Friday, September 29, 2017



How a Radical Left-Wing Historian Birthed the Anti-Columbus Crusade

Confederate statues aren’t the only ones to come under siege from protesters. Christopher Columbus, the Spanish-backed Italian explorer who discovered the Americas, is also being attacked on a wide scale.

Activists and cities around the country are now working to change the holiday made in his name and are working to remove monuments in his likeness.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has even called for a commission that will review potentially removing the over 70-foot-tall column dedicated to Columbus that currently stands in Columbus Circle.

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And Portland, Maine’s City Council recently designated the second Monday of October “Indigenous People’s Day” and has elected to stop celebrating Columbus Day.

This is quite a turnaround from when Columbus was almost universally admired.

Ronald Reagan once said of the famed explorer:

    He is justly admired as a brilliant navigator, a fearless man of action, a visionary who opened the eyes of an older world to an entirely new one. Above all, he personifies a view of the world that many see as quintessentially American: not merely optimistic, but scornful of the very notion of despair.

So, why is this once uniting figure who stood for the New World and immigrants suddenly under attack?

Sadly, much of the modern hostility to Columbus can be traced to the work of a far-left historian, Howard Zinn, whose book, “A People’s History of the United States,” has left an oversized mark on American K-12 and college students.

However, Zinn claimed to turn the pro-Columbus narrative on its head, writing that Columbus was essentially a genocidal monster who paved the way for greedy, profit-seeking capitalists from the Old World to destroy and pillage the peaceful indigenous people of the New World.

“Behind the English invasion of North America,” Zinn wrote, “behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”

One doesn’t have to embrace all of the Italian explorer’s actions to appreciate what he accomplished and how it transformed the world for good.

Historians have certainly pushed back on Zinn’s caricature.

Professor Carol Delaney of Stanford University has criticized Zinn’s history and defended Columbus as devoutly religious, and not simply a man committed to pillaging and plunder.

She said:

    His relations with the natives tended to be benign. He liked the natives and found them to be very intelligent … Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there.  

But Zinn goes even further.

His narrative is based on the idea that not only was Columbus a villain, but the product of his discovery was also an evil. His book follows this in maligning the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and America’s role in World War II, among numerous other individuals and events in our history.

Of the Founding Fathers, Zinn wrote:

    They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

Notions of liberty and timeless principles were dismissed by Zinn as simply the tools of tyrants, which is, of course, the point of his book.

It is a tale of oppressors and oppressed, wrapped in Marxist historical theories.

“A People’s History” is filled with half-truths, ideological distortions, and outright fabrications, yet it is still widely used in American schools.

This is a shame, as he is misleading future generations through his deceiving, but influential work.

Even the far-left magazine, New Republic, conceded that Zinn was a poor historian who did a disservice to his readers, saying:

    In writing as or about radicals, historians owe it to their readers to include the bad with the good, the ignoble with the noble—not in the service of ‘balance’ but in the pursuit of intellectual honesty. The most regrettable aspect of Howard Zinn’s full and lusty life is not that he chose to ignore this responsibility. It is that he never seemed aware of it in the first place.

“A People’s History” is terrible history, but it is effective ideological propaganda. And when it’s the only thing students are reading, there’s no wonder that activists are taking to the streets to attack American figures of the past.

SOURCE







The weed who threw a flare into cop car during protests gets 5 years



A 23-year-old man who threw burning flares into a Portland police cruiser and the downtown Target store during May 1 protests that overran downtown Portland admitted guilt Monday and will be sentenced to five years in prison.

A local TV station aired live footage of Damion Zachary Feller hurling a flare through a shattered picture window at Target, prompting employees to run with fire extinguishers to put out a burning section of carpet. TV and cellphone cameras also caught Feller throwing a flare through the shattered window of a battered police SUV parked across the street from Target, at Southwest 10th Avenue and Morrison.

Other people clad all in black or wearing masks can be seen on the videos kicking or whacking windows of the police car seconds before Feller swoops in with the flares.

Police identified Feller as among a group of about 20 anarchists who descended on downtown as peaceful May Day protesters spoke about a variety of social issues. Officers arrested 25 people that day for vandalizing property, setting fires, throwing rocks and other violence.

Feller wasn’t arrested until two days later after officers who recognized his image from the videos spotted him on the streets of downtown.

Detectives showed him a photograph of the person who threw one of the flares and he replied: “I saw that online, and I knew I was (expletive),” according to a probable cause affidavit.

Feller admitted he was guilty and told detectives that he became part of the “mob mentality,” according to the affidavit.

On Monday, Feller offered no statements in Multnomah County Circuit Court. He wore a blue jail uniform as he stood beside his public defender, DeAnna Horne.

Feller pleaded guilty to first-degree arson, second-degree arson, riot and first-degree criminal mischief. He is scheduled to be sentenced to five years in prison during an October hearing.

He also was charged in federal court for his crimes. But as part of his plea deal, he won't be sentenced to any additional prison time.

Feller will be eligible for release from prison after four years, if he gets time off for good behavior.

Shortly after his arrest, Feller told authorities that he doesn’t talk to his family, which includes his grandmother in Longview and his parents in Colorado. He said he’d been homeless for the past year, been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and smoked marijuana daily.

He said he’s unemployed, although he occasionally picks up odd jobs through the temporary job service Labor Ready.

Feller had no history of criminal convictions, although court records show he previously had been arrested five times in Oregon, Colorado and Texas on allegations of committing nonviolent crimes or failing to appear in court. He still faces pending charges of theft and criminal trespass in Umatilla County.

SOURCE





'In other faiths we call it paedophilia': Peta Credlin slams 'feminist warriors' for failing to stand up for Muslim girls forced into arranged marriages

[Australian] Media commentator Peta Credlin has slammed feminists for failing to speak up about a Muslim man in his mid-thirties marrying a 14-year-old girl.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott's chief-of-staff is outraged at the political left's silence on child brides, less than a week after a refugee was sentenced to one year in jail for taking part in the Melbourne mosque wedding last year.

'In other faiths we call it paedophilia but not when it comes to Islam,'  she told Sky News on Tuesday night.

'Their failure to speak up for these girls is because the left's silence on the crimes of Islam trumps any voice for the victim.'

Ms Credlin's impassioned critique of left-wing feminists comes six days after Rohingya refugee Mohammad Shakir, 35, was formally jailed for one year for marrying the 14-year-old girl at the Noble Park mosque, in south-east Melbourne, on September 29, 2016.

'We shouldn't even call it child brides. These young girls are being raped by much older men under the cover of a religious ceremony against Australian law and against Australian values,' she said.

Shakir had pleaded guilty to going through with the ceremony and tearfully told the County Court of Victoria he thought he was 'rescuing' the child bride.

The criminal, who will be returned to immigration detention after his sentence, was the first man to appear before an Australian court prosecuted with marrying a child, an offence that carries a maximum penalty of five years.

Ms Credlin said it appeared the feminists, the political left and Muslim groups were more obsessed with 'so-called Islamophobia' than speaking up for child brides.

'They don't like it and they won't admit it,' she said.

'Quiet too are the many Islamic organisations that are quick to attack so-called Islamophobia but are silent non the rights of young, Muslim girls.'

Former Muslim imam Ibrahim Omerdic was spared jail last month after being found guilty of unlawfully solemnising the marriage.  He was sentenced to two months' prison, but immediately placed on a two-year recognisance release order, meaning he won't serve time in jail.

Omerdic was an imam of the Bosnian Islamic Society and Noble Park Mosque but was later sacked and had his celebrant licence revoked after his arrest last year.

SOURCE






On Political Correctness

By William Deresiewicz

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they couldn’t use expressions like “that’s a crazy idea” because they stigmatize the mentally ill. I heard a young woman tell me that she had been criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins—an act, she was informed, of cultural appropriation. I heard an adjunct instructor describe how a routine pedagogical conflict over something he had said in class had turned, when the student in question claimed to have felt “triggered,” into, in his words, a bureaucratic “dumpster fire.” He was careful now, he added, to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.

I listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it, by the “PC police”—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else regarded as members of the PC police.

I heard all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one college. And I have no reason to believe that circumstances are substantially different at other elite private institutions, and plenty of reasons not to believe it: from conversations with individuals at many schools, from my broader experience in higher education, from what I’ve read not only in the mainstream media but also in the higher education press. The situation is undoubtedly better at some places than others, undoubtedly worse at the liberal arts colleges as a whole than at the universities as a whole, but broadly similar across the board.

