Einstein's diaries contain shocking details of his racism (?)

All they show is that he was a normal human being as well as a brilliant theorist.  To Leftists, the most casual mention of race or some ethnic group puts the mentioner into the same category as Adolf Hitler -- which is utter nonsense -- but nonsense that can be used to intimidate.

In fact up until WWII, it was normal to talk as Einstein did in his diaries.  Let me give a striking prewar example of that:  In interwar Britain it was a well-known usage to express gratitude to someone by saying: "That's white of you" -- implying that whites are more noble and kind than others.  From my readings I get the impression that the usage was most common among British members of the armed forces and former members of the armed forces. They in effect praised whiteness

One must remember that at that time Britain had the largest empire the world had ever seen, that most members of that empire were brown and that those brown people were generally poor.  And Britons were very conscious of their empire and their dominance of that empire. 

In one way or another (e.g. as administrators; as troops) many Britons would have had some personal contact with the people of their empire -- contact with India particularly. And dirt-poor people worldwide tend to have a lack of moral restraint when attempting to ensure  their own survival.  In plain words, many  would lie and steal from their colonial overlords at any opportunity. And that did not go un-noted among the British.  To them, brown people really were morally inferior. White people in their experience really were more admirable.

I note that Wikipedia has a similar view of the origins of the expression: "The racial sense of the expression may refer more explicitly to the administrators and soldiers of the 18th, 19th and 20th-century British Empire".

Another version of the expression was: "That's mighty white of you", which was mainly used sarcastically.

So it was perfectly normal human discourse to refer to people by racial categories.  I remember in my own upbringing during the '40s and '50s it was perfectly routine for Southern European migrants (mainly Italians) to be referred to as "Wogs" or "Dagoes".  As with Einstein's diaries, however, such usages were kept private. You used such expressions among yourselves, not in the presence of the people being referred to.  And despite any private reservations they may have had, my fellow Anglo-Australians were perfectly civil with the migrants and co-operated with them perfectly well in the workplace and in business.  It helped that the Italians tended to be hardworking and genial people.

So that is an example of a phenomenon well-known to social psychologists:  Attitudes are a poor guide to behaviour.  It is sometimes referred to formally as "The attitude-behavior discrepancy".  Another striking example of that discrepancy is the composer Richard Wagner. He voiced some very derogatory  opinions of Jews -- so much so that Hitler held him in great esteem. Yet in his personal life he was particularly helpful to Jewish musicians and Jews were among his closest friends. Some of his best friends really were Jews.

What was going on in the speech discussed so far is that making generalizations is a great human skill.  The work of a scientist is to discover true generalizations.  But the degree of precision needed from a generalization varies with the circumstances. Scientists need great precision but in everyday speech much precision is not needed.  People need only to get the general drift of what is being said.  It is understood that you are not making scientifically precise statements.  It is understood that you are talking about generalities rather than "all or nothing" rules.

So people talk about -- say -- "blacks" among friends when in more critical company they would add "in general". Once again, the degree of precision varies with the audience.  Being steeped in scientific caution I sometimes refer to blacks by the anthropological term "sub-Saharan Africans" where others would refer simply to "blacks" or "Africans". If I do use "blacks" by itself I am simply using it as a form of shorthand, something readily expandable as "many Sub-Saharan Africans" if required.  So, as you can see, there is a tradeoff between precision and brevity.  And in casual conversation, the briefer form will usually be the one used.

And that was what Einstein was doing.  He was writing for his own private purposes not for publication so he wrote with maximum brevity, not with maximum precision.

He would have been perfectly capable of expanding "children" to "The children I saw on this trip" if he thought he might be misunderstood as making over-broad generalizations.

And note that he did insert some qualifications to his observations.  In speaking of the Japanese he used "seem to" rather than "are". And instead of calling the Chinese "dreary", he said "for the likes of us" they would be dreary.  So he was clearly thinking in a cautious way rather than uttering literally-meant generalizations.  And in speaking of the Ceylonese he would undoubtedly have said "most of the locals" rather than "the locals" if he had expected his words to be given critical scrutiny.

So was he using stereotypes in his writings?  He may well have been doing so.  As Gordon Allport noted back in the 1930's, stereotypes have a "kernel of truth". And as more recent research has shown, the popular understanding of stereotypes as mentally imprisoning is the reverse of the truth.  Stereotypes change rapidly in response to new information.  They are a first approximation to a valid generalization but only a first approximation. If subsequent observations confirm the stereotype it will remain.  If subsequent information conflicts with the stereotype, it will be modified or abandoned. See here and here for coverage of the academic research on that. 

But if anything he said about the various groups were also current stereotypes of those groups, he clearly saw nothing to contradict the stereotypes. Though he may have done so with the Japanese. His generally positive view of them at the time was  not generally held, I would think.  I think that they would have generally been seen as part of "the yellow peril" rather than anything else.

So is Einstein at fault for categorizing other people? That is a common complaint made about talk of races.  But it is an empty-headed  complaint.  Human beings are categorizing animals.  Every word in our language is a category (except of course syncategorematic words).  We have words such as "dog" when there is a great variety of dogs of all shapes and sizes.  But we often use just that one word to refer to all of them. "Dog" is a category and a useful one. Similarly "Japanese" is an ethnic  category that is often found useful.

So was Einstein a racist?  If we understand that charge to mean that he had overgeneralized and incorrect beliefs about some human groups, there is no evidence of it. All we see in his diaries is shorthand notes, and even there he sometimes inserts qualifications that deny any intention of firm generalizations.

So the takeaway from this episode is that we should not judge casual speech by scholarly standards.  It is not intended as such and does not work as such.  And to pretend that it is meant as a series of precise utterances generates false accusations and is in general a disreputable strategy designed to hurt rather than enlighten


Einstein's diaries contain shocking details of his racism

Albert Einstein's personal diary reveals that he was racist in his early life.

Newly translated into English, Albert Einstein's private travel diaries from the 1920s reveal that he was racist in his early life, especially toward Chinese people.

The journals, published as "The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein" by Princeton University Press, reveal that Einstein, perhaps the most famous scientist of all time and known for his theory of general relativity and the equation e=mc2, was extraordinarily biased toward certain populations. This is a stark contrast to his stance later in life, when he said that racism was a "disease of white people."

The diaries were written between October 1922 and March 1923. In one entry Einstein wrote that the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.”

Speaking about the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he continued: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

Einstein also derided the people of Ceylon, which is now known as Sri Lanka. In Ceylon, he wrote, the locals “live in great filth and considerable stench at ground level,” before adding they “do little, and need little. The simple economic cycle of life.”

Einstein also gave his thoughts on Japanese people, whom he viewed in a more positive light, calling them "unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing.” However, he also wrote the “intellectual needs of this nation seem to be weaker than their artistic ones — natural disposition?”

"Entries ... contain passages that reveal Einstein's stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race," a description of the book reads.

The journals were translated from the German and are described as "the first publication of Albert Einstein’s travel diary to the Far East and Middle East."

Speaking with The Guardian, the book's editor Ze'ev Rosenkranz said that Einstein's views were not intended for public consumption and provide a shock to those who read them.

“I think a lot of comments strike us as pretty unpleasant — what he says about the Chinese in particular," Rosenkranz told The Guardian. “They’re kind of in contrast to the public image of the great humanitarian icon. I think it’s quite a shock to read those and contrast them with his more public statements. They’re more off guard, he didn’t intend them for publication.”

Rosenkranz is also the assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and has written several books about the life of Einstein.

The remarks in his journal are markedly different to the public image Einstein projected in his later years.

In 1946, speaking at Lincoln University, the first degree-granting historically black university in the U.S., Einstein said that racism was a "disease of white people" and added “I do not intend to be quiet about it," according to a 2007 article in the Harvard Gazette.

Einstein was a founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and left it his literary estate and personal papers. He declined an invitation to serve as Israel's first president.

He died in 1955 at the age of 76.

SOURCE






Why is the Arab world not taking in its own refugees?

In 2014, Amnesty International published a short article, "Facts and Figures: Syria refugee crisis & international resettlement", in which it stated that "The six Gulf countries - Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain - have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees".

This conclusion was echoed Deutsche Welle, the BBC, Time magazine, CNN, the Washington Post , the Huffington Post, the Jerusalem Post and other media. The most detailed report, however, came from the Brookings Institution in a September 2015 article by Luay Al-Khateeb, a prominent Arab expert on the geopolitics and economics of the GCC. Al-Khateeb noted that:

"condemnation of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stance on the region's refugee crisis has reached a crescendo... they have countered criticism by asking the world to do more.

"The GCC, it is pointed out, has nonetheless given more money for refugees than any other [country]."[1]

As early as 2013, this amounted to $40 billion. Despite this generosity, the bulk of GCC aid money goes to other Muslim states, notably Egypt and Morocco, which, as noted in Part Two, have taken almost no refugees.

At this point, things become murkier. In 2015, Alex Nowrasteh, writing for Newsweek, argued that there are more Arabs and Muslims living in Arab and Muslim lands than ever before:

Many more Syrians are living in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States than at the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

The World Bank reports that 1,000,000 Syrians resided in Saudi Arabia in 2013, a whopping 795% increase over 2010. There were 1,375,064 Syrian migrants living in the Gulf States in 2013, a 470% increase over 2010.

Excluding Oman, the 2013 Syrian population in every Gulf State has increased dramatically since right before the beginning of the Syrian civil war.

Others have also taken up cudgels on behalf of the GCC countries. Open Source Investigations, writing in December 2015, argued that the story about GCC failure to receive refugees is "a myth". Just before that, the Guardian opined that Saudi Arabia had said criticism of their refugee response was "false and misleading". The humanitarian organization HumanRefuge(e) published an article entitled "How Many Syrians Let in by the Gulf States?"

The HumanRefuge(e) post even features a map that purports to show high numbers of Syrian refugees who have been settled in Saudi Arabia.[2]

Why is there such a discrepancy between these two accounts: on the one hand, that the Gulf states have taken in no refugees and, on the other, that they have taken large numbers?

The explanation given by HumanRefuge(e), Open Source Investigations, the Saudi government and others hinges (or appears to hinge) on the fact that:

The UNHCR counts refugees using the 1951 Refugee Convention, among other protocols. Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE did not sign any UN protocols on refugees, so most refugees residing in these areas aren't counted by agencies like the UNHCR.

A clearer explanation is given by Chaker Khazaal, commenting on a 2014 report by Amnesty International:

The reason it's difficult to establish just how many refugees are being hosted by countries in the GCC is because they do not officially recognize incoming asylum-seekers as refugees. Since the GCC is not a signatory of the United Nations' 1951 Refugee Convention, they are not bound by law to provide these people with the standard treatment and rights typically afforded those seeking refuge in a new country.

Admittedly, while the Arab states of the GCC might not have officially resettled any of the Syrian refugees, it would be incorrect to say that Arab states have not received any of the millions of Syrians who have been displaced since the civil war began.

The problem is that being an official refugee and being a guest of a GCC work-sponsorship program are not one and the same. The most significant difference is that official refugees in countries that have agreed to the 1951 Refugee Convention are eligible to become citizens after a certain period of time.

There are (or have been) a lot of Syrians in some of the countries in question. But these are migrant workers, not people fleeing from the civil war. Instead of treating these workers as asylum seekers entitled to the rights of resettlement and citizenship, the Gulf states are trying hard to expel them.

Saudi Arabia, for example, has experienced physical and social decline from its migrant population. Dr Khalid Mandeli (PhD from Newcastle University), a lecturer at Jeddah's King AbdulAziz University, has published a number of articles that show concerns about the impact of migrant workers living in slum areas.[3] Their presence goes back to the 1970s, when the country brought in cheap foreign labour after the oil boom and religious awakening of the period.

By 2013, the Saudi government had embarked on a "Saudization" campaign that aims to remove foreign workers in order to put more Saudis to work. The result has been alarming:

Until recently, of the kingdom's 30 million residents, more than nine million were non-Saudis. Since the labour crackdown started in March, one million Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos, Nepalis, Pakistanis and Yemenis have left. And the campaign has moved into higher gear after the final deadline expired on 4 November, with dozens of repatriation flights now taking place every day. By next year, two million migrants will have gone.

In 2015, Human Rights Watch published a short report on the issue: "Detained, Beaten, Deported: Saudi Abuses against Migrants during Mass Expulsions". The report noted that:

None of the workers interviewed were allowed to challenge their deportations or apply for asylum. Saudi Arabia has not established an asylum system under which migrants could prevent their forced return to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened.

Is it plausible, however, that a country that sees foreigners as a problem and has no asylum system in place has brought in as many as two million Syrian refugees to add to their woes?

The same problem apparently lies behind the rejection of refugees in the rest of the region. Khazaal notes that:

The mass deportation of workers is considered to be a result of the region's reported attempts to prioritize giving employment opportunities to their local citizens. There is also widespread perception that Syrians wishing to seek refuge in the Gulf states are unlikely to be granted a visa in the first place.

This was confirmed by the BBC:

Although those fleeing the Syrian crisis have for several years been crossing into Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey in huge numbers, entering other Arab states - especially in the Gulf - is far less straightforward.

Officially, Syrians can apply for a tourist visa or work permit in order to enter a Gulf state.

But the process is costly, and there is a widespread perception that many Gulf states have unwritten restrictions in place that make it hard for Syrians to be granted a visa in practice.

In 2017, UNHCR reported on a "landmark agreement" between themselves and Kuwait to aid Syrian refugees. Good news, but it is important to read the small print. The agreement is worth $10 million and is aimed "to improve the living conditions of Syrian refugees in northern Iraq". But, given that Kurdistan is linguistically and culturally different from Syria, those refugees will find it hard, almost impossible, to settle there. Kuwait's money will only ease refugees living in camps.

Bahrain fits the same narrative. In March 2018 Bahrain pledged a mere $2 million "to build schools in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan". That is small help for a country already highly pressurized by the numbers of refugees it has taken. This too is not a solution.


In March 2018, the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain pledged a mere $2 million "to build schools" in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan (pictured above). Photo by Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images.

The UAE boasted in 2016 that is planning to take in 15,000 refugees over the following five years -- three thousand a year. But the long-term prospects of those refugees are not encouraging. Reem Al Hashemi, the UAE's minister of state for international cooperation explained that:

Ultimately, we must offer a source of hope for displaced persons that allows them to maintain dignity, return home, reintegrate themselves into their societies, and rebuild their countries and their lives. [Emphasis in original.]

Whereas refugees arriving under the UNHCR are entitled to be granted asylum and eventually citizenship, the UAE is clear from the start that it wants to send its refugees back home. Back home to what? To a half-ruined country still ruled by one of history's most brutal dictators hand-in-hand with Iran, Russia, and Hizbullah? To Eastern Ghouta? To Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Lattakia, Deir al-Zur, al-Raqqa, Tartus, Daraa, al-Hasakeh, al-Qamishli? In order to "maintain their dignity... reintegrate themselves... and rebuild their countries and their lives"?

This is the response from the sixth richest country in the world (taking the Emirates together)? The second richest in the Arab world (after Saudi Arabia)? Where Abu Dhabi has been described as "the richest city in the world"?

What of Qatar, ranked by Fortune magazine in 2017 as the richest country in the world per capita? Qatar houses a large number of migrant workers, mainly Pakistani and Indian, with three out of four residents male. The migrants make up 94% of the country's workforce and 70% of its total population. In January 2017, Qatar offered to house Salvadorans who may be expelled from the United States. But they would be admitted on a temporary basis only. The treatment of migrant workers by the state, however, has been strongly condemned by the European Parliament and others. A report by the BBC in 2015 gives some details.

Conclusion
As the years pass, as more and more countries struggle with poverty, conflict, religious extremism, terrorism, ethnic divisions, governmental incapacity, corruption, and declining levels of education, huge sections of the world's rapidly growing population will look in vain for safe places in which to live, work, and raise their families. The Western states who support the UNHCR cannot possibly handle this without suffering internal decline.

This decline in many parts of the world will accelerate the growth of refugee and migrant populations, creating a downward spiral that will drag down even the more affluent countries. According to Paul Ehrlich, "Collapse of Civilization is a near certainty within decades". The failure of so many Islamic states and the refusal of some of the richest countries in the world to do much to help, alongside their expenditure of billions of dollars over many years to spread the radicalization of Islam and finance Islamic terrorism, is one of the greatest problems facing the modern world and challenging the democracies.

This situation theoretically calls for major intervention by the United Nations, but the UN is effectively controlled by the very countries that are causing or contributing to the problem. With the Organization of Islamic Cooperation adding to the pressures on the democracies by working in the interest of Muslim states, it is time for a response. But so far, the Western nations have shown no willingness to create one.

SOURCE







'Nature' Says We Need More Diverse Scientists To Improve Science. They Present No Scientific Evidence To Back It Up

Leftist faith in action

Last week, Nature — one of the most prominent and prestigious journals in science — ran an insane editorial calling for “diversity” in science. Why, you might ask, does the skin color or sexual orientation of scientists have anything to do with scientific discovery? It doesn’t. But we know it’s good for scientists to be diverse because SHUT UP, YOU BIGOT.

Their editorial begins with a ringing call for more scientists from more backgrounds:


"Lab groups, departments, universities and national funders should encourage participation in science from as many sectors of the population as possible. It’s the right thing to do — both morally and to help build a sustainable future for research that truly represents society"


All of this is just fine — the more scientists, the merrier! But then the editorial begins to get weird:


"A more representative workforce is more likely to pursue questions and problems that go beyond the narrow slice of humanity that much of science (biomedical science in particular) is currently set up to serve. Widening the focus is essential if publicly funded research is to protect and preserve its mandate to work to improve society. For example, a high proportion of the research that comes out of the Western world uses tissue and blood from white individuals to screen drugs and therapies for a diverse population. Yet it is well known that people from different ethnic groups can have different susceptibility to some diseases"


This is, plainly put, idiotic. How do we know that people from various ethnic groups have different susceptibilities to disease? Thanks to science emanating largely from white, male scientists. Which is fine, because who the hell cares what your doctor looks like when he’s treating you, or what your researcher looks like when he's trying to determine your susceptibility to disease?

It’s also worthwhile noting here that the complaint Nature seems to be making is that we ought to use more diverse tissue to screen drugs and therapies. That’s right — but that has nearly nothing to do with the identities of the scientists themselves. This argument is somewhat like stating that we ought to be using more dogs rather than lab rats to test various drugs, and therefore we need more puppy scientists. But Nature is just getting started:


"What does it take to make an institution more diverse? To boost recruitment and participation in science among some under-represented groups is difficult. Statistics from the US National Science Foundation show that the representation of minority ethnic groups in the sciences would need to more than double to match the groups’ overall share of the US population"


How much of that disparity is due to discrimination, how much of it is due to social background, and how much of it is due to choice? Why, that’s just the sort of question you might expect Nature to ask, given that it is a journal of science! But nope. No such question is asked. Instead, we are to assume that it is merely sociological barriers that create disparities. To do otherwise would be intolerant, you see. So, what does Nature recommend?


"As we highlight in a Careers piece this week, there are steps that groups, departments and institutions can take to try to draw from a broader pool of talent. Some of these demand effort to reach out to under-represented communities, to encourage teenagers who might otherwise not consider science as an option. Even the wording of job advertisements can put people off — candidates from some backgrounds might be less likely to consider themselves "outstanding" or "excellent", and so might not even apply. Yet diversity efforts should not stop when people are through the door. To retain is as important as to recruit — mentoring and support is essential for all young scientists, and especially so for those who have been marginalized by academic culture"


Or, alternatively, we could use objective measures of quality — you know, like a scientist would — in order to recruit the best scientists. We could use actual mathematical models and measuring tools. But that might not result in the sort of identity diversity Nature likes.

According to Nature, we should use a sort of affirmative action recruitment effort because to do so is both “moral and ethical” (notably unscientific terms), and can help business’ bottom line. How so? Well, Nature reports that a McKinsey report champions a

“positive link between a firm’s financial performance and its diversity — which it defines in terms of the proportion of women and the ethnic and cultural composition of the leadership of large companies. Could something similar be true in science?”


There is no evidence whatsoever that racial diversity contributes to scientific investigation and discovery. But that’s okay. Nature says so. After all,


“The lack of diversity in science is everyone’s problem. Everyone has a responsibility to look around them, to see the problem for what it is, and to act — not just to assume it is someone else’s job to fix it.”


Or, alternatively, Nature could be scientific, and investigate the actual causes of ethnic disparity in the sciences. Nature could even make a scientific case why diversity in science matters. But they won’t bother with any of that. Better to print identity politics slogans in a leading science journal than actually bother with science.

SOURCE






From Tolerance to Celebration: How Corporations Impose Sexual Orthodoxy

June is Pride Month for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, and popular fashion retailer J. Crew has collaborated with the Human Rights Campaign to create a clothing collection to support the “fight for equality.”

The clothing includes adult and children’s socks, T-shirts, and a tote bag, and depicts rainbow-printed slogans such as “Love First” and “Love to All” as well as the yellow equal sign logo of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s largest advocates of the LGBT political agenda. The items come in sizes for children as young as 2.

J. Crew says it will donate 50 percent of the purchase price of items in the collection to HRC. In addition, J. Crew stores nationwide reserved June 9 as a day of “LGBTQ pride” celebration on which customers could “share the love” or “get ready for a parade” with free flags and temporary tattoos.

J. Crew is a private company that has the right to partner with any organization. But it is part of a growing trend in corporate America of household brands that promote illiberal legislation to undermine the First Amendment.

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Others include Amazon, American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Facebook, General Electric, Google, Hershey, Microsoft, Target, Twitter, and Uber.

In the name of promoting “tolerance” for some customers, these corporations erode the freedoms of others.

The Human Rights Campaign, or HRC, spearheads efforts to pass state and federal legislation that would limit the constitutional freedoms of those who believe in marriage between a man and a woman, a belief that has been held by people around the world for millennia.

In Congress, the Human Rights Campaign leads the charge to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would add both “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”  to the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Jury Selection and Services Act, and several other laws regarding employment with the federal government.

If passed, the Equality Act would impact a broad spectrum of private businesses by adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to laws prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. Although the original purpose of such laws during the civil rights movement was to shield racial minorities from invidious identity-based discrimination, LGBT activists seek to abuse these laws by turning them into swords to punish people whose religious beliefs teach that marriage is between a man and a woman.

This is precisely how the state of Colorado used its law to punish bakery owner Jack Phillips for creating custom cakes only for occasions and messages that align with his traditional Christian beliefs, and not for a same-sex wedding or a divorce celebration.

Tim Gill, who has poured $422 million of his fortune into legislative campaigns to insert sexual orientation and gender identity into antidiscrimination laws, candidly admitted in Rolling Stone magazine that he is doing so to “punish the wicked.” That is, those who disagree with his view of marriage and sexuality.

Gill and the Human Rights Campaign have succeeded in passing such “SOGI” measures in 21 states and the District of Columbia. The HRC also enlisted the support of corporate America to try to limit Phillips’ First Amendment freedoms at the Supreme Court.

J. Crew’s Pride Month collaboration with the Human Rights Campaign will fund national legislation to empower LGBT activists to leverage the power of government to punish millions of Americans for living according to their religious beliefs.

And even after its campaign is over, J. Crew’s support of the Equality Act will continue channeling money from customers into legislation that will reduce their freedoms.

Jim Brett, CEO for J. Crew Group Inc., has said that the brand is committed to doing what it can to help bring about “a more inclusive world.” But by supporting the Human Rights Campaign and, in turn, the Equality Act, J. Crew is furthering the exclusion of its orthodox Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant customers from public life.

HRC President Chad Griffin has boasted of being able to form coalitions of major businesses, including Walmart Inc., to defeat religious freedom protections for citizens in Indiana and Arkansas.

J. Crew’s Pride Month campaign also helps market homosexuality and animus toward orthodox religious believers. For instance, images of same-sex couples, children, and a celebrity are used to market the attire. Each photograph is accompanied by a quote relating to “love” or “pride.”

Actor and producer Evan Jonigkeit responds to the question “What does Love First mean to you?” He says: “It’s about setting aside your preconceived notions about any particular individual and working from a place of empathy.”

Such advertising advances the false notion that anyone opposing the Human Rights Campaign and its mission is not only narrow-minded but cold-hearted and unfeeling. In reality, many moral and legal reasons exist to oppose the HRC’s agenda, none of which involve bigotry or hatred.

It is no coincidence that corporate America prioritizes the LGBT agenda over the freedom to live according to one’s religious beliefs about marriage.

The Human Rights Campaign publishes an annual ranking of corporations according to their public support for “SOGI” legislation, including the Equality Act.

In 2017, J. Crew received a relatively low score of 20 percent. But through its Pride Month collection, the company may be able to boost that score.

Of course, any and all customers may refrain from purchasing the merchandise, or tell J. Crew to focus on its product line rather than on promoting illiberal causes. Customers also may tell the company to stop pressing the new sexual orthodoxy on them and their children.

But, as both children and adults model J. Crew clothing, the Human Rights Campaign’s intolerant message will spread to multiple generations of Americans, no matter how low or high the company’s sales are.

Unfortunately, J. Crew is now only one of many large corporations whose cultural cronyism undermines their customers’ freedoms, and uses their own money to do it.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

A Major Mediterranean Diet Study Was Retracted. But Do Docs Still Recommend It?

This is hilarious.  The study in both its original form and in its revised form is a crock.  It actually showed that the diet had NO EFFECT on heart health.  It's all too common for researchers to see in their results what they want to see rather than what is actually there. That's a major cause of the non-replicability of most scientific findings.  See the critique I wrote when the study first came out


A landmark study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet for heart health had serious problems with its methods, the study's authors announced this week.

The problems were so critical that the researchers retracted their original paper — a rigorously designed study first published in 2013 in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that following a Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In its place, the authors have published a reanalysis of their data in the same journal on June 13, which they say accounts for the methodology problems and comes to the same conclusion as the original.

But in light of the problems with the original study, do doctors still recommend that people follow a Mediterranean diet to protect their hearts?

Some experts say that despite the study's problems, there's already a lot of other research showing the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, and so they'd continue to recommend the diet.

"Although the methodology of this study is somewhat questionable, there still exists a preponderance of data prior to this study which came to the same findings," Dr. Rachel Bond, associate director of the Women's Heart Health Program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told Live Science. [7 Tips for Moving Toward a More Plant-Based Diet]

But others say that the reanalysis is not enough to make up for the study's methodology problems, and that now, evidence supporting the Mediterranean diet for heart health is weakened.

More HERE





Faith-based adoption agencies are too valuable to shut down

For decades, the government has relied on private child-welfare providers, including faith-based agencies (FBAs), to help care for children in foster care. There are about 440,000 children in care right now, about a quarter of whom are waiting for adoption. In places like Illinois, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, some FBAs have been forced to shut their doors because of their faith. Eighty members of Congress penned a letter on May 23 to President Trump urging him to protect faith-based child welfare providers. The future of FBAs in Michigan and Philadelphia are currently under threat.

The letter states:

“Child neglect, abuse, and abandonment are being fueled by the ongoing opioid epidemic, yet as more children are entering the foster care system we have fewer families available to provide safe and loving homes for them. ...

“We cannot allow history to repeat itself and shut out faith-based agencies doing crucial and quality work. Too much is at stake to place politics above the needs of our nation’s most vulnerable children. Members of Congress are working to develop legislative solutions. But this issue is so important that all branches of government must take responsible action.”

On May 18, Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer signed into a law a bill that would allow faith-based child welfare providers to continue serving vulnerable children and families in accordance with their sincerely held religious beliefs. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a similar law on May 11. They join the ranks of seven other states that, over the last few years, have proactively protected FBAs that provide foster care and adoption services.

A lawsuit by the ACLU in Michigan — a state which currently protects FBAs — wants the state to stop allowing FBAs exemption from regulations that conflict with their faith. If the ACLU wins out, organizations like Catholic Charities would likely not be able to continue providing their services to vulnerable children.

My new report out for the Heritage Foundation looks at the important role of faith-based agencies (FBAs) in the child-welfare system. It also lays out what states would lose if many FBAs had to end their foster care and adoption services over regulations that conflicted with their sincerely held beliefs. 

With a population of 325 million people — Hispanics, Christians, Asians, atheists, whites, Muslims, African Americans, Buddhists, Native Americans (and too many other religions, races, and ethnicities to list) — across 3,000 counties and two billion acres of intensely varied geography, the United States represents an incredibly diverse community. This is mirrored in a diverse set of providers that deliver human services to families across the nation, including foster and adoptive services. There are public, private, faith-based, and secular child-welfare agencies. They all abide by regulations and requirements set by their states, to ensure a certain standard of care for the children they serve. They all do important work. With the growing foster care and adoption needs of the country, there is plenty of room for all these agencies to roll up their sleeves and work together.

Forcing agencies out because of their faith leaves other agencies to absorb their caseloads — requiring more caseworkers, more foster families to recruit and train, and more resources to serve these additional children. That is especially tough when many agencies are already staggering under the influx of children into foster care over the last five years.

While nationwide the number of children in foster care has increased by 10 percent from 2012 to 2016, several states saw growth of over 50 percent in that time, like Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, and New Hampshire. The number of kids in care waiting for adoption increased 15 percent nationwide from 2012 to 2016. One of the primary driving factors in this increase is the opioid crisis — which has only continued to worsen.

This has increased the number of foster homes needed. However, many states have actually seen their foster-home capacity decrease over the last few years — either because their number of foster homes is going down, or because the number of foster homes isn’t increasing fast enough to keep up with the growing numbers of children in foster care. People of faith are more likely to step forward for this role. Research has found that practicing Christians are much more likely to adopt and foster, or even consider fostering, compared to the general population.

There are also many examples of faith-based organizations and networks that excel at recruiting foster parents. The CALL in Arkansas helped recruit almost half the state’s foster families. Focus on the Family helped cut in half the number of children in Colorado waiting to be adopted. These are just two instances. Sometimes FBAs also do a better job at finding forever homes for populations that are traditionally harder to place, such as sibling groups and older youth. For example, 45 percent of all Catholic Charities adoptions were children with special needs in 2016.

FBAs are valuable partners for states and can help prevent children from languishing in care or aging out of the system without a permanent family. In a time of great need when there is a shortage of foster and adoptive families in many places, states that are looking to take full advantage of their local resources should embrace their faith communities. Likewise, faith networks and organizations should increase their efforts and commitment to families in need and help ensure that every child has a loving home.

SOURCE





A woman-hating feminist

"Yes, yes, and yes," a Vanity Fair reporter told MSNBC's Nicole Wallace when asked if "Trump women" are "numb,""dead inside," and "paid off" for tolerating President Donald Trump.

"They do not see President Trump the way that all of us see President Trump," Senior Reporter Emily Jane Fox told Wallace Thursday when asked how "Trump women" could overlook disparaging remarks about the credibility of porn actresses like Stormy Daniels made by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Wallace: "Let me ask you, you know more about the Trump women, the Trump family than anyone. What do they do on a day like today? Are they the most stoic human beings? "Are they numb, are the dead inside, are they paid off? What's their deal?"

Fox: "Yes, yes, and yes.

"But, I think they do not see President Trump the way that all of us see President Trump. They have such a distorted image of who he is. They don't have the kind of reaction that we do. It's almost some sort of trick."

Fox then attacked the Trump's daughter, Ivanka, declaring that she isn't "a rational person" - like the MSNBC's Wallace:

Wallace: "But, they're mothers now. They seem to be raising nice kids. How do they wall it off?"

Fox: "You're looking at this as a rational person. But, I have written this a million times: Ivanka Trump is the most masterful compartmentalizer that America has, maybe, ever seen.

"And, so, her ability to separate something like this out from, then, going and sitting in the West Wing and doing her job, or going and visiting her father in the Oval Office.

"She's able to separate those things in a way that your or I, probably, can't understand."

[More Leftist projectuion.  Threy have got most of reality walled off so they accuse others of "compartmentalization"

SOURCE







Australia: 'Absolutely I've been discriminated against': Man claims Officeworks refused to let him print posters criticising Islam because it's 'the holy month of Ramadan'

An activist who was refused service at Officeworks for attempting to print out anti-Islamic posters has hit out at the chain store, claiming his right to freedom of speech has been violated.

Avi Yemini and Ralf Schumann of the Australian Liberty Alliance are both regular customers at the Officeworks branch in South Melbourne: printing and laminating any materials there that are too large to print in their own office. Like, for example, an armful of flyers for an upcoming rally they've organised in support of free speech and defense of Sonia Kruger.

'We went there this afternoon like we have for 3 or 4 years,' Mr Schumann told Daily Mail Australia. 'The chap on the counter puts the USB stick in like he always does, gets the first screen up like he always does - and calls his young manager over.

'[The manager] then gives me a lecture on their shop policy and tells me that they will not print anything that is offensive to Muslims and especially not in the holy month of Ramadan.'

One of the posters declares that: 'Criticising perverse ideologies is not racial discrimination. Islam does not equal race'.

The second features the face of Sonia Kruger - who is due to face the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal over blasphemy and vilification charges - alongside the text: 'Mass blasphemy! Half of Australia agrees with Sonia #LetsTalkAboutIslam.'

Mr Schumann went on to explain how the store manager told him 'we [Officeworks] can't print these racist things.'

'So I wrote a brief email to the manager to tell him that his store policy does not override federal or state anti-discrimination laws,' said Mr Schumann.

'These laws happen both ways: you can't discriminate on religious grounds OR political grounds.'

Mr Schumann insists that, in this case, he's the one who is the victim of discrimination. 'Absolutely I've been discriminated against,' he declared.

'You go into a shop and they tell you 'I don't serve you because of your political opinion.' Well, we're happy to cry foul over political discrimination.'

Officeworks refused to comment when approached by Daily Mail Australia.

The company has, however, since posted a comment on a Facebook video that Mr Yemini uploaded on Friday. In the video, Mr Yemini trumpets to his 168,000 followers how the chain store has disrespected his right to freedom of speech.

'At Officeworks, we respect our customers' right to free speech,' the company's comment reads. 'However our policy prohibits customers from printing any materials which may be threatening, abusive or incite hatred on any person.

'In relation to your recent visit to our South Melbourne store, our team member has misinterpreted the policy. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.'

Mr Schumann asserts that: 'Nothing on those two placards was in any way inciting violence or being nasty to any person or group of persons.'

Mr Yemini further claims that the office supplies chain's refusal to print the posters is in violation of consumer law.

'If they have a complaint under racial discrimination they can refuse it, but this wasn't racial discrimination,' he said.

'We criticised Islam, and that in [the store clerk's] eyes during the holy month of Ramadan is unacceptable. Unfortunately Officeworks took his side, protecting Islam before Australian 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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

JORDAN PETERSON’S TRAGIC FOLLY

By Nirmal Dass | Researcher with a PhD in translation theory

Nirmal Dass has written a rather long article that is critical of Peterson.  He says Peterson’s recent book — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — is filled with errors and misinformation.  I found that a most amusing claim as I would say that Nirmal's article is "filled with errors and misinformation".  It is certainly a very opinionated article.  He writes with great confidence and zero sign of self-doubt.  His dogmatism is extreme.  He provides no links or references for any of his assertions.  We are apparently supposed to sit at his feet and revere him as an infallible scholar. He appears to be of Indian origin so maybe he has adopted the role of guru.

Another thing that amused me was his prominent claim at the very beginning of his article that he has a PhD in translation theory.  I have written a little on problems in translation myself but I rather wondered why he would make that claim so prominently.  It appears that he may have that doctorate but it was not his first doctorate.  He also has a doctorate in critical theory, which is a neo-Marxist sect, or a series of neo-Marxist sects. So Nirmal seems keen to deflect a search of his qualifications.

So at least when he talks about Marxism, you would think he knows what he is talking about.  He probably does but it doesn't appear in his article.  He makes in fact a quite hilarious claim about Marxism.  He says there is such a thing as "real" Marxism.  Some Marxists are not true Marxists, apparently.

I taught for some years in a university sociology department where most of the rest of the teaching staff were Marxists of one  stripe or another. And a phrase that still rings in my ears from that time was "What Marx was REALLY saying ...". I heard it so many times. There was in other words no agreement about what constituted true Marxism.  In fact, as far as I can tell, there are as many versions of Marxism as there are Marxists.  For a time in Australia there were two Communist parties:  "The Communist Party of Australia" and "The Communist Party of Australia, Marxist Leninist".  The first was pro-Soviet and the second was Maoist. They hated one-another but both of course would have claimed to be the true Marxists

The Communist sect which probably has the best claim to be close to the writings of Marx would be the Trotskyists. They do make strong claims to being the true followers of Marx.  So I suspect that Nirmal is a Trot these days.  Trotsky was a bloodthirsty beast but I like his judgement that the Soviet regime was "Bonapartist".  That's a grievous insult in Marxist circles and equates roughly to being Fascist.

So that little example gives you the flavor of Nirmal's writing.  Whatever he thinks and believes is an absolute.  It alone is the true interpretation of anything.  Nirmal is the true Marxist and others who claim inspiration from Marx are fools or impostors.

We encounter that dogmatism in Nirmal's first paragraph, where he speaks of "true concern of Chinese thought".  There is a single  body of thought in China and it has a "true concern"?  One would have thought that there are many bodies of thought in China and that they all had their own concerns but Nirmal says it is not so.  He has detected a "true concern" and that is the end of the matter.

We next find Peterson accused of incorrect interpretation of Jungian thought.  But again there is no such thing as a correct interpretation of Jung.  Carl Gustav Jung's ideas were highy speculative. He thought he could find deeper meaning in history and much else as well.  And his followers have done likewise.  Jungian thought is a speculative and critical exploration, not an infallible truth. And Jordan follows in those footsteps. Once again, however Nirmal appears to think he has found the "True" Jungianism and everybody else is wrong.

Then we go on to the Bible and we are blandly informed that Peterson "misconstrues the Logos".  How, we are not told.  I wonder however if it might be Nirmal who misconstrued the first verse of the Gospel of John. I find a lot misconstrue it.  How for instance does he interpret  the anarthrous predicate in ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. He is an expert on ancient languages but I might still be able to give him a run on that one.

And so it goes.  It is all just dubious assertions.  I could pick apart his whole article as thoroughly as he tries to pick Peterson apart but I have already spent too much time on his nonsense


Jordan Peterson’s recent book — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — is filled with errors and misinformation. Consider, for example:

1. The yinyang, claims Peterson, is a male-female duality. However, most Chinese philosophy denies such a claim, where only Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179–104 BC), a cranky oddball, says anything vaguely similar. Rather, the swirling pattern describes aesthetic order (the true concern of Chinese thought).

