Political Correctness Watch

2012-02-04T00:29:00.000+11:30

Right-wingers are less intelligent than left wingers, says study

I debunked this study last month. The only well-justified statement below is the last sentence

Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study.

Conservative politics work almost as a 'gateway' into prejudice against others, say the Canadian academics.

The paper analysed large UK studies which compared childhood intelligence with political views in adulthood across more than 15,000 people.

The authors claim that people with low intelligence gravitate towards right-wing views because they make them feel safe.

Crucially, people's educational level is not what determines whether they are racist or not - it's innate intelligence, according to the academics. Social status also appears to play no part.

The study, published in Psychological Science, claims that right-wing ideology forms a 'pathway' for people with low reasoning ability to become prejudiced against groups such as other races and gay people.

'Cognitive abilities are critical in forming impressions of other people and in being open minded,' say the researchers. 'Individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate towards more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo. 'It provides a sense of order.'

The study used information from two UK studies from 1958 and 1970 , where several thousand children were assessed for intelligence at age 10 and 11, and then asked political questions aged 33. The 1958 National Child Development involved 4,267 men and 4,537 women born in 1958.

The British Cohort Study involved 3,412 men and 3,658 women born in 1970. It's the first time the data from these studies has been used in this way.

In adulthood, the children were asked whether they agreed with statements such as, 'I wouldn't mind working with people from other races,' and 'I wouldn't mind if a family of a different race moved next door.'

They were also asked whether they agreed with statements about typically right-wing and socially conservative politics such as, 'Give law breakers stiffer sentences,' and 'Schools should teach children to obey authority.'

The researchers also compared their results against a 1986 American study which included tests of cognitive ability and questions assessing prejudice against homosexuals.

The authors claim that there is a strong correlation between low intelligence both as a child and an adult, and right-wing politics. The authors also claim that conservative politics is part of a complex relationship that leads people to become prejudices. 'Conservative ideology represents a critical pathway through which childhood intelligence predicts racism in adulthood,' says the paper.

'In psychological terms, the relation between intelligence and prejudice may stem from the propensity of individuals with lower cognitive ability to endorse more right wing conservative ideologies because such ideologies offer a psychological sense of stability and order.'

'Clearly, however, all socially conservative people are not prejudiced, and all prejudiced persons are not conservative.'

SOURCE

MPs' 'sexist' beer ban: Top Totty ale outlawed in the Commons bar

And the brewers are laughing all the way to the bank

Like many real ales, its quirky name helps it to stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately for a brew branded 'Top Totty', it stood out a little too much for one female Labour MP who has managed to have it banned from a House of Commons bar.

Kate Green, the party's equalities spokesman, said she found the beer – which has a pump plate with a cartoon picture of a bikini-clad bunny girl – offensive, adding later that it 'demeans women'.

Despite never having even seen the pump in question – and the bar not receiving a single complaint – Miss Green yesterday stood up in the Commons chamber to demand it be removed from sale.

Last night, however, her stance provoked a backlash from men and women alike who branded her 'humourless' and criticised her 'knee-jerk puritanism'. Slater's Ales, meanwhile, the ale's family-run Staffordshire brewery, said the outcry had seen its orders double.

The £2.70-a-pint beer was banned from the Strangers' Bar, where MPs can take guests, within an hour of Miss Green's complaint. Leader of the House Sir George Young intervened to rid Parliament of what he called 'offensive pictures'.

Miss Green, MP for Stretford and Urmston in Greater Manchester, brought up the issue at business questions in the Commons, where she called for a debate in the House on 'dignity at work in Parliament'.

She took up parliamentary time to say: 'I was disturbed last night to learn that the guest beer in the Strangers' Bar is called Top Totty, and that there is a picture of a nearly naked woman on the tap.' She said later on Twitter that it 'demeans women'.

But many MPs did not share her outrage. Tory Tracey Crouch asked on Twitter: 'Why is a beer called Top Totty offensive & now banned from Commons?' Fellow Conservative MP Nadine Dorries tweeted: 'Westminster = sense of humour-free zone. Banning of the Top Totty beer was weak PC decision and gives sensible pro-women advocates a bad name.'

The ale – described as 'blonde, full bodied with a voluptuous hop aroma' – had been introduced as a guest ale by Tory Jeremy Lefroy, MP for Stafford, where it is brewed. Mr Lefroy said: 'These guest ale slots offer a very welcome opportunity for small independent breweries like Slater's to reach a wider audience with their products, some of which have cheeky names.'

The ban was also denounced by Mike Nattrass, Stafford's UKIP MEP, and Claire Fox, director of think-tank the Institute of Ideas. Mr Nattrass said: 'Miss Green really is a humourless sort. This sort of knee-jerk puritanism does more to damage the cause of equality than a thousand beer labels.' And Miss Fox said: 'What really demeans women is the idea that we've no sense of humour – and MPs acting as sanctimonious killjoys in our name.'

Last night Vicki Slater, of Slater's Ales, said: 'At first I just couldn't believe it that in this economic climate a Labour MP would get exercised about the name of a beer.

'But all this publicity has been a blessing. After the fuss, it sold out immediately. People have been phoning from all over Britain asking us to supply their pubs. We're delivering twice as much Top Totty tomorrow as we ever have before.'

SOURCE

"Wrong" Speech Is Also Free Speech: "Citizens United" at Two

In the past week, many commentators have used the second anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee to reiterate their critiques of the controversial decision. Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Public Citizen's Robert Weissman, for example, write that the decision "poisoned our political process" and ask whether the "merits or the money" will now "tip the balance when an issue comes before Congress."

I sympathize with Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman. We all hope that our nation's policies are chosen due to merit rather than some other influence. But our valuation of a policy's merit is intertwined with our ideological commitments. Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman make this clear when they list policies that they believe would be in effect if corporate speech were suppressed, that is, if "merit" won out over money. Among these: a national health care program, rectifying the "collapse of the middle class," fixing the high price of prescription drugs, and ending gratuitous military spending.

Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman thus demonstrate a crucial fact: many who oppose Citizens United do so because they want to silence speech that promotes policies they oppose. They want to silence it because they think it is bad speech that gives a disproportionate influence to bad ideas. Yet there can be no greater violation of the First Amendment than to act with this motive.

Critics of the decision cite the "undue influence" corporations can have on elections through such mechanisms as "drowning out [candidates'] messages" with "misleading negative ads." Sean Siperstein writes about a new campaign by Public Citizen to expose the "mega-corporations" that are most "responsible for greedy, disastrously short-sighted policies, to the detriment of the rest of us."

These critiques blur the line between one type of influence that the Supreme Court has acknowledged should be stopped--outright candidate bribery--and other types of influence that are strongly protected by the First Amendment--such as affecting the national debate or influencing candidates' policies by making both them and the public aware of issues. Critics of Citizens United often conflate these two types of political spending, regarding all corporate spending as either corrupting the national debate through disproportionate influence, or corrupting politicians through something tantamount to bribery.

But tellingly, their critiques are one-sided. Missing from any of the articles linked above is any discussion of the "disproportionate" effect that unions have on the American political landscape. Although it is rarely acknowledged, Citizens United permitted both unions and corporations to make independent campaign expenditures. And make no mistake about it, unions are significant moneyed interests in American politics, comprising nine of the top 15 "heavy hitter" campaign spenders over the last 22 years, according to OpenSecrets.org. It is striking, to say the least, that those who rail against disproportionately loud voices and the "undue influence" of political speech are so silent when it comes to the effects of union spending. Perhaps it is more difficult to be critical of the undue influence of speech that one believes is meritorious. If you agree with the speaker, why not buy him a megaphone?

The omission of any discussion of union money in essentially every critique of Citizens United published in the past month is glaring. A dispassionate assessment of the effects of money in politics demands attention to union spending. But an ideologically committed assessment would tend to view the ideas that one finds convincing as being the result of merit, while viewing the ideas one believes unconvincing and harmful to the nation to be the result of "undue influence." This predilection is not because of any inadequacy on the part of Citizen United's critics, it is a result of human nature.

Yet I do not want to unjustly besmirch Rep. Sanders and the other critics of the decision. Perhaps they believe that union spending should also be curtailed. If so, I wish they would make more of a fuss about it. Otherwise, they demonstrate bias that is extremely harmful to their argument. They also underscore my broader point: it is difficult, if not impossible, for any ideologically committed person to assess which speech, if any, is "unduly influential."

The reasons for this are rooted in human psychology. It can be difficult to explain to ourselves why people disagree with us. This observation is simultaneously mundane and profound. On some level we expect disagreement, but on another level, we scratch our heads at how others can believe in ideas that are so obviously, well, wrong. This is more true for the ideologically committed who have devoted their lives and careers to pushing for a society that they believe would be happier and more just, a category of people to which I fully belong.

There are many possible explanations available to us for why there is opposition to our views. Perhaps those who oppose us are evil. Maybe they're selfish and only care about themselves. But the hardest explanation to accept is that your opponents are honest, well-meaning, informed people who have rational reasons for their views. It's easier, and more self-rewarding, to believe that your opponents are being misinformed by speakers who shout the loudest and actively spread lies.

This last explanation has become a crucial part of the modern debate over campaign finance reform. Understandably so. After all, why should we let liars and shouters stand in the way of a better world?

The First Amendment, that's why.

The First Amendment does not allow anyone to pursue his vision of a better world through censorship. Although we'd all love the liars and shouters to be silenced, the First Amendment forbids such censorship precisely because there is no way to agree on who is a liar and who is "too loud." Those determinations are too intertwined with our ideological commitments.

Although I agree with Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman that money may have too much influence on politics, perhaps we should address this problem by creating a government that lacks the power to reward undue influence — that is, a limited government that cannot determine whether someone succeeds or fails in life — and not by stifling free speech.

SOURCE

Australia: Debate rages after call for spanking children to be made illegal

READERS have overwhelmingly rejected a call for an outright ban on parents smacking their own children. At 1.15pm, more than 91% of 6500 votes cast said the practice should not be outlawed as debate raged among commenters.

The debate was sparked by this morning's Herald Sun report of comments by Dr Gervase Chaney, the head of Australia's peak paediatric body, who called for mums and dads to be banned from disciplining their children with physical force. He said it was no longer OK for parents to argue "it never did us any harm" - and called on colleagues to stand up for children's rights.

Speaking today, World Vision Australia head Tim Costello admitted smacking his own children but backed calls for an outright ban. Rev Costello admits he smacked his own children and sympathises with parents who have, but said it is not the right way to discipline. “I think smacking should not be allowed, it should be banned to prevent abuse,” he said.

He has been echoed by Dr Joe Tucci, CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation, who said his organisation had been campaigning for a ban for the past 15 years. "We think children should be afforded the same level of protection under law as an adult," he said.

"I don't believe parents necessarily set out to hit their kids, but if they are frustrated, angry or upset with the child it can inadvertently lead to them hitting too hard or in places where it does leave an injury and I don't think parents want that."

Ban 'too interventionist'

But former Australian of the Year and CEO of Child Wise Bernadette McMenamin rejected calls for a ban and said it would leave parents thinking they lived in a nanny state.

Ms McMenamin, whose brother was the victim of abuse as a child, said smacking needed to be stopped – but through education, not the law. "I think it would make parents feel like the Government is going too far, taking over the parental role,” she said. "Setting a law for no smacking, I know where the professor is coming from, but parents would find that far too interventionist and a nanny state."

Ms McMenamin has a child of her own whom she has never smacked and said parents who do smack their children did so for the wrong reasons – and risked escalating smacking into child abuse. "I do not believe that smacking is a useful disciplinary tool, it's about the parent taking out their frustration on a child,” Ms McMenamin said. "If you smack a child, how can you tell what is a smack and what is a punch? "It may start with an odd smack, but it can escalate.”

Political reaction

A spokesperson for Premier Ted Baillieu said this morning there were "no plans to change the law as it relates to the smacking of children".

Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews also said he did not support a change in the law. "A parent's first duty is to care and protect their child, and Victoria already has strong child protection laws in place," he said. "Parenting is hard and it's not made any easier by unenforceable and intrusive proposals like this."

Federal political figures have also opposed a ban on smacking kids, saying criminal law should not be applied to parents. Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey told Sunrise that parents had the responsibility to protect their children. “There are some things that the criminal law shouldn't be involved with,” he said. “In raising children, parents have a responsibility.”

His thoughts were echoed by Minister for Population and Communities, Tony Burke, who also appeared on the program. “These experts, there are helpful ideas they come up with, the naughty corner and these different ideas for raising kids,” he said. “I’ve found a lot of that really helpful with my own kids, but to start saying the criminal law and legal penalties is the way to deal with this - parents do it tough enough already."

Australia 'lagging behind'

Dr Chaney says Australia is lagging behind other countries in outlawing smacking, describing some cases as tantamount to child abuse. He is pushing for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians paediatric and child health division to officially support a ban as the body reviews its policy on smacking.

His comments come after The Royal College of Paediatrics in Britain this week called for a ban on smacking, saying too often "today's smack becomes tomorrow's punch".

In Victoria, parents can smack their children as long as the punishment is not "unreasonable" or "excessive".

The issue has polarised opinion in Australia - the Presbyterian Church last year backed the right of parents to smack their child within existing common-law parameters. The church's submission to a state government inquiry said there was "a significant body of research confirming its utility in raising children well".

Victorian Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary said he did not support smacking, but he was worried a ban could be misused and unfairly punish some parents. "The way children are disciplined should be thoughtful and respectful," he said.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-02-03T00:26:00.001+11:30

The Double Standard on 'Hoes'

Remember when Don Imus saw his cushy CBS Radio and MSNBC career go up in smoke in 2007 when he tried very early one morning to make one of his fake misanthropic jokes about the Rutgers women's basketball team being "nappy-headed hoes"? Black activists demanded his firing. Advertisers fled. The corporate suits, appalled and fearful of the terrible publicity, canned him.

But if you're a black rapper, terms like this advance your career. The female rapper Nicki Minaj has a very hot new video called "Stupid Hoe." She uses that same term to snap at other women -- "We ship platinum, them b----es are shipping wood / Them nappy-headed hoes, but my kitchen good." (Don't hurt your brain trying to make sense of it.) Minaj even threw the n-word in the lyrics: "How you gon' be the stunt double to the nigga monkey?"

The video broke YouTube records by clocking up 4.8 million views in its first 24 hours on the site and 11 million over the weekend. But outrage from our elites? Hello? Anyone? So far, the silence is deafening from America's major race-card players.

Back in 2007, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- the dynamic duo of racial correctness -- met with CBS chairman Leslie Moonves to demand Imus be given the boot. When they won, Jackson called the firing "a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation."

Sharpton added: "It's not about taking Imus down. It's about lifting decency up...We cannot afford a precedent established that the airways can commercialize and mainstream sexism and racism."

Sumner Redstone, chairman of the CBS Corporation board and its chief stockholder, had told Newsweek that he had expected Moonves to "do the right thing." Translation: Bye-bye, Imus.

It seems rather clear that Imus deserved some punishment, even if his dismissal might be excessive. So why were the reverends applauded universally for their activism?

Because all of their fuss wasn't about "public decency" or "degradation" or media companies "mainstreaming racism and sexism," not really. It was about race, and about how whites can't say "indecent" things about blacks, not even in jest. But blacks can use those very same words -- however they wish -- with the ugliest of intentions, if desired, with impunity. Where are Jackson and Sharpton over "Stupid Hoe" now? Cricket, cricket.

The Washington Post is running a major series this week on the self-esteem issues of black women in America. But when will the Post and other media scolds discover this song and what it says -- and shouldn't say -- about black women?

As for degrading public decency, the song has 10 uses of "bitch," 10 F-bombs and unsurprisingly, 37 uses of "hoe." The refrain, if you want to call it that, is "You a stupid hoe" -- repeated 14 times. A verb, like the word "are," was apparently not necessary. This has to be one of the dumbest, most illiterate songs ever to go viral.

Just because Minaj caused a major YouTube splash and just because the elites were silent, doesn't mean the reaction was favorable. Anyone who clicks on it quickly learns this is not a song, but a droning, rapid-fire, hip-hop headache. The video is so jumpy it could cause epileptic seizures. In the first few days, YouTube watchers gave the Minaj video about twice as many dislikes as likes -- 176,000 to 87,000.

Some commenters just nailed it: "You know, if she's trying to call someone else a stupid hoe, it doesn't help her case too much when she's on all fours, dressed like a leopard, trapped in a cage and whipping her hair everywhere."

But this is my favorite: "36 seconds in and I was losing the will to live."

Last summer, Minaj shocked many by having a breast pop out as she performed on ABCs "Good Morning America." Why the Disney-owned network put this woman on is anybody's guess. She was performing the song "Where Them Girls At," with classy morning-TV lyrics like "You can suck a d--k, or you can suck a ballsack." In her "Stupid Hoe" song, Minaj raps twice "you can suck my diznik."

Minaj is an artist for Cash Money Records, now a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, which brags that it is "the world's largest music content company." (The French media conglomerate Vivendi did not include UMG in its NBC-Universal deal.) If one accepts these boasts, no one in the world can "mainstream racism and sexism" faster than these people. Let's see if the Imus firing squad ever says a word.

SOURCE

The High Cost of Being a Tiger Mom

American women are both incredibly dogmatic and anxious about our mothering. When Amy Chua described her intense efforts to push her two daughters into high achievement in school, in music and, hence, in life, she caused an uproar among many Americans who consider her methods bordering on child abuse. (What? No playdates!?) Two new studies do point out that there are costs to tiger mothering.

A study by professor Desiree Qin and colleagues was published this month in the Journal of Adolescence and is titled, “Parent-Child Relations and Psychological Adjustment Among High-Achieving Chinese- and European-American Adolescents.”

Qin looked at survey data on 295 Chinese-American and 192 European-American ninth-graders at Stuyvesant High School, a well-regarded public magnet school in Manhattan.

Chinese-American teens reported lower levels of psychological well-being, less family cohesion and more conflict with their parents, on average.

The ethnic differences on psychological adjustment disappeared once family conflict and cohesion were controlled for, suggesting “such perceptions may be a key factor in understanding the high academic achievement/low psychological adjustment paradoxical pattern of development among Chinese-American adolescents.”

“(Chua) said Western children are not happier than Chinese ones,” Qin told the New York Daily News. “But at the same time, research from our study does show that when parents place a lot of pressure on their kids, the children are less happy.”

Tiger mothering works, in other words. But having a mom or dad who constantly push you to perform well can also take a toll.

It takes a toll on the moms as well.

Professor Esther Chang and colleagues also have just published a new study on tiger moms in the January 2012 issue of the Asian-American Journal of Psychology, “Parenting Satisfaction at Midlife among European- and Chinese-American Mothers with a College-Enrolled Child.”

“Chinese-American mothers reported significantly lower parenting satisfaction than did European-American mothers, as well as less positive relationship quality (i.e., lower mutual warmth and acceptance and higher parent-child conflict) and poorer perceived college performance by their young-adult child (i.e., grades, academic investment and satisfaction with students' college experiences),” the study found.

Chinese-American moms whose children did not appear to be doing as well at college reported less parenting satisfaction; Euro-America moms' satisfaction wasn't affected by their children's college performance.

The most important factor in parenting satisfaction for all mothers turned out to be the degree of mutual warmth. Pushing your child to achieve more and more can (but may not always) push your child away from you emotionally.

And yet, and yet, and yet ...

Amy Chua's daughter was just accepted into Harvard this month. And according to the Daily News, this particular tiger cub is also a piano prodigy and “an able writer who eloquently defended her mother in the press.”

Alexander Nazaryan, a member of the Daily News editorial board, points out the overall results of the American emphasis on fun and warmth over achievement: “In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment exam, American teenagers placed 31st in math, 17th in reading and 23rd in science among 65 competitors. Shanghai, China's largest city, topped all three categories -- by far.”

As Amy Chua noted, “In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70 percent of the Western mothers said either that 'stressing academic success is not good for children' or that 'parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.' By contrast, roughly 0 percent of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.”

I did not have a tiger mom. I'm a Spock baby, and I raised my children the same way, emphasizing support and closeness over pressure, routine and discipline.

Frankly, I worry about that a lot. It worked for me -- will it work for them? We mothers can't know until it is too late, hence the anxiety. All parenting strategies have costs as well as benefits.

The only thing I'm certain of is that every mother sacrificing to raise decent kids deserves respect, and not uproarious, dogmatic, overanxious condemnation.

SOURCE

British shopper, 25, asked for ID to buy TEASPOONS – as shop worker says they could be used as drug paraphernalia

A woman was asked to prove her age when buying a packet of teaspoons - as a shop worker claimed they could be used as drug paraphernalia. Elinor Zuke, 25, was told by the self-service checkout at Sainsbury's that she needed age verification as she tried to buy a £1.19 pack of spoons.

A shop worker then intervened and said it was because of the risk they could be used for drugs - heroin users 'cook up' the drug in teaspoons.

Heroin is an illegal Class A drug - so it is irrelevant whether someone is over 18 - the spoon should not be used for that purpose anyway. The maximum sentence for possessing heroin is seven years in prison or an unlimited fine.

Ms Zuke said yesterday: 'I could not understand what the problem was -- when the supervisor said it was because they could be used as drug paraphernalia I was completely shocked. 'I would imagine the vast majority of spoons sold by Sainsbury's are used for nothing more nefarious than stirring a cup of tea. Having to prove I was over 18 to buy them seemed total madness.'

Sainsbury's blamed the mistake on a problem with its stock-keeping units which provide a unique identifier for each product on the shelves. A problem with the system meant that it asked for identification automatically. A spokeswoman said: 'The self-scan system recognised the spoon's SKU as one for a knife. This had now been rectified.

'We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused. Our Think 25 policy is designed to ensure age-related products are sold safely.'

In October 2009, Emma Sheppard, 21, was asked for identification when buying spoons in a Tesco store in Evesham, Worcestershire. She was forced to leave the store without the 57p pack of five spoons because she did not have a passport or driving licence with her. Tesco later apologised for the mistake.

SOURCE

Let’s have a proper debate about the welfare state

Hooked on poverty porn, getting the unelected Lords to do their dirty work... there’s little progressive about today’s welfare-defenders

What is worse: elected politicians proposing to reform the welfare state, or unelected Lords, cheered on by liberals, unilaterally shooting down such reform? It’s the latter. Even if you aren’t a fan of Lib-Con plans to trim the welfare bill (I think it’s daft to imagine such trimming will reverse the economic downturn), you should be far more concerned by the patronising and profoundly undemocratic turn that the so-called radical side in this debate has taken. Today, the defenders of welfare are doing far more harm to what we might term progressive politics than the right-wingers seeking to rethink welfarism.

Yesterday, to the chagrin of liberal activists, the House of Lords failed to support a peer-proposed amendment to the government’s welfare reform bill. Having inflicted a triple defeat on the bill last week, by voting 224 to 186 against proposals relating to disability and incapacity allowances, the Lords had won a special place in the hearts of leftists opposed to the Lib-Cons. These unelected lords and ladies are ‘the only decent politicians left’, chirped one commentator. Another described them as ‘a blessing’. These observers will no doubt be disappointed that the Lords yesterday failed to deliver a fourth blow to the government’s plans, though hopefully they’ll have learned a lesson about how daft it is to rely on the whims of the rich and aloof when pursuing political agendas.

There are two problems with the notion that state welfare is so sacred it should never be reformed, even if that means getting the most undemocratic layer of the British political class to ringfence it from those grubby inhabitants of the elected Commons. Firstly, such an allergic reaction to the idea of having a serious debate about the size and shifting nature of state welfare means that the problems associated with welfarism – which are myriad – are never clarified, far less tackled. And secondly, calling on the unelected second chamber to fight the Commons over welfare is an insult to democracy and to the British public, who are reduced to the level of paupers who need good-hearted Lords to fight their battles and preserve their pennies.

You don’t have to be a fellow traveller of the Lib-Cons (I’ve never voted for either party) to recognise that the welfare system in Britain does need reform – radical reform. The problem with the government’s proposed reforms is that they’re driven by a penny-pinching mentality, designed to save the state cash. The real motivation behind welfare reform should be a humanist one – a recognition that intensive welfarism, the intrusion of the ‘caring state’ into every aspect of less well-off people’s lives, has damaged both individuals and communities and therefore should be questioned and challenged and, in part, done away with.

Of course, all civilised societies should provide for those who, for whatever reason, lack the capacity to feed and clothe and house themselves. Discretely distributed as a fund for those too poor or disabled to provide for themselves, welfare can be a good thing. The problem with the ever-growing welfare state in Britain is its permanency, the way it is now used to sustain, forever, huge swathes of people, including able-bodied people, and the impact that this has on people’s view both of themselves and their communities. When you’re encouraged to become reliant on the state rather than on your own wits or your own mates, your sense of individual resourcefulness declines, and your feeling of attachment to and reliance upon your community becomes corroded.

The social destructiveness of the cult of welfarism can best be seen in that part of welfare that is now most feverishly defended by liberal campaigners: the realm of incapacity and disability benefits. In recent decades, more and more people of working age have been redefined by the welfare state as ‘incapable’ of working or as disabled. This is, to say the least, curious at a time when we are healthier and longer-living than ever before. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Britain has one of the highest rates of incapacity/disability benefit-claiming in the Western world. Young people in Britain are more than twice as likely to claim sickness benefits as their Western European counterparts. Strikingly, there has been a big shift from the unemployment camp into the ‘incapable’ camp. In the 1980s, the number of people claiming unemployment benefit was nearly four times higher than the number claiming some kind of disability benefit; by 1997 the numbers were equal; today, the number claiming a disability benefit exceeds the number claiming unemployment benefit. Now, more than three million people are categorised as incapable of working, out of a non-working population of around five million.

Of course, there are many people who have serious impairments or illnesses that prevent them from working, and they should be provided for generously by society. But it’s pretty clear that, in recent decades, society has cynically cast the ‘incapacity’ net ever-wider, leading to more and more people effectively being rebranded as physically or mentally deficient rather than simply unemployed. That way, the unemployment stats can be massaged, and society’s failure to provide people with gainful employment can be redefined as an individual rather than a social failing – apparently it is because these people are weak, pathetic and ‘incapable’ that they cannot work, not because of the structural malaise of capitalist society and the lack of vision amongst those who govern it.

In a twisted irony, the leftists now fighting tooth-and-nail to protect incapacity/disability benefit from any criticism or reform are actually upholding a right-wing creation. Invalidity Benefit, which later became Incapacity Benefit, and which is now mixed together with various disability allowances, was first introduced under Ted Heath’s Tory government in 1971. The number of claimants grew exponentially under the Thatcher and Major governments in the 1980s and 90s – in 1981, 463,000 men and women were claiming invalidity/incapacity benefit; by the mid-1990s it was more than one million. The cynical rebranding of capable men and women as incapable was a useful tool for Tory governments that were throwing people out of work but which didn’t want the unemployment figures to look too shocking. It is remarkable that so-called progressives should now go to the wall to protect this cynical, Tory-invented idea that massive numbers of working men and women are actually too useless or mental or weak to work.

The end result of the spread of the concept of incapacity, and the relativistisation of the category of disability to include increasing numbers of people, is that individuals become both decommissioned and alienated. They are put out to pasture, told that they cannot work, which frequently becomes a self-fulfilling thing; and through their reliance on the faceless state, they become separated from their own communities, coming to be more dependent on the pity and favour of outsiders than on the support and tips of people they know and see every day.

Even worse than uncritically defending such a pernicious system is defending it in an undemocratic fashion. Today, the pro-welfare lobby, clearly disillusioned not only with the Commons but also with the dumb people who elect it, have turned to the unelected Lords to try to preserve the entire welfare state. Radical campaign groups and trade unions call on their members to ‘Adopt a Peer’ – that is, email a lord begging him to vote against government plans on the NHS and welfare – while commentators sing the praises of the peers, saying, yes, they might be ‘ennobled and stuck in an anachronistic institution’ but they are nonetheless willing to ‘speak up for the very poorest and sickest among us’.

A quick glance at history should be enough to shoot down the batty idea that the Lords are potential class warriors defending poor people’s welfare from evil elected officials. The constitutional crisis of 1909-1911 was brought about by the Lords’ refusal to back an early welfare package – Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith’s ‘People’s Budget’ – and the Asquith government’s subsequent decision to override the Lords helped to define and bolster the ideal of democracy in Britain. Today’s welfare-defenders seem keen to turn the clock back, to revert to a time when the Lords, described by Thomas Paine as the ‘remains of aristocratical tyranny’, were expected to reprimand the Commons. Even if you do your peer-cheering in the name of standing up for ‘the very poorest and sickest’ (what’s with all the patronising Dickensian lingo?), the end result will be the same: the further concentration of moral authority and political power in the hands of a tyrannical few.

With their poverty-porn images of families too sick and destitute to care for themselves, and their love of Lords who stand up and make grandstanding speeches about ‘helping the poor’, today’s welfare-defenders are taking us into Downton Abbey territory – back to a pre-welfare state world of poor laws and posh pity where the very rich were pleaded with to help the lame and the weak. That is the essence of much modern welfare thinking. ‘Please, my lord, stop the evil politicians from taking away my grub and my blankets.’ Screw that. The less well-off are more than capable of looking after themselves, and don’t need to have democracy overturned in their name by unelected twits and their dizzy cheerleaders in the media.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-02-02T00:20:00.000+11:30

Useless British police put on the spot

'Three strikes' rule to tackle yob gangs: Police must act on complaints or face the sack

Police will no longer be able to ignore homeowners whose lives are being made a misery by yobs, the Home Secretary is set to announce. Once three separate complaints have been lodged, officers will have no option but to take action, Theresa May will say. The same will apply if five individuals from five different households in the same neighbourhood complain about the same issue.

If they still fail to respond, they can be hauled in front of a ‘crime commissioner’, who will have the power to fire chief constables.

Ministers hope the ‘community trigger’ system will halt a string of shocking cases where police and councils have failed to intervene to prevent homeowners being tormented.

They want to prevent a repeat of the case of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled 18-year-old daughter Francecca – who had a mental age of four – when her cries for help went unheeded.

An inquest heard that yobs screamed obscenities at them, hurled stones and eggs at the windows, shoved dog excrement and fireworks through the letterbox, and threatened Miss Pilkington’s dyslexic son Anthony with a knife.

Despite receiving 33 desperate 999 calls in ten years, police said Miss Pilkington, 38, was ‘over-reacting’ and dismissed her as ‘low-priority’.

Unable to bear the torment any more, she decided death was her only escape, and killed herself and her daughter by setting fire to their car near their home in Barwell, Leicestershire, in October 2007.

A separate report by the police watchdog revealed officers were failing to visit tens of thousands of families whose lives are made a misery by louts. The Chief Inspector of Constabulary’s report said the true number of anti-social behaviour incidents could be twice as high as the 3.6million estimated by the Government in 2008-9.

In a speech in London today, Mrs May will say: ‘It’s too easy to overlook the harm that persistent anti-social behaviour causes. 'Many police forces, councils and housing providers are working hard, but I still hear horror stories of victims reporting the same problem over and over again, and getting no response.
Will police revert to Dutch protocol

‘These long-running problems – and the sense of helplessness that goes with them –can destroy a victim’s quality of life and shatter a community’s trust in the police. ‘The “trigger” will give victims and communities the right to demand that agencies who had ignored a problem must take action.’

The new power will target Community Safety Partnerships, which are joint panels of the police and local authority officials. It specifically deals with anti-social behaviour: low-level offending such as vandalism or intimidation.

Officers have in the past viewed it as a council job – leading to criticism they do not take bad behaviour seriously. But now either the police or council will be required to take steps to resolve a problem once it has reached the trigger stage, and reply to the complainant detailing a plan. Only ‘malicious’ complaints can be rejected.

From November, that reply will be copied to elected police and crime commissioners – who will be elected for the first time in November. These commissioners will have the power to fire under-performing chief constables.

SOURCE

‘A Significant Victory’: Atheists Lose Battle Over Jesus Statue Atop Montana Mountain

Last October, we reported about atheists’ attempts to have a Jesus statue removed from government-owned land on a Montana mountain. Now, months later, it seems non-believers have lost their battle to have the religious symbol banished. In a press release delivered this afternoon, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) announced:

"…today’s decision by the federal government to renew a lease that keeps in place a World War II memorial on a Montana mountain — a statue of Jesus — is a “significant victory” and represents a sound defeat for an atheist organization that challenged the memorial."

The Blaze previously reported that the statue was on U.S. Forest Service land and, thus, was being threatened by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a church-state separatist group. The Forest Service has teetered back and forth regarding whether the statue would be able to stay on federal land, as the group initially said that it would no longer permit a renewal contract last year. The Missoulian has more about this challenge:

"Last August, a Wisconsin atheist organization challenged the Forest Service permit, arguing it was an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion. The Forest Service initially opted to remove the statue, but suspended that decision for a public review."

