Does immigration make littering worse?

Philippe Lemoine is a young and outspoken campus conservative.  He is also a very bright boy generally.  He is very much at ease with statistical analysis.  He uses that skill to do a thorough examination of the claim that minorities litter more.  He first takes apart a claim that they do not and shows the claim  concerned to be statistical garbage

He then goes on to examine statistically all aspects of the issue and shows that blacks and Hispanice litter more than twice as much as whites.  His analyses are pretty straightforward so should be understandable by many readers.  Because he has to cover so many bases, his article is very long.  I reproduce below therefore just the more important excerpts. 


Does immigration make littering worse?  It sure looks that way
Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester just published a piece which they claim to show that, in the US, immigrants don’t litter more than natives.

Their post has been shared pretty widely and uncritically by pundits, academics and journalists and it’s already being used to argue that anyone who claims that immigrants litter more than natives is a racist. The problem is that, as I will argue in this post, not only does their analysis fail to show that immigrants don’t litter more than natives, but insofar as the data they used show anything, they show exactly the opposite.

Nowrasteh and Forrester claim to have been moved to write about this because, even though the issue seems a bit superficial, the argument that immigrants litter more is made increasingly often by restrictionists:

At the recent National Conservatism conference, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax argued in favor of restricting non-white immigration to the United States because she said they litter more. My colleague David Bier was heckled at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018 and asked about immigrant littering. Fox News Tucker Carlson has been bringing up immigrant littering over the years, most recently with the help of City Journal associate editor Seth Barron.

If you ask me, this paragraph is extremely uncharitable, to the point of being dishonest. It makes his sound as if Carlson and Wax think the fact that non-white immigrants litter more alone justifies restricting non-white immigration, but obviously that’s not what they mean. They just use littering as one example of anti-social behaviors that, according to them, immigrants from certain parts of the world engage in more often than natives.

In fact, if you read what Wax said in her infamous talk (it was actually during the Q&A), she explicitly said as much:


"I think we are going to sink back significantly into Third Worldism. We are going to go Venezuela, and you can just see it happening. I mean one of my pet peeves, one of my obsessions, is litter, and I… If you go up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or Yankee territory, right? Or versus other places that are “more diverse,” you are going to see an enormous difference. I’m sorry to report. You know, generalizations are not very pleasant, but little things like that, which aren’t little, they really affect our environment, attitudes towards public space."


Anyway, having explained why they felt the need to jump into this debate, Nowrasteh and Forrester  describe how they allegedly showed that immigrants don’t litter more than natives:


"Fortunately, there are data available to at least partially answer this question. The American Housing Survey (AHS) is a biennial longitudinal housing survey that asks about the amount of trash, litter, or junk in streets, lots, or properties within a half-block of the respondent’s housing unit. The answers are a “small amount of trash,” a “large amount,” and “no trash.” We constructed a scale from zero to one using a min-max normalization for all non-missing observations where a higher value indicates more trash in a neighborhood. We then take a weighted average of these scores using the weighting variable present in the AHS public use file for each metropolitan area.

The smallest geographical unit in the AHS was the Core-Based Statistical Area (CBSA) for 15 major urban areas in the United States that account for about 33 percent of the total U.S. population (around 58 percent of the foreign-born population and 30 percent of the native-born population).

We linked the foreign-born shares of the CBSA populations from the 2017 American Community Survey (2013-2017, 5-year estimates) to the AHS survey responses on the amount of litter and trash. We then ran a regression where the independent variable is the percent of the CBSA’s population that is foreign-born and the dependent variable is the response to the litter question."


As they explain in the rest of the post, when they did that, they didn’t find statistically significant relationship between the proportion of immigrants in a CBSA and the amount of litter.

But does it mean that Nowrasteh and Forrester are right and that immigrants don’t litter more than natives? Well, no, it does not. Not at all. The way they analyzed the data makes absolutely no sense and, when you do it correctly, you find exactly the opposite result. In fact, insofar as the data show anything, they completely vindicate Wax, but amazingly Nowrasteh and Forrester reached exactly the opposite conclusion. The problems with their analysis are so obvious that, when I read their post, I just couldn’t believe it. The dataset they used contains more than 50,000 observations, but by aggregating at the CBSA level, they reduced that to only 15 observations. The only reason to use this approach is that, by doing that, we can precisely determine the demographics of the area where respondents live instead of using their own demographics for the composition of their neighborhood. But the CBSAs in the dataset are huge and contain a lot of people, whereas respondents were asked about the presence of trash in the streets within 1/2 block of where they live, so this is not helpful.

