Sunday, October 15, 2023
RSPCA again: Under pressure to explain why 74% of the money raised from its weekly lottery goes on expenses
From prior reports I have seen, their chief talent seems to be for quickly putting down animals entrusted to their care. Do they care about animals at all or are they just another bureaucracy? Some of them talk animal rights a lot but animal rights seems mainly to be people hatred
The RSPCA faces questions over how it spends the proceeds from its lotteries after it revealed more than 74 percent of money raised is spent on administration and expenses.
Twenty percent of proceeds help fund the vital work of the charity, the minimum amount set by the Gambling Commission, and the remainder goes towards prizes.
The RSPCA raised £3,335,704 through its various lotteries in 2022, meaning about £2.5mn was spent on expenses, as reported by The Sunday Telegraph.
The charity runs a weekly £1-entry lottery offering a jackpot of £1,000, and up to £10,000 in quarterly 'superdraws'.
According to the RSPCA's website: 'In 2022 £3,335,704 was raised from ticket sales in our Weekly Lotteries, Quarterly Superdraws and seasonal Raffles, with 5.77% spent on prizes, 74.16% spent on expenses and 20.07% being used to fund the work of the RSPCA in England and Wales.'
The figures were 'based on the Lottery Submissions made by the RSPCA to the Gambling Commission, during the 2022 calendar year'. 'This translated to a fantastic £669,669.24!'
The Gambling Commission states that 'the level of expenses and prizes allocated from the proceeds must not be such as to reduce the profits to below 20%'.
That means at least 20 per cent must be 'applied to its purposes' - going towards the running of the charity.
It says that proceeds can otherwise only be used to go towards prizes or to pay expenses 'reasonably incurred' organising the lottery.
This can include the salaries of those running it, the cost of selling or supplying tickets, printing and distributing tickets, marketing, or paying any fee to an external lottery manager.
As reported in The Telegraph, Anne Kasica, founder of The SHG help group for people experiencing issues with the charity, said: '[If] the RSPCA is unable to match the prudence and financial competence of other charities, it is no wonder that they are always claiming to be in crisis and desperate for money.
'Perhaps it is time for the Charity Commission to take a much closer look at the RSPCA's financial [proficiency].'
An RSPCA spokesperson said: 'We aim to keep expenses as low as possible.
'We regularly review where savings can be made and will explore if costs can be reduced further without impacting the vital funds raised and remaining compliant with the strict Gambling Commission guidelines.'
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Authoritarian Thugs Continue Their Persecution of Jack Phillips
I've been writing about Denver-area baker Jack Phillips for over a decade now. It's clear to me he's going to be badgered into the grave by authoritarians intent on punishing him for thought crimes. From the first time his name appeared in the news until this day, the media have misled the public about him, about the case and about the law.
The latest chapter in Phillips' Kafkaesque saga involves a transgender lawyer named Autumn Scardina, who demanded Phillips create a pink cake with blue frosting to help celebrate a gender transition. As expected, Phillips, who'd already spent years fighting government coercion, refused to participate.
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission agreed that Scardina had been discriminated against as a transgender person. Then, the dishonorable A. Bruce Jones of the 2nd Judicial District upheld the commission's flagrant attack on free expression. Now, the Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.
The entire case is built on ludicrous contortions of logic and law. The Colorado Court of Appeals, for instance, ruled in favor of Scardina, contending that the colors pink and blue aren't really speech because, in and of themselves, they aren't expressive of anything. The message, says the court, is "generated by the observer."
Yes. Because Phillips isn't a complete idiot, he understands that context matters. The color white has no inherent meaning, either. If a known Klansman asks a tailor to fit him for some white sheets, it definitely does.
Then again, if you believe Scardina just happened to approach the most famous Christian baker in the country to create a "transition" cake the same day the Supreme Court announced it would hear the Masterpiece case in 2017, you're certainly an idiot. The entire Scardina episode, including the configuration of the cake -- using colors but no words -- was calibrated to set Phillips up.
In the initial complaint to the Civil Rights Commission, Scardina claimed to be "stunned" by Phillip's rejection. It should be noted, because it isn't in any media coverage, that Phillips' lawyers had very good reason to suspect Scardina, whose name appeared on a caller ID, first requested "an image of Satan smoking marijuana." Later, an email was sent to the shop requesting "a three-tiered white cake" with a "large figure of Satan, licking a (nine-inch) black Dildo ... that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."
Then again, Scardina admitted it was a setup. As the Associated Press reported last year, according to the activist's lawyer, "She called Phillips' Masterpiece Cakeshop to place the order after hearing about the court's announcement because she wanted to find out if he really meant it ... It was more of calling someone's bluff."
There was no bluff to call. Phillips isn't going to create cakes to celebrate gay weddings or gender transitions or the grand openings of strip clubs or bawdy bachelor parties or for a 'happy divorce!' or any other event that undermines his faith. And even if he was the biggest hypocrite in all of Christendom -- which he most certainly isn't -- it wouldn't change anything. Americans don't have to justify their free expression to anyone.
