The corruption of British justice

Sean Gabb

Any system of criminal justice worth the name needs to reconcile humanity with certainty. On the one hand, part of the function of the criminal law is deterrent. When you know that you will go to prison for six months if you smash someone’s window, you may be less inclined to pick up the stone than if you believe you may get an absolute discharge or a whipping. Another part of the system’s function is to match severity of sentencing to the perceived gravity of offences. We need to see that breaking a window is less of a crime than breaking someone’s nose, and that murder is much more of a crime than either.

On the other hand, no set of laws can take into account every set of circumstances. Should someone who steals a loaf of bread for a bet receive the same punishment as if he had stolen it to feed his hungry children? We can write in allowances for age and mental capacity. We can write in examples of mitigating circumstances. But rigid sentencing tariffs will always lead, sooner or later, to perceived injustice of punishments. Indeed, unless the system is in the hands of human robots, rigid tariffs will usually be circumvented in practice. Before the nineteenth century, English juries would often acquit rather than see a defendant sentenced to death or transportation for a crime of passion or an uncharacteristic lapse. Or judges would pass sentence, and then approach the King or his Ministers for a pardon or a commutation of punishment. Later on, the prosecuting authorities would bring lesser or greater charges, depending on how they saw a defendant.

By the twentieth century, both in Britain and America, a criminal justice system had emerged in which, murder and treason aside, offences had minimum and maximum sentences laid down in the law, and it was up to the judges to decide what sentence was appropriate within these bands. Sometimes, a judge was too harsh or too lenient. On the whole, however, the system worked. It reconciled a general hierarchy of punishments with a reasonable faith in the justice of punishment for each individual case.

In Britain, the system is now breaking down. Take these examples:

In January 2013, Chelsea Lambie and Douglas Cruikshank attached bacon to door handles and threw strips inside the Edinburgh Central Mosque in Scotland. In June 2014, Lambie was sent to prison for twelve months and Cruikshank for nine months. [Pair jailed for Edinburgh’s Central Mosque bacon attack]

In June 2014, an Islamic teacher called Suleman Maknojioa was found guilty of sexually molesting one of his eleven year-old female students. He was let off going to prison because the Judge accepted that his wife’s English was too bad for her to function in England without him to take her about. [Islamic teacher who sexually abused girl, 11, as he taught her the Koran spared jail because his wife doesn’t speak English]

I could fill a whole article – I could fill a small book – with similar instances of differential punishments that must shock any reasonable sense of right and wrong. I am not saying that the wilful desecration of a place of worship should go unpunished, or even that the case given above should have been punished exactly as if the defendants had left bacon in a church. But prison for sacrilege and a suspended sentence for sexual assault of a child – where is the justice in that?

The answer is that the criminal justice system has been politicised. It still dispenses justice, but the justice dispensed is no longer our justice. It instead reflects the sense of right and wrong of a ruling class that has no regard for the moral views of ordinary people, but is committed to a revolutionary transformation of British society. Stupidity aside, there are no mitigating circumstances for those Scottish bacon-layers, and they deserved some punishment. But their real crime appears to have been that they disobeyed the prime commandment of the modern law, which is to act and speak at all times as if we really were living in a multicultural love feast. Their actual crime was “hate,” or “intolerance.” The act of leaving bacon in a mosque was only evidence of their crime. As in Rotherham [Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal], the sexual abuse of children may be at best a minor offence, to be lightly punished, if not systematically covered up, when committed by one of the ethnic minorities.

But the corruption is more profound than the manipulation of sentencing guidelines. During the past twenty years in Britain – and perhaps also in America – the criminal justice system has been politicised at its heart. Traditionally, a criminal court has been asked to consider two elements of guilt – wrongful act (actus reus) and wrongful intention (mens rea). For example, murder is defined as “killing with malice aforethought.” If you poison your wife to lay hands on the insurance money, you have killed her, and you have killed her deliberately. You have committed murder. If, on the other hand, you kill her by accidentally knocking her off a ladder, or letting her catch your cold that then turns to pneumonia, you may only have been negligent. You may be guilty of manslaughter or nothing at all. But you are not guilty of murder.

