Monday, April 30, 2012


Media censored seven hate crime mob attacks in Grand Rapids, Michigan

You didn't hear about this is the media, but on the weekend of March 24th and March 25th at least seven white people were brutally beaten by mobs of blacks in Grand Rapids, MI. Five of the victims filed police reports. At least two other victims exist, and there are probably others. The local media has refused to report the cruel attacks and the authorities are resisting any serious charges.

I talked with one of the victims, 37 year old Jacob Palasek. He is a full time student and does computer work part time. He was attacked by a wolf pack of thugs on the corner of Sixth Street and Broadway in Grand Rapids, Michigan just after midnight on March 25th. The location is a mix of stores, offices, and residential neighborhoods. Jacob lives near where he was attacked.

As he was walking to his apartment, he saw three black males loitering. One was on a bicycle. The suspect on the bicycle rode up beside him. Suddenly the thug smashed him in the side of the head with a chain. He was hit two or three more times in the head with the chain before he broke loose and ran to the nearest home. He knocked on the door, hoping the owner would call the police.

All three of the black males then attacked him on the porch. They yelled “this is what you deserve you white piece of shit.” Jacob was hit in the head with the large chain more times. Jacob broke free again and hid behind a dumpster. The attackers initially chased him, but broke their pursuit and walked away. There were some cars driving by and the thugs may have thought a driver was calling 911.

All seven known victims were attacked within about six blocks of where Jacob was attacked. The victims were in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Some of the victims were attacked during the day in broad daylight.

Jacob believes he could have died if he was hit with the chain more times. He still has bad headaches and has not been able to work since the attack. Jacob doesn't have insurance and can't afford the correct medical treatment. His landlord is now threatening to evict him from his apartment. Since he was not able to work, he has missed a rent payment. A victim's relief fund is planning to give him a small amount of money. However, police did not even tell him the fund existed so he applied very late. He is still waiting on the help.

The police listed aggravated assault with a weapon and ethnic intimidation, Michigan's state hate crimes law, on the police report. Jacob identified two of the perpetrators. However, police have told Jacob that the thugs will get off easy because they are only 17. Police told him that the thugs will not serve time in prison for the brutal hate crimes.

Police said that the suspects will not be tried as adults. They will only face juvenile boot camp instead of prison. A detective told Jacob that they believe all the attacks were racially motivated. The detective also told Jacob that he believed the Trayvon Martin media frenzy is what prompted the attacks. Jacob also believed that the thugs were seeking revenge for Trayvon Martin before the detective confirmed this belief.

To add insult to injury, not a single media outlet in all of Grand Rapids reported the brutal hate crimes. Jacob has contacted the local paper and his local news affiliates repeatedly. None will report the story. He has also contacted numerous politicians, none of whom has helped.

He even wrote to US Rep. John Conyers. Conyers is a black US rep from Detroit who was a co-sponsor of the Federal Hate Crimes Act. The exact stated purpose of the Federal hate crimes act was to help people like the victims in Grand Rapids. When someone is a victim of a violent racially motivated attack and the local authorities won't pursue serious penalties, the DOJ is supposed to pick up the slack and apply Federal hate crimes charges.

Eric Holder, who heads the DOJ, says he is investigating ways to charge George Zimmerman with a Federal crime. Think Eric Holder will concern himself with the white victims of horrific hate crime mob attacks in Grand Rapids?

For the past two years black on white racially motivated mob attacks have been occurring in the United States weekly. Local media outlets typically only have little blurbs about them and censor all mention of race. Numerous major media outlets now openly admit to having a policy of censoring black crime, so as not to “stigmatize” black people. Political correctness supersedes public safety. The response from the authorities has been one of constant downplaying. None of the perpetrators are ever charged with a hate crime.

Now it has reached a point where the media in some markets are refusing to even report black on white hate crimes. How many other horrific black on white hate crime mob attacks are going on that we have never heard about?

SOURCE




When did Britain become the kind of country that tolerates voting fraud?

Labour's massive expansion of postal voting opened the door to electoral fraud

The old woman was pleased to see me, though undoubtedly confused as to why a 16-year-old boy she’d not previously met was crouched by her chair. I’d never been in a sheltered housing day-room before, but it doesn’t take more than a moment to register the residents’ tangible desire for company – any company – and it unsettled me. Because it was this desire that we were there to abuse.

“Hello. I’m here on behalf of the local Conservatives. It’s to remind you about the elections next week. Have you sent in your postal vote, yet?”

I’d accepted the canvassing mission because “We have to get there before the Labour Party does; they’ll vote for whoever comes first”; and of course, as a new Young Conservative, I wanted our party to win. But even a teenager’s conscience is sufficiently developed to tell right from wrong, and I knew, from the elderly woman’s trusting smile, that this was wrong. Twenty-odd years before the Electoral Commission got round to suggesting that maybe party activists should stop asking voters for their postal votes (PVs), I resolved that I’d never ask for one again.

My decades-old embarrassment seems almost quaintly innocent now: I was only asking for completed and sealed PVs, in order to ensure they reached the returning officer on time; no one in Ayrshire Conservatives would have dreamt of interfering with the actual vote itself.

For there was once a sanctity to the act of voting; your vote was between you and your conscience. Even Presbyterians like me understood something inviolable to take place in the instant between the pencil being gripped and the cross being marked; the act was so secular-holy that it would have been an obscenity for a third party to witness it, let alone interfere with it. That’s why we had curtains on polling booths. And that’s why only the bedridden (and servicemen) were excused the walk to the polling station: it was your civic duty to make the effort to vote.

No more. Since those days, of course, we’ve had a Labour government, and were it still in power, I suspect by now we’d be voting on X Factor-style 0898 numbers (“Hello! You’ve got through to Harriet Harman’s Vote-Line! Votes cast after polling day may not be counted, though you’ll still pay a heavy price”) or by scraping at petrol station scratch-cards (“They’re All The Same! So Why Not Vote By Lucky Dip?”).

What Labour did achieve was a deliberate, massive expansion in voting by envelope. Since nearly every government minister started off as a party activist, they must have known the potential for abuse that such a switch entailed, but they pressed on regardless; we reap what they sowed.

In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, where a Ken Livingstone supporter is mayor, the number of registered voters increased by a “surprising” 7,023, in a single month, between April and May 2010. Likewise, in a borough with a large Bangladeshi community – not a society to which the concept of communal voting is unknown, or one famous for its liberated women – the proportion of postal votes has inexorably grown.

Some of the worst frauds have made their way to the courts. In a case in Birmingham, in 2005, Judge Richard Mawrey likened our postal vote-heavy system to that of a banana republic. The same judge is reported this week as saying that postal voting fraud remains rife.

It’s not the cases that get to court that matter, though. It is sufficient for us all to be aware of the ongoing violation of the secret ballot’s sanctity, for a mockery to be made of our entire democratic process. Postal vote fraud is widespread; we all know this; the effect is corrosive.

But it’s OK. A report by the Electoral Commission – which rates electoral registration in Tower Hamlets as “good” – tells us to chill. The key finding in its review of 2010 general election fraud was to declare itself not “aware of any case reported to the police that affected the outcome of the election to which it related nor of any election that has had to be re-run as a result of electoral malpractice”. It’s bad enough we pay for this quango at all, worse that it prefers to be “not aware” of the widespread voting malpractice in such boroughs as Tower Hamlets.

The Electoral Commission is still led by Jenny Watson, even after the 2010 polling day debacle. She’s on a hundred grand a year, and is described on her Wikipedia page as a “long-term campaigner for women’s rights”. Were I a “long-term campaigner for women’s rights”, let alone in charge of the state outfit that regulates elections, I’d have something to say about patriarch-driven postal vote farming in communities where many women remain culturally and linguistically excluded from the mainstream.

Jenny Watson’s quango may be blithely unconcerned about the potential of postal vote fraud to affect next week’s London mayoral election. I wonder if Ken Livingstone’s supporters in Tower Hamlets take a similarly indifferent view of its potential?

SOURCE





The "Hate Speech" Prosecution of Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Plà

Efforts are currently underway in Spain to criminally prosecute Catholic Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Plà of the diocese of Alcalá de Henares. It seems he had the audacity to deliver a homily from the Bible during a Good Friday mass extolling the virtues of the sinless life.

And as bad as this was—reading aloud from the Bible on Good Friday and all—everything he did was acceptable until he included “homosexual behavior” as one of the sins to be avoided. This brought out the ever-predictable torches-in-hand witch-hunters promoting, above all else, the notion that any and all of criticism of homosexual behavior must be harshly stamped out, and those uttering such blasphemies must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Appealing to the force of law to ban politically incorrect ideas and censor the words that shape them is, of course, nothing new. We need glance no further than to our old friend George Orwell’s prophetic look into the future, 1984. Recall that Big Brother sought to control not only all thoughts but all language used to form thoughts, and the totalitarian regime Orwell described made any alternative thinking a “thought crime"—or, in the vernacular of the book, a “crime think.”

Orwell’s point was that if something can’t be said—because the words have been criminalized, banned, or no longer exist—then it is far more difficult to think it.

