Wednesday, February 18, 2015



A politically correct sniper







A really charming multiculturalist

Totally lacking any spark of human decency

A 93-year-old who was knocked to the ground in a violent robbery outside his home for just five pounds has spoken of his anger of being attacked by a man he says he gave £10 to months before.

Pensioner Stanley Evans, who lives on his own, was left lying on the floor for 10 minutes after being targeted by the robber when he came home from a shopping trip in London.

Police have today released CCTV footage of the robbery and assault, which a senior officer branded 'totally unprovoked, callous and sickening'.

Mr Evans - a retired cameraman who worked on films including the 1947 classic Brighton Rock with Richard Attenborough - said he was left 'flailing like a seal'.

Describing the attack, Mr Evans said: 'I've gone past anger, I'm frustrated. If I ever came across that one again I was a boxer and aggressive, if someone punches me I punch them back.'

'I was coming up to my flat from the supermarket with a trolley when I saw a large black man sitting on the wall, I vaguely recognised him as someone I had gave £10 to last year. I'm quite friendly with people in the area.

'He was even helpful with the trolley. I left him sitting on the wall and started fiddling with my key. Then he was behind me. He told me he had come to visit someone on the second floor.

The assault and robbery took place at Ingestre Court, central London at around 8pm on Saturday, 31 January.

The footage shows Mr Evans chatting to his attacker before he is violently knocked to the ground

The robber - who made off with just £5 - walked from the scene, leaving Mr Evans stricken on the floor   

He is determined not to let the mugging scare him out of leaving his flat and enjoying Soho where he has lived and worked in for so many years.

The CCTV footage released by police shows Mr Evans being followed by the suspect as he returns from the shops into the block of flats where he lives.

Pushing a small shopping trolley, the frail victim is seen waiting in a communal entrance for the lift to his flat as the robber approached him.  The attacker then grabs his pocket and pushes him to the floor.

The footage then shows the shocked pensioner collapsed in the communal area as he waits for help to come. As a result of the assault the pensioner suffered a shoulder injury, which was treated by an ambulance crew.

The suspect is described as a black male, around 5ft 10ins and 6ft, slim build and aged between 20-30 years. He was wearing casual dark clothing.

SOURCE






The Proofiness of the Politically Correct Rape

A legion of the politically correct who make a living from the alleged oppression of women were gleeful and almost goofy with proofiness this week. The incident is a window into how statistical myths are created.

Charles Seife, a journalist and a professor at New York University, coined the term proofiness as a corollary to an earlier term coined by comedian Stephen Colbert: truthiness. Truthiness was defined as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." It became the American Dialect Society’s 2005 Word of the Year because it embodied a cultural zeitgeist that haunted the socio-political narrative of our time.

Proofiness is "the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true—even when it’s not." It should have been the Word of the Year for 2010 when Seife’s book Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception was published. A new study gives the term a second chance for fame, as it points to the dark side of math.

The Latest "Men Are Evil" ’Study’

"Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders" is a ’study’ at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, which has just been released by the portentiously named journal Violence and Gender. It claims that approximately 1 in 3 male students would rape their female counterparts "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences." The study is almost a classic example of proofiness.

It almost descends to the level of "Potemkin data." The phrase refers to Russian lore in which Gregory Potemkin erected fake settlements along the Dnieper River in order to deceptively impress his paramour Catherine II as she toured the newly acquired Crimea (1787). The faux villages were akin to movie props with no substance behind their fronts. Potemkin wished to trick Catherine into believing a situation was better than it really was. The North Dakota ’study’ wants people to believe a situation is worse than it really is. Except, of course, for those to whom political correctness is a profession or a moral crusade. To them, the finding of male depravity is good news because it means another paycheck and another false stat about which to be self-righteous.