In general, when people complain about “immigration”, even if they don’t use any qualifier, they are only complaining about some groups of immigrants but not all of them, so the average effect of immigrants is irrelevant to their claims. For instance, when people in France complain about immigration, everybody knows they’re talking about African and North-African immigrants. I have almost never heard anyone complain about Asian immigrants, because they tend to do very well and don’t cause many problems.  Thus, if we are going to use the American Housing Survey to assess whether people like Carlson and Wax are right, we must disaggregate by region of origin and/or race, which Nowrasteh and Forrester didn’t do. Again, even if they had, it wouldn’t have shown anything one way or the other, because it would have done nothing to alleviate the problems with their methodology that I described above.

Finally, restrictionists about immigration don’t just talk about immigrants, but also about their descendants, because their central point is that neither immigrants nor even their descendants magically adopt the culture of their country of destination just in virtue of living there. You may think that it’s wrong, although it clearly isn’t, but in any case that’s the claim they make, so you can’t possibly refute it by just looking at immigrants. Indeed, just looking at immigrants and ignoring the effects of their descendants is another trick that pro-immigration advocates often use, but the effects of immigration are not limited to the effects of immigrants themselves. It also includes, among other things, the effects their descendants have. In fact, if you go back to Wax’s answer where she talked about littering, you will see that she doesn’t even talk about immigrants. She claims that littering is worse in areas that are more “diverse”, so she isn’t making a point about immigration per se but about race/ethnicity, although those issues are obviously related. Thus, if we want to use the American Housing Survey to assess whether she is right, we have to examine whether race/ethnicity, not just place of birth, is related to littering.

Even though I have just explained that one should disaggregate between immigrants depending on region of origin, let’s first see whether, when the data are analyzed at the individual level, we find a difference between natives and immigrants.As you can see on this chart, where I represented the confidence intervals, there is a statistically different between immigrants and natives, so the answer is yes.

Next, since Wax singles out non-white immigrants, let’s see what happens when we disaggregate the group of immigrants into white and non-white immigrants.Well, look at that, it turns out that not disaggregating hid a significant difference between white and non-white immigrants. I wonder who could have predicted that? Well, I guess we know at least one person who had predicted it, Amy “the horrible racist” Wax.

But the white/non-white dichotomy is still very crude and no doubt hides a lot of heterogeneity, so let’s focus on immigrants and disaggregate further based on where they come from.As you can see, for most groups of immigrants, there is no way to know for sure whether they are less or more likely than natives to report the presence of trash in the streets near where they live. But this is not true for immigrants from South/Central America and the Caribbean, who are significantly more likely than natives to do so. As it happens, when people say that immigrants litter more than natives, hispanic immigrants are precisely the group they usually single out. Thus, far from undermining this claim, the data seem to support it. It should also be noted that South Asians are significantly less likely to report the presence of trash in the streets near where they live, but I’ve never heard anyone complain that Indian immigrants litter…

Finally, as I have explained above, people like Wax are not just concerned about immigrants themselves, but also about their descendants. Even if immigrants litter more than natives, it may not be a big deal as long as their descendants, having been socialized in the US, had adopted the local norms and behaved similarly to natives with respect to littering. In order to check whether the data supports this hypothesis, let’s look only at natives and disaggregate by race/ethnicity.



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UK: Humberside Police condemned by judge for 'Gestapo' style investigation into transgender tweet

Judge compares investigation into free speech to the feared Geheimestaatspolizei from Nazi Germany

Humberside Police have been condemned by a judge for investigating who liked a tweet questioning transgender people.

In a damning court ruling, the High Court ruled Humberside Police unlawfully interfered with Harry Miller’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work over his allegedly "transphobic" tweets.