In considering “hate speech” laws and the plight of Plà, many lessons from Orwell can be applied. We know, of course, that law itself represents society’s standard of conduct, defining acceptable from unacceptable behavior. And the end goal of any law is the elimination of certain specified criminal behaviors. With that stated, what can we make of a law that bans the mere utterance of certain words? Indeed, what are we to make of a law when its real objective is to ban certain “dangerous ideas”?

The growing popularity and use of “hate speech” laws—which ban the expression of certain words—is much like the creation of a new and “improved” language, where the dictionary continuously shrinks rather than grows.

For those comfortable with a shrinking rather than a growing dictionary, the ever-expanding use of “hate speech” laws is no cause for alarm. But let’s pose a few questions. Having opened the Pandora’s Box of such laws, and in light of the endless supply of unwanted, stupid, and obnoxious ideas and speech, why not expand these laws to eliminate any speech the government deems bad?

Seriously—having already legitimized the banning of certain “dangerous” or “hurtful” words, where do we as a society stop?

Orwell once famously said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” In other words, he and others believed that, without the freedom to offend, free speech and free thoughts cannot exist.

Ideas are indeed sometimes dangerous things, especially ideas that seek to challenge or even change the current status quo or existing orthodoxy. And is there really any point in having certain protections for freedom of speech if there is only freedom to express the most popular or politically correct ideas and opinions?

To be sure, the freedom to offend can propagate stupid and irrational ideas. But such freedom is also the chief means available to fight against tyranny, or fascism, or communism, or to overturn foolish but widely accepted dogma.

Think about it this way: does freedom to speak have any real value when it only protects the expression of popular or politically correct views? This was the world of Joseph Stalin; it was the world of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, and is today the reality in several fundamentalist Muslim nations, where the expression of certain politically incorrect ideas can get you killed.

The punishing of speech and the expression of certain offensive ideas is a classic slippery slope. It starts so disarmingly with baby-steps, then gradually gains speed, and in time, gives birth to a society where free speech is no longer free, and people whisper words they believe are true for fear of punishment or retaliation.

We are reminded of these things as we see the efforts against Bishop Plà unfolding in Spain. The attempt to bring criminal “hate speech” charges against a sitting Catholic bishop for doing nothing more than preaching orthodox Christian doctrine illustrates that we may be closer to Orwell’s 1984 than most realized. And we may be further down the proverbial slippery slope than we thought.

SOURCE





Employment is a contract, not a right

Comment from Australia

Australia’s industrial relations system does not treat the employment contract as a simple contract between two equal agents, but as a relationship with unequal constraints and expectations. Toyota’s sacking of 350 workers last week has brought the issue of ‘unfair’ dismissals to the public sphere, but while the debate centres on the manner and basis of these dismissals, the more fundamental issue of consent has been ignored.

A defining principle of contract in common law is its voluntary nature. A contract is an agreement between two parties that is valid only as long as both parties consent to it. One cannot contract with someone who does not consent, and if one party no longer wants to be involved with the other, they can simply terminate the contract. If employees want to leave their employer, they don’t have to explain why they want to leave. All that matters is that they no longer consent to the contract for their labour.

Unfortunately, the law as it stands today is not a two-way street. Employees may quit work for whatever reason they see fit, but the employer cannot fire employees without ensuring that their reasons for terminating the employment contract are ‘fair.’ No longer is it a simple matter of consent but a case of arbitrary value judgments forbidding dismissals deemed ‘harsh, unjust, or unreasonable.’

Because of unfair dismissal provisions, employers often hang on to undesirable staff. Workers who would have already lost their jobs, and received an important market signal, are kept on out of fear of legal action. Employees may be unproductive, skip work often, not adhere to safety protocols, have a poor attitude, or simply have personality clashes. Whatever the reason, if the employer deems an employee no longer fit to work, keeping the worker employed can be detrimental to both productivity and workplace culture.

Firing workers is not a decision made lightly. Employers must be certain that the worker cannot improve. They then must consider redundancy payments and the cost of finding and training a replacement. This is a time-consuming and costly process in itself, but with the addition of unfair dismissal laws, the employer must also consider the costs of conciliation and arbitration arising from an unfair dismissal claim, and the extra ‘go away’ money needed if the claim is successful.

As a result, employers often try to sack undesirable staff under the cover of economic hardship. They may cite falling consumer demand, a financial crisis, a strong currency, high input prices, etc. It doesn’t really matter. They are simply carrying out a process long overdue and getting rid of employees who have long overstayed their welcome.

The charade needs to end. The law must reflect the reality that employment is a voluntary contract, and when one party no longer consents, the contract must be terminated.

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 WATCHAUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING 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.  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, April 29, 2012


The modern woman's dirty secret

Story  from Britain.  There is obviously a degree of self-mockery below and there is a possibility that it could be a total spoof.  Nonetheless, it is true that there are still some women who take pride in keeping an immaculate home.  And those I know don't feel a bit in need of being "liberated".  I once remarked to one of them that I couldn't see anything that needed cleaning in her immaculate house, only to be greeted by the reply:  "But I can"!

My name is Bryony Gordon and I have a dirty secret. I love cleaning. I mean I really love it. If cleanliness is next to godliness, one day I shall be made a saint - a saint with an exceptionally well-polished halo and a nice line in rubber gloves.

As the sun streamed through the windows last weekend, highlighting every bit of dust and slight smear of dirt in my home, I did not think: "Oh no, I am going to have to waste a glorious day up to my elbows in muck." Instead, I got up at 8am with joy in my heart and a bottle of bleach in my hand. Because I love the smell of bleach more than any perfume.

It came as no surprise to me, then, to read that one out of three women secretly loves cleaning. Researchers have discovered that many find the process "relaxing", "satisfying" and "therapeutic", though only four in 10 would admit this to a partner - possibly due to horrid sexual stereotypes. I have no such qualms. My boyfriend enjoys tidying almost as much as I do. We fight over who gets to wash up ("me!" "No, me!"). We quarrel over whose turn it is to do the vacuuming. And we often have arguments over the iron which will one day end in third-degree burns.

The study found vacuuming, tidying and wiping surfaces clean are the chores women most enjoy. Cleaning the toilet and the oven are not so popular. On average, more than four hours a week are spent cleaning - "more" being the key word here, given that on Sunday I spent six hours vacuuming, washing, dusting and raking the garden of old leaves and cigarette butts (so satisfying).

To me, the most shocking thing about this survey isn't that a third of women enjoy cleaning, it is that two-thirds of them don't. Perhaps that is simply because I have chronic obsessive compulsive disorder. Most likely it is because we have been brought up to see cleaning as a chore, as something put-upon women of the 1950s did while their husbands earned money and seduced their secretaries.

The idea of a woman tending to her house became dirty, filthy, shameful, each mop of the floor a violent blow to feminism. But now that having a cleaner is no longer a Downton Abbey-style luxury and more of a middle-class necessity, the humble art of tidying has practically become a lifestyle choice. A hobby, even, akin to those trendy fashionistas who claim to knit and crochet in their spare time.

There is nothing more delightful than the sound of debris being sucked up a vacuum cleaner. Who could fail to be aroused - yes, aroused - by mopping away spillages from the kitchen floor? There is simply no lovelier way to spend a Sunday evening than ironing in front of the television; the smell of fresh starch and orange-and-pomegranate ironing water filling the room and your bed linen.

As saintly as this all sounds, the truth is that my love of cleaning is entirely self-serving. It makes me feel smug and allows me to cleanse myself of all sorts of other sins, such as coming home drunk and forgetting to pay the bills. Nobody can get cross with you if you have spent two hours cleaning the oven.

Tidying is a good way to claim superiority and get what you want. Indeed, there's a new survival guide for frustrated wives by a woman named Kerri Sackville. It is called When My Husband Does the Dishes (He Usually Wants Sex!). But it can work the other way around, too.

SOURCE





No sex discrimination in sport  (Title IX)  -- unless  it's against boys, of course

A group of officials in New York has taken the drastic step of banning a 13-year-old boy from playing for his high school's all-girls field hockey team for a simple if ludicrous reason: He's simply too good.

As reported by New York CBS affiliate 1010 WINS, Fox News and a variety of other outlets, 13-year-old Southampton (N.Y.) High student Keeling Pilaro will not be allowed to compete for the Southampton field hockey team in fall 2012 because he has simply been too dominant a player over the past two seasons. Pilaro began competing for the Southampton varsity field hockey team at just 11 years of age, and at age 13 still stands a tiny 4-foot-8 and 82 pounds.

What Pilaro lacks in dominant physical stature he makes up for in international experience. The teen was raised in Ireland, until his family came to Long Island, and he grew up playing field hockey in Europe, where the sport is relatively popular among boys just as it is in the U.S. among girls.

In 2011, Pilaro was the only boy to compete in the sport in Suffolk County, N.Y., and he emerged as Southampton's leading scorer with 11 goals. To try and stem that influence -- and the possible influx of other male athletes in the sport -- New York's Section 11 (which includes Suffolk County) decided that Pilaro had too significant an advantage when compared to other field hockey players, ostensibly just because he is of a different gender.

"As a sport, it's a girls sport," Section 11 executive director Ed Cinelli told MyFoxNY.com. "When a boy plays, it leads the way for other male players to come in and take over.

"[Pilaro is] having a significant adverse effect on some of his opposing female players. The rules state he would be allowed to play if he wasn't the dominant player."

