WHITES NEED NOT APPLY: Brits of English Heritage Banned from Paid Training Posts… at English Heritage

Historic England, the public body tasked with preserving England’s heritage, is advertising paid training placements for itself, the National Trust, English Heritage and other bodies which are not open to white people.

“We’re excited to offer a number of training placements for undergraduates or recent graduates (graduated within the last 18 months),” begins the advert, which is illustrated with a picture of a hijabi Muslim — before the kicker:

“If you’re interested in gaining skills and experience for a career in heritage and identify as having Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic Heritage or mixed heritage (jump to Background to find out why), please see how to apply below.”

The ‘background’ section of the advert explains how the Tory government published a Culture White Paper in March 2016 which “challenged Historic England and other nationally funded cultural organisations to develop and share strategies for improving workforce diversity.”

It explains how, “In response, Historic England developed a Workforce Diversity Strategy which has several strands of activity but one of the most significant is a new paid Heritage Training Placements scheme for undergraduates and recent graduates with Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic Heritage.”

The result is that the paid training placements — which are being offered not only at Historic England but also other public bodies including the National Trust, the Heritage Alliance, and English Heritage — are not actually open to applicants of English heritage.

Social justice policies of this nature are extremely popular with Prime Minister Theresa May, who has also declared a crusade against the “burning injustice” of the arguably fictitious gender pay gap.

White Britons have also been banned from applying for lucrative paid internships at the BBC and ITV’s Peston on Sunday programme recently, and even prevented from attending recruitment workshops run by the British Transport Police.

This is despite the fact that the White British working-class actually have the poorest life outcomes of any ethnic group in the country by several measures, with Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner recently having to admit that the focus on “race and women’s agendas” has had a negative on white working-class boys, in particular.

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London's Mayor Declares Intense New 'Knife Control' Policies To Stop Epidemic Of Stabbings

Pissing into the wind

An epidemic of stabbings and acid attacks in London has gotten so bad that London mayor Sadiq Khan is announcing broad new "knife control" policies designed to keep these weapons of war out of the hands of Londoners looking to cause others harm.

The "tough, immediate" measures involve an incredible police crackdown, a ban on home deliveries of knives and acid, and expanding law enforcement stop-and-search powers so that police may stop anyone they believe to be a threat, or planning a knife or acid attack.

Khan announced Friday that the city has created a "violent crime taskforce of 120 officers" tasked with rooting out knife-wielding individuals in public spaces, and is pumping nearly $50 million into the Metropolitan Police department so that they can better arm themselves against knife attacks. He's also empowering the Met Police to introduce "targeted patrols with extra stop and search powers for areas worst-affected," according to a statement.

The mayor took to Twitter to announce his new policies.

Strangely enough, Khan is responsible for decreasing the number of stop-and-searches, having previously declared the tactic racist and potentially Islamophobic. It's also not clear what local Londoners will now use to cut their food.

Parliament is also set to take up heavy "knife control" legislation when it resumes this week. The U.K. government is expected to introduce a ban on online knife sales and home knife deliveries, declare it "illegal to possess zombie knives and knuckledusters in private" — "zombie knives" are those defined as being manufactured for the purpose of being used as a person-to-person weapon — and ban sales of caustic materials to anyone under the age of 18, the Independent reports.

London has seen a dramatic uptick in murder rates, surpassing even New York City in the number of homicides every month since the beginning of 2018. It has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world, and, technically, knives carried "without good reason" are off limits to anyone under the age of 18.

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Trump appointee at center of fight over religious freedom

Roger Severino is implementing strict rules at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) meant to protect religious rights — in part because of discrimination he says he has experienced firsthand.

The son of South American immigrants, Severino, the director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), grew up in Los Angeles, where he says “people attempted to close doors in front of me, and I’ve had to fight to pry them open.”

In government, Severino says the discrimination he has faced has been focused more on his politics and religion.

While working at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Office, he said a supervisor, commenting on Severino’s religious and conservative beliefs, told him, “I thought we were done hiring people like you.”