And Justice Julian Knowles made a contrast between Mr Miller’s freedom of speech and the approach of the “Gestapo or Stasi”, the feared and hated state police of the Nazi and Communist regimes in Germany.

Mr Miller, 54, a former police officer from Lincolnshire, said the police's actions had a "substantial chilling effect" on his right to free speech.

Mr Miller claims an officer told him that he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a "hate incident". Mr Miller had not actually created the tweet, a limerick about transgender people, but liked it.

In his ruling on Friday, Justice Knowles sitting at the High Court in London found Humberside Police's actions were a "disproportionate interference" with Mr Miller's right to freedom of expression.

The judge said: "The claimants' tweets were lawful and there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet.

"I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant's place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant's right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect."

At a hearing in November, Mr Miller's barrister Ian Wise QC said his client was "deeply concerned" about proposed reforms to the law on gender recognition and had used Twitter to "engage in debate about transgender issues".

He argued that Humberside Police, following the College of Policing's guidance, had sought to "dissuade him (Mr Miller) from expressing himself on such issues in the future", which he said was "contrary to his fundamental right to freedom of expression".

The judge said Mr Miller strongly denies being prejudiced against transgender people, and regards himself as taking part in the "ongoing debate" about reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which the Government consulted on in 2018.

Announcing the court's decision, Mr Justice Julian Knowles said: "The claimant's tweets were lawful and that there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet.

"I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant's place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant's right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect."

The judge added that the effect of the police turning up at Mr Miller's place of work "because of his political opinions must not be underestimated".

He continued: "To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society."

The Cheka were Lenin's secret police during the Russian revolution while the Stasi were the secret police in East Germany under communist rule during the Cold War. The Gestapo were the hated and feared secret police during Hitler's Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Julian Knowles stated: "I conclude that the police left the claimant with the clear belief that he was being warned by them to desist from posting further tweets on transgender matters even if they did not directly warn him in terms.

"In other words, I conclude that the police's actions led him, reasonably, to believe that he was being warned not to exercise his right to freedom of expression about transgender issues on pain of potential criminal prosecution."

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We need more Harry Millers. He fought the thoughtpolice, and he won

Today is a good day for free speech in Britain. The High Court has ruled that it is unlawful for police officers to harass members of the public for expressing views on the internet that some people find offensive, but are otherwise entirely legal to express. That this even had to be clarified tells us something about how far we’ve fallen, and how sorely this ruling was needed.

The legal challenge was brought by Harry Miller, a Humberside docker and former police officer. Last year, police visited his workplace and later spoke with him because he had posted around 30 trans-sceptical tweets that someone took offence to. An officer, speaking with Miller over the phone, told him he had committed no crime, but that he nevertheless needed to ‘check’ Miller’s ‘thinking’.

In an absurd exchange that followed, the officer, who had apparently been on some transphobia-awareness course, singled out a limerick that Miller had retweeted as particularly hateful. Miller says he argued with the officer, telling him Nineteen Eighty-Four was supposed to be a dystopian novel, not a policing manual. The reference went over his head.

As it turned out, Miller’s tweets constituted a ‘non-crime hate incident’, which is as chilling a concept as it sounds. These are instances, logged by the police, that a self-described victim, or any other person, considers to be motivated by hostility or prejudice but are not actually unlawful. No evidence has to be provided for one to be recorded, and the police are explicitly told, by the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance, not to challenge any claims made.

Miller – backed by his Fair Cop campaign – took Humberside Police and the College of Policing to the High Court. The judge ruled that Humberside Police had acted unlawfully in their pursuit of Miller for nothing more than his political opinions, and he did so in strong terms: ‘In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.’

The second part of the challenge, against the College of Policing’s guidelines, was rejected. Which is a great shame, given the section on non-crime hate incidents in that document is downright demented. Not only does it create a form of quasi-crime, the kind of which even those nodded-to police states never dreamt up, but those statistics have also completely distorted discussions around hate crime and racism, as Fraser Myers has noted on spiked.

But this is still an important victory, for free speech and for common sense. The police have become almost comically preoccupied with policing speech and social media recently, well beyond what they are required to do by law. Humberside Police are not some rogue example. Who could forget Glasgow Police telling people to avoid being unkind on Twitter, lest they risk getting a ‘visit from us this weekend’. Or South Gwent Police warning people on Facebook that mocking a drug dealer’s unfortunate haircut might be illegal. Meanwhile, knife crime is still a thing.

