Thursday, May 31, 2018


'Blue Wednesday' in Chicago as union takes stand against 'anti-police' Mayor Emanuel

Democrats have a fellow-feeling for  crooks -- unsurprisingly

It’s being called “Blue Wednesday” in Chicago as the city’s Fraternal Order of Police organized a unified public demonstration against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who the FOP calls “anti-police.”

During the city’s regularly scheduled city council meeting Wednesday morning, ranking members of the police union read aloud a strongly worded statement against Emanuel in which the FOP alleges the mayor has “turned his back” on his police department by being more concerned with “pandering to police-hating media” and by allowing the American Civil Liberties Union to have a seat at the negotiating table.

A protest organized by police officers became tense at City Hall. One woman was seen apparently spitting at a demonstrator marching with police officers.

The Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge 7, which says it represents an estimated 15,000 active and retired members, recently sent out a notice to all of its members to attend Wednesday’s city council meeting to demand that “Mayor Rahm Emanuel back police.”

The move comes in response to the Chicago Police Board’s recent decision to put Officer Robert Rialmo on a no-pay status for a 2015 fatal shooting that was deemed unjustified by the board—but was ruled justified by Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson.

Emanuel does not sit on the independent Chicago Police Board, which made the ruling on Rialmo’s job status. A spokesperson for the mayor responded to some of the FOP’s allegations.

“When you have people on either side of the police reform issue criticizing, it’s a sign we’re hitting it down the middle of the fairway as we continue to build trust between officers and residents, ensure oversight and accountability, and give officers the tools and training they need to be proactive in the crime fight,” the spokesperson said.

Tension between Emanuel and his police department has been growing in recent years —beginning in 2015, when a video was released showing Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting a 17-year-old teen armed with a small knife 16 times. The shooting occurred in 2014 but the video was withheld by the prosecutor’s office until a journalist fought for its release.

The public was outraged over the video and eventually Emanuel abruptly fired his police chief, Garry McCarthy. McCarthy, who is now running against Emanuel for mayor, has said Emanuel “threw him under the bus.”

The city also entered into an exclusive agreement with the ACLU in which officers are required to fill out reports for every single stop and frisk they’re involved in— which police say is an intentional move to use stats against them.

Emanuel is in the midst of running for his third term as mayor of Chicago. The FOP’s public move against him could serve as a thorn in his side, just nine months prior to the election.

The city of Chicago is also in midst of finalizing a consent decree with the federal government that will give a federal court oversight over the Chicago Police Department.

The consent decree came down during the Obama administration amid allegations of racism and police brutality. A months-long DOJ patterns and practices investigation concluded CPD needs a major overhaul in training and sensitivity.

Chicago Police said the decree is a shroud for even more anti-police policies.

SOURCE







Furious mother slams other parents for buying her seven-year-old son toy guns for his birthday

A mother has called giving a toy gun to a child as a birthday present 'inappropriate' - after her son was gifted three.

The anonymous woman posted on British parenting site Mumsnet that she was torn over taking the fake weapons away from her seven-year-old as he appeared to be enjoying playing with them.

Revealing her discomfort with the toys, the mother received a flood of responses on the online community from parents who agreed with her views.

A minority of people argued that preventing children from playing with toy guns is unreasonable.

Posting under the name Juneau, she wrote: 'Now I know it's up to people what they give and that as the recipient's parent I don't get a say, and I should be grateful that these DC came to his party and brought him a gift (and I am), but I would never give a gun as a gift.

'I think it's really inappropriate and I'm very uncomfortable with having even toy guns in my house.

'Seeing my 7-year-old running around with a gun (albeit a plastic one), and shooting at us and laughing is horrible. And of course he loves them and he was given them and if I took them away then I'd be the bad guy.'

A large number of parents revealed they discourage their children from playing with toy weapons such as guns and swords.

One person said: 'You Are Not Being Unreasonable. My four year old is going through a WWII phase that involves building guns out of lego and pretending to shoot the Germans (I. E. Us). I have to keep telling him off.'

Another wrote: 'I wouldn't give a gun as a gift so I get where you are coming from. My son has been given one which went 'missing' after a couple of weeks.

it is just for make believe play though, he's not going to turn into a violent thug because he pretended to be a cowboy when he was 7. Just get rid of it when the novelty has worn off'

Many others revealed that although they wouldn't approve of traditional toy guns, they make an allowance for water pistols.

One person wrote: 'I really don't like toy guns. Weapons should not glamourised as a toy. I know one day, one or both of my children might want one, but I'm trying to stall as long as I can. Water guns, yes no problem. But toy guns that make shooting noises no.' 

Another wrote: 'Mine aren't allowed guns and they know I'll take them off them. I know I'm a cow but I hate them.'

Speaking under the handle 'titchy', one person mocked those who don't allow toy guns but haven't made an effort to ban alternative toys.

She said: 'Those that don't allow guns, I assume you've removed all twigs from your surroundings and amputated your child's index and middle fingers?'

Another parent attempted to defend guns as the safest toy weapon in comparison with swords. 

She wrote: 'Guns are better than swords for pretend play at that age. Swords end up with injuries as fighting involves hitting. Have you banned swords too?

One mother revealed she had compromised with her daughter playing with a toy gun by being strict on the targets she could use to play with it.

She said: 'My daughter is going through a gun phase where her fingers or anything else is a gun. She must have got it from preschool. I showed her people shooting at the Olympics on YouTube and she now pretends to shoot targets instead of people, usually'.

SOURCE






The arrogant EU elite is playing with fire: STEPHEN GLOVER says Italy's pain could be Britain's gain as Brussels struggles to contain an even bigger problem than Brexit

British Eurosceptics sometimes overestimate the likelihood of the EU and the euro falling apart under the weight of their in-built contradictions.

Many were convinced a few years ago that the huge debt problems of Greece would force it to crash out of the euro. In the event, the country has so far remained part of the single currency, though at a terrible cost to its economy.

But dramatic developments in Italy over the past 48 hours entitle one to say that the trouble brewing in that country is likely to dwarf anything that has happened in Greece.

This is a full-blown crisis in the Eurozone's third largest economy, nearly ten times the size of Greece's.

What is taking place is a stand-off between the increasingly unpopular Italian Europhile class represented by President Sergio Mattarella on the one hand and, on the other, two populist parties, both critical of the EU, which together won half the vote in March's general election.

Mattarella has vetoed the appointment of Paolo Savona, a distinguished veteran Eurosceptic put forward by the anti-Establishment Left-leaning Five Star Movement and the hard-Right League as their finance minister in a prospective populist coalition.

As a result, both parties have given up their attempt to form a government, and are calling for President Mattarella's impeachment. Meanwhile Mattarella has asked Carlo Cottarelli, a pro-EU stooge who has worked for the International Monetary Fund, to lead an interim administration.

It is certain this won't last more than a few months since Cottarelli only enjoys the support of a minority in parliament. There will soon be another election in which, it can be confidently predicted, Five Star and the League will do even better than they did in March.

The truth is that, by rejecting the Eurosceptic Savona in such a high-handed way, Mattarella (who has no democratic mandate) has behaved as the Europhile ruling class usually does in most EU countries, including our own. The democratically expressed view of the electorate is ignored.

Whether the insufferable Jean-Claude Juncker or Germany's Angela Merkel actually picked up the telephone to tell Mattarella what to do we don't yet know. But both Brussels and Berlin have swiftly welcomed Mattarella's actions. The Italian President was doing what was expected of him.

Paolo Savona is a hate figure in Europhile circles because of his intelligent appraisal of the disastrous effect membership of the euro has had on Italy. A euro exchange rate that suits Berlin is throttling the sclerotic Italian economy, which has scarcely grown since the country joined the single currency 19 years ago.

Savona has even blamed Germany for Italy's plight. He has written of the 'German cage' and criticised Berlin in forthright (and to my mind accurate) terms: 'Germany didn't change its idea on its role in Europe after the end of Nazism, even if it abandoned the idea of imposing itself militarily.'

In fact, there is nothing to suggest that the 81-year-old Savona would have taken Italy out of the euro had he been allowed to assume his position as finance minister. But he would undoubtedly have been less friendly to the EU than his pliant, Brussels-approved predecessors.
      
Mattarella's behaviour is almost certain to increase suspicion of the EU in Italy. Many Italians believe Brussels has ignored its serious migrant problem, and there is little doubt that the plan of the Five Star/League alliance to deport 500,000 illegal immigrants carries widespread popularity.