Beginning with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the British ruling class has added a further element, which is motivation. For example, if you commit grievous bodily harm against someone of your own race or religion, the maximum prison sentence is five years. If you commit this against someone of a different race or religion, and it can be shown that you were motivated by dislike of that race or religion, the maximum sentence is now seven years. There is a consistent loading of punishments for virtually every crime against life or property.

According to the Crown Prosecution Guidance Note:

[T]here are common problems that are experienced by victims of racist of religiously aggravated crime. They can feel extremely isolated or fearful of going out or even staying at home. They may become withdrawn, and suspicious of organisations or strangers. Their mental and physical health may suffer in a variety of ways. For young people in particular, the impact can be damaging to their self-esteem or identity and, without support, a form of self-hatred of their racial or religious identity may result.

This may be the case. But it can be the case with any assault, regardless of motive. The effect of the law is to make opinions into crimes. If you get into a fight with a black man, and you are charged with assault, you will be in greater trouble if the police then search your home and find copies of books by Enoch Powell, or if your browsing history shows that you read articles on VDare. Again, some part of your crime will be “hate,” and, again, the specific assault will be merely evidence of this.

A through tyranny, such as Bolshevik Russia, can get away with perverting the law in this manner. In a semi-free society, such as Britain or America, the natural result is gradually to bring the criminal law into scandal, and its officers into contempt. The main danger is probably not that differential punishments will lead to thorough tyranny. There is still the possibility of a reaction. The danger is that all law, of whatever kind, will be seen as an expression of rule by a malevolent ruling class, and that all the safeguards of life and property will be weakened. A further danger is that if, or when, the reaction comes, the idea of sentencing discretion will be so discredited that the balancing of certainty with humanity will be forgotten, and we shall find ourselves with a criminal law written in letters of blood.

Sadly, given the nature and current progress of the revolutionary transformation mentioned above, it can be doubted whether something unpleasant can be avoided.

Via email: sean@seangabb.co.uk






The Challenge of Reforming Nutritional Epidemiologic Research

John P. A. Ioannidis, writing below, is a renowned critic of bad science.  He points out that conventional beliefs about what constitutes "healthy" food are very poorly founded.  The article is from a leading medical journal

Some nutrition scientists and much of the public often consider epidemiologic associations of nutritional factors to represent causal effects that can inform public health policy and guidelines. However, the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiology is difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The field needs radical reform.

In recent updated meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies, almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk.1 Substantial deficiencies of key nutrients (eg, vitamins), extreme overconsumption of food, and obesity from excessive calories may indeed increase mortality risk. However, can small intake differences of specific nutrients, foods, or diet patterns with similar calories causally, markedly, and almost ubiquitously affect survival?

Assuming the meta-analyzed evidence from cohort studies represents life span–long causal associations, for a baseline life expectancy of 80 years, eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per hazelnut),1 drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years,2 and eating a single mandarin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life.1 Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking.1 Could these results possibly be true? Authors often use causal language when reporting the findings from these studies (eg, “optimal consumption of risk-decreasing foods results in a 56% reduction of all-cause mortality”).1 Burden-of-disease studies and guidelines endorse these estimates. Even when authors add caveats, results are still often presented by the media as causal.

These implausible estimates of benefits or risks associated with diet probably reflect almost exclusively the magnitude of the cumulative biases in this type of research, with extensive residual confounding and selective reporting.3 Almost all nutritional variables are correlated with one another; thus, if one variable is causally related to health outcomes, many other variables will also yield significant associations in large enough data sets. With more research involving big data, almost all nutritional variables will be associated with almost all outcomes. Moreover, given the complicated associations of eating behaviors and patterns with many time-varying social and behavioral factors that also affect health, no currently available cohort includes sufficient information to address confounding in nutritional associations.