In October, though, supporters received a small victory when the agency changed course. Now, following public support for the statue, the government has officially announced that the land will, again, be rented to the KOC.

“This decision by the National Park Service represents a significant victory in defense of the history and heritage of the region,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ. “We’re delighted that federal officials understood what we have argued all along — that this statue of Jesus does not convey any government religious endorsement of religion. Instead, this historically important memorial is designed to commemorate the sacrifice made by those killed in World War II.”

“The special-use permit that originally allowed a local chapter of the Knights of Columbus to install the memorial was granted in 1953, the Blaze’s Chris Santarelli originally reported. “The KOC installed the statue as a memorial to local veterans of World War II.”

The community, as corroborated by the massive movement in support of the statue, has revered the statue for decades and was intent on seeing its placement remain. The National Park Service announced today that it will renew the KOC permit for another 10 years and acknowledged the statue‘s importance to the region’s history.

“I understand the statue has been a long-standing object in the community since 1955, and I recognize that the statue is important to the community for its historical heritage based on its association with the early development of the ski area on Big Mountain,” proclaimed Chip Weber, the supervisor of Flathead National Forest.

SOURCE

Recruiting for the Church of Atheism??

Atheists in Minnesota stand firmly opposed to parents “indoctrinating” their children to believe in a higher power. So, like their counterparts in Colorado (among other localities), they’ve erected new billboards that make their anti-God messaging loud and clear. Only these atheists are taking a unique route: they’re using pro-life advertisements as the inspiration for their billboards.

According to the Christian Post, Minnesota Atheists, a group associated with American Atheists, recently erected the massive signs in Minneapolis. One of the ads reads, ”Please don’t indoctrinate me with religion. Teach me to think for myself.” Another says, ”We are all born without belief in gods. Learn how to be a born-again atheist.” Smiling babies are featured on the billboards, which will remain up until Feb. 19.

The purpose of the billboards is apparently to attract people who are already non-believers to become members of American Atheists and the local Minnesota Atheists groups. According to Eric Jayne, a board member and project leader at the local organization, his group wishes to curb ”the practice of indoctrinating young, impressionable minds with religious dogma that cannot be substantiated with evidence.”

The cute pictures of the babies that accompany the anti-God messages were inspired, according to August Berkshire, the president of Minnesota Atheists, by Prolife Across America, a Minneapolis-based group. This particular organization uses babies on its ads and billboards to support its efforts against the practice of abortion. Berkshire said:

“It’s (billboards) turning out to be a pretty popular way to get the message out. [Prolife Across America] use[s] a lot of images of children and that got us thinking: religious indoctrination begins with children as soon as they’re old enough to learn. If they weren’t given this indoctrination, they probably wouldn’t believe. It’s for people to realize, where did this religion come from? You weren’t born with it. It was taught to you. And it’s possible to unlearn it.”

While local church leaders disagree, some seem open to the debate that the signs is spawning. “We believe that people are actually born with a natural desire to connect to a higher power. So, the billboards are wrong, but if they stimulate some thinking — certainly no harm in that,” said Pastor Kevin McDonough, a faith leader at Church of St. Peter Claver, a house of worship located near one of the billboards.

According to the Star Tribune, Prolife Across America director Mary Ann Kuharski is fine with her group serving as the atheist campaign’s inspirational status. ”Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” she says, “They’re (babies) eye-catching. We can’t help noticing them. Frankly, they (atheist billboards) may be helping us. They’re still identifying babies for what they are, which is precious.”

SOURCE

God Bless the Hungarians

Hungary is almost broke. That is the country's great tragedy. It needs financial help from the other members of the European Union (EU), who are already helping EU states in financial difficulties, and from the IMF. But both the EU and the IMF refuse to come to Hungary's aid because they dislike the new Hungarian Constitution and a series of new laws that came into effect on January 1st.

Last week, the European Commission initiated legal proceedings against Hungary over its new constitution and legislation. It gave Hungary one month to enact changes with regard to the independence of the central bank, the judiciary and the national data protection authority, or else face the prospect of being fined by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU's supreme court. American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also voiced concern over democratic freedom in Hungary.

In April last year, the conservative Fidesz party won a landslide victory in the Hungarian Parliament. Fidesz, led by current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, won over 52% of the votes and more than two thirds of the seats. The Conservatives owed their victory to the deep dissatisfaction of the Hungarians with the Social-Democrat MSZP which led the country since 2002 and has bankrupted its economy.

The MSZP is the successor of the former Communist Party which ruled Hungary until the end of the communist dictatorship in 1989. For the sake of national conciliation, the former Communists were left largely undisturbed when democracy was reintroduced in Hungary. Many members of the old Communist Party were allowed to keep their top positions in the civil service, the judiciary, the universities, the media and the army. Former communists who had enriched themselves by liquidating state assets were also left alone.

As in many other East European countries, the Communists rebranded themselves as Social Democrats. Like the former communist parties in several other East European countries, the MSZP was welcomed into the international networks of the West European social democrat parties. The MSZP even got to hold several high-ranking functions at the European Parliament and in the European Commission.

The Communists' rebranding tactics seemed to have worked. From 1994 to 1998 and from 2002 to 2010, the Hungarians voted the former Communists back into power. In September 2006, however, their reputation received a major blow when a tape was leaked of a private conversation in which the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány could be heard admitting to party officials that he had lied to the nation. Gyurcsány said that the MSZP had won the elections by deliberately concealing how dramatic the economic situation in the country was. The leaking of the tape led to protest demonstrations by thousands of Hungarians who felt cheated by a party that had simply camouflaged its dictatorial core with democratic theatrics. The demonstrators were savagely beaten up by the police, but the Hungarians took revenge in last April's elections. The MSZP was trashed and fell to 19.3% of the popular vote from 49.2% four years earlier.

After the elections, Fidesz set out to do what it had promised the Hungarian electorate it would do: break the power of the old Communist elite. To this end, the Hungarian parliament adopted a new constitution. Its preamble is an ode to traditional values, patriotism, the family and freedom. It even mentions God, which undoubtedly annoys the EU elites in Brussels who refused any reference to God in their own constitution.

Although there is a strong case to be made for a woman's pregnancy not being in the purview of governments but a private matter between her physician and her, the Hungarian constitution protects human life from the moment of conception and, even though same-sex couples may legally register their partnership, defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The country's name is also changed from "Hungarian Republic" to "Hungary," and although Hungary remains a republic, the preamble contains references to the Holy Crown of King Stephen, the first king of Hungary.

The Constitution also refers to "the inhuman crimes committed against the Hungarian nation and its citizens during the National Socialist and Communist dictatorships." It explicitly mentions that the self-determination of Hungary was lost between March 19, 1944 (the date of the German invasion) and May 2, 1990 (the date of the first free elections in the post-Communist era), and asserts the invalidity of all legislation dating back to that period: "We do not recognize the Communist constitution of 1949 because it has served as a foundation of tyrannical rule. For this reason that legislation is hereby invalid."

Referring to the damage done by four decades of Communist rule, the constitution says that Hungary has "an eminent need of spiritual renewal since last century's developments have undermined moral values."

With its emphasis on traditional values, historic continuity, Christianity and the need for spiritual renewal, Hungary's constitution is an affront to the ruling liberal elites in the European Union and the world, who are hostile to Europe's Christian heritage and national traditions.

The New York based NGO Human Rights Watch criticized the Hungarian constitution, saying that it "could lead to efforts to overturn Hungary's abortion law and result in restrictions on abortion that would put a number of fundamental rights for women at stake." It also complained that, by defining marriage as a bond between a man and a woman, the constitution "denies LGBT people access to state protection for their families and relationships, and is inconsistent with Hungary's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union Charter on Fundamental Rights."

Hungary has also angered the liberal elites in the West by curbing judicial activism. To this end the retirement age for judges has been lowered from 70 to 62 and the president of the Supreme Court is required to have at least five years' Hungarian judicial experience. This eliminates the incumbent who served for 17 years in the activist European Court of Human Rights.

With regard to the economy, the new Hungary has introduced a flat tax of 19% and has capped the budget deficit to a maximum of 3% of GDP. It is also merging the Hungarian central bank (MNB) with the institution that supervises commercial banks, thereby restricting the power of András Simor, the MNB governor. Simor, an economist who worked for the MNB during the Communist era, is an appointee of the previous MSZP government. While Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is not dismissing Simor, the new constitution wants the MNB governor to take on oath of fidelity to Hungary and its interests. The case is being used by the EU and the IMF to deny Hungary credit guarantees and to justify other sanctions.

Both institutions argue that Hungary has violated the central bank's independence. The European Commission also objects to the oath because the MNB governor is a member of the council of the European Central Bank – a neutral pan-EU body. José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission (and a former Maoist), said last week, as the Commission was initiating legal procedures against Budapest, that the Hungarian authorities had failed "to guarantee respect of EU law" and that the Commission is determined "to make sure that EU laws, both in letter and in spirit are fully respected [in Hungary]. We do not want the shadow of doubt on respect for democratic principles and values to remain over the country any longer."

"The independence of Hungary's central bank will be a precondition for a European Union and International Monetary Fund precautionary financial support program for the country," said Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner For Economic and Monetary Affairs.

In the European Parliament, Orbán was attacked for violating the fundamental values of democracy and freedom. Liberals, Greens and Socialist said that the new Hungarian constitution is an undemocratic document. Liberal group leader Guy Verhofstadt, and Green group leader Daniel Cohn Bendit both called on the EU to suspend Hungary's voting rights in the EU Council because its constitution is a "serious and persistent breach" of EU principles. Cohn Bendit, a former Communist, said that Orbán behaved the same way as Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Socialist group leader Hannes Swoboda said that Orbán is destroying the very freedoms that the Hungarian people fought for.

The threat that Hungary will not receive the loan of €20bn ($25bn), which it urgently needs to avoid bankruptcy after years of Socialist economic mismanagement, is forcing Orbán to appease his critics. He has promised to amend the measures to restrict the powers of the MNB and the early retirement of judges.

Last Saturday, however, the Hungarians made it clear that they are still standing behind Prime Minister Orbán. Over 100,000 people gathered in Budapest in support of the government. During the last century, the Hungarians played a prominent role in opposing Soviet tyranny. Today, they are taking the lead in opposing the European Union. "May God bless the Hungarians!" says the opening phrase of the new Hungarian constitution. May He, indeed.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-02-01T00:54:00.001+11:30

Non-Darwinist doctor refused job

A doctor was denied employment at a Norwegian hospital because he did not believe in the Theory of Evolution.

Saying, “we are quite far apart when it comes to a view of the world”, an Oslo University Hospital official claimed the doctor would not get the job “because I don’t think this will quite work.”

The psychiatrist, who wished to remain anonymous for his future professional career possibilities, told Christian newspaper Vårt Land, “Both I and colleagues reacted strongly to that such a justification could be allowed.”

“I therefore decided to bring the matter further before an independent body to verify this was unacceptable.”

The Equality and Discrimination Ombudsman subsequently found in favour of the doctor, saying he had been subject to discrimination.

Agreeing that considering views about the theory was legitimate for an employer, as it central to understanding how the human mind develops, the ombudsman nevertheless ruled the hospital had violated the Equal Opportunities Act by not giving other grounds for refusal.

The psychiatrist accused hospital officials of narrow-mindedness, saying, “It’s about tolerance for thinking differently, [...] and having more openness to other perspectives, which should be seen as a resource.”

“An employer should be allowed to ask about philosophy, even if they cannot handle the answer. The problem is how my view has been used as an argument to disqualify me as a professional. The refusal has not affected me, but it was an important matter of principle.”

SOURCE

Parents must have the right to spank their children to instil discipline, says Boris Johnson

The Mayor of London spoke after a senior Labour MP blamed his party’s partial ban on smacking children for last August’s riots.

Former education minister David Lammy called for a return to Victorian laws on discipline, saying working-class parents needed to be able to use corporal punishment to deter unruly children from joining gangs and wielding knives.

He claimed parents were ‘no longer sovereign in their own homes’ and feared that social workers would take their children away if they chastised them.

Labour’s 2004 law did not completely ban smacking, but said a smack should cause no more than a reddening of the skin.

Last night Mr Johnson supported Mr Lammy, saying the current law was ‘confusing’, meaning that parents do not know how far they can go in terms of smacking their children.

‘People do feel anxious about imposing discipline on their children, whether the law will support them,’ he told the Pienaar’s Politics programme on BBC Radio 5 Live.

'Obviously you don’t want to have a licence for physical abuse or for violence and that’s very important.’

The Mayor said he believed he had the support of Education Secretary Michael Gove.

‘I know that people will have their own views, but let me just say on the issue that’s been raised a lot of times with me; the issue of are you allowed to chastise, are you allowed to impose discipline?’

SOURCE

Pet-loving people haters in America

They sound a lot like Leftists and Greenies

People who rescue animals can be reluctant to believe anyone deserves the furry creatures. Some rescue groups think potential owners shouldn’t have full-time jobs. Others reject families with children. Some rescuers think apartment dwelling is OK for humans but not for dogs, or object to a cat’s litter box being placed in a basement. Some say no to people who would let a dog run around the fenced backyard “unsupervised,” or allow a cat outside, ever.

It used to be that people who wanted to get an abandoned or abused animal went to the local pound, saw one they liked, paid a small fee, and drove home with a new pet. Since the 1990s, however, the movement to reduce animal euthanasia and the arrival of the Internet have given rise to a new breed of rescuer. These are private groups, or even individuals, who create networks of volunteers to care for needy animals.

The new organizations take potentially adoptable pets out of the shelters and foster them, usually in private homes, until the right owner comes along. They control the fate of an increasing number of animals. In New York City, for example, almost 45 percent of the dogs and cats that come into the Animal Care & Control system are passed to one of more than 150 private rescue groups.

Groups like these have high standards for who gets to adopt. Applicants are sometimes subjected to an interrogation that would befit Michael Vick. After receiving this hostile treatment, several would-be pet owners told me, they got offended and gave up. Others push on, answering pages of questions (“As a dog ages, it often becomes incontinent and arthritic. How do you intend to handle your dog's age-related problems?”), supplying personal and veterinary references, and submitting to home inspections. Even after going through that ordeal, you can be told that you are unworthy for pet ownership, for reasons often left mysterious.

At this point, many frustrated animal lovers can commit an act they’d previously thought abhorrent: They buy a dog, cat, bird, or guinea pig from a pet store or breeder. I know because that’s what happened to me.

A few months ago during a Dear Prudence chat, I mentioned in passing how ridiculous some rescue groups were. When my family decided to get a second rescue dog, I felt it was my job to prove to the groups we contacted that I wasn’t a vivisectionist. Fed up, we decided to buy a puppy and found a lovely breeder, and our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Lily, has made us all ecstatic.

After I wrote this, I expected to be skinned alive by animal lovers. Instead, dozens of people posted comments about their own humiliation and rejection at the hands of these gatekeepers.

Katie wrote that she wanted to adopt a retired racing greyhound but was told she was not eligible unless she already had an adopted greyhound. Julie got a no from a cat rescue because she was over 60 years old, even though her daughter promised to take in the cat if something happened to Julie. Jen Doe said her boyfriend’s family lives on fenced farm property with sheep, but they weren’t allowed to adopt a border collie—whose raison d’être is herding sheep—because the group insisted it never be allowed off-leash. Philip was rejected because he said he allowed the dog he had to sleep wherever it liked; the right answer was to have a designated sleeping area. Molly, who has rescued Great Danes for more than 30 years, was refused by a Great Dane group because of “concern about my kitchen floor.”

My friend M., who looked into getting a family dog when her children were 6 and 9, had a similarly vexing experience. After she and her husband decided rescue was the right thing to do, they looked online and found a mutt named Rusty. Rusty’s rescue group was having an adoption day and the family made the long drive to see him. Adopters were told not to mingle with the animals, but that specific dogs would be brought to them. While Rusty was otherwise engaged, M. asked if they could look at some of the other dogs but almost all were declared not suitable for children.

As the family waited, the children sat on the ground and started writing in the dirt with sticks. A volunteer came over, alarmed. He reprimanded them, saying that if a dog sees a stick in a person’s hand it will expect that stick to be thrown, and it’s not fair to frustrate a dog.

Eventually, Rusty was brought over. He was a little hyper but everyone agreed he was fine. M. told the rescue group they wanted him, and when the family returned home they started buying dog supplies. But a call from the group aborted their plans. “We had a report about inappropriate behavior by your children,” M. was told, which meant they would not be allowed to adopt.

M. and her husband were astounded and the children were crushed. “We still really wanted a dog, so we did the wrong thing and went to a breeder,” M. says. They bought a Bernese Mountain Dog who basks in constant attention from M. and her husband, who both work at home. “He loves his life,” she says. “Too bad for Rusty.”

Let’s posit that many people who are drawn to humane work don’t have a particularly positive view of humanity. This natural aversion is exacerbated by years of helping abandoned, abused, and neglected animals, which means seeing the worst people do to innocent creatures. Unfortunately, a subset of these people who dislike people have become like admissions officers at selective colleges, rejecting applicants who don’t fit an ideal template.

Besides being as much fun to fill out as a Form 1040, many group’s applications are full of tricks and traps. Some are obvious. Anyone who gets to this question on one group’s application—“Do you plan to tie or chain the dog out at anytime?”—should know the answer is “never.” (I agree that dogs shouldn’t be chained outside). And you should know that the answer to this inquiry—“Have you ever had a cat declawed? Will you be declawing your new cat?”—is, “I would rip out my own fingernails with a pliers before declawing a cat.”

But other questions are conundrums. If you think having a dog would be great for your kids, or that your personal reproductive plans are not the business of strangers, then consider how to answer this question from a Labrador rescue group: “Are you considering having children within 10 years?” And who knows what number is disqualifying when answering this one: “How many steps are there to reach your front door?”

If an applicant manages to get approved, the adoption papers should be read carefully before signing. It turns out the contract often specifies the adopter is not the actual owner of the animal. Sure you’re responsible for the pet’s food, shelter, training, and veterinary care, but the organization might retain “superior title in said animal.” This means the group can drop in unannounced at any time for the rest of your pet’s life and seize Fluffy if it doesn’t like what it sees.

There are people in the rescue community who are aware that zealotry is damaging their cause. After all, since fewer than 20 percent of new pets come from rescue groups, driving down that proportion is self-defeating. Jane Hoffman is the president of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, the organization that transports potential pets from animal control to private groups and provides training and other services. “You have two ends of the spectrum,” she says. “Pet stores will sell to anyone with the money. And then there are rescue group who won’t adopt to anyone. We need a happy medium.”

Being an animal rescuer can be a potent source of identity, combining salvation and self-sacrifice. But in recent years the ASPCA has seen that, for some people, this identity crosses over into pathology. Dr. Randall Lockwood, a senior vice president of the ASPCA, says that around 25 percent of the 6,000 animal hoarding cases reported in the United States each year involve purported rescuers, up from less than five percent 20 years ago.

“They are trying to do something good,” he says, “and they end up doing something bad.”

More HERE

Segregation is back in Knoxville, TN: Anti-Gay Senator kicked out of restaurant

Stacey Campfield and I don't agree on much, he thinks only gays spread AIDS, he supported a "Don't Say Gay" bill, and he probably believes in what I refer to as "socialist sexuality" or the idea that we should all have the same sexuality. So what? I deal with people I disagree with everyday and I don't discriminate against them.

If Stacey Campfield came to my restaurant or wanted to do business with me, I would treat him with the same respect I give all my customers. You would think this kind of common sense would be popular, you would think everyone does that, yet that's not always the case:

"“Martha Boggs, owner of the Bistro at the Bijou, said she ordered the controversial Republican legislator out of her restaurant Sunday in disgust over his recent remarks about the origin of AIDS. ‘He’s gone from being stupid to dangerous,’ Boggs said today. ‘It’s just my way of standing up to a bully.’ ‘He didn’t have much to say,’ Boggs said. ‘He left graciously.’”

What a hypocrite! These liberals preach tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness all day long yet look at how they treated Stacey Campfield, they threw him out like a black man trying to eat in the white section of a segregated restaurant in 1952. Where's the EEOC? Where's the NAACP? Oh right, Stacey is white and Christian so he doesn't have "La Raza" fighting for him. I guess he's the wrong raza.

Sorry Stacey, if you had been born brown that Bistro of BS would have been firebombed by now. I guess blonds don't always have more fun, specially when dealing with progressive supremacists. Hey Martha, what kind of cross will you be burning? One made of sage and potpourri?

Remember those "No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs" signs they used to put outside restaurants? Will be the new sign for Bistro at the Bijou be "No Republicans, No Christians, No Insensitives"?

You want to know why some people hate gays? THIS IS WHY! All you had to do was shut up, serve your customer and take his money. Is that so hard? Didn't they teach that at Culinary School?

I'm an insurance salesman, you think I discriminate against my customers? You think I'm going to tell a liberal "you don't need life insurance"? You think I'm going to reject selling policies to people who voted for Obama? Of course not! I've gone into houses that smell like crap and I still manage to smile, listen to my customers, and see if I can help them.

Politics is politics and business is business, and although you do have the right to discriminate against certain people, YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO!

That is why I'm calling freedom-lovers everywhere to Boycott the Bijou until Martha Boggs APOLOGIZES to Senator Stacey and treats him to a FREE DINNER in her restaurant.

You want to disagree with the Senator? Go ahead, but when he comes to your restaurant you serve him just like any other customer! Boycott the Bijou!

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-31T00:23:00.001+11:30

Don't legalise gay marriage, Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu warns David Cameron

Marriage must remain a union between a man and a woman, says the Archbishop of York, and David Cameron will be acting like a “dictator” if he allows homosexual couples to wed.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dr John Sentamu, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, tells ministers they should not overrule the Bible and tradition by allowing same-sex marriage.

The Government will open a consultation on the issue in March and the Prime Minister has indicated that he wants it to be a defining part of his premiership. But the Archbishop says it is not the role of the state to redefine marriage, threatening a new row between the Church and state just days after bishops in the House of Lords led a successful rebellion over plans to cap benefits.

“Marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman,” says Dr Sentamu. “I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just [change it] overnight, no matter how powerful you are.

“We’ve seen dictators do it in different contexts and I don’t want to redefine very clear social structures that have been in existence for a long time and then overnight the state believes it could go in a particular way.

“It’s almost like somebody telling you that the Church, whose job is to worship God [will be] an arm of the Armed Forces. They must take arms and fight. You’re completely changing tradition.”

It was widely assumed that the Church would have to accept same-sex marriage for fear of appearing out of touch. Dr Sentamu says the bishops in the House of Lords did not try to stop Labour introducing civil partnerships in 2004, giving homosexual couples improved legal rights.

The Church tolerates clergy who are in civil relationships but expects them to be celibate. The Archbishop says the Church was also content with last year’s move to allow civil partnership ceremonies in places of worship, as long as it is voluntary and agreed by the governing body of any particular denomination.

But Dr Sentamu is opposed to the homosexual civil marriage proposal, and says the Government would face a rebellion on any changes in legislation. His intervention may serve as a rallying cry for traditionalist Tories who oppose Mr Cameron’s plan.

“The rebellion is going to come not only from the bishops,” he says. “You’re going to get it from across the benches and in the Commons.

“If you genuinely would like the registration of civil partnerships to happen in a more general way, most people will say they can see the drift. But if you begin to call those 'marriage’, you’re trying to change the English language.”

“That does not mean you diminish, condemn, criticise, patronise any same-sex relationships because that is not what the debate is about.

“The Church has always stood out – Jesus actually was the odd man out. I’d rather stick with Jesus than be popular because it looks odd.”

Dr Sentamu, in Jamaica to mark its 50 years of independence, also says the Church’s leadership needs to become less middle class.

SOURCE

Lord Carey backs Christian psychotherapist in 'gay conversion' row

Leading church figures including the former Archbishop of Canterbury have sparked controversy by championing a psychotherapist who believes gay men can be 'cured' of their homosexuality.

Lesley Pilkington was effectively barred from her professional register after attempting to convert a homosexual man in a therapy session at her home.

Her patient turned out to be a gay rights journalist, who had secretly recorded the sessions and then reported her to her professional body. Mrs Pilkington, a committed Christian, was subsequently found guilty of professional misconduct.

The therapy practised by Mrs Pilkington had been described as "absurd" by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and roundly condemned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

But ahead of her appeal against the BACP ruling, Mrs Pilkington has received backing from the Rt Rev Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

In a letter to her professional body, Lord Carey – along with a number of senior figures – suggests Mrs Pilkington is herself a victim of entrapment whose therapy should be supported.

His comments – in a letter co-signed by, among others, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and the Rt Rev Wallace Benn, the Bishop of Lewes – will cause controversy in the gay community and beyond.

The joint letter states: "Psychological care for those who are distressed by unwanted homosexual attractions has been shown to yield a range of beneficial client outcomes, especially in motivated clients ... Such therapy does not produce harm despite the Royal College of Psychiatrists and others maintaining the contrary."

It concludes: "Competent practitioners, including those working with biblical Judeo-Christian values, should be free to assist those seeking help."

Lawyers acting for Mrs Pilkington will argue at the appeal hearing on Wednesday that the counsellor did not get a fair hearing.

The case against Mrs Pilkington – first reported in The Sunday Telegraph a year ago – was brought by Patrick Strudwick, a journalist, who approached her at a largely Christian conference and asked her to treat him.

In May 2009, Mr Strudwick attended a therapy session at Mrs Pilkington's private practice, based at her home in Chorleywood, Herts, and recorded the session on a tape machine strapped to his stomach.

On the tape, Mr Strudwick asks Mrs Pilkington if she views homosexuality as "a mental illness, an addiction or an anti religious phenomenon". She replies: "It is all of that."

Last year, Mr Strudwick said: "Entering into therapy with somebody who thinks I am sick … is the singularly most chilling experience of my life.

"If a black person goes to a GP and says I want skin bleaching treatment, that does not put the onus on the practitioner to deliver the demands of the patient. It puts the onus on the health care practitioner to behave responsibly."

Mrs Pilkington said her method of therapy – Sexual Orientation Change Efforts – is legitimate and effective.

The therapy is practised by a handful of psychotherapists in Britain. The method involves behavioural, psychoanalytical and religious techniques.

Homosexual men are sent on weekends away with heterosexual men to "encourage their masculinity" and "in time to develop healthy relationships with women", said Mrs Pilkington.

Her legal defence is being funded by the Christian Legal Centre (CLC), which has instructed Paul Diamond, a leading human rights barrister, to fight the case.

SOURCE

A Missed Opportunity

The official Republican response to the President’s State of the Union Address was fine—as far as it went. But Gov. Mitch Daniels missed a golden opportunity to put before the American people a better vision of family, faith, and freedom.

Interestingly, the only mention of family in Gov. Daniels’ response was his praise for President Obama’s own family. Let me stipulate: The Obama family is a model family, apparently devoted to one another. The president even lives happily under the same roof with his mother-in-law. Now, that’s devotion.

But Gov. Daniels could have noted that the policies of the Obama administration are the most antagonistic to the family of any administration in history. This is a fact. With 42% of American children born out-of-wedlock, a tragedy of fatherlessness is being visited on millions of homes. Bill Bennett rightly calls this “the broken hearth.” And broken hearths lead to broken hearts.

Does the president address this in his budget? No. Instead, he gives hundreds of millions to Planned Parenthood, the world’s leading trafficker in abortion. We know that the more sexual contacts young people have prior to marriage, the more likely they are never to marry, or to divorce after marriage. You cannot be pro-family and shovel money at this evil enterprise. This is one shovel-ready project we should reject.

Yet, President Obama has told Speaker Boehner that any cut in federal funds for Planned Parenthood is “a non-starter.” President Obama has relentlessly pushed abortion at home and abroad. Obamacare is the most massive expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. Under Obamacare, health care coverage will include abortion. Thus, we will all be forced to pay for the killing of unborn children.

The president is concerned, he tells us, about education. We must all share that concern. But he has taken over college loans, an unprecedented power grab. He does this even as his administration is menacing the liberty of every private and religious college in America. If your college does not want to push condoms in the dorms or dispense abortion-producing drugs at Student Health, the Obama administration threatens you with action.

Dr. Larry Arnn is president of Hillsdale College, a proud independent college founded by abolitionists in the 1850s. Hillsdale takes no federal funds. Dr. Arnn recently spoke of how the intact family undergirds limited government:

The principles of our country stem from the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. This word “Nature” is full of rich meaning. It comes from the Latin word for birth, so of course the nature of man, and natural rights must be understood to include the process of begetting and growth by which human beings come to be…If families do not raise children, then the government will. What then becomes of limited government?

I offer Dr. Arnn’s eloquent analysis to President Obama. That terrible figure of 42% out-of-wedlock births shows up the false promises of those who said that abortion-on-demand would end welfare and poverty. When they said that, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was less than half what it is today.

Social scientist Charles Murray has written a new book, Coming Apart, in which he shows that the dream of upward mobility for millions is being lost. In this important work, he shows that marriage and religion are central to the economic well-being of millions of Americans.

The Obama administration is actively hostile to marriage, refusing even to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. That law was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president. And Mr. Obama’s administration is seeking suppress the conscience rights of millions—including Catholics, Evangelicals, Lutherans, and Orthodox Jews. His radical demand that every federally-supported institution in the country dispense abortifacients is a grave threat to religious liberty.

To the fires of social discord this administration is adding fuel. To those on the lower rungs of life’s ladder, asserting their God-given right to rise, this administration is breaking the first rungs. These are the issues I’d like to see both of our major parties address in 2012.

SOURCE

Church-Burning Video Used to Promote Atheist Event at Ft. Bragg

Atheists are using a music video that celebrates the burning of churches and synagogues to promote an upcoming atheist-themed festival at Fort Bragg.

“Rock Beyond Belief” is scheduled to be held on the parade field at Fort Bragg in March. The event was created in part as a response to a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association event that was held last year.

Justin Griffith, who organized “Rock Beyond Belief,” said he was personally offended that a Christian evangelical event like “Rock the Fort” was held on the base.

“We felt it was entirely inappropriate for anyone to say your current religion is wrong,” Griffith told Fox News& Commentary. “We view all soldiers as already spiritually complete. Whatever their current religious preference is has no bearing on how fit they are as a soldier or anything related to military business.”

Griffith confirmed the lineup includes atheist speakers, a rapper who raps about evolution and a “kiddy pool” where boys and girls will be able to scientifically walk on water.

There will also be a number of bands performing – the most famous of which is Aiden. They are featured in a video on the “Rocky Beyond Belief” website that includes images of burning churches and bloody crosses.

Among the lyrics: “Love how the burn your synagogues, love how they torch your holy books.”

The group is no stranger to strong lyrics. Another of their songs says, “F*** your God, F*** your faith in the end. There’s no religion.”

Griffith said that particular song would not be performed at the festival, but defended the video of burning churches.

“You can buy their albums in Wal-Mart, a Christian-friendly store,” Griffith said. “If you have issues with bands that sometimes have swear words, or naughty words, or shocking imagery, that’s a part of the First Amendment.”

Benjamin Abel, a spokesman for Fort Bragg told Fox News & Commentary that they were launching a review of the bands scheduled to perform along with their content.

“This is a family-friendly event and we expect the entertainment will meet the standards of decency that would be typical on a top-40 music station,” Abel said. “We owe it to our soldiers and families on post to make sure it is.”

As for the graphic, anti-Christian lyrics – Abel said “I would have to think we would have to take a very close look at that kind of lyric.” “I don’t know how family-friendly that is,” he said.

Griffith said there is absolutely no controversy about Aiden’s upcoming performance.

“It’s a little shocking to hear some of this stuff,” he said. “I’m sure you understand that these types of shocking things are not going to be front and center for a rock concert that is on a military base. This is not controversy. This is not a real story.”

But if that’s the case, why is there a video of the band performing in front of burning churches on the “Rock Beyond Belief” website?

The military could not answer that question. “I can’t speak to somebody’s website,” Abel said. “We are reviewing the material and will ensure that event organizers understand that we will have to hold them to a certain level of decency.”

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-01-30T00:13:00.002+11:30

Paedophile of 'the most sickening order' was able to film himself abusing girls in primary school classrooms because bosses did NOTHING despite 30 warnings

Behold the attitudes engendered by being a British public servant. They are an especially protected class who can be fired only under the most exceptional circumstances so they often just go through the motions of doing their jobs -- with the only important thing to them being what cake to have with their morning tea. This case was so extreme, however, that the most guilty party was fired. He should have been prosecuted for criminal negligence or as an accessory after the fact

A paedophile teacher filmed himself abusing girls in the classroom after school bosses failed over 14 years to act on 30 warnings about his behaviour. Nigel Leat, 51, was described by a judge as a ‘paedophile of the most sickening order’ when he was jailed indefinitely last year for abusing five girls, some as young as six.

