Thursday, June 30, 2011


New realistic British policy on self-defence

Householders were yesterday given licence to kill burglars with knives or pokers without fear of prosecution. Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke suggested people would be judged to have acted within the law as long as they did not shoot intruders in the back as they were running away down the road. And he pledged that an act of Parliament would be used to ‘clarify’ the existing legal right to use reasonable force against intruders.

Prime Minister David Cameron last week promised that the Government would ‘put beyond doubt that homeowners and small shopkeepers who use reasonable force to defend themselves or their properties will not be prosecuted’.

The move follows public outrage at cases like that of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot dead a burglar, and Munir Hussain, who chased and beat a man who had held his family at knifepoint in their home.

‘If an old lady finds she has got an 18-year-old burgling her house and she picks up a kitchen knife and sticks it in him, she has not committed a criminal offence and we will make that clear,’ Mr Clarke said. ‘There is no doubt that you or I or anybody else is entitled to use reasonable force to defend ourselves and to protect ourselves or our homes or both. ‘We will make it quite clear you can hit the burglar with the poker if he is in the house and you have a perfect defence if you do so.’

Mr Clarke accepted that the defence of reasonable force already exists, but said: ‘Given that doubts are expressed, we are going to clarify that.

‘It is quite obvious that people are entitled to use whatever force is necessary to protect themselves and their homes. What they are not entitled to do is go running down the road chasing them or shooting them in the back when they are running away or to get their friends together and go and beat them up. ‘Nobody should prosecute and nobody should ever convict anybody who takes these steps.’

Labour's justice spokesman Sadiq Khan accused the Government of using 'spin and smokescreens of new laws in an attempt to distract from what is a Justice Bill in total shambles'

An official spokesman for David Cameron said that the Prime Minister was 'very pleased' with Mr Clarke's remarks, but Labour's justice spokesman Sadiq Khan, right, said the Justice Bill is in 'total shambles'

It is not clear whether a clause will be added to the Government’s Justice Bill later in the year, or guidelines to police, prosecutors and courts will be strengthened.

SOURCE






One in four accused of 'street grooming' in Britain is a Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim

One in four men accused of ‘street grooming’ underage girls for sex is Asian, a shocking report reveals. In total, 2,379 offenders are suspected of attempting to lure vulnerable victims, often using drugs and alcohol, over the past three years.

And a ‘disproportionate’ 28 per cent of them were found to be Asian, in those cases where ethnicity was recorded. The ethnic group makes up just six per cent of the UK population.

But although the figures are likely to provoke controversy, officials warn that they are incomplete and potentially misleading.

The report was ordered after the ringleaders of a Derby gang, which subjected a string of vulnerable girls to rapes and sexual assaults, were jailed earlier this year. Following the case, former home secretary Jack Straw accused some Pakistani men in Britain of seeing white girls as ‘easy meat’ for sexual abuse.

Several police forces have investigations currently going on into gangs suspected of systematically abusing young girls.

The latest figures were revealed in the most detailed assessment yet of a crime that takes place ‘under the radar’.

Civil servants have spent weeks arguing over how best to present the potentially incendiary findings of the six-month study, which examined figures dating back to 2008. It found that of 1,217 offenders whose ethnicity had been recorded, 346 were Asian, 367 white, 38 black, 464 unknown and two Chinese.

Analysis revealed that 28 per cent of offenders are Asian. The majority of offenders were men aged between 18 and 24, with many using flattery and gifts to make victims believe they had an ‘older boyfriend’. Of the 2,083 victims, 61 per cent were white, and most aged 14 or 15. Many were in care, or had a history of running away from home.

And many victims were reluctant to speak to police and feared appearing in court because ‘they did not expect to be believed’.

However, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said its research is incomplete because authorities across the UK are failing to record basic information.

Peter Davies, who leads the agency, said local authorities charged with protecting children are failing to take ‘elementary steps’, including recording statistics. He said: ‘This is a horrific crime, it involves the systematic, premeditated rape of young children. ‘There should be no hiding place anywhere for people who plan and take part in this type of crime.

‘Victims need a level of help and support that in most parts of the country they do not receive and is not on offer to them.’ Mr Davies admitted the figures did reveal a ‘disproportionate’ number of male, Asian offenders. But he warned: ‘Focusing on this problem simply through the lens of ethnicity does not do it service.’

In the Derby case, Abid Saddique and Mohammed Liaqat, part of a gang of nine, cruised the streets of the town, picking victims who they plied with vodka and cocaine before attacking them. In January, they were told they would serve a minimum of 11 years and eight years respectively before they could be considered for release.

The Government will publish an action plan in the autumn, detailing how it will respond to concerns about the sexual exploitation of children. Last week, Children’s Minister Tim Loughton provoked a row by suggesting that ‘closed’ Asian communities have turned a blind eye to child sex grooming by gangs of men. He said criminals had escaped detection because of attitudes within their communities as well as ‘political correctness and racial sensitivities’ of the authorities.

Anne Marie Carrie, of Barnado’s said the report confirms not all victims come forward. ‘Still more children remain trapped under the control of their abusers because we are failing to spot the signs,’ she warned.

Home Office Minister James Brokenshire said: ‘This assessment is an important step in our understanding an extremely complex issue.’

SOURCE





Obama admin. tried to save America from dumb, unskilled Southerners

Hate speech from the Left

I had to check my paper copy of the Wall Street Journal today to make sure this wasn’t some elaborate prank. Then I double-checked what year it is, to make sure I hadn’t been slingshotted around the sun and found myself back in 1975.

That’s about when I remember it last being routine for Rust Belt lawyers to publicly disparage the skills and education of people from the South. The only thing missing from the op-ed by Chicago-based lawyer Thomas Geoghegan is the word “hick” or “hillbilly.” WSJ is to be applauded for its determination to feature different viewpoints, but Geoghegan’s piece certainly pushes the envelope.

The topic is the NLRB ruling against Boeing moving its assembly plant for the Dreamliner to South Carolina. And it really is as bad as my intro suggests. Go read it, if you think I may be cherry-picking or making a mountain out of a molehill. I’ll wait. OK, here’s that last paragraph again:

Most depressing of all, Boeing’s move would send a market signal to those considering a career in engineering or high-skilled manufacturing …: Don’t go to engineering school, don’t bother with fancy apprenticeships, don’t invest in skills.

In case you miss the point of the piece, here’s another go at it: “We should be aghast that Boeing is sending a big fat market signal that it wants a less-skilled, lower-quality work force.”

And this:

… because of [our] trade deficit, foreign creditors have the country in their clutches. That’s not because of our labor costs … It’s because we have too many poorly educated and low-skilled workers that are simply unable to compete.

And Boeing wants to turn the manufacture of airplanes – airplanes! – over to these poorly educated, low-skilled workers in South Carolina.

Here’s a weird fact, though. There is already a plant manufacturing rear-fuselage elements for Boeing in South Carolina. (The Dreamliner final-assembly plant that opened 10 June is located next to it.) South Carolina also has a BMW plant, a Honda plant, a Bosch plant, a Caterpillar plant, an American LaFrance plant (fire engines and ambulances), and a Daimler plant, all employing highly-skilled labor to manufacture big, intricate stuff that has to work. That’s in addition to the Milliken, BASF, GE, Core, Bose, BP, DAK, DuPont, Eastman, Mitsubishi, Albemarle, MeadWestvaco, PhilChem, Roche, Mount Vernon Mills, Invista, Metromont, Johns Manville, Alcoa, Kimberly-Clark, Shaw, Jarrett, Mohawk, Anderson, AccuTrex, Sonoco, and Cox Industries plants – and those are just the ones I recognized by industry as I looked through the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance website. I left out a bunch of other ones.

Should I go on? If Southern manufacturing workers are a national liability, we’re in big trouble. All those aircraft engines being mishandled at the Pratt & Whitney plant in Georgia. Shoddy VWs and Nissans coming out of Tennessee, Hyundai clunkers being puked out of Alabama, lousy Kias flooding the market from Georgia, Toyota risking its customers on the gap-toothed th’owbacks who show up with employment applications in Mississippi.

Texas is going to get us all killed: there are 248 separate listings for aircraft and aircraft parts manufacturers just in the Dallas area alone. And let’s not even get started on all the scary, substandard manufacturing going on in North Carolina, where Honda headquarters its global aircraft-components manufacturing, and thousands of non-agricultural manufacturers are heaving chemicals, plastics, textiles, engine parts, computer parts, airplane and vehicle parts, and who know what else at an unsuspecting market every day of the year.

