Sunday, May 19, 2019



AG Barr Urges Return to 'Comply First, Complain Later' in Dealings With Police

This is hugely important advice that could save lots of lives. The media are full of police treating blacks harshly, even killing them.  But it regularly emerges that the black concerned was being defiant to the police.  As defiance is always seen as potentially dangerous to the police officer, bullets then fly

In a speech marking National Police Week, Attorney General William Barr said resisting police officers -- an increasingly common phenomenon -- puts everyone in danger.

Barr said it's time to "get back to basics" when it comes to public dealings with police:

One of the factors that is increasing the danger to police officers these days is increasing toleration of the notion that it is okay to resist the police. It was once understood that resistance is a serious crime because it necessarily triggers an escalation of violence that endangers the life not only of the police office, but also the suspect.

It was not too long ago that influential public voices – whether in the media, or among community and civic leaders – stressed the need to comply with police commands, even if one thinks they are unjust. “Comply first” and, if you think you have been wronged, “complain later.”

But we don’t hear this much anymore. Instead, when an incident escalates due to a suspect’s violent resistance to police that fact is almost always ignored by the commentary. The officer’s every action is dissected, but the suspect’s resistance, and the danger it posed, frequently goes without mention.

We need to get back to basics. We need public voices, in the media and elsewhere, to underscore the needs to “Comply first, and, if warranted, complain later.” This will make everyone safe -- the police, suspects, and the community at large. This will save lives.

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Women's Institute banned from baking cakes for local hospice due to council health and safety rules

This old idiocy again.  WI food is probably safer than some commercial foods

The Women's Institute has been banned from baking cakes for a local hospice after council health and safety bosses said that volunteers would need kitchen inspections.  

The Leicestershire and Rutland WI was told by the hospice that they cannot accept cakes from their members unless individual kitchens had been visited by health inspectors and issued with a hygiene certificate. 

The WI had been providing the hospice Loros (Leicestershire and Rutland Organisation for the Relief Of Suffering) with baked treats for 40 years.  

Glenice Wignall, vice chairwoman of the board of trustees of the Leicestershire and Rutland Women's Institute, said: "It is all very sad. We started baking cakes for Loros when they set up. Our groups took it in turns to bake the cakes but now that will all have to stop." 

Mrs Wignall, 75, has worked for the Women’s Institute for 30 years and had never encountered problems with health and safety before.

However, this is not the first time health and safety have prevented people from enjoying the delights of home baking.

Last year Prue Leith, a judge on Great British Bake Off, said that staff were not allowed to take home leftover treats. “We’re not allowed to take anything home though, because of health and safety, which is sad really,” she told OK! Magazine.   

Loros cares for 2,500 people across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland and runs 29 charity shops.   It is believed that bar began after Leicester City Council food safety experts inspected the kitchen of the Loros hospice in February and told staff about the regulations. 

A member of the Cossington WI, who did not want to be named, said this is “health and safety gone mad.”  

Loros facilities and operations manager, Helen Williams, said: "We did receive an inspection from Environmental Health and if we don't comply with their report then we could risk jeopardising our own food rating certificate here at Loros. 

She added: "We have loved receiving donations from so many generous supporters, just like the WI, but unfortunately, this is a decision made by the local authority, not by our organisation." 

A Leicester City Council spokesperson said: "The most recent food hygiene inspection of Loros rated the establishment as five - very good, the highest possible rating. 

"However, to comply with current food safety regulations, the cake maker that supplies the snack bar must be registered with the council as a food establishment.   "This process is simple, free of charge and registration cannot be refused." 

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More on the fantasist the British police believed

Credulous police who ignore the rules of evidence are a danger to us all

The man who sparked Scotland Yard’s £2 million VIP sex abuse inquiry after claiming to have been raped and tortured by a group of prominent public figures is a convicted paedophile himself, it can now be revealed.

Carl Beech, 51, who was known as Nick throughout the Operation Midland investigation, was convicted of making and possessing indecent images of young boys and of voyeurism earlier this year.

On the second day of his trial for perverting the course of justice and fraud at Newcastle Crown Court, the jury was told that Northumbria police had found the child porn images on various devices when they were investigating him on suspicion of lying about his own abuse.

