Thursday, October 03, 2019


Transgender Players Disrupt Women’s Rugby Football in Britain

Biological males who identify as transgender women are wreaking havoc in women’s rugby in Great Britain.

Women’s rugby referees in England are quitting their jobs over the inclusion of the male athletes, according to a report in The (London) Sunday Times.

“Being forced to prioritize hurt feelings over broken bones exposes me to personal litigation from female players who have been damaged by players who are biologically male. This is driving female players and referees out of the game,” one referee told the British newspaper under the condition of anonymity.

“If you even ask the question, you are told you are a bigot,” another referee told the Times, recounting that five different players with beards played with women’s teams over the course of half a season.

Former Olympic athlete Sharron Davies told the newspaper that allowing biologically male athletes who identify as transgender women to play on female rugby teams is nonsensical.

“My daughter Grace was told at the age of 11 she could no longer play with the boys because it was no longer safe. How can they have that rule in place and … say it is perfectly OK for a transgender woman who is a biological man to play with the girls, but girls who are girls are not allowed to play with the boys because it is dangerous?” Davies said.

Elsewhere in Great Britain, transgender rugby player Kelly Morgan is laying waste to opponents in a Welsh women’s rugby league.

“She’s going to be a good, good player for the next few years, as long as we can stop her injuring players in training,” Morgan’s coach, Brian Minty, told the BBC last month.

The team’s captain, Jessica Minty-Madley, told the British network that Morgan “folded a girl like a deckchair during a game, which was quite funny, but they’re still friends.”

“I do feel guilty, but what can you do?” Morgan told the British network in an interview. “I don’t go out to hurt anybody. I just want to play rugby.”

Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail have rallied behind the Equality Act, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “gender identity” a protected characteristic under federal anti-discrimination law.

The bill passed in the House with unanimous Democratic support in May, but it hasn’t come up for a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. [Nor will it]

SOURCE 




UK: Councils must do more to crack down on the illegal conversion of flats and houses to bedsits to stop young renters from being exploited, according to an influential MP

So it's going to help the poor to throw them out of their cheap accommodation??

Crowded accomodation arises because not enough homes are being built.  The huge influx of migrants into Britain has to be housed somewhere and in the absence of government action, private enterprise comes to help.

Home-owners see large market who need housing but can't pay much.  So they see a profit in subdividing.  They provide small living spaces for small sums in rent.  But those small sums add up to more than what the property was getting before subdivision. So everyone is happy.  The migrants have a roof over their heads and the property owner has more income than before.

What the do-gooders want is impossible unless as many as a million new modern apartments are built -- and that is not going to happen.  Only a new city's worth of new apartments could house the migrants in the style that the do-gooders want. If they succeed in their meddling and close down the subdivided houses, where will the occupants go? It will simply throw poor migrants onto the streets.  Is that good?



Clive Betts, the [moronic] chairman of the housing select committee, questioned whether some local authorities have the political will to deal with rogue landlords after a Times investigation found that unlicensed bedsits are being advertised with impunity online.


Analysis of 100 rooms offered in five-bed properties on the most popular house-share websites found that only 12 per cent were listed on council registers of approved Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO).

An HMO licence is mandatory for all rental properties where five or more unrelated people live. Every council has to publish a list of licensed properties so in most cases a check would be as simple as entering an address into a website.

Mr Betts said: “I know local authorities have suffered staff shortages and huge cuts but nevertheless these websites are easy and obvious places to go looking for these problems. Money is a big issue but political will is also important.

“This piece of work by The Times is very helpful. Every local authority should now be looking at these sites and taking action. Councils need to start enforcement. Once they do, compliance increases as well because word gets around.”

The investigation found that websites, such as spotahome.com, which is part owned by a founder of Uber, are offering rooms to rent as small as five square metres in converted houses and flats as the housing crisis encourages landlords to turn even upmarket properties into glorified bedsits. A consequence is that “generation rent” is facing the end of the sitting room with nine out of ten house shares in some areas being offered with no communal living space.

Mr Betts said: “These websites should also be answering questions about facilitating illegality. I think it is disgraceful if a company is making huge amounts of money out of the housing crisis.

“We might need to follow up our committee’s report on the private rented sector and see how much progress councils are making on taking action, and what the government is doing to drive this issue.”

Polly Neate, chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, added: “Solving this problem demands a two-pronged approach: councils need more funding to be able to clamp down on law-breaking landlords and we also need a decent alternative to private renting. That alternative must be social homes – three million of them in the next 20 years.”

The Local Government Association, which represents councils, insisted that local authorities are doing what they can to raise standards in the private rented sector..

David Renard, the organisation’s housing spokesman, said: “Enforcement would usually be a last resort for councils, who have to weigh up whether or not the fines available would be a significant deterrent to rogue landlords, or whether expensive prosecutions are a cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money at a time when councils are under significant financial pressures.

“It can take more than a year to prosecute a rogue operator and in many cases paltry fines are handed out to criminal landlords.

“There are things that central government can do to help – granting councils further banning powers for the minority of landlords not prepared to offer up-to-standard accommodation, and powers to levy more substantial fines on the worst offenders would be powerful incentives to bring the best out of the private rented sector and ensure it delivers quality accommodation for our residents and communities.”

SOURCE 






Maybe you should NOT buy online

Bill O’Coin was cutting a tree stump in his daughter’s backyard last summer when the gas powered chain saw he was using stalled and wouldn’t restart, no matter how hard or how many times he pulled the starter cord.