So this is how I’ve come to understand the situation. Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

I should mention that when I was speaking about these issues last fall with a group of students at Whitman College, a selective school in Washington State, that idea, that elite private colleges are religious institutions, is the one that resonated with them most. I should also mention that I received an email recently from a student who had transferred from Oral Roberts, the evangelical Christian university in Tulsa, to Columbia, my alma mater. The latter, he found to his surprise, is also a religious school, only there, he said, the faith is the religion of success. The religion of success is not the same as political correctness, but as I will presently explain, the two go hand in hand.

Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

Which brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation—if necessary, by censorship. It makes a perfect, dreary sense that there are speech codes, or the desire for speech codes, at selective private colleges. The irony is that conservatives don’t actually care if progressives disapprove of them, with the result that political correctness generally amounts to internecine warfare on the left: radical feminists excoriating other radical feminists for saying “vagina” instead of “front hole,” students denouncing the director of Boys Don’t Cry as a transphobic “cis white bitch” (as recently happened at Reed College), and so forth.

But the most effective form of censorship, of course, is self-censorship—which, in the intimate environment of a residential college, young adults are very quick to learn. One of the students at Whitman mentioned that he’s careful, when questioning consensus beliefs, to phrase his opinion in terms of “Explain to me why I’m wrong.” Other students— at Bard College, at the Claremont Colleges—have explained that any challenge to the hegemony of identity politics will get you branded as a racist (as in, “Don’t talk to that guy, he’s a racist”). Campus protesters, their frequent rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, are not the ones being silenced: they are, after all, not being silent. They are in the middle of the quad, speaking their minds. The ones being silenced are the ones like my students at Scripps, like the students at Whitman, like many students, no doubt, at many places, who are keeping their mouths shut. “The religion of humanity,” as David Bromwich recently wrote, “may turn out to be as dangerous as all the other religions.” .....

But so much of political correctness is not about justice or creating a safe environment; it is about power. And so much of what is taking place at colleges today reflects the way that relations of power have been reconfigured in contemporary higher education. Campus activists are taking advantage of the fact (and I suspect that a lot of them understand this intuitively, if not explicitly) that students have a lot more power than they used to. The change is the result not only of the rise of the customer-service mentality in academia, but also of the proletarianization of the faculty. Students have risen; instructors have fallen. Where once administrations worked in alliance with the faculty, were indeed largely composed of faculty, now they work against the faculty in alliance with students, a separate managerial stratum more interested in the satisfaction of its customers than the well-being of its employees.

Progressive faculty and students at selective private colleges will often say that they want to dismantle the hierarchies of power that persist in society at large. Their actions often suggest that in fact they would like to invert them. All groups are equal, but some are more equal than others.

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group.

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous.

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

And here we come to the connection between the religion of success and the religion of political correctness. Political correctness is a fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all. It provides a moral cover beneath which undergraduates can prosecute their careerist projects undisturbed. Student existence may be understood as largely separated into two non-communicating realms: campus social life (including the classroom understood as a collective space), where the enforcement of political correctness is designed to create an emotionally unthreatening environment; and the individual pursuit of personal advancement, the real business going forward. The moral commitments of the first (which are often transient in any case) are safely isolated from the second.

Political correctness and rational discourse are incompatible ideals. Forget “civility,” the quality that college deans and presidents inevitably put forth as that which needs to “balance” free expression. The call for civility is nothing more than a management tool for nervous bureaucrats, a way of splitting every difference and puréeing them into a pablum of deanly mush. Free expression is an absolute; to balance it is to destroy it.

True diversity means true disagreement. Political correctness exists at public institutions, but it doesn’t dominate them. A friend of mine who went to Columbia and Yale now teaches at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. “When you meet someone at Hunter,” she told me, “you can’t assume they see the world the same way you do.” That’s about as pithy an expression of the problem at selective private colleges as I can imagine. When you meet someone at Columbia or Yale or Scripps or Whitman or any of scores of other institutions, you absolutely can assume they see the world the same way you do. And anyone who threatens to disrupt that cozy situation must be disinvited, reeducated, or silenced. It’s no surprise that the large majority of high-profile PC absurdities take place at elite private schools like Emory or Oberlin or Northwestern.

Selective private colleges need to decide what kind of places they want to be. Do they want to be socialization machines for the upper-middle class, ideological enforcers of progressive dogma? Or do they want to be educational institutions in the only sense that really matters: places of free, frank, and fearless inquiry? When we talk about political correctness and its many florid manifestations, so much in the news of late, we are talking not only about racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, or about the coddling of privileged youth, though both are certainly at play. We are also talking, or rather not talking, about the pathologies of the American class system. And those are also what we need to deal with.

More HERE

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

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Thursday, September 28, 2017


Nashville church shooting: Masked gunman kills woman, injures seven in Antioch, police say

But no nationwide outrage from the racist media?  Unlike the shooting by Dylan Roof.  A coverup of the fact that the shooter is an immigrant from Africa?

One person was killed and eight others wounded Sunday after a masked man opened fire following a church service in Antioch.

The shooter, identified as Emanuel Kidega Samson, a 25-year-old Rutherford County man, accidentally shot himself after he was confronted by an armed member of the congregation. Samson was treated at an area hospital and was released into police custody, according to Metro Nashville Police.

Samson will be charged with one count of murder, additional charges will come later, police said. Police say he previously attended the church.

The woman killed has been identified as Melanie Crow Smith, 38. Smith was a mother who lived in Smyrna.

Police say the gunman wore a neoprene ski mask when he shot and killed Smith in the parking lot of Burnette Chapel Church of Christ, as the service ended shortly after 11 a.m.

With his blue Nissan Xterra still running, the gunman then entered the rear sanctuary doors of the church and began "indiscriminately" shooting, police said.

Among those shot were three men and three women, police spokesman Don Aaron said.

The church's minister Joey Spann, 66, and his wife, Peggy, 65, were both injured in the shooting, said Nashville Christian School in a statement on Facebook. Spann is a Bible teacher and a high school and middle school basketball coach.

Churchgoer Caleb Engle, who was hailed by police as a "hero," confronted the shooter while inside the church and was violently pistol whipped, Aaron said. During the confrontation with Engle, the gunman shot himself in the left side of his chest, Aaron said. Shortly after the shooting, the gunman was transported to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, he said.

About 42 people were inside the church at the time of the shooting, officials say. All victims, including the shooter, were taken to area hospitals.

Although congregants attempted to run away, some were shot from behind, said Rosa, who had blood on her blue dress and cell phone case. "Our church is senior people. They didn't make it out."

A spokesman for Vanderbilt University Medical Center said two of the victims are critically injured, with four others in stable condition.

After identifying the shooter, who had two pistols, police said Samson was a legal U.S. resident but not a U.S. citizen, who came from Sudan in 1996.

Although it's unclear if race or religion played a role in the shooting, authorities, including the federal Justice Department, have opened a civil rights case.

The shooting quickly sent shockwaves throughout the neighborhood. Steven Whidby, who lives about six houses from the church, said he's known the minister his whole life.

"It’s just a lil' country church," he said. "It’s just a sad day when people do something like that at a church."

SOURCE





Multiculturalist accused of raping a German woman in front of her boyfriend in terrifying knife-point attack calls her a 'prostitute' in furious courtroom outburst



A Ghanaian asylum seeker accused of raping a German woman while forcing her boyfriend to watch called his victim 'a prostitute' in court.

The man - only identified as Eric X - is accused of raping a 23-year-old woman after spotting the couple camping in a nature reserve near Bonn, west Germany in April.

Appearing in a Bonn district court today, Eric X, 32, defied his lawyers' advice to stay silent and after insulting his alleged victim, he added that anyone who believed her were 'filthy'.

The attack took place on April 2, shortly after midnight. The couple were already asleep when Eric X allegedly cut through the tarpaulin, threatened them with a tree saw and ordered them to hand over their valuables - six euros (£5.35) and a music box.

After robbing them he is said to have dragged the 23-year-old woman outside, where he raped her and forced her boyfriend, 26, to watch.

German media have reported that the boyfriend's call to police was initially considered a joke.

The suspect was arrested soon after in nearby Siegburg after a man recognised him from a composite picture of the sex attacker.

