Tuesday, November 21, 2017



Could trophy hunting be saving rhinos, elephants and lions?

IT’S almost too easy to jet out to Africa and hunt a lion, elephant or rhino in its “natural habitat”.

A shocking new documentary film, Trophy, shows how massive conventions are now flogging package holidays for those looking for the perfect kill.

The only catch is, they often have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to slaughter some of world’s most iconic animals in their natural habitat — some say they are saving theses precious species at the same time as killing them.

“I did not know that you could simply go online and, within minutes, book a hunt for any animal that you desired — a lion, a cheetah, an elephant, even a critically endangered black rhino,” said internationally acclaimed film director, Shaul Schwarz, whose film explores the controversial subject.

“Could it be that simple? It is,” he said. “Hundreds of African outfitters will welcome you, lodge you, and provide legal permits for your hunt.”

Trophy hunting, the recreational killing of animals the killing of big game for a set of horns or tusks, a skin, or a taxidermied body has become a billion-dollar business.

Now a heated debate is raging over whether this money, some of which goes back into conservation, is worth the moral issues it raises and the market for killing and animal products that it feeds.

“The basic principal of supply and demand drives these businesses — the rarer and closer to extinction a species is, the higher the price for the kill,” said Schwarz.

The cost of some of these hunts is staggering. For example, a 14-day, single elephant hunt in Namibia can cost around $105,000.

Some of that cash is reportedly used to fund conservation projects to protect the area’s wildlife and often the meat goes back into the local, predominantly impoverished, communities.

Felix Marnewecke, a guide and hunter who leads trophy tours, told National Geographic that a portion of the fee is paid directly to community members. “I feel quite shitty when an elephant dies, but those elephants pay for the conservation of the other 2500 that move through here,” he told the magazine “Trophy hunting is the best economic model we have in Africa right now.”

“In the end it may save this place — and the elephants too.”

Problem solved then, right?

Mr Schwarz, says this couldn’t be further from the truth and some of the statistics he uses in the film are shocking. He says big-game populations are dwindling because of pressure hunting, human encroachment, shifting climate norms, and widespread criminal poaching.

Since 1970, the world has lost over 60 per cent of all wild animals. In 1900, there were 500,000 rhinos in the world. Now there are fewer than 30,000.

In 1900, there were 10 million elephants. In 2015 there were only 350,000 left.

And there are holes in this “hunting to save” theory. The profit-driven industry is overseen in some cases by corrupt governments and it feeds a demand for products from these animals — such as ivory.

The film also shows how the commodification of killing is becoming like a “fast-food culture” where hunters can go on “canned” expeditions — where they can kill lots of animals in a more enclosed environment. They are also far cheaper than the multiple day hunts.

In Trophy, US tourists are shown gunning down tied-up crocodiles at close-range hunts and celebrating in a “canned” experience.

Biologist and lion expert Craig Packer, told National Geographic the “kill to protect” argument isn’t justified. “If hunters were shooting lions for a million dollars and returning a million per lion directly into management, they would be on solid ground,” he said. “But lions are shot for tens of thousands of dollars, and very little of that goes into conservation.”

And, if these hunters really cared about the animals they claim to help protect — wouldn’t they be better not killing at all?

The link between hunting and conservation is nothing new. Prominent conservationists such as Charles Darwin and Ernest Hemingway were also big hunters.

But, trophy hunting and glorifying of big-game killing through social media have foisted it firmly back into the public eye in recent years.

The killing of celebrity lion Cecil in Zimbabwe three years ago created headlines around the world and outrage on social media.

The US dentist who killed the lion using a bow and arrow went into hiding and spent thousands on personal security.

Some hunters have claimed many those who are outraged by these pictures are hypocrites because they eat packaged meat and consume animal products from cruel, industrial-scale farming.

Trophy also explores how the animal parts from these incredible beasts are trafficked and how the hunting industry is feeding into it.

The filmmakers met with John Hume — who is the world’s largest private rhino breeder and founder/owner of Buffalo Dream Ranch, home to approximately 1500 rhinos in South Africa. He says rhino horn is most expensive animal product in the world and it is worth more than gold.

The retired property developer publicly advocates for legalisation of the trade in rhino horn and took the South African government to court in order to lift a 2009 moratorium on rhino horn trade that triggered a massive spike in poaching.

He trims his rhinos’ horns every two years and has over five tons of horn currently stockpiled and claims the market for the substance is not going away. So, he is advocating for a transparent, legal market.