This background led the conservative advocate, who opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, to arrive at HHS with one goal: to make sure that health workers who have religious- or moral-based objections to abortions or other procedures aren’t forced by their employers to participate in them or have their jobs threatened for refusing to do so.

“Nurses and doctors who dedicate their careers to saving lives should not be coerced into helping take lives in abortion or assisted suicide,” he said in an interview with The Hill. “This is and shouldn’t be a controversial position.”

Severino has launched a new division in the Office for Civil Rights solely responsible for enforcing laws that let health professionals opt out of procedures that violate their religion or conscience.

It is also charged with investigating claims of discrimination from those who say their religious or moral rights have been violated.

An accompanying proposed rule, which hasn’t yet been finalized, would require entities that receive HHS funding to certify they are complying with the conscience statutes. Those that are not could lose funding.

The new focus at HHS on religious freedom has been applauded by conservative and anti-abortion rights groups, but has drawn an aggressive backlash from Democrats and LGBT advocates.

They argue the new rules could exacerbate discrimination against gay and transgender individuals by allowing people to do so based on their religious beliefs.

“This has been a problem for many years, but we’re profoundly concerned these proposed changes and change in focus will inevitably worsen an already bad situation,” said Jennifer Pizer, law and policy director of Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization and legal group that focuses on LGBT rights.

Overall, the changes at the OCR reflect a broader elevation of religious freedom within the administration.

Last year, for example, HHS released a rule offering broad exemptions to ObamaCare’s contraception mandate for organizations and businesses that have religious or moral objections to providing birth control to their employees. This, too, prompted backlash from Democrats and spurred lawsuits from liberal states, but was cheered by religious and anti-abortion rights groups who saw the change as long overdue.

“Coming in, I said a major priority would be protecting conscience and religious freedom, and we’ve done several things in respect to that. It’s a priority that’s shared by the president, the secretary, and I as well,” Severino said.

The controversial rule on HHS funding only specifically mentions abortion, sterilization and assisted suicide as procedures that could be opted out of on religious grounds, but questions have been raised on whether it would also allow groups and businesses to opt out of procedures for gay or transgender people as well.

While at the Heritage Foundation, however, Severino argued that health professionals shouldn’t have to provide services to transgender people if it violated their religious or moral beliefs.

 “Religious liberty is a fundamental American value, but religion should not permit a person to cause harm to others or subvert the rights of others,” Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.), ranking members of the House Energy and Commerce and the Education and the Workforce committees, respectively, wrote in their public comment letter on the regulation.

“Women, minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups already face widespread discrimination in our health care system and this policy would only make this worse by offering an extensive group of individuals and entities a license to discriminate.”

In Severino’s view, he’s simply righting the wrongs of the previous administration, which conservatives argue didn’t take religious discrimination in health care seriously.

“We’re moving from callousness, indifference and hostility to respect when it comes to religious freedom,” Severino said.

Asked whether workers could opt out of performing other procedures, like gender reassignment surgery, Severino replied, “We’re considering public comments on several of the issues you just raised. We can’t prejudge until we consider all the public comments and come to conclusions.”

But, he said, the proposed rule said nothing about using religion or conscience to deny care to LGBT individuals.

“The proposed regulation mentioned abortion or assisted suicide — I think it was nearly 200 times. It mentioned LGBT issues a grand total of zero times.”

That doesn’t soothe advocates, who argue the rule is written so vaguely and broadly that a health worker could deny care to someone who is transgender, arguing it would violate their religion or conscience.

Severino says religious freedom is an under-enforced and neglected civil right, just as important as protections from race and gender discrimination.

“For too long, we have not treated conscience and religious freedom on par with every other civil right,” Severino argues.

The changes are intended to “restore the balance and parity” between religious freedoms and other rights.

Despite the criticism from those who oppose the direction he has taken OCR in, he says he’s right where he should be.

“It feels like all the steps I’ve taken in my career, unbeknownst to me, were leading me to this position,” he said.