Today, Eric X.'s lawyers ordered the accused to remain silent, but according to local media his responded by shouting in court: 'Why should I remain silent, about a case where I don't know anything about?'

Eric X. said: 'If the girl claims she has been raped, she must be a prostitute. 'All who help her in the lie are filthy people.'

Lawyer Gudrun Roth, who represents the 23-year-old student, said that it is 'always a slap in the face, if someone who has experienced such a thing is mocked even further.'

Both of the victims, from Stuttgart, south-west Germany are currently undergoing psychological care as according to local media they are still heavily traumatised.

Following his arrest it emerged that the man had been served notice by the German authorities ten days before the attack, informing him he would face deportation to Italy as his asylum application had been rejected.

He arrived in Italy in January and his asylum application was immediately rejected but by then he had made the journey to Kassel in Germany.

The suspect lived for a time in asylum seeker housing accommodation in the town of Sankt Augustin, near Bonn.

But local media have questioned why he was not immediately deported.

Vanessa Nolte, of the Cologne district authorities, said: 'On 23 March he received the order, on 24th March he appealed it.'

Bonn police spokesman Robert Scholten said: 'As well as from the rape, we found a lot of DNA samples at the crime scene, which are clearly from the arrested man.'

The trial is expected to last eight days.

SOURCE






Son of Hamas Founder Shakes Up UN Human Rights Council: "If Israel Did Not Exist, You Would Have No One to Blame"

The U.N. Human Rights Council's perennial debate focusing on condemning Israel witnessed an unusual intervention Monday - a strong-worded statement in Arabic-accented English slamming not Israel but the Palestinian Authority.

Speaking for less than 90 seconds, the speaker questioned the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas's P.A., accused it of jailing and torturing its critics, and called it the "greatest enemy of the Palestinian people."

"If Israel did not exist, you would have no one to blame," he declared, concluding by accusing the P.A. of using the HRC platform "to mislead the international community, to mislead the Palestinian society to believe that Israel is responsible for the problem you create."

The speaker was Mosab Hassan Yousef, the disowned son of a founder of the Islamist terror movement Hamas, and a convert to Christianity.

Yousef's statement at the HRC in Geneva was especially striking as it came among dozens of others - by U.N. member-states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - almost universally condemning Israel.

Permanent item number seven on the HRC's agenda deals with Israel. None of the other 192 member-states of the U.N. are the subject of a country-specific agenda item. Any crisis situation occurring elsewhere in the world is covered under a general agenda item (number four), entitled "Human rights situations that require the council's attention."

This means that Israel alone is condemned every time the HRC holds a regular, three week-long session (three times a year).

In recent times Western democracies have generally boycotted the item seven debate, and the list of speakers on Monday reflected both their absence and the prominent role played at the HRC by some of the world's most autocratic regimes.

The Palestinian representative was first to speak, followed by delegates from Syria, Venezuela, Tunisia, Egypt, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Qatar, Brazil, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

Others to speak later included representatives of Iran, China, Russia, Sudan and North Korea, before more than a dozen NGO representatives made statements, most of them similarly critical of Israel.

Yousef spoke on behalf of the Geneva-based NGO U.N. Watch. His full statement is below.

In it, he challenged the P.A.'s legitimacy. Abbas' four-year mandate expired in January 2009, although his tenure was extended by decree for a year beyond that. Presidential elections scheduled for January 2010 were then postponed indefinitely, also by decree. More than seven years later, Abbas remains - in the West Bank at least - "president of the State of Palestine."

Yousef, the son of West Bank Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, was himself a Hamas member who abandoned Islam and embraced Christianity.

He secretly informed on Hamas' activities to Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency for a decade, helping to thwart a number of planned terrorist attacks. He moved to the U.S. in 2007 and was later granted political asylum. In 2010 he wrote a memoir in 2010 entitled "Son of Hamas."

U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer noted Monday that while the HRC focuses disproportionately on Israel it has no special agenda item relating to the human rights situation in Syria, Sudan, Iran, North Korea or anywhere else.

"For good reason, Western democracies once again boycotted today's debate," Neuer said.

"In the dystopian universe of George Orwell's 1984, everyone was forced to undergo a daily ‘Two Minute of Hate'. In the dystopian universe of the U.N. Human Rights Council - where Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Cuba and Venezuela are members - the built-in schedule of every session includes one day dedicated solely to spewing hate against the Jewish state."

President Trump at the U.N. General Assembly last week called the HRC "a massive source of embarrassment."

SOURCE





Smithsonian finally gives Clarence Thomas a spot in year-old African American history museum

Just in time to celebrate its first anniversary, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has included a display featuring Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative stalwarts.

Justice Thomas appears in an exhibit that was installed shortly before the one-year anniversary Sunday, a Smithsonian spokeswoman said Monday. The display honors both of the black justices who ascended to the pinnacle of the legal profession. The other is Thurgood Marshall.

Justice Thomas’ apparent omission irked conservative observers, who suspected an ideological bias among Smithsonian officials and called for the influential jurist’s inclusion in the museum.
SEE ALSO: Clarence Thomas snubbed by Smithsonian’s new African American history museum

Ronald D. Rotunda, distinguished professor of jurisprudence at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University, said Justice Thomas deserves to be recognized for his contributions to constitutional jurisprudence, his record of public service and his inspirational life story.

“Like Thurgood Marshall, he has been a very influential justice, and like Thurgood Marshall, he has risen from humble beginnings,” Mr. Rotunda said. “His father left him, his grandparents raised him. The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. turned him to the law. He left a successful corporate law practice and turned to public service. That path led him to the Supreme Court.”

Mr. Rotunda said it’s “surprising that it has taken so long” for the museum to acknowledge such a “seminal figure on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Linda St. Thomas, chief spokeswoman for the Smithsonian Institution, said the exhibit includes a picture of Justice Thomas, the cover of Jet magazine on which he appeared in 1991 and the inscription, “Clarence Thomas: From Seminary School to Supreme Court.”

She said the museum is “evolving and other things will change over time.”

The Smithsonian faced an intense backlash last year over Justice Thomas’ absence from the museum. Although the museum failed to make mention of the second black man to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, it found considerable space to recognize the Black Panthers, hip-hop and the Black Lives Matter movement. Even a pin reading “I Believe Anita Hill,” the woman who accused Justice Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearing, was included.

Congressional Republicans introduced resolutions in December asking the museum to recognize the “historical importance” of Justice Thomas. Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, penned a letter to the Smithsonian saying he was “deeply disturbed” by the snub.

The controversy boiled over again last month, when museum curators said gear worn by Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who refused to stand for the national anthem before football games last year, would be put on display.

The exclusion of Justice Thomas was a blemish on an otherwise beloved museum. The Smithsonian’s 19th and most popular institution, the National Museum of African American History and Culture far exceeded attendance expectations, attracting nearly 3 million people in its first year.

“We expected 4,000 people a day,” founding director Lonnie Bunch told The Associated Press. “We get 8,000 people a day, so I can’t complain about a thing.”

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

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Wednesday, September 27, 2017






We're just too clever to find a boyfriend! It may sound insufferably smug, but these women say their high intellect means they struggle to meet someone

There is some truth and a lot of mistaken assumptions below. Men are less keen on going to university these days because that is no longer where the money is.  Tradesmen such as electricians and plumbers are the high income earners these days. So for a woman to find a man with similar interests and background is difficult. 

But it always was.  Traditionally women were interested in clothes and babies while men were interested in cars and beer. Interests in common have never been a major factor in  male/female pairings and it is foolish to expect it.

And the women described below have, if anything, accentuated that difference.  They all seem to have done do-gooder studies of some sort. That fits a woman's biological role as a carer but it is not a biological role for a male and is more likely to put men off than elicit approval.  And for a women to have done feminist studies is worst of all.  That would send most men running.  Feminism is just too hostile to them.

And the claim below that a brainy background is uniquely handicapping to women is an example of how identity-conscious people routinely assign to their identity something that is not identity related at all. 

Take the example of blacks.  Everyone experiences social exclusion and disapproval of some sort for all sorts of reasons but a black will often attribute all such disapproval to his blackness when it may have many other causes -- such as his excessive self-esteem.

And it is true that a highly educated person will be somewhat isolated by that.  But such isolation happens to MEN TOO.  When I used to go to parties many years ago, I would have two answers ready to the usual "what do you do for a living" question.  At that time I was a university lecturer but also drove taxis part time for a bit of extra money. 