Miller has shown the importance of standing up to the new illiberalism that confronts us, and he’s done us all a great service. This should spur us on to go further, to start a debate about state censorship and to challenge all laws and police practices that criminalise speech, opinion and thought, either by design or in effect. From the teenager given on an ankle tag for quoting a rap lyric on Instagram to the notorious Markus Meechan case to the war on drill music, it’s clear Britain has gone down a dark and illiberal path.

Britain’s complicated web of malicious-communications, public-order and incitement-to-hatred laws has made trials of alleged hate-speakers routine. Just today, Kate Scottow, a gender-critical feminist, was convicted under the Communications Act. According to reports, the judge said that her ‘deliberate and persistent use of male pronouns’ to refer to one Stephanie Hayden, a trans activist, had caused ‘needless anxiety’. Scottow’s supporters say this concerns a dozen or so tweets sent over seven months.

More than ever, we need to remake the case for free speech, to make clear that the state has no right to police what we say and think, and to establish that the best and only way to deal with contentious social issues or to tackle genuine bigotry is through more speech, not less. To do that, we need more Harry Millers. He fought the thoughtpolice, and he won.

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Australia: Paul Barry forgets the ABC of calling out media bias

His name is Paul Barry and if he is to be believed, he is leading the fight against bias in the Australian media. This week the Media Watch host presented an Australian Communications and Media Authority survey of around 2000 people which revealed 85 per cent of respondents had concerns that “news is reported from a particular point of view rather than being balanced or impartial”.

“That will come as no great surprise to fans of Media Watch, which regularly reveals how bad news and current affairs coverage can be,” proclaimed a self-congratulatory Barry. He then listed eight cases of what he claimed were examples of these breaches, two of which were from News Corp newspapers. Tellingly, he did not cite any from ABC.

Keen to point out this survey was not a reflection on “all journalism” (you know what’s coming next) he stated that “the ABC is praised by several respondents”. Of course. Referring to ACMA’s attempt to encourage the media to self-regulate, Barry was pessimistic. “What’s the chance of that,” he asked rhetorically. “Not much.”

If Barry is in the mood for self-regulation, he does not have to look far. The day after his bias denunciation, ABC Canberra radio presenter Adam Shirley hosted a panel to discuss the subjects “What makes a good man” and “When does a man become toxic”. Two of the three panellists were women. Not that the ABC is likely to discuss the subject of what makes a woman toxic, but if it did you can imagine the reaction from the sisters if a man were on the panel, let alone if men outnumbered the women.

But it gets even better. One woman was feminist, author and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Jane Caro. Just the night before, Barry, had slammed “presenters on current affairs shows who have an opinion on everything”. Presumably this does not extend to panellists.

The other woman was feminist and former ABC journalist Virginia Hausseger, now director of The 50/50 by 2030 Foundation. During the discussion she observed “I am disgusted at what I see in news media and popular culture now in terms of representation of women”.

Now think back to 2007 when Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan used the term “deliberately barren” to refer to the fact that then opposition deputy leader Julia Gillard did not have children. It was a sexist and stupid remark and he was right to apologise for it. That was not enough for Hausseger. Writing for the Canberra Times, she said he “deserves to be castrated”. Undoubtedly many readers would have been disgusted by what she – my bad, I had forgotten we were talking about toxic masculinity.

Shirley turned to what he referred to as “the bloke in the room”, journalist and author Phil Barker, who duly noted “Men are constrained by this performance of masculinity that results ultimately in horrific domestic violence and male suicide” You might remember Barker. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017 spoke of his reaction to reports that journalist Tracey Spicer was about to release allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment against 60 figures in the media and entertainment industry. “’Oh my god it’s going to be a bloodbath!’ I shouted, delightedly,” he wrote.

Forget that this turned out to be the year’s biggest journalistic fizzer, and instead consider Barker’s language and fervour in that article. “In a war there’s always friendly fire, collateral damage,” he said gleefully, declaring to readers he was part of the “far left”. And finally: “So there’s no way around it. Some innocent men are going to get shot in the head. So be it.” Barker, incidentally, teaches male students about “positive masculinity”.