The ’study’ is a classical example of how to construct Potemkin data. Some of the characteristics this includes:

Start with deeply biased researchers. Led by psychology professor Sarah R. Edwards, the researchers state within the ’study’: "Given that callous sexual attitudes permit violence and consider women as passive sexual objects, it follows that for men who endorse these, sexual aggression becomes an appropriate and accepted expression of masculinity. In this sense, using force to obtain intercourse does not become an act of rape, but rather an expression of hyper-masculinity, which may be thought of as a desirable disposition in certain subcultures." (p.189)

Proceed from a false premise or assumption. The opening sentence of the ’study’ states, "Federal data estimate that about one in five women becomes the victim of sexual assault while in college, most of which is committed by assailants known to the victim" (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control 2012). The 1-in-5 figure has been exhaustively debunked for many months and should be rendered unresurrectable by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report (12/14) that found the actual rate of rape to be 0.61 percent per year—or 6.1 per 1,000 students.

Use a ridiculously small sample that is selective and drawn from one source. Of the approximately 15,000 students at the university in question, 86 male students were surveyed and 73 answers were used for analysis. Of these, 23 respondents were considered to have expressed "intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse."

Further bias the sample by adding incentives. The Mary Koss study from which the 1 in 4 rape stat derives offered a $10 gift card for anonymous and self-reporting participation. The Edwards study offered extra university credit to participants. The incentive may have encouraged answers that the students thought the researchers wished to hear so as to complete the process and receive the credit.

Or the participants may have blown off the questions. The intrepid Ashe Schow commented in the Washington Examiner (13/01/15): "Even in a world where college men take everything seriously, nine guys does not equal a mass epidemic of would-be rapists. A more sound reading is that nine college boys didn’t take the survey too seriously."

Ask questions that skew participants toward the desired answer. The researchers specified that the imaginary rape would never be discovered and would have no consequences. How many people would admit to seriously considering murder at some point – e.g., of an ex-spouse, a swindling partner, an assailant – if the murder was guaranteed to be unknown and consequence-free? By removing the imagined rape from the real world, non-real rates are achieved.

Draw upon prestigious but dubious authority. Sources welcoming the prospect of rapacious men frequently mention that the ’study’ was peer reviewed. But, since research became a political tool circa the 1980s, peer review means increasingly little. Consider the peer-reviewed study "The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science" in PLOS ONE (2013). The researcher found that age did not correlate with indicator factors. When a single self-reported age was removed from the sample (post-publication), age didcorrelate. The deleted sample was a 32,757-year-old person.

And, then, there was the study upon which Slate (11/11/2014) commented in an article entitled, "This Is What Happens When No One Proofreads an Academic Paper." The study "Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments" appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Ethology. The published paper included a candid question intended for peer readers; the researcher asked, "Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?"

Meanwhile, never admit there is sound contradicting evidence. A Huffington Post article (09/01/15) reported, "Another 2002 study by David Lisak at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, speaking with 1,882 men, found 120 had committed rape or attempted rape."

State the researchers’ subjective conclusions based on their beliefs. The ’study’ declares of the rapacious males, "We believe that men exhibiting higher levels of hostility toward women will exhibit awareness that their behaviors constitute rape, and still endorse use of force given that the motivation of the encounter is to punish women." (p.189)

The Why of the Edwards ’Study’

The most insidious aspect of the ’study’ is one of the least commented upon. It is an attempt to reconcile a fact that has embarrassed and encumbered the 1-in-4 rate of female rape statistic upon which so much politics rests. Fully 73% of the women identified as rape victims in the pivotal Koss study said they had not been raped. Koss deliberately dismissed them and categorized them according to her own perceptions and needs. Otherwise stated, only 27% agreed with Koss’s assessment of their experience.

How does a researcher justify the unmitigated arrogance and dishonesty of dismissing data in order to fit an agenda? By claiming the participant does not understand the meaning of their own words or feelings ... but the researcher does. In an unskeptical Newsweek article (09/01/15), Edwards claimed that "the No. 1 point [of the study] is there are people that will say they would force a woman to have sex but would deny they would rape a woman." This statement was meant to explain the extreme discrepancy between men who reported a willingness to use force but not to rape; 31.7%, on which 1 in 3 is based, as opposed to 13.6% or 1 in 14. Edwards stated the conclusion of the ’study’ as "when survey items describe behaviors ... instead of simply label[ling] them ... more men will admit to sexually coercive behaviors in the past and more women will self-report past victimization." [Emphasis added]

The Newsweek article commented on a recent MIT survey that must have been a disappointment to rape culture zealots. It stated, "[O]nly 10 percent of those MIT women also said yes when asked if they were sexually assaulted, and just 5 percent said yes when asked if they were raped." But if the participants did not know the truth of their own experiences – and the researcher did – then those rates might soar.