“All of those things came together in this moment where I feel I am exactly where I need to be, and that’s a very good feeling.”

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‘Pay Gap’ Myth Ignores Women’s Intentional Job Choices

Tuesday is supposedly “Equal Pay Day,” but what does that mean?

Well, according to outdated, flawed, and incomplete statistics that say women make only 82 cents on the dollar, compared with men, Equal Pay Day signifies how long into the new year women have to work just to catch up to the earnings of their male counterparts from the previous year.

Equal-pay activists have declared April 10 as the approximate Equal Pay Day for 2018, but based on the 82-cent figure, the date should have been March 21.

Regardless of the actual “celebrated” date, if women actually had to work that much longer than men to make the same amount of money, women might as well pack their briefcases and go home. After all, who would really work an extra three months to earn the same pay for the same job as their male counterparts?

That level of pervasive pay gap simply doesn’t exist.

Statistics matter, and they can help households, businesses, and governments make informed decisions. But statistics—particularly selective and incomplete ones—can also be misleading, and even detrimental.

The pay gap is the perfect example of statistics gone awry.

For starters, the data cited in the gender pay gap looks only at the median earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers. It doesn’t differentiate really important factors, such as education, occupation, experience, and hours, which account for nearly all of the differential in earnings between men and women.

It turns out that accounting for all these factors eliminates all but an estimated 3 to 5 cents of the gender pay gap.

Data is also subject to human error. Comparisons between survey data and administrative records reveal substantially underreporting of income within some of the most widely used survey data.

Consequently, the data disregards substantial changes, such as large gains in women’s retirement incomes.

And finally, data isn’t the supreme indicator, because not everything comes with a price tag or pay stub. What is the value of a flexible work schedule; a job with huge upward-mobility potential; particular benefits packages; the ability to tap into flexible, sharing-economy labor platforms, such as Uber and Airbnb; or to access new business platforms, such as Etsy for additional income?

Workers who seek these job characteristics often do so despite lower pay. But those intentional choices don’t show up in the statistics.

If a woman has the exact same job title as a man, but works 30 hours a week instead of 40, and sets her own hours and telecommutes, her paycheck likely won’t match that of the man’s—nor should it.

One of the job qualities that women—particularly mothers—value most is flexibility. Flexibility is a difficult job feature to measure, but that’s exactly what a group of economists recently did using data from the Uber ride-hailing company.

After analyzing data from more than 1 million registered Uber drivers, the authors tagged the average value of being able to set one’s own work schedule on an hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute basis at $150 per week. That’s the equivalent of $7,800 per year, or almost 20 percent of the median earnings of women in the U.S.

In essence, this is the value of choice. It’s not the same value for everyone, but it shows that many workers are willing to sacrifice a lot in terms of pay for more flexibility and choice.

On the opposite side, some employers are willing to pay a high price for flexibility from their employees—to log long hours and to work day or night.

Economist Claudia Goldin has found evidence of “part-time penalties” in certain very high-income fields. This happens when certain companies—those in finance and law, for example—pay employees who work 80 hours a week more than twice as much as they pay those who work 40 hours per week.

This likely has to do with certain employers’ need for employees to respond at all hours or to log double or triple time when needed, coupled with employees’ demand for higher pay when sacrificing so much of their own time and flexibility.

Anecdotal evidence and the choices women and men make suggest that women value job choices more than men and that their preference for greater flexibility accounts for some—if not all—of the remaining pay gap between men and women.

But choice is what legislation such as the Paycheck Fairness Act would squelch. Equal pay for equal work is already the law of the land. Imposing further-reaching policies in an attempt to eliminate pay differences that have little or nothing to do with discrimination could actually backfire.

Pay regimes based on factors such as job titles or “equivalent work” would take away businesses’ freedom to determine the value of their work and undo decades of women’s progress by imposing one-size-fits-all jobs that take away women’s—and all workers’—freedom to negotiate pay in exchange for personal priorities.

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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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