Tony Badenoch QC, prosecuting, described Mr Beech as a "committed and manipulative paedophile", and said he had even tried to blame his own teenage son when he was confronted with the evidence.

On Tuesday, the court heard how Mr Beech had gone to Scotland Yard in 2014 claiming to have been sadistically sexually abused by a group of powerful public figures including, Sir Edward Heath, the former prime minister, Lord Brittan, the former home secretary, Field Marshall Lord Bramall and Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP.

He even claimed the group had murdered three boys in front of him.

But despite Scotland Yard initially describing the claims as "credible and true", a subsequent investigation by the Northumbria Force had found his "most heinous" allegations were "totally unfounded" and "hopelessly compromised".

Mr Badenoch explained that as part of the police investigation, officers had seized a number of electronic devices belonging to Mr Beech and found indecent images of young boys, secretly taken photographs of school boys a covert recording of a boy using the lavatory at his house.

The barrister said: "These child sex offences were committed whilst he was speaking to investigating police officers. At the same time he perpetrated these lies about Harvey Proctor and so many others, he was also viewing indecent images of the gravest kind and spying on small boys".

The jury was told that when confronted with the evidence Mr Beech had initially pleaded not guilty, even suggesting that his son might have been responsible for the material.

But just as the trial had been about to get going in January he had changed his plea and admitted the offences.

The prosecutor said: "This evidence demonstrates that Carl Beech is a committed and manipulative paedophile, capable of deceit to investigators and limitless manipulation when required, including if necessary, framing his own child.

"The sort of individual concerned only for himself, unconcerned with the impact on others, whether it is falsely accusing them of heinous crimes, seeking to attribute blame to his own son for child pornography or gathering covert indecent images of small boys visiting his house."

Mr Badenoch suggested it was Mr Beech’s interest in child pornography that had prompted him to go to the police with his own allegations in the first place.

He told the court: "It all suggests that he also wants to be a part of it, and so he talked about it to the Metropolitan Police, intending for them to take it seriously and enable him to continue to do so."

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Busybodies ensure gender bias has now gone full circle

It is now men who are heavily discriminated against but sexist policies continue to rule.  Comment from Australia:

Reworking a suggestion by US Chief Justice John Roberts, the way to stop gender discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of gender. The judge was dealing with race discrimination in a case before the US Supreme Court just over a decade ago. But it is high time we draw some honest conclusions about gender discrimination. Have we turned the tables of injustice so that we now punish men? Are we OK with that?

Parents with sons and daughters about to enter the workforce ought to be particularly concerned. Those with young sons should be especially troubled if the search for fairness for one sex causes unfairness towards the other sex.

For years, gender warriors, corporate social engineers and motley bands of busybodies have been preoccupied with dismantling unconscious bias against women in the workplace. Unconscious bias is said to take place when recruiters prefer candidates who are similar to them, or when there is group pressure to conform with the decisions of others. A wider culture of appeasement by people who don’t want to make waves has sustained this agenda, regardless of whether unconscious bias is real.

In fact, the idea that many employers fall back on a deep-seated bias that discriminates against women has become so ensconced that gendered recruitment has sped in reverse. Corporate fashion now favours conscious bias, system-wide positive discrimination that gives young women a terrific boost into jobs. The flip side is that the job prospects of young men, and their careers, are being damaged. Unconscious bias is bad enough, if it exists. But is cementing real conscious bias the answer?

Feminist warriors talk about corrective justice that addresses historical wrongs. The weak-willed go along with this social justice narrative and virtue-signalling men, including those Male Champions of Change who advocate for positive discrimination in favour of women, relish the halo effect of sounding so damn good.

But are any of these people doing good? Recruiters will tell you, sotto voce, that women continue to make very different career choices at key points in their ­careers, and without a hint of ­coercion. Recruiters won’t say this publicly because dissenting from social justice orthodoxy is certain social death, and a likely career-killer too.

But anecdotally, they explain cases where the numbers of young women applying for certain graduate jobs are dramatically lower than for young men. Take XYZ Investment Bank with an annual program to recruit 100 new graduates, split 50-50 for gender equality. The bank will often receive applications from 300 men and 100 applications from women (a not unrealistic difference in some professions).