Yesterday a damning report showed that the primary school where he worked had catastrophically failed to protect the children in his care. Over 14 years, concerns had been raised repeatedly about Leat’s behaviour with pupils, but his conduct was never investigated. He had abused children in the school’s computer room, resource room, staff room and even during lessons with other pupils present.

Leat also regularly filmed the pupils’ harrowing ordeals using a camera provided by the school, storing hundreds of films on more than 20 memory sticks labelled with his victims’ names.

Staff at Hillside First School in Worle, Somerset, first noticed Leat selecting girls who were ‘less academically able, emotionally needy or pretty’ as his ‘favourites’ a year after he started teaching there in 1996.

His inappropriate behaviour was so well known that staff tried to prevent children likely to become his ‘star pupils’ from being put into his Year Two and Year Three classes.

In 2004, a mother claimed Leat had been taking pictures of her daughter with a mobile phone but he denied the accusation and no action was taken. Four years later, two children told staff that Leat, a married father of two, had been touching their legs and kissing one of them – causing her to be sick – and a teacher twice reported him to the head. Another member of staff saw Leat projecting an indecent image of an adult on to a wall during a lesson.

Leat was also seen lifting up and groping young girls in the playground, tickling and cuddling pupils in class and sitting on cushions with a schoolgirl while visibly aroused.

But those staff members who reported Leat’s behaviour were told they should not ‘insinuate things’ and were bullied into silence, a report said yesterday.

It was later discovered that Leat would routinely hide a camera under his desk and then summon his victims, recording the subsequent horrifying images of the abuse. In many of the videos, which are up to ten minutes in length, other children can be seen or heard in the background.

When police finally became involved, Leat first denied wrongdoing but later admitted 36 sexual offences including rape, assault and voyeurism.

Yesterday a review by the North Somerset Safeguarding Children Board concluded that his appalling crimes could have been stopped much earlier if the school had not failed to act on the warnings. Instead, out of 30 disturbing incidents noted, only 11 were mentioned to the school’s headmaster, Chris Hood, and none was passed on to an agency outside the school.

Leat was only arrested in December 2010, when a schoolgirl told her mother he abused her ‘every day apart from when the teaching assistant was in the classroom’.

Police who raided the home he shared with his wife, also a teacher, found more than 30,000 images, including 61 pictures and 21 movies at level five, the most serious level. At least 20 children were victims of Leat’s abuse or witnessed it at the school, which caters for 128 children aged between four and eight.

Three Ofsted inspections undertaken during the time Leat was abusing his students graded it as ‘good’ and a report in 2009 noted: ‘Pupils feel exceptionally safe and secure because they know that staff have their well-being at heart.’

Tony Oliver, who chaired the serious case review, said: ‘There was a failure at every level within the school.

‘There was a culture which just did not empower people to voice their concerns. It could be interpreted as a culture of bullying.’ He said the headmaster had been sacked following a disciplinary process.

SOURCE

Ban on spanking behind London riots?

The ban on smacking children must be overturned to help prevent a repeat of last summer’s riots, according to a senior Labour MP.

Former Education Minister David Lammy, who represents the Tottenham area of North London where the disturbances started, says working-class parents need to be able to discipline their children physically to deter them from joining gangs and getting involved in knife crime.

Calling for a return to the Victorian laws on discipline, Mr Lammy said parents were ‘no longer sovereign in their own homes’ and lived under constant fear that social workers would take away their children if they chastised them.

The MP said it was easier for middle-class parents to control their children as they could afford to pay for private schools, which have tougher discipline than state schools, as well as activities such as tennis lessons.

Mr Lammy, 39, said he was smacked as a child and it taught him self-discipline and respect, adding that he had smacked his own sons, aged three and five – mainly to protect them from danger.

He called for a reversal of Labour’s 2004 decision to tighten up the smacking law. Previously parents could use ‘reasonable chastisement’, while the new definition prohibits any force that causes ‘reddening of the skin’. Mr Lammy poured scorn on that description, saying it was irrelevant to black children.

He said: ‘Many of my constituents came up to me after the riots and blamed the Labour Government, saying, “You guys stopped us being able to smack our children.”

‘When this was first raised with me I was pretty disparaging. But I started to listen. These parents are scared to smack their children and paranoid that social workers will get involved and take their children away.

‘The law used to allow “reasonable chastisement”, but current legislation stops actions that lead to a reddening of the skin – which for a lot of my non-white residents isn’t really an issue.’

Mr Lammy – who is married to portrait artist Nicola Green, the daughter of the founder of the British Lung Foundation, Professor Sir Malcolm Green – said the law was designed for middle-class families, not those who lived with ‘fear outside their windows’.

‘Middle-class families can find all sorts of ways to handle children, by putting them in tennis classes or using traditional private schools,’ he said.

Asked if he had smacked his own children he confessed: ‘I have smacked my kids, but it doesn’t happen very often – usually when they are in danger.’ The MP was pressed on the issue in an interview with Iain Dale on LBC Radio, after he had made a call on the Mumsnet website for smacking to be legalised.

Parents in his area had to ‘raise children on the 15th floor of a tower block with knives, gangs and the dangers of violent crime just outside the window’, he said.

‘They no longer feel sovereign in their own homes. And the ability to exercise their own judgment in relation to discipline and reasonable chastisement has been taken away.’

He added that ‘middle-class’ MPs and Ministers had no idea of the ‘realities of the single mum struggling with these issues. We should return to the law as it existed for 150 years before it was changed in 2004’.

The Children Act of 2004, introduced by Tony Blair’s Government, removed the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’, meaning injuries as slight as a bruise can result in an assault charge. Guilty parents can be jailed for up to five years.

Mr Lammy told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Parents in my constituency are frightened that if they smack their children, a social worker will come knocking at the door.

‘When the law changed in 2004, it was to deal with people who abused their children. The law at that time left judges to determine if a parent had used reasonable chastisement. Under the new arrangements it is left to social workers.

‘Single mums raising boys feel there are things that happen outside their front door – drugs, gangs or knife crime – where smacking is one of the things they should be able to do. They are confused about the law. We should allow 99 per cent of parents to determine how to help their children understand boundaries and learn right from wrong.

‘We have to distinguish between that and child abuse. No normal parent enjoys smacking their child. A lot do it from time to time and as children get older it stops. ‘I was smacked as a child. And I am hugely grateful for the role my mother played in my life. I wouldn’t be an MP if it were not for her.’

Mr Lammy was brought up in Tottenham by a single mother, Rose, and has previously spoken of his sense of ‘betrayal’ after his father walked out on the family when he was 11 years old.

Mr Lammy set out his support for scrapping the smacking ban in his book Out Of The Ashes: After The Riots.

He said that last year’s summer riots, which started after a man was shot dead by police in Tottenham, were ‘an explosion of hedonism and nihilism’, fuelled by police blunders – and not caused by Government cuts or joblessness.

His predecessor as Tottenham MP, Bernie Grant, famously said police got a ‘bloody good hiding’ in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, when PC Keith Blakelock was killed.

Mr Lammy’s constituency in the London borough of Haringey has witnessed two terrible child abuse scandals. In 2009, the mother of ‘Baby P’, Peter Connelly, and two others were jailed after he died, despite being seen by Haringey’s authorities 60 times. The council was also criticised after eight-year-old Victoria Climbie was starved to death in Tottenham in 2000.

SOURCE

Veterans Group Calls on West Point to Pull Speaking Invite for Anti-Islamist Retired Officer

A group of veterans is calling on the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to retract its speaking invitation to a retired Army officer known for his controversial views about Islam.

Retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin was the Pentagon’s senior military intelligence official until 2004, when he was reprimanded for remarks comparing the war against radical Islam to a Christian struggle against Satan and for saying Muslims worship idols and not “a real God,” according to the Washington Post. He has also said he believes no mosques should be built in America and has called Islam “a totalitarian way of life.”

Boykin, an ordained minister who speaks around the country, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a West Point prayer breakfast Feb. 8.

On Thursday, VoteVets.org, the self-described “largest progressive organization of veterans in America,” released a letter to West Point‘s superintendent asking for Boykin’s invitation to be rescinded.

“[Statements similar to Boykin's] remarks threaten our relationships with Muslims around the world, and thereby, our troops serving in harm’s way,” the letter stated.

Calling Boykin’s values “inconsistent even with current Army doctrine,“ the organization said it would be ”counterproductive for our future Army leaders to hear the views of Lt. Gen. Boykin.”

VoteVets.org has been joined by the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, a “community support network” that “responds to insensitive practices that illegally promote religion over non-religion within the military or unethically discriminate against minority religions or differing beliefs,” according to their website.

SOURCE

Australian tennis ace critical of homosexuality

TENNIS great Margaret Court claims homosexuality is often the result of sexual abuse. Amid a growing backlash over her opposition to same-sex marriage, the three-time Wimbledon champion told The Sunday Mail "many, many" gay and lesbian people she knew of had "been abused" and this had led to their sexual orientation.

Court, a senior minister at Perth's Victory Life Centre, has already sparked fury among gay and equal rights activists for recent comments, including that the push for gay marriage was trying "to legitimise what God calls abominable sexual practices".

Mental health advocate Chris Tanti accused her of "spreading misery" and putting young gay people at risk of suicide with what he called her anti-gay comments, amid calls for her name to be removed from centre court at Melbourne Park.

But Court said: "We get them (homosexuals) in (at church) and you'll find that many, many of them have been abused". When asked if she felt such abuse led people to homosexuality, Court said: "Yes. You look at a lot of them, that's happened."

She would not be drawn on whether she felt same-sex abuse was specifically to blame, saying, "We'll start another can of worms if I start talking on all this."

Peter Rosengren, editor of the Catholic Church's The Record newspaper, batted away her claims, saying he had "never heard of any scientific study" linking abuse and homosexuality, and that "everyone has to be respected".

In a wide-ranging interview, Court also said:

"The word of God is our TV guide to life. It's not the fear book, it's a love book and it tells us how to live our lives."

"I would have won six Wimbledons not three . . . if I'd known what I know now from the scriptures, on the area of the mind."

Many migrants expected Australians "to change our laws to embrace what they have and I don't feel that's right".

"Christianity is a way forward" for Aboriginal people.

Court also said she did not regret speaking out against same-sex marriage. "I say what God says and that's why I've spoken out," she said. "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. "I have a right as a minister to say that. You look at the decline in the world today. I think it's so important for values and morals and righteousness to come forth like never before."

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-01-29T00:24:00.001+11:30

Heavy criticism for an academic who said those who display the Australian flag are likely to be racist

I think criticism of her is justified. She did apparently use the term "racist", which is very inflammatory. Many people would see it as including Hitler-type behaviour and she had no evidence that the people she described would endorse such behaviour.

There are many possible gradations of opinion about race-related matters. It may be noted, for instance, that the man who declared war on Hitler (Neville Chamberlain) was himself an antisemite of sorts -- so any implicit or explicit claim that there is such a thing as a monolithic entity called racism is unscholarly.

And any social scientist making or implying such a claim is ipso facto a very low-grade intellect. Though it might be noted that mean minds are common among sociologists. Many of them are still devoted to the writings of an obsolete economist and proven stimulator of hate named Karl Marx. The term "racist" of no use for anything except abuse. I use the term only in mockery of Leftist abuse.

I made some technical remarks about her research on 24th. but readers may also be interested in an alternative to her kneejerk reaction to the old "white Australia policy". See here for a more philosophically sophisticated look at the issues involved

A PERTH professor whose study found people who fly Australian flags on their cars are more racist than those who don't, says she has received over 70 critical emails which include demands that she go back to her "own country".

Brunei-born University of WA Professor Farida Fozdar [Judging by the name she is ethnically an Indian Muslim], who moved to Australia when she was seven, said she was shocked by the national reaction to her study which also spread as far India and the United States.

“Some emails have been quite polite and I’ve been able to reply and we’ve actually had quite a positive interaction out of it which, I really really value," Professor Fozdar said.

"But some are straight out lots of swear words and suggesting that I should go back to where I came from.

“I’ve also had a couple of emails from people implying that I’m the Grinch that killed Christmas and that now nobody is going to fly a flag because they think it shows that they’re racist.”

Professor Fozdar, a sociologist and anthropologist, said that although the study was reported “relatively accurately” in the media, some people have misinterpreted its findings.

“What has struck me most is that the media has reported the research relatively accurately in most cases, perhaps apart from some headlines, but people have taken it up in the wrong way,” Professor Fozdar said.

“People have taken it as though I was saying that anyone who flies a flag on their car for Australia Day is racist and that flying the flag generally is a racist thing to do and that certainly wasn’t what I was saying.”

Professor Fozdar said the study revealed flag-flyers were significantly less positive about Australia’s ethnic diversity than “non-flag flyers” but that the attitude is not shared by all Australians.

“The fact that there were significant differences doesn’t mean that everybody who flys the flag feel negative towards minorities but it means that a larger proportion of them did compared with people that weren’t flying flags,” she said.

Professor Fozdar said many people ignored her findings that the majority of both flag-flyers and non-flag flyers, interviewed by her research team, felt positive about Australia’s ethnic diversity.

“But that’s not what gets picked up by people,” she said. “That statistic was there, in a lot of media reports, but people took out of it that I’m saying they shouldn’t fly a flag for Australia Day because it’s racist and that we shouldn’t celebrate Australia Day. “That was just nowhere in the research and so that is what has surprised me.”

SOURCE

Hysteria and the moral battle to end welfare dependency in Britain

By Simon Heffer

This week’s row about welfare reform threw up several shocking facts. First, the £26,000-per-household cap on benefits that the Government seeks to impose is equivalent to a £35,000 pre–tax salary of someone in work.

Then there was the case of a parish priest who said he worked six days a week and earned £22,000 a year. Since he is in employment he does not qualify for any of the hand-outs (such as free public transport) given to some full-time welfare benefits claimants.

In a letter to a newspaper he rebuked the bishops of his own church who had voted in the Lords against the Government’s benefits cap, which would be set at £4,000 a year more than he earns.

To say that welfare is a perennially toxic subject is one of the great political understatements of our times. However unmerited some people’s financial support from the State is, the threat of its reduction or withdrawal always triggers hysteria from those unthinking elements on the Left — whether in the Labour Party, the Anglican Church or the BBC.

The truth is that, as a country, we have lost sight of the importance of every citizen striving to contribute to society, however modestly, as opposed to making a claim upon it.

As a result, perversely, those who won’t contribute are treated the same as those who do. This injustice means that they are given the right to live handsomely off the labour of the rest of us.

To sustain this grotesque state of affairs, which is an abnegation of society’s most fundamental values, would be unacceptable even in times of plenty. But in a time of economic crisis, it is simply outrageous.

Following this week’s Lords rebellion against the Coalition’s plans to cap the cost of benefit payments, the Mail has highlighted families living on small incomes who are determined to be self-reliant and to avoid becoming trapped in a cycle of welfare dependency.

Sadly, it has also been easy to find examples at the opposite end of the moral scale — people who are perfectly capable of work, but refuse to take or even look for it.

Indeed, earlier this month the media reported that some unemployed people were so idle that they couldn’t even bother to get out of bed in the morning to sign for their welfare benefits.

The fact that such behaviour is now tolerated without retribution is a shameful reflection of the attitudes of those who have governed this country over recent years.

Mercifully, there are influential figures such as Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith and former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey who are determined to end this State-sponsored moral degeneracy.

This week, Lord Carey wrote an article for the Mail in which he said the scale of Britain’s public debt was the ‘greatest moral scandal’ facing the country and warned that the welfare system is rewarding ‘fecklessness and irresponsibility’.

He criticised the bishops who led the Lords rebellion, saying the senior churchmen were encouraging the culture of welfare dependency that led to ‘poverty of aspiration’. He said that they could lay no claim to the ‘moral high ground’.

Meanwhile, Mr Duncan Smith is wrestling to cut the £100 billion annual welfare bill. His initial proposals are modest, not because he lacks radicalism (for he understands exactly what must be done to wean Britain off dependency) but because his party’s Lib Dem coalition partners refuse to concede that the drastic reforms are necessary.

However, Mr Duncan Smith has two advantages that ought to help him carry through his proposals.

First, he has spent years studying the problems of poverty and he knows what he is talking about; what is more, the public trusts him because of that expertise.

Second, the dire economic state of the country means welfare reform is not being embarked upon purely as an ideological exercise. It is an urgent necessity because we have a crippling £1 trillion debt, caused by the last Labour administration, and the Government must make huge savings.

The public understands this and supports attempts to reduce the debt. The Tory Party, which is driving the reforms, is ahead in the opinion polls. This means there has never been a better time to break the culture that makes welfare dependency, for some people, a lifetime career.

Mr Duncan Smith deserves the unqualified support of all taxpayers in his attempts to start the process. The tragedy is that he appears to be fighting an almost lone battle in Westminster.

It is time his fellow Tories gave their public support to his reforms and highlighted the scandal of the way those who refuse to work (being given lavish welfare hand-outs) are treated in comparison with those who do.

Meanwhile, one has only to read the Left-wing media’s coverage of the debate about welfare to see that blackmail is being attempted to get reformers to halt their programme.

First, their opponents argue that any restriction on benefits given to the workshy will inevitably harm the claimants’ children. Also, they warn that some claimants may turn to crime if they lose their benefits.

The way to defeat such specious arguments is to make clear the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Although this is often considered to be a Victorian concept, it was, in fact, first properly defined in 1563, when magistrates were told to differentiate between various types of poor in their parishes.

The deserving were deemed to be those who wished to work but couldn’t find employment. A ‘poor rate’ was levied to raise money to provide them with clothes and food.

Also deemed to be deserving were those too old, young or ill to work. They would be supported in alms houses or orphanages, and children would be offered apprenticeships to ensure that their adult lives were not blighted by poverty.

On the other hand, the undeserving poor were those — such as sturdy beggars — who avoided work. A remedy was found in 1563 when it was agreed that these idlers should be whipped until they saw the error of their ways, or moved on to another parish.

This distinction between deserving and undeserving poor was enshrined in the Poor Law of 1601, which remained until it was revised in the 19th century.

Of course, today’s undeserving poor are no longer whipped. Instead, they are kept in idleness by a state welfare system that gives them little or no incentive to work. Their weekly benefit cheques relieve them of the necessity of begging. Their children, produced regardless of their parents’ ability to provide food and clothing, are used as human shields in the fight against any cuts in welfare.

Surely the Government can devise a proper system that ensures that widows, orphans, disabled and elderly receive the full compassion of the State, while those who live off taxpayers have their life of idleness halted.

There has often been talk of ‘workfare’, a scheme used successfully in America where benefits are paid in return for state-sponsored work. The main obstacle to such a system in Britain has been the trades unions, who feared work would be found at the expense of their members.

The truth is that there are plenty of socially useful and productive tasks that could be done as a condition of receiving benefits.

For some of these people, though, this may require a major change in attitude. For example, people such as the university graduate who recently claimed her human rights had been infringed because she’d been made to work for her jobless benefits as a shelf stacker in Poundland must be made to realise how lucky they are to have gainful employment.

As for the argument that children will come to harm because their parents might lose benefits, that is not true. They would not lose out financially. Their hand-outs would simply be replaced by payments from the workfare scheme. Neither would there be a rise in crime, for the same reason.

Politicians have talked for nearly 20 years, since the time when fellow Tory Peter Lilley did Mr Duncan Smith’s job in the mid-Nineties, of ending the something-for-nothing society.

Even if a few bishops support it, the rest of the country is fed up being taken for a ride. We cannot afford it, literally or morally. Now is the time to deliver on the promise.

SOURCE

Vilified for telling the truth: The Christian GP whose life was made hell after he questioned the legalise drugs campaign

Dr Hans-Christian Raabe is a man of gentle demeanour and firm principle who cares deeply about his patients in the deprived area of Manchester where he works as a GP. Indeed, he chose to serve a community where unemployment is high, drug problems endemic and gang warfare rife because he wanted to make a difference.

‘I wanted to care for people in areas of most need, so I opted to work in a disadvantaged community with a high prevalence of social problems,’ he says. ‘And at the root of many of these problems are drugs.’

‘Every day I see the devastation substance abuse causes to individuals, families and communities. I see huge numbers of patients whose lives — whether directly or indirectly — have been ruined by the misuse of drugs.’

As a result of this first-hand experience — and because he felt a public-spirited compulsion to help tackle a national crisis — Dr Raabe volunteered for an unpaid post on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).

However, he had barely taken up the three-year voluntary position as a Government adviser when a witch hunt against him began.

Disseminated by internet, the campaign swiftly gathered speed. Then the Home Office weighed in: in February 2011, Dr Raabe was dismissed before he had even had a chance to attend an ACMD meeting. He was given no right of appeal.

What happened? Had he committed a crime so heinous that no amount of self‑justification could exonerate him? Actually, he had not. Dr Raabe, 47, was merely guilty of holding unfashionably uncompromising anti-drugs views — namely that legalising drugs merely normalises their usage, and that we should instead try to create a drug-free society by focusing on drug prevention.

Incredibly, Dr Raabe was also criticised for being a Christian. He was stunned: ‘I was called a bigot, scum and a mad ba****d. I was accused of being a waste of space and of having no qualification to talk about substance abuse.

‘All I’d done was to offer a day or more of my time every week for three years to help improve the drug problem in the UK, and I was subjected to a vile stream of abuse and defamation. The Home Office caved in to pressure from the politically correct brigade. I believe it was spineless of them.

‘When they revoked my appointment I was not given a chance to refute any of the allegations against me. I began to feel as if I was living in a totalitarian regime — in Stalinist Russia or Ahmadinejad’s Iran — not in Britain in 2011.’

For months Dr Raabe, reeling from the shock of the onslaught, considered his position. And then he decided to fight back.

The German-born doctor has been granted permission for a judicial review against Home Secretary Theresa May, which is set to commence later this year, and is being represented by leading human rights lawyer James Dingemans QC.

He hopes to win back his committee post and, in so doing, stand up for Christians, who he believes are becoming increasingly marginalised and excluded from public office. ‘The attack on me was a confirmation that I was doing something right,’ he says. ‘The way I was treated strengthened my resolve to fight my corner.’

His determination was further bolstered this week when the Sentencing Council announced new rules under which heroin and cocaine dealers can be spared prison — serving community sentences instead. This week also saw Sir Richard Branson calling for the liberalisation of drugs laws, claiming three-quarters of young adults had tried cannabis.

The Virgin boss, who has admitted smoking the drug and using cocaine and ecstasy, said it was wrong to criminalise those with drug problems and argued that addicts should be given treatment, not sent to jail.

Dr Raabe fiercely contests this approach. ‘If you legalise drugs, you normalise their use,’ he says. ‘Do we really want to normalise the use of heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and all the synthetic drugs?

‘Those who suggest legalisation is the answer have not learnt from history. It has been tried before and failed disastrously. Sweden and Japan have had painful experiences with legal drugs and, as a result, they have chosen instead to focus on drug prevention. They now have very low rates of misuse.’

Such uncompromising views have earned Dr Raabe enemies, who, he believes, sought to dredge up reasons why he should be sacked from the ACMD.

From the maelstrom of accusations and insults whipped up when he was appointed to the council in January last year, another grievance against him emerged. His opponents exhumed an academic report he co‑authored in 2005, while he was living in Canada, linking homosexuality to paedophilia.

The report, a collaboration between several doctors, was written when the Canadian Parliament was debating whether or not to legalise same-sex marriage, to which Dr Raabe — while he is not against civil partnerships — is opposed.

‘The paper summarised scientific evidence, which was in the public domain, and it was one paragraph, mentioning homosexuality and paedophilia together, which — so the Home Office tells me — caused them “embarrassment”,’ says Dr Raabe.

The offending paragraph states: ‘While the majority of homosexuals are not involved in paedophilia, it is of grave concern that there are a disproportionately greater number of homosexuals among paedophiles.’

However, the Home Office also made essentially the same point in a document it published, which states: ‘Twenty to 33 per cent of child sexual abuse is homosexual in nature and about 10 per cent mixed.’

The irony of this is not lost on Dr Raabe. Even so, it was a Home Office civil servant who phoned him a couple of weeks after his ACMD appointment to question him about the report. ‘Three days later I received a letter from the Home Office saying it was “minded to reconsider” my appointment and asking for my response. I sent a detailed letter back and within two days my appointment was revoked.

‘I was told it was because I could potentially discriminate against gay people; something I have never done either in my professional or private life. I’m not anti-gay.’

There were other complaints against him. He had, it seems, compounded his ‘crime’ by holding firm opinions against legalising of drugs such as cannabis; views which set him at odds with former ACMD chairman Professor David Nutt, who believes that prohibition has failed and advocates a new approach based on teaching young people how to use prohibited drugs more safely.

Professor Nutt was sacked from the ACMD after claiming that ecstasy, LSD and cannabis were less dangerous than alcohol.

Dr Raabe, who has consistently opposed moves to reclassify cannabis from class B to C, holds the opposite view from Professor Nutt. He refuses to take the defeatist stance traditionally espoused by the ACMD — and echoed by the 30 celebrities who last year wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister asking him to consider decriminalising the possession of drugs — that the war against drugs is lost, and that children should be educated in the safest way to use them.

Instead, his aim is to try to create a drug-free society by teaching young people to say ‘no’. He is a member of an evangelical free church and his beliefs and opinions are in line with those of many of the Christian churches, which also seems to have raised hackles.

‘I take a very different view from the ones that have shaped the disastrously unsuccessful drugs policy in Britain,’ he says.

‘I’m a great fan of prevention, which is the approach used in Sweden, where the incidence of drug misuse is among the lowest in Europe. In contrast, Britain has among the highest rates of drug misuse, so current policies are patently not working.

Meanwhile, as an internet furore against Dr Raabe gathered pace, his own staff and patients — the people who use his surgery in the deprived Greater Manchester suburb of Partington and who know him best — rallied in support of him. ‘I’ve had not one negative comment, and many positive, encouraging messages,’ he says.

Meanwhile, the flurry of gratuitous insults from the legalise cannabis lobby continue. ‘It has upset me, but what worries me more is the fact that because I challenged the liberal Establishment, I was seen as a threat and had to be removed. ‘I was sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and have been discriminated against on the basis of my opinion and my faith.

‘However, something similar could happen to anyone of any faith or none if he or she dares to hold views that are not deemed to be politically correct.

The Christian Institute, which is supporting Dr Raabe’s High Court challenge to the ACMD, has called his removal from his post, ‘worryingly like some sort of anti-Christian McCarthyism.’

The Home Office meanwhile, has urged him to retract the views he expressed in the report on homosexuality that caused such uproar.
Should he not have done so?

‘I cannot retract scientific evidence,’ he says simply. ‘And if I did so, I would have to ask the Home Office to retract its own paper, too.’

More HERE

The War on Political Free Speech in the USA

Two years after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, the campaign to silence opponents is becoming more censorious.

Two years ago the Supreme Court upheld the right of an incorporated nonprofit organization to distribute, air and advertise a turgid documentary about Hillary Clinton called, appropriately enough, "Hillary: The Movie." From this seemingly innocuous and obvious First Amendment decision has sprung a campaign of disinformation and alarmism rarely seen in American politics.

From the start, reaction to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has bordered on the hysterical. Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) called it the "worst decision since Dred Scott"—the 1857 decision holding that slaves could never become citizens. In his State of the Union message, within days of the ruling, President Obama lectured Supreme Court justices in attendance that they had "reversed a century of law" to allow "foreign companies to spend without limit in our elections." Neither statement was true.

In 1907, Congress passed a law—the Tillman Act, named for segregationist South Carolina Sen. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman—prohibiting corporations from contributing to political campaigns. This law was extended to unions in 1943, and in 1947 a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act extended the prohibition to cover spending done independently of campaigns.

Citizens United overturned only the 1947 independent-spending restriction, not the earlier prohibition on corporate contributions to campaigns. Not until 1990 did the Supreme Court uphold a prohibition on corporate political expenditures independent of campaigns. Citizens United, therefore, overturned not "a century of law," but a precedent 20 years old.

Moreover, the court specifically noted that it was not ruling on the viability of the prohibition on foreign political spending—and earlier this month it summarily upheld a lower-court ruling finding that the prohibition on foreign political expenditures was constitutional.

Meanwhile, regardless of the 1947 federal law, the majority of states—including many of the best governed, scandal-free states such as Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Florida and Washington—have long allowed unlimited corporate spending in state elections.

None of this has slowed the decision's critics. Then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) began a committee hearing in September 2010 by arguing that in his small state, "it's easy to imagine corporate interests flooding the airwaves. . . . The rights of Vermonters . . . to be heard should not be undercut by corporate spending." Vermont has never prohibited corporate spending in state elections, yet it survived with its citizens' rights intact.

Mr. Leahy, at least, limited himself to foolish remarks. His junior colleague, Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), proposed a constitutional amendment last month that would not only prohibit corporations from speaking on political elections, but would prohibit any group of citizens organized "to promote business interests" from speaking about elections. Presumably, this could extend to everyone from the Heritage Foundation and the National Federation of Independent Business to the Republican National Committee and local citizens organizing against a sales-tax referendum.

Because most newspapers are incorporated, UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh believes that the Sanders Amendment and a companion bill in the House would even authorize the government to prohibit newspaper editorials about elections.

A national coalition, Move to Amend, seeks a constitutional amendment providing that "artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities . . . shall have no rights." The coalition seems oblivious to the fact that this would apply to campaign committees and nonprofits such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club, and would allow legislatures to make the advocacy of Move to Amend's goals illegal for most of the coalition's "endorsing organizations" (which are themselves corporations).

These amendments are based on the leftist cry that "corporations aren't people," but the Supreme Court has never said that they are. "Corporate personhood" is a legal fiction that allows natural people to sue and to be sued, to own and transfer property, and to carry on their affairs as a group. Corporations have rights because the people who own them have rights.

As Chief Justice John Marshall explained nearly 200 years ago in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, corporations allow "a perpetual succession of many persons . . . to manage [their] affairs and to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity, of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand." The legal concept of a corporate "person" has been with the United States since its founding, recognized in literally hundreds of Supreme Court decisions.

If Move to Amend got its way, police could search businesses, unions, clubs and nonprofits at will, without a warrant. The state could seize business property without due process or just compensation, leaving pension funds and individual shareholders holding worthless stock. Partnerships and corporations would have no legal rights in court. Incorporated churches would have no right of worship.

The absurdity should be obvious. Yet city councils around the country, including New York and Los Angeles, have passed resolutions calling for such an amendment.

Super PACs have become the latest villain du jour of the anti-speech crowd, which plays off the general public distaste for the political rancor that surfaces every election year. Critics including Mr. Sanders say that Super PACs don't disclose their donors and rely on "secret" money. This is simply not true. Super PACs, like the traditional political action committees that have existed for decades, disclose all expenditures and all donors over $200.

There are organizations that spend on politics but don't disclose their donors: traditional nonprofits such as the NAACP, the NRA and Public Citizen. These groups have never had to disclose their donors—and the Supreme Court, over 50 years ago, upheld their right to keep supporters anonymous. But reformers intentionally seek to blur the lines between these traditional groups and Super PACs in order to whip up criticism of Citizens United.

The goal of this misinformation is clear. Reformers, who sit mainly on the political left, and their Democratic Party allies hope to silence voices that they perceive to be hostile to their political interests.

Two years after Citizens United, American democracy seems as robust as ever. This may be what its critics fear most—a vibrant debate that they cannot control and fear they will lose.

The U.S. government argued in Citizens United that it had the right to ban the publication of books, pamphlets and movies that advocated the election or defeat of a candidate if they were produced or distributed by unions or corporations, such as Random House, Barnes & Noble and DreamWorks. That position is the one that deserves scorn. Fortunately, no new amendment was needed to defeat it—only the First Amendment and a Supreme Court willing to uphold it.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-28T00:16:00.001+11:30

Stepmothers can be MORE loving than a real mum (that's why my stepson chose to live with me)

As a stepfather to three great kids, I can relate to this story. Luckily, I had no stresses like the ones reported below. All the people involved were kind and unaggressive people. And one result is that my stepson (now a man in his 30s) has always got on far better with me than with his own father -- even though his father is a perfectly nice man in my experience of him -- JR

Every woman knows, deep down, that the much-vaunted maternal instinct isn't nearly as 'natural' as society makes it out to be.

In fact in my experience - and I know I will be roundly condemned for this view - this means that some women can even be better at taking care of and understanding a child than his or her own mother.

I am a stepmother - one of a band of much-maligned women who have suffered a bad rap right through history, from the wicked stepmothers of countless fairy tales to TV presenter Christine Bleakley, who is currently wrestling with damned-if-she-does, damned-if-she-doesn’t attempts to integrate herself into the lives of her fiancé Frank Lampard’s daughters.