It’s a meltdown. So many things are now manufactured in the poorly educated, low-skilled South, it’s a wonder you’re not dead yet.

Just a couple of sober points. One, the South Carolina average manufacturing wage of $14 an hour isn’t what the most experienced workers, with the most difficult skill-sets and the longest time on the job, make. Calculating the state’s average wage (for all “production” workers) takes into account lower-wage workers like food processors ($8-12 per hour), sewing-machine operators ($10 an hour), and furniture finishers ($11 an hour).

But first-line supervisors in equipment manufacturing plants make over $25 an hour. Computerized-machine operators in manufacturing make over $20 an hour; operators of grinding, lapping, buffing, and polishing machines make over $19 an hour, and welders, solderers, and brazers make $16-17 an hour. The average skilled manufacturing worker in an industry like Boeing’s is making $16-21 an hour in South Carolina – and that’s an average. Some workers make more, depending on skills, seniority, and position.

The average in Washington State, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was $16.75 per hour, for all “production” workers in the same period (figures are for 2010). Mr. Geoghegan pulls the demagogue’s trick of comparing the South Carolina state average with the union pay of some (not all) Boeing workers in Washington. The actual wage differential for the same types of work is $1-3 an hour – not $14.

The second point relates to Geoghegan’s discussion of the Boeing “retaliation” against past worker strikes in Washington. Geoghegan makes the supremely cynical case that if the CEO of Boeing had simply kept his mouth shut about moving to South Carolina because of the cost of strikes in Washington, he could have brought off the move without interference from the Feds.

But it is a corrupt kind of “law” that can be gotten around so easily. The purpose of properly-constituted law is not to show meaningless solidarity with unions. It is to define what government will prosecute and punish. Law that has to be ignored, gamed, and gotten around in order for human life to function – and law that can be ignored, gamed, and gotten around – loses the respect of the people, and corrupts their consciences and the consciences of government officials. If the law in question is so unlikely to be enforced, then the most important point of all is that we don’t need it in the first place.

SOURCE





Big Daddy and video games in California

When it comes to monitoring their children's media diets, some parents worry about sex, while others worry about violence. I worry more about inane sitcoms featuring smart-alecky kids and dumb adults, which is why I have blocked the Disney channel.

Different parents have different standards, and the same parents are likely to have different standards for different children, depending on their age, maturity and personality. Because of this diversity, policies that aim to bolster parental authority by restricting minors' access to material the government deems inappropriate, such as the California video game law that the Supreme Court overturned this week, would be doomed to fail even if they did not violate the First Amendment.

California's law made selling or renting a "violent video game" to a minor a civil offense punishable by a $1,000 fine. It covered games "in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being," depicted in a way that "a reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors," that is "patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors" and that "causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

The thing about reasonable people, of course, is that they may disagree, especially on such abstruse issues as whether a video game appeals to a minor's "deviant or morbid interest," whatever that might be. "Prevailing standards in the community," which determine what is "patently offensive," are likewise a matter of dispute. Pretending that everyone in California agrees about "what is suitable for minors," or sees eye to eye on the redeeming value of violent entertainment, does not make it so.

The one thing all parents probably do agree on is that teenagers should not be treated like toddlers. Yet that is what California's legislators decided to do, decreeing one (indeterminate) standard for everyone under 18. The industry's game ratings, by contrast, draw six distinctions based on age and use 30 "content descriptors" to indicate the nature of potentially objectionable material.

Since parents can use these ratings to regulate what their children play (and can even use system settings to block games with certain ratings), what was the motivation for California's law? "California cannot show that the Act's restrictions meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children's access to violent video games but cannot do so," the Supreme Court concluded.

"Not all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games," Justice Antonin Scalia noted in the majority opinion, questioning the premise that "punishing third parties for conveying protected speech to children just in case their parents disapprove of that speech is a proper governmental means of aiding parental authority." He suggested that the main effect of the law was to enforce "what the State thinks parents ought to want" -- the opposite of respecting parental authority.

On the same day the Court overturned California's video game law, it agreed to consider a First Amendment challenge to the federal ban on broadcast indecency, another policy that imposes government-determined standards of propriety in the name of helping parents protect their children. It features the same sort of constitutionally problematic vagueness and subjectivity, yet applies to adults as well as minors, banning "patently offensive" material related to sex or excretion between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

Like California's law, which arbitrarily distinguished between video games and other forms of violent entertainment, the indecency ban is "wildly underinclusive," applying to broadcast TV and radio but not to programming carried by cable, satellite or the Internet. In both cases the solution is not to expand the government's cultural regulations but to privatize them by letting people raise their own children.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or 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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Wednesday, June 29, 2011


How an Australian Leftist government looks after blacks

A Leftist State government is abandoning poor children who have vision and hearing problems

There has been only passing mention of this in the media so I thought I might flesh it out a little.

Ever since 1911 Queensland has had specially trained nurses going around all the schools testing children's vision and hearing and keeping an eye out for any other health problems that they might detect.

This has been especially important in lower socio-economic areas where parents are often not alert to such problems in their children or do not have the confidence to do anything about problems that they are aware of. In such communities the nurse can often galvanize action on a child's vision or hearing loss at an early age and thus remove very large roadblocks to the child's educational progress.

This has been particularly so where Aboriginals (native blacks) are concerned as hearing loss is something of an epidemic among Aboriginal children and the parents are usually far too timid to do anything about it.

So what is the latest from Queensland Health on the centenary of this invaluable service? They are cancelling it. As a substitute they have agreed to pay local GPs a small sum to carry out such testing on anyone who comes in for it

So for a start they have just lost the Aborigines. Many Aborigines won't be alert to the problems concerned and in any case will rarely have the confidence to approach local GPs about such problems. The people who need the assistance of school nurses the most are now having it taken away from them.

And few GPs have the experience and equipment to do a job as good as the job that the specialized nurses do.

And it will just lengthen the already long waits to see a doctor in lower socio-economic areas. In such areas it can take a couple of weeks to get an appointment with a GP. So Queensland Health is just putting a new burden onto already overstretched GPs and stretching out waiting times for appointments even further.

So why is Queensland Health doing this dastardly deed to the poor families of Queensland? Budget cuts. They have spent hundreds of millions on getting their botched payroll system working and the money has got to come from somewhere.

But why take it away from frontline services? 20 years ago the school nurses had only a couple of employees in addition to the nurses themselves. Now there is a great bureaucracy that is more numerous than the nurses. If there have to be cuts, why not cut back the bureaucracy to what it was 20 years ago? The sevice ran perfectly well for many decades without a huge bureaucracy on top of it and could easily do so again.

But Leftist goverments regard their bureaucracies as sacred for some inscrutable reason so that is the last thing they will consider. I guess it gives them a feeling of power to have so many people dependant on them. Pity about the poor, though.

The Minister for Health in the Queensland State government is Hon. Geoff Wilson MP

You can email him here




America’s new racists

by Walter Williams

The late South African economist William Hutt, in his 1964 book, "The Economics of the Colour Bar," said that one of the supreme tragedies of the human condition is that those who have been the victims of injustices and oppression "can often be observed to be inflicting not dissimilar injustices upon other races."

Born in 1936, I've lived through some of our openly racist history, which has included racist insults, beatings and lynchings. Tuskegee Institute records show that between the years 1880 and 1951, 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites were lynched. I recall my cousin's and my being chased out of Fishtown and Grays Ferry, two predominantly Irish Philadelphia neighborhoods, in the 1940s, not stopping until we reached a predominantly black North or South Philly neighborhood.

Today all that has changed. Most racist assaults are committed by blacks. What's worse is there're blacks, still alive, who lived through the times of lynching, Jim Crow laws and open racism who remain silent in the face of it.

Last year, four black Skidmore College students yelled racial slurs while they beat up a white man because he was dining with a black man. Skidmore College's first response was to offer counseling to one of the black students charged with the crime.

In 2009, a black Columbia University professor assaulted a white woman during a heated argument about race relations. According to interviews and court records obtained and reported by Denver's ABC affiliate (Dec. 4, 2009), black gangs roamed downtown Denver verbally venting their hatred for white victims before assaulting and robbing them during a four-month crime wave.

Earlier this year, two black girls beat a white girl at a McDonald's, and the victim suffered a seizure.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an emergency shutdown of the beaches in Chicago because mobs of blacks were terrorizing families. According to the NBC affiliate there (June 8, 2011), a gang of black teens stormed a city bus, attacked white victims and ran off with their belongings.