2. Peterson’s Jungian explanations of myths are fabrications, complete with mistranslations from languages he doesn’t know (Akkadian, Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, Greek). He calls such misinformation, “ancient wisdom.”

3. Lacking theology and history, Peterson proceeds to “explain” the Bible, by relativizing God and absolutizing opinion. Thus, he misconstrues the Logos, and blasphemes his way through the Old Testament and the Gospels. As for history, just one example suffices: No, Jesus is not a version of the Egyptian god, Osiris. This nonsense comes from Gerald Massey, a 19th-century crackpot who faked evidence to make such claims). Unbeknownst to Peterson, he has one ancient ally, the Pneumatomachi, who said the Bible was all tropes and happily fashioned harebrained interpretations.

4. “Marxism” (Peterson’s catchphrase for postmodernism, Marx, the Frankfurt School and feminism) is the great enemy, supposedly “destroying” the West. Some of Peterson’s talking points come from the fallacious book by Stephen Hicks (Explaining Postmodernism). But the West isn’t being destroyed by Marxism, The West is trying to become rootless via apostasy and acedia, which Peterson promotes. Should the West return to its root (Christianity), it will thrive. That real Marxists hate postmodernists is unknown to Peterson. He also knows nothing about Maximilien Robespierre’s Jacobin progeny (the democides Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and the Kims).

5. Peterson cannot differentiate philosophy from critical theory and thus can only name-drop (Rousseau, Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Derrida, etc.).

6. Peterson naively believes that the labels, “ancient,” “medieval,” “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” embody civilizational shifts. Scholars have long abandoned such designations, since the history of ideas shows no such drastic changes. Thus, Peterson’s evolutionary construct of “progress” and “change” via these labels is fiction.

7. Peterson’s “science” is smoke-and-mirrors. His example of lobsters is not true, since serotonin behaves differently in crustaceans and mammals. As an evolutionary psychologist, he’s a mythographer, interested not in truth but in the management of emotions.

8. Peterson has no formal logic and makes category mistakes (too many to list). He confuses one category with another, then draws a false, universalizing conclusion. For example, the lobsters, “ancient wisdom,” “Marxism” and so forth.

He “spreads a spirit of foolishness and of error,” in the words of Jean Racine, because he embodies that which he rails against — for he’s a postmodernist, steeped in conceptual relativism (per Hilary Putnam), where an object has a multitude of interpretations because it cannot have one universal meaning.

Thus he advises that “…each of us…bring forward the truth, as we see it” — because there’s nothing greater than the self: “…you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering…This is where meaning is to be found.”

As for facts, they “cannot speak for themselves…[as there are]…an endless number of interpretations.” Reality, then, is feelings, not ideas, and facts are fluid.

It gets worse. Camille Paglia calls him “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan.” But Peterson disagrees, for he says thinking is overrated: “When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself…it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.”

(It’s best to ignore the problem in logic – how can “existence” be “existentially intolerable?” This is another Petersonian trick – using “philosophicalese” to sound profound, a postmodernist sleight of hand).

So, Peterson wants you to “notice,” and not “think.” Why? Read Rule 6: “Set your house in order before you criticize the world.” This is acedia: Worry about yourself; you have nothing to offer the world. Trust only feelings (noticing) – that is your “truth” which will “justify your miserable existence.”

As a postmodernist, Peterson universalizes his feelings, imagining that his personal Hell includes the entire world. He wants to “enforce the myth of man’s material perfectibility,” in the words of Whittaker Chambers.

Henri de Lubac once observed, “…without God man can only organize the world against man.” This is the reason for all democides, from Robespierre onwards. Peterson too wants to organize the world without God by trying to replace one form of material perfectibility with another (his Jungian self-realization).

Peterson decries “Marxism,” while depending on Marxian logic, methodology and assumptions (materialism) to establish his own “broken truths” (another problem in logic – if truth is broken, then it’s not truth).

The constant theme of his book is the “enemy within…arrogant, static, unchanging existence.” He hopes to overcome this inner Hell by using delusion (errors and misinformation) as an opiate just to get through “miserable existence.” This is why he misteaches and misinforms, for he wants to fabricate a calming narrative to counter meaninglessness (suffering) that materialism always produces. Such is his strategy of worldly success (the 12 Rules).

Materialism has no faith, hope or love. Thus, Peterson has no antidote to chaos, because he himself is chaos. In his strategy of success, there is no God, no meaning, no truth, no history, which is “far preferable to waiting, endlessly, for the magical arrival of Godot.” By “Godot,” he means Christ. There’s only the self, eternally alone, trying to forestall suffering by way of distraction (noticing). As an evolutionary psychologist, he can only try to manage emotions.

The more important question is this: How can Peterson presume to offer “rules,” when he can offer no categories for their obedience? This is Consequentialism (per Elizabeth Anscombe), which dismantles Peterson’s entire book. Man obeying man is tyranny.

“Truth is the radiant manifestation of reality,” observed Simone Weil. Since Peterson does not want thinking, he cannot know truth, and can never know reality – hence his errors and misinformation. On what authority, then, does he presume to teach? Those that choose to follow him should answer this question.

SOURCE







Another Muslim pervert

A pervy gynaecologist who told a patient to bring sex toys to his surgery and wanted to give her porn has been struck off.

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed, 51, even asked the woman if she wanted sex after performing an intimate examination on her.

The married dad-of-two also stared at the patient as she undressed at his surgery in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire - warning her not to tell anyone because he would 'be in trouble'.

Ahmed was found guilty of a string of sexual misconduct offences, including touching the woman intimately without consent and asking if she felt like having sex while examining her.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) heard how the woman, in her 40s, went to the Princess Royal health clinic for advice about sexual health twice in August 2013 and January 2015.

She told how she had been left shaken and embarrassed Ahmed when quizzed her over her sex life, what sex toys she used and if he could look at them.

The woman said: 'He started behaving strangely when I told him I didn't have a boyfriend and he started asking about my sex life and if I was having sex with anyone.

'I said I am having sex with someone because I didn't want him to know I was on my own because I felt uncomfortable and worried.

'He went on to ask many sexual questions like what sexual positions do I do and which I like.'

The woman continued: 'He asked if I like licking and he pulled his tongue out and wiggled it.'

She said: 'I did not answer but I felt dirty.

'He asked me the same question again and I told him again I didn't understand. He then said again did I feel like I wanted to have sex whilst he was doing the exam. I did not answer.'

The woman told how she saw Ahmed 'staring at me when I was putting my clothes back on'.

He would later access her medical records for her telephone number and ask her more inappropriate questions about her private life.

He also asked if he could install pornography on her home computer.

The patient said in her statement: 'He said it was Dr Ahmed, did I remember what we said earlier and was it okay for him to come to my house to put the porn on my laptop.

'I said I wasn't at home and I could feel he was shocked. He paused and he said it was alright, he could come this evening.

'I said I didn't feel that it was alright for him to come round to install porn and I didn't want that.'

Ahmed, originally from Bangladesh, failed to attend the medical tribunal disciplinary hearing and is now thought to be practising in America.

He was banned from the medical register for life.

The MPTS, sitting in Manchester, said in its judgment: 'The Tribunal was concerned that Dr Ahmed abused his position of trust as a genito-urinary doctor: a role in which he would have routinely conducted intimate examinations on walk-in patients, some who may have been vulnerable.

'The tribunal found that his sexual misconduct would seriously undermine public trust in the profession.'

SOURCE







The Importance of Dads in an Increasingly Fatherless America

There is a growing split taking place among American fathers today. On the one hand, more and more children are growing up without a dad in their lives. But on the other hand, fathers who are involved in their kids’ lives have actually become even more active.

The Pew Research Center reports that fathers who live in the same home as their children have become increasingly engaged in the lives of their kids over the past half-century. In 2015, fathers reported spending an average of 7 hours a week interacting with their children, compared with 2.5 hours in 1965.

Today, 57 percent of dads say they see parenting as a central part of their identity.

This encouraging shift in fatherhood involvement could be owing, at least in part, to the greater amounts of research showing the importance of a father’s role in the life of his child. Nonprofits like Focus on the Family have championed the role of fathers and have promoted well-researched materials to back up their claims.

While it’s true more fathers are taking the time to come home from work and throw the football around with their kid, an increasing number of children find themselves without an active paternal presence in their lives.

Pew reports that only 11 percent of American children lived apart from their dads in 1960. Today, that number has grown to 27 percent. One in every three American children are now growing up in a home without their biological father.

There is a “father absence crisis in America,” according to National Fatherhood Initiative, and the results are sobering.

Studies have found that children raised without a father are:

At a higher risk of having behavioral problems.

Four times more likely to live in poverty.

More likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.

Twice as likely to never graduate high school.

At a seven times higher risk of teen pregnancy.

More vulnerable to abuse and neglect.

More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.

Twice as likely to be obese.

From education to personal health to career success, children who lack a father find themselves at a disadvantage to their peers raised in a two-parent household.

A 2017 Heritage Foundation article reported that “routine family bonding activities like reading bedtime stories and eating meals together have a profound effect on children’s educational development and psychological well-being.”

Simply put: Dads, we need you.

As I reflect back upon my own childhood and the role my dad played, and is still playing in my life, I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude. My father is far from perfect, but he was present.

School was challenging for me as a kid, so my dad often took time to help me with my homework after he got home from work. I remember sitting on our living room couch struggling to understand my math homework with my dad’s instruction.

To be honest, I’m not sure he was much of a help—but he was there. I have always known that my dad was there for me, not just because he told me he was, but because he showed me. The greatest gift my father has ever given me was his time.

So to the fathers who have sacrificed for their children, who have worked to be involved in each day of their child’s life, thank you. Your children will always remember your involvement in their lives.

And to the fathers who would like to do more, remember the importance of your role. It is not about being perfect, but being present.

SOURCE






PC brigade in a hate speech class of their own

The politically correct class in Australia has always been particularly zealous in its defence of provisions such as section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act and similar provisions in the anti-discrimination laws of the states and territories.

These statutes make it unlawful to publish material that, in many cases, does no more than offend the sensibilities of various groups in the community. What these laws do is place a higher value on hurt feelings than on the rigorous public debate of political, social and economic questions.

It is under one of those laws that the Nine Network and Sonia Kruger face legal proceedings, starting ­tomorrow, alleging racial vilification. In a morning TV show, Kruger attempted to discuss the question of whether there was any correlation between Muslim immigration and terrorist incidents in various countries.

When it comes to its own participation in public debate, however, the politically correct class often has few limits on offensive and insulting statements.

When two members of the Senate proposed the amendment of section 18C in 2016, they were described by the chief political correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald as “hate-speech apologists”. In addition one was said to be “a boorish, supercilious know-all with the empathy of a Besser block” and the other “an absurdist fringe-dweller”. Both were “self-promoting misanthropes”.

About the same time, in a ­Herald cartoon of Malcolm Turnbull speaking at the UN about refugees, he was shown as wearing three badges inscribed with: “Hate makes the world go around”, “Hate will find a way”, and “All you need is hate”.

One of the most flamboyant examples of this sort of rhetoric occurred last March when Julian Burnside posted on Twitter an image of the federal Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, in a Nazi uniform. This was a particularly striking example because Burnside is not from the fringes of Australian society. He is the product of Melbourne’s most prestigious private school, a Queen’s Counsel at the Victorian Bar and a member of the Order of Australia.

It would have been unthinkable in the fairly recent past that such an establishment figure would be involved in these kinds of guttersnipe exchanges, but the tenor of public debate in Australia has certainly changed in a relatively short space of time.

More recently there were the comments of a history professor at Sydney University who asked whether The Australian’s Greg Sheridan and Chris Kenny “think that Western countries are succumbing to a poisonous cocktail of multiculturalism, Muslim immigration, political correctness and cultural Marxism”, and added: “It seems that, much like Anders Breivik and Steve Bannon, they do.”

Putting aside this categorisation of former Trump staffer Bannon, Breivik was the person who murdered 77 people on one day in Norway in July 2011. This material was published in, of all places, the ABC’s religion and ethics website, but the reference to Breivik was later removed by the ABC. The professor said: “I think some people have overreached themselves with their incendiary rhetoric.” Quite so.

Sydney University staff have no monopoly on inflammatory statements. An edition of the student newspaper in May carried a photo on the cover of a female ­suicide bomber who had killed many Israelis, describing her as a “martyr” in the struggle against “Israeli colonisation”.

When the Australian Union of Jewish Students complained, the student representative council passed a motion condemning them and congratulating those who had worked on the newspaper “for their brave and highly defensible cover depicting a pro-Palestine freedom fighter”.

The domination of universities in Australia by the politically correct class is, of course, not a recent phenomenon. But their influence is just as pervasive in most public institutions and many private ones, including the boards of many public companies, often seemingly more concerned with taking a political stance than making a profit for their shareholders.

What is interesting, however, is the contrast between this group’s view of themselves as the moral guardians of society and their ferocious intolerance for anyone who expresses a view contrary to their own. It is as if those contrary views represent a threat to their role as moral guardians, whereas they occupy most of the commanding heights of Australian ­society and are, unfortunately, not at all threatened.

One thing they have done, however, is to lower the tone of public debate with virulent attacks on their opponents that reflect the deep intensity of their sanctimonious opinions.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Palestinians: Victims of Arab Apartheid

Tens of thousands of Palestinians are now living in a Lebanese ghetto called Ain Al-Hilweh, and the world seems to be fine with that

Lebanon is one of several Arab countries where Palestinians are subjected to discriminatory and apartheid laws and measures. The plight of Palestinians in Arab countries, however, is apparently of no interest to the international community, and pro-Palestinian activists and groups around the world.

Recently, the Lebanese authorities placed electronic screening gates at all entrances to Ain Al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. The move has sparked a wave of protests in Ain Al-Hilweh and among Palestinians living in other refugee camps in Lebanon, who are describing the installation of the electronic gates as collective punishment.

Until a few years ago, Ain Al-Hilweh had a population of 75,000. However, with the influx of refugees from Syria, which began in 2011, the camp's population is now estimated at more than 160,000.

About two years ago, the Lebanese army began building a security fence around Ain Al-Hilweh as part of an effort to combat jihadi terror groups that were reported to have infiltrated the camp. With the completion of the fence, the Lebanese authorities, in a move that has surprised the Palestinians, decided to install electronic gates to screen all those entering and leaving the camp. The Lebanese authorities say the gates are critical to discovering explosives and other types of weapons.

The installation of the electronic gates came during the holy month of Ramadan -- a move that has further exacerbated tensions inside Ain Al-Hilweh and drawn strong condemnations from the camp residents and other Palestinians.

Leaders of several Palestinian factions in Lebanon who held an emergency meeting earlier this week to discuss the installation of the electronic gates called on the Lebanese government to ease security restrictions on the camp residents. Some of the leaders claimed that the new gates were part of a US-led "conspiracy" targeting Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

"We fear that the recent Lebanese measures are in compliance with US pressure on the Lebanese government to impose punitive measures against the Palestinian camps [in Lebanon]," said a Palestinian official who attended the emergency meeting. He claimed that most of the terrorists wanted by the Lebanese authorities had left Ain Al-Hilweh in spite of the tough security measures surrounding the camp, and as such there was no justification for the electronic gates.

According to residents of Ain Al-Hilweh, the electronic gates have turned their lives into misery, resulting in long lines and delays as Lebanese soldiers conduct thorough searches on Palestinians leaving and entering the camp. They claim that the gates were placed at all the entrances to the camp, although only after the security situation inside the camp had relatively improved and recently been calm. "Such security measures are unjustified and serve to only increase anger and frustration," argued Yasser Ali, an official with a group that represents Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. "Why are they dealing with Ain Al-Hilweh as if it were an island full of diseases?"

In the past few days, residents of the camp have staged a number of protests against the electronic gates, and demanded an end to the Lebanese authorities' harsh measures against Palestinians in Ain Al-Hilweh in particular and Lebanon in general. "We prefer to die than to be humiliated," and "The people in the camp challenge the gates," the protesters chanted.

A Palestinian human rights organization condemned the Lebanese army's decision to place electronic gates at the entrances to the camp. He said the measure turns all the residents of Ain Al-Hilweh into suspected terrorists. "This measure is an insult and humiliation to the camp residents and an assault on their dignity," the organization said in a statement.

"Such electronic gates are used at airports and international borders, and it is hard to understand why they are being used to screen residents of a camp. Clearly, this is collective punishment that affects tens of thousands of people. The security measures, including the electronic gates and the concrete fence have turned the camp into a real prison. The residents have become prisoners who are permitted to enter and leave only with the permission of the military, which is standing at the entrances."

Some Palestinians have called out Lebanon's leaders for their hypocrisy. "In whose interest is it to humiliate the Palestinians in Lebanon?" asked Palestinian political commentator Ahmed Al-Haj Ali. "How can Lebanese officials experience schizophrenia when they talk about liberating Palestine while they are imposing strict measures against the Palestinians?"

On June 13, a delegation representing Palestinian factions met with Bahia Hariri, a Lebanese parliament member who happens to be the aunt of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and appealed to her to intervene to have the gates removed from the entrances to Ain Al-Hilweh. The delegation complained to her that the gates have had a negative impact on the lives of the camp residents and urged her to use her influence with the Lebanese authorities to ease restrictions imposed on Palestinians in Lebanon.

Here it is worth noting that the 450,000 Palestinians in Lebanon have long been suffering from a policy of systematic discrimination and marginalization by the Lebanese authorities in all aspects.

Until 2005, Palestinians were barred from 70 different categories of qualified professions, such as medicine, law and engineering. Although the Lebanese Minister of Labor issued a memorandum in 2005 permitting Palestinians to work legally in manual and clerical jobs, the ban on Palestinians seeking professional employment has remained in place. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament passed a law that prevents Palestinians from owning and inheriting property. In addition, Palestinian refugees have no access to Lebanese government hospitals. As one Palestinian pointed out:

"The Palestinians in Lebanon and other Arab countries are treated as if they are not human beings. The Arabs hold us in ghettoes and deny us basic human rights. In Lebanon, Palestinian refugee camps are like a zoo or a prison. This is shameful that Arabs are capable of treating their fellow Arabs in such a manner. Even more shameful is the silence of the international community and the UN."

As if that were not enough, in 2007 the Lebanese army launched a large military operation against another refugee camp, Nahr Al-Bared, killing hundreds of people and destroying most of the houses there. Most of the 32,000 camp residents were forced to flee their homes. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), "the effects of this displacement have compounded the already severe socioeconomic conditions facing these refugees and constitute a chronic humanitarian crisis."

The residents of Ain Al-Hilweh now fear that the tough security measures around their camp, including the placement of the electronic gates, mean that they could meet the same fate.

That is why they are planning to step up their protests in the coming days and weeks. However, the Palestinians in Lebanon would be mistaken to pin high hopes on the international community or Palestinian leaders.

The international community pays attention to the Palestinians only when it is possible to blame Israel. The only Palestinians who seem to win the attention of the international community and media are those living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and who are in direct conflict with Israel. Palestinians living in ghettos in the Arab world and who are being killed and displaced by Arab armies do not attract any attention from the international community or mainstream media.

No one cares when an Arab country mistreats and discriminates and kills Palestinians. But when something happens in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, the international media and community suddenly wake up. Why? Because they do not want to miss an opportunity to condemn Israel.

The residents of Ain Al-Hilweh would have been fortunate had Israel placed the electronic gates at the entrances to their camp. Then, dozens of foreign journalists and human rights activists would have converged on the camp to document an Israeli "violation of Palestinian human rights." One can only imagine the uproar in the world were Israel to pass a law denying Arabs jobs or the right to inherit property.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians are now living in a ghetto called Ain Al-Hilweh, and the world seems to be fine with that. In fact, most Palestinians in Lebanon have long been living in ghettos surrounded by the Lebanese army.

There are no protests on the streets of London or Paris. The UN Security Council has not -- and will not -- hold an emergency session to condemn Lebanon. Of course, the mainstream media in the West is not going to report about Arab apartheid and repressive measures against Palestinians. As for the leaders of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they do not have time to address the problems of the camp residents. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are too busy fighting each other and the last thing they have on their minds are the interests and well-being of their people.

SOURCE






Great writers are found with an open mind

Racism at Penguin books

Lionel Shriver

I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’ The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.

The accompanying questionnaire for PRH authors is by turns fascinating, comical and depressing. Gender and ethnicity questions provide the coy ‘prefer not to say’ option, ensuring that being female or Japanese can remain your deep dark secret. As the old chocolate-or-vanilla sexes have multiplied into Baskin Robbins, responders to ‘How would you define your gender?’ may tick, ‘Prefer to use my own term’. In the pull-down menu under ‘How would you define your sexual orientation?’, ‘Bi’ and ‘Bisexual’ are listed as two completely different answers (what do these publishing worthies imagine ‘bi’ means?). Not subsumed by that mere ‘gender’ enquiry, out of only ten questions, ‘Do you identify as trans?’ merits a whole separate query — for 0.1 per cent of the population. (Thus with a staff of about 2,000, PRH will need to hire exactly two). You can self-classify as disabled, and three sequential questions obviously hope to elicit that you’ve been as badly educated as humanly possible.

And check out the ethnicity pull-down. ‘Asian or Asian British’ may specify ‘Indian,’ ‘Bangladeshi, ‘Chinese’, or ‘Pakistan’; the correct adjectival form of the latter nationality seems to be mysteriously unprintable. ‘Black or Black British’ may identify as ‘Caribbean’ or ‘African’. ‘Mixed’ allows for the options ‘White and Black African’, ‘White and Black Caribbean’, and ‘White and Asian’, but any other combo is merely ‘Mixed: Other’. As for us crackers, there’s ‘White: British’, ‘White: Irish’, and ‘White: Gypsy or Irish Traveller’, but the rest can only tick ‘White: Other’.

Let’s unpack that pull-down. If your office is chocka with Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Germans, Danes, Finns, Bosnians, Hungarians, Czechs, Russians, Americans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Argentines, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Romanians who aren’t travellers and South African Jews — I could go on — together speaking dozens of languages and bringing to their workplace a richly various historical and cultural legacy, the entire workforce could be categorised as ‘White: Other’. Your office is not diverse.

I see two issues here. First: diversity, both the word and the concept, has crimped. It serves a strict, narrow agenda that has little or nothing to do with the productive dynamism of living and working alongside people with widely different upbringings and beliefs. Only particular and, if you will, privileged backgrounds count. Which is why Apple’s African-American diversity tsar, Denise Young Smith, got hammered last October after submitting, ‘There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.’ She hadn’t bowed to the newly shackled definition of the word, which has now been effectively removed from the language as a general-purpose noun.

Second: dazzled by this very highest of social goods, many of our institutions have ceased to understand what they are for. Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes.

We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some.

In the news last week, we find the ultimate example of this fatal confusion over what is your actual job. Will Norman, London’s ‘walking and cycling commissioner’, bemoaned the fact that too many cyclists in the city are white, male and middle-class. ‘The real challenge for London cycling,’ he declared, ‘is diversity.’ As opposed to building more cycle lanes for everybody, or fixing potholes lethal to everybody’s wheel rims, Norman regards his principal function as increasing black and minority ethnic ridership.

I’ll be fascinated how he accomplishes this noble mission. Will he resort to stereotypes — broadcasting gangsta rap from lampposts alongside cycling superhighways, where pop-up snack stands hand out free chapattis? For a cycling commissioner to define his primary remit as ‘diversity’ is no less ludicrous than for Transport for London to turn a blind eye to the chronic tailbacks along the Embankment, just so long as the requisite number of Koreans is stuck in them.

With rare guts, the softball conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently decried the ‘misplaced idolisation of diversity’. Although a laudable penultimate aim, he wrote, ‘diversity is a midpoint, not an endpoint.… [An] organisation has to be diverse so that different perspectives can serve some end. Diversity for its own sake, without a common telos, is infinitely centri-fugal and leads to social fragmentation.’ Just as Brooks sees diversity as no substitute for ‘a common national purpose’ in the US, private and public institutions alike need to keep their eyes on the prize: good books. Safe cycling. For everybody.

SOURCE






Are you easily offended? If so, this column was written especially for you

Transport for London (TfL) has apologised unreservedly — and not before time — after staff cruelly humiliated passengers by chasing them along the platform with sticks, shouting: “Put your big, sweaty bum-cracks away.” Counselling is available to those affected.

Oh. It seems I’ve got that wrong. What actually happened was that a member of staff wrote on a whiteboard for its inspirational quote of the day these words: “During this heatwave please dress for the body you have. Not the body you want!” To which some people promptly burst into Twitter tears, accusing TfL of “body-shaming”.

In a normal, well-adjusted world TfL would have told those people to shut up and get a life, then returned to the business of keeping London moving. But we do not live in such a world. So a familiar snivelling script was followed. It released a statement saying, “We apologise unreservedly to customers who were offended by the insensitive message on the whiteboard at Blackhorse Road station,” then promised an investigation. Into what, exactly? Having a sense of humour? Stating the blindingly obvious truth?

I’m sure you don’t want to sit on a public seat marinated in buttock juice because someone was spilling out of skimpy shorts any more than I do. It’s no fun either staring at someone’s fungally infected toenails because they are wearing sandals for the first time since August 2017. But I suppose to turn away and retch is “toe-shaming”? Fungi have feelings too.

How do you body-shame eight million people simultaneously, by the way? This message never promoted an ideal body size nor mentioned weight. There was no picture. It was a light-hearted plea not to let perspiring bare flesh drench the upholstery, or put people off their Soleros. It was a call for consideration and self-awareness via a regular message-board designed to make people laugh and remember for one fleeting moment in rush hour that they’re not ants, but human beings. (Apologies if that sounds ant-ist or if any ants reading are offended. Ants are, of course, part of a hardworking community and, for the record, I have never seen a fat ant. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. No, no. No thorax-shaming here.) But what about the people who are offended by a builder’s bum-style crack in their face on the Tube? What about them, eh?

These perpetual offence-takers now rule the world, forcing people to make apologies for nothing, fainting if a friendly shopkeeper calls them “love” and claiming that their feelings are hurt by absolutely everything. Last year some students in Dallas actually wanted an annual display of flags commemorating the victims of 9/11 to be moved because it was “triggering”. I loathe the term “snowflake” — which is just as well because last year most young people in a poll said that being called one affected their mental health.

If tonight you watch Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s TV documentary Britain’s Fat Fight, which confronts our national obesity crisis, you will see members of Newcastle city council, which is discussing a city-wide weight loss campaign, tiptoeing in terror around the f-word. “Fat” carries a lot of “blame” and “negativity”, frets one woman. Another man dislikes the word “diet” lest it suggest eliminating food groups. Yes, yes — don’t worry that the UK’s annual expenditure on the treatment of obesity and diabetes is greater than the amount spent on the police, fire service and judicial system combined. Let’s focus on the priority: not making anyone “upset”.

I would guess that the number of people genuinely offended by that TfL whiteboard is about three. Yet there must be a time-wasting “investigation”. The humourless are taking over the asylum.*

*no offence.

SOURCE






African vibrancy in London

UK drill music gang banned from making violent music

THE music videos often feature gangs, weapons, violence and threats of revenge attacks — and now the artists have been banned from even making them.

The unprecedented move against west London “drill” group 1011 comes as the United Kingdom deals with a rising knife crime problem, that has seen almost 50 fatal stabbings in the capital alone this year, and daily attacks.

The rappers — who specialise in a genre of rap music that originated on the south side of Chicago — must now obtain permission from Scotland Yard before making or performing music after a court order banned them from mentioning rival gangs in their music.

The group’s five members — Yonas Girma, 21, Micah Bedeau, 19, Isaac Marshall, 18, Jordan Bedeau, 17, and Rhys Herbert, 17 — were jailed last week after being found guilty of planning a machete attack on a rival gang. They have previously rapped about stabbing the gang.

They have also been banned from encouraging violence and mentioning postcodes in a gang context, a popular way of inflaming tensions. Any future videos will also have to do without gang-related hand gestures, and they are forbidden from wearing bandana in public.

The 1011 members were convicted of conspiracy to commit violent disorder. Police said they were planning a revenge attack on rival gang 12-World, also from west London, who had filmed themselves harassing and threatening the Bedeau brothers’ grandmother.

Drill is a dark and confrontational style of rap that first began in Chicago. Artists have had only minor success, but their videos have been viewed on YouTube millions of times. Police have repeatedly blamed drill for the rise in knife crime and have ordered YouTube to remove dozens of videos.

They were arrested last November while they were on their way to confront 12-World and were found to be armed with machetes, knives and bats.

The order means when they are released they will not be allowed to reference violence in their music.

Detective Superintendent Mike West said the number of videos that “incite violence” have been increasing for three years.

“The gangs try to outrival each other with the filming and content — what looks like a music video can actually contain explicit language with gangs threatening each other,” he told The Independent. “There are gestures of violence, with hand signals suggesting they are firing weapons and graphic descriptions of what they would do to each other.”

The 1011 videos played in court included lyrics like “back out the spinner [gun] and burst [shoot] him. I put bullets in numerous guys like how come the opps [rivals] ain’t learning?”

Others referred to shooting a rival dead “Clock me an opp, wind down the window...”

Another: “OT [out of town] trip trying to get some funds [money]. We get bread and invest in guns. Dem boy run when we tapped **** ching, splash aim for his lungs.”

It continued with a reference to the notorious moped gangs terrorising London: “Four men on two peds [mopeds] jump off with my shank [knife] leave an opp boy splattered.”

Detective Chief Superintendent Kevin Southworth, head of the Met Police’s Trident gang unit, said the landmark order was an important case.

“[They] take detailed and firm measures to restrict the actions of a gang who blatantly glorified violence through the music they created. Their lyrics referenced real events that had happened and made threats that further violence would take place. If they break the conditions of the CBOs they will be back before the courts.”

He claimed police were not being killjoys. “We’re not in the business of killing anyone’s fun, we’re not in the business of killing anyone’s artistic expression — we are in the business of stopping people being killed. When in this instance you see a particular genre of music being used specifically to goad, to incite, to provoke, to inflame, that can only lead to acts of very serious violence being committed, that’s when it becomes a matter for the police.”

He said the move wasn’t about regulation or censorship and denied “demonising any one type of music”.

Youth worker Colin James, 48, is helping rehabilitate young gang members at his Gangs Unite charity in South London. He told news.com.au the ban did nothing to address the “underlying issues”.

“It [the music] is an expression but it is not really the issue. They are always going about drill music this, drill music that — it just doesn’t make sense. They have to look at why they are wanting to do that in the first place.”

In many ways, it was a sign of the times, he explained.

“In previous times with punk rock they have [sung] about killing the Queen — but there were no decisions to ban.”

Freedom of expression campaigners also criticised the move. Index on Censorship chief executive Jodie Ginsberg said: “Banning a kind of music is not the way to handle ideas or opinions that are distasteful or disturbing.

“This isn’t going to address the issues that lead to the creation of this kind of music, nor should we be creating a precedent in which certain forms of art which include violent images or ideas are banned. We need to tackle actual violence, not ideas and opinions.”

Mic, a rapper and producer form north London, told the BBC the order “sets an ugly precedent”.

He said: “There is a censorship problem in the country. There are a lot of young musicians in this country whose only outlet for expressing themselves is music.

“It might be violent but what do you expect in the Britain we’re in right now?”

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

What America has lost

By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh —— a Romanian who escaped Romania as a young girl in the '70s. What she says about small town America of the past reminds me a lot of my growing up in a small Australian country town -- and I miss it

America is the land of opportunity where immigrants dream to find success through hard work and a lifestyle with a picket fence, a nice home, plenty of food, and a traditional family comprised of mother, father, and children. Nineteen-seventy America was still the land of opportunity where, if one worked hard, one could reach whatever he/she was willing to sacrifice in order to achieve their goals. But Christianity, God, faith, and family were at the center of a successful life.

There were no pedestrians in the southern town where I lived. Americans were trapped inside large metal gas guzzlers that drank gasoline like water. Nobody strolled outdoors except in the square downtown. If anyone saw you walk on the side of the road, since sidewalks did not exist except in large cities, they would stop and offer you a ride. It was done from a sense of pity as well as concern for your safety, walking in 90-degree oven-like heat coupled with unbearable humidity that kept everyone’s face looking young and shiny.

Many foreigners who dared or were allowed to travel to America came by boat as it was still much cheaper than flying. Once here, some took the Greyhound bus across the U.S. and others, like me, flew everywhere or crisscrossed the country by car or truck, seldom taking the train.

In a very small southern town of 3,000, church was the center of life for young and old. I counted over 100 churches stretching as far away as a ten mile radius in the county. Many youth trips, activities, and summer camps were sanctioned or sponsored by the church.

There was a drive-in theater, and one grocery store, locally owned and operated. The closest chain grocery store was over 60 miles away. A tiny mall with boutiques and a Sears store is where people bought their washers and dryers, TVs, lawn mowers, bikes, toys, Christmas gifts, and clothing. Fancier TVs could be purchased in a Curtis Mathis store. There was no Super Walmart, Target, or such retailers.

Some cross-roads had a small convenience store that the local farmers frequented for their daily necessities, milk, bananas, ice cream, and candy bars. Americans of all ages consumed, I thought, way too much sugar then. The owners knew everybody and, if they just came from the field and did not have their wallets, the items purchased were put on an account which the farmer could pay later.

There was a level of trust that I have never seen anywhere else—nobody needed a credit card. People did not dare write bad checks and credit cards were hard to obtain and seldom accepted. My Egyptian friend Lula remarked that we bought everything with checks, not cash. She did not understand the western concept of banking.

People dressed simply, the local seamstress made a good living with Simplicity patterns and fabrics purchased by the yard at Hancock’s Fabrics. She charged $20 to make a dress at a time when minimum wage was $3.10.

The local beauty shop was a wooden building on the side of an empty highway, no sign, every lady in the county knew where it was, just big enough for a couple of chairs, a sink, and the window air conditioner. A southern belle dressed in jeans and a country shirt did her hair on Friday for $10 and then went to the grocery store and bought the week’s $20 supply of food for the family. Americans could buy a lot of food for $20 in the seventies and still only spent about 15 percent of their income to fill their refrigerators.

I was mesmerized how homes in the middle of a pasture had running water and a septic tank. In my Romania at the time, country folks still had smelly and unsanitary out-houses.

Eating out was unheard of unless you counted going to the Rexall Drug counter for a soda float or getting a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar at Vaughn’s country store. The small town had a Sonic drive-in but no McDonalds and no pizza parlor.

Locals bought their blue jeans at Varney’s Department Store on the square and Elegant Ladies, each the size of a master bedroom today, or at the Co-op store where you could pretty much purchase anything you needed to run a farm, including the tough Wrangler jeans for $10.

If you were willing to drive over 60 miles to buy food in a chain grocery store, you could also shop in a real Sears or J.C. Penney store, today’s dinosaurs. Catalogs came in every year but ordering by phone and receiving packages in the mail took time and effort and the shipping and returns were costly. The post office was not conveniently located either. Walking in the heat and the unforgiving sun to retrieve packages or mail from the mailbox on the side of the country road, far away from any farm house, was a sweat-drenching proposition.

Homes were sprawling and comfortable, simply decorated, with A/C units in the windows or the occasional central air heating and cooling. Poorer folks lived in trailers who rocked, rattled, and shook during the frequent Tornado Alley storms that seemed to crack the sky in two with thunder and lightning.  Powerful winds whipped and ripped old and venerable trees from the roots and occasional tornadoes demolished and flattened the forest, ripping anything else apart that stood in its path, and sending cows and humans flying through the air.

People dressed in their best for Wednesday and Sunday church services, followed by picnics and potluck suppers when everyone brought their best dishes to share with the congregation. And during football and baseball season, people attended the high school games and prayed before each game, cheering for the home team.

A stream of friends and acquaintances visited my in-laws to meet the Romanian girl who was lucky enough to escape Ceausescu’s communism while the Romanian was bewildered by all these well-meaning strangers who had no idea what kind of world she had left behind.

Without a myriad of TV channels of today, the drive-in was the only cinema that offered the latest movies. If your car broke down in the middle of the road, kind strangers stopped to help, change a tire, give you a lift home or to the nearest garage.

Cell phones did not exist in our bucolic lives and land lines were expensive. Many country folks had rotary dials with four parties on one phone line. You had to wait your turn to make a call or, in an emergency, ask the other parties to get off so that you can make the call. Everybody knew anybody else’s latest news and gossip as it was easy to listen in on conversations, intentionally or not.

Foreigners like me, an oddity from the communist world Americans despised, were a rarity in the South and Americans opened their homes to them but did not really accept them as part of their social milieu, they kept them at arm’s length and on the fringes because communists were not to be trusted. Yet foreigners like me learned the language and integrated into society, and became naturalized Americans who were contributing to its well-being and paid taxes.

Today’s Americans embrace communism and desire to change their society to that utopian failed state. They take in with open arms the real flotsam and jetsam of the third world who are often anti-Christian and unwilling to ever integrate into society, learn English, and assimilate. They are only interested in the generous welfare.

In the 70s, it was a shame to accept welfare. You had to be really down on your luck and prayed to improve quickly so you could get off welfare. There was shame and dishonor associated with accepting handouts. Today that shame is gone and it has morphed into an entitlement to everything other people own and had worked hard for.

The local high schools would invite foreign speakers who survived and escaped oppressive regimes to educate young Americans about the evils of totalitarianism/communism and how dear leaders like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, and Ceausescu have tortured and killed 100 million of their own people, citizens kept prisoners in their own countries and often starved to death.

After decades of telling teachers and students that one cannot mix Christian religion and state, the k-12 Common Core curriculum adopted is indoctrinating students into Islam and into sexual deviance. It is sad to watch today’s public schools, some private schools, and many colleges in the U.S. preach communism, intolerance of everyone who loves America, the pillars of Islam, and anti-Christianity even though many well-informed parents object.

And those who object to this indoctrination are labeled immediately—intolerant, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, islamophobic, misogynist, or whatever “hate” label the Left has chosen for the rest of us who fell in love with 1970s America.

With a few areas here and there, small towns that did not have enough money or resources to accommodate the welfare-seeking invasion of illegal immigrants and government-allotted mostly male refugees, 1970s America is unrecognizable today. The rule of law and borders long forgotten, is the country still yours?

Say good-bye to what you grew up with and hello to 2018 America altered not by the normal change that the passage of time creates but a socially-engineered globalist entity spawned by the communist Left over the last five decades.