This means that the 300 men will have a one in six chance of ­securing a job and the 100 women will have a one in two chance.

Are we OK with that gender inequity?

Clumsy quotas ignore the real­ity of women’s choices. From sociologist Catherine Hakim’s extensive research, we know that for every woman who regards work as the centrepiece of their lives, there are three men. In other words, men and women are not competing in equal numbers. Rather than some misogynistic conspiracy to clip the careers of women, women are deciding to work differently from men.

Social engineers don’t like facts that expose the new injustice against men in the workplace. Rather than a nuanced debate, the activists and their appeasers continue to artificially engineer a 50-50 gender representation in the workplace despite drawing from a pool that is not made up of equal numbers of men and women.

Corrective justice for past injustices is not a sound reason to discriminate against young men today. If XYZ Investment Bank has a pool of 300 male applicants, compared with 100 young women, the pool of 300 young men will necessarily reflect a wider slice of Australia, from exclusive inner-city private schools to public schools in the country. Are we OK with preferring private school girls from Abbotsleigh over working-class boys from Newcastle High?

Many are so wedded to conscious bias in favour of women that they reject moves that might dismantle it. This week, The Australian reported on a study that found removing names from public service job applications to confront unconscious gender bias has backfired. The trial was conducted by a behavioural economic unit established when Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister. The study of more than 2100 public servants from 14 agencies found that when recruiters reviewed gender-neutral applications, meaning names were removed, men fared better than they did under recruitment processes that included names of applicants.

In other words, gender-neutral applications expose the ­entrenched gender bias in favour of women that exists when gender is included on job applications. ­Instead of calling out conscious bias in existing recruitment processes, the study urges “caution” as de-identification of gender may “frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity”.

In a cute twist, last week, after being mobbed by school girls at St Joseph’s Catholic School on the NSW central coast, Bill Shorten committed a Labor government to gender-neutral resumes in the public service. The man should be mobbed by schoolboys who will benefit from an end to conscious bias that favours women. That’s not what Shorten had in mind, of course, as he committed his Labor caucus to 49 per cent women. But it points to the determined ignorance of facts over gender agendas. The indifference to facts gets worse the higher up you go in corporate Australia. The reality of women’s preferences is reflected in higher attrition rates among women who have different work-family preferences as they enter their late 20s and 30s. More women than men choose to leave jobs to raise children or to simply work less for other reasons, or to work differently. Sometimes that is not voluntary, but often it is.

The knock-on effect of this higher attrition rate is that an even smaller pool of privileged women reap even larger rewards at the expense of a bigger pool of men. Yet quota-seekers never address how quotas, drawing from different sized pools of men and women, inevitably deliver unjust outcomes.

By the time you get to the level of corporate boards, women become the Golden Skirts of corporate Australia. Good on them. But let’s not pretend it is fair or just.

The Golden Skirts phenomenon originated in Norway following laws that mandated 40 per cent of women on boards. The shallow pool of talented women means a few privileged women sit on ­multiple boards. In Australia, as of last year, 38 female directors from a smaller pool of female talent sat on three or more ASX 200 boards while only 25 men from a larger pool held the same number of board seats.

Conscious bias, at the graduate level or at higher levels, is not the high road to equity. It is a racket for a few lucky women at the expense of a large number of men. And Labor’s Andrew Leigh says a Shorten government will legislate that low road by mandating quotas for women on ASX-listed companies, cementing injustice into corporate Australia.

It is profoundly demeaning for women to be given a job because they are female rather than because they are the best person for the job. Sadly, ideas like this will remain unfashionable until more of us agree that the best way to stop gender discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of ­gender.

Which reminds me. At a small lunch in a salubrious Melbourne club last week, Institute of Public Affairs chairman Rod Kemp told us that he had an announcement.

He prefaced his news, that I will take over as IPA chairman come July 1, by saying he must surely have joined the saintly crowd of Male Champions of Change.

Then Rod burst out laughing, as did others, at the utter nonsense of those virtue-signalling men. Just as well. If Rod were serious about this appointment depending on my gender, I might have decked him.

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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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