Furthermore, the literature is shaped by investigators who report nonprespecified results that are possible to analyze in very different ways.4 Consequently, meta-analyses become weighted averages of expert opinions. In an inverse sequence, instead of carefully conducted primary studies informing guidelines, expert-driven guidelines shaped by advocates dictate what primary studies should report. Not surprisingly, an independent assessment by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine of the national dietary guidelines suggested major redesign of the development process for these guidelines: improving transparency, promoting diversity of expertise and experience, supporting a more deliberative process, managing biases and conflicts, and adopting state-of-the-art processes.5

Proponents of the status quo may maintain that the true associations are even larger than what are reported because of attenuation from nondifferential misclassification. Indeed, self-reported data have error,6 but there is no guarantee it is nondifferential. Nevertheless, if error is nondifferential and estimated effects are attenuated, reported results become even more implausible: eating 12 hazelnuts daily would increase life expectancy by 20 to 30 years, not just 12 years.

Individuals consume thousands of chemicals in millions of possible daily combinations. For instance, there are more than 250 000 different foods and even more potentially edible items, with 300 000 edible plants alone. Seemingly similar foods vary in exact chemical signatures (eg, more than 500 different polyphenols). Much of the literature silently assumes disease risk is modulated by the most abundant substances; for example, carbohydrates or fats. However, relatively uncommon chemicals within food, circumstantial contaminants, serendipitous toxicants, or components that appear only under specific conditions or food preparation methods (eg, red meat cooking) may be influential. Risk-conferring nutritional combinations may vary by an individual’s genetic background, metabolic profile, age, or environmental exposures. Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables is challenging, if not impossible.

To use an analogy from genetics, studying associations of specific foods is like studying whether large chromosomal regions increase mortality risk. For decades, genome linkage scans struggled to link large chromosomal areas to disease risk. According to current knowledge, these previous efforts were doomed: each chromosomal area contains thousands of genetic variants. Linkage scans resulted in numerous articles, but limited useful information. Retrospectively, using a few hundred microsatellite markers to study an entire genome with many million polymorphisms seems naive. Similarly, limited self-reported nutrition data ascertained with a handful of questions and self-reported items fail to acknowledge or accurately measure a system that matches or exceeds the genome in complexity.

Beyond food studies, results of single-nutrient studies have largely failed to be corroborated in randomized trials. False-positive associations are common in the literature. For example, updated meta-analyses of published data from prospective cohort studies have demonstrated that a single antioxidant, beta carotene, has a stronger protective effect on mortality than all the foods mentioned above.7 The relative risk of death for the highest vs lowest group of beta carotene levels in serum or plasma was 0.69 (95% CI, 0.59-0.80).7 Even when measurement error is mitigated with biochemical assays (as in this example), nutritional epidemiology remains intrinsically unreliable. These results cannot be considered causal, especially after multiple large trials have yielded CIs excluding even a small benefit.

Proponents of the status quo of nutritional epidemiology point to occasional small trials with surrogate or metabolic outcomes (eg, lipids, diabetes, composite end points) whose results agree with epidemiologic findings. However, these small trials often have selective reporting bias similar to that of nutritional epidemiology.

Nutritional research may have adversely affected the public perception of science. Resources for some of these studies could have been better spent on unambiguous, directly manageable threats to health such as smoking, lack of exercise, air pollution, or climate change. Moreover, the perpetuated nutritional epidemiologic model probably also harms public health nutrition. Unfounded beliefs that justify eating more food, provided “quality food” is consumed, confuse the public and detract from the agenda of preventing and treating obesity.

Confusion is further enhanced by some approaches to publication in this field. Slices of data are often published from a cohort without accounting for other findings from the same cohort. A single article reporting a significant effect of a dietary component may seem plausible in isolation but would be untenable if all results were available. Given the vast space of analyzable associations, some prolific cohorts (eg, European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition, Nurses’ Health Study) have yielded more than 1000 articles each. Nutritional epidemiology articles also attract attention because the public is very interested in (and perpetually misinformed about) nutrition. For example, one of the 20 highest Altmetric scores in 2017 was for a study reporting major survival benefits from coffee.8 Despite important limitations and shortcomings, such studies also accrue substantial numbers of citations.

