Friday, October 16, 2020



Handmaids of Bigotry

Well, they dusted off those colorful “Handmaid’s Tale” outfits that were so visible at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018.

Even before Amy Coney Barrett’s hearing on Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats were being cheered on by permanently angry women (and maybe some men) dressed in red cloaks with white duckbills extending from their hoods.

This is the uniform of the oppressed women in Hulu’s serialization of Margaret Atwood’s dystopic, anti-Christian novel. If you thought atheist crusader Philip Pullman’s thinly disguised depiction of church authorities as evil in “The Golden Compass” book and movie were bad, Ms. Atwood runs circles around him. In her 1985 book and TV series, the polygamous men cite Bible verses and treat the women as sex slaves.

Braving the rain on Monday, the demonstrators held signs festooned with messages such as a giant NO! in rainbow colors over “Trump/Pence Must Go!”

This time around in the Senate star chamber, the Democrats who pretend to honor religious liberty while assailing nominees’ faith think they have a smoking gun. The word “handmaid.”

Mrs. Barrett and her husband have long been members of an ecumenical charismatic Christian group begun in 1971 called People of Praise, based in South Bend, Indiana, home to Notre Dame University and its law school, from which she graduated summa cum laude and taught constitutional law.

Women leaders in the group, including Mrs. Barrett, previously held the title of “handmaid,” which is derived from Jesus’s mother Mary’s own description of herself in Luke 1:38 as “the handmaid of the Lord.”

The group dropped that title in favor of “women’s leader” because “the meaning of this title has shifted dramatically in our culture in recent years,” a spokesman said.

Mrs. Barrett, 48, now serves on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, to which she was nominated by President Trump in 2017. At that time, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said at a hearing that Mrs. Barrett’s religious beliefs worried her because “the dogma lives loudly within you.”

Wow. Talk about open religious bigotry. But it’s OK because the senator is a Democrat, and they get to do this sort of thing. It’s not as if the media would have a problem with it.

Here’s a front-page headline from last Wednesday’s Washington Post: “Barrett long active with insular Christian group: Community preached subservience for women, former members say.”

Ah, those “former members.” You can always dig up a dissident or two to make the point you want, unless you’re reporting on Black Lives Matter or the Democratic National Committee, which are pretty much the same thing.

As for People of Praise, here’s more from their own media statement provided to Heavy.com:

“A majority of People of Praise members are Catholic, and yet the People of Praise is not a Catholic group. We aim to be a witness to the unity Jesus desires for all his followers. Our membership includes not only Catholics but Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Pentecostals and nondenominational Christians. What we share is a common baptism, a commitment to love one another and our teachings, which we hold in common.

“Freedom of conscience is a key to our diversity. People of Praise members are always free to follow their consciences, as formed by the light of reason, experience and the teachings of their churches.”

As the Apostle Paul instructs, and many biblically sound churches teach, men are to be the spiritual leaders in the church and in their own households and they are to love their wives as they love themselves. This is considered scandalous by our cultural commissars.

In Ephesians 5:25, Paul writes: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for her.” That means laying down your life if necessary. It’s why when things go bump in the night, the guy should be the one who goes downstairs with the baseball bat or the Sig Sauer.

Democrats are terrified of the attractive and articulate Mrs. Barrett, a mother of seven, just as they were threatened by Clarence Thomas, who destroyed their narrative that blacks belong on the leftist plantation.

Mrs. Barrett has impeccable credentials that the Senate already examined when she was nominated for the appeals seat. At that time, the “handmaid” reference didn’t get traction, since the TV version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” only debuted in April of that year.

In the meantime, we’ve seen New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker take a page from Bernie Sanders and grill Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo in 2018 about sex and marriage, strongly implying that his traditional Christian views are a form of bigotry. Booker likes to make much of his own Christian faith, which apparently is free of the burden of having to abide by crystal clear biblical principles regarding sex.

Also hewing to “smarter than God” theology is Kamala Harris, who has embraced all things LGBTQ, plus taxpayer-funded abortion and Marxist economics. On December 5, 2019, Harris asked Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee for district court in Nebraska, “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” And, “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization?”

During Monday’s hearing, Mrs. Barrett had to face the likes of Booker, Feinstein and Harris, plus the troupe of “Handmaid” harridans.

After the process is over and Associate Justice Barrett is sworn in, the “ladies” can make further use of their costumes.

After all, Halloween is right around the corner.

Saudi Prince Bandar Denounces Palestinian Leadership: Is Saudi-Israel Peace Deal Next?

Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, one of the most widely recognized and respected Saudi officials in the world, gave a three-part interview to the government-controlled Al Arabiya news network and proceeded to tear down 70 years of myths about the leadership of the Palestinian national movement. Bandar spent 22 years as a Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and is known to speak for the government.

It was an extraordinary series of interviews — a brutal assessment of the numerous self-inflicted wounds by Palestinian leaders going all the way back to the 1930s. It was broadcast in Arabic with English subtitles on a news network that reaches every country in the region. And while Bandar is no longer in the government, a palace spokesman said he was speaking for Crown Prince Mohammed ben Salman.

Bandar began by talking about the Mufti of Jerusalem, the very first Palestinian national leader, who made a deal with the Nazis back in the 1930s and got nothing to show for it.

Bloomberg:

Bandar goes on to mention a list of similar bad choices and decisions: The Arab rejection of the 1948 United Nations partition plan that would have given the Palestinians a state. The Arab League’s rejection of UN Resolution 242 after the 1967 War that called for an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories; and the Palestinian Liberation Organization rejection of the Clinton Plan in 2000 that would have given the Palestinians a state in most of the West Bank and Gaza.

The most interesting rejection came in 1979, at Camp David. Israel offered Palestinians autonomy in the occupied territories. Yasir Arafat, turned it down flat. Sixteen years later, Arafat signed the Oslo Accord with Israel. Bandar asked him at the time to compare that deal with the terms he had turned down 16 years earlier. Arafat said that the autonomy offer was “10 times better” than Oslo.

Bandar asked Arafat why he nixed the Camp David peace accord between Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Arafat’s simple answer was that President Assad of Syria would have had him murdered.

The prince’s diatribe against Arafat was only the beginning. His stinging criticism of Palestinian leaders for their obstinancy and hesitations has, he believes, cost the Palestinian people dearly.

Why did he do it?

Prince Bandar is candid about the reasons for his monologue. First, he wants a record of how hard the Saudis have worked on behalf of the Palestinians over the decades. Second, he intends to reassure the UAE and Bahrain, which are being vilified by the Palestinians for recognizing Israel — and any other Arab country contemplating a similar step — that the Saudis have their back.

Third, he is calling out the PLO and Hamas for making alliances with non-Arab countries Turkey and Iran, who the Saudis consider dangerous. He is signaling that the Saudis will deal only with a new generation of pragmatic, moderate and dependable Palestinian partners. About the current leaders, he is candid: “It is difficult to trust them and to do something for the Palestinian cause with them around.”

And in what has to be one of the most significant developments in Middle Eastern diplomacy, Bandar concluded his remarks with a declaration of independence from old obligations. “In my own personal opinion,” he says, “we are at a stage in which, rather than being concerned with how to face the Israeli challenges in order to serve the Palestinian cause, we have to pay attention to our national security and interests.”

The Saudis have seen what happened to UAE when they made their deal with Israel: the shunning by certain Gulf states and the anger of the Palestinian mobs. But they also see Turkey and Iran growing in power and influence and it worries them greatly.

So what now for Israel?

BBC:

They have certainly watched Prince Bandar’s interview with interest but have so far declined to comment directly.

Instead, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said: “We hope that even more countries will recognise the new reality in the Middle East by joining us on the road to reconciliation.”

Saudi Arabia has traditionally moved slowly and with great caution when it comes to changes of policy, testing each move before committing itself.

With Prince Mohammed ben Salman dragging his country out of the Middle Ages and trying to modernize his society, the pace of change may be accelerating. Bandar’s words and the sentiment behind them is a clear signal to Israel that they are ready to talk seriously about normalization. And that particular earthquake would upend the region and change the world in dramatic ways.

SOURCE



Police use of deadly force is not about racism

By David Wojick, PhD

The screaming headline said "Black Americans 2.5X more likely than whites to be killed by police." The statement is false. It is the kind of assertion that is used to claim police are systemically racist. It leads to fewer police, fewer arrests, more crime, more racial discord, and more innocent black deaths.

Accurate, honest statistics show just the opposite. When police must use deadly force, whites are more likely to be killed than blacks. But we rarely see these statistics, because they do not support claims of systemic, systematic racism against blacks. The statistics we do see are too often agenda-driven.

The sad reality is that, as a percentage of their total American population, black deaths by police are around 2.5 times white deaths. But this has nothing to do with likelihood, because the vast majority of people of both races have near-zero likelihood of being killed by police.

In fact, up to 88% of people killed by police were armed and being arrested at the time of their deaths. Such people are indeed at greater risk of being killed. However, racism has nothing to do with it.