Now consider that ABC editorial policies require journalists to “present a diversity of perspectives” and “not unduly favour one perspective over another”. If that was a balanced panel, then my name is Beatrix Potter. We know the ABC holds that masculinity is inherently violent and misogynistic.

"We need to do the hard work and for all men to put their hands up and acknowledge their misogyny, acknowledge the fact that they are profiting from toxic masculinity in some way, even if they are not violent." @nicheholas #TheDrum pic.twitter.com/PN2xQshBk6

— ABC The Drum (@ABCthedrum) April 2, 2019
But would it be too much trouble for future ABC panels if the token male was someone other than the bloke who effusively parrots this misandrist drivel?

If Barry’s record of umpiring on his home turf is any indication, this carefree disregard of editorial policies is not likely to be mentioned on his show. In reviewing Media Watch’s Monday episodes for the latter half of 2019, I noted eight segments critical of ABC presenters compared with 24 in respect to News Corp columnists and presenters (this does not include Barry’s criticism of Fox News media).

That represents a disproportionate focus of three to one. That disparity increases even further when the focus shifts to Barry’s Twitter account as revealed by The Australian’s Associate Editor Chris Kenny on Sky News’ Kenny on Media this week. Of Barry’s last 300 tweets (those in which he was not replying to another user), 47 of them – around 15 per cent – targeted News Corp columnists and presenters. Conversely only two of them – 0.66 per cent – highlighted lapses by ABC presenters. Seventy-six of the sample – around 25 per cent – referred to climate change, a topic regularly seized on by Barry to castigate those portrayed as climate sceptics.

Barry also appears to have different rules for ABC programs compared to the standard he applies to commercial media. In October, he criticised Studio 10s Kerri-Anne Kennerley and Sky News’ Peta Credlin for joking about driving over Extinction Rebellion protesters who were blocking major intersections. “I think it’s time they got some new material and perhaps stopped making jokes about killing protesters,” said Barry. “Because some nutter out there might just take them up on it.

But Barry’s cease and desist notice was, well, noticeably absent when it came to covering ABC Q&A’s all-female panellists episode last November. During this debacle, feminist Mona Eltahawy asked “how many rapists must we kill” and indigenous activist Nayuka Gorrie declared that “violence is okay” to bring about change, urging people to “burn stuff”.

Barry’s response was to gently admonish Q&A host Fran Kelly for not challenging those views. “A bit more pushback was what Q&A needed,” he said, saving his condemnation for ABC’s decision to take the program down. Declaring it was “a massive over-reaction” and “a real failure of nerve,” he said it was “Q&A’s job to be confronting and at times offensive,” and “ABC management’s job to defend its right to be so.”

So, jokes on commercial television about using climate protesters as speed bumps must be stopped, but deadly serious panellists on the national broadcaster who call for extrajudicial killings and other violence as a means of effecting change require only “pushback”. Clear now?

Last August, Barry made positive mention of ABC presenter and activist Benjamin Law for donating $36 of his “hard-earned cash” to readers who cancelled their subscription to The Australian. This newspaper’s crime was to highlight alarming practices regarding children and teenagers diagnosed with “gender dysphoria”, particularly the health authorities’ embracement of the “affirmation model”. Barry claimed this coverage of this major public interest issue was “one-sided”.

Less than two weeks before, the ABC documentary “Waltzing the Dragon”, written and presented by Law, featured an interview with historian Dr Sophie Couchman regarding the Lambing Flat Riots in Burrangong, NSW in 1860. In that episode she noted reports that Australian miners had scalped their Chinese counterparts. However, what had been omitted from this screening was Couchman’s noting conflicting accounts that no scalping had occurred. Following the backlash, ABC subsequently apologised, acknowledging that an “error of judgment” had occurred in the editing process which had misrepresented Couchman. As for Barry and Media Watch, let’s just say a rather large dragon waltzed on by without them noticing.