SOURCE






The EU melting pot is melting down

By Niall Ferguson

One hundred ten years ago the British author Israel Zangwill completed his play “The Melting Pot.” Premiered in Washington in October 1908 — where it was enthusiastically applauded by President Theodore Roosevelt — it celebrates the United States as a giant crucible, fusing together “Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian — black and yellow — Jew and Gentile” to form a single people.

It is rather hard to imagine a similar play ever being written about the European Union in the early 21st century. Or rather, you could easily imagine a very different one. In it, the influx of migrants from all over the world would have precisely the opposite effect from the one envisioned by Zangwill. Far from leading to fusion, Europe’s immigration crisis is leading to fission. The play might be called “The Meltdown Pot.”

Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts, Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis. Their broader argument will be that a massive Völkerwanderung overwhelmed the project for European integration, exposing the weakness of the EU as an institution and driving voters back to national politics for solutions.

Let us begin with the scale of the influx. In 2016 alone there were an estimated 2.4 million migrants to the 28 EU member states from non-EU countries, taking the total foreign-born population of the union up to 36.9 million, more than 7 percent of the total. Germany saw the largest influx as a result of a temporary relaxation of controls, admitting more than a million migrants.

The problem is intractable. Continental Europe’s population is aging and shrinking, but European labor markets have a poor record when it comes to integrating unskilled migrants.

Moreover, a large proportion of Europe’s migrants are Muslims. Liberals insist that is should be possible for Christians and Muslims to coexist peacefully in a secular post-Christian Europe. In practice, the combination of historically rooted suspicions and contemporary divergences in attitudes — notably on the status and role of women — is making assimilation difficult. (Compare the situation of Moroccans in Belgium with that of Mexicans in California if you don’t believe me.)

Finally, there is a practical problem. Europe’s southern border is almost impossible to defend against flotillas of migrants, unless Europe’s leaders are prepared to let many people drown.

Politically, the immigration problem looks fatal to that loose alliance between moderate social democrats and moderate conservatives/Christian democrats on which the past 70 years of European integration have been based.

European centrists are deeply confused about migration. Many, especially on the center-left, want to have both open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is hard to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable.

In Italy we see one possible future: The populists of the left (the Five Star Movement) and the populists of the right (the Northern League) have joined forces to form a government. Their coalition is going to focus on two things: entrenching old welfare norms (it plans to undo a recent pension reform) and excluding migrants. Last week, to much popular applause, the interior minister, Matteo Salvini, turned away a boat carrying 629 migrants rescued from the sea off Libya. The Aquarius is now in Spain, whose new minority Socialist government has offered to accept its human cargo.

But the Italian model may not be for export. Imagine, if you can, the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) sitting down with the German leftists (Die Linke) for sausages and beer in Berlin. Impossible. As a result, as Germans found after their last election, there is in fact no alternative but for the old grand coalition of center-right and center-left to limp onwards.

I used to be skeptical of the argument that Brexit was about leaving a sinking ship. I am now reassessing my view. Even as the impossibility of reconciling Tory “remainers” and Brexiteers becomes an existential threat to Theresa May, events in Europe are moving in directions that seemed inconceivable just a few years ago.

In his upcoming book on immigration in America, my friend Reihan Salam — himself the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — makes a bold argument: The United States must either restrict immigration or risk civil war as rising inequality and racial tension combine.

I hope Salam is right that the American melting pot can somehow be salvaged. But I have no such hope for Europe. No one who has spent any time in Germany since Angela Merkel’s great gamble of 2015-16 can honestly believe that a melting pot is in the making there. Anyone who visits Italy today can see that the policies of the past decade — austerity plus open borders — have produced a political meltdown.

Fusion may still be an option for the United States. For Europe, I fear, the future is one of fission — a process potentially so explosive that it may relegate Brexit to the footnotes of future history.

SOURCE






Merkel’s Leadership Threatened by Killings by Immigrants, Wrought by Open Borders

Diana Feldman received an unusual text message from the phone of her 14-year-old daughter, Susanna, late last month. Written in broken German, the message said she would be back home in a few weeks and that her mother should not try to find her.

Yet the message was not from Susanna. She had already been raped and strangled, and her body was dumped next to some railroad tracks in the city of Wiesbaden in western Germany.

Such stories—coming in the wake of the mass sexual assault of more than 1,000 women in Germany on New Year’s Eve of 2015—have a variety of consequences.

One consequence is political. Concern over immigration could lead to the collapse of Merkel’s coalition government. Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister, wants to begin turning away refugees who have passed through another European Union country before getting to Germany. Merkel is refusing, concerned about the effects this would have on forging a coherent EU-wide refugee policy.

The coalition is splintering, and if an agreement cannot be reached, a vote of confidence in Merkel—and new elections—could be imminent.

Another consequence relates to security. One recent study demonstrated that violent crime had increased by more than 10 percent in 2015 and 2016. Ninety percent of that increase was because of violent crimes committed by male refugees.

Similarly, the sharp increase to the Islamist terrorism threat in Germany is not primarily from radicalized Germans, but from recently arrived asylum seekers. While some plots were thwarted, those in Wurzburg, Ansbach, Berlin, and Hamburg were not.

In that environment, many Germans have turned to a radical, outsider party that made a platform out of cracking down on immigration. Alternative for Germany got about 6 million votes (13 percent) in September 2017 and is now the third-biggest party in Germany.

That’s not because Germany has a hitherto concealed population of racists who were unearthed in the election, but because Merkel very clearly made a cataclysmic mistake.

Germany did take in too many people. It did not know who they were then, and so, it has no idea who is living in the country now. It was too trusting in accepting asylum applicants’ backstories—and the German Medical Association is still speaking out against checking claimants’ ages.

Germany is not deporting enough of those who have no right to be in the country, or making decisions on asylum appeals quickly enough.

If this were solely a German problem, then perhaps it would be easier to contain. Yet it also extends to Sweden, which is dealing with a surge in crime in areas with high concentrations of immigrants.

One recent study in Sweden showed that more than 75 percent (at a minimum) of those claiming to be children were actually adults. Austria, Italy, and other countries in Europe face similar challenges.

A responsible approach would be for nations to listen to voters’ concerns and craft policies that address them.

Merkel’s desire for an EU-led solution demonstrates the hopelessness of the current approach. An unresponsiveness to democratic impulses in the EU is a well-established theme.

Meanwhile, the numbers continue to grow. About 10,000 new asylum seekers come to Germany every month. The government hopes they will integrate, but has no real idea how to make that happen, and the crisis rolls on.

SOURCE





False rape accusation again

Prosecutors have dropped sexual battery charges against two college students who were accused of gang raping a drunken woman at a party.

The case against University of Central Florida students David Anthony Kirk, 20, and Jack Ryan Smith, 26, was 'not suitable for prosecution', the Orange-Osceola State Attorney's Office said in a notice filed on Thursday, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Kirk's attorney said that witnesses debunked the woman's claims, and that she fabricated the story out of embarrassment after she was spotted at the party having sex with two men.

The prosecutor's office did not elaborate on what made the case unsuitable for prosecution. 

Kirk and Smith were arrested in April, several days after the party near the UCF campus in Orlando.

An arrest report says the woman was too drunk to consent to sex when she was assaulted at what was described as a 'party home' for the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.

The woman told deputies she drank vodka and flavored water on the way to the party, and then continued to drink green apple-flavored shaved ice with vodka at the party. The arrest report did not say if the woman was a student.

During the party, she said she spent most of her time with Kirk and Smith in the backyard, according to authorities, and then began to slur her words and blacked out.

She said that she then remembered waking up naked in a bedroom on her stomach in a queen-sized bed.

The woman alleged that while Smith was raping her, Kirk was forcing her to perform oral sex on him, according to the arrest report.

The woman told deputies she was numb, in shock, and in tears. She said she heard the two men say ‘my turn, my turn’ before switching positions. 

The woman said that after the alleged rape, she sat on the bathroom floor across the hall and texted her friends for help. She then met them and went home.

Kirk was expelled from the UCF chapter of the fraternity, and is not known if Smith was a member.

It is the second time in less than a year that members of Alpha Tau Omega's UCF chapter have had charges dropped in an alleged gang rape.

In August, two men - Alexander Garces and Antonio Candido, both 22 - were charged with sexual battery and false imprisonment.

A woman accused the two men of raping her at a ‘New Years in July party’ at the on-campus home.

The charges against the two men were dropped a few months later.

SOURCE






Blacks are Blind to their real Problems

Walter E. Williams

For several decades, a few black scholars have been suggesting that the vision held by many black Americans is entirely wrong. Dr. Shelby Steele, a scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said: "Instead of admitting that racism has declined, we (blacks) argue all the harder that it is still alive and more insidious than ever. We hold race up to shield us from what we do not want to see in ourselves."

Dr. John McWhorter, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, lamented that "victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues," adding that "these three thought patterns impede black advancement much more than racism; and dysfunctional inner cities, corporate glass ceilings, and black educational underachievement will persist until such thinking disappears."

In the 1990s, Harvard professor Orlando Patterson wrote, "America, while still flawed in its race relations ... is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; (and) offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa."

During an interview in December with The Daily Caller, Steele said the anti-Americanism that started during the 1960s and has become mainstream and visible in the black community is "heartbreaking and sad." That anti-Americanism that so dominates the American black identity has been "ruinous to black America, where we are worse off than we were under segregation by almost every socio-economic measure."

Some people might challenge Steele's assertion that in many measures blacks are worse off than during segregation. How about some numbers? As late as 1950, female-headed households were only 18 percent of the black population. Today 70 percent of black children are raised in single-parent households. In the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, for example, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. From 1890 to 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. Today about twice as many blacks have never married as whites. The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.

What about the labor market? In every census from 1890 to 1954, blacks were either just as active as or more so than whites in the labor market. During that earlier period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it's about 30 percent longer. Would anyone suggest that there was less racial discrimination during earlier periods?

White liberals and the Democratic Party are the major beneficiaries of keeping black people fearful, angry, victimized and resentful. It's crucial to both their political success and their efforts to change our nation. Racial harmony would be a disaster for leftists, be they politicians, academic liberals or news media people. As for black politicians and civil rights hustlers, Booker T. Washington long ago explained their agenda, writing: "There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Church Forced to Remove 'Anger-Provoking' Billboards Declaring 'America Is a Christian Nation'

Billboards promoting a celebration of faith and freedom at the First Baptist Church in Dallas were removed after complaints from Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and the Dallas Morning News.

The patriotic billboard campaign included the title of the sermon Dr. Robert Jeffress planned to deliver on June 24 — “America is a Christian Nation.”

“We were told by the billboard company that the message was divisive,” Jeffress told the “Todd Starnes Radio Show.”

The sermon title was inspired by comments made by Supreme Court Justices John Jay and David Josiah Brewer, both of whom described America as a Christian nation.

“The message will present the historical evidence for the bedrock of faith upon which America was founded,” said Jeffress.

However, the Dallas Morning News and Mayor Rawlings blasted the pastor’s sermon title by suggesting it was hateful and divisive.

“That is not the Christ I follow,” the mayor told the newspaper. “It’s not the Dallas I want to be — to say things that do not unite us but divide us. I never heard those words — that voice come out of Christ. Just the opposite. I was brought up to believe: Be proud of yours, but do not diminish mine.”

Columnist Robert Wilonsky started the controversy with a scathing column on June 7 titled, “First Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress’ gospel of division does not represent my Dallas.”

Wilonsky was apparently triggered by the patriotic billboard while stuck in traffic and suffered a massive microaggression.

“My rabbi warned me there would be days like this,” he wrote. “All I saw Wednesday was someone telling me and everyone else who does not worship Jesus Christ that we do not belong here.”

The following day the church received a message from the billboard company that its signed contract was being canceled and the billboards would be taken down.

“We are getting hammered by the media for the ‘America is a Christian Nation’ tagline on the billboards,” a representative of Outfront Media wrote to a church leader. “Dallas Morning News and other news affiliates are doing stories on how it’s offensive and bigoted. Someone called our corporate office in New York about the ‘offensive’ billboards and following our lawyer’s advice, we have to take them down ASAP.”

The church offered to revise the sermon title to “Is America a Christian Nation?” but that, too, was rejected by the billboard company.

“We were told that the title was ‘anger-provoking’ rather than ‘thought-provoking,’” the pastor told me.

The local representative was apologetic — but it was clear the New York-based company was no match for angry anti-Christian radicals.

“The reason those on the Left do not want people to hear my message is that they know the historical evidence is on my side that America was founded on the principles of the Christian faith,” Jeffress said. “We will not be deterred as we defend the foundational values of our country.”

City Hall spokesman Scott Goldstein defended the mayor on Twitter. “Mayor @Mike_Rawlings speaks for the real Dallas. The guy on the billboard does not,” he wrote.

To be clear, First Baptist Dallas has no beef with Outfront Media. It is a privately owned company and it has a right to decide who it does business with.

“We support the right of businesses to refuse service to customers based on religious conviction,” said Jeffress, who is also one of the top spiritual advisors to President Trump.

The problem, he said, is the Dallas Morning News and Mayor Rawlings. “It should greatly concern people of any faith when those in the press or government proactively seek to defeat, censor or silence any religious message with which they disagree,” Jeffress said.

I reached out to the mayor’s office for a comment. I asked one simple question: Did the city of Dallas directly or indirectly put pressure on the billboard company?

The mayor’s office did not respond to that question.   “We don’t believe Dallas city officials have any right to directly or indirectly be involved in censoring a church’s message,” Jeffress told me. And what about the Dallas Morning News?

“For the Dallas Morning News — who pose as champions of free speech — to try to censor our church’s message is gross hypocrisy,” the pastor said.

The key word is “try.” It turns out another billboard company offered to put up the church’s message on 20 billboards, not two.

In other words, Mr. Wilonsky might want to find another way to work — or else prepare for another traffic-jam microaggression.

SOURCE





Feminist professor asks bluntly in WaPo column, ‘Why can’t we hate men?’

The column was written by Suzanna Danuta Walters, sociology professor and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University. She proposed that men “lean out” by stepping away from positions of power and leaving them for women.

“Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down,” Walters wrote. “Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power.”

Glenn’s take:

“I’m not going to get outraged because she’s idiotic,” Glenn dismissed the piece. “The article stands as one of the more divisive, inflammatory pieces of rhetoric coming out of the radical left.”

SOURCE






UK: Tyranny of the minorities: We live in an age of mob rule by minorities in which anybody who disagrees with them is censored and freedom of expression is something only THEY enjoy

ONE of the great lines in 20th century films comes from Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr Strangelove. The scene is a nuclear missile control bunker. With World War III imminent, two men scuffle until their boss, played by Peter Sellers, cries: ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room!’

Er, what is a war room for if not fighting?

That gag came to mind this week when our so-called liberal Left went into convulsions of illiberality after author Lionel Shriver mocked the latest diversity madness. Writing in The Spectator, Ms Shriver poked fun at box-ticking, multi-cultural political correctness at publisher Penguin Random House, which is planning to commission authors on the basis of racial, gender and other quotas.

Such sacrilege proved a timebomb. Tick, tock, tick, tock — KABOOM! Bien pensants, when they heard accounts of Ms Shriver’s article, exploded. They were furious.

As Dr Strangelove might put it: ‘We can’t allow diverging views about diversity!’

No we can’t! At our universities, which are meant to be bastions of free thought, guest speakers are barred for fear they might so much as question Left-wing dogma. This happens to even such distinguished liberals as Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell.

The forces of political correctness impose their unyielding views everywhere.

At Oxford and Cambridge, there are calls for statues of historic benefactors to be torn down because they do not comply with fashionable modern positions on minority rights. At Newcastle University, meanwhile, the students’ union demanded sanitary bins in men’s loos so as not to upset any students ‘with a range of genders’.

Supposedly apolitical charities try to thrust correctness down the gullets of their staff. The National Trust instructs country house guides to wear gay pride badges. The RNLI sacks long-serving lifeboatmen for using tea mugs with risque images of women.

Theatre companies are left in no doubt that they will not be given Arts Council subsidies unless they cast a number of ‘non-traditional’ actors — i.e., women playing Shakespearean kings or Afro-Caribbeans as English Regency fops.

Firms ban employees wearing crosses in case they offend non-Christians or atheists (but it’s fine to wear a burka).

Elsewhere, a popular fun run is told it should no longer ask runners to declare if they are men or women (campaigners insist that ‘non-binary’ athletes might take mortal offence).

The Armed Forces are pressured to spend precious funds on almost totally unnecessary gender-neutral lavatories.

Cake decorators are told they must accept commissions from gay couples, and that fool the Mayor of London removes the male and female symbols from pedestrian signals in order to conform with the latest hare-brained theories about gender.

We live in an age of the minority mob. An odd expression, I know. Mob rule used to be an assertion of power through violence by the great unwashed, be it in the French Revolution or America’s racist deep south, when it lynched individuals.

It has been replaced by the no less illogical (and hardly less chilling) hysteria of a knot of activists who weaponise minority rights — they seem particularly obsessed with lavatories — and wield them as a political threat against the majority. More often than not, these agitators themselves are not part of the minorities that have allegedly been offended. They belong instead to a class of professional busybodies who seize on the minorities game for their own ends.

‘Diversity’ is now a booming employment sector and it offers hefty salaries. More insidiously, others exploit it for political ends and furtherance of their own ambitions.

The Twittersphere is full of these self-appointed stewards of indignation who see it as their job to police the media and shout down anyone who dissents from received opinion.

Their strategy is to expunge divergence of views and crush resistance to their creed of racial and sexual egalitarianism. Freedom of expression is something only they can enjoy.

Lionel Shriver was swiftly condemned this week by people who pretty clearly had not read her article and were interested only in hurting her. They called her a neo-colonialist, a relic of ‘status quo bias’ and a supporter of ‘ingrained, insidious racism’. In short she was convicted of being a very nasty person (#human garbage, as they say online).

A gang of new writers from Penguin was organised into signing a denunciation of her and she was sacked from a literary awards judging panel run by a feminist magazine. Its editor was honest enough to admit that she was not distancing herself from Ms Shriver on account of her actual article. She was sacking her on account of the kerfuffle the article had caused.

The BBC and Left-wing media outlets such as the Guardian promptly piled into the melee, gleefully reporting these barbs against Ms Shriver. Someone was criticising quotas for minorities? Outrageous! Let’s authenticate her critics — and whip up further rage —by organising a phone-in or holding a studio debate on Radio 4’s Today programme!

It is worth looking at Ms Shriver’s article to see what she actually wrote. She began by noting that Penguin Random House had come up with a ‘company-wide goal’ that its authors must ‘reflect UK society by 2025’. Penguin announced: ‘We want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’

Such things would be more important, it said, than the matter of whether or not a prospective employee had been to university.

Ms Shriver proceeded to cite a questionnaire sent to Penguin authors about gender, sexuality and ethnicity. What had this to do with their writing ability? She concluded that Penguin was ‘drunk on virtue’ and no longer regarded its raison d’etre the ‘acquisition and dissemination of good books’.

‘Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Thus, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability and sexual preference boxes.

‘We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers round town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscipt is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed- paper recycling.’

In any sane country, Lionel Shriver’s article would be acclaimed as common sense. She was putting a meritocratic case — ie, people should be judged on their ability and talents. And who can really argue with meritocracy?

When we board an aeroplane, do we worry what sexuality or ethnicity the pilot has? No. We merely hope she or he knows how to operate the controls.

When we visit a dental practice, do we demand the medical professionals reflect the UK population’s minority profiles? I am more interested in their ability to drill and fill.

For the egalitarian commissars, higher considerations apply. For them, talent and ability come second to quotas of race, gender and sexual inclination.

This is because they want to broadcast that they are morally superior beings who support minorities. The politicians among them hope that, by appealing to those who identify themselves as minorities, they will win votes. This is called identity politics, but really it is the politics of the lunatic asylum.

There is a profoundly worrying problem with this tyranny of the minorities. By insisting every minority has preferential rights, you end up denying the majority their rights.

Imagine that you are applying for a job. You have all the qualifications and the necessary experience. But, as per that memorandum from Penguin Random House, you do not help the company ‘to reflect the UK population’.

Apologies, say your prospective employers, we can’t give you the job as another candidate has a disability/sexual preference/skin colour we haven’t yet ticked off our staff lists. We’d have loved to hire you, we really would, but our diversity policy means we need a one-legged Latino goat-fancier.

Diversity is supposed to stop discrimination. But what is this if it is not discrimination? Diversity is supposed to provide greater opportunities for people no matter their colour, creed, sexuality, gender, ethnicity or inside leg measurement. A reasonable onlooker will say ‘but we should encourage minorities’. Of course we should. But Penguin’s appalling policy will achieve the very opposite, for it will force the company to recruit a mirror image of the population.

The entirely noble idea of diversity thus becomes an inflexible rod. It becomes a menace. This will not make the majority feel more kindly towards minorities. It will ignite resentment. And how exactly does it comply with equality laws which forbid treating people differently according to ethnicity, race, sexuality or disability?

A few months ago, I had an experience like Ms Shriver’s when I criticised the Royal Shakespeare Company for what I felt was some clumsy, minority-quotas casting in a Restoration comedy. I asked if the RSC was being leaned on by the Arts Council (which places inordinate store by its diversity policies). Did it fear that unless it cast black actors in historically white roles it might not be given such big dollops of public cash?

Like Lionel Shriver, I did not suggest that minorities were creatively less gifted than anyone else. Not in the slightest. I merely questioned the wisdom and morality of putting political correctness before raw merit. For this, I was swiftly and repeatedly maligned and misrepresented. Whoomph!

The RSC denounced me as a racist and numerous blowhards in the subsidised theatre world pretty much compared me to Satan. Behind the scenes, senior theatre practitioners told me they completely agreed with me — but feared that if they said so in public, their careers would be damaged.

In medieval Spain, the Inquisition caused terror by chasing down anyone who uttered public heresy (i.e. questioned Roman Catholic dogma). The Inquisition itself was small, but it was brutally effective at snuffing out dissent. With fire and torture, it came down hard on a few prominent free-thinkers and that was enough to create widespread repression.

Spain’s population saw the way so-called heretics had been pulled limb-from-limb and it thought ‘crumbs, we’d better do what we are told’.

In medieval days torture was physical — men were boiled, put on the rack, or subjected to the Pear of Anguish, the Judas Cradle or the Saw, brutal instruments which concentrated pain on the most sensitive areas of the anatomy.

In more recent times, political regimes such as Mao’s China and Hendrik Verwoerd’s South Africa have suppressed dissent. I remember, as a child holidaying in Sixties Spain, being told never to utter out loud the name of the country’s fascist dictator, General Franco. ‘It’s just safer not to say it,’ said my mother.

Maybe someone should have given similar advice to Lionel Shriver. Maybe someone should have said: ‘Don’t mock diversity — it’ll only land you in the most frightful trouble’.

Under this tyranny of the minorities, that may be what you should do for an easy life. But the thing about tyrannies is that they are ruled, ultimately, by bullies. The way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them, as Lionel Shriver has done with such brave clarity.

British public life is not like Dr Strangelove’s war room. It is a place where the lively conflict of views should be welcomed as an essential part of a flourishing democracy. Freedom of expression has been fought for with blood over the centuries and is vital for liberal, civilised behaviour. No minority mob should ever be allowed to destroy that.

SOURCE






The UN Redefines What It Means to Be a 'Human'

In blatant violation of international law, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has unveiled a startling new campaign that claims "you have human rights since birth."

The unsettling image, which depicts a baby's arm with the statement written on a hospital bracelet, makes clear the position of this U.N. body-human rights should not be afforded to human beings until after they are born.

Abortion advocates might applaud this claim, but the position of the body flies in the face of established, and binding, international law on the rights of the unborn.

As the U.N. body in charge of human rights, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is mandated to uphold the international legal framework. Deploying the poster at strategic vantage points at the U.N. in Geneva serves as a provocative, and jarring, assault on the fundamental principle of the right to life enshrined in international law and the countries that continue to defend it.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, the pre-eminent international treaty on children's rights, leaves no room for ambiguity in its preamble. "The child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth," it states.

Other international treaties unequivocally reference the right to life of the unborn, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In this treaty, the death penalty is prohibited for pregnant women to "save the life of an innocent unborn child," as explained in its accompanying interpretative documents (A/C.3/SR.819, paragraphs 17 & 33).

Although shocking, the ease with which the office goes against international law is not without precedent. Led by a high commissioner for human rights who functions largely without check, the office frequently has veered into areas that lack member state approval, running multimillion-dollar campaigns and issuing policy recommendations that overtly contravene international law, not to mention the will of member states.

Countries are subjected to regular policing in which they aggressively are urged to change their laws on matters that fall under domestic jurisdiction and have no bearing on human rights.

It is difficult to navigate the fine line between respect for a state's self-determination and the urgency of U.N. interference when human rights are at stake, but the activities of the human rights office far surpass the work of ensuring fundamental human rights.

The new round of posters, tied to the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, reveals just how far the office is willing to go in its mission to overhaul international law to further a nonconsensual activist agenda that defies the traditional, religious, or ethical values that so many countries and peoples hold sacred.

The declaration, as with the other founding documents of international law, was expertly drafted to protect these values and leave room for crucial national self-determination. It is a great irony that the campaign is tied to the declaration, which is still considered the most important reference point on human rights today.

The mandate of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is to promote and protect human rights and to coordinate the many human rights mechanisms of the United Nations to monitor and improve member states' compliance with the treaties they have signed.

It claims to be an "objective voice" on human rights, but it regularly issues highly coercive recommendations to states under the guise of human rights and uses a complex network of special rapporteurs, independent experts, and working groups to aid with enforcement.

These procedures are purportedly impartial and autonomous, but the human rights office's efforts to force countries to change their national laws on an array of highly sensitive social issues demonstrates a marked disregard for state sovereignty.

Much of the lack of accountability surrounding the office stems from the inherent tension in monitoring human rights. By its very nature, the task of overseeing countries' human rights records requires a fair amount of independence. The office must be free to make unbiased assessments regarding what is going with human rights at the country level.

But the subsequent autonomy that it enjoys has resulted in a flagrant disrespect for the very international legal documents that it was created to uphold. As evidenced by these posters, the time has come for increased accountability for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights-the rights of the unborn all around the world are at stake.

SOURCE






Winning propaganda strategies for Israel

by David Weinberg, Vice President of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies.

I’m just back from a speaking tour in Europe, where I was confronted with the challenge of justifying Israel’s actions on the Gaza border and even the country’s very legitimacy as a nation among nations.

The deep “psychological asymmetry” (as Dr. Irwin Mansdorf calls it) employed by Hamas and Fatah as a strategic weapon against Israel – is working. The Palestinians exploit civilians in order to meet strategic goals, by placing them in danger or condemning them to unending refugee life.

The ensuing misery gnaws away at the conscience of well-meaning and naïve observers around the world, and they find it hard to justify the “imbalance” in suffering between the Palestinians and Israel. The soft bigotry of low expectations (by Europeans of the Palestinians) excuses Mahmoud Abbas and Yihye Sinwar of any responsibility for their people’s predicament.

Then there is the radical progressivism which has captured much of mainstream political discourse in the West. This makes liberal people uncomfortable with the use of force by nation states in almost all cases.

Israel’s “over-dog” position and its frequent recourse to military action to defend itself is then magnified and manipulated by malign and much less naïve actors to skewer the Jewish state.

On this particular trip I also encountered a growing proclivity to take refuge in a false, manufactured dichotomy between “good old Judaism” and “bad new Zionism.”

The ancient Jewish faith is something to be admired and commemorated, you see. Jewish heritage is hip and Jewish history is interesting – all across Europe. (Perhaps this is the European way of awkwardly atoning for centuries of persecution of Jews).

But modern-day Jewish nationalism as expressed in the powerful State of Israel is a sin. Israel is a sinful country committing criminal acts against its neighbors and even against Judaism itself – I was told.

Only Palestinian statehood can redeem Israel’s rotten record, it would seem – even though there is no basis to believe that such a state will be anything other than one more failed, fractured and violent Arab country – perhaps radically Islamist – at war with Israel and its other neighbors.

Without admitting it, people speaking this way are deeply anti-Semitic in effect. The Jew they (claim to) like and (very belatedly) admire is a weak, cerebral Jew; a Diaspora Jew whose Talmudic literature is all-of-a-sudden filled with wisdom, and whose art and poetry is unexpectedly so very 21st century cultural.

But then there is the Jew they love to hate; the mighty and brawny Zionist Jew that wields the most formidable army in the Middle East and whose economy to just too damn overwhelming. That Jew is just too robust and zealous. Too vicious and potent. That Jew needs to be cut down to size.

BEYOND ALL THE USUAL pro-Israel talking points and debate tactics with which I am well familiar, I found on this trip that there were five key strategies that had some impact on my interlocutors.

First, don’t play the victimhood game. People out there don’t care, alas, how many dunams of fine Israeli agriculture have been burned by Palestinian incendiary kites, or how many Israeli women and children have been murdered by Hamas suicide bombers, or how many missiles Iran is giving Hizballah to fire into Israel.

The recounting of Arab atrocities, no matter how egregious, doesn’t wash. European liberals simply don’t see Israel as the underdog.

Second, history matters. The Six Day War was not an act of Israeli aggression, but a defensive war, and the Arab side lost fair and square. There never was a Palestinian state. Settlements are not colonialist outposts but express a Jewish “right of return” to ancestral lands. Israel placed three full-scale peace proposals on the table over the past 15 years involving Palestinian independence and almost-complete West Bank dominion – yet Abbas rejected all offers and preferred to fight on.

Few care much about this history, but it needs to be re-stated because it isn’t known and it goes to the core of Israel’s case.

Third, you have to emphasize, over and over again, that Israel seeks conflict resolution, not jihad; that Israel wants to resolve conflicts through compromise, not end conflicts by annihilation of the enemy. Say that Israel wishes to live at peace and cooperate with its neighbors, not to conquer Arabic and Islamic nations from Tunisia to Indonesia.

No matter how ridiculously self-evident this seems, the repetition of this truth is extraordinarily important. It isn’t obvious to many Europeans.

Fourth, it is simply not enough to explain Israel’s security dilemmas or revisit Israel’s diplomatic generosity towards the Palestinians. What’s needed is a much more basic restatement of Israel’s cause and purpose: Israel as a grand historic reunion of people and land, and as a just and moral actor in the medieval and violent Arab Middle East. Israel wins when you speak about justice and the Jewish nation.

Fifth, and most important of all, don’t be embarrassed by Israel’s strength. Admit to it. Flaunt it.

As counter-intuitive as this may seem, especially in contrast to the “outstretched hand for peace” narrative described in a previous paragraph, never apologize for using “disproportionate” force. Instead, articulate the reasons why and the circumstances under which Israel must use force to defend its homeland, and don’t be shy about it.

Largely, this means sharing Israel’s dilemmas with your audience. It’s okay to agonize a bit over the need to be a ferocious military power; dwelling on this is truly Israeli and it is humanizing. But never ask for forgiveness or suggest that Israel will pull its punches just to win a nice guy award.

I have found that forthright, unashamed talk has salutary impact. Without being nasty or unfeeling regarding our adversaries, one can convey a deep sense of sincerity and believability by verbalizing Israeli red lines and enunciating core Zionist commitments. People are forced to respect that, even if they won’t impute to you awe-inspiring humanity. Better shock-and-awe than shrink-and-whimper.

Grudgingly, even Europeans come to see that you have a point; a perspective that might be tough and gruff, but that also might be reasonable under the circumstances.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Germany's Migrant Policy: Why Trump was Right

Media slipperiness about the facts again

US President Donald Trump attacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel's migrant policy this week. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition," he tweeted on June 18. "Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" he added.

President Trump's comments come at a time when Merkel is facing the biggest crisis of her career. She is struggling to hold her government together, with the Bavarian Catholic party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), threatening to leave the governing coalition over immigration. The CSU wants the police to have the authority to turn away illegal migrants at the border, a move bitterly opposed by Merkel.

While Trump slammed Merkel's handling of the migrant crisis during his presidential campaign, until now, he has refrained from publicly criticizing her over the issue.

Predictably, the mainstream media were quick to criticize President Trump for his remarks.

"Trump falsely claimed that crime in Germany is on the rise," wrote The New York Times.

The Washington Post ran a "fact-checking" story entitled, "Trump says crime in Germany is way up. German statistics show the opposite."

"Statistics contradict Trump's remarks," German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

"Trump's comments are certain to irk German ministers, especially as Europe's largest economy recently reported the lowest crime figures in more than 25 years. The number of crimes fell almost 10 percent in 2017 over the previous year."

CNN, BBC, Vox and even the youth fashion magazine Teen Vogue published similar reports.

With major media outlets on both side of the Atlantic reciting the same talking points in unison, millions of viewers and readers across the globe could come to believe that the Trump had made a false claim while attacking Merkel's open borders policy that let millions of migrants into Europe since the autumn of 2015.

According to the narrative peddled by the mainstream media, after a series of horrendous migrant crimes and string of deadly terrorist attacks perpetrated by newly arrived Muslim migrants, the towns and cities across Germany were reverting to some sort of idyllic harmony.

All the media reports were based on the 2017 police crime statistics that registered a drop of almost 10% in the crime rate over the previous year. Speaking to reporters in May 2018, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer cited the report to assert that "the number of crimes committed in Germany is the lowest since 1992."

Let us examine that report closely.

On April 22, 2018, writing for the German newspaper Die Welt, Ansgar Graw challenged the much-quoted crime report in an article entitled, "The Reality Behind the New Statistics on Crime":

"When all [categories of] crimes are taken into consideration, then the crime has certainly gone down (by 9.6%) over the previous year. In case of violent crimes -- that particularly lead to fear -- the picture is nuanced. There was, however, a slight improvement compared to 2016 (and as well as to 2011 or 2012). But in general terms, violent crimes subjected to high fluctuation are above the levels [recorded] between 2013 and 2015."

Cases of murder. manslaughter, rape and sexual assault have risen measurably. In 2014, for example, a total of 180,955 acts of violence were reported, in previous year they were 188,946.

As Graw concludes, "the crime statistics drop only when compared to 2016, but have risen in comparison to the period before the refugee crisis." Addressing the issue of migrant crime, he wrote that "the proportion of non-German suspects across the board, and particularly when it came to violent crimes, was disproportionately high."

According to the 2017 crime statistics, more than 1,100 foreigners were charged with murder or manslaughter, as opposed to around 1,500 suspects holding German passports. The previous year's statistics showed a similar correlation: 1,137 foreigners were charged with homicide-related crime, compared to 1,638 German suspects. These are staggering numbers given the fact that Germany was home to roughly 10 million foreigners as opposed to 70 million German nationals.

In an article meant as a rebuttal to President Trump's tweets, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 19, 2018 admitted that the police crime report of 2017 showed a rise in homicide and sexual assault across the country. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, while correctly maintaining that the crime report showed an overall drop of 9.6%, disclosed that, "The number of homicides rose by 3.2%" and "the number of sexual assaults had risen as well."

On June 8, 2018, German public broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR) admitted that there was a "correlation between refugee influx and rising crime."

Concerning violent crimes, the 2017 government crime report found that the police charged 69,163 foreigners for such crimes compared to 112,346 Germans. In 2016, the report showed a ratio of 67,869 non-German, compared to 110,494 for German suspects.

There is nothing new about the mainstream media seizing an opportunity to ridicule and discredit the US President. However, the issue of mass migration into Europe is bigger than a fresh round of Trump-bashing or finding delicacies for the next news cycle. By shielding Merkel's migrant policy from legitimate scrutiny and criticism, and hushing up a public debate, the mainstream media have become an accessory to the seriously flawed open-door migrant policy pushed by Merkel and the rest of European political elite.

SOURCE







Michigan woman who lied about campus rape sentenced to 45 days jail

In Britain such liars get yers in jail

A 21-YEAR-OLD woman who plead guilty to lying about being raped in a university campus parking lot has been sentenced to prison.

Mary Zolkowski, a 21-year-old from Michigan in the United States, was sentenced to 45 days in jail and with no credit for time served, along with a two year probation period.

During her probation she will be routinely tested for drugs and alcohol and will attend substance abuse counselling.

She was also ordered to undergo a mental health assessment.

If Zolkowski breaks parole an additional 220 days will be added to her jail term.

The sentence was handed down on June 18 by Bay County Circuit Judge Joseph Sheeran and follows false claims made by Zolkowski that she was raped in a Delta College parking lot.

On February 22, 2017 the Delta College Public Safety Office received a call from Zolkowski’s mum who said her daughter was claiming to have been raped on campus, MLive reported.

In Zolkowski’s initial report to police she said she was walking to her car at about 5.50pm when a man grabbed her from behind and raped her without a condom while holding her face and throat.

She said she was only able to see her attacker’s hands and did not get a look at his face because he jumped in his car and drove of as soon as it was over.

Court records show that her reasoning for not being able to provide a description of the vehicle was because she “kind of blacked out”.

Zolkowski refused to have a physical examination.

When she spoke with the authorities a second time her story had changed and she told them she had been raped in an apartment by an acquaintance but did not want to press charges.

In a third interview she reportedly changed her story again, telling police she wanted to tell the suspect to stop during sex, but it ended before she was able to do so.
She was sentenced for 45 days jail and two years parole for her crime. Picture: Mary Zolkowski/Instagram

She was sentenced for 45 days jail and two years parole for her crime. Picture: Mary Zolkowski/InstagramSource:Instagram

In March, Zolkowski pleaded guilty to falsely reporting a felony, telling the judge that she lied because of a previous assault at a different campus.

“I was assaulted previously, not at Delta’s campus,” Zolkowski said.

“And because I was ashamed of circumstances of that, when my mother called, I vented through Delta, which was very wrong of me. I should have been truthful from the very beginning, and I used Delta.”

Zolkowski’s lawyer, James Piazza, said that his client had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, for which she was receiving treatment.

In the same hearing Judge Joseph Sheeran indicated he would not impose jail time on Zolkowski and would instead sentence her to probation but this week he handed down the 45-day sentence.

She could have faced up to four years and prison and a $2000 for her crime.

SOURCE






Trump and the Invasion of the West

Patrick J. Buchanan

Where many Americans see illegal intruders, Democrats see future voters.

And with 11,000 kids of illegal immigrants in custody and 250 more arriving every day, we could have 30,000 in custody by summer's end.

The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?

The U.S. Hispanic population, already estimated at nearly 60 million, is predicted to exceed 100 million by 2050, just 32 years away.

And Europe's southern border is more imperiled than ours.

