Tuesday, September 22, 2015


A multicultural flight attendant



A video has appeared online of a flight attendant on a Southwest Airlines flight appearing to slur his words and have trouble remembering his script.

The footage posted to Live Leak shows the shocking moment that the seated employee seems to fall asleep mid-sentence while making a passenger announcement.

A few seconds later, he opens his eyes and returns the microphone to its holster.The incident was filmed by a concerned passenger on a flight between Birmingham, US and Dallas. 

According to a report in the Mirror, SouthWest Airlines said the employee may have been affected by 'new medication'.

The airlines statement on the incident was: 'Due to a concern raised by a customer, we had supervisors meet flight 464 upon arrival into Dallas from Birmingham to assess a flight attendant onboard.

'Although the Captain onboard the flight and supervisors on the ground did not witness or detect any unusual behavior, the Employee acknowledged a potential reaction to new medication prescribed by his physician.

'We made the proactive decision to remove the Employee from duty for the remainder of the day.'

SOURCE






Je Suis Toujours Charlie

Yes, we must also defend their freedom to publish cartoons about drowned Syrian refugees.

The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is in trouble again – this time for publishing two cartoons about drowned Syrian refugees. And anybody who believes in unfettered free speech needs to stand up for Charlie’s liberty to offend the pro-refugee and anti-racist lobbies just as staunchly as its right to offend Islam.

It is barely nine months since people across Europe and America marched behind those ‘Je Suis Charlie’ banners, for the scurrilous mag’s right to freedom of expression after the murderous attack on its editorial office by Islamist gunmen who shot dead eight cartoonists and journalists and four others. Now the online footsoldiers of the You Can’t Say That lobby are marching across the internet, denouncing Charlie on social media and threatening it with prosecution, if not actual execution, for crimes against humanity.

Peter Herbert of the Society of Black Lawyers – one of the UK’s leading offence-taking outfits – has made headlines after announcing via Twitter that his group will consider reporting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons ‘as incitement to hate crime and persecution before the International Criminal Court’.

Herbert’s tweets continued in the same vein, declaring that ‘Charlie Hebdo is a purely racist, xenophobic and ideologically bankrupt publication that represents the moral decay of France’. Good to see such racially sensitive souls avoiding national stereotypes. Meanwhile, many others have denounced the ‘disgusting’ Charlie, said they have ‘lost all respect’ for the magazine, and that, in the words of one tweeter, it was time to ‘Draw the line’.

As it happens, some of us might fail to see anything ‘racist [or] xenophobic’ about the new Charlie Hebdo cartoons. One uses an image of a toddler in shorts and a t-shirt face-down on the shoreline, like the infamous photo of the drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, beside an advertising billboard that offers two children’s meal menus for the price of one. The headline says ‘Welcome migrants! So close to his goal…’.

The other one – also by a cartoonist who survived the January attacks – depicts a Jesus-like figure walking across the sea saying ‘Christians walk on water’, while a smaller figure wearing shorts is upside down in the water, saying ‘Muslim children sink’. The caption concludes ‘Proof that Europe is Christian’.

You surely do not need to be an expert in French satire to see that the target of the cartoons is European society rather than Muslim migrants – a familiar-looking attack on consumerism and hypocrisy over here. That makes no difference, however, to those constantly on the prowl for any words and images to take offence at and demand action against.

In fact, it does not matter what you think the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are trying to say, or whether you find them funny or offensive. Defending unfettered free speech is both a non-negotiable principle and a practical necessity today. It means defending the freedom of Charlie Hebdo, or anybody else, to offend who it chooses whether we like it or not. You don’t have to be Charlie, read Charlie or chortle at Charlie in order to defend it. Free speech is always primarily about defending what a US Supreme Court justice once called ‘freedom for the thought that we hate’.

The new backlash against Charlie Hebdo has exposed the truth behind the free speech fraud we witnessed after the January massacre. The false image projected then was of a Western world united behind the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ banners, defending freedom of expression against the barbarians at the gate. The truth, as we argued from the first on spiked, was that the more powerful and insidious threats to free speech came from within the citadels of civilisation itself. Indeed, those freedom-hating Islamist gunmen were not alien imports so much as products of the prevailing mood in Western society, where free speech is increasingly out of fashion and we spend far more time discussing how to limit our most precious liberty than defend and expand it.

As I put in the prologue to my book Trigger Warning: ‘We need to face the hard fact that the Islamist gunmen who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo acted not just as the soldiers of an oldish Eastern religion but also as the armed extremist wing of a thoroughly modern Western creed. From the official censors of the police and political elite to the army of unofficial censors online, the cri de coeur of these crusaders is You Can’t Say That. The Islamist gunmen took that attitude to a murderous extreme.’

France is of course the land of Voltaire, whose classic defence of free speech and tolerance is summarised as ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. The latest backlash against Charlie Hebdo confirms that we are now living in the age of those I call the reverse-Voltaires, whose slogan is ‘I know I will detest what you say, and I will defend to the end of free speech my right to stop you saying it’.

In response, we must insist on the freedom to think what we like and say what we think, and defend the freedom of Charlie Hebdo or anybody else to publish what they believe to be true or just funny, whether it offends Muslims or Catholics, Tories or transgender activists, racists or the refugee campaigners. Je Suis Charlie, not just in January, but Je Suis Toujours Charlie.

