Australia: Club football players to boycott match over objection to club's "pride" jersey
They are entirely justified. The club had no right to impose political views onto its players. I have never been able to work out why anybody would be proud about sticking their appendage into another man's behind -- JR
Seven Manly Sea Eagles players have withdrawn from selection for Thursday night's NRL match with Sydney Roosters over the team's decision to wear a gay pride jersey in the fixture.
On Sunday, the Sea Eagles announced they would become the first team in NRL history to wear an LGBTQIA+ jersey for the match, with a rainbow design replacing the strip's traditional white hoops.
But that decision has caused some unrest among players who are unhappy they were not consulted by club management.
According to Sydney Morning Herald, the boycotting group are Jason Saab, Tolutau Koula, Haumole Olakau'atu, Josh Schuster and Kiwi players Christian Tuipulotu, Josh Alioai, and Toafofoa Sipley.
Their objections are reportedly based on respective cultural and religious grounds.
Kieran Foran, Reuben Garrick and Sean Keppie were among those to help launch the strip but other players claim they learned about the move over social media on Sunday night.
Coach Des Hasler has reportedly supported his players' decision.
Club great Ian Roberts, who in 1995 became the first rugby league player to come out as openly gay, told The Daily Telegraph he was disappointed by the response of the players objecting to wear the jersey.
"I try to see it from all perspectives but this breaks my heart," Roberts said. "It's sad and uncomfortable. As an older gay man, this isn't unfamiliar. I did wonder whether there would be any religious push back. "I can promise you every young kid on the northern beaches who is dealing with their sexuality would have heard about this."
Rugby league broadcaster Paul Kent put the onus back on the club for trying to inflict its own political stance on the players. "The players, according to my understanding.. only became aware they were wearing these jerseys when they read about it in the newspaper," Kent said on NRL 360.
"The Manly club did this without any consultation of the players, they did it without board approval. It's basically a marketing decision and they've just assumed everything was okay.
"The club has imposed its own politics on these players and these players have inadvertently been embroiled in this scandal and they will be, hopefully, protected. But they will be under pressure now through no fault of their own.
"It's an embarrassing look for the club and it's a difficult one. This talk about inclusion, wearing the Manly jersey for me is inclusion.
"To inflict their own political views on the players who may not share that and are now being forced to deal with the consequences of that is a real oversight by the club and it’s something they should be embarrassed about."
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The real employment crisis behind the official announcements
The real crisis in the U.S. labor market is not, as we keep hearing, that there are not enough people who can work. The real crisis is all of the working-age people on the sidelines, not even looking for a job. Yes, the unemployment rate is low, but that statistic covers only people who have looked for a job in the last four weeks. The labor-force participation rate, which measures the share of working-age people working or at least looking for work, shows a long-term decline, especially for men without a college degree. This is especially true in states like Texas. When able-bodied men are not even looking for work, a host of social problems ensue — from crime, to drug addiction, to family breakdown.
The possible reasons for the decline in labor-force participation are as varied as the suggested solutions, but the role of immigration, both legal and illegal, is difficult to deny. A comprehensive 2016 study from the National Academies found that increasing the supply of labor through immigration reduces the wages for some U.S.-born workers, particularly the least educated, and this almost certainly reduces the incentive to work.
Perhaps more important, the crutch of immigration allows politicians, employers and the public to ignore this dramatic decline in work and the social problems it causes. We have a clear recent example of this. Even though labor force participation remains near historic lows in Texas, at the end of April, U.S. Sen. Cornyn, R-Texas, was in talks to significantly increase guest workers to satisfy employers.
Just how large is the decline in labor-force participation in Texas? Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, which excludes jails and prisons, research by myself and Karen Zeigler shows that the number of 16- to 64-year-olds not in the labor force increased 67% between the first quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of this year, even though the state’s overall population grew roughly 31%.
Among Texas men between the ages of 25 and 54, which is the “prime age” for work, only 84% of the U.S.-born without a bachelor’s degree were in the labor force in the first quarter of this year, down from 88% in 2019 before COVID-19, and 91% at the peak of the expansion in 2000. Back in 1979, it was 93%, though we cannot break out the U.S.-born separately in the older data.
Related:D-FW leads the U.S. in 2022 office building starts
Over this time, the immigrant population grew dramatically in Texas. The foreign-born share of Texas’ population tripled, from 6% in 1980 to 18% today. Roughly two-thirds of the 5.4 million foreign-born residents now living in the Lone Star State are legal immigrants. No one should “blame” immigrants for the labor-force decline of the U.S.-born per se, or begrudge immigrants’ desire to achieve a better life in the U.S. But continuing to allow so many people into the country has consequences for the existing population, including competition with lower-skilled workers.
