Tuesday, March 31, 2009

 

Cowardly British police kill three people

In the name of Britain's notorious "health & safety" rules. There are a lot of males in the British police force but not many men

Police held back would-be rescuers as three people died in a house fire, angry neighbours said last night. They said they could see heavily-pregnant Michelle Colley at an upstairs window, screaming 'please save my kids'. But police said they had to wait for firemen to arrive. By then, however, Mrs Colley, 25, her husband Mark, 29, and their three-year-old son Louis were dead. Their daughter Sophie, five, is fighting for her life in hospital.

Family friend David Davis, 38, said: 'It was the most harrowing thing I have ever seen. 'Michelle was at the bedroom window and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. 'We were willing to risk our own lives to save those children but the police just wouldn't let us - and there was no way they were going to try themselves. 'Tempers were running high but the police were saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety rules.' He added: 'When a family is burning to death in front of your eyes, rules should go out of the window - especially when children are involved.' Neil Cotterill said he heard another neighbour shouting for people to bring ladders. 'We could have helped,' he said.

The fire broke out shortly after midnight on the ground floor of the family's three-bedroom terraced home in Highfields, near Doncaster. Mrs Colley, who was expecting her third child in a fortnight, and her husband had spent a quiet evening at home before going to bed. They were woken by the fire and a 999 call was made at 12.26am. Police were the first to arrive.

Mr Davis said: 'There were four or five officers. We heard the sirens and went across to help but they wouldn't let us. 'I thought the police were there to protect lives. Years ago they would have gone inside themselves to try a rescue. But all they seemed bothered about was health and safety rules. 'It's unbelievable that it could happen like that. Everybody wanted to try and help. You can't have respect for police if they have no respect for other people's lives. It might have been different if it was one of their own. 'Mark and Michelle were a great couple. A real family - they loved their kids and the kids were smashing.'

Another witness said some friends and neighbours ignored the police warnings and tried to reach the family with ladders and a hosepipe. But again the police intervened and stopped them. Chris Richardson, 37, said: 'It was shocking. I couldn't believe the police were acting like that. 'One woman climbed over the garden fence and went to the house but there was a policeman at the back who stopped her.'

Firemen using breathing apparatus-found Mr Colley, a DIY store supervisor, in the master bedroom with his wife. Sophie was in another bedroom and Louis on the landing. Witnesses said police arrived 'several minutes' before firemen but South Yorkshire police refused to give the exact time, citing 'data protection' rules.

Detective Superintendent Peter McGuinness said: 'I would like to commend our officers. The Fire Brigade were only minutes away [How many minutes? Odd that they won't say. Minutes matter in a fire] but our officers were faced with a raging fire. They handled the incident as professionally as we would expect and then worked long into the night.' Experts said the blaze was not suspicious.

SOURCE



Love That Hate!

By Paul Kengor

"We must teach our children to hate," Vladimir Lenin instructed his education commissars. The Bolshevik godfather declared that hatred was not only "the basis of communism" but "the basis of every socialist and Communist movement."

Class envy has been a defining staple of the left for centuries, from the frenzied mobs leaping around the French guillotines to the Soviets to, well, the new masses circling AIG executives today. The difference is merely the degree of response -- a question of socially acceptable force or violence.

Historically, this behavior is both foreign and antithetical to the American experience. Unfortunately, modern Americans don't understand their founding and the nation's core principles -- our educational system doesn't teach those things. Thus, they are now voting, and behaving, in kind. And we are now witnessing our own homegrown socialist movement in action, inspired by hate. Some Americans, whipped into poisonous hatred by their elected representatives, have literally called for death for AIG executives, and one U.S. senator openly requested that these businesspeople commit suicide.

Liberals in Congress, from Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Chris Dodd, plus a wild gaggle of unleashed central planners in the House, have conducted a show trial of AIG executives, with the larger purpose of placing American free enterprise in the dock. The interrogation by this anointed body made me think of the old Soviet "Extraordinary Commission," the operation of which was explained by its awful head, the Latvian M. Y. Latsis:

In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation. These questions define the fate of the accused.

Latsis characterized his commission as a tribunal acting on the home front against the capitalist class.

Liberals -- if they'd ever heard of Latsis, which they probably haven't in their universities -- might ridicule the extremism of my analogy. After all, they aren't talking about "eliminating the bourgeoisie as a class," as did Latsis. Fair enough. But, again, it's a matter of degree. Certainly, the acceptable demonization of an identified, despised class, for the purpose of working the masses into a rush of rage for political exploitation, is not terribly different. As members of Congress target the likes of AIG chief executive Edward Liddy, mobs target the homes of AIG employees in Connecticut.

Of course, our sophisticated members of Congress separate themselves from the fray by choosing a non-violent but, ironically, somewhat Bolshevik-like response: they confiscate AIG pay ("bonuses") at a flat, full tax rate of 90%.

Will this financial penalty satiate the mob's bloodlust? No. That's the problem when deadly sin -- envy -- becomes government demagoguery and policy. The torch-carriers spill into the streets to take "social justice" into their own hands. A case in point is a remarkable New York Times article, titled, "Scorn Trails AIG Executives, Even in Their Driveways." Though frightening, the piece is not surprising. It begins with AIG executive James Haas trying to make his way into his home in Fairfield, Connecticut -- a "bay-windowed house," as the Times described it. "I feel horrible," said Haas, "this has been a complete invasion of privacy."

But Haas's tormentors do not respect things private. They seek to expropriate the private. "You have to understand," pleaded Haas, fighting back tears, "there are kids involved, there have been death threats." Haas explained how he had offered political penance -- to pay reparation: "I didn't have anything to do with those credit problems. I told Mr. Liddy I would rescind my retention contract.... Leave my neighbors alone."

The neighbors, however, are fit to be tied. They want a body. The Times quoted a loving New England resident who for 24 years lived down the block. Driving by, dripping with rage, surely after watching the morning news shows, she practically spit as she fulminated against AIG bonuses - which are a microscopic sliver compared to the trillions of dollars in debt Obama and the Democrats have racked up in only eight weeks. "It makes me absolutely sick," scowled the neighbor, in reference to AIG, not the federal government. "It's despicable. It's disgusting what these people have done. They should be forced to give every cent back." AIG workers are being demonized, noted the Times; they are hiring bodyguards. And it isn't only AIG. Merrill Lynch is dealing with similar assaults.

And that's just the start. It's only a matter of public exposure until another group of private-sector "reptiles" -- Lenin's word -- is identified for the proletariat. Congress and the White House will be happy to call out the next group of kulaks.

Alas, among the eager comrades joining this effort -- and, predictably, not investigated by the liberal media camped outside AIG homes -- are the ringleaders behind the packs of protestors across the country, including those carted around in "bus tours" of AIG executives' homes. These alleged unprompted uprisings of "the people" are, of course, hardly spontaneous. They are organized, particularly by the odious Service Employees International Union.

Personally, I knew where to follow the footsteps. I went to the website of People's Weekly World, an organ of Communist Party USA. There, among the articles praising Obama's "mandate for change," praising the "Employee Free Choice Act," and so forth, was an article titled, "Angry about AIG? Here's how you can do something about it." The CPUSA article emphasized that "President Obama calls AIG's behavior an ‘outrage.'" "But what can [you] do about it?" asked the communists. Well, "if you're angry," you can join the "March 19 Day of Action Against Corporate Excess." CPUSA then linked to a "complete list of cities and events." "Don't see your city on there yet?" carefully guided the article. "Sign up to organize your own Take Back the Economy rally -- all the materials you need are available through the site." Indeed, they were: PDF's of fliers and all kinds of things.

Following the links, one ends up at the sponsors for the Day of Action. Topping the list, naturally, is ACORN, the training ground for the current President of the United States and leader of the free world. Joining Obama's alma mater is SEIU, MoveOn.org, the National Lawyers Guild, the Mass Nurses Association, and other usual suspects.

Dependably, the useful idiots of the Religious Left were there: Interfaith Worker Justice, United for Peace and Justice, Catholics United, American Friends Service Committee, Brockton Interfaith, Catholic Scholars for Social Justice, Mass Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, New England Jewish Labor Committee, and other fellow travelers.

But most significant, the greatest dupes of all -- the liberal media -- are relied upon as the ultimate sucker: The ringleaders count on the press to report the tiniest protest; they understand that the mainstream media is educator-in-chief to most Americans. From there, the likes of James Haas's Connecticut neighbor learn how to feel about the Haas family's bay windows. That's the process. Thus, the mob.

Well, the mob wants someone's head on a platter -- now. Time to eat the rich. Perhaps our dear leader, President Obama, can go to Connecticut to play the role of healer, addressing the faithful, calming their fears, a political sermon on the mount. Blessed would be the peacemaker. But not yet -- for now, this hate is just too excellent, too perfect for advancing the agenda of the leftist ideologues and envy-mongers running the republic.

Who's to blame? The American people are to blame. I'm tired of the populist nonsense from talk-radio on how Americans "deserve better than this." They do? Why? They voted for this. Obama is being Obama. Pelosi is being Pelosi. Schumer is being Schumer. The American people cast the ballots. You reap what you sow. Enjoy the hate, America. You elected it.

SOURCE



Waltz with Sisyphus: Israel's impossible propaganda war

Israel's supporters mostly agree that the country has an image problem. To solve it, they look to ways of improving hasbara. The telling Hebrew expression literally means "explanation," and its ideal is the revelation of the nation's dreams and pain to the world. Its creed might be rendered "the better we are known, the more we will be understood and supported."

As domestic news coverage of Operation Cast Lead made clear, hasbara philosophy has deep roots. During the operation, the public was subjected to endless footage of frightened women and children in the South. It reminded the public why it was at war. The Israeli people doesn't like to make sacrifices based on long-term necessity or cold calculation. When it reluctantly gives battle, it prefers to be in dire straits. And for many, the suffering face of the South explained the much greater suffering of the Palestinians.

In large part, the foreign hasbara effort relied on the same formula, focusing on making the South's face known. Especially in Europe, the explanation was dismissed as "disproportional."

Israel might have chosen instead to spend more words on Hamas's intractability and its genocidal philosophy. The goals of the war might have been more clearly stated, or Iranian ambitions in Gaza exposed. But Israel explained the war to the world the same way it explained it to itself, in terms of its own immediate suffering. It demanded direct empathy from people, asking, "How would you react?"

ISRAEL'S IMPULSIVENESS, its sensitivities and its unique moral symbolism run deep. For many, the face of captive Gilad Schalit explains the need to release hundreds of terrorists from jail. To understand the phenomenon, one must certainly understand the country's specific character. But it is another thing entirely to expect the rest of the world to share it.

The film Waltz with Bashir, like Beaufort before it, is an Oscar-nominated antiwar film with a documentary feel. Its animated sequences recount the stories of several aging veterans of the First Lebanon War. They suffer flashbacks from their experiences and try to come to terms with their moral wounds. As the film progresses, a universal message of the senselessness of war is interwoven with direct and specific attacks on politicians and generals, and the IDF's culpability for the Sabra and Shatila massacres is strongly implied.

The film's director, Ari Folman, revealingly commented that his work was not geared specifically toward Israelis. He also admitted that two government funds had paid for the film to represent Israel at international film festivals, adding, "I think that they think that the film does good propaganda in the sense that it shows Israel is a very tolerant country that can deal with issues of the past that are hidden in many ways."

Nor were the government and Folman the only ones to think so. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, whose conviction of the country's essential wickedness is unassailable, criticized it on the same grounds. "It is an act of fraud and deceit, intended to allow us to pat ourselves on the back, to tell us and the world how lovely we are," he wrote.

The expression "we shoot and weep," ridiculed by Levy, describes the moral pride of middle Israel forced into war. Waltz with Bashir is a beautifully choreographed pageant of shooting and weeping, with perhaps more weeping than shooting. Political messages aside, the film shows the very human face of IDF soldiers sent to war. It explains. The one thing it is not does not explain, however, is the justice and necessity of Israel's ways. This hardly makes for successful propaganda.

ISRAEL'S CASE for existing is strong. It is not evident that its moral tears, however genuine, make that case stronger in the eyes of the world. Its self-doubts, encouraged by world condemnation, only remind the West of its own self-doubts and historical episodes it has chosen to reject. Direct empathy and identification, as terrorists and insurgents around the world have learned, is the longest path to the heart of the West.

Outside of America, few Western nations identify with Israel. For them, to be Western is above all to be charged with not inflicting suffering. Israel shares the West's repulsion with suffering. Perhaps it thinks for this reason that its tears will win sympathy. In fact, they encourage its enemies and confuse its supporters. The bitter truth is that hasbara is not propaganda at all, so much as a moral need particular to the Israeli psyche. And Israel's need to be known, warts and all, does not convince Westerners of justice of its cause.

In many laudable ways Israel tries to be a light unto the nations. They can all be accomplished in the absence of unlimited self-revelation.

SOURCE



Australia: Melbourne Catholic Church embraces testing to ID gay priests

THE Melbourne Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican recommendation to test potential priests for sexual orientation. Under the guidelines, potential priests who "appear" to be gay must be banned. The head of the Vatican committee that made the recommendations has made it clear celibate gays should also be banned because homosexuality is ‘‘a type of deviation’’.

Archdiocese of Melbourne spokesman James O’Farrell confirmed Carlton’s Corpus Christi Catholic seminary had started adhering to the guidelines, but refused to comment further.

Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby spokeswoman Hayley Conway said the church was sending a ‘‘dangerous and offensive’’ message about sexuality. ‘‘They seem to be moving backwards in a lot of ways which is really unfortunate . . . especially for those who are Catholic and out, and there are a lot of them already struggling,’’ she said. ‘‘If the plan is to root out pedophilia or child molestation, targeting people with homosexual tendencies isn’t the way to go about it.’’

Outspoken Catholic priest Father Bob Maguire said the document ‘‘flies in the face of secular society’s sense of fairness and justice’’. ‘‘The point is not to what gender you are attracted, but how you manage that attraction,’’ he said. [Since it seems to have been badly managed in the past, surely it is best not to have that problem in the first place. Frustrated homosexual would-be priests could easily become Anglicans, where they would find many "friends" and plenty of gorgeous eucharistic services, complete with bells, smells and elaborate vestments]

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:15

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Monday, March 30, 2009

 

Some Leftist history

The Leftist view of the world is driven by their emotional needs rather than by reality so history is very unkind to their simplistic theories. They know that and normally avoid history like the plague, even when conservatives try to shove it down their throats. Sometimes however they get themselves into a position where they have to say something about history, so, on such occasions, they pick out a few bits and pieces and distort them. They NEVER tell the whole story. That great hater, Ward "Eichmann" Churchill, gives us an excellent example of that below

We've received, via one of our jackbooted thugs, a copy of Professor Ward Churchill's recent Works & Days article "The Myth of Academic Freedom: Experiencing the Application of Liberal Principle in a Neoconservative Era" (published a few scant weeks before Teh Trial began). It is as chockful o'facts as we've come to expect of any Churchill screed, provided that—in this PoMo world—zero still equals zero. We're reading it over the weekend, and we'll post our impressions as time and industry (or our lack of same) permit.

We note right off that in the section "On Matters of Historical Interpretation" Churchill makes his usual flight into fabulism with yet another iteration of his intentional smallpox infection story. He says, for instance, that in 1837

"[Charles Larpenteur] exposed a group of forty Assiniboins [sic] to a child in the most highly contagious stage of the disease, them told them to flee back to their home village(s)"

and cites in the accompanying footnote Larpenteur's own Forty Years A Fur Trader as part of his documentation (his other source is the two-volume A History of the American Fur Trade in the Far West by Hiram Martin Chittenden—which, incidentally, Churchill consistently misspells as Chittendon). Unfortunately for Churchill, the text of Forty Years is available on the Internet, and the relevant passage reads thus:

While the epidemic was at its height a party of about 40 Indians came in, not exactly on a trade, but more on a begging visit, under the celebrated old chief Co-han; and the word was, "Hurry up! Open the door!" which had been locked for many days, to keep the crazy folks in.

Nothing else would do we must open the door; but on showing him a little boy who had not recovered, and whose face was still one solid scab, by holding him above the pickets, the Indians finally concluded to leave. Not long afterward we learned that more than one-half of the party had died some said all of them.

Clearly, Churchill would have the reader believe Larpenteur's actions were consciously malicious toward the Indians, while the text is far less self-accusatory. More importantly, the immediately preceding sentences give the reader a very different perspective on the incident:

"[...] for immediately on the landing of the [steamer] we learned that smallpox was on board. Mr. J. Halsey, the gentleman who was to take charge this summer, had the disease, of which several of the hands had died; but it had subsided, and this was the only case on board. Our only apprehensions were that the disease might spread among the Indians, for Mr. Halsey had been vaccinated, and soon recovered. Prompt measures were adopted to prevent an epidemic. As we had no vaccine matter we decided to inoculate with the smallpox itself; and after the systems of those who were to be inoculated had been prepared according to Dr. Thomas' medical book, the operation was performed upon about 30 Indian squaws and a few white men. This was done with the view to have it all over and everything cleaned up before any Indians should come in, on their fall trade, which commenced early in September. The smallpox matter should have been taken from a very healthy person; but, unfortunately, Mr. Halsey was not sound, and the operation proved fatal to most of our patients. About 15 days afterward there was such a stench in the fort that it could be smelt at the distance of 300 yards. It was awful the scene in the fort, where some went crazy, and others were half eaten up by maggots before they died; yet, singular to say, not a single bad expression was ever uttered by a sick Indian. Many died, and those who recovered were so much disfigured that one could scarcely recognize them."

That Larpenteur was not only not maliciously intent on infecting Indians with smallpox, but rather, was trying desperately to save them (even observing in admiration their courage in the face of certain death), Churchill does not note in his "history," probably because it interferes with--the uncharitable might say baldly contradicts--his narrative. Count us among the uncharitable.

Churchill notes that Larpenteur was a fur company employee who filled in as post surgeon at Fort Union "while Denig was recovering from a very mild case of the pox" and cites Barton H. Barbour's Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade as the source for this assertion, but Barbour himself only notes that Denig "was stricken with an unidentified violent fever, probably a mild case of the disease."

By the way: Larpenteur's account (being, as it is, one told by someone who was there and completely involved in the events) offers what we'd call pretty substantial proof that the smallpox epidemic started with the infected white trader, Mr. J. Halsey. One would think that to contradict such a straightforward recounting of events as witnessed by a participant with a tale of malicious and intentional infliction of smallpox by the US Army would require at least a similarly first-person account of same. One, of course, would be wrong. Churchill need offer no such proof. He is, after all, Ward Churchill.

More HERE



Conservative Black Group Challenges Liberal Urban League's "State of Black America 2009" Report

"Harmful Recommendations," "Dreary" Tone Among Criticisms

This year's edition of the liberal National Urban League's annual State of Black America report fails to effectively challenge the Obama Administration, is unnecessarily dreary and makes recommendations that would be harmful, say members of the conservative Project 21 black leadership group.

"It is long past time that groups such the National Urban League should be given a pass as they blame poor personal decisions, lack of personal preparation and the realities of life on a phantom bogeyman of conspiratorial dictates designed to impede black progress," said Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie. "If they are going to point fingers, they should not exclude pointing fingers at themselves. They cannot claim 100 years of making a difference in the lives of blacks while simultaneously claiming that blacks aren't succeeding as quickly as every other group of Americans."

This year's National Urban League report, like past reports, dwells on negatives. National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial, for instance, says, "The election of the first black president does not mean we can all now close up shop and go home." This echoes Morial's predecessor, John E. Jacobs, who wrote in the 1993 edition that black Americans were faced with "bleak despair countered by fresh hope" upon the change of presidential administrations.

Among essays by entrepreneur and publisher Earl Graves, Jr. and scandal-plagued U.S. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), the report makes specific recommendations on policies pertaining to education, health care, homeownership and employment, among others. Some of these recommendations, as categorized in the National Urban League report's executive summary, are constructively challenged by Project 21 members.

In the area of health care, the National Urban League recommends government-run universal coverage. As Project 21's Massie points out, this sort of health care has failed abroad and would fail in America as well.

"Do we need the people who run the DMV in charge of the emergency room? That's what you get with government-run health care," said Massie. "Creating a new health care bureaucracy would stifle innovation and limit choice."

"If you want an example of what may happen, look no further than the 'Urban Health Initiative' created by now-First Lady Michelle Obama and Obama political guru David Alexrod at the University of Chicago," noted Massie. "Their plan seeks to divert residents away for the university's elite hospital to county hospitals and clinics. This shocking plan is now being reconsidered after the Chicago Tribune reported that Dontae Adams, a 12-year-old dog bite victim, was given only a shot and some painkillers at the university hospital. He was told to seek follow-up treatment the next week at a county hospital. His mother immediately took him to another hospital on a bus for reconstructive facial surgery that same day."

Massie added: "What happened to Dontae might be a common occurrence for all under government-run health care. What Americans need are more choices and the ability to make their own decisions when it comes to their medical needs. That's what the NUL should be asking for."

Regarding homeownership, the NUL report suggests funding educational initiatives and credit counseling, something that might find them at odds with some activist groups of which they are usually allied that have opposed such programs in the past as akin to "redlining" because they might target certain areas and populations.

But NUL also supports an expanded Community Reinvestment Act - the regulation that mandates risky mortgage lending situations and is blamed by many as the catalyst for the subprime mortgage crisis.

Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli said: "Government aid and intervention should not replace an individual's responsibility to exercise good judgment. Achieving the American Dream of homeownership begins with understanding the terms of the contract and meeting those obligations. Expanding the Community Reinvestment Act risks inflating another housing bubble that would further hinder our country's economic recovery. For the National Urban League to encourage more risky loans at this point is reckless."

On education, the NUL suggests retaining the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind" standards policy, but does not adequately speak out in favor of popular school choice and charter school programs that explicitly spotlight and seek to remedy failing government-run schools by denying them a captive student body. NUL suggestions still look to government as the best administrator of education despite its poor track record.

"The status quo on education has not worked and it never will work," said Project 21 member Kevin Martin. "While the National Urban League is focused on what the government can do, they are not speaking out enough about what parents can do. Education is the civil rights issue of our time, and vouchers, charter schools and similar alternatives to the failed government approach need to be encouraged."

Overall, Project 21's Martin noted: "The black community does not need to be protected from capitalism, as the National Urban League's report seems to imply. The black community needs to embrace capitalism. The free market is where true opportunity lies."

The above is a press release from Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research. For more information, contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or project21@nationalcenter.org



Britain's Leftist government has emasculated the police

Police efforts to deal with anti-social behaviour are being crippled by Government diktats, a hard-hitting report by ‘Robocop’ Ray Mallon has found. Mr Mallon, who became famous for his zero-tolerance policing as a Detective Superintendent in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, warns that officers are in the grip of an ‘arrest or ignore’ culture. He warned that police priorities have become distorted, leading to a collapse in public confidence.

Mr Mallon, who is now Mayor of Middlesbrough, makes his claims in a report released tomorrow by the Centre for Social Justice, a think tank set up by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.

In an article for Mail Online today (below), Mr Mallon says that officers’ discretion has been removed by strict operational guidance from the Home Office and a need to hit arrest targets, while the real problems of anti-social behaviour are not being tackled. It means officers have to make a snap decision to either arrest a suspect or let them go instead of giving them an old-fashioned clip round the ear and a stiff talking-to.

He quotes one policeman as saying: ‘Prisons are full, detections are up, but go to any High Street in the country and ask anyone: do you feel safer? The answer is a resounding no.’ He adds: ‘Over the last ten years, policing has become far too complicated and needs to be made simple again. More and more, the police find their actions constrained by tight Government prescription, set down in complex action plans, performance indicators and targets.’

Mr Mallon’s report coincides with a drive by the Conservatives to toughen up the party’s law and order policies. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling says the Tories would introduce a number of measures to combat anti-social behaviour, including allowing the police to ‘ground’ children who cause trouble.

Research carried out for the report found that more than three-quarters of people did not think there were enough police on the streets or that they were doing enough to combat anti-social behaviour.

Taking Back the Streets

By Ray Mallon

Over 28 years as a career police officer and now as an elected mayor, I have seen how important it is for police to challenge unacceptable behaviour on the streets. When I talk to the public I find it isn¹t the fear of burglary that worries them but what might happen on their way home from work. It¹s when they have to cross the road to avoid a crowd of violent yobs or when they wait at home concerned because someone they love is late back from the bus.

That's when their heart rate rises and the fear of their streets sets in. This is the essence of what policing should be about. For that rising heartbeat is the fear of crime.

Despite the Home Office saying year after year that crime is going down, two out of three people think it has gone up. As one police officer told us: 'Prisons are full, detections are up but go to any high street in the country and ask anyone: 'Do you feel safer?' The answer is a resounding 'No'.' The public just don't trust crime statistics that tell them they are safer now than ever because that isn't their experience in the street.

It was because of my concerns about what has been happening to the police that when Iain Duncan Smith at the Centre for Social Justice asked me to help by getting to the heart of what's gone wrong with policing, I agreed. We started by commissioning national polling which told us what any Government should already know. Eighty-five per cent of people said that there are not enough police on the streets.

Seventy-two per cent of people said that it is unacceptable for police officers on duty, not to intervene when they see a crime. and seventy-six per cent said that the police don't deal with antisocial behaviour.

These are worrying numbers which show the public have become dissatisfied, losing their faith in a once proud force. Is it any surprise they feel like that, when police officers spend less than a fifth of their time on street patrol – that's under seven hours a week for a full-time police officer.

They patrol in pairs and in cars, making them half as visible and stopping them from interacting with the public. In the end, only one per cent of an officer's time is spent on foot patrol. How can the police intervene, if they aren't even on the streets? The public want a Force to police the streets. Instead, we have been de-policing them.

This is because over the last ten years, policing has become far too complicated and needs to be made simple again. More and more, the police find their actions constrained by tight government prescription, set down in complex action plans, performance indicators and targets.

During the course of this report, my team and I met so many officers who felt they were being forced to police in a straight jacket, unable to use their discretion. They knew that without the ability to use discretion, when on patrol, they couldn't provide a proper service to the public.

Discretion allows officers to judge when to make an arrest and when to use an informal approach. The public will judge the officer's intervention not by whether it achieves some government target but by whether it makes their street a better and safer place to live.

While I want to see a police force committed to intervene against every crime, disorder or act of antisocial behaviour that doesn't mean they have to arrest every kid who causes trouble.

I believe most of the public want the police to send a strong message about what is and isn't acceptable in their towns and streets. To break up the fight, to make the litterer pick up their mess - a voice of authority yet also a voice on the side of the law abiding in their community.

They should be encouraged and resourced to talk to parents and to schools, to use commonsense, to make the drunken college student repair or work off the shop window that he smashed. To make this happen, we need to tear up the excuse book. We have to get rid of these central targets, no one out there, not the police or the public wants the hand of central government on their shoulder, they are desperate for local policing driven by local priorities.

Too many times officers told us in desperation, 'We've been politicised. We don't police to do what we think is important, we police to do what someone up there wants.' They're right. Too often the public feel as though the police have become the agents of an over centralised state and of course the police know this.

What makes it worse is that as their methods have become less responsive to local needs, the dead hand of the health and safety lobby has emasculated the police further still. Stories about police unable to enter the scene of a shooting in case they got injured or unsure whether to save a drowning child because the risks were to great. This is madness on stilts.

I want police officers to be under orders to put themselves in harm's way if the safety of the public is at risk. That's why I joined and I know that is why those young men and women join today. They have joined to protect and serve the public and to make a difference. Surely It's time to free them and give them that chance.

If policing is going to improve, it needs to become a true profession, strongly led by effective Chief Officers who are liberated from petty political interference and have genuine operational independence.

Those Chief Officers must put the needs of the community they serve first ahead of careers and awards. To do this they will need to be overseen by effective and truly local governance, to hold not only the Chief Constable to account but also all of the agencies who combine together to make our streets safer.

Good policing is a basic expectation for every citizen and the recommendations in our report will make sure that it happens. They must become effective if they are to regain the trust of a sceptical public and through this trust they will regain the consent of the public. When the police reclaim the streets they will become, once again, a Force to be reckoned with.

SOURCE



Leftist racism again: Treating Arabs (and Muslims generally) as irresponsible children

By Caroline B. Glick

Tuesday's violent riots in Umm el Fahm and the debate which accompanied them are emblematic of one of the greatest challenges facing not only Israel, but much of the Western world today. Far right Jewish Israeli political activists held a peaceful demonstration in the radical Arab-Islamist dominated city of Umm el Fahm in the Galilee under heavy police protection. Thousands of Arab Israelis supported by far left Jewish Israeli political activists reacted with violent rioting. And the media blamed the violence on the peaceful Jewish Israeli demonstrators.

Tuesday's demonstration, which was led by former followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, MK Michael Ben-Ari, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir was supposed to take place last December after the Supreme Court upheld the activists' legal right to march through the city. But the police blocked it, claiming they could not guarantee the marchers' security. Only after again being ordered by the Supreme Court to the let demonstration to go forward did the police relent. But they limited the march to the outskirts of the city.

In accordance with the police guidelines, Tuesday the marchers were transported to the outskirts of the town in bullet-proof buses. 2,500 policemen deployed along Wadi Ara highway, and throughout the town to protect them. They were allowed to march holding flags and singing folksongs for a half an hour and then returned to their bullet proof buses. In the meantime, thousands of local residents standing on rooftops and crowding into the streets began rioting. They threw volley after volley of rocks at the Jewish marchers and the police protecting them. They cursed them. They cursed the police. In the end, some 15 policemen were wounded by the projectiles - including Inspector General Shahar Ayalon, the Deputy Superintendent of the National Police.

As far as the media were concerned, the fact that thousands of Arabs attacked the police and the lawful demonstrators was a non-story. The fact that these Israeli Arab citizens claimed to be personally insulted and injured because the demonstration "forced" them to set their eyes on their national flag was seemingly understandable. The fact that these Israeli citizens rejected Israel's flag while waving Palestinian and Islamic flags was neither newsworthy nor controversial. No one in the media asked the Arab rioters whom they felt threatened by. No one asked them why seeing Jews marching with the flag of Israel should provoke them to attack.

To the extent the media found a culprit, it was the Israeli demonstrators. They were "provocateurs" who forced taxpayers to spend millions of shekels to deploy 2,500 policemen armed with riot gear to the city. It never occurred to the media that Ben Ari, Marzel and Ben Gvir were not the cause of the enormous police presence. They were a danger to no one. The reason the police were forced to deploy so massively was because they believed that the Arabs would violently attack the Jewish demonstrators. It was the Arabs, not the Jews whom the police feared would break the law. And as it works out, they were right.

The media's coverage of the Umm el Fahm riot fits into an ongoing pattern. Over the years, the local media have developed a code for reporting on Arabs - whether Palestinian or Israeli or foreign. And it is a bigoted code.

As far as Israel's media are concerned, Arabs cannot be expected to act like responsible citizens. They cannot be required to abide by the law like the rest of the country's citizens. As far as Israel's media and the rest of the political Left are concerned, Arabs are either victims or objects. They cannot be culprits or independent actors. Their will -- to the extent they have one -- is collective. No individual can be held accountable for his or her actions. And their will is reactive. All Arab actions are but reactions to Jewish provocations. Many in the US and Europe have expressed surprise and indeed mystification about Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitenu party's strong third place showing in last month's elections. And there is good reason for their confusion. Lieberman is not an easy candidate to swallow for either rightists or leftists. Right wingers find his plan to make the Galilee and parts of the Negev part of a future Palestinian state absurd and wrong. Leftists find his call for all Israelis, including Arab Israelis -- to declare their loyalty to the state as a condition for keeping their citizenship absurd and wrong. And yet, due to the 15 Knesset seats he won from both right and left wing voters, Lieberman will serve as the foreign minister in the incoming Netanyahu government.

The Israel Left has demonized Lieberman as a racist for his positions on the Arabs. The anti-Israel lobby in Washington is already using their attacks to discredit the incoming government. But the fact is that fundamentally, Lieberman is little different from the Left which demonizes him.

Lieberman is a populist. He owes his popularity to the fact that he properly identified the political radicalization and increasing lawlessness among Israel's Arab citizens as the major domestic issue of our times. Lieberman is unique among politicians from both the Left and the Right in that he is the only one who is willing to confront the issue head on. And it is due to his readiness to discuss this issue that the public rewarded him with fifteen Knesset seats.

Like most populists, Lieberman is not a deep thinker. As a consequence, he adopted the bigoted framework of the Left for contending with the challenge posed today by Israel's Arabs. His idea of removing the Galilee from sovereign Israel and attaching it to a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is based on the Left's bigoted assumption that Israeli Arabs cannot be expected to be loyal to the country or act as law abiding citizens. Lieberman's adoption of the Left's prejudiced perspective on Israeli Arabs has engendered a dismal situation where while the debate has now been joined on the issue of how to contend with Israeli Arab disloyalty and crime, the debate that has developed is nothing more than a dialogue of the deaf.

No one talks about the need to inculcate Israeli values of liberal democracy among our Arab citizens. No one talks about blunting the power of radical leaders like Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, who heads the Islamic Movement's Northern Branch or Arab parliamentarians who openly treat with Hizbullah and Hamas and side with Israel's enemies in time of war. No one talks about empowering Israeli Arabs who are loyal to Israel. That is, no one talks about adopting policies that could actually improve the situation.

And this is a tragedy because the situation is truly grave. Early this week a Hizbullah-controlled Israeli Arab terror group which calls itself the Free People of the Galilee claimed responsibility for the attempted car bombing at Haifa's largest shopping mall Saturday night. That bomb, planted in a car trunk outside the mall, was large enough to have toppled the three story mall and kill hundreds of people. Mercifully, it was discovered before it was detonated.

Since 2001, the same group has claimed responsibility for a string of murderous attacks - mainly centered in Jerusalem. It claimed responsibility for the massacre of eight students at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva last year. It claimed responsibility for the first bulldozer attack in Jerusalem last year in which three people were murdered. And it claimed responsibility for the murder of several individual Jews around the Old City in Jerusalem since August 2001.

Also this week, the Jerusalem District Attorney's office announced that four Israeli Arabs have been indicted for the attempted murder of an American Hebrew University student last month. The four attacked the student as he walked through the Jerusalem Forest on the way to his dormitory. They beat him, stabbed him in the cheek, and tried to slash his throat before fleeing the scene. And earlier this month, the police announced the arrest last month of another Israeli Arab on charges of spying for Hizbullah. The arrest of 27-year-old Ismail Sulaiman from a village in the Jezreel Valley is the latest in a string of arrests of Israeli Arabs on charges of spying for Hizbullah. Last September IDF Sgt. Maj. Louai Balut from the Western Galilee, who served as a tracker along the Lebanese border was sentenced to 11 years in prison for spying for Hizbullah. And of course, former MK and Balad Party leader Azmi Bishara remains on the lam after he fled the country just before being charged with spying for Hizbullah during the 2006 war.