And, just this week, President Trump said that he was temporarily reversing his decision to lift the Obama-era ban on importing big game hunting trophies into the United States.

Could Mr Hume be right?

“There are no easy answer to these questions,” said Schwarz. “We hope Trophy becomes a first step bringing those oppositional forces together to ignite a healthy, informed debate on how to save these animals before they disappear.”

SOURCE






Why Didn't Liberals Embrace 'Whiskey Tango Foxtrot'?

I don't know what made me decide to take a chance the other day on Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a movie released last year and now available on Netflix. I've had it up to here with anti-American, military-bashing movies about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I had no reason to believe that this one, about an American network news correspondent who spends a couple of years based in Kabul, would be any less PC or preachy than Redacted, Syriana, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss, Grace Is Gone, Green Zone, or a dozen others. (I liked The Hurt Locker and American Sniper, but Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which flopped last year when it was released in cinemas, definitely didn't look like it was in the same class as those pictures.)

But I gave the movie a chance anyway, deciding to have it on while I was futzing around the apartment. I was pleasantly surprised almost immediately. Tina Fey, playing a longtime newsroom writer with zero on-camera, war-zone, or foreign-correspondent experience (the movie is based on a memoir by Kim Barker, then of the Chicago Tribune, now of the New York Times), arrives in Kabul only to be greeted at the airport by a hijab-clad local woman who barks at her: “Cover your hair, shameless whore!” That line was a good sign – this was one movie, apparently, that wasn't going to back off from gags at the expense of Islamic culture. After Fey is driven to the house where she'll live with a bunch of reporters for other Western media organizations, one of those reporters – a stunning Britain blonde – tells her that while she (Fey) is a “six or seven” in New York, she's almost a ten in Kabul. Another good sign – this movie's not too PC to make jokes based on the premise (offensive in some quarters nowadays) that some women are more attractive than others.

It got even better. Seeing a bunch of women in blue burkas, Fey calls them “IKEA bags.” She gives her translator a copy of Oprah's magazine, O, so he can get some idea of how women think. Visiting a village on a Marines embed, she's irked that the male interpreters aren't allowed to talk to the local, burka-wearing women. In the same village, where a well installed by the Marines has been repeatedly destroyed, presumably by the Taliban, she's taken aside by the village women, who, removing their burkas, explain to her that they're the ones who keep destroying the well, because walking down to the river to get water is the closest they ever get to being free.

I was stunned. Was this really a Hollywood movie?

There was more. Interviewing an Afghan official, Fey addresses the continuation under the Karzai government of Taliban-style “vice and virtue” policing and the retention of sharia law in Kandahar. Preparing to visit Kandahar, Fey quips about the burka she's obliged to wear there: “It's so pretty I don't even want to vote.” Her Afghan bodyguard tells her: “Now you are in the blue prison.” In Kandahar, she visits a girls' school firebombed by the Taliban. There's graffiti on the wall. “What does it say?” she asks. The answer: No education for women.

No, it's not All Quiet on the Western Front or Saving Private Ryan or The Deer Hunter. It's a nice, appealing little movie about real people – a fish-out-of-water story with likable characters and a colorful setting. The funny lines landed; the poignant moments came off; the obligatory kind-of-love story that developed in the film's second half was believable and interesting enough and neither took up too much screen time nor yanked the film off course.

And no, there was no out-and-out personal tragedy, no overt depiction of wartime horror (unless you count a brief, scary encounter with a ragtag group of Taliban types and a climactic kidnapping scene), but we already know that war is hell and there are plenty of war movies that give us two solid hours of hell. The idea here was plainly to look at the war in Afghanistan through a different window. And it worked. It felt fresh; I felt as if I was glimpsing a side of that country that I hadn't seen before.

One more thing. Without engaging in so much as a second of sententious moralizing, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot sent a powerful feminist message. Much of its humor was at the expense of Islamic patriarchy. For that reason, American feminists should've embraced this picture. Hell, American liberals generally should've embraced it for the humane picture it paints of friendly, respectful interaction between Westerners and ordinary Afghans, who are presented consistently without condescension.

And yet I hadn't even heard of this film before. Why was that? As soon as it was over, I looked up some reviews online – and I found out what sins writer Robert Carlock and directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa had committed, in the view of the mainstream cultural commentariat. The Hollywood Reporter informed me that Whiskey Tango Foxtrot had done “nothing to illuminate the larger geopolitical picture.”