A week ago, the new populist regime in Rome refused to allow a boat full of migrants from Libya to land in Sicily. Malta also turned them away. After a voyage of almost a week and 1,000 miles, 630 migrants were landed in Valencia, Spain.

Why did Italy reject them? Under EU law, migrants apply for asylum in the country where they first enter Europe. This burdens Italy and Greece where the asylum-seekers have been arriving for years.

Of the landing in Spain, Italy's interior minister Matteo Salvini, a leader of the populist League party, chortled:

"I thank the Spanish government. I hope they take in the other 66,629 refugees (inside Italy). We will not be offended if the French follow the Spanish, the Portuguese and Maltese, we will be the happiest people on earth."

If the migrants boats of the Med are redirected to Spanish ports, one suspects that the Spanish people will soon become as unwelcoming as many other peoples in Europe.

And Trump is not backing down. Monday he tweeted:

"The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!"

Whatever European leaders may think of him, many Europeans are moving in Trump's direction, toward more restrictions on immigration.

In Germany, a political crisis is percolating. The Bavarian-based CSU, longtime coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, is now talking divorce if Merkel does not toughen German policy.

Merkel has never fully recovered from the nationalist backlash against the million migrants she allowed in from Syria's civil war. A New Year's Eve rampage in Cologne, featuring wilding attacks on German girls by Arabs and Muslims, cost her dearly.

Among the reasons Bavarians are pulling away from Berlin is that, being in the south of Germany, Bavaria is a primary point of entry.

Virtually every one of the populist parties of Europe, especially of the right, have arisen to contest or to seize power by riding the issue of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East.

Yet the progressives adamantly refuse to act, apparently paralyzed by a belief that restricting the free movement of peoples from foreign lands violates one of the great commandments of liberal democracy.

We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide.

If Europe does not act, its future is predictable.

The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet.

If but a tiny fraction of the African and Middle Eastern population decides to cross the Mediterranean to occupy the emptying towns and villages of an aging and dying continent, who and what will stop them?

Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents.

But on the mega-issue — the Third World invasion of the West — he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future.

SOURCE





Palestinians: How to Achieve a Better Life

"It's become safer to demonstrate against Israel than against Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Israel is at least a country of law and order and they have human rights organizations and a powerful media and judicial system. We can only continue to dream of having something like what the Jews have."— Palestinian activist.

In the past two weeks, Palestinians received yet another reminder that they are living under undemocratic regimes that have less than no respect for public freedoms.

The regimes of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip never miss an opportunity to remind their people of the dire consequences that await anyone who speaks out against the leaders. The two Palestinian regimes have been forcing it down the throats of their people for many years.

Still, some Palestinians seem surprised each time the PA or Hamas send their police officers to break up (or, more precisely, to break bones in) a demonstration in Ramallah or the Gaza Strip.

The streets of Ramallah and Gaza City showcase, yet again, that the Palestinians' true tragedy over the past five decades has been failed and corrupt leadership -- one that keeps dragging them from one disaster to another; one that never offers them any hope; one that has been radicalizing and brainwashing its people; one that steals large portions of the financial aid provided by the international community, and one that has brought them nothing but dictatorship and repression.

The Palestinian Authority is nearly 25 years old, but it continues to act as a corrupt dictatorship. Like most Arab regimes, the PA and its leaders have zero tolerance for any form of criticism.

Ask Palestinian journalists, bloggers and pundits in the West Bank and they will tell you (in private and anonymously; they would like to save their skins) how the Palestinian Authority cracks down on them and imposes severe restrictions on their work. In the past year alone, at least 11 Palestinian journalists and political activists have either been arrested or summoned for interrogation by Palestinian security forces in the West Bank. The charge: voicing various forms of criticism against the Palestinian Authority or one of its senior officials, including, of course, President Mahmoud Abbas.

Earlier this month, the Palestinian Authority went one step further in demonstrating to its constituents what dictatorship looks like. Hundreds of Palestinians were staging a peaceful demonstration in the center of Ramallah to call on Abbas to lift the sanctions he had imposed on the Gaza Strip a year earlier. The sanctions, which severely aggravated the economic crisis in the Gaza Strip, included firing thousands of PA civil servants and cutting off social assistance to many families. Abbas has also refused to pay for the electricity and medical care that Israel supplies to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Abbas placed the sanctions on the Gaza Strip in the hope that affected Palestinians would revolt against his enemies in Hamas. So far, however, his measures seem to have backfired. Hamas is still in power and there is almost no real challenge to its rule over the Gaza Strip. Also, Abbas does not want to bear any responsibility for his people in the Gaza Strip; he wants the Gaza Strip to be the problem of Israel, Egypt and the rest of the world. Anyone who thinks that Abbas is eager to go back to the Gaza Strip is living in a dream world. (Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority and Abbas from the Gaza Strip in 2007).

Abbas does not like to be reminded of his responsibility for what many describe as a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, and he does not want any Palestinians to protest the punitive measures he imposed on the Gaza Strip.

First, Abbas issued a directive banning Palestinians from protesting in the major cities in the West Bank.

His directive, however, did not stop hundreds of Palestinian activists from taking to the streets of Ramallah on June 13 to condemn Abbas's sanctions. What was supposed to be a peaceful protest turned out to be one of the most violent clashes between Abbas's security forces and demonstrators, whose only crime was that they were calling on their leader to lift the sanctions he imposed on the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinians in the West Bank are also trying to show solidarity with their brothers in the Gaza Strip. They seem to be beginning to realize that Abbas, instead of helping the people in the Gaza Strip, is actually punishing them by cutting off their salaries and denying them medical and humanitarian aid. The Ramallah protest also came amid growing criticism (mainly from the Gaza Strip) that the Palestinians of the West Bank are indifferent to the suffering of their brothers in the Gaza Strip.

On instructions from Abbas, dozens of Palestinian policemen, both in uniform and civilian clothes, attacked the protesters with brute force, using clubs and tear gas. More than 44 protestors were arrested and 20 injured. The brutality, however, did not end there. Palestinian policemen later raided hospitals and medical clinics in Ramallah to arrest injured Palestinians suspected of taking part in the peaceful protest. At least five Palestinian and foreign journalists were wounded during the police assault, while many others had their cameras and other equipment confiscated.


Hundreds of Palestinian protesters took to the streets of Ramallah on June 13 to condemn the sanctions placed on the Gaza Strip by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. On instructions from Abbas, dozens of Palestinian policemen attacked the protesters with brute force, using clubs and tear gas. (Image source: Wattan video screenshot)

"The Palestinian Authority has crossed all red lines," said a Palestinian protester who was beaten up by Palestinian policemen during the demonstration. "They treated us as if we were the biggest enemy of the Palestinians. We have no idea why they used such force against us. This is a real crime and a violation of Palestinian human rights."

The Palestinian Authority has defended its brutal assault on the peaceful protesters by arguing that the demonstrators had failed to obtain a permit for their protest. But since when do Palestinians need a permit from their leaders to demonstrate? Well, in this instance they do need a permit because the protest was directed against the Palestinian Authority and Abbas.

Demonstrating against Israel or the US and burning their flags and posters of Israeli and American leaders do not require a permit from the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. In fact, the Palestinian leaders in Ramallah have played a major role in initiating anti-Israel and anti-US demonstrations, especially in recent months. It is one thing to shout chants against the US and Israel, but it is a completely different story when a Palestinian shouts chants against his leaders. Such a Palestinian would be lucky indeed if he winds up in hospital with only with a broken limb.

So Abbas, who is already punishing his people in the Gaza Strip under the pretext of fighting Hamas, is now telling his people in the West Bank to keep their opinions to themselves or pay for the impudence with broken heads and broken bones.

Abbas's warning was echoed by one of his senior officials, Akram Rajoub, who serves as "governor" of the West Bank city of Nablus. In a video posted on social media after the violent Ramallah incident, Rajoub is seen and heard threatening any Palestinian who demonstrates against President Abbas:

"We will curse the father of anyone who protests... From now on, we're not afraid and we don't care. We will strike back at anyone who curses us and harms our dignity. Cursed be the fathers of those who say bad things about us!"

Rajoub's threats, which sound more like the language of a street thug than a senior official, came in response to widespread criticism of the Palestinian Authority's brutal violence against the Ramallah protesters. His threat is seen as an attempt to deter other Palestinians from speaking out against Abbas's sanctions on the Gaza Strip.

Rajoub's threats represent a massive mockery of truth on the part of the Palestinian Authority. On the one hand, Abbas and his officials continue to hold Israel responsible for the misery of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and are calling on the international community to condemn Israel for its policies in defending itself against attacks (from the Gaza Strip), while it is, in fact, Abbas himself who is largely responsible for the current crisis. It is because of Abbas, and not Israel, that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip get only four or five hours of electricity every day. It is because of Abbas, and not Israel, that tens of thousands of Palestinian employees have not been receiving salaries for the past few months. It is because of Abbas, and not Israel, that hospitals in the Gaza Strip lack medicine and medical equipment.

These are only some of the inconvenient truths that Abbas and his cronies in Ramallah do not want the world to know or the Palestinians to talk about. That is why Abbas sent his police officers to Ramallah to beat up the protesters, whose only crime was that they had dared to call on their leader to remove the sanctions on the Gaza Strip.

For now, Abbas appears to have achieved his goal of silencing and intimidating his critics. The violent scenes on the streets of Ramallah on June 13 served as a sufficient deterrent. As one Palestinian activist commented:

"It's become safer to demonstrate against Israel than against Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Israel is at least a country of law and order and they have human rights organizations and a powerful media and judicial system. We can only continue to dream of having something like what the Jews have."

The fact that Abbas is running a one-man show in the West Bank and is cracking down on public freedoms does not mean that his rivals in Hamas are any better. Sometimes, in fact, it is hard to distinguish between Abbas's regime and that of Hamas. The two often use the same tactics to impose terror and intimidation on their people. Hamas is bad, but who said that the Palestinian Authority is good?

The scenes we witnessed on the streets of Ramallah in mid-June were replicated in Gaza City a few days later, when Hamas used the same tactic to break up a peaceful protest. On June 18, Hamas policemen and militiamen attacked a group of Palestinians who were holding a peaceful protest to call for Palestinian unity. Again, several Palestinians ended up in hospital, while scores of others were arrested by Hamas. Hamas also justified the use of force by arguing that the protesters had failed to obtain a proper permit.

In both Ramallah and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas managed to send a message to their people that anyone who speaks out against his or her leader will have his bones or skull smashed. Hamas and the PA despise each other and have been ripping each other to pieces -- figuratively and literally -- for the past decade. At the end of the day, however, Palestinians know that the power struggle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is not between good guys and bad guys, but between bad guys and bad guys. These bad guys are no different from other Arab dictatorships that enslave and kill their people.

If the Palestinians ever wish to seek a better life, the first thing they need to do is rid themselves of the "leaders" who have destroyed their lives.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Pentagon Covering Up Fact That Female Officers Nearly Sank Navy Ship

The "diversity" mongers have blood on their hands

During the early weeks after the USS Fitzgerald was speared by a lumbering Philippine container ship, it was noteworthy that the captain and a couple of admirals were publically named, but not the actual officer in charge, the officer of the deck. (OOD) The other person who should have kept the Fitz out of trouble is the person in charge of the combat information center, the Tactical Action Officer. That individual is supposed to be monitoring the combat radar, which can detect a swimmer at a distance of two miles.

Not until a year later, when the final reports are made public and the guilty parties have been court-martialed, does the truth come out. The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!! The Tactical Action Officer would normally be in near constant communication with the OOD, but there is no record of any communication between them that entire shift!

Another fun fact: In the Navy that won WWII, the damage control officers were usually some of the biggest and strongest men aboard, able to close hatches, shore up damaged areas with timbers, etc. The Fitz’s damage control officer was also a woman, and she never left the bridge. She handled the aftermath of the accident remotely, without lifting a finger herself!

Look it up: The OOD was Sarah Coppock, Tactical Action Officer was Natalie Combs. . . .

When I noticed last year that they were doing all they could to keep the OOD’s name out of the headlines, I speculated to my son that it was a she. Turns out all the key people (except one officer in the CIC) were female!

Indeed, I did some searching, and Lt. Coppock pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty. Lt. Combs faced a hearing last month:

"In an 11-hour hearing, prosecutors painted a picture of Lt. Irian Woodley, the ship’s surface warfare coordinator, and Lt. Natalie Combs, the tactical action officer, as failing at their jobs, not using the tools at their disposal properly and not communicating adequately. They became complacent with faulty equipment and did not seek to get it fixed, and they failed to communicate with the bridge, the prosecution argued. Had they done those things, the government contended, they would have been able to avert the collision."

That two of the officers — Coppock and Combs — involved in this fatal incident were female suggests that discipline and training standards have been lowered for the sake of “gender integration,” which was a major policy push at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. It could be that senior officers, knowing their promotions may hinge on enthusiastic support for “gender integration,” are reluctant to enforce standards for the women under their command.

This was the story of Kara Hultgreen, the Navy pilot who died in a 1994 F-14 crash. Investigation showed that Hultgreen had been allowed to proceed in her training after errors that would have meant a washout for any male pilot. But the Clinton administration was pushing for female fighter pilots, which resulted in a competition between the Navy and Air Force to put women into these combat roles. It is not necessary to believe that (a) women shouldn’t be fighter pilots, in order to believe (b) lowering standards for the sake of quotas is a bad idea. Of course, you may believe both (a) and (b), but it is (b) that gets people killed.

It seems obvious that the Pentagon (and the liberal media) sought to suppress full knowledge of what happened to the Fitzgerald in the immediate aftermath of the June 2017 incident that killed seven sailors, in the same way the details of Kara Hultgreen’s death were suppressed. It took investigative reporters like Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times a lot of hard work to find out what actually happened to Hultgreen. Let’s hope other reporters will dig into what’s happening in our military with the “gender intergration” agenda at the Pentagon now.

SOURCE







Eurydice Dixon: ‘Rape culture’ facts just don’t fit

Australia's CLAIRE LEHMANN comprehensively demolishes feminist theory in just one article

It has been little more than a week since a young Melbourne woman, Eurydice Dixon, had her life cut short by young man who allegedly raped and murdered her, leaving her body in an empty oval in the early hours of the morning. The young man has since turned himself in to police. [He was a mental case]

In the aftermath of this brutal crime we have seen calls to action from Malcolm Turnbull to “change the hearts of men”, from Bill Shorten to “change the attitudes of men”, and from Adam Bandt that “we (men) must change the way we act”, as if there were some kind of unspoken bond between the person who committed this crime and the politicians who govern the nation.

Such utterances, while potentially comforting to those who are acutely distressed, are overly broad in their attribution of blame. Whether such broadness is intentional or not, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of evil, and betrays the liberal principle that no person should be held accountable for a crime they did not commit.

In my brief time as a graduate student of forensic psychology, I learned about children who had “callous and unemotional” traits. These traits are the childhood version of what we call psychopathy in adults. Children who exhibit these traits are cruel to their pets and siblings in ways the ordinary person would struggle to comprehend. I read about one child who stuck pins into the eyes of the family dog, and another child who poured paint stripper over his disabled sister’s legs. The traumatised parents of these children live out lives of devastation and outrage, and suffer the fate of being blamed for their children’s disturbance (when most often it is not their fault). Fortunately, there are a handful of clinics around the world that try to train such children out of such behaviour. But in the long run many of them do grow up to be antisocial, some become criminals, others do not.

When Victoria Police Superintendent David Clayton said people “should be aware of (their) surroundings” and take precautions to protect their own safety following the discovery of Dixon’s body, he uttered a statement so commonsensical as to be banal. Yet, from the vicious reaction to his words, one might have momentarily thought that he was the murderer. Premier Daniel ­Andrews seemed to implicitly rebuke the senior police officer when he officiously declared: “Women don’t need to change their behaviour. Men do.”

Yet anyone who has had any real-life experience knows what Clayton was referring to: psychopaths exist in our midst, and these predators opportunistically engage in acts of malevolence. These criminals are rare but the damage they can do can be devastating. All the high-minded efforts to get men to “change” aren’t going to rid the world of psychopaths, unless one believes psychopaths don’t exist in the first place.

As a senior police officer, Clayton presumably knows a bit about crime. He is familiar with depravity and recognises its signs. Yet this simple fact of life, that evil exists, seems beyond the realm of the progressive imagination. Limited by an emaciated vocabulary, such crimes are now explained via the newspeak of “oppression”, “power” and “problematic attitudes” that have been “socialised”.

The fashionable explanation today is the idea that crimes against women are a cultural phenomenon. Prominent feminist Clementine Ford writes in The Age: “Sexual violence and homicide might be the extreme end point of it, but the spectrum they sit on stretches right back to ‘harmless’ casual sexism, the rape ‘jokes’ and threats that proliferate online and the attitude expressed towards women on a daily basis by groups of men who’ve been socialised to view themselves as superior. These toxic behaviours don’t manifest one day out of nowhere. They are cultivated.”

White Ribbon ambassador Andrew Swan joined the crime-is-cultural chorus, stating: “It is crucial to consider sexual assault and family violence as part of the same spectrum — a dark rainbow that begins with something as simple as a sexist joke, and our reaction to it.” The solution? “Try not laughing,” he said.

The focus on sexist jokes and “everyday sexism” seems disproportionate when weighed against the evidence. You wouldn’t know it from the amount of times the myth is repeated by media commentators, but there is no evidence that links the telling of jokes to sexual assault or murder. On the contrary, in the psychiatric literature, losing one’s ability to laugh (anhedonia) is a recognised sign of psychopathology, and a general sense of humour is considered healthy.

The fashionable idea that all men are somehow responsible for a culture of rape and violence is not supported by the evidence either. Crimes in general, including crimes against women, are committed overwhelmingly by a minority subset of the general population. In Sweden, for example, a population-based study that looked at more than two million people from 1975 to 2004 found that only 1 per cent of the population were responsible for 63.2 per cent of all crimes recorded — nearly twice as many as the other 99 per cent combined. That’s a tiny percentage of the population responsible for the vast majority of offending.

The same holds true for sexual assault. Offenders who commit sexual assaults are much likelier to be “life-course persistent offenders”; that is, individuals who have the greatest propensity to criminality. Again, a minority is responsible for the majority of offending. Even when it comes to sexual harassment, it is likely that repeat offenders cause most of the trouble. The fact is that recidivist offenders are responsible for the vast bulk of all crimes, and unfortunately these individuals are the least likely to be persuaded by rehabilitation campaigns or public education efforts.

“But what about domestic violence?” one may ask. Isn’t the high rate of intimate-partner ­violence evidence that we live in a culture that belittles and devalues women?

It is true that women experience the most serious forms of domestic violence, which can involve stalking and end in murder. In Australia, about 70 per cent of all intimate-partner homicides are female. And about one in four women (or about 25 per cent to 30 per cent) report having been the victim of intimate-partner ­violence at some time. Yet intimate-partner violence is not a male-only domain. In an Australian study, lesbians were likelier to report having been in an abusive relationship than gay men (41 per cent and 28 per cent respectively). And in the US, the lifetime prevalence of having been the victim of intimate-­partner violence is found to be much higher among lesbians and bisexual women when compared with heterosexual women and gay men. The feminist theory that claims violence is a tool used by men systematically to oppress women as a collective fails to account for such data. It also fails to account for the Nordic paradox.

A study published in 2016 coined the term Nordic paradox to refer to the puzzling finding that in countries with the highest level of gender equality — ­Sweden, Norway and Finland — rates of reported intimate-partner violence are substantially higher than in the rest of the world. (The global prevalence of IPV is estimated to be about 30 per cent but in Sweden it is 38 per cent.) Researchers do not know if this is because there is a backlash effect in which men are responding to shifts towards gender egalitarianism by lashing out, or if it is simply the result of increased awareness and reporting. But whatever the explanation is determined to be, the feminist prediction that violence declines as gender equality increases simply is not supported by the data.

The idea that our culture condones violence against women is farcical. There are no sympathetic portrayals of rapists or wife-­abusers in films, TV shows or in most of the Western canon. On the contrary, films often revolve around a plot of revenge where a morally depraved figure who has harmed a woman receives his just deserts. There are no cultural artefacts that glorify rape and, contrary to the accusations of some feminists, men who abuse or exploit women generally are held in contempt by other men.

Crimes against women are stigmatised and punished harshly. Sexual offenders generally are given lengthy prison sentences and are secluded from other prisoners precisely because the crime is so reviled — even in ­prison.

While ABC journalists ask why violence against women is an “accepted part” of Western civilisation we must remember that a long view of the trends in violent crime all point to violence decreasing substantially across time. In Australia, the homicide rate and sexual assault rate peaked in the 1970s and has been declining steadily since.

As documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, all Western nations have seen dramatic and persistent declines in interpersonal violence dur­ing the past 500 years. While there may be variations from year to year, rates of violent crime are much lower now than at any point in our recorded history.

Yet in public conversations about crime, data is overlooked in favour of appeals to emotion. And to compound the naivety, the political narratives that surround crime today — especially crimes against women — are becoming increasingly toxic and divisive. While “equality” for the left once meant the removal of artificial barriers that impeded people’s ability to partake in social and economic life, today it means something different.

The contemporary left sees the world through the lens of groups warring over scarce resources. This perspective perceives res­ources as static: there is a pie that never grows, and the role of politics is to cut the pie up in a more fair and equitable manner. In this world view, if more men are in positions of power within a society, then this happens at the expense of women. Interactions between groups are zero-sum.

In this world of identity politics, individuality is subsumed into the collective. When one man holds power, he doesn’t do so on behalf of himself, he does so on behalf of the male collective. Likewise, when one man commits a murder, collectivists will portray it as being done in the service of all men. This regressive world view has no qualms about ascribing collective guilt to entire groups of people. But ascribing collective guilt strikes at the very heart of our understanding of justice and liberty.

One reason violence has declined in the West is because at some point along the way we decided that individual sovereignty matters, and that it was unjust to hold people accountable for crimes they did not commit. Let’s not reverse the trend.

SOURCE 







SPLC agrees to $3.3 million settlement over its ‘Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists’

JOHN SEXTON

The Southern Poverty Law Center has made an apology and agreed to a $3.3 million settlement in a lawsuit over its “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” When the Field Guide was published in 2016 it included the name of Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim who runs the Quilliam Foundation. Nawaz sued the SPLC in 2017 and today Quilliam announced the settlement victory:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc. has apologized to Quilliam and its founder Maajid Nawaz for wrongly naming them in its controversial Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. In a public statement, the SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, explained that “Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism.”…

The SPLC also agreed to pay a $3.375 million settlement, which Quilliam and Nawaz intend to use to fund work fighting anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism. “With the help of everyone who contributed to our litigation fund, we were able to fight back against the Regressive Left and show them that moderate Muslims will not be silenced,” said Nawaz. “We will continue to combat extremists by defying Muslim stereotypes, calling out fundamentalism in our own communities, and speaking out against anti-Muslim hate.”

The SPLC posted a video apology on its own site, which you can view here. The apology says in part, “Since we published the Field Guide, we have taken the time to do more research…” Yes, lawsuits have a funny way of making people do more research.

The SPLC’s tone today is very different now from what it was two years ago. When the Atlantic spoke to the Field Guide’s author, Mark Potok, about the inclusion of Nawaz in its list, Potok was confident no apology was forthcoming:

“Our point is not to make these people targets for violence, Potok said. “The point is to tamp down the really baseless targeting.” While Nawaz demanded a correction, retraction, and apology, Potok said none was coming.

In addition to Nawaz, the same document listed Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an extremist. She wrote about her inclusion on the list in a piece for the NY Times last August:

In that guide, the S.P.L.C. claims that I am a “propagandist far outside the political mainstream” and warns journalists to avoid my “damaging misinformation.” These groundless smears are deeply offensive, as I have dedicated much of my adult life to calling out the true extremists: organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet you will look in vain for the S.P.L.C.’s “Field Guide to Muslim Extremists.” No such list exists.

That’s a shame, because Islamic extremism — a movement that aims to impose a caliphate and Sharia law by violent means — is as toxic as white supremacy. In the past two decades, it has certainly been responsible for many more deaths.

The SPLC deleted the “Field Guide” from its website sometime in April of this year. It’s good to see them forced to backtrack, though the settlement will barely make a dent in their $432 million endowment. Finally, it’s worth noting that Popehat, who doesn’t seem to have much love for the SPLC, says there’s a worrisome aspect to this settlement:

The SPLC has fallen from being a justifiably respected warrior against bigotry and brutality to an unreliable, sophomoric, flailing orthodoxy-cop that struggles to distinguish organized hate groups like the Klan from trolls, idiots, or social conservatives. I would like to see them be more responsible. But I am worried — and you should be too — about the abuse of defamation law…

It’s impossible to overstate the extent of the SPLC’s surrender here — I can’t remember one combining this level of money and apology, especially pre-litigation. So why did they do it? Maybe there are specific false statements of fact in the Field Guide that haven’t come to light. Perhaps discovery would have revealed ugly things about the SPLC’s process of writing such lists. Perhaps the lawsuit would have resulted in sustained terrible publicity for the SPLC, undermining whatever credibility it has left. Maybe they’re actually contrite.

But though I celebrate an apology for wrongdoing, I can’t celebrate a surrender at swordpoint that encourages censorious litigation. Bad opinions are, and ought to be — must be — absolutely protected. If the SPLC surrendered because we’ve got a broken judicial system that makes litigation ruinously expensive and fails to protect free speech, the result is bad, not good.

SOURCE







Spanish authorities rescue 569 sub-Saharan African migrants in flotilla of more than 16 boats including two men in a canoe in the Strait of Gibraltar

Lucky old Spain.  A black wave is rolling across the Mediterranean as Leftist mischief-makers get into the act to facilitate it

Spanish authorities say they have rescued 264 people in 16 boats in the Strait of Gibraltar.

The country's Maritime Rescue Service says those rescued Saturday from the busy shipping lane with treacherous currents included two men were pulled from a canoe.

Twenty-seven others were found in the Mediterranean between Spain and Morocco and 129 more off the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean.

Fair weather and calm seas in recent days have brought a increase in migrants' attempts to reach the Spanish coast via the Western Mediterranean route.

Spain's new center-left government recently announced a softer stance on migration, extending public health care to foreigners without residence permits.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

What Jordan Peterson Doesn't Understand About Religion and Free Speech

Only a principle of COMPLETE freedom of expression will ensure that YOUR freedom is not taken away. 

There  is also an interesting point about meaning below which aroused my philosophical instincts.  The nature of meaning is a major debate in analytical philosophy. 

With regard to the wedding cake controversy, apparently some Leftists say a cake can have no meaning: "It's just a cake".  Justice Kagan in her SCOTUS ruling concurred, saying the the Christian cake-baker "invests its sale to particular customers with ‘religious significance.’ So the meaning of the cake is entirely in the baker's mind, not in the cake, so therefore doesn't exist.

But that is a non-sequitur.  Meaning can only exist in someone's mind.  An inscription in Chinese will have meaning to Chinese people but will be meaningless to me because I don't speak Chinese. And different meanings may exist in different minds for the same word: What is covered by "freedom", for instance, is often disputed. 

What was at issue in the case was not some non-existent absolute meaning but the baker's feelings and responses.  Baking the cake for him meant disloyalty to the scriptures.  And the First Amendment tells us that he is at liberty to bake or not because of such religious beliefs.

It seems a pity that a Supreme Court justice was too thick to see that what was at issue was a man's beliefs, not some mythical absolute property of a cake.  Kagan was, however, an Obama appointee


Recently, Jordan Peterson was interviewed by Australian comedian Jim Jeffries's show on Comedy Central. The interview did not go particularly well for Peterson, who, among other things, has had a meteoric rise as public intellectual for deftly handling tense interviews regarding his opposition to the cultural left's assault on free speech. There's been some oddly triumphant coverage of what happened. Vice summed up the interview this way, "Watch Comedian Jim Jefferies Finally Shut Up Jordan Peterson."

Here's what happened. Peterson was asked about the issue underlying a recent Supreme Court case: Should bakers be forced to bake wedding cakes for gay weddings if they have religious objections? Peterson says, "I don't think that would be a very good idea." Jeffries then asked if a baker should be able to deny a wedding cake for black people. Peterson says they should probably be allowed to deny service to black customers, "but that doesn't mean it's right." Jeffries then says that the civil rights movement did result in passing laws that required people to serve black people and that made society better and asks Peterson why this is different than now. Peterson says, "Maybe it's not different. ... Maybe I was wrong about that." Obviously, I'm paraphrasing a bit, but you can watch the whole exchange here:

This exchange is useful because it gets at a fundamental problem with religious liberty debates. Peterson's first impulse in favor of free expression in the broadest sense was right, but he got caught flat-footed when presented with a very common and overly simplistic reading of the distinction between where public accommodation laws end and free speech begins. It's a debate that demands some real understanding, as the future of the First Amendment depends on it.

As someone who's covered religious liberty issues for more than a decade, here's the answer I would have given: Business owners should be able to turn down any customer for any reason, period. That's freedom, and I think we're far enough removed from Jim Crow that there would not be widespread discrimination if it were the law of the land tomorrow. Further, businesses who did discriminate would likely be punished in the marketplace. When a bakery in the Portland suburb didn't make a cake for lesbian commitment ceremony, they were run out of business in months. I don't like that this happened to them, but in an area as liberal as Portland, it was very predictable.

However, a funny thing happened. A year and a half after the business was shuttered, the Oregon labor secretary Brad Avakian slapped the bakery owners with a $135,000 fine. When Avakian ran for secretary of state in 2016 the state's major papers didn't endorse him on the grounds that Avakian was too "political," and while bakery wasn't often explicitly discussed the egregious fine was tacitly understood to be part of his problems. The result was Avakian became the first Democrat to lose a statewide election 14 years. Liberal Oregonians thought being punished by the marketplace was both appropriate and enough.

However, since horrifying official racism is still in living memory, commercial freedom is a difficult thing to argue for. So where does that leave us? Note that in the recent Supreme Court decision Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Justice Kennedy's decision very clearly articulated the difference between public accommodation laws and argument for protecting the expression of creative professionals such as bakers (without coming down one way or the other). Still, even defining the difference was a huge victory.

Public accommodation laws to combat Jim Crow were always understood to apply to services that were essentially uniform and interchangeable. A black man wanting a sandwich at a lunch counter, a hotel room, or a train seat wasn't getting service that was any different than the white guy next to him. Beyond that, it legal distinctions about providing more subjective and individualistic services were hazy and deliberately so. Policing the link here involves assuming or determining intent—and it's very easy perceive racist intent where none exists—and this creates a host of problems when it's not an outright a violation of rights. Then there's the intersection of speech and business. Selling racist pamphlets is an overtly discriminatory commercial activity by nature and a lot more harmful than not baking a cake, and yet perfectly legal commercial activity because not tolerating it to some significant degree is not only at odds with the First Amendment but invites the government to make highly subjective judgments about what speech is and is not tolerable.

When the New Mexico wedding photographer case (Elane Photography v. Willock) appeared in 2006, the initial reaction was pretty interesting. I remember going on relevant message boards for wedding photographers and there was a lot of "I'm a liberal who supports gays, but I'm concerned." Wedding photographers retain the copyright to their work, were legally viewed as artists, and very much saw themselves as creatives. It was instinctively understood that the government telling artists what art they had to create was a very bad precedent.

In the related cases that have popped up since, the clearer the occupation is relative to either artistic or lexical expression, the better the odds it will be protected. I think the only one of these cases that has won thus far in a lower court is that of Hands On Originals, a T-shirt printer in Kentucky who declined to print T-shirts for a gay pride event. A significant reason the printer won his case is that the public accommodation argument is belied by the fact he owns a literal printing press that prints words and messages, even if his medium is T-shirts and promotional tchotchkes rather than, say, newspapers.

From there, it's harder to make an argument whether or not bakers or florists count as expressive artists, though it should be obvious enough that a) when it comes to protecting free speech from government interference the prudent thing is to define these matters as broadly as possible b) accepting them on their own terms as artistry should be easy enough since this all centers on custom designs and there are big artistic competitions in both professions. (Bakers are also often asked to put words on cakes in addition to both professions being asked do create things that are overtly symbolic.) Obviously, if I pick up a sheet cake that's pre-made at the grocery store, public accommodation arguments would seem to be applicable. It's also why Jack Philips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, would sell his offended gay customers anything already in his store, but not make them a cake from scratch. His own effort was not intertwined with the wishes of the customer in selling pre-made goods the way it would be in a custom order meant to honor a specific ceremony of religious significance to him. (Notably Phillips doesn't do other things that violate his beliefs, such as make Halloween-themed baked goods.)

Now the media coverage of these issues has not been conducive to dealing with the nuances outlined above. Which has contributed to a situation where, even when liberals start to understand the speech implications, they stumble over their own hypocrisy on public accommodation measures. Having spoken on these issues publicly a number of times I've seen this happen a lot, and prominent defenders of religious freedom tell me it happens to them as well. The conversation you have tends to go something like this:

"What's the big deal? They just want a cake."

"Well, it's not 'just a cake.' What if the customer wants a 48-inch, five-layer cake that when you cut it open has been dyed to look like a rainbow pride flag and has an image of the two grooms respective faces on two fondant sculptures of Michalengelo's David on top and in frosting underneath it says 'Jesus Approves of the Union of Chuck and Buck's Open Marriage' and will take this baker baker three days of his life to make, if it didn't grossly violate his religious beliefs to make it in the first place?"

"That doesn't mean anything. It's just flour and sugar. Why won't this bigot sell him a cake?"

"If I forced you to bake me a cake that said 'Make America Great Again' you'd object, right?"

"Of course I would. Trump is practically Hitler."

"Ok, don't you see how the same principle of compelled speech applies to the first cake?"

"That's totally different. Those gay dudes just want a normal cake."

So long as the cake represents things the person believes in, there's nothing unique about it in their mind and for some reason they cannot be made to see it's in any way symbolic or representative of a viewpoint not everyone agrees with. And when you realize people are incapable of making this distinction, to the point of total moral disassociation that allows for compelling speech from others that they would object to explicitly being done to them personally, you realize there's a viral strain of argument that could be used to justify subjecting people they disagree with to any number of abuses. It also seems the most powerful people in America are infected with this thinking. Liberal Justice Elana Kagan voted as she did on Masterpiece because she understood the baker was subject to overt animus, such as a Colorado civil rights commissioner calling the baker a Nazi, that made his punishment appear to be arrived at predjudically. But then the "just a cake" non-argument rears it's ugly head in the much discussed bizzarroland footnote in her concurrence:

As Justice Gorsuch sees it, the product that Phillips refused to sell here—and would refuse to sell to anyone—was a ‘cake celebrating same-sex marriage.’ But that is wrong. The cake requested was not a special ‘cake celebrating same-sex marriage.’ It was simply a wedding cake—one that (like other standard wedding cakes) is suitable for use at same-sex and opposite-sex weddings alike… And contrary to Justice Gorsuch’s view, a wedding cake does not become something different whenever a vendor like Phillips invests its sale to particular customers with ‘religious significance.’

I suspect Jordan Peterson hasn't thought all this through, and I'm not surprised he hasn't because the public debate has been so bad. But there are abundant reasons to suspect that if it were explained to him, he'd get it. The fact a Supreme Court justice's can't see something so obvious and essential to the First Amendment, after she was specifically tasked with puzzling it out for months, well, that should keep people concerned with preserving free speech up at night.

SOURCE






'About 60 Organizations' Are Considering a Lawsuit Against the SPLC Following $3M Nawaz Settlement

About time!

No fewer than 60 organizations branded "hate groups" or otherwise attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are considering legal action against the left-wing smear factory, a Christian legal nonprofit leader confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. He suggested that the $3 million settlement and apology the SPLC gave to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation on Monday would encourage further legal action.

"We haven't filed anything against the SPLC, but I think a number of organizations have been considering filing lawsuits against the SPLC, because they have been doing to a lot of organizations exactly what they did to Maajid Nawaz," Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, told PJ Media on Tuesday.

Liberty Counsel filed a lawsuit against the charity navigation organization GuideStar for defamation after GuideStar adopted the SPLC's "hate group" list. That lawsuit is ongoing.

In 2016, the SPLC published its "Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists," listing Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, a practicing Muslim, as one such extremist. The left-wing group listed various reasons for including him, changing the reasons every so often, and even at one point mentioning that he had gone to a strip club for his bachelor party.

On Monday, SPLC President Richard Cohen extended his group's "sincerest apologies to Mr. Nawaz, Quilliam, and our readers for the error, and we wish Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam all the best." In settling the suit, the SPLC paid Nawaz's organization $3.375 million.

"This is a significant settlement," Staver told PJ Media. "3.375 million dollars, and it did not even go to litigation; it was a result of a demand letter."

Importantly, "the allegations that were at issue here were very similar to the allegations against the other groups," the Liberty Counsel chairman explained. "The SPLC promotes false propaganda, demonizes and labels groups they disagree with, and that labeling has economic as well as physical consequences."

The SPLC started as a group to oppose racist terrorism, and its first legal action targeted the Ku Klux Klan. In recent decades, the organization has begun marking mainstream organizations as "hate groups" on par with the KKK. Last year, 47 nonprofit leaders denounced the SPLC's "hate list" in an open letter to the media. The SPLC has admitted that its "hate group" list is based on "opinion."

Staver insisted that the settlement with Nawaz "will encourage further legal action." He suggested that the settlement "helps our lawsuit against GuideStar" and may encourage organizations that were considering suing the SPLC to actually file the paperwork.

"There are probably about 60 organizations that we're talking to — there's at least 60," Staver told PJ Media. He mentioned the group of 47 nonprofit leaders who denounced the SPLC last year, and said "that group has grown since then."

Furthermore, many of the "hate groups" attacked by the SPLC do not encourage hate or violence, but merely disagree with the left-wing organization's political views. Many — like the Family Research Council (FRC), the Ruth Institute, and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — merely stand for marriage as between one man and one woman. The SPLC has twisted 30-year-old arguments to smear these groups, and in one egregious case the group actually quoted as hateful the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Other organizations attacked by the SPLC also told PJ Media they are "considering their options" regarding a lawsuit.

"Truthfully, I have not been following the activities of the SPLC too closely," Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of the Ruth Institute, an organization that lost its credit card processor, Vanco Payments, over the SPLC's "hate group" labeling last year, told PJ Media. "Pursuing our mission is more important than attempting to take on the behemoth of the SPLC."

"I must say, though, this apology to Mr. Nawaz has caused us to consider our options," Morse added, cryptically.