Israel of course is not alone in contending with this challenge. Throughout Europe governments are forced to contend with the fact that increasingly, the greatest threat to the security of their general citizenry comes from their Muslim and Arab citizens. The only difference is that Israel alone is castigated as a racist state simply for suffering from the problem of Muslim extremism.

On Sunday Phillip Johnston published a column in the *Sunday Telegraph* critiquing the British government's new strategy for defending against Islamic terror. Johnston bemoaned the fact that the new plan pays no attention to the fact that most of the terrorists sitting in British jails as well as the perpetrators of the July 7, 2005 bombings are British. Whereas the new strategy concentrates on the need to fight terrorists in places like Afghanistan, as Johnston put it, "There was not a single mention of the undeniable truth that the extremists who will actually carry out atrocities live among us and need to be confronted here and now."

Johnston argued that rather than ignore the problem of increased extremism among Britain's Muslims "in the interests of 'community harmony'," the British government should actively engage in "an unequivocal and enthusiastic espousal of British values of tolerance and liberal democracy."

That is, to contend with the growing radicalization of British Muslims, the government in London should end its current policy of appeasement of radical Muslim groups which is based on the bigoted assumption that Muslims cannot be expected to either abide by the laws or to integrate into wider society. Britain should instead embrace its own identity as a liberal democracy and require its citizens to abide by liberal democratic norms.

In Britain as in Israel and indeed throughout the free world, those norms are based on the understanding that the ability of a society to remain a free society is contingent on its citizenry's recognition that there can be no civil rights without civic duties. The Umm el Fahm riots serve as yet another warning of this fundamental truth.

Here in Israel we face the same choice. Either we encourage our Arab citizens to fully accept both the rights and duties of citizenship or we continue - through either populism of cowardice - to facilitate their rejection of our society. If we embark on the first path, we will safeguard our national identity as a Jewish liberal democracy. If we remain on the second path, we will imperil our lives, our way of life and our national existence.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:13

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Sunday, March 29, 2009

 

The Truth Catches Up, Probably Too Late

In the aftermath of Israel's incursion into Gaza, there was widespread criticism of the conduct of Israeli troops. News outlets in Israel printed accounts of alleged killings of civilians that originated with left-wing activists. Those stories were quickly repeated in the American press, including the New York Times, which reported on March 19:

Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and reckless destruction of property that is sure to inflame the domestic and international debate about the army's conduct in Gaza. On Thursday, the military's chief advocate general ordered an investigation into a soldier's account of a sniper killing a woman and her two children who walked too close to a designated no-go area by mistake, and another account of a sharpshooter who killed an elderly woman who came within 100 yards of a commandeered house.

When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: "What's great about Gaza -- you see a person on a path, he doesn't have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, 'Maybe he's a terrorist.' What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood." ...

One of the soldiers' testimonies involved the killing of a family. The soldier said: "We had taken over the house, and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left. The sniper on the roof wasn't told that this was O.K. and that he shouldn't shoot. You can say he just did what he was told."

These widely-publicized incidents have now been investigated, and the conclusion is that they didn't happen. CAMERA has the story:

The brigade commander of the unit linked to alleged "wanton killings" in Gaza launched his own investigation after hearing of the charges, speaking with actual eyewitnesses, all of whom said that the alleged killings did not take place. The original charges, based only on hearsay and rumors, have therefore been refuted and should be retracted.

The brigade commander's findings were reported in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, in a story titled IDF Investigation Refutes the Testimonies About Gaza Killings. According to the story (translation by CAMERA):

Two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade. The brigade's commander today will present to Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the Gaza division, the findings of his personal investigation about the matter which he undertook in the last few days, and after approval, he will present his findings to the head of the Southern Command, Major General Yoav Gallant.

Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander's investigation cites the sniper: "I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, 'Why did you shoot at them?' I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots."

Officers from the brigade surmise that fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.

The other alleged incident, the killing by a sniper of an elderly woman, also seems not to have taken place:

Regarding the second incident, in which it was claimed that soldiers went up to the roof to entertain themselves with firing and killed an elderly Palestinian woman, the brigade commander investigation found that there was no such incident.

It will be interesting to see whether the Times and other newspapers that published the original "testimonies" follow up on this more current, and more reliable, information.

SOURCE



More tedious BBC political correctness -- at the expense of historical accuracy

Friar Tuck has been viewed for centuries as a roly-poly, comic addition to Robin of Sherwood's band of merry men. But in the latest BBC series of Robin Hood, which begins tonight, he has been reinvented as a black martial arts expert, to the fury of historians. David Harewood, the new Friar Tuck, who starred in the BBC thriller Criminal Justice, admitted that this reincarnation of the character had seemed ridiculous to him at first. “I actually laughed,” he said.

Historians are less amused about the casting of Friar Tuck, who is usually played by short, fat, balding white men. There had been rumours that Matt Lucas, the star of Little Britain, would get the role. Helen Phillips, Professor of English at Cardiff University and an expert in medieval literature, said: “Sub-Saharan Africans wouldn't have been converted by that point, they would have had other religions. North Africans would have mostly been Muslims. “Also, friars came from upper-class families, as did monks. The kind of families from which friars were drawn wouldn't have been in any sense African.”

Harewood, who was the first black actor to play Othello at the National Theatre, said that he had been persuaded of the merits of the radical interpretation of the character. “They sent me the character breakdown and it was very different from what I expected. It was a welcome change and something I really felt was going to be exciting,” he said. “Funnily enough, when I first saw Robin Hood when it started three years ago, I thought they'd missed a trick and that they should have had a black character in it. It turns out that I am the black character, so I think it adds a modern dimension to it, as well. I think viewers will really take to it: at least I hope they will.”

In the first episode of the new series, at 6.50pm on BBC One, Tuck has abandoned his mission to the Holy Land and returns to England with the hope of resurrecting the legend of Robin Hood. However, he finds the country a different place. Harewood said: “He wants England to be a place of hope but he comes back to find that the people are slightly broken, much like they are now with the credit crunch. “The people need a hero, and that's what Tuck very much wants: to stand behind a symbol of good.”

But viewers will at first be led to believe that the friar is a tricksy, brooding character with more on his mind than simply helping the battle against the Sheriff of Nottingham. “If he did have an ulterior motive, I think it would be to make the country a republic,” Harewood said. “He's not necessarily in love with the country at all. He's very much for the people, by the people, and, if it was up to him, he'd get rid of the monarchy and make it a republic. He wants the people to govern and the people to be happy.

“Tuck is very much his own person. Many times he will go against Robin, argue with Robin and talk Robin into doing things he doesn't want to do. I think he's going to be a challenge to the whole group.”

The actor underwent gruelling fighting lessons for the role, in line with historic interpretations of Friar Tuck as being proficient with “clubbes and staves”. He said: “My stunt double was a kind of a capoeira [a Brazilian combination of martial arts and dance] champion, and there's quite a lot of martial arts that my character does later on in the series, which was really, really fun to do and very physical.”

SOURCE



The Holy Father was right!

When the pope visited Africa back in mid-March, a firestorm erupted when the media reported he had said “condoms spread AIDS.” Although the pope didn’t use those exact words, it was an accurate summary. Here’s what the pope did say:

I would say that this problem of AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem. The solution can only come through a twofold commitment: firstly, the humanization of sexuality, in other words a spiritual and human renewal bringing a new way of behaving towards one another; and secondly, true friendship, above all with those who are suffering, a readiness—even through personal sacrifice—to be present with those who suffer. And these are the factors that help and bring visible progress.

According to the pope, “the scourge [of AIDS] cannot be resolved by distributing condoms”—in fact, doing so “risk[s] worsening the problem.” Predictably, there was a cacophony of condemnation directed at the pope. And to give just one example, ACT UP, the gay activist group, labeled him “assassin,” and threw condemns at worshippers leaving service at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

I guess activists can’t help throwing condoms—either at those who oppose their policy, or at populations dying of AIDS in Africa and around the world.

Soon after the story broke, Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, released an interview with Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Here’s what Green had to say:

We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.

The pope is correct, or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that condoms have been proven to not be effective at the level of population. There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the US-funded Demographic Health Surveys, between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction technology such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by compensating or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.

I also noticed that the pope said monogamy was the best single answer to African AIDS, rather than abstinence. The best and latest empirical evidence indeed shows that reduction in multiple and concurrent sexual partners is the most important single behavior change associated with reduction in HIV-infection rates (the other major factor is male circumcision).

So Harvard agrees with the pope: condoms spread AIDS!

Have you ever heard this before?—anywhere? It’s hard to believe that there’s a classroom or newsroom in America where this has ever been discussed or broadcast. Who knew that distributing condoms doesn’t lower the HIV-infection rate, it raises it? I didn’t.

We were talking about this on my radio show the day the story broke, when I went to the next caller, “Rick in Santa Margarita”—who ended up being pastor Rick Warren from Saddleback, listening in on his way to a hospital visitation.

Rick shared that he’s friends with Ed Green, familiar with his research, and stays up to speed on the whole AIDS pandemic in Africa. No pastor in America has done more to fight AIDS in Africa than Rick Warren—and he went on to affirm everything Ed Green and the Pope said about condoms: passing out condoms promotes promiscuity, promiscuity increases risky behavior (i.e., “non-safe sex”), and non-safe sex spreads AIDS. Thus, “condoms spread AIDS.”

As Rick pointed out, the real question policy-makers must answer is whether they want to stop AIDS or merely slow it down. If they want to slow AIDS, then they’ll keep passing out condoms and teaching “safe sex.” But the problem is, we now know this isn’t true. Condom distribution doesn’t even slow the spread of AIDS, it actually speeds it up.

If they want to stop AIDS, then they’ll have to stop encouraging promiscuity and adultery and teach abstinence and monogamy.

This is why in Africa, where AIDS has already killed tens of millions, more and more countries are abandoning our Western strategy of condom distribution and replacing it with the strategy that actually does save lives.

Since it began teaching abstinence, Uganda has dropped its HIV infection rate from 30 percent down to 6 percent. Other countries have gotten the message.

SOURCE



Why children do best with strict parents

British findings

Children are more likely to grow into well-adjusted adults if their parents are firm disciplinarians, academics claimed yesterday. Traditional 'authoritative' parenting, combining high expectations of behaviour with warmth and sensitivity, leads to more 'competent' children. It is particularly important for girls, who can suffer from a lack of confidence and may turn to drugs if care is merely adequate, said researchers from London's Institute of Education, a body widely viewed as Left-wing.

The findings, from a Government-funded study into parenting qualities, raise questions about whether parents leading hectic lifestyles need only be 'good enough'. 'Contrary to the notions of "good enough" parenting, a wealth of research indicates that better parenting leads to better-adjusted, more competent children,' the report said. 'The notion of "good enough" parenting may seem ideal in today's hectic world, yet the realityis that "good enough" parents will most likely produce "good enough" children at best. 'Considering this, we need to provide support to parents to be more than just "good enough" to ensure that children are not at risk.'

The best parenting was characterised by high expectations that children would act with the maturity befitting their age. Supervision and discipline was also key, as was responsiveness to children's needs. 'Multiple studies have documented that children who have authoritative parents - that is, both firm disciplinarians and warm, receptive caregivers - are more competent than their peers at developmental periods, including pre-school, school age and adolescence,' said the report.

It drew from studies which had shown that girls whose parents were 'mediocre' were more likely to experience 'significantly more internalising problems such as low self-esteem or the use of illicit drugs'.

Principal author Dr Leslie Gutman is research director of the Institute's Centre for Research On The Wider Benefits of Learning.

The findings, which will fuel parental angst over the best way of bringing up children, were handed to Children's Minister Beverley Hughes yesterday. The conclusions, based on a review of studies on parenting, were reinforced by the centre's own study. This involved observing more than 1,000 mothers reading to their children at age one, and again at five. It found that mothers who breast-fed, had strong mental health and well-developed social networks were more likely to score highly on the task. These mothers were also more likely to show warmth towards their children, and communicate effectively with them.

'We would therefore recommend that maternal mental health, breastfeeding and social networks form the focus of intervention efforts to boost parenting capabilities,' the report added. 'Both who you are and what you do are important in terms of parenting - personal characteristics such as interpersonal sensitivity and education and behaviours such as breastfeeding are significant predictors.'

The claims are the latest salvo in the fiery debate over child-rearing. The Good Childhood Inquiry recently claimed a culture of 'excessive individualism' among adults was to blame for many of children's problems. It said 30 per cent of adults in the UK disagreed with the statement that 'parents' duty is to do their best for their children even at the expense of their own well-being'.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:10

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Saturday, March 28, 2009

 

Illegal to wake up a dormouse??

Batty Britain again

When Dreamy the dormouse was pictured in the Mail sleeping peacefully on a red rose, he became a very small celebrity. Not that he knew, of course, because he was busy hibernating. But his celebrity status became a big problem for staff at his rescue centre home after Jonathan Ross showed the picture on his BBC1 chat show.

Ross suggested Dreamy must have been woken from hibernation at some point during his photographic session, an offence under the Animal and Welfare Act. Some viewers believed him and rang police. When an officer went to investigate at the Secret World Wildlife Rescue Centre in Somerset, staff were horrified. After all, they had originally saved Dreamy when he was found in a greenhouse with wounds thought to have been inflicted by a cat. Spokesman Jamie Baker said: 'We told them the dormouse had never been woken up. '

Avon and Somerset Police later said no offence was committed. The following week, on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, the presenter apologised, adding: 'The charity who provided that picture have been raided by the police for allegedly disturbing the dormouse during its hibernation, which is illegal. The dormouse stayed asleep during the whole thing and was fine.'

Mr Baker said: 'I think people meant well but they should have got the whole story first.' A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police confirmed that a complaint was made over the dormouse and that an officer was sent out to investigate. He added that no offence was committed.

SOURCE



British elite hatred of the middle class again

'Equal Justice Under Law' are the words chiselled in stone above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court building in Washington. I did not notice whether any similarly stirring sentiment adorns the somewhat less impressive frontage of a certain magistrates' court in East London but I rather suspect that it does not.

My wife and I are three months behind with our council tax payments to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and as a result we had to appear in court. We hoped that if we promised to clear our debt of 549 pounds by March 31, the end of the fiscal year, the magistrates would waive the additional 75 cost of our summons. As most of our food shopping involves the 'Last Day Of Sale' shelf - we walk a fine line between nourishment and food poisoning - that sum represents more than two weeks' worth of groceries for us.

We felt we had a chance. After all, the two magistrates on the bench had been magnanimously lenient in the four cases that preceded ours. However, it was not to be.

Our financial troubles had started when the credit crunch began to affect our already irregular incomes, necessitating the selective paying of bills. My wife, Vahni, is a sporadically employed ballet dancer and I am a sporadically employed actor. We have always resorted to various day jobs to get by between engagements: market stalls, telesales, product demonstration and a host of other badly paid, short-term posts ranging from the boring to the unbearable. Now even those were becoming few and far between. One firm we had worked for had closed its doors without notice, owing us money.

So our cardinal rule has been never to sign on or to claim any form of social assistance. I'm Canadian, naturalised British, Vahni is American, and although we've lived here for many years and are eligible for benefits, we would find it embarrassing and presumptuous burdening a 'foreign' country with the responsibility of subsidising our artistic ambitions...

On our day in court, the magistrates, both of whom had public-school accents, worked slowly and carefully through each case preceding ours and were punctiliously fair to all the defaulters, who were of many different nationalities. Interpreters were provided, all sorts of holy books were made available for oath-taking and a lawyer was present to explain the finer points of the law. In two instances, the magistrates gently admonished those before them for obvious lies and evasions.

It didn't seem to bother them that not a single defendant was completely self-supporting. Employed or not, all were on some sort of benefits and the magistrates carefully took this into account when assessing repayments. In each of the four cases, thousands of pounds had been owed over a considerable time but the magistrates generously charged no interest, wrote off a significant proportion of the arrears and made no mention of court costs. The most flagrant evader was ordered to repay 20 pounds a week - he'd owed 5,000 for some years - the others were let off with repayments of 10 pounds per week.

We were easily distinguishable from the other defendants because we'd made the effort to dress in a manner we felt appropriate for a court appearance. Also, our case involved just a few months of arrears rather than years, we were not on benefits and we spoke English as our native language.

Our turn. Into thy hands, Blind Justice. I rose and politely stated our case. I freely admitted the money was owed, explained our impecunious circumstances, promised repayment as soon as possible, and asked only that court costs should not be charged.

The magistrates smiled, and one thanked us for being so straightforward and honest. 'Are you aware,' he asked with a vulpine grin, 'that your appearance today means a further 20 pounds in costs, in addition to the 75 previously assessed?' I was not - and I sensed with some unease that the magistrates seemed almost to relish our discomfort.

'We will,' the second magistrate pronounced in lordly tones, dripping with munificence, 'waive that 20.' A pause. 'The 75 will stand.' 'Yes,' said the first. 'You should realise many people are suffering financial hardship these days. We can't make exceptions for everybody. Kindly make arrangements with the council to pay this off as quickly as possible.'

Undoubtedly their predecessors would have hanged me and sold my remains to an anatomist. The court usher sighed as he showed us out. 'Can't say I'm surprised,' he said. 'Sometimes they seem to come down hardest on the well-spoken ones.'

On the way home to our privately rented flat, we tried to work out what had gone wrong; why we were the only people the court had stigmatised. Was it because we were the only ones who had respected the court and dressed accordingly, perhaps making us look affluent? Was it our assurance that we'd do everything we could to pay off the debt as soon as possible? Or had we simply made too much of the fact that we'd never succumbed to the lure of benefits?

Not for the first time I wondered why our society seems dedicated to the punishment of those who are trying to pull their own weight. Is it because liberal democracies know that without the taxes extracted from those of us who concede the necessity to pay them, their mad social engineering schemes would vanish in a puff of brimstone?

But I'm not bitter: everything is grist to an actor's mill. If I am ever asked to play a victim of injustice, I can always draw on the memory of this experience.

SOURCE



How Not to Fight Discrimination

The EEOC joins a class-action effort against Wal-Mart

The federal government reversed course last week and endorsed a new model for suing companies that could result in untold riches for trial lawyers at the expense of U.S. businesses, employees and consumers. The Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission filed an amicus brief on Thursday in support of plaintiffs in a closely watched gender class action against Wal-Mart. The lawsuit was first filed by six women in 2001, and until now the agency had decided not to get involved. The retailer is accused of not promoting women and systematically paying them less than male counterparts.

Wal-Mart says the women who filed the suit are not representative of the 1.6 million current and former female Wal-Mart employees whom they seek to represent. But a U.S. District Court in San Francisco certified the lawsuit as a nationwide class action in 2004, ruling that statistical disparities in pay and promotion were enough to justify class treatment. The decision was upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Wal-Mart asked for a rehearing, which was granted, and the full Ninth Circuit heard arguments Tuesday.

In its amicus brief, the federal government does not defend the trial court's class certification order in toto, which isn't surprising given that the judge's order conflicts with the decisions of many courts of appeal. But the EEOC brief does support the notion that a claim seeking billions of dollars in punitive damages and back pay may be decided on a class basis without individual hearings that would permit the company to defend itself. In other words, the Obama Administration is saying that it's appropriate to impose huge monetary damages on companies without allowing them to show that employees were treated fairly.

Wal-Mart says that not allowing it to defend against the women's claims on an individual basis is a violation of due process and would result in payouts to people who weren't harmed. Allowing the suit to proceed as a class action also conflicts with the Supreme Court's 1977 Teamsters ruling, which held that in cases alleging systemic discrimination, defendants have the right to challenge the claims of plaintiffs individually.

As startling, the EEOC's brief conflicts with the federal government's own defense against discrimination suits. The class action against Wal-Mart was certified under a provision of the law that allows for injunctive relief, not large money awards. Class claims for monetary relief must meet a higher standard to be certified. And one of Wal-Mart's arguments is that the plaintiffs are seeking billions in damages but never met the more rigorous threshold for class certification. The EEOC's amicus brief never mentions that the feds have successfully defended themselves in the past by making the same argument as Wal-Mart. Apparently, the EEOC would allow the government to play by a set of rules that are off limits to private companies trying to defend themselves against massive class actions.

The five-member EEOC is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans thanks to a vacancy caused by the recent departure of a Bush appointee. And we hope the brief against Wal-Mart doesn't mean we can expect a more radical agency under President Obama. If the plaintiffs prevail, companies will have every incentive to establish race and gender quotas for hiring, lest they be sued for statistical imbalances. The EEOC can play a useful role in combating discrimination, but not by urging courts to stack the deck against the accused.

SOURCE



"Great men are almost always bad men" (Acton)

We like the story of the disgraced former [Australian] judge Marcus Einfeld, jailed last week for lying about a minor traffic fine, because it is a reassuring morality tale. It restores our belief that character is destiny, that karma eventually catches up with everyone, and that lying, even in an era when trust is in short supply and truthfulness downgraded, is a serious transgression that can land a big wig in jail.

Einfeld didn't just start telling lies in 2006, when he falsely named a dead friend as the driver of his car when it was caught travelling at 10kmh over the limit by a speed camera in Mosman.

The pattern of deception apparent in even a superficial examination of his life shows that he gained a lot of kudos and reward from his fabrications, whether it was padding his Who's Who CV with dodgy degrees from American "diploma mills", or alleged plagiarism, or allegedly claiming a lost overcoat on expenses when he was head of the Human Rights Commission, having already lodged an insurance claim, or using the names of people living overseas in statutory declarations to evade traffic fines. A habit of dishonesty went unpunished.

Instead, Einfeld was richly rewarded, becoming a darling of the legal and media establishment, with an Order of Australia and named a "National Living Treasure". Sad as it is for a 70-year-old man suffering from prostate cancer and depression to be thrown in jail for what essentially began as a trivial matter, his punishment represents a larger righting of wrongs.

More HERE

Being an incorrigible academic, I thought I might give a fuller version of the famous quotation from Lord Acton. It formed part of Acton's opposition to the declaration of Papal infallibility of 1870

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. "

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:13

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Friday, March 27, 2009

 

Penn. police officer punished for upholding the law

Unfortunately, more and more of the stories we share with you tell of government officials ignoring or violating the Constitution in their actions against those who speak their faith in public places.

But it's also true that many officials across this country continue to recognize and respect those who thoughtfully, publicly share their beliefs. And sometimes, these officials pay their own price for refusing to enforce a more politically-correct agenda.

Corporal Steven Armbruster, for example, of the Kutztown University Police Department in Philadelphia, has for nearly two years been reaping the consequences of his decision to respect the Constitution. On April 18, 2007, he was one of several university police called in when 15 members of a local Christian group shared the gospel and addressed moral issues like abortion and homosexual behavior with some other students on campus.

Nearly 300 protestors from other campus clubs converged on the scene and began shouting their disagreement. Alarmed at the disturbance, University President F. Javier Cevallos called in the school's police chief, William Mioskie, and urged him to get the Christians off campus.

One member of the group was promptly arrested, and then Armbruster heard Mioskie order his officers to "push" the other members off campus for "disorderly conduct." To Armbruster, that meant either arresting or threatening to arrest the Christians, who – as best he could tell as an eyewitness – had done nothing "disorderly" to contribute to the uproar.

He stepped over to share that concern with his chief, along with his understanding and knowledge that any action taken against the Christians under the current circumstances would constitute a violation of their civil rights. Armbruster was relieved of his duties and ordered to leave the scene, while other officers proceeded to arrest some of the Christians.

As it turned out, a local court dismissed all charges against the Christians. Unfortunately, that same justice has so far eluded Armbruster himself. Placed on administrative leave after the incident, he was later suspended without pay for five working days and warned that he'd be fired if he made any similar assertions in the future. A disciplinary letter was placed in his administrative file and could easily block any future promotion.

"Campus police officers who understand and respect the constitutional rights of American citizens should be commended, not punished," said ADF-allied attorney Randall L. Wenger, chief counsel for the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center, which on March 12 filed a lawsuit on behalf of Armbruster. "Corporal Armbruster honored his conscience as a Christian and his duty as a civil servant to protect – not violate – these citizens' free speech rights. He knew that he was being asked to punish the wrong party in the situation."

The complaint in this lawsuit, Armbruster v. Cavanaugh, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

SOURCE



Will they lock me up for playing Widow Twankey?

A British homosexual actor rejects the need for new speech laws

During the dark days of Soviet oppression, there was a joke that did the rounds in Russia. ' Homosexuality is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison locked up with other men. There is a three-year waiting list.' Don't laugh too loudly. It could soon be illegal to repeat a joke like that.

I'm not kidding. In the name of challenging 'homophobia', the Government is planning to push legislation through Parliament that will make it a serious crime to use any language which could be construed as offensive to gay men and women. The new law will even override the basic requirements of freedom of speech, one of the pillars of our democracy.

All comedy, entertainment, TV, books and radio will be subjected to this new regime if it comes into existence, no doubt rigorously enforced by an army of boot-faced, unsmiling commissars desperately trying to find some infringement of their rules. The politically correct censors will be our own British version of the East German Stasi. Under this proposed new orthodoxy, almost any colourful display of theatrical high camp could be presented as stereotyping of gay life and would therefore fall foul of the law.

So no more repeats of Are You Being Served. In place of John Inman's deliciously shrill battle cry, 'I'm free', there would be only the silent void of Puritanism. No more showings of Carry On movies with Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey, no more Matt Lucas sketches of the Only Gay In The Village.

Those of us who have made something of a habit of taking to the stage as pantomime dames will be living in fear of the knock at the door, wondering whether we will be charged with wearing wigs, high heels and lipstick in a public place. Widow Twankey might have to be performed in secret locations to groups of brave dissidents.

This might all sound absurd. The proposers of the new law would, no doubt, claim they are only seeking to ban extreme abuse of gays and lesbians. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. New laws so often have unintended consequences, especially when they are introduced not to combat a genuine crime but to establish the state's view of orthodox thinking.

If this legal change really came into practice, there is no doubt it would create a new climate of fear, stifling creativity and restricting the scope for humour. This is exactly the point made by Rowan Atkinson, the comedian who has campaigned heroically to protect freedom of speech in this country from the interfering busy-bodies. Speaking to members of the House of Lords last week, he warned that if the legislation became law, then writers and performers would adopt a form of self-censorship to avoid falling foul of the authorities.

In such a world, it is unlikely that Rowan would dare to come up with some of the dazzling performances that made his reputation - like the wonderful sketch in Blackadder Goes Forth, where he was being held in prison and sent for Bob Massingberd, the finest lawyer in England, to secure his liberty. Outlining the brilliant courtroom gifts of Massingberd, Blackadder recalled the lawyer's role as prosecutor in the trial of Oscar Wilde: 'Big, bearded, butch Oscar - the terror of the ladies; 114 illegitimate children, world heavyweight boxing champion and author of the pamphlet Why I Like To Do It With Girls. And Massingberd had him sent down for being a whoopsie.'

You can just imagine the outraged intake of breath from officialdom at that word 'whoopsie'.

In fact, even before the legislation is introduced, the censors have been at work, as I discovered to my own cost. In 2007, the BBC showed repeats of that wonderful sitcom Porridge, in which I was lucky enough to play the rather effeminate prisoner nicknamed Lukewarm. But in its determination to uphold fashionable thinking, the Beeb decided to strike out one passage where Ronnie Barker's character Fletcher, in response to a remark that Lukewarm always kept his cell clean, said: 'Well, that sort do, don't they?' I thought the whole thing was utterly ludicrous. Far from being homophobic, Porridge handled the whole gay issue with sensitivity as well as humour - indeed, with far more sensitivity than the clod-hopping zealots show today.

I sometimes have to ask myself what is happening to dear old Britain. Humour is meant to be part of our national DNA. Yet the politically-correct brigade are behaving like a bunch of Cromwellians, cracking down on any signs of laughter. In these times of mass unemployment, economic recession and financial crisis, hasn't the Government got anything better to do than waste taxpayers' money on this killjoy campaign?

Supporters of this change like to pose as the protectors of the gay community, but they are nothing of the sort. The idea that we are all such enfeebled victims that we cannot take a single joke is actually an insult. Most gay men and women love self-deprecating humour and camp exaggeration of stereotypes. That is why drag artists are so popular on the gay scene. It can hardly be a coincidence that the two greatest wits of the modern English theatre, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, were both gay, since the glamour of showbusiness and quickness of dialogue has such an appeal to large numbers of gays.

The great American comedienne Joan Rivers once put it well: 'Gay people were the first to find me out, they're so sharp. I'll look out in the audience and I see three or four gay guys in the front row or a couple of lesbians and I know it's going to be a good show.'

Camp humour is an integral part of British culture, as epitomised in the pantomime dames of the old music hall.

Even when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, the popularity of the BBC radio show Round The Horne, featuring the camp solicitors Julian and Sandy, or the performances of drag artist Danny La Rue, showed that the public was not nearly as intolerant as the political establishment believed. Showbusiness and comedy provided a route to acceptance, not oppression.

Recently, I read of a remarkable instance of such tolerance during World War II, on one air base of Bomber Command. You could not get a tougher, more hardened masculine environment, yet one flier, 'queer as a coot', used to provide uproarious entertainment by going on stage at the station in drag under the name 'Miss Dillis Fixey', an inversion of the famous female stripper of the time, Phyllis Dixey. To wild cheers, he would then perform his own striptease, only to reveal, on shedding the final garment, the slogan emblazoned across his chest: 'Not tonight, darling.' I suppose the modern censor would disapprove of that act, condemning it as nothing more stereotyping.

Showbiz, camp theatrics and dazzling wit helped to pave the way for gay rights. They should be cherished, not suppressed. It is bitterly ironic that, in the name of tolerance, the Government should be marching towards such a culture of intolerance.

The politically correct bigots should not be allowed to have it both ways. They cannot say, on one hand, that gay lifestyles should be accepted as a perfectly normal part of life, and then, on the other, demand special treatment for gay people to shield them from everyday humour. We are more grown up than that. But just as importantly, we must not be allowed to lose the ability to laugh at ourselves. In these times of crisis, laughter is more vital than ever.

SOURCE



Crucial medical research 'threatened' by EU animal welfare plan

Important medical research into conditions such as autism, Parkinson’s disease, strokes and Aids will be “closed down” if a European Union directive on animal experiments is passed in its current form, leading scientists said yesterday. Vital studies of brain and cell function that promise new therapies for serious disorders would be blocked by the proposed regulations, turning Europe into a “scientific backwater”, a coalition of research organisations warned.

The directive also threatens the capacity of European countries to defend against a flu pandemic, it was claimed. It would bring hens’ eggs, which are critical to the production of flu vaccines, under the scope of vivisection regulations, creating costs and bureaucracy that could drive vaccine manufacture out of Europe.

The proposals from the European Commission and the European Parliament would create new bureaucratic burdens for scientists without delivering benefits for animal welfare, and sometimes increasing suffering, the experts said. The new rules would impose stringent restrictions on monkey experiments that would effectively ban research intended to improve understanding of neurological conditions and infectious diseases.

Nine British research groups, including the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the Association of Medical Research Charities, issued a “declaration of concern” about revision to Directive 86/609. The European Science Foundation, the European Medical Research Councils and the Pasteur Institute in France also protested about its contents before a European Parliament debate that begins next week.

Sir Mark Walport, the director of the Wellcome Trust, Europe’s biggest biomedical research charity, said that the directive “would simply close down some aspects of medical research that can only be addressed by animal models”. He added: “It will increase the costs of research and the bureaucracy of research, and I’m afraid we think it will bring little or no benefit for animal welfare at all.”

One of the chief concerns is a clause that bars the use of nonhuman primates in research intended to investigate basic brain or immune system functions rather than to test new therapies for particular diseases. Primate experiments would be allowed only if they directly examined “life-threatening or debilitating” conditions. This would have blocked studies that have transformed understanding of the brain, such as the discovery of cells called mirror neurons that are involved in autism, the experts said. Roger Lemon, Professor of Neurophysiology at University College London, said: “Blocking basic research in nonhuman primates would render the EU a scientific backwater.” Research with implications for Parkinson’s disease, strokes, malaria and HIV/Aids would suffer.

Tim Hammond, of the drug company AstraZeneca and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, said that the extension of animal regulations to cover eggs would be disastrous for vaccine production. “It would encourage companies to move outside the EU, which would give us real issues in terms of access to vaccines in a flu pandemic,” he said.

The directive was published by the Commission last November, and a European Parliament committee will vote on amendments next Tuesday. Animal rights groups urged MEPs to resist the campaign to amend the draft directive. Emily McIvor, the policy director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, said: “The revision of [the directive] is a great opportunity to make a better deal for animals in laboratories.”

SOURCE



Hunt supporters say decision to drop charges against three hunt masters proves ban has failed



Hunt supporters have hailed a decision to drop charges of illegal hunting against three members of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds as evidence that the ban has failed and leads to "confusion, cost and conflict". The case against joint-master Maurice Scott, huntsman Donald Summersgill, and whipper-in Peter Heard was dropped on Friday.

The Crown Prosecution Service said that, in the light of a High Court ruling in February, it was for the prosecution to prove a hunt was not carrying out exempt hunting. The case was the second under the Hunting Act to be dropped by the CPS this month. The three men were charged with illegal hunting in 2006, and pleaded not guilty on the basis that their hunting was "exempt" and therefore legal.

Mr Scott said: "This is a huge relief, not just for myself, and others facing the charges but for hunting as a whole."

Simon Hart, the Countryside Alliance chief executive, said: "There have only been three successful prosecutions of hunts, involving five people, since the Act came into force in February 2005. "The decision to drop this case suggests that prosecutions under the Hunting Act will now be even rarer. "It could not now be more obvious that this Act has failed and all it now promotes is confusion, cost and conflict."

The CPS dropped four charges of illegal hunting against a huntsman, Julian Barnfield, of the Heythrop Hunt, in Oxfordshire, earlier this month. That decision followed a High Court ruling that the use of dogs to search for a wild mammal in order to stalk it or flush it out was not in breach of the Act.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:30

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

 

Dumbing Down Marriage

Being able to buy a $500,000 house on fabricated and blown up income figures with no money down....... a perversion of the American dream of homeownership. Getting paid $15MM for employment that helped cause failure at major financial institutions.....a perversion of the American work ethic. Assaulting the institution of marriage so as to eviscerate it of any meaning whatsoever..... a perversion of the American social fabric.

And assaulting the very idea of marriage is exactly what is occurring at every turn. Consider just four examples from the past week:

1) New data shows more than 40% of American babies were born out of wedlock. This staggering figure continues a twenty-year growth trend in children starting life from the outset in incomplete families.

2) Most, if not all, dictionaries, now provide multiple definitions for “marriage.” Their stated goal is to reflect cultural usage rather than to create it.

