Wednesday, December 10, 2014



A third of UK children don't know Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, says survey

A third of children in the UK aged between ten and 13 do not know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, according to a survey.

What’s more, half the population considers Jesus’s birth irrelevant to their festive celebrations, while only one adult in ten can correctly state four facts about the Nativity.

Critics claim the research shows schools are becoming too politically correct and are not putting on Nativity plays for fear of offending people of different religions.

Francis Goodwin, of campaign group Christmas Starts With Christ, which commissioned the survey, said: ‘Britain is fast becoming one of the world’s most secular countries.

As nations get richer, they think they no longer need God and may only come back to him in a crisis.’  He added: ‘There is a problem with political correctness in schools. They think they should not focus on the Christian roots of Christmas because of inclusivity.  'But it is misguided. People of other faiths are not offended.

'In a multi-faith, inclusive society, children can learn about the Muslim festival Eid, for example, as well as Christmas.’

SOURCE





Black thugs make cops stop good blacks

Why do police officers stop innocent black men? Reputedly racist "killer cops" get all the blame for such confrontations. But black hoodlums are at least partially responsible for casting suspicion on black men who merely resemble those wanted in police manhunts.

Some of America's roughly 627,000 uniformed officers practice racial profiling and others may be black-hating bigots. Until mankind becomes perfect, the imperfection of prejudice will infect cops - as well as grocers, pilots, and, yes, even journalists.

Some cops stop black men who break the law. Former Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson might have instructed Michael Brown to stop walking in the street and then moved on. Unfortunately for Brown, a police dispatcher told officers to find "a black male . . . He's got a red Cardinals hat, white T-shirt, yellow socks, and khaki shorts." That suspect also carried stolen cigars. Wilson noticed that Brown matched that description. Moments earlier, in fact, Brown had robbed cigars from a convenience store and manhandled its clerk. So, Wilson stopped Brown. The rest is history.

Too often, though, cops stop good black men because bad ones place targets on their backs.

In his searing book Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, the Wall Street Journal editorialist Jason L. Riley recalls driving home through Washington, D.C., after working late at USA Today back in 1993. "I was sitting at a red light when no fewer than four squad cars converged on me, lights flashing and sirens screaming." Gun-wielding cops rousted Riley from his Volkswagen, threw him on the ground, handcuffed him, and then searched his car.

"When the police were finished," Riley explains, "I was told that I fit the description of someone they were after, something about me having New York license plates and problems with gunrunners from up north." If those blacks had not run guns, Riley almost certainly would have reached home without incident.

Just last August, Beverly Hills cops stopped film producer Charles Belk before an Emmy Awards pre-party. They cuffed him, sat him on a sidewalk, and detained him for six hours. "I was on the brink of tears," Belk told NBC News.

Too bad for Belk, another black man allegedly was an accomplice of Brianna Clemons Kloutse, a black woman now charged with robbing nine banks - including a Citibank branch near Belk's arrest scene. Police said that Belk "matched the physical characteristics of the second suspect and was in the area of the bank shortly after the robbery."

If that black suspect had not knocked over banks, Belk almost surely would have celebrated the Emmys without distraction.

Black criminals even help harmless black men get killed.

On February 4, 1999, four undercover NYPD officers encountered a young, unarmed black man. In the confusion on a dark Bronx street, they shot him 19 times. Tragically, the late Amadou Diallo mirrored the police sketch of Isaac Jones, who lived a mile away and was sought by the cops who killed Diallo. That April, the so-called Bronx Rapist was arrested and charged with robbing and raping 29 women. His victims were primarily black and Hispanic females between the ages of 13 and 53, according to the New York Daily News. In August 2000, after sentencing Jones to 155 years in prison, Judge Joseph Fisch asked him: "Would Amadou Diallo be alive today if it were not for your activities here in the Bronx?"

"If you get pulled over for . . . Driving While Black, don't be mad at the cop," a young black man named Frederick Wilson II advises in a compelling video. "Be mad at the brothers who came before you who gave the reputation to the black man, so that a cop says, ‘Hey, look. There's a car full of brothers. They're probably up to no good.'"

"This is much less of a race issue than is widely reported in the media," City University of Seattle criminal-justice professor Vincenzo A. Sainato tells me. "For example, a significant majority of cops going through the New York police academy these days are black or Hispanic. While there are a lot of white cops, there are a lot of non-whites, too. Unequivocally, most negative interactions, especially in urban areas, between cops and citizens involve blacks, but that is because they are disproportionately the ones reported by victims as the offenders."

Yes, bad cops should be punished. Good cops should be promoted. And every officer should strive to serve even better. In that connection, body cameras look like a promising, high-tech way to bring sunshine to this entire sphere.

But those who have been screaming, rioting, and looting since the shooting in Ferguson should aim at least a smidgen of their rage at the black thugs who make cops stop good blacks.

SOURCE







EEOC Has Become the Problem, Not the Solution

One of President Ronald Reagan’s most famous quips was that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

It is indeed sad that America today is plagued, indeed threatened, by the very institution it invented to protect its own citizens. Government.

And there’s no better example of today’s distortions of what government is supposed to be about than the EEOC – The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The EEOC was established in the wave of idealism of the 1960s as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The agency was set up to enforce federal laws established to protect against discrimination in the workplace.

