Tuesday, November 22, 2016



Some multicultural childcare



A MAN has been charged over the death of a two-year-old [black] American boy whose dismembered remains were found in a neighbourhood lake.

Kamel Harris, 41, faces a first-degree murder charge in the death of Kyrian Knox of Rockford. Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Harris was once a caretaker for the boy.

They say they believe the little boy had been fed milk and been crying for hours when Harris ‘snapped’.

Authorities were first made aware of the incident when a member of the public spotted a foot floating in the lagoon.

They later found another foot and two hands on the shoreline before finding the toddler’s head the next day.

Police Cmdr. Kevin Duffin said Harris was being held on an unrelated charge at the Winnebago County Jail in northern Illinois when arrested Monday night in the boy’s death.

Chicago Police have described the tragedy as ‘a once in a lifetime incident’.

Knox’s remains were found in September 2015 in the Garfield Park lagoon on Chicago’s West Side.

The FBI positively matched the boy’s DNA with that of a dismembered body found in the lagoon two weeks before he was reported missing.

The toddler’s mother told police last year the child was staying with Harris and his girlfriend while she moved from Rockford to Iowa.

In November 2015, police said Harris and his girlfriend had been uncooperative with the investigation. Duffin said investigators believe the child, who was lactose-intolerant, ingested milk and had been crying most of the day before he was killed.

Harris “kind of just snapped and couldn’t deal with it anymore,” Duffin said. Though ruled a homicide, the Cook County medical examiner’s office didn’t determine a cause of death.

Duffin said investigators found blood in the carpeting of a vehicle connected to Harris, and received a DNA match to the boy over the summer.

He said police also spoke with witnesses who had information only those close to the killer would know.

He said Kyrian is believed to have been killed in Rockford, but that Harris was charged in Cook County because the child’s body was found in Chicago and police in that city did extensive work on the case.

SOURCE






Fifty years of 'enlightened' jails gave us one thing - more crime

By Peter Hitchens

Modern politicians don’t like taking responsibility for anything difficult. They hate the idea that you sometimes have to punish people. That’s understandable. Locking people up and making them work hard and do as they’re told isn’t very nice.

But if you can’t bear the burden, then don’t seek paid public office. These nasty tasks are the most basic duty of the State. If it won’t protect us from the wicked, then we might as well wind it up.

We have disarmed in the face of danger. Until about 50 years ago, the stated aim of prisons was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’. Under a clear criminal code, most crooks and most louts were scared of prison and tried not to go there. It wasn’t some savage place of torture and beatings.

By world standards our prisons were very civilised. But they were austere, disciplined and under the control of the authorities.

Then along came the liberal modernisers. Police were turned into paramilitary social workers, soft on crime, tough on professors’ wives trying to stop trees being cut down.

Judges were no longer allowed to punish anyone without checking first to see if they’d had a horrid childhood. Voluntary drug abuse was treated as an unavoidable disease, rather than as the crime it is.

How the criminals laughed. Prisons were transformed into apologetic, weakly run places where something called ‘rehabilitation’ would supposedly happen. It never has.
  
The point of prison was to scare people away from doing things they knew would put them there. Nobody had any fancy ideas about changing the hearts and minds of those who were actually locked up.

With a bit of luck they wouldn’t want to go back, but if they did, there was room.

It worked. In 1950-51, the prison population of England and Wales was 20,474. Even ten years later it was a manageable 27,099. Then along came the enlightened ones. By 1980, the total was almost 40,000. By 1999, the same approach (plus lots of unpaid fines, cautions and community service) had taken it to nearly 65,000. Now it is a little more than 85,000.

These places are far from being ‘holiday camps’. That is not the problem. Many of them are terrifying because the authorities have lost control, and the nastiest inmates are in charge.

I often wonder how those who are so squeamish about executing a few vicious murderers feel about the monstrous annual tally of despair – the prison suicide rate, now more than 100 a year.

But our bulging prisons are full in spite of huge numbers of crimes not reported because nobody is interested, of crimes ignored by the police, of offenders cautioned but not arrested, of ‘restorative justice’, of decisions not to prosecute by the CPS, suspended sentences, probation orders, automatically halved sentences, tagging and other devices for keeping criminals out of prison.

It’s quite simple. The feebler you are, the more crime you get.

And in the end the crime so outstrips the space in prisons that you more or less give up. That is what we have done.