3) The same-sex marriage battle continues in California in spite of the passage of Proposition 8 in November. Gay activists have already begun mobilizing for another referendum if the state's Supreme Court allows Proposition 8 to stand.

4) Two Pepperdine University law professors published an article in Time this week, arguing that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether.

These four examples join what has become a siege on the very notions of family and marriage in America. Much like Vicksburg in 1863, where residents dug tunnels to survive the daily bombardment from Union cannons and hid food to try to outlast the severed supply lines, marriage and family today live in a fixed state of defense and survival, clinging to what little sustenance they can find in a culture almost exclusively hostile to them. From the defective idea of “same-sex marriage,” to the increasing disregard for marriage as the birthplace for children, and to a malformed desire to make marriage contractual and disposable at will, family and marriage stand battered and bruised by a ceaseless bombardment of attack.

Sadly, in the not too distant future, we will experience the painful chaos borne by those in our nation who claim to “broaden” our understanding of marriage. In fact, these folks dumb down the very concept of marriage so as to gut it of meaning altogether. The resulting chaos, if the trend continues, will wreak havoc on children who will consistently find themselves unable to give and receive love in appropriate ways, unable to form deep bonds of intimacy and long-term commitments, and unable to provide a stable setting for future generations. This chaos comes from the increasing pressure in our culture to define the ideas of marriage and family by purely individual desires rather than by socially meaningful and viable ones.

Such positions fail to recognize that our culture has a huge interest in encouraging and supporting healthy marriages, much moreso than it ever did to encourage or support home-ownership. The nuclear family provides the basic building block of stability for the culture, doing so in an almost unseen way. The family structure holds our society together much like the threads holding the individual squares comprising a quilt. Without those threads, we become a mere collection of squares, chaotically strewn across the landscape. That collection may be many things, but it is not a cohesive whole; nor is it a quilt.

As Helen Alvare has shown, the family is a place of love, a place where attentive, secure, and sacrificial love can develop. Through that love, marriage is characterized by an openness to life and bringing new life into the world. As such, marriage becomes a family where children learn to give and receive love. If that kind of love is not experienced as a child in a family, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop those abilities as one matures. Moreover, a family provides the long-term commitment necessary to raise slow-maturing human lives. Government clearly should encourage that behavior. Healthy citizens are made and raised in marriages and families, and economically stable citizens live in those same marriages over the long haul.

The evidence uniformly demonstrates that children who do not benefit from a two-parent home face greater odds in life's most basic tasks. They are more likely to develop substance abuse issues, more likely to land in the criminal justice system, and less likely to complete their education. The social costs of government's endorsing merely tolerable, as opposed to encouraging best, marriage and family behaviors are enormous. With good reason, family advocates remind us that if a person gets three things right in life (finish high school, get married after the age of 20, and wait to have babies until married), there is an 8% chance of their living in poverty sometime during their life. Get one or more of those wrong, and there is a 79% chance of your living in poverty at some point in your life.

Moreover, the government has a large, vested interest in encouraging what is best for children rather than merely blessing what is tolerable or what is accepted as the lowest common denominator. To fail to encourage settings which are best for children invites further cultural chaos and deterioration. For example, the ever-rising tide of out-of-wedlock births will likely have a continuing snowball effect as each successive generation becomes less able than the one before it to provide stability and security for its own children.

Marriage is a gift, something to be cherished and nurtured. Marriage and family are among God's greatest gifts to us. Marriage provides a bedrock for our society, an underlying foundation of stability for children. However, marriage is not a right, something to which each of us is entitled, any more than home-ownership is a right. Not everyone is designed for marriage. Marriage may be a gift, but it is not the only gift, nor is it a gift absolutely intended for everyone.

The total union, commitment, and fidelity of a marriage between a man and a woman is a beautiful thing when done well. Is it always done well? Of course not. But that does not mean that the government or our society should therefore dumb down the definition of marriage to bless any configuration an individual might desire. Nor should we continue to stand and applaud the trend toward incomplete homes and fatherless children in the name of feminism and women's rights. The stakes simply are too high, for all of us.

SOURCE



Palestine victim of Arab betrayal

INTERNATIONAL donors pledged almost $4.5 billion in aid for Gaza earlier this month. During the past few years it has been very painful for me to witness the deteriorating humanitarian situation in that narrow strip where I lived as a child in the 1950s.

The media tends to attribute Gaza's decline solely to Israeli military and economic actions against Hamas. But such a myopic analysis ignores the problem's root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at cementing the Palestinian people's status as stateless refugees to use their suffering as a weapon against Israel. As a child in Gaza in the '50s, I experienced the early results of this policy. Egypt, which controlled the territory then, conducted guerilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza. My father commanded these operations, carried out by Palestinian fedeyeen (Arabic for self-sacrifice).

Back then, Gaza was already the front line of the Arab jihad against Israel. My father was assassinated by Israeli forces in 1956. It was in those years that the Arab League started its Palestinian refugee policy. Arab countries implemented special laws designed to make it impossible to integrate the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab war against Israel.

Even descendants of Palestinian refugees who are born in another Arab country and live there their entire lives can never gain that country's passport. Even if they marry a citizen of an Arab country, they cannot become citizens of their spouse's country. They must remain Palestinian even though they may have never set foot in the West Bank or Gaza.

This policy of forcing a Palestinian identity on these people for eternity and condemning them to a miserable life in a refugee camp was designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the Palestinian refugee crisis. So was the Arab policy of overpopulating Gaza. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, whose main political support comes from Arab countries, encourages high birthrates by rewarding families with many children. Yasser Arafat said the Palestinian woman's womb was his best weapon.

Arab countries always push for classifying as many Palestinians as possible as refugees. As a result, about one-third of the Palestinians in Gaza still live in refugee camps. For 60 years, Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab regimes and Palestinian terrorists in their fight against Israel.

Now it is Hamas, an Islamist terror organisation supported by Iran, that is using and abusing Palestinians for this purpose. While Hamas leaders hid in the well-stocked bunkers and tunnels they prepared before they provoked Israel into attacking them, Palestinian civilians were exposed and caught in the deadly crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers.

As a result of 60 years of this Arab policy, Gaza has become a prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians. Both Israel and Egypt are fearful of terrorist infiltration from Gaza - all the more so since Hamas took over - and have always maintained tight controls over their borders with Gaza. The Palestinians continue to endure hardships because Gaza continues to serve as the launching pad for terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Those attacks come in the form of Hamas missiles that indiscriminately target Israeli kindergartens, homes and businesses.

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in the hope that this step would begin the process of building a Palestinian state, eventually leading to a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was no cycle of violence then, no justification for anything other than peace and prosperity. But, instead, Hamas chose Islamic jihad. Gazans' and Israelis' hopes have been met with misery for Palestinians and missiles for Israelis.

Hamas, an Iranian proxy, has become a danger not only to Israel but also to Palestinians as well as to neighbouring Arab states, which fear the spread of radical Islam could destabilise their countries.

Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. If they really loved their Palestinian brethren, they would pressure Hamas to stop firing missiles at Israel. In the longer term, the Arab world must end the Palestinians' refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel.

It's time for the 22 Arab countries to open their borders and absorb the Palestinians of Gaza who wish to start a new life. It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.

SOURCE



In Praise of Black Conservatives

No word is more overused in public discourse today than 'courage.' A loyal viewer hailed CBS for its courage in producing Swingtown, the now defunct series detailing the sexual infidelities of married couples in the 70s (bedhopping on network TV — what a daring concept). Sean Penn was dubbed courageous for his nauseating Oscar acceptance speech, as are most liberal entertainers who spew left-wing tripe before adoring audiences.

But if going verbally against the (real or perceived) grain of public opinion defines courage, then should we not salute those black Americans who are not celebrating the presidency of Barack Obama? Black Americans who didn't vote for Obama are statistically insignificant, though we harbor that sliver of hope that Michael Steele will be the one to attract the masses of black voters that Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice never did. Nonetheless, they can inspire us — with American rationality numbed by Obama-mania, soon we may all be black conservatives.

Just before the election, popandpolitics.com profiled Joe Hicks, a conservative radio host in Los Angeles. Hicks also heads a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on issues of race in society. He numbers among the fewer than 1 in 10 black voters who supported the McCain/Palin ticket. He is one of those described as “the marginalized of the marginalized.” A proud liberal for much of his life, when he came out as a conservative, he heard the familiar calls of 'Uncle Tom,' 'Traitor' and 'Sellout' from his colleagues.

Certainly some black conservatives were torn between their ideology and their racial identity, wanting to be part of history in electing Barack Obama. Former GOP Congressman J.C. Watts expressed his indecision and we all know how Colin Powell opted — but then was he ever a conservative in the first place?

Dena, who I met through a conservative website, was never undecided. She is a black single mother who, like Hicks, lives in Los Angeles. She proudly supported McCain/Palin (which, in LA, is brave in itself). Also like Hicks, she was a liberal for much of her life. She desperately wants more for herself and her son. She would love to be married someday, though in the meantime she relies on her own grit and determination and the support of friends and her church to help her through tough times. She reveres Dr. King's memory and one of her greatest recollections is of having once seen Rosa Parks. Not only does President Obama not factor into her unwavering optimism, she can't stand the guy, mainly for his stances on abortion and increasing dependency on the federal government, referring to him merely by his first and third initials.

If Joe Hicks and Dena — and Alan Keyes and Larry Elder and Star Parker and Thomas Sowell — don't amount to profiles in courage, they certainly earn points for marching to their own beat. Conservatism has never been chic, but now with Obama it is all but marginalized and black conservatives are often more reviled than their white counterparts. They are perceived as betraying the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and, thus, their own people. Few were offended that Clarence Thomas was portrayed as a lawn jockey in editorial cartoons. Even moderate Republican Condoleeza Rice was graphically depicted in Civil War-era stereotype for her loyalty to President Bush and barely an eyebrow was raised. Certainly knowing that our nation's major parties are both headed by black men should make Americans proudly aware of our progress, but that fact has yet to resonate. It's still Barack Obama's moment. Say what you will about them, black conservatives have little to gain personally by standing on conviction. In the words of Joe Hicks, “If I wanted to be on the winning side, I'd be sitting here telling you how great Obama is.”

More here



EU rules to abolish part-time British firemen

The extension of the European Working Time Directive will force the majority of firefighters, who are part-time, to choose between their day job and covering for the emergency services. Even the time they are on call is calculated by Brussels as part of their working week. Around 90 per cent of Britain is protected by retained firefighters.

The Chief Fire Officers' Association has warned that the Fire Service "could not function effectively" and predicts that 13,200 retained firefighter posts will be regulated out of existence by the EU.

The Conservative Party, which is opposing the change, has predicted that council taxes will also have to rise sharply as local authorities will be forced to pay more permanent rather than part-time staff. The Tories have warned that the tax on band D properties could rise by between £59 to £167-a-year.

Last week the Daily Telegraph reported that patients face a significant increase in waiting times for operations because "insane'' European rules mean doctors' hours will be cut so much by the 48-hour week rule that they will not be able to cope.

Fire chiefs have warned that they too will not be able to cope as they are the only ones in Europe who depend so heavily on part-time workers.

David Dalziel, Secretary of the Chief Fire Officers Association in Scotland, said: "The potential loss of the individual opt-out in the UK would have catastrophic effects." In Scotland there are only 76 full-time stations, compared with 248 part-time.

Mr Dalziel added: "These men and women provide the national resilience and emergency response to natural and man made disaster, major incidents and other emergencies crewing two out of every three fire stations in the country. They hold other jobs in their local communities and also provide around 120 hours availability every week of the year to deliver a local fire and rescue service. Any adverse impact on that would expose this country to an unacceptable level of risk."

Philip Dunne, the Tory MP who chairs the Commons All-Party Parliamentary group on rural services, said that his Shropshire constituency was typical of rural Britain with only three of the 23 stations manned by full-time firefighters.

He said: "This European decision threatens to leave residents of many areas in Britain, particularly rural areas, without fire fighting protection. It's putting lives at risk. The UK is the only country in Europe to have fire protection provided by part-time paid firefighters. So other EU countries are not concerned by this problem."

Caroline Spelman, the Shadow Local Government secretary, said: "This will be yet another blow to rural services. Lives will be put at risk through reduced fire cover, and the fire levy on council tax will have to rise even more."

Glyn Morgan, chief executive of the Fire Officers Association, said: "There is a widespread fear that these EU changes will potentially have an adverse impact on safety and lead to reduced fire cover particularly in remote and rural areas where nearly all the firefighters are retained."

In North Wales there are 550 retained – or part-time – firefighters who hold down full-time jobs while still making themselves available to fight fires in their communities. Dorset has 26 fire stations, but only eight fire engines are manned by full-time crews. The other 33 are manned by retained firefighters, who usually have full-time jobs but spend up to 120 hours a week on call in their homes or workplaces.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:22

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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

 

Illegal jokes in Britain

At last – legislation is about to be passed which will make homophobic jokes illegal. It has been a long time coming. I haven’t found jokes about homosexuals funny for at least two decades, so either way I win...

The other great thing is that jokes about homosexuals will immediately become funny again, because they are now contraband, samizdat and against the law. Those same boring old jokes about not bending down in the shower, being good at interior design, liking Judy Garland and so on, will now make one prick up one’s ears (ooh, get you, dearie! But not the ears, surely). And these days we need more things to laugh at.

For years I found racist jokes extremely boring – but they became funny when it was apparent that the act of telling them could (a) lose you your job and (b) bring the Old Bill down on you with a charge of inciting racial hatred. Now, as a consequence, I find almost all racist jokes hilarious, especially ones about Muslims and particularly if they are cartoons which feature Allah or Muhammad or fat ladies in burqas saying to one another: “Does my bomb look big in this?”

However, I don’t find them quite as funny as I find jokes about physical or mental disabilities – they are the real howlers these days. And that’s because the disability lobby has become so preternaturally sensitive, so disposed towards pouncing on anything which might be construed as disablist. Consequently, these days, all you have to do is say “and guess what . . . he only had one arm!” and I fall about laughing.

When my colleague Jeremy Clarkson described Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” I smiled briefly; but when the professional race monkeys and anti-disablist monkeys got on his case I suddenly found it all killingly funny. “How dare he imply that having one eye, or being Scottish, is an insult?” these terrible people ranted, and with every rant Jeremy’s comment became truly funny. Oh, I thought, in the end – strap up my sides, I can’t stand it. Such wonderful pomposity, a real gift to the comedian. Such hilarious hypersensitivity.

Jokes are almost never funny per se, when they are stripped of their social context (if they ever could be). The stuff that makes us laugh is never neutral; it involves poking that part of us which, for most of the time, remains unpoked. The part of us which civilised behaviour insists should remain below the surface. That’s why Ricky Gervais is so funny; he gets this point – he understands the latent humour of social embarrassment, of saying things which you are simply not supposed to say. The mentally handicapped kid in the restaurant, the black actor confronted by a golliwog.

It is the breaching of the social convention which is really funny, not the supposed slighting of black, disabled or homosexual people. It is the potential for naughtiness, which exists in all of us (yeah, okay, except maybe Patricia Hewitt). Bring on the legislation and bring on those queer jokes.

SOURCE



Why does it take a German like me to get the English to celebrate St George's Day?

By John Jungclaussen, London Correspondent, Die Zeit

I confess: I am an Anglophile. It is a condition I first succumbed to when I arrived on these shores some 16 years ago. Back then I spent my first week travelling round chocolate-box villages in the rolling hills of the Cotswolds. A week later I found myself on a teeming campus in the heart of London where I enrolled at university. One couldn't, perhaps, think of two places in Britain that are more different - and yet the tranquil and unspoilt beauty of the 'Heart of England' and London's relentless rhythm of people and politics, commerce and culture are both quintessentially English.

They encapsulate what is great about this nation: the instinct to try to preserve and protect its sublime countryside, including the social structure and cultural heritage that come with it, and the tolerance to absorb people from different cultures who have migrated to London over the centuries to create the most global metropolis in the world. Those are among the many things that I have come to love about this country.

I have now settled down in London in my job as a foreign correspondent and although my view of the English is perhaps not quite as rose-tinted as it was back then, my love for the English has only grown over the years. It is like getting to know a friend. The more you know about them and the more you understand their peculiarities, the dearer they become.

But the one thing that strikes me most about this dear friend is how little the English think of themselves. I can't think of a fellow Anglophile who is English. Those who love England are foreigners like myself. Ask an Englishman about his native land and all you get is a litany of how dreadful things are. This is a nation that seems to revel in a Press that is constantly talking the country down. Life in Britain these days seems to be about nothing else but Asbos, binge drinking and teenage pregnancy, spiced up only by yet another celebrity scandal.

About time then for somebody to do something to change that - and London Mayor Boris Johnson's plan to use April 23, St George's Day, to stage a festival of Englishness in the capital seems to be just the kind of event that is long overdue.

It is not surprising that an unashamed celebration of Englishness has to be organised from the top. The Welsh have been celebrating St David's Day for generations. Children have a day off school and wear daffodils when they attend eisteddfods to celebrate their music and literature. The Scots have Burns Night and St Andrew's Day to remind themselves of their national identity, and on St Patrick's Day the Irish celebrate their nation across the world from London's Trafalgar Square to New York's Times Square.

Were it not for a populist mayor who likes to boast about his Turkish roots [The reference is to Boris Johnson, an old Etonian and Balliol Classics graduate], it wouldn't even occur to London's English population to stage a celebration of their culture and national identity.

If anything, being English has become something to be embarrassed about. In the same vein as the previous Mayor Ken Livingstone, who thought it necessary and appropriate to apologise to the capital's African and Caribbean communities for London's role in the slave trade, 200 years after its abolition, the English would rather apologise for their history as conquerors of the British Isles and creators of the United Kingdom than be proud of their heritage.

The last stage for English national sentiment is on the terraces of the football stadium where - a German might be forgiven for saying this - Englishness does not present itself in its most appealing guise. I have often found myself in the firing line of bellicose football supporters, reduced to the German whose grandparents were beaten on the beaches of Normandy and whose parents were beaten at Wembley.

Although it seems too obvious that the English have achieved a lot more in the past 64 years than winning the war against Nazi Germany and winning the World Cup in 1966, all they are concerned with is debating notions of Englishness versus Britishness instead of celebrating the countless positive aspects and achievements that make up their identity. Let me suggest a few things about the English that are well worth celebrating.

First of all, the sublime beauty of your countryside. Millions of my fellow countrymen flock to England every year on holiday. They love the romantic beauty of the West Country with its quaint villages and the dramatic scenery of the Peak District.

Although the protest march against the Government's fox-hunting Bill in 2004 mobilised one of the largest demonstrations in English history, there is no sense that the celebration of the countryside is part of an English identity. It should be.

Second, William Shakespeare. Every child knows that the Bard is one of the greatest writers of all time and yet the world sees him as a Briton, not as an Englishman. Claim his heritage in the same way that we Germans claim the heritage of Bach and Beethoven and the Austrians have made Mozart their own. And while you are at it, acknowledge and be proud of the fact that English is the lingua franca and one of most important tools in the globalised world.

Third, your history as merchants and inventors. England kick-started the Industrial Revolution and led the way in the introduction of new production techniques which, in turn, revolutionised trade and helped to create in the 19th Century the first wave of globalisation.

Acknowledging these achievements and these aspects of English national heritage should be the norm in the same way that the notion of British cuisine, a focal point of Boris Johnson's London festival of Englishness, needn't be seen in the context of French cuisine. After all, the French don't suffer from an inferiority complex when they talk about gardening.

The English revel in individuality and instinctively question authority, which is why the cradle of modern democracy stands in Westminster. Kings and queens were well advised to hand over power to Parliament before an unruly mob could storm their palaces.

What happens in societies where the collective overrules the individual was amply demonstrated in the 20th Century across Europe when Queen Victoria's descendants lost at least their thrones and mostly their lives as they were sacrificed on the altar of great utopian ideas of revolutionary societies.

Such grand visions didn't appeal much in England where Anglo-Saxon pragmatism helped society to muddle through the upheavals of wars, economic crises and social change.

Whereas her European neighbours created societies according to textbooks, Britain relied on the age-old notion of getting by on a shoestring. Although that way the country avoided bloodshed and revolution and maintained an admirable political stability, over time it also lost a sense of its own identity.

Every now and then people and nation states need an earth-shattering event to remind themselves of who they are. Germany and countries all over Central and Eastern Europe had to redefine their national identities after the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. The US lived through the traumatic events of 9/11 to strengthen her sense of purpose.

England, on the other hand, continued to muddle through. Neither the 7/7 bombings in London nor the recent collapse of Anglo Saxon capitalism seem to have done much to refocus British society on a strong common theme.

So, Boris, organise a festival of Englishness that captures the imagination in the same way that the 1951 Festival of Britain excited previous generations. The Skylon and the South Bank Centre showed postwar Britain a new way into the future. What England needs is a reminder of her greatness to overcome all the current social and economic problems - for they are only going to get worse.

SOURCE



Setback for Australia's Gestapo

iiNet quits Government web filter trials. "Gestapo" is an abbreviation for "Geheime Staatspolizei" or "Secret State Police". Judge for yourself whether it fits

AUSTRALIA'S third largest internet service provider (ISP) has pulled out of the Government's web filtering trials, saying the plan is "no longer just about stopping child porn".

The Government's plan involves a nation-wide filter that stops "unwanted material" from appearing on Australian user's computer screens. iiNet says the ambiguity of "unwanted material" is what caused it to pull out of the trials. “We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship,” iiNet managing director Michael Malone said in a statement.

“It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as 'unwanted material' without an explanation of what that includes."

Shadow Minister for Communications Senator Nick Minchin said the iiNET withdrawal cast further doubt over the internet filtering trials. “This decision by iiNet casts further doubt over the veracity and credibility of these trials and raises more questions about the Rudd Government’s unpopular mandatory filtering policy,” Senator Minchin said. “While the Government has selected six ISPs to take part in the first stage of the trial, I am advised that none of them, other than Webshield, which already offers its customers an ISP-level filtering option are in a position to even yet start.

“The onus is squarely on Communications Minister Senator Conroy to demonstrate what he is proposing is even technically feasible and while the Coalition is prepared to examine any trial results that are produced, he must commit to an independent audit of any results to ensure they are credible. Without the involvement of the nation’s three largest ISPs it is difficult to see how any meaningful results will be produced," he said.

Earlier this year, the Government snubbed larger ISPs Optus and iiNet when announcing participants for its first round of live trials, instead favouring a handful of small ISPs. One of them, Primus, has since compared compulsory web filtering to China.

Optus will still seek to participate in the second round of trials, according to ZDNet.com.au.

iiNet had stated it would take part in the trials to prove that an ISP-level web filter won't work. “Everyone is repulsed by, and opposed to, child pornography but this trial and policy is not the solution or even about that." “In reality, the vast majority of online child pornography activity does not appear on public websites but is distributed over peer-to-peer networks which are not and cannot be captured by this trial or policy.”

The web filter is based on blacklist of websites administered by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Last week, a list of websites purporting to be ACMA's blacklist was leaked online, containing alleged links to child porn as well as more common sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and small businesses.

Geheimepolizist Conroy denied the leaked list was the same as ACMA's, but said it contained "some common URLs".

SOURCE



Australia: State of secrecy

THE media in the US enjoys an incredible amount of freedom, at least compared with the media in Australia. For example, the media in the US can tell you exactly what Barack Obama did on his first full day in the White House. He spent the first 10 minutes alone in the Oval Office in quiet contemplation. During that time, he read a letter that former president George W. Bush had left on the desk for him. At 9.10am, wife Michelle popped in. Together they went to prayers, then, on his return to the Oval Office, Barack Obama issued his first memo as President. The topic? Transparency in government.

In that memo, widely available online, Obama instructed the heads of all the various government agencies he controls to be open and honest with the American people. The presumption, he said, should be "in favour of disclosure". To that end, department heads should renew their commitment to freedom of information law and take "affirmative steps to make information public". Moreover, they should use modern technology (that is, the internet) to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government.

Now, it's all very well for Obama to issue such a memo on day one in office. Time will tell how transparent his administration actually is, but it's interesting to compare that memo from Obama's first full day in office with the Rudd Government's progress on transparency in government.

When Labor was in Opposition in Australia, it too promised a "sunlight" policy on information held by government. It pledged changes to freedom of information laws that would make so many more documents accessible, in a reasonable time frame and at a sensible fee, to anybody who wanted to seethem. It promised protection for whistleblowers, who could include people such as the nurse who came forward and exposed the horror at the heart of the Bundaberg hospital scandal; and it promised shield protection for journalists such as the Herald Sun's top reporters, Gerard McManus and Michael Harvey, who were fined $7000 each and given criminal records for refusing to reveal their sources on a story about lax airport security that was correct and in the public interest.

These changes are necessary and overdue, and not just because the media says so. The ordinary member of the public probably has no idea how difficult it is to get even the simplest information out of government.

Under existing law and protocol, anybody employed by the government - that can mean a nurse, a police officer or a bus driver - is threatened with disciplinary action if they speak to the media.

It's not possible for journalists to call state schools and ask principals what they think about a state government plan to tackle bullying. It's not possible to call social workers in indigenous communities to ask them whether new rules on the supply of petrol have helped or harmed the young. All must go through the central press office: in other words, through government.

In recent weeks, the Rudd Government has busily been insisting that it has, or is, delivering on its promise to make government more transparent. Last Friday, for example, Attorney-General Robert McClelland congratulated himself for introducing to parliament the Evidence Amendment (Journalists' Privilege) Bill 2009, otherwise known as the Government's shield laws for journalists.

McClelland says the law will provide "much-needed protection for journalists", but it won't do any such thing. It won't give a journalist the right to protect their source and it won't place the onus on the government (or any other agency) to explain why a source should be exposed.

All the change will do is give judges some discretion when dealing with journalists who won't reveal their source.

How will this change compare with law in other democracies? The Australian National University's leading student of shield laws, Lorraine Ingham, last year compared Australian laws with legislation in New Zealand, Britain and the US. She says Australia continues to "lag well behind its foreign counterparts" because there is "no presumption in Australia that a journalist need not reveal their source" and the new legislation will not change that.

Moreover, there is nothing in the Australian amendment about public interest or about the right of the people to a free flow of information, both of which are features of the US and the NZ laws.

According to Ingham, it should be incumbent on the Australian government, or whatever other party is seeking disclosure, to explain why the identity of the source is a matter of public interest and the reason can't be: "Because we want to charge them with the offence of leaking."

McClelland says that, under his amendments, judges will have to consider "the potential harm disclosure of identity could cause both the source and the journalist".

With respect, the fact journalist or source may come to harm if their identity is revealed is hardly the point. The point should be: Is this information in the public interest? If so, it's right and proper that it's before the public.

The protection of one's source is of paramount importance to journalists. This was proven in 1995, when The Australian's editor, Paul Whittaker, who was working as an investigative reporter for Brisbane's The Courier-Mail, refused to answer 430 questions at a commission of inquiry about the source behind a story about former Labor senator Graham Richardson. The inquiry was set up to determine who had leaked to Whittaker and Marian Wilkinson, then a reporter at The Australian, information about a politically sensitive investigation into allegations of corruption concerning Richardson. Richardson was accused of being supplied with prostitutes by Gold Coast businessmen in exchange for making favourable representations on their behalf to a US defence contractor. Whittaker's home was raided and he was threatened with being jailed indefinitely for contempt, but he held firm and 14 years later he shows no sign of buckling. He has never revealed his source.

A coalition of media organisations, formed last May under the banner of Australia's Right to Know, has welcomed the planned changes, saying the amendments, if passed, will at least mean that journalists won't "automatically face conviction or jail" if they refuse to disclose the identity of a source.

McClelland says the new law should be read in conjunction with the Government's planned laws to protect whistleblowers, which are likely to be introduced later this year.

The whistleblower laws are likely to be informed by the findings of a legal and constitutional affairs committee headed by Mark Dreyfus QC. That committee suggests that whistleblowers first take their concerns to a superior of some kind (and, in the process, probably wreck their career); and, if that doesn't work, they should complain to an external body such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman (a process that is itself likely to be a bureaucratic nightmare, befouled by politics). If - or when - that fails, the whistleblower must wait a reasonable period (whatever that may mean) before taking their concerns to journalists, and then only if the matter concerns "an immediate and serious threat to public health and safety".

According to Dreyfus, these changes would "transform the culture of the public service and protect whistleblowers from reprisals".

In fact, whistleblowers would still have to jump through hoops and lawyers would have a field day trying to decide what constitutes an immediate and serious threat.

This newspaper wonders: would airport security qualify? After all, it was The Australian that in 2005 published details from an internal Customs report that revealed lax security and drug-smuggling rings at several airports, leaving the country vulnerable to terrorism. The report had been ignored by internal officials for two years before it eventually was leaked to the newspaper. No journalist was dragged to court but Customs official Allan Kessing was charged, convicted and sentenced to nine months' jail, later suspended. He lost his job and is fighting an appeal, which has cost him his savings, all while protesting his innocence. The Australian has never given up its source. Its view issimple: the story was correct and in the publicinterest, and therefore was published.

University of Queensland business school lecturer Bill De Maria has described the planned reform of whistleblower law as "mean and narrow in its vision" and "embarrassingly conservative in its proposals". "It won't give protection to ordinary members of the public wishing to report instances of commonwealth wrongdoing," he says. "It won't give protection to people fed up with bureaucratic obstruction and harassment who go to the media."

Australian Press Council chairman Ken McKinnon agrees, saying: "The future situation will be hardly better than it is today. Whistleblowers know that their best and quickest chance of rectifying corruption, waste and general governmental incompetence is to go directly to the press."

Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance federal secretary Christopher Warren says: "This Government made some very positive noises in Opposition. There are some signs that it has a positive attitude to some of these issues, but we'd like it to go a lot further. Paying lip-service is not enough. It demands national leadership, practical legislation and committed campaigning. It also demands a change in culture, from that of secrecy to one of transparency and openness."

Nobody is pretending the news media always gets the balance right when it comes to the release of information. As John Hartigan, chairman and chief executive of News Limited (publisher of The Australian), said in one of his many speeches on this topic: "Certainly our media is imperfect and its journalism sometimes flawed. The media, like most industries, has room for improvement."

Hartigan's point, however, is that media "remains our primary source of information" about politicians and government, and "the only one that can challenge that information, to test that it's right ... to unearth the things they're hiding, tell everyone what's really going on."

That is why members of the Right to Know coalition - Fairfax, the ABC, SBS, the commercial television networks and News Limited - remain united on the subject of media freedom. Today this group will host a forum on the Right to Know.

Of particular interest will be Special Minister of State John Faulkner, who is expected to outline details of the freedom of information reforms. He has hinted that a change in culture is necessary. That's both true and overdue.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:13

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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

 

Homosexual couple sue Christians for barring them from hotel bed

The Christian owners of a seaside hotel may be prosecuted after refusing to allow a gay couple to stay in a double room. Peter and Hazelmary Bull are facing an unprecedented court case under controversial new equality laws.

Martyn Hall, who lives with his civil partner Steven Preddy, has lodged a county court claim for up to 5,000 in damages alleging 'direct discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation'.

But the Bulls deny the charge, saying they have a long-standing policy of banning all unmarried couples, both heterosexual and gay, from sharing a bed at the Chymorvah Private Hotel in Marazion near Penzance in Cornwall. Mrs Bull, a 62-year-old great-grandmother, said that even her brother and his female partner had to stay in separate rooms when they visited the hotel.

The Bulls, who have the backing of the Christian Institute, have operated their 'married only' policy since they bought the hotel in 1986. The hotel website says: 'We have few rules but please note that out of a deep regard for marriage we prefer to let double accommodation to heterosexual married couples only.'

Last August, the Bulls received a letter from Stonewall, the gay rights organisation, saying it had received a complaint and warning the hotel it was breaking the law.

The following month Mr Preddy, from Bristol, rang to book a double room for two nights. Mrs Bull, who took the call, said last night that she had wrongly assumed that he would be staying with his wife before she accepted the booking. When Mr Preddy and Mr Hall arrived, they were told by the manager, Bernie Quinn, that the hotel could not honour the booking. The couple told him he was acting illegally before leaving and reporting the incident to police.

Mrs Bull insisted last night: 'I have had people clearly involved in affairs and under-age people who have tried to book in here for sex, and I have refused them the same as I refused these gentlemen because I won't be a party to anything which is an affront to my faith under my roof.'

The couple's solicitor, Tom Ellis, from the Manchester-based firm Aughton Ainsworth, said: 'Our argument is that the regulations impinge on the Bulls' human rights. 'Under the European Convention on Human Rights, people are able to hold a religious belief and manifest it in the way they act.'

A spokesman for Stonewall said: 'We look forward to the hotel changing its policy to reflect equality, the 21st Century and the law.'

SOURCE



Brussels ‘recreating Soviet bloc in Europe’

The outspoken Czech leader has warned of a ‘democratic deficit’

THE leader of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, has warned that a “Europe of states” is in danger of turning into a “state of Europe”, legislating on almost every aspect of people’s lives but lacking in democracy and transparency. In an interview with The Sunday Times, President Vaclav Klaus drew parallels between Brussels and the failed communist dictatorships of eastern Europe. “My criticism is based on the sensitivity towards attempts to restrain freedom and democracy, and it does relate to the fact that for most of my life I lived in a political, social and economic system which was not free and was not democratic,” he said.

Klaus also predicted that Gordon Brown’s attempts to produce a European solution to the global economic crisis in time for next month’s G20 summit in London could make the problems worse.

Klaus, 67, an economist by training and a successful finance minister after the fall of communism, said he believed Brown’s plans for more regulatory supervision of the financial system would resolve nothing. Instead, Europe should let business and markets go free. “The crisis cannot be solved by restraining human initiative and putting further burdens on businesses,” he said. “I propose the exact opposite: deregulation, liberalisation, removing barriers and unnecessary obstructive legislation at the European level.”

A longstanding Eurosceptic and admirer of Margaret Thatcher, Klaus remains scornful of attempts to impose the Lisbon treaty on an unwilling electorate. He said the treaty contained measures to give unelected officials in Brussels “even more power”. Irish voters who threw out the treaty in a referendum last year “knew what they were doing”, Klaus added, and he was not certain that the second vote which has been called will have a different outcome: “But the pressure will be enormous and not very democratic.”

He talked of a “democratic deficit” in the EU when he addressed the European parliament last month. In his interview, conducted by e-mail, he explained: “I see the democratic deficit in a growing distance between the citizens of the EU member states and the EU political elite, as well as in the shift of decision making from the member states’ capitals to Brussels.” About 75% of legislation was made in the EU by unelected officials, he said. The Lisbon treaty would give the EU its own legal personality and would abolish important rights of veto: “This certainly is not a solution to the democratic deficit. It makes the democratic deficit even greater.”