On a per-arrest basis, the data say whites are much more likely to be killed by police than blacks. If so, the police are clearly not racist. Indeed, they seem to be deliberately trying not to kill blacks. Another study found that 36% of officer-involved shootings were “suicide by cop,” 16% of whom were blacks.

Statistical reality must begin with the fact that black males represent 6.5% of the US population – but according to FBI data they constitute 54% of arrests for robbery and 53% of arrests for murder. Far worse, nationally syndicated talk show host Larry Elder points out, in 2018 there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of America’s total homicides, and nearly all were murdered by other blacks. (Have Black Lives Matter or NFL-NBA-MLB athletes ever acknowledged any of this?)

Those are the real reasons blacks outnumber whites in the nation’s prisons – the real reasons more blacks are likely to be killed during arrests and other confrontations with police.

Even more telling, when we look at the issue that motivates and infuriates Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its allies – unarmed blacks killed by police – we learn that the Mapping Police Violence database tabulates “just” 25 such police killings in 2019, resulting from shootings, tasers, beatings, chokeholds and vehicles. (A Washington Post database records only police shootings.) And then we read this:

“A wave of gun violence swept through the nation over the [July Fourth 2020] holiday weekend, leaving dozens dead from coast-to-coast – with children as young as 5 among the casualties,” the New York Post despaired. In Chicago, the article continued, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen [of those shot] were children caught in the crossfire. The vast majority were black.

Think about that. In one weekend, in one city, we had three-fourths the number of deaths that BLM is raging about, for the entire nation, over the course of an entire year. Or consider this awful news:

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community” and “97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted. New York City witnessed a 204% increase in shooting victims over the past 28 days, compared to the same period in 2019, he added.

Meanwhile, Darrius Sutton participated in at least three drive-by shootings after he was released from NYC jails without bail on attempted murder charges – a far too frequent occurrence in Di Blasio Town. Again, no comments, no outrage from BLM.

What about law enforcement officers like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood? What about Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and too many other Black children gunned down by their fellow blacks? Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was playing with other children in Chicago over this year’s Fourth of July weekend, when thugs leapt from a car and sprayed gunfire into a crowd, killing her.

Why don’t their black lives matter to Black Lives Matter, its often violent supporters, and its corporate, Hollywood and pro athlete funding sources? Does anyone really think the solution is “defunding” or “reimagining” police forces – perhaps replacing thousands of police officers with social workers?

The victims’ families certainly don’t. Natalia’s father told local news media he wants more police, not fewer. Her aunt said, “We talk about Black Lives Matter, but at the end of the day, we’re killing each other off. We’re killing our babies.”

“The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, such as car accidents and drownings,” Larry Elder notes. “The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man.” How depressing.

Police have to deal with way too many criminals, attacks, confrontations and murders, especially in poor and minority areas of our cities. They never know who will pull a gun, even during a routine intervention, traffic stop or domestic disturbance – or which incident might be a setup, an ambush. That’s part of the reason some officers are jumpy or feel they must use potentially deadly force when they would much prefer not to. But racist tendencies, much less systemic racism, have nothing to do with it.

The United States once had systemic, government-decreed racism. This is no longer the case, and elevating individual, thankfully now pretty rare cases of racism into something systemic gets us nowhere.

It is much more likely that what is happening today is the result of too many black boys being raised fatherless, by gangs, amid street violence – and to their not attending school, and thus growing up with no education, skills or future. They likewise receive no grounding in civics, humanity, morality or religion, and have few scruples and little remorse over murdering someone to settle a score or perceived insult.

Just as in medicine, getting the diagnosis wrong can be much worse than useless. Trying to blame or cure systemic white racism or supposedly widespread individual white racism will only make matters worse. Blaming people for things they are not doing just makes them angry. Intimidating them into silence over these accusations just makes them angry and resentful.

Honest, probing social science, media coverage and debate could help us find solutions. Name calling, guilt trips and false assertions of systemic racism will make the situation worse. That people are being told everything is due to racism is tearing us apart, instead of pulling us together in search of solutions. It is a political trick that is causing horrific, widespread social upheaval, whether by accident or design.

Marching, screaming, burning, looting and simplistic, deceptive slogans are not solutions. They are not even calls for constructive action. They are certainly not calls to ponder the points presented here and in countless other articles and reports – or to reexamine some of the well-intended but woefully misguided government programs that helped get us where we are today.

