Friday, February 28, 2020



Parents Organize to Fight Back against authoritarian "welfare" organizations
  
Brian was a 15-year-old big man on campus. Good-looking and witty, he had a way with the girls, and the guys thought he was fun too.

But Brian’s party spirit included consuming lots of alcohol. Soon he was smoking pot, and then even that was not enough. In a few months he was not only using hard drugs but selling them, too.

For a while he was able to maintain his charm and respectful attitude at home. Inevitably, his personality and health quickly plummeted along with his school attendance and grades.

Thankfully, his parents finally recognized the problem before it was too late and enrolled Brian in a private residential drug-rehab clinic.

The reality that Brian had become a secret addict under their noses crushed his mom and dad. They felt guilty, helpless, and heartbroken.

On their knees before God, they pledged to do everything possible to help their son and committed to change their lives so they could be a bigger part of his.

When they called the clinic to arrange a meeting and seek reconciliation with their beloved boy, they were told that they could have no contact.

As a physician, Brian’s dad asked to review the medical records and speak to the doctor so he might understand the treatment. He was flatly turned down.

Why the secrecy? Brian’s father was told that the law forbids parental access to Brian’s medical information without his consent. And Brian — detoxing, embarrassed, and angry at the world — would not consent.

Since the state laws extended to every rehab center and Brian’s life was in jeopardy from drug abuse, there was no choice but to allow Brian to complete the program. Without his parents’ help, it took far too long for Brian to get well. He and his parents still despise the laws that kept them apart during a vulnerable and painful period.

The law far too often gets between parents and their children. Increasingly, just when kids need their parents the most, moms and dads discover that the state has taken their place; that the government has determined that immature children, often in trouble because of bad choices, are wiser than their parents.

A nonpartisan group of parents is fighting back. Led by Deborah Flora, Parents United America seeks to restore parental authority in every area of a child’s life.

“The biggest argument against parental rights is that the state needs to protect children from potentially abusive parents,” Ms. Flora said. “However, we have laws in place to deal with abuse. The state should never try to usurp the rights of the vast majority of parents who work tirelessly to provide a home and a future for their children. Yet that is what we are seeing from multiple fronts in our society.”

Ms. Flora points to several frightening examples of how the government is quickly becoming not just a nanny state — not just a bully of a big brother — but a god-like, all-encroaching force set on destroying the family unit. Consider:

A six-year-old girl in Texas was committed to a mental-health facility without parental consent.

State legislators in Washington are attempting to require mandatory sex ed for kindergartners even though 54% of the community is against it.

When parents of a five-month-old boy sought medical care for a broken bone, he was forcibly taken from his parents by Colorado by Child Protective Services and placed in foster care without due process. It turns out that the baby wasn’t abused but suffered from a bone disease.

In many states, parents of children as young as 12 are denied access to their medical records without the child’s consent.

Wisconsin parents are suing the Madison Metropolitan School District over a new policy that allows children of any age to change their gender identity at school without their parents knowledge.

You probably have your own horror stories. To share them, join hands and hearts with other loving parents — and get help to fight back — by logging on to www.parentsunitedamerica.org.

Ms. Flora told me, “Most parents want what is best for the children. The question is, who gets to decide? Remote bureaucrats who don’t know the individual needs and unique personalities of each child? Or the parent who knows their children intimately, who understand what brings them joy and what keeps them up at night? This radical shift is only happening because many parents are either unaware or bullied into silence.”

"Numerous studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that the key factor in helping children flourish is parental engagement,“ Ms. Flora continued. "Anyone who truly cares about the well-being of children will fight for increased parental engagement, not take a radical stance to exclude them. Parents United America connects, informs, and empowers parents by joining our voices. When united, parents will become an unstoppable force that can no longer be ignored by administrators, bureaucrats, or politicians.”

SOURCE 





Supreme Court Strikes Down Orwellian Government Attempt to Redefine the Catholic Church in Puerto Rico

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a horrifying Orwellian court ruling that told the Catholic Church in Puerto Rico that it could not define itself as an organization. Puerto Rico's Supreme Court had ruled that individual Catholic churches and schools do not exist as independent legal entities, holding them jointly liable for claims against the "Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church in Puerto Rico."

In a unanimous decision in Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Juan, Puerto Rico v. Yali Acevedo Feliciano, et al. (2020), the Court struck down the previous ruling on technical grounds of jurisdiction that had nothing to do with the Puerto Rico court's extensive violation of the Catholic Church's religious freedom to define its own structure. However, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion insisting that the underlying religious freedom issue is important and may need to be reconsidered.

"Our clients are pleased that the court vacated the Puerto Rico court’s ruling that jeopardized their ability to operate without government interference," Lea Patterson, Counsel to First Liberty Institute, which represented two Catholic schools in the case, said in a statement. "If a court can dictate a church’s operating structure, it’s only a matter of time until government tells churches what they can believe. The Supreme Court’s decision is an important step towards protecting religious liberty in Puerto Rico."

The case dates back to 2016 when former employees of various Catholic schools brought suit against a number of Catholic entities, including the two schools in question. The Puerto Rico Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision finding that individual Catholic churches and schools don't exist as independent legal entities but rather holding them jointly liable for claims against the "Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church in Puerto Rico," an entity that does not exist. The true organization unit is the Archdiocese of San Juan.

In its brief to the Supreme Court, First Liberty argued, "By assigning legal personality to an entity that does not exist within the Catholic Church’s polity while dissolving the legal personalities of entities that do exist within that structure, the decision below destroys the hierarchical polity governing Catholic churches and other Catholic entities throughout Puerto Rico."

The Supreme Court struck down the ruling on jurisdiction grounds, remanding the decision back to lower courts. Yet Justices Thomas and Alito argued that "As the Solicitor General notes, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment at a minimum demands that all jurisdictions use neutral rules in determining whether particular entities that are associated in some way with a religious body may be held responsible for debts incurred by other associated entities."

They raised important questions that "may well merit our review": "(1) the degree to which the First Amendment permits civil authorities to question a religious body’s own understanding of its structure and the relationship between associated entities and (2) whether, and if so to what degree, the First Amendment places limits on rules on civil liability that seriously threaten the right of Americans to the free exercise of religion as members of a religious body."

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian law firm responsible for many Supreme Court victories, filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Catholic schools.

"The U.S. Constitution protects every American’s right to exercise religious freedom, and central to that freedom is a church’s ability to decide its own structure without civil government intrusion," ADF Vice President of Appellate Advocacy and Senior Counsel John Bursch said in a statement. "The U.S. Supreme Court properly vacated the Puerto Rico courts’ ill-advised attempt at church governance by deciding for themselves what constitutes ‘the Catholic Church’ in Puerto Rico."

"Our country has an admirable history of restraining the government’s impulse to police and micromanage communities of faith, and we are confident that the Puerto Rico courts will now abide by this vital constitutional principle, which ADF highlighted in its friend-of-the-court brief and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas echoed in their concurrence to the high court’s order," Bursch concluded.

Churches and religious organizations must have the freedom to define themselves as they see fit. Intrusions into this liberty are a serious injustice, as Luke Goodrich explains in his book Free to Believe: the Battle Over Religious Freedom in America.

SOURCE 






Abortion Debate Shows How Media Deploys Language Gymnastics to Serve Left-Wing Goals

“Pregnancy Kills. Abortion Saves Lives.”

That was the headline on an absurd opinion article in The New York Times, deploying Orwellian language to turn the abortion debate on pro-lifers and comfort those who support abortion on demand.

The media, cleverly and often subtly, use rhetorical adjustments to reinforce left-wing ideas under the guise of objectivity.

It’s not just on the abortion issue that the media kowtow to the left in the terminology they use in charged public debates.

For instance, The Guardian, a British outlet, recently updated its style guide to reinforce the idea that challenging prevailing left-wing ideas about man-made climate change is fundamentally illegitimate.

The Guardian is updating our style guide to accurately reflect the nature of the environmental crisis.

“Climate change” —> “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”

“Global warming” —> “global heating”

“Climate skeptic” —> “climate science denier”

Few topics, however, draw out media bias like abortion, where the concerns of pro-life Americans are left on the back page or uncovered, and a magnifying glass is put on anyone who challenges pro-abortion orthodoxy.

Ultimately, media bias regarding abortion is nothing new. Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times columnist, wrote in 2012:

Conservative complaints about media bias are sometimes overdrawn. But on the abortion issue, the press’s prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant, and its blinders impenetrable. In many newsrooms and television studios across the country, Planned Parenthood is regarded as the equivalent of, well, the Komen foundation: an apolitical, high-minded and humanitarian institution whose work no rational person—and certainly no self-respecting woman—could possibly question or oppose.

This is certainly the case today.

Not only is coverage of abortion highly skewed, but it’s clear that the language used to describe it is made to soften the reality of what the practice is, while diminishing the concerns of those who believe fundamental rights are being violated.