Racist black attacks are not only against whites but also against Asians. In San Francisco, five blacks beat an 83-year-old Chinese man to death. They threw a 57-year-old woman off a train platform. Two black Oakland teenagers assaulted a 59-year-old Chinese man; the punching knocked him to the ground, killing him.

At Philly's South Philadelphia High School, Asian students report that black students routinely pelt them with food and beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms as they hurl racial epithets such as "Hey, Chinese!" and "Yo, Dragon Ball!" The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund charged the School District of Philadelphia with "deliberate indifference" toward black victimization of Asian students.

In many of these brutal attacks, the news media make no mention of the race of the perpetrators. If it were white racist gangs randomly attacking blacks, the mainstream media would have no hesitation reporting the race of the perps. Editors for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune admitted to deliberately censoring information about black crime for political reasons. Chicago Tribune Editor Gerould Kern recently said that the paper's reason for censorship was to "guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion."

These racist attacks can, at least in part, be attributed to the black elite, who have a vested interest in racial paranoia. And that includes a president who has spent years aligned with people who have promoted racial grievance and polarization and appointed an attorney general who's accused us of being "a nation of cowards" on matters of race and has refused to prosecute black thugs who gathered at a Philadelphia voting site in blatant violation of federal voter intimidation laws.

Tragically, black youngsters – who are seething with resentments, refusing to accept educational and other opportunities unknown to blacks yesteryear – will turn out to be the larger victims in the long run.

Black silence in the face of black racism has to be one of the biggest betrayals of the civil rights struggle that included black and white Americans.

SOURCE





British abortion charities could be banned from advising women on whether to have a termination

Britain's abortion laws could be tightened to ban providers from also serving as counsellors for women considering whether to have a termination. It would be the first significant change to the law for more than 20 years, following concerns that women are not getting independent advice at a time when they are vulnerable.

Under plans being considered by the Government, charities which provide abortions could be stripped of their automatic right to provide counselling. Instead women would be referred to an ‘independent’ therapist or organisation before they could have a termination.

Dozens of MPs are backing the move led by former Labour minister Frank Field and Conservative Nadine Dorries, a former nurse. Mrs Dorries, Mid Bedfordshire MP, believes it is vital to remove the conflict of financial ‘vested interest’ that exists for abortion providers in the procedure going ahead.

But abortion charities argue the move would delay women getting the help they need and there is no evidence the system is not working. Just a fifth of women seeking advice choose not to have an abortion. At present, charities including the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and Marie Stopes, offer women counselling before they make a decision on termination. All women must have a consultation.

Under amendments already tabled to the Health and Social Care Bill, counselling would have to be provided by a statutory body or a private organisation that does not itself provide abortions and has no financial interest in the outcome.

However, new legislation may not be necessary as the Department of Health suggested yesterday that existing ‘legal mechanisms’ may be able to achieve the same objective.

Mrs Dorries said she was concerned minor changes would not protect women and there was ‘huge public support’ for a tightening of the law. ‘Legislation is required to prevent abortion providers establishing subsidiary counselling organisation to circumnavigate the new requirement,’ she added.

‘My intention is for vulnerable women to have access to the best possible care as quickly as possible, for counselling to be optional, independent and to present no delay whatsoever to the abortion process.

Official figures show there were 189,100 abortions in 2009, slightly down on the previous year. In 1990, the Abortion Act was amended to lower the time limit from 28 to 24 weeks. Attempts last year by MPs to shorten the 24-week limit failed.

Ann Furedi, of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: ‘We are extremely concerned to learn that the Department of Health is reviewing care pathways for women considering abortion and looking into a ban on counselling by abortion providers.

'In recent years, delays for women in need of abortion care have been reduced significantly, and last year nearly 80 per cent of procedures took place within the first ten weeks of pregnancy.

‘Pregnancy Advisory Bureaux run by charities like BPAS that offer abortion are already licensed and regulated by the Secretary of State, and must conform to a core set of principles regarding the information and counselling.’

In May, the Government appointed pro-life charity Life to a new sexual health advisory forum, but prevented BPAS from taking part. BPAS said it had been ‘disinvited’.

The Department of Health said it ‘wants women who are thinking about having an abortion to be able to have independent counselling’. ‘We do not believe it is necessary to set out this requirement in primary legislation as the necessary legal mechanisms already exist.’

SOURCE






Tax break call for married couples: Tory MPs urge £1,500 reform on British PM

Conservative backbenchers yesterday tried to push David Cameron into giving tax breaks to married couples. At least ten MPs backed a Commons amendment which would allow husbands and wives to share income tax allowances – a reform that would benefit the couples by up to nearly £1,500.

Their aim was to lever the Prime Minister into making good his longstanding pledge to shore up marriage. Mr Cameron repeated his promise in his speech on feckless fathers earlier this month when he declared: 'I want us to recognise marriage in the tax system so, as a country, we show we value commitment.'

Among the Conservatives backing the amendment were senior backbenchers Edward Leigh and David Amess, Congleton MP Fiona Bruce, and Witham MP Priti Patel.

A supporter said: 'David Cameron and other senior Conservatives repeatedly expressed their commitment to recognising marriage in the tax system during the last Parliament. 'This was a key policy response to the challenge of social breakdown – the Broken Britain phenomenon – and became an important manifesto pledge. 'The commitment got into the Coalition agreement, but no action has yet been taken.'

Critics say the decline of marriage is a central factor behind rising social disruption and family break-up. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has warned that this costs the country £100billion a year.

The rebel backbenchers yesterday put down an amendment to the Finance Bill which is setting Chancellor George Osborne's March Budget into law.

A transferable income tax allowance would mean that a working husband could take over the tax-free allowance of a wife who stayed at home to bring up children, or vice versa. It would be worth up to £1,495 to a one-earner couple.

The backbench initiative, which is unlikely to become law, was attacked by Labour. During Labour's years in power the last tax break for husbands and wives, married couples allowance, was removed, and the importance of marriage eroded to the point where officials were told to remove the word from public documents.

Labour Treasury spokesman David Hanson said: 'It is astonishing that at a time when millions of families and pensioners are being hit hard by deep spending cuts and tax rises, the first priority of David Cameron's restless Tory backbenchers is unfair tax cuts only for a few.

'And the proposed multi-billion pound marriage tax break would penalise those who are separated, widowed or divorced – many of whom are already being hit hard by cuts to tax credits and childcare support.'

Mr Cameron is thought to be holding back on a firm promise of tax breaks for married couples on the grounds that the country cannot afford it. Calculations by the Centre for Social Justice think-tank suggest it would cost £600million to give a transferable tax allowance to married parents of young children, and £3.2billion to extend it to all married couples.

In the run-up to last year's election, Mr Cameron said: 'I just think as a society, saying that marriage is a good thing and celebrating it and encouraging it, including through the tax system, is something that most societies do in Europe. It's very sensible for us to do as well.'

The idea also appeared in the the Coalition agreement which says that a transferable allowance for married couples will be introduced. But it gives no details or timetables, and it allows the Lib Dems to abstain on any vote to bring it in.

The Lib Dems have threatened to oppose the measure, and have successfully insisted that their own policy of raising the personal allowance to £10,000 must take priority.

SOURCE





Senior Australian police police are demanding prosecutors appeal the aquittal of Muslim liar

SENIOR police are demanding prosecutors relaunch legal action against the veiled Muslim woman cleared of lying about being attacked by an officer.

Deputy Commissioner Nick Kaldas told The Sunday Telegraph new material had emerged about the case over the past few days and a fresh appeal had to be mounted against the acquittal of Carnita Matthews.

"The NSW Police Force is obviously disappointed with the outcome of the appeal," Mr Kaldas said. "The force will examine the judge's reasons for his decision and has requested the Director of Public Prosecutions consider another appeal. "NSW Police will examine further information that has come to light in the media since the appeal judgment."

Ms Matthews was sentenced to six months' jail in November for falsely accusing a policeman of attempting to rip off her niqab during a random breath test conducted in June.

An appeal court last week quashed the conviction on the grounds there was no proof she was really the veiled woman who walked into a police station to make the complaint, a few days after the alleged incident.

Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, who has been at a conference in Europe, will meet Police Minister Mike Gallacher this week to discuss possible law changes that could give police the power to fingerprint veiled women, or insist upon removal of headgear including helmets or veils.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or 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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Tuesday, June 28, 2011


Left-run City of Sydney officially declares white settlement of Australia an invasion

SYDNEY is rewriting the history books, declaring the arrival of white settlers an "invasion". After City of Sydney's Aboriginal advisory panel threatened to quit, councillors capitulated, wiping the words "European arrival" from official documents and declared the arrival of white settlers to be an "invasion".