Klaus refused to say whether he would agree to sign the treaty, which has yet to be passed by the Czech Senate, if and when it arrives on his desk. “I don’t wish to foresee . . . what happens after that; let’s wait for the Senate’s decision,” he said. The Czech government’s presidency has smashed any hopes of a cosy EU consensus. Klaus was booed by many MEPs after his speech and a humorous sculpture installed in Brussels portrayed Bulgaria as a lavatory, Romania as a Dracula theme park and France as a country permanently on strike. They were not amused.

Klaus, who helped to lead his country from communism to freedom, warned that the new constitution would stifle debate and democracy. “Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition,” he said. “It was through this experience that we learnt the bitter lesson that with no opposition and tolerance to differing points of view, there is no freedom.”

Klaus revels in speaking his mind on controversial subjects, always prepared to confront politically correct orthodoxies. He is a leading critic of the green movement and also of measures to fight global warming. Freedom and prosperity, he said, were much more endangered than the climate.

He firmly refuses to fly the blue and gold European flag over his official residence in Prague, pointing out that “the European Union is not a state and legally it does not have a flag”.

In a pointed reference to his country’s Soviet-dominated past, he said: “We have lived through the times when it was compulsory on some days to fly another state flag next to ours. I am very glad that these times are over.”

SOURCE



Boris ignores political correctness to fly England's flag and celebrate St George



Boris Johnson slew the dragon of political correctness yesterday by announcing London would mark St George's Day with a week of celebrations. The capital's mayor said he would proudly fly the red and white flag of England's patron saint from his City Hall office on April 23.

St George's Day has been a low-key event in London in recent years, dwarfed by a St Patrick's Day parade funded to the tune of £100,000, and enormous crowds at Gay Pride. The Mayor's endorsement of St George's Day appears to mark an official determination to make English patriotism more acceptable. In recent years, many local authorities have banned taxi drivers, builders and firemen from displaying the Cross of St George – often citing spurious health and safety reasons.

Mr Johnson said: 'St George's Day has been ignored in London for far too long, but I'm truly pleased to announce some fantastic events to mark this occasion. 'We have much to be proud of in this great country. England has given so much to the world, politically, socially and artistically.'

A music festival on Sunday April 25 in Trafalgar Square will feature artists 'finding innovative ways to express music that is inspired by English folk tradition'. And as April 23 is also Shakespeare's birthday, there will be an event commemorating the Bard's work at the Globe Theatre in London.

Many councils have shied away from endorsing St George and the English flag over a perception that they were the preserve of far-Right political parties and racists. St George's adoption by Crusaders against Islam in the Holy Land has been a further obstacle. But in recent years, English patriotism has become more acceptable, with the flag more likely to be associated with the national football team.

The news was welcomed by the Left-wing musician Billy Bragg yesterday. He said: 'I think it's great that the Mayor is grasping the nettle. Good luck to him. If you don't use the flag in a positive way then you leave it to be used by the far-Right and it will have negative connotations.'

Until the 18th century, St George's Day was a celebration on a par with Christmas. But it fell out of favour. Despite being the patron saint of England, St George is thought to have been a Roman soldier born in Turkey. The legend of George slaying the dragon is believed to have been brought back from the Middle East by Crusaders, growing in popularity until he was canonised in the 1400s.

Last year, Gordon Brown flew the flag of St George over Downing Street for the first time in recent years. But the day has not received much backing from government. Over the past five years, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport spent just 230 pounds promoting St George's Day.

SOURCE



Australian rights record under scrutiny in UN seat bid

What a lot of crap. Human rights are as good in Australia as in any country in the world. And as far as Aborigines are concerned, successive Australian governments poured welfare money down their throats for decades because anything else would have been called racist. The fact that welfare did more harm than good is no surprise but it was a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't

PRIME MINISTER Kevin Rudd's dream of winning a UN Security Council seat might be dashed by international concerns about Australia's record on human rights.

Australia's poor treatment of its indigenous population and refugees will come under scrutiny by an international human rights watchdog, amid continuing lobbying for a seat on the prestigious UN body that oversees military and peace-keeping operations.

The Human Rights Committee will today examine Australia's human rights record and issues, including the Northern Territory intervention and immigration detention.

Australian lawyers meeting in New York last week said a good report from the committee would improve the Prime Minister's bid to join the Security Council.

"It would assist substantially," said Human Rights Law Resource Centre director Philip Lynch. "Australia has put human rights front and centre of its Security Council bid."

High level officials from the Immigration, Indigenous Affairs and Attorney-General's departments will represent Australia during the two-day hearing.

Andrew Hudson, senior associate at non-government organisation Human Rights First, said the committee objectively examined countries and their compliance with treaties and standards.

"It will criticise Australia's human rights record to the extent that it falls short," he said.

Unlike the US and Britain, Australia does not have a bill of rights. Proponents sense the Security Council bid could propel the Rudd Government to enshrine human rights in law, as they are in Victoria and other states.

Teena Bagli, from the National Association of Community Legal Centres, said human rights had to be secured for a bid to succeed. "It's vital for the Government - who has said human rights is important and is a part of their Security Council bid - to walk the walk," she said.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:16

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Monday, March 23, 2009

 

New rights spark ‘nanny state’ row in Britain

Ministers are to introduce new “human rights” covering housing, healthcare and education in a move critics fear could lead to a massive and costly expansion of the welfare state. Plans for the new bill of rights will be unveiled tomorrow by Jack Straw, the justice secretary. He will suggest that new entitlements such as rights to good healthcare, education and freedom from poverty could be added to traditional freedoms such as trial by jury and free speech.

The new rights would be offset by responsibilities, such as a duty to look for work in return for receiving benefits or to look after one’s children.

Tomorrow’s green paper is expected to face attack from those who believe such reforms are a distraction from the task of battling the recession.

There will also be fears that the plan would be another step towards a “nanny state”, providing further lucrative work for lawyers who have cashed in on the 1998 Human Rights Act.

David Heathcoat-Amory, a Conservative member of the Commons European scrutiny committee, warned that the introduction of “socio-economic rights ” would herald increased power for the state and restrict reforms. “I very much doubt Margaret Thatcher would have been able to carry out the reforms she made in the 1980s if the institutions she reformed were covered by some kind of bill of rights,” he said. It is understood several cabinet ministers privately urged Gordon Brown to scrap the plan.

Straw’s deputy, Michael Wills, writing in today’s Sunday Times, insists the recession has made a bill of rights more important. He says: “Better articulating the responsibilities we owe and the rights we have is not an alternative to decisive action on the economic front but an essential complement to it.”

The Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, has been much criticised, particularly by Tories. In his article, Wills says the government has no intention of scrapping the law. He says there may well be a case for not making the new rights enforceable in the courts, but adds: “Words have power in their own right. They can move us and mould our society even though they are not law.”

SOURCE



The Great Betrayal

On this sixth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq, there is finally a consensus among supporters and opponents that we’ve won the war. The surge that Bush launched and Democrats opposed has been successful and, as a result, Iraq has become a Middle Eastern democracy, an anti-terrorist regime, and an American ally. It would be hard to imagine a more remarkable turnabout or a more comprehensive repudiation of conventional political wisdom. Yet this has not led to a comparable reappraisal by critics of the war of their previous attacks, or to any mea culpas by Democrats who launched a scorched earth campaign against the president who led it, and continued it for five years while the war dragged on

The Democratic attacks on the war described America’s commander-in-chief as a liar who misled his country and sent American soldiers to die in a conflict that was unnecessary, illegal and unjust. This made prosecution of the war incalculably harder while strengthening the resolve of our enemies to defeat us. It is time to re-evaluate the words and actions of the war’s opponents in the stark light of a history that proved them wrong.

In the fall of 2002, a majority of Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in voting to authorize President Bush to use force to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein. In July 2003, only three months after Saddam had been removed, the Democratic National Committee launched a national campaign which accused President Bush of lying in order to trick Democrats into voting for the war. It was the beginning of a five-year campaign designed to paint the president as the liar-in-chief and America as a criminal aggressor, and the military occupier of a poor country that had not attacked us.

What had changed in the intervening three months to turn Democrats so vehemently against the war they had authorized? The answer can only be found in domestic politics. In those three months, an unknown antiwar candidate named Howard Dean had taken the lead in the primary polls and was looking like a shoe-in for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a result rival candidates who had voted for the war, including eventual nominees Kerry and Edwards, changed their positions 180 degrees and joined the attacks on President Bush. Naturally, the Democrats couldn’t admit their attacks were motivated by crass political calculations. Instead, they claimed that they had been deceived by the White House which had manipulated the intelligence on Iraq, persuading them to support the war on false premises.

This allegation was in fact the biggest lie of the war, since Democrats had full access to all U.S. intelligence on Iraq through their seats on the congressional intelligence committees. This intelligence was available to them, in advance of their vote to authorize the use of force. In the months and years that followed, the Democrats added other false charges -- that troops “killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” were “terrorizing kids and…women,” and had committed atrocities comparable to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime.” They rejoiced when news reporters leaked information about national security programs designed to combat the terrorists – and thus destroyed them. They held up funding for American soldiers on the battlefield, attempted to cut off all funding, and when that failed, tried to tie funding to a timeline that would ensure America’s defeat. They openly accused uniformed officers like General David Petraeus of lying about conditions on the ground and hoped against hope that “this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything.”

Dissent is legitimate in wartime, but the Democratic Party’s opposition to this war went far beyond dissent into unprecedented territory. Fortunately, the Bush administration was able to retrieve its own mistakes and its domestic opponents to win a war that Democrats said was unwinnable and (despite their own authorization) shouldn’t have been fought in the first place. But it was no thanks to the Party that now occupies the White House that this American war was won.

SOURCE



Australia's secretive internet censorship

The censorship is offensive enough by itself but the veil of secrecy over it is an open invitation to abuse by bureaucrats and politicians

SECRECY, said British judge Sir John Chadwick, is the badge of fraud. He was speaking in the context of financial fraud but it seems equally to apply in Australia where governments wear the badge while robbing us of our freedoms, all the while pretending to do precisely the opposite. We have over the past decade descended down a path of official deceit where governments erode our freedoms of association and expression while making it an offence to speak of their fraudulence.

It began in the hysteria of a post-9/11 world when the Government stole our presumption of innocence and the protections of habeas corpus under the pretext of protecting us, and then made it a crime to speak about its trespasses. Demonstrable incompetents were empowered to bang people up and, if their blunderings found nothing criminal, to release them under an oath of secrecy and pain of punishment if they revealed what had been done in the name of national security. Secrecy became an end to itself, behind which the Government and its minions were able to hide their worst excesses and intimidate their victims.

Now, under the pretext of protecting us from corruption on the internet, a government of a different colour hides its abuses of power behind another veil. And it threatens punitive damages against anyone who lifts the veil and exposes its stupidity.

Anyone who gives more than a passing thought to their rights should have been long concerned over the Federal Government's nobly declared but ill-considered and illiberal plan to filter the internet. More specifically, they should have been outraged over the Government's blacklist of 10,000 sites which were to be added to another 1300 identified by the unelected and faceless Australian Communications and Media Authority to be filtered out of our consciousness.

Just what might we be protected against? We may never know. The ACMA list was said to be mainly of child pornography sites, but last year Broadband and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy could not even define the grounds for restricting the 10,000, although they were supposed to contain "illegal and unwanted content". Now we learn the ACMA list of banned sites has mysteriously grown to more than 2300, with no public inquiry and no rights of appeal. Worse, we are not allowed to know what is on the proscribed list and anyone who wants to rescue us from our ignorance is threatened with up to 10 years in jail.

An outfit called Wikileaks put online a leaked list of what purports to be the banned list, including entirely innocent sites and blameless individuals. For its trouble, it was threatened with huge fines and placed on the blacklist. Conroy denies the veracity of the list but we may never know because it is a dark secret shared by the Government, the ACMA and a favoured few who stand to get fat by perfecting the internet filter.

For all Conroy's denials and sanctimony about irresponsibility, the expert opinion is that for the national filtering scheme to work the Government, through the ACMA, will have to be party to the distribution of possibly salacious, hurtful and erroneous information to a select few private companies.

And we, the people whose freedoms are curbed, will be forbidden under pain of penalty from ever knowing or speaking of what is hidden from our eyes.

What next? Who next? This is an assault on our freedoms, an insupportable presumption of power by government and its unelected officers that begins to erode freedoms guaranteed since Magna Carta. It is a Kafkaesque exercise in mindless tyranny that is unworthy of one of the world's oldest, proudest and previously durable democracies. Secrecy may be a badge of fraud. It is also the flag of frightened men.

SOURCE



Australia ready to boycott Durban II

Australia said it will boycott the Durban II anti-racism conference unless the heavily anti-Israel conference draft document is changed. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said in federal parliament March 12 that Australia would join Israel, Canada, the United States and Italy in withdrawing from the United Nations-sponsored conference pending a revision of the text of the draft documents for next month's conference in Geneva. “If we form the view that the text is going to lead to nothing more than an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic harangue and an anti-Jewish propaganda exercise, Australia will not be in attendance,” Smith said.

“We will give the working group every opportunity to revise the text in a qualitatively improved way to ensure that that does not happen, and we will make our judgment at a time of our choosing when we have given all nation-states concerned the opportunity to add qualitatively to the text to enable it to form the proper basis of debate at the conference," he said.

Numerous Jewish representatives have lobbied the federal government to boycott the April 20-24 conference, which they fear will be a reprise of the U.N. World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that took place in 2001 in Durban, South Africa. Israel and the United States walked out of the conference, which they criticized as an anti-Israel hate fest.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:12

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Sunday, March 22, 2009

 

A Short Interview With Evan Sayet About The Nature Of Liberalism

Evan Sayet has given not one, but two of the best talks I have ever heard about liberalism (You can see them here and here). So, I was very pleased to get an opportunity to get together with him for an interview to talk about liberals. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Q. You used to be a liberal, correct? So why are you no longer a liberal? What changed you around? What changed your perspective?

A. Yes, where I grew up you were a liberal or a Democrat. It was practically in your DNA. There was no intellectual rational reason that I was a Democrat. You went into schools. You leave your home. You leave your temple and by the time you go out into the real world to actually experience things, you've been bombarded with liberal ideology from day one.

You know, one of those things that I recognized later on when I went out and sought out Republicans, and attended a Republican meeting, was that it dawned on me that it was the first time I had ever heard what Republicans believed from Republicans.

Q. Now you've been around a lot of liberals. You said that's how you grew up -- and you worked on Bill Maher's show. So you certainly saw them there. What's the difference between liberals and conservatives? What is the basic difference?

A. The basic difference is a recognition that good and evil, right and wrong, better and worse do exist and that's what the conservative believes -- and it becomes his job to do his best to seek out the good of fighting evil, to promote the better end and squelch the worse.

The opposite point of view is that nothing can be recognized as better or worse than anything, not because it doesn't necessarily exist, but because as human beings we don't have the objectivity to know if our belief that something is good is really because it's good or if it's a reflection of our bigotries.

So to eliminate the possibility that our beliefs are bigotries, to eliminate the evil of bigotry, the liberal eliminates all critical rational judgement.

Q. Now you say, and this is related, that the modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right...

A. ..Evil over good, wrong over right. You got it.

Q. ...And behaviors that lead to failure over behaviors that lead to success. You say it's not because they're not stupid or evil, so is it just because of that that they don't discriminate?

A. It's twofold. One, it may be because they don't discriminate between right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse. But indiscriminateness of thought doesn't lead to indiscriminateness of policy.

Indiscriminateness of thought leads to a society with evil, failure, and wrong because if nothing is better than anything else, then that which failed must have been victimized. If it's just as good as everything else, then if it fails or if it's just as good as everything else and it commits an evil act, that evil act must have been de facto, provoked.

Q. College kids and celebrities are often very liberal. Can you explain why you think that is?

A. Sure. In order to hold onto the belief that nothing is better than anything else, you have to remove yourself or have been removed from the consequences of your beliefs. Because once you went to the real world, you recognize some things are right, some things are wrong.

...One of the lines I like to use is that stupidity is a luxury. And when you're young and you're on the college campuses and you don't have a job, you're not paying taxes. You're not starting a business. You don't have to worry about environmental policies that are ridiculous.

You're living on these college campuses where no matter how much you binge drink, no matter how much you projectile vomit, no matter how much you go wild for the cameras in Cancun and strip naked, the next day you wake up on a campus with lush manicured lawns. You wake up in an ivy covered two room mansion. You wake up and somebody else has bought your food, cooked your food, serves you your food, and when you're finished, cleans your dishes for you.

...Then you have the other side that you mentioned, the celebrities who have been retarded at the age of the child by their fabulous wealth. These are people who never have to recognize right and wrong, better and worse. They don't have to make decisions in which those have consequences. You know, of course, Bruce Springsteen doesn't have to choose between putting money away for his retirement or spending it now. He can spend it now and have hundreds of millions for retirement too.

Susan Sarandon doesn't have to choose between not getting a new car this year because the rent may go up. She buys lots of houses and lots of new cars. But, the celebrity is isolated from the consequences of their beliefs by their money. This goes to professors as well that are on the left at college campuses. They can't get fired no matter how bad they are at their job. That isolates them from the need to be smart. It isolates from the need to be right. It isolates from the need to be good -- and these are things that allow somebody to hold onto their childish, foolish, and quite just plainly spoken, idiotic mentality that is modern liberalism.

Q. Well, let me ask you, how does that apply to the media, for example? They certainly don't make as much money. They're not as privileged. They're almost uniformly liberal though. How does that happen, do you think?

A. Remember the real world is an antidote to the stupidity of liberalism -- and it used to be that journalists learned their craft in the real world. If you wanted to be a journalist, you got the most rotten job there was in journalism -- the late night to 8 a.m. at the courthouse shift or whatever -- and you learned your craft and you got a slight promotion. You got a slight raise -- and then 20 or 30 years later maybe, you were the anchor of a network or whatever.

Now you don't do any of those menial jobs where you actually learn your craft. You go to the Columbia School of Journalism where you were taught theoretics, not actuality -- where your childhood is perpetuated not only through college but now through grad school. Suddenly instead of starting out as a working journalist, you start off with the credential from the Columbia School of Journalism -- and you start already hosting the weekend news reports and you never get down and dirty. You never get to the grit. You instantly go from the fanciful life of college to the world of great personal power -- and you're dictating the truth to people -- and the money ain't bad either. Because once you graduate from the Columbia School of Journalism, you know, your entry level salary is pretty darn good.

SOURCE



Leftist British government forced to acknowledge historic occasion

Britain's D-Day veterans will receive the respect and support they deserve during this summer's 65th anniversary after Gordon Brown finally threw the full weight of Government behind the 'great generation of heroes'.

In a resounding victory for the Daily Mail's campaign, Downing Street tacitly admitted ministers had misjudged the public mood in refusing to help. The Royal Family is now expected to play a full part in this year's events both in France and Britain, while Mr Brown will travel to Normandy on June 6 where he will be joined by other ministers and military service chiefs.

In a further major success for our campaign, National Lottery chiefs announced they would repeat the 'Heroes Return' programme - which paid for 39,000 British veterans to revisit foreign battlefields to mark the 60th anniversary celebrations five years ago. That means the dwindling band of surviving veterans hoping to make one last pilgrimage to Arnhem, Germany, Italy, Burma or any other World War II battlefield in the comanying months will benefit from lottery cash to cover their expenses and those of their carers.

Mr Brown also said he hoped to stage a commemoration service at Westminster Abbey for all the veterans who could not make it to Normandy on health grounds.

In the wake of the dramatic rethink by the Government, the veterans themselves voiced their delight and thanks for the magnificent response to the Daily Mail's fund-raising appeal - and called a halt to further fund-raising. Generous readers donated 70,000 pounds on the first day of our campaign, and officials said they were now confident that the final few thousand pounds they need would follow, so that every Normandy veteran fit to travel can join in official events in France on June 6.

But when the Normandy Veterans' Association - which is to disband this year - approached the MoD for help with funding for the June celebrations it was firmly rebuffed, and defence officials even blocked plans for a national service of remembrance at Westminster Abbey. When the Mail first highlighted the veterans' plight on Wednesday, the Government said there were no plans to send ministers to Normandy to represent Britain. Bureaucrats cited a policy of giving official support only to 25th, 50th, 60th and 100th anniversaries, despite the fact that none of the veterans would be alive for the centenary.

Yesterday the Prime Minister completely reversed that position, while Downing Street sources voiced frustration that MoD officials had mishandled the issue. At an EU summit in Brussels, Mr Brown said he 'very much' wanted to be part of the event. 'As some of you know, I have written about this quite extensively in a book I have done for charity, so I want to be very much a part of the commemoration of both D-Day and the huge contribution that British soldiers made by risking their lives for the freedom of Europe. 'Nicolas Sarkozy and I are talking about what we can do together, how to commemorate this important occasion not only in Britain but across the whole of Europe.'

Diplomatic protocol means that Mr Brown and the Royal Family must wait for an invitation from the French government before drawing up plans, but Downing Street confirmed that it would back any invitation to the Royal Family to attend events in Normandy, and that they would also be invited to attend any service in London to mark the 65th anniversary. Palace officials stressed that no invitation had been received and some Royal Family members already had engagements booked, but added: 'We are seeing what we can do.' The Queen is already scheduled to meet some Normandy veterans at an event in Hampshire next month.

Peter Hodge, Secretary of the Normandy Veterans' Association, said: 'There's a special bond between the Queen and the D-Day veterans. 'She was there to take the salute at Arromanches for the 60th anniversary in 2004. I remember overhearing one of her equerries asking her how long she was prepared to stay, and she told him, "As long as it takes". 'If she were able to attend one of the events - perhaps the Cenotaph on June 21 - it would be the icing on the cake.'

Trevor Beattie, the businessman who has overseen fundraising for the Normandy Veterans, said he was 'absolutely delighted' with the response from Mail readers. Any surplus funds will be used to meet carers' travelling expenses, and to help those Normandy veterans too frail to go to France to attend events closer to home.

Tory leader David Cameron said he was 'hugely encouraged' by the response to the Mail's campaign. 'It sent a powerful signal of support to our veterans that the Government could no longer ignore.'

SOURCE



Britain's social work tyranny again

"We had our baby taken away for a year over a doctor's blunder". No second opinion sought, of course. Taking a baby away is a mere bagatelle to hate-filled British Leftist social workers -- unless the baby is really in danger, of course! Then the mother is "supported" and the baby can go to hell -- and often does! There should always be expedited judicial proceedings in an open court before a baby is taken away. Scum social workers are the last people who should be trusted. They are taught in their social work schools to despise the society they live in and it shows

A soldier and his wife had their baby taken away for almost a year after a doctor misread an X-ray. Lance Corporal Matthew Dean and his wife Katie were accused of abusing Louie and were suddenly faced with the threat of losing all their three children. The ordeal started with a hospital scan when Louie was two months old which found blood between his brain and skull. He had been thriving despite being born five weeks prematurely with a slightly enlarged head and floppy limbs.

Further X-rays seemed to show no more injuries until a doctor claimed she could see a broken rib. Louie's father, who has served with the Princess of Wales Regiment in Iraq, Kosovo and Northern Ireland, and mother were told they could not be trusted with him.

It was only after almost a year of misery that a judge ruled that the blood on Louie's brain was the result of an accident and that the rib had never been broken at all. The doctor had misread the X-ray. Social services then realised their case was so weak that they did not even bother to cross-examine the couple in court.

Cuddling Louie, now 18 months, Mrs Dean, 32, said last night: 'Social services treated us like something they'd stepped in and were desperate to build a case. 'Doctors and social workers have an important job but in this case they've over-reacted on a suspicion, rather than facts. Louie had one injury, and that was accidental.' Lance Corporal Dean, 34, said: 'Nothing can ever repay us for that year away from Louie.'

The couple, from Southampton, met in 2002 and have a five year-old daughter Daisy. Mrs Dean has another daughter, Charlotte, nine, by an earlier relationship.

Louie was born in August 2007 near Hanover, Germany, where his father had been posted. Because his head was enlarged, the couple were told to take him to a civilian hospital for regular check-ups. After the scan found the blood between his brain and skull, he needed two operations. Louie also developed meningitis but was eventually sent home with his parents. The cause of the blood remained a mystery but Army social workers said their should be no problem as German doctors could find no evidence of other injuries.

The family returned to England for Christmas but X-rays had been sent to Southampton General Hospital consultant radiologist Jo Fairhurst. Court documents show Dr Fairhurst believed 'there was a healing fracture' of a rib 'suggesting non-accidental injury'. On the strength of her opinion, the Deans were told they were to be arrested for child abuse when they returned to Germany. A document from the British Forces Social Work Service informed them that Mrs Dean's mother Christine Long, 62, would have to take charge of their son. Mrs Long moved temporarily to Germany to watch over Louie 24 hours a day while investigations continued.

The only way the couple could regain the right to look after him was through the UK courts, so LCpl Dean gained a transfer in January 2008. Hampshire social services took over the case and told them Louie would have to live with his grandmother on the other side of the town.

Last December, the couple were finally able to look after their son again when a judge rejected a bid to place their three children in care. The High Court in Portsmouth heard that the blood on Louie's brain was probably the result of an accident or could have simply happened spontaneously. His parents suspected it dated from his difficult birth.

More importantly, a German doctor assured the court that the 'rib fracture' was a misreading of a line on the X-ray created because Louie's lungs and spine had moved.

The judge said: 'I cannot find it proved that Louie suffered a fractured rib. I conclude it is very unlikely either of these parents was responsible for causing the bleeding between his brain and skull.'

John Coughlan, Hampshire's director of children's services, defended the 'necessary but proportionate intervention'. He said: 'We went to great pains to ensure Louie stayed within the care of the family.'

A hospital spokesman said Dr Fairhurst was working overseas and he was unable to comment in her absence. [Someone should fire the stupid bitch]

SOURCE




British council forced to give squatters a list of all its empty properties

Having 800 properties vacant is a huge bureaucratic disgrace but that is no excuse for letting just anyone march into them. Allocating them to qualified applicants should be urgently expedited

A council has been forced to give details of every empty home in its area to squatters because of a legal loophole. Lambeth in South London had to hand over the list after squatters submitted a Freedom Of Information (FOI) request. The Labour-run borough provided details of an estimated 800 properties despite council officers' fears that the move could lead to a marked rise in squatting in the borough.

Critics will ask whether the coup could be used as a precedent by other squatters' groups. They accuse the local authority of 'incompetence' in the way it handled the request from the Advisory Service for Squatters, submitted in September last year.

Liberal Democrat opposition leader Ashley Lumsden said a senior council source told him that housing officers had earlier committed 'a grave error' by publishing a list of all vacant properties in the appendix of a council document. When the squatters presented their demand, the information was already in the public domain so the request could not be denied.

But the council said it had been forced to give out the information because of a legal precedent set by another council. A spokeswoman for Lambeth Living, which manages the borough's council housing, said: 'When responding to FOI requests we have to operate within the letter of the law. 'A legal precedent had already been set in response to a similar FOI inquiry to Bexley Council. 'On challenging the request, they were instructed by the Information Tribunal that they had a legal duty to provide the address details of empty properties which were not owned by individuals.' She added that the number of Lambeth properties with squatters had fallen over the past six months from 49 to 45.

The incident is not the first major embarrassment for Lambeth in its struggle with squatters. Four empty blocks of flats at Limerick Court on the border of Streatham and Balham were occupied by more than a hundred people for six months until they were evicted last summer. Two years ago at least 100 armed police officers used stun grenades in a huge raids on a property in Kennington which had been used as a squat for decades - finding several kilos of cannabis, crack cocaine and six rounds of live ammunition.

Councillor Lumsden said the Freedom of Information incident was in a long line of blunders by the housing department that has seen it overspend by an estimated 23 million pounds, and the number of empty council homes double since 2006 to close to 900. He told the Streatham Guardian: 'The administration seems hell-bent on destroying public housing in Lambeth through a mixture of brain-numbing incompetence and sheer bloody-mindedness.'

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:12

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Saturday, March 21, 2009

 

Britain fails to shut down a single extremist website in two years

The Home Office has failed to shut down a single terrorist website despite a pledge to do so from Tony Blair four years ago.

Stopping extremist websites operating was one of the measures unveiled by Mr Blair in the aftermath of the 7 July suicide bombings in London in 2005. Although the powers were enshrined in law with the Terrorism Act 2006, the Home Office has now admitted that not a single website has been shut down in the past two years. The Tories said the news "smacks of dangerous complacency and incompetence".

Under Section 3 of the legislation, a police officer can order that "unlawfully terrorism-related material is removed or modified within two working days". However, Vernon Coaker, a Home Office minister, said: "The preferred route of the police is to use informal contact with the communication service providers to request that the material is removed. "To date no Section 3 notices have been issued as this informal route has proved effective."

Last year a leaked report from the Security Service highlighted the importance of the internet in radicalising young people.

Mr Coaker insisted that some sites were shut down after informal contact with the sites' hosts with the police. Yet the Home Office had no idea how many were shut down after the informal talks. Mr Coaker added: "Statistics covering the number of sites removed through such informal contact are not collected."

Patrick Mercer, the Conservative backbench MP who obtained the information, said he was shocked that despite spending over 100 million pounds on preventing radicalization, not a single extremist website had been closed down. He said: "Websites are a crucial means of communication for the terrorist and unless the Government takes action against them, they will continue to be one of the terrorist's most powerful weapons."

Baroness Neville-Jones, the shadow Security Minister, added: "We have known for years that organisations like al-Qaeda are increasingly using the internet as a tool for radicalisation. "So it is shocking that the Government has failed to shut down a single terrorist website, even though Parliament gave them the power to do so more than two years ago. "They claim that they haven't closed any down because they prefer to put pressure on internet service providers to remove dangerous material. But they're not even able to tell us what they've achieved by this route."

A Home Office spokesman said: "If material is hosted in the UK, informal contact between the police and the Internet Service Provider has, to-date, proven sufficient to have material removed from the internet. We hope that this continues." [Must be nice to Muslims -- which also precludes checkups on them, apparently]

SOURCE



Children don't make you happy... says an expert who hasn't any!

A baby's first smile, a toddler's first steps... all the way through to seeing your child walking up the aisle. These are the moments parents treasure - but one social scientist says they give us an unduly rosy impression of raising a family. Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee - who does not have children himself - is pouring cold water on the idea that being a parent makes you happier.

'Social scientists have found almost zero association between having children and happiness,' he said. 'In a recent study of British adults, for example, we found that parents and non-parents reported the same levels of life satisfaction.'

The economist, from the University of York, believes he can explain why the benefits of parenthood have been repeatedly overstated. He said most parents remember milestones like a first smile, and think these rewards more than compensate them for the challenging task of raising children. But Dr Powdthavee claims that any small bursts of happiness are cancelled out by the day-to-day chores of having a family.

His comments are published in the latest issue of The Psychologist, the magazine of The British Psychological Society. The widespread belief that having children makes you happy is a 'focusing illusion', he argued. 'To imagine what it's like being a mother or a father we're likely to focus more on the good things about being a parent than the bad things. 'This is mainly because we believe that the rare but meaningful experiences like a child's first smile or graduating from university or seeing them get married will give us massive and long-lasting increases in happiness.'

But he added: 'These boosts in wellbeing tend not to last for very long. Instead, parents spend much of their time attending to the very core processes of childcare - problems at school, cooking and laundry - which are much more frequent. 'And it is these small but negative experiences that are more likely to impact on our day-to-day levels of happiness and life satisfaction.'

Despite his research, the 30-year-old and his girlfriend are thinking about starting a family of their own. He said that 'deep down' everyone knows that raising children is probably the 'toughest and dullest job in the world'. 'But what if all of us decided one day - for the sake of our own personal happiness - not have children any more?' he asked. 'Then chances are that the future will stop at our generation, which is perhaps worse.'

SOURCE



Media trashes breadwinning dads over Parenting Magazine's `Mad at Dad' survey

"Alarming percentages of moms are angry at dads on a regular basis." "Hell hath no fury like a mommy scorned." "Moms are angry about dad's role." These are some of the headlines which greeted Parenting Magazine's new "Mad at Dad" survey which found that 31% of mothers get "little or no help" with childcare and 46% of mothers "get irate with their husbands once a week or more." The New York Times called the survey "disturbing," while a Washington Post columnist announced that mothers are "literally killing themselves."

Is the survey a wake-up call? A shocking portrait of dysfunction in American family life? No-it's junk science, and the New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets should have known better than to parrot its outlandish claims.To do the study, Parenting's research arm, the MomConnection, sent out 5,000 survey questionnaires to subscribers. Parenting's "nationally representative" findings are based on the 1,000 who responded.

In the social science field this is known as a "SLOP"-a Self-selected Listener Opinion Poll. Four out of five of those receiving surveys didn't respond. The ones who did are more likely to have an ax to grind or be angry-exactly the response the magazine claims its survey revealed. This data cannot be credibly applied to the average mom or family.

SLOPs are a widely discredited methodology. For example, 35 years ago sexologist Shere Hite used the same SLOP methodology to produce the shocking statistic that 98% of married women were dissatisfied with their marriages and 75% had had extramarital affairs.

However, according to Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, only 4% of the women who were given the survey responded. When the Washington Post and ABC News did a scientifically credible survey on the same topic, they found the exact opposite to be true-93% of women reported satisfaction in their marriages, and only 7% reported having had affairs.

Parenting's claims that dads are derelict in their duties contradict credible surveys on American families. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2004 Time Use Survey, men spend one and a half times as many hours working as women do, and full-time employed men still work significantly more hours than full-time employed women. Yet Child Trends' 220-page study Charting Parenthood: A Statistical Look at Fathers and Mothers in America found that in two-parent families, mothers spend only about 35 minutes per day more with children than do fathers [2 hours, 21 minutes vs. 1 hour, 46 minutes]. And the Families and Work Institute in New York City found that fathers provide three-fourths as much child care as mothers do.

Mothers who are dissatisfied might want to examine their own behavior as well as that of their husbands. Studies reported in the Journal of Family Psychology in June, 2008 and the Journal of Marriage and the Family in 1999 show that mothers are generally the gatekeepers of fathers' involvement with their kids. If she criticizes or insists that any way that isn't her way is wrong, dad will often withdraw. But if she stands aside and lets him parent, he usually does.

Another problem with Parenting's survey is that they only queried mothers-a poor method to judge what fathers do or don't do. For example, a 2002 Rand Graduate School study of father involvement found that "the failure to incorporate both parties' (i.e. mothers' and fathers') perspectives may lead to inaccurate, inappropriate.conclusions."

Credible social science researchers and journals routinely report the details of how their research was conducted. Yet Parenting doesn't seem to want people to know how they got their results. Despite multiple requests, Parenting has refused to make public the questions its researchers asked or the answers responders gave.

Are fathers shirking their responsibilities to their families? A 2002 University of Michigan Institute for Social Research survey found that women do 11 more hours of work in the home per week than men, but men work at their jobs 14 hours per week more than women. According to the BLS, men's total time at leisure, sleeping, doing personal care activities, or socializing is a statistically meaningless 1% higher than women's. When work both outside the home and inside the home are properly considered, it is clear that men do at least as much as women.