Five Star and the League certainly have some wacky policies – not least lower tax rates combined with a grant of about £690 a month for those deemed at risk of poverty. The bill could run into billions, and boost Italy's already stratospheric national debt.

But Mattarella's EU-backed policy of undermining the two populist parties seems certain to backfire in a country where, according to a poll last week, 61 per cent of Italians believe their voice isn't being heard by Brussels.

In the short term, there is very likely to be mounting political and economic chaos in Italy, which is sad for that wonderful country. In the longer term, though, the chances of Italy escaping the stranglehold of the euro must have improved.

Meanwhile, Italy's pain could be Britain's gain as Brussels struggles to contain an even bigger problem than Brexit – a problem which really does threaten the disintegration of Jean-Claude Juncker's tottering, and increasingly unloved, empire

SOURCE






Cyclists in London are too white, male and middle class, says bike tsar in diversity push

More nagging authoritarianism

Lycra-clad packs of middle aged men zooming around the capital are becoming a 'problem' according to the London Mayor's cycling tsar, Will Norman.

So-called 'mamils' (middle-aged men in lycra) are dominating the cycling scene in London, leading to a false perception that cycling is not for everyone, Mr Norman claimed.

Too few females and people from ethnic minority backgrounds are taking to two wheels around the capital and the Mayor's office could introduce 'diversity targets' to combat the figures.

Despite millions being pumped into the cycling infrastructure in London the majority of those making use of it are middle aged men.

At present, black, Asian and minority ethnic groups account for about 15 per cent of cycled journeys in London – around two-thirds less than Transport for London (TfL) estimates it could be.

Mr Norman told The Independent: 'There is a problem with cycling and the way it is perceived of getting middle-aged men cycling faster around the city, which is not the objective at all.

'It touches on something which is a real challenge for London cycling, which is diversity.'

London mayor Sadiq Khan said he would make cycling safer around London. However, members of the London Assembly said it is not being done quickly enough.

Now Mr Norman said more groups should be benefitting from the changes made. He added: 'Even when we have seen the growth in the number of cyclists, we haven't seen that diversity.

'There are a number of reasons for that. One is that safety is paramount for getting different people from different walks of life cycling: older people, younger people, those from different backgrounds.'

The way in which the gap will be filled, Mr Norman says, is through projects such as promoting electric bikes, cycling courses and grants for community groups who do not typically cycle.

There was a six per cent recorded rise in female cyclists after the opening of Quietway 1, which links Waterloo with Greenwich, from 29 per cent to 35 per cent.

Mr Khan promised an average of £169m annually for cycling schemes over the next five years. 'Is it ambitious enough in the longer term? I think we need a higher level of change,' Mr Norman told The Independent.

'The target that we have set out in the mayor's transport strategy is over that 25 years we want to shift to 80 per cent of journeys to be walking, cycling or by public transport.

'That is a much more ambitious target and really is fundamentally rethinking the way that we move around our city.'

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, May 30, 2018



Allah is honoured once again

Two police officers and a civilian have been shot dead by a man reportedly shouting Allahu Akbar, which led to a hostage situation at a high school in east Belgium.

The unnamed man opened fire in the centre of the city of Liege, at around 10.30am local time, after being stopped by officers for a routine document check

He killed two officers, a female bystander in a car, and injured a third officer.

The man then reportedly took a female cleaner hostage inside the nearby secondary school, before being shot dead himself by an elite police unit.

During the document check, he managed to disarm one of the officers and opened fire, killing the pair and the female bystander sat in a nearby car.

It has been claimed that the attacker stole the weapon as he disarmed the police officer, but it is not clear whether he used it to open fire, or if he was already armed.

Local news website DHnet.be reported that the man had shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he fired on on Liege's central Boulevard d'Avroy, citing police sources.

Videos posted on social media showed people scurrying for safety on Liege's central boulevard d'Avroy with shots and sirens being heard in the background.

One video showed two police officers in body armour moving into position on the street.

Minutes later, anti-terrorist special forces police could be seen surrounding the area, which went into lock down. 

The kidnapper was 'neutralised' at 11am, ending the siege, and officials say they are now considering the crime to have been an act of terrorism.

'There are elements that point in the direction that this is a terrorist act,' said Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutors office.

All students in the school were successfully evacuated, and the female hostage was released without being caused any harmed.

According to Belgian broadcaster RTBF, the shooter was released from prison on Monday and was only known for minor infractions with no known links to extremism.

Catherine Collignon, a spokesman for Liege prosecutors, confirmed 'four deaths in total', with two other police officers seriously wounded.

She confirmed that 'terrorism' was currently considered the principal motivation for the attack by those leading the judicial enquiry. 

Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said Belgium's Federal Crisis Centre was monitoring the situation.

'Our thoughts are with the victims of this horrible act. We are in the process of establishing an overview of exactly what happened,' Jambon wrote on Twitter.

The crisis centre said a security cordon had been set up around the area and urged people to stay away.

Liege, an industrial city close to the German border in the French-speaking Wallonia region, was also the scene of a shooting in 2011.

A gunman killed four people and wounded over 100 before turning the gun on himself.

Belgium has been on high alert since a Brussels-based ISIS terror cell was involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people, and Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died.

The UK Foreign Office advises British citizens that 'terrorists are very likely to try to carry out attacks in Belgium.'

The Foreign Office's travel advice website adds that 'attacks could happen anywhere, including on public transport and transport hubs and in other places visited by foreigners'.


SOURCE






A real mother



A mummy blogger with 18-month-old identical twin boys and a two-year-old daughter is 'unapologetically' refusing to bring up her children as 'gender neutral'.

Sydney mum Eliza Curby, 28, told Daily Mail Australia she won't 'create some unreasonable neutral gender playing field' for her children - because she isn't 'afraid of gender'.

Ms Curby made headlines after giving birth to her twin boys Jack and Wolfe in December 2016 - after conceiving just six weeks after the birth of her first child, Charlie in January.

The mum gave birth to three children in 2016 - Charlie, her daughter in January, and her sons in December    +9
The mum gave birth to three children in 2016 - Charlie, her daughter in January, and her sons in December

The busy mum noticed her young boys 'gravitating towards the few toy cars' in the house - and says they are 'obsessed' with the garbage truck.

'It got me thinking about boys and girls and why we are so afraid of the difference,' she said.

So she wrote a post about it on Facebook - challenging new-age ideals about gender.  'Why are we so scared of gender these days?' she asked.

'We are so concerned with equality, blurring the lines in such a way that we expect men and women be treated the same, act the same, be judged the same, 'be' the same,' she wrote.

'But here's the thing - we are not the same.'

She went on to say she is 'proud to be a woman' and that she expects to be treated as one.

'I'm honoured to have an incredible man who opens the door for me, pulls out my chair, who 'looks after me' - not in a sense that I cannot do these things myself, but to show me a certain respect and love in doing them.

'And I intend to raise my boys - unapologetically - in the same manner,' she wrote.

And it appeared to hit the mark with her 'Twingenuity' blog followers. 'Love this !! What's wrong with girls being 'girls' and boys being 'boys'!' wrote one mum.

'I am raising my son just as that - a boy. With respect, manners and chivalry for women. A gentleman. And there is nothing wrong with this!' said another.

'Hear, hear! Because a man treats (and respects) a woman differently to a man, like opening a door or giving up a seat, it in no way means men think of them as inferior. We are in all ways equal but just different. And the differences should be celebrated,' a father wrote.     

'If my kids decide they are the wrong gender I will support them, if they are boys boys or if my daughter is a girly girl I will support them - I just don't intend to overthink the matter,' she said.

SOURCE 







Tempers at boiling point as female protesters break into a men-only lido in Hampstead and leap into the pool as they claim to 'self-identify as male'

They didn't look like men and they didn't sound like men – but these women insisted they had every right to swim in a male-only pool.

Tempers were as hot as the weather yesterday as they arrived en masse and jumped in to the water as part of a protest against proposed gender laws.

One put on a bushy beard while another swam in a lime mankini – a joke male version of a bikini – to make their point that they 'identified' as men.

But regulars at the men's bathing pond in Hampstead, North London, didn't see the funny side.

And neither did the police who arrived and escorted the women out amid fears that they could be breaching the peace.

