disney, Apple, Time Warner, Intel, the NFL and the NCAA, which exerted enough pressure on Georgia Governor Nathan Deal that he vetoed the state’s bill protecting religious liberty in the face of same-sex marriage policies. The businesses are hopping on board the homosexual agenda because they find it good for business. Rights, Liberty and the tolerance of diverse opinions don’t matter when the irate leftist minority is threatening boycotts at every turn.

SOURCE






Mississippi Moves to Protect Religious Freedom on Marriage

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1523 into law on Tuesday

This morning, the Mississippi House passed a bill, HB 1523, protecting religious freedom. If the House disposes of a procedural maneuver that has delayed a final vote until Monday, the bill will go to the governor’s desk for his signature, as the Senate passed the bill earlier this week. The bill is good policy and the governor should sign it.

HB 1523, "Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act," is based on the principle of protecting minority rights after major social change. In other states where marriage had been redefined, citizens and religious organizations who continued believing that marriage was a union of husband and wife have been penalized by the government. Bakers and florists have been fined, adoption agencies shuttered. So the citizens of Mississippi have acted to make sure it never happens in their state. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage, they’re working to protect their civil liberties.

It’s what Americans did after Roe v. Wade, too. Congress and the states have passed a variety of laws that protect pro-life conscience. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court invented a right to an abortion. But after Roe legislatures made clear that government cannot require a pro-life doctor or nurse to perform an abortion—that they, too, had rights that required specific protections from hostile judges and bureaucrats.

Likewise, in the Obergefell decision, the Supreme Court redefined marriage throughout America by mandating that governmental entities treat same-sex relationships as marriages. The Supreme Court did not say that private schools, charities, businesses, or individuals must abandon their beliefs if they disagree, but some governments are acting as if it did.

That’s what HB 1523 would prevent. It protects the freedom of conscience for people who believe any of the following three things: 1) that marriage is the union of husband and wife, 2) that sexual relations are reserved for marriage, and 3) that our gender identity is based on our biology. It doesn’t say anyone has to believe these things, it just says that if someone does believe them, the government can’t discriminate against them. So the bill takes nothing away from anyone, it simply protects pluralism.

HB 1523 specifies types of people and types of organizations for particular protections—including religious organizations, medical professionals and professionals working in the wedding industry, and government employees. It crafts careful protections for each type of entity.

For example, HB 1523 says that the government can never discriminate against a religious organization because it declines to solemnize or celebrate a same-sex wedding, or because it makes employment decisions in keeping with their religious beliefs about marriage. It prevents the government from discriminating against religious organizations that do adoption or foster care work in keeping with their religious beliefs about marriage as the union of husband and wife.

When it comes to professionals, HB 1523 says that the government can never discriminate against a surgeon, psychiatrist or counselor because they decline to do sex-reassignment surgery or decline to do marriage counseling for a same-sex marriage. The bill makes clear, however, that it cannot be used to deny visitation or proxy decision making to a same-sex spouse, nor to deny any emergency medical treatment required by law. Likewise, under HB 1523 the government could never penalize a photographer, baker or florist who declined to help celebrate a same-sex wedding.

As for government employees, HB 1523 strikes a reasonable balance. It says that the government cannot discriminate against employees for speech or conduct they engage in in their personal capacity outside of their job responsibilities when it comes to these three beliefs.

Inside of work, it says the government can’t signal out these viewpoints for particular sanction—that employees must abide by common "time, place, and manner" regulations, but no content restrictions on speech at work. It also says that a government employee may seek a recusal from issuing marriage licenses, provided they do it ahead of time and in writing, and provided they "take all necessary steps to ensure that the authorization and licensing of any legally valid marriage is not impeded or delayed." A commonsense win-win outcome.

Finally, the bill makes clear that the government cannot take any adverse action against any organization that makes access to sex-specific facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms based on biological sex.

Hopefully we will not see a repeat of Indiana and Georgia in Mississippi. Big business and special interests should not attack the state or this bill.

When the bill reaches his desk, the governor should sign it into law, and other states should follow Mississippi’s lead.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************




7 April, 2016

Air France: Female Crew Not Wanting to Comply With Islamic Dress Code Can Decline to Fly to Iran

Air France management agreed Monday that any female crew member not wanting to comply with Islamic dress code once the airline resumes long-suspended services to Iran this month may opt out of working on the route.

The decision came after an uproar over the airline’s directive that air hostesses wear long trousers with a long jacket – instead of knee-length skirts – on flights to Tehran, and that during stopovers in the country, "outside the bedroom, women must wear a scarf and a wide and long garment to conceal their shapes."

Air France said all international airlines flying to Iran expect staff to comply with Iranian law regarding women covering their hair, but that in talks with staff unions it has agreed to allow dissenting female pilots or stewardesses to choose not to work the Paris-Tehran route.

Unions had called the directive an invasion of privacy and an attack on individual rights, and urged the French women’s rights minister Laurence Rossigno to intervene.

Rossigno did so – the French government owns 17.6 percent of Air France-KLM – and the matter was resolved on Monday.

"In Iran, the law stipulates that all women present in the country have to wear a headscarf covering their hair in public places," the airline said in a statement. "This obligation does not apply during the flight and is respected by all international airlines serving the Republic of Iran."

"Tolerance and respect for the cultures and customs in the countries served by the airline are part of the fundamental values of Air France and its staff."

But in order to respect the "personal values" of every female staff member, it said, "when a stewardess or female pilot is assigned to a flight to Tehran, Air France will offer them the possibility to choose not to fly to Tehran and work on a different flight."

"They will have to inform of their decision to refuse to wear the headscarf in line with a specific procedure beforehand."

A staff union, Union des Navigants de l’Aviation (UNAC), welcomed the decision, but said it regretted that it required media coverage and the minister’s intervention to resolve concerns that had been raised for more than four months.

The three-times weekly service to Tehran will resume on April 17 for the first time since Air France suspended the route in 2008 in line with international sanctions over Iran’s nuclear activities.

In France, a liberal, secular state which along with Germany has the largest Muslim community in Europe, the subject of Islamic dress code has long stoked controversy.

The government banned headscarves and other religious accouterments in public schools and government offices in 2004, a decision which brought condemnation from mainstream Islamic organizations, but also from extremists, with al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden calling it part of "a Zionist-Crusader war" against Muslims.

In 2010, France passed a law banned the wearing in public of any full face-covering clothing.

SOURCE






Stacey Dash Backs Little Sisters and Religious Freedom Against Obama

In a recent blog post on Patheos, actress and Fox News contributor Stacey Dash condemned the Obama administration for targeting religious organizations through its HHS contraceptive-coverage mandate saying that protecting religious freedom "seems like a pretty simple and fundamental right to me."

"You will never guess who the Obama Administration’s latest target is?" asked Ms. Dash in her blog. "The Little Sisters of the Poor."

On March 23, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument over a group of cases collectively called Zubick v. Burwell concerning "[w]hether the HHS contraceptive-coverage mandate and its "accommodation" violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by forcing religious nonprofits to act in violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs, when the government has not proven that this compulsion is the least restrictive means of advancing any compelling interest."

"Yes, really," stated Ms. Dash. "The President and his bureaucratic allies have decided to challenge the religious freedom of a group of nuns who have devoted their entire lives to caring for impoverished elderly people around the world" and who "simply want to be able to live out their faith and not be forced to violate their consciences."

Stacey Dash criticized Obama for implementing a rule that "force[s]" nonprofits like the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide "birth control that works similarly to abortion."

"It seems like a pretty simple and fundamental right to me," said Ms. Dash. "Is he [Obama] going to make the Muslims eat pork so the pig farmers don’t go out of business?"

Suggesting that Americans of all faiths should "want to protect the rights of the Little Sisters to live out their faith," Stacey Dash concluded by praising the Little Sisters of the Poor for taking a stand for the religious freedom rights of all Americans in the highest court of the land:

"One thing is for certain, though. The Little Sisters of the Poor are amazing women who are quite literally being the hands and feet of Christ. I am glad that they are standing for what they believe in and are demanding religious freedom for all Americans!"

SOURCE






Another Biblically Historic Find Provides Evidence of Mary Magdalene’s Existence

A real biblical site, a real woman, and a real faith, all rooted in history. That’s what we learn from the archaeological dig at Magdala.

If there were a prize for the least-understood yet incredibly-important person in the Bible, it would probably go to Mary Magdalene. I suspect that more people "know" that she was a prostitute—which is based on a misreading of Luke, chapters 7 and 8—than the fact that she was the first witness to the Lord’s resurrection.

Recent archaeological discoveries are shedding a much-needed light on the life and times of this vital biblical character.

Ten years ago, the Pontifical Institute Notre Dame Jerusalem Center decided to build some guest houses in the Galilee region. The site they choose was near the Israeli town of Migdal and the former site of an Arab town called Al-Majdal.