NPR, which is of course publicly funded, recently updated its language guidelines for reporters.

Here are some of the terms now off-limits for NPR journalists: pro-life, late-term abortion, fetal heartbeat, partial birth.

Instead they are to use terms such as “intact dilation and extraction” (to describe a partial-birth abortion)and “medical or health clinics that perform abortions” (instead of simply “abortion clinics”).

The phrase “abortion doctor” also would drop off the list of acceptable phrases. Instead, NPR reporters are instructed to list the doctor’s name and write that he “operated a clinic where abortions are performed.”

If anything, the attempt to use more scientific language to describe abortions, such as “intact dilation and extraction” in the place of “partial birth abortion,” at best merely confuses readers as to what actually is being performed.

This article does a lot to explain why our abortion debate is utterly dysfunctional. A mainstream outlet openly articulating its policy for manipulating language to disguise what abortion is

Of course, NPR has also set strict guidelines about how to treat the words “unborn” and “baby,” making sure that reporters never describe, well, unborn babies in anything other than technical language to remove thorny debates about personhood or humanity. NPR instructs its reporters:

The term ‘unborn’ implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a ‘baby’ or ‘the unborn’ is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.

Media bias on this issue will become only more pronounced as the “positive good” school of thought about abortion becomes more pronounced on the left than the “safe, legal, and rare” camp.

Regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, attempts to dance around prickly questions about life and humanity are unlikely to solve the division.

The media, as is so common today, distinctly reveals its biases and lets slip the mask of objectivity that’s becoming increasingly difficult for Americans to believe.

SOURCE 





Audiences have had a gutful of incessant pontificating and virtue signalling by Hollywood and actors generally

Comment from Australia

While normally not one to believe conspiracy theories, I sometimes muse there is a secret and sinister political movement that over many years has infiltrated our creative and performing arts industry and now controls it. Its members are actors, writers and singers, and they range from the highest paid celebrities to those struggling to make a name for themselves.

If there is such a movement, its methodology is to subject audiences and the wider community to incessant pontificating and displays of virtue, the aim being to elect and defend centre-right governments worldwide. You read that correctly. Conservatives are massively indebted to celebrities for sabotaging so-called progressive causes.

You probably thought Hollywood is a hive of leftist activism, that writers’ festivals are an imbibing of wokeism, and that concerts take the form of endless social justice homilies, interrupted only by the occasional song. If so, you failed to look beyond the superficial. While ostensibly supporting movements that the left holds dear, these artists use self-ridicule not only to discredit themselves, but everyone associated with the cause in question.

When Sir Elton John paused his concert in Verona, Italy, last year to rage against the evils of Brexit, he personified the petulance of Remainers. “I’m ashamed of my country for what it has done,” he wailed. “It’s torn people apart … I am a European. I am not a stupid, colonial, imperialist English idiot.”

Not so ashamed, apparently, that he would surrender his knighthood, together with its connotations of a colonialist and imperialist country of old. Only months later Britain’s conservative government, led by prime minister Boris Johnson, won a landslide victory under a Brexit banner.

As for US president Donald Trump, the celebrities who so loudly opposed his election in 2016 are doing their best to ensure he is given a second term. To acknowledge all of them would be too massive a task. Two warrant special mention: first: actor Robert De Niro, who announced in a choreographed scene just before the 2016 election that he wanted to “punch” Trump in the face.

It reeked of De Niro trying to trade on his onscreen tough guy persona, and merely highlighted the Democrats’ bluster and impotence.

The other is singer and actor Bette Midler. When she’s not tweeting foul-mouthed insults to Republican supporters, she composes what can only be described as erotic Vogon poetry as she speculates about Trump’s sex life.

There once was a girl from Slovenia
Who now lives right on Pennsylvinia
To the East Room she’ll flee
From her husband’s wee wee
While he plays with his own schizophrenia

— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) June 18, 2019

It is behaviour that is imbecilic, pathetic and counterproductive. Given Midler’s abysmal record in trying to unseat Trump, prime minister Scott Morrison is unlikely to be fazed to learn that last month she questioned his leadership, as well as labelling him an “idiot” and a “f**kwit”.

Pity the poor #Australians, their country ablaze, and their rotten @ScottMorrisonMP saying, “This is not the time to talk about Climate Change. We have to grow our economy.” What an idiot. What good is an economy in an uninhabitable country? Lead, you fuckwit!!

— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) January 3, 2020

As for Australia, we too have a tradition of celebrities lending their support to causes, only to botch them completely. When the minority Gillard Government rolled out a publicity campaign for its carbon tax in 2011, remember who fronted the camera to serenely inform financially strapped Australians this was all in the name of addressing “carbon pollution”?

That’s right, it was actor and multimillionaire Cate Blanchett, accompanied by fellow actor Michael Caton, whose idea of establishing his common man cred was to wear a flannelette shirt. One of the few who thought the choice of Blanchett was a good idea was then Treasurer Wayne Swan, which only showed he knew as much about connecting with ordinary Australians as he did delivering budget surpluses.

In 2015 — just prior to the executions of Australian drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran — actors Bryan Brown, Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce and Joel Edgerton and others featured in a video titled “Save our boys”. It was based on the false and slanderous insinuation the Abbott Government was doing nothing to ask the Indonesian Government to grant clemency.

While the celebrities were largely restricted to reciting “I stand for mercy”, the video also featured lesser known types indulging in rank opportunism. Some examples: “Show some ticker,” “Come on Abbott, be a leader,” “Imagine if it was your child”, and “The time for diplomacy has now passed”. The corollary being an invasion of Indonesia I take it?

If you thought that was abject stupidity, wait for this: “Tony Abbott you need to give diplomatic immunity and protection to Andrew and Myuran before it’s too late,” an anonymous blonde woman tartly states. But the daddy of them all was from actor Brendan Cowell.

“Tony, if you had any courage and compassion, you’d get over to Indonesia and bring these two boys home,” sneered Cowell as he was filmed reclining on a bed. “Show some balls,” he added contemptuously.

As to who was lacking a pair, that was made very clear when Cowell hurriedly deleted his Twitter account in response to a social media backlash. He also conceded to radio station 2UE that he had no idea how Abbott could prevent the executions.

Brown surfaced again in 2018, along with New Zealand actors Sam Neill and Rebecca Gibney and singer Jimmy Barnes, this time in a video decrying the policy of detaining asylum-seekers in Manus and Nauru. Urging politicians to “stop playing politics with people’s lives” (oh the irony), Neill described these measures as a “barbarity”. For good measure Gibney’s voice quavered as she urged Australians to lobby politicians. As expected, none of the celebrities concerned suggested a viable alternative to mandatory detention.

All these cases and countless others serve as an example to celebrities that the best thing they could do for their pet causes is not to be a part of them, at least not overtly. Or if they must appear publicly in these movements, they should not condescend or patronise.

Clearly this was lost on actor Simon Baker, star of the television series The Mentalist. This week Greenpeace launched a climate change and renewable energy campaign video titled “Dear Scotty” featuring the actor, which targeted the prime minister. “Mate, sorry to do this to you,” he says in the opening scene, dripping with faux melancholy as he and others lambast Morrison in sequence for his supposed failings. “How will history remember you?” he asks pensively.

Should not a renowned actor be expected to — how does one put this — act? Likewise, they should be able to recognise a lousy script. “The audience should be treated with a certain level of intelligence, and I get very upset when we talk down to them,” Baker told the Glasgow Times in 2015. “It annoys me,” he added. Yes, Mr Baker. It annoys us too.

In 2018, Baker campaigned against Adani’s Carmichael Mine, telling viewers it was “just inland” from the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, the distance between the two is around 350km. “It’ll unleash one of the biggest reservoirs of carbon pollution we’ve ever known,” he said. “It’s a death sentence for the reef.” This is fearmongering. It is also elitist, given the unemployment rate in regional Queensland is higher than 14 per cent in some areas. Then again, it is all too easy to forget the plight of the unemployed when your lifestyle reflects that of the highest-paid actor in US television.

Predictably he also voices his opposition to “fossil fuels”, yet when Baker resided in Los Angeles he and his family frequently travelled between the US and Australia. “Mate, sorry to do this to you,” you might ask him, “but can we assume none of these multiple international trips involved a zero-carbon yacht?” Or “When you were filming in Western Australia in 2018 and someone stepped on your glasses, is it true you flew to New York just to get a replacement pair from your favourite store?”

Again, sorry for the impertinent questions. We are just compiling a record about you and all other activist celebrities. Its title is “How will history remember you?”

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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Thursday, February 27, 2020



What’s Really Driving the Homelessness Crisis

The homelessness crisis in America’s West Coast cities is beginning to draw national attention. There are now an estimated 166,752 people on the streets in California, Oregon, and Washington, and sensational stories of human despair and the return of medieval diseases have captured the public imagination.