During a long debate, Deputy Mayor Marcelle Hoff argued that the term "invasion or illegal colonisation" should be used in the council's official documents and statements. She read out dictionary definitions of invasion as "to take possession, to penetrate, to intrude upon, to overrun". "They came in and they did not leave," she said.

When other councillors described the term as offensive, Ms Hoff said: "It's intellectually dishonest to not use words that offend some people."

Lord Mayor Clover Moore said she had tried to remove the word "invasion" but said she had underestimated the depth of feeling on the issue. She said Aborigines were the original custodians of the land and the term was important to them. "In respect to the Aboriginal community, it's something that is very important and needs to be used," she said. After a 7-to-2 vote in favour, the term "this invasion" will be used in the council's Aboriginal policy, which appears in many of its official documents.

Ms Moore read out the new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Statement which says: "In 1788 the British established a convict outpost on the shores of Sydney Harbour. "This had far reaching and devastating impact on the Eora Nation, including the occupation and appropriation of traditional lands. Despite the destructive impact of this invasion Aboriginal culture endured and is now globally recognised as one of the world's oldest cultures."

Ms Moore also deleted a paragraph she proposed last week which said: "British settlement of Sydney and its surrounds is interpreted by some people, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, as invasion. For others it is colonisation. History is interpreted by people differently according to their experience of its consequences." Ms Moore asked a packed public gallery if they agreed with the new wording - and nearly all put up their hand.

However, councillor Phillip Black, who is on Ms Moore's team of independents along with Ms Hoff, said the council should moderate using emotive language. "Healing the past will not be achieved by alienating others. The word invasion has served its useful life. I do not believe it should be used in our documents," he said. He was lambasted for suggesting in emails that Aborigines were also migrants. [They were. They all but wiped out their pygmy predecessors]

SOURCE





Australia: Christians not vilified by Islamic billboard



I see the billboard as a rare positive recognition of Christianity from Muslims

PROCLAIMING Jesus to be ''a prophet of Islam'' on billboards is a statement of belief and does not discriminate against or vilify Christians, the Advertising Standards Bureau has found.

The billboard, one of several in an awareness campaign by Islamic group MyPeace, was the subject of a series of complaints to the bureau on the grounds that the statement was insulting to those who believed Jesus to be the son of God.

Other complaints included the charge that Jesus ''must not be associated with such [an] aggressive religion'' and another claiming the advertisement was upsetting to children. ''What [my child] knows of Islam she has learnt from watching mainstream news broadcasts and to have her saviour identified as being part of this malicious cult was very traumatic!'' one complaint stated.

But the bureau found that while some members of the community would be offended by the statement, which would be inconsistent with Christian beliefs, ''such a statement does not, of itself, discriminate against or vilify people who hold different beliefs'' and was not a breach of the Advertiser Code of Ethics. ''The board acknowledged that the Islam faith does consider that Jesus is a prophet of Mohammed,'' it read.

It found the billboards did not suggest violence or contain frightening material ''and that it is not unreasonable for children to be exposed to a variety of information in their daily lives, some of which may conflict with the views with which they are raised''.

MyPeace founder Diaa Mohamed confirmed earlier this month that two billboards - one at Rozelle and another at Rosehill - had been vandalised.

Another reading ''Mary and prophet Jesus: read about their lives in the [Koran]'' was erected on Fairfield Road, near the M5 at Padstow at the weekend, he told the Herald.

In a written response to the Advertising Standards Bureau, he said misunderstandings about Muslims and Islam prompted the campaign, which aimed to reduce discrimination and vilification of certain sections of the community - and in particular Muslims.

''[The advertisement] conveys the message that, like Christians, we the Muslims also regard Jesus with extreme reverence,'' it read. ''The idea being that the people will see beyond the words in the advertisements and recognise that Islam and Muslims are not much different from any other ordinary Australian.''

SOURCE




ACLU Attacks God and Children, Again

It must require an Ivy League degree in relevant truth to buy into the ACLU’s separation clause arguments. The relevant portion of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Pretty straightforward.

This shrewdly crafted sentence should keep government in its place while citizens work out their own salvation. In order to unclarify this succinct instruction, the ACLU has pulled a bait-and-switch maneuver that tricks ‘em every time.

In 1789, the wording of the First Amendment was proposed in Congress by Representative Fisher Ames, debated at great length, voted on by both houses, and ratified by three-fourths of the states.

In 1947, Justice Hugo Black embraced a newly proposed interpretation of the First Amendment, citing a phrase from a letter written by a President of the United States.

Last Tuesday, June 21, 2011, the ACLU filed its latest lawsuit against an American school district for violating their “separation between church and state” mantra. The specific offense is allowing parents to spend vouchers for their children at schools that have a religious foundation.

The Supreme Court was created by the nation’s founders to interpret components of the Constitution in light of their original meaning. Purportedly, that was the action taken in 1947 with Everson v. Board of Education when the separation clause mandated that children attending religious-based schools could not ride a publicly funded school bus.

No, I am not kidding.

The decision has been the basis for challenges against prayer, nativity scenes, mentioning God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and every other recognition of the Creator where the ACLU can gleefully find an application.

The famous words, “wall of separation between church and state” came from a letter of assurance from President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Church. That same letter from Jefferson also includes the sentiments, “I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man.”

And yet, there is no insistence by the courts nor the ACLU that public schools recognize the Father and Creator of man.

Thomas Jefferson was not a fan of having a Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

Yet his unofficial words that were never debated, voted on, nor ratified have become the phrase used to hammer school districts who would dare allow voluntary attendance to schools that acknowledge an intelligent design behind the science that they teach.

If the 1947 Supreme Court were sincere in their desire to discover the original intent of the writers of the First Amendment, they would more appropriately have cited the following statement from Congressman Fisher Ames himself; “Why then, if these books for children must be retained, as they will be, should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book?“

I see no one asking for vouchers to fund the education of religion.

Rather, it is anticipated, reasonable, and very normal to explore the possibility of an intelligent designer behind the consistency in math, matter, and natural laws.

It is an insidious agenda that denies parents the choice of spending public dollars on educating their students at a school that also teaches about faith.

Rather than ensuring that the First Amendment is respected, the ACLU and their fellow plaintiffs are misappropriating a precious legal process to destroy a civilization.

New York artist Makoto Fujimura recently said, “We today have a language to celebrate waywardness. But we do not have a cultural language to bring people back home.”

To the ACLU and their plaintiffs, I would say, “Stop dragging the public into your personal struggle with God.”

SOURCE






U.S. soccer team booed in their own country as Mexican fans turn LA into an 'away' game

If the U.S. soccer team were hoping for the home advantage during Saturday's Gold Cup final then they were in for a nasty surprise. Despite being the 'home' side in California's Rose Bowl stadium, the majority of fans - most of them American born of naturalized Mexicans - booed and jeered the U.S. team.

The surprising scenes were followed by angry outbursts from U.S. team goalkeeper Tim Howard, who was visibly shaken after the entire post match ceremony was conducted in Spanish. Speaking after the game, Howard said: '[tournament organisers] CONCACAF should be ashamed of themselves. You can bet your ass that if we were in Mexico City, it wouldn't be all in English'. 'It never ceases to amaze me all that stuff.'

Tempering his comments, the ex-Manchester United keeper added: 'It was a good crowd today. 'They were up for it, doing the wave, it was what we expected. We know it's going to be like this.'

Speaking to the LA Times, Mexican supporter Victor Sanchez said: 'I love this country, it has given me everything that I have, and I'm proud to be part of it.' The 37-year-old Monrovia resident reflected the sentiment of most of the 93,000 strong crowd when he added: 'But yet, I didn't have a choice to come here, I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be.'

Despite the remarkable support for the Mexican side, head coach of the U.S. team Bob Bradley told reporters after the game his team were expecting the hostile crowd. 'Obviously … the support that Mexico has on the night like tonight makes it a home game for them. 'It's part of something we have to deal with on the night.'

Speaking to the Times, American fan Roy Martinez was one of the few supporters present actually supporting the U.S. He said: 'I know, it's strange, and when we got here, we were a little worried. Wrapped in an American flag he led USA cheers outside the stadium, trying to gee up the home side.

The game came after it emerged this week ethnic minorities now make up the majority of babies in the United States.

Long after the game finished Mexico supporters remained, bouncing up and down as they chanted and cheered for their team. The American's were not even spared in the trophy ceremony after Mexico's 4-2 win - booed for one final time as they were announced as runners up.