And if we don’t rediscover our nerve, our prisons and our country are heading fast towards the Third World, but without the sunshine and the beaches.

SOURCE




Christian JP who was sacked for his views over same-sex parents is suing Jeremy Hunt after losing his job in the NHS

A Christian magistrate sacked for speaking out against adoption by same-sex parents is suing Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt after also losing a senior NHS role.

Richard Page was suspended as an NHS Trust director following decades of service in the organisation after he said it was better for children to be brought up by a man and a woman.

It was claimed his remarks ‘undermined’ the confidence of staff and patients, and the former NHS finance manager has now been effectively barred from working again as a non-executive director on the board at Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust (KMPT).

The 70-year-old father-of-three is taking his case against Mr Hunt to an employment tribunal on the grounds of religious discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.

In March, Mr Page was dismissed as a JP after 15 years by then Justice Secretary Michael Gove and Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas after making his comments in a BBC TV discussion.

They said his views were ‘biased and prejudiced against single-sex adopters’ and brought the magistrates’ courts into disrepute.

Days later, after just one complaint from a staff member, he was suspended by the NHS after Andrew Ling, the KMPT chairman, wrote to the Trust chiefs saying his comments would have a major impact on ‘the perception of living the Trust values’.

In a letter to Mr Page, Mr Ling said: ‘The recent publicity you have courted is likely to further undermine the confidence staff, particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) staff, have in the leadership of the Trust.’

Mr Page reapplied for the role of non-executive director after his term expired in the summer, but his application has been rejected by an NHS panel.

He said recent laws passed by the Government ‘silenced Christians’ and made it impossible for him to follow the Bible and keep a public role.

He added: ‘More than 6,500 people signed a petition or directly emailed the Trust to back me in my battle with the NHS, but only one complained about my views.’

Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Christian Legal Centre which is supporting Mr Page, said: ‘Once again we find political leaders washing their hands of Christians prepared to stand up for their faith.’

Laws to allow gay couples to adopt were introduced in 2002, and the number of such adoptions has quadrupled in the past five years.

SOURCE




The Morality of Corruption

"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," said President Obama recently in Pittsburgh. "There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world," he continued. "The answer is obviously not censorship, but it's creating places where people can say 'this is reliable' and I'm still able to argue safely about facts and what we should do about it."

This is vintage Obama in its dishonesty. If we call it "curating," suggests Mr. Obama, then it is not censorship.

But it is dishonest in a way that has characterized Mr. Obama's utterances since the first days of his presidency. It is dishonesty that no honest, halfway intelligent person would be fooled by. It is so transparent as to be almost childish. But it is not intended to persuade the honest, intelligent person. Mr. Obama is the first president who was able to dispense with appealing to the honest, intelligent American.

Mr. Obama's, and Mrs. Clinton's, contempt for the truth, and the degree to which their constituents are indifferent to their dishonesty-and to their many other transgressions against morality and the rule of law-suggests a degree of public and private corruption that we could not have imagined a generation ago. Remember "Bush lied, people died." The reason that refrain was as effective as it was-even though it was itself a lie-was that Mr. Bush's constituents took morality in their leaders seriously.

And it was only one lie that Mr. Bush's opponents alleged. One would be hard-pressed to count the number of lies Mr. Obama has told since he took office. But the Bush incident exemplifies the reality that in the hands of the Left today, morality is nothing more than a weapon to be used against their opponents, precisely because their opponents take it seriously.

The Left have never had much use for what most of us consider morality. Rationality, honesty, industriousness, self-reliance, thrift, reliability, sobriety, sexual restraint, good manners, an ability to defer gratification and to engage in long-range planning, reverence for those who merit it-these are all values objectively necessary to making the most of life on this earth. But they are also what are commonly called "bourgeois," or middle class values, values long disparaged and sneered at by the Left, for whom the middle class represents the height of narrow-minded conventionality. It now appears that Democratic voters no longer require such moral virtues of their leaders.

Nowadays, the Left are largely relativists when it comes to morality. Live and let live. Whatever floats your boat. But there are a couple of moral values about which they are not indifferent. One of these is the idea that one man's need is another man's moral obligation. This is the premise that underlies the welfare state, and the Left do not treat is as a relative moral principle but as one to which everyone must subscribe. This is because it is tailor made for collectivists and totalitarians, as Stalin and Mao would attest.