Scardina claims the lawsuit was intended to "challenge the veracity" of Phillips' claim that he would serve LGBTQ customers. This is the central lie of the case. Phillips never once refused to sell a gay couple or a transgender person or anyone else anything in his store. But Phillips isn't Scardina's servant, and the government has no right to compel him to endorse or participate in any lifestyle.
Speaking of which, the media keeps contending that Phillips is looking for a religious "carve out" in anti-discrimination law -- or something along those lines. No such thing exists. It is unclear if the people who write those words are unfamiliar with the First Amendment or just instinctively dismiss it, but religious liberty and free expression are explicitly protected by law. Anything that infringes on those rights is the "carve out," not the other way around. If "anti-discrimination" laws dictate that the government can compel Americans to express ideas they disagree with, as Colorado does, then anti-discrimination laws need to be overturned, tout de suite.
At this point, the best-case scenario is for Phillips' case to reach SCOTUS, so the court can either repair the Masterpiece decision -- which basically provided the state and activists with a guidebook on bullying people of faith (basically, don't show public animosity while doing it) -- or shelve the First Amendment.
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German Nazism's Successor: Islamic Nazism
"In every generation they arise to annihilate us." That statement appears in the Haggadah, the book read from at the Passover Seder. The book is about 1,000 years old; the statement is more than 2,000 years old.
A generation or two ago, it was the Nazis who arose to annihilate the Jews.
In this generation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic movements have risen to annihilate the Jews.
The widespread overuse of the term "Nazi" -- like the overuse of the terms "fascist," "racist," "existential threat," "genocide," "misinformation," "threat to our democracy," among others -- has rendered "Nazi" little more than a word to dismiss people who oppose the Left.
"Nazi" should never be used to describe non-Nazis. Nazi evil was sui generis. There has never been as organized, as industrialized, an attempt to murder every member of a religious/ethnic group -- "every member" meaning babies, women, and the elderly as well as adult males -- as the Nazi attempt to murder every Jew in Europe. Within a mere four years, they nearly succeeded: The Nazis murdered two out every three Jews in Europe.
But the term "Nazi" is applicable to one ideology today. There is an ideological successor to the Nazis. Just as the primary aim of Nazism was to kill every Jew in Europe, the primary aim of tens of millions of radical Muslims is to kill the seven million Jews in Israel and eradicate the one Jewish state.
The Muslim leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran regularly announce that the annihilation of Israel is their paramount aim. They would rather murder the Jews of Israel and eradicate Israel than feed their people. In fact, they have stated that the death of tens of millions of their fellow Iranians is a price worth paying if it means annihilating Israel.
That is why the purpose of Hamas's attack was to slaughter as many Jews as possible. No army base was attacked -- because the attack had no military aim. Hamas Einsatzgruppen (the name of the Nazi mobile killing units) attacked a music festival, where they murdered at least 270 young people and maimed an untold number of others. Their other targets were homes, so as to kill entire families -- because their aim was not military victory but the murder of Jews. Babies and grandmothers are not military targets.
Many Jews not initially killed by Hamas were taken as hostages, including toddlers and grandparents. "Social media," the Times of Israel reported, "were filled with horrifying videos of men, women and children being carried into the (Gaza) Strip, many of them appearing to have been abused."
The celebrations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Muslim world were over Jews having been murdered and displayed. You can see the ecstatic joy of throngs of Palestinians in Gaza as Hamas terrorists display Jewish bodies in the back of pickup trucks driving through the streets of Gaza.
From the Times of Israel:
"The video of the woman stripped down to her underwear appears to be of Shani Louk, a German citizen who was identified by her mother, and who had been attending the music festival which was staged close to Kibbutz Re'im. Hamas operatives are seen celebrating and cheering in the pickup truck in which they had placed Louk's body, which was contorted in an unnatural angle, while Palestinians surrounding the truck shouted, 'Allahu Akbar' ('God is the greatest'). Two of the men spit on her."
From the Daily Mail:
"A woman was seen being kidnapped with her children as horrified onlookers screamed: 'She has a baby.' The mother was later identified as Shiri who was taken with her husband, Yarden, sons Ariel, three, and nine-month-old Kfir, as well as her elderly parents Yossi and Margit. They were believed to have been snatched from Shiri's home ... on the border with Gaza.
"Disturbing footage shows a boy of ten being dragged towards an opening in the border's fence by terrorists.
"Erez Kalderon, who was snatched from his home in Nir Oz in the south of Israel by Hamas, looks terrified as he is led through the streets by the heavily armed men. His father Ofer and sister Sahar, 16, were also abducted.
"Ditza Heiman, 84, was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, close to the border, and taken into Gaza... Another grandmother, 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, was bundled into a golf buggy at gunpoint by a group of terrorists."
The result was that on Oct. 7, 2023, more Jews were murdered than on any one day since the Holocaust. Percentagewise, it was as if 40,000 Americans had been murdered. And these Israelis were murdered for the same reason Jews were murdered during the Holocaust -- because they were Jews.
Radical Islam's useful idiots on the Left deny this fact. They say that Muslims who seek to annihilate Israel are not motivated by antisemitism but by anti-Zionism, as if there is any real-world difference between the two, and as if seeking to eradicate one nation in the world -- the only one that happens to be Jewish -- is in no way anti-Jewish.
