Wednesday, November 13, 2013



Multicultural midwives in Britain too



As is usual with African defendants, the defendants admit nothing

Two midwives responsible for a sick woman's four-day-old baby lay the child on its stomach and left it in a stationery cupboard, a tribunal has heard.

Yvonne Musonda-Malata and Christine Onade are accused of failing to provide appropriate clinical care to a baby while working on a night shift at Queen’s Hospital, Romford, north east London.

Ms Malata, 35, who has worked as a nurse since 2004, was responsible for looking after the baby while its mother caught up on sleep, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) was told. It is alleged that she tended to the baby, known as Baby A, in a cot by the midwives station before moving it into a large stationery cupboard after it became unsettled.

She and Ms Onade, 46, are also accused of failing to record any feeds given to Baby A. Both midwives deny all allegations.

The alleged incident, which occurred on 18 April, 2011, was reported by Alex Curtis, a nursery nurse at the hospital who found the baby alone in the cupboard at about 6:30am.

She told the tribunal: 'I went to the post-natal ward to get an envelope from the stationery cupboard and found a baby lying on its tummy on its own.  'The baby was in the cot just behind the door. I cannot remember whether the light was off or on, but I saw baby on its front and went to check if it was breathing.

'This was an unusual occurrence. We always lie a baby on its back as there is a risk of cot death.

'If, as a nursery nurse, I took responsibility for a parent’s baby, I would never leave it alone. If I needed to go off and do something, I would ask another nurse to look after the baby.'

Derek Zeitlin, the case presenter at the NMC, said: 'The baby’s mother has a health condition and it is vitally important for her to get a good night’s sleep.  'Her husband therefore invited the midwives to take the baby away so that his wife could get a good night’s sleep.  'That decision was not taken lightly. The nurse looking after Baby A’s mother was involved in that decision. It was the right thing to do.'

Mr Zeitlin explained that the baby became unsettled at 'various points' throughout the night, adding that there was 'no specific place to put a baby' while it was looked after in the post-natal ward.

He said that Ms Malata and Ms Onade had both confirmed that Ms Malata had placed Baby A in a cot in the doorway of the cupboard, but claim that the door was kept open.

Mr Zeitlin said: 'There came a stage where Ms Malata was called away to another patient and was away for about 20 minutes.

'The next thing that happened was a member of the nursing staff went to the cupboard and was shocked to find Baby A inside.

'The door was closed. The baby was found on its stomach, but babies are always placed on their back to avoid cot death.'
He added: 'There were no feeding charts for Baby A. The reality of that was that entries that were made about feeds didn’t coincide with what the registrants record about the feeds.

A further investigation was carried out which led to both nurses being suspended.

Claire O'Toole, associate human resources director at Queen's Hospital, said: 'I was asked to investigate a complaint on April 20 in 2011, raised by Alex Curtis.

'Miss Musonda-Malata was the named midwife and was unable to provide satisfactory care explanation for the duration of the shift.

'There was a lack of clarity for who was caring for Baby A.  'Miss Onade did have a significant level of involvement in the care of Baby A, she couldn't clearly outline the care when she had actually taken part in it.

'Miss Musonda-Malata engaged with the process well and was consistent but Miss Onoade was unresponsive and unwilling to engage.

'Miss Onade was reluctant to accept responsibility for Baby A.
'The incident brought the hospital into disrepute due to the publicity in The Sun.

SOURCE






The fight for freedom of speech in Britain

Were you outraged when a couple of London coppers suggested to a newspaper vendor that he should stop selling Private Eye magazine on the basis that its cover image might prejudice the trial of former News International boss Rebekah Brooks? Good. You should have been. No one with any sense - not to mention a love for liberty - should want to live in a country where policemen get to say what sort of material people can print, hawk and read. That way tyranny lies.

But wait - were you equally outraged when, last year, police in Manchester confiscated hundreds of copies of Red Issue, the Man Utd fanzine, on the basis that a cartoon it contained could have angered Liverpool FC fans? If you were, then, again, good. To have a situation where the boys in blue can forcibly impound printed material that they’ve unilaterally decreed to be ‘offensive’ - as happened in Manchester - runs counter to every principle of liberty. It turns the clock back to that black period when the authorities got to say what the rest of us could say, depict and declare, when the right to speak was a gift of officialdom handed only to those whose ideas pleased the powers-that-be.

If you weren’t as outraged by the massive police op against Red Issue as you were by the comparatively small-scale harassment of that Private Eye vendor, if you didn’t tweet and rail against that Stasi-like squishing of an ‘offensive’ football mag in the same way you did over the Private Eye fiasco… well, why not? Do you think freedom of speech is less important for football fans than for people interested in political and media gossip? Do you think footie fanzines are fair game for state obliteration, and it’s only clever political material we should worry about protecting from the long arm of the law?

Were you disturbed when David Cameron made a veiled threat to the Guardian recently, telling it in relation to its revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying antics that it must exercise more ‘social responsibility’ in what it reports or otherwise officialdom might have to ‘use injunctions or D notices’? I hope you were. For a prime minister to use weasel lingo about ‘social responsibility’ and dark whispers about D notices to try to stop a newspaper from publishing politically embarrassing things is deeply worrying. It speaks to the political class’s illiberal instinct to muzzle its critics, to tame papers that reveal things that politicians would rather keep hidden.