"We are reviewing all our legal options," J.P. Duffy, a spokesman for the Family Research Council, told PJ Media on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Prager University, another organization attacked by the SPLC, said that "at this point" the group had "no intention to sue," but they "reserve the right to change their mind as the situation evolves."

Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), echoed this trend, saying his organization is "evaluating all our options," including a potential lawsuit.

"It's appalling and offensive for the Southern Poverty Law Center to compare peaceful organizations which condemn violence and racism with violent and racist groups just because it disagrees with their views," Tedesco told PJ Media. "That's what SPLC did in the case of Quilliam and its founder Maajid Nawaz, and that's what it has done with ADF and numerous other organizations and individuals."

"This situation confirms once again what commentators across the political spectrum have been saying for decades: SPLC has become a far-left organization that brands its political opponents as 'haters' and 'extremists' and has lost all credibility as a civil rights watchdog," the ADF senior counsel added.

Tedesco defended the good name of Alliance Defending Freedom, which SPLC falsely maligns as a "hate group.""With eight wins in the last seven years at the U.S. Supreme Court and hundreds of victories for free speech at America's public universities, ADF is one of the nation's most respected and successful legal advocates, working to preserve our fundamental freedoms of speech, religion, and conscience for people from all walks of life," he said.

SOURCE






Spain: Ground Zero for Europe's Anti-Israel Movement

The proliferating anti-Israel activism, driven by the rise to power of the political far-left, is establishing Spain as the EU member state most hostile towards the Jewish state.

Valencia, the third-largest city in Spain, has approved a motion to boycott Israel and slander it by declaring the city an "Israeli apartheid-free zone." The move comes days after Navarra, one of Spain's 17 autonomous communities, announced a similar measure. In all, more than 50 Spanish cities and regions have passed motions condemning Israel. The proliferating anti-Israel activism, driven by the rise to power of the political far-left, is establishing Spain as the EU member state most hostile towards the Jewish state.

The Valencian measure, introduced by the far-left party València en Comú, was approved during a plenary session of the city council on May 31. The motion, which commits the city to refrain from engaging in business contacts or cultural events with Israeli authorities or companies, aims at establishing Valencia as "a global reference for solidarity with the Palestinians."

The motion, which libelously describes Israel as an "apartheid regime," accuses the Jewish state of "colonialism,""racism,""ethnic cleansing,""tyranny," and "genocide."

The measure, which claims to reflect the "dignity, solidarity and justness" of the Valencian people, was introduced by Neus Fábregas Santana, a city councilor whose Twitter feed reveals an obsession with demonizing and delegitimizing Israel.

Santana works closely with a group called BDS País Valencia, the local branch of a worldwide movement trying to delegitimize Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

BDS País Valencia is currently promoting a Spanish documentary about the Gaza Strip called "Gas the Arabs," a title that alleges, falsely, that the Jews in Israel are doing to the Arabs today what the Nazis in Germany did to the Jews during the Second World War.

An activist with BDS País Valencia, Mireia Biosca, said the motion in Valencia had three objectives:

"The first is the dismantling of the apartheid wall and the return to the borders of 1967. The second is the end of apartheid both in Palestine and in Israel, and the third is the right of return."

Biosca also said BDS País Valencia would work to prevent the Eurovision song contest from being held in Israel in 2019:

"There is a very clear line: first to ensure that states do not participate in the festival, and obviously a campaign to prevent the festival from being in Jerusalem. For me it is equally boycottable if it is decided that Eurovision will be held in Tel Aviv...."

A Madrid-based organization, Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM), which is fighting the anti-Israel BDS movement in Spain, said that Valencia's motion was anti-Semitic and an incitement to hatred. It said it was studying whether to take legal action against the City Council of Valencia for violating the Spanish Constitution and promoting discrimination based on religion, ethnicity or national origin:

"The declaration is full of lies, manipulations and libels, whilst it calls for the city to formally adhere to the BDS movement and declare itself 'free of Israeli apartheid' (a known euphemism in Spain for Judenrein [free of Jews], where any perceived sympathizer of the Jewish State is demanded to publicly denounce the policies of the only democracy in the Middle East in order to be admitted to social, political, economic or civic activities in the municipality) ....

"We informed the local press of the illegality of the BDS campaign, detailing dozens of judicial cases won by ACOM in the Spanish Courts that proved the unconstitutionality of exclusionary measures."

ACOM has filed more than twenty lawsuits against provincial and town councils which have enacted boycotts of Israel.

Much of the BDS activity in Spain is being promoted by Podemos (translated in English as "We Can"), a neo-Communist party founded in March 2014 to protest the economic austerity measures put into place after the European debt crisis. Podemos received more than 20% of the vote in the national election held on December 20, 2015 and is now the third-largest party in Parliament.

Podemos head Pablo Iglesias and his deputy, Íñigo Errejón, served as advisors to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and have been accused of receiving more than €7 million ($8 million) from Chávez to fund their political activities in Spain. Podemos has also been accused of receiving funding from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iglesias has a long history of anti-Semitism: he has downplayed the Holocaust, describing it as "a bureaucratic and administrative decision"; compared the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw ghetto; and described Spanish police who apprehend illegal immigrants as being the same as SS guards.

Iglesias hosts a television program, "Fort Apache," which is broadcast on HispanTV, a Spanish-language cable television network owned by the Iranian government. He has been accused of using his show to repeat anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and tropes.

In a June 7 interview on RTVE, a leading state-owned television and radio broadcast network, Iglesias, said that Israel was an "illegal" country: "We need to act more firmly against an illegal state like Israel. Israel's actions are illegal. The apartheid policies of Israel are illegal."

València en Comú, the political party which sponsored the BDS motion in Valencia, is a local offshoot of Podemos. The motion was approved with support from Compromís, a coalition of Communist and left-wing nationalist parties, as well as the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which recently took over the central government in Madrid.

BDS motions have also been approved in: Abrera, Alcoi, Alhaurín de la Torre, Artés, Badalona, Barberà del Vallès, Barcelona, Benlloch, Campillos, Casares (Malaga), Castrillón, Castro del Río, Catarroja, Concentaina, Córdoba, Corvera, El Prat, Gijón, Gran Canaria, La Roda Llangreu, Los Corrales, Madrid, Mairena del Aljarafe, Molins de Rei, Montoro, Muro, Navalafuente, Navarra, Oleiros, Olesa de Montserrat, Onda, Pamplona, Petrer, Ripollet, Rivas-Vaciamadrid, Sabiñánigo, San Fernando, San Roque, Sant Adrià del Besòs, Sant Cebriá de Vallalta, Sant Celoni, Santa Eulària (Ibiza), Sant Boi de Llobregat, Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Sant Pere de Ruidebitlles, Santiago de Compostela, Sant Quirze del Vallès, Seville, Telde, Terrassa, Trebujena, Velvez-Málaga, Viladamat, Viloria del Henar, Xeraco and Zaragoza, among others.

ACOM President Ángel Más explained the dynamics behind the rise of the BDS movement in Spain:

"The BDS is a global phenomenon that is born from the modern anti-Semites' acceptance of the improbability of defeating Israel through military confrontation or terrorist attacks. The objective is the same: the annihilation of the Jewish homeland, 'from the river to the sea.' But now, BDS tries to push the international community to condemn Israel as a pariah state and ostracize all those that support her: Zionists. Jews.

"The delegitimizers, as old-time bigots, mask their thuggery, presenting themselves as victims and hiding their true intentions. They appeal to public feelings against oppression or abuse and the sympathy for underdogs and suffering minorities.

"The BDS movement in Spain acquired its current virulence with the emergence of Podemos, a 'Chavist' far-left party financed by Venezuela and Iran. Podemos won 25% of the votes in Spain's 2015 local elections. Before those elections, BDS was a marginal confederation of small groups focusing on academic and cultural boycotts of Israel. The core group that formed Podemos had been active in the BDS initiatives for years, and hostility against Israel was a top priority in their political agenda.

"As Podemos gained control of the municipal governments in the main Spanish cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza and Cadiz, the anti-Israel movement had access to multiple economic, human and organizational resources. When those far-left groups occupied public institutions, they didn't distinguish between their own sectarian agenda and the government's agenda.

"Local administrations (provincial and municipal) formally joined the BDS movement and declared their territories 'free of Israeli apartheid.' In effect, Judenrein. Stickers were distributed to be exhibited in shops and offices, public companies were instructed not to work with Israeli firms or individuals and Spanish citizens suspected of being associated or sympathetic to the Jewish state were demanded to repudiate it publicly in order not to be excluded from social, political, economic and civic life.

"Podemos has driven over 90 such declarations in Spain in jurisdictions covering a population of over eight million people. Its plan was to create an oil spill of hatred reaching the majority of Spain in 18 months. This was an existential threat, and we had to act....

"No local boycott is too small to go unchallenged. BDS groups carefully manipulate the information reaching political decision makers, spend massive resources on media campaigns and are masters at social media intoxication. In general, pro-Israel groups are lagging behind in the application of analysis and action in those fields."

SOURCE






Trinity Western University Loses Religious Freedom Fight

In a 7-2 decision, the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled against Trinity Western University in their fight to open a law school, siding with the Law Society of British Columbia in its belief that LGBTQ+ rights trump religious freedom rights.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Richard Wagner, along with Justices Rosalie Abella, Michael Moldaver, Andromache Karakatsanis, and Clement Gascon stated “The LSBC’s [Law Society of British Columbia] decision not to approve TWU’s [Trinity Western University] proposed law school represents a proportionate balance between the limitation on the religious protections under s. 2 (a) of the Charter and the statutory objectives that the LSBC sought to pursue. The LSBC’s decision was therefore reasonable.”

TWU is an evangelical institute of higher learning that has multiple locations in Canada. The institution was founded by the Evangelical Free Churches of Canada and America in 1962 and was upgraded to university status in 1985.

In June 2012, Trinity Western submitted a proposal for a law school at their main campus in British Columbia. In April of 2014 the LSBC, however, in October of 2014, the LSBC reversed its decision based on a referendum of British Columbia’s lawyers. Trinity Western sued the LSBC for their decision and thus began a years-long legal battle that resulted in the Supreme Court of Canada handing down a decision in favor of the LSBC’s favor on June 15.

At issue in this legal dispute was Trinity Western’s “Community Covenant” which, among other things, prohibited “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”

Justice Beverly McLachlin, who retired on Dec. 15, 2017 but was still on the bench in late November and early December of 2017 when Trinity Western’s appeal was heard, agreed with the majority decision, stating, “Where legislatures delegate regulation of the legal profession to a law society, the law society’s interpretation of the public interest is owed deference.”

Justice Malcolm Rowe also agreed with the majority, stating, “With the privilege of self-government granted to the LSBC comes a corresponding duty to self-regulate in the public interest. The LSBC was entitled to interpret its public interest mandate as including consideration of the effect of the Covenant on prospective law students. The fact that the Covenant is a statement of religious rules and principles does not insulate it from such scrutiny.”

Justices Suzanne Cote and Russell Brown disagreed with the decision, however, stating “Under the LSBC’s enabling statute, the only proper purpose of a law faculty approval decision is to ensure that individual graduates are fit to become members of the legal profession because they meet minimum standards of competence and ethical conduct. Given the absence of any concerns relating to the fitness of prospective TWU law graduates, the only defensible exercise of the LSBC’s statutory discretion would have been to approve TWU’s proposed law school.”

The full text of the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision including concurring and dissenting opinions, can be found here.

For its part, TWU mourned the majority’s decision, stating, “Until now, Canada has encouraged the rich mosaic created by the diversity of views, race, gender, and belief systems. Sadly, the Supreme Court has decided that this does not extend to a law school at Trinity Western University.”

Earl Phillips, executive director of what was going to be TWU Law School, said, “We feel this is a lost opportunity for Canadians, many of whom do not have affordable access to justice. There are only three common law schools in Canada that offer a course in charity law. The TWU Law School would have offered a specialty in charity law. Because Canada has the second largest charitable and non-profit sector in the world, this law stands to impact Canadians coast to coast.”
Ad Feedback

Phillips further stated, “Without question, the Trinity Western community is disappointed by this ruling. However, all Canadians should be troubled by today’s decision that sets a precedent for how the courts will interpret and apply Charter rights and equality rights going forward.”

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Federal Judge Says Public Prayer by Police Officers Violates Law

How perverse!  I would greatly prefer a cop who prays to one who doesn't

The city council of Ocala, Florida, has decided to fight back after a federal judge ruled that the city and its police chief violated the Constitution by promoting and holding a prayer vigil.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan ruled in May that Police Chief Greg Graham and city leaders broke the Establishment Clause by organizing, promoting and holding a 2014 prayer vigil after a drive-by shooting injured several children.

“The government cannot initiate, organize, sponsor or conduct a community prayer vigil,” Judge Corrigan wrote in his order. “That is what happened here.”

The American Humanist Association represented several local residents who were allegedly triggered and suffered microaggressions as a result of the vigil.

The lawsuit claimed the police chief was “reckless and callously indifferent” because of his involvement in the planning and promotion of the event.

The chief and the city were ordered to pay $3 in damages plus attorney fees, Ocala.com reported.

The city council filed a motion to vacate the judgement.

Mayor Kent Guinn told Fox News about 600 people showed up to pray “for the children that got shot in the drive by shooting.”

Renowned evangelist Franklin Graham said prayer is a basic human right and public employees should be able to petition the Almighty.

“George Washington prayed, Abraham Lincoln prayed, and other presidents have called on God publicly in times of war or crisis,” the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse tweeted.

“Atheists have the right not to believe and not to call on God,” he said. “People of faith have the right to pray, and it should not be taken away.”

But AHA legal director David Niose said prayer rallies should be run by churches, not police departments.

“Police departments shouldn’t be endorsing religion, yet that’s exactly what the Ocala Police Department did here by sponsoring and promoting a prayer vigil,” he said in a statement.

It really takes a perverted kind of reprobate to sue a police department for participating in a prayer vigil.

SOURCE






Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder's name is REMOVED from top children's literature honor over her 'stereotypical attitudes' to blacks and Native Americans

Far-left librarians again. Frustrated old maids? That the award went to a black writer for the fourth straight year tells you about their politics.  Race is all.  Literature can take a back seat

The famed author of the Little House on the Prairie series has been put out to pasture.

In a unanimous vote on Saturday, the board of the Association for Library Service to Children agreed to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from the group's top award honoring children's literature authors over her depiction of blacks and Native Americans in her work.

'This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,' said the group in a statement after the vote.

Rob Lowe mocked the controversy on Monday, tweeting: 'Wait.. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a racist author? How did I miss that?! Say it ain’t so, Halfpint!!!'

At the same time, Wendy McClure, who runs a parody account under Wilder's name, wrote: 'Not to be controversial (though of course I AM) but don't you think an award should be more about honoring the person who WINS IT than the person it's named for? Don't worry about my name and what award it is or isn't on, flutterbudgets. Kindly save your outrage for other things.'

Wilder's name had still not been removed from the organization's website as of Monday morning.

'Administered by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made, over a period of years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children,' reads the page describing the honor.

Below that is a biography of Wilder, which consists of just two sentences, followed by three paragraphs under the heading: 'Wilder's Legacy, and the Award in Context.'

That section, which is three times longer than the one detailing Wilder's life, states: 'Wilder's body of work continues to be a focus of scholarship and literary analysis, which often brings to light anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work.

'Her books continue to be published, read, and widely used with contemporary children. ALSC recognizes the author’s legacy is complex and Wilder’s work is not universally embraced.'

Later, the group stresses that while it will continue to preserve the works of Wilder, it has opted to not associate her name with a prize honoring a writer's lifetime achievements.

The decision was made as the honor, now awarded annually, went to a black writer for the fourth straight year.

Past honorees include E. B. White (1970), Beverly Cleary (1975), Maurice Sendak (1983) and perhaps the most famous children's writer of all, Theodor S. Geisel (1980).

Geisel, better know as Dr. Seuss, is now under investigation himself by the group's task force, along with British bookseller John Newbery, illustrator Randolph Caldecott, businessman Robert Sibert, Mildred Batchelder, and author May Hill Arbuthnot.

ALSC Blog Manager Mary Voors wrote on the group's website that the vote on Saturday was met with a standing ovation.

In Little House on the Prarie, Wilder writes early in the book that out west 'there were no people. Only Indians lived there.'

That line clearly reveals Wilder's belief that Native Americans were not 'people,' and was changed int he 1950s to read 'no settlers.'

These sentiments did not impact the success of her novels, which are still sold worldwide and were made into a hit television series starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert.

SOURCE






U.S. Army training will now focus on actual battlefield skills, not social issues

Actual fighting will now take precedence over dealing with transitioning transgender troops, drug abuse and other issues as the Army seeks to overhaul its training regimen to hone its soldiers’ battlefield skills.

In a series of recent service-wide memoranda approved by Army Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and obtained by The Washington Times, service leaders are now making optional previously mandatory training on issues like transgender transition and drug abuse. The move, Army leaders argue, is designed to relieve stress on the already overburdened troop training regimen and refocus on soldiers ability to fight in combat.

“The Army’s regulations and policies that deal with training were pretty settled and there were not a lot of detractors to it. … It was all the other [training] requirements that we levied on ourselves, or we had levied from other places” that led to the increasingly cumbersome approach to combat readiness, said Col. John O’Grady, chief of the Army’s collective training division.

Those mandated training requirements “served as barriers to maximizing time … to build readiness and lethality” within combat units, he said in an interview. Aside from ending mandatory training programs on transgender troops and drug abuse, courses on media awareness and anti-human trafficking have also been eliminated from the mandatory curriculum, the service memoranda state.

Army officials are codifying the new marching orders into service-wide training guidelines and doctrine, which will bring the Army more in line with the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, Col. O’Grady said.

The strategy, which was one of Defense Secretary James Mattis’ earliest policy initiatives, shifted away from the George W. Bush and Obama-era strategies dominated by battling extremist groups like al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State, and putting the priority on challenging traditional nation-state rivals such as China and Russia. It also placed a greater emphasis on increasing lethality in conventional combat operations.

SOURCE






The Bad Hate the Good: The SPLC vs. Prager University

Dennis Prager

“Antifa” is to violence what the Southern Poverty Law Center is to words. In short, it is a hate group on the Left.

The SPLC smears individuals and groups it differs with by labeling them as some form of “hater”: “racist,” “white supremacist,” “extremist” and the like. That it is cited and even relied upon by The New York Times, Facebook, Amazon, Google, CNN and others, and that Apple gave the organization a million dollars, is testimony to the moral state of mainstream media and corporate culture in America today.

Were the SPLC not quoted and used as a source, there would be no reason to pay it any attention. All the SPLC does is politicize, and thereby trivialize, the fight against racism and other evils.

Any organization that labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the extraordinary Somali-American woman who devotes her life to fighting for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world — an “extremist,” as the SPLC has done, is not a moral organization. No wonder it just agreed to pay Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million and issued a retraction for smearing him as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

This kind of behavior should surprise no one. Since Stalin labeled Trotsky, the ideological leader of Soviet communism, a “fascist,” the Left (not liberals, to whom the Left is as opposed as it is conservatives) has libeled its opponents. Without lying about its opponents, there would be no Left.

Now the SPLC has placed an article about PragerU on its “Hatewatch” blog. It never actually accuses PragerU of “hate” because even it can’t substantiate such a charge. In over 300 videos, it could not find a single sentence countenancing hate or bigotry, so it simply describes two articles by outsiders about PragerU, knowing the dirty work will be accomplished via implication.

The article is about two PragerU critics, Kevin M. Kruse, a Princeton history professor who sought to rebut a PragerU video in a Twitter thread, and a self-described sociologist named Francesca Tripodi, who wrote an article examining PragerU’s reach.

Professor Kruse tweeted a series of disagreements with a PragerU video by former Princeton University and Vanderbilt University professor Dr. Carol Swain, a black scholar, on the subject of the Republican Party and the “Southern Strategy.”

Now, professor Kruse may be right, and professor Swain may be wrong. But that has nothing to do with hate. Nor does Kruse imply that it does. So, the SPLC citation of Kruse is just deceitful.

The SPLC article goes on to charge that “more than a few” PragerU videos “function as dog whistles to the extreme right.”

And how does PragerU blow these “dog whistles”?

The article uses Tripodi to make its case. Here is the essence of her argument, as described by the SPLC: “Tripodi says she discovered several elements tied to PragerU’s presenters and its online marketing that paint the brief videos watched more than a billion times in a troublesome light.”

And what are those “several elements?”

“To start with,” the article says, “when one visits the PragerU channel on YouTube, there is a column of ‘Related Channels’ with links to other outlets PragerU’s audience may find interesting: Fox News seems to be a no-brainer, as does The Daily Wire, given its founder Ben Shapiro’s relationship as a presenter for PragerU. But alongside those you also can find the channel of Stefan Molyneux, an extremist who espouses pseudo-scientific ‘race realism’ propaganda.

”‘[PragerU] … is very blatantly algorithmically connected’ to the extreme right content found on YouTube, Tripodi explains.“

Only a very careful reader will discern that PragerU has never had any connection whatsoever to Molyneux or any "extreme right content.” All Tripodi and the SPLC could write is that Google has “algorithmically connected” PragerU to such content.

Needless to say, PragerU has no power over how Google algorithmically connects anything.

Then the SPLC writes, “More troubling, Tripodi discovered, are the connections some PragerU presenters have with white nationalist thinkers.”

Again, only a very careful reader will realize PragerU has no connections whatsoever to white nationalist thinkers. Rather, “some PragerU presenters” do.

And who might they be?

Tripodi and the SPLC give one example: Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin made a video for PragerU titled “Why I Left the Left.” He is a very popular liberal video podcaster, and the fact that he is a gay Jewish liberal who left the Left disturbs the SPLC.

Now, do you know any gay Jewish liberals who support white nationalists? I doubt it.

So, on what grounds is Rubin smeared in this way? Not because of any views he espouses but because he has interviewed the aforementioned Stefan Molyneux.

As it happens, I differ with some of the admittedly little I have seen of Molyneux’s views (for example, I believe the entire race and IQ issue is utterly pointless and, on occasion, racist). But how does the fact that one PragerU presenter interviewed someone he disagrees with in any way impugn him — let alone PragerU?

Of course, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop the SPLC hate site from drawing such tenuous “connections” to smear fine people.

Would George Will, Bret Stephens, Charles Krauthammer — all Pulitzer Prize winners — Alan Dershowitz (a lifelong Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter), Arthur Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, Bjorn Lomborg, UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Marmer, former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (one of the most prolific living writers on Judaism), to name just some of our presenters, participate in a white-supremacist endeavor? The implication is absurd — and libelous.

In addition to videos on current political issues, history and economics, PragerU brings goodness and kindness into millions of people’s lives. It produces videos on forgiveness, refraining from gossip, raising grateful and kind children, remaining attracted to one’s spouse, God and suffering, happiness and the importance of gratitude, along with many other life-enhancing subjects. And these have been viewed by tens of millions of people — most of them under age 35.

On any given day, PragerU increases goodness and kindness on Earth while the Southern Poverty Law Center increases anger and resentment.

That’s why the SPLC hates PragerU. The bad hate the good. It’s a rule of life.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Supreme Court Tells State’s Highest Court to Reconsider Case of Florist Who Declined Order for Gay Wedding

Barronelle Stutzman faces fines for violating Washington’s anti-discrimination law by declining to provide flower arrangements for a longtime gay customer’s wedding. (Photo: The Daily Signal)
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sent the case of a florist who declined to provide flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding back to the highest court in Washington state.

The Supreme Court asked the Washington Supreme Court to reconsider the case of Barronelle Stutzman, owner of a flower shop in Richland, Washington state, in light of its June 4 ruling in favor of Jack Phillips, a Christian baker in Colorado who declined to create a custom cake to celebrate a gay marriage.

“Today’s decision suggests that [the Phillips case] may provide more robust protections than many commentators initially thought,” Ryan T. Anderson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” told The Daily Signal in an email.

Both Stutzman and Phillips are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group that specializes in religious liberty. In both cases, the organization has argued that the First Amendment prevents government from forcing Americans to use their creative talents to express messages, such as same-sex marriage, with which they disagree.

Stutzman, a 73-year-old grandmother, faces fines for violating Washington’s anti-discrimination law by declining to provide the flowers for a longtime gay customer’s wedding. Like Phillips, she is a Christian who believes, as the Bible teaches, that marriage is between one man and one woman.

The Supreme Court “reversed Colorado’s decision to punish cake artist Jack Phillips for living and working consistently with his religious beliefs about marriage, just as Stutzman has also been trying to do while under legal attack by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and the American Civil Liberties Union,” Alliance Defending Freedom said in a formal statement.

The organization’s senior vice president in charge of its U.S. legal division, Kristen K. Waggoner, acted as lead counsel in Stutzman’s case, Arlene’s Flowers v. State of Washington, as well as Phillips’ case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Stutzman’s case goes back to March 2013, when customer Rob Ingersoll asked her to provide floral arrangements for his wedding to another man, Curt Freed.

“Barronelle Stutzman served a particular gay couple for almost a decade—happy birthday flowers and get-well-soon flowers—but couldn’t do the floral arrangements for their same-sex wedding,” Anderson told The Daily Signal, adding:

Rather than respect her conscience and religious liberty rights, the state attorney general [Ferguson] went after her. But this disagreement about marriage isn’t discrimination, and the government shouldn’t punish people simply for acting on their belief that marriage unites husband and wife.

SOURCE






Supreme Court rules against California law targeting anti-abortion pregnancy centers

The Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a major blow to a California law requiring anti-abortion pregnancy centers to inform women about publicly funded abortion and contraception services.

The 5-4 ruling by Justice Clarence Thomas, with the court's conservatives in the majority, said the law "likely" violates the First Amendment as a form of compelled speech.

"Licensed clinics must provide a government-drafted script about the availability of state-sponsored services, as well as contact information for how to obtain them," Thomas said. "One of those services is abortion — the very practice that petitioners are devoted to opposing."

In a concurring opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the law is "a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought and expression."

The decision was aimed at a liberal state government seeking to notify pregnant women of their rights to an abortion. But it could have unintended consequences. Laws in more conservative states requiring women seeking abortions to view ultrasounds or learn about the growth of their fetus now could be at risk.

Justice Stephen Breyer read a synopsis of the four liberal justices' dissent from the bench. "If a state can lawfully require a doctor to tell a woman seeking an abortion about adoption services ... why should it not be able to require a medical counselor to tell a woman seeking prenatal care about childbirth and abortion services?" he said.

California's law forces licensed pregnancy centers to post notices about free or low-cost state programs that include abortion services. It also requires unlicensed centers to inform clients that they are not medical facilities. Challengers called it a form of compelled speech.

“No one should be forced by the government to express a message that violates their convictions, especially on deeply divisive subjects such as abortion," said Michael Farris, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the pregnancy centers. "In this case, the government used its power to force pro-life pregnancy centers to provide free advertising for abortion.”

The justices were divided over the requirements during oral argument in March. The court's conservatives, including California's Anthony Kennedy, complained that the law targets only clinics that counsel women to complete their pregnancies. But liberal justices compared it to laws, upheld by the high court, that require doctors performing abortions to advise women about alternatives.

The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, which operates or is associated with about 130 California pregnancy centers, argued such "informed consent" laws are warranted on the verge of a medical procedure, but the same is not true for centers counseling women to continue pregnancy.

The state contends that many pregnancy centers deceive and misinform clients by posing as medical clinics and running ads intended to attract women in search of traditional abortion and contraception services. It says more than half of its 700,000 pregnancies each year are unintended, and women need to know their options.

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, decried the court ruling, which she said gives "fake health centers ... a free speech right to dress up like medical centers and deceive pregnant women."

While the Supreme Court made abortion legal nationwide in 1973 and has struck down state restrictions that block access for women, it has defended free speech rights in a number of recent cases.

Cities such as New York, San Francisco and Baltimore were first to enact laws imposing requirements on pregnancy centers. The facilities fought back in court — successfully in most cases — by arguing that the cities were discriminating based on their viewpoints.

A coalition of municipal groups argued that a ruling against California could put other required postings on shaky legal ground, such as those providing first aid instructions or requiring workers to wash their hands.

SOURCE






UK: Heterosexual pair WIN right to enter a civil partnership rather than get married after landmark Supreme Court ruling

A heterosexual couple have won the right to enter a civil partnership instead of getting married after a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court. Five Supreme Court justices unanimously granted an appeal by Rebecca Steinfeld, 37, and Charles Keidan, 41 this morning.

Speaking outside the court, the overjoyed pair said: 'We did it for Britain's 33million couples!'

Currently heterosexuals are not allowed to have a civil partnership because the Civil Partnership Act 2004 only allows same-sex couples.

But for four years Ms Steinfeld and Mr Keidan have argued it should be an option as well as marriage for cohabiting pairs. 

The academics, who live in Hammersmith, west London, suffered defeat at the Court of Appeal in February last year, but were given the go-ahead in August for a Supreme Court hearing today.

Speaking outside court this morning, Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan spoke of their 'jubilation' following their landmark court victory after a four-year battle.

Ms Steinfield said: 'This is a resounding victory which would not have been possible without the help of our legal team.

'Today we are one step closer to making civil partnerships available for us all. But to get this far we have had to go toe to toe with the government over four years and they have wasted tax payer's money to defend an unfair system.

'So forgive us if today we also feel a degree of sorrow that is has taken this long to get to this point.'

Her partner Mr Keidan added: 'There are 33million cohabiting couples in the UK, we are the fastest growing family type.

He said: 'Many want legal and financial security but cannot have this because in the eyes of the law they are not married. The law and government needs to catch up with family life in 2018. People are already suffering because of this.

'Today's declaration means the government is legally bound to end the mistreatment of people who are not married; human rights is meant to be progressive.'

The couple then urged Women's Minister Penny Mordant to fast track a private member's bill supporting their cause.

The panel of Supreme Court justices, including the court's president, Lady Hale, heard the couple's case in May and announced their decision this morning.

The judges granted a declaration that the 2004 Act was 'incompatible' with human rights laws on discrimination and right to a private and family life. 

Lord Kerr, announcing the court's decision, said the Government 'does not seek to justify the difference in treatment between same-sex and different sex couples'.

He added: 'To the contrary, it accepts that the difference cannot be justified.'

What the Government sought was 'tolerance of the discrimination while it sorts out how to deal with it'. He concluded: 'That cannot be characterised as a legitimate aim.'

Lord Kerr said it was 'salutary to recall that a declaration of incompatibility does not oblige the Government or Parliament to do anything'.

The couple, who have two daughters aged nine months and two, claimed the Government's position is 'incompatible with equality law'.

During the hearing, their barrister, Karon Monaghan QC, told the court they have 'deep-rooted and genuine ideological objections to marriage' and are 'not alone' in their views.

She said matrimony was 'historically heteronormative and patriarchal' and the couple's objections were 'not frivolous'.

Ms Monaghan added: 'These are important issues, no small matters, and they are serious for my clients because they cannot marry conformable with their conscience and that should weigh very heavily indeed.'

The Court of Appeal agreed that the couple had established a potential violation of Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which relates to discrimination, taken with Article 8, which refers to respect for private and family life.

SOURCE






‘You are unbalanced & one-sided’: Hungary’s FM tells BBC reporter in heated migration debate

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto hit back at a BBC reporter who suggested his government is xenophobic and authoritarian during an intense interview, in which the politician defended his country’s immigration record.

As Hungary’s foreign affairs chief sat down for an interview with BBC Newsnight on Tuesday, the talk quickly turned heated. Reporter Emily Maitlis recalled how the Hungarian parliamentary election, which happened two months ago, was criticized by the nation’s opposition parties.

“There is a sense of erosion of the rule of law. This is no longer a democracy. It is creeping authoritarianism,” she told Szijjarto, whose conservative Fidesz party won over 70 percent of votes in April. The minister rebuffed the allegations.

“You echo lies on this television. And I don’t think it’s fair. You are unbalanced, you are one-sided,” he responded. “You look only at the opinion of those who are frustrated because they lost the election.”

BBC’s Maitlis also suggested that Hungary’s anti-immigration law “flouts human rights” and recalled the fierce rhetoric of country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, known for branding certain migrants “Muslim invaders” and speaking about the need to protect “Christian Hungary.”

“So, this isn’t actually about immigration, is it? It’s about xenophobia,” the reporter told Szijjarto who said that he considered the accusation a “very serious insult.”

“What we don’t want is a massive illegal influx coming from the south to us. We want to keep Hungary a Hungarian country. And we don’t think multiculturalism is by definition good,” he explained. “I understand that the liberal mainstream doesn’t like our laws. But it is the Hungarian voters whose expectations we have to fulfill.”

Orban’s Hungarian government regularly faces criticism from the European Union and human rights groups for its ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards migration from the Middle East and Africa. Hungary is one of the few countries that refuses to accept mandatory migrant quotas proposed by the EU.

Last week, Hungary adopted a controversial bill punishing NGOs and aid workers suspected of “enabling illegal immigration.” The law, like many of Hungary’s anti-immigration measures, was denounced by various human rights watchdogs.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

In 1948, Palestinians lost land. But not to Israel

The May 9 The World article “A modest opening for new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem” described what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as the anniversary of the date on which Palestinians “lost their land when the Israeli state was created in 1948.”

That is partially true: In the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Palestinians did in fact lose what was offered to them with the loss of the West Bank; the Palestinians did in fact lose what was offered to them with the loss of Gaza.

But the dark little secret that the manipulative sentence left out was that the Palestinians lost the West Bank not to Israel but to their land-grabbing brethren Jordan. And they lost Gaza not to Israel but to their land-grabbing brethren Egypt.

This set of facts is critical to assess what happened to the Palestinians and who is culpable. As most know, but The Post routinely omits, the war was started by the local Arabs and neighboring Arab countries. If the Palestinians had accepted the two-state solution of 1947, there would be no conflict today, and the two-state solution would be going on its 71st year.

The problem stems from the seminal point that the Palestinians have time and again refused the two-state solution and have continued this refusal to this day. Hopes and wishes by the media will not change this fact.

The empty words of peace by Palestinian leaders are in no way consistent with their actions. It’s time this is acknowledged. The truth may not bring peace, but culpability will shape world opinion and perhaps push the Palestinians to realize that their 70-year attempt to defeat Israel is over.

SOURCE






Cowardly European response to Terrorism

They have learned nothing from the failed attempts to appease Hitler. Hitler did not go away. Nor will the Muslims

The European Union lost €180 billion (USD $210 billion) in GDP due to terrorism between 2004 and 2016. The United Kingdom (€43.7 billion) and France (€43 billion) suffered the highest losses, followed by Spain (€40.8 billion) and Germany (€19.2 billion), according to a Rand Corporation study.

"Beyond those who have been directly physically affected by terrorist attacks, the extensive coverage of terrorist attacks through multiple media and social media channels has substantially increased the amount of people and companies that could be psychologically affected. This subsequently affects their economic behaviour".

New statistics have also come from the Britain's anti-terrorism office. 441 people have been arrested in the UK for terrorism in the last year alone, and 4,182 since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The threat of terrorism is exhausting Europe.

According to the Spanish "black book" of terrorism, 658 Europeans have been murdered in terror attacks on European soil, while 1,029 Europeans have been killed by them abroad. Half of the French army has been deployed within the French Republic to protect the civilian targets, such as schools, monuments, and religious sites. Europe's armies are exhausted from patrolling the streets, to the point that NATO planners now fear that, over time, European armies "may get better at guarding railway stations and airports than fighting wars". An officer who recently returned from Afghanistan for guard duty in Belgium said: "We are standing around like flowers pots, just waiting to be smashed". Germany also sent troops into the streets for the first time since the Second World War.

One has to ask: Is Europe really serious about its war on terror? The French magazine Causeur just called it "the Batman Syndrome":

"How can we respect a society that is too cowardly to fight those who threaten its citizens, and that demonstrates its weakness by systematically seeking appeasement at the price of the most unreasonable accommodations? It is the 'Batman syndrome': the hero refuses to kill, he systematically saves his enemy who escapes and kills new victims until the hero catches up with him, and so on."

France is now close to freeing at least 50 terrorists from prison. The UK is also due to free 80 Islamic fundamentalists from prison. According to a new French report, nearly 10% of the 512 prisoners incarcerated for terrorism are likely to be released by the end of 2018. Their release may well pose a major threat. Khamzat Azimov, a terrorist who stabbed a man to death and injured four other people with a knife in central Paris, was known to counter-terrorism forces. Belgium released from prison a terrorist who had gone on a "bloody rampage" in the city of Liege two days before he killed two policewomen and a passerby.

Unless it gets serious about arresting not only the terrorists but also their deadly ideology, Europe will not see the end of the jihadist siege. A few days after the attacks in Liege, France thwarted another jihadist plot "with either explosives or ricin, this very powerful poison". After that, there was another terror attempt to strike the French gay community.

"France is the priority target of the terrorism unleashed in Europe by conquering Islam" wrote Ivan Rioufol in Le Figaro.

"Since 2015, 247 people have been killed in France in attacks by Islamists. The 'knife intifada' is no longer reserved just for Israel. In Magnanville, a couple of policemen, Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and Jessica Schneider, were stabbed in front of their three year-old child. Father Jacques Hamel was slaughtered in his church. In Marseille, Laura and Maurane had their throats slashed. These crimes will continue so long as the Republic leaves the enemy in peace".

The level of threat in France remains alarmingly high. "9,157 people were subjected to at least one surveillance measure by the intelligence services in 2017 in the name of the prevention of terrorism", an official French report recently revealed. In 2017, 20 major terror attacks in France were foiled.

Regarding the West's current "war on terror," American historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

"The result is the present age of serial Punic conflict, perhaps intolerable to the psyche, but in amoral terms tolerable as long as casualties are kept to a minimum and defeat is redefined as acceptable strategic wisdom. In the past, such periods of enervating war have gone on for a century and more. Ultimately, they too end — and with consequences."

In the end, there might be still a region called "Europe", but it may no longer enfold European culture.

SOURCE






Anti-Christian bigotry in Massachusetts

by Jeff Jacoby

IF YOU WERE looking for someone to successfully manage a promising company, it would be hard to find a candidate with a better array of credentials and know-how than Andrew Bushell.