And yet Barry would have us believe there is no entrenched bias at the ABC. Not so according to his predecessor Jonathan Holmes, who hosted Media Watch from 2008-13. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2016, Holmes stated it was “undeniable” that ABC’s capital city radio presenters leaned more to the left than the right. “I say ‘undeniably’, but senior ABC managers for decades have chosen, if not to deny it, then to ignore it, and they’ve certainly failed to do anything about it,” he said.

When ABC presenters repeatedly fail to abide by the broadcaster’s statutory charter, it also falls on Barry to acknowledge and expose its cultural bias. What are the chances of that? Answer, not much.

Self regulation needs to get serious and do it properly. Stamp out blatant lies. Draw a line between news and ads. Wind back bias. Respect the facts.

— Paul Barry (@TheRealPBarry) February 10, 2020
Thanks Ben for bringing the @australian gender coverage to our attention.

— Paul Barry (@TheRealPBarry) August 19, 2019
THE MOCKER

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14 February, 2020  

Medical Journal: CPS Should Take Kids From Parents if They Oppose Transgender 'Treatment'

At the tail end of last year, the Journal of Medical Ethics published a paper advocating for government intrusion into the family if parents disagree with their kids about dangerous experimental transgender drugs. Among other things, the paper suggested that Child Protective Services should remove children from their parents if the children identify with the gender opposite their biological sex and the parents do not wish for them to take dangerous experimental "treatments."

According to the abstract, the paper focuses on "how to proceed if a minor and their parents have disagreements concerning their gender-affirming medical care." After studying "ethical, paediatric, adolescent and transgender health research," the authors "discuss three potential avenues for providing gender-affirming care over parental disagreement: legal carve-outs to parental consent, the mature minor doctrine and state intervention for neglect."

The authors — professors and plastic surgeons in New York, Michigan, and Washington State — approach "this parent-child disagreement in a manner that prioritises the developing autonomy of transgender youth in the decision-making process surrounding medically assisted gender affirmation." In other words, the authors assume that if a child consistently insists that he or she is "really" a she or he,  medical professionals should encourage that child to take experimental transgender drugs and be put on a path to surgery, even if the parents want to protect their child from taking this dangerous path.

The experimental drugs are "gender-affirming," so the child's "autonomy" outweighs the parents' rights, even though the child is not legally considered old enough to vote or drink alcohol or be considered responsible for himself or herself.

According to this logic, parents who object to transgender medical experimentation on children who seek to transition are guilty of neglect.

"Neglect, as a medico-legal term, can be used to initiate an evaluation by Child Protective Services and remove a parent as a child’s legal guardian in the most severe instances," the authors write in the full report. Citing pro-transgender literature, the authors claim that experimental medicine lowers depression and other high-risk behaviors among gender-confused young people.

Revealed: The Secretive Strategy Behind the Transgender Assault on Parental Rights
"We conclude that situations where a parent prevents a minor from receiving treatments related to gender dysphoria violate the Harm Principle and justify state intervention," the authors claim.

This position echoes a radical shift in the medical field. The binary nature of biological sex had long been seen as a given, especially after genetics revealed the XX and XY chromosomes that code for female and male, respectively. Yet thanks in part to the influence of billionaires and Big Pharma and the success of the LGBT activist movement, medical professionals have embraced the idea that experimental treatments to affirm a gender identity opposite a person's biological sex are not only healthy but necessary — to prevent these vulnerable people committing suicide.

Yet many doctors have spoken out against these "treatments."

"I call it a development blocker — it’s actually causing a disease," Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an independent private practice endocrinologist in Rocklin, Calif., who consults with Sutter Roseville Medical Center, told PJ Media last year. The disease in question is hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. It occurs when the brain fails to send the right signal to the gonads to make the hormones necessary for development.

While endocrinologists — doctors who specialize in hormones and the endocrine system — are familiar with the disease and gladly treat it when a patient has been diagnosed, many of them are effectively causing their patients to contract the same disease in an attempt to affirm gender identity, Laidlaw said. "An endocrinologist might treat a condition where a female’s testosterone levels are going to be outside the normal range. We’ll treat that and we’re aware of metabolic problems. At the same time, an endocrinologist may be giving high levels of testosterone to a female to 'transition' her."