Some additional, large-scale, long-term, randomized trials on nutrition may be useful, especially for assessing diet patterns.3 The most promising large trial to date, Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea (PREDIMED), a trial of Mediterranean diet, had shown a benefit on a composite end point but was recently retracted and republished9 after it was realized that there were multiple subversions of randomization. Findings from the reanalysis showed results similar to those of the initially reported findings; however, the study should no longer be considered a randomized trial. Regardless, the trial showed no survival benefit. Large pragmatic trials for more complex diet patterns also may yield largely negative results. Nevertheless, their outcomes may help inform nutritional guidelines with some pragmatic “intention-to-eat” data.

Reform has long been due. Data from existing cohorts should become available for reanalysis by independent investigators. Their results should be presented in their totality for all nutritional factors measured, with standardized methods and standardized exploration of the sensitivity of conclusions to model and analysis choices. Readers and guideline developers may ignore hasty statements of causal inference and advocacy to public policy made by past nutritional epidemiology articles.10 Such statements should be avoided in the future.

The nutritional epidemiology community includes superb scientists. The best of them should take ownership of this reform process. They can further lead by example (eg, by correcting their own articles that have misleading claims). Such corrections would herald high scientific standards and public responsibility. A flawed methodological approach has dominated research questions that have proved particularly difficult to answer, more difficult than those of other epidemiologic disciplines.

A counterargument may be, by analogy, that genome linkage scan publications have not been corrected, so why correct nutritional epidemiology? The difference is that genomic scans performed with a handful of microsatellite markers have been replaced by better methods and generally did not affect public policy and people’s lives. Conversely, studies of nutritional epidemiology continue to be published regularly, spuriously affect guidelines, and confuse the public through heated advocacy by experts and nonexperts.

Nutritional epidemiologists who espouse reform in past and future work should be rewarded, for example, with continued funding to conduct pivotal trials, widely share their cohort data, conduct transparent all-encompassing analyses, and explore entirely new avenues of nutrition research. Funding agencies should support the reform agenda and thereby rejuvenate the field of nutritional research.

SOURCE







With fentanyl flooding the illicit market, all drug users now in danger

Fentanyl is a powerful surgical anaesthetic and has a very narrow window of safety.  Get the dose just a bit wrong and you are dead

Fatal overdoses continued to decline in Massachusetts in the second quarter of 2018, but a new challenge has surfaced as deadly fentanyl gets mixed with cocaine, a drug now found in more overdose deaths than heroin, authorities said Friday.

The devastating and growing prevalence of fentanyl was the dominant message in the state’s latest quarterly report on opioid-related deaths, released Friday. Fentanyl — the illicit synthetic, not the drug doctors prescribe — was present in nearly 90 percent of overdose deaths.

“If you are using illicit drugs in Massachusetts, you really have to be aware that fentanyl is a risk no matter which drug you’re using,” said Dr. Monica Bharel, Massachusetts public health commissioner. “The increased risk of death related to fentanyl is what’s driving this epidemic.” Fentanyl is many times more potent than heroin.

“Pretty much all you can access in the Boston area is fentanyl. You’re not finding heroin anymore,” said Richard Baker, director of the mobile prevention team at Victory Programs, a treatment provider.

That means that a new population of drug users — those who use cocaine — are also in danger of opioid overdose, said Dr. Alex Walley, physician and researcher at Boston Medical Center’s Grayken Center for Addiction.

Some cocaine users may not know their drug has been cut with fentanyl, and unaccustomed to opioids, they are especially prone to overdose. Others are continuing a longstanding practice of mixing cocaine, a stimulant, with heroin, a depressant — except that now, instead of heroin, they’re using the much more potent fentanyl.

“The deadliness of doing that increases with the introduction of fentanyl,” Walley said.

“It’s been over a year since I’ve seen [a patient] who told me they used heroin and they didn’t have fentanyl in their toxicology screen,” he added. “Fentanyl is the rule when it comes to people using what they call heroin.”