As the names suggest, the area was associated with the ancient city of Magdala, from which Mary Magdalene got her biblical epithet. Still, no one expected to find the actual Magdala, much less the kind of evidence that told us anything substantial about the biblical heroine.

But that’s exactly what they got.

During a mandatory, albeit cursory, examination of the site by the Israel Antiquities Authority, diggers struck something hard, which they thought was a bench. It was not a bench. Instead, it was part of a first century synagogue, one of only seven such remains ever to be found in Israel.

What’s more, they found a coin dating from 29 A.D., during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. Sound familiar? This is the time of Jesus’ public ministry, and since Jesus was active in the area—Capernaum was only five miles away—we are talking about ruins and artifacts that may have been associated with Jesus himself. Dina Gorni-Avshalom of the Authority told the New York Times that there was "circumstantial evidence" of Jesus having been there.

Judging by the evidence, Magdala was a prosperous town. It was the center of the fishing industry in the region, with an infrastructure to match, and it exported fish to as far away as Rome itself. The synagogue reflected this prosperity. It was, in the words of Smithsonian Magazine, "opulent" for its time and place.

It contained murals and frescoes, and "an ornately-carved stone block" that was probably used for reading from the Torah. In fact, the stone appears to be a miniature version of the temple in Jerusalem.

The prosperity of her hometown, and presumably Mary herself, sheds light on Luke 8, where Mary Magdalene and several other Galilean women are said to have provided for Jesus and His disciples "out of their resources."

Father Eamon Kelly of the Jerusalem Center, who recently appeared with me on the "Eric Metaxas Show," has suggested that after the first Easter, this synagogue may have become the home to a congregation of Jewish Christians. He cites, among other things, the fact that it is located on the outskirts of Magdala rather than in the center of town.

The find at Magdala is yet another reminder of the historical nature of Christian faith. The Christian story of the Word made flesh, who lived and died as one of us and rose on the third day, may sound "mythic," but it happened in actual history.

And, as the evidence from places like Magdala attest, the Gospel accounts faithfully reflect this history. Magdala was a real place that produced a real woman named Mary who probably had the wherewithal to support Jesus in his ministry and follow him all the way to Calvary.

That being the case, it’s reasonable to believe the Bible when it tells us that the story didn’t end there

SOURCE






Australia: 'It's offensive': Men and women forced to sit SEPARATELY at Sydney Muslim conference - and attendees must buy tickets stamped 'male' or 'female'

United Muslims of Australia has organised Quest for Success event
But those people attending it will be separated by their gender
Men and women's tickets for conference are also being sold separately

An influential Muslim group is selling sex-segregated seating for a major conference next month, with male and female tickets being sold separately for the event.

Channel 7 reports that the United Muslims of Australia (UMA) has organised the Quest for Success conference in Sydney and they confirmed that those attending it will be separated by their gender.

This comes after radical Muslim political party, Hizb ut-Tahrir, were found guilty of discriminating against women after making them sit at the back of public meetings last month.

The issue came to a head during a public meeting in Western Sydney, where men were seated at the front, but women were made to sit at the back of the room.

Anti-discrimination campaigner Alison Bevege believed that the decision to separate men and women in this way at the Sydney conference next month was ‘offensive’.

‘It’s just as offensive to split women from men side to side as it is to split black people from white people from side to side,’ Ms Beverage said.  ‘It's appalling, it's a step back for women's inalienable right to equality.’

The price range for tickets makes no attempt to hide the segregation with an early bird male ticket costing $50, non-discount male ticket $70, and male student $35. Separate female tickets are available in the same price range.

On the Quest For Success website it states that the UMA is one of the largest Islamic youth and community based organisations in Australia, which has been running for more than 15 years.

It said the foundation was founded on traditional Islamic principles and focused on providing quality spiritual, social, educational and recreational programs and activities for the continued development of the Muslim Community within Australia.

‘We are excited to announce that the 2016 UMA Conference - Quest for Success - will focus on the journey of seeking success in this life and the hereafter,’ the website said.

‘The event will feature inspirational international and local guest speakers to share their vast range of insights, experiences and advice on how this goal can be attained by developing a blueprint for Muslims individually, within the family environment and the wider community.’

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************






6 April, 2016

Some REALLY addled Leftism

As postmodernism goes, the article below is not too bad.  You can sort of get what they are driving at.  They seem to be saying that whites have a particular psychologoical state and that that state is psychotic.  Since they themselves sound thought-disordered, that is a rather amusing claim. Psychosis refers to a loss of reality contact so I suppose we could all be living in a dream world -- but as far as I can see the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore non-empirical

If the writers below are allowed to point the skinger of forn at whites, I assume it is fair if I say something more factual back:   The prevalence of mental illness among blacks is greater than among whites and by ordinary psychiatric criteria, blacks also have a high incidence of psychopathic personalities


The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle

Kehinde Andrews

Abstract

Critical Whiteness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades. Central to this project is the idea that if the processes of Whiteness can be uncovered, then they can be reasoned with and overcome, through rationale dialogue. This article will argue, however, that Whiteness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is beyond any rational engagement. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the two only British big budget movies about transatlantic slavery, Amazing Grace and Belle, the article argues that such films serve as the celluloid hallucinations that reinforce the psychosis of Whiteness. The features of this discourse that arose from the analysis included the lack of Black agency, distancing Britain from the horrors of slavery, and downplaying the role of racism.

SOURCE






Black babies don't matter?

The moment a woman drops her baby on a pavement so that she can throw punches in a brutal fight has been captured by shocking footage.

The little girl was dropped when a brawl erupted between two women on a housing estate in the United States.

After having a heated argument the pair square up to each other before raining down punches and grabbing on to each other's clothes.

In an incident that will horrify parents the baby hits the concrete on her back, but it is not seen if her head hits the concrete in the process.

It is unclear how the fracas started but within seconds the women go from an aggressive argument to a vicious battle.

While the violence is brutal it is the complete disregard shown for the well-being of the baby that is most upsetting.

The toddler is dropped from waist height as her mother decides it would be better to engage into a brawl than walk away.

The little one hits the ground with a thud and while someone is heard shouting 'get that baby' it is not known if she was injured from the drop.

In fact this is the most attention the child gets in the clip as the women are completely oblivious to the fall and the crowd are more interested in watching the fight.

The audience, which forms a ring around the pair, are also heard reacting to the impact of the punches and shouting at the fighters.

Such is the ferocity of the scrap that even when the pair move towards a lamppost they simply continue to fight around it, swinging their arms to connect with each other.

After what seems like an age, but is in fact under a minute, the brawl comes to an end and the pair go off their separate ways.

It is never revealed what consequences the fall had for the infant.

SOURCE








Are we raising a generation of delicate children?

Kids today, eh? What's with them?  I know, I know, that line's a bit tired, isn't it?

Every generation brings with it a new idea, or a new movement. Which then leads to all the previous generations weighing in with their two cents. Generation Y were classed as spoiled, Generation X too soft, Baby Boomers too tough. We love labels, that's something our generations can agree on.

But when it comes to kids today, has there been a shift? Have we gone too far in the other direction? Instead of giving tough love, now we give love out by the bucketful. For everything and anything. And we teach kids that everyone's a winner. But, let's be honest. They're not. Sometimes we win, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have to watch someone do better than us, succeed where we might need to work a bit harder. And we're not happy with that in today's society.

Internationally renowned researcher Carol Dweck has questioned where we've been headed in recent years:

We often hear these days that we've produced a generation of young people who can't get through the day without an award.They expect success because they're special, not because they've worked hard. Is this true? Have we inadvertently done something to hold back our youth?

When I played sports, there were awards at the end of the year. Best and Fairest, MVP, those kind of things. And it was given to one child who was voted out of the others and that was that. And everyone seemed fine with it. But now, all kids are given pats on the head for breathing, trophies and ribbons handed out to all. And if they don't get it? Well, cue meltdowns and tears. From parents too.

It's a trend I've seen become more apparent in my role. People getting upset and angry if their child isn't praised and acknowledged a certain number of times. Comparing how many times one child gets an award relative to another, and if all children aren't equally awarded, then that's cause to unleash a torrent of abuse.

Dweck believes that we've been mistaken in our belief that praising intelligence and skill encourages confidence, and the idea that motivation and achievement is largely due to inherent abilities. In a study by Eddie Brummelman and colleagues looking at the effects of praise, found that when parents overvalue their children (i.e. tell them how exceptional they are at everything all the time), it didn't actually help build self-esteem, it developed narcissism instead.

There is nothing wrong with praise and acknowledgement. Nothing at all! But perhaps we need to be reviewing what we're praising and how we're praising. It shouldn't become an expectation, it should be recognition at appropriate times.

While we want to shield our kids from hurt, it is an important lesson for them to learn that sometimes we don't win. The ability to cultivate resilience is one of the most important things we can give to our children. Even more important than award certificates and being told how special they are.