He's a natural-born entrepreneur, with wide and varied experience both in and out of the business world. He founded and successfully managed a $2.5 billion investment firm. He worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co. After 9/11, he took a hiatus from the high-pressure world of finance and venture capital, immersing himself instead in the high-pressure world of war-zone journalism to cover Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Economist. And when, after years abroad, he returned to his New England hometown, he came up with an idea for a unique local business: making and selling gourmet salt from Atlantic seawater. Like Bushell's other endeavors, the Marblehead Salt Company flourished, with annual sales growing at a 25 percent clip and the salt winning raves from foodies.

So when Bushell approached the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency last year with an application for loans to grow yet another Marblehead business venture — a craft brewery and taproom — officials might have been expected to welcome him with open arms. According to MassDevelopment's website, after all, the agency was created to "help foster real estate and business projects that generate economic benefits for local communities and the state." Given Bushell's stellar track record, financing for Marblehead Brewing Co. should have been a no-brainer.

It wasn't.

The brewery applied for two loans. It intended to use the funds from one to improve its property in downtown Marblehead, and the other to purchase additional brewing equipment, in order to increase production from 700 barrels of beer in 2018 to 2,500 barrels by 2023. MassDevelopment said no. It demanded that the brewery enlist private backers who would personally guarantee the repayment of any loans. Bushell and Marblehead Brewing did so, providing the state with guarantees equal to three times the value of the loans applied for. The state demanded that the company's brewing equipment, worth $1.6 million, be put up as collateral. Bushell agreed to that too.

And still the agency says no.

Why? Because Bushell — more accurately, Father Andrew Bushell — is an Orthodox Christian monk. And the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is flummoxed by a loan applicant whose business chops are everything a state development agency dreams of, but whose mission and appearance are not at all what it's used to.

Marblehead Brewing is a for-profit corporation. Like any other commercial brewery, it pays taxes and must keep its federal, state, and municipal licenses current. It won't survive if it can't turn a profit. But turning a profit isn't its highest purpose. Supporting the work of the church is.

Bushell is the 192nd chairman of the St. Paul's Foundation, a monastic Christian charity more than 1,000 years old. Under Bushell, it has focused in recent years on easing the misery of Syrian refugees, providing food for 2 million displaced people, and supplying hundreds of thousands of tents and blankets for the homeless. The foundation also supports the Guitars Project, a charitable endeavor that provides guitars and musical instruction to hundreds of mostly Muslim children in the Middle East who have been displaced by violence. (Profits from Marblehead Salt have been donated to local causes as well, including the Marblehead Festival of the Arts and the anti-addiction work of the Marblehead Health Department.)

Marblehead Brewing is located at the Shrine of St. Nicholas, the first Orthodox Christian church in Marblehead. The church and the brewpub share the same building — the drinking establishment with its tables and tap is in the front room; the church, complete with altar and icon, is in a more private interior space — but they are separate entities, with different tax ID numbers, bank accounts, and legal profiles. The brewery is a secular, for-profit business. The church and the foundation are nonprofit religious entities that are among Marblehead Brewing's shareholders. In launching a commercial brewery to sustain the work of his church, Bushell is following the classic example of Trappist and Benedictine monks who for centuries have supported themselves through brewing and winemaking.

MassDevelopment has no problem with beer companies. It has provided financing for quite a few of them, including Notch Brewing in Salem, Tree House Brewing in Charlton, and Night Shift Brewing in Everett. But a brewing company run by an Orthodox monk who wears a black cassock, lives under a vow of poverty, and has devoted his life — and exceptional business talents — to God appears to give state officials the heebie-jeebies. According to Bushell, agency officials have told him his loan will not be approved "because you're a church" and the state doesn't want to be in the position of suing a church if a loan weren't repaid. Through a spokeswoman, MassDevelopment declined to comment for this column.

Rejecting Bushell's application because of his religious vocation may well be illegal under the First Amendment. It is unquestionably short-sighted.

"Entrepreneurs come in many shapes and sizes, and not all fit the typical business model," says Glenn Hutchins, a tech investment superstar who is a director of the New York Fed and sits on the executive committee of the Boston Celtics. In a phone conversation the other day, Hutchins sang the praises of Bushell's beer, Marblehead Ale No. 2. He was even more enthusiastic about the monk's ability to "take a blank sheet and turn it into something impressive."

To a talented financier like Hutchins, hardheaded business acumen isn't to be discounted because it serves a larger, spiritual devotion. He knows better than to judge an entrepreneur by his cassock. If only Massachusetts bureaucrats were as clear-sighted.

SOURCE






Switzerland Welcomes Radicalization

There are approximately 250 mosques in Switzerland, but the authorities do not know who finances them. By rejecting the proposal compelling mosques to disclose who finances them, the Swiss authorities can now remain willfully blind.

Switzerland has just rejected a proposed law preventing mosques from accepting money from abroad, and compelling them to declare where their financial backing comes from and for what purpose the money will be used. According to the proposal, imams also would have been obliged to preach in one of the Swiss national languages.

While the proposal narrowly passed in the lower house of parliament already in September 2017, the upper house recently rejected it. The proposal was modeled on regulations in Austria, where already in 2015, a law banning foreign funding of religious groups was passed. The Austrian law aims to counter extremism by requiring imams to speak German, prohibiting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria, and stressing the precedence of Austrian law over Islamic sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

The Federal Council, which constitutes the federal government of Switzerland, was also against the proposal, and claimed that it constituted 'discrimination': "We must not discriminate against Muslim communities and imams and put them under general suspicion," Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said. The Federal Council noted that in Austria, Islam is officially recognized, whereas it is not in Switzerland. According to the Swiss government, therefore, the model applied in Austria does not apply to Switzerland, as "One cannot demand obligations without rights". Instead, the Federal Council evidently believes that the risks posed by extremist Islamist preachers and communities can be combated within existing law.

There are approximately 250 mosques in Switzerland, but the authorities do not know who finances them. The authorities have no jurisdiction to collect data on the financing of Muslim associations and mosques apart from exceptional cases in which internal security is threatened. By rejecting the proposal compelling mosques to disclose who finances them, the Swiss authorities can now remain willfully blind.

Several experts have pointed out the foreign Muslim networks at work in Switzerland. In 2016, Reinhard Schulze, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Bern, pointed out that donations from the Muslim World League, based in Saudi Arabia, and other funds from Saudi Arabia were flowing to "those mosques and organizations that are open to the Wahhabi tradition". Another expert on Islam in Switzerland, Saïda Keller-Messahli, has spoken and written widely on how "Huge sums of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey are flowing to Switzerland", and how the Saudi-based Muslim World League is behind "a whole network of radically-oriented mosques in Switzerland... with the clear intention of spreading Salafist thought here".

In addition to the Salafist influence, there are an estimated 35 Turkish mosques, financed by Turkey's official Religious Affairs Directorate, known as Diyanet. (Previous reports have mentioned 70 Turkish mosques in Switzerland).

According to a report published by Diyanet in 2017, Islam is "superior" to Christianity and Judaism and "Interfaith dialogue is unacceptable". Turkey supports the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist off-shoot Hamas.

In fact, the building of another Turkish mosque was just given the go-ahead in the Swiss town Schaffhausen. The people behind it reportedly claim that the 1.5 million Swiss francs (approx. $1.5 million) will be collected locally, and not from Turkey, but the imams for the mosque will nevertheless be sent from Turkey.

None of these facts, however, appears to bother the Swiss government, which seems to want to continue the flow of foreign funding of mosques and Islamic centers into the country.

Above all, the Swiss government seems not to have considered the rights of Swiss non-Muslim citizens, who are the ones left to live with the consequences of the government's ill-thought-out policies.

One such consequence was recently on display in Swiss courts, as three board members of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (ISSC) were on trial for charges of having produced illegal propaganda for al-Qaeda and related organizations. One of them, Naim Cherni, was given a suspended prison sentence of 20 months for publishing an interview he conducted with Saudi cleric Abdullah al-Muhaysini in Syria in 2015, in which al-Muhaysini called on young Muslims in Europe to join the jihad. The two other board members, chairman Nicolas Blancho and Qaasim Illi, were acquitted.

In contrast to Switzerland, Austria recently announced plans to shut down seven mosques and expelling up to 60 imams belonging to the Turkish-Islamic Union for Cultural and Social Cooperation in Austria (ATIB), a Muslim group close to the Turkish government, on the grounds of receiving foreign funding.

The response from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman was that the policy was part of an "Islamophobic, racist and discriminatory wave" in Austria.

The strong message that the Swiss government is sending to those Muslim states and organizations that are fueling radicalization in Switzerland by funding Salafist, Turkish and other radical mosques, is that they are welcome to continue doing so; the Swiss government has no intention of stopping them, let alone asking any unpleasant questions. It might as well put up a sign, saying, "Radicalization Welcome"

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

A Japanese teacher exposes the deep dysfunction of American black culture

It's pretty plain below: As an  outsider he can see clearly the absurdities that the Left have produced.



He seems genuinely uncomprehending of why many blacks are like that.  His incomprehension is not surprising given the huge efforts that have been put into covering up the root cause of all the dysfunction.

Like so much else it boils down to IQ.  IQ doesn't explain everything but it explains far more than most people realize.  And the fact is that American blacks have a very low average IQ.  There are of course some very smart blacks but they are rare -- much rarer than very smart whites.  To put a number on it: For roughly a century we have known that on almost any IQ test, blacks on average score about one standard deviation below the white average -- where only four standard deviations make up almost all of the range.

And IQ is a strong predictor of academic and employment success.  You cannot go far either in the education system or in employment with a low IQ.  In school most blacks simply CANNOT do the work set for them beyond a certain low point.  This "gap" in educational achievement is exceedingly well known and is exactly what the IQ tests predict.  Educators have for many years turned themselves inside out trying to erase that gap but nothing works -- as you would expect of something that is genetically hardwired in the person. One could in fact dispense with all talk of IQ and simply talk about "unteachability" with very little loss. 

And the unteachability is so serious that many blacks "graduate" High School barely able to read and write.  I contrast that with a "love note" that a little Chinese girl aged about six wrote to her teacher (A teacher I know) at the end of Grade 1.  It said: "I luv my techa". It's not perfect English but to write at that level and at that age is remarkable.  The Chinese of course have high average IQs -- about half a standard deviation above the white average.  So once again IQ tests are a good predictor.  The Chinese girl had very high teachability.  The student body at Harvard would be almost entirely Chinese if the racist Harvard leadership did not conspire to keep most of them out.

And from black unteachability all else flows.  Poor educational achievement will exclude blacks from almost all good jobs and most positions of homor and respect in society. Some blacks who sing and dance well or run fast will achieve wealth and respect but that accounts for very few.

And blacks can see the differential between themselves and whites perfectly clearly.  It is too obvious to miss. They see it every time they turn on the TV.  And they mostly hate it. It makes them angry.  But it is all too human to blame others for one's own failings and they do exactly that. They need to think that somehow "Whitey" or "racism" is responsible for their place at the bottom of most heaps. So anger is never far beneath their surface and can well up readily towards anybody they are near  -- black or white. So even though most homicides in America are black on black, it is also true that homocides inflicted on whites are mostly inflicted by blacks -- as our Japanese friend documents.

And as our Japanese commenter also pointed out, that is certainly a good reason for whites to be very wary of blacks.

And the poor teachbility has another dire effect:  Black theft of various kinds -- mugging, home invasions etc.  Because they can rarely earn much money by working, they steal it or attempt to do so.  And because many Americans are armed that can and sometimes does lead to violent confrontions in which one or more people die. See my blog GUN WATCH

So, one way or another, black dysfunction traces back to black IQ.  Blacks of course are not all the same and some find a place in white society that they are comfortable with.  It has been estimated, however, that about a third of all black males will spend some time in prison.  So the siutation described here is a mass phenomenon, even if it is not universal.

FOOTNOTE:

Nobita, the author of the video above usually broadcasts as "Find Your Love in Japan". Find Your Love In Japan is a Youtube channel. He makes videos similar to That Japanese Man Yuta where he interviews Japanese men, women and foreigners on the street on current popular subjects. In Nobita's videos, he mainly focuses on topics such as "How to find love in Japan" and Japanese people's opinions on relationships with people inside and outside of their culture. In his private life, he is a language teacher in Tokyo.







The Netherlands Approves Burqa Ban

"People's faces should not be hidden in society, for it is our faces that give us our identity and our fundamental means of communication with others."— Geert Wilders, Party for Freedom (PVV).

Dutch Interior Minister Kajsa Ollongren said the new law represents "a fair balance" between "the freedom to dress as one wishes" and "the general interest of communication and security." She also said that far from violating fundamental rights, the ban will enable Muslim women "to have access to a wider social life" because if they do not cover the face "they will have more possibilities for contact, communication and opportunities to enter the job market."

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) twice has ruled that burqa bans are legal, making it unlikely that the Dutch ban could be overturned in court.

The Dutch Senate has approved a law that bans the wearing of "face-covering clothing" in public buildings, including hospitals, schools and government offices, as well as on public transportation.

Although the ban does not extend to public streets, the law authorizes police to ask individuals to remove face-covering clothing to establish their identity.

Those found flouting the ban — which includes Islamic veils and robes such as burqas (which cover the entire face) and niqabs (which cover the entire face except for the eyes), as well as balaclavas and full-face helmets — will be subject to a fine of 410 euros ($475).

The new law, previously adopted by the Dutch House of Representatives in November 2016, was approved on June 26 by 44 to 31 votes in the 75-seat Senate.

In a statement, the government, which has not yet said when the law will enter into effect, explained its purpose:

"In a free country like the Netherlands, everyone has the freedom and space to behave and dress as he or she desires. Sometimes, limits can and must be imposed on that freedom. In the case of face-covering clothing, this applies in particular if mutual communication is impeded or safety is jeopardized.

"Mutual communication whereby people can look each other in the face is so important that uniform rules have now been laid down by law. This makes it clear to everyone what is and is not allowed in those situations."

A Muslim activist group called "Stay away from my Niqab!" said the ban is unconstitutional. In an open letter sent to Dutch lawmakers, the group, which has more than 5,000 followers on Facebook, asked:

"Why is it not realized that this law leads to people being isolated from society? This ban leads to women who wear face-covering clothing, who like to participate in society, no longer to be able to do this effectively because they now have a restriction on education, license applications, travel with public transport, visiting a doctor and much more....

"Is the constitution no longer applicable to women with face-covering clothing? What about the right that everyone is free to dress how he/she wants, regardless of race, gender, religion or belief?

"What about Article 6 of the Constitution which sets out freedom of religion and belief? Is there a problem in which everyone does not have the right freely to confess their religion or belief, individually or in community with others?"

The group's spokeswoman, Karima Rahmani, added:

"We feel that we are being wronged with a repressive measure, which is why we trying to make our voices heard. It is getting harder and harder to be on the street with a niqab. I myself have been threatened with death, and other women have even been physically attacked.

"There is a lot of talk about me, but no one comes to me to ask: 'Why do you actually wear that niqab?' It is part of my religion and I want to be free to make that choice. It is a spiritual experience that I personally experience."

The Council of State, an independent advisor to the government on legislation, said that the ban was unnecessary and potentially unconstitutional. In a November 2015 report, it said that the Dutch Cabinet had been guided too much by "subjective feelings of insecurity" that "do not justify a ban." It added:

"The Council of State points out that the bill primarily seems to have been motivated by objections to wearing Islamic face-covering clothing.... Insofar as face-covering clothing (for example a burqa) is worn to express a religious clothing prescription, this falls under the constitutionally-protected freedom of religion. The ban proposed by the government does not, according to the Council of State, justify restricting the right to freedom of religion."

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), however, twice has ruled that burqa bans are legal, making it unlikely that the Dutch ban could be overturned in court.

In July 2017, for example, the ECHR upheld a Belgian ban on wearing the burqa in public spaces. It said that the government had been responding "to a practice that it considered to be incompatible, in Belgian society, with social communication and more generally the establishment of human relations, which were indispensable for life in society...essential to ensure the functioning of a democratic society." In July 2014, the ECHR upheld France's burqa ban, accepting the French government's argument that it encouraged citizens to "live together."

The Dutch government has repeatedly insisted that the ban is not about restricting religion but about promoting communication and public safety. It has described the new law as "religion neutral" because it is not limited just to the burka and niqab, but also includes the balaclava and full-face helmet.

Dutch Interior Minister Kajsa Ollongren said the new law represents "a fair balance" between "the freedom to dress as one wishes" and "the general interest of communication and security." She also said that far from violating fundamental rights, the ban will enable Muslim women "to have access to a wider social life" because if they do not cover the face "they will have more possibilities for contact, communication and opportunities to enter the job market."

A complete ban was originally proposed in December 2005 by Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, who argued that burqas and niqabs are barriers to the integration of women in the Netherlands: "We must ban the burqa. People's faces should not be hidden in society, for it is our faces that give us our identity and our fundamental means of communication with others."

The Netherlands is the sixth European country to approve a burqa ban, after France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Austria and Denmark. Bavaria in Germany, Catalonia in Spain, Lombardy in Italy and Ticino in Switzerland also have imposed regional burqa bans, while Norway has tabled a law to ban burqas in public schools. Latvia has proposed a burqa ban, but it has not yet been enacted.

SOURCE







Italy's interior minister wants a register of gypsies

Petty crime is the lifestyle of many Gypsies.  That does make them a problem

Rome: Italy's hard-line interior minister, who recently sparked a multinational showdown by refusing entry to a Mediterranean Sea rescue boat packed with 630 migrants, is now taking aim at Italy's minority Roma community.

Matteo Salvini told a Lombardy television station on Monday that he wants to conduct a census or "registry" of Roma, also known as Gypsies, in Italy. Salvini, the leader of Italy's right-wing League party, insisted later the project's purpose wasn't to identify individual Roma.

"I've asked the ministry to prepare a dossier on the Roma question in Italy," he told TeleLombardia, adding that the current situation of Roma was "chaos" several years after a crackdown.

Italy has a sizeable Roma community that includes people originally from Romania and the former Yugoslavia. Authorities periodically clear out the squatter camps where many live on the outskirts of big cities.

Salvini's remarks sparked immediate denunciation from centre-left politicians, who warned that Italy had a "terrible" history with its Fascist-era census of Jews.

"You can work for security and respect for rules without becoming fascist," tweeted Democratic legislator Ettore Rosato. "The announced census of Roma is vulgar and demagogical."

Salvini stressed in a follow-up statement that he had no intention of taking digital fingerprints or making index cards of individual Roma. He said he wants a study of the overall situation.

"We are aiming primarily to care for the children who aren't allowed to go to school regularly because they prefer to introduce them to a life of crime. We also want to check how millions of euro that come from European funds are spent," he said in a statement.

Salvini was asked about the Roma by TV interviewers and callers complaining about migrants, crime and the recent arrests of a band of Roma women arrested for pickpocketing at Milan's central train station.

The minister said he wanted to "redo what was once called a census, making a registry" of Roma to know who they are and where they live.

He later wrote on Facebook that he wanted also to help "those poor children who are brought up in these camps surrounded by theft and illegality".

His comments made headlines in a country still reeling from the weeklong standoff he started by refusing entry to the Aquarius, a rescue ship carrying 630 migrants who were picked up in waters off Libya. A convoy of three boats landed with the passengers Sunday in Valencia, Spain.

Salvini, whose League party scored huge gains in March 4 elections on its xenophobic platform, has vowed mass expulsions of migrants. He said of the Roma who have Italian citizenship: "We have to keep them".

Salvini said he plans to meet this week with Pope Francis, who has dedicated much of his pontificate to urging countries to welcome and integrate migrants.

SOURCE






Discrimination Law Isn't Supposed to 'Punish the Wicked'

A 7-2 win at the Supreme Court is a big deal. But some advocates of religious freedom minimized the importance of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, saying it was a narrow ruling that applies only to the manifest hostility to religion the commission showed in adjudicating Jack Phillips’s case. Religious liberty opponents have claimed the decision is an open door to invidious discrimination, including racism. Both views are wrong.

The hostility to Mr. Phillips and his beliefs isn’t unusual. The rhetoric Justice Anthony Kennedy condemned — and cited as examples of constitutionally impermissible animus — is often heard from antagonists who attempt to ruin religious believers. Comparisons to racism and Nazism such as the Colorado commission made are standard for left-liberal culture warriors.

In 2016 the chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission wrote — in an official report — that “‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ … remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

The following year Rolling Stone magazine published a friendly profile of Tim Gill, “the Megadonor Behind the LGBTQ Rights Movement.” Mr. Gill is bankrolling the effort to pass new antidiscrimination laws that treat “sexual orientation and gender identity” as a protected class like race. He revealed why gay rights activists oppose religious liberty claims with such vehemence: “We’re going to punish the wicked.” The Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s extreme and open bias is consistent with a campaign to punish heretics. But antidiscrimination policy is supposed to be a shield. It has been transformed into a sword, used to coerce people into affirming a sexual orthodoxy.

Consider Philadelphia, whose local government recently announced it would no longer work with Catholic Social Services on foster care. That effectively closes Catholic foster care in the city, because the government has ultimate responsibility for children in need. If the government won’t work with a foster agency, that agency can’t help children.

Why did Philadelphia do this? Not because the Catholics do a bad job: the city ranked Catholic Social Services as the second-best foster care agency of the 28 it worked with. The sole reason is that the Catholic agency doesn’t place children with same-sex couples.

Catholic Social Services has never received a complaint from a same-sex couple wanting to foster a child. Same-sex couples could foster or adopt a child from another agency. Yet Philadelphia officials were willing to shut down a good agency that causes no harm merely to send a message that its religious beliefs are intolerable — precisely what the Supreme Court in Masterpiece Cakeshop said the government may not do.

Catholic agencies decline to place children with same-sex couples not for reasons of sexual orientation but because, as Pope Francis has said, “Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother.” The issue isn’t whether gay people can love or care for children — of course they can — but in the church’s view, the two best dads in the world cannot make up for a missing mom, and vice versa.

If those playing down the importance of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling are wrong, those overstating it are also off base. “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane claimed that “it’s a shorter walk than we think, particularly today, from ‘I won’t bake them a cake because they’re gay’ to ‘I won’t seat him here because he’s black.’” This wildly mischaracterizes Mr. Phillips’s position. The Masterpiece proprietor serves all customers, regardless of sexual orientation, but he can’t in good conscience communicate all messages or celebrate all events. He is motivated by his Christian belief that marriage unites husband and wife, not his customer’s identity.

This disagreement about the definition of marriage occurs among people of good faith motivated by honorable theological and philosophical premises, as Justice Kennedy recognized in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 same-sex-marriage decision. And as he wrote in Masterpiece, "religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.“

That is why states should be careful not to abuse antidiscrimination policy in a way that amounts to an enforcement of an orthodoxy regarding questions about sex on which reasonable people can disagree.

Monday’s ruling won’t open the floodgates to invidious discrimination as critics imagine. But neither should we gainsay its wider applicability. The Supreme Court has said clearly that the government may not punish people because of their religious beliefs. Any generally applicable, neutral law must serve the common good, not punish those whom people in power deem to be "wicked.”

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Australia is a Feminist's despair



Below is the first part of a familiar rant from an unhappy lady.  Her ethnography is correct.  Australians really are like that. 

I would be regarded s a deep-dyed villain in her book.  On family BBQs, my ex-wife sometimes gets me my meal, then usually gets me my dessert and then asks me later on if I would like a cup of tea.  I rarely get up.

So why does she do that?  It's to a small degree because we are a pretty traditional family but the real reason is simply that she is a very kind person.  She knows that I am rather clumsy and get involved in conversations with the men present so she simply looks after me. I noted the same in Scotland when I was there. I asked one of the Scotsmen at a BBQ why they did not fetch their own meal from the BBQ.  He said: "My wife knows what I take"

There are many kind women in Australia who willingly do most of the housework. They have various expectations of their men and if those expectations are fulfilled they are happy to do their bit.  The writer below seems not to know that.

The basic truth that she misses is that all relationships are different and the mix of expectations will differ too.  As she herself acknowledes, the pattern I am familiar with is the norm.  She wants to change the norm.  That is rigid and dogmatic on her part.  She should respect differences and stop trying to impose her preferred relationship pattern on others. 

In fact, she has the unshakeable conviction about the rightness of her values that one so often sees on the Left  -- a conviction that in Communist regimes regularly leads to mass murder.  How much better for all of us it would be if the values of the carpenter of Nazareth were our guide


AT A party a few weeks ago, I witnessed a blood-boiling example of inequality. Through the entire three courses of dinner — for which the women had put together salads and baked desserts, organised decorations and gifts for the birthday boy — the majority of men remained glued to their seats as we milled among them, collecting plates, serving food and effectively waited on them, hand and foot.

It was a clear example at the huge gulf between the sexes in Aussie culture.

While there’s plenty of talk about Australian men increasing their housework effort, and being ahead in their contribution of men in other countries, it’s clear women are still picking up far too much of the slack. While I am fortunate to be in the minority of women with a husband more anal than I am about germs, women continue to do up to two-thirds more housework than men, according to data from the 2016 Census. I should also point out that while neither of us cares that much about housework, both of us are aware of the fine line between pretending not to care and hoarding empty wine bottles and “Pods” packets under the bed.

In his article, “Dirty Secret: Why Is There Still A Housework Gender Gap”, Oliver Burkeman sums up the problem rather succinctly when he says: “The ‘housework gap’ largely stopped narrowing in the 1980s. Men, it seems, conceded that they should be doing more than before — but then, having half-heartedly vacuumed the living room and passed a dampened cloth over the dining table, concluded that it was time for a nice sit-down.”

I can believe it.

SOURCE 

COMMENT FROM A READER:

"...women continue to do up to two-thirds more housework than men"

 I doubt that statement is true, certainly not if we include house, garden and vehicle maintenance. I suspect she is one of those one-eyed, egocentric, ungrateful and perpetually irritable women. She says herself that her blood boils when she sees women bringing men their meals. Yuck...what a noxious creature she must be. Anyone with both eyes open can see that generally men do all of nearly all of the more physical and technical things around the house and property, the operating, repairing, maintaining and servicing of machinery such as motor vehicles, lawn mowers, chainsaws, and other equipment, repairing fences, gates, sharpening equipment, the building and renovating of things, all the dangerous work that involves plumbing, electricity, crawling inside and on the roof, cleaning and repairing roof guttering,... etc, etc, but she is blind to all that. And she is probably also blind to the fact that most men work






Europe's migration fiasco: Brussels plan to build EU migrant centre descends into farce as leaders queue to say 'not in my back yard'

A Brussels plan to build EU migrant detention centres descended into farce last night as European leaders lined up to refuse to host them.

The proposal was billed as an attempt to alleviate pressure on frontline Mediterranean countries, where the vast majority of migrants arrive.

But French president Emmanuel Macron said he would not host one of the ‘controlled centres’ and Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz mocked the prospect of one being built in his country.

EU leaders want to build migrant centres in north Africa to prevent them attempting to risk their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean

The detention centre proposal was part of a strategy agreed by EU leaders on Thursday night with the aim of ending a brewing immigration row. But key aspects of the plan unravelled within hours of being agreed.

EU diplomats last night poured scorn on the migration deal. One said: ‘It has kept everybody happy, but parts of it are an obvious fudge.’

Another said: ‘This is a bit of paper that will never become reality. It is a mess and will discredit the EU because it is unworkable and everyone knows it is unworkable.’

None the less, the deal appeared to have brought Angela Merkel’s political career back from the brink of collapse. The embattled German chancellor heralded the agreement as an ‘important step’ after it was thrashed out over a marathon dinner in Brussels that ran into the early hours of yesterday morning.

But the proposal to build migrant detention centres across the EU where asylum requests would be fast-tracked sparked a war of words between the leaders. Mr Macron said the secure centres would be reserved for Mediterranean countries at the forefront of key migrant routes, such as Malta, Italy, Spain and Greece.

‘France is not a country of first arrival,’ he said. ‘Some want to push us to that and I refused it.’

But Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte rejected Mr Macron’s suggestion that the asylum centres would be hosted in countries such as Italy. He said: ‘Macron was tired. I deny what he said.’

Asked if he would host a migrant centre in Austria, Mr Kurz said: ‘Of course not... we are not a first arrivals country, unless people jump from parachutes.’

The centres will only be opened if EU member states agree to them and governments can refuse to host asylum seekers deemed in need of protection. The opt-outs are a concession to hardline member states such as Hungary and Poland.

The plan was signed off by leaders after heated discussions stirred up by Mr Conte, who threatened to scrap any agreement that failed to meet his demands.

After nine hours of talks on migration finished at 3am yesterday morning, he waved a copy of the agreement in the air and said: ‘Today Italy is no longer alone. We are satisfied.’ He said he had bullied other EU leaders a ‘little bit’.

But Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, whose country has seen an increase in migrants, said the agreement could have gone ‘much further’.

The EU agreement backs the controversial creation of asylum centres in North African countries, which would see migrants who are rescued in the Mediterranean returned to a ‘disembarkation’ area to have their asylum claims assessed.

But in their joint conclusions from the meeting, the EU leaders acknowledged that the camps could create an unwanted ‘pull factor’ by attracting asylum seekers who could apply there.

The deal was welcomed by the CSU, sister party to Mrs Merkel’s CDU, which has threatened to close Germany’s borders in a move that she opposes. [The CSU represents the Southern States (Laender) so controls the borders leading into Germany.  The Southern states have considerable autonomy so could conceivably close their borders to immigrants -- leaving Merkel high and dry]

SOURCE





Real faked news

By GILES COREN

The poor old BBC is taking a beating again for having “faked” a scene in a documentary. Apparently, a treehouse built by Korowai people high up in a forest in Papua New Guinea, which featured in an episode of Human Planet in 2011, was just a stunt.

The charming buck-naked indigenous ­chappies built it purely for the ­cameras and had no plans whatsoever to live in it, despite the ­voiceover from John Hurt (so inherently trustworthy) declaring they were building “a new house 35m up. For the Korowai, the higher the house, the greater the prestige.”

Photographs of the huge, jerry-built shed teetering at the top of a preposterously flimsy tree look ridiculous. It is hard to imagine a child of six or seven believing it was someone’s actual home, let alone fully grown television viewers or producers.

But viewers are gullible and producers have a thankless, not especially well-paid, job to do. That’s how factual television works: underfunded, overworked functionaries slog their nuts off to put stuff on screens that millions of people who aren’t really paying attention will believe is real. Nobody involved pretends it’s the literal truth, as long as it can squeeze through the guidelines, which are quite vague and ­always open to interpretation.

I know. I have been presenting factual television for 15 years for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, Sky and some international channels, and while I have never made anything that was an outright lie — nobody wants to do that — I’ve never made anything entirely true either.

Yes, in the dozens of time-travelling shows I’ve made, the house was stripped back to the way it might have looked in our chosen era … in the rooms we were filming in. Yes, Sue Perkins and I, or the guinea-pig family, wore period clothes … when the cameras were rolling. Yes, we/they lived on the diet of that time … for the meals that we filmed.

But nobody was going back in time, duh. People were being put through a series of ­scenarios built around ­received historical cliche that were designed to make you go: “Ooh, I ­remember that!” And you did. In your millions. And you loved it. And everyone got paid. And in the evening we all put our jeans back on and ­dialled in pizza.

Or take the travel shows I’ve done which, like all travel shows, build towards a climactic event involving all the people I have made friends with during my trip, in a big weepy last couple of minutes. More often than not, this big climactic event — a party, a fireworks display, a musical performance — happens pretty much the day I arrive in the country. So I am ushered straight off the plane into a room full of ­strangers, told which ones are going to become my “friends” during the course of filming and I go up to them and hug them and say things like, “How’s it going, man?” and “It’s been great ­getting to know you and your beautiful home/lovely family/vibrant political movement”, and they stare back, stupefied, at this lunatic English stranger pretending to know them.

Then during the course of the week I do meet them properly and bond with them and all that guff, and then back home in Britain they flip it all around in the edit, put the party at the end (when I’ve often weirdly lost the sun tan I had picked up during the week) and Bob’s your uncle: “Giles has been on a journey.”

Is that a lie? Is that wrong? Is that “Fake views!” as the newspapers screeched about the treehouse scandal, before going on to remind us of that time when Frozen Planet passed off some shots of polar bear cubs in a zoo with fake snow as wild footage?

It’s hard to say. No doubt the Korowai began building their “very high traditional treehouse” but it was only a metre off the ground and the film crew was a bit worried that this was going to be pretty dull and not at all worth the tens of thousands of dollars being spent on flights and kit hire and personnel and they just said: “Can’t you nudge it up the tree a bit? Just for us?”

Nobody would ever find out and then there’d be a much better chance of Barry in his front room shouting to Ethel in the kitchen: “Come and look at this, love, these primitive monkey people are building a treehouse in the sky!”

Or maybe it was the Korowai pulling the wool over the crew’s eyes for larks.

I made a film in Alabama once about an old-fashioned hog farmer who slept with his herd and lived on squirrel meat. For the final scene, he stewed some squirrel meat for me and we went through the whole recipe and I said how delicious and squirrelly it was. And then after we cut, the guy fell about laughing and revealed that what he had fed me was in fact a fricassee of pig’s testicles. It turned out he was angry about being pigeonholed as a rodent-eating redneck and thought he’d get his revenge on us by giving “that there Jew boy a mouthful of hog nuts!”

Well, it was too late to unfilm the whole show so we made our pact of silence and out it went into a million homes.

Which is why I think it is very possible that the Korowai just wanted to play a trick on Old Whitey, who couldn’t possibly be dumb enough to believe that they all live 30m up in the air, like something out of Gulliver’s Travels.

SOURCE






India riding high in space

The Indian Space Research Organisation launched its most powerful rocket to date on the southern island of Sriharikota on June 5

India has joined an international race to explore the dark side of the moon, seeking to launch a lunar mining expedition for nuclear fuel.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has announced that it will send an unmanned mission later this year to explore the south face of the moon, for signs of water and helium-3.

The latter, if properly harnessed, could change energy consumption on Earth for the next 250 years, scientists say. Helium-3 is in limited supply on Earth but is believed to be abundant on the moon, Bloomberg India reported.

“The countries which have the capacity to bring that source from the moon to Earth will dictate the process,’’ Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairman of Isro, said. “I don’t want to be just a part of them, I want to lead them.’’

India is not the only country interested in the moon’s dark side: Russia, China, the US and Japan are also keen to explore there, along with the privateers Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

Landing a rover on the moon is one phase in a long-term plan for Isro that includes launching a space station and, one day, a human crew on Earth’s lunar satellite.

“We are ready and waiting,’’ said Dr Sivan, who joined the organisation in 1982. “We’ve equipped ourselves to take on this particular programme.’’

China is the only country to land anything on the moon this century with its Chang’e 3 mission in 2013. In the US, Nasa has a $19 billion (£14.4bn) budget this year with the aim of launching another lunar rover within five years.

Isro’s estimated budget is a fraction of Nasa’s – about $1.7bn – but exploring the heavens on a shoestring has been the hallmark of India’s space missions since the early 1960s.

The mission to the moon this year will not be India’s first. The Chandrayaan-1, launched in October 2008, discovered molecules of water on the moon’s surface.

The Chandrayaan-2 includes a rectangular rover, a six-wheeled vehicle powered by solar energy, which will collect information for at least 14 days

Meanwhile, Isro has announced that it will help train astronauts from smaller countries. “India has taken the initiative to train scientists of countries like UAE and African nations that lack the technical knowhow and capability to build a satellite”, said Mr Sivan said at the UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, in Vienna.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Why I favor the Equal Rights Amendment

Because it should KILL affirmative action for women stone dead. It reads:

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

But equality between the sexes is denied if a more qualified male candidate for a job is passed over in favour of a less qualified woman.  Yet that is a continuous cry from the Left these days.  They want equal numbers of men and women in many jobs and try to set quotas which would achieve that.  But all that agitation would be pointless if men and women were equally qualified.  The whole feminist aim is to pass over a well qualified male in favour of a less qualified person with less between her legs.  You might call it genital determinism.

There is in fact a great deal of favoritism, both deliberate and narural in favour of women. Probably natural is the greater presence of women in the universities.  But that preponderance would seem to fly in the face of the ERA.  There are simply fewer men admitted and that would have to change -- presumably by easing the admission requirements for men.

The straightforward interpretation of the ERA that I have put forward, however, may not be adopted by the courts.  The courts twist the law to suit their ideology at will and you can be sure that courts would be anxious to avoid feminist rage.  The configuration of SCOTUS created by Trump, however, might very well adopt the literal interpretation that I have proposed.  That would be a great victory over feminist bigotry and bias.

The uncertainty about what courts would rule does however add to the many reasons given below about why an ERA is a bad idea


The idea that the Constitution doesn’t protect equal rights for women, or that the Founders didn’t include women in their views about individual rights, is completely wrong.

Unfortunately, some self-described members of the “Me Too” movement have embraced the so-called Equal Rights Amendment to “fix” the Constitution, including actress Alyssa Milano, who spoke at rallies to generate support in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Illinois recently became the 37th state to ratify this proposed constitutional amendment, which says, in part: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The amendment has been a huge issue for the left for quite some time. In 2014, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it her most favored addition to the Constitution.

“If I could choose an amendment to add to the Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment,” Ginsburg said. “ … I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion—that women and men are persons of equal stature—I’d like them to see that is a basic principle of our society.”

Ultimately, attempts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment are mostly symbolic for now.

Passage of a constitutional amendment requires 38 states to ratify it. This seemingly puts the Equal Rights Amendment one state away from passage—but most of the other states ratified the amendment in the 1970s, and five actually rescinded their vote (Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, South Dakota, and Kentucky).

When Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972, it insisted that the amendment be ratified by the states by 1982, that is, within 10 years.

Only 35 states ratified the amendment by the deadline. It’s likely those states will have to re-ratify the amendment for it to pass.

The Equal Rights Amendment is likely a ways away from passing, but it’s worth noting the false premise it’s built on

Many on the left charge that the Constitution doesn’t protect equal rights for women. But that is simply incorrect, and it is misleading to portray the document as inherently sexist.

As historian Thomas G. West wrote in his book “Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America,” it’s incorrect to claim that the founding documents are inherently sexist.

“The word ‘men’ in the Declaration [of Independence] means mankind, human beings, male and female, or whatever color or race,” West wrote.

While the Founding Fathers certainly didn’t have modern views about the equality of men and women, that is not to say that they did not believe that women, too, qualified for the basic rights and dignities that the new country would be founded upon.

West noted that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, explained in his famed “Notes on the State of Virginia” that only a barbarous society would deny women their equal, God-given rights.

In recognizing these rights, Jefferson explained, however, we must recognize that men and women are different.