Eventually, to finish the job, O’Coin grabbed one of the three other chain saws he owns.

But it bothered him that the chain saw his children gave him as a Christmas gift 18 months earlier had conked out. He hadn’t used it much, maybe 20 times, so he figured it was defective and that the Swedish manufacturer, Husqvarna, would quickly fix or replace it because it was still under warranty.

But that’s not what happened.

O’Coin, 67, of Leicester, is a retired department store manager. His wife recently retired after 36 years of teaching second-graders in the next town over. They live on a big, wooded spread where O’Coin spends a lot of time outside, sweating over chores and projects.

If you count all the hours O’Coin has put into getting his chain saw fixed or replaced, you might think he’s gone overboard for a $345 piece of equipment. But he insisted he’s not going away.

“Sometimes it comes down to the principle of the thing,” he said when we met.

The Husqvarna warranty is pretty standard. For two years, it covers anything that breaks, unless the customer is deemed to be at fault for damaging the product.

When his chain saw died, O’Coin contacted Husqvarna, which directed him to City Power Equipment, a retailer and authorized Husqvarna dealer in Charlton. Store owner Mark Mitchell found a small crack in the crankcase of O’Coin’s chain saw and concluded it was damaged by O’Coin, based on O’Coin’s account of getting it “stuck” in a tree stump.

O’Coin told me that was a misinterpretation of what he had told Mitchell. The stump he was cutting was half rotted, and the blade easily slipped out after it stalled.

But Husqvarna sided with Mitchell. “After speaking with the dealer they informed me that this is not” covered under “warranty,” Husqvarna wrote in an e-mail to O’Coin. “City Power had diagnosed that the saw had gotten pinched, and was damaged while attempting to remove the saw.”

When I visited Mitchell at his shop one of the first things he said was that O’Coin hadn’t purchased the chain saw at his store — and that “I don’t love the Internet.”

I’m convinced that’s a big part of O’Coin’s problem. The saw was purchased online, rather than at a store. Stores may charge a little more, but many, especially smaller ones, have sales people willing to lavish attention on walk-in shoppers they hope to retain as repeat customers.

Some of that attention comes into play when a warranty is invoked, I learned last week in interviews with people in the industry. Customers claiming warranty protection typically get sent to a store designated by Husqvarna as an authorized dealer, where the store owner makes the all-important recommendation on coverage to the manufacturer.

If that authorized dealer is the place where you bought your saw (and maybe other stuff, too), then you’re likely to get the benefit of the doubt.

That’s important because it’s often difficult to determine, based on the evidence (or lack of it), whether a malfunctioning chain saw is the result of a manufacturing defect or damage caused by the consumer.

“The dealer is in the middle, between the consumer and the manufacturer,” one store owner said.

No such personal relationships exist on Amazon. While a manufacturer’s warranty is just as valid on a purchase made on Amazon as one made at a local hardware store, there’s no one at Amazon to put in a good word for you with the manufacturer.

(You can return defective or damaged items directly to Amazon for a refund or replacement, but only within 30 days after purchase, according to its policy posted online. After 30 days, Amazon recommends contacting the manufacturer directly.)

By the time I got involved, O’Coin and Mitchell were at an impasse. Denied warranty coverage, O’Coin said he wanted Mitchell to return his chain saw, which by then had been reduced to a box of parts by a technician looking for the problem. But Mitchell refused unless he got $100, which he said was fair compensation for his time and effort. O’Coin refused to pay it.

After I contacted Husqvarna, the company reversed its position and promised to replace O’Coin’s saw at no cost (and without further explanation to me). I think that was the right thing to do.

SOURCE 





Australia: A Christian private school principal has blasted Greta Thunberg in a newsletter, labelling her a “little girl with mental problems”

Rodney Lynn, head of Coffs Harbour Christian Community School, wrote the letter to pupils and parents on September 26. In the letter, seen by news.com.au, he implored his students to put their faith in God and “not in the predictions of a little girl”.

He did not refer to Ms Thunberg by name, but he made reference to “a little girl from Scandinavia” who was promoting “doomsday waffle talk”.

“No one knows when the final wind up of the world will be,” he wrote. “Jesus said no one, only the Father God, knows about that day or hour.”

He said Ms Thunberg was a “little girl with self declared various emotional and mental problems that she thinks give her a special insight into a pending doom”.

“She says she is anxious. You too can be anxious. My life experience has taught me that the doomsday predictors are just attention getters,” he said in his September 26 newsletter.

The letter was published the same week the 16-year-old made an impassioned speech at the United Nations in New York — hitting out at world leaders for failing to take strong measures to combat climate change.

Galvanised by Ms Thunberg, young people around the world have taken to the streets to demand stronger action on climate change, but Mr Lynn questioned their actions in his letter.

“You can skip school. Hold up a piece of cardboard in the streets and call out for the government to ‘do something to stop it all happening’ … really???” he wrote.

“Do not be afraid. Your word’s future is in the hands of God, not in the predictions of a little girl and false prophets,” he wrote before signing off.

“God’s promises have never failed yet.”

Mr Lynn’s letter has been met with some local opposition, with the Coffs Coast Climate Action Group writing on Facebook that “we don’t like amplifying the toxic words of this Coffs Harbour principal”.

However, the statement went on to say “other more responsible church leaders are calling out his dangerous comments and talking about the need to protect our planet’s climate for younger generations”.

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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