The game of explaining away women’s disappointing reports of their own experience is afoot. The game of defending the 1-in-4 stat is on. Women’s voices be damned.

SOURCE





Homosexual Lawmaker Wants to Replace Statuary Hall Figure of Missionary Headed for Sainthood With Lesbian Astronaut

An openly gay State Senator in California has introduced legislation to replace a statue of Catholic missionary Father Junipero Serra in National Statuary Hall with a statue of Sally Ride, the first female U.S. astronaut and a lesbian.
The move by State Senator Ricardo Lara comes just weeks after Pope Francis announced plans to elevate Serra to sainthood.

“Dr. Sally Ride is a California native, American hero and stratospheric trailblazer who devoted her life to pushing the limits of space and inspiring young girls to succeed in math and science careers,” Lara said in a statement.
“She is the embodiment of the American dream whose accomplishments and life work will encourage future generations to reach for the stars and celebrate diversity and inclusivity.”

If the legislation is successful Ride would be the first member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the first woman representing California to be placed in the hall at the U.S. Capitol.

The proposal, according to Lara’s office, “aims to relocate the statue of Father Junipero Serra, known as an eloquent preacher and founder of numerous missions throughout California, at a location in California where citizens and visitors can enjoy it and be reminded of his significant historical impact upon our state.”

"Though Father Serra is a controversial figure, this effort is about recognizing the invaluable contributions of an accomplished Californian and American pioneer: Dr. Sally Ride," Lara told the Los Angeles Times.

Some Los Angeles Native American groups have protested the pope’s decision to canonize Serra, charging that he oppressed Native Americans and forced them to abandon their customs.

But Monsignor Francis J. Weber, an author and historian of the 18th century missionary, has rejected the characterization of Serra as “controversial.”

“You see all of these accusations against Serra, but not one of them can be validated by a responsible historian,” Weber told the Catholic News Agency.

Weber described Serra as a hero to the Native Americans. “California today is what he started it out to be,” he said, “Things have progressed a lot in 200 years, but he set the foundation.”

“The Native Americans, I think, are being utilized by these people who have a rather warped view of what evangelization is all about,” he said. “I’m convinced that the questions about Junipero Serra are really not about Serra himself, who simply epitomized Catholic evangelization. I’m convinced that this is an attack on all of Catholic evangelization throughout the world.”

Authorized by Congress in 1864, the National Statuary Hall Collection allows each state to provide two statues of notable state historical figures for display in the U.S. Capitol.

Along with Serra, California is currently represented in the collection by President Ronald Reagan.

SOURCE





Government websites are not 'women friendly' because they use too many British FLAGS, top Liberal claims



Women are being put off going into business - because websites encouraging female entrepreneurship use too many Union flags, an MP has claimed.

Branding on the Government's ‘Great Business’ site is not seen as ‘woman-friendly’ and looks too much like a military recruitment site, a study by the Liberal Democrat’s Lorely Burt has claimed.

Mrs Burt, the government’s women in business ambassador, singled out the website as a barrier for femail entrepreneurs considering setting up their own companies.

She said there was too much ‘untapped talent’ in the country because of the lack of women in business.  The Lib Dem MP said too many women thought entrepreneurship services was ‘not for them’.

The Solihull MP said: ‘One powerful way to show women that services are for them is to be explicit about it.  ‘The www.greatbusiness.gov.uk website includes a page explicitly for women in enterprise, which is welcome. It has links of particular interest to women entrepreneurs.  ‘To show graphically that the page is for women the bar on the right-hand side of the page uses all-women case studies.

‘However, in all other respects the page uses the same branding as the rest of the Great Business website.  ‘This branding is seen as not “woman-friendly”: the proliferation of Union flags, for example, has been compared to a military recruitment site.’

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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