The invasion was part of a nationwide campaign set up on Mumsnet called #ManFriday which encourages women to 'self-identify' as men for the day on Fridays in a protest against possible changes to gender laws.

Campaigners say changes to the Gender Recognition Act could enable people to simply declare themselves to be a man or woman to get all the legal rights of either sex.

Amy Desir, 30, who wore the mankini and led the protest group of around 20 women, said yesterday: 'We are here to raise awareness. There's a legal consultation due to come out this summer asking for the law to change to say that any man that says he is a woman can get all the legal protections that women do.'

The mother of two and her fellow campaigners are concerned that the proposed legislation would enable predatory men to target women in single-sex facilities.

Hampstead has three ponds for swimming: one for men, one for women and one mixed. In order to cater for transgender women, the women's pond changed its rules last December to allow men in who say they identify as female.

Yesterday the women protesters told staff at the pond that they 'identified as male' and said they had the right to swim there. But police arrived 15 minutes later and they were forced to leave.

Yesterday the women protesters told staff at the pond that they 'identified as male' and said they had the right to swim there

'We're clearly not men, but we've just been allowed in by Hampstead's own policy,' Mrs Desir said. 'Women's safeguarding has gone out the window.'

Hannah Clarke, 39, who also attended the protest yesterday, said: 'I would hate to think that I had upset anybody here today, but this is the point of a protest. We want to keep single-sex places single-sex and that was the aim of today. And clearly it's not just women that want them to stay single-sex, is it?'

There was widespread anger among the male swimmers at the pond. Peter John, 81, said he thought the invasion by the women was 'ridiculous' and urged the them to use the pond for female swimmers.

Mr John, from Hackney, said: 'They're saying, 'I want to identify as a man today'. That's not how this works. Women have their own female-only pool, we have ours and if you want to swim with men then go to the mixed pond.

'Women have their own pool where they can bathe topless. This is absolutely ridiculous. This has been here since Victorian times!'

Ken Menczer, 70, from Camden, said: 'We should be introducing disability measures over transgender measures.

'That's more important. I think they're completing abusing a situation.'

One man shouted: 'They aren't men!' Another said: 'This is ludicrous. If I turned up at the female-only pond and claimed to be a woman I would never get let in. This is our space and that's how it should stay.'

PC Barry Macefield of Hampstead Heath constabulary, said: 'They've been peaceful, when we've asked them to leave they've left so we've got no issues with that.

'There were some men annoyed because they felt their privacy had been invaded and some who were concerned about photography.

'They've had a chance to make their point which they have done peacefully – but you can't enter a facility designated for the opposite sex, and if this occurs with men in the women's ponds we'd deal with that too.' He added: 'The rules need clarity.'

SOURCE






Now the nanny state wants control of YOUR chocolate bar: Calls for graphic tobacco-style warnings on junk food - with claims 80% of Australians will be overweight by 2025

Just a small problem:  How do we decide what is "junk" and what is not?  A big Mac was once said to be junk because it contained fat.  But fat is now said to be good for you. A big Mac may be unprestigious but there is no certainty that it is bad for you.  Its bad name is most likely pure snobbery


There are calls for graphic warnings, similar to those on cigarette packets, to be introduced on junk food packaging to fight skyrocketing obesity rates.

Health experts want graphic images including fat-covered hearts, to be branded across junk foods after it was revealed 80 per cent of Australians would be overweight by 2025 if drastic action wasn't taken.

The call comes after a study found images like fatty hearts or decayed teeth displayed on packaging would successfully deter someone from making unhealthy choices.

Speaking on Sunrise on Thursday, commentator and lecturer Jane Caro supported the idea. 'It would literally put you off your food,' she said. 'It's proved very effective with [cigarettes] it's something we should look at with junk food.

'I think all of society has to come together and make junk food as socially unacceptable as cigarettes have become.'

Melbourne's 3AW presenter Tom Elliott disagreed. 'Can you imagine going to a kids party and having to display all these pictures of diseased organs?' he said. 'If you have it on junk food how do you separate it from kids and adults. 'If it's up there at a Maccas and kids are being taken to Maccas, kids are not going to enjoy the experience too much.'

The University of Melbourne and Cancer Council Victoria study, which was published on Thursday, found negative text combined with explicit images, was twice as effective at sending a message, than negative text without the image.

For the study, 95 hungry participants were shown colour pictures of 50 different snack foods ranging from chips, chocolate bars and biscuits to nuts, fruits and vegetables.

They were asked to rate on a scale how much they would like to eat each food at the end of the experiment.

In addition, participants' brain activity was monitored with electrodes attached to their heads.

The results revealed the warning labels prompted participants to exercise more self-control rather than act on impulse.

'The study shows that if you want to stop people choosing fatty and sugary packaged foods, health warnings actually work,' said study co-author, Dr Stefan Bode.

'It sheds light on the mechanisms in the brain that underlie the effects of health warning messages on food processing,' Dr Bode said.

Cancer Council Victoria behavioural researcher Dr Helen Dixon said the graphic images worked because they 'disrupt' the strong cues - like taste - that images of junk foods elicit. This then allows a person to consciously consider the health implications of their food choices, she explained.

Obesity Policy Coalition executive director Jane Martin says the use of packaging should be used for good, not for bad. 'This research demonstrates that powerful, relevant information on food packaging can influence people and push them away from junk food,' said Ms Martin.

'Poor diets and being above a healthy weight are risk factors for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. To address this Australia needs a comprehensive strategy, which should consider improved labelling,' she said.

The public health advocates have called on the government to make the graphic labelling mandatory, as part of the revised Health Star Rating System.

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, May 29, 2018



Study: Women Who Have Abortion Face 81% Increased Risk of Mental Health Problems

Some of the women concerned would not have been too good to start with, but not all.  Some would simply have been young and naive

An analysis of 22 studies on abortion and mental health showed that women who had an abortion faced an "81% increased risk of mental health problems" and that nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was "shown to be directly attributable to abortion," according to a report published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, and posted online in January of this year.

The report also found that women who carried their babies to term experienced a "protective effect," in that the suicide rate for mothers (per 100,000) was nearly 50% lower than that of women of reproductive age (per 100,000) who had not had children. Further, "several other studies conducted in different countries have revealed even lower rates of suicide following birth when compared with women in the general population," according to the report.

The report, "Abortion and Mental Health: Quantitative Synthesis and Analysis of Research Published 1995 - 2009," is written by Priscilla K. Coleman. She is the Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Coleman also is the co-author of Post-Abortion Trauma: Possible Psychological and Existential Aftermaths, published by the Pontifical Academy for Life at the Vatican.

In the report, Coleman examined 22 peer-reviewed studies -- 15 from the United States and seven from other countries.

In total, there were 877,181 participants in the studies, "of whom 163,831 had experienced an abortion," reported Coleman. The studies looked at abortion and its potential impact through 36 "measures of effect," which included "9 alcohol use/misuse, 5 marijuana, 7 anxiety, 11 depression, 4 suicidal behavior."

"Based on data extracted from 22 studies, the results of this meta-analytic review of the abortion and mental health literature indicate quite consistently that abortion is associated with moderate to highly increased risks of psychological problems subsequent to the procedure," reads the report.

"Overall, the results revealed that women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be directly attributable to abortion," said Coleman.

"The strongest effects were observed when women who had had an abortion were compared with women who had carried to term and when the outcomes measured related to aubstance use and suicidal behavior," wrote Coleman.

She also reported, "The finding that abortion is associated with significantly higher risks of mental health problems compared with carrying a pregnancy to term is consistent with literature demonstrating protective effects of pregnancy delivered relative to particular mental health outcomes. For example, with regard to suicide, Gissler et al reported the annual suicide rate for women of reproductive age to be 11.3 per 100,000, whereas the rate was only 5.9 per 100,000 in association with birth."

In conclusion, Colman said, "The composite results reported herein indicate that abortion is a statistically validated risk factor for the development of various psychological disorders."

SOURCE





Farage to FB's Zuckerberg: Conservatives 'Are Being Willfully Discriminated Against' by Facebook

While questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the European Parliament on May 22, UKIP founder and MEP Nigel Farage said that Facebook was instrumental in helping Brexit pass and Donald Trump get elected, but now had changed its algorithms to restrict conservative content.

Contrary to Zuckerberg's repeated claims, Facebook today is not a "platform for all ideas," said Farage, and "mainstream" conservatives "are being willfully discriminated against." He added that it may be time to establish a "social media bill of rights to basically protect free speech."