Most moms have no reason to be mad at dads, and there's no evidence that they are. Unfortunately, such a finding doesn't play to the mainstream media's anti-family "woman good/man bad" drumbeat. It also doesn't make for catchy headlines.

SOURCE



Australia: Millions may have visited popular websites on 'leaked blacklist'

A SECRET list of websites purporting to be from the communications watchdog has been leaked to the public, and includes one of the most popular sites in the country. The pornography site, which news.com.au cannot name, is the 38th most popular site in Australia, according to web ranking service Alexa. It is more popular than sites like White Pages, Yellow Pages, Optus, Career One and the official sites of the NSW, Victoria and Queensland state governments.

However the Communications Minister has denied this "leaked list" is the original from the watchdog.

A secret blacklist of illegal sites, maintained by the Australian Communications And Media Authority (ACMA), is the basis of the Federal Government's web filtering plan. Under the plan, all internet service providers will be forced to block access to sites on the blacklist.

The fake list was published on a public website without any age verification or warnings. It contains 2395 sites, which is what identified it as a fake, says Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. "The published list purports to be current at 6 August 2008 and apparently contains approximately 2400 URLs whereas the ACMA blacklist for the same date contained 1061 URLs," Senator Conroy said in a statement. Last November the media watchdog said its blacklist contained 1370 sites.

“The leaking of the list has confirmed some of our worst fears,” said vice-chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) Colin Jacobs earlier today, before the list was slammed by Senator Conroy. “This was bound to happen, especially as mandatory filtering would require the list to be distributed to ISPs all around the country."

As well as sites suspected of publishing child pornography the fake list includes pages on Wikipedia, YouTube and Wikileaks as well as online gambling sites.

ACMA has warned that anyone who republishes the list or attempts to access child pornography sites on it could face up to 10 years in prison. It has also warned that linking to sites on the list could incur fines of up to $11,000 a day.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:23

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Friday, March 20, 2009

 

The western world needs more like this guy

There's a huge Union Flag flying proudly outside Deva Kumarasiri's house and it's been there so long the edges are tattered and torn. Nearby, another one flutters from the back of his favourite Land Rover as he drives to work as the local cornershop postmaster.

In case it's not immediately clear, the Sri Lankan born father of two - who fulfilled a dream to come this country 17 years ago and took citizenship to make his life here - is proud to be British. So proud, in fact, that he's insisting all his fellow immigrants embrace our culture and pride with the same enthusiasm as he does.

Mr Kumarasiri, who taught his two young daughters every word of the National Anthem and is encouraging them to join the RAF when they grow up, introduced a controversial new regime at his post office counter. If his customers can't be bothered to learn English, he tells them, they must go away and learn it before he serves them.

His bold stand against non-integration has sent a shudder of political correctness down whatever spine the post office has these days, and infuriated some local do-gooders who accused him of inciting division among the community. But even a few minutes spent with the 40-year-old Liberal Democrat councillor is about all it takes to establish that his motives are pure - and that he's driven only by a passion for the country he loves so much.

'Nobody stands up for anything in Britain any more,' he said. 'It's the best country in the world as far as I'm concerned, but the great country I once called Great Britain has changed a lot since I came here. All I'm doing is telling people that if they want to live in Britain, be British.

'Don't boo our soldiers when they come home from Iraq. Don't live your life without embracing our culture. Don't stay here without making any effort to learn the language. And if you don't want to be British, go home.'

Mr Kumarasiri runs the sub-post office inside a corner shop in Sneinton, an inner city area of Nottingham that boasts a diverse ethnic mix. He became so weary at of customers expecting to be served without uttering a word of English that he took to telling them to go away and learn the language. It's not exactly a ban, he says, because they keep coming back anyway. But he tells those who make no effort to speak English they will need an interpreter if he is to give them a proper standard of service. 'Our laws are written in English; our culture is chronicled in English. How can anybody understand that if they can't understand English? 'I tell them if they don't speak the language and they can't be bothered to learn, then don't bother coming here. It's up to them whether they take any notice - but if they want to live here in Britain, they should take notice.'

Mr Kumarasiri, whose wife is a nurse, likes to call his regular customers 'duck' and 'dear', following local tradition. 'The fabric of the nation begins to unravel if we don't all speak the same language. You can't be wholly part of British culture if you don't speak the language.

'When I left Sri Lanka I left behind that country's culture, customs and language. I have done my utmost ever since to be part of this country's culture. There are far too many people who come here and expect Britain to change to suit them.

'White people can't say what I'm saying because they'd end up in jail,' he explains.

SOURCE



Where government secrecy and coverups get you

In a small provincial courtroom, the most high-profile trial in Austria's post-war history is taking place behind closed doors. The public, and the world's media, have been banned from hearing evidence against Josef Fritzl because of Austria's obsession with privacy. After brief opening arguments from the prosecution and defence on Monday, and a tantalisingly short statement from Fritzl himself, everyone bar the defendant, judges and lawyers was ordered to leave the room

Journalists have been warned that if we report anything said in the trial (by getting it second-hand from lawyers, for example), we will be imprisoned for up to six years. So much for justice being seen to be done. While it may seem incredible that a man who imprisoned his own daughter in a cellar for 24 years should be tried in an empty room, in Austrian courts secrecy is the rule, rather than the exception. Officially, the media ban is to prevent "voyeurism". The consensus in the Austrian press, however, is that the authorities simply don't want the horrific evidence to be used to question their failure to stop Fritzl sooner.

It is this culture of secrecy that enabled Fritzl to get away with his crimes for so long - a culture that has its roots in Nazi-era Austria, and one that is viewed with growing shame by a younger generation of Austrians, some of whom have staged noisy demonstrations outside the court in St Poelten.

One protester, Peter Rosenauer, of the child welfare group Resistance for Peace, told me: "We have a society where child abuse is hushed up and trivialised. People who report cases of abuse are often ignored or even intimidated by the authorities. The golden rule, which starts with bureaucrats and filters down through society, is that you shouldn't pry into people's private lives."

It was this very attitude that enabled Fritzl to hide his daughter away for a quarter of a century while those in authority failed to ask the obvious questions which could have saved her. Elisabeth ran away from home on several occasions as a teenager, only to be returned by police to her father each time. What was making her so unhappy? No one bothered to ask her. None of their business.

When three of Elisabeth's children turned up on Fritzl's doorstep, supposedly left by Elisabeth after she ran off to join a cult, social workers visited him 21 times to make sure he was fit to adopt the children. What they didn't know, because of Austria's draconian privacy laws, was that Fritzl was a convicted rapist who had served time in prison in 1967. His conviction had been deleted from all official records after 15 years. As far as the authorities were concerned it was all in the past and no one had a right to know about it.

Josef Leitner, a former tenant in Fritzl's house, said: "Why didn't the authorities try to find out why Elisabeth wanted to run away? If they'd asked her friends, I'm sure they would have told them." Leitner says that after raising questions about those in authority he was visited by the police, who threatened to report him to the state prosecutor in what he says was a blatant attempt to "shut me up".

Fritzl's may be an extreme case, but it is by no means unique in Austria. Natascha Kampusch escaped her captor in 2006 after eight years in a bunker; three children were rescued from a cellar in Linz in 2007 after being locked up for seven years by their mother.

Austria's preoccupation with privacy is a throwback to the Nazi era, when Hitler was enthusiastically welcomed into towns like Amstetten, where a young Josef Fritzl sat on his father's shoulders and cheered the fuhrer. Collaborators were encouraged to inform on neighbours who did not embrace the Nazi agenda, who were then taken away to a nearby concentration camp. After the war, Austria was desperate to hush up its complicity in the Holocaust: three out of every four death camp commandants was Austrian. Hence the instinct, which exists to this day, to cover up the unsavoury and discourage the sort of curtain twitching that was rife during the war.

Such a culture has led to farcical scenes at Fritzl's trial, where judges were so nervous of breaching the defendant's right to privacy that they did nothing to stop him covering his face with an A4 ring binder when the media were briefly allowed to film him. Austrian newspapers are only allowed to refer to the defendant as Josef F, which is standard procedure in sex abuse trials but pointless pedantry in a case where the entire world knows the defendant's name.

Back in Amstetten, the mayor and senior civil servants have all gone on holiday for the duration of the trial to avoid any awkward questions. Before they left, the council put out a statement saying: "The crime case of Amstetten does not exist. It is the crime of a single person."

Josef Haslinger, a philosopher, said: "There is this pretty, shiny surface that Austrians like to show, but it hides a monstrosity . this perverse world that nobody wants to talk about. The de-Nazification process never succeeded. We have a culture of looking away."

SOURCE



My imam father came after me with an axe

Hannah Shah had been raped by her father and faced a forced marriage. She fled, became a Christian and now fears for her life

We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.

The book is called The Imam's Daughter because "Hannah Shah" is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.

He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being "disobedient". At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to "honour" in her family's eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian - an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang - in the middle of a British city - to find and kill her.

Hannah Shah says her story is not unique - that there are many other girls in British Muslim families who are oppressed and married off against their will, or who have secretly become Christians but are too afraid to speak out. She wants their voices to be heard and for Britain, the land of her birth, to realise the hidden misery of these women.

Hannah's own voice is quiet and emerges from a tiny frame. She is clearly nervous about talking to a journalist and the stress she has been under is betrayed by a bald patch on the left side of her head. Yet she has a lovely natural smile, especially when she reveals that she got married a year ago; her husband works in the Church of England, "though not as a vicar".

I tell Hannah that the passages in her memoir about her sexual abuse are almost impossible to read - but I also found it hard to understand why, now that she is in her early thirties, independent and married, she has not reported her father's horrific assaults on her to the police. "What has stopped me is that if my dad went to prison, the shame that would be brought upon the rest of the family would be horrific. My mum would not be able to . . . I mean, it's bad enough having a daughter who's left, is not agreeing to her marriage and is now a Christian. Then to have my dad in prison would be the end for her."

I tell Hannah, perhaps a little cruelly, that in her use of the word "shame" she is echoing the sort of arguments that her own family had used against her. "I understand that, but what I'm saying is that if I do that, then there will never be a door open to me to have contact with my family ever again. I'm still hoping that there will be some opportunity for that." Of course, by writing this book, albeit under an assumed name and with all the places and characters disguised, there is a chance that her family and community will identify themselves in it. What does she think they would do, then?

"To be honest, I don't even want to think about that. Either they will decide between them that they are not going to say anything because it will bring shame on all the community, or they will decide that they want to take action. Then my life will become even more difficult, because they'll all be looking for me."

Hannah's description in the book of the moment when her "community" discovered the "safe" home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: "Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We're going to rip your throat out! We'll burn you alive!" Does she still believe they would have killed her? "Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes."

Why didn't you call the police afterwards? "First, I didn't think the police would believe me. That sort of thing just doesn't happen in this country - or that's what they'd think. Second, I didn't believe I would get help or protection from the authorities."

Hannah had good reason for this doubt. When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn't bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: "It's not right to betray your community."

Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: "My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed `cultural sensitivity' by bringing in someone from my own community to `help', but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot. "When I've been working with girls who were trying to get out of an arranged marriage, or want to convert to Christianity, and they have contacted social services as they need to get out of their homes, the reaction has been `we'll send someone from your community to talk to your parents'. I know why they are doing this, they are trying to be understanding, but it's the last thing that the authorities should do in such situations."

This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia, Islamic law, rather than British civil law. What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks? "I was horrified." If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? "I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman's witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more."

She believes the British government is making exactly the same mistake as Rowan Williams: "It says it talks to the Muslim community, but it's not speaking to the women. I mean, you are always hearing Muslim men speaking out, the representatives of the big federations, but the government is not listening to Muslim women. With the sharia law situation and the Muslim arbitration tribunals, have they thought about what effect these tribunals have on Muslim women? I don't think so."

It's fair to say that Hannah Shah is an evangelical Christian, who clearly feels a duty to spread her new faith to Muslims- something with which the Church of England's eternally emollient establishment is very uncomfortable and the government even more so. She points out that even within this notionally Christian country, people are "persecuted" for evangelism of even the mildest sort. She cites the recent cases of the nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for a patient and the foster parents who were struck off after a Muslim girl in their care converted to Christianity.

"Such people - I'm not talking about apostates like me - have been persecuted or ostracised in this country simply because they want to share their faith with others. People call this political correctness but I actually think it is based on a fear of Muslims, what they might do if provoked."

Shah's conversion seems to have its origins in the fact that the family who put her up after she ran away from the prospect of an arranged marriage in rural Pakistan were themselves regular church attenders. She began to go with them and, to put it at its most banal, she liked what she heard. "It was the emphasis on love. The Islam that I grew up knowing and reading about doesn't offer me love. That's the biggest thing that Christianity can and does offer. I sense that I belong and am accepted as I am - even when I do wrong there is forgiveness, a forgiveness which Islam does not offer."

So does Hannah offer Christian forgiveness to the father who raped and abused her and who, by her own account, was even prepared to murder her? "It's taken a long time and it's only in the past few years that I've got to that. It's very hard to get there and it's taken a lot of shouting and screaming behind closed doors, and praying, to get me to the point of being able to say: I forgive. I have to, partly because otherwise I would be a very bitter and angry person and I don't want to livea life that's full of anger."

I can't help asking how she would react if a future child of hers decided she wanted to abandon the Christian faith of the family home and become a Muslim. "It would be very hard for me, obviously." Would she try to discourage it? "No. I'd bring them up as Christians, take them to church, but I'd also want them to know about, well, my culture, about Islam. Because being Christian should be a choice, not what you're born to. But yes, it would be hard if they chose Islam." Somehow, though, I think Hannah Shah would cope.

SOURCE



Australia: Lebanese Muslim gang rapists cop it in jail

They are such scum that they asked for it in my view. They acted like big men when dealing with defenceless women but did not do so well in the company of other men of their own low standards

Four of the state's most notorious killers, including notorious triple family killer Matthew Wayne De Gruchy, have appeared in court this morning over the vicious jail bashing of infamous gang rapist brothers. Matthew Wayne de Gruchy, who is serving a 28-year jail term for the murder of his mother and two siblings at Albion Park Rail, near Wollongong, in 1996, is among the four murderers, two rapists and an armed robber allegedly involved in the vicious bashing of the brothers who can only be known as MSK and MAK.

The bashing, in a yard of Goulburn jail in February 2007, almost killed MAK who suffered severe head injuries and needed to be airlifted to hospital for brain surgery. His brother was treated for a broken arm.

After an extensive two-year investigation the inmates have been charged and made their first appearances for inflicting grievous bodily harm in Goulburn Local Court this morning. The inmates charged, who appeared this morning via videolink, include De Gruchy who was only 18 when he killed his mother Jennifer, 42, brother Adrian, 15, and sister Sarah, 13. Also charged was triple child murderer Craig Andrew Merritt. Jay William Short, who murdered Lithgow teenager Alison Marie Lewis in 1997, was also charged, as was killer Shannon Daley. Adrian Gray, serving time for armed robbery, and Chebli Djait, serving time for drink spiking-related sexual assault, have also appeared in court. Yet to appear is another man, serving time for aggravated sexual assault.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:15

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Thursday, March 19, 2009

 

Five Ways that Insanity Has Become the New Normal in America

by John Hawkins

"In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. ...(T)he pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning...visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors." -- Clay Shirky in an explanation of the downfall of the newspaper business that also describes what's happening in America

Since Barack Obama has been elected, gun sales and copies of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged have flown off the shelves. Meanwhile, there's a Russian academic all over the news predicting that America will soon collapse, "tea parties" springing up all over the country, and the stock market has been doing a great impression of Michael Richards' career since he left Seinfeld.

Is that because people have gone crazy? No, it's the reaction of sane people to the crazy as a football bat insanity that has begun to pass for conventional wisdom in large swathes of America. Living in this country today is like sitting in the back seat of a car that's hurtling towards the edge of a cliff at a hundred miles an hour while the driver fiddles with the radio and the guy in the passenger seat mocks the very idea of using brakes. When sheer insanity becomes the new normal, people who can admit that the emperor has no clothes are left to point out:

The Global Warming Fraud: There are few things stranger than watching a "debate" over global warming. One side constantly quotes scientific facts, makes logical arguments, and tries to appeal to reason. These people are called "anti-science" by the side that "argues" by comparing their opponents to Holocaust deniers, spins apocalyptic doomsday scenarios out of whole cloth, and is constantly dinged for stretching the truth on the few scientific facts they do talk about. These people are the ones who supposedly "put science first" in the debate. Meanwhile, the earth has been getting warmer and colder since it was formed, the planet has been considerably warmer in the past than it is today, and the earth is currently cooling, not warming. Yet and still, our President intends to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a Cap and Trade scheme that will spike energy costs into the stratosphere so that we can solve this non-existent "problem."

The Lawsuit Lottery: In our legal system, you can injure yourself doing something utterly stupid, sue someone who just happened to be in the vicinity while you acted like a lunatic, and if you get lucky, you can walk away with millions of dollars while he's driven out of business. It's like playing the lottery, except your odds of winning are much better.

The evidence of how warped our legal system has become is all around us. It's difficult to find an obstetrician in some parts of the country because they've been sued out of existence. In California, it's legal to sue good Samaritans who try to help people who've been injured. Many people and corporations actually settle lawsuits that they know they would eventually win because it's cheaper and less of a hassle than defending themselves in court because our system, in most cases, provides no compensation whatsoever for being the target of a meritless lawsuit.

This illness in our justice system goes all the way up to the Supreme Court, where we have four justices who believe in actually sticking to the Constitution and four who vote for whichever result best serves liberalism. That means whether a law is ruled unconstitutional or not may often depend on little more than whether Anthony Kennedy got enough sleep or is a little cranky because his lunch was delivered late. Justice is supposed to be blind, but we've gone one step further in America and made it random.

Demonizing Success and Rewarding Failure: In America, we have a government that rewards people for failure. If you lose your job, we will incentivize you not to get back to work with unemployment insurance. If you stay out of work long enough, then we'll give you welfare and more money via a "tax credit." If you don't pay your mortgage, then we'll help you out with that, too. Is your corporation going out of business? Then we'll bail you out. Long story short, if you're failing in life, then we will give you goodies to reward you for it.

On the other hand, successful people are suspect, just by virtue of their success and therefore, they must be punished. At a time when taxes are already so high that corporations are fleeing overseas and even the Treasury Secretary is a tax cheat, the President is planning massive tax hikes on both successful individuals and corporations. After all, how are we going to reward all of life's losers if we don't take the money from people who have succeeded? In order to justify killing the Goose who laid the Golden Egg, successful people are regularly vilified as greedy nuisances to society who should be thrilled to have the money they worked for confiscated by people who hate them so it can be handed to people far less industrious than themselves. But, what you subsidize, you get more of and what you penalize, you decrease. That's one of the oldest and simplest lessons in the book; yet it's one we never seem to learn.

Spending Money Like We're Never Going To Have To Pay It Back: Here's Peter Schweizer describing how the Soviet Union was broken by Reagan,

First of all, the Soviet Union has been in economic crisis, there was an economic crisis from the very beginning in 1917, but they'd always been able to figure out a way, working internationally, to bail out their system. They got western businesses that would set up industries, they got western banks to loan them money, they were able to get peace agreements with the West that would provide temporary relief to their economy. So the Soviet economy was always in crisis but they'd always been bailed out by the West. Reagan's administration is really the only one that never did that.

So, the Soviet Union relied on its enemies to keep it financially afloat and when they refused to do it any longer, it was the beginning of the end. Well, replace the "Soviet Union" with the "United States" and "The West" with "China" and ask yourself: doesn't it seem more than a little familiar?

What happens if China decides one day that they'd like to see us go the way of the Soviet Union and does to us what we did to the Reds? Do we end up with skyrocketing inflation that makes a dollar today worth ten cents tomorrow? Do we end up passing on such large debts onto our children that we will guarantee that they can never have the opportunity to grow up in the sort of great country that we did? The people spending our money? The frightening thing is not that they're coming up with different answers; it's that they're not even asking the questions.

Our Topsy-Turvy Approach To Illegal Immigration: Although we have laws on the books designed to prevent illegal immigration, they are systematically ignored or the people in charge of enforcing them are deliberately understaffed so they can't fulfill their duties. Bizarrely, people who merely suggest that the laws on our books should actually be enforced are derided as racists and nativists. Worse yet, to suggest that tens of millions of uneducated foreigners, many of whom don't speak the language or obey our laws, should not be able to benefit from breaking our laws by staying here permanently is treated as beyond the pale. Why, how dare we "break up the families" of people who have been shamelessly breaking our laws for so long that they've had time to start a family here?

Despite the fact that we've already had a "one time only amnesty" and drug violence is now regularly spilling over our borders, advocates of amnesty are unfazed. In fact, under Barack Obama we've actually gotten to the point where we're prosecuting people like Sheriff Joe Arpaio for enforcing our immigration laws even as we create 300,000 jobs for illegal immigrants with the stimulus plan.

If you don't have borders, you don't have a country -- and if we believe we can turn tens of millions of poor, uneducated, non-English speaking people with no love for our nation or respect for our laws, into productive, well assimilated, loyal Americans merely by granting them citizenship -- then we're engaging in exactly the sort of magical thinking that has helped undermine and destroy more than a few nations -- including most notably, the Roman Empire.

SOURCE



Britain's target culture 'is harming justice': Police accuse prosecutors of downgrading charges

Serious criminals are being allowed to cheat justice so that prosecutors can save money and hit Whitehall targets, police claim. Officers have broken ranks after growing 'frustrated' amid claims that the Crown Prosecution Service is repeatedly downgrading the seriousness of an offender's crime - or not charging them at all. In many cases, police say the CPS - ordered to save 69million by ministers by 2011 - wants to avoid the prospect of a case going to Crown Court, where they would have to pay for an expensive barrister.

In an exclusive Daily Mail interview, Police Federation vice-chairman Simon Reed said prosecutors were also trying to hit Government targets for reducing the number of unsuccessful trials. As a result, they are opting for charges which the criminal will be more willing to accept, rather than challenge in court.

Police are powerless, as Labour recently gave responsibility for charging many criminals to the CPS - rather than police. Officers give the examples of actual bodily harm (ABH) being downgraded to assault, drug-dealing to possession of drugs, burglary to theft and mugging to theft from the person. Mr Reed said: 'We know there are people who are not being prosecuted when they could be. It leads to a lot of angst for the police. The criminal justice system is pulling in different directions. 'We see very few charges of ABH any more. They are prosecuted for common assault instead. It keeps the case away from Crown Court.'

The Federation says this makes the police's job harder, as criminals will be back on the streets sooner or are not jailed at all. The deterrent against reoffending is also reduced if criminals feel they have been treated leniently. Mr Reed added: 'The reoffending rates from criminals are 70 per cent, and that tells its own story. It is hugely frustrating for police officers.'

Police are keen to regain the right to charge suspects themselves but prosecutors are resisting. The Conservative police spokesman David Ruffley said: 'This is soft justice for criminals and an insult to victims. 'That's why the Conservatives will return discretion to charge more offences to police sergeants - without them having to refer it first to the CPS lawyers. This will also help cut paperwork and time spent waiting for a CPS lawyer to make a decision. It will mean more commonsense policing.'

Criminologist David Green, director of the Civitas thinktank, said there was a ' paradox' at the heart of Government policy. The police have recently been told the raft of Whitehall targets they previously faced would be scrapped for a single target of the public having increased confidence in them effectively dealing with crime in their local area. Dr Green said officers had been deprived of one of the main powers they need to provide this confidence - the right to decide on charges.

The number of criminals handed cautions by the police instead of being charged and put before the courts has risen significantly in recent years. In 2005 a total of 333,420 offenders were let off with a caution, while 423,000 were charged with a crime. By 2007 - the last year for which full figures are available - cautions had risen to 357,222 with 405,000 suspects charged.

However, a CPS spokesman said: 'The CPS is not undercharging defendants in order to reduce ineffective trials or as a cost-cutting measure. 'A recent joint independent CPS-police inspection of statutory charging confirmed that the standard of charging decisions by prosecutors was good. 'Since the CPS assumed responsibility for charging decisions in all but minor offences, Crown Court cases have increased year on year from 95,000 to 102,000 whilst the conviction rate has increased from 74 per cent to 80 per cent.'

SOURCE



Governments that are strangers to business

Comment by Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen

Pick the odd man out: Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, John Key. Only one of them, New Zealand's Prime Minister Key, has any material personal experience of how to make a dollar in the private sector. Rudd may be the wealthiest Prime Minister Australia has had, because of his wife's admirable business acumen, but even that business is built on government contracts. Rudd's experience is that of a lifelong public servant and politician, with a short stint as a consultant with KPMG. Obama is the world's most famous community organiser, lawyer and, since 1996, full-time politician. Only Key - who was a manager at a clothing manufacturer and then moved into currency trading - has worked in a wholly private enterprise for any meaningful period of time.

This is not to denigrate the public service or community sectors. They do important work. But a lifelong immersion in the public sector creates a government-focused cast of mind and blind spots about the private sector. Obama and Rudd are in the business of pursuing growth by government programs, which demonstrates a dangerous ignorance of the role of growth led by productive private enterprise, small business in particular. No wonder Obama gave Rudd the thumbs up last week for the PM's approach to the global financial crisis. But if there was ever a time when we needed those who understand the importance of growth in the private sector, it's now.

If you doubt that blind spot, here is how US Vice-President Joe Biden explained the Obama administration's strategy to help small business. He was asked on the CBS Early Show by a viewer who had laid off most of her staff last year how the US President's trillion-dollar stimulus package would help small business. Biden was plainly stumped. After buying time by suggesting the woman contact his office, he then spluttered that "it may very well be that she's in a circumstance where she is not able, her customers aren't able to get to her, there's no transit capability, the bridge going across the creek to get to her business needs repair, may very well be that she's in a position where she is unable to access the - her energy costs are so high by providing smart meters, by being able to bring down the cost of her workforce".

This is not a spoof. Either Biden is a buffoon who does not know his stuff or there is no stuff to know. The best Biden could conjure up for a small business owner was to build a bridge to improve her customers' "transit capacity" and smart meters so she can count her energy costs.

Closer to home, addressing the NSW Chamber of Commerce in Sydney a few weeks ago, Rudd had nothing much to tell small business either. Small business men and women waited in vain for Rudd's vision for small business. All they got was Rudd's standard helicopter made-for-television view of the GFC and Australia's response to it. There was no chance for questions and answers. "It was all spin and no substance," said one businessman at the luncheon.

Rudd's appointment of Craig Emerson as Small Business Minister was promising. Yet the Government as a whole demonstrates no understanding that, with two million small businesses employing about 4.5 million people, according to the Council of Small Business of Australia, small business is the key to real growth.

Now ask yourself why the Obama administration and the Rudd Government have nothing much to offer small business. Given that both are committed to industrial relations reforms that boost the power of unions, perhaps they have very little interest in small business where unions have no hold? Or could it be that neither is focused on growth derived from private enterprise, preferring to forge ahead with growth by bigger government? A bit of both perhaps.

Key, on the other hand, understands what is needed to make businesses hum: lower taxes, smarter regulation and a flexible labour market. He has recognised that a one-off sugar hit - or cash splash - won't help business employ people for any longer than it takes to spend the cash. Permanent tax cuts help business employ more staff - permanently.

He told The Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel a few weeks back that he is determined to stop the slide that has seen NZ fall to the bottom half on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's per-capita gross domestic product rankings. "We have been on a slippery slope ... so we need to lift those per capita wages, and the only way to really do that is through productivity growth driving efficiency in the country." Key is cutting taxes, reforming regulations that inhibited foreign capital and tackling environmental legislation that has been misused by green groups to stop private sector investment. Oh, and he is undertaking a line-by-line review of every government department as part of his Government's commitment to capping spending.

No wonder Key is the odd man out. And it is a shame that NZ will not be attending the G20 meeting in London next month, the latest effort by world leaders to confront the global financial crisis. Spend big and all will be in order is Obama's resounding theme. It's all stimulus this and stimulus that. Is it too much to hope that G stands for growth, not group-think?

Yet real growth - through the private sector - is not a concept you hear much about these days. We have a Government that talks incessantly about the dangers of the GFC yet is steadfastly committed to industrial relations policies that will, through their unfair dismissal laws, discourage small businesses from employing more people. And a Government that only accidentally supports small business when it suits some other agenda, cherry picking small business stimulus winners to push Labor's green credentials and its education revolution. Good for those who sell insulation batts and a small band of workers who will build new school halls. But there is no broader vision to encourage growth in the small business sector as a whole.

There is plenty the Rudd Government could do if encouraging jobs growth was its genuine focus. Banking on rising unemployment and focusing on retraining is not enough. For example, the PM, keen to stamp his influence on state governments, ought to be paying the states to abolish payroll taxes - which have the direct effect of hindering employment - rather than funding this year's sales of plasma TV sets. And that's just for starters.

This could be the Liberal Party's moment in the sun, reminding us it stands for encouraging real growth in small businesses, in the same heartland that once delivered it government

SOURCE



The Islamic Assault on Free Speech

Comment from Australia

It is one of the many benefits of Christianity that the West enjoys religious freedom and freedom of conscience. The properly understood notion of the separation of church and state arose from the Christian worldview, and goes back to the words of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's".

Islam of course knows of no such separation. Church and state are one in Islam. There is no sacred-secular distinction in the Muslim world. Everything is religious and everything is political. As Rodney Stark wrote, "Muhammad was not only the Prophet, he was head of state. Consequently, Islam has always idealized the fusion of religion and political rule, and sultans have usually also held the title of caliph" (The Victory of Reason).

Or as Dinesh D'Souza put it, "The prophet Muhammad was in his own day both a prophet and a Caesar who integrated the domains of church and state. Following his example, the rulers of the various Islamic empires, from the Umayyad to the ottoman, saw themselves as Allah's viceregents on earth" (What's So Great About Christianity?).

As Bernard Lewis explains, "In classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam, there are no pairs of terms corresponding to `lay' and `ecclesiastical,' `spiritual' and `temporal,' `secular' and `religious,' because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy that has no equivalent in the world of Islam" (Islam and the West).

It is the genius of the West to have run with the Christian version of events in this regard, and not the Islamic one. But these cherished freedoms are ironically now being whittled way in the West as we increasingly seek to appease militant Islamists.

In many parts of the Western world Muslims are demanding, and getting, preferential treatment. And in the process, freedom of religion is slowly being eroded. A classic example of this can be seen in Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. This bit of scurrilous legislation has been used to silence Christians from proclaiming their faith, and from making rational criticism of Islam. The nefarious Victorian law effectively cramps real freedom of speech and religious diversity.

Of course hyper-sensitive Muslims around the world are seeking to implement such censorship on all non-Muslims. At the UN level, for example, Muslims are hoping to use UN Resolution 62/154, which has to do with "combating defamation of religions" to allow Islam to be above all criticism and critique.

A number of people have written about this recently, expressing their concerns. Atheist Christopher Hitchens for example wrote in the Australian warning of "so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the UN that Islam not only be allowed to make such absolutist claims, but that it be officially shielded from any criticism as a result."

The Resolution is full of typical UN balderdash: "For example, paragraph five `expresses its deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism', while paragraph six `notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001'."

"You see how the trick is pulled? In the same weeks this resolution comes up for its annual renewal at the UN, its chief sponsor-government (Pakistan) makes an agreement with the local Taliban forces to close girls' schools in the Swat Valley region (a mere 150km or so from the capital in Islamabad) and subject the inhabitants to sharia law. And this capitulation comes in direct response to a campaign of horrific violence and intimidation, including public beheadings."

One reason why the Victorian legislation is so fatally flawed is that it mixes two quite different things: racial or ethnic vilification, and religious vilification. There may be a case to seek to reduce wrongful discrimination based on race, but to seek to isolate religious views from theological scrutiny and public debate is ludicrous. This is just what is happening in the UN Resolution:

"Yet the religion of those who carry out the campaign [of Islamist violence] is not to be mentioned, lest it `associate' that faith with human rights violations or terrorism. In paragraph six, an obvious attempt is being made to confuse ethnicity with religious allegiance. Indeed this insinuation (incidentally dismissing the faith-based criminality of September 11 as merely tragic) is in fact essential to the entire scheme. If religion and race can be run together, then the condemnations that racism axiomatically attracts can be surreptitiously extended to religion, too. This is clumsy, but it works: the useless and meaningless term Islamophobia, now widely used as a bludgeon of moral blackmail, is testimony to its success."

The muzzling of free speech is the sure outcome of this: "See where the language of paragraph 10 of the resolution is taking us. Having briefly offered lip service to the rights of free expression, it goes on to say that `the exercise of these rights carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations as are provided for by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others, protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals and respect for religions and beliefs.' The thought buried in this awful, wooden prose is as ugly as the language in which it is expressed: watch what you say, because our declared intention is to criminalise opinions that differ with the one true faith. Let nobody say that they have not been warned."

The five-year-long court case involving two Christian pastors should suffice to demonstrate the lunacy of Victoria's anti-vilification laws. The entire case was a travesty of justice, and was simply an attempt by Muslims to silence Christian voices which dared to question Islam.

To have such laws on an international scale would achieve as much for the Islamists as 9/11 ever did. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and this goes for religious freedom as well. The question is, will the West resist this clampdown on freedom of speech, or will it instead submit to appeasement and dhimmitude?

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:10

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

 

British police release 'hero' arrested after teenage burglar is 'stabbed to death breaking into house'

A man quizzed over the fatal stabbing of a teenage burglar was freed on bail today as supporters hailed him a hero. He was released as members of the public swamped websites set up in memory of the raider with messages backing the man's actions. The suspected burglar, 17-year-old Tyler Juett, was killed after he was allegedly caught breaking into a house in Old Basford, Nottingham. The youngster died from stab wounds after being rushed to the city's Queen's Medical Centre after the incident on Friday afternoon. Neighbours later claimed he was confronted inside the home of foster carer Jacqueline Johnson, 46, and her three grown-up children.

It emerged yesterday that a 14-year-old boy - believed to have been an accomplice of Juett - was also stabbed but was not seriously injured.

Two men in their early 20s - thought to Ms Johnson's relatives - and four male youths were later arrested in connection with the incident. Police, who are treating Juett's death as murder, released the 21-year-old without charge on Sunday and freed the 22-year-old on bail yesterday. There was no sign of the Johnsons at their home, which remained cordoned off as forensic officers continued to search the scene for clues.

But the family received massive public support on the internet, with one site specially set up to hail a householder's right to defend his home. One visitor claimed Juett deserved his fate, adding: 'This dude is a pretty cool guy. He stabs thug wanna-bes and isn't afraid of anything.' Others left comments including 'I admire your work - good job, sir', 'The world is a better place', 'He got what he deserved' and 'Good riddance'.