This created some problems for early proponents of an Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s. Many women, especially those working in blue-collar industries, feared they would lose special protections designed for women and mothers working in industries requiring manual labor.

“Civilized men, in Jefferson’s view, do not abuse their superior natural strength. They treat women as free beings, not as slaves compelled to toil for their male masters,” West wote.

Civilization, Jefferson wrote, “first teaches us to subdue the selfish passions, and to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves. Were we in equal barbarism, our females would be equal drudges.”

The Constitution, following this line of thinking, makes no distinction between men and women.

“Whenever the Constitution speaks of ‘privileges guaranteed to individuals,’ women are always included by clear implication,” West wrote. “Or are we to assume that the constitutional guarantee of ‘the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus’ means that women (but not men) may be imprisoned but not charged with a specific crime? … Obviously not.”

From the time of the nation’s founding, women could give equal testimony in court, own property, and even vote in some states.

While the 19th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote nationally, many states allowed women to vote long before the law went into effect in 1920.

In fact, New Jersey allowed women to vote in the 1790s, in an era in which voting was restricted for some men, such as nonproperty holders. Many Western states in particular opened up voting to women in the 19th century.

Ultimately, the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment likely would cause more problems than it would solve, even for the people who have become proponents.

It would mean that women would have to be registered for the military draft, for one, and could eliminate laws that benefit women, such as alimony.

The late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who was instrumental in killing the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, wrote in 2007 that it would “[A]bolish the presumption that the husband should support his wife and take away Social Security benefits for wives and widows.”

“It would also give federal courts and the federal government enormous new powers to reinterpret every law that makes a distinction based on gender, such as those related to marriage, divorce and alimony,” Schlafly wrote.

The concerns of the Me Too movement have more to do with culture than anything else, and while the Equal Rights Amendment is unlikely to turn the Harvey Weinsteins of the world into angels, the goal of many of its advocates is to codify the most extreme elements of the sexual revolution into law.

Pro-life groups worry that the Equal Rights Amendment could be a method to add a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded abortion.

Some proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment have argued that putting any limitations at all on abortion would be in violation of the amendment and a form of sex discrimination.

Certainly, adding abortion-neutral language to the proposed amendment has been met with fierce opposition in the past.

National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis, a conservative columnist, explained why the Equal Rights Amendment is both useless regarding the specific concerns of the Me Too movement and dangerous when it comes to the Constitution.

DeSanctis wrote:

If they get their way, it will no longer be the Department of Health and Human Services forcing employers to subsidize contraceptives and abortifacients; it will be the Equal Rights Amendment. When the giants of the abortion industry insist that Congress use taxpayer dollars to fund abortions, they will come carrying a copy of Madison’s founding document. Every demand for complete sexual libertinism, facilitated by the state, will suddenly have behind it the imprimatur of the U.S. Constitution. That’s what they’re after.

Schlafly and a powerful contingent of social conservatives, led by traditionalist women, killed the Equal Rights Amendment even in the culturally heady days of the 1970s, and it should remain a dead issue.

The Constitution already protects equal natural rights for women. There’s no need to revise the document to include a weapon for left-wing social engineering on a national scale.

SOURCE






Black culture in action



A Michigan woman has been charged after she allegedly bit part of a Chinese restaurant owner's ear off because she wasn't happy with her order.

Jade Anderson, 24, was upset about her order at China 1 restaurant in Mount Clemens on Thursday night, reported the Macomb Daily, although it's unclear what she was angry about.

Due to a language barrier, the son of the owner and his wife, described by a witness to be around 10 or 11 years old, was translating Anderson's complaints.

According to the newspaper, Anderson allegedly pushed the son to the ground and threw her food to the floor.

After she began assaulting the wife, the owner stepped in to try and intervene.

Anderson then began assaulting the owner. As she was being pushed out the door, she allegedly bit the man's ear, partially detaching it.

A 911 call from the owner's son was released by WXYZ.  'There's a violent woman over here hitting my mom. She also hit me,' the owner's son is heard saying.

'Who is she?' the 911 dispatcher asks. 'I don't know. I'm scared. Can you please come? She's fighting us right now,' the son says.

Macomb County Sheriff deputies were called to the restaurant around 9.40pm. They found the owner with his ear partially bitten off and a woman with a large bump on her forehead.

Anderson was arrested by authorities and booked on charges of assault with intent to maim charge.

She is being held at the Macomb County Jail in lieu of a $20,00 bail and is due in court on July 11.

The Macomb County Sheriff's Office said that the owner was taken to a hospital and treated for his injuries while the wife was treated at the scene. The son was not injured, deputies said.

The Macomb Daily reported that the China 1 property is owned by Byung Kim and Young Kim of Troy, according to Mount Clemens tax records.

The newspaper also reported that incorporation records from the state of Michigan show that the president of the China 1 location is Liang Wu.

Deputies said Anderson left a small child at home unsupervised when she went to the restaurant. The deputies said the child has been turned over to a 'responsible adult'.

On Friday afternoon, a sign at the restaurant read that it was closed 'because of some reasons', reported WXYZ.

SOURCE






UN to Trump: Accept Muslim Refugees and Illegal Aliens or Else

President Trump has released his updated travel ban and it looks to be legally bulletproof.

The State of Hawaii has filed a lawsuit against the revised Middle Eastern refugee ban, but it’s unlikely to be successful. In 2015, Hawaii resettled just FIVE refugees and none of them were from the six countries on the ban list. Hard to prove that Hawaii was negatively affected by the order…

Now, the DOJ is filing motions to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits against the old order. But lo and behold, a new challenger has emerged. The United Nations Human Rights Commission is meeting behind closed doors to debate whether to go after the United States for violating international law.

That’s right. There are bureaucrats in the UN considering suing the United States and forcing us to accept refugees and illegal aliens..

And the biggest slap in the face is that this whole lawsuit is being financed with our tax dollars!

Enough of this nonsense. Send your urgent FaxBlast to Congress and DEMAND they pass Ted Cruz’s legislation to defund the UN once and for all!

Jordanian Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared that President Trump’s policies are “in breach of international law, if undertaken without due process guarantees, including individual assessment.”

SOURCE






College student sues woman for $6million claiming her false rape accusation at a frat party has destroyed his life

A college student is suing a woman for $6million because he says her unsubstantiated claims that he raped her after a drunken frat party have 'destroyed' his life.

Catherine Reddington, 22, has claimed repeatedly via social media that Alex Goldman raped her following a party in April last year at Syracuse University's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in upstate New York.

She informed police and the university of the rape accusations in the days after the party and has taken to social media several times in the past month to reveal the details of her alleged assault.

Goldman, also 22, was expelled from Syracuse University after the claims surfaced and more recently was fired from his summer internship with an engineering firm when his accuser informed them of the allegations.

He was never arrested or charged over the incident.

'During the early hours of April 23, 2017 I was raped and sodomized. I woke up in Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity in Alex Goldman's bed confused, bloody, bruised, with ripped clothing and splinter,' Reddington wrote on Facebook on June 4.

'Alex Goldman is a rapist.'

A police investigation into the allegations found no evidence that Reddington had been raped or even had a sexual encounter with Goldman that night.

The investigation, which involved a medical exam and rape kit within 26 hours of the alleged incident, found Reddington had no internal cuts or abrasions in her vagina and that there was no traces of Goldman's DNA.

Both Reddington and Goldman said at the time that they had no memory of the night before.

Goldman filed a defamation lawsuit against Reddington last week claiming that his former classmate is waging a campaign to 'destroy and wreak havoc' on his life and get him expelled from his new school.

'In the past few weeks, in particular, (Reddington) has made numerous posts on social media platforms Facebook and Linkedln falsely accusing Mr Goldman of sexual assault and stating that he is a 'rapist',' the lawsuit states.

'These posts by (Reddington) included a picture of Mr Goldman and 'tagged' Mr Goldman's employer and the university where Mr Goldman attends college. These vicious accusations were knowingly false and intentionally made. These social media posts have been viewed and 'liked' by thousands of people.'

In her Facebook posts, Reddington has often tagged the New Jersey Institute of Technology - the school Goldman now attends.

She also left a review on NJIT's Facebook page that reads: 'A school that accepts recently expelled rapists, despite it being marked on their transcript...'

Reddington contacted Goldman's employer, Bohler Engineering, over social media to inform them of the allegations. She then posted what appeared to be an exchange with Bohler in which they informed her that Goldman had been fired.

Goldman is now seeking $6million in damages from the defamation lawsuit claiming he has suffered emotional, mental and economic harm because of Reddington's allegations.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Germany caves: To lock up new illegals until it can send them back

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives have settled a row over immigration that threatened to topple her fragile governing coalition after talks with her rebellious interior minister led him to drop his threat to resign.

Emerging after five hours of talks, Horst Seehofer, leader of Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU), told reporters he would remain in his post after a deal with Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) that he said would stem illegal immigration.

"After intensive discussions between the CDU and CSU we have reached an agreement on how we can in future prevent illegal immigration on the border between Germany and Austria," he told reporters on leaving the CDU's Berlin headquarters.

Under the deal, outlined by the CDU's General Secretary Annagret Kramp-Karrenbauer, migrants who have already applied for asylum in other European Union countries will be held in transit centres on the border while Germany negotiates bilateral deals for their return.

The row had stretched a 70-year-old alliance between the two parties to the breaking point. Merkel said a "really good compromise" on immigration had been reached.

It meant that Seehofer was able to hail tighter immigration controls, while Merkel was able to say that Germany adhered to EU rules and was committed to the principles of freedom movement within the bloc. It comes as EU leaders reached a deal on the continent's approach to the migrant crisis last week.

Seehofer was the premier of Bavaria when his state became the main gateway into Germany for migrants in 2015. He wanted Germany to block migrants at the border if they have no papers or have already registered in another European country.

Merkel's CDU relies on the CSU to maintain power through a coalition, which also includes the centre-left Social Democrats.

The CSU faces a strong challenge from the far-right Alternative for Germany in October's regional election.

SOURCE





Study Reveals What Women Are 'Hard-Wired' To Find Attractive. Feminists Are Going To HATE It

Turns out, women are hard-wired to be much more attracted to male protectors who espouse so-called "benevolent sexism" than men who treat them as equals. And the best part: this is true even for hardcore feminists, scientists found.

According to a new study from University of Kent and Iowa State University scientists, which was published on Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, women overwhelmingly preferred chivalrous men who viewed women as needing protecting. Researchers Pelin Gul and Tom Kupfer classify this apparently "patronizing" behavior as "benevolent sexism" (BS), or well-meaning sexism. The researchers suggest that women are hard-wired to overlook the "harmful consequences" of BS, "because BS mates are perceived as willing to invest (protect, provide, and commit)," reads the study's abstract. Gul and Kupfer chalk this up to natural selection, a symptom of which women have yet to shake.

As noted by The Daily Mail, the research was collected from five study groups full of women, with the largest group comprising of 233 women, and the smallest with 104. The females were asked to view scenarios of interactions from men, which "included men who were kind but in what is considered a sexist way, and men who treated the women as equals and didn't offer any special treatment." They were then asked to rate the men's "warmth and attractiveness, and how willing they thought they would be to provide for, protect or commit to them." They also divulged their own degree of their feminist leanings, outlining how "patronizing" or "undermining" they found the behavior.

"Women find benevolent sexist [BS] men attractive, not because they are ignorant of the harmful effects, but despite being aware of them," the scientists found. "This suggests that the desirable aspects of BS attitudes and behaviors are sufficient to overcome the perceived negative effects."

"Our proposal is that women approve of BS attitudes and behaviors because they are taken as cues that a man is willing to invest by being protective, providing, and committed," the duo added.

And it gets even worse for feminists who promote sameness instead of equality for the sexes: they desire "sexist" men, too!

"Evidence shows that many women – even those who desire [equal] relationships – want a man to be chivalrous, by, for example, paying for dates and opening doors for them," wrote the researchers. "Furthermore, the finding that high feminist women, and not only low feminist women, rated a [sexist] potential romantic partner as more attractive despite being more aware of the detrimental effects, suggests that the attraction may be a mate preference for women in general, and not just for women who endorse traditional gender roles."

Uh-oh, looks like we have a whole gender full of "internalized misogynists." Or maybe it's just biology; and men and women value different things and generally play different roles because — gasp — they are different.

SOURCE






The federal government continues to use your money to promote the homosexual agenda

The most heavily favored and pandered “marginalized” group in U.S., the homosexual community, just finished celebrating their designated “pride” month. And as if Americans were still unaware of their minority status, the federal government did its utmost to ensure the ubiquitous presence of the rainbow. Following Barack Obama’s evolution on same-sex marriage, along with this repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” federal agencies have made a concerted effort to celebrate LGBT Pride Month ever since. And since Donald Trump’s election, how have the agencies responded?

First, Trump clearly broke with his predecessor’s practice and did not issue a Pride Month proclamation. This year, the Pentagon also passed on offering any proclamation. But there were several agencies that did celebrate, including Veterans Affairs, which put on a drag show; the CIA with new Director Gina Haspel recognizing Major General Tammy Smith as the highest-ranking openly homosexual general in U.S. history; NASA joined in San Fransisco’s LGBT Pride Parade; and the National Park Service (NPS) celebrated the month with photos of employees on its website marching in Pride parades and brandishing rainbow flags.

As for the NPS, it’s already anticipating next year: “June is Pride Month, and while Stonewall National Monument shares the unforgettable story of the 1969 riots year-round, this year kicks off a special countdown to World Pride in 2019. This annual event, which will be hosted by New York City in 2019, is the largest global Pride celebration. It will mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and its pivotal role as the birthplace of the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer civil rights movement.”

That’s just a brief look at how American tax dollars are being spent to promote an agenda of immorality, and to normalize and celebrate pathological gender dysphoria.

SOURCE






Feminists are to blame for women freezing their eggs: Inability to find males who will commit to a relationship is the most common reason for procedure, rather than career, finds study

The viciousness of feminist-inspired divorce laws sends men running from committment

Single women are freezing their eggs due them being unable to find men who will commit to a relationship, rather than to focus on their careers, new research suggests.

Delaying motherhood to focus on work is the least common reason women undergo the procedure, a Yale University study found today.

Most women who freeze their eggs are single, divorced or in broken relationships and wish to keep their options open, the research adds.

Some even freeze their eggs because they would rather be single mothers, the study found.

The researchers claim the reason for egg freezing 'mostly revolves around women's lack of stable partnerships with men committed to marriage and parenting'.

Around 76,000 egg-freezing procedures are expected to take place in the US this year. Since 2010, at least 471 babies have been born from frozen eggs in the UK.

The researchers analysed 150 women who chose to freeze their eggs from four IVF clinics in the US and three in Israel.

The women were interviewed about their reasons to undergo the procedure.

Some 85 percent of the participants were single, with the remainder being in new or uncertain relationships, polygamous couples, or with men who do not want children.

More mothers are waiting until later in life to have children, but pregnancy after 50 is still quite rare.

A woman's fertility begins to decline in her early 30s. After age 35, her number of viable eggs starts to fall more quickly.

Women are born with a set amount of follicles - between one and two million - or immature eggs.

These develop at different rates. Some follicles never release an fully-fledged egg, but each month the ovaries release one egg to wait for fertilization in the uterus.

Most women only ovulate around 450 eggs over the course of their lives, so by their late 40s, most have run out and start to head toward menopause. 

Menopause begins around age 51 for the average woman, at which point pregnancy becomes impossible.

However, even as fertility is declining among American women (and men) overall, one group is having a few more babies than they did in the past: older women.

The birthrate among women between 45 and 49 - the oldest group that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks - went up by 0.1 percent between 2016 and 2017.

In 2013, an estimated 677 American women over 50 gave birth, marking a 370 percent increase over the 144 such births in 1977.

So far, an Indian woman believed to be in her 70s who had a baby boy in 2016 is thought to be the oldest to give birth, though a 66-year-old holds the official record.

Celebrities too, have made headlines for having in their later years, including Janet Jackson who had her son, Eissa Al Mana, at age 50. 

A growing number of women choose to freeze their eggs - which decline in quality with age - while they are younger, use IVF, surrogates or donor eggs in order to have children at more advanced ages.

But pregnancy after peak fertility can come with risks. 

Older women are more likely to develop high blood pressure, preeclampsia, diabetes and heart problems, so most doctors screen them carefully if they are trying to conceive.

If women in this age group do get pregnant, doctors will continue to monitor them closely as a precaution, but they can certainly have healthy pregnancies, and a growing number are doing just that.

Women turn to egg freezing due to a lack of a 'stable partner'

Results further suggest women are more likely to freeze their eggs because their partners work abroad than to focus on their careers.

Speaking of the findings , study author Dr Marcia Inhorn said: 'Our study suggests that the lack of a stable partner is the primary motivation. Freezing eggs holds out hope for many.'

'Most women had already pursued and completed their educational and career goals but by their late 30s had been unable to find a lasting reproductive relationship with a stable partner. This is why they turned to egg freezing.'

'Their choices are to freeze their eggs, hope to find a partner or decide to become a single mother with donor sperm.'

Dr Inhorn adds doctors performing such procedures should be aware of the potential reasons behind women's decisions and offer appropriate support.

The findings were presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Barcelona.

This comes after research released last July by the same researchers found most women who freeze their eggs are doing so because they cannot find a similarly successful man.

The claim was made following reports that women are a third more likely to attend university than men in the UK.

These highly-educated women, who pay around £5,000 each for egg freezing, are described as the ‘leftover women’ amid a generation of ‘missing men’.

Their problem, according to the researchers, is they are unable to find similarly clever, driven men because fewer males are entering higher education. Dr Inhorn said: ‘There are not enough graduates for them. In simple terms, this is about an oversupply of educated women.

‘In China they call them “leftover women”. It sounds cold and callous but in demographic terms this is about missing men and leftover women.'

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it

One could point out many examples of the saying that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.  The one that presses on us all most these days has to be the finding that a majority of Amerrican young people think well of socialism. That is not too surprising given that a modern American education usually includes little history. Even so, that there clearly is for many no memory of the Soviet or Maoist tyrannies is disturbing.

It is not socialism that is most at issue, however.  It is the culture wars.  The ferocious attacks on critics of homosexuality are a good example.  How can anybody be so dogmatic about the unattackable righteousness of homosexuality, knowing that only a few decades ago it was so execrated as to be illegal? Being informed by history, however, in particular by Karl Marx's hostility to the family, it seems to me that homosexuality is now being used by Leftist haters as a tool to attack the traditional family. I see a pretense that a perversion is being promoted as being in some way equal to normal family life.

So ignorance of even recent history  can be deplored. So what about the history of times much further back? I like to go back to Beowulf, an epic poem that is the only substantial remainder of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon literature.  The values one encounters there are the values of our relatively recent ancestors -- people who came out of the womb very much like us -- and yet they are at huge variance with current Western values.  Formidableness in battle was the chief value then.

So Beowulf is a hugely useful corerctive to all assumptions that our culture is in any sense absolutely right.  It alerts us to the way our values are a product of our time and place and that they may be replaced by something quite different in the future.  It introduces us to humility about our beliefs.

In saying that, however, I realize that very few people are going to take time to read a poem from a thousand or more years ago.  So I am very pleased to have found a much shorter peom set to good music which has basically the same values as Beowulf.  It was written quite recently by Scottish/Canadian tenor John McDermott, well known in Canada.

I rather wonder what made McDermott able to think within a primitive pre-Christian mindset but he has done it  The values seem insanely warlike to a modern mind but they are in fact the values of our own pre-Christian ancestors so they should alert us to  how unwise it is to be dogmatic about the rightness of anything.

Below is a video and the lyrics of McDermott's version of Scotland the Brave. The values in the song probably do well represent the values of the Scots of old. They probably had to have such values to survive as an independent people.  To be a little bit Jungian about it, perhaps there was in McDermott a folk memory of how his remote Scottish ancestors would have felt.


   
Let Italy boast of her gay gilded waters
Her vines and her bowers and her soft sunny skies
Her sons drinking love from the eyes of her daughters
Where freedom expires amid softness and sighs

Scotland's blue mountains wild where hoary cliffs are piled
Towering in grandeur are dearer tae me
Land of the misty cloud land of the tempest loud
Land of the brave and proud land of the free

Enthroned on the peak of her own highland mountains
The spirit of Scotia reigns fearless and free
Her green tartan waving o'er blue rock and fountain
And proudly she sings looking over the sea

Here among my mountains wild I have serenely smiled
When armies and empires against me were hurled
Firm as my native rock I have withstood the shock
Of England, of Denmark, of Rome and the world

But see how proudly her war steeds are prancing
Deep groves of steel trodden down in their path
The eyes of my sons like their bright swords are glancing
Triumphantly riding through ruin and death

Bold hearts and nodding plumes wave o'er their bloody tombs
Deep eyed in gore is the green tartan's wave
Shivering are the ranks of steel, dire is the horseman's wheel

Victorious in battlefield Scotland the brave
Victorious in battlefield Scotland the brave

UPDATE:

I wondered what McDermott was referrring to in his verse about Italy.  The best I could come up with was Monteverdi madrigals.  Below is "Chiome d' Oro" ("Tresses of gold" -- i.e. praise of a blonde woman)  A wonderful rendition performed on original instruments below.  Wait for the words:



Italian text

Chiome d’oro, bel tesoro,
tu mi leghi in mille modi
se t’annodi, se ti snodi.

Candidette perle elette,
se le rose che scoprite
discoprite, mi ferite.

Vive stelle, che sì belle
e sì vaghe risplendete,
se ridete m’ancidete.

Preziose, amorose,
coralline labbra amate,
se parlate mi beate.

O bel nodo per cui godo!
O soave uscir di vita!
O gradita mia ferita!


English translation

Golden tresses, oh so precious,
you bind me in a thousand ways
whether coiled or flowing freely.

Small, white matching pearls,
when the roses that conceal you
reveal you, you wound me.

Bright stars that shine
with such beauty and charm,
when you laugh you torture me.

Precious, seductive
coral lips I love,
when you speak I am blessed.

Oh dear bonds in which I take delight!
Oh fair mortality!
Oh welcome wound!

And then there is "Zefiro torna", which some regard as the best of Monteverdi's madrigals:



First in Italian then translated into English.

ORIGINAL ITALIAN VERSION:

Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti
l’aer fa grato e’il pié discioglie a l’onde
e, mormoranda tra le verdi fronde,
fa danzar al bel suon su’l prato i fiori.

Inghirlandato il crin Fillide e Clori
note temprando lor care e gioconde;
e da monti e da valli ime e profond
raddoppian l’armonia gli antri canori.
Sorge più vaga in ciel l’aurora, e’l sole,
sparge più luci d’or; più puro argento
fregia di Teti il bel ceruleo manto.

Sol io, per selve abbandonate e sole,
l’ardor di due begli occhi e’l mio tormento,
come vuol mia ventura, hor piango hor canto.

ENGLISH VERSION:

Return O Zephyr, and with gentle motion
Make pleasant the air and scatter the grasses in waves
And murmuring among the green branches
Make the flowers in the field dance to your sweet sound;
Crown with a garland the heads of Phylla and Chloris
With notes tempered by love and joy,
From mountains and valleys high and deep
And sonorous caves that echo in harmony.
The dawn rises eagerly into the heavens and the sun
Scatters rays of gold, and of the purest silver,
Like embroidery on the cerulean mantle of Thetis.
But I, in abandoned forests, am alone.
The ardour of two beautiful eyes is my torment;
As my Fate wills it, now I weep, now I sing.






Gina Miller’s nasty elitism sums up Britain's EU enthusiasts

How dare you plebs question us experts? This is the cry of Remainers.

It’s not often I say this, but we should be grateful to Gina Miller. Ms Miller is the wealthy businesswoman who says the Brexit vote made her physically sick and who is so barren in the category of self-awareness that she once gave an interview to a fawning New Statesman hack in which she gabbed about the problems facing 21st-century Britain while ‘spread across a velvet sofa’ in a ‘high-ceilinged drawing room’ while her ‘multimillionaire husband’ acted as her bodyguard. So Caligulan! These are the people the left now loves. Anyway, we should nonetheless be grateful to Ms Miller because her latest outburst has really shone a light on what is driving elitist Brexitphobia.

On Friday, Ms Miller and a host of other female members of the great and good – lawyers, professors, peers, the daughters of filthy-rich capitalists, etc – wrote a letter to the Guardian – where else? – in which they opined that women’s rights would collapse post-Brexit. Because before the EU came into existence in 1992 – the year of Wet Wet Wet, John Major and Damien Hirst’s shark, in case you’re one of those people labouring under the illusion that the EU has existed forever – British women basically had no rights, right? It is only thanks to the grey, stale, quite male oligarchy in Brussels that British women were able to shake off the shackles of oppression. What an insult to the generations of British Suffragettes and libbers who spent decades struggling for freedom before the EU was even a glint in the eye of scheming bureaucrats.

Not surprisingly, Miller and Co’s ridiculous letter – long on initials after the signatories’ names, short on facts – caused annoyance. Not least among some of the millions of women who voted for Brexit. Ms Miller, incredulous that such inhabitants of the plebeian sections of society would presume to question her and her friends, all of whom are well-educated and read broadsheet newspapers, fired back at these little people on Twitter. ‘People responding negatively to our letter [regarding] loss of women’s rights post-Brexit know more than the top women signatories?’, she asked. Then she listed some of these ‘top women’. ‘Jessica Simor QC, Caroline Criado-Perez feminist activist, Cherie Blair QC, Helena Kennedy QC, Shona Jolly QC, Susie Courtault rights campaigner…’

We get it, you know a lot of QCs! And QCs count for more than you and me. This is what Miller is saying. She knows this is what she is saying, we know it is what she is saying, so can we cut to the chase here? Ms Miller is really asking, in the tone of a 17th-century monarch, or 19th-century boss, ‘Do you think you know more than me?’. And we should be glad she is, because this Twitter freakout, this rage of a businesswomen who puked over our vote, this listing of people who are better and cleverer than the rest of us, captures the essence of elitist Remoanerism – which is the belief that some people’s political views are worth more than other people’s, and therefore should carry more weight. Autocracy, as some of us might call it. Whatever it is, it isn’t democracy, which is a system in which everyone’s views, regardless of our racial, gender or educational background, are meant to impact equally on the fate of the nation.

Miller’s unguarded snobbery, her probably accidental exposure of her belief that lesser citizens should stop criticising people with letters after their names, confirms what lies behind Remoaners’ deification of expertise. It is a belief, as old as politics itself, that the well-educated and well brought-up are better placed to make political judgements than the rest of us. Right from Plato’s ‘Philosopher Kings’ to the complaint that was made about women demanding the vote in the late 19th century – as one misogynist politician put it, women ‘lack the expertise… which is necessary for informed political activity’ – there has always been this idea that some people, us, are better at thinking and deciding and doing politics than other people: them. You know them: the kind of folks who vote for Brexit or who outrageously clog up Ms Miller’s Twitterfeed with – brace yourselves – negative comments.

This is the tyranny of expertise. This is the thing Michael Gove was dead right about – and you could tell he was dead right because his comments sent the chattering classes into a political tailspin – when he said people have ‘had enough of experts’. This public bristling against the elevation of expertise in political and social matters isn’t philistinism, as the elitists claim it is, and nor is it a folk-wisdom that prefers the diagnosis of a witch doctor over the insights of Western science. Rather, it is part of a great and democratic growing discomfort with the way in which the beatification of experts grates against the ideal of ‘one person, one vote’ by suggesting, or outright arguing, that some people and some groups should have more say than us.

The populist revolt against experts is a wonderful and positive moment in British politics. This is people saying, ‘Our views count as much as yours. When it comes to politics, our say is absolutely equal to your say, even if we might be poorer than you and have fewer PhDs’. This is in keeping with virtually every stab for the expansion of democracy in history, all of which have relied upon a scepticism about elevated expertise and a conviction that ordinary working people have just as much to contribute to political debate as lords and ladies and business owners do.

In fact, I’d go further: in answer to the question Miller is really asking – which is, ‘Do you lot think you know better than us?’ – we should say ‘Yes’. Yes, by dint of the fact that ordinary people really live in society in a way that bureaucrats and businesspeople often don’t, and therefore are very often more sensitive and alert and thoughtful about the difficulties facing that society, they know more than you. They are better than you at making long-term political decisions that will benefit everyone. They are more politically trustworthy than those who have vested interests, narrow experiences, and a sometimes jaundiced view of society and its inhabitants. But don’t worry, we are democrats, which means we won’t let the fact that ordinary people are better placed than the elites to make sensible political decisions get in the way of your rights. So you’ll still have a vote. That’s all, though. One vote. Like the rest of us.

SOURCE






Why Britain's Deradicalization Programs Are Failing

A. Z. Mohamed says radical Islam is straight from Muslim scriptures so you must tackle that in some way to have much  success

The vast majority of deradicalization programs in the UK are at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive, according to a recent study by the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT, also known as the "nudge unit"), a social purpose company partially owned by the UK government, but that works in partnership with the Cabinet Office.

As the Times reported recently, BIT examined 33 deradicalization programs across Britain, in schools, youth centers, sports clubs and English-language classes. Most of these are part of Prevent -- a strategy presented in 2011 to the UK Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department -- designed to keep vulnerable citizens from becoming terrorists or supporting any form of violent extremism inspired by radical Islamist or right-wing ideologies. BIT found that only two of the programs have been successful.

The main reason for the failure of the other 31 programs, according to the Times' report on the study, is:

"...that facilitators were uncomfortable dealing with sensitive topics and would often refuse to engage if they were brought up. BIT found that teachers in particular were afraid to bring up matters of race and religion with their students without appearing discriminatory, often causing them to refuse to talk about these topics entirely."

The two effective initiatives, according to the Times, were "one defying political correctness and tackling difficult issues head-on and the other directly addressing extremism in religious [Islamic] texts."

In Britain, the majority (82%) of the 228 people in custody for terrorism-related offenses espouse Islamist extremism. In August 2017, the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, said that the UK has more radicalized Muslims than any other European country. He added that Britain "has identified 20,000 to 35,000 radicals. Of these, 3,000 are worrying for MI5, and of those 500 are under constant and special attention."

In a speech in London on June 4, Britain's recently appointed Home Secretary, Sajid Javid MP, said that the UK's "... biggest threat [today] is from Islamist terrorism – including Al Qa'ida, but particularly from Daesh.

"While the so-called caliphate is a thing of the past, Daesh continues to plan and inspire attacks both here and abroad as well as recruiting British citizens to fight.

"Over the past 5 years, our law enforcement and intelligence agencies have foiled as many as 25 Islamist-linked plots."

"But the threat doesn't only come from Daesh. "Extreme right-wing terrorism is also an increasing threat... Daesh and the extreme right wing are more similar than they might like to think. "They both exploit grievances, distort the truth, and undermine the values that hold us together.  "And they don't hesitate to learn lessons from each other."

"Misapprehensions around Prevent are often based on distortions.  "They are based on a lack of understanding about the grassroots work that is involved, and the efforts by civil society groups and public-sector workers to protect vulnerable people.

"We have a moral and social obligation to safeguard vulnerable people from the twisted propaganda of those seeking to radicalise them. "And Prevent is about doing just that."

To illustrate the benefits of Prevent programs, Javid told the story of a 13-year-old boy:

"He witnessed domestic abuse at home and suffered from racist bullying at school. He started to watch violent propaganda online and to show an interest in fighting for Daesh. But he was given the mentoring and support that he needed to stop him from going down that wrong path. Now his mum says, and I quote, 'he's no longer on the path to radicalisation and all he wants to be is a car salesman.'"

Unwittingly, by recounting this tale, Javid showed just why the deradicalization programs he is defending do not work. He reduced the radicalization of a Muslim teenager to domestic abuse, racist bullying at school and online violent propaganda. He said nothing about the boy's family's religious faith, radical Islam or the narrative of hate and intolerance founded on a "radical" interpretation of the Quran and Sunna to which the boy may well have been exposed at home, at the mosque and over the internet. Instead, Javid provided a politically correct narrative to back up his assertion that Prevent is not only a success, but part of the "new counter-terrorism strategy" he was unveiling.

Javid then devoted a whole section of his speech to his fellow Muslims in Britain:

"After any [terrorist] attack, a lot of well-meaning people will line up to say it has nothing to do with Islam. That the perpetrators are not true Muslims. I understand this reaction. I know they are not true Muslims. But there's no avoiding the fact that these people they self-identify as Muslims.

"Let me be very clear. Muslims are in no way responsible for the acts of a tiny minority who twist their faith. And I know that there is no such thing as a single, homogenous Muslim community. Muslims live and thrive in all walks of British life and society.

"Globally, Muslims are by far the biggest victims of Islamist terrorism. And Muslims are fighting and dying on the frontline of the battle against terrorism every day.

"It would be absurd to say that the actions of a tiny handful in any way represent a peaceful, wonderful religion shared by a billion people worldwide.

"That's exactly why, although we all share the responsibility for tackling terrorism, there's a unique role for Muslims to play in countering this threat.

"British Muslims up and down the country are leading the fight against Islamist extremists by throwing them out of their mosques and by countering poison online and on the streets. It is incredibly powerful when a young Muslim man turns their back on the preachers of hate, and say: 'Your bigotry and bloodlust have no place in the modern world.'

"I want to say to all those who stand up against all forms of extremism that this government stands with you..."

The trouble with Javid's tribute to those Muslims who "stand up against all forms of extremism" is that bigotry and bloodlust are not merely figments of Islamist extremists' minds that lead to their violent conduct. They stem from an authentic interpretation of Quranic verses and hadiths, which -- according to Londonistan author Melanie Phillips -- "although millions of Muslims don't subscribe to it, currently dominates the Islamic world." Sadly, worldwide, Muslims, too, are often victims of Muslim violence.

For deradicalization programs -- and counter-terrorism initiatives -- to work, they must first defy political correctness, tackle the root causes of Islamist extremism and address all related sensitive issues, including those which appear in Islamic texts. British Muslims should not only participate in this endeavor, but be on the front lines, monitoring early signs of radicalization and ceasing to show sympathy for or to rationalize violence.

SOURCE






Australia's absurd Human rights commission strikes again. Orders Suncorp Bank to compensate paedophile after it refused to hire him because of his criminal record - but the bank refuses to pay

The Commission has only advisory power.  It has to go to court to enforce anything.  It would lose this one

The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) ordered Suncorp to compensate a registered sex offender but the bank refused to pay.

Despite the AHRC ruling a man was 'discriminated against due to his criminal record' the bank insisted the man's convictions for possessing child pornography justified the decision not to hire him.

The man, known as BE, had applied to be an insurance claims consultant at Suncorp in 2015.

While AHRC president Rosalind Croucher conceded BE did not fully disclose his criminal record, she still ordered the company to pay him a total of $2,500.

Prof Croucher said in a statement, 'Notwithstanding the very serious nature of Mr BE's convictions, I find that Suncorp's decision to deny Mr BE the opportunity to access employment with Suncorp constituted an exclusion which impaired Mr BE's equality of opportunity.

'I accept that having a conditional offer of employment ­extended to him, and then ­rescinded on the basis of a criminal record that does not adequately relate to the ­inherent requirements of the role has caused ... distress'.

BE reportedly answered 'No' to a question in his online application that asked if he had been convicted of an offence.  

BE's criminal record dates back to 2008, which included convictions of 'use of a carriage service to access child pornography material' and 'possession of child pornography'.

BE was sentenced to a year in jail and was suspended for two years.

Suncorp was also told to re-educate its staff, revise its policies, and review its conduct after the incident.

'We have carefully considered your findings and recommendations,'Suncorp responded in a December 2015 statement.  'In particular, we note your finding that Mr [BE] was discriminated against on the basis of his criminal record.

'We respectfully maintain that Mr [BE]'s criminal record is of a serious nature and impacts on his ability to perform the inherent requirements of the Work@Home Consultant role. 'For this reason, Suncorp declines to pay any compensation to Mr [BE].

'Notwithstanding the above, Suncorp has developed comprehensive recruitment procedures and provides on-going training to employees, including in relation to anti-discrimination and equal opportunity.

'These procedures and training assist with ensuring we can fairly assess whether a prospective employee with a criminal record can perform the inherent requirements of a particular role, on a case by case basis.'

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

The Utility of Peterson

Like anybody who specifically targets the left, and criticizes their hostile disposition toward enlightenment values and the individual, Jordan Peterson is the object of much animosity and attempted speech suppression. But his fame and belovedness, as prominent as they are, naturally have made him a hot target for politically motivated equivocation by left leaning smear artists.

It is Jordan’s vociferous and impactful criticisms of postmodernism and Marxism that influence such people to conflate his reverence for the underpinnings of western culture with far right chauvinism. But to anybody who has taken the time to absorb a lecture of his (impartially), it’s readily apparent that his material is born out of a surplus of kindness and authentic investment in the wellbeing of all people.

Far from resembling the sociopathic caricature of the world’s Cenk Uygurs’ archetypal “right-winger”, a category classical liberals are now commonly pigeonholed into, Jordan is known for extending a hand of sympathetic understanding to those most of society would consider irredeemable wretches, upon whom he rarely confers undue moral judgments.

He refers to his enemies even as being under the possession of bad ideas, rather than painting them as evil. He does not lower himself to the common impulse of dehumanization most people act on with reference to their enemies. He’s someone brimming with compassion, particularly for those who feel lost or disenfranchised, and have nobody to represent their feelings in good faith.

Though the left has made an increasing number of character and credibility assassination attempts on Peterson, they fail to realize he is one of the few voices regularly defusing the complicated grief of many young men which left untreated could grow into violent attempts at retribution, shootings, and other rampages. In spite of all the left does to paint Peterson as mysoginistic, angry, and unhinged, he is actually the one assuaging the male rage while the leftists continually exacerbate it.

Peterson gives expression to the anger many young white men justly feel, having been abandoned by their own culture and local institutions, and tries to remake it into a positive sense of responsibility and motivation toward success. These are people who feel that the entire world is rigged against them, and Peterson would like to guide them toward a renewed understanding of the potential and meaning of their lives.

Anger is a natural expression of despair and grief, and while Peterson tries desperately to provide the correct outlet for it, the left alienates those who feel angry by perpetually demonizing them. This comes from the idea on the left that those who are not part of a protected class have no right to ever feel angry or left out — an impossible standard that shits on the validity of their feelings in perpetuity.