Much of the moral deterioration of the Left today is due to the metastasizing of the welfare state. A government with the authority to expropriate the wealth of one person and give it to another is corrupt ipso facto. Left untreated, such corruption will spread like a cancer. The party that champions the welfare state will attract the most corrupt office seekers and supporters. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the inevitable product of the welfare state.

Yet, despite their manifest corruption, the Democrats are able to pose as the moral alternative to the Republicans. Why? Because they "care" about the needy and the underprivileged, in contrast to the cold and heartless Republicans. And the Republicans cannot oppose them in principle because they concede the Left's moral premise, that one man's need is another's moral obligation. Today the Republican establishment is as committed to continuing the welfare state, for political and moral reasons, as the Democrats are.

Now the welfare state is metastasizing in a new direction, which we call political correctness. Instead of expropriating the wealth of some and redistributing it to others, political correctness perverts the law to afford special privileges to its clients. Blacks, women, homosexuals, and immigrants, legal and illegal, number among the beneficiaries of politically correct legislation and enactments. "Homosexual marriage" and forcing the Catholic Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraception and abortion services to their lay employees exemplify this kind of legal enactment.

Just as the welfare state rests on the moral foundation of selflessness, so political correctness rests on a few moral principles that the Left treat as universally valid. One of these is the idea of "inclusiveness." Inclusiveness requires that we admit members of previously excluded groups, such as blacks and homosexuals, to all our social and other endeavors. Inclusiveness fosters "diversity," which, for the Left, is the great desideratum of our time.

Another, related moral principle of the Left is tolerance. If we are to include persons with unusual sexual proclivities or with alien cultural practices and values in our endeavors, then clearly we must learn to tolerate their practices and values.

As the current jihad against Donald Trump illustrates, the "tolerant" Left enforce the few moral principles they subscribe to-including moral relativism, paradoxical as it may seem-with all the fervor of a Cotton Mather. Indeed, one of the great lies of our time is that the Left represent the forces of enlightenment against a religious Right determined to shove their morals down others' throats. Everything the Left believe in they try to impose on the rest of us by means of government force. If making girls accommodate sexually confused boys in their bath and locker rooms is not forcing the Left's values upon others, then I don't know what is.

Political correctness simply expands the corruption of the welfare state into new areas. So why are the Democrats, despite their immorality and political corruption, able to continue to pose as the only moral choice for American voters? Again, because they "care," about blacks and women and homosexuals and all the rest, enough to twist the Constitution in knots to purchase the votes of their constituents. It's the same game as the welfare state, only played with different currency, and the Republicans cannot play that game without fatally compromising their principles.

But political correctness is especially insidious, because it uses our most cherished classical liberal principles as weapons against us.

You believe in racial equality, say the Left? Then remain silent as we disrespect your national anthem in support of our comrades who are ginning up a war on your "racist" police.

You believe in equality between the sexes? Then send your women into combat. And while you're at it, why not erase any remaining differences between the sexes. Let's start by inventing new "genders," until the concepts of male and female are obliterated altogether. Beyond the differences in reproductive hardware, they're just social constructs anyway.

You believe in tolerance and equality? Then tolerate homosexual marriage. Who cares if we have to re-define-by government force, as usual- a social and cultural institution that goes back to the dawn of civilization, and that remained utterly uncontroversial until ten minutes ago?

You claim to be a nation of immigrants? Then allow us to flood the United States with a deluge of immigrants from cultures with little or no experience of your free political institutions, this at a time when Leftist orthodoxy argues against assimilation.  So what if a great many of these immigrants will become recruits to the ranks of Democrats seeking to extend the political corruption and cultural derangement of the Obama years?

You believe in religious tolerance? Then tolerate these thousands of Muslim refugees, at time when a great many of their co-religionists are at war with us. So what if there is precious little in the cultures from which these Muslims come that would prepare them to support our free political institutions, and a great deal that would make them hostile to those institutions and traditions?

There is a way to fight back against political correctness. But the Republican establishment will not avail themselves of it, because they believe that to do so would make them racists and sexists and omni-phobes. Recall that during the election campaign many Republicans were as horrified by Mr. Trump's lack of political correctness as the Democrats were. As in the case of the welfare state, the Republican establishment has conceded the moral validity of political correctness.

But Donald Trump has shown how to defeat it. Don't give an inch, concede nothing, and, above all, refuse to sanction their moral pretensions. Political correctness can defeat us only if we participate in their moral charade. Refuse it our sanction, and it crumbles into incoherent street violence.

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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