Clearly, there are no physical justifications for banning Pilaro, as his mother made clear.

"He is not a physical dominating presence on the field by any stretch," Fairley Pilaro told 1010 WINS. "In fact, he's far below the girl's varsity height and weight."

Southampton male field hockey star Keeling Pilaro — 1010 WINSSouthampton male field hockey star Keeling Pilaro — 1010 WINS

Pilaro's father has already unsuccessfully appealed the decision once, and the family has a second appeal of the decision scheduled to be heard in May.

While Section 11's decision to ban Pilaro may be an attempt to protect competitive equity among its field hockey programs, it is likely to open up an enormous can of worms by doing so. Even Dana Edell, the executive director of the SPARK movement, an activist organization for the equality of girls in sports, raised concerns about what banning Pilaro would do to the enforceability of Title IX regulations and the equality of opportunity between the sexes.

"If he's not allowed to try out for the team, that opens up the door for all kinds of discrimination," Edell told MyFoxNY. "It's the coaches responsibility to make sure the players are safe. And a boy should not be penalized because he's good."

The issues raised when boys compete in traditionally all-girls sports are not new ones, with competitive equity and physicality often raised as concerns. Still, with lack of better outlets for their specific skills, there are often no real solutions to the issues raised by the likes of field hockey and swimming coaches in states such as Massachusetts. In May 2011, Massachusetts field hockey coaches attempted to institute guidelines which would limit the areas and amount of time boys were allowed to be on the field during a game, but the rule changes were eventually rejected by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association's Board of Directors over fears it would violate Title IX.

Now, if Pilaro is successfully kept out of varsity competition in 2012, other states and governing organizations may seriously investigate opportunities to fundamentally limit male players' participation in female sports, regardless of whether that is fair, just as it would be considered unfair to bar a female football player interested in competing for her school's team as a place kicker, lineman or even a running back if she so chose.

"This is an issue of safety, equity, and liability," Reading (Mass.) High field hockey coach Mim Jarema told an MIAA meeting at which the Massachusetts rule changes were discussed. "It's time for us to take up this challenge."

Now those steps are being boldly taken two states to the south, even though it seems laughable to consider the player who has brought it on is a safety risk to the competitors around him.

SOURCE





Miss America Contestant Told Not to Mention Pro-Life Views

In a new interview, Miss Delaware, Maria Cahill, who is a pro-life advocate, talks about how she was instructed to not mention anything about her pro-life views during the pageant.

Maria is the second oldest of seven children, and has always been passionate about the pro-life movement:

“It came from growing up in a household where the value of life was respected no matter what the case. I became even more involved when I met women that were contemplating abortion. Seeing the pain in their eyes and hearing them talk about the fact that they believed that there was no other way out was heart wrenching; and honestly made me want to make a difference,” she has said.

She previously indicated the Miss Delaware organization would give her the opportunity to publicly share her beliefs.

“I have heard that because I am in the public eye, I have no right to speak about the pro-life movement. I feel the total opposite. There is a crown on my head for a reason. I am trying to save innocent lives and if it takes a crown for people to maybe consider this issue a little further, then my mission has been accomplished,” she said.

Now, in an interview with Town Hall, she says the Miss America pageant did not want her to share her pro-life views.

“I heard a lot of people say that because I was Miss Delaware and represented the Miss America Organization, for that reason, I had no right to talk about anything political,” Cahill tells Townhall. “In my mind, I thought exactly the opposite.”

As Elisabeth Meinecke, Townhall Magazine Managing Editor, indicates:
To Cahill, abortion is not part of any GOP “war on women” or infringement on women’s rights.

“With this [birth-control] mandate and the so-called ‘war on women,’” she says, “I feel like people don’t know both sides and they’re not getting to the real root of the problem, and that is another life is at stake. I think getting to the root of the problem is where the solution lies.”

Cahill offers a much-needed voice in the movement, one that is not afraid or ashamed of her beliefs. Referring to the use of the empty platitude created by pro-abortion activists of “My body, my choice,” she exposes its lack of morality: “No one likes to think of themselves as selfish. But whenever those terms get thrown around like ‘My body, my choice,’ you’re just bringing it all back onto yourself, and, to me, that’s selfish, whether people want to believe it or not.”

She has attended the March for Life every year as well, including an appearance this past January as Miss Delaware.

“I was really debating going as Miss Delaware or not. I did not tell my directors I was going,” Cahill reveals.

But, she is glad she did. Speaking of her experience of this past March for Life, Cahill said the best part was how thankful people were that they had another voice in their corner

Cahill is a prime example of someone who recognizes that beauty is not only seen in a beauty contest but in the wonderful and awesome development of human life before birth and she is willing to stand up to the powers that be to proclaim that truth.

SOURCE





Australia: Member of Sudanese gang jailed for his role in gruesome three-week robbery rampage

Africans are a big problem in Melbourne.  The episode below is only one of many.  Rather than feel gratitude towards the country that gave them refuge from war-torn Africa, many of them seem to feel only contempt for the rest of the community.  Africans in America have the threadbare excuse that they resent being the victims of slavery.  There is no such excuse in Australia

A MEMBER of a gang of Sudanese youth who attacked 13 victims during a three-week robbery rampage has been jailed for almost six years after a judge said the courts could not tolerate unprovoked violence against soft targets on Melbourne's streets.

The assaults and robberies were "violent, it was unforgivable, it was brazen, it was frightening," County Court Judge Michael Tinney said today in sentencing Ring Chol, now 19, to a maximum five years and 10 months and a minimum term of three years and four months.

Some of the victims, attacked after leaving western suburban train stations or walking alone in St Albans in mid afternoon, had left Australia after the bashings, the court heard.

Judge Tinney said Chol's group, which included offenders aged 13 to 16, targeted vulnerable people, some of whom were bashed, threatened with a knife or bottle, or laughed at during attacks - despite offering to hand over possessions during the 22-day spree in June 2011.

"Just take my wallet, take my phone, take my bag, just leave me alone, I will die," one victim told his attackers after trying to flee.  "Yet he was punched repeatedly by you and at least two others" and lost consciousness during the assault which lasted 10 to 15 minutes, Judge Tinney said.  "These were cowardly and often brutal attacks," the judge said.

"Many people in this community no longer regard public transport as a safe option.  "This court must send a clear and loud message."

Judge Tinney said hardly a day goes by when soft targets are not subjected to robbery and assault in Melbourne and unprovoked violence must no longer be tolerated by the courts, if it ever was.

In one incident Chol stood on the bumper of a taxi and threatened to smash a rock into the windscreen unless the driver gave over property, and in another a victim was followed from Keilor Plains train station to his home where his house window was smashed and three vehicles damaged.

While bailed for the original offences, Chol breached curfew and has since been charged with two other assaults committed in central Melbourne for which he is yet to face court, Judge Tinney said.

He said Chol suffered post traumatic stress from the horrors he witnessed growing up in Sudan and what was described as "three years of hell" being subjected to racially-motivated violence in Egypt before coming to Australia as a 14-year-old.

But Judge Tinney said while some sentence reduction was called for due to his earlier trauma and his youth, the nature and gravity of the offending should be condemned.

Chol pleaded guilty to two counts of armed robbery, six robberies, two counts of recklessly causing serious injury, four counts of criminal damage and one count of attempted robbery.

Two child offenders are yet to be dealt with in the Childrens' Court and other members of Chol's group have not been identified, the court heard.

SOURCE





Diversity Training Doesn’t Work, But It Persists Anyway, Due to Compulsion

by Hans Bader

Diversity training doesn’t work, according to an article in Psychology Today. In it, Peter Bregman notes, “Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.”

But don’t expect it to stop. Government regulations often require that a school be accredited, a condition that accreditors like the American Bar Association use to force law schools to run costly diversity and sensitivity-training programs or use racial preferences in admissions (despite the dubious legality of some such diversity programs and admissions preferences). Such mandates have contributed to the growth of a vast and costly “diversity machine” in college administrations. (And as a condition of practicing law in California, I had to take continuing legal education on the topic of “elimination of bias in the legal profession.”)

Time magazine had a story on April 26, 2007, entitled “Employee Diversity Training Doesn’t Work.” Employers pay millions every year for diversity training, but often the training backfires and blows up in the face of the employer that paid for it. In Hartman v. Pena (1995), the Federal Aviation Administration got sued for sexual harassment after it subjected employees to three days of diversity training that scapegoated white males. After a federal judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit against it, the agency had to pay out a settlement to the white male employee who sued.

Diversity training often imparts bad legal advice to supervisors and employers that can come back to haunt them in court. Experts on civil-rights law can find such training annoying and misleading.  Gail Heriot, a law professor and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, complained about sexual harassment and diversity training she received at the University of San Diego, in a state (California) where harassment training is mandatory under state law. The training sent the message that criticisms of affirmative action by white male employees are something that the employer should “nip in the bud” through investigations.

That was bad legal advice, since criticism of affirmative action is protected against retaliation by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1981, and other laws, even when the affirmative action program criticized turns out to have been perfectly legal. Even court rulings that have upheld private-sector affirmative action programs, such as Sisco v. J.S. Alberici Const. Co. (8th Cir. 1981), have allowed workers to sue employers who punish them for criticizing affirmative action. In the public sector, such punishment also violates the First Amendment. The California Department of Corrections attempted to fire John Wallace after he angrily denounced its affirmative action plan to the Hispanic female employee he perceived as benefiting from it.  An appeals court, however, ruled that his criticism of the plan was protected speech, and barred his termination, in California Department of Corrections v. State Personnel Board, 59 Cal.App.4th 131 (1997).