Angrily demanding that “things have to change” is not a step forward. It may even be a step backward, if it leads to more confusion, and more stupid or useless programs. Promoting racial division and discord will ensure that the real causes of crime, violence and murder in our black and other minority communities are never addressed

These issues cry out for attention they are not getting. Perhaps after the elections, after the insanity and riots are over, we can have honest, no-holds-barred conversations about this, without being shouted down and canceled out. We must hope so. Otherwise, our nation’s future is bleak indeed.

Via email

Australia: Politically correct spending on childcare

Josh Frydenberg has confirmed the Morrison government, fresh from bringing forward some tax cuts slated for 2022, still plans to lift the top marginal tax rate of 47 per cent to $200,000 in 2024.

That may not happen if Labor gets to implement its universal childcare policy, born of the absurd idea that the federal budget handed down last week was anti-women.

The government already spends more on childcare as a share of GDP than socially democratic Germany, The Netherlands and Austria, and about the OECD average.

Federal spending on childcare, supercharged by the Coalition’s 2017 reforms, is on track to rise 30 per cent from last financial year to $10.3bn by 2024, according to the budget.

That’s not enough for Labor which, we learned in Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech, wants to increase the subsidy per dollar families spend on childcare from 85c to 90c.

Reflecting its base among high-earning public sector workers, where two incomes easily lift household income above $189,000 a year, Labor would scrap the cap of $10,500 per child a year that applies at that level of household income. Households earning below $530,000 a year — basically all of them — would receive a subsidy.

The government screamed “upper-class welfare” but it was crossbench senators David Leyonhjelm and Derryn Hinch who imposed a modicum of discipline on the Coalition’s own childcare reforms in 2017, capping support at household income of $350,000.

We are well past the optimal quantum of childcare funding, which increasingly forces the childless to subsidise the career ambitions of well-off parents who would have had children anyway.

It’s understandable high-income earners advocate universal childcare, making all sorts of fabulous arguments about how it’s good for the economy and GDP. While formal childcare can pay developmental dividends for children in single-parent or lower socio-economic households, for children in other households it’s glorified childminding.

Of course putting children in childcare adds to GDP: parents caring for their own children don’t count in the formal economy. Fees to childcare centres do, as do wages earned in a job. But this says nothing about prosperity.

Advocates overlook the cost of raising the funding: the distortion of higher taxation and the goods and services those taxpayers would have bought instead.

But it’s worse than that. Excessive childcare subsidies create childcare jobs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. They can lure parents into work that — even with the taxpayer subsidy — pays little more than childcare workers earn, implying it would be better if they swapped jobs and left the poor taxpayer alone.

And, naturally, childcare centre owners cream off as much of the public subsidy as they can, knowing government will pick up the bulk of the fees charged.

Childcare funding is really about ideology, not economics or fertility. It’s about socialising child-rearing and “empowering” women.

Labor is opposed to the third stage of tax cuts, for instance, which would return years of bracket creep for those earning above $180,000, yet it is happy to give the same households sizeable handouts for childcare.

The great increase in female workforce participation — and collapse in fertility — occurred in the 1970s, long before significant childcare subsidies emerged.

Scandinavian nations spend double what we do and have similar female workforce participation and fertility rates. Even if childcare did boost fertility, with almost eight billion people on Earth (up from 4.4 billion in 1980) the case for subsidising people to have more isn’t obvious.

Economics has long considered work a disutility, something you avoid if you are fortunate enough to be able to. Childcare advocates see having women in paid work as desirable in and of itself, independently of what women themselves want.

If families want to use childcare that’s fine, of course, but why should others — including families that choose to look after their children — pay for it?

Government could make childcare more affordable by paring back the so-called National Quality Framework, which micro­manages supply.

If parents don’t care whether staff have Certificate III, let them pick a cheaper centre that doesn’t care either.

If there’s to be a bias in the system it should be towards parents caring for their own children, the most efficient transaction of all, even if it’s ignored by GDP — one sustained by love, not money.

Taxpayers already fund primary and high school education, and a multitude of other payments and benefits in kind. Can we draw the line somewhere, please?

In economic terms, children once had the characteristics of an investment from the perspective of the parents: more hands to work on the farm, daughters to sell off for dowries, and for some help in old age, and so on. But today they are more akin to consumption.

“A very young child is highly labour-intensive in terms of cost, and the rewards are wholly psychic in terms of utility,” Nobel prize-winning American economist Theodore Schultz noted.

“From the point of view of the sacrifices that are made in bearing and rearing (children), parents in rich countries acquire mainly future personal satisfactions from them.”

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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