The latest anti-stepmother brickbat came in last week's Femail, when Kelly Rose Bradford explained that she will never let her son meet his father’s new girlfriend. Kelly wrote acidly about how the thought of another woman ever being a 'parent' to her eight-year-old son left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Her controversial views sparked a phenomenal online response from hundreds of readers condemning her as 'selfish' and 'manipulative' and, in at least one post, suggesting Kelly's child should be removed from her care.

Now, I'm sure Kelly would like me if we met. Beyond the vitriol she directs at her ex's new girlfriend, Kelly seems loyal, smart and kind - attributes many of my friends would also ascribe to me.

And yet, I am Kelly’s worst nightmare, because for seven days a week I am 'mummy' to a child I did not give birth to.

For the last two years, my 15-year-old stepson John has lived full-time with his father Stephen and me. Stephen is a carpenter with his own business, typically working ten hours a day, six days a week.

I run our household and I am raising Stephen's child. John’s mother is allowed access to her son for two weekends each month. There was no fraught custody battle between John's parents - it was all very simple: John just decided he wanted to live with his father and me.

He was seven when his parents separated: it was more than 18 months later that Stephen and I met.

Our early days were full of challenges. For a start, my relationship with John wasn’t always easy. I met him for the first time when he was nine, and remember him playing with his Game Boy throughout my attempts to bond with him over a Coke.

His father, who had made the initial awkward introductions, peered anxiously at us as I tried to make small talk. It was excruciating, so I was lucky that my sister - who is a mother - was there to help make conversation.

If my relationship with Stephen was to go the distance, I had to find a way to get on with John, particularly since Stephen had joint custody then, which meant his son lived with us for one week in two.

Faced with the frightening reality of my new role, I bought virtually every manual published on how to be the ideal stepmum. Do so-called 'natural' mums buy manuals on how to be a good mother, I wonder? I made plenty of mistakes at first. As a TV producer earning a good salary, for example, I showered John with expensive gifts - most of which John told me his mum threw in the bin. Extravagant on my part? Maybe. Unfair to John? Without a doubt.

It was around this time that John developed stress-related problems. During his many days off school - by this time I had gone freelance and spent more time at home - John and I grew closer.

'At times I wasn't sure if his biological mother's behaviour was rooted in genuine concern for her child’s welfare, or was merely an act of jealous spite'

Then Stephen and I got married when John was 11. We were in love - and still are - and beyond happy. The only blight on our relationship was John’s mother.

From the moment I moved in with Stephen and we became a family, I felt she wanted me out of her son's life.

At times I wasn't sure if her behaviour was rooted in genuine concern for her child’s welfare, or was merely an act of jealous spite. Sadly, John witnessed harsh telephone conversations between his parents, hot-headed reactions to emotionally fuelled text messages, and angry scenes at the door during hand-over each week.

As my stepson observed the dubious actions of his mother, he was also developing his own opinions about the situation.

He always turned to me for solace. I mopped his tears, cuddled him until he fell asleep and made his favourite hot chocolate.

The stress of the situation also had a devastating impact on my husband, who visibly aged as he was bombarded with insulting name-calling on change-over day.

My attempts to make peace proved futile. My husband's ex wouldn’t accept me, and refused even to refer to me by my name. Instead she called me 'the tart' - and still does.

We live in France, where the courts deem that, at 13, a child whose parents are separated or divorced is old enough to decide which parent they want to live with. A month before his 13th birthday, John said he wanted to live with us. We helped him engage a lawyer - my husband, his ex and I were not allowed to be party to their discussions - then he had his day in court.

He'd had enough of his mother bad-mouthing his father and interfering in our lives. Perhaps most poignantly of all, John said in his witness statement to the judge that he’d had enough of his mum’s spiteful remarks about me.

The court judgement ruled that John should live with his father and me.

It seems unjust that society regards stepmothers like me with fear and suspicion - especially since we’re on the increase, with nearly one in three households in the UK now a stepfamily.

Biological mothers complain about sacrosanct boundaries being crossed by stepmothers who, they argue, overstep the mark when caring for their children.

But I think they’re just picking a fight out of jealousy. It is ridiculous for biological mothers to claim they're the only ones with the know-how to love and mother their offspring.

In my own family, we've always lived by the belief that it takes a community to raise a child.

I had a happy upbringing: both my parents worked full-time, so I regularly stayed with aunts, neighbours, my uncle and grandmother. Things didn’t change when my parents divorced.

'It is ridiculous for biological mothers to claim they're the only ones with the know-how to love and mother their offspring'

My stepmother and stepfather are, and always have been, two of my biggest allies in life, and my parents wouldn’t have dreamt of imposing draconian restrictions on my relationships with them.

Step-parenting expert Dr Lisa Doodson has some simple advice. She says: 'Stepmums can be hugely beneficial to children, but biological mums can sometimes feel threatened by having someone so close to their children.

'My advice is to stop worrying. Stepmums can be an extra source of support to the children.

'We all have different skills, and children can benefit from having additional adults to guide and support them. Sometimes it can be an advantage for children to have an adult who isn't Mum or Dad, but who they can talk to.'

Don't think I’m gloating or sitting pretty with my ready-made family. I am 40, but for the last five years I’ve had to delay my desire for a family of my own because the situation with John’s mother has been so volatile.

I take my maternal role in John’s daily life seriously and, for me, his welfare and happiness comes first.

Now we have become a solid family. John finally feels secure, and is doing well at school.

It's only now that Stephen and I can think about adding to our family and, fingers crossed, bringing another life into the world.

Meanwhile, I am busy with John. Last year I counselled him through his first romance. If John's mum could find it in her heart to forge a relationship with me, I could share these precious memories with her.

What I probably wouldn't share with her is that it's me who ensures he buys his mother presents at Christmas, and who reminds him to call her on her birthday.

Now and again John has called me Mum, but I don't make a big deal of it. I don't correct him, or tell him not to.

I know he's not my child, but that doesn’t stop me loving and caring for him. A child has one set of biological parents, but I’d argue that I, and many stepmothers like me, bring something very special indeed to the lives of the children we 'inherit'.

And many of us make better mothers than the women who actually go by that name.

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The Leftist gospel constantly preached in the schools and elsewhere ("There is no such thing as right and wrong") bears fruit

The other morning I woke to find a voicemail message on my mobile phone, beginning with the words: ‘This is the police station at Charing Cross. As it turned out, the message was to inform me that some honest soul had handed in my sister’s wallet, which she had dropped at Embankment Underground station on her way to her early shift at the BBC World Service that morning.

The police had looked diligently through her business cards, finding mine among them, and since my surname matched the one on Catherine’s credit cards, they guessed rightly that I would know how to get in touch with her.

My faith in human nature was instantly restored, and I felt a stab of guilt at having suspected our blameless boys of having got into trouble.

All the parties concerned had come out of the incident well — from the kind stranger, probably on his way to work, who had gone to the trouble of handing the wallet in, to the police who took such care to see it returned to its rightful owner.

As the cynics (or realists) among you may guess, there’s a depressing sequel to this story. But I’ll keep that until the end.

For now, I’ll just say that after my initial amazement that someone in central London had been honest enough to hand in a bulging wallet, I began to wonder why I should really have been surprised at all. After all, I know that if I found somebody’s wallet, I would certainly take it to the nearest police station.

I would have done so even before my own was stolen by a sharp-suited pickpocket in Rome this summer — when it came home to me what a devastating loss a wallet can be in this high-tech age, when our whole lives are encoded in electronic strips on plastic cards.

What’s more, I’d be 100 per cent happy to bet the entire contents of my new one — restocked with cash and plastic after days spent cancelling and reapplying for everything — that the enormous majority of people reading this article would do the same good turn for their fellow man, without so much as a passing thought to pocketing his property. (Well, perhaps just a nanosecond’s thought before our innate honesty kicked in.)

But it seems that we’re in a shrinking minority, you and I. For a disturbing report from the newly established Centre for the Study of Integrity at Essex University finds that honesty is going out of fashion in modern Britain, as increasing numbers of our fellow subjects think it acceptable to lie and cheat.

In my book, the two most striking findings of the survey are that the under-25s are twice as likely to condone dishonesty as the over-65s — and that while women are slightly more honest than men, integrity in both sexes bears no relation to social class, education or income.

I hope I’m not being too hard on my sons’ middle-class friends when I say that neither discovery surprises me in the least (while the second one should explode once and for all the patronising libel that the poor are more likely to be dishonest than the better off).

To illustrate what I mean, I remember one occasion when several of one of my son’s teenage friends came round to take him off to town for a party. I asked my boy if he had enough money for his train fare and one of his friends told me: ‘It’s OK. They leave the station gates open at this time of night and there’s never anyone around to check.’ He said this in a matter-of-fact way, to a stuffy middle-aged man he hardly knew, as if he was just passing on a helpful tip.

It didn’t seem to occur to him that he was proposing that my son should join him and the others in committing the crime of defrauding the Southern Railway Company of about £25. Or if it did, it simply didn’t occur to him that this was wrong. As far as he was concerned, it was a morally neutral matter — and if there was no chance of getting caught, it would be downright silly to pay.

It’s the same with internet piracy. God knows how many people are at it, each carrying around stolen albums worth hundreds or even thousands of pounds on their iPhones.

To them, it’s a victimless crime — and no doubt countless teenagers will tell you, with a look of insufferable piety, that they support Wikipedia’s protest against U.S. plans to crack down on ‘free information’.

But to those of us, musicians and others, who rely on our intellectual property to feed our families, it doesn’t feel victimless at all. Heaven knows, however, it’s not only the young who seem increasingly unable to spot the difference between right and wrong, between behaving with integrity and not-getting-caught.

Think of the legions of Incapacity Benefit claimants who are miraculously cured as soon as the summons to a medical check drops on to the doormat. Or the swelling numbers of motorists, encouraged by shyster lawyers, who claim for undetectable whiplash injuries after minor car crashes — so pushing up premiums for the rest of us.

As for why the nation seems to be losing its moral compass, I imagine the decline of religion — and with it, the fear of eternal damnation — must have something to do with it. So, too, must the increasing leniency of earthly punishments for dishonesty.

But shouldn’t we also lay much of the blame for its spread on the collapse of integrity in public life? I’m thinking, of course, of the orgy of larceny that was the MPs’ expenses scandal.

I’m thinking, too, of the vast rewards reaped by unpunished bankers for parcelling up bad debts and selling them on to the unsuspecting.

And I’m thinking of the endless lies — from the monstrous whoppers told by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell when they took us to war against Iraq, to the knee-jerk fibs told by so many MPs, whose first instinct when they find themselves in a hole is to try to lie their way out of it.

But I’m in danger of sounding hideously priggish. Like most of us, I’ve told many a lie in my time, ranging from the white (‘I absolutely love the jumper you gave me’), to the off-white nod to the boss suggesting that, yes, I paid close attention to the Foreign Secretary’s interview on the Today programme this morning.

To be honest, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even bother to hand in a sum of less than £20 if I saw it lying the street. I’d probably just leave it there — and let someone else wrestle with his conscience. But a wallet .... now, that’s different.

Which brings me at last to the sequel to my sister’s tale. When she lost her wallet at Embankment station, it contained just over £40 cash. When she collected it from the police station — you guessed it — the money had gone. I told you it was depressing.

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Why I let my son dress like a girl for five years...and why for his sake I put a stop to it

By Lorraine Candy (Editor-in-chief of British Elle magazine)

As a toddler, my son Henry used to sleep in a nightie, after I gave up on trying to wrestle him into pyjamas. Later, he took to calling himself Stephanie, Jean, Olive or, most frequently, Miss Argentina.

His favourite game was wearing his elder sisters’ sequin party dresses while running his imaginary boutique ‘Slinx’ or greeting customers in his hairdressing salon ‘Slapchicks’ (God knows where he got that name from).

Once, aged three, his penchant for dressing as a girl even landed us in A&E, where a patient doctor had to remove Barbie’s earring from inside Henry’s ear canal. ‘Which one is it?’ asked the doctor, meaning which ear. ‘The pink one with gold round the outside,’ he replied.

Visitors to our house assumed I had three girls because he rarely wore boys’ clothing at home. He said he preferred to wear something ‘more comfortable’: dresses, skirts, tights or princess costumes.

At first I let him get on with it, because it seemed to make him happy. My husband rolled his eyes at the sight of his chubby, short-haired boy squeezed into a tutu. ‘He’s just in touch with his feminine side,’ I told him.

But essentially we were in agreement —‘banning’ anything in the early years is the route to rebellion later. So we let him dress as he pleased, and indulge his ‘feminine’ side.

And his love of all things girly started to colour other aspects of Henry’s life too. He refused to go to football club because he didn’t like the uniforms, despite my explanation that even the girls wore the club’s outfit. ‘Shorts are for boys,’ he would protest.

You may assume, from all this, that I’d be in favour of what has been termed ‘gender neutral parenting’ — raising a child as neither boy nor girl, but giving it free rein to express itself in whatever way he or she chooses.

That was the approach taken by Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper. They’re the couple who made headlines last week for raising their five-year-old son, Sasha, as ‘gender neutral’. Like me, they allowed their little boy to dress in girls’ clothes and play with girls’ toys.

But unlike me, it seems Sasha’s parents’ ‘experiment’ formed part of their wider ideology, using it to examine whether ‘boy/girl’ stereotyping could be bypassed altogether.

I know, from my own experience, that some children do not conform to the conventional behaviour expected of their gender anyway. But I know also that there came a time when I had to put a stop to my boy’s ‘girlish’ instincts. I knew it was my duty as a parent to make it stop — for reasons I will come to later.
Little angel? Unlike Lorraine's son, five-year-old Sasha is being raised as 'gender neutral'

Little angel? Unlike Lorraine's son, five-year-old Sasha is being raised as 'gender neutral'

So where had my Henry’s love of girls’ clothes come from? To start with, my husband and I found it hard to understand. I turned to parenting books, they indicated that it was probably because Henry worshipped his two older sisters (now aged eight and nine) and wanted to be ‘in their club’.

Apparently, all children need to ‘belong’; they crave positive recognition as they develop between the ages of three and seven. They seek the approval of their peer group to make them feel secure so they can develop with confidence.

Before he started school, Henry’s sisters were his peer group. Dressing like them was his way into their world, where he felt safe. They wore nighties, so he wanted one too.

When he was a toddler, this was fine. Other toddlers pay no heed to what fellow miniatures wear. But older children do. When Henry was four, I noticed that the older children of some of my friends would laugh at his feminine attire.

I couldn’t bear to watch him run off red-faced to change. Of course, he didn’t fully understand why people laughed at him. But I did. And I began realise how, as he grew older, his cross-dressing would become a habit which enabled others to hurt him. I had to stop that happening.

My husband and I decided to wait until Henry’s fifth birthday in November to break the news to him that there would be no more sequins, no more Slapchicks or Miss Argentina. We tried building up to it gently, mentioning it every now and then so he would know what was coming.

Then one night last November, we packed away his nightie and the dresses for good. ‘From now on, you need to wear boys’ clothes and sleep in boys’ pyjamas,’ I told him.

He was mildly upset but not unduly worried. He didn’t fully understand why he could no longer dress in the clothes he loved, but since starting school in September, he had become more aware of the difference between boys and girls anyway.

‘Can I still do it on special occasions?’ he asked. We said he could — but he hasn’t asked since.

The fact he had a new baby sister helped. ‘These are Mabel’s things now,’ we told him.

Actually, it was me who grieved most. I was sad to say goodbye to the alter ego he’d created (and accessorised so stylishly) with such joy. I think my husband was relieved — and Henry’s two older sisters were pleased that he’d stop ferreting through their jewellery boxes.

Some may see my decision as pandering to convention. But I didn’t make this decision because I was scared of what the future holds for a boy happy in his feminine skin or because I believe cross-dressing is wrong. Remember, I work in fashion.

No, I made this decision because although I truly wish fashion’s liberal and inclusive attitude extended to all other industries, it just doesn’t. Allowing my son to continue down his feminine path would only incur ridicule and hurt.
A video of Sasha Laxton talking about how 'silly' it is to have girls' and boys' colours was put on You Tube by his mother

A video of Sasha Laxton talking about how 'silly' it is to have girls' and boys' colours was put on You Tube by his mother

This is what confuses me about parents like Sasha’s. He has been hailed as an experiment in breaking stereotypes, but who would want to expose their child to possible derision for the sake of their political beliefs?

Yet, they are by no means alone. Last year, the US parents of a five-year-old boy called Dyson wrote a book called My Princess Boy and appeared on live TV with him in a ballet outfit.

He was to be the poster boy for a radical change in gender thinking, they said — as he sat there supremely uninterested in the discussion. Meanwhile in Canada, another five-year-old called Storm is being raised gender neutral. In Sweden they have two-year-old Pop, while one Swedish nursery has instigated a ‘gender neutral’ policy referring to the children as ‘friends’ rather than him or her.

Of course, a more open-minded attitude to gender can be a positive thing — whether in childhood, to counteract Disney’s ridiculous glorification of Cinderella (a world where blondes are good, brunettes are bad and falling in love makes everything better), or in adulthood, to help challenge the ‘gender gap’ between male and female rates of pay in the workplace.

I would happily ban all those wretched pink-frilled dolls that fill the shelves of supermarkets across the land, mini ironing boards and kitchen utensils (who wants to be a indoctrinated into domestic drudgery that early, boy or girl?).

Perhaps if there were gender- neutral schools in every borough then Sasha, Dyson, Storm and Pop would be welcome trailblazers for a new way of thinking. But in the real world, schools separate boys and girls for many sensible reasons.

It’s a huge responsibility for children as young as five to be expected to change this thinking. And a little arrogant of parents, who don’t work in the field of child care or child psychology to assume they can do this through a lone child.

But perhaps the most important point is that many of these attempts to unburden children from the constraints of gender are misguided. Dressing up is what pre-schoolers do. You may think your toddler is striking a blow for feminism or his future right to wear women’s clothing in public but he’s not — he’s just playing a game.

You may think you are giving him the rare freedom of ignoring society’s expectations of his gender but actually he’s just thinking: ‘Whoa, sequins! They look cool’.

No child expert has advocated this as a resolution to gender stereotyping and its consequent inequalities. While they say it’s unlikely to be damaging (as long as the child is not forced to dress a certain way), it probably won’t have the effect these parents desire either.

But we should also remember that in today’s world of rapid, global information, these images of Sasha and all those YouTube videos of Dyson will live for some time. They’ll be there for all to see whether these boys like it or not. They have had no choice in the matter — is that really fair?

Wouldn’t it be better for parents to encourage schools and nurseries to talk more about gender and how it affects their charges as they grow rather than to put such a burden on very young children.

And perhaps more importantly, parents like Sasha’s should remember these precious early years belong to their children, not to them.

SOURCE

Israel's shameless Arabs

Arab parliamentarians endorse tyrants, terrorists while slamming 'undemocratic' Israel

“The shahid is honored throughout the history of nations. He is the one who blazed the trail for us. No value is more noble than martyrdom," Knesset Member Ahmad Tibi waxed poetic a few days ago on the occasion of “Palestinian Martyr Day.” Of course, he did not forget to present the obvious flip-side, whereby in Israel “the real terrorist murderer is considered a hero or a minister.”

Immediately after that, Tibi made sure to make it clear to all his fans that "Israelis are ignorant with regards to the term 'shahid' and misunderstand it. It refers to anyone who was killed by the occupation for the homeland or died for a national cause." That is, there is the active, bogus type of martyr, who seeks to slaughter as many Jews as he can. Then there is the real martyr, the passive, noble type, the most amazing and glorious of all human beings, which only incurable Israeli ignorance fails to appreciate.

Former Palestinian leader Arafat apparently only referred to them, the passive martyrs, when he spoke of Shahids, just like his former advisor Tibi, who did the same while serving in Israel’s Knesset.

The Talmud says that when a person keeps repeating an offence, it’s as though he receives permission to keep doing it. And so, Mr. Tibi can praise the qualities of the martyr while at most prompting weak journalistic protest, and then go back to that same Israeli media in the role of Dr. Tibi and express his amazement about the very question regarding his right to endorse Shahids.

Tibi can also slam others as if he was the lowliest chauvinist, while hurling crude sexual hints at MK Anastasia Michaeli, and at the best prompt a minor reprimand from the media and from various women’s rights groups, which on normal days would harshly slam any harm done to women, by certain men that is.

Gaddafi's friends

Similarly, Hanin Zoabi and other Arab parliamentarians can put their trust in the guardians of Israeli democracy in the media, High Court, academia and the cultural world every time they write a forward to venomous anti-Semitic books, as Zoabi just did in her forward to anti-Semitic British writer Ben White’s book. These Arab MKs also board various Gaza-bound ships or visit Hamas leaders or enlightened Arab rulers such as Gaddafi, may he rest in peace.

Indeed, Arab MKs use these opportunities to talk about Israeli injustice, the apartheid regime adopted there, and the racism that has spread everywhere. Mostly, they explain in their visits to such models of democracy like Hamas or Libya how un-democratic Israel is.

Yet nonetheless, even if only a handful of Israel’s Arabs crossed the lines (for example, “only” some 200 Arab Israelis were involved in terror attacks in the years 2001-2004 that claimed the lives of 136 Israelis,) the vast majority of the Arab sector regularly votes for the same representatives, who view the eradication of the Zionist enterprise and Jewish State as their utmost mission, while serving as members in the Jewish State’s parliament.

Still, we’ll always find the good Jews among us who will keep explaining to us that the involvement of Arab Israelis in terror, their hugely disproportionate share of crimes (in 2011, Arabs were involved in 67% of murders in Israel,) illegal construction or road accidents is all our doing. We are the ones who sinned and mistreated the Arabs. We are the ones at fault, rather than Tibi, Zoabi, or any other Arab victim.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-27T01:07:00.001+11:30

Archbishop blasts clerics who oppose welfare reform and declares REAL moral scandal is our £1 trillion debt

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey today launches an astonishing attack on the five bishops trying to derail the Government’s £26,000-a-year benefit cap.

In an article for the Daily Mail, Lord Carey insists the sheer scale of Britain’s public debt – which yesterday hit £1trillion – is the ‘greatest moral scandal’ facing the country and warns the welfare system is rewarding ‘fecklessness and irresponsibility’.

He is scathing about all opponents of the proposed limit on benefits – who include Labour peers and Liberal Democrat rebels – but reserves his most outspoken criticism for the Anglican bishops, who led the rebellion in the House of Lords.

He said they encouraged the culture of welfare dependency which led to ‘poverty of aspiration’, and warned them that they could lay no claim to the ‘moral high ground’.

‘If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren,’ he writes.

Lord Carey hails Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith as a ‘committed Christian’ who is trying to reform a welfare system which is ‘fuelling vices and impoverishing us all’.

Downing Street insisted last night that its plan to impose an annual limit on welfare payments would be implemented ‘in full’ despite the dramatic defeat in the Lords. Labour leader Ed Miliband’s decision to try to derail Government plans for a cap, designed to ensure workless households cannot receive more than the average working family, was branded a ‘total disaster’ by his own shadow ministers.

Amid accounts of chaos and confusion in the run up to a crunch vote, several frontbenchers expressed despair that the party had appeared to put itself on the side of benefit claimants over working families.

Labour issued a tortured explanation of its stance, claiming it did not in fact support bishops’ plans to exclude Child Benefit from the cap, but wanted an opportunity to return the legislation to the Commons to make different amendments.

In his attack on the bishops, Lord Carey says it is clear that the welfare system ‘desperately’ needs to be reined in and insists it is ‘obvious’ that employment must pay more than a life on benefits.

‘Considering that the system they are defending can mean some families are able to claim a total of £50,000 a year in welfare benefits, the bishops must have known that popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers,’ he writes.

‘Yet these five bishops – led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds – cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground.

‘The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today. If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren.’

Lord Carey is particularly scathing about the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Rt Rev John Packer, who led the Lords revolt by invoking the Bible and Jesus’s concern for children. ‘I can’t possibly believe that prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children,’ he writes.

The Cabinet discussed Monday night’s defeat in the Lords when it met yesterday. It agreed to reverse the amendment when the legislation returns to the Commons.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said: ‘I think the vast majority of people think it is fair to say that you can’t receive more in benefits than if you were to earn £35,000 before tax.

He added that the Government had already increased out-of-work benefits by 5.2 per cent for this year, saying: ‘We want to make sure that those who are vulnerable are properly supported but that at all times in the welfare system there are incentives to work and that it pays to work.’

But Enver Solomon, policy director at the Children’s Society, warned the Government not to ignore the Lords’ vote. He said: ‘Children should not be held responsible and penalised for the employment circumstances of their parents.’

Labour peers backed the bishops’ amendment, to exclude Child Benefit from the cap, despite the party saying it supported the principle. It said it would aim to add additional safeguards when the proposals return to the Commons.

But one Labour frontbencher said: ‘Do you imagine my constituents are going to understand the idea that we support a cap but have voted against it? They will just think we support unlimited handouts for people out of work. It is a total disaster.’

Conservative Deputy Chairman Michael Fallon said: ‘Ed Miliband has failed the key test of his leadership. He has promised to “take the tough decisions” on reforming welfare. But his party in the Lords supported a wrecking amendment to ensure that some families get thousands of pounds more in benefits than the average family earns by working.’

SOURCE

Eight out of ten Brits claiming benefits ARE fit to work, according to new incapacity tests

Eight out of ten people tested for new incapacity benefits were found to be fit for work, official figures revealed yesterday. The Department for Work and Pensions decided that 57 per cent of claimants were no longer eligible for the hand-outs. A further 21 per cent could carry out some sort of work with the right support.

Just one fifth of claimants – 22 per cent – were found unable to do any form of employment.

Around 1.5million people who have been claiming Incapacity Benefit are being reassessed for its replacement – the Employment Support Allowance – to see if they are able to carry out work.

The latest figures show the numbers claiming ESA and Incapacity Benefit have dropped to their lowest level since 1996 following the introduction of the tests.

There are still 2.6million people claiming the benefits, nearly a million of whom have been on them for more than a decade.

Figures relating to claims lodged between March and May last year show that 38 per cent were dismissed at the first stage – before face-to-face assessments were carried out – while 48 per cent were subjected to further consideration. A further 14 per cent of claimants are still being assessed.

The latest analysis also shows there has been a decrease in the number of people claiming for drug and alcohol-related conditions – from 105,110 in May 2010 to 100,120 in May last year.

Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: ‘These reforms are changing the landscape of our country. ‘By concentrating on what people can do, we will help people back into work and out of the trap of benefits that has blighted communities.

‘We want to help everyone who can be in work to get there, not just for themselves but for their children. It is clear that the majority of new claimants to sickness benefits are in fact able to do some work.’

But critics have warned that the new testing regime is flawed – and a report by MPs on the work and pensions select committee recently found that large numbers of seriously unwell claimants have been wrongly refused support and high numbers of appeals have proved successful.

Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted the new system is much better at putting people through their ‘paces’.

Claimants who pass the first stage of assessment are then placed in three groups: Those who need permanent support, those who might be able to work after a few months and those fit to work. If placed in the latter category they are told to resubmit a benefits application – but this time for Jobseekers Allowance.

SOURCE

Sisterhood beware - silencing ideas stymies progress

When debate is marked by personal vitriol, people opt out and keep quiet -- comment from Australia

I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like the nasty in-group in primary school. You can't be our friend because you don't wear the right pink dress. You can't be our friend unless you toe the approved party-line on abortion, childcare or sexual clothing. It is astounding to watch grown women engage in exclusionary behaviour that most of us outgrew by age 10.

But they have been at it again in the debate over the feminist credentials of Melinda Tankard Reist.

Anne Summers wrote in The Sunday Age that Tankard Reist can't be in the feminist club because she is pro-life. Summers said the core principle of feminism is women's independence, financial and reproductive. That might be Summers' definition, but it's not mine, nor would it be many other women's. Definitions aside, why can't Summers just reiterate the arguments in favour of free, legal and safe abortion, instead of seeking to ostracise someone with whom she disagrees? "You're not my friend" does not counter any anti-abortion argument. It is a non-sequitur.

Kate Gleeson, an Australian Research Council Fellow in politics at Macquarie University, then called for Tankard Reist to explain herself in The Age - in particular her work for former senator Brian Harradine.

Gleeson said that many feminists were "suspicious" of Tankard Reist because she "identifies as a pro-life feminist". Lots of people have advised politicians with whose policies many of us disagree. Why Tankard Reist has to explain herself any more than any other adviser is beyond me. And why any of us should be "suspicious" of her just because she thinks differently from us beggars belief. I don't believe in god but I feel no need to be suspicious of those who do.

Like Tankard Reist, I have been on the receiving end of the self-appointed sisterhood's ire. I used to write about motherhood and childcare; about the importance of women having time away from work to care for their own children; about the need for child-friendly work practices, as opposed to employer-friendly long hours of care and short periods of leave. Ideas that are commonplace now, but 15 years ago, fresh out of '80s feminism, were rare, if not among mothers, at least in public forums.

I used to write about that, but not now. I stopped because along with other academics I know, I couldn't be bothered dealing with the vitriol, as opposed to refutation of ideas. The insistence on playing the player, not the ball. I stick to property law these days. My ideas on strata schemes don't seem to leave anyone reaching for their garlic and crucifix.

The problem with exclusionary vitriol is that it lowers the level of public debate.

First, many people, much smarter and more insightful than me, step out of the arena. Public debate is carried on by the small pool of people thick-skinned enough to weather, or perverse enough to like, the nastiness. Now that unaccountable bloggers, sneering and abusing from the safety of their bedrooms, have entered the fray, the pool of contributors to civil public debate is even smaller.

Second, shooting the messenger fails to engage with the question at hand. "You're wrong because you don't think like us" only convinces the converted.

Finally, silencing ideas stymies progress. The essence of any functioning democracy is the ability to get as many ideas on the table as possible and then thrash them out without fear or favour. The humility to admit that you might be wrong, that someone might be able to change your mind by presenting you with a new idea, is the hallmark of a healthy intellect.

The alternatives to democratic debate are cults or repressive religions. Devotees want to be told what to think and tenets of faith must not be questioned, on threat of excommunication. I have often thought this is what some women want from feminism.

I do not know Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her beliefs. That includes her right to advise senators with whom I might also disagree.

The real test of tolerance is tolerating those with whom we strongly disagree. And we will never have a right to express our own contested ideas if we do not defend others' rights to do the same.

SOURCE

Australians love one thing more than beer - freedom

That must be sour news to Leftists

WE love our beer, we love our beaches and we love our barbecues. But, like the swaggie who sprang into the billabong back in 1895, we love our freedom most of all.

We asked you to name the three things that made it great to be an Aussie, and got more than 15,000 responses. Sam Kekovich can rest easy: barbecues, meat and mates all got significant support.

But freedom topped the list - and there was daylight between that and the second most popular response, beer.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-26T11:23:00.001+11:30

Hands off Hungary!

Brussels’ culture war against the ‘white savages’ of Hungary is destroying democracy and helping to boost reactionary right-wingers

By Frank Furedi, a reformed far Leftist who was born in Hungary

Thirty or 40 years ago, the way that the EU and the IMF are behaving towards Hungary would have been described as a classic example of neo-colonial pressure. Unlike Greece, Hungary is not simply being lectured about the need to sort out its economy - it has also been subjected to a veritable culture war. As far as the EU and the Western media are concerned, the real crime of the Hungarian government is not so much its inept economic strategy as its promotion of cultural and political values that run counter to what is deemed correct in Brussels.

The Brussels bureaucracy has long regarded Hungary as a society in danger of being engulfed by white savages. In 2006, when people in Budapest rioted against their corrupt government, the EU and sections of the Western media described the demonstrators as right-wing mobs posing a threat to democratic values. At the time, Brussels weighed in to support its man in Budapest, Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Socialist prime minister. The fact that Gyurcsany had lied to cover up the scale of Hungary’s massive budget deficit, and that he had admitted his dishonesty to some of his close colleagues, did not stop his mates in the EU from singing his praises. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, president of the Party of European Socialists, was quick to rush to Gyurcsany’s defence, claiming he was the ‘best man to make the reforms that Hungary needs’.

What the Western media overlooked was that the corrupt Gyurcsany government was complicit in creating the conditions for mass demoralisation and cynicism. It was this EU-backed regime that did much to unravel and damage public life in Hungary. Gyurcsany’s humiliating electoral defeat in 2010, and the triumph of Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, meant that the EU’s placeman was replaced by an autocratic nationalist and populist prime minister.