Employers can be quite gullible about the claims made by “diversity” trainers, allowing minority trainers to promote racial stereotypes that would provoke outrage if they were subsequently repeated by white managers or employees. For example, Glenn Singleton, a wealthy “diversity” trainer, has claimed that “white talk” is “impersonal, intellectual, verbal” and “task-oriented,” while “color commentary” is “emotional.” If a white person said this, it would rightly be regarded as a ridiculous, racist stereotype that relegates black people to inferior status. (California Superintendent Jack O’Connell, a white liberal, was publicly embarrassed, and called racist, after he repeated a belief that Singleton shared with him that black people are loud. Singleton also embarrassed the Seattle Schools in a landmark Supreme Court case.)

Major employers have paid out millions of dollars in discrimination claims because of diversity-training programs. One Fortune 500 company paid out tens of millions of dollars in response to a class-action racial discrimination suit by minority employees, which was fueled by remarks managers made after undergoing mandatory diversity training (they joked about jelly beans used in the training to represent minority employees. That, coupled with a poor quality recording in which a manager’s reference to “Saint Nicholas” was misinterpreted as the N-word, created a furor).

Diversity training triggers workplace conflict and lawsuits, by compelling employees to talk about contentious racial or sexual issues, with resulting acrimony, and remarks that are misinterpreted or perceived as racist or sexist. For example, in Stender v. Lucky Stores (1992), statements made by managers during sensitivity training were held by a court to be evidence of discrimination. Some judges take a dim view of diversity training.  In Fitzgerald v. Mountain States Tel & Tel. Co. (1995), where employee reactions to diversity training gave rise to a lawsuit, a federal appeals court noted that “diversity training sessions generate conflict and emotion” and that “diversity training is perhaps a tyranny of virtue.”

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 WATCHAUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING 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.  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, April 28, 2012


For Societal Well-Being, Marriage is Foundational

I think that there is much truth in what  Marybeth Hicks says below but, given the way current divorce laws are weighted against men both in the USA and Britain, a man would have to be mad or seriously underinformed to marry in those countries.  No wonder many men "won't commit".  It could be financial suicide.  I myself have been married four times with no real adverse outcomes  -- but I do live in Australia,  which is a much more relaxed and hence saner society than most of the rest of the world

It’s official. Brad and Angelina are engaged, succumbing to pressure from family members to finally tie the knot.

Back in the day, that pressure would have come from a worried mother, or more likely, a protective father and the business end of shotgun.

But this is 2012. The family pressure to marry comes, in this case, from the Jolie-Pitts’ six children. Though the couple once said they wouldn’t marry until the privilege to do so was afforded to everyone, their political statement in defense of gay marriage ultimately lost out to the need to make a promise to their kids.

Who knows if this celebrity marriage will have more staying power than most? So far, their devotion to their children appears to reflect a certain level of commitment. But it takes much more than shared parenting to make a marriage. It takes work.

According to a 2010 study from the Pew Research Center, only about half of all adults were married as of 2008. In 1960, that number was 72 percent. And marriage itself is becoming a luxury of the wealthy and well-educated. The Pew study indicates there now is a 16 percent gap in marriage rates between college graduates and those with a high school diploma or less. In 1960, that gap was only 4 percent.

Worse, growing numbers of adults say marriage itself is becoming obsolete. In 1978, 28 percent of registered voters thought the institution of marriage was an outdated idea. Today, nearly 40 percent think this is so.

If the institution itself has not quite gone the way of the dodo, certainly the expectation that marriage is a lifelong commitment might be considered optimistic, at best.

Divorce is a likely outcome for between 41 percent and 50 percent of first-time married couples (the frequency of divorce depends on which research you believe), with 60 percent of second marriages ending in divorce and a whopping 73 percent of third marriages failing.

As the Huffington Post’s “Divorce” page reminds us, “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” (Huffington Post doesn’t even have a “Marriage” page. Go figure.)

Former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum used his campaign to remind us that successful marriages are crucial to the health and well-being of a society.  “Marriage is a society’s lifeblood,” he said. “Not everybody can or will marry, but all of us (married or not) depend on marriage in a unique way. Marriage is foundational: It creates and sustains not only children, but civilization itself.”

According to the Family Research Council, marriage is “the most important social act, one that involves much more than just the married couple.”

“To begin with, extended families are merged and renewed through a wedding. It also is through marriage that the community and the nation are renewed.

“Marriage also has beneficial social and health effects for both adults and children, and these gifts benefit the community and the whole society. … The future of the nation depends on the creation of good marriages and good homes for children.”

Of course, we don’t get married to save the nation. We don’t imagine our families as “mitigating structures” for the community, or as an economic force to uplift our towns and neighborhoods.  We marry for love.

Twenty-five years ago today, I married the love of my life, Jim Hicks. We couldn’t know then what it meant when people told us that a lifelong marriage would take work and sacrifice and selflessness.

We couldn’t imagine the frustrations and disappointments along the way, just as we could not have dreamed of the blessings and bounty that God - in his inexplicable grace - has allowed us to enjoy.

We only hoped for children, but never envisioned the four human beings whose mere existence affirms our own and personifies our love.  We simply said, “I do.” And then we did. With prayer and patience, love and laughter, we uphold the covenant we made all those years ago.

Obsolete? Not even a little bit. Love endures forever.

SOURCE

 




Some great British comedies no longer "correct"

Cowardly broadcasters are blacklisting TV classics like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum for fear of causing offence

BBC2 is currently halfway through airing a documentary series suggesting that the 1970s was a very misunderstood decade. Although it has briefly mentioned that several comedy shows of the era reflected the roots of a sexually permissive society and environmentalism, it is a fair bet that some of the more controversial – but truly groundbreaking – productions will be quietly ignored.

Morecambe and Wise is still lauded as the gold standard of the era, with The Two Ronnies a close second, but the swift fall from modern grace afforded to most other offerings of the time is a telling barometer of changing societal attitudes, and not always for the better.

Comfortable stockbroker-belt cheese, represented by Terry and June in their detached suburban house, has long since gone out of fashion, unless accompanied by a dysfunctional family aspect. And Man About the House – and its spin-offs George and Mildred and Robin’s Nest – are rarely aired since increasing gender equality meant even the merest hint of female subservience was frowned upon. However by far the biggest shift has been in the area of race.

One would struggle to discover it now, but the ‘70s brought forth a plethora of comedies inspired what was then the brand new idea of multiculturalism. A nation that was still emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, complete with a suspicion of foreigners, was coming to terms with the societal friction immigration invariably brings. And doing it rather well.

Differences were highlighted and ridiculed by shows such as Mixed Blessings, which charted prejudice surrounding inter-racial marriage. Racist Alf Garnett was laughed out of the house by his own daughter and made to look a hypocritical fool. And the macho, sometimes violent, animosity of Love Thy Neighbour – in which the ‘white honky’ Eddie mostly ended up being portrayed as an ignorant dinosaur – were all lost to our screens a long time ago, despite their arguably highlighting irrational bigotry on both sides.

To TV audiences, it’s like they never existed, with few programmers brave enough to schedule repeats. Their passing hides a valuable historical record of our nation’s agonising over race, and the consequential realignment of values to suit the modern age – all told with a slice of subtle education and a healthy dose of slapstick.

This denial of history has been subtle for quite a while, but has ironically been elevated by the BBC this week deciding that It Ain’t Half Hot Mum be marked as unsuitable for modern re-runs on the grounds of political correctness.

While BBC2 is admirably laying to rest myths about 1970s culture and attitudes, their schedulers have sent a different signal in condemning a series which was a major comedy success and enjoyed up to 15million viewers at its peak, all innocently chuckling through its seven year run.

Not uniquely for its age, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum lampooned the entire cast. There were stereotypes - of that there is no doubt - but they were just as likely to be the authoritarian stereotypical military Brit in the form of Windsor Davies, or the ineffectual fish out of water soldier, Gunner ‘Lofty’, as they were ‘Indian, Burmese or Japanese’ according to the reasoning behind the programme being shelved.

The BBC points to the terms of its trust status in censoring - because that is exactly what it is - this highly successful series based on their own self-administered sensibilities. That it was considered for repeats in the first place proves that it was likely to be popular, and was not black-balled as a result of projected apathy or lack of viewers. This means the decision was political, not based upon whether it was funny enough to merit re-screening or not.

This is perfectly illustrated by the fact that all the comedy series mentioned are available to buy on DVD at far from subversive sites such as Amazon. Even multicultural stereotype promoter Mind Your Language is available -  at a premium price - too. We’re perfectly free to watch these programmes. Just not, it would appear, on the BBC.

The recently-announced decision to exclude It Ain’t Half Hot Mum from future programming is all too depressing. Not only by depriving younger viewers an insight into what the BBC admits was ‘a different time’, but also by attempting to pretend that prejudices, even comical ones, never existed in the post-war era.