Even President Donald Trump has tweeted about the “very bad and dangerous conditions” in San Francisco and warned that leaders must take action “to clean up these hazardous waste and homeless sites before the whole city rots away.”

There has been remarkably little clarity, however, on the key question: What’s really driving the homelessness crisis in West Coast cities?

For the past decade, progressive political leaders, activists, and media organizations have insisted that housing costs are the primary cause of homelessness. There is some truth to that: It’s obvious that in the largest West Coast cities, where a one-bedroom apartment rents for at least $2,000 a month, it’s more difficult for low-income individuals to afford stable housing.

However, as an emerging body of evidence shows, homelessness in America’s West Coast cities—particularly unsheltered homelessness—is not driven primarily by high housing costs, but rather by three interrelated phenomena: addiction, mental illness, and permissive public policies.

In cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco, residents have complained about rampant public drug consumption, psychotic episodes, and millions of used hypodermic needles that have been discarded on city streets.

Still, despite the obvious visible evidence, progressive political leaders have insisted on the fiction that addiction and mental illness are only a small part of the homelessness crisis. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only “1 in 4” of the homeless struggle with drugs and alcohol, while Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti does not even list addiction as one of the major causes of homelessness on his official website.

However, as the Los Angeles Times has demonstrated in a recent investigation, “mental illness [and] substance abuse … are much more pervasive in Los Angeles County’s homeless population than officials have previously reported.”

While the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported substance abuse for only 14% of the homeless population, according to a UCLA study, the real figure is likely to be 75%—more than five times higher than the official estimates.

The figures are similar for mental illness. Government authorities have estimated that 25% of the unsheltered population suffers from mental illness, while the UCLA study suggests that the true number is likely to be 78%.

As the Times points out, “the findings lend statistical support to the public’s frequent association of mental illness, physical disabilities, and substance abuse with homelessness.”

Put another way, the politically incorrect perception that homelessness, substance abuse, and mental illness are deeply intertwined is, in actuality, factually correct—and political leaders who insist otherwise are in a state of deep denial, preferring an ideological fiction to the harsh reality of life on the streets.

Unfortunately, the progressive political class in major West Coast cities is compounding the homelessness crisis with a set of permissive public policies.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, homelessness is not a national crisis. In fact, homelessness has declined 14.6% nationwide over the past decade, while at the same time increasing dramatically in major West Coast cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

In part, it’s because these cities have adopted permissive policies on public camping, drug consumption, and property crime, which has created an attractive environment for the homeless.

In Los Angeles, more than one-third of unsheltered adults migrated to Los Angeles County after becoming homeless. In Seattle, even the former homelessness czar has admitted there is a “magnet effect” because of the city’s policies and availability of services. (As I have reported for City Journal, 9.5% of Seattle’s homeless population moved to the city “for legal marijuana,” 15.4% “to access homeless services,” and 15.7% were “traveling or visiting” and decided to stay.)

If political leaders in West Coast cities truly want to reduce street homelessness, they must first break through their denial about its causes.

Although reducing housing costs is a critical public policy goal, it will not significantly reduce the number of people on the streets. The compassionate response is not to maintain the fiction that homelessness can be solved with new housing developments, but to grapple with the complex human challenges of addiction and mental illness.

SOURCE 





Intellectual Elitism: A Threat to Racial Reconciliation

Why is it that so many liberals assume that blacks have to hate President Trump?

Patrick Hampton
  
On Presidents’ Day, I met a pair of tourists who were enjoying their stroll around downtown Chattanooga. Upon wishing them a “Happy Presidents’ Day” greeting, they proceeded to engage with me about our nation’s origins.

After just a few minutes of conversation with the couple, it was clear that they inherited a liberal mindset. The lady openly expressed her hatred for our sitting president, upon which I explained how I actually support President Donald Trump. (Of course this would lead to being called crazy and ignorant. How kind!)

What was initially a cordial conversation turned into vocalized vitriol. Pleasantries turned into put-downs, as she lobbed a fury of insults toward our POTUS before storming off along the bridge walk. The man continued to engage with me, mentioning the usual mainstream-media headlines. His favorite? Where President Trump’s father prevented non-creditworthy individuals from renting an apartment block. Of course, the gentleman equated this to the fact that these low-income individuals were black.

“So are you saying that blacks are poor?” I responded. Anyone with business sense understands why non-creditworthy individuals may not qualify for certain purchases like a home or a rental property. But because the MSM told him so, the man repeated this without understanding how it made him sound.

The man stammered to provide a response, dancing around the question and using anything to justify the notion that Trump is a racist. Of course, running down a list of Trump’s many achievements supporting the black community didn’t make them flinch a single bit. For these individuals, credibility comes from a television screen and not out of the mouths of regular black people like myself. We eventually parted ways, I with a smile on my face, the couple with an imprint of disgust.

These sorts of engagements are actually quite common. People who are far removed from black people get the only information they know about the demographic from television and social media. This, in turn, leaves their minds at the mercy of the programming they receive. Which is why they repeat the hottest headlines without fail. Yet despite their limited knowledge and interaction with actual black people, they always seem to have a remedy for what ails our communities. This hypothesis is often replicated as Democrats come into urban communities and make them worse at the expense of minorities. (From the hills, these wealthy liberals and progressives rule over the black and brown people they live far away from. But I digress.)

We black conservatives are waging a sort of unknown war. But it’s not against other black liberals or the black community at all (like many liberals erroneously believe). The battle is against a sort of intellectual elitism — often dealt by white democrats who vote based on what television and mainstream media tells them about the black population. While some are individuals are well-meaning yet uninformed, others simply possess a profound lack of faith in minorities. This intellectual elite abhors and rejects those who think differently — this includes black conservatives and Republicans who don’t fit the narratives that the elite write for them. To engage with one of us — like the couple engaged with me — would trigger a total meltdown every single time.

The fact that black people largely overlook this is baffling. Are we, as a demographic, okay with intellectuals assuming our political ideas? Are black people happy that white liberals are speaking on their behalf, regardless of whether these people know any black people at all or have our interests at heart? What has the intellectual elite done to earn our undying trust? But most importantly, what happens if we disagree? Will your individual views be respected? I don’t know. Let each of us ask a liberal and find out for ourselves.

SOURCE 






Calorie labels on food packages aren’t as precise as they seem

Changing numbers on nutrition labels reveal inexact science

NEW YORK — Almonds used to have about 170 calories per serving. Then researchers said it was really more like 130. A little later, they said the nuts may have even less.

Calorie counting can be a simple way to help maintain a healthy weight — don’t eat and drink more than you burn. And the calorie labels on food packaging seem like an immutable guide to help you track what you eat.

But the shifting numbers for almonds show how the figures printed on nutrition labels may not be as precise as they seem.

Last month, Kind said it was lowering the calorie counts for its snack bars, even though the ingredients weren’t changing. The company cited studies that indicate nuts have fewer digestible calories than previously believed.

Conducted by government researchers with funding from nut producers, the studies show the inexact method of determining calorie counts established more than a century ago. The widely used system says a gram of carbohydrates and a gram of protein each have 4 calories, while a gram of fat has around 9. Companies can also subtract some calories based on past estimates of how much of different foods are not digested.

But based on anecdotal comments, researchers suspected more of the nutrients in nuts may be expelled in the bathroom than previously estimated.

“If they’re not digested, then maybe the calorie content is not correct,” said David Baer, a co-author of the nut studies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funded the research along with nut producers like the Almond Board of California.

To test the hunch, Baer and colleagues gave 18 people meals with and without raw almonds and instructed them to return daily with their urine and stool packed in dry ice. The contents were analyzed to calculate that a serving of almonds has about 130 digestible calories, rather than the widely used figure of 170.

A few years later, in 2016, another study by Baer and colleagues also looked at the effects of food processing. They found cooking and grinding helped break down cell walls in almonds, freeing more calories for digestion. Roasted almonds had slightly more digestible calories than raw almonds. When the nuts were ground up into almond butter, nearly all the calories were digested.

Notably, the second study also found raw almonds had even fewer digestible calories than suggested by the first study. Baer attributed the discrepancy to variations in how people digest foods and natural differences in almonds themselves.

“It’s unlikely you’re going to get the exact same number every time you repeat the experiment,” he said.

The almond studies are among several Baer has co-authored on the digestibility of nuts. Another last year was funded by the Global Cashew Council and found cashews had fewer calories than estimated.

Despite his findings, Baer said he thinks the calorie counts used for most other foods are fairly accurate. And even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration lets companies use different methods to determine calorie counts, the agency says products aren’t supposed to have more than 20% more calories than what’s stated on labels.

That’s why health experts said the calorie counts on nutrition labels are still valuable: They offer general guidance for people trying to keep their weight in check. But it’s even more important to pay attention to overall diet and not get hung up on small caloric differences, experts said.

“That’s not what’s going to make or break someone’s attempt at weight management,” said Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, a University of North Carolina nutrition professor.