Speaking after the game, another fan summed up the mood for many American-Mexican fans. He said: 'We're not booing the country, we're booing the team. 'There is a big difference.'

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or 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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Monday, June 27, 2011


Black teenage gang charged under lynching law after savage attack on 18-year-old white student

Four members of a teenage gang have been charged under a state's lynching law after allegedly beating an 18-year-old student so badly he required facial reconstruction surgery.

South Carolina prosecutors have charged the boys with second-degree assault and battery by mob, a crime which until last year was known as lynching.

The eight members of the gang, the youngest of whom is just 13, allegedly set upon Carter Strange in a parking lot as he jogged back to his home in Columbia.

They allegedly turned themselves in after surveillance footage of the gang roaming the streets in the area was released on local television.

The savage attack left Carter so badly injured his mother, Vicki, almost didn't recognise him when she saw him lying on his hospital bed. She said: 'I literally bent over him; I recognised his hand and his hair, and I said "that's my son".' He was left with a broken nose and a broken eye socket, and doctors had to operate to remove a blood clot.

Mrs Strange arrived in court on Friday with her husband, John, to watch as the eldest of the gang, 19-year-old Thyeem Henrey, was charged with second-degree assault and battery by mob, common law robbery, and criminal conspiracy.

A 14-year-old, 15-year-old, and 16-year-old appeared in juvenile court to be charged with strong arm robbery, second-degree assault and battery by a mob, and criminal conspiracy. A 13-year-old and three other 16-year-olds were charged with criminal conspiracy. They are all too young to be named.

The brutal beating happened last Sunday, when Carter, described as a 'sweet and quiet' boy, was jogging back home from a friend's house. Mrs Strange said she called him just after midnight, his curfew time. She told Channel 10: 'At 12:07 he wasn't home, I called him and said "Carter where are you?" 'He said "Momma, I'm almost home. I'll be there in just a minute." At 12:15 I called, but the phone was dead.'

The gang had allegedly been roaming around the area for most of the evening, and police said they had already tried - and failed - to rob four other people.

When they saw Carter, they allegedly ran towards him, savagely assaulted him and stole his cell phone.

Police Chief Randy Scott said: 'This teenager was minding his own business, trying to make his curfew when he was brutally attacked and robbed.'

Henrey broke down in court as Carter's parents vented their anger. Mrs Strange said: 'Since Carter didn't fight against them eight Sunday, I'm going to fight for him now. I'm going to fight for him until my last breath.'

Her husband said: 'I pray that you get your life right. Find God. If you pray for forgiveness, he will forgive you. I don't have that in my heart right now. Maybe one day, but not today.'

Mrs Strange told Channel 10: 'We got lucky he didn't die. Next person won't be lucky. If they did this now, what's to stop them from doing it again?'

Henrey remains in custody. His bond was set at $750,000.

SOURCE





British binmen tell old lady they won't empty her wheelie bin because her rubbish is the wrong shape



Margaret Tasker, from Coventry, West Midlands, was told refuse collectors couldn't empty her recycling bin because an ice-cream tub she'd put in it was the wrong shape.

The 66-year-old phoned Coventry City Council after her blue wheelie bin was the only one on her street not to be emptied. But she was stunned when a council worker told her that her empty ice-cream tub meant that binmen would refuse to take away any of her recycling.

Mrs Tasker, a retired accountant, said: 'I was absolutely flabbergasted. I'm always very careful with my recycling, and only ever put items in that say they can be recycled. 'I was a bit surprised when I came home and realised my bin was the only one on the street not to have been emptied.

'I had washed out the tub and put it in with my other plastic bottles. When I phoned the council, they said if it had been bottle shaped, it would have been taken.

'I only get one bin collection every two weeks as it is, and now I don't have room to recycle any of my other rubbish. 'I've always put ice cream tubs in my recycling, and no-one's ever complained before. 'I don't see why they couldn't have taken the tub out and put it in my other bin if there was a huge problem with it. 'The whole situation is a huge farce.'

But after the grandmother-of-two complained, the council backtracked - and claimed that they had made a mistake and square ice-cream tubs were now accepted for recycling. The council told Mrs Tasker they would retrain all of their staff to teach them which objects can be recycled.

She added: 'I couldn't believe my ears when they said they were going to retrain all of their staff. 'Surely all that's required is a bit of common sense?'

A spokesperson for Coventry City Council said: 'We are in the process of expanding the range of things people can put in their blue-lidded bins for recycling.

'Previously, a plastic ice cream tub would not have been suitable for recycling, however, it is now, and the bin should have been emptied. 'We apologise to Mrs Tasker for the mistake and we will empty her bin at the earliest opportunity.

SOURCE






Genderless Swedish preschool bans 'him' and 'her'

AT the Egalia preschool, staff avoid using words like "him" or "her" and address the 33 kids as "friends" rather than girls and boys. From the colour and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don't fall into gender stereotypes.

"Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing," says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. "Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be."

The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged one to six is among the most radical examples of Sweden's efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.

Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.

To even things out, many preschools have hired "gender pedagogues" to help staff identify language and behaviour that risk reinforcing stereotypes.

Some parents worry things have gone too far. An obsession with obliterating gender roles, they say, could make the children confused and ill-prepared to face the world outside kindergarten.

"Different gender roles aren't problematic as long as they are equally valued," says Tanja Bergkvist, a 37-year-old blogger and a leading voice against what she calls "gender madness" in Sweden.

Those bent on shattering gender roles "say there's a hierarchy where everything that boys do is given higher value, but I wonder who decides that it has higher value," she says. "Why is there higher value in playing with cars?"

At Egalia - the title connotes "equality" - boys and girls play together with a toy kitchen, waving plastic utensils and pretending to cook. One boy hides inside the toy stove, his head popping out through a hole.

Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction.

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. From a bookcase, she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless - until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg.

Nearly all the children's books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no Snow White, Cinderella or other classic fairy tales seen as cementing stereotypes.

Rajalin, 52, says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play. "A concrete example could be when they're playing 'house' and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble," she says. "Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on."

Egalia's methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. Rajalin says the staff have received threats from racists apparently upset about the preschool's use of black dolls. But she says that there's a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.

Jukka Korpi, 44, says he and his wife chose Egalia "to give our children all the possibilities based on who they are and not on their gender."

Sweden has promoted women's rights for decades, and more recently was a pioneer among European countries in allowing gay and lesbian couples to legalise their partnerships and adopt children.

Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted $US80,000 for a postdoctoral fellowship aimed at analysing "the trumpet as a symbol of gender."

Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he's not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go. "The kind of things that boys like to do - run around and turn sticks into swords - will soon be disapproved of," he said. "So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness."

Egalia is unusual even for Sweden. Staff try to shed masculine and feminine references from their speech, including the pronouns him or her - "han" or "hon" in Swedish. Instead, they've have adopted the genderless "hen," a word that doesn't exist in Swedish but is used in some feminist and gay circles.

"We use the word "hen" for example when a doctor, police, electrician or plumber or such is coming to the kindergarten," Rajalin says. "We don't know if it's a he or a she so we just say 'Hen is coming around 2pm' Then the children can imagine both a man or a woman. This widens their view."

Egalia doesn't deny the biological differences between boys and girls - the dolls the children play with are anatomically correct.

What matters is that children understand that their biological differences "don't mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities," Rajalin says. "This is about democracy. About human equality."

SOURCE






Another day, another ban

By Alexander Philipatos, writing from Australia

Banning is supposed to be an extreme policy, used in severe circumstances with great caution. Today, however, it seems to be the first tool politicians reach for amid public protest. Our representatives are banning everything – from live cattle exports to cigarette advertising, from mortgage exit fees to swearing in public. In the time of focus group politics and governance by poll, the ‘ban’ is the new ‘in thing.’

While some may think this is harmless, the real economic and social ramifications of knee-jerk policies are repeatedly underestimated.

The recent ban on Spanish cucumbers thought to be contaminated with E. coli cost Spanish farmers $306 million per week. The suspension of live cattle export to Indonesia has already cost $10 million to the Australian Agriculture Company and threatens to shut down many smaller Aussie farmers. Melbourne’s 2am lockout trial in 2008 cost many bars and clubs thousands in lost revenue with no reduction in violence.

Of significant concern is the estimated $3 billion in lost revenue to be borne by pokies if Independent MP Andrew Wilkie gets to put limits on gambling, not counting the flow-on effects.