What’s discrimination? It started out to be discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, and genetic information.

In 2011 the EEOC included “sex stereotyping” of lesbian, gay, and bi-sexual individuals as a form of sex discrimination. In 2012, the definition of discrimination warranting protection was again expanded to include transgender status and gender identity.

Once we decide that right and wrong is a political problem rather than a religious/moral problem, our lives get turned over to politicians and bureaucrats who, with great relish and enthusiasm, exercise their power to control us and define right, wrong, and justice for us.

Two Obama nominees for the EEOC were just confirmed by the US Senate and both, warriors for the LGTB cause, are getting their due celebration from groups that support this agenda.

It’s worth recalling again the case of Crystal Dixon, a Christian black woman, who, in 2008, in the midst of a successful career at the University of Toledo, was fired from her job as Associate Vice President for Human Resources because of a politically incorrect op-ed piece she wrote, as a private citizen, in the local newspaper.

Dixon’s op-ed, published in the Toledo Free Press, challenged an earlier op-ed which equated the movement for gay rights to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. Dixon’s op-ed included the fatal phrase “….I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are civil rights victims.”

Dixon was shown the door, informed that her career at the University of Toledo was over.

Moral relativism does not neutralize the moral marketplace. It replaces one set of values with another.

As Christians are forced to hide in the shadows of today’s America, it is clear which set of values now define the day.

Absurdities abound as we increasingly relinquish our lives, and our freedom, to Washington political power brokers.

Honeywell Corporation is now being sued by the EEOC because the firm insists that employees covered by the firm’s health insurance plan take a health survey as part of the corporate wellness program. According to the EEOC, requiring the survey, and penalizing those who don’t take it, violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.

Maybe, as Americans enter this Advent season, approaching Christmas, we all should dedicate special thought time this year to what it means to be free and to live in a free country.

Perhaps a useful point of focus might be on the most famous antidiscrimination employment act in American history – the breaking of the racial barrier in major league baseball.

It didn’t happen because of a government dictate. It happened because of the free choice and courage of two deeply Christian men – Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson.

Maybe Christmas season 2015 will be the year Americans re-find their way and realize that a country controlled by politicians cannot be a country that is free.

The great invention of the American founders, becoming so lost today, was the idea that government protects its citizens so they can take personal responsibility for their own lives and make those moral choices.

SOURCE





Germans take to the streets to protest against 'Islamisation'



A new type of anti-immigration protest is sweeping across Germany, as thousands take to the streets against what they say is the growing “Islamisation” of the country.

The new protests, which began in the city of Dresden in the former East Germany, feature no neo-Nazi slogans and have nothing to do with the traditional far right.

Instead the demonstrators have adopted the old rallying call of the protests against the East German communist regime that brought down the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”. They say they want to preserve Germany’s Judeo-Christian Western culture.

The protests come as Bavaria’s ruling Christian Social Union (CSU) is seeking to distance itself from a draft proposal for its party conference which said that immigrants should speak German not only in public, but at home as well.

Germany is now the second most popular destination in the world for migrants, after the US, and the country is struggling to cope with an unprecedented influx of asylum-seekers.

While Angela Merkel’s government has made clear it will block any attempt by David Cameron to curtail freedom of movement within the EU, the German debate over immigration has focused on those coming from outside the bloc, and on Muslims in particular.

Thousands have defied sub-zero temperatures to join weekly marches each Monday in Dresden under the banner of Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of Europe, or Pegida.

The protests were started by a local man, Lutz Bachmann, with no background in politics. When he called his first demonstration in October, only a few hundred turned up, but the movement has snowballed, and last week 7,500 came.

Pegida has inspired similar movements across Germany. Though the numbers have not been as high as in Dresden so far, marches have been called in cities from Düsseldorf to Munich.

Demonstrations against Muslim immigration in Cologne earlier this year turned violent, but unlike the far-right groups and self-proclaimed “hooligans” behind those protests, Pegida insists its movement is peaceful.

It has run into opposition, though: last week a counter-demonstration by around 1,000 people succeeded in blocking Pegida’s way through Dresden, and in the city of Kassel, counter-demonstrators actually outnumbered those who marched against immigrants.

Critics contend that known neo-Nazis have infiltrated the protests, while Mr Bachmann, who has called for “zero tolerance for criminal immigrants”, was forced to acknowledge he “has a past”, after a local newspaper reported he has a lengthy criminal record of his own, including convictions for burglary and drug-dealing.

He has been at pains to stress that he is not opposed to genuine political refugees, only to economic migrants who “take advantage” of the German system, and has no problem with Islam but is worried about erosion of German culture.

Concerns for the German culture plunged Bavaria’s ruling CSU into its own controversy, after a draft proposal for the opening motion at the party conference called for immigrants to speak German at home.

“Whoever wants to live here permanently should be encouraged to speak German in public and within the family,” the draft said.

After a storm of criticism, including the Twitter hashtag YallaCSU, Arabic for “Let’s go, CSU”, and questions over how such a policy could possibly be enforced, Andreas Scheuer, the party’s general secretary, sought to limit the damage.

The proposal was only ever intended as “encouragement”, he said. “Obligation, nannying or control are out of the question.”

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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