Resilience is the ability to adapt and overcome difficult times in a healthy way. Basically it's how we bounce back from tough stuff. It is through a combination of factors, both from the environment and within an individual that resilience comes about. While it's a work in progress, childhood is where we can really help shape resilience. Some ways we can help our kids build their resilience is by

    Helping them to understand their feelings, even the negative ones. All feelings are valid, and we don't need to just 'get rid' of the not-so-nice ones.

    Working with them to develop prosocial problem solving skills

    Showing warmth and appreciation for effort, as opposed to overvaluing

    Supporting children to develop a healthy self-view. That is- seeing the parts of themselves that they feel are good, and understanding that nobody is perfect.

    Reviewing what is in their control, and what is beyond. This helps with accountability and regulation.

And the number one factor in building resilience? According to the Centre on the Developing Child at Harvard, having a strong and committed relationship with at least one parent or caregiver is at the core of resilience. All the praise in the world doesn't equal the value that such a relationship can have on a child's development.

Instead of telling our kids how special and wonderful they are, perhaps we need to guide them toward looking at their effort.

Telling them that the work they're putting in is fantastic, and having them give something a go, even if it doesn't work out, is the biggest reward in the end. Not being too quick to praise for things that are easily achieved, but instead encouraging our kids to challenge themselves, and praising that effort instead. While it is tough to see your child upset and to miss out on something, maybe the bigger picture is that it's healthy and okay for them to not achieve 100 per cent success all the time. Focusing on the effort rather than the end result. We're not bad people for allowing our children to experience challenges. Because, really, what is the alternative for this latest generation if we don't?

SOURCE






Australia: Outrage over child photos ignores law and logic

This week's non-story concerned the use of stock photos of happy kids and families by Barnardo's Find A Family program to promote adoption. That this story was beaten up by 'outraged' anti-adoption groups is revealing of their agenda.

The simple explanation is that privacy laws prevent the use of real images of children awaiting adoption. However, this logical legality wasn't good enough for the Australian Adoptee Rights Action Group, which reached into its stock bag of slogans to assert that the ads represented the "commodification" of children.

This slur, which implies that adoption represents an illegitimate trade in children, is wrong-headed. The alternative to adoption for children with no prospect of going home safely is to spend the rest of their childhoods in care.

The current child protection system truly turns children into valuable commodities. Those who spend the majority of childhood in care are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funding to the non-government charitable organisations that provide outsourced 'out-of-home' care services.

This is the system into which vulnerable children are eventually dumped after being profoundly damaged by prolonged exposure to abuse in the family home, before they are further damaged by spending extended periods in highly unstable 'temporary' care while efforts are made to reunite them with their dysfunctional families.

Adoption reform is about breaking this destructive cycle by intervening earlier to rescue children and provide them with the permanent and stable families they need to thrive.

None of this cuts any ice with anti-adoption groups because most of these activists were adopted and had negative experiences.

This was usually in the days when adoptions were 'closed', and lack of contact with and knowledge of biological families and heritages affected the sense of identity and belonging of some (but by no means all) adoptees. We have learned from these mistakes and harm done, which is why modern adoption are always 'open' in the best long-term interests of children.

Despite this, the anti-adoption movement encourages risk-adverse attitudes by arguing that because some adoptions have been unsuccessful, there must be no adoptions under any circumstances. In practice, this means taking a risk-blind attitude and overlooking the harm that the current system is doing to many children.

 The seeming belief that successful adoptions will invalidate the personal experiences of anti-adoption activist's verges on the narcissistic. It ignores the good that adoption would do for many children caught up in our flawed and failed child protection system.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************




5 April, 2016

Religion and intelligence

Edward Dutton has kindly just sent me a PDF of his 2014 book under the title above.  It is a very comprehensive and research-based treatment of its topic.  And I will mention his most striking finding straight away:  Churchgoers are just as intelligent as atheists.

The big problem with research in the area is defining religion.  There are all sorts of religions.  A major religion these days is "Belief in God only".  Does that count for anything? And what about Leftism?  It has many of the characteristics of a religon. Should it be included? So we cannot be too surprised to note that the various research studies show no uniform definition of religion. 

And even people of the same religion may have very different beliefs.  A Catholic who attends mass regularly will usually have much different beliefs than one who has not been to mass for years.  So direction of belief and strength of belief need to be sorted out too.

I can think of some solutions to those problems but none of the studies so far have addressed them adequately, as far as I can see.  But, out of what's available, the best indicator of religious belief would seem to be church attendance, or "religious practice" more broadly.  It too does of course have its weaknesses.  It is very well known that some people attend church for social rather than religious reasons.  They may even go just for the coffee and cake afterwards.  But there can surely be very few church attenders who are totally non-religious.  And when we think of religious people, it is surely churchgoers whom we are most likely to have in mind.

Table 7.2 on p. 180ff of Dutton's book gives the correlations between churchgoing and IQ.  Most are very low indeed and all but one are less than .20.  And a correlation of .20 reflects only 4% common variance between the two factors, so is negligible.

As it happens, the correlation with religious belief that Dutton tabulates are also low, though not as low as the correlations with religious practice.  The majority are in fact less than .20.

So the conclusion has to be that IQ is unimportant as an explanation of religious belief.

And if someone wants to get Marxist with me and say that I draw that conclusion only because I am myself religious, I reiterate  what I have often said before:  I am the most utter and  complete atheist.






Renewed requirement of work for food stamps produces predictable liberal backlash

There used to be a rule in place – part of the sadly abandoned movements toward welfare reform in the 80s and 90s – which required food stamps recipients to do at least some work in order to receive the benefits if they were childless and able bodied. That rule was suspended in most places since the beginning of the crash in 2007, but now that unemployment is allegedly back down to nominal levels and the economy is “stable” across most of the country, that exception is being rolled back. This, of course, has liberals up in arms. (WaPo)

    "The 20-year-old rule — which was suspended in many states during the economic recession — requires that adults without children or disabilities must have a job in order to receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for more than three months, with some exceptions. Many states have begun to reimpose the federal rule as the economy recovers, with the largest group reviving it at the beginning of this year. As a result, many recipients’ three-month limit expires today, April 1.

    The change has reignited a fierce debate between conservative leaders, who say waiving the mandate discourages people from working, and their liberal counterparts, who say the three-month time limit ignores the reality that jobs are still hard to come by for low-skilled workers"

Ah, yes. Those hateful Republicans are at it again, trying to demonize and punish the poor. But while we consider this question, let’s keep in mind that an experiment in precisely such a change has already been rolling out in Maine. We talked about this last month when the Left was all aflutter over that state’s decision to require ABAWD (able bodied adults without dependents) to put in some work while remaining on the SNAP program long term.

    "In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in Dec. 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015"

There were plenty of job openings in Maine already and the result of that work requirement was a major savings for the taxpayer. As they found out, those who truly couldn’t work or needed to care for children were easily able to demonstrate that and their benefits continued uninterrupted. But a significant number of recipients were either able to find a job or, as it turned out, had been working under the table to avoid taxes and collecting benefits on top of that. Those individuals dropped off the rolls quickly.

As I noted last month, we can see the direct effect of going in the opposite direction on such policy by looking at New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has essentially thrown welfare reform into reverse.

    "The number of New Yorkers on welfare is reportedly on the rise, with about 13,000 more people being added to the rolls during the mayor’s first year in office.

    The New York Post is reporting that the cash assistance program swelled by 4 percent in 2014.

    According to an advanced look at the “Poverty and Progress in New York” report, the jump comes the same year the city added around 90,000 jobs"

When you remove work requirements entirely for the childless, able bodied recipients, there will always be some percentage who will seek to game the system for their own advantage. That’s just a fact of life. (And before you get your liberal undies in a twist, this applies across all demographic lines.) These programs aren’t “punishing” anyone or discriminating. They are providing an incentive toward upward mobility and ensuring that only those truly in need are drawing down resources from the system.

SOURCE






ARE DEMOCRATS USING GOOGLE TO SILENCE FREE SPEECH?

The Internet has brought an explosion of information to the general public across the globe. Unfortunately, much of the information we get from the Internet, whether it be by websites, e-mail, or on social media, is un-vetted and much of it is misleading and simply not true. Finding the truth can be a real chore sometimes, requiring hours of research and even then the truth may be illusive. Yes, the information flowing unchecked in cyberspace can lead to disagreements from time to time, but thankfully you can’t throw a punch, or pull a trigger, on the Internet.

Nevertheless, the Internet, through all of its medium forms, has provided a conduit for individual expression like never before in the history of man. Opinions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas and images flow freely to tens of millions of individuals in microseconds, every minute, every hour, every day. People of like mind can hook up at the speed of light and organize forums around either specific or general subjects or issues at will. The free flow of ideas, however flawed, is the very epitome of freedom. But what if someone could tamper with this free flow of ideas for a political agenda, or any agenda?