If we are to learn by history, the denying of it can serve no purpose except to encourage many to cast themselves as victims of politically-correct marginalisation and consequentially reinforce prejudices on race, rather than break them down.

Is the BBC really trying to say that the 1970s public – which they entertained without too many qualms at the time - were largely racist and uncaring? Many alive today who have experience of the decade would undoubtedly take that as a profound insult.

Additionally, if the BBC is quoting stereotypes as a reason for banning comedies from the 1970s, Dad’s Army’s black or white portrayal of Germans – complete with caricatured ‘Jerry’ accents – must surely soon be for the chop. As will ‘Allo ‘Allo, a show whose sole comic vehicle was stereotypical portrayals of Europeans, and authored by the same David Croft who crafted It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

It is very sad that, yet again, something as innocent and life-enhancing as comedy is being censored as if it were damaging to the nation, when quite the opposite is true.

Political correctness is, or should be, promoted as a way of improving lives not detracting from them. By banning a TV show in which millions have found enjoyment, the BBC are playing the modern game of pandering to the too-easily offended, and depriving the many a dash of simple comedy joy for fear of feeding an ever-vanishing minority of bigots.

They mean well, without question, but without conflict comedy fails; it was the situation which provided the comedy. With friction comes fun. Dispensing with It Ain’t Half Hot Mum tries to rewrite history through censorship, is a condemnatory slap in the face to those who enjoyed it, and employs political correctness as a tool to yet again make life that little bit more dreary.

SOURCE





Israel and the Plight of Mideast Christians

Just as Jews were once expelled from Arab lands, Christians are now being forced from countries they have long inhabited.

The church in Bethlehem had survived more than 1,000 years, through wars and conquests, but its future now seemed in jeopardy. Spray-painted all over its ancient stone walls were the Arabic letters for Hamas. The year was 1994 and the city was about to pass from Israeli to Palestinian control. I was meeting with the church's clergy as an Israeli government adviser on inter-religious affairs. They were despondent but too frightened to file a complaint. The same Hamas thugs who had desecrated their sanctuary were liable to take their lives.

The trauma of those priests is now commonplace among Middle Eastern Christians. Their share of the region's population has plunged from 20% a century ago to less than 5% today and falling. In Egypt, 200,000 Coptic Christians fled their homes last year after beatings and massacres by Muslim extremist mobs. Since 2003, 70 Iraqi churches have been burned and nearly a thousand Christians killed in Baghdad alone, causing more than half of this million-member community to flee. Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Iran, where last month Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani was sentenced to death. Saudi Arabia outlaws private Christian prayer.

As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they've inhabited for centuries.

The only place in the Middle East where Christians aren't endangered but flourishing is Israel. Since Israel's founding in 1948, its Christian communities (including Russian and Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Armenians and Protestants) have expanded more than 1,000%.

Christians are prominent in all aspects of Israeli life, serving in the Knesset, the Foreign Ministry and on the Supreme Court. They are exempt from military service, but thousands have volunteered and been sworn in on special New Testaments printed in Hebrew. Israeli Arab Christians are on average more affluent than Israeli Jews and better-educated, even scoring higher on their SATs.

This does not mean that Israeli Christians do not occasionally encounter intolerance. But in contrast to elsewhere in the Middle East where hatred of Christians is ignored or encouraged, Israel remains committed to its Declaration of Independence pledge to "ensure the complete equality of all its citizens irrespective of religion." It guarantees free access to all Christian holy places, which are under the exclusive aegis of Christian clergy. When Muslims tried to erect a mosque near the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the Israeli government interceded to preserve the sanctity of the shrine.

Israel abounds with such sites (Capernaum, the Hill of the Beatitudes, the birth place of St. John the Baptist) but the state constitutes only part of the Holy Land. The rest, according to Jewish and Christian tradition, is in Gaza and the West Bank. Christians in those areas suffer the same plight as their co-religionists throughout the region.

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, half the Christian community has fled. Christmas decorations and public displays of crucifixes are forbidden. In a December 2010 broadcast, Hamas officials exhorted Muslims to slaughter their Christian neighbors. Rami Ayad, owner of Gaza's only Christian bookstore, was murdered, his store reduced to ash. This is the same Hamas with which the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank recently signed a unity pact.

Little wonder, then, that the West Bank is also hemorrhaging Christians. Once 15% of the population, they now make up less than 2%. Some have attributed the flight to Israeli policies that allegedly deny Christians economic opportunities, stunt demographic growth, and impede access to the holy sites of Jerusalem. In fact, most West Bank Christians live in cities such as Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, which are under Palestinian Authority control. All those cities have experienced marked economic growth and sharp population increase—among Muslims.

Israel, in spite of its need to safeguard its borders from terrorists, allows holiday access to Jerusalem's churches to Christians from both the West Bank and Gaza. In Jerusalem, the number of Arabs—among them Christians—has tripled since the city's reunification by Israel in 1967.

There must be another reason, then, for the West Bank's Christian exodus. The answer lies in Bethlehem. Under Israeli auspices, the city's Christian population grew by 57%. But under the Palestinian Authority since 1995, those numbers have plummeted. Palestinian gunmen seized Christian homes—compelling Israel to build a protective barrier between them and Jewish neighborhoods—and then occupied the Church of the Nativity, looting it and using it as a latrine. Today, Christians comprise a mere one-fifth of their holy city's population.

The extinction of the Middle East's Christian communities is an injustice of historic magnitude. Yet Israel provides an example of how this trend can not only be prevented but reversed. With the respect and appreciation that they receive in the Jewish state, the Christians of Muslim countries could not only survive but thrive.

SOURCE






Young Australian Aborigines are the principal authors of their own misfortunes

It's no good blaming the police

What is the likely fact missing from the following droll entry in the NSW Police media log for Wednesday, September 28, last year?

"Police have arrested two boys aged 15 and 11 following the pursuit of a stolen car in Sydney's inner west this morning. About 3.30am police spotted a stolen white Honda Civic travelling along Parramatta Road at Stanmore.

"The car failed to stop after being directed and a pursuit was initiated … The pursuit was terminated after … the car crashed into a gutter at an intersection [in Petersham].

"When police approached the car, the 15-year-old driver was allegedly armed with a pair of scissors … The driver, from Glebe, was subjected to a breath alcohol analysis and returned a reading of 0.042."

The same likely fact is missing from a incident two weeks later on October 11, reported on smh.com.au: "A 14-year-old girl allegedly failed to stop for a random breath test and led officers on a high-speed car chase before crashing and rolling a car in western Sydney this morning, police say."

The car chase took place about 3am in the western suburb of Whalan.

There have been other similar incidents leading up to the depressingly predictable crash and shooting in Kings Cross early on Saturday, when a stolen car, driven by a 14-year-old, ran down two pedestrians.

What sort of kids are on the streets after 3am, in stolen cars, drinking alcohol, driving recklessly and resisting police?

You know the answer. The statistical probability points to a subculture that is overwhelmingly over-represented in arrests, convictions, incarceration, child abuse, child neglect, domestic violence, alcohol abuse and substance abuse. This subculture functions in a culture of moral apartheid, which perpetuates the vicious cycle.

It was inevitable that a feral teenager in a stolen car was going to run over someone. Cars are more lethal than guns. They kill or seriously injure thousands of people a year, while guns are used in only several dozen murders or attempted murders a year.

In Kings Cross on Saturday morning, Sarah Roberts and Tanya Donaldson were on the footpath when they were bowled over. Roberts, 29, was rushed to hospital. The joyriders going to Kings Cross in a stolen car were begging for trouble and it duly came when a police foot patrol, attempting to stop a vehicle that had already hit two women, fired into the front window to immobilise the car.

In so doing the police wounded the 14-year-old driver and the 17-year-old front seat passenger. The police were aiming at the windshield, not the occupants. When a car is being driven with such callous indifference to safety that two pedestrians are knocked over, police must assume the car's occupants are also dangerous and attempt to subdue them quickly. These incidents take place in instants, not minutes.

It turns out that the driver of the car has been known to police since he was eight. Eight! Five occupants of the car, including two 14-year-olds, were later charged with various offences.

Yet since the incident the two who were shot have been presented as victims, with stories about anger in Redfern. At a rally outside NSW Parliament on Wednesday organisers accused police of "attempted murder".

Predictably, Anthony Mundine, he of the quick fists and quick mouth, entered the fray via Twitter: "Heartbreaking day for me visiting 14 y.o kid shot by police at Kings Cross. I'm at loss to understand how cops could shoot unarmed kids!!!"

He later added: "Barry O'Farrell needs to take a serious look at his police force. All I keep hearing about [is] trigger happy cops killing people. Wrong fo[r] real!!!"

It is not "trigger happy cops" the community is worried about. The bulk of the anger coming out of the Kings Cross drama is from a much wider community sick of violent, self-destructive behaviour by young Aborigines. The community is sick, too, of the constant use of the term "disadvantage" to rationalise the irrational and excuse the inexcusable.

Mundine continued to dig a hole for himself on Twitter yesterday - "police intentionally shot to kill!" - followed by this: "Yes the kids should be trailed [sic] for what they did! But the police should be trailed [sic] for attempted murder!"

Sarah Roberts and Tanya Donaldson were minding their own business when they were mowed down by a dangerous fool. As to their welfare, Mundine had nothing to say, other than this: "DID THEY DIE???"