Juett's family have demanded proof that he and his friends were raiding the property, claiming suggestions he was a burglar were 'made up'. His mother Michelle, 34, refused to speak to the press but wrote on her Facebook page: 'Why, why, why, why, why? I want my baby back.' One visitor to an anti-Juett website responded: 'It's always the parents who are first to complain when something happens to little Johnny. 'If they took more responsibility for their kids they wouldn't be out burgling people's houses and wouldn't get shot or stabbed or whatever.'

A page dedicated to Juett on memorial site gonetoosoon.org was removed after being overwhelmed by comments in support of the householder. Friends yesterday admitted Juett, a former pupil at the Henry Mellish School in inner-city Bulwell, Nottingham, was known to get into trouble. One, Chris Imrie, said the one-time promising footballer would be missed, adding: 'He had a hard upbringing, but he was always a mate. 'If you were around him it would always be an upbeat atmosphere, because he could always say things that made people laugh.' A posting on another tribute site, which hailed Juett as a 'solja', added: 'He done what we do. But it went wrong, so that's unlucky.'

A post mortem confirmed Juett died from a stab-wound, but detectives have refused to reveal who owned the knife that was used to kill him. Nottinghamshire police said they were still treating the incident as a murder and that a burglary attempt was one line of the inquiry. A spokesman added: 'We would ask anyone who was in the area to cast their minds back and see if they can remember anyone acting suspiciously.' Neighbours living near the scene of the killing said the area had suffered a number of recent burglaries and householders were 'on edge'.

SOURCE



The Protocols of the Drinkers of Coffee

By Melanie Phillips

If this were only a Purim joke! What we are up against within the Islamic world is quite simply a wholesale negation of reason; nothing less

From Egypt, further evidence that the Islamist hatred of the Jews is not caused by Israel's behaviour or even its existence. It's caused by... hatred of the Jews. Here, Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub raves:

If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels - not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims, but because Allah said: 'The Jews say that Uzair is the son of Allah, and the Christians say that Christ is the son of Allah. These are the words from their mouths. They imitate the sayings of the disbelievers before. May Allah fight them. How deluded they are.' It is Allah who said that they are infidels.

Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies. They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. Allah said: 'You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the disbelievers [sic] to be the Jews and the polytheists.' Third, you must believe that the Jews will never stop fighting and killing us. They [fight] not for the sake of land and security, as they claim, but for the sake of their religion: 'And they will not cease fighting you until they turn you back you're your religion, if they can.'

This is it. We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle - and this is the fourth point. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.

Egypt, let us not forget, is a `moderate' Arab state that has a peace agreement with Israel. It is nevertheless a major source of barking-mad Jewish demonisation in the Arab world. Here is Egyptian Cleric Salama Abd Al-Qawi warning Muslims against the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - the notorious Czarist forged claim that the Jews covertly rule the world - and many US companies :

They [the Jews]began conspiring to annihilate the Islamic and Arab nation, to plunder its resources, and to destroy its youth. Regretfully, the plots they hatched are being implemented today in detail. One of their conspiracies, which stemmed from their black hatred, was to gain control over the entire global economy, bringing the world under their thumb. So they founded huge companies, which, like spiders, send their webs all over the world. The main goal of these companies was to erase Islamic identity.

... Many basic products, which may be found in many Muslim households, like the Ariel, Tide, and Persil laundry detergents, are made by Zionist companies. The Coca Cola and Pepsi companies and all their products - Seven Up, Miranda, Fania, and all these products, all the carbonated beverages, with very few exceptions that don't bear mention... Almost all the carbonated beverages are Zionist-American products.

[...] Some restaurants, I'm sad to say, are teeming with Muslim youth, and their safes are full of the money of Muslims... McDonalds is Jewish-Zionist, Kentucky Fried Chicken is Jewish-Zionist, Little Caesar, Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza, Burger King... By the way, all these products, which I have mentioned... In addition, there is a new type of coffee these days... All these are pure Zionist products, especially what is known as Starbucks, the well-known coffee. It is Zionist.

Ah yes, Starbucks: home of the Zionist genocidal apartheid bean. In January, Egyptian Cleric Safwat Higazi brought viewers of al Nas TV urgent news about the Starbucks logo:

Has any of you ever wondered who this woman with a crown on her head is? Why do we boycott Starbucks? ... The girl on the Starbucks logo is Queen Esther. Do you know who Queen Esther was and what the crown on her head means? This is the crown of the Persian Kingdom. This queen is the queen of the Jews. She is mentioned in the Torah, in the Book of Esther. The girl you see is Esther, the queen of the Jews in Persia...

Can you believe that in Mecca, Al-Madina, Cairo, Damascus, Kuwait, and all over the Islamic world, hangs the picture of beautiful Queen Esther, with a crown on her head, and we buy her products.[...]We want Starbucks to be shut down throughout the Arab and Islamic world. We want it to be shut down in Mecca and in Al-Madina. I implore King Abdallah bin Abd Al-`Aziz, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques: It is inconceivable that in Mecca and Al-Madina, there will be a picture of Queen Esther, the queen of the Jews.

As anyone can see, however, the female figure in the Starbucks logo (pictured above) has two fish tails. This is a clue that she is not Esther, queen of the Jews in Persia. She is instead a twin-tailed siren of Greek mythology. This is because the company is apparently named in part after Starbuck, Captain Ahab's first mate in the book Moby Dick.

What we are up against within the Islamic world is quite simply a wholesale negation of reason; nothing less.

SOURCE



Push to criminalise criticism of Islam

The Muslim religion makes unusually large claims for itself. All religions do this, of course, in that they claim to know and to be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being. But Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God's word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of "the recitation", or Koran. If there sometimes seems to be something implicitly absolutist or even totalitarian in such claims, it may result not from a fundamentalist reading of the holy book but from the religion itself. And it is the so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the UN that Islam not only be allowed to make such absolutist claims, but that it be officially shielded from any criticism as aresult.

Although written tongue-in-cheek in the language of human rights and of opposition to discrimination, the non-binding UN Resolution 62/154, on "combating defamation of religions", seeks to extend protection not to humans but to opinions and to ideas, granting only the latter immunity from being "offended". The preamble is jam-packed with hypocrisies that are hardly even laughable, as in this delicious paragraph, stating that the UN General Assembly: "Underlining the importance of increasing contacts at all levels in order to deepen dialogue and reinforce understanding among different cultures, religions, beliefs and civilisations, and welcoming in this regard the Declaration and Program of Action adopted by the Ministerial Meeting on Human Rights and Cultural Diversity of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Tehran on September 3 and 4, 2007."

Yes, I think we can see where we are going with that. The stipulations that follow this turgid preamble are even more tendentious, and become more so as the resolution unfolds. For example, paragraph five "expresses its deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism", while paragraph six "notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001".

You see how the trick is pulled? In the same weeks this resolution comes up for its annual renewal at the UN, its chief sponsor-government (Pakistan) makes an agreement with the local Taliban forces to close girls' schools in the Swat Valley region (a mere 150km or so from the capital in Islamabad) and subject the inhabitants to sharia law. And this capitulation comes in direct response to a campaign of horrific violence and intimidation, including public beheadings.

Yet the religion of those who carry out the campaign is not to be mentioned, lest it "associate" that faith with human rights violations or terrorism. In paragraph six, an obvious attempt is being made to confuse ethnicity with religious allegiance. Indeed this insinuation (incidentally dismissing the faith-based criminality of September 11 as merely tragic) is in fact essential to the entire scheme. If religion and race can be run together, then the condemnations that racism axiomatically attracts can be surreptitiously extended to religion, too.

This is clumsy, but it works: the useless and meaningless term Islamophobia, now widely used as a bludgeon of moral blackmail, is testimony to its success. Just to be clear, a phobia is an irrational and unconquerable fear or dislike. However, some of us can explain with relative calm why we think faith is the most overrated of the virtues. (Don't be calling us phobic unless you want us to start whining that we have been offended.)

And this whole picture would be much less muddied and confused if the state of Pakistan, say, did not make the absurd and many-times discredited assertion that religion can be the basis of a nationality. It is such crude amalgamations -- is a Saudi or Pakistani being profiled because of his religion or his ethnicity? -- that are responsible for any overlap between religion and race. And it might help if the Muslim hadith did not prescribe the death penalty for anyone trying to abandon Islam; one could then be surer who was a sincere believer and who was not, or (as with the veil or the chador in the case of female adherents) who was a volunteer and who was being coerced by her family.

Rather than attempt to put its house in order or to confront such grave questions as the mass murder of Shia Muslims by Sunni Muslims (and vice versa), or the desecration of Muslim holy sites by Muslim gangsters, or the discrimination against Ahmadi Muslims by other Muslims, the UN resolution seeks to extend the whole area of denial from its existing homeland in the Islamic world into the heartland of post-enlightenment democracy, where it is still individuals who have rights, not religions.

See where the language of paragraph 10 of the resolution is taking us. Having briefly offered lip service to the rights of free expression, it goes on to say that "the exercise of these rights carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations as are provided for by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others, protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals and respect for religions and beliefs."

The thought buried in this awful, wooden prose is as ugly as the language in which it is expressed: watch what you say, because our declared intention is to criminalise opinions that differ with the one true faith. Let nobody say that they have not been warned.

SOURCE



Heavy government internet censorship at work -- not in China -- in Australia

I doubt that this would survive a High Court challenge, however

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks. Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website. ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme. But even without the mandatory censorship scheme, as is evident in the Whirlpool case, ACMA can force sites hosted in Australia to remove "prohibited" pages and even links to prohibited pages.

Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

"The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban. The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

Already, a significant portion of the 1370-site Australian blacklist - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which are legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

Electronic Frontiers Australia said the leak of the Danish blacklist and ACMA's subsequent attempts to block people from viewing it showed how easy it would be for ACMA's own blacklist - which is secret - to be leaked onto the web once it is handed to ISPs for filtering. "We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government's own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future," EFA said. "The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment."

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its "watch list" of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information. The main issue raised was the Government's proposed internet censorship regime. "This report demolished the Communications Minister's contention that Australia is just following other comparable democracies," Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam said. "We are not. The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet. "I agree with Reporters Without Borders. If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia's anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed."

EFA said the Government's "spin is starting to wear thin" and it could no longer be denied that the ACMA blacklist targets a huge range of material that is legal and even uncontroversial. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has repeatedly claimed his proposed mandatory filters would target only "illegal" content - predominantly child pornography. "As time goes on, pressure will only mount on the Government to expand the list, while money and effort are poured into an enormous black box that will neither help kids nor stem the flow of illegal material," EFA said. "If the minister truly believes that children are seeking out, or being bombarded with, child pornography, then there's a dearth of both common sense and proper research in the ministerial suites."

Already, the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Jim Wallace, has said he hopes the sex industry will go broke as a result of the censorship scheme. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon previous expressed his desire to have online gambling sites added to the blacklist but has since withdrawn his support for the scheme, saying it was dangerous and could be "counter-productive". The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked. The Opposition has obtained legal advice that "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required", but others have said it may be possible to implement the scheme without legislation.

Speaking at a telecommunications conference last week, Senator Conroy urged Australians to have faith in MPs to pass the right legislation. Despite previously saying his scheme would be expanded to block "refused classification" content that includes sites depicting drug use, sex, crime, cruelty and violence, he said opponents of his plan were spreading "conspiracy theories".

The Government's internet censorship trials are due to begin shortly but critics have said they may not provide much useful data on the real-world implications because none of the major ISPs were chosen to take part.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:11

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

 

The British Nanny State pulls back, for once

Gordon Brown has rejected a proposal by his top medical adviser for a minimum price of alcohol to tackle binge drinking. The Prime Minister acted after newspapers published details of Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer's, plan, which could result in every can of beer costing at least 1 pound and a bottle of wine a minimum of 4 pounds. The Department of Health gave the idea a fair wind initially, saying that nothing was ruled out and pointing out that Sir Liam had been one of the earliest proponents of a ban on smoking in public places.

Mr Brown made plain that the idea, which would fix prices at no less than 50p per unit of alcohol, was a non-starter. "I do not think this is where we are going," said a source close to the Prime Minister. "The majority of sensible drinkers should not have to pay the price for the irresponsible and excessive drinking by a small minority."

That line was repeated by James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary. "We want to focus on the irresponsible minority rather than I think punishing everyone equally. Clearly we will look at Liam Donaldson's proposals; he's a very eminent person in his field," he told BBC One's The Politics Show. "But we are very clear we don't want to punish the majority for the sins of the minority. I think certainly at a time of economic difficulty that looks like it would be the effect."

Department of Health sources said that it would have come to the same conclusion as Mr Brown but would have preferred to see Sir Liam's ideas debated. "There is no split on the policy," an insider said, "but the truth is, this policy was made this morning in Downing Street. That is their right. They are in charge." Other Whitehall sources denied that the department's approach suggested a split with No 10. "The Health Department has to be diplomatic about this and dealing with Sir Liam. It's easier for No 10 to knock it."

The Conservatives were equally unenthusiastic about raising prices. Andrew Lansley, Shadow Health Secretary, said: "There is clearly a need for action. But it is very important to recognise that we need to deal with people's attitudes and not just the supply and price of alcohol."

He said that Conservative proposals, which include measures to tackle loss-leader promotions and higher taxes on high-alcohol drinks aimed at young people, would address this without penalising the majority of moderate drinkers. "This would seem to be a much better route to go down than distorting the whole drinks market, which in any case may not be legal."

The Liberal Democrat culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster backed Sir Liam's call. "The Liberal Democrats have long argued that the ridiculously cheap below-cost price of alcohol in some of our supermarkets and off-licences is a key contributor to the problem of binge drinking," he said. "There is clear research showing that putting an end to pocket money-priced alcohol will influence drinking behaviour. While more work needs to be done on the details, we welcome Sir Liam's intervention and hope that the Government will act." Sir Liam's proposal would mean most bottles of wine could not be sold for less than 4.50.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said that the Government had not ruled out taking action on cheap alcohol. She said: "It's clearly linked to people drinking more and the subsequent harm to their health. It would be wrong to make sweeping changes without consideration of all the options suggested by our research published in December. "We need to do more work on this to make sure any action we take is appropriate, fair and effective. Any decisions we make will take into account their wider economic impact during this difficult time and it would not be right to penalise the overwhelming majority of responsible drinkers."

More here



Free Speech, Fewer Lawsuits - A Fight Worth Fighting

In a time of massive Ponzi schemes and widespread financial turmoil, it is important for people to feel they can speak up when they believe that something improper is being done. The protection of free speech was given a big boost this past week with a $545,000 settlement, which wrapped-up over three-and-a-half years of court cases.

During that time, Elizabeth Enney lost both parents, survived a fifth heart surgery and paid more than $300,000 to defend herself against two libel lawsuits ultimately found to have been without any basis in law or fact. The lawsuits were described by Enney's lawyer, Cynthia Counts, as "frivolous." The 11th Circuit scolded the plaintiffs who brought the suits, which tied Enney's life into knots. The court stated in its decision that, "based on a reasonable inquiry, they either knew or should have known that they could not satisfy necessary elements of their cause of action for libel." In other words, the lawsuit should never have been filed in the first place.

Enney's saga began in July 2005, when she e-mailed the board of directors of the Rolls-Royce Owners' Club, a non-profit corporation, regarding a "serious conflict of interest," regarding a $9,000 payment the club made for a computer system. One month later, Enney was named in a $1 million federal libel lawsuit filed in Connecticut by M.S. Koly and Delcath Systems. The libel portion of this lawsuit was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction. But Enney was then named in a second $1 million lawsuit filed in the Northern District of her home state of Georgia, in July of 2006.

While others might back off, apologize and hope that the lawsuit would disappear, Enney said "I just look at it as my civic duty," to stand up for what is right. Enney comes from a long line of people who have loved and served their country. Her father, Kenneth Enney, served 33 years in the U.S. Navy as a naval aviator. Fulton Lewis, Jr., her maternal grandfather, was a conservative syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator in the 1950's. Her brother serves today as a lieutenant colonel in the Marines. Referring to her family as "good old-fashioned salt of the earth," Enney said "I've been a fighter all my life," and I was not going to just walk away."

On April 19, 2007, District Judge Jack Camp granted Enney's motion for judgment and dismissed the libel case, but rejected the motion for Rule 11, which permits for the reimbursement to Enney for attorney fees for the defense of the lawsuit. Charles Tobin, who chairs Holland & Knight's national media practices team and is a partner in the Washington office of the law firm, said there has been "too much predilection to let libel go forward," in the courts. When cases are dismissed, the courts essentially tell the defense to "Get over it," rather than applying Rule 11, he said. According to Enney, even after the dismissal of the libel lawsuit brought against her, she felt "we didn't win anything" in that the plaintiffs had been able to "force me to defend a frivolous lawsuit and nobody won."

By the time of the dismissal, Enney had spent more than $300,000 defending herself. Tobin said that Rule 11 should dissuade plaintiffs from filing frivolous lawsuits, but its value is limited since plaintiffs know that it is only rarely applied. Counts, Enny's attorney, appealed to the 11th Circuit Court, requesting the application of Rule 11. How often is Rule 11 applied? "Once in a blue moon," said Tobin, adding "you have to move heaven and earth" to get the courts to pay attention.

But Counts apparently did just that. The 11th Circuit reversed and remanded the case noting "that the district court abused it discretion by denying Enney's Rule 11 motion." According to Tobin, this is a strong statement by the extremely prominent 11th Circuit Court, and its action on this case "should lead to more fee awards" and therefore fewer frivolous lawsuits. Last September 25, Judge Jack Camp referred the case to mediation. The result - a global settlement approved by Camp on March 10, 2009, which included the $545,000 payment to Enney.

Enney said it is important to her for the case to serve as an example to others, and hopefully dissuade frivolous libel lawsuits. While she was able to pay the legal fees, Enney understands that most people would not have this ability and needed someone else to fight this battle for them.

Her belief is that free speech is one of the cornerstones of our country; her hope is that people will not be afraid to speak. When something needs, as she says, a bit of "sunshine shown on it," Enney hopes those who can pull back the shades will not be afraid to do so. In our country, it is important for us to feel safe to speak up for what is right without fear of a resulting lawsuit. That right was reinforced last week, thanks to Enney.

SOURCE



"Civil Liberties For Our Side Only"

Tom Maguire skewers liberals Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias for "their unsteady commitment to civil liberties." "The topic," Maguire writes,

is the right of Deborah Weinsig, a Citigroup equity analyst who covers retail stocks, to explain to her clients why she thinks that card check will be bad for WalMart.

Mr. Klein:

This is a big deal for two reasons. First, it calls into question the impartiality of Citibank's ratings division. Second, it happened amidst a government-funded bailout of Citibank. This is a moment when you'd expect Citibank to be on its best behavior, both in terms of its political action and its business practices. In fact, they appear to be dispatching their analysts and leveraging their ratings division to oppose a policy that the Obama administration supports.

So much for dissent as the highest form of patriotism. Here is Mr. Yglesias:

But there's a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn't be engaged in lobbying or political activities.

I would say that it's a polite exaggeration to describe their "commitment to civil liberties" as "unsteady." In fact, their spotty or non-existent commitment calls to mind a very revealing episode from the 1930s in the history of contemporary liberalism, the first bitterly divisive debate inside the American Civil Liberties Union over ... civil liberties. There has been a good deal of talk, much of it uninformed, over Obama's determination to usher in a new New Deal, but we may be able to learn more about the values of current liberals by looking at the 1930s schism in the ACLU over "civil liberties for our side only" than by looking at the National Industrial Recovery Act or the Civilian Conservation Corps.

That schism was caused by the ACLU's intervention in a dispute between the Ford Motor Company and the National Labor Relations Board over limits on the right of Ford, and by extension other employers, to campaign against union organizers. (A nice summary can be found here, especially around pp. 47-50.) "From its inception in 1920," writes William A. Donohue in The Politics of The American Civil Liberties Union, the work just linked, "the ACLU had defended Communists and Fascists, labor agitators and Klansmen, but never once - not for eighteen years - did it defend the free speech rights of capitalists to oppose unions."

It was forced to confront that issue head on in 1938, when the National Labor Relations Board found Ford guilty of "unfair labor practices" under the Wagner Act, and one of those "unfair" practices was distributing anti-union literature to employees.

Do employers have the right to free speech? The NLRB did not find the question difficult. It ordered the company to cease and desist from "circulating, distributing or otherwise disseminating amongst its employees statements or propaganda disparaging or criticizing labor organizations, or advising it employees not to join such organizations."

Government restriction of the right to distribute literature would seem to be a clear First Amendment violation, but, Donohue reports, "the mere suggestion of such a fundamental civil liberties principle was greeted as heresy by members of the ACLU's `non-partisan' staff." A bitter fight then ensued. The ACLU's labor committee initially supported the NLRB.

[ACLU founder and long-time head Roger] Baldwin ... stated that when employers were asking if they too did not enjoy the right of free speech, the [American Civil Liberties] Union said, "No, you have not rights of free speech against unions now because the right to form a union is now a fundamental one under the National Labor Relations Act." When employers asked, "Well, can't we even talk?" most of the board members, according to Baldwin, replied, "No, you can't even talk."

One labor committee member dissented, "suggesting that the same test of coercion used by the NLRB would have to be applied to the statements of government bureaucrats...." He was promptly dismissed, and subsequently he accused the ACLU of a "liberal purge" and resigned from the organization.

Eventually the ACLU board compromised. It half-heartedly reaffirmed its commitment to free speech by stating its opposition to "any interference with the expressions of opinion on the part of employers" but placated its pro-labor faction by also announcing its opposition to "threats" such as "We'll never recognize the United Automobile Workers or any other union," claiming that such statements violate the civil liberties of workers.

This "civil liberties for our side only" approach to fundamental (or not) rights frequently roils the shallow waters of liberalism. How many of those today, for example, who want to muzzle Citibank employees will propose imposing similar restrictions on other beneficiaries of government largesse, such as ACORN?

Readers of DISCRIMINATIONS, I'm sure, will also be quick to see the similarity - indeed, almost identity - of the belief that only progressives should have unfettered free speech rights and the equally unprincipled position that the right to be treated without regard to race, ethnicity, or gender applies only to some races, ethnicities, and genders - and to them only some of the time (when it works to their alleged benefit; at other times, they have the right to preferential treatment).

SOURCE



Embryos and ethics

by Jeff Jacoby

SHORTLY AFTER the president announced his new policy on funding embryonic stem-cell research, CNN's Larry King devoted a special program to the subject. His first guest was Mary Tyler Moore, the international chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, who has long been involved in raising funds and awareness for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes, a disease for which there is still no cure. "I am so pleased with the thought and care that he put into making this decision. I think it's a good one," Moore told King when he asked for her reaction to the president's statement. "What's wonderful too is that this means that the United States will maintain its leadership in things medical and scientific. . . . So this is a very good thing."

Moore's words of praise might not strike you as exceptional, given the widespread approval last week of President Obama's order reversing the Bush administration's restrictions. But Moore wasn't speaking about Obama. Her interview on "Larry King Live" followed President Bush's stem-cell decision, which was announced in a televised address on Aug. 9, 2001. Also joining the conversation that night was Christopher Reeve. His take on Bush's policy was "a little bit more mixed," he acknowledged. "However, I think it is a step in the right direction. I'm grateful for that to the president."

For eight years Bush's critics caricatured him as a Bible-thumping yahoo for whom ideology routinely trumped science, so it might be difficult to remember that the policy he articulated in 2001 was anything but a knee-jerk rejection of scientific progress. The commentator Charles Krauthammer-- a graduate of Harvard Medical School, a quadriplegic, and a former member of the President's Council on Bioethics who did not agree with Bush's decision -- recalled it a few days ago nonetheless as "the single most morally serious presidential speech on medical ethics ever given." In it, Bush explained why "embryonic stem-cell research offers both great promise and great peril," conscientiously laying out the arguments for and against supporting such research with tax dollars. In the end, he concluded that federal funding could be justified for work on existing stem-cell lines, but not for research that would require the destruction of additional human embryos. Bush's decision had clearly been reached after much deliberation and consultation. "I don't think he did it just politically," Reeve observed. "I do believe he really thought about it."

Obama had an opportunity last week to deliver an equally thoughtful speech. He could have explored the moral dilemmas involved in exploiting a living embryo to advance scientific knowledge. Instead he resorted to political rhetoric and ill-disguised scorn for his predecessor.

The president rejected the "false choice between sound science and moral values" that supposedly characterized the Bush policy, and declared that his administration would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." Promoting science, Obama said, means "letting scientists . . . do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion" and "listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient."

But science is not an unqualified good, and scientific ends do not justify any and all means. It is not "manipulation" or "coercion" or "ideology" to insist that scientific research -- especially when funded by taxpayers -- be restrained by moral and ethical guardrails. The absence of those guardrails can lead to such abominations as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which government doctors -- with the support of the American Medical Association -- deliberately withheld medical treatment from infected black men in order to better understand the natural progression of venereal disease. Those who raised ethical qualms about the study were disregarded by the Public Health Service -- an example of what Obama might call rejecting the "false choice between sound science and moral values."

Like most Americans, I don't believe that microscopic human embryos deserve all the legal protections of personhood. But whether it is right to kill such embryos for the sake of medical research is not just a question about science; it is also a question of moral and political judgment. Public officials are called on to make those judgments, not to simply defer to whatever scientists say they want. Obama blithely concedes that "many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research." Yet at no point did he articulate or address those concerns, let alone attempt to allay them.

"If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable," Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem-cell science, told The New York Times in 2007, "you have not thought about it enough." Thomson's remark has been widely quoted, but it seems not everyone has gotten the message.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:14

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Monday, March 16, 2009

 

British clergyman beaten after clashing with Muslims on his TV show

A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: `If you go back to the studio, we'll break your legs.' The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu.

Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: `He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door. He started slapping my face and punching my neck. He was trying to smash my head on the steering wheel. Then he grabbed my cross and pulled it off and it fell on the floor. He was swearing. The other two men came from the car and took my laptop and Bible.' The Metropolitan Police are treating it as a `faith hate' assault and are hunting three Asian men.

In spite of the attack, Mr Samuel went ahead with his hour-long live Asian Gospel Show on the Venus satellite channel from studios in Wembley, North London. During the show the Muslim station owner Tahir Ali came on air to condemn the attack.

Pakistan-born Mr Samuel, 48, who was educated by Christian missionaries and moved to Britain 15 years ago, said that over the past few weeks he has received phone-in calls from people identifying themselves as Muslims who challenged his views. `They were having an argument with me,' he said. `They were very aggressive in saying they did not agree with me. I said those are your views and these are my views.' He said that he, his wife Louisa, 48, and his son Naveed, 19, now fear for their safety, and police have given them panic alarms. `I am frightened and depressed,' he said. `My show is not confrontational.'

SOURCE



Britain: We demonise all boys as feral .... then wonder why they turn into hoodies



We demonise all boys as feral .... then wonder why they turn into hoodies. When did head covering become such an issue? Hoods and hijabs both cause enormous anxiety. Hoods more so - but no one is forced to wear them. Hoodies really want to be hoodies. I saw that when talking to a group of teenagers about the representation of teenage boys in the media last week. The fact that another generation finds hoods scary is remarkable. The kids themselves, hooded or unhooded, were just bemused that their clothing could cause such a fuss.

We were there to discuss new research that measures how boys are seen by the rest of us. A photograph of a boy in a hood is now the symbol of urban decay or the end of the world. Teenage boys - when not knifing each other or fathering children - are hanging around drinking and drugging. Or they are in their bedrooms playing violent games, which is anti-social.

What the research commissioned by Women in Journalism highlighted was that there are very few good stories about teenage boys. Reality TV and shows such as Pop Idol are about the only place where we might see them in a positive light.

Does it matter if we label what we have reproduced ourselves as feral scum? I think it might. If every teenage boy is a potential mugger or knife-wielder then every teenage boy must carry a knife to protect himself. There is a horrible logic to it. I have had enough boys in and out of my house, thanks to teenage daughters, to see that the mumbling, gangly ones virtually wearing balaclavas are doing so partly to intimidate, partly out of fashion and partly because they are shy.

Yes, I know when one encounters a group of hooded youths on the street who won't step aside, one doesn't immediately think `poor shy little boys' - but sometimes these hoods are their security blankets. Eve Pollard, not a woman easily scared, was also in the discussion and asked some of the boys to remove their hoods. `But I can't see your faces,' she said. You could see the boys cowering as she spoke. When challenged as to why they wouldn't by the ultra-reasonable Anthony Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider series, one even came up with `My ears are cold'. There are an awful lot of cold ears about, then.

This fashion is also, surely, a deliberate, if unconscious, response to the surveillance culture of CCTV. It is, of course, in some boys' interest to keep their faces covered, but not the majority. So why have we criminalised an entire generation? It is as if we fear for our children too much and then we begin to fear them.

This divvying up of kids into angels or devils is not new. Think back to James Bulger's murder. Children killing children. I will never forget the mothers with toddlers in buggies outside the courtroom screaming that the ten-year-old murderers should now be killed as `killing children was wrong'. Ever since then, relentless images of underclass feral youth have been pumped into our consciousness. Most kids go to school, go through a bit of a dodgy stage and turn out OK in the end.

The madness of the Myerson saga reveals parents who could not accept their golden boy was growing up, no longer the sweet baby. He turned into a great, hulking manchild who didn't know what to do with himself for a while. It's really not the Jake Myersons of this world we need to worry most about but the white, disaffected working-class kids.

In demonising boys we make them afraid of each other. It is scary out there. But if we are afraid of our youths and their silly hoods, then we make them frightened of each other. That is a dangerous thing to be doing right now.

SOURCE



TEAM OBAMA'S ANTI-ISRAEL TURN

The Obama administration is increasingly fixed on resolving the "Arab-Is raeli dispute," seeing it as the key to peace and stability in the Middle East. This is bad news for Israel - and for America. In its purest form, this theory holds that, once Israel and its neighbors come to terms, all other regional conflicts can be duly resolved: Iran's nuclear-weapons program, fanatical anti-Western terrorism, Islam's Sunni-Shiite schism, Arab-Persian ethnic tensions. Some advocates believe substantively that the overwhelming bulk of other Middle Eastern grievances, wholly or partly, stem from Israel's founding and continued existence. Others see it in process terms - how to "sequence" dispute resolutions, so that Arab-Israeli progress facilitates progress elsewhere.

Pursuing this talisman has long characterized many European leaders and their soulmates on the American left. The Mideast "peace process" is thus the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone - its mere existence being its basic justification. And now the Obama administration has made it US policy. This is evidenced by two key developments: the appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy for the region, and Secretary of State Hillary's Clinton's recent insistence on a "two-state solution" sooner rather than later.

Naming Mitchell as a high-level, single-issue envoy - rather than keeping the portfolio under Secretary Clinton's personal control - separates Israel from the broader conduct of US diplomacy. Mitchell's role underlines both the issue's priority in the president's eyes and the implicit idea it can be solved in the foreseeable future. Obama and Mitchell have every incentive to strike a Middle East deal - both to vindicate themselves and, in their minds, to create a basis for further "progress." But there are few visible incentives for any particular substantive outcome - which is very troubling for Israel, since Mitchell's mission essentially replicates in high-profile form exactly the approach the State Department has followed for decades.

When appointed, Mitchell said confidently: "Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings." This is true, however, only if the conflict's substantive resolution is less important than the process point of "ending" it one way or another. Surrender, for example, is a guaranteed way to end conflict.

Here, Clinton's strident insistence on a "two-state solution" during her recent Mideast trip becomes important. She essentially argued predestination: the "inevitability" of moving toward two states is "inescapable," and "there is no time to waste." The political consequence is clear: Since the outcome is inevitable and time is short, there is no excuse for not making "progress." Delay is evidence of obstructionism and failure - something President Obama can't tolerate, for the sake of his policies and his political reputation.

In this very European view, failure on the Arab-Israeli front presages failure elsewhere. Accordingly, the Obama adminstration has created a negotiating dynamic that puts increasing pressure on Israel, Palestinians, Syria and others.

Almost invariably, Israel is the loser - because Israel is the party most dependent on the United States, most subject to US pressure and most susceptible to the inevitable chorus of received wisdom from Western diplomats, media and the intelligentsia demanding concessions. When pressure must be applied to make compromises, it's always easier to pressure the more reasonable side.

How will diplomatic pressure work to change Hamas or Hezbollah, where even military force has so far failed? If anything, one can predict coming pressure on Israel to acknowledge the legitimacy of these two terrorist groups, and to negotiate with them as equals (albeit perhaps under some artful camouflage). The pattern is so common that its reappearance in the Mitchell-led negotiations is what is really "inevitable" and "inescapable."

Why would America subject a close ally to this dynamic, playing with the security of an unvarying supporter in world affairs? For America, Israel's intelligence-sharing, military cooperation and significant bilateral economic ties, among many others, are important national-security assets that should not lightly be put at risk. The only understandable answer is that the Obama administration believes that Israel is as much or more of a problem as it is an ally, at least until Israel's disagreements with its neighbors are resolved. Instead of seeing Israel as a national-security asset, the administration likely sees a relationship complicating its broader policy of diplomatic "outreach." No one will say so publicly, but this is the root cause of Obama's "Arab-Israeli issues first" approach to the region.

This approach is exactly backward. All the other regional problems would still exist even if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got his fondest wish and Israel disappeared from the map: Iran's nuclear-weapons program, its role as the world's central banker for terrorism, the Sunni-Shiite conflict within Islam, Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda and other regional ethnic, national and political animosities would continue as threats and risks for decades to come.

Instead, the US focus should be on Iran and the manifold threats it poses to Israel, to Arab states friendly to Washington and to the United States itself - but that is not to be. President Obama argues that he will deal comprehensively with the entire region. Rhetoric is certainly his specialty, but in the Middle East rhetoric only lasts so long. Performance is the real measure - and the administration's performance to date points in only one direction: pressuring Israel while wooing Iran. Others in the world - friend and foe alike - will draw their own conclusions.

SOURCE



Opulence for All!

Tibor R. Machan

As I drive to work in the morning I pass a community college on my right and for years now I have been struck by its opulence. This facility looks like some palace built for pharaohs, not a supplementary educational institution helping people with a few under-division college courses each term. No, by now at least California has several of such fabulous schools--I recall Foothill College up in the Bay Area, which matches some of the best endowed private universities in its architecture, as well as Santiago Canyon or Santa Barbara City College. These and others stick to my mind but there are hundreds of them, as well as similar so called public facilities that show enormous investment at taxpayers' expense or on government credit.

When I hear about California's enormous budget deficit--were they not constitutionally required to balance it each year?--my mind quickly focuses on these and other indulgences throughout the state. They certainly make it appear that whoever plans the state's educational programs has no concern about frugality or thrift. Instead the mentality that appears to go into these projects is that if anyone anywhere is studying at a marvelous college, well then everyone must, including those who spend but a few hours three times a week on campus.