The effects of cross-sex hormones and so-called "puberty blockers" are far from fully known, but studies suggest people who take these "treatments" increase the risk for cardiovascular disease, deep vein thrombosis, and weaker bone density. Laidlaw has suggested that alterations to children's chemical makeup may also stunt brain development.

These hormones may also leave children sterile, unable to have children of their own when they grow up. Children who start on "puberty blockers" and cross-sex hormones are far more likely to undergo genital surgery, which permanently sterilizes them. Concerns about "chemical castration" are very real.

Yet Dr. Andre Van Mol, a board-certified doctor in Redding, Calif., told The Christian Post's Brandon Showalter that transgender ideologues have taken control of major medical organizations.

"Transgender ideologues now seem firmly in the driver's seat of establishing policy for several of these medical organizations, most notably the ones for pediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers," Van Mol said. "It is not based on science or long-term evidence. Many of us see this as a replay of the lobotomy movement of the '50s and '60s. Opposition to it knows no boundaries of politics or faith, and it is gaining momentum."

The case of 7-year-old boy James Younger has drawn national attention to this issue. Younger's mother insists that the boy is really a girl, and is engaged in a custody battle with the boy's father, whom she divorced. The mother claimed she "knew" James is a girl because he liked the movie Frozen and asked for a girl toy at McDonald's. The father claimed that the mother dressed up James in dresses at the tender age of three. The mother wants hormone "treatments" for her son and the father testified in court that she wants to remove the boy's genitals.

Parents who disagree with this approach to transgenderism have already lost custody of their children. In 2018, Christian parents in Ohio lost custody of their 17-year-old daughter for refusing to give her transgender drugs. Child Protective Services has a history of removing children from their parents for no good reason, and this Journal of Medical Ethics article is only making the situation worse.

Parents and citizens need to speak up to make sure that the government does not remove children from their parents for the crime of disagreeing with the new transgender orthodoxy. This is nothing less than terrifying.

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NYPD Blasts de Blasio Over War on Cops

An assailant was arrested Sunday in New York City after two separate attacks on police officers that law enforcement dubbed assassination attempts. "He was depressed at times because his son got shot in the street," explained the perpetrator's grandmother. But others blame anti-police rhetoric for motivating the assailant.

"Anyone who spews hatred at our officers is aiding and abetting this kind of atmosphere; it is not acceptable," said Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio. "You could protest for whatever you believe in, but you cannot vilely attack those who are here to protect us. It creates this kind of dynamic."

We're glad to hear de Blasio say so, but many — including numerous NYPD officers — blame de Blasio himself for falling in with the Democrat war on cops begun by Barack Obama and his ilk. The two officers in New York aren't the first in that city or elsewhere to be attacked or murdered by anti-cop zealots inspired by leftists slandering police as racists.

A union representing New York's police sergeants declared, "Mayor DeBlasio, the members of the NYPD are declaring war on you! We do not respect you, DO NOT visit us in hospitals. You sold the NYPD to the vile creatures, the 1% who hate cops but vote for you. NYPD cops have been assassinated because of you."

Why the blame? De Blasio won office partly on promises to rein in policing in minority communities, and he has followed through with several measures. New Yorkers are starting to notice the resulting rise in crime. Blue lives matter, and until Democrats come around to that point of view, attacks on police will likely continue.

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Evangelical Support for Trump Still Baffles Media

It goes without saying that the Democrat Media Complex is no fan of President Donald Trump. As numerous studies have observed, over 90% of the mainstream media's coverage of Trump and his administration has been negative and often aggressively so. In fact, if one were to take the Leftmedia's dubious characterization of Trump as the gospel truth, one would be hard pressed in distinguishing him from Adolf Hitler. Then with this over-the-top negative characterization of Trump, anti-Trumpers bash those who voted for him and support him as either unthinking fan boys or motivated by a sinister, immoral, and selfish ambition.

This straw-man tactic has been regularly applied to evangelical Christians in an attempt to shame them for giving 80% of their votes to Trump. The anti-Trump crowd falsely charges that evangelicals made a Faustian bargain when they voted for Trump and that they have made a mockery of their Christian faith.