If I replied to the party question "I am a university lecturer", the space around me would clear within minutes.  Nobody wanted to talk to me.  On other occasions I would reply "I am a taxi driver".  That was a great social success.  Everybody would want to talk to me about taxi drivers they had met etc.  So the ladies below should stop being sexist about what is in fact normal social segregation. They are feeling unreasonably aggrieved and grievance has its own problems.

The focus on conversation is one I share but it is not necessarily wise.  In Australia the population is about 5% Han Chinese so there are a lot of short little Asian young ladies about.  And they HATE being shorter than almost anyone else around.  So they are determined to have taller children.  But the only way to do that is to get a tall man.  But the tall men are almost all Caucasians.  So that is what the little ladies go for. So it is common out and about where I live to see little Asian ladies on the arms of tall Caucasian  men.

So how come those Asian ladies can get a man  when the ladies below cannot?  Simple. Asian ladies don't want to know what the men think of Mr Trump or social issues generally.  They just want to know what he wants and do their best to give it to him.  And that suits the men.  Asian ladies tend to come across as very feminine and their obliging nature makes the man think he has hit the jackpot.  So there will be a lot of Eurasian children about in Australia before long.

So are there any lessons from that for the bereft ladies below?  There is a BIG lesson.  It is relationships that matter not your hobbies -- intellectual or otherwise.  Concentrate on people before all else and you will do well.  You might even find that "dumb" electrician to be a nice guy who will keep you in style.  And you can have your specialized conversations with your friends.

That's roughly what I do.  As a much published Ph.D. academic and as someone who ran Sydney Mensa for a number of years, I am betting that I have even greater difficulty than the ladies below in finding similarly qualified women to relate to. I never have.  So I don't try.  I seek and find women with a good heart and have my specialized conversations mostly with my son.

What I have just said runs hard against what women are mostly told these days but it is also traditional wisdom. And what has worked for thousands of years may have something to be said for it.



For Natasha Hooper, the most important part of pre-date preparation isn’t getting her hair done, waxing her legs or buying a new dress.

Instead, she is more preoccupied with composing a list of conversational topics which she hopes will bridge the gap between her highbrow preoccupations, and the more mainstream interests of her dates.

Waiting in a bar for a young man a few weeks ago, she ran through possible options, before settling on the subject of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A surefire way, the 22-year-old undergraduate reasoned, to guarantee an interesting debate.

Yet while the 30-year-old office worker who sat down in front of her was handsome, polite and smartly-dressed, the minute Natasha brought up the Labour leader’s policies, any spark of attraction was extinguished. ‘When I mentioned Jeremy Corbyn he said: “Who’s that?” I couldn’t believe it,’ says Natasha.

After 90 minutes discussing what she describes as ‘benign’ subjects, such as reality TV and football, Natasha made her excuses and left, no closer to finding Mr Right.

With long dark hair, big brown eyes and a stunning Size 8 figure, Natasha — entering her final year at Goldsmiths, University of London — has no problem attracting male attention.

The issue, she explains, is the calibre of men she attracts. ‘I’m not claiming to be Albert Einstein, but I can’t seem to meet a man I find intellectually stimulating,’ she says. Nor is she the only well-educated young woman who says she is too clever to find love.

Indeed, she is one of a growing breed of women who fear — perhaps with good reason — they will be left on the proverbial shelf because of a shortage of educated men.

Recent figures from the university admissions service UCAS showed that 30,000 more women than men are starting degree courses in the UK. On A-level results day last month, 133,280 British women aged 18 secured a university place compared with 103,800 men of the same age.

The effects of this carry over into the workplace, where women aged from 22 to 29 typically now earn £1,111 more a year than their male peers.

This growing gulf between male and female attainment — the result, many believe, of the feminisation of the education system, with more female teachers, less physical exercise and an emphasis on the arts — is having troubling repercussions when it comes to relationships.

A recent study found more than 90 per cent of predominantly graduate women surveyed were delaying motherhood not to pursue careers, but because they couldn’t find a suitable man.

Some were so despairing they were considering freezing their eggs as an insurance policy.

Put simply, it is an oversupply of educated females. In China, they are called ‘leftover’ women.

‘It sounds cold and callous, but in demographic terms it’s true. There are not enough graduates for them,’ said the study’s author Marcia Inhorn, professor of anthropology at Yale University.

The upshot? Frustrated young women terrified of being left single and childless — and men driven by a sense of inadequacy.

‘Men may claim to want educated women, but don’t know how to deal with those they meet and some say they’re intimidated by me,’ says Natasha, who grew up in Birmingham and is single after breaking up with her boyfriend this year.

‘I feel I’m hitting a brick wall.’

Like many arts degrees, her media and communications course is dominated by female students, and Natasha claims the few male undergraduates ‘lack the intellectual maturity to handle conversations’.

‘One cancelled our date four times because he was too busy getting drunk. In class, their conversations centre around going to gigs and smoking weed at weekends, which is not what I’m looking for in a date.’

She prefers instead to date older men she meets through her part-time job as a nightclub promoter.

Yet even more mature men fail to show the requisite enthusiasm for her university projects — which include a radio documentary she recently produced on ‘the pressure that black women are under to adhere to white beauty stereotypes’.

One can imagine how such a topic could be a little alienating to many men, and Natasha herself admits ‘there’s only so much I can talk about my own interests without sounding patronising.’

She says that men often try to change the subject matter back to lads’ nights outs, holidays and sporting hobbies.

‘I’ll always listen to be polite, but superficial, self-indulgent conversation is an immediate red flag,’ she says.

Since the breakdown of her most recent relationship, with a DJ ten years her senior, Natasha has had a handful of dates, but declined to take things further.

‘Afterwards I’ll text to say our conversations weren’t flowing in the right direction. Most accept it although one, a company director, went on the defensive, saying I thought I was a princess,’ says Natasha.

‘I think he had anger issues.’ British women began to ‘catch up’ with men’s educational attainment levels in the Sixties, when larger numbers entered universities, but only recently have the roles been dramatically reversed, with men falling behind at an alarming rate.

‘In the Sixties there was a gendered way of pushing female graduates into jobs such as teaching and nursing,’ says Nichi Hodgson, author of The Curious History Of Dating: From Jane Austen To Tinder.

‘And only 20 or 30 years ago a man wanted his female partner to be smart because the assumption was that she would be the primary carer, staying at home to raise their children, who would then absorb her intellect.’

But now women are competing with men for the same careers — there are more female junior doctors than male, for example, while nearly two-thirds of practising lawyers in Scotland under 40 are women — their achievements have become more problematic.

‘Smart women raise the issue of who would take time off when they have children,’ says Hodgson. ‘After all, why should a female partner stop working if she’s studied hard for her career?

‘The reality is that with women getting more — and better — degrees, in the next ten to 20 years women will be smarter than men, in terms of how well they’re educated. And I don’t think men are ready for this.’

This is no surprise to Becca Porter, who graduated last year from Manchester University with a joint honours degree in history and sociology, and is now starting a masters in disability studies at Leeds University.

‘The sense of achievement I derive from learning seems alien to most men,’ says Becca, 23. ‘At school I wasn’t bothered about boys, but I’m at the stage where I’d like to share my life with someone.’

With a working-class upbringing — Becca’s mother is an activities co-ordinator and her father an engineer — Becca was not only the first in her family to go to university, but an anomaly among her male peers in Burnley, Lancashire.

Among those from poorer backgrounds, the gender divide is highly pronounced, with young women who were on free school meals 51 per cent more likely to go into higher education than men in similar circumstances.

‘The boys at my school mostly went into manual jobs after we left and seemed to think I had a high opinion of myself for going to university,’ says Becca. ‘They say I’m too bright for them.’

Becca recalls a factory worker she asked out in a bar while home for the holidays turning her down because she was ‘too clever’ for him.

‘We were having a great chat until he found out I was at university,’ says Becca. ‘I insisted I wasn’t too clever for him and he agreed to go on a shopping trip together for our first date.

‘But it was awful. I think he felt I should lead the conversation, so he barely spoke and I felt too awkward to say anything.’

Her longest relationship was with a car mechanic from Burnley last year. It lasted a few weeks.

‘He thought I viewed myself as a big shot,’ says Becca, who admits she found him ‘monosyllabic’.

‘Our conversations were mundane. When I tried to start an informed discussion — about religion or terrorism, for example — he had no idea how to react.