As has been widely noted by the media, the legislative programme of the Orban government is a product of autocratic ambition. Its economic programme is a confused mix of pragmatism and nonsense – privatisation of industry, slashing welfare benefits while nationalising people’s pension schemes, and so on. In the domain of politics, the Orban government’s key impulse is to centralise control over the key institutions of public life, including the media and the judiciary. The Orban government has also passed new electoral laws that seem designed to entrench its power for years to come. This authoritarian approach is justified by the government in the name of upholding traditional Hungarian values. The new constitution reads like a caricature of a 1930s Balkan autocracy. It is thoroughly anti-liberal (in the classical sense of that term) and appeals to the Christian heritage of Hungary, the family and the nation.

Critics of this illiberal constitution rarely acknowledge that, for all its flaws, it is the first Hungarian constitution to be enacted within a parliamentary framework after a free election. In other words, this constitution has been put together by a government with a massive democratic mandate. Moreover, the Western media overlook the democratic deficit that preceded the Orban regime - namely that the earlier constitution of Hungary lacked any democratic mandate. The pre-Orban constitution was enacted on 20 August 1949 as part of the consolidation of the Moscow-dominated Stalinist regime in Hungary. No one in the EU appears to think it odd that an undemocratically enacted constitution imposed on Hungary by a former superpower should be considered morally superior to one based on a democratic mandate.

But then, the EU itself has no inhibitions about imposing its values on to its target audiences. It, too, does not want its constitutional proposals held up to public scrutiny. Sometimes it rules by decree and refuses people’s requests to hold any referenda on EU-related matters, on the basis that the issues are far too complex for ordinary people to understand. Evidently, the EU commissioners have read their Voltaire. To recall – it was Voltaire who praised the Russian absolute monarch Catherine the Great’s invasion of Poland and celebrated her ability ‘to make fifty thousand men march into Poland to establish there toleration and liberty of conscience’. The EU does not have 50,000 men but it does have many other resources for executing its culture war. Voltaire was tragically mistaken in his belief that deploying coercion was a legitimate tool for forcing people to change their beliefs – but at least he actually believed in tolerance and freedom of conscience. In contrast, the EU technocracy has little time for genuine tolerance.

Moreover, a genuine democratic ethos is not something that the European Commission is particularly passionate about. Its offensive against the Hungarian government has little to do with defending democratic rights. When it finally decided to match its threats of sanction with action, Brussels appeared to be most concerned about the fate, not of Hungary’s electorate, but of its unelected central bankers, unelected judges and the technocrats who run the data-protection agency. On 17 January, Brussels dispatched three letters of formal notice, warning the Orban regime to alter or get rid of recently enacted laws which failed to guarantee the independence of these three institutions. It seems that Brussels technocrats, who cherish their independence from the electorate, are annoyed by the Orban government’s self-serving attempt to cut their colleagues down to size.
What’s next for Hungary?

Faced with enormous economic and political pressure from the EU and the IMF, it appears the Hungarian government is ready to compromise and is likely to alter legislation that undermines the independence of the central bank, the data-protection agency and the judiciary. However, such a compromise will neither solve Hungary’s domestic problems nor restrain the EU from continuing to wage its culture war against this nation.

The Hungarian economy is in dire straits and the Orban regime faces growing hostility from an increasingly desperate electorate. Numerous commentators have pointed out that as a result of the massive scale of economic dislocation and disquiet about the new draconian laws, the Orban government has lost some of its electoral support. The large anti-government demonstration held in Budapest in early January was presented as proof that the base of support for Orban has eroded.

The reality is that, at present, there is no credible democratic alternative to Orban. Opposition to the new constitution, and to the Fidesz regime more broadly, has been both opportunistic and incoherent. A placard on the January demonstration summed up the problem. Written in English, it said: ‘Hey Europe, sorry about my prime minister.’ Clearly, the author of this placard was not addressing the people of Hungary but rather the Western media. Similarly, a statement written by 13 former dissidents protesting against the Orban government’s actions was clearly intended for foreign consumption. It ended with the line: ‘The desperate situation of present-day Hungary should be a warning for all of us: if Europe is prepared to help Hungary, it will also help itself.’

Sadly, imploring Europe to help opponents of the Orban regime is really a statement of irresponsible impotence. Brussels has no political role to play in Hungary other than to use undemocratic coercive pressure against a freely elected government. Worse, by appealing to foreign institutions to sort out Hungary’s domestic problems, the opposition betrays the same democratic deficit that it claims to see in the Orban government. The most likely result of this call for help from Europe will be to reinforce nationalist resentment at external interference. At a time when a sense of national victimhood has widespread resonance, the opposition’s plea for external intervention is likely only to confirm this prejudice.

In the present circumstances, the main beneficiary of the Orban government’s difficulties is not the Socialist opposition but the very unpleasant xenophobic Jobbik Party. It is likely that Jobbik – ‘the movement for a better Hungary’ – now enjoys greater electoral support than the Socialist Party. Jobbik has succeeded in mobilising a significant section of the people who have lost out in the process of transition from the former Stalinist regime to the corrupt post-Communist one. Unlike the ageing constituency of the Socialist Party, many of the supporters of Jobbik are young and relatively energetic. Jobbik’s platform consists of a mixture of populist xenophobia - against Roma people and Jews - with a nineteenth-century reactionary embrace of parochialism and national self-sufficiency. However, when I talked to a group of Jobbik voters last October, what struck me was not their nationalist fervour but their powerful conviction that they had ‘lost out’, had been forgotten and treated with contempt by institutions they could not trust. They support Jobbik because this movement reminds them that they exist.

To a significant extent, the relative success of Jobbik is a legacy of the wasted years of the post-Communist era. During this time, successive governments refused to settle scores with Hungary’s Stalinist past. The new elite – which had strong links with the previous nomenklatura – had one priority: securing its self-interest. Its alliance with the EU technocracy helped to foster an illusion of a reforming prosperous liberal democracy… but as we now know, the reality was far more complicated.

The most useful contribution that Europeans can make to help Hungary is to resist the temptation to ‘help’. It is up to the people of Hungary to determine their political future and hopefully to embrace the values of an open society. Most important of all is the need to recognise the right of people to work out for themselves the norms and values they wish to live by. That’s why the advocates of EU cultural correctness need to be told: ‘Hands off Hungary!’

SOURCE

What We've Lost

Alan Sears

It’s the time of year when thoughts turn more concertedly to the ongoing tragedy – and travesty – of abortion. Activists count back to the January 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and produce new calculations on how many lives have been ended prematurely through the deliberate choice of their mothers—and with the often enthusiastic cooperation of medical professionals who have found their own ways of reconciling the destruction of life with their Hippocratic oath. (The latest addition tells us that a number roughly equivalent to the population of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona has been subtracted from the human race.)

Partisans of “a woman’s right to choose” rejoice, taking shelter in the assertion that the decision to abort a child is a personal one, between a mother and … well, really, no one. A father’s rights are no longer any more sacred than the life in the mother’s womb, parents are often legally required to stand aside, and doctors these days are on hand less to offer medical counsel than to facilitate the mechanics or chemistry of destruction.

On that score: chemistry is rapidly trumping mechanics, as the efficiency of the abortionists grows. Planned Parenthood is making new fortunes in blood money through the increasingly widespread use of “tele-med” abortions, which negate the presence or participation of medical staff. An expectant mother simply steps into a room, confirms to a doctor via a video chat her determination to abort, follows his directions to press a specific button, and – voila! – a drawer pops open with two pills inside. “Take one now and one tomorrow,” the doctor says. No muss, no fuss … no baby.

Such simplicities make it easier for the body count to accumulate, and there, too, the abortionists are at an advantage, for as Joseph Stalin reminded us, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The more babies that die, the less unbearable the death of one more … a hundred more … a thousand more becomes. Abortionists know better than most that nothing succeeds like excess.

Stalin, though, had nothing on Shannon Dea, co-president of Planned Parenthood’s Waterloo Region, in Canada, who recently declared that “Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being – that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one.” But what, exactly, is to be gained by wading into debate with those who deem undeniable truth – and even facts – irrelevant?

Nothing, likely. But for the general benefit, let us consider one particular philosophical implication of all those lives, quenched in the womb. The roughly 53 million children aborted since 1973 equals about 17 percent of America’s current 312 million-plus population. Nearly one-fifth of us, simply taken out of the equation … the equation being our culture, our communities, our daily interactions, our myriad accomplishments as a people.

How would any of us begin to estimate the cost of losing not just the lives, but the extraordinary impact of one-fifth of our nation’s people? What diseases have gone untreated because the mind that could have isolated the necessary bacteria or virus never lived to see a laboratory?

Across those two lost generations, what outstanding leaders of business or industry, what eloquent voices of religion or politics, have been forfeited to a mother’s choice? What paradigm-shifting ideas and insights … what soul-stirring art and music and language … what heroic explorations and athletic accomplishments have never transpired because the unique imaginations and wills and endurances that would have achieved them were vacuumed from a woman’s womb?

How many of those aborted had within them the one-of-a-kind vision that might have accomplished peace … rolled back poverty … broken down racism … staved off tyrants and terrorists … translated, transformed, transcended some aspect of our civilization in a way no one ever had before?

A mind like Einstein’s … the eloquence of Martin Luther King, Jr. … the wisdom of Washington … the physical grace of Baryshnikov … these come along maybe once or twice in a generation. In our arrogance and near-sightedness, did we forfeit our most gifted ones to the expediencies of a self-centered, sex-obsessed culture?

We may never know – but we can wonder. In city after city, as child after child is destroyed without coming to fruition, what are we costing ourselves – and our own children and grandchildren? The abortionists are half right: abortion is as personal as a decision gets.

But it’s about far more – so very, very much more – than any woman’s “right to choose.”

SOURCE

Anti-social behaviour isn't a crime... it's just a nuisance: How lazy British police forces are failing to record and investigate offences

Muggings, burglaries and even rapes are being written off by police who wrongly record that no crime has taken place, a report says today. In some forces, up to one in four crimes is not being investigated properly because officers mistakenly choose to drop the inquiry.

Complaints of anti-social behaviour are being particularly badly handled with many crimes mislabelled as simply 'nuisance', a snapshot study has found. As a result, offences of harassment and disorder are airbrushed out, vanishing from official crime statistics with no hope of ever being solved.

Overall, officials discovered that most forces failed to record around one in ten crimes properly. In cases of anti-social behaviour, only a 'low number' of crimes were recorded and police remain poor at identifying repeat and vulnerable victims.

The failings come despite an outcry in the wake of cases such as the death of Fiona Pilkington and the murder of Garry Newlove.

Ministers want police chiefs to identify repeat victims and increase their response to low-level incidents which blight the lives of thousands. The latest figures are revealed after a review of police computer systems by officials at Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.

It examined whether crimes were recorded properly in the first place and if cases were later incorrectly written off under the category 'no crime'.

A valid example of a 'no crime' would be when a motorist calls police to report vandalism but it is later found that masonry fell from a roof and damaged his car.

The HMIC review found that, on average, 87 per cent of 'no crimes' were correctly recorded last year, compared with 64 per cent in 2009.

Crimes considered included violent attacks, robbery, rape, burglary, vehicle crime and anti-social behaviour.

Decisions in cases of violence were correct 84 per cent of the time and in rape the average was far higher at 90 per cent. Officials found that some forces incorrectly recorded up to a quarter of all reports as 'no crime'.

These forces were the Metropolitan Police, Avon and Somerset, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and West Yorkshire. The best force was Thames Valley Police, where 100 per cent of 'no crime' decisions were appropriate.

The survey looked at almost 5,000 records from 43 forces in England and Wales and the British Transport Police.

Officials said they are concerned that police call handlers may be the weak link in the chain because it is not easy to check their decisions.

Fears have been raised that police may be tempted to record disputed incidents as 'no crime' to improve performance or simply because they are too hard to solve.

But that means victims are unlikely to receive the same level of support and police fail to build up a picture of repeat offences and crime hotspots.

Last night Tory MP Priti Patel said: 'The fact that police are prepared to write off serious crimes almost needs to be investigated itself – it is dreadful. How can they justify this to victims of crime?

'Clearly there are police forces out there failing in their duty to protect the public and give support to victims to protect them. They need to learn from those doing the right thing.'

Vic Towell, of HMIC, said: 'These results show that forces understand the importance of making correct “no crime” decisions, particularly for the more serious crime types. While the majority do well, the variation between the best and worst remains too wide and needs to improve.'

Policing Minister Nick Herbert said: 'We commissioned this report to shine a light on recording practices and there are issues in some forces which need to be addressed.'

Two years ago the head of HMIC, Sir Denis O'Connor, warned that police are failing to get to grips with a tidal wave of anti-social behaviour.

He said the true number of loutish incidents could be twice as high as the 3.6million estimated by the Government.

The problem was highlighted by the death of Miss Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled daughter after being tormented by thugs.

Police were heavily criticised after it emerged she made 33 calls for help before setting fire to her car in a layby near her Leicestershire home in 2007.

The murder of Mr Newlove, who was kicked to death after confronting teenagers outside his Warrington home in 2007, also showed the terrible toll of yobbery.

The research comes hard on the heels of news that year-on-year crime fell in some of the cities worst hit by the August riots. Senior officers admitted that looting and disorder may have only resulted in a handful of offences because of the way crimes are recorded.

SOURCE

Fury as British Defence Dept. fires hundreds of troops in job cuts... but not one penpusher

Public servants are a specially protected class just about everywhere

Not a single penpusher has been sacked under Ministry of Defence job cuts despite the 'grotesque' axing of hundreds of troops, a damning report reveals today.

MPs say it is 'stark and shocking' that no bureaucrats have been made compulsorily redundant yet 40 per cent of the military personnel culled were forced out.

In a scathing attack on the MoD, the Commons defence select committee hints that civil servants might also have received a better voluntary redundancy package.

'The MoD should consider whether the terms offered to either the military or civilian staff [were] fair or appropriate,' the MPs' report says.

The committee also criticises the claim by top MoD mandarin Ursula Brennan that civilians were more likely to apply for voluntary redundancy because they were more 'flexibly employable'. The report says: 'This runs contrary to our experience.'

Under the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, unveiled in 2010, the Forces must lose 17,000 personnel by 2015 – 7,000 from the Army and 5,000 each from the RAF and Royal Navy.

The MoD will eventually lose around 32,000 civil service posts. Ministers have been ordered to make £4.7billion of savings within four years and to plug a £38billion equipment overspend.

Some 2,900 servicemen and women were selected for the first tranche of redundancies last year, with the Army and RAF each losing 920 posts, and 1,020 being cut from the Navy.

But only 60 per cent applied for redundancy, meaning around 1,200 members of the Forces were sacked. A second round of 4,200 cuts was announced last week.

By comparison, not one civil servant has been forced to quit the MoD in the first two redundancy rounds, set to total 15,000 penpushers. Instead, all volunteered to leave.

The report says: 'For military redundancies to be compulsory in 40 per cent of cases, yet for civilian redundancies to be compulsory in none, is so grotesque that it requires an exceptionally persuasive reason, which we are yet to hear.'

MPs say Forces personnel should be retrained in areas of the military where there are shortages, such as bomb disposal, logistics and healthcare.

Labour defence spokesman Jim Murphy said ministers were treading a 'thin line between callousness and carelessness' over the job cuts. 'Thousands of service personnel are being unceremoniously sacked,' he said. 'It is essential that the painful impact of David Cameron's decisions is minimised wherever possible.

'The committee are right to suggest retraining for all those made compulsorily redundant.'

The MPs' report – into the MoD's annual report 2010–11 – also expresses dismay that the National Audit Office spending watchdog had refused to give the seal of approval to the department's accounts for the fifth successive year.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-25T00:36:00.001+11:30

Is Australian flag-flying "racist"?

The study below seems to have overlooked the origins of those who did not fly flags. Many may have been foreign-born. Perth has a very large contingent of Brits and whites from Southern Africa who may know little of Australian history. Had Australian-born people only been interviewed, there may have been no difference between flag flyers and others.

But the most important confounding variable would be social class. Middle class people are less likely to display patriotism and more "correct" in their expressed opinions

And it is after all reasonable to say that the long-term exclusion of blacks was beneficial -- given very high black crime-rates worldwide. It could be seen as rational rather than racist

DRIVERS who fly Australian flags on their cars to celebrate Australia Day are "more racist" than people who do not, according to research from UWA.

University of Western Australia sociologist and anthropologist Professor Farida Fozdar and a team of assistants surveyed 513 people at the Australia Day fireworks on Perth's Swan River foreshore last year to find out whether there was a link between car flag flying and racist attitudes, Perth Now reports.

Professor Fozdar said the team found that of the 102 people surveyed on the day who had attached flags to their cars for the national holiday, 43 per cent agreed with the statement that the now-abandoned “White Australia Policy” had “saved Australia from many problems experienced by other countries”.

She said that only 25 per cent of people who did not fly Australia car flags agreed with the statement.

Under the “White Australia Policy”, which was non-official government policy until after World War II, non-Europeans were barred from migrating to Australia.

The survey also found that a total of 56 per cent of people with car flags feared for Australian culture and believed that the country’s most important values were in danger, compared with 34 per cent of non-flag flyers.

Thirty-five per cent of flag flyers felt that people had to be born in Australia to be truly Australian, compared with 22 per cent of non-flag flyers. Twenty-three per cent of flag flyers believed that true Australians had to be Christian, while 18 per cent of non-flaggers agreed with the statement.

An overwhelming 91 per cent of people with car flags agreed that people who move to Australia should adopt Australian values, compared with 76 per cent of non-flaggers.

A total of 55 per cent of flaggers believed migrants should leave their old ways behind, compared with 30 per cent of non-flaggers.

“What I found interesting is that many people didn't really have much to say about why they chose to fly car flags or not," Professor Fozdar said.

"Many felt strongly patriotic about it - and for some, this was quite a racist or exclusionary type of patriotism - but it wasn't a particularly conscious thing for many.”

SOURCE

The futility and hypocrisy of the Occupy stragglers

Across her neck, the contradiction of a permanent tattoo shackle that reads: “Freedom.” Across one forearm, a tattoo that reads, “Liberate All Beings.” On the other arm, “Inside Job,” a reference to her belief that 9/11 was carried out by the US Government.

You can take my dignity… but you'll never take my freedom tattoo. Pic: Paul Toohey.You can take my dignity… but you'll never take my freedom tattoo. Pic: Paul Toohey.

Kanaska Carter is 26. She is a former hairdresser from Canada who came to the US to protest on the 10th anniversary of September 11 but got caught up in Occupy Wall Street, six days later. And now there’s the Google wars, another natural fit for a conditioned young protestor.

Kanaska has lived homeless on the streets of New York for five months. She makes some money busking and inking tattoos and knows various places about the city where she and her friends can get free dinners each night.

She has been sleeping in a church in Manhattan’s upper west side. The church lets around 100 people in at 8.30pm and kicks them out at 8am. Most of them lost their tents when their Occupy campsite at Zuccotti Park, near Wall St, was cleared out in November.

The church has toilets, but no showers. “You wash your hair in the sink and use baby wipes. It’s pretty brutal,” says Kanaska.

Kanaska and her friends are sitting on the steps of the church on a freezing morning, having been sent out to face the day. They’re wrapped in blankets against the incoming North American winter. There’s a hash oil pipe going around and the hard smoke causes wracking fits of coughing.

After four months living the protest life, none of the group sees an end of the line. Or, if they do, they’re not willing to admit it yet.

Today they are leaving New York for Washington. A friend is picking them up in a van and driving them down.

The Washington mission seems confused. Red, one of Kanaska’s friends, says they’re going to hang out at the White House, raise hell and show solidarity for Obama. Kanaska says: “Fuck Obama.”

“Do you know he only became a senator four years before he became president?” Red says, trying to argue that Obama is not a longtime entrenched political insider, like the ones they’re supposed to despise.

“Yeah, that was about the same time he became an American citizen,” says Kanaska, only half joking.

That’s the thing about the protestors. They take bits of Leftist rhetoric, they take bits of the Right. And they don’t like either.

Kanaska wears a badge that says: “If voting changed anything it would be illegal.” She has never voted. She doesn’t see the point.

They don’t seek media attention. They don’t have a discernable message. They don’t want a leader. They don’t even agree with each other. But they’re going to the White House anyway.

Commentators have struggled to understand how the Occupy protestors have been able to unite without a clearly stated quest or shared goal. But, as Kanaska says: “I felt I’ve been waiting my whole life for this kind of activism.”

Something dawned on me speaking to this group. Political protest is merely the thread that holds them together. It’s about lifestyle.

They missed the chance to turn on, tune in and drop out in the 1960s. They missed the 1970s antiwar movement and, in the 80s and 90s, they didn’t miss much at all.

The turnouts at the various Occupy sites gave them an instant society, an on-the-spot family who would look out for each other. It gave them a chance to become homeless, en masse, without the loneliness or the begging on the streets or the fear of being attacked or having to ride the freight trains south.

“My street family is here with me and they’ve got my back,” says Kanaska. She met this particularly group of three or four blokes about a week ago and they’ve been hanging out since.

They claim they’re liberating America but, really, it’s about liberating themselves.

“I’ve been homeless for a while,” Kanaska says, “on and off for two or three years. It’s a choice. I find it humbles you. I used to have my own apartment and I slowly lost my mind. I was in there with my two cats and I was just like going crazy.

“When I’m homeless I’m always surrounded by friends. There’s freedom without having to pay rent all the time to a system that’s broken, without having to work a nine to five job and being able to do what you’re actually passionate about. I’d rather live playing music, doing artwork and tattooing people.”

On this day, her entire cash reserve is one dollar. “Some days it’s hard to find food but I just put out the guitar case,” she says.

Kanaska says her parents back in Canada are divided on what she’s doing. “My mum supports me fully,” she says. “My dad, he wants me to go to school, but if I go to school I’m going to have tons of debts so I don’t see the point.”

This life cannot last and she knows it. Her US visa runs out in March and that will be her time of reckoning. She’ll have to make some choices.

They all will. Otherwise their chosen homelessness will not be enjoyable. It will be real.

SOURCE

A THIRD of inmates at British youth jail are Muslims... and more convert to get better food

A third of inmates at one of Britain’s most notorious youth jails are Muslims and the religion is attracting a large number of converts.

There are 229 Muslims out of a total of 686 youngsters detained at Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution in West London, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

There are now so many worshippers at Friday prayers that they have to be split between Feltham’s mosque and its gym.

Sources claim that converts are attracted by the chance of better food and a more comfortable regime.

But there are also fears that some are being radicalised.

During Ramadan, Muslim prisoners are given food in separate hot and cold containers so they can eat what they choose at the end of their daylight fast.

A source revealed: ‘Over the last few years there has been a huge surge in those attending Muslim services. ‘The popularity of the faith has surprised people. We are seeing a large number of inmates converting to Islam.'

He added: ‘There is a difference between mainstream believers and extremists, but the fear is that some in the jail are being radicalised. 'Others convert for protection or to have what they believe is an easier lifestyle.’

Prison insiders say most non-Muslims are locked up during Friday prayers because so many guards are needed to monitor the lunchtime service.

The Ministry of Justice said: ‘The Prison Service is committed to ensuring the religious needs of prisoners of all faiths are met.’

SOURCE

British millionaire wins right to ban official busybodies from nosing round his home

It is a country estate of such beauty that it inspired the composition of one of our best loved hymns. But the mansion behind ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was the subject of an unholy row in court today over its modernised interior.

Conservation officials failed in their demand for access to Llanwenarth House to check on renovations and were told by the owner: ‘An Englishman's home is his castle.’

Millionaire Kim Davies, 56, told a court how planning inspectors had made up to 20 visits to the country mansion after they feared the Grade II listed property had been given a ‘footballer's wife-style’ makeover.

But he refused their request for an architectural historian to inspect the Elizabethan manor which is nestled in the idyllic Usk Valley in South Wales, and Brecon Beacons National Park Authority took him to court.

The home is currently for sale at £2.25million but work carried out Mr Davies has come in for close scrutiny.

National Park planning officer Clare Jones told the hearing she had visited the property at least 10 times and wanted to carry out further checks. She said: ‘The authority has now engaged a conservation expert who needs to advise us about the works that have taken place. ‘He will advise the authority if the history of the building has been compromised and on remedial work to put the building back to its original state.’

Mr Davies, a builder and car dealer, bought the house for £675,000 in 2007 and has since spent more than £1million on it. He admits that a new kitchen and bathrooms have been installed but claims the work falls outside the restrictions on listed buildings.

Planning officials were called in after it was compared to a ‘footballer's wife monstrosity’ which may have damaged the historic gem and an injunction was taken out to stop further work.

Mr Davies told magistrates in Abergavenny that he had always complied with the regular inspections by the National Park officials. But he opposed the application for a warrant to enter the property saying: ‘Enough is enough.’ He continued: ‘I have to take a stand. No further work has taken place since their last visit. ‘My sister is suffering from cancer and is convalescing at my home at the moment. ‘They have been there up to 20 times and I'm not prepared to let them come again.’

Dr Charles Mynor, representing Mr Davies, told the hearing: ‘There is no evidence of any new works or that anything extra has happened. ‘It seems that the National Park are coming back for another bite of a cherry that has already been bitten on many occasions.’

The magistrates refused to grant the Brecon Beacons National Park a warrant to enter the property and awarded £500 costs to Mr Davies.

Chairman of the bench Dr Christopher Rowlands told the court: ‘Mr Davies has said under oath that no further work has been carried out on the property and on those grounds the application is refused.’

After the case, Mr Davies said: ‘I have always welcomed the National Park people when they have visited my home. ‘But it is my home and there has to be a limit to the number of times they want to have a look around. ‘I would get a letter one day saying they were coming the next. I opposed the warrant because quite simply enough is enough.

‘An Englishman's home is his castle - only in this case it's a Welshman's home.’

Photographs used by the estate agent show the inside of the seven-bedroom house has changed considerably since the time of Mrs Alexander’s visit.

The kitchen has a large chandelier and granite tops while the bathroom boasts an ornamental Jacuzzi bath, and there is nothing Mrs Alexander would recognise about the high-ceilinged cinema room.

The estate agent description states: ‘Much of its character still remains yet the expansive home also embodies great comfort and ease of living.’

But the refurbishment work by property developer has not won universal songs of praise. Before the hearing Monmouthshire county councillor Christine Walby said: ‘The house is an architectural gem and the park authority has a legal obligation to ensure that listed buildings are preserved.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-24T00:57:00.001+11:30

Is Anyone Else Getting Tired of This Whole Politically Correct Bullying Thing?

David Cortman

Maybe it is just me, but I am getting a bit tired of reading about the left’s aggressive push on the whole bullying issue. I am no bullying expert, nor am I a child psychologist, but I have been bullied before (after all, I am vertically challenged and wore braces growing up). Haven’t most of us been bullied at one point or another? Maybe many of us still are. And isn’t that part of learning how to cope with adversity and challenges in this cold, cruel world that we live in?

So why all of a sudden this outrage for something that has been happening since the beginning of time? A loaded question, I know. Let me offer a concession, identify a problem or two, then a general assessment.

First, a concession (with a caveat): bullying is no good. People shouldn’t bully. It is a serious issue, but one that should not be hijacked for political gain or to push an agenda.

Second, let me point out a problem or two with trying to prohibit bullying. Perhaps you’ve never thought about it, but how is bullying to be defined? I am not just talking about a general description or definition, but rather one that permits a fair and even-handed application. (More difficult is an application that is even possible with young children especially.)

Here is what I mean. How do you draft and then enforce a bullying policy, say, in an elementary school? Would it look like this?

1. Students must be nice to each other.

2. Students may not say mean things to each other.

3. Students should tell their teacher if someone says something to them that hurts their feelings.

Mind you, I am not trying to make light of bullying but rather to point out the difficulties in identifying it. You see, when “bullying” crosses the line into physically threatening or hitting someone, you don’t need a bullying policy to prohibit that. But bullying policies usually have the added (and often unconstitutional) component of prohibiting “mean or hateful or offensive” speech. And if each child was punished every time they said something hurtful, the biggest class would be in the principal’s office. So when do you enforce it, and when do you chalk it up to children being children? And what about each time an adult said something hurtful or offensive? Where should we be sent?

And now the assessment. In the tone of the late Andy Rooney, one might say, “Have you ever noticed” that, when a bullying policy is pushed, it is usually accompanied by the promotion of the homosexual agenda? I have yet to see any major push to address bullying that was not tied to the left’s sexual vision for our children. The bullying outcry is not so much about students being mean to each other as it is about the left taking advantage of a volatile issue to promote their own agenda. I mean, after all, who is going to defend bullying? Not even those crazy right-wingers (although I am sure that is what some will say that I am doing in this article). So if someone dare oppose any anti-bullying measure, they must be really mean.

Just one recent example, among many, that was forwarded to me recently is located in the Huffington Post’s “Gay Voices.” The title: “Elementary School Climate, Anti-Gay Bullying Examined in New Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network [GLSEN] Report.” If that title alone doesn’t prove my entire point, then nothing does. And let’s look for a moment at the first line: “Given that more and more youngsters are self-identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) at younger ages, a new report hopes to shed light on school climate, biased remarks and bullying among elementary school students.” Really? Five-year-olds are “self-identifying” as “gay” or “transgendered”? Or are some groups (consisting of adults) pushing it on five-year-olds who, by the way, have no idea what any of that stuff is.

And what was the major finding of this “report?” That the number one reason students didn’t feel safe at school was…“personal appearance.” Sounds about right. But that won’t stop these groups from using this “report” to promote their sexual agenda. How do I know? The article goes on to state: “In conjunction with the report, GLSEN officials also released ‘Ready, Set, Respect!’ which they describe as ‘a new instructional resource informed by our findings to address homophobia, gender expression and LGBT-inclusive family diversity at the elementary school level.’”

Still think the anti-bullying push is really about stopping bullying?

SOURCE

The hypocritical Milibands -- Rather what you expect from the sons of a prominent Marxist theoretician

David Miliband takes lucrative new job with a Pakistan-based City firm backed by a Swiss playboy as brother Ed rails against Capitalist predators

David Miliband has taken a lucrative job with a Pakistan-based City firm which will push his post-ministerial earnings to £500,000 – at a time when brother Ed is campaigning against capitalist ‘predators’.

The former Foreign Secretary, who has picked up a string of highly paid positions since losing the Labour leadership battle to his brother, has been appointed as a senior adviser to Indus Basin Holdings.

The firm, set up last year to funnel investment into Pakistani agriculture, boasts a number of colourful backers, including a Swiss aristocrat playboy called Baron Lorne Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Mr Miliband, who will earn about £50,000 a year from the part-time position – which is not expected to occupy him for more than a few days a month – is starting to emulate the money-making success of his political patron, Tony Blair. And like Mr Blair, he has constructed his business affairs in a way that appears to limit tax liability.

Mr Miliband would pay income tax at the normal rate on his £65,000 salary for being an MP.

His non-parliamentary earnings, however, are paid into a company called The Office Of David Miliband Limited, which is subject to corporation tax of between 20 per cent and 27.5 per cent – substantially less than the 50 per cent rate of income tax for those earning more than £150,000. Last night, a leading City accountant estimated that using the company device would have lowered his tax bill by £127,000.

The accountant added that shares in the company were split 50-50 between Mr Miliband and his wife – a move usually deployed to ‘split incomes’ so both partners can exploit their lower tax bands to the full. Last night the former Minister’s office did not respond to questions about tax.

Earlier this month it was disclosed that Mr Blair’s firms had paid just £315,000 in tax on a £12 million annual income.

News of Mr Miliband’s latest job comes as his brother tries to turn around his sagging political fortunes by attacking ‘fat cat’ executive pay and joining cross-party calls for reckless former RBS banker Sir Fred Goodwin to be stripped of his knighthood. The Labour leader used last year’s party conference to condemn capitalist ‘predators’ who are ‘just interested in the fast buck’.

Indus Basin Holdings (IBH) was set up by Aamer Sarfraz, a merchant banker at London-based investment company Tigris Financial, to make money out of burgeoning farm businesses in Pakistan.

As Foreign Secretary, Mr Miliband had frequent contact with Islamabad – including personal visits – as part of anti-terror negotiations. Last night his office stressed that none of the contacts he made in his official work had helped him land the job.

IBH’s investors include Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. The 48-year-old film-maker is the son of five-times-married billionaire art collector Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza and British fashion model Fiona Campbell-Walter. Known to have lost his virginity at 15 to a prostitute, in his youth he was linked to the models Koo Stark and Baroness Andrea von Stumm.

Another IBH investor is Tim Draper, a US venture capitalist known for being an early backer of Skype internet telephone technology.

Before securing his new job, Mr Miliband had already amassed more than £400,000 from speeches, lectures and consultancy work in the past 15 months.

The jobs include more than £92,000 a year from the Californian ‘clean energy’ firm VantagePoint, £75,000 a year as vice-chairman of Premier League football club Sunderland, and one-off fees including £24,000 for a week of teaching at a US university and lectures in the Middle East at £25,000 a time.