This egalitarian mentality seems to me to have contributed big time to the country's financial wows. Although I am convinced of the superiority of privatizing all education, I figure that if the government is going to get into the education industry, it could certainly practice some restraint. Subsidized education ought at least to be modest and the opulence witnessed around California and some other regions of the country--Long Island, New York comes to mind, as does Florida and Texas--is simply way over the top.

Certainly if I am going to ask my friends to help me out with some of my personal needs, such as purchasing a car or dish washer, I would be abusing the privilege if I spent their good money on the most expensive of these items. But the egalitarian entitlement mentality is such as to insist that if some people in society are studying at institutions with outstanding and beautiful facilities, well then everyone is entitled to the same. Never mind that the money is obtained through the extortion method called taxation, a relic of feudal times when monarchs had to be compensated for allowing their realm to be used by their subjects.

Which brings to mind a related matter--Nevada Senator Harry Reid's recent contention in an interview widely circulated on the Web that taxation is voluntary and that when taxes are collected, it's like collecting dues from us which we all owe because we choose to pay them. Bunk. Dues are the result of signing up for a benefit with the provision oft paying an agreed upon weekly, monthly, or yearly fee. But taxes are nothing like this. Just being born and trying to make a living qualifies one as the subject of it, to being extorted arbitrary portions of one's livelihood.

But back to the egalitarian opulence that has contributed to the current fiscal meltdown in so many regions of not only America but the rest of the world. It may be driven by envy or by a phony political ideology, namely that everyone is naturally entitled to equal "shares" of the country's wealth but in either case it is nonsense. And it's costing big time. Of course there is an ancient habit afoot that supports this sentiment. It is one that sees society as a club or team to which everyone belongs as an ant to a colony and from which everyone may draw maximum benefits, so long as the leadership allows it.

In the time of kings and other mythical leaders of state it was an ideal to aspire to because it was one way to wrest of the wealth from the rulers--persuade them it isn't theirs in the first place (which it wasn't though they firmly believed it was). But once it was widely enough realized that societies were supposed to be realms wherein we all were to be free to work and aspire to some level of success but not entitled to end up like everyone else, this was supposed to change and we are all more or less competing with the understanding that in a competition people end up in different places at different points of the race. But by refusing to see it this way, the society is seen as obligated to maintain everyone in a state of economic opulence and that is simply unsustainable and leads to George Orwell's very apt depiction of an egalitarian society in his novella, Animal Farm, wherein everyone is equal only some are far more "equal" than others.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:15

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Sunday, March 15, 2009

 

Britons who HATE Britain: The Muslim extremists hell-bent on segregation rather than integration

And the British government subsidizes them!



This was the scene that greeted homecoming soldiers in Luton this week. Behind it is a community where integration has abjectly failed, breeding a small but rabid band of poisonous fanatics. The call to morning prayers begins at dawn: 'Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar' (Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest). The voice echoes across the rooftops from an amplifier on a minaret at Luton Central Mosque. Outside, men in beards and tunics are arriving. They slip off their shoes, douse their faces in water, then kneel with foreheads meeting the carpet. So it was yesterday, Friday - the most sacred day of the week for Muslims.

The mosque, with its distinctive golden dome dominating the skyline, is the most visible symbol of Islamic life in the town. It was also one of seven Muslim centres in Luton chosen to receive Home Office funding last year for a project called 'Preventing Violent Extremism'. So far, 200,000 pounds has been handed out via grants from the council. Another 400,000 has been set aside to capture the 'hearts and minds' of young Muslims. In the wake of the scenes which greeted soldiers taking part in a supposedly morale-boosting homecoming parade in Luton this week, some might wonder whether this is money that has been well spent. Members of 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment faced jeering protesters waving placards saying 'Butchers of Basra'. It seems that some hearts and minds have not been captured.

One in five of Luton's 200,000 population is Muslim. But in the Bury Park district, where Luton Central Mosque is situated, the figure is much higher. Indeed, the original indigenous white population has all but disappeared from these back-to-back terraces near the Kenilworth Road football stadium. Bury Park has effectively become a town within a town, with its own madrasah (faith school), Islamic primary school and high street, where the local butcher has been replaced by the halal store and the corner shop by a Muslim grocery. Boutiques now sell Day-Glo saris and other traditional Asian clothes. So far, so familiar in modern Britain - but there is another side to life here.

While the majority of Muslims are peace-loving, industrious people, it would be wrong to deny that there are deeply disturbing tensions in the area. When a Mecca Bingo Hall opened in the heart of Bury Park, its windows were smashed. The neon Mecca sign, some Muslims claimed, was an insult to their religion because it associated the name of their holiest city with gambling. Adverts and billboards featuring women deemed to be showing too much flesh have been defaced. An evangelical church was daubed with graffiti.

Over the past 18 months or so, around 30 non-Muslim homes in the area have also been attacked. One white couple in their 80s had bricks - and, on one occasion, a lump of concrete - hurled through their front window. A West Indian woman in her 70s was watching television when a metal beer keg crashed through her bay window. The culprits have never been caught. Rightly or wrongly, the victims of these incidents are in no doubt that they were targeted by a small group of religious extremists who want non-Muslims out of Bury Park.

Sadly, the process of integration, which began back in the 1970s when thousands of families from the Indian sub-continent came to Luton to work at the Vauxhall car factory, has turned into segregation in all but name. Multi-culturalism in Bury Park now seems to mean a Muslim from Pakistan living side-by-side with a Muslim from Bangladesh, not white living next to black and brown. Multi-culturalism also, presumably, means allowing a group of young men the freedom to hand out inflammatory leaflets in the street - entitled 'Return of the Khilafah' - just 24 hours after they had launched that ugly protest against the Anglian Regiment returning home from Iraq. A Khilafah, for those who may be unfamiliar with the term, is an Islamic state created by Jihad, or holy war. Osama Bin Laden is the standard-bearer for these beliefs.

The Luton extremists - part of a network, it should be stressed, that is only 35 strong - may not have made the headlines before this week, but they have been waging their own local Jihad for a number of years. At the Luton Central Mosque, one respected Muslim leader - who asked not to be named - told me this week that the group were the Islamic world's equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Recently, Holocaust memorial ceremonies attended by many moderate Muslims were among the events the extremist group tried to disrupt. Almost all of the fanatics, according to the Muslim leader at the mosque, are on the dole or claiming benefits of some kind. 'They wouldn't have the time to stir up so much trouble if they worked,' he said. So the state is supporting them even as they plot to overthrow it.

A number of the extremists attend a mosque in Bury Park and, at one time or another, their group has gone under different names: One Nation, Muslims Against British Atrocities, The Saviour Sect (anyone who does not follow their path is 'damned') and now Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah. This latest is said to have succeeded the Luton branch of Al-Muhajiroun, the banned organisation led by 'preacher of hate' Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is now in exile in Lebanon.

Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah (ASWJ) operates mainly through an invitation- only internet forum set up in 2006. Sheikh Bakri Mohammed is a regular contributor, along with Anjem Choudry, who this week taunted the grieving families of three Royal Anglian Regiment members killed in a friendly fire incident and who yesterday said he wants to see an Islamic flag 'flying over Downing Street'. One journalist who penetrated ASWJ found recordings of Osama Bin Laden on the website.

Luton, according to a leaked intelligence report, remains a focus of concern for anti-terror police and continues to be a 'magnet' for extremists, alongside Beeston in Leeds, Birmingham and parts of London. One of the first signs of the impact of extremist ideology being propagated in Luton came in 2001, when two British Muslim men from the town were killed fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Six years later, it emerged that one of the militants convicted of plotting to use a fertiliser bomb to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre in Essex came from the town. And in a further chilling twist, the ringleader of that gang was revealed to have met the leader of the 7/7 London bombers four times. (The London gang congregated at Luton station before heading to King's Cross.)

One of the organisations which is now getting government money to combat the militant threat in Luton is the Islamic Cultural Society, based in Luton Central Mosque in Bury Park. The 25,000 it received last year is helping to fund two full-time teachers whose job it is to engage and educate potentially disaffected young Muslim men. The unemployment rate in the town is more than 8 per cent, but significantly among the Asian population it is estimated to be as high as 25 per cent. Again, the great majority of these unemployed people are peace-loving, but, as we have already said, there are tensions....

More here



Anti-Americanism

Comments by a Brit living in the USA

'Americans are so stupid!" states the teenage daughter of good friends visiting us last year in Washington DC from the UK. I have just finished telling her about a silly little misunderstanding of language that had taken place at our local supermarket (where, needing to buy butter, I had finally had to resort to doing a charade of milking a cow and buttering toast, with the assistant at the shop suddenly exclaiming, "Oh, you want buh-der!)

I study our young friend, wondering how a 17-year-old brain can already be so automatically programmed to espouse such views. As an expat living in Washington, I am extremely used to spending (ill-afforded!) intellectual currency on defending Americans but, even so, the reaction of this lovely young girl has me releasing a large sigh of disappointment and thinking: "Oh no, not you too."

Expats living Stateside, often try to stave off verbal attacks on America by listing the many examples of American achievement and scientific discovery that we should all feel grateful about. We become a pastiche of John Cleese's character in Monty Python's Life of Brian. He asks, "Well, what have the Romans ever given us then, eh?", only for people to start shouting out a list which leaves him saying: "Well, alright, apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, public baths, public order and wine - what have the Romans ever given us, eh?"

One could easily substitute the word 'Americans' for 'Romans' and list a plethora of wonderful American inventions; the first ever powered human flight, animation, the bra, oral contraception, the assembly line, personal and laptop computers, carbon dating, celluloid, blood banks and a multitude of other amazing contributions. But, as in the film, the Romans would still be hated - loathed all the more for their brilliance of ingenuity. Is it, then, a type of jealousy that makes Europeans so detest Americans?

I do realize that it may seem naive, verging on downright neglectful, to blame the dislike of Americans on jealousy. What of globalisation? What of the hypocrisy of Guant namo? What of Iraq? What of the non-ratification of the Kyoto Accord? There seems to be a veritable moral smorgasbord of distaste for us Europeans to choose from but are we balanced in our views?

To try to better understand the European dislike of Americans, I asked the BBC's North America Editor, Justin Webb, to shed a little insight. Justin has lived in the USA with his wife and children since 2002 and has written a book, Have a Nice Day, on the subject of anti-Americanism. Having spent the past seven years travelling the country, as well as producing a documentary for Radio 4 about anti-Americanism, he has had plenty of opportunities to examine the American psyche, at a collective and individual level.

Justin begins his book by depicting a scene from his childhood, when he would accompany his mother (who was both a Quaker and a pacifist) to Saturday protest meetings in the Abbey churchyard in his home city of Bath. He describes his mother and her fellow band of protester friends as 'genteel and sensibly shod' but, a few years later, he was left wondering why this group of 'good people' only pointed an accusatory group finger at the USA. Why, for example, did their protests against nuclear weapons, concentrate solely on American warheads and not Soviet missiles?

Justin said: "These seemed to me to be more than attacks on the things America did. They were part of a general attitude towards America and the world, an ideology whose central tenet was that 'the Yanks are to blame'.

"In spite of ourselves, and in spite of all the evidence, we keep expecting Americans to come to their senses and have a National Health Service, or a ban on keeping pistols under suburban pillows, or affection for public transport. But, guys, they won't!

"On occasions European dislike of America comes close to racism. It is a deeply felt prejudice. Why else would English friends with impeccable anti-racist credentials ask of our children (who have grown up in the US), 'How will you get rid of their accents?' They assume, without ever questioning why, that we would want to."

What then, I ask him, of the future of anti-Americanism? Am I being too Doris Day-like, too Pollyanna-ish, to believe that the dawn of the Obama years, and a week in which he welcomed Gordon Brown to Washington, will eradicate the worst of the stereo-typing and scapegoating?

In his view, Obama will help but only up to a point: "European anti-Americanism has only a limited amount to do with who is in power here," he says, "it is also a function of our disappointment with ourselves, our jealousy at the success that America has been, and our seduction by the American Way; all of this comes together to make us hate ourselves for loving America. The relationship is complex - too complex for Obama to resolve."

Although I cannot believe that the all-pervasive European anti-Americanism of the past will entirely dissolve with this new administration, the Doris Day in me would like to hope that the changes we see in the White House will effect change in our judgments towards everyday, Americans.

While the hands of Congressmen and women are still recovering from the many standing ovations they gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown on his trip to Washington, his words, "There is no old Europe, no new Europe. There is only your friend Europe", are still ringing in our ears. If, as Gordon Brown states, this is the "most pro-American European leadership in living memory", hope springs eternal for this expat that Europeans will let us all have a nice new day.

SOURCE



Recession-Proof Diversity

By Heather Mac Donald

The college diversity racket is immune to economic downturns. Harvard University has announced its latest diversity dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Any rational budget analyst would mark this deanship for the ax, since it overlaps with the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity--and with the cochairpersonships of the Standing Committee on Women. Yet it would appear that no financial meltdown, no matter how great, can shake academia's manic and irrational pursuit of a creature as imaginary as a unicorn: an even remotely qualified faculty made up of proportional numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and women.

Back in 2005, then-president Larry Summers inflated Harvard's already bloated diversity bureaucracy in penance for suggesting, in the spirit of open academic debate, that the distribution of high-end math skills in men and women could at least partly explain male dominance in the hard sciences. That recklessly truthful comment ultimately cost Summers his presidency, but not before he bootlessly tried to placate the diversity machine by creating a diversity sinecure--the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity--and committing $50 million to a fanatical search for a racially and sexually proportional faculty.

Now, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust and dean Michael D. Smith have appointed sociology and African-American studies professor Michele Lamont the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' diversity dean. Lamont--an "expert on the dynamics of social exclusion in France and the United States," the Harvard Crimson says--will also chair yet another new diversity committee. But please don't confuse the diversity dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity. They are not the same, though how they differ is a mystery beyond ordinary human ken. The diversity provost just published a report comparing the percentage of minority and female professors at Harvard and other universities; the new diversity dean will use this latest report to browbeat departments for their lack of diversity, which the diversity provost does as well.

Not daunted by the superfluity of her role, Lamont plans to "research what other universities are doing on the diversity front," the Crimson reports, something that the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity also does. The answer, no matter who's asking, is simple. For the last 30 years, Harvard and its peers have pledged repeatedly to find the Holy Grail of perfect diversity. They have remained deliberately blind to the fact that the critical precondition to attaining diversity--a sufficient number of qualified minority Ph.D.s across the academy and of female Ph.D.s in the hard sciences--is not in place. They have desperately searched the horizon for a miraculous, undiscovered trove of qualified "diversity" candidates, and lowered hiring standards when they have failed to discover it. And, of course, they have obsessively produced comparative diversity studies for years, as if running the numbers would magically produce candidates who don't exist.

If ever there were a time to reconsider this futile quest, now would be it. Harvard lost at least $8 billion from its endowment--or 22 percent--between the end of June and early December. The university has put a freeze on faculty salaries, searches, and promotions. In a November 10 letter to the Harvard community, President Faust called for "greater financial discipline" and said that "tradeoffs and hard choices" could no longer be put off. Well, getting rid of Harvard's duplicative diversity apparatus wouldn't even be a "hard choice." When one is cutting budgets, the most obvious items to target are those that don't accomplish anything. The diversity racket fits that description to a tee.

Lamont is already up to speed in the three essential qualifications of a diversity bureaucrat: pretending that the sinecure requires special expertise, repeating the same tired bromides that have been endlessly regurgitated for years, and ignoring reality. "I'm basically using my knowledge to advise [Dean Smith] and to educate the Faculty," she told the Crimson. And in what arcane science will she be "educating" the faculty? In the agonizingly trite and wholly unjustified assertion that "diversity and excellence are not opposites--they're additive."

On the reality front, the fact that faculty searches and promotions have been frozen would seem to preclude "diversity" hires and promotions. Not to a diversity dean, however. Lamont says that she sees "opportunity" in the financial crisis. Departments will be able to focus more on diversity issues, Lamont said, according to the Crimson. Believing that departments can make diversity hires during a hiring freeze is no more irrational than believing that a department can achieve racial proportionality when the number of black and Hispanic Ph.D.s in substantive fields barely registers.

Lamont's expertise in the "dynamics of social exclusion" will no doubt sharpen her eyes to the exceedingly subtle ways that Harvard excludes blacks and minorities. Someone without the special insights of a diversity dean might find such a claim of exclusion inconsistent with Harvard's having poured millions of dollars into finding and promoting minorities and women. Too bad Harvard can't direct just as much energy to scoping out waste. Somewhere within that massive university, vital scholarship and scientific research takes place. While such research may be jeopardized by the current financial crisis, it's all the more at risk from Harvard's foolish conformity to diversity nonsense.

SOURCE



Australia: His Eminence Cardinal Pell believes West now scared of criticising Islam



The West has become scared to criticise Islam and accepts death threats by Muslim extremists as normal, Cardinal George Pell has suggested in a speech in England. The outspoken Catholic Archbishop of Sydney said laws intended to promote tolerance were being used to stifle debate, which was "fermenting intolerance under the surface". In the March 6 speech at Oxford University, he also attacked a global campaign of "bullying and intimidation" by secular groups trying to drive Christians from public debate and stop churches providing schools, hospitals and welfare.

"Many in the West have grown used to practising self-censorship when it comes to Islam, just as we seem to accept that ex-Muslims who criticise Islam and extremism, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, require round-the-clock police protection," he said. "You can be persecuted for hate speech if you discuss violence in Islam, but there is little fear of a hate-speech prosecution for Muslim demonstrators with placards reading 'Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas'."

He said the expense and time of defending frivolous hate-speech allegations and the anxiety from "being enmeshed in a legal process straight out of Kafka" stifled robust discussion. "No one in the West today would suggest that criticism of Christianity should be outlawed," he said. "The secular and religious intolerance of our day needs to be confronted regularly and publicly."

Some secularists wanted a one-way street, and sought to drive Christianity not only from the public square but from providing education, health care and welfare to the wider community. "Modern liberalism has strong totalitarian tendencies," he said.

Cardinal Pell said a Californian referendum that rejected same-sex marriage had been a focus for demonstrations, violence, vandalism and intimidation of Christians. He said "this prolonged campaign of payback and bullying" would have received much more attention if same-sex marriage supporters had been the victims. It was strange how some of the most permissive groups easily became repressive despite their rhetoric about diversity and tolerance, he said. "Opposition to same-sex marriage is a form of homophobia and therefore bad, but Christianophobic blacklisting and intimidation is passed over in silence," he said.

Cardinal Pell said discrimination laws had been used to redefine marriage and the family. Children could now have three, four or five parents, relegating the idea of a child being brought up by his natural mother and father to nothing more than a majority preference. He said last year's Victorian law decriminalising abortion made a mockery of conscientious objection, which had been attacked as merely a way for doctors and nurses to impose their morality on their patients. Cardinal Pell said Christians urgently needed to deepen public understanding about religious freedom.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:14

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Saturday, March 14, 2009

 

A downturn in British moral values?

Watch out: the recession could turn you into a fat fascist wife-beater with anger-control issues. Allegedly.

Remember when the recession was supposed to be a good thing? Not long ago, the great and the good were sending Mac-written missives from their unrepossessed homes about how the economic downturn would help us - the little people - to rediscover `long-forgotten, old-fashioned values', like thriftiness, rationing, community spirit, hunger. Well, now the G&G have gone and changed their minds. It turns out the recession will not bring out the best in people, but the very, very worst, threatening to turn us into fascist wife-beaters with vastly expanding waistlines and a whole host of mental health problems.

First the recession will make us fat. You would think, in a time of economic downturn, that any start-up, business expansion or other form of job creation would be warmly welcomed. In fact, the news that Domino's Pizza has boosted its profits by 25 per cent over the past year, and now plans to open 50 stores and create hundreds of new jobs in the coming year, was treated as an Hieronymus Bosch-style warning of a hellish future of fat-limbed, jobless people eating themselves into an early grave. The recession is `ruining our health', declared one newspaper headline. A food writer said it is `utterly, utterly depressing' that people are `slobbing out on the sofa at home, not with a bowl of hearty, homemade soup, but with a whopping great bucket of fried chicken or a calorie-laden pizza'.

Food critic Jay Rayner dry-heaved upon hearing that KFC plans to open 300 new outlets and create 9,000 new jobs in the next 12 months. The recession has further exposed the `deeply chronic divide', he said, `between those who give a toss about what they eat and those who, frankly, do not, and who see lectures about what they have for dinner as little more than that: a hectoring irrelevance for lives lived at the bottom of the economic heap'. Hmm, I wonder why people might see `food advice' as a `hectoring lecture' from poshos? Expanding on who it is that `doesn't give a toss about what they eat', one medical expert used that deliciously Dickensian phrase `the poor' to describe those people who `cannot cook' and who in a recession `are increasingly likely to eat poorly nutritious fast food'.

The celebrity chef and government adviser, Jamie Oliver, who with his use of the term `white trash' has been far more honest about who these `slobs' are who eat buckets of chickens that are a `killer combination of cheap protein, even cheaper carbs and tongue-coating fats', told the House of Commons Health Select Committee (yes, he was invited) that the recession will make our `obesity epidemic' even worse.

This discussion of recession-induced lardiness, especially amongst The Poor and white trash who according to Oliver suffer from the `new poverty' of not knowing how to cook, perfectly sums up what fuels the obesity panic today: not hard scientific evidence that the uneducated hordes are waddling towards early death with a family-sized bucket of boneless chicken under each arm, but a voyeuristic, vicarious obsession with slipping standards of health and morality amongst the lower orders. Obesity is a metaphor for the old sins of gluttony and sloth, and celebrity chefs are the new priests who want to save The Poor from their own worst (eating) habits. The less well-off are seen as a peculiar, unknowable blob, who might be pushed further down the road to hydrogenated hell by the uncertainty of the recession.

Once you have been made more rotund by the economic downturn, you will be the perfect size and shape for the next expected impact of job losses and money worries: fascism. The G&G are positively (one might even say pornographically) convinced that the recession will make neo-Nazis of us all. Well, not all of us; just those who `don't give a toss about what they eat' or about foreigners. One UK government minister, Jim Murphy, has warned of `credit crunch racism'. Trevor Phillips of the Equality and Human Rights Commission says Britain could become more racist as the recession bites, giving rise to `an angry, embittered permanent underclass looking for targets on whom to vent its rage'.

The Labour left is gripped by fascist fantasies. Some old-style Labourites warn that this global downturn, likes its 1930s cousin, could facilitate `a rise in fascism'. Only they don't mean the emergence of an elite jackboot movement such as that which emerged in one of the most powerful countries in Europe in the 1930s (which would be an ahistorical prediction anyway); they mean that `racist workers' and the `permanent underclass' might start attacking anyone who looks or smells foreign in an attempt jealously to guard their own jobs and dole money. Commenting on the recent wildcat strikes - slogan: `British jobs for British workers' - Tribune magazine whined about how New Labour's promises to protect British jobs sound like a `dog whistle to working-class Labour supporters toying with the idea of voting for the British National Party'.

Here, too, it is not any evidence of a recession-linked upsurge in Johnny Foreigner hatred that fuels the fascist predictions, but rather an elite view of the little people as volatile, unpredictable, given to outbursts of irrationality. At a time when the old politics of left and right is a thing of the past, and the workers v bosses divide looks like a distant memory, the working classes and The Poor are seen as unreadable, and as easily swayed by what one Labour commentator describes as the `leeches of the far right'. It is the aloofness and disconnection of commentators and quango heads that generates fascism fears.

This is clear from Tribune's use of the `dog whistle' metaphor: the working classes are seen as automatons, the human equivalent of attack dogs, who speak in their own shrill, high-pitched lingo that is not readily audible to the more sensible, leeches-immune Labour commentariat who sit above them.

And once you are fat and a fascist, what is the next logical step? Wife-beating, of course. Last week's news was rife with predictions that the `recession will prompt a rise in domestic violence' and that women will be `worst hit' (literally) by the economic downturn. The UK attorney general, Lady Scotland, warned that `domestic violence will rise with increased financial worries'. What has triggered this fear of male-on-female violence in downturn-whacked Britain? The arrival of hundreds of badly beaten wives of newly unemployed men at police stations across the UK? No. It springs from a government report, titled Real Help Now for Women, which casually and unscientifically predicts that during the recession `women may face threats from violent or abusive partners'.

The Metropolitan Police says there had been a `slight increase' in domestic violence over the past year, but there was no evidence yet that it was linked to `stress in terms of lost jobs'. Yet that didn't stop the government from focusing its `real help' for women during the recession, not on creating jobs for them or on ensuring that they can remain active, productive citizens despite the downturn, but on protecting them from their own allegedly violent families. The wife-beating panic is fuelled by elite porno-fears about what takes place Behind Closed Doors, and a view of the family as a dangerous place rather than a sanctuary, a means of pooling resources and pulling through during tough economic times.

What all of these recession predictions have in common is a view of the public as an amorphous mass that will be pushed, prodded, twisted and reshaped - for the worse - by the economic downturn. Any view of us as resourceful, tough individuals, who together with our friends, families and social networks can get through the economic downturn in one piece, has given way to fears that we will become dog-like haters of foreigners and women with chicken-blocked arteries to boot. Even worse, the relentless focus on managing the masses' foul and violent reaction to the recession - by giving more food lectures, censoring those `dog whistles' tempting us to become fascists, encouraging women to be suspicious of their husbands, or offering free therapy to counter the `epidemic of anxiety' - lets off the hook those who are largely responsible for this mess in the first place: the authorities. Unable to manage the economic fallout, far less have an honest debate about what needs to be done to improve productivity and living standards, the powers-that-be focus on micro-managing wayward individuals instead.

SOURCE



'We've left children to rot, now they are animals': Michael Caine speaks out after returning to his roots to make new movie

Sir Michael Caine has spoken of his horror at returning to the 'sink estates' in the area he once called home. The Oscar-winning actor said children in Elephant & Castle, South London, were being 'left to rot' and growing into 'animals'.

Sir Michael is no stranger to the tough streets of the capital, as he grew up in the same area when 'spivs' prowled with razor blades sewn into the brims of their hats. But on returning to film a low-budget thriller about gang culture, he was shocked by what he found. Much of his time shooting Harry Brown was spent around an area called the Heygate Estate, a 1960s social housing scheme that is to be demolished. And none too soon, according to Sir Michael.

The actor, who grew up Maurice Joseph Micklewhite - the son of a Billingsgate fish market porter and a charwoman - said such 'rotten places' should never have been built. Sir Michael, 75, moved to Camberwell from Rotherhithe in the 1940s, when he was 12. He lived in a prefabricated house which had electric lights and an inside bathroom. 'That terrible place for me was a step up,' he said. 'But when I see how children live now, compared with the flats there now it was like a middle-class dwelling.'

'[The film] is about sink estates and the violence on them,' he told the Evening Standard. 'This is a dark portrait but unfortunately it is very true and we're all responsible for it. We left the children to rot. We left these children and they grew into animals.' He added: 'The families have let the children down, the educators have let the children down. 'We've put them in rotten places like the Heygate Estate... which fortunately is being pulled down. It should never have been built.'

Last night, Kim Humphreys, Conservative councillor for Southwark, said Sir Michael seemed to be confusing reality and fiction. 'I understand he is making a gang movie, but if he went around the estate, given the amount of security he would find it one of the safest, cleanest and friendliest estates in South-East London.' He admitted the estate was 'past its sell-by date', and said that was why residents were being rehoused.

SOURCE



Black History Month: racial equality not black and white

Does Black History Month in America does more harm than good ?

For one month only: classroom walls in America are covered with posters of famous black figures. But Morgan Freeman doesn't approve: 'I don't want a Black History Month,' he says. 'African history is American history'

February brought two things to classrooms in the United States: Valentine's Day and Black History Month (BHM). The walls of schools around the country were suddenly covered with love hearts and pictures of famous African Americans, which will quietly disappear again next week.

Last year, our first in the US, BHM took me by surprise. At six, Athena, my daughter, was blissfully unaware that skin colour had any more significance than green eyes or red hair. I loved this innate sense that humans were just humans, and hoped to keep it that way for as long as possible. For her, Venus Williams was just a tennis player.

Every February, I discovered, first and second grade pupils are asked to choose their favourite famous black person and create a poster about his or her life and achievements, to present to the class. Athena, still inhabiting a parallel universe of Lion King and unicorns, didn't have a favourite celebrity of any hue. She hadn't even registered the terms "black" and "white" till the previous month on Martin Luther King Day. After that, she literally painted him black on a computer colouring activity, causing all his features to disappear. We had a lot of ground to cover. To help, a list of suggestions came home, from Oprah Winfrey to Louis Farrakhan.

The more I thought about it, the more misgivings I began to have. I recalled how, as a postgraduate journalism student, I had written an article about successful black people in the media. Trevor McDonald agreed to be interviewed but Moira Stewart turned me down - she didn't like being seen as a "black" newscaster. I realised how patronising I had been. Now I was asking my daughter to do the same thing! The thought of her standing before the class with her famous-black-person poster made me cringe. It seemed a crass introduction to sensitive, complex issues. I tentatively canvassed the views of a few other parents, hoping they wouldn't think I was a closet racist. One defended BHM passionately. Without it, racial intolerance would creep in at a very early age, he argued. Others had misgivings, but their kids had started doing it at the age of four or five. "We've been doing this for so many years here that no one really questions its relevance for the littlest ones," said one.

Another emailed: "As someone who grew up in the American South and always had Black History Month as a fixture in our schools (because if we didn't there would be no person of colour ever considered), I have gotten used to the idea. I agree we should be able to integrate historical figures and writers into the main lessons and not have to single them out. But the books haven't advanced that far yet."

BHM was obviously a non-negotiable, "carved-in-stone orthodoxy", as one friend described it. It was a reflection of the long way the US has to go in making reparation for its past sins, many of them shockingly recent. It began as Negro History Week in 1926, created by African-American historian Carter G Woodson at a time when lynchings were common and thousands of black people were denied the vote. It became a monthly fixture in 1976. The UK has one too - in October - but I suspect not many primary school children know that.

Realising I couldn't single-handedly orchestrate a cultural revolution, I nevertheless emailed Athena's teacher. Was singling out one race for a month of scrutiny the best way to promote tolerance and equality? Surely instead it implied otherness. Wasn't this just what Barack Obama was trying to escape from - being regarded as a black candidate, rather than just a candidate?

She immediately called me in for a talk, expressed her sympathy but suggested that her hands were tied. This was the way it was. So Athena did her poster about Venus Williams while I quietly mourned the passing of her racial blindness.

This year we have an African-American president and a black school principal: what more positive role models could our children hope for? Yet, on cue, the posters appeared again - Louis Armstrong, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King. But this time I bit my tongue. After all, there is something wonderful about this wealth of inspiring individuals adorning the walls and I'm delighted that Athena has had the chance to learn about some of them. Her poster features Harriet Tubman, who led slaves to freedom on the underground railroad. Yet I still can't help agreeing with the actor Morgan Freeman, who in 2005 said that black history should not be relegated to a month. "I don't want a Black History Month," he said. "Black history is American history."

Now that Obama is a household name, surely the idea of separating black history will seem increasingly redundant. The American electorate has shown it is ready for change. Until then, as the satirical paper The Onion puts it, next month it's back to "the traditional observation of White History Year".

SOURCE



Palestinian/Jewish dialogue unwelcome in Australian Arab organization

by Philip Mendes

The recent Senate Inquiry into allegations of academic bias highlighted the intense ideological divisions within universities and schools of learning. As confirmed by the Inquiry, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provides one of the most volatile and polarised sources of such division. My personal experience as a long-standing participant in this debate suggests that even the most moderate academic supporters of Israel cannot find common ground with pro-Palestinian academics for respectful debate and dialogue.

For 15 years from 1987 till early 2002, I was active in the left-wing Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS). The AJDS position on the Middle East was very straightforward: a two-state solution based on the State of Israel existing roughly within the 1967 borders, and the corresponding creation of a state of Palestine within the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A key AJDS strategy was to establish links and dialogue with members of the local Palestinian and Arab communities.

Central to this strategy was a concern to show the rest of the Jewish community that Jews willing to recognise Palestinian rights and aspirations would receive positive feedback from local Palestinians and Arabs. A further implicit motivation was that successful Jewish-Arab dialogue in Australia based on mutual recognition and compromise could perhaps be seen as a model for successful peace negotiations within Israel/Palestine. This strategy included participation in the Australasian Middle East Studies Association (AMESA), an academic association consisting of both academics teaching in Middle East Studies - some of whom were Arabs and others who were Anglo-Saxon - and members of the local Palestinian and Arab communities.

Throughout the period of AMESA's existence (from about 1981 onwards), AJDS representatives had regularly been invited to speak at AMESA conferences, and welcomed within AMESA circles. My own involvement in AMESA had perhaps been less significant, but had included presentations to two AMESA conferences, contributions to the Deakin University (and AMESA-linked) Journal of Arabic, Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, and contributions to the AMESA Newsletter. In addition, I had submitted in November 1997 at the request of a leading AMESA figure a witness statement to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission supporting a case by the Australian Arabic Council against the Herald & Weekly Times and Australia/Israel Publications (AIP).

Briefly, the matter involved some allegedly racist anti-Arab statements made by a visiting AIP-sponsored speaker David Pryce-Jones which had been published by the Herald Sun. The matter was subsequently settled out of court, and the Australian Arabic Council thanked the author in writing for "your very honest and powerful witness statement, and all your support throughout the two year case".

Not only this, but two prominent AMESA and Arab community intellectuals, Ray Jureidini and Christine Asmar, had approached me to draft a joint opinion piece on Jewish-Palestinian community relations in Australia. The article was intended to pinpoint the negatives of existing relations, and the future potential for improving relations. Plans were even made for the publication of a joint monograph on Palestinian and Jewish experiences of otherness and racism in Australia.

In late 1998, I was invited by the President of AMESA, Christine Asmar, to contribute an article to the AMESA Newsletter exploring how AMESA might improve its relations with the Jewish community. The submitted piece made the following points: that there was at best token representation of Jews in AMESA, that there did appear to be an in-built structural bias against Jewish representation within AMESA, but that nevertheless there were different views within the Jewish community about AMESA including some interest in identifying common ground.

In order to facilitate constructive engagement, I suggested the following: that AMESA adopt for its 1999 Conference the theme of "Jewish/Arab dialogue and friendship historically and today"; that AMESA invite the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to nominate two representatives to participate in the Conference Planning Committee; that AMESA invite the Israeli Ambassador and the Palestinian Ambassador to co-open proceedings, that AMESA consider inviting a mainstream Israeli writer or academic as a keynote speaker; and that AMESA invite the editor of the Australian Jewish News and a commensurate Arab community newspaper to speak at a joint session on Australian media presentations of Jews and Arabs, and possibilities for joint action against racist coverage.