The growth of the Internet has also led to the formation of corporate giants like AOL, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Dell, HP, Microsoft, IBM and thousands of smaller companies. The corporate profits generated by the Internet are in the tens of billions of dollars every year.

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of corporate giants, awash in cash, is the wielding of great financial and political power to manipulate and exploit the people they allegedly serve. We ran into that manipulative power just recently when we discovered that some conservative authors, including us, are being silenced by a tricky Google tactic (yes, Google) through their web browser, “Google Chrome,” by attaching a Security Alert to any website that doesn’t fit the Google liberal narrative. On the NewsWithViews.com website (http://www.newswithviews.com) Google has attached a Security Alert to over half of the authors that write for this conservative, on-line publication. In further research, we found that other websites offering a conservative point of view have also been targeted by Google Chrome’s Security Alerts.

Google’s Security Alerts advise the reader that the particular website they have logged onto may contain Malware and advised to go back to a “safe” page. The Alert is clearly bogus and obviously done for political motives in a highly charged presidential campaign season. Ironically, these Security Alerts only happen with the Google Chrome browser. We could find no such tampering with other browsers. Who controls Google Chrome? Google of course.

Now, if you are thinking that this is just an isolated incident, or an accident, or a coincidence, or a quirk of the Google Chrome browser, think again. The Google Chrome Security Alert suddenly appeared on multiple conservative articles a week or so ago, right after Donald Trump held up an article from the Newswithviews website and the website received over 3,000,000 hits in one day. One might ask, why would Google do this? The answer is simple and glaring.

The political ties to the Democrat Party of Google founders, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, including thousands of Google employees, is well known: From one source we learned that:

    “Few Silicon Valley companies have ever embraced a political party as passionately as Google has. Its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been described as a "kind of guru" to President Obama's campaign manager, and Google employees emerged as the No. 2 donor to the Democratic National Committee in the last election.”

We were incensed that a major U. S. Corporation would use its power to tamper with free speech and more specifically attempting to silence our conservative articles. So incensed in fact that we penned a terse message to the Google Board of Directors, e-mailing it to their Investor Relations department

SOURCE






Waleed Ali has a good imagination

Waleed Ali is an Australian-born Muslim lawyer.  He is the go-to Muslim for the Australian Leftist media.  He has a long screed below about how weird Australians are.  They are weird because there have been a few media discussions about the right way to describe white settlement in Australia.  He seems to think such discussions are illegitimate.  Since there is disagreement about it, I would have thought such discussions to be perfectly normal. It is just one of the many things that arise for public discussion all the time.

And there is something to discuss.  Calling white settlement of Australia an invasion conjures up visions of an armed force arriving and doing battle with another armed force to take possession of territory.  But the white settlement of Australia was nothing like that.  The whites who arrived under Governor Phillip in 1788 encountered no systematic resistance at all.  Basically, the Aborigines just looked on in astonishment. There were one or two minor skirmishes after a while but that was all.  So calling the British arrival an invasion is misleading.  And why it is not sufficient to say simply that the British expeditioners "settled" in Australia escapes me.  That says nothing about who else might have been there at the time.

So if this passing topic of conversation has any implications at all I would say that it is just another instance of Leftists using misleading language and others insisting on greater  terminological accuracy.  All the vast implications for Australian souls that Aly writes about are just figments of his imagination. 

I grew up among working class Australians of the same British ancestry as mine and I can assure one and all that in that environment, on the rare occasions when it is mentioned, the topic of Aboriginal displacement evokes mild sympathy but absolutely no Angst.  Leftist might agonize but agonizing is what Leftists do

Leftists cannot cope at all with carefully expressed conservative thought.  Confronted with that, all they can do is stick fingers in their ears or run away.  So the focus of their criticism is always on  impromptu and less well educated  conservative utterances.  They reveal their own limitations in doing that. Waleed Ali does

This "lowest common denominator" representation of conservatives is a common Leftist strategy.  I wish I had kept a link to it but around ten years ago I saw a New York Times article about conservatism that was illustrated by a picture of a snaggle-toothed Appalachian.  You can lie with statistics but you can also lie with pictures.

And there is in fact an incontrovertible example of the NYT deceiving in that way. When the Trayvon Martin death became a great Leftist campaign, Martin was represented by a picture of him as a nice kid aged about age 11, rather than equally available pictures of him as the sneering thug that he later became.


Every country has its weirdness, its reflex points that trigger spontaneous, uncontrolled actions that look almost comically irrational to the observer. It's the kind of thing you can only comprehend once you know the anatomy.

Take, for example, the United States' permanent weirdness on guns. Viewed from Australia – a nation that embraced gun control with relative (though not total) ease after a single massacre – it's gobsmacking that repeated mass shootings seem only to entrench positions rather than inspire a solution.

It's only when you grasp how guns have become totems of individual liberty and a principled distrust of government – and that these ideas constitute nothing less than the country's very reason for being – that you can begin to make sense of the madness.

So, beneath every weirdness most likely is a revelation. Not about the substance of whatever issue is in play, but about the essence of the nation grappling with it.

For Australia, it's Indigenous history. The US may be caught in a cycle of tragedy and denial, but we simply do away with the cycle. For us it's a founding tragedy, then steadfast denial ever since. The specifics might change – terra nullius, the stolen generations – but the constant is a remarkable jumpiness at the very thought of facing the past. A jumpiness so powerfully reflexive, it doesn't matter how insignificant the stimulus.

This week it's a guide on "Indigenous Terminology" from the University of New South Wales. As documents go, it's resoundingly minor: an advisory list, likely to be read by very few people, that "clarifies appropriate language" on Indigenous history and culture. But that was enough to start the nation's most prolific outrage machines to humming.

"WHITEWASH", boomed The Daily Telegraph, taking particular exception at the guide's suggestion that Australia was not "settled" or "discovered" by the British, but rather "invaded, occupied and colonised". This instantly triggered the talkback reflex, with lines of angry callers – historians all, no doubt – venting with all the gusto Alan Jones or Ray Hadley could inspire in them. For colour, and certainly not content, Sydney radio host Kyle Sandilands joined the party, ensuring the meltdown covered all frequencies.

Where do you start? Perhaps with the Tele's remarkably sloppy allegation that "UNSW rewrites the history books to state Cook 'invaded' Australia". Of course, UNSW did no such thing. The reference to Cook is entirely a Telegraph invention. The guide talks of invasion but doesn't attribute it to James Cook, who had no army with which to invade. It's an extrapolation showing that not only does some editor or other know nothing about the history they're so keen to defend, but that they're also quite keen to rewrite the present.

Or perhaps you might begin with precisely which historical account does the rewriting: the one of "settlement" with its implications of an uninhabited continent, or the one whose language of invasion and colonisation implies the significant resistance of Indigenous people and the slaughter that flowed as a result?

All that history is well trodden. For now, it's the weirdness of this, and what it reveals, that interests me. Specifically: why is this hysterical response so entirely predictable? Why is it that the moment the language of invasion appears, we seem so instinctively threatened by it? This isn't the response of sober historical disagreement. It's more visceral than that. Elemental even. It's like any remotely honest appraisal of our history – even one contained in an obscure university guide – has the power to trigger some kind of existential meltdown. What strange insecurity is this?

An American observing this, perhaps even while carrying a gun, would be entitled to be bewildered. Theirs is a dark history too – one that encompasses indigenous dispossession, slavery and segregation – but it's a history they can hardly be accused of denying in the way we do.

Sure, indigenous American history is frequently ignored, but this is partly because it is buried beneath the sheer tonnage of black history that is so constantly rehearsed. There will be people in the US south who lament losing the Civil War, and who cling to the Confederate flag. But it's hard to imagine a public freak-out because a university wanted to discuss slavery. By now, slavery and its abolition are central parts of the American story. There might be varying degrees of honesty in the way the US tells that story, but it has typically found a way to incorporate its warts.

Why do we struggle so much more? Demography, sure. It's harder to brush aside the claims of 13 per cent of the population than the roughly 2 per cent of ours that is Indigenous. But it's also a function of national mythology.

The US is built on the idea of constant progress through individual liberty. It's a nation that is never finished, never perfect, but always being perfected. Its historical scars are therefore not fatal to its identity. Indeed, they are essential because they allow Americans to tell a story of their own perfectibility. In these hands, slavery is not simply a stain, but a symbol of how far they've come. So, in the process of acknowledging slavery, the US is celebrated, not condemned.

We're not like that. We struggle with our history because once we admit it, we have nowhere to go with it; no way of rehabilitating our pride; no way of understanding ourselves. As a nation, we lack a national mythology that can cope with our shortcomings. That transforms our historical scars into fatal psychological wounds, leaving us with a bizarre need to insist everything was – and is – as good as it gets.

That's the true meaning of the love-it-or-leave-it ethos that so stubbornly persists. We don't want to be improved in any thorough way, because for us that seems to imply thorough imperfections.