During his questioning, Farage, a Member of the European Parliament, said to Zuckerberg, "The one slight problem I have – I’m watching very carefully the testimony you gave on Capitol Hill. Time and again, people asked you, is this genuinely a neutral, political platform? And you come up with the same line again and again -- it’s well-crafted -- you say that Facebook is a platform for all ideas."

“Now historically, of course, it’s true, that through Facebook and other forms of social media there is no way that Brexit or Trump or the Italian elections could ever possibly have happened," said Farage, the founder of the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP).  It was social media that allowed people to get round the back of mainstream media."

“Now, perhaps you’re horrified by this creation of yours and what it’s led to, I don’t know," said Farage. "But what is absolutely true is that since January of this year, you’ve changed your modus operandi, you’ve changed your algorithms, and it has led directly to a very substantial drop in views and engagements for those that have got right-of-center political opinions."

He continued, “The facts are very clear. Just look at President Trump’s numbers, which are at a much smaller scale. Look at mine. Look at thousands of other conservative commentators. On average, we’re down about 25% over the course of this year. And, you know, that’s happening on a 'platform for all ideas.'"

“I’m not talking here, Mr. Zuckerberg about extremism," said Farage.  "I’m not talking about encouraging violence. I’m not talking about hatred of anybody. I’m talking about people who have majority, mainstream opinions."

"Frankly, I feel they are being willfully discriminated against," he said.

“What interests me is who decides what is acceptable?" said Farage.  "Who are these people you referred to earlier, these third-party fact-checkers? Who are these people? Why is there no transparency in this process at all?"

"I’m not generally someone that calls for legislation on the international stage," he said, "but I’m beginning to wonder whether we need a social media bill of rights to basically protect free speech. … Would you accept that today Facebook is not a platform for all ideas that is operated impartially?"

On Twitter, May 22, Farage stated, "Stop telling us Facebook is a 'platform for all ideas.' The evidence shows your algorithms censor conservative opinions."

A new report by the Media Research Center, "Censored! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech", details numerous instances of deliberate censorship of conservative content on the major social media platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google.

Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people, and 68% of Americans use Facebook. The left-leaning Facebook and other social media platforms are dialing down and restricting, burying conservative information.

"War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing -- badly," states the MRC report. "If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media. It's the new battleground of media bias. It's a war against ideas. It's a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation."

SOURCE






Demo Identity Politics Chasing Whites Away



You may have heard that whites are becoming Republican because they feel at home venting their anti-immigrant sentiments in a party led by a president whose alleged dog whistles have called the racist hounds home.

But that nasty and simplistic explanation doesn’t quite cut it. Nor does it tell us why so many working-class whites who voted for Barack Obama jumped ship to support a businessman and television celebrity for president.

Democrats, who have long believed that tribalism and identity politics would rack up Electoral College votes, still fail to realize that promising a multicultural, gender-neutral society isn’t enough for millions of Americans who can’t find jobs, pay their bills or send their kids to college.

In 1992, Democrat campaign strategist James Carville famously told an inner-circle of Bill Clinton’s staff, “It’s the economy, stupid.” In doing so, he got the campaign to focus on a powerful issue that President George H. W. Bush was neglecting.

It seems like Democrats could use a little bit of that old-fashioned common sense in their campaigns these days, but they’re clearly not getting the message. Instead, the party is moving farther and farther to the left, seemingly unable or unwilling to recognize what’s driving Donald Trump’s support among white voters.

Jim Geraghty writes at National Review that years after Bill Clinton pledged to restore the American promise by focusing on economic issues, “The Hillary Clinton campaign reflected Democrats’ increasing obsession with identity politics, contending that the country’s most pressing injustices explicitly broke along the lines of gender, race, immigration status, and sexual identity.”

The numbers show a downward trajectory in white support of Democrats since the Clinton years, which happens to correlate with the decision by many Democrat candidates to abandon the white working class.

In 1996, Clinton won 49% of the white vote in a two-party race. In 2000, Al Gore attracted only 43%. After pulling a bit more whites into his camp in 2008, Barack Obama’s support from whites dropped to 39% in 2012. Hillary Clinton won about the same percentage in 2016. And if Hillary Clinton had matched Obama’s 2012 support among blacks, she still would have lost to Trump.

Identity politics is clearly backfiring on Democrats.

Vox provides more evidence that Democrats are abandoning non-educated whites at their own peril: “White non-college voters remain a larger group than white college voters in almost all states — and are far larger in the Rust Belt states that gave the Democrats so much trouble in 2016: Iowa is 62 percent white non-college versus 31 percent white college; Michigan is 54 percent white non-college versus 28 percent white college; Ohio splits 55 percent to 29 percent; Pennsylvania 51 percent to 31 percent; and Wisconsin 58 percent to 32 percent.”

Joshua Zingher of The Washington Post further explains the loss of white voter support in the Democrat Party to two factors. One is that more white, conservative Democrats have moved over to the Republican Party than white, liberal Republicans have become Democrats, and that Democrats have “courted and won more votes from ethnic and racial minority groups” while “at the same time, in response to these demographic changes, more whites have shifted rightward on economic issues.”

What white voters were looking for in 2016, and what drives their loyalty to President Trump through the sagas of Stormy Daniels and off-the-wall tweet storms is the hope that an outsider in the White House just might be able to offer them something that no other candidate has.

Deep down, many coal miners in West Virginia and unemployed steel workers in Pennsylvania probably know that the Rust Belt might never fully recover. But a president who at least offers them a vision of what’s possible is a lot more attractive than candidates offering gender-neutral bathrooms, unabashed globalism, and promises of green jobs as a cure-all for America’s economic woes.

And branding the white working class neo-Confederates isn’t a wise strategy.

Thomas B. Edsall suggested in The New York Times earlier this year that “a Democratic Party based on urban cosmopolitan business liberalism runs the risk not only of leading to the continued marginalization of the minority poor, but also — as the policies of the Trump administration demonstrate — to the continued neglect of the white working-class electorate that put Trump in the White House.”

Yet, many Democrats continue to believe the party can gain seats in Congress or take back the White House by appeasing every identity group except white working-class voters. They’re counting on the fact that the burgeoning electorate of women, Millennials, educated professionals and minorities will be enough to make up for the loss of whites. For now, their calculations have resulted in Republicans holding more power nationwide than at any point since the early 20th century.

The GOP shouldn’t rest on its laurels heading into the 2018 midterms, though. It’s newfound support in the working class is tentative at best, especially if the party doesn’t keep producing results. But until Democrats stop focusing on “white privilege” and start listening to white voters, the balance of power will continue to favor Republicans in the coming years.

Democrats hoping for a “blue wave” this fall must fight a rising tide of working-class Republicans. Sure, they can do this by practicing identity politics. But unless they start identifying with the hopes and dreams of the white working class, Nancy Pelosi can forget about taking the speaker’s gavel from House Republicans in November.

SOURCE






Here’s What Happened After Liberal Activists Shut Down Catholic Adoption Providers in Illinois

For the past decade, left-wing activists have targeted faith-based adoption agencies if they do not assist same-sex couples who wish to adopt. Through lawsuits and legislation, these activists gave faith-based agencies an ultimatum: Comply with politically correct views on sexuality and marriage and place children with same-sex couples, or shut down.

Faced with this dilemma, Steve Roach, executive director of Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, closed the foster care and adoption programs he ran in the state. The cost? In an interview with The Daily Signal, Roach estimates that 3,000 children were affected and thousands of  foster parents no longer will be part of the system.

Now, he advocates passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, federal legislation to prohibit discriminating or taking other adverse action against a child welfare service provider that declines to provide, facilitate, or refer for a service that conflicts with the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs. Learn more in the transcript of the interview, which was lightly edited for clarity.

Kelsey Harkness: Tell us what happened to your adoption and foster care program run through Catholic Charities, and how you found yourself in this situation.

Roach: In 2011, the state of Illinois passed a law which effectively ended up shutting down foster care and adoption programs for Catholic Charities and a couple of other faith-based organizations in Illinois.

We were definitely forced out of foster care and adoption. The law was called the Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act. The language in that law required that all agencies providing this service must place children in the homes of same-sex couples.

My faith and our religion believes in the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, and we could not abide by that new state requirement. So after 50 years of providing quality foster care for children, for tens of thousands of children all across Illinois, the state said, “Well, if you do not surrender that religious belief, you will be eradicated.” And that’s what happened.