Apart from the retrospective economic costs of wrongheaded restrictions, there are social costs to individual liberty. Discussions of whether Ban A will reduce smoking or whether Ban B will reduce gambling ignore the fundamental issue of individual rights.

The real question is whether Australia is committed to a free society or whether we are prepared to have the government decide for us what we can advertise, how we may do business, how we manage risk and health, what mistakes we may make, and how we speak to each other.

The more the public offloads individual decisions and responsibilities to the state, the less say we have in governing ourselves.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated 24 June. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.

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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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or 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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Sunday, June 26, 2011


Liberals' Frankenstein Monster Runs Amok in Chicago

Civilization is coming unraveled in the city that gave us Barack Hussein Obama and much of his crew. But don't be racist by noticing:
Pardon the unintentional rhyme, but Chicago is under attack by packs of wild Blacks. (Paul Kersey is all over this.) They're storming buses 15 at a time, beating White people with bottles and robbing them (NBC Chicago, June 8). Gangs of 15 or 20 are ambushing White pedestrians and bicyclists (CBS Chicago, June 5 and June 6; Chicago Tribune, June 6). Smaller packs are using pepper spray to disable their White victims (CBS Chicago, June 3 and June 5). …

Until recently, the hopelessly biased mainstream media were content merely to ignore, to suppress, to censor the race of these savages — that's race, not races. But censorship wasn't enough. It couldn't stop readers from seeing the photos. It couldn't stop them from watching the videos. It couldn't stop them from looking out their windows at the dark-skinned mobs rampaging outside. And it couldn't stop the White victims from telling everyone they knew.

So the readers noticed, and pretty soon they cracked the secret code: if a story omits the race of the perpetrators, it's not because the reporter doesn't know what race they were. It's because they were all Black.

That's when readers started to complain.

The Chicago Tribune responded to the complaints by denouncing its own readers and by shoveling out the usual politically correct pabulum about how awful it is to acknowledge facts liberals deem to be racist (see here and here and here and here).

Meanwhile, Chicago's government is blaming the mayhem on Sarah Palin, the Constitution, and of course racism. Chief of Police Garry McCarthy serves up the moonbattery:
The pervasion of illegal guns in America's black and Latino communities is a result of "government-sponsored racism," akin to "slavery, segregation, black codes [and] Jim Crow," Rahm Emanuel's new police chief, Garry McCarthy, told parishioners at St. Sabina's Church earlier this month.

St. Sabina's Church is where unhinged Obama crony Michael Phleger, the Emimem of Black Liberation Theology, spews maniacal diatribes denouncing Caucasians. Back to McCarthy:
"Let's see if we can make a connection here. Slavery. Segregation. Black codes. Jim Crow. What, what did they all have in common? Anybody getting scared? Government sponsored racism."

"Now I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of the African American history in this country, and tell me if I'm crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms, into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children," he said.

McCarthy blasted the NRA, telling parishioners that their communities have paid the price while the gun manufacturers are getting "rich and living in gated communities."

And he told an anecdote of just one night with the New York Police Department. After returning home from investigating a pair of shootings, he said he flipped on the television to relax, only to find "Sarah Palin's Alaska" being broadcast.

"She was caribou hunting, and talking about the right to bear arms," he said. "Why wasn't she at the crime scene with me?"

Whether out of idiocy or out of sheer evil, liberals have created a monster in the form of millions of perpetually aggrieved blacks whose culture was reduced to savagery when welfare destroyed the two-parent family. As their monster runs amok, the Dr Frankensteins of the governmedia blame its victims.

SOURCE




Must not criticize feminism in the British Labour Party

Ed Miliband's new policy guru has been accused of sexism by a key ally of deputy leader Harriet Harman. Maurice Glasman, an eccentric academic tasked with coming up with new vote-winning policies for Labour, is accused of betraying women by ‘harking back to a Janet and John era’ and being part of an ‘entirely male clique’.

Justice spokeswoman Helen Goodman, a former Commons aide to arch-feminist Ms Harman, distributed a diatribe to Labour MPs last week after reading Lord Glasman’s explanation of ‘Blue Labour’, the political philosophy which Mr Miliband hopes will win him the next Election.

According to Lord Glasman’s creed, policies promoting local activism and a ‘small-c conservative version of socialism’ will have voters flocking back to the party. He describes it as ‘Labour standing with the fans and not the bosses of football clubs’.

But, provocatively, it also argues that the growing economic independence of women has harmed society.

Ms Goodman’s outburst coincides with a new demand by Ms Harman for women to be given a greater role in Labour. Ms Goodman was incensed when she read The Labour Tradition And The Politics Of Paradox, Lord Glasman’s recent book which explains his idea.

It includes a glowing passage about the benefits of a ‘patriarchal social order’, including ‘the reproduction of family and social relations, status hierarchies and moral values’. The piece concludes provocatively: ‘This patrimony has now been fragmented and disrupted by ...... the growing independence of women.’

Livid Ms Goodman, 53, who won her Bishop Auckland seat on an all-women shortlist, complains that Lord Glasman ‘characterises as female all the aspects of New Labour he dislikes, whereas all the characteristics he applauds he draws as male. It looks more like something suitable for the psychotherapists’ couch than a political tract.

‘If Glasman thinks we will all greet this with an ironic post-feminist smile, he is wrong. How can we in a country where 1,000 women are raped each week? He seems to be harking back to a Janet and John Fifties era.’

And she adds: ‘It is noticeable that Blue Labour seems to be an entirely male clique.’

The attack comes amid growing disquiet in the Shadow Cabinet over the influence wielded by Lord Glasman within Mr Miliband’s inner circle. The 49-year-old lecturer was astounded when offered a peerage by Mr Miliband in the New Year’s Honours list.

Labour commentator Dan Hodges said: ‘Some of these advisers are clever and have something to offer. But their input has to be managed and filtered, and walls need to be built between them and Ed Miliband. At the moment it looks as if every political crank, conjuror and snake-oil salesman in Westminster has a direct line to the leader of the Labour Party.’

SOURCE






Is Delta Airlines Showing Signs Of ‘Creeping Sharia’ Law & Should Jewish Passengers Be Concerned?‏

Copies of letters at link. I tend towards seeing the airline's POV here. The laws of the countries they fly into are not their business

Imagine the protests in the streets if Delta Airlines were to tell Muslims that they could not fly somewhere because the local customs would not permit them to enter that country? And just how quickly would Rev. Al Sharpton be able to gather thousands to march against Delta Airlines if they would not allow black people onto their planes because the country where they were flying would not permit people of color to enter?

Those situations are impossible to conceive because they could never happen, right?

But Delta Airlines is facing a similar moral dilemma as they get are about to complete an alliance with Saudi Arabia. The Delta-Saudi deal means adding Saudi Arabian Airlines (SAA) to Delta’s SkyTeam Alliance. For the first time, this would allow Delta passengers to fly direct into Saudi Arabia, as long as passengers are not Jewish, do not have a passport from Israel or a passport that is stamped from Israel.

This issue was addressed back in April when attorney Jeffrey Lovitky sent the following letter to Delta

Two weeks later, Mr. Lovitky received a response from Delta, and not from CEO Richard Anderson. Lovitky‘s letter was referred to ’Customer Care.’

The answer was quite clear. Delta did not see Saudi Arabia’s discrimination against Jews to be their problem. And yet, Mr. Lovitky presisted with his questions until he received this letter.

As far as Delta was concerned this was a dead issue. Dead until it was brought to the attention of former Congressman, Fred Grandy. Mr. Grandy was visiting some old friends on Capitol Hill earlier this week when these letters were handed to him. Fred and his wife are regular guests on the Jeff Katz morning show on Talk 1200 in Boston, and this past Wednesday they discussed the potential problems that might stem from Delta’s business alliance with Saudi Arabian Airlines.

You can hear the entire segment with Fred and his wife (known to radio listeners as ‘Mrs. Fred) here.

In a telephone interview with The Blaze today, Mr. Grandy explained his concerns for what he and his wife called ‘Creeping Sharia Law.’ He also explained that he saw no difference between the restrictions imposed by the Saudi government on Jews and women and those limitations imposed by the apartheid rules of the South African government. During Grandy’s time in the House of Representatives, America would not permit airlines from South Africa to land in our country as long as that country had laws discriminating against people of color.

The story seemed to be gaining traction in the blogosphere today and not long ago, Delta Airlines Senior Manager of Corporate Communications, Trebor Banstetter posted the following on a company blog site:
"We’ve gotten questions today from you, our concerned customers, following an article about Saudi Arabian Airlines joining SkyTeam (the global airline alliance that includes Delta as a member).