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 WATCHAUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING 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.  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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Friday, April 27, 2012


Black Panics and White Hispanics

 Mike Adams

In my many years of serving on faculty hiring committees, I have often heard the statement “minorities and women are encouraged to apply.” It usually follows in close proximity to the statement “our institution does not discriminate on the basis of race.” The two statements cannot be reconciled by logic. But, then again, logic is considered a form of white oppression at the postmodern university.

Nor can those hiring statements be validated empirically. Not all minorities are encouraged specifically to apply at my university. Orthodox Jews are not encouraged. White Mormons are not encouraged. And neither are white Hispanics. We really discriminate when we take affirmative action against discrimination. I hope someday we take affirmative action against illogic.

This practice of establishing certain preferred minorities has been going on for a long time.

Make no mistake about it: At issue in the Zimmerman case is not whether he had a right to overpower Martin. The power struggle in the Zimmerman case stems from race-baiters' worry that Hispanics will overtake blacks as the most powerful racial interest group in America. That is why Jackson and Sharpton are clinging on to Martin like Marion Berry on a crack pipe.

In their struggle to maintain racial minority supremacy, black civil rights leaders regularly invoke the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule states that anyone who has even a drop of black blood is considered black. The rule was once used by white racists in the South. They thought that anyone who had a drop of black blood was contaminated, so to speak. Just a drop of black blood made them both intellectually and morally inferior.

However, now blacks are using the one drop rule to advance their own political agenda. Given that half of black pregnancies end in abortion, blacks must have some means of keeping their numbers and corresponding political influence from dwindling.

Of course, the one-drop rule operates differently with respect to Hispanics. Black civil rights leaders now want to say that having a single drop of white blood means you are white, not Hispanic. The reason for that is obvious: open-border immigration has made Hispanics the largest minority in America – numerically, if not politically, speaking.

It is also worth noting that these Hispanic immigrants are often Roman Catholic. That means they are less likely to abort their children than someone who practices black liberation theology. It helps explain why Hispanics are now 15% of the United States population while blacks constitute only 12%.

The gradual displacement of blacks as America’s preferred minority is producing a powder keg of racial tension in Florida and elsewhere. So much so that even the normally wise Bill Cosby can’t quite come to terms with it. Cosby wants to think this is all about guns but it isn’t. It’s about race, Bill. And the wave of inter-racial violence in the wake of the Zimmerman release should have tipped you off.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. Mitt Romney has a high probability of choosing Senator Rubio as his running mate. He is going to run on a pro-life and pro-gun platform, regardless of his true beliefs, which are virtually indiscernible. And Hispanics will support Romney/Rubio in record numbers.

Eventually, blacks will figure out that the real threat to young men like Trayvon Martin was not a white Hispanic named George Zimmerman. It was a white supremacist named Margaret Sanger.

SOURCE





Black racist

If a white guy said this stuff he would be out on his ear but nothing dents Marion Barry

I think Washington DC is lucky to have Filpinias to do nursing jobs that blacks obviously don't want.   The small, gentle and sentimental Filipinas must think they have descended into hell when they arrive in DC


For the second time in less than a month, D.C. Council member Marion Barry is having to fend off criticism that he unfairly singled out an ethnic group as he attempted to explain how to get more African Americans trained and employed in the District.

At a hearing Monday on the University of the District of Columbia’s budget, he spoke about the need to train more African Americans to become nurses. In a video of his remarks aired by WTTG-TV, Barry noted a growing number of nurses are “immigrants” from the Philippines.

“[I]f you go to the hospital now, you’ll find a number of immigrants who are nurses, particularly from the Philippines,” said Barry (D-Ward 8). “And no offense, but let’s grow our own teachers, let’s grow our own nurses, and so that we don’t have to go scrounging in our community clinics and other kinds of places, having to hire people from somewhere else.”

The National Federation of Filipino American Associations called Barry’s remarks “racist” and “bigoted.”

“We reject this continued Asian bashing by elected officials like Mr. Barry and demand that he apologize for his insensitive and irresponsible remarks,” Ed Navarra, chairman of NaFFAA, said in a statement. “We also call on him to engage in a meaningful dialogue with our community so we can better educate the broader American public about the significant contributions that our diverse immigrant communities have made to this country.”

On Tuesday, Barry said he was attempting to make a larger point about the university and the country’s demands for nurses.

“UDC ought to be a premier nursing school in the country. The nursing shortage is so bad we have to bring in nurses from the Philippines. What’s negative about that? Nothing’s negative about that,” he said. “It’s an asset to the United States to have access to nurses from other countries, but I want UDC to be the premier nursing institution.... Every time I mention a group, it’s not negative, it’s a fact.”

Earlier this month, Barry was forced to apologize after an election night screed in which he referred to Asian-owned businesses in Ward 8 “as dirty.”

Several of his council colleagues, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and several Maryland lawmakers of Asian descent publicly condemned Barry’s statements as divisive.

Barry’s remarks Monday appear to track with his long-held views that the city needs to do more to reduce unemployment, particularly in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. Along with Barry, D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and a majority of the D.C. Council have embraced policies to require or encourage local businesses and institutions to hire more District residents.

Barry stressed during Monday’s hearing that local colleges could help lower the unemployment if schools such as UDC, which has a growing nursing program, redoubled efforts to identify and train potential nurses.

Because of shortages nationwide, for years hospitals have had to turn overseas to bolster their ranks of nurses. More than half the foreign-trained nurses come from the Philippines, according to a 2005 study by Minority Nurse, which focuses on career and education training.

But Navarra said Barry made a hurtful mistake by singling out an ethnic group. “Filipino nurses and teachers have performed admirably in America’s health care and educational system, and they don’t deserve the harmful and xenophobic rhetoric that pits them against other American professionals,” Navarra said.

Barry’s relationship with the Asian American community could come to a head Thursday, when he’s to conduct an oversight hearing on the Office of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs.

As chairman of the Committee of Aging and Community Affairs, Barry oversees several District agencies designed to serve as liaisons between the government and minority communities. He created several of the offices when he served as mayor in the 1980s.

SOURCE





Obsession with safety is risking our children's well-being

A decade after child protection checks began, common sense and compassion have been sidelined

Imagine living in a society governed by fear: fear of the authorities, fear of your fellow citizens’ covert suspicions and overt accusations, fear of having even your most decent human impulses twisted into an unthinkable crime.

It’s the stuff of police states, of Kafka and the Communist revolution and the Stasi-dominated dystopia of the DDR. It is also, experts warn, a damning snapshot of Britain today.

Take the example of tousle-headed toddler Abigail Rae, who died because the passing adult who could have – should have – saved her, was too frightened to stop his van, scoop her up in his arms and take her to safety, lest he be branded a pervert.

The two-year-old, who had strayed from her Warwickshire nursery and was spotted toddling along a village road by a bricklayer driving past, was later found, drowned, in a pond. Commenting at the inquest of the case, which took place in 2002, the coroner remarked that: “This is perhaps a sad reflection on our society, but you may well understand the circumstances.”

We can understand, perhaps – the unpalatable truth is that the driver’s fears were far from unfounded – but surely we can’t condone his inaction?

Much is made of the “crisis of childhood” besetting youngsters growing up in our over-sexualised culture. Perhaps it’s time we asked ourselves whether there isn’t an even greater crisis in adulthood.

A decade after the introduction of Criminal Records Bureau checks, we have developed such a preoccupation – some would say out-and-out hysteria – about rooting out paedophilia that common sense and compassion have been sidelined, to everyone’s cost.

“There’s been a shift towards a 'better safe than sorry’ approach towards those working or involved with children that isn’t based on logic,” says Helene Guldberg, Open University psychologist and author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear. “We have absurd situations where you can’t take photographs of your own child in public places, or a man isn’t allowed to sit beside an unaccompanied child on an aircraft, and this assumption of guilt, of sinister motivation, is really corrosive to society.”

The CRB system was established in the wake of the Soham murders of 2002, when Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged 10, were murdered by Ian Huntley, who had been employed as a school caretaker, despite having faced a number of accusations of sexual assault.

Few dispute that its introduction has weeded out unsuitable candidates who previously gravitated towards jobs working with children. But there are those who believe its widespread (mis)use has brought more losses than gains.

Guldberg argues that it is impossible for any sense of community to exist without trust. If all other adults – particularly men – are perceived as a potential risk to children, then we reach a situation where only the parent is responsible for a child, and other adults shy away from intervening, even where a child is in danger.

“One study found that 75 per cent of men admitted they would not help a child in distress, for fear of what it might look like to others,” says Guldberg. “A total of 23 per cent would ignore the child completely, the others would find a woman to assist.”

That level of fear may be shocking – but the high tidemark of mistrust isn’t far behind. Of those men, 67 per cent said they themselves would be concerned about the intent of another man who approached a distressed child.

According to libertarian campaigners, The Manifesto Group, CRB checks – all 32 million of them to date – are no guarantee of safety. On the contrary, mass vetting leads to an abdication of personal responsibility and an assumption that child safety is the sole preserve of the state.

Nor is the “better safe than sorry” ethos confined to children’s welfare. Risk aversion and an almost farcical over-reliance on regulations is fast becoming ingrained in our psyche.