Harkness: But you do allow single mothers to adopt—can you explain why? I think some people look at that and don’t understand why you’re OK facilitating adoptions for single mothers versus facilitating adoptions for same-sex couples.

Roach: We believed that a child is raised best with a mother and a father. Married mother and father. We did provide homes with single parents as long as those parents were not cohabitating. Research shows that a lot of abuse happens in homes via the live-in paramour. So our policy was if you’re a single adult, and you qualify, we will work with you.

Harkness: What do you say to someone from the ACLU or from the other side that calls you “anti-gay?”

Roach: We just say that’s not the case. What we were was an organization that tried to provide quality foster homes for abused and neglected kids, and we did it very well. We were one of the best at it. I want to say, what’s the solution for these kids who are suffering? That’s what we need to be doing.

Harkness: Can same-sex parents still adopt children, whether faith-based agencies are a part of the system or not?

Roach: Absolutely. The [proposed] Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act does not prevent anyone from becoming a foster or adoptive parent. In Illinois, we know all same-sex couples can be served because without Catholic Charities, they all are being served.

So with Catholic Charities in the picture, it wouldn’t change that. This [proposed] law does not prevent anyone from the opportunity to become a foster and adoptive parent.

Harkness: What were the consequences of being shut down?

Roach: Thousands of children and foster parents were forced to leave Catholic Charities and go to other agencies. I think altogether there were about 3,000 children that were disrupted, and thousands more foster parents that were no longer allowed to work with Catholic Charities.

The consequences were something that we had predicted. We were one of the most effective organizations in the state of Illinois in recruiting quality foster parents. And now, one only has to look at the headlines and see that there is a shortage of quality foster homes, not only in Illinois but across the country.

That’s only been exacerbated now in the last few years by the opioid epidemic. And so at a time where foster parents were in desperate need, you have quality organizations with a long-standing history of being able to find them being forced to the sidelines.

Harkness: Why is Catholic Charities so good at recruiting foster parents compared to your average organization?

Roach: It has a lot to do with our long history. Not only had we been providing foster care and a partnership with the state of Illinois since the early ’70s, late ’60s, but for over 100 years Catholic Charities had been finding adoptive homes, working with various Catholic orphanages.

So we have this huge, long history. It is a mission, it’s something that we hold very near and dear to our hearts. Children need homes and that’s what the church has been involved with for a long, long time. And I think that’s why we’re really, really good at what we do.

Harkness: What happens if other faith-based adoption agencies get pushed out of the system?

Roach: I think the travesty is perpetuated. The crisis will be made worse. The children are the one who’ve suffered in all this. This was clearly an argument on rights. Our side believe this was a religious liberty argument, and we will always believe that. The other side believes that this was a civil rights argument, and so we had a conflict within the public-private partnership that had worked well since the Great Depression.

And instead of resolving the conflict by putting the kids first and coming up with a solution that would help those kids, all we did was shout at each other, and that’s all they’re doing right now. You discriminate, or you’re anti-gay, or you’re anti-God, and all we do is we argue and fight.

In the meantime, you have thousands of kids who are suffering. So if this continues to happen, the number of kids suffering will only grow. We have to be adults in the room; we can’t be shouting, we’ve got to help these kids. There is a solution. The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act provides that solution.

The solution should do two things. One, it should ensure that anyone who wants to do this difficult work, and it is very difficult work—it’s not a right, no one has a right to become a foster parent or adoptive [parent]—anyone who wants to do this work should allow religious organizations to abide by their religious faith in providing these services. The second thing should be that the solution should be done in the best interest of kids.

This act does all of that. It takes away the argument and says we’re gonna focus on kids. So if everyone can be served who wants to be a foster parent or adoptive parent, and religious organizations can practice this service according to their faith, then everyone wins because the kids then will have the maximum opportunity to find a quality forever home. And that’s what we need to be focused on. That’s not what happened in Illinois.

Harkness: You’re now advocating to address this from the federal level. Why?

Roach: The fight that I described earlier, religious liberties versus civil rights, is happening in several other states around the country. The ACLU is continually perpetuating lawsuits to try and attempt to drive out religious organizations that have the radical belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Harkness: In general, how bad is the foster care and adoption crisis?

Roach: Do a simple Google search. You’ll see headline after headline after headline in states across the country where there’s a foster home shortage. Not only in Illinois but in many, many other states. I’ve read articles where they can’t find homes and so kids are staying in offices because there’s no home for them to be placed in. It has reached a crisis proportion, and it’s been exacerbated by the opioid crisis.

There have been studies that have shown that the need for foster homes has increased because there are a lot more kids now coming into care because [of] neglect, because the parents are so addicted that their addiction is their only focus. Children are being left home alone, children are being not fed, children are not going to school. And so the state is coming in and removing those children because they’re in dangerous situations. And so it has definitely grown the need.

We are in a very difficult situation right now, and these kids are suffering. We need to think about how can we, as a society, reach out to all segments of our population to find people who would provide care and homes for these children. We don’t need to be shunning people and organizations. We need to be maximizing our opportunities to find these parents.

Harkness: Where do you go from here?

Roach: One of our strengths is that we are able to provide a wide array of services. And so after this happened to us, our bishop and our board began planning to see what else we could do out there to fulfill the mission of providing mercy and love to people who are hurting.

We’ve developed other programs—legal service programs, rural outreach programs, immigration programs—since we lost foster care and adoption.

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, May 28, 2018


An attack on Jordan Peterson by a former friend

Furious denunciations of Jordan Peterson from the Left are a dime a dozen but there is a more reasoned article here by BERNARD SCHIFF, an old associate of Jordan Peterson which has a serious claim to uncover Peterson's feet of clay.  His obviously intimate and long term association with Peterson gives his words some claim to authority.

I am not going to attempt a systematic reply to the article.  That would be absurd when Peterson himself is far better placed to do that.  So I just want to offer a few notes:

Some of the accusations Prof. Schiff makes are serious ones. He actually hints that Peterdson is behaving like a Fascist dictator.  But his principal claim is that Peterson is not a systematic thinker and that he therefore is prone to serious self-contradictions and inconsistencies.

But his own knowledge of the sort of things that Peterson discusses looks very shallow at times.  I was amused that he repeats the ignorant Leftist accusation that HUAC and Joe McCarthy were somehow one and the same.  He says:

"In the 1950s a vicious attack on freedom of speech and thought occurred in the United States at the hands of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee".

How a Senator could be part of a House committee is an abiding mystery and yet to conflate the two is a common Leftist mistake that shows how utterly shallow and unscholarly Leftist thought usually is. HUAC was a Democrat creature established in 1938 which ran to 1975. It was initially chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-Tex.). McCarthy was active from about 1950 to 1954 and had no association with HUAC.

Another accusatory paragraph from Prof. Schiff:

Jordan has a complex relationship to freedom of speech. He wants to effectively silence those left-wing professors by keeping students away from their courses because the students may one day become “anarchical social revolutionaries” who may bring upon us disruption and violence. At the same time he was advocating cutting funds to universities that did not protect free speech on their campuses. He defended the rights of “alt right” voices to speak at universities even though their presence has given rise to disruption and violence. For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either.

That is a fairly absurd paragraph in several ways. It's hard to believe but Schiff really is saying that the Alt-Right should not be heard because that provokes Leftists to attack them!  Prof. Schiff admits to being a Leftist but that is singularly one-eyed for a Leftist academic.  You could justify the Nazi attacks on Catholics with that sort of argument. "He who controls the Streets is the only one with any right to be heard" is the underlying argument.

And what about Peterson's wish to de-politicize academe is inimical to free speech?  It is an argument about keeping politics out of a certain venue, not an aim to completely muzzle one kind of speech -- which is what Leftists aim to do when they ban or obstruct conservative speakers from campus. Peterson is consistently defending free speech, on campus or off.

And Prof. Schiff's other arguments are of that sort.  He sees things from a completely Leftist perspective, with all the limitations that entails, where a broader perspective would see Peterson's ideas as quite reasonable, defensible and consistent.  Schiff is simply objecting to Peterson's conservatism, nothing more. Any competent conservative writer could show that Peterson's arguments are not inchoate, inconsistent or unreasonable -- JR






Make more babies, America

by Jeff Jacoby

FROM THE National Center for Health Statistics came some disturbing news last week: The US birthrate, which has been on the skids for a decade, hit another record low.