After losing the leadership battle in September 2010, Mr Miliband opted to walk away from the party front bench. By the next General Election in 2015, however, he is likely to have secured his financial future, putting him in a strong position for another run at the leadership.

He said in a statement yesterday: ‘I care deeply about Pakistan, the development of its economy and its future in the wider region. ‘I look forward to working with IBH in building support and investment in Pakistan’s agricultural capacity and productivity.’ His spokesman said the IBH job had been cleared by the relevant Government’s Advisory Committee.

And Red Ed isn't as green as his eco-bag proclaims

As he leaves for work, Ed Miliband looks for all the world like the eco-friendly politician he is supposed to be.

The Labour leader emerged from his house in North London earlier this month clutching a reusable bag bearing the slogan ‘My Green Bag’ – clearly advertising his environmental credentials.

But within seconds, Mr Miliband, who was Climate Change Secretary in the last Labour Government, was spotted climbing into the back of a powerful Jaguar XF as if worries over global warming were a thing of the past.

The Jaguar XF range goes from a £29,250 2.2-litre diesel version to a £63,780 five-litre petrol model capable of 155mph.

Last night, Labour defended Mr Miliband, insisting the car provided for the Opposition leader came from the same fleet used by Ministers.

The party said: ‘The car is from the Government Car Service. It’s what Coalition Ministers are given.

‘As it is with the official car service, they meet high environmental standards.’

The spokesman said that Mr Miliband was not always given the same car, but the models used were always diesel.

SOURCE

Evil British social workers again

Under the pretext of "caring", they do all they can to hurt and frustrate people

An elderly couple were banned from going on holiday together after their local council said it was too risky. In an astonishing example of the nanny state at work, Norman Davies and Peggy Ross were told by Cardiff Council that they could not go on the planned Mediterranean cruise, just days before they were due to leave.

Over-zealous social workers claimed Mrs Ross, who suffers from dementia, was in danger of wandering off or falling overboard.

But the 82-year-old woman and her 81-year-old husband fought the court order and were eventually able to set sail from Southampton on the 16-day holiday of their dreams.

Despite the dire predictions of the interfering council, the couple enjoyed the trip of a lifetime and Mr Davies said the break had in fact benefitted Mrs Ross's mental alertness.

In October, after the council learned about the £3,200 holiday the pair had planned, it tried to use mental health laws to prevent from Mrs Ross leaving her care home.

Furious Mr Davies, a former engineer who lives near Newport, told ITV Wales: 'I'm with her 24/7. The cabin is a self-contained unit and we go down for meals together - she's just never left on her own.'

The couple have been together for around 20 years and have often gone on around 30 cruises.

They were horrified when jobsworths at the council obtained a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguard authorisation and then applied to the Court of Protection for a declaration to say Mrs Ross was unable to travel.

'They just didn't want me to go,' said Mrs Ross. She admitted she sometimes gets confused. but added: 'I do look after myself, and we're usually in the same room together, so he notices if I try to go out. It's not often.'

She had been admitted to the nursing home in July 2010, suffering from memory loss, and her social worker claimed she lacked 'capacity to make a decision' about the holiday because her 'ideas/beliefs are not based in reality'.

Luckily, Mr Davies and his daughter Gaynor Lloyd moved quickly and instructed a solicitor to challenge the order, with days to go until they were due to set sail from Southampton.

The case was heard at Cardiff Regional Court a mere three days before they were set to go away, and to the couple's great relief, the judge ruled that it was in Mrs Ross's best interests to go.

Judge Crispin Masterman said that even if others believed Mrs Ross’s decision to go on the holiday was 'unwise', that did not show she was unable to make it.

He said the social worker and care home staff obviously had her safety in mind, but were too concerned with 'trying to find reasons why Mrs Ross should not go on this holiday rather than finding reasons why she should'.

The judge concluded that she did have capacity to make the decision and the couple sailed away on their holiday.

His lawyer said the victory revealed that the over-cautiousness of modern life had to be tempered with common sense. Lawyers from Essex Street chambers said the case highlighted 'a tendency among local authorities to focus on risk-prevention at the expense of emotional wellbeing.'

Previous cases have seen councils and health bodies try to prevent a man having sex, force a woman with a low IQ to take contraception and even stop a man bringing his grandmother home for Christmas.

A Cardiff Council spokesman said: 'The council has always had Mrs Ross's best interests at heart and we worked with her to find an alternative holiday where we could be confident that the required level of care which she requires on a daily basis could be provided.'

Her care home manager said that nothing stopped Mrs Ross leaving the care home and she was 'free to have a lovely life with her partner.' But she said she was concerned over the 82-year-old being away for 16 days.

SOURCE

Pro-life push in Australian Leftist ranks

LABOR'S anti-abortion forces are rallying behind a new ginger group that will promote and campaign for candidates who are against abortion and euthanasia.

Labor for Life was formed last month to link members with conservative views and, partly, in response to the party's official recognition of gay marriage.

The move is being seen by progressive MPs as a sign Labor's socially conservative rump is muscling up for a fight on issues such as abortion.

Federal MPs who have given their support to the organisation include the Tasmanian senator Helen Polley, who opposed the push for gay marriage at the national conference.

The group's Facebook page also lists the 29 politicians and organisations it views as sympathetic including Senator Polley, the NSW senator Ursula Stephens and the Minister for the Environment, Tony Burke.

"It's really important that members of the ALP who have these views have a group and have people they can connect with," the group's convener, Simone McDonnell, who has previously been a federal Labor candidate in South Australia, said.

"It's really important that we support a diverse range of views, particularly on moral issues."

The group also has links to the largest union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, and its staunchly anti-abortion boss Joe de Bruyn.

In 2008, Mr de Bruyn described abortion as the "deliberate destruction of human life" when he clashed with former prime minister Kevin Rudd over a decision to drop a ban on foreign aid funds spent on family planning services.

Labor for Life received a boost at last month's Labor Party national conference where members who spoke against the proposal to recognise gay marriage, including Mr de Bruyn, begged for tolerance for their views.

Ms McDonnell said it was important Labor remained a "broad church". This was an argument made repeatedly by delegates to the national conference who fear support for progressive issues such as gay marriage and abortion will alienate Labor's more conservative supporters.

Senator Claire Moore, a long-time campaigner for reproductive choice within the party, said she had been expecting a formal anti-abortion group to establish itself for some time.

"It's a message to those of us who feel differently, that we can never be complacent," Senator Moore said.

"We have an increasingly conservative number of parliamentarians. There's a lot of people with less progressive views [than before]."

She noted that Labor for Life also campaigned against the death penalty, making it hard for pro-choice MPs to condemn it out of hand.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-01-23T00:31:00.001+11:30

The Growing Science of Sex Difference

The headline at the online magazine Miller-McCune.com just about says it all: "Sex on the Brain Proves Costly for Men."

In an intriguing set of empirical studies just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a team of social scientists led by professor Sanne Nauts shows that the mere prospect of speaking with an unknown woman reduces men's (but not women's) performance on cognitive tasks.

In the first study, 71 college students at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands were asked to complete a "lip-reading task" while supposedly being observed on a webcam by an unseen researcher who would instant message them. When the alleged researcher messaging them was named "Lisa," the men performed worse than when the purported observer messaging them had a male name.

In a second study -- this one involving 90 students -- the researchers decided to create even more distance between actual interaction with a woman to see if merely imagining that they were about to interact with a woman could affect men's cognitive performance.

As in the first study, participants were escorted to a cubicle by an experimenter of their own sex, ostensibly to collect stimulus materials for a study on lip reading.

Then the students were merely told they were being observed by a researcher named either Danielle or Daan, who would turn on the webcam and send them an instant message. That never happened. Nonetheless, the mere idea they might soon be messaging with an unknown woman whose attractiveness they could not evaluate caused in the men what the researchers call "cognitive impairment."

The authors attribute this to the cognitively costly effect of impression management, which leaves less brain energy for other tasks:

"Men seem so strongly attuned to mating opportunities that they were influenced by rather subtle cues to a woman, even in the absence of clear information about her," they note. "Casually mentioning a female instead of a male name was sufficient to impair men's cognitive performance."

It may just be that firing up the reward systems of the brain makes men less focused on the task at hand. The authors cite a 2004 study led by Bram Van den Bergh, intriguingly titled "Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice." After men were shown photos of women in lingerie or swimsuits, they became generally more impulsive -- e.g., they tended to prefer a little cash now to more cash down the road.

When women enter the room, reason flees?

The most interesting thing is that the inverse is not true for women. On average, women who were told they would interact with men did not perform any differently on cognitive tasks than women who were told they would be interacting with women.

Gender simply matters less to women. I've always suspected this is the root of much feminism, as well as women's sexual confusion, and the deepest source of the endless human sexual comedy.

Unlike men, women have a category called "human" in which gender (while recognized) is relatively unimportant. As a hypothesis for future busy research scientists, I offer the suggestion that this may be due to the primacy of maternity in women's evolutionarily adapted brain structure. The category "my baby" is way more important than the gender of a child to the mother.

When I sent a copy of "The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction With a Woman Can Impair Men's Cognitive Performance" to my husband, his response was: "They need scientific studies for this stuff?"

Well, yes, apparently these days we do. Men and women really are different. Not only our bodies, but our brains react differently.

Suppressing reality in the interests of ideology doesn't help women -- it just makes us all act in dumber and dumber ways.

SOURCE

Tens of thousands of criminals in Britain commit a new crime within a month of receiving a caution

Tens of thousands of criminals go on to reoffend within days of being let off with a caution. In one year, 21,000 offenders – including 6,000 teenagers – broke the law within a month of being given what is effectively a ‘slap on the wrist’.

It means that every day almost 60 criminals – a third of them youths – offend again less than four weeks after being let off for crimes from theft to violence.

The figures are yet another illustration of Britain’s soft justice system and will raise further fears over the ‘caution culture’.

Just weeks ago it emerged that more than half of those involved in the August riots had been let off with a caution for earlier crimes.

The latest statistics were revealed days after Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt called for fewer young criminals to be sent to jail. Mr Blunt faces an overcrowding crisis as prison numbers rocketed to more than 87,000 this week.

Last year police handed out 235,600 cautions to thugs instead of passing the cases to prosecutors to administer justice in court. Critics say the penalties – which carry no other punishment than remaining on their record – undermine the message that ‘crime does not pay’.

The figures revealed that in one year, 6,007 children and 14,994 adults committed further crimes a month after being handed a caution.

Almost a quarter of all under-18s given reprimands end up reoffending within a year. The average adult reoffender commits more than two offences after a caution.

The totals emerged after a parliamentary question from Priti Patel, a Tory backbench MP, who said last night: ‘This shows the scale of the problem ministers have inherited.’

The figures, from 2009 – the most recent available – show 17.6 per cent of all adults handed a caution reoffended within a year, as did 23.3 per cent of juveniles.

A total of 85,750 adults reoffended within a year as did 39,697 juveniles who were issued a reprimand or final warning – the under-18 equivalent of a caution.

Some 52,442 adults and 22,648 children reoffended within six months; 23,403 adults and 9,572 juveniles did so after two months.

Separately, Miss Patel found that every year, hundreds of adult criminals receive cautions despite having been convicted of offences more than 15 times before.

From 2005 to 2009, there were 2,347 occasions on which a cautioned adult offender with 15 or more previous convictions received another caution within a year.

Despite these figures, Mr Blunt said earlier this week he wanted to see fewer children being locked up, with more being told to say sorry to their victims instead.

He said he did not believe ‘offending should automatically lead to prosecution’, adding: ‘In some cases, particularly involving young children, restorative justice can satisfactorily resolve incidents.’

Criminologist David Green, of the think-tank Civitas, said: ‘The thousands who are reoffending within a month are only those who are caught – which will be a tiny proportion of the real number.

‘These figures show cautions are being inappropriately used. If these are career criminals, they should be given more serious sanctions.’

Last month the Daily Mail revealed 50 people a day suffer a violent or sexual attack by a convict spared jail in the soft justice system. Official figures showed every year more than 18,000 convicts given a community punishment commit a sexual or violent crime within 12 months of being sentenced.

SOURCE

Dodgy British crime statistics again

They would make Stalin proud

The riots that left whole neighbourhoods up and down the country in a state of ruin last August were the worst civil disturbances for a generation. But reading crime figures released yesterday, it is almost as if the five days of widespread looting and violence never took place. Nearly half of the areas worst-affected by the riots saw crime fall during that month, according to Home Office statistics.

In Croydon, where a 144-year-old furniture shop was one of dozens of buildings burned to the ground and a photo of a woman jumping from a first-floor inferno became one of the defining images of the riots, police recorded just seven disorder offences.

Seven disorder offences. Rioting by hundreds of mostly-masked youths in the south London borough saw dozens of shops burned, including a 144-year-old furniture store.

The disparity comes down to the way officers recorded the avalanche of offences committed during the unrest. Some forces classified hundreds of feral thugs rampaging through different streets in the same city as just one incident of public disorder.

Similarly, mass looting in which one person broke into a shop only to be followed by dozens more was recorded as a single offence.

And not one force reported the offence of rioting, officially defined as '12 or more people who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence for a common purpose'.

In a statement, the Home Office said: 'It is important to understand the basis of crime recording to appreciate the impact of the disorder incidents on crime statistics. 'Police record crimes according to the number of specific victims, rather than the number of offenders.'

But Trevor Reeves, the owner of the 144-year-old Reeves Furniture Store in Croydon that was destroyed in an arson attack, slammed the police's method of recording crime as 'crazy'.

'You would expect a great big blip in the crime statistics after those five days of rioting,' he told the Telegraph. 'It is crazy to put down something like looting as one crime and is unnecessary. The whole world saw what was happening and to record it like this will just make them look ridiculous.'

Police in the London borough of Southwark recorded just one public disorder offence despite five days of unrest and 314 other offences. Officers in Manchester also said crime fell during August, despite recording 11 public disorder offences and 386 related crimes. A total of 184 incidents of violent disorder and 5,112 connected offences were recorded by police forces across England. Despite this, nine of the 15 worst affected councils recorded more crime in August 2010 than a year later.

The figures did show that knifepoint robberies rose by 10 per cent last year and that one victim is held up by a knife-carrying criminal every 35 minutes. Senior officers have warned the attacks are carried out by muggers determined to steal smartphones and cash.

Separate figures show a double digit rise in the number of pickpocket thefts – the biggest increase for nearly a decade.

Across England and Wales, robbery rose by 4 per cent in the year to September 2011 compared with the previous 12 months.

There were 15,313 knifepoint robberies in the same period – up 10 per cent from the 13,971 offences a year earlier, the crime statistics showed.

Around half of all robberies took place in London and the most common items stolen were smartphones, bags and cash.

The Metropolitan Police recorded a 13 per cent rise in robberies in the capital and West Midlands Police recorded a 10 per cent increase.

Former Met commissioner Lord Stevens, who is chairing a commission into the future of policing set up by Labour, said the rise in crimes against the person was ‘a bit alarming’. He said: ‘I’m not surprised. It’s really worrying. We’ve got to get on top of them really quickly or you could run out of control.’

The British Crime Survey, based on a poll of more than 40,000 victims, suggested a 5 per cent rise in burglary, and a 7 per cent increase in car theft.

Pickpocket thefts rose by 12 per cent to nearly 600,000, while garden shed break-ins fuelled a 15 per cent rise in other thefts of personal property. However, overall recorded crime fell fractionally. The number recorded was down by 4 per cent to 4.1million.

Chief Constable Jon Murphy, from the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: ‘While incidents in violence against the person fell, a continued cause for concern was the increase in pickpocketing, robbery and robbery with knives.’ ‘This has been driven by a rise in robberies of personal property and police will want to focus on tackling these offences and offering crime-prevention advice.’

Meanwhile, the number of murders and other killings rose by 5 per cent in the year to March 2011, said the Home Office. That is a rise of 28 – taking the total number of violent deaths to 636, up from 608 in 2009/10. The latter includes the 12 victims of the Cumbrian shootings in June 2010 by Derrick Bird.

Ministers are set to introduce a ‘tough’ law meaning automatic jail for anyone caught carrying a knife with the intention of using it to commit a crime. Currently just one in five of those caught carrying a knife is given a jail term. The rest are handed community sentences, fines or other punishments.

Policing minister Nick Herbert said: ‘Today’s crime figures cannot be used to show there is a long-term change in either direction. There are areas of concern and, as we have consistently said, crime remains too high. ‘We know good policing makes a difference.’

SOURCE

Power to the people? British Liberals have other ideas...

As you would expect -- JR

People sometimes accuse me of being too hard on MPs. Why, they say, are you so sceptical? Well, just look at what the Establishment has done to the election promise to give voters the right to sack their MPs in the middle of a Parliament.

Here was a strong idea, widely endorsed. Now it is being strangled.

Two independent-minded Tories, Douglas Carswell and Zac Goldsmith, went before the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee yesterday to cry foul. The Whips long ago gave up on pukka Mr Carswell (Clacton) and tanned Mr Goldsmith (Richmond Park). That is greatly to the credit of both men.

Both support ‘parliamentary recall’ – the term for allowing constituents to call a by-election if they feel their MP has erred badly. However, they loathe the way the Government is pretending now to fulfill its promise to bring in recall. A White Paper has emerged from Nick Clegg’s office. It certainly suggests something rather greasier than what was expected.

Many of us imagined an arrangement under which, say, 20 per cent of an MP’s constituents might have to sign a demand for a re-election, which would then be held if 50 per cent of voters opted for that in a local referendum.

Cleggy and his Tory ministerial sidekick, clean-fingernailed Mark Harper, had a different idea. Their draft Bill hands the power of triggering the re-election process to – oh no! – a committee of parliamentary grandees.

Madness. The whole point of recall is to empower poor, ruddy electors fed up with MPs for fiddling their expenses, reneging on promises, failing to attend the Chamber (Gordon Brown, ahem) or Heaven knows what.

David Cameron’s guru Steve Hilton was hot for this idea. Alas, it was given to mad monk Oliver Letwin, a minister who complicates everything. Then it passed to Mr Clegg, who must have thought about his U-turn on college fees, contemplated voters’ sentiments and done a big gulp.

Out of the Whitehall sausage machine we now have this White Paper which, disgustingly, would give the political party system all the power originally envisaged as going to the voters. Classic.

‘This is a 180-degree wrong proposal,’ chomped Mr Carswell out of one side of his mouth. ‘It has been messed up by the people in charge.’ He argued that under the Clegg idea, the party bosses would be able to threaten rebellious backbenchers.

Mr Goldsmith said the Government’s Bill was so terrible it needs to be opposed by the very supporters of parliamentary recall it supposedly set out to assure.

The committee’s chairman, Graham Allen (Lab), was concerned about elected politicians, who may already be too weak, facing constraints on their power. There are also worries that recall could be abused by pressure groups and vexatious obsessives. Mr Carswell met this argument by saying that the public are not fools. They would soon spot anyone playing silly games.

So what has gone on? ‘Sir Humphrey would like to keep the people at bay,’ reckoned Mr Carswell, a punchy performer and empirical thinker. ‘Most governments fear the impact of democracy,’ added Mr Goldsmith.

Some people recoil from Mr Goldsmith because he is stonkingly rich. Actually, he is proving a better tribune of the people than many MPs who are supposedly closer to their voters.

An academic from Reading University was wheeled on to provide opposing arguments. He was all in favour of more panels of the great and good. These people usually are. They seem to regard the populace as something unwholesome. The attitude of Paul Flynn (Lab, Newport W) to tabloid newspaper readers was, alas, similarly snooty.

But Mr Flynn perhaps had a fair point when he wondered if electors are sufficiently outraged by MPs’ misbehaviour ever to crowbar them out of office.

Do you feel you should have the right to bin dishonest MPs? If so, get writing to 10 Downing Street, specifically our ally Mr Hilton. Fight for your rights. The Establishment will not surrender them lightly.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-22T00:27:00.001+11:30

Is homosexuality now a human right?

It's not in any bill of rights that I know of

On December 6, President Barack Obama’s support for the demands of the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender” agenda rose to the next level when he issued a memorandum directing federal agencies abroad to “improve protections for LGBT asylum seekers and to strengthen opposition to criminalization of LGBT status or conduct.” The key phrase in the directive was Obama’s claim that so doing is but another part of the “United States’ commitment to promoting human rights.”

This shift in characterizing the sexual and political demands of those who engage in homosexual behavior as a “human right” is as purposeful as it is dangerous to liberty, marriage, and the family. And if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech last week in Geneva was any indicator, the appeal to “human rights” is the new moniker for silencing and punishing any person, organization, or state that will not support the homosexual agenda.

In Geneva, Clinton said:

"Our commitments to protect the freedom of religion and to defend the dignity of LGBT people emanate from a common source. (No, this is not a typo.) For many of us, religious belief and practice is a vital source of meaning and identity, and fundamental to who we are as people. And likewise, for most of us, the bonds of love and family that we forge are also vital sources of meaning and identity. And caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human."

She then went a step further, intertwining what it means to be “fully human” with human rights: “It is because the human experience is universal that human rights are universal and cut across all religions and cultures.”

In other words, Clinton presented things dear to each of us—love and family, our faith and who we are—and then used them to play on our heart strings and further the administration’s contention that a denial of these things to anybody, for any reason, is a violation of the highest order for it is a violation of “human rights.”

Clearly these arguments, both President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s, are framed in such a way as to make those whose experience has not been “universal” in embracing sexual behavior appear insensitive, if not outright cruel, toward same-sex couples who only want to fabricate new ways to share “the bonds of love and family” heterosexual couples share. Here we must remember that our culture does not rest on some momentary, politically correct expression of “human rights,” but on the eternal bedrock of natural rights, fixed and ordered by the same God who joined man and woman together as one flesh in the Garden of Eden.

Throughout history we have had enlightened elites demanding a reordering of such rights and the result has been death, in culture and in life. (Just think of what the reordering of natural rights did in the 20th century, where millions more Jews and Christians died than in prior history.) Or consider the enlightened pursuit of new human rights amid the eugenics movement which led to “three generations of imbeciles being enough” (Oliver Wendell Holmes). Now, the states with mandatory sterilization laws deal with restitution payments while the new human right to slaughter one’s own child for any reason has led to nearly 54 million missing among us.

If “caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human,” then it’s all the more reason to contend for natural marriage, regardless of the emotional pleas to the contrary. Marriage is the one and only relationship that is absolutely essential to the future of humanity: at all times and in all places. It naturally builds family—mom, dad, and children—and gives hope that the next generations will carry on into the future.

Therefore, society should protect and strengthen marriage, not undermine it. And while Americans should certainly stand up to defend God-given rights for all, they should reject deceptive calls to redefine our future based on the demands of the moment.

SOURCE

End of the Line for Bullet Trains

High-Speed Rail is Coasting to a Stop, and Not Just in California

The way high-speed rail projects have been collapsing around the world, you’d think they were corrupt, outrageously expensive, fiscally ruinous, poorly planned government efforts to build a 19th century means of transportation for which there’s no demand.

The Obama Administration’s bullet-train dream is dead. Florida Gov. Rick Scott last year rejected $2 billion in federal funds rather than commit the Sunshine State to such an expensive project. California’s high-speed rail effort is in turmoil, recently suffered a purge of top management, and is unlikely to meet its September deadline to break ground on a federally mandated leg universally termed the “train to nowhere.”

New York State’s effort to build a Buffalo-New York City line is also stalling out. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) trekked out to the village of Bergen in Genesee County the other day only to face hostile questioning from reporters and the local mayor. Schumer’s photo opp by the side of an existing CSX track highlighted a trait the Empire State’s project shares with California’s: It proposes to destroy a proven business – freight rail – to make room for a bullet train that would not be self-supporting even according to the rosiest estimates.

Don't trust SEIU colors. Bullet trains are having even less luck outside the United States – where, the cognoscenti never tire of reminding us, international sophisticates are way ahead of us Yankee bumpkins. Spain’s high-speed rail system, until recently a model for new bullet train construction (and, to be fair, a line that replaced one of the slowest railways in Europe), is sinking under low ridership and dragging that kingdom even deeper into a swamp of bad public debt.

The unkindest cuts of all are occurring in China, whose bullet train once drew hosannas from California governors and bully-worshipping toadies like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Rail minister Liu Zhijun, the putative “Father of High-Speed Rail,” was removed from office and arrested last year; Liu’s deputy, “Grand Designer” (and owner of a five-bedroom home on 30,000 square feet in Los Angeles County) Zhang Shuguang, is also facing corruption charges. An early investigation by the Ministry of Rail revealed that the Chinese bullet train’s budgeting is extremely murky (with some parts of the initiative costing two or three times as much as projected); its ridership is low (after only two months of operation, the Beijing-Fuzhou line was quietly shut in 2010); and ticket prices are beyond the means of lower-income people who actually use mass transit. HSR-related debt increased by a factor of 22 over only three years, from 77.1 billion yuan in 2007 to 1.68 trillion in 2010. In July a bullet-train crash in Zhejiang killed 32 people and injured more than 200.

Railroads have always been favorites of dictators. (Note that nobody was ever brought to a concentration camp on a bus.) But they somehow retain their fascination for popularly elected politicians as well.

A substantial majority of Californians oppose the bullet-train in its current form. That’s a remarkable turnaround in a state where 53 percent of voters approved $9.95 billion in high-speed rail bonds during the high-turnout 2008 election. It seems like just a month ago that the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) was an object of wonder for its reality-distorting public relations influence and political strength. Now even the left-leaning media treat with scorn the CHSRA and its plan to make a non-operational Bakersfield-Fresno run the great project’s first phase.

Meanwhile, the CHSRA’s CEO and board chairman have both fled the collapsing project, in a move that neither the Brown nor the Obama Administration appears to have seen coming. The authority is in a dispute with its former PR firm, which was unable to distract public attention from the glaring truth that since 2008 the estimated cost of the project has more than doubled, from around $40 billion to $98.5 billion. (The suspiciously steep increase in projected costs has prompted calls for a new referendum on railway debt, on the grounds that the voters were hoodwinked the first time around.) The authority’s own peer review group and the Legislative Analyst’s Office have strongly recommended delaying and rethinking the project. A larger percentage of voters would now vote No on HSR bonds than voted for them in 2008.

These are all steps in the right direction, but there’s another intellectual hurdle for the populace to clear. These failing, costly high-speed rail catastrophes are not cases of a good idea poorly carried out. Failure is built into the concept. There is neither need nor demand nor real popular will to bring trains back in a spiffier form. In this respect, one part of Jerry Brown’s speech was accurate: High-speed rail is not a new idea. Passenger railroads had their day. To pretend otherwise is truly to believe our civilization is in decline.

SOURCE

There are 30,000 job vacancies in London but young Brits don't have the right work ethic, says Mayor

Unemployed young people need to learn lessons from the hard-working immigrants who have taken their jobs, Boris Johnson said last night.

The Mayor of London said that the younger generation are missing out on jobs because they do not have the same ‘energy to go out and get them’ as the foreigners being employed in this country.

Speaking a day after youth unemployment broke records, Mr Johnson said that there are vacancies, but British young people do not have the right work ethic.

He pointed to successful sandwich chain Pret a Manger, noting native Londoners are rarely seen behind the till. ‘London is a fantastic creator of jobs – but many of these jobs are going to people who don’t originate in this country,’ he said.

‘They are hard-working, good people, and we need to learn from them and understand what it is that they have got that makes them able to get those jobs that young Londoners don’t have.’

Figures released earlier this week showed that more than one in five of those between the age of 16 and 24 are unemployed, hitting a total of 1.04million.

But Mr Johnson, who is hoping to beat Ken Livingstone in the mayoral race in May, said that there are around 30,000 mid-market and lower-skilled vacancies in London alone. He said: ‘There are large numbers of job vacancies. Why are young people not taking up those jobs? How can we help them? That is the key problem for our economy.

‘In this city there are jobs going. It’s vital that Londoners have the skills and the aptitude but also the energy and appetite for work as well.’ He went on to suggest that British young people do not have the same determination as many of the foreign workers in hotels, coffee shops and shops in this country.

‘Let’s talk about work ethic,’ he said in the interview with The Sun. ‘I don’t want to stigmatise young people because many of them do have the aptitude. But we need to face up to these issues. ‘In some cases it can come down to the fact that the jobs are there and people need to have the energy to go out and get them.’

Unemployment figures this week showed that the overall jobless total has reached a 17-year-high of 2.69million.

Mr Johnson also criticised unemployed graduate Cait Reilly who claimed earlier this month that she is suing the Government for making her taken an unpaid work placement at Poundland in Birmingham. He said she 'sneered' at hardworking Britons by saying the work was 'forced labour', telling newspaper: 'She should not turn down the opportunity to do work of a kind that many, many people do and value'.

He recalled his first job as a trainee reporter at The Times saying he could not believe how hard everyone worked when he first started and insisted Miss Reilly would learn from her work placement.

SOURCE

Britain pays more than £2 BILLION in welfare payments to foreigners each year

More than £2billion is being claimed in benefits by foreigners every year, including thousands of illegal immigrants, figures reveal.

The Department for Work and Pensions announced a fraud investigation last night after it emerged 5,000 illegals claimed handouts worth £42million to which they are not entitled.

Ministers acted after the first-ever study of claimants’ nationality, which found 371,000 foreign nationals are on out-of-work benefits.

The study by the DWP found 6 per cent of all benefit claimants were foreign nationals when the data was collected in February last year.

Of those claiming benefits, 258,000 were from outside the European Economic Area, which includes the 27 EU countries as well as Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

But a follow-up exercise found 2 per cent of all claims by foreign nationals were made by those without the immigration status to justify the payments.

The DWP said last night: ‘Two per cent of cases appeared to have no lawful immigration status and the legitimacy of their status for benefit purposes is being investigated.

‘The DWP is co-ordinating with UK Border Agency to review the small number of cases where it appears benefit is being claimed illegitimately. 'Where this is the case, benefit will be stopped and enforcement activity considered.’

Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: ‘It is not acceptable that people from other countries can claim our benefits if they have not worked or paid tax in the UK. ‘We will root out those claimants who cannot prove their immigration status and in turn they will be stripped of their benefits.’

Immigration Minister Damian Green said: ‘These findings uncover a worrying issue we have inherited, which is why we’ve ordered urgent work to pursue claimants suspected of abuse and to withdraw their benefits if they cannot prove they are entitled to claim.’

According to the figures, 54 per cent of non-EEA claimants went on to secure British citizenship. But the survey also suggests many are moving to the UK to take advantage of our generous benefits system.

Last year £35billion was paid to 5.5million people in out-of-work benefits, including Jobseeker’s Allowance, Incapacity Benefit and its replacement Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Disability Living Allowance, Carer’s Allowance and Bereavement benefit. Of that, 6 per cent, or £2.1billion, goes to foreigners.

Under current rules, those given leave to enter or remain in the UK may be eligible for income-related benefits, including anyone granted refugee status, exceptional leave to enter or remain, or Humanitarian Protection.

EEA nationals with ‘worker status’ who have left their job but are looking for alternative work are eligible for income-related benefits.

Those who can demonstrate they are seeking work are eligible for Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Robert Oxley, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: ‘With billions at stake the proper controls need to be in place to prevent benefit tourism from swallowing up taxpayers’ money.

Taxpayers will rightly worry the rules designed to prevent benefit tourists are steadily being eroded by a meddlesome EU, leaving Britain to pick up a bigger welfare bill than it needs to.’

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-01-21T00:25:00.001+11:30

A modern man or just a cowardly Italian?

Is Captain Schettino just the latest example of modern society's lost values? He was not alone in displaying ungallant behaviour

Theodore Dalrymple

Courage is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we have a right to demand them? Which of us cannot look back on his or her own life and remember decisions, or compromises made, or silences kept because of cowardice, even when the penalties for courage were negligible?

If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their fate, do we say, "There but for the grace of God go I"?

I have witnessed some very fine instances of bravery. Once, as a junior doctor, I was walking through the hospital grounds when I noticed a patient sitting on a bench slashing his wrists with a broken bottle of vodka whose contents he had just drunk. I asked him to come into the hospital where I could sew him up (sobering him up was beyond my powers). He climbed up the fire escape and clambered over the railings on to a narrow ledge, on which he was swaying drunkenly. A porter and I went up the fire escape: the man threatened to jump if we came nearer.

We decided we had to make a grab for him; as we did so, he jumped. We held him suspended by his arms three storeys up. First he shouted, "Let me go, you bastards!" and then, "Help, I'm falling!" - a metaphor for the whole of human life, when you come to think of it.

By the luckiest chance, two policemen arrived at the hospital and rushed up the fire escape to our assistance. Without a moment's hesitation, they climbed on to the ledge themselves and hauled the man to safety. They brushed away my commendation, and even my thanks; in their own opinion, they had only done their duty, what they were expected, and expected themselves, to do.