Mayer-Davis said the studies on the calories in nuts wouldn’t affect her general advice that they can be part of a healthy diet. She said it’s more important to pay attention to how they’re prepared, such as whether sweeteners are added.

Kind’s founder, Daniel Lubetzky, said he hopes the studies will help overcome the reluctance some might have about eating nuts because of their relatively higher calorie counts. The studies also mean the company’s most popular bar can now drop from 200 to 180 calories, which could be a marketing advantage that sways decisions at the grocery store.

“It can’t hurt,” Lubetzky said

Mars, which took a minority stake in Kind in 2017, said it doesn’t have plans to update the calorie counts for M&M’s with almonds. The Almond Board says it’s not aware of other companies yet using the lower numbers.

SOURCE 





Activist chief executives are ‘stealing’ from shareholders

It's not their money to spend on "good" causes

Every other day a corporate chief somewhere will declare, in sombre tones and often for applause, that business must take a stand on an issue for the sake of the community. These big-noting corporate chaps justify their grand plans for humanity in many ways.

They claim businesses have a legitimate interest in matters affecting the wider community in which they operate. Political leaders are not doing enough, they say. Workers and consumers want us to do this, they assure themselves.

While it is not evident how they canvassed the views of workers or consumers, it is patently clear these new activist chief executives are endearing themselves to other activists with the same ­visions for the planet.

These reasons for corporate activism were, more or less, laid out last week by John Denton, the first Australian to head the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce. He waved away as “completely ridiculous” the notion that corporate leaders should stick to their knitting. “This is our knitting,” Denton declared.

This is also the same tedious click-clacking sound emanating from many self-important business people who make up the Business Roundtable in the US, and swan around at Davos. They imagine their own beliefs are so brilliant they form a modern-day list of corporate commandments.

Like the harm that’s done to the human body from ingesting too much sugar, Denton’s attempt to encourage corporate bosses to be more activist is loaded with so much corporate saccharin it threatens to kill off the company as a vehicle to pool people’s money.

If activist chief executives, and their Paris-based spokesman, are impatient with politics, they could, of course, stand for parliament and spend other people’s money as a politician. In choosing much ­higher-paid gigs running companies and managing shareholders’ money, credibility comes from ­explaining how, at law, an activist chief executive fits in the company model. But this is where modern-day ­corporate preachers fall silent.

When was the last time any chief executive, let alone the bloke running the International Chamber of Commerce, discussed the agency costs of activist chief executives?

When did any of them last mention the importance of rules that govern how managers spend other people’s money?

Talking about such matters is painfully dull compared with setting out your vision for ­humanity. But the bigger reason they don’t ­address this dry issue of agency costs is that it might cramp their activist style. If chief executives admit to the agency costs they have created for shareholders by spending shareholders’ money on issues that have nothing to do with running a company, they might have to stop doing what earns them applause from their friends

There is a deadly serious issue. Soon after the earliest companies were formed, separating the ownership of business ventures from management, agency costs were recognised as a critical issue.

How do the owners of a ­company stop management using shareholders’ money to feather their own nest? Or to put it more simply, how do owners stop ­employees stealing from them?

While some agency costs might be inevitable, others are ­entirely avoidable.

Doctrines of fiduciary duty evolved to regulate how managers use shareholders’ money. While managers learned they shouldn’t use shareholders’ money for their own benefit, they grew more creative about how they used shareholders’ money.

It was clearly wrong to take money from the petty cash tin and use it to buy yourself a new TV. And it was equally wrong for a manager to use the petty cash tin to pay for a romantic dinner with a lover. But what if the manager used shareholders’ money to pay for a big party for employees? This was probably legitimate because keeping employees happy makes for a more successful business. Similarly, using shareholders’ money to sponsor a local football or netball team might be good advertising, buying local goodwill that helps a business thrive.

But, of course, that way danger lay. As shareholders’ money began to be used in a wider range of ways, it became even clearer that some red-line rules were needed to separate legitimate uses of shareholders’ money from ­illegitimate ones.

To deal with these agency costs, company law established some sensible rules for managers, imposing duties on them to act in the best interests of shareholders, and the company, and basically preventing them from using other people’s money to line their own pockets.

Importantly, English and Australian common law dating back to the 19th century recognised that managers needed some flexibility to use shareholders money in a way that doesn’t directly benefit shareholders but does benefit the business, and thus shareholders, indirectly.

Courts apply the notion of shareholder primacy to separate legitimate from illegitimate uses of shareholders’ money by management. It means that the financial benefit to shareholders of expenditure for social purposes does not need to be immediate or direct or even terribly obvious — but it does need to exist, and be able to be demonstrated.

It is a deliberate furphy when activist chief executives and their spruikers claim that shareholder primacy must be dismantled because it ­requires managers to seek short-term profits. That is a straw man concocted by those who want no rules restraining chief executives from their glorious plans for the world.

The other straw man put up by activist chief executives is the claim that capitalism needs a clean-out. In fact, the clean-out is needed among the vainglorious chief executives, and their chamber of commerce boosters, who are creating a new, and egregious, set of agency costs for shareholders.

They want free rein to use other people’s money, not to line their pockets but to warm their hearts, and to earn kudos from other people like them.

Frankly, it is theft — idealistic theft, perhaps — but still theft. The fact Robin Hood stole money for noble purposes did not change the nature of his act: taking money from others without their consent.

Managers could ask shareholders to donate the profits they receive as dividends to a climate change fund. But to simply use company money on management’s pet causes without so much as a “by your leave” from shareholders is theft.

If activist chief executives think society should be putting more money into climate change or other noble causes, they should use their own money rather than shoving their sticky fingers into the retirement nest eggs of superannuants and ­investors.

And let’s be honest here. Much of the confiscation of shareholders’ money is done not for noble causes. There is a sizeable bullshit factor where chief executives seek self-aggrandisement rather than tangible outcomes.

It is not at all sexy to talk about rules that manage, and minimise, agency costs inherent in a public company where ownership is divorced from control. But this is a critical issue. And not just to protect today’s shareholders from a new form of theft.

If we allow chief executives and other activists to chip away at these foundations, they will end up destroying the company as a proven way to pool money from many people in order to do business.

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, February 26, 2020


America's 'Brexit': Taking back power from the administrative state

On Jan. 31, more than three years after the people of the United Kingdom had voted for it, Britain left the European Union in a move nicknamed "Brexit." The reasons for this are complex, but the clearest motive was outlined by Boris Johnson, a leader of the movement who is now the country’s prime minister.

In a speech during the Brexit campaign, Johnson noted that 60% of the laws passing through the British Parliament and becoming the law of the U.K. came from decisions made by the EU in Brussels.

"We are currently unable to exercise democratic control over such basic economic matters as our tax rates," said Johnson. "We cannot control the EU budget … nor can we protect the U.K. taxpayer from the demands of the Eurozone countries for bailout funds … It is time to take back control and speak for freedom in Britain."

Here, as in so many other areas, British politics seems to foreshadow what happens in the United States. Obviously, we are not subject to foreign control through a supranational organization such as the EU. But there are serious questions about the degree to which the American people are currently able to control the rules and regulations made by unelected officials in federal agencies — agencies which, because of their remarkable power and apparent immunity from popular control, are called the administrative state.

Without question, the representative republic set up by the framers of our Constitution offered protection against the loss of popular control. The Constitution vests all law-making power in Congress, a Senate and House of Representatives elected by and theoretically subject to the will and priorities of the American people.

But since the New Deal, and increasingly in recent years, this system does not appear to be working as designed. Instead of making the difficult political decisions for society, who is benefited by and who pays the price for new legislation, Congress has been enacting laws that simply set goals for the agencies of the administrative state. This delegates unlimited authority to these agencies, but it insulates members of Congress from accountability for the political costs of making these controversial decisions.

In addition, under a key 1984 Supreme Court ruling, Chevron v. U.S., lower federal courts were directed to defer to the interpretations of administrative state agencies themselves about the authorities they were granted by Congress.

When broadly worded delegations of statutory authority are combined with court deference to agency views of their rule-making power, it should be no surprise that the agencies of the administrative state can expand their jurisdictions to matters Congress never contemplated. Executive agencies, then, rather than Congress, have been able to make the rules under which everyone must live.

In other words, the people are in very much the same position in relation to their government as the people of Britain were before they voted for and achieved a separation from the EU. As in Britain, people bound by the rules flowing from remote bureaucracies have little ability to affect the scope of these rules. As in Britain, this will eventually give rise to dangerous questions about the legitimacy of the rules.

Of course, the remedy in our constitutional system must be entirely different from what the British did, but there is a remedy. It’s a return to the original constitutional structure in which Congress — when it provides authority to the agencies of the executive branch — places limits on the scope of these powers. At the same time, the courts must be the key interpreters of what powers Congress intended to confer and should not be required to defer to agencies’ views of how much authority they have been given.