About 3.85 million babies were born in the United States in 2017. That was down from 3.95 million births in 2016, which in turn was down from 3.98 million in 2015. For every 1,000 American women of childbearing age, there were just 60.2 births last year, the lowest birthrate ever recorded. A related yardstick is the fertility rate — the number of babies each woman, on average, will have over her lifetime. It takes a fertility rate of 2.1 just to keep a nation's population stable, neither growing nor shrinking. Last year, the US rate dwindled to 1.76, a 40-year low.

Americans are less inclined than ever, it seems, to be fruitful and multiply. That should trouble anyone who hopes that America's best days are yet to come. Nothing is more indispensable to the growth of any society than its human capital — the knowledge, skills, imagination, and energy of human beings. As the late, great economist Julian Simon famously argued, people are the ultimate resource in any society, since human beings over time create more than they destroy.

When nations retreat from marriage and children, their outlook tends to become bleaker and less prosperous. Japan, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, illustrates the phenomenon well. As Japanese births have dwindled, the working-age cohort has accounted for a smaller and smaller share of an older and older population. Economic decline has followed demographic decline. And with Japan's labor force doomed to keep shrinking, the worst is yet to come.

There are many reasons for the plunge in fertility rates, and some of those reasons are unequivocal blessings. First and foremost is the near-eradication of infant mortality. In the 1850s, wrote Jonathan V. Last in his 2013 book What to Expect When No One's Expecting, one-fifth of white American babies, and one-third of black babies, died during infancy. Today, by comparison, the infant mortality rate is minuscule: 5.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. When children are more likely to survive, parents have fewer children.

Other positive changes have also helped bring down fertility rates. Among them: the explosive increase in women's education, the availability of modern contraception, and the surge of women into the workforce. Added to those have been still other social transformations. The establishment of Social Security and Medicare eroded the need for children to support their parents in old age. The waning of religion in modern America has weakened the conviction that getting married and raising a family are moral imperatives. And the din by environmental alarmists about the dangers of "overpopulation" have convinced many people that childlessness is a virtue.

But it isn't.

It should go without saying that Americans are perfectly free to delay getting married or having children, or to decide that they want no part of the expense, commitment, and restrictions of parenthood. This isn't Margaret Atwood's Gilead. Individual men and women who choose not to have kids are exercising a reproductive liberty that most of us regard as inviolable.

Yet that doesn't mean we're obliged to close our eyes to the aggregate impact of those individual choices. A society that ceases to "be fruitful and multiply" is a society that sows the seeds of its own decay. The retreat from child-rearing, in columnist Ross Douthat's words, is a form of "decadence" — an attitude that "privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be." A plummeting birthrate has ramifications that go beyond the economic burden of a swelling elderly population and fewer people of working age to bear that burden. To opt out of having children is to opt out of the most meaningful investment in the future — and to thereby make it more likely that America's best days are not to come.

Government can't make people have babies, and shouldn't try to. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage parenthood, or remind ourselves how important babies are to American success, enterprise, and optimism. America's children are its most valuable asset, and a persistently sinking birthrate is a warning: That asset is being dangerously depleted. Life with kids is undoubtedly a challenge. But as America is on the verge of finding out, life without them will be more challenging by far.

SOURCE






Hero cop wins almost £900k after suffering sexist bullying from female boss

A MALE cop has won £870,000 compensation after suffering sexism from his female boss. Chief Inspector Adrian Denby, 49, was in charge of a tactical unit when he was victimised by Met deputy assistant commissioner Maxine de Brunner.

She wanted to challenge the squad’s macho culture and flipped after seeing a cop with only a towel round his waist in the office on his way from the shower to the locker room.

De Brunner ordered a probe after beer was found in a fridge with a price list on the front.

The Met also investigated unfounded claims of homophobic bullying.

Mr Denby, who has nine commendations, was later removed from his post. A tribunal found he was discriminated against and the Met has paid up in an out-of-court deal.

It is also understood the London force is helping him to set up a business as part of the settlement. With legal costs, the case has cost it more than £2million, a source said.

It is thought to be the first case in which a male cop sued his force over sexist bosses.

He regretted not stopping male staff crossing the room in towels but blamed poor design of the office. He claimed he was unfairly punished for failings, while a female colleague in a similar position was not.

He is on sick leave. De Brunner has retired. The Met declined to comment.

SOURCE







The decadent ADL.

The ADL has been irrelevant for 50 years. Its full organizational name, the Anti-Defamation League, like that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is rarely used because that identity and mission lie in another era.

The ADL was founded in 1913 to promote the acceptance of Jews in mainstream society. Its founding charter was concerned with "the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures". Its original plan was to fight anti-Semitic prejudice by lobbying theater managers and newspaper editors.

Jews won acceptance in mainstream society over 50 years ago. Hollywood has more Jewish caricatures than ever. The revival of Murphy Brown means that CBS now will have three sitcoms featuring grotesque caricatures that play every negative Jewish stereotype for laughs. But that’s okay.

The ADL long ceased fighting that battle. And all the others. It’s an irrelevant organization on its last legs.

Its original mission became irrelevant when Jews won mainstream acceptance. Jews are the best liked (or perhaps least disliked) religious group in America. Yet anti-Semitic hate crimes dominate the roster.

How can both be true?

As anti-Semitism declined nationally, it receded to the racial and political margins. Instead of a lukewarm prejudice of many, it became the passionate creed of political extremists. The ADL shifted to combating anti-Semitism on the margins instead of in the mainstream. Instead of critiquing movies, it monitored hate groups. But, unlike mainstream lobbying, its monitoring of the margins was ineffectual.

Neo-Nazis wouldn’t be dissuaded by the ADL. Neither would any other fringe group. The ADL’s monitoring only fed into their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and gave them an enemy to fight. But the ADL also needed an enemy to fight, a reason to exist and an incentive to keep the donations coming.

Meanwhile it was ignoring the threat of a breakout from the margins becoming mainstream.

The far right had been growing less relevant for most of the ADL’s existence. The Klan had gone from marching in the tens of thousands and dominating entire cities to being unable to fill a small room. But the far left had been steadily growing in influence. And its takeover would change everything.

By the sixties, anti-Semitism in America was profoundly changing. But the ADL didn’t change.

Anti-Semitic violence was now largely a feature of urban life. The new Jewish middle class, many of them Holocaust survivors and accented immigrants who had worked tirelessly in sweatshops to put their kids through college, was driven out of its comfortable urban enclaves by racial violence.

Jewish neighborhoods and businesses built by the immigrant generation vanished in riots, firebombs, muggings and stabbings. The second act of the civil rights movement was an anti-civil rights movement that, had it been directed at blacks, would have been met with protests and outrage. Instead the left defended the perpetrators and condemned the victims. Black leadership jettisoned Martin Luther King’s calls for equality and co-existence, replacing them with nationalism and racial supremacism.

And the left cheered.

That’s how Al Sharpton went from leading anti-Semitic pogroms to addressing the DNC. It’s why Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus met with Farrakhan. It’s why Bernie Sanders backed Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson despite his anti-Semitism. It’s why anti-Semitic black literature is celebrated.

That is how Tamika Mallory ended up in the audience at a Farrakhan speech. And that’s how Eric Holder likely contrived to help Mallory boot the ADL from Starbucks for calling out her anti-Semitism. When two black men were kicked out of Starbucks, there was outrage. When a Jewish organization was kicked out of Starbucks at the behest of the fan of a black supremacist who admires Hitler, there were shrugs.

The left has been dismissing concerns about black nationalist anti-Semitism for 50 years.

Defenders and condemners of this phenomenon will blame the unique issue of race in America. But that doesn’t hold up. The left did the same exact thing with pogroms in Russia. Whether it was Russian peasants or urban thugs, the left defended the violence as the outcry of an oppressed class or race against the privileged Jewish bourgeoisie, even though the targets were inevitably the Jewish poor.

American Jews, whose ancestors largely arrived from Russia before the Communist violence, were under the impression that anti-Semitic violence was a feature of Czarist life being combatted by the left. This distorted view of what was really going on was encouraged by lefty propaganda rags like The Forward.

Both sides opportunistically encouraged anti-Semitic violence (while occasionally condemning it) when it served their political interests. One mob would shout, “Death to the Jews and the Commissars!” The other mob would shout, “Smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” And often, they were the same mob.