But wait – were you equally disturbed when Cameron made not-so-veiled threats against the tabloid press in 2011, when, announcing the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture and ethics of the press, he said that where for years the press had spoken truth to power, now it was time for ‘those in power [to] tell truth to the press’? If you weren’t, why not? Why is it bad for Cameron to insist that the Guardian behave in a ‘socially responsible’ way, but okay for him to demand – and to seek to enforce – ‘ethical responsibility’ among the tabloid press? How is his hint of using a D notice against anti-NSA reporting worse than his non-hint, very real-world use of lords, inquiries, modern-day Star Chambers and huge political pressure to try to bring to heel the raucous tabloids?

That’s a question that should certainly be asked of the 70-odd human rights groups who last week wrote an open letter to Cameron accusing him of imperilling Britain’s traditions of press freedom through his response to the NSA stuff, yet who raised not a peep – not a single peep - about his government’s war on the tabloids’ right to publish and be damned, on their right to not be ‘socially responsible’, or ‘ethically responsible’. In fact, the head of one of those Cameron-criticising human rights groups – Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty – actually sat on the panel of the Leveson Inquiry that dragged every tabloid editor in the land before it to give him a censorious grilling. From partaking in Cameron’s drive to force the tabloids to be ethically responsible to lambasting Cameron for suggesting that the Guardian be socially responsible… in the words of the wicked tabloids, you couldn’t make it up.

Have you been perturbed by reports in recent years about theatres, including London’s Royal Court, refusing to stage plays critical of Islam in case a few hotheads armed with Korans kick up a fuss? I hope you have been. Such self-gagging shows that when a climate of political correctness takes hold, when inoffensiveness is made into a public virtue, then we don’t even need states to censor our sentiments, criticism or art – we do it to ourselves, for fear of upsetting those who arrogantly presume to have a licence to silence and demolish any word, picture or artwork that offends their sensibilities. But wait – were you also perturbed by officialdom’s ban on certain Islamist preachers from coming to Britain, most notably Dr Zakir Naik, on the basis that their praising of the 9/11 hijackers and their justification of domestic violence and other nutty utterances are ‘not conducive to the public good’? If not, why not? Do you think freedom of speech somehow covers criticism of Islamism but not expressions of Islamism? How does that work then?

Were you disturbed by London mayor Boris Johnson’s floating of the idea of banning political protests in London’s West End? Good. I presume, then, that you were equally disturbed by his unilateral banning of a poster on London buses which suggested homosexuals could be ‘cured’? Were you alarmed by the police’s arrest and trial of a tweeter who made a joke about blowing up Robin Hood Airport in Nottingham? I hope you were. And I hope you were equally – in fact more – alarmed by the actual imprisonment for 56 days of a drunken tweeter who spouted online racial abuse about the then very ill footballer Fabrice Muamba? Were you disturbed by the British Chiropractic Association’s suing of the science writer Simon Singh? Good. It was a very clear example of how Britain’s archaic, reputation-worshipping libel laws can be used to silence dissent and ridicule. I presume, then, that you were equally disturbed by ITN’s use of the libel laws in the late 1990s to punish and ultimately shut down LM magazine after it dared to ask searing questions about ITN’s coverage of the Bosnian War?* Yes? Surely? Come on.

If you can answer ‘yes’ to all of the above – if you can say you opposed the censoring or threatened censoring of both the respectable Guardian and the naughty tabloids; of both Islam-criticising playwrights and Islamist preachers of nonsense; of both jokey tweeters and racist tweeters; of both lefty protesters and homophobic adverts – then congratulations are due: you understand what freedom of speech means, which is quite simply that speech – all of it, with absolutely no exceptions – ought to be free. Free from the blue pen and eraser and modesty bags of the state, its offshoots, the police, the moral majority, moral minorities, easily offended cliques or anyone else who imagines he has the right to stop us, the public, from seeing or hearing certain things.

If you cannot answer ‘yes’ to all of the above – if you supported the freedom of speech of some of those folks but not of others – then I am afraid I have some bad news for you: you don’t know what freedom of speech is. Indeed, it is a profound contradiction in terms to defend freedom of speech for some people but not for others. It is technically and morally impossible to have ‘freedom of speech for some’. If you criticise restrictions on the speech of people you like but ignore, or even worse cheer, restrictions on the speech of people you don’t like, then what you are doing has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom of speech; instead, you are helping to turn speech into a privilege, to be enjoyed by some but denied to others.