Instead, we want to be praised, to be acknowledged as a success. It's a kind of national supplication, a constant search for validation. And history's fine, as long as it serves that purpose. But if it dares step out of line, it can expect to be slapped swiftly with the Sandilands dictum until it changes the subject: "you're full of shit, just get on with life". Then we can be comfortable again.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************




4 April, 2016

Anti-Islam banner displayed at football match in Melbourne, Australia



The banner is entirely reasonable if you have read the Koran.  The Jihadis are just doing what the Koran commands.  So a Muslim just has to become more religiously motivated to wage jihad.  And hatred of Western civilization repeatedly preached in the mosques is a major influence in pushing young Muslims to Jihad.  So the Muslim population as a whole is the problem.  Any one of them at any time could decide to wage murderous Jihad against us.  Many have done so in the past and many will do so in the future.

We should be entitled to protect ourselves from such a menace. Pretending that Islam is a religion of peace makes ostriches look alert.  Brussels is the seat of the EU which has parceled out million to Muslims, including great gobs of cash to Palestinian terrorists. Did this blood money buy Belgium any goodwill?


Leader of the United Patriots Front Blake Cottrell has appeared in a video to explain the controversial reason why members of the extreme far-right political group held up a banner emblazoned with 'Stop The Mosques' at an AFL match.

Mentioning the Lindt Cafe siege and the shooting of Parramatta police worker Curtis Cheng, Mr Cottrell said in the video he is 'concerned about the future' of Australia and called for the removal of 'places of worship and segregated communities for a foreign power which [don't] like us.'

The anti-Islamic banner was unfurled during the second quarter Collingwood-Richmond match at the MCG in Melbourne on Friday night with a prominent United Patriots Front logo.

'You think i'm peddling fear? I'm concerned about the future of my country and I'm realistic about the people being brought into this country - that they aren't like us and never will be like us,' Mr Cottrell said in the video.

Following the stunt, Collingwood president Eddie McGuire calling for those responsible to be banned from attending games.  'If they have anything to do with our club, they'll be banned,' he said.

In the video, Mr Cottrell claimed the group used the banner to make 'a set of predictions' about how the AFL would react to the stunt.  'It's the left wing progressives that spread fear of social and financial strangulation if the people don't do what they ask and even the AFL is subject to them is under their control,' he said.

A video taken at the match and posted to the UPF Facebook page with the caption 'Rise Without Fear' shows the banner being hoisted up below one of the MCG's large LED screens. 

The AFL issued a statement saying the actions 'no place in society' and the league would also work with police.

'Match-day security removed the banner when they became aware of it and evicted the patrons responsible.

The UPF campaign heavily against Islamic immigration, proposed mosques and halal food.

The group regularly post videos and images to their Facebook page to promote their slogans and messages that primarily discriminates against Muslims.

SOURCE






Islamophobic bees?

More than 20 people were stung and one hospitalized when a swarm of up to 20,000 killer bees invaded a Phoenix mosque Friday afternoon.

The incident occurred at the Muslim Community Mosque near 32nd Street and McDowell Road, ABC 15 reported.

The road outside the mosque was  shut down and fire crews dispatched to spray the building with foam in order to quell the swarms of angry bees.

The bees had formed a nest under the eaves of the mosque. One mosque worker there told Azfamily.com that a man had already been booked for Saturday to remove the nest but the bees attacked earlier than expected.

Nearby residents were told to stay in their homes. John Chavarria, one such local, told ABC 15 that he witnessed the attack from his house.

'I don't know, it was just crazy how everyone was running everywhere,' he said.

Miming swatting at bees around his head, he continued: 'They were making some movements like that ... some people would even fall in the grass over there and then they'd get up and start running.

'I can’t believe they had the whole street blocked off for the bees.' 

Some worshipers used blankets to protect themselves from the swarm, but more than 20 were stung 'multiple times' and one 24-year-old man hospitalized, although everyone was said to be in stable condition.

One man told Azfamily.com that he was stung on the face in five different places.

The bees are believed to have been disturbed by the mosque's speakers, which are located next to their nest.

Killer bees, officially known as Africanized bees, are a particularly aggressive species. They are created by breeding European and African bees.

SOURCE






Muslim attitudes in action:  Dad charged with murder after 'shooting his son dead for being gay'

A dad has been charged with murder after allegedly killing his son because he was gay.

Amir Issa, 29, was found dead outside his family home from gunshot wounds while his mother Rabihah Issa, 68, was found stabbed to death inside the bathroom.

His father, 69-year-old Shehada Khali Issa, has now been charged with premeditated murder.

Police were called to the family home in Los Angeles and arrested Shehada Issa on Tuesday afternoon.

Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said in a statement: "It is alleged the murder was committed because of the victim's sexual orientation and because of the defendant's perception of that status and the victims' association with a person and a group of that status."

An investigation into his wife's death is still ongoing.

Detective John Doerbecker told the Los Angeles Daily News that the father had claimed he returned home and found his son had stabbed his wife to death, after which he shot his son.

But Doerbecker added: “He claimed (the son) was armed with a knife, and there was no knife to be found.  “It was a horrible family tragedy.”

Los Angeles LGBT Center released a statement following the killings, NBC News reported , which read: "Despite all the civil rights victories we've had in the last few years, we still live in a society where people face violence or even murder for being open about their sexual orientation or gender identity."

SOURCE






Report: Anti-Semitism Spikes at Top U.S. Colleges

Jewish students face wave of hate

Top colleges throughout the United States are experiencing an unprecedented rise in anti-Semitic incidents and anti-Jewish behavior, according to a study that determined the behavior is being fueled by a rise in the number of campus organizations promoting inflammatory anti-Israel propaganda.

The survey, which focused on 113 U.S. campuses with large Jewish populations, concluded that at least 70 percent of those schools surveyed experienced “one or more kinds of anti-Semitic activity” in the past year.

There were more than 300 anti-Semitic incidents in total at these schools in 2015 alone, according to the report, which was compiled and released Monday by the AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that monitors anti-Semitism on campus.

The rise in the number and severity of these incidents is directly related to anti-Israel activities coordinated by a pro-Palestinian organizations that support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state.

The study marks the first time that a statistical analysis has empirically tied these anti-Israel organizations to the sharp rise in anti-Semitic behavior on campus.

At least “99 percent” of schools with one or more active anti-Zionist groups had one or more incidents of anti-Semitic activity, whereas only 16 percent of schools with no active anti-Zionist student group had incidents of overall anti-Semitic activity,” the study found.

Additionally, “57 percent” of the schools with one or more active anti-Zionist student groups had one or more incidents that targeted Jewish students for harm, 91 percent of the schools with one or more active anti-Zionist groups showed evidence of anti-Semitic expression, and 80 percent of schools with one or more active anti-Zionist groups showed evidence of BDS activity,” according to the study.

The largest amount of anti-Semitism by incident occurred at Northwestern University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Davis.

The highest incidence of “targeting” Jewish students on campus occurred at Santa Cruz, Northwestern University, Berkeley, and Northeastern University.

The highest level of anti-Semitic expression occurred at Northwestern University, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Berkeley, and UCLA, according to the report.

Anti-Semitic activity was reported at Brooklyn College, the University of Michigan, Vassar College, Columbia University, and Stanford University, among many others.

The study also found a “strong correlation between the presence of faculty who have expressed public support for an academic boycott of Israel and anti-Semitism.”

The presence of an active BDS movement on campus “strongly correlates” with anti-Semitic activity on campus, the study determined.

This includes the presence of campus organizations such as the Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been suspended at several college campuses for, among other things, disseminating Nazi propaganda.

At least 56 percent of schools permitting an active BDS movement “had one or more incidents that targeted Jewish students for harm, whereas of the schools with no evidence of BDS activity, only 23 percent had incidents targeting Jewish students,” according to the study.

SOURCE 

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





3 April, 2016

Multiculturalist charged with murder of mother of three and her 'lover' after bloodbath knife attack in which two of her sons, aged 20 and 17, were also injured
   


A 53-year-old man has been charged with the murder of a mother of three and her ‘lover’ who were stabbed to death in a 'bloodbath' knife attack which also left two of her sons seriously injured.

Foster Christian has been charged with two counts of murder and two counts of GBH following the deaths of Natasha Sadler, 40, and boyfriend Simon Gorecki, 47, in Canterbury, Kent.

Christian was arrested following the incident on Tuesday night, which also left Ms Sadler’s 17-year-old son Brandon in a critical condition in hospital and her other son Connaugh Harris, 20, injured.

Christian, a mechanic who is thought to live in the property which Ms Sadler and Mr Gorecki were stabbed outside of, was charged at 8pm last night after police were given more time to question him.

He will now appear before Medway Magistrates' Court today via video link.

Post mortem examinations of Ms Sadler and fishmonger Mr Gorecki were due to take place today.

Officers were called to a report of an 'altercation' at a residential property in Dickens Avenue, Canterbury, shortly before 8pm on Tuesday.