Few American Jews have ever heard of the Glukhov pogrom by the Red Army in which leftists massacred 450 Jews, including children, to shouts of, "We are going to slaughter all the bourgeoisie and the Yids." The Communist Pravda described this anti-Semitic massacre as a victory over the “counter-revolution.”

Soviet anti-Semitism was not a break from its revolutionary principles, as some liberals liked to think. It was the execution of those principles. The Bolsheviks had repeatedly hounded their Menshevik rivals as the “yids” or “kikes”. As they consolidated power, they discouraged pogroms by individual bands and instead implemented a national Jewish pogrom of gulags, torture, execution and religious repression.

The attacks on Jewish neighborhoods and stores by black nationalists like Sharpton were a carbon copy of the pogroms that had been organized in Russia and Ukraine, by the same leftist ideology. A decade after the Glukhov pogrom, the Young Communist League and the Young Liberators were already working Harlem trying to stir up riots against Jewish storeowners.

The glamorization of Hitler in the black community did not begin with Farrakhan. Back in the thirties, Sufi Abdul Hamid, now known as a “pioneering labor leader”, but then dubbed the Black Hitler, was vowing, "an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites."

Neither Tamika Mallory, nor Sharpton, are a break with a mythological past dominated by a black-Jewish civil rights alliance that the ADL and its base are obsessed with, instead they are the fulfillment of a the long, ugly alliance between the left and anti-Semitic black nationalists that grew on the ADL’s watch.

The left’s anti-Semitic tactics have been consistent across countries and cultures. When its regimes rise, they persecute the Jews, whether it’s in the USSR, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela or the United States.

But the ADL’s liberalism was its undoing. Like most American Jews, it viewed the rise of the left as a progressive phenomenon. It did not matter that the same mistake had been made countless times with the same outcome. There could be no harm in the Democrats leaning further and further to the left.

Except maybe to Israel.

The debate about lefty anti-Semitism centers largely on Israel. And that’s how the left wants it.

Unlike nationalist anti-Semitism, transnationalist anti-Semitism is cloaked in in abstractions. The Red Army pogromists were fighting the bourgeoisie. Sharpton was fighting racism. BDS is battling Zionism.

Leftist anti-Semitism identifies Jews with an ideological abstraction and then attacks the actual people.

The Red Army thugs, Sharpton’s thugs and BDS thugs are anti-Semitic. Capitalism, racism and Zionism are excuses. Lefty anti-Semitism neither began with Zionism nor will it end there. The Jews who were murdered by the Soviet Union, who fled Nicaragua and Brownsville, had nothing to do with Israel.

The ADL wants to be a lefty organization fighting anti-Semitism. Replacing Abe Foxman with Jonathan Greenblatt was meant to adapt it to the new landscape. But the left doesn’t want to fight anti-Semitism.

There is no future for an organization fighting anti-Semitism on the left.

The left has built its own Soros lobby coalition of anti-Jewish organization staffed by activists with Jewish last names. Like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya or Jewish Section, they redefine anti-Semitism as a ‘bourgeois’ phenomenon that the left is immune to. These activist groups seek to destroy Israel and the Jewish community because they interfere with their task of mobilizing Jews as lefty activist cannon fodder. They defend lefty anti-Semitism and accuse the right of anti-Semitism. 

Despite the ADL agreeing with 99% of their agenda, the left is determined to destroy or control it. And the ADL still refuses to confront the left because, like most liberals, it believes that it is on the left.

The leftward drift of the people who were once liberals had left them incapable of confronting lefty illiberalism. They know that they agree with the left’s causes, they only question some of its tactics. They talk a great deal about extremism, but they only whisper about the extremism on their own side.

And when the argument becomes about tactics, instead of worldview, the left wins.

The left’s tactical illiberalism isn’t impatience or passion; it’s the product of an illiberal worldview. Anti-Semitism isn’t an aberration on the left. It’s inevitable. A fundamental difference between liberalism and the illiberal left is that the latter defines solutions to social problems through destroying groups.

Destroy the bourgeoisie, smash the deniers, eliminate religion, crush whiteness and wipe out the Jews.

The left needs an “other” to personalize its abstract hatreds. Jews fill the traditional role of the “other” as scapegoat. And anti-Semitism serves the same function on the left as it did throughout history.

It’s no accident that the star of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate was Emmanuel Goldstein.

Multiculturalism doesn’t mean that there is no “other”. It means that there are a plethora of “others”. And when there are a thousand “others”, an “other” that everyone can agree on is urgently needed.

The left can make Jews embody capitalism, whiteness, nationalism, war crimes, exploitation and every evil. The Jews control the weather, a lefty councilman claims, and the left rushes to defend him. The Jews are killing Palestinian babies, stealing organs, training police to shoot black people and controlling the world’s wealth. It’s the same old bigotry in a keffiyah. And it serves the same tawdry function.

Anti-Semitism is the sewer, sausage factory and the boiler room of the leftist soul.

The ADL has tried to find common ground with the left. But the left is not in the common ground business. Where the left takes institutional power, in a country, a state, a college or a profession, ideological diversity quickly vanishes leaving behind its ruling activists and a silent majority.

As a liberal consensus vanishes, the ADL is becoming an organization with no base. The ADL is too pro-Jewish for the left and not pro-Jewish enough for the right. The left has its own collection of organizations that it wants to impose on the Jewish community. The Soros lobby’s JFREJ, Bend the Arc and If Not Now were hurled into action against the ADL. Eventually they will cannibalize the ADL.

The ADL failed to stand up the left. And like other liberal collaborators, it will be replaced with a leftist Yevsektsiya that will divide its time between condemning Israel and denouncing Jews as bigots who need to be reeducated about their privilege and their complicity in whiteness. And then it will get ugly.

When the ADL was founded, there was a mainstream consensus for it to influence. The consensus has been replaced by political and racial tribalism. The margins are becoming mainstream. And it’s dying.

The ADL may choose to shut down. Or like HIAS, it may jettison its Jewish identity and join the anti-Jewish left. Or it can do what it should have done all along. It tried colluding. It promoted Black Lives Matter and signaled softness on BDS. But its efforts to collude with intersectional anti-Semitism failed.

Now an irrelevant organization in its final years has one last chance to stand up to the left.

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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Sunday, May 27, 2018




Trump gets it

Speaking at the annual gala of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump cited Jeremiah 1:5 in explaining his belief that “every life is totally worth protecting.”

“As the Lord says in Jeremiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I set you apart,’” said Trump. “When a mother and a father hold a new baby in their arms, they are changed forever.”

“When we look into the eyes of a newborn child, there is no doubt we see the beauty of the human soul and the mystery of God’s great creation,” said Trump. “We know that every life has meaning and that every life is totally worth protecting.”

“When we stand for life, we stand for the true source of America’s greatness,” said Trump. “It’s our people. Our people are great.”

Here is an excerpt from Trump’s remarks:

"As the Lord says in Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I set you apart.” When a mother and a father hold a new baby in their arms, they are changed forever. When a child says “Mommy” or “Daddy” for the first time, there is nothing like it anywhere in the world. No matter what you do, there is nothing like it. And when parents watch their children thrive and grow, they’re filled with joy beyond words, and a love beyond measure. You know that—everybody in this room.

"When we look into the eyes of a newborn child, there is no doubt we see the beauty of the human soul and the mystery of God’s great creation. We know that every life has meaning and that every life is totally worth protecting. Thank you. Thank you very much.

"When we stand for life, we stand for the true source of America’s greatness. It’s our people. Our people are great. It’s the people who grace our lives, who sustain our communities, and who make America a nation, a home, and this magnificent land that we all love so much.

"As long as we have faith in our citizens, confidence in our values, and trust in our God, then we will never, ever fail. Our nation will thrive. Our people will prosper. And America will be greater than ever before. And that’s what’s happening.

SOURCE






Hungary’s maverick prime minister, Viktor Orban, is questioning current Western values

Four years ago, Orban gave his critics ammunition when he said he was constructing an “illiberal democracy.” This month he doubled down, declaring liberal democracy dead and urging other European leaders to stop trying to revive the corpse.

Instead, Orban exhorted them to get busy invoking a new democracy based on Christian principles.

“Liberal democracy is no longer able to protect people’s dignity, provide freedom, guarantee physical security or maintain Christian culture,” he said in Hungary’s parliament earlier this month. “Some in Europe are still tinkering with it, because they believe that they can repair it, but they fail to understand that it is not the structure that is defective: The world has changed.”