I witnessed another instance of great bravery many years later, when times were changed. It was in the prison in which I worked as a doctor. A prisoner set fire to his mattress in his cell, and years of research by the British Home Office seemed to have gone into disproving the old saying that there is no smoke without fire, for the mattress produced the thickest, most acrid, black smoke that I have ever encountered, without much in the way of flame.

With no thought for his own safety, a prison officer entered the cell and pulled the prisoner to safety. As I sent the officer to hospital to be treated for possible smoke inhalation, I praised him highly and said I expected he would receive an official commendation.

He smiled pityingly at my naivety and said: "A reprimand more likely." And so it proved: he had not followed procedure, which was to leave it for the fire brigade.

A world in which a man can be reprimanded for bravely saving another's life is not propitious for the widespread practice of bravery. Virtues tend to disappear in the dissolving acid of rationality.

What might Captain Schettino say in his defence? Let us, for the sake of argument, leave aside the possibility that the whole disaster was an error of his seamanship, and suppose instead that it was what some people call "one of those things".

In a world used to the utilitarian Zeitgeist, he might say that if he had stayed on board and gone down with his ship, nobody who died would have been spared. We imagine a captain on his deck, as he slips under the waves, but this is quixotic romanticism if in fact no one is saved.

Can we be sure that if Captain Schettino had kept calm and carried on, fewer people would have died? Can it be wholly his fault if the crew were not properly trained and not even able to communicate with each other, let alone with all the passengers?

All this is special pleading, ex post facto rationalisation. Before the event, the captain accepted his own authority without difficulty or reservation. He was, however, tried and found wanting, perhaps for reasons partly cultural: not because he was Italian but because he was modern - that is to say, without an unthinking allegiance to a standard of conduct that in some circumstances might be, or might appear, ridiculous or counterproductive but in others is essential to the performance of difficult duty.

Hard cases make bad law and even worse sociology, though they are the stock in trade of philosophy, and there is no wickedness or weakness under the sun that is without precedent. Captain Schettino's story appears human, all too human: possibly a vainglorious man (but there are worse crimes than vainglory) who panicked at the one crucial moment of his career, and who will now spend the rest of his life in a state of bitter remorse and regret.

I hope it is not taken for lack of sympathy for the victims and their relations to say that, on the scale of human monstrosity, the captain does not climb very high. His place on the scale of human weakness is another matter.

As it happens, one of the great books of our literature, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, deals with a similar case. The hero, if that is quite the word for him, is mate on an old rust-bucket that is taking 800 Muslim pilgrims to Arabia. The boat sinks and Jim saves his skin, an act of cowardice for which he pays for the rest of his life. Marlow, the narrator of the story, describes his fate in words that resonate today:

"Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. … from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe."

SOURCE

Can You Say That On TV? The Supreme Court Debates the Use of Nudity and Profane Language On Broadcast Television As Justices Defend an Array of Positions On the Controversial Topic

In colorful give and take, the Supreme Court recently debated whether policing curse words and nudity on broadcast television makes sense in the cable era, one justice suggesting the policy is fast becoming moot as broadcast TV heads the way of "vinyl records and 8-track tapes."

The case involves programming that is available to all viewers free over the air — even though many now receive it through paid cable connections — during hours when children are likely to be watching. Some justices said they were troubled by inconsistent standards that allowed certain words and displays in some contexts but not in others.

One example frequently cited by the networks was the Federal Communications Commission's decision not to punish ABC for airing "Saving Private Ryan," with its strong language, while objecting to the same words when uttered by celebrities on live awards shows. Justice Elena Kagan said the FCC policy was, "Nobody can use dirty words or nudity except Steven Spielberg," director of the World War II movie.

Other justices seemed more open to maintaining the current rules because they allow parents to put their children in front of the television without having to worry they will be bombarded by vulgarity. Chief Justice John Roberts, the only member of the court with young children, hammered away at that point.

Roberts wondered why broadcasters would oppose FCC regulation, especially when cable and satellite service can offer hundreds of channels with few restrictions. "All we are asking for, what the government is asking for, is a few channels where ... they are not going to hear the S-word, the F-word, they are not going to see nudity," he said, an AP news release reports.

Justice Antonin Scalia placed himself on the side of the government. "These are public airwaves. The government is entitled to insist upon a certain modicum of decency. I'm not sure it even has to relate to juveniles, to tell you the truth," he said, according to the release.

But at least one justice, Samuel Alito, talked about how rapidly technological change has effectively consigned vinyl records and 8-tracks to the scrap heap, suggesting that in a rapidly changing universe, time will take care of the dispute. Already nearly nine of 10 households subscribe to cable or satellite television and viewers can switch among broadcast and other channels with a button on their remote controls, reports the news release by AP writer Mark Sherman.

"I'm sure your clients will continue to make billions of dollars on their programs which are transmitted by cable and by satellite and by Internet. But to the extent they are making money from people who are using rabbit ears, that is disappearing," Alito said.

The First Amendment case involves programming received by antennas on top of a television set, a house or building. Much of that programming now also is available through cable and satellite connections, but only the over-the-air transmissions are at issue.

The case pits the Obama Administration against the nation's television networks. The material at issue includes the isolated use of expletives as well as fines against broadcasters who showed a woman's nude buttocks on a 2003 episode of ABC's "NYPD Blue."

The broadcasters want the court to overturn a 1978 decision that upheld the FCC's authority to regulate radio and television content, at least during the hours when children are likely to be watching or listening. That includes the prime-time hours before 10 p.m.

At the very least, the networks say the FCC's current policy is too hard to figure out and penalizes the use of particular words in some instances but not in others.

The administration said that even with the explosion of entertainment options, broadcast programming remains dominant. It also needs to be kept as a dependable "safe haven" of milder programming, the administration said.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. said that if the court were to overrule its 33-year-old decision, "the risk of a race to the bottom is real."

But Carter Phillips, representing the networks in connection with the awards shows, said that little would change because broadcasters would remain sensitive to advertisers and viewers who don't want the airwaves filled with dirty words and nudity.

Phillips and former Solicitor General Seth Waxman, arguing on behalf of ABC, noted that broadcasters could face fines from thousands of pending complaints, including some relating to the broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The opening ceremonies "included a statue very much like some of the statues that are here in this courtroom, that had bare breasts and buttocks," Waxman said, the release reports.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is not taking part in the case because she served on the appeals court during its consideration of some of the issues involved.

SOURCE

Dear Nanny

Peter Saunders

In England, where I live now, I let a house to a group of students. In 2004, the Blair Labour government passed a new Housing Act which, among other things, required landlords like me to install a hand basin in every bedroom, ‘where practicable.’ This clause is now operative, so just before Christmas, I met at the house with my tenants, a qualified plumber, and an inspector from the local Council to determine whether it was ‘practicable’ to install basins in the five bedrooms.

I admit I wasn’t much in favour of the idea; it is an expensive job and I have visions of drunken students heaving basins off the wall and flooding the whole house. My tenants didn’t like the idea either. They thought basins would take up valuable wall space that could be better occupied by desks, book cases or Che Guevara posters. The man from the Council thought the new rule was ridiculous, too, but his hands were tied. And my plumber had to admit that, with a soil pipe immediately outside two of the windows, it would be quite ‘practicable’ to install basins in two of the five bedrooms.

So we all agreed that in two of the five rooms, basins would have to be installed to comply with the Act, even though it made no sense to do so. The tenants promptly asked me to delay this ‘improvement’ until after they move out.

At the last election, the Tories promised to scrap all unnecessary red tape, so I wrote to my local Conservative MP and suggested that this particular provision of the 2004 Housing Act might be a good place to start. She forwarded my letter to the (Liberal Democrat) Minister responsible for such matters (the Tories are in coalition, remember, and all the boring jobs have been given to Lib Dems). He has just replied to me.

He tells me that the law requiring a hand basin in every room is necessary ‘to ensure that standards are decent.’ The implication seems to be that, unless we are tightly controlled, we avaricious landlords will condemn students to live ‘indecently’ (in my experience, many students manage this quite nicely with no prompting from me).

I have written back to the Minister asking why he thinks a politician in Westminster is a better judge than the landlord who owns the house, the tenants who live in it, and the local council that regulates it, to determine whether or not a bedroom requires a hand basin. I’ll let you know if I get an answer.

Meanwhile, on the same day that I received the Minister’s letter, I had an email from a certain Ben Plowdon, who tells me he is ‘Director of Surface Planning’ at something called ‘Transport for London’. I don’t know Ben, but he seems to know me, for he addresses me personally. He writes: ‘Dear Mr Saunders, I am writing to both drivers and cyclists reminding them to take care on London’s roads.’

I can’t remember the last time I drove or cycled in London. Nevertheless, I was so touched by Ben’s concern for my welfare that I decided to write back immediately:

Dear Mr Plowden,

Thank you for your email telling me to “take care on London’s roads.”

Up until now I did not realise it was necessary to take care when driving in London.

I will do my best to follow your advice in the future – just as soon as I have taught my grandmother to suck eggs.

Yours sincerely

Peter Saunders

PS How many GCSEs do you need to do your job?

SOURCE (GCSEs are a middle school qualification, well short of a degree)

Victimhood has its privileges

To Obama Justice, only underdogs of history are worthy of equal protection

The U.S. Justice Department is ever-vigilant against signs of “voter suppression” these days, most recently blocking - on the grounds that it would hurt blacks - a South Carolina law that would require voter identification. But the voting rights of some minorities, it appears, are more worth protecting than others.

The territory of Guam, for instance, has called for a plebiscite on the territory’s relationship with the United States that could provide momentum for an independence movement. But the only people allowed to vote will be citizens who were native inhabitants in the year 1950 and their descendants. The provision limits the franchise to a group made up overwhelmingly of indigenous Chamorro people and excludes nearly all whites, Filipinos and other racial and ethnic groups who have moved to the island in the past six decades.

When presented with a complaint in 2009 by a white resident, retired Air ForceMaj. Arnold Davis, the Justice Department declined to intervene. In response late last year, the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) and former Justice Department Attorney J. Christian Adams filed suit in Guam federal district court to block enforcement of the voter restriction.

“The Obama administration shows hypersensitivity to race in South Carolina,” Terence J. Pell, president of the CIR, told me last week. But in Guam, where a racial agenda permeates the politics of the island and government action points to intentional race discrimination, he says, “the Obama administration can’t be bothered to look into it.”

I agree with Mr. Pell’s assessment, with one caveat. In Guam, the issue isn’t race - it’s ethnicity. Blacks living on Guam will lose their voting rights just as surely as whites, Asians and non-native Pacific Islanders. The common impulse behind Obama administration policy is its proclivity for favoring what it deems to be historically victimized minorities.

Guam was colonized by the Spanish in 1668 and then ceded to the United States in 1898 after the Spanish-American war. Organized as a U.S. territory in 1950, the island was granted increasing rights of self-governance in succeeding years. Guamanians are U.S. citizens, and their island of 155,000 residents sends a nonvoting representative to Congress. The United States lavishes the island with hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer payments, but collects no taxes in return.

But Chamorros were never given the right to vote on the constitutional measures affecting them, and some still feel like victims of colonial oppression. One obsession is the continuing demand for reparations to compensate for the depredations committed by the Japanese during World War II. Apparently, some Chamorros resent the Americans for permitting the island to be conquered - never mind that it was the Americans who subsequently liberated it.

Chamorros nurse other grievances. They worry about the erosion of their cultural identity as the U.S. continues expanding its military presence on the island and outsiders swamp the natives. Leaders felt snubbed not long ago when a major congressional delegation stopped on Guam to refuel on the way to Asia without doing the courtesy of meeting with them, and again when President Obama did the same.

To borrow the anti-colonial rhetoric of the left, native Guamanians were despoiled by an imperialist United States and were powerless to stop their country from being overrun by outsiders who now outnumber them. Chamorros make up only 37 percent of the island’s population today. They are a minority, and they are victims. Therefore, the Obama Justice Department reflexively sides with them.

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a measure that allowed only native Hawaiians to vote when electing trustees to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Reasoned the court: “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”

The Guamanian measure seeks to circumvent that ruling by making the voting restriction based on residency, not race or ethnicity. However, the measure clearly imposes what liberal legal theorists might term a “disparate impact.”

The Associated Press cites numbers showing that 30 percent of South Carolina’s registered voters are nonwhite, while 34 percent of voters lacking state-issued photo IDs are nonwhite. The Justice Department deemed that 4 percentage point difference jarring enough to warrant overturning the law.

The “disparate impact” of the Guamanian law would be immeasurably greater. Chamarros may make up 37 percent of the island’s population, but it is likely they would account for 95 percent or more of the electorate voting on the plebiscite.

Clearly, the Obama Justice Department applies the principle of proportionality only when it suits it. At some point, the rest of us have to say, “We’re sorry about what happened in the past, but get over it. We’re all American citizens now. We all have equal rights. End of story.”

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-01-20T00:26:00.001+11:30

Racist Norwegian child protection authorities

Indian couple have children taken away by Norwegian social workers because they were feeding them by hand. Behaviour that is good enough for a billion Indians is not good enough for tiny Norway, apparently. There is a lot of authoritarianism in the Nordic countries

An Indian couple have had their children taken away by Norwegian social workers because they were feeding them with their hands and sleeping in the same bed as them.

Anurup and Sagarika Bhattacharya lost custody of their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter eight months ago after authorities branded their behaviour inappropriate.

The drastic measure led to intervention from the Indian government who contacted Norwegian authorities in an a desperate attempt to return the children.

Norwegian Child Protection Services removed the youngsters from their home in May, 2011, leaving their parents horrified with the outcome of the report.

Father Anurup told Indian television channel NDTV: 'They told me ‘why are you sleeping with the children in the same bed?’. '(I told them) this is also a purely cultural issue. We never leave the children in another room and say goodnight to them.'

Anurup added: 'Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child. 'They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences.'

Mrs Bhattacharya said: 'My son was sleeping with my husband. They said he should sleep separately from your son.'

The parents have been told that they can only see their children twice a year, for an hour during each visit until the kids turn 18 when they will no longer be bound by the current restrictions under current Norwegian law.

Despite the Indian government's intervention, Norwegian officials are refusing to meet the request for any further explanation.

Norway's Child Protective Service has come under much scrutiny in the past for excessive behaviour in their handling of child cruelty. Lawyer Svein Kjetil Lode Svendsen said: 'There has been a report in UN in 2005 which criticized Norway for taking too many children in public care. 'The amount was 12,500 children and Norway is a small country.'

With the Bhattacharyas' visas set to expire in March, they have revealed that they will be forced to stay against their will until the return of their infants.

SOURCE

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?

Appearing at Harvard University shortly before his death in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. responded to an apparently hostile question from an audience member about Zionism, saying, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.”

Is this universally true? Does criticism of Zionism always equal anti-Semitism?

On the one hand, the answer is no, criticism of Zionism does not always equal anti-Semitism. There are Israeli Jews and American Jews who are critical of the modern State of Israel, and they can hardly be called anti-Semites (unless we are willing to brand all of them self-hating Jews). Similarly, there are Christians who love the Jewish people and believe that, in a unique way, God is with them, and yet take strong exception to many Israeli policies. They too can hardly be called anti-Semites.

On the other hand, it is quite often true that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same ugly coin, especially in the Muslim world. The recent comments of Mufti Muhammad Hussein, the religious leader of the Palestinian Authority, serve as a stark reminder of just how deeply anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are often intertwined.

In a speech celebrating the 47th anniversary of Fatah and aired on Palestinian Authority TV on January 9th, the Mufti cited a well-known Hadith (an Islamic tradition attributed to Muhammad): “The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” (As reported by Palwatch.org, a July, 2011 poll sponsored by the Israel Project indicated that a staggering 73% of Palestinians “believe” this Hadith.)

These sentiments are enshrined in the Hamas charter, with Article 7 citing the identical anti-Semitic Hadith, prefaced by this comment: “Hamas has been looking forward to implementing Allah’s promise [to annihilate the Jews], whatever time it might take.”

In the Mufti’s speech, and in keeping with Islamic tradition, Hussein also stated that the only tree behind which a Jew will be able to hide himself is the Gharqad tree (since it will keep silent). “Therefore,” he explained, “it is no wonder that you see Gharqad [trees] surrounding the [Israeli] settlements and colonies.” (We can assume that the Mufti actually believes this.)

So, the hostility expressed towards the Israelis is simply the continuation of historic, Islamic anti-Semitism.

The moderator who introduced the Mufti stated (with passion) that, “Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs [meaning the Jews] is a war of religion and faith,” basing himself on another anti-Semitic tradition found in Islam, a tradition often cited by contemporary Muslim leaders.

For example, “in a weekly sermon in April 2002, Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, [then] the highest-ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, called the Jews ‘the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs’,” while in 2001, “Saudi sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, imam and preacher at the Al-Haraam mosque – the most important mosque in Mecca – beseeched Allah to annihilate the Jews. He also urged the Arabs to give up peace initiatives with them because they are ‘the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.’”

Similar examples, from recent years and from past centuries, could easily be multiplied. In fact, the Nazis were able to exploit the Jew-hatred found in many Islamic traditions in forming a coalition with prominent leaders in the Arab world, the most important being the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. (Remember that this predates the reestablishment of Israel in 1948.)

This deep, historic hatred of the Jews continues to fuel anti-Zionism in the Muslim world today. And so, during the demonstrations in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in last year’s so-called Arab Spring, Yehudit Barsky noted that protestors brandished pictures of former President Hosni Mubarak with a Star of David on his forehead, invoking the “image of a conspiracy by Jews to control world leaders, including their own.”

The alleged conspiracy Barsky refers to is, of course, the notorious anti-Semitic forgery known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The book remains a perpetual bestseller in the Muslim world and has also been dramatized for Islamic viewers, most notably in the 41-part series titled “Horseman Without a Horse,” broadcast on Egyptian state television in 2002. In the final episodes of the series, “the Jews are portrayed as leading a conspiracy to form a Zionist state in Palestine while taking the lives of anyone who stands in the way. The series comes to a close with an inscription: ‘Who fights the occupation is not a terrorist’ and contains other thinly veiled political comment on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Whole books could easily be written on this subject with almost endless examples cited, but the lesson should be clear: While not all anti-Zionism can be fairly equated with anti-Semitism, in the religious Muslim world, the two are deeply intertwined.

SOURCE

Shopkeeper in Britain upsets jobseekers by demanding Polish language skills

Shopkeeper Naveed Hassamin has infuriated jobseekers in Cornwall by turning away anyone who doesn't speak Polish. Mr Hassamin placed an advert in the window of Costcutter in Bodmin, Cornwall, stating that a "knowledge of Polish" was "preferable" for the position. But he has been forced to withdraw the advertisment after a string of complaints from unemployed local people desperate for work.

Paul Baynon, 23, a jobseeker from Bodmin, said: "They asked me if I spoke Polish, and when I said no, they said that is what they were looking for, so I didn't have a chance. "They didn't say in the ad that they wanted a translator."

Unemployed local Robert Mill, 27, said: "I would have liked the job at Costcutter because jobs are hard to come by in the town. "I enquired about the position but I can't speak Polish."

The supermarket has a Polish food section and sells the Poland Express newspaper.

Store manager Mr Hassam said he had a lot of Polish customers and required someone who could order the products for him.

The number of Polish migrant workers living in Bodmin - population 13,000 - is not known. But according to Cornwall Council's local education authority, there are currently only 23 primary and seven secondary school children attending schools in the area whose first language is Polish.

Mr Hassam said: "I have had complaints but the advert was not intended in a bad way, I have got rid of it now. "We have a lot of people from Poland coming into the shop and I wanted someone who could understand Polish so they could order products for me and read what they are because I can't read Polish.

"I didn't mean it to sound like we only wanted someone from Poland to get the job, it could have been someone from Britain who could speak Polish. "I just thought employing someone with a knowledge of Polish culture would mean we could provide them with a better service."

A spokesman for the Equality and Human Rights Commission said: "An employer can say it needs someone who can speak a specific language to do a job if that is a genuine requirement, for example for a translator role. "This is lawful if the focus is on the skill needed to do the job, not the nationality of the person sought."

SOURCE

Moldovan squatters and a week that showed how good British citizens suffer while parasites flourish

For society to work, we need to believe that it is reasonably fair — not absolutely fair, because nothing is, but broadly decent in apportioning rewards and penalties.

Nothing does more to breed anger and disaffection among law-abiding British people than a belief that good citizens are exploited, while the bad ones flourish.

Whenever a householder is arrested by police for rough handling of a burglar, gypsy encampments defy eviction orders or an illegal immigrant is granted asylum; when school pupils receive absurdly inflated exam grades or an ambulance-chasing lawyer screws an insurance company for a client’s phoney whiplash injury, our trust is severely damaged.

Most of us instinctively want to believe in our politicians, judges, teachers, police, doctors. We would like to suppose that they know what they are doing, and act broadly in our interests.

But there are times when such faith is hard to sustain, and this week is one of them. We might start with the least serious, though nonetheless deplorable, case which has hit the media.

Janice Mason owns a house in Walthamstow, East London, which had been her childhood home and she was about to sell. She suddenly discovers that it is occupied by a family of Moldovan squatters — four adults and four children — who have changed the locks.

The police say they are powerless to intervene, because squatting is a civil, not a criminal matter. Mrs Mason therefore faces a huge bill for securing these people’s eviction.

Yet any of us can see the injustice of her being obliged to pay a penny to get back her own property. In a properly ordered society, the Moldovans would be summarily removed by the police as soon as it is plain they have no legal title.

Beyond that, since the squatters have breached the code of behaviour we should expect to be observed by all newcomers here, they should be marched smartly aboard a plane back to Moldova. However, nothing of the kind will happen, of course.

Mrs Mason will pay one set of lawyers to get her unwelcome interlopers removed, if she is lucky. Another set, who parade themselves as crusaders, will leap to the Moldovans’ defence, their fees paid by us.

Before long the squatters will probably be ensconced in a detached house in Kensington, living on benefits and sending their children to Eton.

The next case up is that of a 27-year-old Romanian woman named Firuta Vasile, to whom Bristol City Council denied housing benefits — she has already claimed £25,500 on other pretexts, and has four children aged from two to 11.

This week a judge overturned the council’s decision, saying that Ms Vasile must be given housing benefit, since she has established a status as a self-employed person, claiming to earn £100 a week selling the Big Issue.

Her lawyer, another of the multiplying plague culture of defenders of the oppressed, trumpeted outside court: ‘This is a victory for people struggling to work to support their families’.

What nonsense! British taxpayers ask: why do we pay out thousands of pounds of our hard-earned money to support a woman who should properly be claiming benefits from Bucharest City Council, not Bristol? Why did not the judge display the common sense of a gnat?

Then there is a matter of Victor Akulic. He is a 44-year-old Lithuanian who might reasonably be described as a career rapist, since he has served several terms of imprisonment for sexual offences back at home, before committing a further appalling sex attack here in 2010. A judge sentenced him to a minimum eight years of imprisonment, reduced in the Appeal Court this week to seven years.

Lady Justice Hallett inquired how it was possible for a man with Akulic’s record to stroll into Britain unchallenged. The answer is that since he has EU identity documents, he is free to travel from country to country, choosing where to commit his next atrocity from a lavish menu of choice.

The Appeal Court was told that Mr Akulic has applied to serve his sentence back home in Lithuania, closer to home comforts, so he may not be a burden on the British taxpayer for too long. This seems a trifle optimistic. It is more plausible that the Lithuanians will leave us stuck with him.

The last of this week’s cases is the gravest. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has upheld the appeal against deportation of Abu Qatada, a radical cleric who has been described as one of the most dangerous sponsors of terrorism in Europe.

The British government went to great lengths to secure from the Jordanian government — which wants to try Abu Qatada — formal assurances that he would not face torture.

The ECHR accepted these assurances, but nonetheless upheld the man’s appeal on the grounds that evidence obtained by torture might be used against him at his trial.

This wicked man, an unashamed jihadist, has already cost Britain £1 million in benefits, legal and jail costs. His wife and children are living in London at public expense.

Home Secretary Theresa May asserts that the Home Office will not let the matter rest there, but what can she do? Even if more hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent on further appeals, the ECHR has shown itself an impregnable bastion of folly, indifferent to the most conspicuous national security interests.

The ECHR predates and has nothing to do with the EU. The poor quality of its judges, some of them from Europe’s least reputable societies, is common knowledge among governments.

Britain has been lobbying to improve the quality of Strasbourg justice, and David Cameron proposes to make a speech on this theme soon at the Council of Europe. But it is hard to believe anything will improve within the present structure.

British justice, and the interests of British society, have suffered so much at the hands of the ECHR that there seems a powerful case — though massive legal and political obstacles — for severing our bonds to it.

The Court is largely discredited, and does us much more harm than good. Why should we indefinitely suffer its nonsenses, often damaging to our security, merely in the name of European solidarity?

Meanwhile, here at home, we are weary of hearing of abuses of both our national hospitality and laws.

A friend of mine served for several years as an interpreter at an immigration appeals tribunal. She eventually resigned in disgust, because she could no longer bear being party to systemic malpractice.

The case that triggered her departure was one in which a European woman carelessly told her: ‘I have two children but my lawyer says I must claim five, so I will get more money.’

As an interpreter, my friend was barred from revealing her knowledge of this remark to the tribunal, as it would have been a breach of client confidentiality. We, as citizens, are asked to swallow such betrayals almost daily.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

2012-01-19T00:26:00.001+11:30

US Supreme court rules prayers at government events unconstitutional

The court is obviously still taking a very expansive view of what constitutes the establishment of a church

THE US Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take on two cases in which lower courts ruled public prayers at government-sponsored events were unconstitutional.

The court rejected an appeal of a US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that said the predominantly Christian prayers that began meetings of the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners in North Carolina were unconstitutional for violating the First Amendment's prohibition on government endorsement of a single religion.

The justices also refused to weigh the merits of a US Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision that ruled the recitation of a religious invocation at a monthly school board meeting in the Indian River School District in Delaware was unconstitutional.

The decision to reject the appeals means both lower court rulings will stand.

The Supreme Court previously held in 1983 that legislative bodies, such as Congress and state legislatures, may open their sessions with prayers. But the court has not explicitly ruled on whether other government bodies may do so at public events.

The court rejected the appeals without comment Tuesday.

"I'm surprised and disappointed," Mike Johnson, who argued Forsyth County's case at the Supreme Court, told the Winston-Salem Journal. "We really were expecting that the court would want to take a look at the case. I think that this leaves a very important constitutional law issue essentially unresolved. We believe that sometime soon, the Supreme Court will have to hear one of these cases to resolve the issue."

Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said he agreed with Tuesday's decisions.

"One of the most basic rights guaranteed to all Americans is a government that does not pick sides on matters of religion," Mach said in a statement. "Government-sponsored sectarian prayer is needlessly divisive, and with the end of this case, religious liberty has prevailed."

SOURCE

The anachronism of public service broadcasting

In last week’s Spectator, Charles Moore bemoaned the dumbing down of BBC Radio 3. In this week’s issue, several letters to the editor make the same point. Now, you may dismiss this as the snobbery of classical music afficionados. Or you might agree that Radio 3 presenters are indeed ruining the listening experience by telling you how you should feel about particular pieces of music (e.g. “blown away”) and entreating you to to email, text or tweet about what you are hearing. Frankly, I’m too much of a musical moron to have an opinion on the subject.

What this story really highlights is the futility of compulsorily funded “public service broadcasting”. The point of public service broadcasting is, one would assume, to address some failure in the broadcast market – to produce and air content which benefits the public, and which would not otherwise be produced or aired by commercial players. But if you buy this market failure argument, you have to concede that ‘public service broadcasting’ is likely to be a fairly elitist project. The intention may be to bring high culture to the masses, but in reality you will probably end up subsidising the tastes of the relatively wealthy and well educated with a tax paid largely by those who have no interest in such things. This is clearly a rather perverse outcome.

On the other hand, if you “dumb-down”, if you chase market share with populist programming, then the rationale for compulsorily funded public service broadcasting disappears. By way of illustration, let’s look at tonight’s broadcast schedule for the BBC 3 TV channel.

At 7pm, we get Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, “a top 50 countdown of the hippest, sexiest, quirkiest and campest dance crazes of the last 40 years.” At 8pm, it’s Don’t Tell the Bride, a reality TV show in which a man gets £12,000 to arrange his wedding, but isn’t allowed any contact with his wife-to-be while he does it: “Four weeks apart will push their relationship to the limit.” At 9pm, it’s How Sex Works, which is a documentary about twenty-somethings who get around a bit. At 10pm, it is time for Eastenders (a miserable soap opera), followed by documentary Bizarre Crimes (self-explanatory), and a series of cartoons imported from the US. If you are lucky enough to still be awake at 4.25am, you get to watch Cherry Healey look for “essential truths amongst the tales of sex and debauchery to see if losing your virginity is about more than just having sex for the first time.”

Can anyone really argue that programming like that justifies forcing television-owners, on pain of imprisonment, to pay £145.50 a year to a government agency? It’s a rhetorical question.

Public service broadcasting is caught between a rock and a hard place. If it sticks to its ‘market failure’ remit it will appear elitist and lose public support. If it chases a larger market, it will undermine any reasonable case for public funding. Ultimately, public service broadcasting and the licence fee that sustains it are an anachronism – something which might (just) have been appropriate when we had two TV channels and limited broadcasting spectrum, but no longer make sense in a world of thousand-channel satellite television and high-speed internet streaming. With almost limitless choice available at the click of a button, we don’t need government to entertain us, inform us, or filter our cultural diets for us. Curiously enough, the way that technology has democratized the media means that democracy itself no longer has any valuable role in broadcasting. It’s time the BBC and the government realized that.

SOURCE

Church of England faces court battle by dressup queen who claims he was blocked from becoming a bishop

A gay senior clergyman who claims he was blocked from becoming a bishop has threatened to take the Church of England to court.
Church sources say the Very Rev Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, believes he could sue officials under the Equality Act 2010, which bans discrimination on the grounds of sexuality. He has instructed a leading employment lawyer after being rejected for the role of Bishop of Southwark in 2010.

The dean is one of the most contentious figures in the church. In 2003 he was forced to step down as Bishop of Reading by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams after it became known that he was in a gay, though celibate, relationship. The furore fuelled a bitter civil war within the Anglican Church that has dominated Dr Williams’s decade in office.

The dean was again a cause of infighting in 2010 when he was a candidate for Bishop of Southwark.

A respected theologian and former canon at Southwark Cathedral, he had strong backing from senior Church liberals and it was said even David Cameron was supportive.

But the Crown Nominations Commission, whose members are responsible for selecting bishops and include Dr Williams, appointed another candidate.

Dr John was said to be furious and his supporters’ anger was stoked by a memo by another member of the commission, the late Dean of Southwark Colin Slee, claiming Dr Williams was one of those who tried to ‘wreck’ Dr John’s chances.

Dr John has instructed Alison Downie, partner and head of employment at London lawyers Goodman Derrick, to write to the Commission to suggest it risks breaching gay equality laws if it is blocking the dean over his homosexuality.

Ms Downie previously acted for a gay youth worker who successfully sued the Church in 2008 after the Bishop of Hereford Anthony Priddis refused him a job.

It is understood there has been a lengthy correspondence between Ms Downie and Church lawyers in an attempt to resolve the dispute. No legal action has been launched but it is thought Dr John has not ruled out the possibility, although one source said Dr John suggested he would drop his legal threat if he felt he would not be ruled out for future posts.

Church lawyers published new guidelines last summer which said that under the Equality Act, candidates cannot be barred from senior Church posts because they are gay as long as they do not have sex.

The guidance added that candidates could be blocked if they were regarded as divisive because their views or behaviour had angered a significant number of their flock.

Ms Downie refused to comment last night. A Church spokesman also refused to comment.

SOURCE

Catholic midwives challenge British ruling on abortions

Two Roman Catholic midwives are taking a health board to court for allegedly failing to recognise their conscientious objection to supervising staff involved in abortions.

Mary Doogan, 57, and Concepta Wood, 51, told NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde they were not prepared to delegate, supervise or support staff who were looking after patients through “the processes of medical termination of pregnancy”. Their position was rejected by officials and they hope to have the ruling set aside in a judicial review.

The women claim the refusal to recognise their entitlement to conscientious objection violates their rights under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

They say they “hold a religious belief that all human life is sacred from the moment of conception and that termination of pregnancy is a grave offence against human life”. Their involvement in the process would be wrongful and “an offence against God”.

Miss Doogan and Mrs Wood, both midwifery sisters at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, are seeking a ruling at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on their entitlement to conscientious objection under the 1967 Abortion Act. David Johnston QC, for the women, said the matter became an issue for the midwives, who were long-standing employees, in 2007.