And because leftists call everything they did not create fascism, and call everything that doesn’t benefit them fascism, and call everything that doesn’t subjugate itself to their own whims fascism, they cannot allow this. But Peterson is actually a huge moderate attempting to bridge the culture gap. Not to mention Peterson is an actual anti-facist, in the sense that he understands and fights against legitimate fascism. By tearing him down, they’re only widening the culture gap and increasing the likelihood of future civil conflict.

Now, I’m not a Peterson acolyte. I have some criticisms of him. For one, it’s unsure whether mere individualism and the rejection of identity politics can actually conserve our embattled liberty. In other words, maybe the gap can’t be bridged. It may not be enough to simply exhume “the father” and think we can return to the golden age of liberty and social trust by some miraculous resurgence of old values. Who knows?

Another point of criticism is the apparent existential relativism of his philosophy, which is cause for much concern, and something I haven’t been able to overlook since he came to prominence. This is made worse by the stream of consciousness style of his lectures. If his philosophy is to be taken seriously, he better articulate it more coherently. Otherwise, he’s no better than an Oprah or a Dr.Oz, and we’ve got enough of those.

But in spite of this, we can’t overlook the good things he’s done. He’s a powerful influencer, spreading awareness of the caustic nature of campus cult ideology. Thousands of parents are now conscious of the free-thought-inhibiting indoctrination occurring in schools all throughout North America. People are ostensibly more enthusiastic about Western society and identity, and the preservation of the values contained therein. Those who faced lives of total depravity have discovered a rebirth of purpose, and are enthusiastic about the future for perhaps the very first time. These are not small accomplishments.

So, give the doctor his due.

SOURCE






‘Experts’ Rank US in Top 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women—Almost as Bad as Nigeria

Suggesting that many of the world’s most grave problems have been solved, experts in women’s rights from around the world rank the United States among the 10 most dangerous countries for women.

Sadly, however, issues such as female genital mutilation, arranged marriage, rape as a weapon of war, honor killings, and maternal mortality haven’t stopped.

Rather, leading “experts” in their fields appear to have lost any perspective, categorizing the U.S. as almost as dangerous as Nigeria, where Boko Haram militants kidnap, rape, and sexually exploit women and girls.

The ranking was compiled by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Reuters, “the world’s largest news and information provider.” The foundation asked 548 “women’s rights experts” to name the most dangerous countries from among the 193 United Nations member states in health care, access to economic resources, customary practices, sexual violence, and nonsexual violence and human trafficking.

The results came in as follows:

India
Afghanistan
Syria
Somalia
Saudi Arabia
Pakistan
Democratic Republic of Congo
Yemen
Nigeria
United States
Notably missing from the Reuters list:

—South Sudan and Central African Republic, where the armed forces systematically rape women as a weapon of war.

—Mauritania, where an estimated 40 percent of the population is enslaved, presumably many of them women.

—North Korea, where tens of thousands of women are trafficked and trapped in prison camps.

—Iran, where women are arrested for taking off their hijabs and protesting an oppressive regime.

—China, where millions of baby girls were murdered under the country’s one-child policy.

—And Myanmar, where a genocide is happening under our watch.

I could go on. But somehow, it’s the U.S. where women are doomed.

If living in the United States is more dangerous for women than living in a country where boy’s and men’s bodies are used to create bonfires while women are raped and baby girls are grabbed by the leg and thrown into the fire to burn, then forgive me—I must be missing something. As far as I was aware, women in the U.S. face injustices, but we still have equality before the law.

The same can’t be said for these nine other countries, or the dozens of others that didn’t make the list of most dangerous countries for women.

The inclusion of the U.S. in this group demonstrates the level of ignorance among “women’s experts,” and why so many of them shouldn’t be trusted. It reflects the dangerous “victimhood” ideology that’s pervasive among college students, and shows how selfish American feminism has become.

Harvey Weinstein, after all, does not equate with Boko Haram.

In explaining the decision to rank the U.S. as the 10th-most dangerous country for women, the Thomson Reuters Foundation said:

The United States shot up in the rankings after tying joint third with Syria when respondents were asked which was the most dangerous country for women in terms of sexual violence including rape, sexual harassment, coercion into sex and the lack of access to justice in rape cases. It was ranked sixth for non-sexual violence.

The survey was taken after the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment went viral in October last year as Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 70 women, some dating back decades. Hundreds of women have since publicly accused powerful men in business, government and entertainment of sexual misconduct and thousands have joined the #MeToo social media movement to share stories of sexual harassment or abuse.

Specifically, experts ranked the U.S. the third-worst country for the category Sexual Violence, “including rape as a weapon of war; domestic rape; rape by a stranger; the lack of access to justice in rape cases; sexual harassment and coercion into sex as a form of corruption.”

That puts us just between Syria and Congo, the latter once called “the rape capital of the world.”

The U.S. also ranked sixth in Non-Sexual Violence, “including conflict-related violence and forms of domestic physical and mental abuse.” That leaves us just before Saudi Arabia, where women recently gained the right to drive.

#MeToo was a long, overdue movement, and the good news is that it’s creating change. Men who do wrong are being held accountable, and more women feel empowered to speak up. Yes, there’s still a lot of work to do. But the majority of our #MeToo cases don’t compare to women’s cries in the Middle East. Nor do our injustices hold water to the inequalities of women in the developing world.

We might face sexual harassment, assault, and even violence, but it’s not systematically used as a weapon of war. And sure, some of us don’t like our leader, but our government isn’t gassing its own people.

Speaking in relative terms, women in the U.S. are safe.

For anyone who’s perplexed about the level of outrage in America today, look no further than the results of this survey. According to “women’s experts,” there are 183 countries where women are better off living than the U.S.

To be fair, the U.S. does allow women to be thrown out of restaurants, and Democratic leaders call on their supporters to harass political opponents. But even so, women here have it pretty good. So good, in fact, that our borders are overwhelmed with people dreaming of calling this place “home.”

To pretend that life in America is more dangerous than so many other countries is nothing short of sad, insulting, and ludicrous. Because let’s be clear: Women are far better off living in the U.S. than they are in places like Myanmar.

“Women’s experts,” of all people, should know this.

SOURCE






Marine experiment finds women get injured more frequently, shoot less accurately than men

Women in a new Marine Corps unit created to assess how female service members perform in combat were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield, according to the results of a long-awaited study produced by the service.

The research was carried out by the service in a nine-month long experiment at both Camp Lejeune, N.C., and Twentynine Palms, Calif. About 400 Marines, including 100 women, volunteered to join the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force, the unit the Marine Corps created to compare how men and women do in a combat environment.

“This is unprecedented research across the services,” said Marine Col. Anne Weinberg, the deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office. “What we tried to get to is what is that individual’s contribution to the collective unit. We all fight as units… We’re more interested in how the Marine Corps fights as units and how that combat effectiveness is either advanced or degraded.”

The study, an executive summary of which was released Thursday, was carried out as all the services prepare to submit recommendations to Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter this fall on whether any jobs should be kept closed to women. In a landmark decision in January 2013, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rescinded a decades-old ban on women serving in combat jobs like infantry, but gave the services until this fall to research how they wanted to better integrate women and if any jobs should be kept closed.

The Pentagon faces increasing pressure to fully integrate women, following the historic Aug. 21 graduation of two female officers from the Army’s Ranger School. The legendarily difficult school was opened on an experimental basis this spring, with 1st Lt. Shaye Haver, 25, and Capt. Kristen Griest, 26, completing the requirements. Sixteen other women who attempted the course failed, while one other woman remained in the school’s third and final phase at Eglin Air Force Base as of last week.

The Marine Corps’ research will serve as fodder for those who are against fully integrating women. It found that all-male squads, teams and crews demonstrated better performance on 93 of 134 tasks evaluated (69 percent) than units with women in them. Units comprising all men also were faster than units with women while completing tactical movements in combat situations, especially in units with large “crew-served” weapons like heavy machine guns and mortars, the study found.

Infantry squads comprising men only also had better accuracy than squads with women in them, with “a notable difference between genders for every individual weapons system” used by infantry rifleman units. They include the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle (IAR) and the M203, a single-shot grenade launcher mounted to rifles, the study found.

The research also found that male Marines who have not received infantry training were still more accurate using firearms than women who have. And in removing wounded troops from the battlefield, there “were notable differences in execution times between all-male and gender-integrated groups,” with the exception being when a single person—”most often a male Marine” — carried someone away, the study found.

The full study is more than a thousand pages long, Marine officials said. They anticipated publishing it online in coming days.

A physiological assessment carried out by the University of Pittsburgh’s Neuromuscular Research Laboratory found that the average man in the experimental integrated unit weighed 178 pounds with 20 percent body fat, while the average woman weighed 142 pounds with 24 percent body fat.

Researchers hooked men and women alike up to a variety of monitors, and found that the top 25th percentile of women overlapped with the bottom 25th percentile of men when it came to anaerobic power, a measure of strength, Marine officials said. Those numbers were expected to a degree given the general size difference between the average man and woman.

The gender-integrated unit’s assessment also found that 40.5 percent of women participating suffered some form of musculoskeletal injury, while 18.8 percent of men did. Twenty-one women lost time in the unit due to injuries, 19 of whom suffered injuries to their lower extremities. Of those, 16 women were injured while while carrying heavy loads in an organized movement, like a march, the study found.

The kinds of injuries varied, too: The majority of women in the unit who lost time due to injuries suffered through hip problems, with foot and toe injuries also problematic. In men, the most common injuries were to the feet and toes, followed by the ankles, Weinberg said.

The research raises the question whether the Marine Corps may press to keep the infantry and Special Operations, in particular, closed to women. If they do so, they could face resistance from above: Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who oversees both the Navy and Marine Corps, already has indicated that he sees no reason to keep the infantry closed to women.

SOURCE






Australia: Toy guns, superhero costumes and even LEGO could be banned from childcare centres as experts claim they encourage violent behaviour

Where is the evidence that such bans will have any benefit?  There is none

Children may be banned from playing with toy guns, fake plastic swords and even Lego due to fears they encourage violent behaviour.

Games such as 'cops and robbers' and mock bows and arrows could be barred at preschools as childcare centres try and stamp out what they believe is 'violent' behaviour.

Australian Childcare Alliance NSW president Lyn Connolly said children who want to make a gun from Lego blocks should be told 'how they can hurt people'. 

Ms Connolly told the Daily Telegraph that the potential effects of guns should be discussed with children.

The Australian Childcare Alliance will survey its 1,600 childcare centres for policies regarding toy weapons.

Ms Connolly said early childcare centres usually have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to fake weapons.

Child psychologist Dr Justin Coulson said there is no evidence playing with toy guns has an impact on behaviour.

'Even if we were to ban guns, kids will find other things to use if they want to play a 'goodies versus baddies' game.

'While I personally don't like it when kids play with replica guns and I have a personal and moral distaste, there is no evidence to suggest it causes any problems.'

Early Childhood Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the NSW state government was able to take action against childcare providers that used toys which could pose a safety threat.

Australian Childcare Alliance vice president Nesha Hutchinson said children in rural areas often used toy guns as a teaching tool.

They would often have seen their parents using real weapons on farms, she 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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Leftist viciousness never stops

Their reply to criticism is to attempt to hurt the critic.  Debate is not on their agenda.  Below is an email received from a conservative correspondent that shows their inability to handle even mild mockery

I got called up to HR because two feminist women complained about an email I sent. On June 15th it was "Raising awareness of elder abuse day". The colour of the cause is purple, so purple ribbons and balloons were put up around the workplace and around town. An email was sent to everyone advising all staff to wear something purple.

I sent back a reply asking, "Are we expected to take the vow not to abuse old people?"

Two women went to HR and lodged a complaint about me. They are both radical feminists who coordinate the November white ribbon day in which people are encouraged to walk around the town park and men are encouraged to buy and wear a white ribbon and take a vow not to abuse women.

They lodged a complaint, suggesting I was mocking white ribbon day and requested I receive a written warning.

The HR manager did not do that. We had a good laugh about it






Migrant Beheads 1-Year-Old Girl In Germany; Merkel Bans Media Reporting



Angela Merkel’s pro-migrant government has banned German media from reporting on a barbaric crime involving a Muslim migrant who allegedly beheaded his one-year-old baby daughter on a train station platform in Hamburg.

According to eyewitnesses, the 33-year-old suspect, Mourtala Madou, beheaded his one-year-old daughter in front of a horrified crowd of commuters at Jungfernstieg station on Thursday April 12, and then stabbed his German girlfriend, the mother of the child.

The suspect allegedly stabbed the infant from behind, while she was sitting in her stroller, and then severed her neck. He then allegedly stabbed his girlfriend in the chest before fleeing the scene, dumping the murder weapon in a train station trash can. He was later arrested

The woman, a mother of four other children, later died at hospital of her injuries.

Video footage has been uploaded to the internet showing the aftermath of the brutal and senseless double murder that was described as “very targeted” by police spokesman Timo Zill and an “honor killing” by witnesses. The victims bodies can be seen in the video but not their faces.  Eyewitnesses can be heard saying that the suspect cut the babies head off.

The Ghanaian Christian gospel singer who captured the footage on his cell phone can be heard saying, “Oh my God. It’s unbelievable. Oh my God. It is unbelievable. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus. oh Jesus. They cut off the head of the baby. They cut off the baby’s head. Oh my God. Oh Jesus. “

German media has been allowed by the government to report on the murder of the mother, but Angela Merkel’s pro-migrant government banned German media outlets from reporting on the decapitated baby.

Germany’s largest newspaper, Bild, report on the death of the mother of four, without mentioning the details regarding the barbaric murder of her child.

Merkel’s government have been under intense pressure in recent months regarding the open borders policy that is responsible for millions of Muslim migrants settling in Germany during the last three years. Many Germans believe the government issued a blanket ban on reporting this story because they believe it will turn the public mood against the government and represent the final nail in Merkel’s political coffin.

German authorities have also been ordered to clamp down on independent bloggers caught sharing the damning footage.

When Hamburg blogger Heinrich Kordewiner posted the video on Facebook and his own YouTube channel, a police investigation was launched. Kordewiner’s apartment was searched by police and his personal belongings were confiscated. Kordewiner says he and his roommate were awakened at 6:45 am by a squad of prosecutors and police officers seeking access to their home. When they were denied, they forcibly gained access by drilling the door lock.

The Christian gospel singer who recorded the video on his cell phone has also had his home raided and personal belongings confiscated. Police claim they are operating under orders to confiscate material in order to protect the rights of the victims.

But who are they really protecting? Many Germans believe they are protecting the migrant and alleged murderer, Mourtala Madou, as well as the German government guilty of allowing millions of migrants to settle in the country against the wishes of the German people.

A handful of mainstream media articles, worried about the publication of the video, have been published since the police raids, but none of them mention the decapitated one-year-old girl. The case has been completely covered up by the German government.

However they cannot keep the case quiet forever. The fact the one-year-old child had her neck severed is mentioned in the published files of the Hamburg District Court. Stefan Frankreports on achgut.com about this today.

But it seems the German government gag order extends beyond the media. A request by the AFD faction (number 21/12844), regarding the nature of the child’s injury, was redacted with the details blacked out before the Civil Law Court replied.

Even the German judiciary are going out of their way to ensure that the barbaric crimes of Muslim migrants are kept hidden from the German public.

SOURCE





Leftmedia Exploits Child for Homosexual Agenda

Using a confused 10-year-old boy who dresses in drag to promote "pride" is actually child abuse.

Dogmatic commitment to an ideology will ensure that both truth and individuals are sacrificed in support of furthering the greater cause. The reality of this scenario has been repeatedly demonstrated in particular by those committed to the leftist agenda of “social justice.” Ironically, details and facts of specific cases of injustice, abuse or crime are often ignored or misapplied in order to support the desired ideological narrative. Likewise, the exploitation of various vulnerable individuals is accepted and even celebrated if it serves to further the broader cause.

Such is the case with a 10-year-old boy named Desmond. He is clearly struggling with gender dysphoria, though he — with his parents’ encouragement — claims otherwise. You see, Desmond dresses in drag. He says he was inspired to do so at the age of two when he first watched an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” He also claims to have come “out of the closet” as a homosexual at age of three. So a 10-year-old prepubescent boy is able to experience a sexual desire that his hormones have yet to express? What kind of parents would allow their child to live in such a delusion, and not only allow but exploit it? According to Desmond, his parents “didn’t think it sounded like a good idea to force a child to do something they didn’t want to do.”

Forcing kids to do what they don’t want to do is called “parenting.”

The Washington Examiner’s Nicole Russell writes, “That’s nonsense. Parents can and should do this all the time. My children would likely eat Little Debbie Cakes and watch movies all day long without intervention. School, chores, homework, reading — those are all things kids would often rather not do. Do we indulge that fantasy? Heck, kids would rather run out in the middle of the street, go eight days without bathing, and eat Pop Rocks all day long — do we indulge them in that too? There are no perfect parents, myself included, but the fine line between boundaries and freedom is one that every parent must navigate with their children.”

And yet, for that Leftmedia rag called The Huffington Post, Desmond served as the perfect “poster child” for promoting the pro-LGBTQ agenda. The Post tweeted out its celebration of the end of “Pride Month” by featuring Desmond along with this tripe: “As Pride month comes to a close, Desmond Is Amazing, the ten-year-old drag kid from New York, is proof that the future is queer.” No, this is actually proof that The Huffington Post condones exploitation and child abuse. Renowned University of Toronto professor of psychology and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson responded, “In what moral universe is it acceptable to encourage a 10 yr old boy to dress like an adult male mimicking a sexualized adult female, use that as a ticket to fame and then claim it as virtue? If you don’t see that this child is being exploited then ideology has possessed you to the core.”

SOURCE





It’s rape if a woman does not say yes: Pru Goward

To be authentically Australian about it, one is inclined to ask if Pru has ever had a good root? There would be a very large number of mutually enjoyed sexual encounters that would be criminalized by this airy-fairy nonsense



Sex will be deemed rape unless a woman gives vocal consent, a minister in Australia’s most populous state has proposed.

Pru Goward, New South Wales minister for the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault, said: “If you want sex you have to ask for it, and if you want that sex, you have to say yes.”

Ms Goward said the state was seeking to enshrine the requirement for a woman’s audible consent in law, and that its main law advisory body had been tasked with reporting on how the legislation should be drafted. “Often you don’t say no. You say nothing, and that’s why you need to say yes,” Ms Goward 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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

Incels: the ugly truth

There have always been both males and females who fail to find sexual partners ("Incels") -- but in the past they had Christianity to give them a reassuring perspective on it.  Sexual abstinence was even admired as holy.  But for most Western populations, Christian faith is now a relic for all but a few.  Leftists actively despise it. 

But there is very little now to replace Christianity and that is tragic.  Christian thinking was an evolutionary product.  It evolved over a period of thousands of years as an authoritative answer to life's dilemmas.  It made sense of your world and guided you through it.  It was our folk wisdom, the wisdom inherited from many generations of experience

So what is to be done, as Lenin once asked?  The hope I see is only for the young.  The existing generations of incels are probably beyond help.  Teenagers are generally much more open to exploring faith.  A bigger effort to introduce teenagers to Christianity could help.  Evangelical churches do a great work in such outreach but maybe we have got to a point where the churches alone are not effective enough.  Perhaps there needs to be a general societal push to propagandize for the benefits of Christian faith.  The Left regularly preach anti-faith messages.  Perhaps conservatives need to preach pro-faith messages.

And conservatives do not themselves need to be religious. Jordan Peterson has cut a very useful mould in that connection.  He is a great advocate of traditional Christian thinking but is not himself a believer.

I have not read enough of Peterson's life history to be sure but I strongly suspect that he was a Christian in his youth -- as I was.  I was deeply religious throughout my teens.  I was in a very puritanical denomination in which everyone was EXPECTED to be an "incel" and I don't doubt that there were incel personalities -- socially inept personalities -- in the faith.  But, far from feeling inadequate, the incel personalities were praised and supported.  They had a positive role.  And, ultimately, they would marry. Community expectations would be influential and religious faith would provide an emotional bond that would lead to an agreement to marry "in the faith". Their social ineptitude would be excused as spiritual-mindedness.

And what would happen once these unlikely marriages took place?  The incels would learn.  They would learn by doing.  By being tied together they would figure out what they had to do to get on with one another.  They would eventually become a fairly normal, well adjusted couple.  Their ineptitude would mostly fade away.

I left the faith before I got to that point but have the warmest memories of my religious teens and am profoundly thankful for the guidance it gave me through the confusions of teenagerhood.  I did none of the self-destructive things that  teenagers now so often do. I drank no alcohol, used no drugs and committed no crimes. I didn't even take up smoking and to this day have not once smoked or been tempted to do so.  So even as trivial a vice as smoking I was protected from. And I still enjoy the great old hymns.

And, perhaps predictably, I see no harm that my Christian years did to me.  My years as as religious "incel" did not harm my social evolution as far as I can see.  And the fact that I have now been married four times probably makes me as far from an incel as you can get. I have had a great time.

And my son also went through a religious phase in his teens -- with my warm approval.  And it did him no harm either.  His only addiction -- and one he battles manfully -- is to flavoured milk.  He has to hurry past the flavoured milk shelves in the supermarket in order to protect his waistline.  And he is engaged to be married to a pretty woman of strong character and a good brain -- whom he lives with.

So I think Jordan Peterson has shown the way forward.  Conservatives need to do more to promote Christianity and counter the foul moral emptiness of the Left.  Regardless of your own religious beliefs -- and I have none -- one can still see Christianity as a great benefit to the person -- particularly to young persons.  It is our wisdom heritage and cannot easily be replaced.


The strange, self-loathing world of incels owes much to mainstream sexual confusion.

‘The Incel Rebellion has already begun’, wrote Alek Minassian, a self-described ‘incel’, in a Facebook post, minutes before he drove a rental van into pedestrians on a crowded street in Toronto in April, killing 10 and injuring 15. He was inspired by Elliot Rodger, whose shooting and knifing spree in Isla Vista, California killed six in 2014. Mass murders committed by incels have brought incel subculture to mainstream attention, but killers like Rodger and Minassian are a rare, extreme manifestation of the broader incel phenomenon.

Incels are ‘involuntary celibates’ – men frustrated with their inability to find a sexual partner. Estimates on the size of the incel community vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The forum ‘r/incels’ on Reddit had 41,000 members when it was banned in November 2017 for violating the site’s rules on violent content.

Incel forums, like the website incel.me and the message board /r9k/ on 4chan, are awash with anonymous declarations of self-pity, self-loathing and, at times, a violent misogyny directed at the women deemed responsible for their loneliness. Behind a great deal of mindless chatter and ‘shitposting’ is a shared understanding of how they came to be despised by the opposite sex, alongside a bewildering array of slang terms to describe and explain the various states of ‘inceldom’.

According to the incels, there is a ruthless sexual hierarchy, and as ‘beta males’, they find themselves at the bottom. The foil to the incel is a ‘Chad’ – a confident, attractive man with multiple sexual partners, comprising usually attractive but supposedly shallow women, known as ‘Stacys’. Chads are envied and despised in equal measure. Then there are the ‘normies’ (normal people), hated for their herd-like mentality and mocked for their ignorance of incel culture. ‘Blackpilling’ refers to the acceptance that the traits you are born with mean you are destined to be romantically unsuccessful. The term is a play on the moral dilemma presented by the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which Neo is offered a blue pill to remain in a world of illusion and a red pill to see the world as it truly is – ‘redpilling’ is a central trope in online men’s rights’ activism, while blackpilling is the incel equivalent. Physical traits such as height, facial features or penis size (sometimes posted with accompanying pictures), are said to play a big role in the incels’ low status, while a large number of them also blame self-diagnosed mental-health problems, particularly autism-spectrum disorders.

But while many incels are open about their flaws, ultimately the blame is laid on the women who overlook them. Women are seen as effectively slaves to their biology, guided by so-called ‘hypergamy’: an attraction to higher-status men linked to evolutionary psychology. Some parts of the so-called manosphere – a loose constellation of male-dominated online subcultures, including men’s rights activists and pick-up artists – believe that evolutionary psychology can be used to a man’s advantage, that certain techniques can be deployed to overcome a lack of attractiveness and confidence to manipulate women into bed or into a relationship. Incels reject even this bleak view and insist that beta males accept their place in the social-pecking order.

Incel forums are awash with anonymous declarations of self-pity, self-loathing and, at times, violent misogyny

This belief in a rigid social hierarchy inevitably produces problems when it comes to race. ‘Ricecels’ (incels of Chinese and South East Asian origin) and ‘currycels’ (of South Asian descent) are often found posting photos of ‘proof’ of a theory called ‘JBW’, that in order for them to be successful with women they should ‘just be white’. Some white incels look upon black men with envy for their perceived sexual success, while a minority rail against any kind of ‘race mixing’ – even as a form of escape from inceldom.

In addition, incels speak of an ‘80:20 rule’ when it comes to sexual competition: the most attractive 20 per cent of men are said to be sought after by the most attractive 80 per cent of women, with the least attractive 80 per cent of men left to compete for the remaining 20 per cent of women. In previous eras, this situation would have supposedly been prevented by institutionalised monogamy. Some incels call explicitly for a return to a patriarchal society. Today’s world of relative sexual freedom, contraception, no-fault divorce and dating apps, on the other hand, is blamed for offering an abundance of opportunities for Chads and women, at the expense of incels.

Ultra-conservative calls for enforced monogamy may sound like they sit uneasily with a professed jealousy for the promiscuous lifestyle enjoyed by the Chads. But the incel relationship to sex is one of extreme ambivalence. A lack of sexual contact is seen, on the one hand, as the source of all life’s misery. On the other, it is central to the construction of incel identity. Forums are strictly policed in an attempt to root out ‘fakecels’ (fake incels), who are more sexually successful than they claim. ‘Bragging’ about relationships can lead to bans or having certain posting privileges revoked. This can be devastating to those who have invested such a great deal in this identity. Take 19-year-old Jack Peterson, one of the few incels to declare himself publicly to the media. Jack was banned from the forum incel.me after another user questioned his status as an incel, accusing him of bringing up a previous abusive relationship in order to brag about it. The Daily Beast reports that he spent three days straight (occasionally passing out) producing a 30-minute video and Powerpoint presentation that outlines in extensive detail why he believes he is sufficiently ugly and sufficiently mentally ill to still be considered an incel.

Angela Nagle argues in her book Kill All Normies that several of the bizarre online subcultures, from the manosphere to the alt-right, developed in tandem with, and are defined in opposition to, the extremities of the identitarian left. This is clearly the case with incels, where the currency found in unattractiveness on incel forums finds its parallel in the so-called ‘oppression olympics’ of identity politics, where a sense of identity and social status are tied inexorably to victimhood. In the incel world, many seem to revel in their repulsiveness – not only in their frequent use of foul language and imagery, but also in their choice of profile pictures. As most users post anonymously, their avatars might feature anything from other ugly men to frogs, aliens and Hitler.

When the media attempts to account for the incel phenomenon, they rely heavily on the trope of toxic masculinity. It is true that the incels exhibit a great sense of what might be called ‘male entitlement’, to women and to sex, and that they openly lament the passing of a male-dominated world. But far from upholding masculine values like stoicism and self-reliance, the incel subculture is imbued with today’s therapeutic sensibility. Far from being buttoned-up and unwilling to discuss their feelings like the masculine men of old, incels are spilling out their deepest, darkest thoughts and frustrations to strangers. Elliot Rodger spent 14 of his 22 years visiting multiple therapists and wrote a 114-page manifesto detailing his feelings of rejection before going on his killing spree. Plus, it is not only incels like Jack who talk up the poor state of their mental health online to gain the approval of their peers. Teenagers today regularly take to Twitter or Instagram to post about a litany of often self-diagnosed disorders.

Although the incels’ own explanations for their plight border on the absurd, can the emergence of incels be traced to real-world shifts? Research by the UCL Institute of Education suggests that one in eight 26-year-olds in Britain have yet to lose their virginity, up from one in 20 at the same age a generation ago. According to Ipsos MORI, 32 per cent of US millennials (born 1980-1995) are abstinent compared with 19 per cent of Generation X (born 1966-1979). What is more, its polling shows, paradoxically, that the proportion of millennials engaged in promiscuous sex is also higher than previous generations.

Many incels seem to revel in their repulsiveness

Concerned with this mismatch, economist Robin Hanson has proposed redistributing sex, just as the welfare state redistributes income. ‘Those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organising around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis.’ Some denounced the idea as effectively a ‘right to rape’ or dismissed Hanson as creepy. Ross Douthat in the New York Times and Toby Young in the Spectator both say that we will have to redistribute sex eventually and that sex robots might offer a partial answer.

But clearly there have always been lonely, loveless men in society. What these debates miss is that the growth of the incel subculture is a product not just of young men not having sex, but of a society which has no agreed-upon cultural script when it comes to sex. The sexual revolution liberated a generation from religious attitudes and superstitious understandings of sex. But now that the sexual revolution is fading from view, there are few robust defenders of sex as a fun and guilt-free source of pleasure today. Ross Douthat writes that ‘culture’s dominant message about sex is essentially Hefnerian’ and promotes ‘frequency and variety in sexual experience’, but this misses key developments of recent years.

While it is unlikely that most ordinary people believe we live in a ‘rape culture’, this idea is nevertheless accepted and promoted by many educational institutions. In the UK, consent classes have been proposed not just for university students, but also school children and even MPs. While older millennials may have escaped them, their schooling still delivered grave warnings not only of unwanted pregnancies and STIs, but also of the emotional dangers of casual sex. The #MeToo movement has led to people being punished as sexual deviants for knee-touching and telling racy jokes. That is not to say that young people are now terrified of sex, or even that they buy into what they learn about sex from school or the media. Rather, it is that mainstream society offers no coherent or compelling understanding of sex and sexuality. Cultural norms are in flux and this produces a great deal of confusion. How else would 28 per cent of young women come to believe that winking ‘usually or always’ constitutes sexual harassment, compared with just six per cent of over-55s? How else can we account for the absurdity of mutually non-consensual sex? In the absence of a coherent mainstream, the incels’ bizarre world of Chads, Stacys, blackpilling and 80:20 rules seems to fill that void for some lonely young men. Just as many young feminists can relate their beliefs to the all-encompassing theory of rape culture, being ‘blackpilled’ provides a framework through which the incel can make sense of their place in a confusing sexual landscape.

The growth of the incel subculture is a product of a society that has no agreed-upon cultural script when it comes to sex

Then there’s the question of masculinity. While it is overblown to say there is a ‘crisis of masculinity’ – talk of such a crisis has been ongoing since the mid-1980s – clearly this is another area where the modern world offers little more than confusion. For Jack Peterson, incel forums offer respite from society’s contradictory messages to ‘both “man up” and renounce your masculinity… it is like the one bright light you see is this community’. The explosion of popularity in clinical psychologist turned YouTube self-help guru Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) seems to confirm that the need to fill that void goes much deeper than the incels. His 12 Rules For Life is an international bestseller and he sells out arenas, preaching ‘masculine’ virtues. Peterson sets out to counter the ‘lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward’ for young people, particularly young men, who make up 90 per cent of his audience.

Overall, as strange, repulsive and extreme as the incel subculture appears, it is far from alien. Its absurd narrative of sexual politics is seized upon by misguided, alienated young men struggling to make sense of the adult world while the norms of masculinity and sexuality are in constant flux. Ironically, it channels a great deal of the excesses of the West’s therapeutic culture, identity politics and the fetishisation of victimhood – the very things that came to take the place of the old world that the incels claim to pine for.

SOURCE






Kentucky Defies Leftists & Atheists, Brings the Bible Back to Schools

The state of Kentucky just defied those who want every remnant of the Christian faith to be removed from public schools.

In a ceremony last week, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin signed a bill that allows public schools in the state to teach the Bible, WDBP reported.

“The idea that we would not want this to be an option for people in school, that would be crazy,” Bevin said at the ceremony. “I don’t know why every state would not embrace this, why we as a nation would not embrace this.”

The new classes would be electives, not requirements, CNN reported.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. D.J. Johnson, pointed out what many Americans already know to be true — that the Bible is foundational to the American founding and a reliance on God is vital for our nation to flourish.

After all, the freedom and religious liberties we enjoy are based on the knowledge our Founding Fathers had that our rights and value as human beings come from God, not the government.

“It really did set the foundation that our founding fathers used to develop documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights,” said Rep. Johnson. “All of those came from principles from the Bible.”

Unsurprisingly, there are a few unhappy individuals over the new law. “The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky told CNN affiliate WDRB it will be closely monitoring how the law is used by school boards,” CNN reported.

“A Bible literacy bill that, on its face, may not appear to be unconstitutional, could in fact become unconstitutional in its implementation,” ACLU Advocacy Director Kate Miller said. “We want to make sure that teachers can teach and make sure that they don’t go in to preach,” Miller added.

But Gov. Bevin pointed out that religious people shouldn’t be the only ones who think the law is a good idea. “You could be an atheist, and you would appreciate there’s a lot of wisdom in the Bible,” he said.

According to The Daily Caller, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Alabama have also been pushing for religion to remain in the classrooms of public schools.

The state of Kentucky has taken a bold stand for the Bible — hopefully, it encourages others to do the same.

SOURCE
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/kentucky-defies-leftists-atheists-brings-the-bible-back-to-schools/






Terry Gilliam on diversity: 'I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian'

Terry Gilliam has responded to the BBC diversity debate which referenced Monty Python by saying: “I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian.”

Gilliam was commenting on the row over diversity triggered by the BBC’s unveiling of its new comedy programming, announced in June, at which the BBC’s controller of comedy commissioning Shane Allen emphasised the corporation’s commitment to “the stories that haven’t been told and the voices we haven’t yet heard”. In response to a question about Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Allen said: “If you’re going to assemble a team now, it’s not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes. It’s going to be a diverse range of people who reflect the modern world.”

Speaking at a press conference at the Karlovy Vary film festival, where he was presenting his new film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam said: “It made me cry: the idea that ... no longer six white Oxbridge men can make a comedy show. Now we need one of this, one of that, everybody represented... this is bullshit. I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian... My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.”

He added: “[Allen’s] statement made me so angry, all of us so angry. Comedy is not assembled, it’s not like putting together a boy band where you put together one of this, one of that everyone is represented.”

Gilliam follows fellow Python member John Cleese’s angry response to Allen’s comment, who tweeted: “Unfair! We were remarkably diverse FOR OUR TIME ... We had three grammar-school boys, one a poof, and Gilliam, though not actually black, was a Yank. And NO slave-owners.”

Gilliam has previously attracted controversy for his comments on the MeToo campaign, likening it to “mob rule” and saying: “ It’s crazy how simplified things are becoming.”

SOURCE







Minister in fresh push for freedom of religion in Australia

Social Services Minister Dan Tehan has called for a religious discrimination act to provide greater protections to people of faith, in a move that raises the stakes for the Turnbull government as it responds to a key ­review of religious freedoms.

Delivering the St Thomas More lecture in Canberra last month, Mr Tehan said the “creeping encroachment from the state on religious belief” was a key issue, given new conflicts in the areas of euthanasia, same-sex marriage and the sanctity of the confessional.

However, he identified the main threat to religious freedom as the growing influence of ­empowered minorities that used political correctness as a weapon against traditional beliefs and ­customs.

The address, being made public today, represents a rallying cry for Coalition MPs who ­expect Malcolm Turnbull to deliver a substantive response to the ­review of religious freedoms led by former attorney-general Philip Ruddock following the same-sex marriage victory last year.

Mr Tehan, who describes himself as a “far-from-perfect Catholic”, said all Australians of faith should “take a stand” and “strongly defend our rights and responsibilities to take part in ­debates of national significance”.

His proposal for a new ­religious discrimination act offers a path for the Turnbull government to legislate at a federal level to address concerns that ­religion is being driven from the public square. Citing John Howard — a leading advocate for traditional marriage — Mr Tehan warned against the rise of “minority fundamentalism”, which the former prime minister has called “the ­assumption that traditional beliefs and practices represent an ­attack on those who do not support them”.

“Australia has reached an ­unusual point where the tools of oppression — sowing the seeds of division, conquest, manipulation and cultural division — are being wielded by the minority against the majority,” Mr Tehan said.

“We have not realised Martin Luther King’s dream of a society where you are judged by the content of your character, not the colour of your skin. Instead we have woken up to a nightmare where the value of your contribution to a debate depends on what you claim to be a victim of.”

Mr Tehan pointed to the push to sack Australian rugby union star Israel Folau over his social media posts on homosexuality and the boycott on Coopers Brewery products after it sponsored a debate between both sides of the same-sex marriage debate.

“In a liberal democracy, people must have the freedom to air unpopular views, including those ­informed by their faith, and those views must be open to challenge,” Mr Tehan said. “My observation, however, is that there is more disrespect directed at people who share their faith publicly and that is to the detriment of us all.”

There is frustration in ­Coalition ranks at Mr Turnbull’s ­decision to facilitate the passage of a same-sex marriage bill through parliament last year without a series of protections proposed in a set of amendments.

Promoted by a range of senior MPs, including Scott Morrison, Michael Sukkar and Andrew Hastie, the amendments were supported by a majority of Coalition MPs but defeated on the floor of parliament with Labor opposition.

Liberal senator James Paterson, a supporter of same-sex marriage who advocated for greater protections for religious freedoms, yesterday told The Australian it was important for the government to deliver a meaningful response to the Ruddock review.

“The Ruddock review provides the government with a unique ­opportunity to secure the freedoms of Australians with faith,” Senator Paterson said. “We all ­deserve the equal right to live our lives ­according to our values, free from state coercion.”

There is concern within the ­Coalition that a weak ­response to the Ruddock review could reopen an ideological divide within the government and allow Labor a chance to steal the initiative, given that it holds nine of the western Sydney seats that voted against change in last year’s plebiscite. One Liberal MP said: “The time for action is now. We need to protect conscience and ­religious faith because Labor and the Greens won’t.”

The Ruddock review was ­delivered to the government in May after receiving thousands of submissions. It is unlikely the review or the government response will be released until after the July 28 Super Saturday by-elections.

Mr Tehan bolstered his case for a new religious discrimination act by relying on census data to throw forward to an Australia where people of faith had become a minority with only limited legal protections in the form of ad-hoc exemptions to anti-discrimination laws. He warned the trend towards atheism in the 2016 census was “especially stark” among those aged 18 to 34, with 39 per cent saying they had “no religion” — more than three times the number who identified as Christian. “If this trend continues — and there is no reason to believe it won’t — then one day in the ­future the Australians who are part of any religion will become a minority,” Mr Tehan said.

“In preparation for that day, we need to consider how we will defend religious rights in this country from political correctness.”

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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