‘He didn’t understand that my degree meant I had a head full of information and when I asked him about his work all he could muster was that it had been “fine”.

‘In any case, there’s only so much you can talk about when you do the same job every day.’

Andrea Gould, 41, has two degrees and says her intellect has prevented her from finding love and having the family she longed for

In the event, Becca ended the relationship because, she says, he was always at work — an unfortunate fact of life many of us might sympathise with, but one Becca intends to put off for much of her 20s by doing a PhD in disability research after her masters.

She has dated around eight men in total — all non-graduates.

‘I know deep down they didn’t see me as relatable,’ she says. ‘I get the impression they’d rather date a girl without a degree. They don’t know how to react to my different life experiences and see my education as a barrier.’

So why doesn’t Becca date fellow students? Because, she says, of the class divide.

‘The few boys I met at university came from middle-class families in which a degree was expected of them,’ she explains. ‘They weren’t generally interested in their studies, whereas my degree was a big deal — I was there to learn.’

She acknowledges some of her degree subjects were a bit ‘out there’ — they included gender and sexuality in Africa and reproduction in new medical technology — but adds: ‘It was hurtful that men didn’t want to talk about them.

‘One date found the fact I studied from a feminist perspective offputting. Most mistakenly assume I hate men.’

Many believe the growing number of casualties from the intellectual chasm will be educated women in their 30s and 40s, who’ve failed to find men they deem their equal and are running out of time to start a family.

Andrea Gould, 41, from Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, has two degrees and says her intellect has prevented her from finding love and having the family she longed for.

‘Being an A-grade student has been an obstacle as much as a blessing. It has limited my choices in men,’ she says.

During both her degrees — she first studied English and German at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, then social policy at the same university for an extra ‘challenge’ — she claims male students fell into two camps. ‘There were geeky types into computer games, and leery lads who just wanted to drink and were intimidated by my studious nature,’ she recalls. ‘I didn’t want to be around either.’

Throughout her 20s and 30s Andrea — who worked as a foreign languages teacher before setting up an online furniture store — struggled to find anyone suitable.

Her longest relationship, for two years, was in her mid-30s with a musician. It ended because she disapproved of his use of cannabis.

‘Since then I’ve used online dating and tried to date only those who specified a similar level of education on their profile,’ she says.

‘But we had nothing in common. Men think I’m too serious. I want to talk about psychology and literature — they’re obsessed with UFOs and Harry Potter. Perhaps I’m too fussy, but I’m bored within an hour.’

Dr Elle Boag, a social psychologist at Birmingham City University, says: ‘More women graduate with the expectation of being challenged by conversation in a romantic context as well as in their careers. ‘This in turn can be intimidating for men, who often feel belittled by women who’ve outgrown them.’

For her part, Andrea insists that scintillating conversation isn’t too much to ask for. ‘I’m not after a man with money or a high-powered career, just someone to have an intellectual conversation with.

‘But I’m running out of time to start a family and that gives me a sense of emptiness.’

The solution, perhaps, for Andrea and the growing number of women in her situation, could be to master the art of compromise.

After all, as Dr Boag puts it: ‘A degree might make you think differently, but it doesn’t make you a better person. As women continue to excel, many might be better off exercising a bit more humility.’

SOURCE






Research Into ‘Non-PC’ Transgender Surgery Regret Blocked by British University

A British University has blocked an academic studying a reported surge in people regretting transgender surgery, claiming a “social media” backlash to the “politically incorrect” research could harm the institution.

Bath Spa University stopped Psychotherapist James Caspian from examining cases of people who had surgery to reverse a “gender reassignment” after finding they regretted the decision.

Mr. Caspian, 58, a councilor of 16 years who has specialized in and worked with transgender issues for years, slammed the institution for failing to respect “the most basic tenets of academic and intellectual freedom of inquiry”.

“The fundamental reason given was that it might cause criticism of the research on social media and criticism of the research would be criticism of the University and they also added it was better not to offend people,” he told BBC Radio 4.

Adding: “I was astonished at that decision. I think a University exists to encourage discussion, research, dissent even, challenging ideas that are out of date or not particularly useful.”

He pointed out that studies of the percentage of people regretting “transitioning” their gender ranged from a couple of per cent to 20 per cent, and said new research was needed as attitudes changed and practitioners observed a rise in those reversing surgery.

The university initially approved his research, but after he proposed finding more participants online and sent his ideas to the ethics sub-committee for clearance, he was told: “engaging in a potentially politically incorrect piece of research carries a risk to the University”.

“Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university,” university authorities added, The Times reports. “The posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university.”

Opponents of transgender ideology have claimed the transgender lobby is aggressive and even violent in its attempts to promote transgenderism and silence criticism, and some feminist campaigners have been physically attacked by trans activists.

“It’s ridiculous. I’m in my late fifties, I’m an expert in my field and I’m not even on social media. I’m not frightened at all. Asking questions is not a hate crime,” Mr. Caspian complained.

Continuing: “Where would stand the reputation of a university that cannot follow the most basic tenets of academic and intellectual freedom of inquiry?”

Bath Spa University said it was unable to comment while Mr. Caspian’s complaint was being investigated.

So-called “gender identity clinics” in the UK have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people claiming to be transgendered in recent years, with referrals shooting up by several hundred per cent at some.

In 2015, the National Health Service increased its budget for “treating” the transgendered to £22.72 million a year, up from £17.13 million.

SOURCE





The NFL's Worst Fumble Yet

President Donald Trump tapped into the sentiment of the vast majority of Americans over the weekend, and the Leftmedia hate him for it. "Trump turns sports into a political battleground," headlined The Washington Post, as if athletes, coaches, owners and commentators hadn't already politicized sports. What Trump did do was give voice from the most powerful bully pulpit in the land to what many Americans already think: Athletes who make millions of dollars each year to entertain us on the field should not spit in the face of our great nation by disrespecting the national anthem before games. Take the activism off the field.

"Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b—h off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's fired!' " Trump said Friday. "You know, some owner is going to do that. He's going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he's fired.' And that owner, they don't know it [but] they'll be the most popular person in this country." Trump made other similar comments throughout the weekend.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell responded with a complete lack of self-awareness: "Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities." It is the NFL that is allowing divisiveness and "an unfortunate lack of respect" for our country to be showcased every Sunday.

"Roger Goodell of NFL just put out a statement trying to justify the total disrespect certain players show to our country," Trump responded on Twitter. "Tell them to stand!"

The reaction in the NFL was predictable. Many more players joined the anthem protests, taking knees and locking arms. Even a couple of owners joined in. One instance that stood out was the Pittsburgh Steelers, who didn't take the field at all until after the national anthem — except for Steelers offensive tackle and former Army Ranger Alejandro Villanueva. "This We'll Defend" is the U.S. Army motto, and he upheld it with honor. For his part, coach Mike Tomlin was critical ... of Villanueva. "I was looking for 100 percent participation. We were gonna be respectful of our football team," he complained of Villanueva standing alone. Tomlin hoped to avoid controversy by skipping the anthem entirely, he claimed, but we'll bet his Rust Belt fan base sees it differently. The same goes for the Tennessee Titans and Seattle Seahawks, who skipped the "Star-Spangled Banner."

Worse, the Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars took their protest to London, where they disrespected our nation and flag on foreign soil. Yet they stood for the UK's anthem, "God Save the Queen." God save the one who can't see why that's outrageous.

Of course, it all started last year when Colin Kaepernick, who was abandoned by his black parents, then adopted and raised by a loving white couple, complained, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color." Leftists made Kaepernick a hero for his, er, stand, and then a martyr when no team would pick up the struggling quarterback and his following media circus.

Two weeks ago, ahead of the 9/11 attack observance, former Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown criticized the Browns team and Kaepernick for disrespecting our country: "I'm going to give you the real deal. I'm an American. I don't desecrate my flag and my national anthem. I'm not gonna do anything against the flag and the national anthem. ... This is my country, and I'll work out the problems, but I'll do it in an intelligent manner."

That is the "real deal," and the Browns got off their knees, but apparently there are still a lot of petulant overpaid adolescent athletes who think NFL fans are buying their fake celebrity indignation.

As The Wall Street Journal put it, "Americans don't begrudge athletes their free-speech rights — see the popularity of Charles Barkley — but disrespecting the national anthem puts partisanship above a symbol of nationhood that thousands have died for. Players who chose to kneel shouldn't be surprised that fans around the country booed them on Sunday." Millions more aren't booing — they're just tuning out.