When Shami Chakrabarti, fresh from spending the best part of two years sitting in judgement on the tabloid press, says the Guardian should be allowed to publish NSA revelations, she isn’t defending press freedom – she’s defending the privilege of the Guardian to enjoy less state scrutiny than the tabloids, presumably on the basis that it is a more upstanding, politically decent publication. When commentators defend with one breath the right of playwrights to criticise Islam, but then cheer with their next breath the banning of Islamist preachers from Britain, they aren’t defending freedom of speech – they’re defending the privileges of artists to enjoy a greater scope to speak their minds than their intellectual and moral inferiors. When campaigners defend the right of leftists to wave placards on London streets, yet turn a blind eye to the mayor’s banning of homophobic ads or the home secretary’s banning of far-right marches, they aren’t defending political freedom; they’re demanding political privilege, the right to enjoy something that they would deny to others: a platform from which to announce their ideas and intentions.

There is no true, full-on, consistent fight for freedom of speech in Britain today. Instead there are individuals and groups effectively demanding a special privilege to speak, on the grounds that what they have to say – about the NSA, about Islam, about the ‘ConDem’ government – is important and worthy. And those whose utterances are presumed to be unimportant or unworthy, whether they’re daft tweeters, anti-immigrant rabble-rousers, or claptrap-spouting Islamists? Screw them. Ban them. Keep them offline, off the airwaves, off the streets, out of Britain. Today’s privilege demanders disguised as free speech warriors have forgotten the key word in the phrase freedom of speech – which is freedom, exemption from control, a universal value which, unless it is enjoyed by every single free citizen, has absolutely no meaning.

spiked is on a mission to defend proper, all-encompassing freedom of speech – not only for ourselves and those we like (which would be a massive contradiction in terms), but also for the right, the left, the annoying, the batty, the wicked, the racist, the religious, the pornographic, the offensive, the hateful and the downright dumb. Not because we like all, or even any, of those people, but because we like – very much – the key idea behind freedom of speech: which is that it is only by having the fullest, freest, frankest and utterly unpoliced exchange of ideas and information that the people, using their moral and mental muscles, can decipher truth from codswallop and be properly autonomous, destiny-determining creatures. Freedom of speech makes us free; it makes us moral; it makes us human. It is enjoyed by all, or it is enjoyed by none.

SOURCE






Eva Longoria's Sexist New Show

Eva Longoria, former star of Desperate Housewives and ardent Obama supporter, is starring in a new animated show called “Mother Up” on Hulu. In the 13-episode online program, Longoria plays Rudi Wilson, a mom trying to start a new life in suburbia after getting fired from her job. She explained the premise behind the show, which seemed to reveal the actress is more interested in bashing men than empowering women.

"I'm a fan of animation and I watch 'Family Guy' and I watch 'American Dad!' and you always see these really flawed fathers and the really perfect mom who is trying to hold the family together because the dads, they're just idiots," said Longoria.

Based on Longoria’s offensive comments, it was no surprise that her husband on the animated show is portrayed as a cruel womanizer. Our first introduction to him in the pilot is him badmouthing his wife while talking to his mistress on the phone. As Rudi walks in, he exclaims, “Oh, it’s my stupid wife.”

That is the one scene in which we see the father. The only other reference to him is after Rudi gets fired from her job and moves to suburbia and she tells her two children, “Your loser father has left us forever.”

After watching the first episode, I gathered that the gist of the show is to try and prove that women don’t need men to raise their kids. Longoria (who is not a mother), probably did not mention that without these “losers,” statistics show children often grow up with a host of problems.

Here were just a couple statistics missing from the “Mother Up” plotline: Children in father-absent homes are almost four times more likely to be poor. In 2011, 12 percent of children in married-couple families were living in poverty, compared to 44 percent of children in mother-only families. What’s more, a charity report found that fatherless young people were found to be almost 70 percent more likely to take drugs and 76 percent more likely to turn to crime.

But, by all means Eva Longoria, teach women that men are “idiots.”

SOURCE





Second Amendment: Are Gun Owners Racist?

There's just something about foreign academics and their lack of understanding of the American system that makes their research questionable at best. Further evidence of that can be found in a recent study by Australian and British researchers, which concludes, "Symbolic racism was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies in U.S. whites." They continue by asserting, "The findings help explain U.S. whites' paradoxical attitudes towards gun ownership and gun control," before whining that "[s]uch attitudes may adversely influence U.S. gun control policy debates and decisions."

In essence, what these academics are arguing is that those who legally own firearms automatically assume a racist attitude toward blacks, generally with the belief that their self-protection is required because blacks are a threat. The study authors leap to this conclusion by noting, among other statistics, that "[b]lacks are disproportionately represented in U.S. firearm homicides ... and would benefit most from improved gun control." Yet, in the next breath they concede, "[R]esearch on the reasons for opposition to gun control is sparse."

Much of their database comes from a single survey called the American National Election Study, with the researchers using data collected between 2008 and 2009 to test their hypothesis. Nowhere in the study, though, are other theories on attitudes toward gun control brought up, but without a great deal of effort we can conclude that our objection to gun control is based on a document drawn up two centuries ago. A plain reading of the Second Amendment is far from racist. Parting question: Where is the study about racist attitudes and the general disregard for life and property exhibited by baggy pants, backward cap gun-toters?

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

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1 comment:

TheOldMan said...

The big push towards firearm controls came in the South after the Civil War. The KKK was not too interested in meeting blacks with shotguns and rifles. The Democratic Party owned the South from the CW until the late 1970s.