SOURCE






Rapper: Caitlyn Jenner Is ‘Rebuking God’ By Becoming A Woman

He has a point

Waka Flocka Flame thinks Caitlyn Jenner is “rebuking God” by trying to become a woman.

During an interview with “The Breakfast Club” Friday morning, the rapper called Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce” and said that in today’s world, women are afraid to be wives and young men are afraid to be men.

“You are who you are when God made you, not who you became after that,” the 29-year-old told the hosts of the radio show.
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“That’s how I just feel. You’re rebuking God. God ain’t put them feelings in you, man. That’s the devil playing tricks with your mind. That’s a test from God.”

“They don’t market husbands and families and wives no more. Transgenders — they’re marketing evil.”

SOURCE






Richard Dawkins lays in to Texas schoolboy Ahmed Mohamed for claiming the clock was his invention... as Sarah Palin says he was asking to be arrested

Richard Dawkins has provoked outrage by belittling the 14-year-old Texas teenager who was arrested on suspicion of building a hoax bomb that turned out to be a homemade clock.

The scientist and writer slams Ahmed Mohamed for claiming the clock was his 'invention' and hits out at tech firms that have rushed to offer him invitations and freebies.

Dawkins also questions whether the teenager was, in fact, trying to get arrested.

'He disassembled & reassembled a clock (which is fine) & then claimed it was his "invention" (which is fraud),' Dawkins wrote on Twitter.

While conceding that the police should not have arrested Ahmed, he questions: 'what was his motive?'

'If the reassembled components did something more than the original clock, that’s creative. If not, it looks like hoax,' he adds.

His words come three days after Ahmed became something of a national star as the country rallied round him in praise of scientific intrigue.

The teenager was arrested and refused the chance to call his parents after he brought the clock into school in Irving, Texas, and teachers believed it to be a hoax bomb.

President Obama led the stream of supportive messages to Ahmed, tweeting: 'Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.'

Microsoft has delivered a box of state-of-the-art freebies including a Surface Pro 3, a Microsoft Band and a 3-D printer.

Facebook and Google have invited him to their respective headquarters; MIT said they would 'love' to have him as a student when he reaches college age. 

But Dawkins mocks the encouragement as 'mistaken adulation' for something that he did not create.

It comes after Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol hit out at Ahmed's 'dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption' and criticized Obama for inviting him to the White House.

Sarah Palin posted her controversial opinion on her Facebook page and slammed Obama and the 'reactionary-slash-biased media' for defending Ahmed's clock.

'Yep, believing that's a clock in a school pencil box is like believing Barack Obama is ruling over the most transparent administration in history,' Palin wrote in the Facebook post in which she shared pictures of her kids' pencil boxes.

'Right. That's a clock, and I'm the Queen of England.'

Palin, who's daughter Bristol one day earlier criticized Obama of egging on racial tension by inviting the teen to the White House, compared the incident against Mohammed to other incidents in which students were suspended even though they were apparently innocent.

She brought up an example of a student being suspended for bringing a squirt gun to school or for accidentally having ammo on school property because he'd recently gone deer hunting with his dad.

'Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun. Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school's lot later that day,' she wrote.

'Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade "clock" that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told "if you see something, say something!") gets invited to the White House.'

The former Alaska governor said the invitation to the white house was out of line.

'By the way, President Obama's practice of jumping in cases prematurely to interject himself as the cool savior, wanting so badly to attach himself to the issue-of-the-day, got old years ago,' she wrote.

'Remember him accusing police officers doing their job as "acting stupid"; claiming if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon Martin; claiming he needed to know who was at fault in an industrial accident so he'd 'know who's a** to kick'; etc., etc. Those actions are about as presidential as his selfie stick,' she added.

Similarly, Bristol Palin has slammed President Obama for 'egging on' racial divisions by inviting the 14-year-old boy to the White House after Wednesday's incident.

The nation has rallied round Ahmed Mohamed since he was accused by his teachers of building a hoax bomb on Wednesday.

The Texan ninth-grader has received invitations from Google, Facebook, Space Camp, and his dream school MIT amid widespread concerns he was singled out for being Muslim.

Obama tweeted: 'Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.'

But according to mother-to-be Bristol, an invite from the White House is a step too far - as 'the police clearly made a mistake'.

'This is the kind of stuff Obama needs to STAY out of,' Palin wrote on her blog on Thursday.  'This encourages more racial strife that is already going on with the "Black Lives Matter" crowd and encourages victimhood.

'The police made a mistake, clearly. But why put more people against them? Why egg it on?  'Childish games like this from our president have divided our country… even more today than when he was elected.'

Palin is in a minority as leaders across the nation rush to encourage Ahmed after he was handcuffed and accused of criminality.

Ahmed confirmed to Good Morning America that he has accepted Obama's invitation to come to the White House and meet the president, saying, 'I hope to see him soon.'

Asked if he was planning to bring his now-infamous clock with him, Ahmed revealed that Irving authorities have yet to return it to him.

'The clock is still in custody with the police,' he said. 'I want it back with my humility.'

Ahmed also confided that of all the prominent figures who have reached out to him offering their support, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and NASA officials, he was most thrilled to hear from MIT.  'I dream of going there,' he said.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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