And while the media blame this all on Trump, all he did was represent Americans fed up with the Left's political garbage.

SOURCE





Same-sex marriage supporter's racist rant

A SAME-sex marriage supporter has been captured on video in an expletive-ridden rant against a “Vote No” campaigner in Sydney.

The clip, which has now gone viral on Facebook after it amassed more than 53,000 views, shows a young man pointing his finger yelling, “It’s people like you in the country, are what are bringing this f**king country down.”

It comes after a group of “No” campaigners were handing out ‘It’s OK to vote No’ pamphlets at Chatswood on Sydney’s North Shore.

Shocked bystanders watched as the man said, “You’ve come here, we’ve accepted you into this country.”

When a woman hit back saying “we’ve accepted you into this country too” the man fired up saying “I’m Australian — my parents are Australian. I’m not being racist! I’ve got Aboriginal family. I’m not being racist at all.”

“You’re just being a f**king d***head by voting ‘No’. F*** you. F*** you. Respect people’s rights you gronk,” he yelled as he walked off.

A social media user uploaded the footage to the public on Facebook with the caption, “Your weekly dose of tolerance.”

“This man approached one of our team members and started yelling,” he wrote online.

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

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Tuesday, September 26, 2017


Is multiculturalism destructive?

Bill Berotti

Yes, almost always. I am in favor of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-racial society but only as long as that society is not moving towards becoming multicultural.

And I am especially not in favor of the kind of multiculturalism that is nothing but a very transparent mask worn by people who, for one reason or another, feel an inexplicable need to express their hostility towards a dominant Western culture which, for the most part, has gotten things right, as evidenced by how many people are desperate to live here and how few seem desperate to leave.

People should of course feel free to be different, and I think these differences should be respected and even appreciated -- but not necessarily celebrated at a time when the core values and history of Western Civilization are coming under attack.

Unless I hear some good arguments to the contrary, it seems to me that multiculturalism is the very opposite of the kind of assimilation that allowed a country (or entire civilization) to feel as though they were one people, and that the proponents of multiculturalism are not, as they allege, bringing people together in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect but are instead driving us further apart with consequences that, though difficult to accurately predict, may nonetheless prove catastrophic.

If the critics of Western Civilization who claim that the West is intolerant and chauvinistic continue to grow, and if their voices continue to scream above those who disagree with them, these critics will soon get what they claim they fear.

SOURCE





France Apparently Has A Problem With Macho Men

French President Emmanuel Macron is planning to put an end to a big problem in France. No, it’s not terrorism. It’s the French “macho culture.”

According to Macron and his Gender Equality cabinet member Marlene Schiappa, French men are too manly. They’ve become so dangerous that women don’t feel safe dressing or walking how they please.

Which is surprising, as most French men and women dress alike. Gender equality at its finest.

Macron says French men can expect to be punished for cat calling women and asking for their numbers if the law goes through.

It’s pretty easy to see why some might think France is overly macho. It’s nearly impossible to carry a gun, lawmakers want to fine professional sports teams and political parties if they don’t meet a certain quota of female members, and the country has virtually open borders.

These poor 120 lb. French guys frolicking around in skinny jeans and blowing kisses to women from across the street are getting a bad rap. They’re not the problem.

The real problem in France is that they serve terrorism on a baguette and call it diversity.

While French men are legislated into helplessness, the country’s growing population of predominately Muslim immigrants have sectioned off areas of “no go zones” in big cities. These pockets aren’t made to assimilate and they surely aren’t told to be less macho. They’re notorious as one of France’s leading exporters of jihadists.

But it’s the French guys asking for a woman’s number that are the real problem.

SOURCE






Antifa -- America's Taliban

As columnist Charles Krauthammer once pointed out, one the first acts of the Taliban in Afghanistan was to blow up centuries-old statues of Buddha carved in a mountain cliff. They did it not because they were built by the United States or Israel or represented Western colonialism. They did it because they represented civilization and culture and ideas that were different than their own.

Today statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and other “racist” figures, with the exception of statues of the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a KKK “Grand Kleagle”, are the new statues of Buddha and the black masked Antifa thugs that confronted those white nationalists at Charlottesville are the new Taliban. President Trump was right to say “both sides” were at fault at Charlottesville, including the Black Lives Matter and Antifa mobs that showed up in black ninja outfits complete with shields and blunt instruments. Ironically, Trump’s words after Charlottesville, clear enough for those not already hating Trump, were more than enough for Susan Bro, mother of Charlottesville victim Heather Hyer:

The mother of the woman killed at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., thanked President Trump on Monday after he spoke out against hate groups for their role in the weekend’s violence.

“Thank you, President Trump, for those words of comfort and for denouncing those who promote violence and hatred,” Susan Bro said in a statement, according to NBC News.
Antifa is a domestic terrorist group which, like the Taliban, wants to erase history and any national ideology that challenges their own virulent and violent ideology. They are, like their Taliban and brown shirt brethren, nihilists, bent on destroying anything that does not fit their jaundiced world view.

The violent presence of Antifa at Charlottesville was typified by the assault on a black conservative student at a Charlottesville vigil for Heather Heyer, who was killed during the violence:

A black student says he was assaulted over the weekend at a vigil for the victims of the Charlottesville protests because of his conservative beliefs.

Caleb Slater, the president of the Ithaca College Republicans in New York, was wearing a Young America’s Foundation hat at a Sunday evening vigil for Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed when a suspected white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville on Saturday.

The vigil was organized by the Syracuse, New York, chapter of Black Lives Matter.

When masked members of the militant-left group Antifa saw Mr. Slater, they approached him, asked him about his hat, told him to leave and attacked him.

He said his assailants grabbed him by his clothes, choked him with his camera strap and pushed him into the street.
A new report shows that even the Obama administration was aware of this violent group as it participated in and eve precipitated violence at places lik Berkeley and at Trump for President rallies:

Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.

Since well before the Aug. 12 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly, DHS has been issuing warnings about the growing likelihood of lethal violence between the left-wing anarchists and right-wing white supremacist and nationalist groups.

Previously unreported documents disclose that by April 2016, authorities believed that “anarchist extremists” were the primary instigators of violence at public rallies against a range of targets. They were blamed by authorities for attacks on the police, government and political institutions, along with symbols of “the capitalist system,” racism, social injustice and fascism, according to a confidential 2016 joint intelligence assessment by DHS and the FBI.

After President Donald Trump’s election in November, the antifa activists locked onto another target — his supporters, especially those from white supremacist and nationalist groups suddenly turning out in droves to hail his victory, support crackdowns on immigrants and Muslims and to protest efforts to remove symbols of the Confederacy.
Don’t expect this to be broadcast widely by the likes of CNN and MSNBC as they ignore the spread of Antifa into a national infestation of anarchy and violence. Recently the Daily Caller documented the spread of Antifa’s cancer to Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy:

An armed Antifa group is launching a new cell in Philadelphia, with support from the “alt-left” alternative media.

The group currently hosts anti-police workshops called “Our Enemies in Blue.” The group draws inspiration from convicted murderers and calls for violence against the police, theft of goods, and armed insurrection.

Antifa websites like It’s Going Down, Sub.Media and Insurrection News have been promoting the group, which calls itself the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, calling on their readers to donate to a Fundrazr account for the creation of the new cell….

Taking pride in the “legacy” of “Philadelphia’s rich revolutionary tradition,” RAM cites Mumia Abu Jamal, the Black Panther activist who shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981.

It also cites Russell Shoats, who shot a police officer in the back five times in 1970. Similar to Antifa, the actions of the Black Panthers have been described as having a “very undefined purpose of assaulting police officers.”
Looking for white nationalist under every bed has replaced the fruitless search for colluding Russians under those beds But there is a real and growing threat being ignored, or perhaps being silently encouraged, by the liberal media. It is Antifa, the American Taliban, which reared its ugly and violent head at Charlottesville.

SOURCE





A Nation of Sheep: Understanding England and the English

You see, we are an extraordinarily nationalist people. Our nationalism, however, doesn’t cause us to hate foreigners. Instead – and this applies also, and indeed particularly to Americans – we don’t hate you: we just feel sorry for you.