Of course, not every job taken by an immigrant is one lost by a U.S.-born citizen, but research shows that immigration impacts internal migration, indicating that competition does exist. An academic paper published last year shows that as immigrants moved into southern Florida, fewer U.S.-born workers arrived and more left. An analysis published this year finds this same phenomenon nationally. This confirms much older work from the 1990s.
Furthermore, the U.S.-born are a majority of workers in all but six of the 474 occupations defined by the Department of Commerce. There are no “jobs that Americans won’t do.” It is true that agricultural labor is majority immigrant, but it constitutes less than one-half of 1% of the U.S. labor force, and there is already an unlimited guest-worker program for this relatively tiny sector of the workforce.
To be sure, immigration is certainly not the only cause of the decline in labor-force participation. Getting less-educated Americans back to work will involve reforming our welfare and disability systems and trade policies. Allowing wages to rise, partly by reducing immigration, would certainly make work more attractive. Combating the opioid crisis, improving job training, and re-instilling the value of work will all have to play a role. None of this will be quick or easy. But we are much less likely to even address the problem unless immigration is reduced. Bringing in immigrants to fill jobs means turning a blind eye to the destructive impact of idleness among the native-born.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/07/24/the-real-employment-crisis-in-texas/
******************************************************Bannon Convicted, The House Star Chamber Shall Not be Opposed
By Rick Manning
Steve Bannon has been convicted for contempt of Congress due to his refusal to testify before the on-going Get Trump prime time television show starring Adam Schiff, Bennie Thompson and in a very special role, Liz Cheney representing the Deep State.
Steve is an acquaintance of mine, who I genuinely like. He was convicted because he had this naïve idea that in the United States you get to confront your accuser.
Silly guy. When the accuser is the House of Representatives, and the prosecutor is the U.S. Justice Department, and the jury consists of DC swamp dwellers, you not only don’t get to confront your accuser, you don’t get to offer a defense at all.
So, a political witch hunt being conducted by the House of Representatives never has to justify itself in front of someone it is accusing of failing to comply with its demands. The following statement by the prosecution sums it all up, “The defendant chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law.”
Remembering that Bannon agreed to testify before the “committee” upon being notified by former President Donald Trump that their conversations should not be considered covered under executive privilege, it is fair to ask who is actually in compliance with the law?
Of course, the prosecution still occurred after the House Goon Squad got it’s way, because this is about political intimidation and not a “search for the truth.”
Former Democratic National Committee Co-Chairperson and Congresswoman from Hawaii , “Steve Bannon has been charged with contempt of Congress & found guilty, while Brennan, Clapper & others who lied to Congress have never been charged or prosecuted. This just shows yet again how the DOJ has been weaponized by those in power to go after their political opponents.”
Let me repeat that last part because it is the heart of what we are witnessing. “This just shows yet again how the DOJ has been weaponized by those in power to go after their political opponents.”
The same weaponized DOJ which spent the entirety of the Trump administration attempting to concoct a case for impeachment against the duly elected President, whether it be under the guise of their false Russia collusion coup, or the false allegations about President Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that led to impeachment, or the on-going January 6 witch-hunt.
A witch hunt designed to make it impossible to expose obvious corruption and election theft being conducted by many who called President Trump’s 2016 election illegitimate and stolen.
So far, the not ready for primetime committee has shown that states chose to send alternative electors to be considered by Congress. These state legislatures did this because they became convinced that the certified electors were illegitimate and the Constitution provides for Congress to make the final determinations on the seating of a President.
Not a secret, everyone knew it was happening. After all, to contest electors, the state had to provide alternate electors willing to make the case that those certified were improperly counted.
They have found that people counselled President Trump after the election that he should not proceed with challenges, and others counselled him to proceed. Earth shattering stuff, political advisors disagreed on how to proceed on important issue, talk about dog bites man.
They have found that President Trump was mad at Vice President Mike Pence for not aggressively pursuing actions which would have forced Congress to delay the vote until they investigated the election challenges. No kidding.
What they aren’t saying is that all of the above is absolutely legal.
Refusing to accept a stolen election is legal. Heck, Hillary Clinton still parades around claiming that she should have been president, and we aren’t even going to talk about Al Gore.
So now Steve Bannon may testify before this Star Chamber. After being convicted though, he can probably tell them to pound sand. After all, can you be convicted twice for refusing to obey a Congressional subpoena with those constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy in the way?
Now look who is being silly. Constitution, constischmusion. Orange man is bad, and everyone and anyone who supports him must be destroyed.
And somewhere, the invisible man, Kevin McCarthy, wanders Joe Biden-like around the Capitol, allowing the circus to continue. Nary a peep about prices that will be paid by all, staff included, who have participated in this cowardly attack on the political process and free speech rights once Republicans retake the gavel from the power mad Pelosi.
With any luck, the GOP will have a 50+ seat majority in the House and those new members will choose against anointing anyone leader who fiddled while Nancy’s minions burned any semblance of honesty.
As for me, I’m sick of it.