They had both previously given notice of conscientious objection to any involvement in abortions and said they were not expected to participate in such treatment. But in 2007 the health board introduced changes that meant patients undergoing medical terminations were cared for in the labour ward, where the women worked. They were not expected to administer abortion-inducing drugs but management said requiring conscientious objectors to provide care for patients through a termination was lawful.

According to the court papers, Mrs Wood, of Clarkston, Glasgow, had to provide direct care to a patient undergoing the termination process, which caused her “considerable distress and anxiety” and resulted in her obtaining a transfer. Miss Doogan, of Garrowhill, Glasgow, has been absent from work through ill health since 2010 as a result of the dispute.

The hearing continues.

Last year, two Catholic nurses who had been told they could not refuse to work at an abortion clinic had the ruling dropped after claiming that the sanctity of unborn life was a philosophical belief protected under the Equality Act 2010.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-18T00:17:00.001+11:30

All war has desecration

It is hypocritical to punish US soldiers filmed urinating on dead Taliban fighters

THE video that emerged in recent days appearing to show four US marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters has outraged many people in America. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta have condemned the act, the military has promised an inquiry, and some experts are even suggesting the act could qualify as a war crime.

Mainly, however, people seem simply to not understand it. Why would America's warriors - for that matter, why would anyone - urinate on a dead body?

I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. There was a lot of fighting, a lot of casualties and an enormous amount of stress on the men I was with. I never saw anyone do anything like this, but then again, I never saw any dead Taliban fighters; the enemy always recovered their casualties before we could get there.

Nevertheless, the things the soldiers shouted during combat were very revealing of the state of mind that war produces. (For the record, I'm sure the Taliban was screaming pretty much the same things about us.) At one point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that celebration was just so ugly. I didn't want them to be like that.

Later, I asked one of them about it, and he explained that they had been happy because they were that much closer to all going home alive. They weren't cheering the enemy's death; they were cheering their own lives. That particular fighter would never again be able to kill an American soldier.

In a statement issued last Thursday, General James Amos, the marine corps commandant, said that "the behaviour depicted in the video is wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history."

Yet, I can't imagine that there was a time in human history when enemy dead were not desecrated. Achilles dragged Hector around the walls of Troy from the back of a chariot because he was so enraged by Hector's killing of his best friend.

Three milenniums later, Somali fighters dragged a US soldier through the streets of Mogadishu after shooting down a Black Hawk helicopter and killing 17 other Americans. During the frontier wars in the US, white Americans routinely scalped Indian fighters, and vice versa, well into the 1870s.

The US military should be held to a higher standard, certainly, but it is important to understand the context of the behaviour in the video. Clearly, the impulse to desecrate the enemy comes from a very dark and primal place in the human psyche. Once in a while, those impulses are going to break through.

There is another context for that behaviour, though - a more contemporary one. As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing US marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same marines just put .30 calibre rounds through the fighters' chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then baulks at anything that suggests they have dehumanised the enemy they have killed.

But, of course, they have dehumanised the enemy - otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrating a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven't just committed their first murder, that they have simply shot some coyotes in the bush.

It doesn't work, of course, but it gets them through the moment; it gets them through the rest of the patrol.

There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it's OK to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not OK to urinate on a dead one.

When the war on terror started, the marines in that video were probably nine or 10 years old. As children they heard adults - and political leaders - talk about their enemies in the most inhuman terms. The internet and the media are filled with self-important men and women referring to enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries such as Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions, achieved through torture, will not stand up in court.

For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting US wars. The video doesn't surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad; not just for them, but also for us. We will prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is OK to torture the living.

I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I don't have the faintest idea.

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Amid the talk of Scottish independence, it’s now time to answer the English Question

The reawakening of national identity south of the border will have major consequences

During a relatively brief radio interview at the weekend, Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, used the phrase “the people of Scotland” at least a dozen times. You don’t have to listen for long to a US politician, from the president downwards, before you hear the words “the American people” uttered. Yet can you imagine a mainstream political discussion here in which the “people of England” are routinely invoked?

While others proudly assert their nationhood, Englishness is the identity that hardly dares to speak its name. As Richard Wyn Jones, professor of politics at Cardiff University and author of a report on Englishness to be published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), said yesterday: “The British political class is very uncomfortable in dealing with England as England.”

However, this reticence is no longer sustainable in view of the debate about Scottish independence and the prospect of a break-up of the United Kingdom. As a couple of polls have shown recently, resentment is growing rapidly in England over what is perceived to be the special treatment of Scotland. In particular, the so‑called West Lothian Question has started to make itself felt, with more than 50 per cent of English voters of the view that Scottish MPs should not be allowed to vote in the Commons on laws that affect only England.

This week, the Government is due to announce the membership of a constitutional commission to see how this anomaly can be addressed. In some ways, it feels a bit like a sideshow to the main event, the debate over the future of the Union. But since this process will either fracture the UK or, more likely, see Scotland remain within the structure but with enhanced powers, it cannot be ducked any longer.

It was in 1977, during the devolution debates in the Commons, that Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP for West Lothian, asked: “For how long will English constituencies and English honourable members tolerate honourable members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on British politics, while they have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?” Enoch Powell, in the same debate, gave Mr Dalyell’s puzzle the status it now enjoys: “We have finally grasped what the Honourable Member for West Lothian is getting at,” he said. “Let us call it the West Lothian Question.”

To call something a “question” conjured up those great issues that once preoccupied parliamentarians, like Schleswig-Holstein or, more pertinently, the Irish Question. But this was never really the West Lothian Question – it is the English Question. How does England fit into the post-devolutionary settlement? This has been ignored, largely because the English have not indulged in an all‑consuming narrative about national identity as the Scots have done. Symbolism is important. Next week, for instance, the rituals of Burns Night will keep the nationalist flames alight. But where is the English equivalent, a Shakespeare feast of Lancashire hotpot or shepherd’s pie, followed by readings from the works of the Bard and accompanied by pints of bitter and glasses of mead? On March 1, St David’s Day, the Welsh will happily sport a daffodil, but if an Englishman turned up at work on April 23 wearing a red rose in his lapel it would be assumed he was on his way to a wedding, not celebrating his national day.

The English, by dint of their nation’s long history and its disproportionate size within the Union, have never felt it necessary to expend much, or any, political energy on matters of identity. Yet this has meant that many of its people have become estranged from the history, literature and symbols that are quintessentially English, as opposed to British. A poll in this newspaper several years ago found that a quarter did not know the date of St George’s Day, even when it was included in a list of options.

Moreover, while the Scots and the Welsh have never had any compunction about parading their nationalities while abroad, a significant proportion of people from England tended to describe themselves as British. But this is changing (and I write this as an Ulsterman brought up in England for whom the only available national identity is British).

More than 10 years after devolution, the IPPR report detects a fundamental shift in English attitudes and a politicisation of English identity that spreads far beyond fringe nationalist groups. How will this manifest itself in our institutions? Even if Scotland does not split away, pressure for an English parliament within a loose federation of four constituent states will become harder to resist. At the very least, a new system of debating English-only laws will have to be introduced, something that has so far been resisted for fear of stoking up anti-Union feeling in Scotland. That genie is now out of the bottle. The other option, that of regional devolution – a sort of balkanisation of England – was tried by Labour and shot down in the North-East referendum.

The irony is that devolution was supposed to halt the march to separatism. When he was prime minister, Gordon Brown sought to promote Britishness as a concept, in the expectation that it would bring the peoples of the United Kingdom together. Instead, there has been a resurgence of national identities. A new English iconography is developing, with the cross of St George – which became associated with the working-class populism of the far Right – much more in evidence. The heightened debate about Scotland’s future means that the time is coming for the people of England to have a say in their future as a nation. As Chesterton said, they have not spoken yet.

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British bureaucrats' lavish spending reined in under the Tories

Civil servants have started to dine out at McDonald's and Burger King after a spending purge at a department run by Eric Pickles

Mr Pickles looks like he knows a thing or two about pickles

Officials at the Communities and Local Government department are using their Government credit cards to pay for meals at fast food restaurants rather than four star establishments, new spending figures show.

In 2010/11, officials spent £17.95 at McDonald’s, £23.60 at Nando’s and £11.48 at Burger King on their Government Procurement Cards. None of the restaurants appeared in GPC bills in any of the previous four years, according to a Parliamentary Answer.

Overall, spending on the cards by CLG officials fell from £515,000 in 2007/8 and £535,500 in 2008/9 to £210,000 in 2010/11.

A large proportion of the savings were in hotels, bars and restaurants. In 2007/8 and 2008/9 CLG officials spent around £120,000 a year on their cards in hotels. In the first year of the Coalition – 2010/11 – they spent just £18,000.

Similarly spending in restaurants and bars by CLG officials on their cards fell from £54,000 in 2007/8 to just £5,425 in 2010/11. In the first six months 2011/12 the figure was just £180.

Many of the restaurants which featured regularly in the GPC statements under Labour – such as the Cinnamon Club in Westminster – no longer appear in the GPC statements under the Coalition.

Thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money was also spent at a host of upmarket hotels such as the Hyatt in Philadelphia, the Grand Hotel Karel V in the Netherlands, the Grand Hyatt in Dubai and the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh before the last election.

Local Government Minister Grant Shapps said: “We are cracking down on the abuse of Government Procurement Cards, which saw Labour spend people’s hard-earned cash on lavish restaurants, hotels and even pampering at a spa.

“At DCLG we are embracing total transparency, putting as much data as possible into the hands of the people. Transparency saves taxpayers money and we urge local authority users of the cards to take similar steps to end this abuse.”

Some examples of profligate spending did get through however. Stays at Avon Gorge Hotel in Bristol and the Hyatt Regency in Birmingham were charged to the taxpayer on GPC cards under the Coalition.

Officials also spent £217.23 at MC Chauffeurs, a executive chauffeur driven car hire firm in Leeds, despite a ban by Prime Minister David Cameron on using official cars, in July 2010.

The department also organised an away day for “senior management” at the Boy Brigade in September 2010, costing £223.

SOURCE

British Liberal leader hits out at Israel

Israel doing 'immense damage' to peace process Nick Clegg says

Nick Clegg tilted Britain’s Middle East policy sharply towards the Palestinians on Monday with an attack on Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank.

The Deputy Prime Minister drew a hostile reaction from Israel by saying the government’s continued construction on internationally recognised Palestinian land was “an act of deliberate vandalism” that undermined the basis of the Middle East peace process.

In some of the most critical language ever used by a senior European politician in government, Mr Clegg accused Israel of making the likelihood of a negotiated settlement to the conflict impossible to deliver. “It is an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise on which negotiations have taken place for years and years and years,” Mr Clegg said.

He said there was “no stronger supporter of Israel than myself as a beacon of democracy in the region”, but added: “The continued existence of illegal settlements risks making facts on the ground such that a two-state solution becomes unviable.

“That, in turn, will do nothing to safeguard the security of Israel itself or of Israeli citizens. That is why I condemn the continued illegal settlement activity in the strongest possible terms.”

He was speaking alongside Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who is on a visit to London.

Mr Clegg’s comments reflect growing European impatience with the government Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish Israeli prime minister, who is seen by many Western officials as an obstacle to peace because of his refusal to freeze settlement building.

But while European and even American government officials regularly criticise Israel’s settlement policies, few have done so quite as bluntly, a fact that will strain the Government’s increasingly tense relations with Mr Netanyahu.

Israel reacted with predictable hostility, with a foreign ministry spokesman accusing Mr Clegg of “gratuitous bashing”. “It would be much better to contribute to peace by encouraging the fragile revival of Israeli-Palestinian talks,” the spokesman said.

Mr Abbas was delighted by so strong an endorsement of the Palestinian position. “That is exactly what we wanted to hear officially from the government of the United Kingdom,” he said.

Officials in Jerusalem say they now view Britain as one of the most hostile states to Israel in Europe, although the Government bowed to Israeli pressure by agreeing to abstain if a vote on Palestinian statehood was held in the UN Security Council.

The Palestinian Authority has refused to join peace talks with Israel unless Mr Netanyahu agrees to halt all settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, seen by the Palestinians as the capital of their future state.

With more than 600,000 settlers living on land occupied by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967, any further expansion of Jewish construction would make a Palestinian state unviable, Mr Abbas says.

Palestinians also claim that previous peace talks have led to an escalation of settlement construction as a result of Israeli leaders having to pacify the powerful Right-wing in the Jewish state.

David Cameron, who also met Mr Abbas in Downing Street yesterday, signalled his support for his deputy. “We think that time, in some ways, is running out for the two-state solution unless we can push forward now, because otherwise the facts on the ground will make it more and more difficult, which is why the settlement issue remains so important,” the Prime Minister said.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2012-01-17T00:18:00.000+11:30

An Alarming Trend Across the Continent

Last Thursday the emeritus Norwegian Labour politician Thorbjørn Jagland, now an apparatchik in the EU superstate, expressed his concern “that other countries, and not just Norway, will start to demand to govern themselves.” The horror!

Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer has kindly translated Mr. Jagland’s piece. The translator includes this note:

"Have a look at this op-ed authored by Thorbjørn Jagland, former Norwegian Labour Prime Minister, now current Secretary General of the Council of Europe and Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee. It was published a couple of days ago, and gives us an insight into the totalitarian mentality of diehard EU fanatics."

An excerpt from the translated op-ed from Nye Meninger:

In the current political climate in Europe he can expect the support of the nationalist right to break up not only the vast open European market which Norway is part of through our EEA membership, but also the euro and the entire EU cooperation.

This will be the starting point of a renationalizing process of politics in a wide range of areas, including human rights policies. Politicians would then be able to emulate the behavior of Prime Minister Orban in Hungary when he answered the critics of the new Hungarian constitution: “Nobody has the right to tell us which laws we adopt.”

Yes, we do. This is precisely why we built the new Europe after the war: the obligation and the right to interfere in each other’s internal affairs. European countries accepted the commitments stipulated in the European Convention on Human Rights which requires us to do so. A court was even established in order that citizens could take their own countries to court. The European nations are collectively responsible for ensuring that the verdicts are upheld.

The single market of which Norway is a part through the EEA agreement, is an expression of the same: mutual rights and obligations.

I see an alarming trend across the continent at the moment: more and more people are talking about taking back the decision-making processes from the EU. Ørnhøi’s wish may come true, but perhaps not in the way he had intended, namely that other countries, and not just Norway, will start to demand to govern themselves.

In an age when Wilders, the True Finns and Le Pen’s daughter appear in the shadows, it’s simply too dangerous to jeopardize what is built through agreements and legislation.

SOURCE

Judge: NJ Church Illegally Banned Homosexual Ceremony

A New Jersey judge says the Methodist Church violated a state law in refusing to allow a same-sex ceremony on its property in 2007.

On Thursday, Administrative Law Judge Solomon Metzger said the decision made by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association violated New Jersey's discrimination laws.

Metzger ruled the pavilion area where the couple wanted to hold the ceremony is a public space and is advertised as a wedding venue without any religious pre-conditions. The church argued that the pavilion was an extension of its wedding ministry, an argument that the judge rejected.

Jim Campbell, the attorney representing the church, says they may appeal the decision. "The government should not be able to force a private Christian organization to use its property in a way that would violate its own religious beliefs," he said in a statement.

The plaintiffs in the case are not seeking monetary damages, and the judge did not impose any penalties when he made his ruling.

SOURCE

Straight Talk About Economic Inequality

Occupy Wall Street and dozens of offshoot groups have proven far more adept at moral theater than policymaking. Yet their operative assumption – economic inequality is reaching crisis proportions – has become the coin of a wider realm. Governments, beginning with our own, thus must “do something.” President Obama, for one, is listening – and acting.

Call it “class envy” or “a cry for justice,” but outrage toward the highly affluent, personified by the perfidious “1 percent,” is real, large and growing. This impulse, in nuanced tones, also can be found in respectable venues. While mass squatting in public spaces grabbed headlines last year, the more significant news for the long run may have been the release of various reports pointing to a widening gulf between rich and poor, both here and abroad. Advocates of redistribution have seized upon the findings as a justification for higher taxes upon a presumably insular plutocracy unwilling to part with its morally suspect gains. Without such action, they argue, the poor will continue to grow in number and desperation, while the middle class will continue to edge toward the precipice of poverty. Almost everyone, in the end, will revolt. In this neo-Marxist view, the rewards of global capitalism are not only uneven, but positively destabilizing.

“Inequality” can be defined in many ways. One of the most reliable and common measurement tools is the “Gini coefficient.” Named after early-20th century Italian statistician-sociologist Corrado Gini, author of the landmark paper, “Variability and Mutability,” the Gini coefficient, in an economic context, measures income distribution. A coefficient of “zero” represents a situation in which everybody has an identical income; “1” represents an opposite situation in which all income goes to one person. In the world of nations, the closer a country approaches “1,” the more likely its upper economic tier operates as an oligarchy.

Yes, it’s hypothetical. But like “perfect competition” and “Pareto optimality,” the Gini coefficient is a mental construct intended to summarize broad social tendencies, not achieve some ideal result. The problem, from a pro-market standpoint, lies not with the coefficient itself but with its interpretation. Egalitarians use it to call for extracting income from persons not needing it to persons who do. America apparently is in need of redistribution therapy.

Last May the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a consortium of nearly three dozen advanced nations founded in 1961 to promote social progress and free trade, released a widely publicized study, “Growing Income Inequality in OECD Countries: What Drives It and How Can Policy Tackle It?” From the mid 1980s until the onset of the current global financial crisis, noted the authors, real disposable household incomes in OECD nations (the U.S. being one) increased annually on average by 1.7 percent. But growth hasn’t been evenly distributed, say critics. Too many people are being left behind, a reality owing heavily to increased foreign direct investment in OECD countries and rapid adaptation of new technologies that render long-valued skills obsolete.

America is now beset with inequality, the study noted ruefully. Indeed, our Gini coefficient not only increased, it increased to nearly 0.35 by the late 2000s, becoming in the process the least equalized of all surveyed OECD-member nations, second only to Mexico, whose figure was 0.45. Among nations with rising inequality, the Scandinavian countries and the Czech Republic had the least disparities. France, Hungary and Belgium exhibited negligible change. If it’s any comfort to us, the only countries experiencing less inequality over time were Turkey and Greece, with Greece winding up by far the more equal of the two. As an aside, most Greeks these days don’t seem impressed....

The view that inequality in America is reaching crisis proportions, however, goes well beyond the White House. Many leading pundits take it as given. Rana Foroohar’s recent cover story for Time magazine (November 14, 2011), “What Ever Happened to Upward Mobility?,” opined, “(I)nequality is rising, now reaching levels not seen since the Gilded Age.” Atlantic magazine associate editor Max Fisher argued in September that without initiatives such as the Buffett rule, our latter-day robber barons might lead us toward oblivion.

These assumptions need to be challenged. Here, then, in abbreviated form, are several reasonable retorts.

First, affluent households didn’t get that way off the backs of others. “Income is not a zero-sum game,” notes economist Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago. “Somebody else’s income does not come at your expense. It could…but in general these numbers don’t have automatic implications for the 99 percent.” In 2011, the number of millionaire households in the U.S. was 8.4 million, an 8 percent rise from the year before. Can anyone argue that this increase caused suffering among non-millionaires? By the logic of zero-sum economics, non-millionaires should have done very well in 2008, a year in which the millionaire population dropped by 27 percent. As we all know, it was a bad year across the board.

Second, the number of households in income quintiles for any given year will be identical, but the roster is constantly changing. Those in the top income brackets in 1979, or for that matter 1999, weren’t necessarily the people who were there in 2007. Let’s have a look at the millionaires so reviled by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation recently went over IRS tax returns for 1999 of 675,000 millionaire households and followed them on a year-by-year basis through 2007. Just one year later, in 2000, only 338,000 of these households had remained millionaires. And only 38,000, a mere 6 percent of the total, had retained their millionaire status for the entire period. Even more crucial were advances in upward mobility. The Tax Foundation study revealed that three-fifths of the households in the bottom quintile in 1999 had moved to a higher quintile by 2007. And about a third in that lowest quintile had moved to the middle quintile or higher. “The land of opportunity” remains more than a cliché.

Third, income is related to family structure. Non-elderly husband-wife families have higher incomes than other households, if for no other reason, than the fact that married couples have two potential full-time earners. But they constitute a progressively falling share of U.S. households. In 2010, they represented 48 percent of all households, down from 53.8 percent in 2000 and 56 percent in 1990. In constant (2009) dollars, the median income of married-couple families in 1990 was $63,469, rising to $71,627 in 2009. For female-headed households, no spouse present – which has accounted for about 30 percent of all households for the past two decades, but more than double from 1970 – the respective figures were a mere $26,937 and $29,770. Related to this, 40.7 percent of female-headed households in 2010 lived below the poverty line; for married couples the figure was 8.8 percent.

Fourth, immigrants, legal or otherwise, constituted 40 million of the nation’s population in 2010. That was up from 19.8 million in 1990 and 31.1 million in 2000. As a proportion of the total population, the respective figures for 1990, 2000, and 2010 were 7.9 percent, 11.1 percent and 12.9 percent. A little over half in 2010 consisted of Hispanics. Though not necessarily immigrants, Hispanics do serve as an effective proxy for research purposes when detailed ethnic breakdowns on immigration are not available. And the Hispanic population increased during 2000-10 by a whopping 43 percent, whereas the non-Hispanic population as a whole rose by about 5 percent. Moreover, Hispanic incomes in 2010 were only $37,759, well under the $54,620 for non-Hispanic whites. Putting these things together – rapid population growth and far lower incomes among Hispanics – an inconvenient truth comes out: Widening inequality is largely driven by an “inclusive” immigration policy. Don’t expect any presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican, however, to make this point.

Fifth, inasmuch as other countries, especially in Europe, have less income inequality than us, it is largely because their larger welfare state edifices rest heavily on high taxes and bank debt. Many European Union parliaments lately have passed, or are considering passing, tough austerity packages to avert pending disaster. Here is one disturbing indicator: EU nations have a composite 20 percent unemployment rate for persons under age 25. For Italy, Greece and Spain – each in deep financial crisis – the respective figures are roughly 28 percent, 38 percent and 45 percent. European investment advisor Patrick Young puts it this way: “The eurozone bailout fund is on the verge of running out of money as soon as one of those major economies such as Spain or Italy defaults.” Even governments that pursue economic equality, in other words, are coming to grasp its inherent limits. They have no other choice.

There are other arguments against aggressive equalization of incomes, such as the Census Bureau’s non-inclusion of in-kind benefits (e.g., Medicaid, housing vouchers, food stamps) as reportable income. The larger point is that economic equality, beyond a certain point, can be achieved only at a high cost. It’s true that a nation can’t afford to leave segments of its population behind. But way to inclusion, here or elsewhere, shouldn’t burden the most productive members of society with high taxes in order to cover the bills of those who can’t or won’t pay them. Inclusion instead ought to be achieved through such means as economic growth, low taxes, enforceable property rights, free flows of information and limited immigration. Liberty shouldn’t be expendable.

More HERE

The writer above is too polite to mention it but America has two very large minorities with very low average ability levels. Very few of them are capable of high achievement so will always weigh down America's overall performance economically. Jesus could well have been talking about blacks and Hispanics when he said: "The poor ye always have with you". The only really valid comparison would be between the populations of European ancestry in the various countries surveyed

Tory unreconstructed 'modernisers' want to go back to the future

This is like "Life on Mars" in reverse. A bunch of new Conservative MPs seem to have crashed their cars in 1998 and woken up in 2012. This 301 Group as it calls itself will apparently meet with David Cameron today at No 10 in order to impart an urgent message: the party needs to modernise its image. In order to do that, it must go beyond the old obsessions – Europe, immigration and "cuts" – in order to embrace the more fashionable themes of the environment, poverty and the benefits of the welfare state. What? Hello?

Where have these people been for the past two years? Has nobody told them that immigration was the number one issue on the doorstep in the last general election – and that putting it at the top of your priorities does not require being a bigot? Or that it is now the economy which is at the top of the list of ordinary voters worries – and that they are overwhelmingly persuaded of the need for spending cuts as a way of dealing with the present crisis? Are they aware that "the environment" (which is to say, global warming) is electoral death as an electoral issue: that even if voters are not positively scepticial about climate change itself, they are furiously resistant to the idea of green taxes and put environmental issues way back in the queue of their concerns?

On the matter of poverty, have they taken in the fact that Iain Duncan Smith has inaugurated a whole new Conservative approach which involves a far deeper understanding of its causes – among them being welfare dependency and the breakdown of the family – as well as a more compassionate view of the plight of the poor? Good grief. What are these people thinking? Do they not realise that the glossy and superficial image obsession of the Tory modernisers was what made the party seem shallow and opportunistic, and effectively cost the Conservatives the majority they should have won at the last general election?

I do hope that the meeting today goes well and that Mr Cameron treats this delegation from the past with the kindness that deranged people require.

SOURCE

Easily offended? You really should be

A Jewish writer thinks Jews have something to learn from Muslims

Why is antisemitism so popular and prevalent all over the world? Why does it continue, unchecked despite the horrors of 70 years ago? People who care about the fate of the Jews are always searching for subtle, indefinable reasons to explain the continuing intensity of anti-Jewish hostility and hatred. The answer is far from mysterious.

As a matter of fact, the truth is so obvious that you'd have to be brainless not to see it.

My honest view is that as Jews we do little if anything to fight back against such prejudice. It seems to me that everyone knows that whatever the crime committed against a Jew, the only price you'll pay will be that of the ride to the crime scene and back. Then, instead of blaming the criminals, Jews will get involved in an orgy of self-reproach and guilt. And after blaming themselves, they'll start blaming each other.

Somebody will be screaming: "It's your own fault. Why would you be walking in that neighbourhood at two in the morning?". The other one will argue: "Why would I think they would recognise that I am Jewish?" and another voice will yell: "At least you could've been smart enough to wear trainers."

If people really thought that Jews could represent any kind of risk, they would cower before expressing hostility

Then somebody says: "Let's report this to the police," while somebody else is saying: "Are you crazy? What if they find out we reported it? Do you want to get us all killed? Right now they don't know who we are. Let's just get out of the neighbourhood".

It's because antisemites are aware that these are the typical reactions of Jews to any violence committed against them that they feel free to launch their attacks whenever they please. Is it any accident that in Britain and Europe you hear about a rising tide of anti-Jewish attacks, but you rarely hear about the same thing against Muslims? (I know that even right now, you the reader are trembling in fear of what I might write about the Muslims.) And the sad truth about Israel is that its very existence serves as either a cloak or a spur for such bigotry.

While I defend anyone's right to censure the Israeli government, the fact is that too often such criticism is either a coded means of attacking Jews or it has the unintended consequence of feeding and encouraging antisemitism.

Take the former MP for Birmingham Ladywood, Clare Short, who has attacked Israel as the main cause of violence in the world, when it is obvious that for her and her like the only real crime is that the country still exists - something she seems to consider an offense to human decency.

What right do Israelis have to try to live in peace with the Arabs and constantly thwart every attempt of the Palestinian suicide bombers to annihilate their whole population, she seemed to ask? Ms Short claims that the Jews in Israel practice an even more egregious form of apartheid than that which existed in South Africa. Why does she and others call it "apartheid", when every Arab has equal access in every school, to every job, every health-care service and every unemployment benefit? When Arab citizens even hold office in the Israeli parliament and in every other branch of the Israeli government?

Are these people so ignorant that they don't know that none of these opportunities would be granted to any Jew living in an Arab nation? Besides, how would a Jew be able to achieve any of these same opportunities in Arab countries when, in most cases, it wouldn't even be safe for them to live there?

When they attack Israel in such unbalanced, irrational and extreme terms, they simply give licence to thousands of antisemites to peddle the kind of bigotry and hatred from which Jews have suffered for so many hundreds of years.

But these people are likely aware, as are antisemites all over the world, that you suffer few consequences by attacking Jews, particularly if you do so under the cover of attacking Israel.

If people really thought that Jews could represent any kind of risk, they would cower before expressing such hostility, as I believe they now do with Muslims. When was the last time that an Englishman made a hateful speech against Muslims? Not that I'd approve of that. On the contrary - but it seems to me that people are so fearful of Muslims that there are afraid to even say "hello" without apologising. British and American people are now begging forgiveness from Muslims for things they don't even remember doing.

And don't get me started on George Galloway, who makes Clare Short look like Simon Wiesenthal. Mr Galloway is yet another person who attacks Israel while making nice with terrorists, dictators and some of the most vicious antisemites on the planet.

The point is this: when you criticise an Israeli administration, you express views (rightly or wrongly) about the policies of a particular party or group of politicians. When you attack Israel, you express hostility towards an entire population, a nation whose founding and continuing purpose is to provide sanctuary to one of the most oppressed peoples in the history of mankind.

Of course, if you don't think they should be given such sanctuary, then that's another matter - but bear in mind that you'll find yourself in the good company of a host of despots and tyrants.

Hostility to Israel is often used as a blanket prejudice, a blunt instrument with which to attack Jews in place of any reasoned criticism of the Israeli government, which - just like any other government - cannot be exempt from censure or disapproval.

However, such bigotry is far from new. Take one of my country's former presidents, Harry Truman, in the White House at the time of Israel's independence. Jews still wax lyrical about his love for the Jewish people. Whenever two Jews get together and mention Truman, out comes the story of his Jewish business partner, Eddie Jacobson. What they forget is that Truman actually found Jews distasteful and treated his partner with utter disdain. This is evidenced not least when Mr Jacobson pleaded with his former associate, by now the US President, to recognise the state of Israel. Truman's reaction does not bear repeating on the pages of a family newspaper.

As reprehensible, if not worse, was another recent president - Franklin D Roosevelt. At the height of Hitler's atrocities many Jews died needlessly because Roosevelt ignored their plight and, in some cases, even helped Hitler along by refusing to open up US borders, thus sending thousands back to their deaths in the camps.

Was this born out of antisemitism? Or plain indifference? In the end, is there any distinction?

And just the other day the US Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, came awfully close to finding antisemitism excusable in some circumstances. Calling modern Muslim hatred of Jews a "different phenomenon" from other kinds of antisemitism, he declared: "It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian territories and neighbouring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem."

And this coming from the son of a Holocaust survivor.

But of course, instead of firing him, President Obama remained mute. And as a result, whether by design or just by plain stupid omission, my president has given a quiet thumbs up the idea that it is "OK to dislike Israel".

Unfortunately, as America goes, so goes the world. But sadly, as the Haggadah says, "in every generation one rises up to destroy us".

Unlike Britain's Jewish community, which spends much of its time trying to blend into the background, many self-proclaimed Muslim leaders spend time demanding respect. We dare not paint the wrong cartoon, sing the wrong song, write the wrong book, look the wrong way, or even laugh without an explanation.

The Jewish people will never survive if we don't learn a great lesson from the power of the Muslim population.

If this world had the same fear of offending Jews as it has of offending Muslims, attacks on the Jews would never occur. Outside Israel, people never feel threatened when attacking a Jew, because he's a little guy with glasses carrying a briefcase who, in case of an attack, will pull out a fountain pen rather than a gun. He won't be ready to shoot the attacker; he'll be busy looking for a piece of paper to write his name down.

"The attacker" always knows that when his victim is a Jew, he won't get hit or hurt. The Jew won't fight. He'll cry, beg, scream or run. The attacker knows he can't lose life or limb because the victim can't fight; he's only preparing to sue.

As I said, this applies to the Jews outside of Israel. If we in the Diaspora continue to follow this pattern of traditional helplessness, instead of emulating the Israelis, who are ready to fight and survive at any price, we will continue to be hounded by antisemitism for the rest of our lives.

We must stand up and be counted, we must show how proud we are to identify with a people surrounded by nations who are committed to their destruction. Even if it infuriates the Claire Shorts, George Galloways and Howard Gutmans of the world.

It invariably takes more courage to stand up against prejudice that than to join in with it, but is it too much to ask that our leaders display such courage from time to time?

And by the way, in case you think that- despite everything I'm saying - the battle has been won and that we no longer need Israel to fulfil its historic purpose, take a look at what is happening in Hungary right now.

Respected public figures- newspaper editors and journalists, judges, political commentators, human rights campaigners (a number of them Jews) - are being removed in favour of members belonging to the ruling, extreme right-wing party. Only last week Istvan Marta, director of Hungary's National Theatre, was forced out by the government and told he would be replaced by an actor who recently campaigned for the right-wing extremist, antisemitic Jobbik Party and by a playwright who is a professed antisemite.

If that doesn't sound horribly familiar and frighten the hell out of you, it should.

But in spite of all that, consider this: if the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him.

He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind.

All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Good question. And no, those aren't my words. They were written in 1897, by another American, the great Mark Twain.

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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