There is a way to bring this about. It’s called the nondelegation doctrine. This constitutional approach has not been invoked by the Supreme Court since 1935, but with five members of the Court now avowing that they favor the original meaning of the Constitution, it is a reasonable prospect.

Under this approach, the judiciary would strike down as unconstitutional any law that delegates excessive or unlimited authority to an executive agency. This would require Congress, in performing its legislative function, to place limits on the scope of the statutory authority it is granting. The judiciary, in turn, rather than deferring to the agencies’ views, will independently test whether executive agencies are remaining within these limits.

There will certainly be strong opposition to this approach from those who favor the expansive government powers currently exercised by administrative state agencies. But without a change in its current direction, the U.S. government is headed toward a structure not very different in overall effect from what the British people overturned with their Brexit votes.

It’s time either to start that process or resign ourselves to living in a governmental system the framers would not recognize.

SOURCE 






A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office

Anyone who wants to take away your rights can also put a rock through your window.

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours.

There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it.

When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office.

The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

And in an atmosphere of rising radical violence, maybe this story wouldn’t be so extraordinary.

But this wasn’t the first time that this happened to the Humboldt GOP HQ. It was the sixth time.

Not in a decade, but in only two years.

The small hole in the wall office on 5th Street in Eureka, unprepossessing tan walls, blue framed windows and single door, could just as easily be the bar next door or the burger place across the street. Aside from its narrow “Republican Headquarters” sign, it could just as easily be mistaken for a small business.

The 300 block of 5th Street with a Starbucks and Wells Fargo, adjacent to two motels and an AV shop, seems like an unlikely place for a pitched battle between radical leftism and the national norms. But that’s exactly what the extended campaign against the modest storefront with its “Republicans Register Here” notice and Trump signage on a street in this small 27,000 population city represents.

The small office with its American flag fan banners, a few tables and a bookcase is on the front line of a new war between radical leftist extremists and remaining conservatives in a formerly conservative area.

The windows of the office had been previously smashed in April of last year, before the release of the Mueller report. Like this latest attack, that assault had happened late at night over the weekend. After smashing through the windows with rocks, the “Make America Great Again” sticker was replaced with a “Keep America Green” sticker from the Sierra Club. Nothing says environmentalism like vandalism.

Eureka lefties justified the attack because the office has large cardboard cutouts of Reagan and Trump.

In March 2019, a window had been smashed. In August of 2018, the office was vandalized again, leaving behind signs reading, “Fake President Impeach + Indite”, “45 = Lies House of Lies”, and “Guantanamo and Torture x 20 Years 45 and all supporters." A “Make America Great Again” sign had been crossed out and the elephant on the “Republican Headquarters” sign had been defaced.

A month earlier, President Trump had nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

The windows of the Humboldt Republican Headquarters have been broken three times in two years. They’ve been covered with plywood so often that it’s become a familiar sight. And while this latest incident was the most severe, previous episodes of vandalism had marred the windows, defaced signs, and tried to cause as much damage as possible with whatever the leftist vandals had at hand.

This latest attack is expected to cost thousands of dollars in repairs. Previous acts of leftist vandalism had cost in the $700 range.

And despite the leftist signs, the Eureka Police Department dismissed it as “random vandalism”.

"The local police say, ‘Oh, it’s random vandalism,’ except it’s happened five times to us and nobody else,” Humboldt County GOP Chairman John Schutt said.

"This is the 5th time in two years and on prior occasions I have been told these are random acts of vandalism. Interesting the Democrat Office has not had any 'random acts of vandalism'", the Humboldt GOP noted last year.

There’s nothing random about 6 attacks on a Republican office either carried out by identifiable lefties, leaving behind leftist signage, or specifically defacing Republican signage. That’s as deliberate as it gets.

But Humboldt County, once a Republican area, had swung leftward. And the HQ has become a symbol of everything that the new radical population hates. During the Kavanaugh debate, lefty protesters had gathered outside the small office with signs like, “Party of the Predators” and “Stop Rapeublicans”.

The lefty protesters targeted the office even though it had nothing to do with Kavanaugh and had already been vandalized two months earlier.

When local lefties can’t get to D.C. marches, they target the Humboldt County HQ. That’s where opponents of the Bill of Rights appear toting signs like "Massacre Mitch" and "Republicans: Shame on you!"

Reagan was the last Republican to win Humboldt County which has passed its own sanctuary measure. And Eureka, with its large homeless population and regular anti-Trump protests, leans lefty.

The Humboldt County Republican headquarters has faced a uniquely sustained assault on its existence. It is not the only Republican office to be targeted for vandalism and harassment, but the persistence of the attacks and the general disregard of the authorities, is unique and revelatory. This is the first time an arrest has been made despite the presence of surveillance equipment and attackers who leave handwriting samples. And the one man arrested for this latest incident is already back on the street.

“This is about your friends and neighbors and coworkers and people you live with here. It’s just sad that we can’t exercise our First Amendment rights in peace,” Schutt noted back in 2018. “There is not one member of my party here that would go down and do this down the street at the Democrat office.”

The Humboldt County Democrats enjoy an all-glass office on 4th Street. If there were a random violence problem, somebody would have taken a rock to it by now. That’s because there’s nothing random here.

The sustained assault on the Humboldt County Republican headquarters is not the work of one man, but of a culture of intolerance and hatred. It can be summed up by the Bernie sticker on the bike that the vandal threw at law enforcement as he was trying to make his getaway from the scene of the crime.

In 2017, James Hodgkinson, another Bernie Sanders supporter, came to a Republican charity baseball game with a list of the names of Freedom Caucus members and opened fire. The FBI coverup of that attack, which falsely claimed that it was a spontaneous act with no motive, has yet to be investigated.

Like the “random vandalism” in Eureka, the assassination of Republicans was also treated as random.

Civil wars begin in small ways. They’re born out of intolerance. A refusal to coexist. A failure to enforce the law. To punish violence against people different than the ones who hold political power.

In recent weeks, Project Veritas Action has released videos of Sanders staffers threatening violence before and after a possible victory. The media has maintained a tight ban on covering these videos.

In Jacksonville, Florida, earlier this month, Gregory Timm drove a truck into a Republican voter registration tent to take a stand against President Trump. It is no coincidence that the attacks on the Humboldt County Republican headquarters are linked to Trump’s victory. Or that they’ve been excused by some local lefties because the GOP HQ dared to have Trump material on the premises.

There is nothing random or isolated about the reality that the Democrats have become radicalized.

Radicalism doesn’t just mean the embrace of increasingly extreme policies from denying basic biology to taking away everyone’s health insurance to demanding open borders and suppressing free speech.

There is no meaningful separation between extreme policies and extreme tactics. Anyone willing to take away your rights is also willing to put a rock through your window. That’s what we’re seeing in Eureka.

And across America.

SOURCE 







Court Ruling Protects a Transgender Child More Than Other Kids

A federal appeals court has issued a ruling that not only portends a firestorm on transgender policies in public schools but raises fundamental questions about language, biology, and the law’s role in extricating truth from obscurity when political correctness is prevalent.

In its ruling in Parents for Privacy v. Barr, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s decision and found that an Oregon school district did not violate federal law or constitutional rights with a policy allowing a transgender boy (a biological girl who lives as a boy) to use restrooms, locker rooms, and showers set aside for boys.

A portion of the Feb. 12 ruling reads:

In summary, we hold that [Oregon’s] Dallas School District No. 2’s carefully-crafted Student Safety Plan seeks to avoid discrimination and ensure the safety and well-being of transgender students; it does not violate Title IX or any of Plaintiffs’ cognizable constitutional rights. A policy that allows transgender students to use school bathroom and locker facilities that match their self-identified gender in the same manner that cisgender students utilize those facilities does not infringe Fourteenth Amendment privacy or parental rights or First Amendment free exercise rights, nor does it create actionable sex harassment under Title IX.

The ruling is frustrating on legal grounds: Even though the panel of judges suggests the 14th Amendment doesn’t grant a child privacy rights, it states that the same amendment gives a transgender child the “right” to use a restroom matching their gender identity—which is essentially a different kind of privacy right.

How can that be?

According to the 9th Circuit panel’s ruling, the transgender child’s right to use a bathroom that matches how the child feels that day usurps another child’s right to privacy, and thus the transgender child isn’t simply as protected as other kids, but more protected.

Just as disturbing, if not more so, is the court’s insistence on making such a blanket ruling—denying the privacy rights of kids on so many legal grounds—after the judges clearly have accepted the premise of the transgender debate, which is hardly on solid ground at all.

For example, the ruling reads: “The panel held that there is no Fourteenth Amendment fundamental privacy right to avoid all risk of intimate exposure to or by a transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth.”

A transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth. What does that mean?

What does it mean to be “assigned” sex at birth, eschew that, live as the opposite sex, and demand to be legally recognized as that gender with protections under the law?