I’m old enough to remember way back when the Black Lives Matter folks lit cities on fire while extorting billions from woke, scared corporations, when we were lectured that Silence Means Consent. It is time for Kevin to speak up, after all, Minority Leader McCarthy, your silence does indeed mean consent.
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Xi Jinping and his Chinese communists are still vicious mass murderers
David Flint
I recently agreed to join a Sydney demonstration. It wasn’t to block traffic, scream abuse, glue my hands to the road, stop workers from getting to their jobs, in brief, to be a public nuisance to ram down people’s throats the elites’ latest fashionable and yet inane belief.
All I had to do was speak at a law-abiding, peaceful meeting in the public square in front of the Customs House, denouncing the much-ignored but proven beyond reasonable doubt genocide by Beijing of the Falun Gong along with similar terrible crimes against the Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, House Christians, and others.
Falun Gong can be described as an ancient Chinese spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition, combining meditation and gentle exercises similar to yoga or tai chi, with a moral philosophy centred on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
It is difficult to see why anybody would be against Falun Gong ‘practitioners’ as adherents style themselves. Not one myself, I sense a great virtue among them like that seen in those who serve and fight for all good causes, from the old anti-slavery movement to modern firefighting, lifesaving, nursing, and compassionate religion.
In brief, the Falun Gong are good people, and while nobody deserves the treatment the regime dishes out to them, their persecution is initially incomprehensible. It can only be understood when we recall that, from their record of extraordinary evil, the acolytes of the Devil himself must now reside in Beijing.
In any event, when I arrived, I heard pleasant music being played by a large brass band in front of two rows of mostly escaped practitioners. They, or their friends and family, had experienced cruel treatment of the inhuman standard our soldiers, captured at the fall of Singapore, had once known.
They were holding up signs about their beliefs and the persecution, black on golden backgrounds, together forming one large CinemaScope-like screen. There was a sense of peace and order.
After Falun Gong Association President Dr. Lucy Zhao recalled the way the CCP had brutally turned on the Falun Gong, this was my short message:
We have been celebrating this week what Winston Churchill once called the third great title deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded, the American Declaration of Independence, now in its 246th year.
Central to this is John Locke’s great theme which had already formed England’s 1688 Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’
Savour those words. They are fundamental to civilization.
Notice especially that man is ‘endowed by his Creator’. Not by the party, not by the ruling class, but by their Creator. Notice too that they are not just for Americans or Britons, but for ‘all men’, including, of course, the people of China, even if, as the Black Book of Communism concludes, of the at least 94 million lives stolen worldwide by communist brutes, Beijing has extinguished at least 65 million. And every day, they extinguish more.
On this day we remember the terrible persecution which began 23 years ago. But why? The Falun Gong had no political ambitions; it was no competitor for Beijing’s hold on unlimited power and riches.
But to the Party bosses, they were threatening. With a new way of presenting old traditional culture and emphasising true virtue, their growth had been spectacular. The Falun Gong was proving vastly more attractive to people than membership of the Communist Party, no matter what glittering advantages the Party could bring in terms of access to earthly power and riches.
To understand that attraction, just look at the people behind me, so stoically reminding us of their noble and fundamental themes, themes which the Chinese people were choosing over that grotesquely evil world of corruption, greed, cruelty, and gross abuse of power that communism always is and will always be.
When we think of the millions of victims persecuted in China, including at this very moment, think especially of their odious practice of selecting those many young healthy men and women, estimated so far to be 60,000 to 90,000 and growing, all for no other reason than that they are suspected of being Falun Gong practitioners believing in the ‘heresies’ of their ‘cult’ ─ truth, compassion, and tolerance. Think of Xi, through his acolytes, strapping their young healthy bodies to a hospital bed, and, without a drop of anaesthetic, ripping from those living bodies their hearts, their livers, and their kidneys.
As the Chairman of the London Tribunal, eminent lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice QC (prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic) said, these are ‘indescribably hideous deaths’. The ultimate proof is the massively lucrative trade in organs-on-demand from which the depraved criminals in Beijing now profit, ignored by the Western, including the Australian establishment.
And yet we have long been told that when it comes to Beijing, we must not be forced to choose sides. On this very day, the newspapers headlined the visiting New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s maudlin cry that, ‘The nations of the Pacific must not be forced to take sides.’
In return for empty promises of wealth, non-militarisation and future CO2 emissions reductions, Ms. Ardern and other Western elites are covering up for a regime that practices the worst genocide seen since that perpetrated in the second world war, dishonouring the civilised world’s promise, ‘Never Again.’
As we remember the beginning of this terrible, cruel and unacceptable persecution of the Falun Gong and also of the Tibetans, Uighur Muslims, House Underground Christians, and all the others, to retain any honour, all governments and all free people must insist that this outrage stop and stop this very day.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/elites-run-cover-for-genocidal-criminals
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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