Neighbour Rab Hendry, 50, said he helped one of the victims' wounds with tea towels. He told how one person had told him he had been stabbed.

He then saw two people, who he believed were brothers. The older one had been apparently stabbed in the arm, while the other was thought to have been stabbed in the stomach.

A Kent Police spokesman said officers believe the victims and Christian were known to each other.

Last night, Ms Sadler's son Connough Harris paid tribute to her after being released from hospital.  He posted a photo of her on Facebook, and accompanied it with: 'Forever in my thoughts mum.'

Warren Harlow - the father of Ms Sadler's youngest son Chase, five, who was not present at the time of the incident - also paid tribute to her.  'Natasha I love you my girl. So sorry I wasn't there to protect you when you needed me most xxxxxx,' he wrote on Facebook.

Forensic officers in white suits were seen going in and out of the semi-detached house as two officers stood guard outside.

Another neighbour, who declined to be named, believed the property housed people who had been placed there by the authorities.

She said: 'It's been like that for years. There have been some nice people living there who have been polite.

'Something like this happening round here is very unusual. I'm 49 and have been here since three months old, and it's been fine.

'I just saw flashing lights last night. My partner told me there was a tent in the garden where presumably they are doing forensics.'

A spokesman for Kent Police said: 'Officers attended and found two people had sustained fatal injuries. One was a 40 year-old woman from Canterbury, and her next of kin have been informed. Inquiries are on-going to locate the next of kin of a man who also died at the scene.

'A 53 year-old man was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder and remains in police custody. He is known to victims, but not related.

'A further two men aged 17 and 20 years-old sustained injuries and were taken to a local hospital. The 20-year-old remains in a critical condition.

SOURCE





Audiences Are Once Again Flocking to Faith-Based Films

That’s the conclusion of Bloomberg Businessweek reporter David Walters, who recently posted an article about the new popularity of Christian films.

Walters reports that "faith-based" films are experiencing a resurgence after a fallow period of several decades. Movies like “The 10 Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” were hugely popular in the 1950s – “The 10 Commandments” is, adjusted for inflation, the sixth-highest grossing domestic movie of all time - but interest in the genre cooled off until Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed over $600 million on a $30 million budget.

Walters observes that in 2016 a new crop of Christian films such as “Miracles from Heaven” and “Risen” are doing well at the box office:

Industry watchers assumed that Miracles and Risen would earn money slowly and steadily leading up to the Easter holiday. Instead, they surged in their opening weekends. Risen out-earned buzzy horror flick The Witch and Jesse Owens biopic Race, trailing only Marvel’s Deadpool and DreamWorks Pictures’ Kung Fu Panda 3. Miracles recouped its $13 million production budget in just four days, knocking the J.J. Abrams-produced 10 Cloverfield Lane out of the top three earners for the week. Explain it however you want: savvy positioning or divine intervention. But when it comes to box office returns, God is good and only getting better.

“Miracles from Heaven” was budgeted at $13 million and has grossed over $37 million domestically.  “Risen” has grossed over $36 million on a budget of $20 million. “God’s Not Dead,” whose sequel “God’s Not Dead 2” will be released April 1, made over $60 million domestically on a $2 million budget. And a remake of "Ben-Hur" is scheduled for release this August.

Walters reports that part of the key to a successful faith-based film is to have a reasonable budget and to not stray too far from the Biblical source. Ridley Scott’s 2014 “Gods and Kings” failed to recoup even half of its $140 budget, and Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” was protested for taking liberties with the original story.

“The studio heads aren’t really interested in this market, nor do they really know it,” David A.R. White, the co-founder of the “Christ-centered” movie production company Pure Flix Entertainment, told Walters. “So they’re thinking, we’re spending a hundred million, so let’s try to make it a crossover movie –a disaster epic. Let’s do the least amount that we have to do to gather the faith audience, because they’re stupid; they’ll come to anything that has a Bible in it. But the problem is, the faith audience isn’t stupid. They’ve been treated by Hollywood for years and years as if they are, and they’re tired of that."

The Bloomberg story concludes:

A dozen years after the post-Passion boom, Hollywood is starting to learn from the sins of the past, scaling back gluttonous budgets and vowing not to bear false witness in production and promotion. “Studios like Sony have seen that these movies are low-cost, and, if marketed correctly, they can be very profitable,” says Matthew Belloni, executive editor of the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s hit-and-miss, but the downside isn’t big. If one thing works, everyone will try to copy it.”

SOURCE





Setting the Record Straight: North Carolina Law Protects Everyone’s Bodily Privacy

The Charlotte City Council passed an ordinance Feb. 22 that was a direct attack on the long-acknowledged truth that maintaining sex-specific bathroom facilities preserves the privacy and safety of women and girls. If enacted, this ordinance would have allowed men to choose—based on feelings rather than biological facts—to enter restrooms reserved for women and girls.

Recognizing the inherent dangers created by Charlotte’s ordinance, the North Carolina General Assembly and Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, acted swiftly and appropriately to pass the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (“Privacy Act”) to rectify Charlotte’s failure to protect its citizens. The Privacy Act restored fundamental privacy norms to bathrooms in government and public school facilities. It also protects against future attempts to erode the fundamental right to privacy in other venues throughout the state.

And for good reason. Public restrooms are places where women and girls may shower, change their clothes, handle personal grooming issues, and take care of many other private matters unique to females. Many people are uncomfortable merely discussing these topics, so imagine the discomfort when women have to do such activities with males present. Women and girls shouldn’t be forced to conduct these private activities in a confined space with male strangers present.

Consider especially that girls and women who have been sexually abused will suffer the additional trauma of being compelled to engage in their most intimate activities in the immediate company of male strangers. No one is saying that every man who struggles with sexual identity issues is a predator. No one. But the mere presence of men in what should be a private, safe space like a bathroom can trigger serious psychological and emotional trauma for women and girls who have been sexually abused. That is simply unacceptable.

This is why the recent uproar—especially the dishonesty of those advocating that men have access to girls’ locker rooms—surrounding the Privacy Act is nothing short of shocking. The companies threatening to boycott North Carolina based on the Privacy Act are really protesting the right of young girls to enjoy privacy and security.

The fact that the NBA is publicly opposing a commonsense privacy law, choosing instead to support policies that force women and young girls to undress and shower in the presence of men, is both unreasonable and unsafe. Such groups are seeking to transform our culture into a genderless society in which objective standards of truth and biological reality are made subservient to political correctness and relativistic self-definitions.

If the right to privacy means anything, it certainly means that women and girls should not be compelled to undress, shower, or use the restroom in the presence of men. The Privacy Act correctly recognizes the compelling interest the state of North Carolina has in protecting the safety and privacy of citizens, especially women and girls, in the intimate context of restroom facilities.

Thankfully, the North Carolina General Assembly and Gov. McCrory have rejected these misguided notions of open-mindedness and tolerance that are fueling social experimentation with mixed-sex restroom policies.

Their commitment to common sense became even more important this week, when the ACLU and other opponents of privacy filed a baseless lawsuit that aims to deprive North Carolinians of their will as expressed through their elected representatives. Contrary to the ACLU’s lawsuit filed this week, the Privacy Act ensures that everyone has equal access to bathrooms based on biological sex, while also offering accommodations for those with special circumstances.

Keeping men out of girls’ and women’s bathrooms should not be a polarizing issue. Privacy is a universal value that every human is entitled to and that lawmakers in North Carolina rightly recognized by exercising common sense and protecting the privacy of women and girls.

SOURCE






Refugee Council accuses Australia of 'cherry picking' Syrian refugees for resettlement

I certainly hope that Australia is cherry-picking.  We want refugees who will fit in well to Australia and there is no doubt that Christians will do that much more readily than Muslims

The Refugee Council has accused Australian immigration officials of "cherry picking" Middle Eastern refugees to be resettled in Australia.

"I don't think anyone expected that the program would be weighted as strongly towards Iraqi Christians as it now appears," Paul Power, the council's CEO, told 7.30.

"No-one can argue that those who are getting resettlement to Australia need resettlement.

"But there are millions of refugees in the middle east in need of resettlement and for Australia to cherry pick people from perhaps 1 to 3 per cent of the refugee population in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon really doesn't reflect at all well on Australia."

Mr Power said it was wrong to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis with a program that prioritises persecuted minorities, when the vast majority of Syria's nearly 5 million refugees are Muslim — many who have suffered their own persecution at the hands of the Assad regime and Shia militias because they are Sunnis.

"It's pretty clear that religious minorities are not the only people who have fled," Mr Power said.

"In fact, the religious minorities are represented in only a small way amongst the refugee populations in Jordan and Lebanon."

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





1 April, 2016

Multicultural politician, 62, fleeced his mentally ill wife by selling their homes and leaving her to sleep in a park


He's not admitting guilt.  Blacks rarely do

A former Labour politician has vowed to clear his name after stealing from his mentally ill wife and selling their home - leaving her to sleep in a park.