Perhaps the 14th Amendment does not offer protection for privacy or bathroom rights for children in public schools. But the 9th Circuit’s ruling is based on a premise that relies more on political correctness than scientific fact.

Without questioning science, biology, psychology, or ethics to be sure that a “transgender person who was assigned the opposite biological sex at birth” should be using the bathroom of that person’s choosing, judges accept as reality what might be, in fact, a pleasant but distorted fiction.

The last significant time a court did this was the Supreme Court, on the issue of abortion. Even though multiple disciplines—religion, science, philosophy, and bioethics—all offered counter arguments against legalizing the murder of an unborn baby, justices accepted without question the premise that a fetus wasn’t really a baby with separate rights.

Although this false premise made the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade somewhat easier, it never has made logical sense—as the late Justice Antonin Scalia often alluded to—and the juxtaposition has made abortion sacrosanct to progressives.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this is happening with transgender issues and why it happened similarly with abortion.

Perhaps the existence of a large and vocal lobby behind the cause—particularly when groupthink is prevalent and political correctness already has begun to be the ruling order of the day—aids in helping a court to co-opt logic, reason, and cynicism, and to accept a premise that’s as confusing as it is strange.

In other controversial areas—gun rights, free speech, and especially religion—the judiciary analyzes almost to an extreme the language, details, and motives of the case at hand to ensure the constitutionality of the decision holds.

A simple review of the oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission would prove this point.

That Supreme Court case in 2017 included a robust debate over whether designing and baking custom cakes was protected speech—and specifically making such cakes at the request of customers with a certain intention or message, such as to celebrate a same-sex marriage or an occult being.

If courts continue to accept the transgender debate on its surface, as one of privacy rights versus bathroom rights as opposed to extricating the root of the issue—while promoting a progressive, politically correct agenda—these rulings will be as legally and culturally harmful as abortion turned out to be.

SOURCE 






Desperate white South African farmers who rushed for protection visas in Australia have their claims rejected

It's a lot easier if you are an Afghan or an Iranian

A surge of South Africans seeking protection in Australia have been disappointed as no visas have yet been approved.

Rejection letters to the families applying for protection and humanitarian visas have said they are not refugees because the violence in South Africa is widespread, random and opportunistic.

'The risk of murder and serious physical/sexual assaults is one faced by the population of the country generally and not by the applicants personally,' said the letter, quoted in The Australian newspaper.

South Africa's minority white farmers say there has been a concerted campaign to drive them off their land, and violent murders - some involving horrific rape and torture - have been forcing them to leave.

Liberal National Party member Savanna Labuschagne, herself a migrant from South Africa, said some people had their skin ironed off and holes drilled through their knee caps.

'An elderly couple had boiling water poured down their throats. I could go on for days. How do we help our people?' she told The Australian.

Ms Labuschagne said both blacks and whites had suffered from the South African government's 'corruption'.

She also shared some of the racial hatred that has been directed at the white minority by black South Africans on Facebook.

One black South African man had posted to social media that it was his duty and the duty of others to 'eliminate every white person in South Africa'. 

'The only way to end racism and the oppression of my people is to destroy the white race. This must be done as quickly as possible,' his post read.

Ms Labuschagne along with fellow LNP member Patti Maher, also a South African migrant, said they were feeling frustrated as South Africans were prevented from receiving assistance by the bureaucracy.  

South Africa has been divided by deep racial grievances since the apartheid system of racial segregation ended in 1994, and this has been worsened by an economic gulf between rich and poor.

White people, who are less than 9 percent of the population, own most of the farmland in South Africa.

They are vastly outnumbered by black people who make up 80 per cent of the country's 57.7 million population, but who have the least amount of land ownership.

South Africa's ruling party the African National Congress, led by Cyril Ramaphosa, plans to take land without compensation from minority white farmers, who own most of the farmland, and redistribute it to black South Africans.

South Africa's parliament voted in 2018 to amend the constitution to allow land seizures, and has issued a proposed land expropriation bill on which the public comment period is open until 29 February, Business Tech reported.

In March 2018, Mr Dutton suggested white farmers were being persecuted and deserved special attention under Australia's humanitarian program.

He instructed his department to consider claims from persecuted South African farmers, alongside people from Asia, the Middle East and other African countries.

Liberal politicians pushed for up to 10,000 South Africans to come to Australia.

South Africans responded with a surge of 220 claims for humanitarian visas made in the last two years, almost triple the previous rate.

South Africans had previously made just 350 applications for humanitarian visas from 2008 to 2010, an average of 35 per year. 

However most of the visa applications have so far been denied leaving South Africans disappointed.

Of the 570 humanitarian visa applications since 2008, only 41 were granted and 340 are still to be finalised, The Australian reported.

Protection visa applications have also failed with 97 rejected in the past three months.

Of 33 protection visa applications lodged since November, none have been approved.

A Home Affairs spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Monday that anyone who makes a claim for protection will be considered under the humanitarian program, and that there are many other visas available to South Africans such as the skilled, temporary and family visas.

'Almost 80,000 visas have been granted to South Africans since July 2018, allowing them to come to Australia,' the spokesperson said.

'South Africa is the 9th largest source country of permanent migrants in Australia.'

To be considered a refugee, a person must have a well-founded fear they will be seriously harmed because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a social group, the Home Affairs Department says on its website.

The serious harm can be to their life and liberty, or the denial of a capacity to earn a livelihood to survive.

Australia's Refugee Review Tribunal wrote in 2011 that despite concerns among white South Africans that they were being targeted for race, most evidence pointed to other motivations such as financial gain.

Crime is widespread in South Africa where 14 million people live in extreme poverty, and farmers are isolated and thus can be seen as easy targets.

In 2018, South Africa suffered almost 20,000 murders with most of the victims being black victims of black violence, while only 62 were farm murders - not all of them white, according to government figures quoted by investigative journalist James Pogue writing in Harper's Magazine. 

Mr Pogue wrote that the brutality of the torture inflicted on some of the white victims does indicate a level of racial vitriol in the attacks.

In May last year, South African activist Annette Kennealy, 51, who spoke out against attacks on white farmers was found stabbed and beaten to death on her own farm in Limpopo province.

Kennealy was a public supporter of the white Afrikaner community and in her last Facebook post, she shared a link alleging that 10 farm attacks, including one murder, had been reported in just four days in 2019.

She also routinely shared links and stories relating to politics in South Africa, and the government's plans to start expropriating farms from white land-owners.

The South African Human Rights Commission has said black farmers have given evidence that farm safety isn't the preserve of any one racial group, although it does not dispute that there are attacks motivated by racial hatred.

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, February 25, 2020



‘Don’t bastardise all men… these things happen’: Pauline Hanson says cowardly Australian dad who murdered his entire family may have been ‘driven to do it’

It's good that we have sensible Australian women such as Pauline Hanson and Bettina Arndt to speak up against the hateful and totally unreasonable feminist claim that Hannah Clarke was murdered by her estranged husband because that is what "men" do. Baxter's maleness has been given as the sole explanation for his evil deeds. 

That millions of women are NOT murdered by their partner is ignored.  It is surely the vast non-murdering majority of men who tell you what "men" do. But feminists are so full of hate that they cannot see that.

So why did Baxter really do it?  Unless we know that, how are we supposed to prevent similar deeds by other troubled men?

Until we are given the full facts about the family history involved we cannot know for sure how it all worked out but from my point of view as a psychologist there is one highly likely explanation for the tragedy:  Baxter was a bully.

He was a common bully type, physically imposing and very egotistical.  The combination of a strong body and a big ego can be very problematical.  We see it in schoolyards all the time.  Some stronger kid will pick on some weak and "loser" kid.  In the course of a schooling that behaviour will usually be suppressed in some way, partly by teachers, partly by parents and partly by other students. 

I remember a question I once asked my well-built son when he was in High School  I asked him whether any other kids picked on him.  He said "No. I'm too big for them.  And if I see them picking on some smaller kid, I put myself in between them".  So the corrective role of other students should not be ignored.

Sometimes, however, the bully gets away with a lot and forms behaviour patterns that last into adulthood.  But such patterns are very limiting in adulthood.  The bully will find himself avoided if not ostracized.  The bully of course sees this and endeavours to change his ways at least superficially.  He practices being "nice". But that pretence periodically breaks down.  His real motivation comes out in hostility of some sort.

So in the end he will be mistrusted and socially excluded.  And for anyone that is very grievous.  Among Aborigines, social exclusion is the mechanism behind a wrongdoer being "sung" to death.  So the bully in any society has usually been locked into a behaviour pattern that badly hurts him emotionally. 

And when that hurts too much he may strike out fatally at the one whose disapproval hurts him the most.  He blames the other  person -- such as his ex-wife --  for his own deep unhappiness rather than himself. He sees that his life has been a failure and there is nothing left in it for him.  So death seems to him to be welcome.  So murder-suicide ensues.