Cocaine has surpassed heroin in tests of those who fatally overdosed, starting with the last quarter of 2017. That has prompted the state to alert treatment providers that cocaine users are also at risk of opioid overdose, and a new alert to all medical personnel is planned, Bharel said.

The last quarter of 2017 is also when opioid-related deaths overall started to decline. From April to June 2018, fatal opioid overdoses in Massachusetts fell for the third consecutive quarter — but chiefly among whites. Blacks, especially black men, continue to be hit hard: The rate of overdose deaths among blacks increased by 23 percent from 2016 to 2017, while whites and Hispanics saw slight decreases.

Baker, of Victory Programs, cautioned against complacency amid the declining death toll, because certain groups are still severely affected, especially minorities and people in the prime of life. Between January 2017 and June 2018, nearly two-thirds of overdose deaths occurred among people age 25 to 44.

“We have an epidemic among young, new users who aren’t able to access resources and information that some of our older users have,” Baker said.

Massachusetts’ health and human services secretary, Marylou Sudders, acknowledged the issue in a statement. “When you look at the trend lines over time, while the results of our efforts are having an impact, we must double down on our efforts to implement treatment strategies that meet the needs of the highest-risk individuals and communities,” she said.

Most people who die of overdoses have more than one drug in their system, and the medical examiner often cannot pinpoint which drug or drugs were responsible for the death. But the prevalence of different drugs found in the victims’ bodies provides insight into the changing forces in substance use.

In the first quarter of 2018, there were 477 opioid-related deaths in which the medical examiner was able to screen for drugs. Of these, 89 percent involved fentanyl, 43 percent cocaine, 42 percent benzodiazepines, and 34 percent heroin. In contrast, in 2014, fentanyl was present in only about 40 percent of those who overdosed.

“This quarterly report provides a new level of data revealing an unsettling correlation between high levels of synthetic fentanyl present in toxicology reports and overdose death rates,” Governor Charlie Baker said in a statement. “It is critically important that the Commonwealth understand and study this information so we can better respond to this disease and help more people.”

SOURCE






GAVIN McInnes is having some fun -- as usual

He is a genuinely funny man but political correctness is the butt of most of his jokes  -- so he is called "Alt-Right"

McInnes, the co-founder of Vice magazine turned right-wing commentator and head of controversial pro-Trump, street-brawling “men’s rights” group the Proud Boys, smells something  rotten in society.

The Marxists and “fat feminists” have taken over everywhere, he says, spreading a “computer virus of rules” — a “war on fun”.

“When did the social justice warriors get so much power?” he asks.  “It happened in the past 15 years. My theory is it started with eradicating bullying and the whole idea of the death of the in-crowd, which I think we can all support — no one likes Mean Girls, the prom king jock — but what happened is the fat feminists gained power and like the proletariat took over.

“Like the Marxists, the oppressed became the oppressors and they are now way worse. It’s not only affecting high schools, it’s affecting the workplace, comedy clubs.”

He mentions a flyer he saw recently being passed around inside New York Comedy club UCB with “some trans-man who looks like your dad in a wig” dictating who can be cast in sketches if the character is transgender.

“Here are these nerds Trojan-horsing their way into comedy clubs,” he says.

McInnes, who has been labelled by critics as sexist, racist, white supremacist, Islamophobic and transphobic, is the latest right-wing provocateur to set his sights on Australia.

McInnes and the Proud Boys were kicked off Twitter earlier this month for being “violent extremists” ahead of the anniversary of the deadly Unite the Right neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

While McInnes disavowed the rally, its organiser Jason Kessler was once a member of the Proud Boys — McInnes has previously said Kessler was kicked out for his racist views.

McInnes says he is of two minds about the Twitter ban.

“On one hand as a libertarian I say, oh well, that venue doesn’t want me anymore,” he says. “We don’t have a contract, I was just using it. It’s kind of nice to not have Twitter in my life.

“But we are having lawyers looking at suing them. There’s something grander going on. There’s a war on conservatives because they’re petrified of Trump getting re-elected, they’re in a state of panic.