Last week saw the comi-tragic instance of 25 firefighters too entangled in red tape to wade into shallow water and rescue a seabird trapped in a plastic bag. They were, understandably, labelled “ridiculous”.

But what words are there to describe the scenario in 2007, where police support officers stood by, uselessly, as courageous 10-year-old Jordan Lyon dived into a pond to save his younger sister? She lived, but he drowned, because not one grown-up was willing to help. And who can forget the appalling fate of Alison Hume, the Ayrshire woman who fell down a mineshaft in 2008? She languished underground for eight hours, and died of a hypothermia-induced heart attack, despite a winch being available – because the regulations stated it was only for the use of official rescue workers.

However, it took the death of a charity shop worker in a 3ft deep boating lake to bring about real change. Simon Burgess, 41, suffered an epileptic fit in March 2011 and died as emergency crews looked on. Police and paramedics were specifically ordered not to enter the water, a shocking revelation that led the Government to dispense with the health and safety barriers that have been hindering emergency workers. As of last April, officers who carry out “heroic acts” without regard to their own safety are now protected from prosecution. But in the wider community, goodwill and good sense are still open to almost wilful misinterpretation.

In November year, a Tyneside supply teacher was suspended on the grounds of “gross misconduct”. Martin Davis’s “crime”? He gave a stranded 17-year-old pupil a lift home. The student made no complaint and Davis, 59, was cleared of any wrongdoing, but he has struggled to find employment since.

No one disputes that young people need to be protected from predatory adults, but the CRB checks, which were originally a safeguard used in the context of professionals working unsupervised with children, have proliferated exponentially.

They are carried out by a private company, Capita, at a cost of £1.5 billion, as increasing numbers of organisations insist that virtually anyone carrying out community work – whether arranging flowers at church or taking elderly people to the shops – must be vetted.

Local councils have subjected tree surgeons and a burger van operator to CRB checks, on the grounds that they work near schools. Even the Duchess of Cambridge underwent a CRB check before beginning volunteer work with the Scouts on Anglesey, presumably to reassure any parents worried about the intentions of the future Queen of England.

Older people are disproportionately affected by the checks carried out on the one million people a year who apply to do voluntary work. Often, they find themselves footing the bill, which is £26 for a standard check and £44 for an enhanced check.

“What our members really object to is the application of the law,” says Geraldine Bedell, editor of the social network site Gransnet. “They don’t have some rosy notion that checks aren’t needed, but they are irritated and exasperated by the number of them; some have had half a dozen or more CRB checks. There’s an absence of common sense.”

A childminder will have a CRB check to work with children, but if she also wants to be a classroom assistant, she will need a second check, and a third if she wants to help out with the Brownie pack.

According to Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, disproportionate anxiety is destroying the quality of our children’s early years. Our perception of danger has been distorted by our exposure to technology. “Because we have such a screen-based culture, and watch rolling news and are bombarded by pictures on the internet, we are being emotionally hijacked by imagery that bypasses the rational centres of the brain and makes us fearful,” she says.

“Reading a newspaper means we have to process information through words, which enables us to assess the risks. But we are losing that common sense and our sense of commonality, which makes it more and more difficult to trust people.”

The growing influence of Twitter and instant messaging means that negative opinions and emotions can be expressed and conveyed at the touch of a keypad. We assimilate other people’s views with little thought and become accustomed to spectating rather than instigating. That acquired passivity has a trickle-down effect, says Richard House, a senior lecturer in psychotherapy and counselling at the University of Roehampton.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, if someone saw a child either in trouble or causing trouble, a grown-up wouldn’t have thought twice about getting involved,” says House. “Nowadays, people have a greater tendency to play the bystander; rather than responding instinctively, they are more worried about negative repercussions and possibly being seen as an abuser.”

But this tendency to hang back, governed by fear, until someone “more appropriate” comes along, ideally waving their CRB certificate, may not be in our best interests after all. The uncomfortable fact is that if we don’t step in to save someone else’s child, then how can we complain when nobody steps in to save ours?

SOURCE






Putting Faith Under House Arrest

For decades, atheist groups have strategically involved themselves in questions of religious freedom, and they have done so chiefly by fighting to have all Christian symbols and texts removed from public view. But in recent years, as this fight has continued, it’s become evident that it’s not just symbols and texts they want removed from public view, rather, it’s Christians themselves.

In truth, it now seems that their end game is to put Christians into such a small corner that the only place left for open faith is behind the closed doors of your home.

This is explicitly seen in what one group of homosexual activists, One Colorado, is pushing via their effort to alter the Colorado Constitution to limit, for all intents and purposes, the exercise of religious liberty to one’s home or one’s church.

They propose to change Section 4, Article II of the state constitution to read:

In assessing whether government has burdened freedom of religion, a person’s or a religious organization’s right to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief is the ability to engage in religious practices in the privacy of a person’s home or in the privacy of a religious organization’s established place of worship.
One doesn’t have to be a constitutional scholar to understand that these changes basically say that citizens cannot complain that their religious freedoms have been violated so long as they can worship freely in their homes or in their churches.

This is a not-so-clever attempt at making sure that the Christian message never makes it out of private homes and churches. And it would be an astounding constitutional revision—one that puts faith under house arrest. But perhaps it is not so astounding, when one considers how our American president has been busy pushing the novel idea of “freedom of worship” to replace our inalienable right to freedom of religion. This sleight of hand starkly demonstrates what “freedom of worship” really means.

The attempt to remove Christianity from the public arena can be seen implicitly in the way groups like the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers are pressuring the Air Force to remove Bibles from on-base lodging rooms. Under the guise of fighting against “a special privilege for Christianity,” atheists are seeking to have Gideon Bibles removed from the rooms by equating the placement of those Bibles with “insensitive practices that illegally promote religion over non-religion or unethically discriminate against religions or differing beliefs.”

At the same time, such atheists and freethinkers give lip service to the First Amendment, but their actions show that they’ll only be happy when the First Amendment extends no further than our front door. (Remember, in pushing to change the Colorado Constitution, they were careful to say “in” your private house or private church.)

Under these terms, it seems fair to wonder if the choir loft must now be soundproofed, lest stray strains of “Amazing Grace” slip beyond the church doors and out into the forbidden zone.

The bottom line is that your choice as to whether you can worship God and live out your faith as a free citizen is, at this very moment, being shaped by the demands of leftists and proponents of the homosexual agenda who have sworn fealty to the force of law rather than theology. These groups, whether One Colorado or the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, ultimately believe your right to practice religion according to the dictates of your conscience has to align perfectly with the dictates of theirs.

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 WATCHAUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING 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.  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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Thursday, April 26, 2012


How stupid to claim you're too clever for motherhood

Sandra Parsons has some germane comments below but she misses out the key deficiency in the thinking of the unfortunate Lucy Worsley.  Ms Worsley seems to think that dilettantish activities are the peak of enjoyment and fulfilment.  Almost any mother could tell her that children are the greatest joy in life,  compared to  which all other things are a footnote.  Ms Worsley is not liberated;  she is lost

By any reckoning, TV historian Lucy Worsley has done pretty well for herself. In addition to her day job as chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, the 38-year-old has written three books, made umpteen TV programmes - and has also found love, sharing a London riverside flat with her architect boyfriend.

Just about the only thing she hasn’t done is bear a child.

In an interview this week to publicise her latest programme, Antiques Uncovered, she explained that this was her deliberate choice. ‘I have become the poster girl for opting out of reproduction. I am happy to stand up and be counted,’ she declares.

All well and good, you might think. Women who decide not to have children are often made to feel somehow lacking, so three cheers to Lucy for standing up for them.

Until, that is, you read what she said next: ‘I have been educated out of the natural reproductive function. I get to spend my time doing things I enjoy.’  No doubt this was intended as a rather flip, humorous comment. It’s backfired for two reasons.

First, it’s astonishingly patronising. Does Dr Worsley really believe that because she has a history degree from Oxford, she’s somehow too intelligent for the act of child-rearing? Or is she merely saying that those of us whose brains (or upbringing) did not propel us to the dreaming spires should accept motherhood as the summit of our intellectual ambition?

Second, for someone who calls herself a feminist historian, she appears to be hopelessly confused about what equality really means. Because while it’s difficult to be a working woman as well as a wife and mother, at least being the first of these no longer precludes also being the other two.

Indeed, anyone who assumes that women with an Oxford degree have allowed themselves to be ‘educated out of the natural reproductive function’ is entering very dangerous - and regressive - territory indeed. What next? A sort of sliding scale for women to keep handy during their childbearing years? No degree at all? Excellent! Have as many children as you like. A degree from Manchester or Bristol? Fine - have two! A first from Oxford? Sorry, but it would be a waste of your brain to reproduce.

In reality, of course, there are many women just as well educated as Lucy Worsley who’ve managed to have both children and a fulfilling career. Her fellow historian and Oxford graduate Amanda Foreman has five offspring, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has three and BBC Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders two.

There are countless more who’ve made sacrifices big and small for the sake of their families, including turning down promotions, changing careers and giving up work altogether.

What I find particularly distasteful is Dr Worsley’s tone, which implies she’s too superior for the messy business of raising children. Your ability to be a mother has nothing to do with your educational attainment and everything to do with the universal qualities of selflessness, generosity, compassion and patience.