After listening to many of your thoughts today, we’d like to take this opportunity to share some information and help to clarify some of the questions we know you have.

First and foremost, I think one of the most important things to mention here is that Delta does not discriminate nor do we condone discrimination against anyone in regards to age, race, nationality, religion, or gender.

That said, some have raised questions about whether Saudi Arabian Airlines’ membership in SkyTeam means Delta is adopting any type of policies that could present barriers to travel for some passengers, including Jewish customers. For this particular concern, it‘s important to realize that visa requirements to enter any country are dictated by that nation’s government, not the airlines, and they apply to anyone entering the country regardless of whether it’s by plane, bus or train.

We, like all international airlines, are required to comply with all applicable laws governing entry into every country we serve. You as passengers are responsible for obtaining the necessary travel documents, such as visas and certification of required vaccinations, and we’re responsible for making sure that you have the proper documentation before you board."

As it was stated in the very first letter sent from attorney Lovitky to the airline, Delta entered into this relationship with Saudi Arabia and SAA of its own free will. Nobody has forced the company to do business with a country that would restrict entry or movement within that country based on religion or gender. This is all Delta’s choice.

Lovitky has taken his case higher up the food chain and is petitioning Delta’s Board of Directors.

SOURCE




Black racism in Zimbabwe

Driving through land his family have tended for half a century, Colin Cloete stops to inspect a harvested tobacco field, rows of green stumps sprouting from a terracotta soil.

As a seasoned professional farmer, he knows the field needs to be reploughed before pests infest the weedy growths left behind. As a tired political campaigner, however, he knows it is no longer worth his while.

"We should be replanting these fields now, but I don't know who is going to benefit from the next harvest," he says, shaking his head. "I will probably do it anyway, but I do wonder whether it's worth it."

After an 11-year struggle in which their ranks have been murdered, beaten, jailed and bankrupted, the last of Zimbabwe's white farmers are finally facing defeat in their efforts to resist President Robert Mugabe's land-grab programme.

Despite the introduction of a power-sharing government two years ago, state-backed farm seizures have continued, and earlier this month, Mr Cloete lost a final appeal at Zimbabwe's Supreme Court to keep his one remaining property.

Next Monday, he will appear before a local magistrate to answer a charge of trespass, for which the only way to avoid jail will be to pack up and start looking for a new house in Harare, an hour's drive away.

With his departure will also go the hopes of some 300 other white farmers - all that remains of a community that was once 4,000 strong - for whom similar legal challenges had offered some last chance of protection, or at least a stay of execution.

"They will probably give me about 24 hours to get off my land, as they will say I have dragged things out through the appeal process already," sighed Mr Cloete, whose fields supply British American Tobacco, makers of Dunhill's and Benson and Hedges.

"To be honest, I don't really fancy the idea of moving to Harare, and the idea of giving up farming is heart-rending. If I was going to serve a couple of years in jail and then get the farm back, it might be worth it, but that's not how it is."

A former head of the Commercial Farmers' Union, Mr Cloete has spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills fighting the land reform programme, which put Zimbabwe on the path to economic ruin a decade ago when black squatters were first encouraged to "invade" white-owned farms.

Purportedly to redress the injustices of white colonial rule, its effect has been largely to create a new landlord class: the pick of white-owned land has gone to Zanu-PF cronies, leaving an agricultural sector that was once the pride of Africa in the hands of people with no experience of farming.

Hopes that Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC might use their presence in government to halt the programme have proved premature, with the party fearing that vocal support for farmers could allow Mr Mugabe to portray them as the stooges of British rule.

However, the prospect that the MDC might still curb the programme should they win the next elections has encouraged Zanu-PF supporters to continue to grab the remaining white-owned farms while there is still a chance.

"Morgan knows that the land issue is too sensitive to broach because everything is tied in with the liberation struggle," said Mr Cloete, who lives on the farm with his wife Charmian, 57. "But do hope that at some point, we will get a new government and there will be a change of stance."

Mr Cloete's central claim to the Supreme Court was simple: he argued that as had bought the farm after independence in 1980, it could hardly have been considered the booty of a white colonial overlord, and therefore should be exempt from land-grab laws.

That the judges rejected it, though, came as no great surprise to him or his Harare-based lawyer, David Drury.

Zimbabwe's courts are dominated by Zanu-PF judges who are often beneficiaries of land-grabs themselves, says Mr Drury, while the few judges who find in favour of white claimants often end up losing their jobs.

Mr Drury, though, says the intention was not to triumph against odds that were always stacked against them, but to stage what he calls a "show trial" - a record of events that some post-Mugabe government may use to help rectify matters.

"It is a chance to provide a record of the injustice, in the hope that some sort of sanity will eventually be restored to cloud cuckoo land," he said.

"I am the first to support genuine land reform, and to support people who have been marginalised to become productive. But handing land to people on the basis of party connections is completely illogical."

In similar fashion, the Zimbabwean government has also chosen to ignore what should have been a legally binding 2008 ruling by a tribunal of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community, made in response to a petition by 77 white farmers, that the land reform programme was inherently racist as it operated purely on the grounds of colour.

Legal challenges by a few other white farmers are due to be heard by the Supreme Court in July – with some claiming, for example, that they hold their land as a company rather than an individual - but the way every other case has so far been struck down means lawyers are already advising them to prepare to leave.

Even farmers who thought they were on solid legal ground have had no protection.

South African Dirk Visagie, another Chegutu farmer, has suffered constant harassment from farm invaders intent on grabbing his land, despite it supposedly being protected under a bilateral investment agreement between Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Mr Cloete, whose parents first came to Chegutu in 1955 and still live nearby, is in many ways typical of the white farmer's dwindling breed.

He wears the standard attire of khaki shorts and bush shirt, follows cricket keenly, and contrary to Mr Mugabe's narrative of white farmers as uncaring feudalists, shows a country squire's concern for the welfare of his black farm workers.

His mother, he says, built the 700-pupil local school, his father sat on the local council, and whenever his black neighbours need helping out - be it a fellow farmer borrowing a tractor, or the local police borrowing fuel for their cars - it is his door on which they knock.

"There is a perception that we had an elitist, privileged lifestyle, and just took advantage of our workers," he admits.

"And yes, I agree that there are some difficult farmers about - I learned that while dealing with them as head of the CFU. But there is never any talk about the schools we built, the clinics we built. We have never tried to live in isolation from the community."

He has already handed over another farm he owns to a group of black settlers who turned up in 2006, since when, he says, he has done his best to be neighbourly.

He helps prepare the land for cultivation and offers advice when they need it, although driving through his estate, it is clear that some of what is now in black hands is being used for little more than subsistence agriculture.

Such goodwill, however, counts for little when groups of club-wielding "war veterans" - ostensibly men who fought in Zimbabwe's war for independence, but in practice often just hired thugs - turn up to demand a farmer's departure, as they last did with Mr Cloete in late 2009.

The men, who he suspects were sent by Colonel Norman Kapanga, the retired policeman who has claimed his second, 450-acre farm, wielded clubs and lit a fire in his front garden, although they eventually left without further confrontation.

What stung more, though, were the "Go back to Britain" slogans they shouted - meaningless to a man who is in fact of French Huguenot stock, has only ever held a Zimbabwean passport, and has nowhere else to go even if he wanted to.

Infuriatingly, the view that he has no longer a citizen of his own country is shared by the black prosecutor who will oversee his trespass case next week, who has described him in previous court appearances as merely a "visitor".

"I have never viewed myself as anything other than Zimbabwean, and that is what hurts me most," he said. "We are not being looked at as citizens of this country, yet my father was born here before Robert Mugabe. What future do we have when you are fighting people of that mentality?"

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or 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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Saturday, June 25, 2011


Murdered girl's family's in 'appalling' British court ordeal

The treatment of Milly Dowler’s family in court has been branded “appalling” by the Government’s victims’commissioner, Louise Casey. Bob and Sally Dowler were made to feel as if they and not Levi Bellfield, their daughter’s killer, were on trial, she said.

Their ordeal in the witness box, enduring intense cross-examination about intimate aspects of their lives, is just the latest “shocking” example of grieving families being treated as an “inconvenience” in the system, she added.

Miss Casey questioned why the rich and famous are able to obtain court injunctions to hide their adulterous affairs while ordinary families such as the Dowlers had to endure their private lives being raked over.

She called for the case to be a spur for lasting change to a judicial system which, she said, affords defendants a “long list” of rights while victims and their families get only “vague promises”.