“Facebook, Google, YouTube, even Snapchat are clamping down on conservatives. It’s the DNC and Big Tech colluding. That is the government colluding with big business. That is not America, that’s not the west — that is Communism and it’s morally wrong.”

A “western chauvinist” and friend of Milo Yiannopoulos and Lauren Southern, whose recent trips Down Under were marred by violent left-wing protests, McInnes says his message is one of “pride”.

“Shame is such a scam,” he says. “There’s this sense of apology and shame with western countries. I noticed this when I was in Israel, they even sort of assume you’re going to come at them so they come out on the defensive.

“They go, ‘Look we had to build this wall, we were getting a terror attack a day.’ I said, I love your wall, I don’t care.

“What Australia built is so incredible. (But) look at Sydney, it’s being lost to Islam just like West London was. In fact there’s parts of Sydney totally indistinguishable from West London. It’s exactly the same — the sense of capitulation, discouraging assimilation.”

Yet Census data from 2016 reveal Australia is a religiously diverse nation, with Christianity remaining the most common religion (52 per cent of the population).

“Islam (2.6 per cent) and Buddhism (2.4 per cent) were the next most common religions,” the ABS said.

“In the 10 years from 2006 to 2016, the proportion of people reporting a religion other than Christianity in the Census increased from 5.6 per cent in 2006 to 8.2 per cent in 2016. “Although the increase was spread across most of the non-Christian religions, the top two were Hinduism (0.7 per cent in 2006 to 1.9 per cent in 2016) and Islam (1.7 per cent to 2.6 per cent).”

But McInnes says his goal isn’t to preach politics when he arrives in November. “I see it as a comedy tour,” he says.

“My goal is to show people that conservatives are funny. In fact we’re the rebels, we’re Animal House. Who got kicked off campus? John Belushi. Milo and Lauren, even Alan Dershowitz are getting kicked off campus. We’re the fun ones.”

McInnes describes Australia as “like a hot Canada”. “I love Australia, I feel a real kinship,” he says. “The only difference between me and my friends in Australia is there’s more masculinity. I’m looking forward to that, just getting pissed.”

He wants to “have some fun, do some comedy and show millennials and everyone else that there’s life outside of this liberal bubble, outside of social justice warriors monitoring every joke and telling you what you can and can’t say”.

And yes, he’s expecting violent left-wing protesters.

“I don’t know why,” McInnes says. “We don’t come to their things. I don’t understand why there’s a problem with free speech. Why is that seen as a threat?

“Even the worst, most right-wing guys like (white supremacist) Richard Spencer, I don’t like their ideas but I’m not scared of their ideas. A 100-pound girl, what are her words going to do to you — start a world war? Why are people so frail?”

McInnes adds “people will show up and if they want to fight, I’m happy to fight”. “Our motto is we don’t start fights but we’re happy to finish them,” he says. “Isn’t that what your dad used to tell you?”

Antifa, he says, are “rich kids who are the sons of professors and they’ve been brainwashed by this Marxist crap their whole lives”.

“There was a time when fighting racist bigots was cool, like the Freedom Riders in the 1960s,” he says. “The problem is the bad guys are gone, there’s no more Nazis — so how about we make Milo a Nazi?

“It’s like a Twilight Zone episode where everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is considered a Nazi. So they get to feel like they’re fighting for justice, like they’re these brave warriors.”

At the end of the day, though, “people in the media tend to overintellectualise this — it’s just the mods and the rockers fighting on Brighton Beach”.

“We’re talking about a few different trends,” McInnes says.

“The street fights outside venues, that’s just mods and rockers playing silly games. It’s not real. That’s why they don’t want to argue with you. That’s why I can’t get them on my show.

“Usually when they brawl, like the punks and skinheads or the mods and rockers, it’s just middle class kids fighting working class kids. The Proud Boys are blue collar.”

The “more insidious” and threatening element is the underlying cultural shift. “The obsession with making sure everyone has equal outcomes, that women are part of all action movies, this computer virus of rules invading everything including art,” he says.

“It’s a war on fun, on colour, where they want every radio station to be playing the same music. How is that different from Stalinism?”

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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