Lucy Worsley’s ambition is to make history as popular as The X Factor, and I’m all for it. But before she goes any further, can I suggest that she looks at the history of her own sex? Not so long ago, the choice was quite simple: you could be a nun, a bluestocking or a mother. You could also be burned at the stake.

So give us more history, by all means, Dr Worsley. But please make it clear that women are lucky enough today to live in more enlightened times — and whether we have children or not has nothing to do with how clever we may (or may not) think we are.

SOURCE







Children's favourite books removed from British library shelves after parents complain they’re 'offensive'

Public libraries have had to withdraw dozens of long-standing children's favourites after parents complained they were offensive.

Anxious adults have taken action over stories deemed to be racist, blasphemous, violent or otherwise unsuitable, a survey has revealed.

Roald Dahl was among those criticised, with his Revolting Rhymes and Even More Revolting Rhymes singled out over the celebrated author's use of supposedly coarse language.

And while young readers have been enjoying Dahl's satirical fairy tales for decades, even classics such as The Nutcracker and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were said to be too sinister or frightening for children.

Library staff have had to investigate each of the complaints and have often ended up moving the offending books out of the children's section, or removing them altogether.

Racism was a common cause for concern, with the much-loved Babar and Tintin series accused of exposing children to ethnic stereotypes.

Librarians in East Sussex removed copies of Babar's Travels, in which one of the cartoon elephant's adventures finds him faced with 'savage cannibals'.

Those wishing to borrow it must now order it specially, after staff upheld a complaint that it contained offensive stereotypes of black Africans.

A similar complaint saw staff in Lewisham, London, remove Herge's Tintin in the Congo, while elsewhere the title has been transferred to the adult's section.

Children's author David McKee, creator of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant and Mr Ben, attracted more complaints than any other writer.  Parents claimed Tusk Tusk - his book about a dispute between black and grey elephants - was racist, while the wealthy main character of Denver was said to promote the idea of an unfair gap between rich and poor.

Meanwhile, the insults hurled between the characters in Two Monsters - such as 'twit' and 'dumbo' - were thought too aggressive for young ears.

A surprised Mr McKee told the Sunday Telegraph his books were meant to celebrate the differences in society.  He said: 'I think the complaints seem to come from the parents rather than the child. 'Children often seem to get the point. It would be rather boring if all books simply started "once upon a time" and ended "happily ever after".'

Nicholas Allan's More and More Rabbits, about two rabbits who can't stop having babies, has been praised for teaching numeracy and broaching the difficult subject of where babies come from.

But librarians in West Lothian pulled the book after one anxious parent said it the content was inappropriate.

The gruesome Horrible Histories series - which seeks to take the stuffiness out of the subject - was said to celebrate and trivialise violence, while one reader feared its sister series Horrible Science would encourage children to carry out dangerous experiments.

Parents worried that titles such as The Big Ugly Monster and the Little Stone Rabbit - in which a lonely monster fashions friends out of stone - would damage children's self-esteem.

And staff in Newcastle library removed Flabby Cat and Slobby Dog from the health and wellbeing section after it was said to give a negative message about obesity.

The survey of 98 library authorities took in more than 300 complaints from the last five years about 'unsuitable, inappropriate or offensive' works. Half of them were about children's books.

SOURCE 






An angry retort to Bettina Arndt from a feminist

But she ends up agreeing that Bettina has got her facts right

If you read this weekend’s Sunday papers, you will have been thrilled by an incredible piece of news: Bettina Arndt is the first human being to have visited an entirely different universe.

The voyage happened during her piece, Why women lose the dating game; Bettina visited the universe - hitherto only speculated about by astronomers - and found an alien entity who, coincidentally, was called Clem Bastow. This alien entity reached the end of the article and found herself nodding in cautious agreement.

FOOLED YOU! The alien was me! And I have been struggling with this strange new sensation for the past day: what does it mean for you when a large part of a Bettina Arndt article rings true?

First things first, in case you think this article is being written by my dog and I’m actually chained up in a basement somewhere: there’s plenty she didn’t get right, namely, women’s role in the dating game. “Many thought they could put off marriage and families until their 30s, having devoted their 20s to education, establishing careers and playing the field,” says Arndt of silly women nationwide. “But was their decade of dating a strategic mistake?”

Sometimes you just gotta wonder if Bettina even likes women. She seems so determined to decry feminism - even when, as she’s done here, she doesn’t expressly say as much - and defend the plight of the poor men left sobbing in the movement’s wake.

However, on the topic of the misogynist cesspool that is the “dating scene”, unfortunately, she’s spot on.

I used to laugh about things like The Game and the idea of “pick-up artists”, dismissing them as little more than a horror story from across the pond, but then I was hypnotised into a relationship by a 38-year-old Darth Vader impersonator who sidelined as a counsellor who helped young men pick up chicks.

He worked as a ‘guest lecturer’ - or something - with a lifestyle coach who taught meek dudes things like “same night lays” and how to avoid “the verbal leakage of power” (no, I don’t know what that is, either).

These blokes weren’t really interested in actual relationships, and they didn’t have to be, because there were always going to be more single women who were willing to step up to the plate if another demurred.

By that token, the census analysis Arndt quotes - “68,000 unattached graduate men in their 30s for 88,000 single graduate women in the same age group” - isn’t surprising.

Likewise, the experience of Gail - who found that men her own age on dating websites were only interested in younger women - rings true. I am still half-heartedly engaging in the sisyphean saga that is “looking for someone nice to go on dates with”, and now that I’m 30 (well, almost), I find I am almost exclusively contacted by men who are 15 to 20 years older. Who’s contacting the women who are 45+?

In short, it’s hell out there. But here’s where I begin to become human once more, and remember what it’s like to disagree with Bettina Arndt: why do we carry on as though these women who have reached their late-30s and early-40s and found themselves (“still”) single have thrown their lives away?

Yes, it’s nice to share your life with someone - all but the most misanthropic or committedly lone-wolf-ish of us know that. However the tone of Arndt’s piece suggests that we should capitulate to the good-enough husband (even trotting out Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him!, which was listed as a favourite text in the online dating profile of a man I recently encountered who insisted that “[his] crotch!” wanted my phone number).

As Arndt puts it, “many women are missing out on their fairytale ending”. As someone else in the article, Penny, puts it: “We were told we were special, we could do anything and the world was our oyster."

Hate to break it to you, Penny, but all of that is true - provided you don’t need the pearl inside that oyster to be a man.

SOURCE






Proposed Ordinance Would Force Kansas Churches to Host Gay Weddings

According to advocates, religious freedom may be under attack in Hutchinson, Kansas. There’s a controversial ordinance being considered in the local community that would force churches to host gay weddings and parties.

According to Fox News’ Todd Starnes, the Hutchinson City Council is going to consider whether sexual orientation and gender identity should be added to the city’s human relations code. If this action is approved during next month’s expected vote, churches may find themselves in a tough position.

Hutchinson Human Relations Commission has explained that, under the new regulations, churches that make their buildings available for the general public would not be able to refuse gay couples. This essentially means that churches would be forced to, via rental agreements, support gay nuptials.

“They would not be able to discriminate against gay and lesbian or transgender individuals. That type of protection parallels to what you find in race discrimination,” Meryl Dye, a spokesperson for the commission, said in an interview with Fox News. “If a church provides lodging or rents a facility they could not discriminate based on race. It’s along that kind of thinking.”

But Matthew Staver, chairman of the conservative Liberty Counsel Action, said that the proposal isn’t in line with American values.

“It is a collision course between religious freedom and the LGBT agenda. This proposed legislation will ultimately override the religious freedom that is protected under the First Amendment,” he proclaimed. “What we are ultimately going to see is churches forced to confront this law, forced to do things and allow their facilities to be used by people and for events that diametrically undercut the mission of the church.”

So, let’s say the ordinance passes and a church refuses to comply. Unless there’s an exemption for houses of worship when the measures passes, a discrimination complaint can be waged by gay couples or individuals who are refused rental service. If churches are, indeed, found guilty of not complying, fines and other penalties would come into effect.

But, as Starnes notes, it’s not just churches that may be impacted by the proposed ordinance:
    The Hutchinson measure would also have a major impact on private businesses and landlords. Restaurants, bars and retail shops would be required to provide special bathrooms for individuals who may have male body parts but identify as a female.

    According to a FAQ sheet provided by the city, employers would also be forced to allow workers to dress based on their gender identity…

    “Dress codes would not be precluded as long as an employer allows an employee to appear, groom and dress consistent with the employee’s gender identity and gender expression,” the FAQ stated.

    As far as bathrooms, the city FAQ stated, “A transgender person must be allowed to use restrooms appropriate to their gender identity rather than their assigned gender at birth without being harassed or questioned.”

    The city’s revised ordinance would also require transgender individuals to use the locker room and shower facilities of their choosing.

The FAQ document that highlights all of the information presented within the provision can be read here. There‘s no doubt that religious freedom hounds will be monitoring the vote to assess churches’ rights and to ensure that the government doesn’t overstep First Amendments bounds. On the flip side, supporters of the ordinance will surely fight on for what she see as equal rights in its passage.

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 WATCHAUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING 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.  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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