Councillor Matthew Kyeremeh 'fleeced' his wife during their divorce proceedings, leaving her destitute and living on the streets, a judge ruled.

The 62-year-old was able to buy a new home while Angela, 54, ended up sleeping in a park in Thornton Heath, south London.

Kyeremeh was ordered to pay her more than £55,000 at the Croydon Family Court last week, and council leader Tony Newman has urged him to resign as a councillor.  He has since been suspended from the Labour party and sacked from his role as Croydon Council's justice chief.

But Kyeremeh, who represents Thornton Heath, said he will take legal action to clear his name.  He said: 'It is with great regret and sadness that I respond to events that have been reported, events which are a private family matter that has been ongoing since 2013.

'You would know that such matters are often, if not always, protracted, complex and deeply challenging for all concerned. 'I am extremely disappointed that the proceedings have made me out to be what I am now.  'I know what has emerged is very far from the truth and reality and I am seeking legal redress.

'I am very conscious of what we have suffered as a family prior to and after the divorce and I would have wished that this matter was not dragged on any further. 'But I believe that the interest of justice will be served in the end.'

District Judge Delia Coonan ruled that Kyeremeh had 'consistently lied' to the court and his wife during protracted hearings.

The judge has spoken of Mr Kyeremeh's 'mendacity' and said she had 'great difficulty in believing a word he said'.

She decided to publish the full judgement because Kyeremeh, described as an 'evasive and unsatisfactory witness', was deputy cabinet member for communities, safety and justice for Croydon Council.

The evidence showed he deliberately exploited his wife's mental illness to pocket most of the proceeds from the sale of two properties without her knowledge.

While the judge could not be certain Kyeremeh had forged his wife's signature on their divorce papers, she said even if his wife did sign them, 'such signatures were deliberately procured by the husband whilst the wife continued to suffer confusion and disturbance of mind'.

As a result of his 'significant financial misconduct' Kyeremeh was able to buy a new home while the mother of his child ended up sleeping rough.

Ms Kyeremeh complained that Mr Kyeremeh had 'fleeced her of assets' when she was mentally ill and left her 'homeless and destitute' and 'living rough in a park'.

The judge said decisions on how big a payout Ms Kyeremeh would get as a result of the divorce were pending.

She was eventually sectioned under the Mental Health Act and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

SOURCE






White student  was attacked for having dreadlocks

More cultural appropriation nonsense.  The whole world appropriates lots of white North American culture so why are other cultures sacrosanct?  It's plainly racist

A white student who was stopped and attacked by a black girl for having dreadlocks in his hair has hit back at claims of 'cultural appropriation' saying its 'my hair, my rules'.

Footage emerged yesterday showing environmental science student Cory Goldstein being confronted at San Francisco State University by the woman.

After stopping him to say he's appropriating a traditionally black hairstyle, she asks her friend, who is nearby, if he has a pair of scissors.

Goldstein asks: 'You're saying I can't have a hair style because of your culture. Why?'

To which the woman replies: 'Because it's my culture.'

But now Goldstein has blasted claims of cultural appropriation, saying he loves and respects all cultures.

He told an interview on Xpress News: 'The girl apparently followed me down two flights of stairs to approach me about this whole situation, in which case I tried to leave multiple times and she wouldn't let me.

'She kept grabbing me pushing me back to try and make her point. I didn't want to talk or discuss this situation with her at all.

'I felt that I didn't need to explain myself. It is my hair, my rules, my body.

He then asks her why he's 'not allowed' to have his hair in locks
The woman asks her friend if he has scissors to cut Goldstein's dreadlocks off. He then asks her why he's 'not allowed' to have his hair in locks

'Someone within an activist group thought she could attack me based on my dreadlocks and that is not OK.'

The footage, which emerged yesterday appears to show the woman confront Goldstein as he tries to argue his dreadlocks are also part of Egyptian culture.

She then throws the question back at him asking him if he's Egyptian before asking over and over 'Where is Egypt?'

She then creates a physical barrier to prevent him from walking up a stairwell.

'Yo, stop touching me right now,' Goldstein tells her.

She then pulls him down the stairs saying, 'come here', and tells him not to put his hands on her.

'I don't need your disrespect,' he says as she finally releases her grip. He then walks away.

The woman then notices another person filming the video and asks him why he's filming.  'Just for everyone's safety,' he tells her.

She then slams her hand into the camera to cover the lens and the video ends.

Yesterday, SFSU released a statement saying they are investigating the confrontation:

They said: 'We are aware of the video made of an incident which occurred on campus yesterday afternoon. University police were called to the scene of the incident when it occurred.

'The two individuals involved in the incident are not San Francisco State University employees. Further, no criminal charges have been pressed at this time to the University's knowledge.

'San Francisco State University promotes the rights of the campus community to engage in free speech, but does not condone behavior that impedes the safety or well-being of others.

'We are taking the matter seriously and will promptly and thoroughly investigate this incident through applicable University channels, including our campus student conduct procedures'

SOURCE 






French minister sparks outrage by comparing Muslim women who wear the veil to 'negroes who supported slavery'

A senior French politician today sparked outrage by comparing Muslim women who wear fashions designed for their own religion to 'negroes who supported slavery'.

Laurence Rossignol, the families secretary in the Socialist government, was reacting to new lines by designers who increasingly cater for followers of Islam.

They include millions of women in countries such as Britain and France who are increasingly drawn to the clothes in a market said to be worth more than £200billion a year.

Dolce & Gabbana's range includes 14 abayas, or ankle-length dresses matched with embroidered headscarves and hijabs.

Swedish giant H&M uses a veiled Muslim women in its advertising, while Japanese brand Uniqlo said it would sell hijabs in its London stores, along with Marks & Spencer which markets a full-body 'burqini' swimming costume online.

Ms Rossignol caused widespread anger on social media by saying Muslim fashion wearers were just like 'negroes who supported slavery'.

Later, she insisted she had not intended to cause offence but was simply referencing the French philosopher Montesquieu's work 'On the Enslavement of Negroes'.

Ms Rosssignol, who is also responsible for women's rights, admitted later to AFP that she had made 'an error of language' with her controversial comments.  However, she added: 'But other than that... I don't take back a word.'

Her supporters included fashion mogul Pierre Berge who agreed that designers were taking part in the 'enslavement of women'.

The former partner of the late fashion legend Yves Saint Laurent, said: 'I'm shocked. Creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion.

'Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship which imposes this abominable thing by which we hide women and make them live a hidden life.'

Mr Berge said firms should 'renounce the money and have some principles', adding: 'In life you have to choose the side of freedom'.

He insisted: 'I am definitely not an Islamophobe. Women have a right to wear headscarves, but I do not see why we are going towards this religion, these practises and mores that are absolutely incompatible with our western freedoms.'

While France - home of Europe's biggest Muslim population - bans face-covering veils, some of its big fashion houses were among the first to tentatively embrace Muslim-specific style.

DKNY, owned by French giant LVMH, pioneered the 'modest clothing' trend with a 'capsule collection' aimed at the Middle East for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan two years ago.

But designer de Castelbajac, who has dressed singer Lady Gaga, said he had grave misgivings about the trend. 'Fashion is secular and universal, and should bring hope.'

Veteran feminist Agnes b had earlier vowed to 'never do it'. 'There is something obscene about offering clothes to rich women from countries where many are fleeing bombs trying to keep their veils on their heads,' she told the Parisien daily. 'We should not normalise clothing which is significant in the way women are seen.'

In January, Dolce & Gabbana became the first major western brand to directly aim at capturing a corner of the Islamic fashion market - estimated to be worth 230 billion euros - with its Abaya range.

Last summer Zara, Tommy Hilfiger, Oscar de la Renta and Mango all launched varyingly 'modest' collections to coincide with Ramadan.

But Berge, 85, who ran the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house for four decades, decried their 'opportunism'. 'These creators who are taking part in the enslavement of women should ask themselves some questions,' he added.  'It is not because women are forced by their husbands to dress in that way that we too have to encourage it,' he insisted.  'In one way they (the designers) are complicit, and all this to make money. Principles should come before money.

'Rather than covering women up, we must teach (Muslim) women to revolt, to take their clothes off, to learn to live like most of the women in the rest of the world.'

A spokesman for M&S, which has begun selling its burkini, in the UK, said it was popular with customers internationally.

SOURCE






Last Stand for the Free Exercise of Religion in case of Little Sisters of the Poor

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke up early in the oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell.  This case carries the last names of the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh (David A. Zubik) and President Barack Obama's secretary of Health and Human Services (Sylvia Burwell).

Ginsburg seemed to make a telling concession.  "No one doubts for a moment the sincerity of the belief of your client and all the others," she said to lawyer Paul Clement, who was representing, among others, the Little Sisters of the Poor.

"And since sincerity of their belief is accepted, it's off the table," said Ginsburg.