But I’ll not patronise you this morning. I’ll even avoid telling you the truth – that, in the development of our modern civilisation, two great nations have the greatest honour: England and Germany; and that, of these two, England is by far the greatest. What I will do is confess what you must have noticed for yourself – that something has gone badly wrong in England. Exactly when the rot began is a subject that would require far longer to discuss than the time given to me this morning. But you can see the earliest plain evidence of national derangement when the Princess of Wales died in 1997. I watched in horror as the mountains of flowers piled up, and as the funeral was made into a carnival of insanity.

The examples have multiplied beyond counting. I won’t give examples of the multicultural frenzy. Instead, I’ll talk about the sexual mania.

First, there is the legal privileging of homosexuality. In doing this, I speak with much security. I began denouncing the laws constraining homosexual conduct when I was a schoolboy – at a time when what I was saying might have got me roughed up in the playground, and certainly got me funny looks from other boys and teachers alike. I also wrote one of the earliest and best analyses of the Spanner Case. Since then, though, persecution has given way to privilege.

Take, for example, the case of the Rev. Alan Clifford, Pastor of the Norwich Reformed Church. A few months ago, the Norwich Gay Pride organisation held a rally in the middle of Norwich. Dr Clifford and four members of his congregation attended and handed out leaflets of the usual kind. Afterwards, he sent the leaflets out to everyone on his mailing list. This now included the leaders of Norwich Gay Pride. They complained to the police, and Dr Clifford was visited in his home by the police. They told him that a homophobic hate crime had taken place, and gave him the choice of confessing, in which case he would be given a police caution and made to pay a £90 fine, or of denying guilt, in which case he might be prosecuted.

Not surprisingly, Dr Clifford chose to deny his guilt. If the authorities ever do take him to court, they will probably get a bloody nose. Dr Clifford is a Calvinist. His sort drove Catholicism out of England in the sixteenth century, and pulled down the Stuart state in the seventeenth. He will turn up in court with the Bible in his hand and speak to a public gallery filled with his congregation. But his example is important as illustration. There is a regular persecution of Christian   street preachers in England. There are new cases several times a year.

The next example is of the Late Jimmy Saville. During his lifetime, he was adored by the media for his charity work and his public eccentricity. When he died in 2011, enough hot air about him went up to fill a balloon. Then, in 2012, it came out that his sexual taste had been for pubescent girls. The media went hysterical. His family joined in. Early in 2013, his grave stone was torn up, its inscription ground smooth, and then smashed into small pieces and taken off for landfill.

I suggest this is evidence of great mental derangement. It is certainly unEnglish. The custom so far has for the dead to be left to rest in peace.

These are two examples of the madness that has gripped England. Of course, the madness is not universal. If you look at the continuing popularity of Gary Glitter, it seems that many people – perhaps the majority – do not partake of the madness. But it can be seen in every organised area of our national life.

What is the cause? The answer is complex. There is no single cause. But one cause worth exploring is the unbalancing of our Constitution during the twentieth century.

In 1908, Rudyard Kipling published a short story called The Mother Hive. In this, the bees in a hive decide to drop all outmoded ideas of hierarchy and to make everyone equal. This includes the right of workers to eat royal jelly and to mate with the drones. In the spreading chaos that results, traditionalist dissidents are first shunned and then murdered. Eventually, the bee keeper looks into the hive, and sees the empty honeycombs and the horribly deformed offspring of the workers. His response is to poison all the bees.

Now, something like this has happened in England. In the past few generations, the whole of national life has been taken over by the cultural Marxists. They run government and the administration, and the law, and education and the media, and business too. They have imposed on us a nasty hegemonic discourse. Cultural Marxism is ultimately to be traced to European thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School. But this has come to England in American clothing. It has prestige because it was taken up by the American universities.

In America, however, the progress of cultural Marxism has been resisted, or slowed, by a strong religious right and by a written constitution that it is taking a long time to subvert. Here, we have no religious right, nor an entrenched constitutional law. In the past, freedom and common sense were safeguarded by an hereditary land-owing aristocracy and gentry. These ran the country, and did much to determine its moral tone. During the twentieth century, they were marginalised and then eliminated from government. They remain as a class – still very rich – but the tacit deal since at least the 1940s has been that they will be left alone, so long as they keep out of politics. Government has been left to middle class lefties. The effect followed the cause only after several generations. But here it is.

It may be interesting for you, as foreigners, to learn an answer to the implied question in the title of this speech. But it is essential for the English to think about the question and its answers. You see, like both the Germans and the Russians, we have had a revolution. Unlike them, we have had no obviously revolutionary event. The Russians had the storming of the Winter Palace and the murder of their Royal Family. The Germans were utterly defeated in 1945. Their cities were bombed flat. Their country was occupied and divided. Every German knows either that German history came to an end in 1945, or at least that a new chapter in German history had begun.

We do not have that awareness, and it would be useful for us to understand, even so, that we are living in a state of revolution. England has become the Mother Hive.

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

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Monday, September 25, 2017



'Handmaid's Tale' Lunacy
   
Donald Trump, much to his chagrin, never won an Emmy for “The Apprentice,” but he can now take indirect credit for a clutch of the awards.

The Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale” won eight Emmys on Sunday night, a sweep fueled, in part, by the widely accepted belief in liberal America that the show tells us something about the Trump era.

Based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, the series depicts a misogynist dystopia. Christian fundamentalists have established a theocracy that — after an environmental debacle craters the birth rate — forces fertile women, called handmaids, into sexual slavery.

Set in contemporary America, the show combines the atmosphere of “The Scarlet Letter” with “1984.” It is bleak, plodding, heavy-handed and occasionally gripping. What has given it extra oomph is the trope that it is relevant to Trump’s America. This is a staple of the commentary, and everyone involved in the show’s production pushes the notion.

According to Atwood, people woke up after Trump’s election “and said we’re no longer in a fantasy fiction.” The series is indeed highly relevant — as a statement on the fevered mind of progressives.

The president doesn’t want to impose his traditional sexual morality because, for starters, he doesn’t have any to impose. His critics are mistaking a thrice-married real estate mogul who has done cameos in Playboy videos and extensive interviews on “The Howard Stern Show” with Cotton Mather. He isn’t censorious; he’s boorish.

“I thought this could be a great cautionary tale,” director Reed Morano says of the show. “We don’t think about how women are treated in other countries as much as we should, and I guess I thought this would raise awareness.” Fair enough. “The Handmaid’s Tale” does have something to tell us about, say, Saudi Arabia. But, in an uncomfortable fact for Christian-fearing feminists, none of the world’s women-hating theocracies are Christian.

Elisabeth Moss, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of handmaid Offred, warns of “things happening with women’s reproductive rights in our own country that make me feel like this book is bleeding over into reality.”

What this means is that Republicans want to defund the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and roll back Obamacare’s contraception mandate. If they succeed, this would mean less government intervention in matters of sexual morality, rather than more.

The progressive mind is unable to process that it has won the culture war in a rout (except for abortion, where conservatives are trying to chip away at our extremely liberal laws at the margins). We live in a country where Christian bakers get harried by government for politely declining to bake cakes for gay weddings, yet progressives still believe we are a few steps away from enslaving women.

For sheer obtuseness, it’s hard to beat executive producer Bruce Miller’s comment about a protest scene from the show that has been compared to the anti-Trump Women’s March. “You’re seeing exactly the same signs,” he told Vanity Fair, “exactly the same images, and you’re also seeing Capitol police with guns, not firing them, thank God, but it’s the same image.”

Actually, it’s the opposite image. There’s a vast difference between the forces of a totalitarian state crushing a protest, as happens in the show, and police maintaining the peace during a demonstration in a robustly free country, as occurred right here in Donald Trump’s USA.

According to Atwood: “If you’re going to get women back into the home, which some people still firmly believe is where they belong, how would you do that? All you have to do is remove the rights and freedoms that [women] have fought for and accumulated over the [past] 200 years.”

Yeah, that’s all you have to do. Atwood doesn’t explain who, straw men aside, actually wants to do this, or how they’d go about it. She wrote a book that, despite her intentions, has become a cautionary tale about how sophisticated people lose their minds.

SOURCE





I’m a Descendant of Holocaust Survivors. Why I’m Appalled at the Comparison of Christian Bakers to Nazis

It’s November 1938, and the Nazis have confiscated a silk factory owned by the same Jewish family for over a decade, arresting the owner.

Fast forward to 2014, and a state official has compared a Colorado Christian baker to the same group that took away what belonged to the Jewish silk factory owner—the father of my grandmother’s cousin, Godofredo.