So what can be done?  Just one thing:  Bullying has to be stopped at its source.  It has to be stopped during the bully's schooldays.  All Education Departments have high-sounding policies that claim to do that but enforcement is very lax.  So we cannot look at the existing system for hope.  A firmer approach is needed.

I would advocate sending bullies to a special school where bullying behavior is vigilantly watched for and heavily punished.  Bullying must be negatively reinforced, to use psychologist's jargon.  And talk is no good.  The bully has to be subjected to treatment that is a replica of what he normally does to others.



Politician Pauline Hanson has defended controversial comments about the horrific Brisbane murder-suicide, saying 'these things happen'.

In a crime which rocked Australia on Wednesday, Hannah Clarke, 31, was murdered by her estranged husband along with her three young children.

Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3, were burned alive by their own father on their way to school after he poured petrol in their car and lit a flame.

But Ms Hanson said the cowardly murders shouldn't lead to people 'bastardising all men' - saying Baxter could have been 'driven to it'. 'Don't bastardise all men out there, or women for that matter, because these things happen,' she said on Monday morning.

Speaking about domestic violence murders, she added that: 'A lot of people are driven to this, to do these acts for one reason or another.'

The killings have led to calls for more protection for domestic violence victims, after Ms Clarke was emotionally, sexually and financially abused by Baxter for years.

Speaking on Today, Ms Hanson said the murders have been in the news more than if it was committed by a woman - and that Baxter may have been 'driven to it'.

'You know, this has been for a week we have been in the news nearly every day about this horrific tragedy,' she said on Today on Monday morning. 

'But we don't hear much about it when a woman has murdered her children by driving a  car into a tree, she threw out a suicide note. 'Or the woman who doused her husband with fuel and set him alight an said she was possibly driven to it.

'Hopefully the family law inquiry will get to the bottom of it.'

She also defended commentator Bettina Arndt, who made controversial comments about the Baxter murders.

Some MPs want Arndt to be stripped of her Order of Australia, after she praised a Queensland police officer for saying Baxter may have been 'driven too far'. Queensland detective Mark Thompson was taken off the case after making the comments.

'Congratulations to the Queensland police for keeping an open mind and awaiting proper evidence, including the possibility that Rowan Baxter might have been 'driven too far'," Ms Arndt wrote on Twitter. 'But note the misplaced outrage. How dare police deviate from the feminist script of seeking excuses and explanations when women stab their partners to death, or drive their children into dams but immediately judging a man in these circumstances as simply representing the evil violence that is in all men.'

Speaking about Ms Arndt's comments, Ms Hanson said she should not be stripped of her Australia Day honour.

'It was a horrendous act of what he did to his children,' she said. 'It was a tragedy and I am very deeply sorry for everyone.

'But Bettina Arndt should not be stripped of her Order of Australia. She is clearly stating what she thinks and what a police officer said.

'This is why I have pushed for the family law inquiry to get behind what is happening on this.'

The mum-of-three had desperately tried to keep her young family safe from their evil dad, but was struggling after her domestic violence protection order was watered down. 

It has since emerged that he subjected Hannah to years of domestic violence, prompting the brave mum to finally leave him last November.

There was a domestic violence order (DVO) in place, but she expressed frustration that the conditions wouldn't be enough to keep her family safe.

Despite being stalked every day by her monstrous ex, the DVO was watered down to allow her husband to be a close as 100 metres from her.

'I have to go back to court and had to drop off an application today to get the DVO conditions changed as he keeps turning up where I am,' the mother-of-three said in text message to a friend, sent on January 30.

'He got the DVO adjourned and when they did that they took off the no contact and made it just 100m from my home so technically he’s not doing anything wrong … hence why we need it changed!'

Even the female police officer who helped Hannah lodge her DVO last year told her it would do little to protect her from her evil husband.

SOURCE  





Stab City

No one dares speak the truth about young black men stabbing each other to death on the streets of London.

Four stabbings in four East London locations within ninety minutes and it doesn’t even make the news. That tells you a lot about the state of London (or Stab City, as it is increasingly known).

The British Capital is witness to daily violence that is as unrelenting as it is overwhelming. Under the Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan, homicides are the highest in a decade and knife crime offenses are at record highs.

It is against this backdrop that these horrific stabbings have become something of everyday life for Londoners, too mundane to trouble a newsdesk and too routine for a reader to care.

Sunday’s victims were all found in East London: Barking, Dagenham, Hackney and Ilford (shown on the map below). Not the sorts of places you’ll find tourists taking selfies, but all in the vice-like grip of powerful gangs, organized by postcode (zip code) controlling the supply and distribution of drugs on their patch.

Being part of a gang is a way of belonging for young lads brought up on inner-city estates, often without a father figure, desperate to find a way to belong. For many, being part of a gang is a tenuous means of survival.

Stabbings are meted out as a mechanism of initiation, retribution or control, as ubiquitous as the mopeds used to courier their drugs, or the drill music that forms a soundtrack to their lives.

One gang member said: “I don’t even know what this war is about anymore. All I know is if I step out of my territory people want to kill me, and if people come into mine, I want to kill them. It’s as simple as that.”

And it is not just gang members or their rivals being killed. In November 2019, Jodie Chesney, a 17-year-old Girl Scout, was sitting in the park near her home with a group of friends. Two teenage boys unknown to the group, walked up and stabbed Jodie in the back in an unprovoked attack.The seven-inch wound passed straight through her body and she died screaming where she sat.

At the sentencing of her murderers, Prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC told jurors these young gang members took a "casual approach to violence" in a world where knife crime was “routine.”

“The drug dealing world is one of turf wars, rivalries and pathetic claims for ‘respect'. When drug dealers fall out, they do not take their problems to the police. Instead, they take matters into their own hands.”

And so the violence continues, one death necessitating the next, like some ghoulish relay race in which the baton is replaced with a knife.

If we overlay the area of London where four stabbings happened (on Sunday 16 February) with the gangs alleged to operate there, the scale of the problem becomes clear. Each colored block represents a gang and its territory. These demarcations are invisible to a stranger in the street, but a kind of no man's land for rival gangs just the same.

Which begs the obvious question; if kids are being stabbed in the street because of the gangs and we know where the gangs are located, why isn’t something being done?

There is a simple answer, but no one dares say it.

These gangs are mostly young black men; some of their foot-soldiers are as young as ten. But because they are mainly killing each other, isolating the problem to their own kind, no one in power needs to care.

Politicians know these black lads are not voters. They have no voice in the media. No one is howling with indignant rage. Even the mothers of the slain are silenced by the gangs they fear. Those who should be held to account can look the other way.

And they do. Sadiq Khan (who is about as effective as Mayor Bernard Young of Baltimore) is desperate to talk about anything other than the young black lads being knifed on his streets.

Khan has obstructed the Metropolitan Police in their efforts to grip the gang problem in London.

Elected into office on the promise of reducing stop-and-search in London playing on his BAME (black African minority ethnic) credentials, he reduced the abilities of officers on the street to check suspects for weapons. The sharp fall in stop-and-search corresponds with an equally steep rise in knife crime.

When the Metropolitan Police created a Gang Matrix as part of its War on Gangs, Sadiq Khan set up a task force to review whether this matrix was racist in its intent.

The Met claims the matrix, informed by intelligence, helps identify and assess the most harmful gang members in each of London’s boroughs, based on violence and weapon offenses.

Individuals are classified – given a computer-generated harm rating of red, amber or green, meant to reflect the risk an individual poses to others.

So far, so sensible. But of course, the left, Amnesty International, and other bleeding-heart liberals were outraged by this sensible approach, calling it: “Racist policing in its purest form. Of the almost 4,000 names on the matrix at any given time, 78% are black and 9% are other ethnic minorities.”

They demand to know why this shocking disproportion exists.

And there is no answer to give, because the numbers are not disproportionate. They are representative. They are an accurate picture of the demographic makeup of gangs.

In London, two-thirds of knife offenders under 25 were black or minority ethnics. Almost half of murder victims and murder suspects in the capital are young black men -- way out of proportion to London’s population, in which 13% are black.

Fearful of this truth, Sadiq Khan demanded gang names be removed from the matrix, obstructing the work of the Met Police, enabling the gang leaders. The Metropolitan Police have been forced to remove 374 names after the UK's data watchdog found they breached data protection laws.

It is a measure of the madness in which we live. While black lads as young as twelve are being stabbed to death in London, the Muslim mayor is more concerned with the privacy rights of members of the gang.

No one dares speak the truth of this slaughter for fear of being called a racist. It's racist to say these London gangs are mostly young black men. It is racist to say most don’t have a father figure. And it is racist to point out most have no education or qualifications. It is racist to say it is young black men killing each other. Even when the statistics prove this to be true.

Until you can be honest about a problem you cannot begin to solve it. And until a leader is willing to defy the racist label and speak the truth, the stabbing will continue.