Other reviews leveled essentially the same charge. What nonsense. Did Ninotchka “illuminate the larger geopolitical picture”? Of course what really bugged most of these reviewers was that the movie didn't make villains out of the Americans and saints out of the Afghans. Also, they didn't like the fact that the two juiciest Afghan parts weren't played by real Afghans.

Then there was the whole verboten business of making fun of anything remotely connected to Islam. The Ayatollah Khomeini once said that there's no humor in Islam, and in America's left-wing cultural establishment there's certainly no humor allowed anywhere near that most sacred (and scary) of topics. Case in point: Melissa Anderson, whose review of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot appeared in the Village Voice and several other left-leaning metro weeklies. Actually accusing the film of “mild Islamophobia” and of “disregard for the battle-ravaged Asian nation” – sheer calumny! – Anderson was outraged that when Fey makes her “IKEA bags” remark, “we are meant not to be appalled by her bigotry but to chortle along with her forthrightness.”

Yes, that's the word Anderson used: “bigotry.” As far as she's concerned, a woman who openly and unapologetically disapproves of men forcing women into “blue prisons” is guilty of nothing less than bigotry. No surprise there: this kind of repellent cultural relativism, this refusal to stand in solidarity with the planet's most oppressed females, is what passes for American feminism nowadays. And it's why an effective, authentically feminist movie like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gets trashed by the same types of moral and intellectual pygmies who think that Linda Sarsour is a women's rights heroine.

SOURCE





Men are not a different species

Gender determinism has returned in PC form

Patrick West

We are in the midst of a moral panic. And not just any old moral panic – a traditional reactionary one directed at paedophiles, immigrants, skinheads, mods and rockers or Teddy Boys. No, this is a proper ‘progressive’ moral panic, as embodied by the Pestminster witch-hunt. This moral panic is about men, and the belief that there is an existential problem with males as a whole. Masculinity has now become pathologised, and sexism today has become transformed into a modern-day evil: invisible, intangible, omnipotent.

For decades we learned to appreciate that while your sex might influence the way you act and think, it doesn’t define you. Environment is just as important in shaping who you are, both in how culture interprets the differences between men and women, and through other factors unrelated to your sex. More importantly, human beings are not hostages to biology: we can think for ourselves. We may not be able to escape nature or rewrite how we were nurtured, but we are not condemned by either. My genitals, chromosomes, hormones or ‘male brain’ aren’t writing these words – I am.

Yet gender determinism is curiously back in fashion (as is racial determinism, with the rhetoric about the ‘problem with whiteness’). It has become normal to talk of ‘men’ as a problematic category, as if all ‘men’ are potential or actual sexual predators, as if we are a coherent category of automatons, confined by those inverted commas. When Caitlin Moran concluded her Times column on Saturday speaking about ‘the problem of men’, she summed up a mainstream sentiment. It’s astonishing that it needs saying these days that this is no different to talking about the ‘problem of women’ or the problem of ‘the blacks’.

It should baffle us that gender determinism has magically returned, but it is the logical consequence of identity politics, which has held sway ever since the appeal of class began to wither in the 1960s. If you are going to obsess about gender (or race), as has been the norm, making it the foundation of your very essence will follow. This is the logic of political trends, and fashion in general: they always veer to the extreme. Just as once skirts got shorter, flares wider, hair longer and now hipster beards bigger, political trends always get more outlandish.

It is this very ignorance of class that makes today’s gender determinism so intellectually bankrupt. Not only is it irrational to talk of ‘men’ as if they are a different species, and prisoners of biology, but this current fad among a loud, unrepresentative coterie of academics, twenty- and thirtysomething tertiary types and upper-middle-class London journalists ignores class and social status, and other factors that help to shape you, such as race, religion, age and sexual orientation.

Power is gender-blind. A docker in Dover, an African-American in Detroit, or a Third World manual labourer: each possess a fraction of the power and privilege of a wealthy woman in London who writes for a national newspaper. There has been improper behaviour at Westminster and Hollywood not because the culprits are men, but because they are MPs and film directors. Their power – and abuse of it – derives from their elevated social status, not their sex.

Any person who talks about the ‘problem of men’ implicitly condemns their own father and any brother or son they might have. To talk in such hostile, blanket terms of ‘men’ exposes the inhumanity of gender determinism. All of us have or have had a male and female biological parent; misandry is as irrational as misogyny.