During Bellfield’s trial at the Old Bailey Bob Dowler had to admit that he had kept pornographic magazines at the family home in Walton-on-Thames and that bondage equipment had been found in the attic.

His wife was cross-examined on her daughter’s teenage insecurities including distressing poems suggesting she thought she was a “disappointment” to her parents. Relatives said that the way their family life had been portrayed during the trial process had “damaged” them.

Miss Casey, the commissioner for victims and witnesses, said the family’s ordeal since the abduction in 2002 been “heartbreaking” but that they had shown dignity and courage in the face of “unimaginable” horror. “It is appalling that they have also had to go through a court process where it must have seemed that they were themselves on trial,” she wrote in The Sun.

While accepting that defendants were entitled to a strong defence, she went on: “At the same time as the rich and famous obtain court orders to prevent reporting of their extramarital affairs, surely it is not too much to ask that a family who have had their lives torn apart by a murder be afforded a little privacy too?”

Miss Casey listed a series of example of victims being effectively ignored. She cited the case of a family who had to sit close to relatives of their loved-one’s killer as they laughed and joked through the trial.

One mother unable to bury her dead baby for almost a year because of constant requests for fresh post mortem examinations from the defence, she said. Another woman was not told that her father’s killer was being released until she bumped into him in the street.

SOURCE





British singer says ginger jibes are akin to racism

He's right. In politically correct England, some bigotries are still OK: Dislike of people from a different social class; contempt for people from the North of the country; amusement at anything Scottish; dislike of Jews and mockery of redheads

He may have found fame with Simply Red, but you mustn’t mention the colour of Mick Hucknall’s hair. The ginger singer claims making fun of his roots is akin to racism.

After facing a series of belittling comments on social networking website Twitter, the 51-year-old told his followers: ‘Let’s play a game: whenever you read “ginger” try replacing it with “black” or “asian” and see how it reads.’ A later post added: ‘Bigots are mostly best ignored. Tho a little outing once in a while spices up ones Tea!’

The pop star questioned why a string of prominent Britons were not similarly defined by the colour of their hair. ‘Interesting also that Prince Harry almost never referred to as Ginger by the media,’ he noted. ‘Or Churchill, or Elizabeth 1 or Shakespeare (allegedly). And lest we forget, dear old Henry VIII!’

Approximately one in ten people in the UK [mostly in Scotland] has ginger hair, or titian hair as it is sometimes known, giving us one of the highest redhead rates in the world.

The colouring is caused by high levels of the pigment pheomelanin and relatively low ones of the darker eumelanin.

There are plenty of historical examples of extreme ‘gingerism’. In 15th-century Germany, redheads were seen as witches and 45,000 were tortured and murdered. Elsewhere, the Egyptians burned ginger people alive, and the Greeks claimed they turned into vampires when they died.

Nevertheless, some of the modern world’s most desirable women are redheads, including models Lily Cole and Karen Elson.

Hucknall – once known as the Ginger Lothario for his womanising ways – married former art dealer Gabriella Wilke-Wesberry, 40, the mother of his four-year-old daughter Romy True, 13 months ago.

SOURCE




Another war on victimless crime

In Llano, in the middle of the Southern California high desert, a bewhiskered Jacques Dupuis stands in front of what was once his home. His laid-back second wife, Marcelle, her long, silver hair blowing in the breeze, takes a drag on her Marlboro Red as they walk inside and, in thick French Canadian accents, recount the day in 2007 when the government came calling. "That's the seat I have to offer you," she tells a visitor, motioning to the exposed, dusty wooden floor planks in what was once a cozy cabin where Jacques spent much of his life, raising his daughter with his first wife.

On Oct. 17, 2007, Marcelle opened the door to a loud knock. Her heart jumped when she found a man backed by two armed county agents in bulletproof vests. She was alone in the cabin, a dot in the vast open space of the Antelope Valley, without a neighbor for more than half a mile. She feared that something had happened to her daughter, who was visiting from Montreal.

The men demanded her driver's license, telling her, "This building is not permitted — everything must go." Normally sassy, Marcelle handed over her ID — even her green card, just in case. Stepping out, she realized that her 1,000-square-foot cabin was surrounded by men with drawn guns. "You have no right to be here," one informed her. Baffled and shaking with fear, she called her daughter — please come right away.

As her ordeal wore on, she heard one agent, looking inside their comfortable cabin, say to another: "This one's a real shame — this is a real nice one."

A "shame" because the authorities eventually would enact some of the most powerful rules imaginable against rural residents: the order to bring the home up to current codes or dismantle the 26-year-old cabin, leaving only bare ground.

"They wouldn't let me grandfather in the water tank," Jacques Dupuis says. "It is so heart-wrenching because there was a way to salvage this, but they wouldn't work with me. It was, 'Tear it down. Period.' "

In order to clear the title on their land, the Dupuises are spending what would have been peaceful retirement days dismantling every board and nail of their home — by hand — because they can't afford to hire a crew.

Tough code enforcement has been ramped up in these unincorporated areas of L.A. County, leaving the iconoclasts who chose to live in distant sectors of the Antelope Valley frightened, confused and livid. They point the finger at the Board of Supervisors' Nuisance Abatement Teams, known as NAT, instituted in 2006 by Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich in his sprawling Fifth District. The teams' mission: "to abate the more difficult code violations and public nuisance conditions on private property."

L.A. Weekly found in a six-week investigation that county inspectors and armed DA investigators also are pursuing victimless misdemeanors and code violations, with sometimes tragic results. The government can define land on which residents have lived for years as "vacant" if their cabins, homes and mobile homes are on parcels where the land use hasn't been legally established. Some have been jailed for defying the officials in downtown Los Angeles, while others have lost their savings and belongings trying to meet the county's "final zoning enforcement orders." Los Angeles County has left some residents, who appeared to be doing no harm, homeless.

Some top county officials insist that nothing new is unfolding. Michael Noyes, deputy in charge of code enforcement for Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, says, "We've had a unit in the office through the '70s and '80s." But key members of the county NAT team say that "definitely, yes," a major focus on unincorporated areas was launched in 2006. Cooley declined to comment through his media spokesman.

Click here to watch our video exclusive, "L.A. County's War on Desert Rats."

Many residents insist a clearing-out is under way in these 2,200 square miles of arid land an hour north of L.A., a mountain-ringed valley at the western tip of the Mojave Desert named for elegant pronghorn herds that were all but wiped out by an 1884-94 drought. Their anxiety has prompted conspiracy theories about whether the county has its own plans for their land.

The crackdown has the strong backing of Antonovich, whose spokesman, Tony Bell, says of its critics, "I've probably ruined your story because you want to say it's a horrible thing going on. ... We have gotten a very, very positive response from the community."

Not everyone. Oscar Castaneda, pastor of Lancaster's historic adobe Sanctuary Seventh-day Adventist Church, built in 1934 and featured in Kill Bill, recalls the day he says he was ordered to "freeze" in front of his mobile home on isolated land where his only neighbors are rattlesnakes. Decades ago, Castaneda says the county gave him verbal approval to live there in a mobile home. He told the NAT team, which began photographing his spread: "Listen, I've been living over here for 22 years. And nobody has come over here to bother me."

More HERE





Photography phobia at a D.C. Taxi Commission Meeting

On June 22, 2011, I attended a meeting of the D.C. Taxi Commission for a story I'm currently working on about a proposed medallion system in the district.

About 30 minutes into the meeting, I witnessed journalist Pete Tucker snap a still photo of the proceedings on his camera phone. A few minutes later, two police officers arrested Tucker. I filmed Tucker's arrest and the audience's subsequent outrage using my cell phone.

A few minutes later, as I was attempting to leave the building, I overheard the female officer who had arrested Tucker promise a woman, who I presumed to be an employee of the Taxi Commission, that she would confiscate my phone. Reason intern Kyle Blaine, overheard her say, "Do you want his phone? I can get his phone."

(The woman who was given assurances by the officer that she could have my phone can be seen at the end of the video telling me, "You do not have permission to record this!")

As I tried to leave, I was told by the same officer to "stay put." I told her I was leaving and attempted to exit the building. I was then surrounded by officers, and told to remain still or I would be arrested. I didn't move, but I tried to get the attention of a group of cab drivers who were standing nearby. At this point I was arrested.

I spent the remainder of the day in a cell in the basement of the building. In the late afternoon, I was released. We will be reporting more on this as it unfolds.

SOURCE

The subsequent official wriggling here

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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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or 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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