In the words of one young gang member from South East London: “This is the only life we know, we just have to keep doing it -- there’s nothing else for us to do.”

And while Sadiq Khan knows he can rely on the votes of others voting by religion, the death of children, young black children, is no cause for alarm. It looks like Stab City is here to stay.

SOURCE 






The global Left is utterly adrift in this alien populist landscape

Both British Labour and the Democrats are yet to grasp the new ideological dividing line

By a remarkable coincidence, the main opposition parties in Britain and the United States find themselves trapped in extraordinarily similar dilemmas. In America, the Democratic party is now running through the ritual slaughter known as the “primaries” in which prospective candidates do their best to undermine each other irreparably. Mike Bloomberg – who has been doing a plausible impersonation of Donald Trump as the billionaire outsider – crashed spectacularly in his first public debate last week when faced with a professional hit squad of experienced politicians.

Meanwhile, in the quieter backwaters of British political life, the candidates for Labour party leader determinedly discredit each other, and contradict themselves, on the irrelevant margins of public consciousness.

The Democrats in the US, and Labour here at home, both appear to be adrift in an alien political landscape, utterly at a loss as to how to respond to what they see as an incomprehensible change in the electorate. In their desperate confusion, they veer between condemning the voters, and trying to lure them with offers that totally miss the point.

Most often they end up with a mix of the two which is both incoherent and insulting, because the one thing they absolutely will not accept is that people might have had perfectly rational reasons for making the political choices that they made. But for the social democratic Left (which now includes the leading Democratic contender), there can be only one definition of rationality and only one morally acceptable way for society to go forward.

That is why they call themselves “progressive”: implying that any remedies or programmes or inclinations which countermand their own must be steps backwards to a time when social attitudes and living conditions for everyone except a privileged few were worse – and thus such inclinations are inherently immoral or benighted. Policies that do not involve, for example, state-enforced equality of outcomes and redistribution of wealth are simply not a matter for ethical debate.

So what happens when the opinions and proposals that you regard as beneath contempt become, not just debatable, but electable? Answer: you are left with nothing to say. Or you try to say too many things, but nothing that would count as actual argument against the new popular political wave – because you are still compelled to dismiss it as unfit for discussion.

But to the ordinary voter, this sounds like arrogant contempt: as if you cannot conceive of why anybody with any conscience could prefer lower taxes and a smaller state, or why the desire for private prosperity could be anything more than greed. So in the US the new social democratic prophets, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, offer the outright cancellation of all student debt (the cost of which would be staggering for taxpayers) or universal free healthcare which countries (like ours) with much higher levels of general taxation than the US are struggling to maintain.

This is done in the name of an amorphous notion of “enlightened progressivism” whose most fundamental principle is hatred of the rich. Never having experienced the actual effects of redistributive policies, American youth cheers ecstatically – and threatens to put the Democratic party even further out of touch with that mystifying mob who elected Donald Trump.

But, as you may have suspected, I do not really believe that the uncanny similarity between the present conditions of Labour and the Democrats is a coincidence. In fact, I would say that the kinship which commentators – particularly in the US – try to make between Trump and Boris Johnson is almost completely absurd.

The genuine – and historically significant – parallel is between the flailing Democrats and their Labour counterparts. This is part of a larger crisis in centre-Left politics throughout the West but in our two countries it is especially critical because they have both traditionally been two-party democracies rather than coalition-based governing systems. So the collapse of the only viable alternative party of government is very serious.

There have been some – not many, but some – attempts to address this problem from within the moderate British Left even if its actual leadership candidates seem either clueless or disingenuous. One of the more illuminating contributions has come from Tony Blair who might be expected to have some useful insights into a problem to which he was once the answer.

What Mr Blair did in a set piece speech last week was lay out the case for a Labour-Liberal Democrat “progressive coalition” which, he argued, could revive the centre Left project and regain power. That bit was wildly optimistic and implausible. But there was a historical analysis of the problem of the Left which bears proper exegesis. In order to resolve the differences between Labour and the Lib Dems, this coalition would have to discard the old Left ideas based on “class, industrial organisation, the role of the state and individual liberty, all of which are time bound”. (For time bound, read “outmoded”.)

What the two parties had in common was “social reform, advancement of opportunity and passionate commitment to fighting poverty and injustice, all of which are timeless”. (For timeless, read “relevant to modern life”.) Yes indeed, these principles certainly are timeless and relevant. They are, in fact, the precepts which no political party in a modern democracy could possibly disclaim. The debate now is not about whether there should be advancement of opportunity or a commitment to fighting poverty and injustice.

Nobody in his right mind would argue with those objectives. The question is, what is the best way of achieving them? As it happens, quite large proportions of the populations of both our countries have been persuaded that free markets are more likely to deliver mass prosperity, and that a less intrusive state will actually improve opportunities for the individual. In setting out a prospectus for a new New Labour, Mr Blair has only succeeded in making it clear that the Left has nothing new to contribute.

SOURCE 






The Jihad Murder in Florida You Heard Nothing About

A 17-year-old, Corey Johnson, murdered a 13-year-old, Jovanni Alexander Sierra, and stabbed two others in Florida in 2018, and this week it was reported that the victim’s family is suing the Publix grocery store chain for selling Johnson the knife, as the sale violated a Florida law that prohibits the sale of knives to anyone under age 18. That’s all well and good, but there is a good deal more to this story: this was a jihad massacre committed in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings, but it has been swept under the rug. Apparently it doesn’t fit the establishment media narrative.

According to The Blaze, “Johnson, who had converted to Islam prior to the attack, had been under investigation by the FBI because he was viewing radicalization propaganda online, including beheading videos.” Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., Police Chief Clint Shannon explained: “Corey Johnson has confessed his actions to our investigators stating that he stabbed the victims because of his religious beliefs. Our understanding is he had converted to Islam and had been watching violent videos online.”

In the immediate aftermath of the murder, the Palm Beach Post reported that “in January 2017, several local law-enforcement agencies and the FBI came together with the staff at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens, where he was a student at the time. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office received information that Johnson supported the terrorist organization ISIS and had reached out to the group online, expressing his desire to join them.”

Not only that. “The FBI told Jupiter police that a counter-intelligence agency in Europe investigated Johnson’s connection to several threats made on Instagram to McAuley Catholic High School in Doncaster, England. Though the report does not say what the threats were, authorities said they ‘were so severe in nature that up to 100 students were removed from the school fearing some kind of attack.’ British news outlets reported that in October 2016, a threat posted on Instagram stated ‘we will kill every single infidel student at this school.’”

Yes, you read that right: he reached out to ISIS, wanting to join them, and likely sent threats of a jihad massacre to a school, and yet over a year later he was still running around loose and unsupervised to the extent that he was able to buy a knife, even though he was underage, and use it on three people, killing one.

No “watch list” for Corey Johnson. No nothing. So the kid wanted to join ISIS! Who cares! It’s just a phase! And anyway, it’s all right: “a sheriff’s detective interviewed Johnson for a mental-health assessment.” What a relief! His judgment? The sheriff’s detective “said the teen sympathized with terrorist organizations.” No kidding, really?

Johnson’s mother and grandparents said that the boy had “recently began discovering religion.” Which one? You guessed it: he had started, they said, studying the Qur’an. Sierra’s throat was slashed. Maybe Johnson got the idea to do that from one of his scripture studies: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike necks…” (47:4). Local10.com reported at the time of the attack that “in his statement, Johnson advised he stabbed the victims because of his Muslim faith,” and that “just before the attack, Johnson was reading the Quran from his phone ‘to give him courage to carry out his intentions.’”

So now Jovanni Alexander Sierra is dead, and there is no bringing him back, but surely authorities have learned from the blunders that led to his being killed and have taken steps to make sure that nothing like Johnson’s jihad attack happens again, right? Of course not. In the years immediately following 9/11, counterterror agents were taught that one sign of a potential jihad killer was a sudden turn to devout observance of Islam. Devout Muslims weren’t all jihadis, but all jihadis, especially those who were converts to Islam, were devout. During the Obama administration, however, all that was removed from counterterror training: it was “Islamophobic” and “singled Muslims out,” as if some jihad terrorists were Methodists, yet Methodism wasn’t being studied.

All these years later, Corey Johnson showed all the signs of being a dangerous jihadi. Nothing was done because to have acted upon those signs would have been “Islamophobic.” Sierra’s family is suing Publix for selling Johnson the knife; they should be suing law enforcement for not watching Johnson more closely, and the establishment media for relentlessly demonizing anyone who ever suggested that selling Johnson his Qur’an may have been just as dangerous as selling him the knife.

How many people even know that this incident happened at all? The murder of Jovanni Alexander Sierra should have been the occasion for a national discussion about the phenomenon of converts to Islam becoming violent, which keeps happening, and what should be done about it. Instead, the whole thing was hushed up, as always.

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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