No one factor determines you, either biologically or environmentally. You yourself are the final arbiter of who you are and what you are. Like most men, I have never raped a woman or groped a female colleague, and so I refute the war on men’s deterministic narrative. I refuse to accept it. I am not guilty of anything.

SOURCE




It Begins: YouTube Censors Christian site

Two weeks ago, I was summarily informed in a brief email from YouTube that our Russian Faith channel —on which we had spent hundreds of hours of hard work and which complements the Russian Faith website, which I own - had been ‘terminated.’ No reason was given other than a very general one which could mean anything.

Russian Faith is a new media project I started in September:  a website, YouTube channel (now banned), Facebook, and Twitter - to cover Christian issues in general, and the huge story of the renaissance of Christianity in Russia.

This dramatic turn by both government and society in Russia is very important not just for Christians, but for the whole world, regardless of their religious views, because it has so many ramifications important to us Americans.

It should affect our foreign policy, and it contrasts with the hostility to Christian values in our own Western societies. It is a fact that Russia has emerged as the leading defender of world Christianity, and it is a disgrace that liberal forces in the US elites and the government are among Christianity's most hostile foes - both at home and abroad.

Millions of Russians now routinely march for Christianity
Observing the Christian renaissance in Russia first hand while living there, I realized that this story is being badly misunderstood, misrepresented, and under-reported - another massive fail by the mainstream media. No surprises here.

When we launched, we received glowing reviews, enthusiastic support and encouragement from the public, and raised over $10,000 from hundreds of small donors in an initial crowdfund.

The videos which were banned were of the most positive character - videos about love, sacrifice and charity, about honor and respect. YouTube banned them ALL - and most incredibly - refuses to explain why!

I have started and managed successful YouTube channels and understand the environment very well, and it is obvious to me that this is deliberate censorship. Blocking monetization, suppression of views, and manipulation of statistics, is a huge, persistent problem, and there has been a dramatic increase over the past two months across all the big tech platforms.

I have been monitoring this with increasing alarm. If you think this is un-American, then please sign our petition below, and follow my personal pages on Facebook or Twitter. I will be talking more about these encroachments on our rights in the coming weeks and months.

I and the Russian Faith team feel violated - our constitutional rights have been trampled on, our hard work trashed. Our ability to fund this site, which we started on a shoestring thanks to hundreds of small donations from people all across America and the world, has been attacked.

Russian Faith is a labor of love - everyone involved has given and sacrificed to share good things with the world. Here is our initial crowdfund video explaining why we started this (and yes, this one was banned by YouTube too):

We’ve decided to fight back - and have started a petition (sign below) and other measures. If you agree that it is time for Christians of all denominations to speak up against the hostility coming from the elites who control our media and big tech platforms, please join us (see below).

Our views are socially conservative, reflecting the views of the Russian Orthodox Christian Church, which includes being critical of the LGBT movement - and I suspect that is where the problem lies (see below).

The censorship wreaked havoc on our website because we had embedded the videos in dozens of articles, all of which were now showing empty grey boxes where videos used to be. Many of those articles were about the videos, rendering the articles meaningless.

In many cases, we had spent hundreds of hours painstakingly translating videos which were in Russian into English, embedding the subtitles. All this was swept away with a keystroke from a nameless YouTube censor who won’t even condescend to explain what his reasons were.

We will have to spend hundreds of hours fixing it all at considerable expense.

Most importantly, we had our crowdfunding video on that channel, and it had been embedded on many websites across the internet - all of this was also crippled by YouTube’s arbitrary decision. And we depend on the crowdfunding to survive.

Currently, we are still unable to publish our usual volume of content because our small team has to repair all this gratuitous and unnecessary damage.

This is deliberate censorship

I am very familiar with YouTube's rules and guidelines, and I can say with absolute certainty that they discriminated against us, and treated us unfairly as if they were deliberately looking for a reason to shut us down.

The way it usually works is that if you do make a mistake, YouTube gives you a warning, which you can dispute - and only if you accumulate a certain number of these ‘strikes’, and are unable to disprove them, and refuse to take the videos down, does YouTube take the drastic measure of banning your channel.

We got no such warning and had not been notified of any ‘strikes’. The ban came out of the blue.

If there were some violations on any of the videos, why didn’t YouTube notify us? Why did they not give us a chance to take down the videos? Why didn't they give us a chance to dispute any complaints, if there were any? Why do they refuse to answer questions about this? Obviously, they wanted to ban the whole channel, and to stop it altogether. But why?

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

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