To my surprise, AMESA chose to publish six responses to my article in the same issue without either my prior knowledge or permission. Three of the responses were broadly positive. However, the other three responses - from Ray Jureidini, John Docker, and Ned Curthoys - were vociferously critical. Their common concern seemed to be that my proposals would transform AMESA from a pro-Palestinian organisation into potentially a pro-Israel organisation. Docker, an anti-Zionist Jew, was the main concern. He argued without any evidence that my intention was to "intimidate, threaten and marginalise Jewish intellectuals" who did not conform to the Jewish community consensus. He claimed that my proposals would lead to the "surveillance and control of" AMESA by Zionists who had also suppressed "debate and discussion" in the media. Similarly, Ned Curthoys argued that my proposal was "grotesque", and reflected a "totalitarian vision for society".

Both Docker and Curthoys knew that I had argued for over 15 years both within and outside the Jewish community for the legitimacy of Palestinian national aspirations, for the creation of an independent Palestinian State alongside Israel, and for a free and tolerant Jewish debate around these issues. I was the last person who could reasonably be accused of wanting to censor anyone.

But worse was to come. I wrote a relatively short, careful and arguably measured response to the six responses, pointing out the negative and positives, and trying to focus again on the desired objective of achieving better relations between AMESA and the Jewish community.

Initially, Christine Asmar indicated that she would have to cut my letter to one page to which I reluctantly agreed. She also indicated at the same time that our proposed joint paper on Palestinian-Jewish relations would not go ahead. One month later I was informed by a new editor that she had cut and rewritten (without consultation) my letter to 150 words. I subsequently wrote a protest letter to the AMESA President, but to no avail. The organisation had closed ranks, and I was purged. My experience of Jewish-Arab dialogue was over.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:16

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Friday, March 13, 2009

 

French chef plans foie gras museum in his Chicago bistrot

When Didier Durand led a campaign to overturn a ban on foie gras in Chicago, blood was spattered onto his restaurant windows, his patio was vandalised and he received threats. While American animal-rights activists denounced him as a symbol of French cruelty, however, he won admiration in his native Dordogne for his steadfast defence of the local speciality. Now Mr Durand is about to become a cult figure in the countryside of southwestern France after announcing plans to open a new front in the battle over Gallic gastronomy with what he calls a foie gras museum at his bistrot in Illinois.

He said: "I'm expecting more protests. I think I'll have to install surveillance cameras this time." Mr Durand, 48, who grew up on a farm near Bergerac watching his mother produce the fatty duck livers seen by the French as one of the world's great delicacies, says he is on a mission to educate Americans about la cuisine Francaise. "Foie gras has been produced for 5,000 years. It was the Egyptians who started it and there is nothing bad about it whatsoever," he told The Times. Mr Durand insists the force-feeding of ducks and geese to fatten their livers, a practice described as abhorrent by opponents, is inoffensive. "Ducks are built to be force-fed the same way that horses are built to be ridden," he said. To prove his point, he will trace the history of foie gras with pictures and documents on the wall of a room in his restaurant, Cyrano's Bistrot.

Among the exhibits will be photographs of elderly French peasant women stuffing corn down the throats of ducks and geese, and a collection of labels from Gallic producers. "I'd like to be able to move the museum into a separate building at some point, but for now it's going to have to be in the restaurant," he said. His hope is that diners will be inspired to try some of his dishes, such as sauteed foie gras accompanied by crushed potatoes with fines herbes, brioche and peaches and shiitakes with rhubarb glaze; or poached foie gras au torchon with Guerande salt and figs.

In the Dordogne, there could be no more noble cause. Although the French export only about 20 tonnes of foie gras a year to the United States out of a total production of 21,000 tonnes, criticism of the delicacy is seen as an affront to the national identity. Mr Durand, who moved to the US in 1986 and opened his bistrot a decade later, is being hailed as a saviour. "It will take more than a bit of haemoglobin on the front of his restaurant to stop this convinced gastronome," said Sud Ouest, the local daily.

In Chicago, however, his initiative could re-ignite controversy. "It's inappropriate that this horribly abusive industry which rams pipes down animals' throats should have a museum," a spokesman for Peta, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said. "This will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history along with other human atrocities."

When the city outlawed the sale of foie gras in 2006 in the name of animal welfare, Mr Durand campaigned against the ban and continued to serve foie gras in defiance of the law. "I got round the law by charging people for the salad and telling them the foie gras was free," he said. "It is a question of freedom of choice."

As a result, his restaurant was vandalised and he received letters threatening to "stuff him" in the same way that ducks and geese are stuffed with food.

Mr Durand was triumphant when the ban was lifted last summer, and suggested that June 11, when the food re-appeared on Chicago menus, should become national foie gras day in the United States. "More people are ordering it now than ever before," he said. "The more they want to ban it, the more people want to eat it." Now he is turning his attention to California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state's Governor, plans to prohibit foie gras in 2012. "They want us to eat grass," Mr Durand said. "But we will not give up. The fight continues."

SOURCE Is this another war on `Jewish science'?

The elite protest against today's Israel Day of Science in London is built on double standards and a deep disdain for academic freedom.

At the London Science Museum today, school students will be able to attend workshops on everything from solar energy to water desalination. That these science sessions will be run by experts in their fields, such as a physicist who worked on the Large Hadron Collider or a leading nanotechnology researcher, will be of immense value to the students, many of whom will be taking science A-levels this summer.

There is a problem, however. This `Israel Day of Science' is organised by the Zionist Federation and several Israeli universities, a fact of sufficient power to prompt a 400-strong protest organised by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), the same group which has consistently called for a ban to be imposed on Israeli academics. In an open letter to the Guardian, the protest organisers write: `The event is promoted by the Zionist Federation and is designed to showcase the scientific achievements of seven Israeli universities. But all of these are complicit in the Israeli occupation and in the policies and weaponry so recently deployed to such disastrous effect in Gaza. The event is being billed as a celebration of science. In fact it is an attempted celebration of Israel.' (1)

A celebration of Israel? While there's little doubt that the Israel Day of Science pays tribute to the achievements of scientists working in Israel, the content of the day is, as far as I can tell (and the title's a clue here), science. Subjects include cancer research, stem cells, biochemistry and water desalination. There are no sessions on 1948, Gaza or the West Bank. While the organisers of the day do seem to be showing off the achievements of scientists employed in Israel, that is considerably different to boasting about Israel the nation, or celebrating the `occupation of Palestine'.

Sadly, making a distinction between science and the nationality, let alone the opinions, of its practitioners seems to be beyond those calling for the Science Museum to expel the Israeli scientists in their midst. In the words of the frontpage splash in the Independent on Tuesday, `400 academics, a Nobel laureate and the former chair of the Science Select Committee called on the museum to cancel workshops due to be held this week that promote Israeli scientific achievements to schoolchildren' (2). Perhaps it is just unfortunate wording, but what on earth are `Israeli scientific achievements'? Does cancer research have national characteristics? Is physics in Tel Aviv different to physics at Imperial (London)?

Analogies with Nazi-era Germany are too easily and too carelessly flung around these days, both to the detriment of understanding events in the present and the horrors of the past. The protest against the Israel Day of Science bears no relation to Nazism, as some of the shrill defenders of Israel have claimed. And yet, insofar as the protesters are conflating scientific achievement with the national background of the scientists involved, the parallels with the wartime German persecution of the `Jewish Physics' of Albert Einstein or the `Jewish Science' of Freud are revealing: both then and now, in vastly different ways, the life and findings of the mind are being shot down by political expedience.

Curtailing the freedom of those with whom one disagrees is damaging enough to the exchange of ideas and the development of human knowledge. But to try to prevent people from speaking or from educating sixth-form students - not because one is outraged by what they have to say about desalinating water or making solar panels, but rather by their nationality - is a common disgrace.

There is great hypocrisy in the condemnation of the Israel Day of Science. Labour MP Ian Gibson objects to the Day on the basis that `science is not neutral': `It is part of the political process, and very much so in that part of the world.' (3) He is right: science is not `neutral'. It has meaning as part of a universal human desire to understand the world. It is pursued, not for its own sake, but for us; not neutrally, but contextually, humanly.

But Gibson, of course, is saying something more. He is saying that in Israel, science is corrupted by politics, tainted by the demands (and funding) of the Israeli nation state. One wonders where he thinks certain British university departments get their funding from, if not from his own ruling Labour government, the destroyer of Afghanistan and Iraq. And does the granting of honorary degrees to Bill Clinton or Tony Blair infect certain university departments with the Clinton/Blair virus of fact-defying, war-mongering zeal? By the criterion of BRICUP's accusation of `complicity', it would be a struggle to find any university in the world not guilty by state association. There are extraordinary double standards at play here.

What has been utterly buried by the impassioned rhetoric and craven moralising directed at the Israel Day of Science is the principle of freedom that ought to be enshrined in the academy - that is, the freedom to pursue knowledge without impediment, to question orthodoxies, to engage in the free exchange of ideas. Such open pursuit of knowledge is a bastion of freedom of speech itself. But the righteousness of the anti-Israel cause is so overpowering that it seems this freedom is to be withheld from those deemed `unacceptable' or `tainted'. If such freedom is limited in this way, if the freedom to pursue one's research or to engage with students is curtailed, then academic freedom as a whole is compromised. The liberty to explore and articulate ideas is not negotiable, a license to be dispensed or withheld depending on the academic's background; it must be universal. This week's protest against the Israel Day of Science is built on prejudice, illiberalism and anti-intellectualism.

SOURCE



State of Connecticut is trying to bring the Catholic church under its control

The Communist Chinese model seems to be their guide. But China is not restricted by a First Amendment

As I wrote in the comments section here:

I have no doubt that there will be a "schism" within the next few decades that will find an "American Catholic Church" formed (Cardinal Mahoney will probably be its titular head) which will look quite a lot like the Church of England or the Anglican church - rites, rituals, "sacraments" etc, and it will even have the imprimatur of the government insofar as it may - and it will be a church that the majority flock to; it will be seen by many as the "victory" over that stuffy old, stubborn Church of Rome. People will go on Oprah and say "I always loved God but I never felt accepted, but this enlightened American Catholic Church tells me what I need to hear, that God loves me and that divorce, abortion and all that stuff doesn't matter as long as I am a good person, and I AM a good person, Oprah, I AM, and now I am accepted, and (weep, weep) I feel like God finally makes sense in the world!"

"That's right," Oprah will declare, "there is no sin, except the sinfulness of not loving the self! God doesn't make junk!"

Applause, applause. The only ideal that matters is the one that makes you happy and doesn't challenge the status quo. Quite different from what Archbishop Romero or Archbishop Dolan are saying here, though.

And the Church of Rome will probably be sued into seeming non-existance, too, for one political point after another. The church will be declared in extremis. And that is when the remnant will kick in.

The Remnant is much deeper than any movement, and it will surface on its own - full of surprising and surprised people - in due time, when it must, and that may be soon, but neither you nor I know the day or hour. The thing about remnants is that they identify themselves after a carpet has been laid or a robe has been cut, not before. Remnants do not stop a construct from happening.they survive it.

There will always be a remnant. The Roman church will become very much smaller, I think. I'm not afraid of it. In America, of course, the idea of "bigness" is conveyed as superior. But then we've all always known that `bigger" is not especially "better."

If you are not up on the details, of a story Deacon Greg writes "landed like a grenade, yesterday", here it is, in a nutshell:

According to the First Amendment and the Establishment Clause, the government has no business dictating to religious organizations how they should structure themselves. In Connecticut, though, some lawmakers seem to have skipped over the Constitution. A new bill will require Catholic parishes and dioceses - and only Catholics - to organize their parish leadership in a way that pleases the Connecticut legislature; The [Democrats] Lawlor-and-McDonald-controlled Judiciary Committee has introduced Raised Bill 1098, a bill aimed specifically at the Catholic Church, which would remove the authority of the bishop and pastor over individual parishes and put a board of laymen in their place. .Lest you think this is a joke, American Papist has Lawlor's response to criticism. He admits that the state legislature wants to dictate the structure of this volunteer organization.

You can read the whole bill, here. It is, as Ed Morrissey correctly says,

"a piece of work.In other words, bishops would no longer have power over the actions of the parishes. That's the Connecticut legislature's vision of Roman Catholicism, but in America, government doesn't get to structure religious organizations to suit itself. That, in fact, is a form of fascism that we routinely decry in other countries. The State Department objects to China's insistence on picking Catholic bishops itself to suit their political oppression of religion, and Lawlor's motion would find a welcome in Beijing as another means to the same end: state control of Catholicism.

Indeed. "You cannot tell a church how to govern itself," said Marc D. Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress in New York, in this report. "The church is entitled to govern itself any which way it wants." Archbishop Charles Chaput, of Denver, wastes no time in speaking out:

Addressing the perception that outsiders have of the Church as "a monolith," Archbishop Chaput said that "the opposite is true." "Her real structure is much closer to a confederation of families. Each diocese or `local Church' is accountable to the Holy See and in relation to one another within the Catholic faith," the archbishop explained.

"Bigoted legislators," Chaput said in reference to Sen. McDonald and Rep. Lawlor, "including some who claim to be nominally or formerly `Catholic,' are thankfully uncommon. Most lawmakers, whatever their convictions, sincerely seek to serve the common good.

"But prejudice against the Catholic Church has a long pedigree in the United States. And rarely has belligerence toward the Church been so perfectly and nakedly captured as in Connecticut's pending Senate Bill 1098, which, in the words of Hartford's Archbishop Henry Mansell, `directly attacks the Roman Catholic Church and our Faith.'"

"In effect, SB 1098 would give the state of Connecticut the power to forcibly reorganize the internal civil life of the Catholic community. This is bad public policy in every sense: imprudent; unjust; dismissive of First Amendment concerns, and contemptuous of the right of the Catholic Church to be who she is as a public entity," the archbishop criticized.

My email has been exploding with horrified reactions - and not just from Catholics. Most people of faith understand that this is an unconstitutional and dangerous incursion by a state, and one that ought to be resisted with all our might, and a precedent that could potentially bring all religions under the control of the government. Morrissey is quite right to make the comparison to China, where the "state-approved" Catholic church bows to the government, while the Roman Catholic Church runs largely underground, where the Terrible, Traumatic, and Intolerable Name of Jesus Christ may still be uttered and cause knees to bend.

Where is Richard John Neuhaus when you need him? Ah, well.he's in heaven, where he can pray for us before the Throne, along with his good pal (and the great American Patriot) Cardinal John O' Connor.

That's certainly heartening. But I think it's time to face the fact that the notions of "tolerance" and "liberty" in America are about to be wildly re-interpreted, and not in some nebulous distance - not ten years or five years from now - but this very day - or, tomorrow, as it turns out. Just as we are watching the president - who thinks the US constitution is "fundamentally flawed" - make noises that "reproductive freedom" has primacy over "religious freedom" (the latter is explicitly mentioned in the constitution and the former is not), we're going see the state try to penetrate the day-to-day management of the churches. What they cannot subvert through legislation, they will see destroyed, eventually, by lawsuits and punitive damages on a wide range of issues (gay marriage, re-opened statutes of limitations (for Catholics only, not for public school cases) on abuse scandals, "green" population initiatives) that will bankrupt the church and leave her (materially) against the ropes.

In an email, one of my more liberal Catholic readers, BK, writes,

"I am a liberal Catholic and I support gay marriage, think our teaching on abortion, contraception and divorce is heartless, and support female ordination, but I am against this bill. These changes should come from the parishes and the people, not the government."

Well.changes in the church should not come from the government OR "the parishes and the people." The church is not a democracy; it never has been. For all of its serious human failings - and they've existed within the church ever since Christ gave faulty, human, impetuous Peter the Keys - the church is at its core a supernatural entity, and the sorts of changes BK and others like him desire must come from the Holy Spirit, or not at all.

If we look at it that way - and I'm afraid that is the way it's supposed to be in the church Instituted by Christ - then the church may never approve divorce, because Christ himself spoke against it. He may not have spoken explicitly against gay marriage (he would likely have had no need to) but he said clearly "a man and woman shall cleave and the two shall become one." He didn't say "people will cleave."

And I'm afraid no matter how much people may think otherwise, the Holy Spirit is unlikely to approve abortion or any other casual destruction of the life God Himself has brought into being. The Life-giver, who is all about creating Love is probably not going to sign on to "love" that would prefer not to have "life." Female ordination? It might come down the pike, but then again, it might not.

A recent study suggests that a growing number of Americans are either losing their faith or re-evaluating what faith means to them. In a nation where we have been conditioned to want "what we want, when we want it," or to "have it your way" that is not surprising.

And it is precisely why eventually - sooner than we think - (certainly sooner than I thought) we will see the formation of the schismic Catholic Church of America, to which many, many (including, I am sure, our friend BK) will flock. Because Americans have come to want God to accommodate their worldviews, not the other way around. They want the church that teaches the age throughout the faith, not the church that teaches the faith throughout the age.

Do not be afraid. Pray. But understand that sometimes things need to happen in order for other things to happen. So, pray for the longview. Pray that God may use you as His instrument. Pray for wisdom and an understanding heart. Pray that when the rubber meets the road, when it's time to stand up, you'll be ready and able. Much of what you are fretting about right now is passing illusion. The rest of it, well, we'll walk that road.

And remember what I said this morning - it's going to be alright. Practice psalmody. Get quiet. Read the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians - yes, the whole thing. And remember Romans 8:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, 9 nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, 10 nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:38-39

Much to be concerned about, yes. Much to defend and fight for, yes. But do not be afraid.

UPDATE: Well, a reprieve of sorts. Seems "The bill is dead for the rest of the legislative session. As soon as word spread about the bill, the Legislative Office Building was flooded with telephone calls and e-mails on Monday. The bill, virtually overnight, became the hottest issue at the state Capitol.". (H/T Ace) That's good. But it's still on the way - next year, year after that, because as Ed Morrissey writes: They're embarrassed, but they still haven't learned why.

This battle is going to happen. Bank on it.

UPDATE II: This article in the Christian Science Monitor says Evangelicals will find their numbers halved within ten years or so. Maybe. Or maybe something else will happen!

SOURCE History's oldest hatred

By Jeff Jacoby

There is much truth below but I don't think it is the whole story. See my take on the matter here

ANTI-SEMITISM is an ancient derangement, the oldest of hatreds, so it is strange that it lacks a more meaningful name. The misnomer "anti-Semitism" -- a term coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who wanted a scientific-sounding euphemism for Judenhass, or Jew-hatred -- is particularly inane, since hostility to Jews has never had anything to do with Semites or being Semitic. (That is why those who protest that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic since "Arabs are Semites too" speak either from ignorance or disingenuousness.)

Perhaps there is no good name for a virus as mutable and unyielding as anti-Semitism. "The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies," write Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager in Why the Jews?, their classic study of anti-Semitism. "Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as 'racists.' Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a 'fifth column,' while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate."

So hardy is anti-Semitism, it can flourish without Jews. Shakespeare's poisonous depiction of the Jewish moneylender Shylock was written for audiences that had never seen a Jew, all Jews having been expelled from England more than 300 years earlier. Anti-Semitic bigotry infests Saudi Arabia, where Jews have not dwelt in at least five centuries; its malignance is suggested by the government daily Al-Riyadh, which published an essay claiming that Jews have a taste for "pastries mixed with human blood."

There was Jew-hatred before there was Christianity or Islam, before Nazism or Communism, before Zionism or the Middle East conflict. This week Jews celebrate the festival of Purim, gathering in synagogues to read the biblical book of Esther. Set in ancient Persia, it tells of Haman, a powerful royal adviser who is insulted when the Jewish sage Mordechai refuses to bow down to him. Haman resolves to wipe out the empire's Jews and makes the case for genocide in an appeal to the king:

"There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among ... all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of other peoples, and the king's laws they do not keep, so it is of no benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed." After winning royal assent, Haman makes plans "to annihilate, to kill and destroy all the Jews, the young and the elderly, children and women, in one day . . . and to take their property for plunder."

What drives such bloodlust? Haman's indictment accuses the Jews of lacking national loyalty, of insinuating themselves throughout the empire, of flouting the king's law. But the Jews of Persia had done nothing to justify Haman's murderous anti-Semitism -- just as Jews in later ages did nothing that justified their persecution under the Church or Islam, or their expulsion from so many lands in Europe and the Middle East, or their repression at the hands of Russian czars and Soviet commissars, or their slaughter by Nazi Germany. When the president of Iran today calls for the extirpation of the Jewish state, when a leader of Hamas vows to kill Jewish children around the world, when firebombs are hurled at synagogues in London and Paris and Chicago, it is not because Jews deserve to be victimized.

Some Jews are no saints, but the paranoid frenzy that is anti-Semitism is not explained by what Jews do, but by what they are. The Jewish people are the object of anti-Semitism, not its cause. That is why the haters' rationales can be so wildly inconsistent and their agendas so contradictory. What, after all, do those who vilify Jews as greedy bankers have in common with those who revile them as seditious Bolsheviks? Nothing, save an irrational obsession with Jews.

At one point in the book of Esther, Haman lets the mask slip. He boasts to his friends and family of "the glory of his riches, and the great number of his sons, and everything in which the king had promoted him and elevated him." Still, he seethes with rage and frustration: "Yet all this is worthless to me so long as I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." That is the unforgivable offense: "Mordechai the Jew" refuses to blend in, to abandon his values, to be just like everyone else. He goes on sitting there -- undigested, unassimilated, and for that reason unbearable.

Of course Haman had his ostensible reasons for targeting Jews. So did Hitler and Arafat; so does Ahmadinejad. Sometimes the anti-Semite focuses on the Jew's religion, sometimes on his laws and lifestyle, sometimes on his national identity or his professional achievements. Ultimately, however, it is the Jew's Jewishness, and the call to higher standards that it represents, that the anti-Semite cannot abide.

With all their flaws and failings, the Jewish people endure, their role in history not yet finished. So the world's oldest hatred endures too, as obsessive and indestructible -- and deadly -- as ever.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:23

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

 

Insane British bureaucrats: It's too wet for swimming when it rains!

They are tinpot Hitlers who just like harassing people

For those hardy souls who enjoy an outdoor dip, a little extra water seems unlikely to be a major deterrent. But the threat of a spot of rain - when combined with the implacable nature of 'elf and safety regulations - look like succeeding where the cold and the wind have failed. Swimmers at one outdoor pool have been warned they may be banned from taking a dip whenever the heavens open.

The bizarre measure came to light at the popular London Fields Lido in Hackney, East London, during a brief burst of rain. Customers arriving at the baths were advised to wait outside while the downpour was monitored. Eventually the rain eased and the swimmers were allowed to go about their exercise. Staff at the Olympic- sized pool informed them that rain could cloud the water and make it difficult for lifeguards to see the bottom. One swimmer said: 'It was difficult to believe that what I was hearing was serious. The idea that it could be too wet to swim seems almost incredible, but that was what they were actually saying.'

Hackney Council, which runs the Lido, said swimmers would be warned at the earliest opportunity about possible rain-related closures. A spokesman said: 'In exceptional circumstances the pool may be required to be closed in order to protect users' safety. 'For example, exceptionally heavy rain or foggy conditions can distort the clarity of the water, restricting lifeguards' visibility and their ability to keep swimmers safe.'

Conservative MP Patrick Mercer said: 'This rule is ridiculous and the ultimate example of risk avoidance. 'If we continue down this mad path of mindless health and safety rules it will get even worse. There's no common sense and this is just a continuation of the growing nanny state that prevents people from doing more and more things.'

A raft of contentious health and safety rules have been introduced at swimming pools during recent years. Many now insist that anyone taking more than two children under eight for a swim must be accompanied by at least another adult. It means that a parent of three young children is not allowed to take his or her family swimming.

Meanwhile, managers at the Crystal Palace National Sport Centre in South London barred the public from swimming in half of the pool's eight lanes amid fears lifeguards may not be able to see them properly. The rule was introduced despite senior staff reporting they had never experienced that kind of problem.

And retired civil servant Alan Treece, 64, was ordered out of Erith Sports Centre in Bromley, Kent, in 2006 for breaching health and safety rules by diving into the pool. Guidelines required swimmers to gently lower themselves in instead.

SOURCE



New battle for Britain

Warning to tourists - it is now illegal to take a photo of a London bobby (policeman). The time-honored tradition of tourists having their pictures taken with London cops is being dealt a silly death blow by those who control the British nanny-state. The British are not only losing their economic prosperity, but their civil liberties as well.

Will Britain again become the "sick man of Europe"? A quarter-century ago, Margaret Thatcher led Britain out of an economic wilderness and enabled it to have the fastest-growing economy among the four big countries in the European Union. Today, however, under Gordon Brown's Labor government, Britain is rapidly rushing backward with pre-Thatcherite economic policies. Taxes are being raised, government spending is soaring, and deficits, as in the United States and most other countries, are projected to reach record levels. Despite the Thatcher reforms, government spending was only reduced to about 40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) while the United States was able to keep government spending at about one-third of GDP for the last quarter-century.

The British public sector is almost certain to grow to about 48 percent of GDP, while the U.S. government spending will grow to the old British level of 40 percent of GDP. The large countries within the EU that had government sectors approaching 50 percent of GDP (i.e., France, Germany and Italy) grew at about half the rate of the United States over the last 25 years, with Britain falling in between. Thus it is reasonable to expect British growth to fall to the anemic levels of the other big EU countries and the United States. to drop to the old British levels.

Britain had the first big bank to fail - Northern Rock - as a result of the global financial crisis. The government nationalized not only Northern Rock, but now has also effectively done so with its recent takeover of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). The London property price bubble has burst, and, as in the United States, many people are no longer making their mortgage payments.

As the government attempts to prop up the banks and other affected industries, while expanding the social safety net, deficits will soar. The British will add more than $1 trillion in new debt in the next few years, while its economy is less than one-sixth that of the United States.

As a result, public sector debt will rise from the current relatively prudent 40 percent of GDP to well more than 100 percent in the next couple of years. Britain has relied on foreigners to buy much of its debt, but this is unlikely to continue as many countries increase their own debt issuance severalfold.

As a result, interest rates will rise, greatly increasing debt service costs. This, in turn, will put further pressure on the pound, making foreign investment in Britain even less attractive. The U.K. economic establishment is all worried about deflation while it should be worried about the potential for a high rate of inflation from all the new deficit spending.

Civil libertarians on both the left and right are increasingly concerned that Britain is drifting toward becoming a police state. The government has been trying to obtain the right to detain anyone up to 42 days without bringing charges, which would severely undermine the centuries' old right of habeas corpus. Police monitoring cameras in London are more pervasive than in any other city in the world. Public demonstrations near Parliament and other government buildings are restricted more and more. British libel laws are much more restrictive than those in the United States and have effectively make it increasingly difficult to charge public officials with wrongdoing.

The British are also feeling increasingly oppressed by the surge in growth of regulations by both their own government and that of the EU. The cost of regulation has soared by 74 percent in just the last three years. Worse yet, the number of laws and rules the British are now subject to has grown by two and a half times in the last 10 years.

For good reason, the British are increasingly feeling less free, as the politicians in Brussels and Westminster raid their pocketbooks and strip them of their independence. As in the 1940 Battle of Britain, the current struggle to keep Britain both free from control by Europe and from its own bureaucratic class depends on the courage of the young men and women of those fair isles to stand and fight for liberty.

SOURCE



Muslim protest arrests over British Army homecoming

Two people were arrested after a protest against the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment as they paraded through Luton yesterday. The Prime Minister said in a statement: "The whole country is proud of our brave servicemen and women who serve their country with great distinction and courage. "That pride in our Armed Forces was shown once again today when thousands turned out to welcome the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment. It is therefore disappointing that a tiny minority tried, but ultimately failed, to disrupt today's event."

The battalion were returning from their second six-month tour in Iraq in two years. The mainly Muslim protesters held cards with slogans including "Anglian Soldiers: Butchers of Basra" and "Anglian Soldiers: cowards, killers, extremists". Protesters accused the soldiers of "gloating" about "killing innocent women and children". Crowds began a counter-demonstration and two people were arrested.

Shahid Malik, the Justice Minister, said that "all decent people, irrespective of religion, will be sickened by the antics of this group of extremists".

SOURCE



EU Gestapo defeated in EU court

"Gestapo" is short for "Geheime Staatspolizei" or "Secret State police". And it was precisely official secrecy that was used oppressively but eventually defeated in this case

A tennis player today won his case at the European Court of Justice against airport security staff who believed that his racquets posed a terrorist threat and threw him off a flight. Judges ruled that the unpublished European Union register of hand luggage restrictions could not be enforced because passengers had no way of knowing exactly what was prohibited. The EU list shows that racquets are not specifically banned from the cabin. However, it contains a catch-all prohibition on "any blunt instrument capable of causing injury". An over-eager airport official might still argue that racquets fall into that category.

BAA tonight advised tennis travellers at British airports to play safe and store their racquets in the hold. A spokesman said that even if they escaped a ban as a terrorist weapon, they would most likely exceed the size limits for cabin baggage.

The case was brought by Gottfried Heinrich, Austrian tennis enthusiast. On his way to a tournament he was thrown off a flight at Vienna airport in 2005, having already cleared general security screening. It highlighted what one legal adviser called the "fundamental absurdity" of European anti-terror regulations from 2003 that outlawed a range of possible weapons from the aircraft cabin - but were not made public for security reasons. The EU eventually published the secret list last summer, finally explaining why passengers had found that skateboards, golf clubs and fishing roads were not allowed in the cabin.

Mr Heinrich was so angry that he brought a compensation case against the Austrian authorities for failing to inform him that he was carrying banned items. The Austrian court felt that the matter was of such great importance to all airline passengers in the EU that it referred it up to the ECJ in Luxembourg. After winning his case today, Mr Heinrich is now able to pursue his compensation case at the court in Austria.

Ignasi Guardans, a Spanish MEP who campaigned on behalf of Mr Heinrich, said: "It was utterly illogical to produce a list of banned objects from cabin baggage yet not tell anyone what they were."

A spokesman for BAA said: "Our view is that tennis rackets will clearly contravene the hand baggage size regulations of 56x45x25cm, and therefore we would definitely recommend to passengers that these are placed in their hold luggage. Even if they were smaller than that, it is worth noting that the regulations prohibit "sporting bats, cues and darts" from being taken aboard."

Sarah Ludford, a Liberal Democrat MEP, said: "This categorical judgement is a victory for democracy and openness, and a slap in the face of the European Commission and EU governments who thought Kafkaesque methods acceptable. "The Court has now agreed with our protest that it cannot be right for 500 million EU citizens to be told to obey laws they cannot read for themselves."

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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posted by jonjayray 00:15

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

 

Obnoxious name given to morally troublesome act



Soon after President Barack Obama signed an executive order lifting the ban on the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research, the wizards behind the White House web site posted the photo above. Though I find it less troubling than the president's continuing assault on the unborn, the file name (hero_stemcell_main2.jpg) under which someone at the White House saved the photo of the signing ceremony this afternoon is disturbingly creepy.

I discovered the file name when I went to save the photo to my computer. Click here to see a screen shot which shows the file name for the photo highlighted in blue as I was in the process of saving the photo to my computer.

To imply that President Obama is somehow heroic by signing a measure that lifts a ban on the slaughter of human embryos for scientific purposes goes beyond the pale. Such an amateurish action should not, however, surprise anyone familiar with Obama's socialist agenda (a.k.a., "Obamalism") and his follower's blind allegiance to "Dear Leader."

Post above recycled from Bob McCarty.



Our brains are wired up for God

As Billy Graham often said: "There is a God-shaped void in people". This does rather explain why some atheists are so evangelical about their atheism. It has always been clear to me that I have strong religious instincts despite being an atheist. But I put those instincts into supporting those who are believers. I think atheists who attack Christians are just insecure in their own beliefs. I feel no need to "convert" anyone. I don't need others to validate my thinking on the matter

The brain of every human being, from believers to atheists, has been revealed to contain at least three "god spots", all linked to religious beliefs and thoughts. A team of US researchers has obtained strong evidence that religiosity is managed by the same parts of the brain that are used every day to interpret other people's moods and intentions and to analyse experiences. Moreover, the spots exist in the brains of ordinary people, not just those whose extraordinary religious experiences have been triggered by brain injury or neurological conditions like epilepsy.

Scientists, philosophers and theologians have long argued about whether religious belief is a biological or a sociological phenomenon. Britain's controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins contends that religion is essentially a cultural virus, spread from brain to brain. Others argue that it arises from the structure of the brain itself. The new findings by researchers at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland -- obtained by non-invasive brain scans of 26 Americans -- have gone far to resolving the debate.

Jordan Grafman and his colleagues wrote in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the evolution of the brain networks that handle religious thoughts "was likely driven by their primary roles in social (thinking), language and logical reasoning".

According to University of NSW evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks, the study shows that religion taps into existing parts of the brain that evolved to handle complex social interactions. "It exploits existing parts of our brain," Associate Professor Brooks suggested. He agreed with the US team that, regardless of whether god existed, the work showed that religious beliefs did exist and could be studied rigorously.

Dr Grafman's group broke down religious belief into three "psychological" components: god's perceived emotion, god's involvement with the world and doctrinal, or knowledge, aspects of religion. They then used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch what went on in the brains of volunteers as they evaluated statements about religious belief. The scans revealed that the volunteers' brains evaluated the actions of other people in the same way they contemplated god's mood and involvement with humanity. The imaging also pinpointed an association between a person's previous religious teachings and a part of the brain involved in memory and speech.

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How the Great Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power

Oh goody! Looks like we're having another Depression -- maybe just a little one, but who knows how long we can stretch it out, if we give it a good try? So now we can play FDR and The Glorious New Deal. If that sounds insane to you, well, it's what both Charles Krauthammer and David Broder -- the Burt and Ernie of the Washington Post -- have now concluded about the Obama White House.

The Great Depression certainly empowered FDR to make big changes in America over his four terms. In spite of all the hoo-hah the country didn't get out of the long, long slump until 1940 or so, with the huge mobilization of men and industrial resources for World War II. But FDR did get to play to his heart's content, through the NRA, the WPA, the AAA, the CCC, the TVA, the NLRB, the FDIC and the SEC. By comparison all we've got is a measly TARP. So far.

Trouble is, the Great Depression also brought Adolf Hitler to power. (Darn, I knew there had to be a downside somewhere.) For those who have forgotten history or never bothered to learn it, here's is the sixty-second version.

1. Adolf Hitler started out as just another Bohemian intellectual, a sort of fire-breathing hippie, hanging around the coffee houses of Vienna after the big defeat of World War I. Just like Lenin, Mussolini and all the other psychopaths who rose to power around the same time. (Look it up, kids). His ilk can still be found in all the big city cafes of Europe, along with Berkeley, California, Madison, Wisconsin, and other college towns. They