What these anti-Trumpers conveniently dismiss or ignore is the reality of the massively divergent worldviews between the country's two largest political parties. Christians are called by Jesus to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The anti-Trumpers blast Christians for employing that first principle of wisdom in how they voted. The fact of the matter is we are not primarily voting for an individual and his record but rather for the political platform and vision that individual espouses. Does individual character matter? It certainly does, but so does what the individual is proposing for the nation.

In 2016, evangelicals were faced with a difficult decision only because Trump was an individual with well-known moral failures. Yet, as far as Trump's policy platform was concerned, there was little to object to and much to be encouraged by. So, the vast majority of evangelicals chose the candidate whose policy platform aligned most consistently with their own worldview values. And one of the biggest issues in this value system is the right to life.

With the choice presented to evangelical Americans, they were wise as serpents and made the best choice given the options before them. They recognized the implications of electing Hillary Clinton — her advocacy of abortion and ever-increasing government is a road to greater tyranny and loss of Liberty. A vote for Trump was risky, for it was unknown whether he would actually follow through on what he promised, but he has and by so doing has only strengthened his evangelical support. A good argument can be made that Trump, as deeply flawed and broken as he is, has been uniquely used by God to bring blessing to the country. This is what evangelicals were hoping for when casting their votes in 2016 and almost certainly again in 2020, perhaps in even greater numbers.

SOURCE 





Australia: Lunacy protects foreigners over us

More racism from the establishment

Chris Merritt

The lunacy at the heart of the latest decision by the High Court comes down to this: this is pure racism built upon an illegitimate exercise of judicial power.

By the narrowest of margins, the nation's highest court haS elevated a racial distinction to a position of constitutional privilege that would never be acceded if such a question were put to the people at a referendum.

Four of the court's seven judg es have preempted the people of this nation by injecting a new racist concept in the Constitution that can only be overturned by referendum or a future High Court.

This shameful ruling has punched a hole in the principle that everyone is equal before Australian law and has eroded the federal government's ability to protect the community from foreign criminals who have never tried to become citizens.

Even when born overseas and holding the citizenship of another country, foreign criminals with Aboriginal ancestry can no longer be treated as aliens for the purposes of migration law.

There will be those who will say the impact can be confined to the specific facts of the case. But a dreadful precedent has been set. In this case, the High Court majority has effectively created a new right for foreigners that comes at the expense of Australians who expect their governments to protect them from criminals, regardless of their race.

The majority has decided that foreign citizens with Aboriginal ancestry have such a special connection with Australia that it would be inconsistent with that special connection to treat them as aliens for the purposes of migration law.

This principle was applied even though the men who brought this challenge never tried to become Australian citizens.

Common sense has gone out the window. The majority has invented a new, illogical category in migration law that applies only to Aborigines who hold foreign citizenship: they can simultaneously be non-citizens and non-aliens.

Because a crucial part of the test for Aboriginality depends on the views of communities or their leaders, this means Aboriginal communities — and not parlia ment — will have the power to determine when the normal migration law will apply.

This was too much for Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, who differed strongly with the majority and pointed out that such a mechanism "would be to attribute to the group the kind of sovereignty which was implicitly rejected by (the Mabo decision)".

Kiefel's dissent goes a long way to limiting the damage to the court's reputation. Four judges went off on a frolic: Geoffrey Nettle, Michelle Gordon, James Edelman and Virginia Bell.  Kiefel was steadfast, backed by Stephen Gageler and Patrick Keane.

The Chief Justice points out in her dissent that it is settled law that it is up to parliament, relying on the Constitution, to create and define the concept of citizenship and determine who is an alien. She also argues that "questions of constitutional interpretation cannot depend on what the court perceives to be a desirable policy regarding the subject of who should be aliens and the desirability of Aboriginal non- citizens continuing to reside in Australia".

"In the absence of a relevant constitutional prohibition or exception, express or implied, it is not a proper function of a court to limit the method of exercise of legislative power," Kiefel wrote.

The great tragedy of this decision is that it will inevitably be used to attack the arguments of those, like this writer, who have argued for a constitutionally entrenched Aboriginal voice to federal parliament.

The judges in the majority are massively out of step with community values and the core principle of equality before the law. They have done a disservice to the legitimate aspirations of indigenous Australians.

From "The Australian" of 12 February, 2020

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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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