This in a country founded by people who fled religious persecution.

While America, the country that mostly turned away Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler, is thankfully not on a course to repeat the Holocaust’s atrocities, some of its citizens have taken to comparing matters of individual freedom—such as a baker refusing to make a same-sex wedding cake—to the actions that led to the deaths of 11 million people, including 6 million Jews and 1.5 million children.

Colorado Civil Rights Commissioner Diann Rice said, “Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust.”

Especially as the grandson of Holocaust survivors, my message for Rice and for those who make religious liberty comparisons to the Shoah is simple: Stop it.

The late Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust, warned against comparisons like this. He said: "Only Auschwitz was Auschwitz. I went to Yugoslavia when reporters said that there was a Holocaust starting there. There was genocide, but not an Auschwitz. When you make a comparison to the Holocaust it works both ways, and soon people will say what happened in Auschwitz was “only what happened in Bosnia.”

Apply that logic to the case of Colorado baker Jack Phillips: Only Auschwitz was Auschwitz.

I went to Colorado where a baker refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. I personally think it’s a shame, but it’s a private business refusing to bake a cake for a purpose of which the owner doesn’t agree.

It was a denial, not an Auschwitz. To cheapen the Holocaust by making such comparisons is to convolute and deny its atrocities.

The Holocaust, which only started with the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws only to end up in genocide, didn’t happen so much because of a hatred of a religion, but rather an explicit hatred for a people. This hatred extended to people who helped those the Nazis targeted, like the family who hid my only living grandmother when she was a child in France.

In fact, once Hitler took power, he sought to reduce Christianity’s influence on German society.

Rice’s comment was nothing but perverted and bigoted. I dare her to tell my living grandmother that what the Colorado baker did compares to the atrocities at Dachau, of which her late husband survived (his father perished there), and about which Phillips’ father wrote notes regarding the atrocities there and other places like Buchenwald, which he helped liberate.

Hypocritically, those on the left, like Rice, cite the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II as a reason for why the U.S. should take in refugees from war-torn places like Syria. Apparently they failed to learn about the Holocaust, which consisted of Jewish bakeries and other businesses being looted on Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass,” let alone being sent to concentration camps.

(Important side note: Where is the outrage from the left over the atrocities in Rohingya, Darfur, Tibet, in Iraq against the Yazidis, and other persecuted groups in the Middle East? Those conflicts are severe compared to a bakery refusing to bake a same-sex wedding cake.)

Intolerance was part of the Holocaust. Blatant discrimination was part of the Holocaust. Concentration camps and gas chambers were part of the Holocaust. Death marches were part of the Holocaust. Indifference was part of the Holocaust.

Bakers refusing to bake same-sex wedding cakes were not part of the Holocaust. Rice seems indifferent to the magnitude of the Holocaust’s barbaric and sadistic acts, and instead chose to relate them to a baker who simply followed his conscience in declining to make a same-sex wedding cake.

Would Rice equate Phillips refusing to make a “divorce” cake to the Holocaust? Would Rice compare Phillips refusing to make Halloween-themed cakes to that of the Holocaust?

The famous psychologist Rollo May said, “The opposite of courage in our society isn’t cowardice. It’s conformity.”

It’s astonishing that America, which eventually admitted my surviving grandparents, is in 2017 a place where some are trying to coerce others to conform to an ideology, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs.

In Nazi Germany, if you weren’t an Aryan as Hitler prescribed in “Mein Kampf,” you would perish. Is it somehow acceptable to compare this baker or anyone coerced by those with differing ideologies to the Nazis?

If we’re going to say “Never again,” let’s also say “No more.” No more false equivalences. No more hate. Conversing, not ostracizing, is the solution to bridge divisions between people.

Let’s judge people personally—not by their background, but rather by their character.

SOURCE





Likely Next Solicitor General Fought for Nuns, Against Disputed Obama Appointees

After racking up victories against the Obama administration before the Supreme Court, Noel Francisco is expected to be confirmed by the Senate to manage the Trump administration’s cases there.

President Donald Trump nominated Francisco, who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia and was a lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, to be his solicitor general.

A Senate committee approved the nomination four months ago. Democrats have stalled a final vote, but an end looks in sight.

While working in private practice for the Jones Day law firm, Francisco, 48, successfully argued before the Supreme Court against the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, winning a 9-0 decision.

He also gained a 4-4 tie at the high court after arguing for the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns, against Obamacare’s mandate requiring employers to cover contraception and abortion-inducing drugs in employee health plans.

In another widely publicized case that made its way to the high court, Francisco helped overturn the conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, on charges of public corruption.

The Supreme Court is set to begin hearing new cases Oct. 2. Some of the more high-profile cases concern the separation of powers, Trump’s “extreme vetting” order blocking immigration from certain failed states, and religious freedom.

“There are a number of very significant cases before the court and he is equal to the task for any cases before the Supreme Court,” John Malcolm, who heads the Institute for Constitutional Government at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “Noel Francisco is exceptionally bright and has impeccable character, and the nation will be well served to have him as solicitor general.”

Francisco, approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party line, 11-9 vote in June, is one of many Trump nominees whom Senate Democrats have managed to prevent from coming to a final floor vote.

Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal group, watched Francisco argue the NLRB v. Noel Canning case before the Supreme Court. The justices unanimously ruled the president could not make recess appointments—installing appointees without Senate confirmation—while the Senate was not officially in recess.

Severino said Francisco’s impressive record was on display in his actions as a litigator.

“This has been another shameful holdup by the Senate Democrats who dragged this nomination out much longer than necessary,” Severino told The Daily Signal. “Noel Francisco is very well-known attorney and a very skilled litigator.”

“I’m glad he’s on board,” she added, “but we are still moving at a pace of confirmation that it would take three terms to confirm all of this administration’s nominees.”

The U.S. solicitor general works in the Justice Department, charged with managing the defense of the federal government’s cases in front of the Supreme Court. In many cases, the solicitor general argues the case.

Francisco briefly served as acting solicitor general until Trump nominated him for the position in March. Jeffrey Wall, who has served as acting solicitor general, is set to take the office’s No. 2 slot upon Francisco’s confirmation.

Francisco grew up in Oswego, New York. Francisco received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1996. He clerked for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit before clerking for Scalia at the Supreme Court.

“If you asked any conservative attorney in this town, they would put Noel in the top five legal minds,” said Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice and a legal affairs fellow with FreedomWorks, both conservative organizations.

“Given the resistance to Trump in the federal courts, almost everything could be dealt a blow by a district court somewhere, it’s important to have someone with executive branch experience, and it’s more important than ever for not only the country but for this administration,” Levey told The Daily Signal.

SOURCE






Gov. Seeks to Normalize Transgenderism Via Science  

When science and social politics collide, science is often co-opted to promote political ideology rather than genuine science instructing public policy. The former seems to be the case (again) regarding the National Science Foundation’s spending of over $100,000 to create “safe zones” for LGBTQ students. Some $114,116 was given to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the purpose of studying ways to “increase the inclusion of LGBTQ students and professionals in engineering.” According to the grant, the field of engineering can be an “unfriendly or a chilly” climate for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals.”

The grant also states that “the research will be the basis of systematic development and formative refinement of an online SafeZone course to provide inclusion training to engineering students and professionals nationwide.” Is this science or politically motivated social engineering?

The federal government’s use of “science” to further push the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism onto the American public doesn’t stop there. The National Institutes of Health will be spending $200,000 on “exploratory or developmental research on the health of transgender and gender nonconforming people.” The NIH announcement further stated, “Transgender and gender nonconforming people encompass individuals whose gender identity differs from the sex on their original birth certificate, including individuals who are making or who have made a transition from being identified as one gender to the other, as well as individuals who are questioning their gender identity, who identify with more than one gender, or whose gender expression varies significantly from what is traditionally associated with or typical for that sex.”

It’s important to note that studying the problems of gender dysphoria and the impact it has on individuals is not unwarranted or unscientific research. But in today’s politically correct environment — where transgenderism is being celebrated as normal, and anyone questioning its normality or morality is labeled a bigot and a hater — it’s pretty clear this is an attempt to use “science” as a tool to further justify forcing the American public to accept transgenderism as normal. Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is drinking the Rainbow Mafia’s Kool-Aid. He is co-sponsoring a bill that would prevent the military from banning transgenders from serving.

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

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