The response, he added, is “to replace the shipwreck of liberal democracy by building 21st-century Christian democracy.”

For many reasons, Orban deserves our attention when he says his ambition—“now we want to hunt really big game” is precisely how he put it—is to change the course of Europe.

He is flushed with an electoral victory in which his party last month captured more votes than all of the opposition combined. He has defeated German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the important philosophical debate over immigration (Orban says it should be lowered). And he has vanquished the leftist billionaire George Soros, who just announced his nongovernmental organization is leaving Hungary.

Most importantly, the question of values is the fundamental issue confronting the Continent. Unlike the United States, modern European states are not founded upon creedal documents that lay out the constituting character and culture of the nation, and how to preserve them.

When “Europe” was more or less coterminous with “Christendom,” that text was the Bible. The culture that defined all the European nations—the paintings, the music, the festivals, the folk wisdom—was suffused with Christianity and its imagery. Greco-Judeo-Christian ethics bonded Portuguese and Finns in the absence of DNA or language links.

As Europe has de-Christianized, at best it has evolved into a values-free, empty husk. At worst it has become a supranational entity that pretends adherence to hate-speech codes, mandatory work rules, open borders, and coercion of everyone into publicly affirming lifestyles they find repugnant—all violations of different freedoms, and ironically of liberalism itself—now form “European values.”

Orban thumbs his nose at European Union pieties with gusto, which is why he can be forgiven if he uses provocative terms to attract attention to an important project.

But first it is important to note obvious downsides. Orban is no Thomas Jefferson, and his emphasis on ethnicity, not civic nationalism contained within borders, is sui generis.

If you believe that all men are created equal, are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted “to secure these rights” and “the blessings of liberty,” then the type of state that Orban wants to build is likely not your bag.

He says he believes that Hungarians are exceptional innately, not as a result of national traits that are acquirable. “We are a unique species,” he said last week. “There is a world which we alone see.”

This Hungarian nation is not geographically defined within juridical and electoral boundaries. The Hungarian nation, Orban said four years ago, “sometimes coincides with the country’s borders, sometimes doesn’t.”

Most important, securing individuals’ liberties is most assuredly not the central purpose of the state he is busy creating. As he said, again, in the 2014 speech:

“The new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.”

There is good reason why ethnic, rather than civic, nationalism gives us pause. Though ethnic nationalism is unassailable from a natural rights perspective, it does de-emphasize the individual’s agency by making citizenship (belonging) non-volitional.

All of this is less of an indictment of Orban than one would think, however. First, he’s building a state for Hungarians, not Americans—and we must remember that even though safeguarding freedom must be our central animating spirit, to do that, we too, must preserve America’s unique culture.

Also, Hungarians are more ethnically separate than­­­­­ most. They are descended from seven tribes that emerged out of Central Asia more than a millennium ago and settled eventually in the Carpathian Basin.

Surrounded by a sea of German and Slavic, they continue to speak a language that is Asian in origin, not European, and to have distinct foods and customs. They are highly homogenous at home, and have enclaves in neighboring countries who are still considered part of the “Hungarian nation.”

And Orban is not—with due respect to his critics—vowing to pursue his project by depriving Hungarians of their freedom or property. He really doesn’t have a beef with liberal democracy, if understood as a system of representative government where the rule of the majority is checked by constitutional guarantees for minority rights and checks and balances prevent tyranny. Though he does not make freedom “the central element” of his project, he does secure people’s rights. He’s not Putin, Castro, or Xi Jinping.

It is instructive that for Orban, the inflection point for systemic change was the 2008 financial crisis. What he saw, what many saw, was intellectual and financial elites, transnational in outlook, suffering less than their working-class compatriots. He is trying to reconstruct a sense of nation.

By attempting to reintroduce the Judeo-Christian ethic into a secularized Europe, Orban arguably is giving Europe a chance to do just that. Even if the ethnic model he and his electorate may be pursuing is irreplicable in America or most of Western Europe, the values model could have a lot to offer.­­­

SOURCE






Morgan Spurlock’s Alcoholism Confession Casts Doubt on His ‘Super Size Me’ Health Claims

Just another Leftist crook

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock caused waves with Super Size Me, the 2004 film in which he claimed eating McDonald’s gave him multiple health problems — but his recent admission to decades of heavy drinking call into question his dramatic claims about his health ailments being the result of fast food.

With his film, Spurlock won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was even nominated for an Academy Award. Phelim McAleer reminded readers of Super Sizes Me’s theatrical acclaim in a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

Spurlock’s super-sized claims were quite dramatic. Before he started filming the expose about the effects of McDonald’s food on a human body, the filmmaker said that he was in a “good spot” with his health. But after a full month of eating fast food, Spurlock insisted that his health took a dramatic, downward turn.

In that one month, the filmmaker insisted that he gained an unhealthy amount of weight, he said he got “the shakes” from the burgers and fries, felt depressed, lost sexual function, and he even made the claim that his liver was damaged by the temporary fast food diet.

In a subsequent interview, Morgan Spurlock congratulated himself on “opening people’s eyes” on the ills of fast food. He also claimed that the experience hurt his body to the point where he gains weight easily.

But, the liver problems were his most dramatic claims. Did eating McDonald’s for a month straight really do so much harm to his liver? He has always maintained that his liver problems were a result of Super Size Me. But new information raises important questions.

Phelim McAleer found that Spurlock himself recently made a statement that seems to put his earlier health claims in doubt. McAleer notes that after he was accused of sexual harassment, Spurlock made a shocking admission:

Fast-forward to December 2017, when Mr. Spurlock issued a #MeToo mea culpa titled “I Am Part of the Problem,” detailing a lifetime of sexual misdeeds. As a result, YouTube dropped its plans to screen his Super Size Me sequel, and other broadcasters cut ties. But overlooked in all this was a stunning admission that calls into question the veracity of the original Super Size Me.

After blaming his parents for his bad acts, Mr. Spurlock asked: “Is it because I’ve consistently been drinking since the age of 13? I haven’t been sober for more than a week in 30 years.”

“Could this be why his liver looked like that of an alcoholic? Were those shakes symptoms of alcohol withdrawal?”McAleer asked.

McAleer also pointed out that Spurlock’s admission about his drinking raises a question about earlier claims:

Mr. Spurlock’s 2017 confession contradicts what he said in his 2004 documentary. “Any alcohol use?” the doctor asks at the outset. “Now? None,” he replies. In explaining his experiment, he says: “I can only eat things that are for sale over the counter at McDonald’s — water included.”

Morgan Spurlock’s recent admission about a possible chronic alcohol problem appear to be at odds with the claims he made that eating fast food damaged his health.

Naturally, Spurlock has refused to respond to questions about these contradictory statements.

SOURCE





Fake Black Activist Rachel Dolezal Accused Of Welfare Fraud

She's just a fraud, period. She'll make a good Leftist

Rachel Dolezal, the former Washington state NAACP president thrust into the spotlight after media revealed she was a white woman posing as black, is facing welfare fraud charges.

Dolezal, who legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, could face up to 15 years in prison after authorities say she received thousands of dollars in public assistance. She’s accused of welfare fraud, perjury and false verification for public assistance, TV station KHQ reports.

Rachel Dolezal faces felony theft charges illegally receiving $8,747 in food assistance and $100 in childcare assistance from August 2015 through November 2017.  She could face 15 years in jail.

FOX News reported:

Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP chapter leader who resigned after her parents revealed she’s not African-American, is facing a felony theft charge in Washington state after she allegedly made false statements to secure nearly $9,000 in food and childcare assistance.

The charges against Dolezal, who changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in October 2016, were first reported by KHQ-TV.

According to court documents, investigators with Washington state’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) started looking into Dolezal’s finances in March 2017 after the publication of her autobiography, “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World.”

DSHS investigator Kyle Bunge said Dolezal had claimed that “her only source of income was $300.00 per month in gifts from friends.” However, the department found that she had deposited nearly $84,000 in her bank account between August 2015 and September 2017 without reporting it.

According to the investigation, the money came from sales of Dolezal’s autobiography as well as “the sale of her art, soaps, and handmade dolls.”

Authorities say Dolezal illegally received $8,747 in food assistance and $100 in child care assistance from August 2015 through November 2017.

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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