One of the beliefs Catholic organizations presented in Zubik was summarized in a brief presented by, among others, the Diocese of Pittsburgh: "Petitioners believe that in order to stay true to their Catholic faith, they may hire an insurance company only if it will not provide their students and employees with coverage that may destroy human life or artificially prevent its creation."

The Obamacare regulation at issue in Zubik mandates that Catholic organizations do this — or give up all health insurance for their employees and be fined.

The court, Justice Ginsburg seemed to signal, was not going to argue with the Catholic Church about what is and is not consistent with the Catholic faith.

But the voice of Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented another question: How can the government function if it cannot demand people do things they believe will damn their souls?

"Because every believer that's ever come before us, including the people in the military, are saying that my soul will be damned in some way," said Sotomayor.

"I'm not naysaying that that is a very substantial perceived personal burden by them," she said. "But if that's always going to be substantial, how will we ever have a government that functions? How will we ever have anything that the government can demand people to do in objecting ... that won't be a problem?"

The First Amendment itself answers Sotomayor's question: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

When federal regulators force Catholics to buy or provide health insurance plans that cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs and devices they are denying Catholics the "free exercise" of religion guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

But, according to the Supreme Court's official transcript, not one voice in the court during the oral arguments in Zubik used the term "free exercise" of religion.

That is because the court will not decide this case using the language and meaning of the First Amendment. It will decide using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

"Government," says that act, "may substantially burden a person's exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest."

In the Hobby Lobby case two years ago, a 5-4 majority (including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia) ruled that the Obamacare regulation was a substantial burden on the religious exercise of Hobby Lobby's owners, who did not want to cover abortifacients. But that majority also "assumed" the government was furthering a compelling interest with the regulation.

Where the government failed in Hobby Lobby was in convincing five justices that it was furthering its compelling interest by the least restrictive means.

To win the power to require Catholic organizations to act against the Catholic faith — and, thus, surrender the free exercise of religion — all the government needs is one more justice than it had in Hobby Lobby.

What America needs are more voices on the court that will defend not only the free exercise of religion but every word in the Constitution.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************





HOME (Index page)

BIO for John Ray






(Isaiah 62:1)


A 19th century Democrat political poster below:








Leftist tolerance



The most beautiful woman in the world? I think she was. Yes: It's Agnetha Fältskog



A beautiful baby is king -- with blue eyes, blond hair and white skin. How incorrect can you get?


Kristina Pimenova, said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair



Enough said



There really is an actress named Donna Air


What feminism has wrought:

There's actually some wisdom there. The dreamy lady says she is holding out for someone who meets her standards. The other lady reasonably replies "There's nobody there". Standards can be unrealistically high and feminists have laboured mightily to make them so


Political correctness is Fascism pretending to be manners


Political Correctness is as big a threat to free speech as Communism and Fascism. All 3 were/are socialist.


The problem with minorities is not race but culture. For instance, many American black males fit in well with the majority culture. They go to college, work legally for their living, marry and support the mother of their children, go to church, abstain from crime and are considerate towards others. Who could reasonably object to such people? It is people who subscribe to minority cultures -- black, Latino or Muslim -- who can give rise to concern. If antisocial attitudes and/or behaviour become pervasive among a group, however, policies may reasonably devised to deal with that group as a whole


Black lives DON'T matter -- to other blacks. The leading cause of death among young black males is attack by other young black males


Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves. Leftist motivations are fundamentally Fascist. They want to "fundamentally transform" the lives of their fellow citizens, which is as authoritarian as you can get. We saw where it led in Russia and China. The "compassion" that Leftists parade is just a cloak for their ghastly real motivations


Occasionally I put up on this blog complaints about the privileged position of homosexuals in today's world. I look forward to the day when the pendulum swings back and homosexuals are treated as equals before the law. To a simple Leftist mind, that makes me "homophobic", even though I have no fear of any kind of homosexuals.

But I thought it might be useful for me to point out a few things. For a start, I am not unwise enough to say that some of my best friends are homosexual. None are, in fact. Though there are two homosexuals in my normal social circle whom I get on well with and whom I think well of.

Of possible relevance: My late sister was a homosexual; I loved Liberace's sense of humour and I thought that Robert Helpmann was marvellous as Don Quixote in the Nureyev ballet of that name.


I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.


I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take children away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass


Racial differences in temperament: Chinese are more passive even as little babies


The genetics of crime: I have been pointing out for some time the evidence that there is a substantial genetic element in criminality. Some people are born bad. See here, here, here and here, for instance"


Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"


Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!


Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.


So why do Leftists say "There is no such thing as right and wrong" when backed into a rhetorical corner? They say it because that is the predominant conclusion of analytic philosophers. And, as Keynes said: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”


Children are the best thing in life. See also here.


Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."


Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".


One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.


It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.


A modern feminist complains: "We are so far from “having it all” that “we barely even have a slice of the pie, which we probably baked ourselves while sobbing into the pastry at 4am”."





Patriotism does NOT in general go with hostilty towards others. See e.g. here and here and even here ("Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: A Cross-Cultural Study" by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan. In Current Anthropology Vol. 42, No. 5, December 2001).


The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin


"An objection I hear frequently is: ‘Why should we tolerate intolerance?’ The assumption is that tolerating views that you don’t agree with is like a gift, an act of kindness. It suggests we’re doing people a favour by tolerating their view. My argument is that tolerance is vital to us, to you and I, because it’s actually the presupposition of all our freedoms. You cannot be free in any meaningful sense unless there is a recognition that we are free to act on our beliefs, we’re free to think what we want and express ourselves freely. Unless we have that freedom, all those other freedoms that we have on paper mean nothing" -- SOURCE


RELIGION:

What the Bible says about homosexuality:

"Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; It is abomination" -- Lev. 18:22

In his great diatribe against the pagan Romans, the apostle Paul included homosexuality among their sins:

"For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.... Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" -- Romans 1:26,27,32.

So churches that condone homosexuality are clearly post-Christian


Although I am an atheist, I have great respect for the wisdom of ancient times as collected in the Bible. And its condemnation of homosexuality makes considerable sense to me. In an era when family values are under constant assault, such a return to the basics could be helpful. Nonetheless, I approve of St. Paul's advice in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans that it is for God to punish them, not us. In secular terms, homosexuality between consenting adults in private should not be penalized but nor should it be promoted or praised. In Christian terms, "Gay pride" is of the Devil


The homosexuals of Gibeah (Judges 19 & 20) set in train a series of events which brought down great wrath and destruction on their tribe. The tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out when it would not disown its homosexuals. Are we seeing a related process in the woes presently being experienced by the amoral Western world? Note that there was one Western country that was not affected by the global financial crisis and subsequently had no debt problems: Australia. In September 2012 the Australian federal parliament considered a bill to implement homosexual marriage. It was rejected by a large majority -- including members from both major political parties


Religion is deeply human. The recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe suggest that it was religion not farming that gave birth to civilization. Early civilizations were at any rate all very religious. Atheism is mainly a very modern development and is even now very much a minority opinion


"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)


I think it's not unreasonable to see Islam as the religion of the Devil. Any religion that loves death or leads to parents rejoicing when their children blow themselves up is surely of the Devil -- however you conceive of the Devil. Whether he is a man in a red suit with horns and a tail, a fallen spirit being, or simply the evil side of human nature hardly matters. In all cases Islam is clearly anti-life and only the Devil or his disciples could rejoice in that.

And there surely could be few lower forms of human behaviour than to give abuse and harm in return for help. The compassionate practices of countries with Christian traditions have led many such countries to give a new home to Muslim refugees and seekers after a better life. It's basic humanity that such kindness should attract gratitude and appreciation. But do Muslims appreciate it? They most commonly show contempt for the countries and societies concerned. That's another sign of Satanic influence.

And how's this for demonic thinking?: "Asian father whose daughter drowned in Dubai sea 'stopped lifeguards from saving her because he didn't want her touched and dishonoured by strange men'

And where Muslims tell us that they love death, the great Christian celebration is of the birth of a baby -- the monogenes theos (only begotten god) as John 1:18 describes it in the original Greek -- Christmas!


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds


Even Mahatma Gandhi was profoundly unimpressed by Africans








Index page for this site


DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism" (Backup here)
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
Western Heart


BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral Reef Compendium.
IQ Compendium
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia


BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Bank of Queensland blues



ALSO:

Mirror for this blog
Mirror for "Dissecting Leftism"
Longer Academic Papers
Johnray links
Academic home page
Academic Backup Page
General Backup
General Backup 2
Pictorial Home Page
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Rarely updated)



Selected reading

MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM

CONSERVATISM AS HERESY

Rightism defined
Leftist Churches
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler a socialist
What are Leftists
Psychology of Left
Status Quo?
Leftism is authoritarian
James on Leftism
Irbe on Leftism
Beltt on Leftism

Critiques
Lakoff
Van Hiel
Sidanius
Kruglanski
Pyszczynski et al.





Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Best with broadband. Rarely updated)



Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/