It should therefore be noted, to cite but one example of non-Israeli Jews being murdered by Islamists, that in 1994, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization in Lebanon, bombed the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring more than 300. They weren't Israelis; they were Argentinian Jews.
It should also be noted that Hamas's charter makes no distinction between Zionists, Israelis, and Jews:
"The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'"
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Divide over Israel: We can only hope the ‘descent from civility’ dissipates quickly
Gerard Henderson
Former Australian prime minister John Howard has a good turn of phrase. His description of the anti-Israel protest that took place in Sydney on Monday as “a catastrophic descent from civility” is precisely accurate.
The unauthorised protest march took place from the Town Hall to the Opera House. I watched hundreds of protesters – men and women with children – march down Phillip Street chanting loudly: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” At the rear of the protest was a large number of NSW police vehicles, including members of the riot squad. The contingent gave the impression that this was a movement that required a police escort.
I did not know at the time that the march was unauthorised or that the police had instructed Jewish Australian supporters of Israel to remain at home.
Or that the only person arrested on the day was a man peacefully carrying an Israeli flag – he was subsequently released without charges laid. But he did not receive a police escort home.
When the protesters reached the Opera House, there were audible cries of “F..k the Jews” and “Gas the Jews”. The former is racially motivated abuse, the latter an incitement to murder, even genocide. No arrests were made on the night – not even when demonstrators threw lighted flares at the feet of police on the Opera House steps and burned Israeli flags in a public place.
On Wednesday morning, NSW Premier Chris Minns apologised to the Jewish community on behalf of the government and himself for what had occurred. He pointed out that the intention “to light up the Opera House” in Israeli colours had been to “create a place and a space for that community to come together to commemorate (following) these terrible events in the Middle East”. But he added that the Opera House forecourt “was obviously overrun with people that were spewing racial epithets and hatred on the streets of Sydney”.
In fact, the spewing of hate had begun the previous Sunday evening outside Lakemba station in southwest Sydney. At the time it was known that the Hamas terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip, and supported by Iran, had indiscriminately fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel and was attacking civilians on the Israeli side of the border as well as that part of the Israel Defence Forces that was in the vicinity.
Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun, an imam from United Muslims of Australia, said he was elated at the events, declaring this to be “a day of pride, a day of victory”. The next day pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched through Sydney.
We now know that Hamas terrorists, who like to be called militants, involved themselves in war crimes as they attacked and murdered children and babies, men and women (some of whom were raped). It wasn’t a day of pride and it’s unlikely to be a day of victory following the war that Hamas initiated.
There is not much that unites the extreme left and the extreme right in Western nations – apart from hostility towards Israel. The protesters marching through Sydney consisted not only of individuals with a Middle Eastern background but some white Australians of a green-left bent.
The chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means only one thing: that the Jewish presence should be driven out of the land that exists between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. That is, the elimination of Israel (in which a large Muslim minority lives peacefully) that was formally recognised by the UN in 1948.
As Daniel Mandel documented in his book "HV Evatt and the Establishment of Israel" (Routledge, 2004), Australia’s external affairs minister at the time, Bert Evatt, played an important role in the creation of Israel.
On Sunday evening, John Lyons, the ABC’s Sydney-based global affairs editor, told viewers of ABC TV news the Israeli public faced this “big question”: namely, whether “the cost of maintaining its occupation over three million Palestinians in the West Bank and its blockade over the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza is worth the price that it pays”.
It’s true that Israel occupied the West Bank after the success in its defensive war of 1967. But the area in southern Israel that Hamas attacked has been part of Israel for ages. The Gaza Strip is currently blockaded by Israel to an extent as a means of a democratic nation defending itself from Hamas, which is intent on destroying it. In any event, there is an exit from Gaza into Muslim-majority Egypt.
On ABC TV News Breakfast on Friday, Ebony Bennett, the deputy director of the left-wing Australia Institute, described Gaza as “occupied” by Israel. There have been no Israelis living freely in Gaza for more than a decade.
It is possible that Israel and the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah on the West Bank (which has limited autonomy) can eventually bring about a situation in which Israel can exist within secure borders as part of a two-state solution. But there will be no deals between Israel and Hamas.
The key political opposition to Australia’s support for Israel comes from the left. On Monday, Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi put out a post declaring “One colonial government supporting another – what a disgrace”.
This overlooks the fact Pakistan-born Faruqi willingly settled in what she terms a colonial society, in which she has achieved much success.
Many of the Muslim Lebanese who criticise Australia’s support for Israel overlook that they or their immediate ancestors became Australian citizens due to the decision of the Coalition government in 1976 to accept those affected by the Lebanese civil war despite the fact they were not formally refugees. I wrote about this in these pages on November 24, 2016.
The success of modern Australia is that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others live freely in a democratic society – despite differences.
However, right now some Jewish Australians – including students – do not feel safe. We can only hope that this week’s descent from civility as identified by Howard dissipates quickly and that relative peace returns to the Middle East.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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