UK: Right-on Kew Gardens

Rod Liddle

We must all hurry down to the Temperate House at Kew Gardens next month to enjoy Queer Nature After Hours, an evening of drama, music, comedy, drag acts and ‘a sprinkling of queer joy’. If, like me, you have never previously been sprinkled with queer joy, here’s your chance to find out what it’s like. There will be a performance by Trans Voices as well as a chap, or maybe not a chap, called Bi-Curious George. Here’s what George will be doing: ‘Within the splendour of the Temperate House, Bi-Curious George (he/him) will broadcast immersive parody-monologues, set to soaring classical scores. The audience becomes George’s parade of beautifully queer creatures and George becomes some of the animals too. Expect cabaret, parody songs, lip syncs, dancing, and sparkly costumes.’

Can’t wait, can you? Kew has helpfully provided attendees with the correct pronouns to employ in regard to each performer, so nobody should leave having been triggered or merely affronted. Anyway, this should all meet with the approval of the plants, 90 per cent of which are, like about half of our country’s sixth-form students, possessed of both male and female sexual organs and would most certainly object to being referred to as ‘him’ or ‘her’, were they capable of objecting to anything other than an injudicious watering regimen. In point of fact, the plants actually don’t get much of a mention in the blurb for this extravaganza, despite the fact that this is why Kew Gardens exists.

In other words it is not a celebration of the beauty tended over the years by less stupid curators, but yet another example of fashionable, top-down, performative grandstanding – a simpler description of which is ‘narcissism’. The people invited along, and the performers, are not there to marvel at the miracles of nature, but at their own miraculousness and to shout about it and show off. It is a revelling in themselves and how wonderful they are and yet also how victimised and oppressed by the horribly white, straight hegemony. In this it is much like the rest of the stuff which makes up what we refer to as the ‘culture war’ – whether it’s the gays or the trans people or indeed the Black Lives Matter crew, identitarianism is always an act born of narcissism: we are important, everybody else not so much. Perhaps I should get on board and be a bit more identitarian myself, in the hope that one day Kew Gardens might put on a special event for my tribe – An Evening Among the Giant Ferns For Ageing Fascist Gammons.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/right-on-kew/

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A Blue State Will Recognize ‘Transgender History Month’

The state of California will recognize August as “Transgender History Month” going forward, becoming the first state to do so.

The California State Assembly voted and passed the resolution this week, according to Fox 40 in Sacramento.

Democratic Assemblymember Matt Haney, who authored the bill, said: “I couldn’t be more proud to have introduced legislation that will designate August as the first statewide Transgender History month in the nation."

“I believe that as Californians our strongest defense against the anti-trans agenda is just to tell the truth. Let’s tell the truth about transgender people’s lives, and let’s lift up the history of the transgender Californians who left their mark on our great state,” he added.

"Many Californians remain unaware of the real lives and experiences of transgender people, even here in California," Honey Mahogany, San Francisco's Democratic Party Chair, told Fox 40.

"We can change that through awareness, education, and outreach, and I believe that establishing a Transgender History Month in California is one way we can do just that."

Last year, San Francisco announced that it would observe August as Transgender History Month, as Townhall covered.

Townhall has noted how many states have passed laws protecting children from the harms of so-called “gender-affirming” care, which includes hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers, and sex reassignment surgery. Additionally, many states have passed laws protecting women’s sports and locker rooms from so-called “transgender” athletes who are biological males.

Currently, school districts in California have come under fire by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration for implementing policies that protect parents rights and keep them in the loop about their child’s gender identity. This comes after a school district in the state agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing teachers of encouraging a student’s gender transition and keeping it a secret from their mother, which Townhall covered.

Now, parents in the Golden State have created an organization called Protect Kids California and launched a ballot initiative aimed at allowing voters to decide on these issues.

“We have a system in California that sells false choices and false hope to parents and their kids,” the group’s co-founder, Jonathan Zachreson, said during a press conference about the initiative. “This bill of lies has been sold to many young people, especially young women, in California.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/09/09/california-will-recognize-transgender-history-month-n2628164

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Legalized Shoplifting Becomes a Racket, and Minorities Hardest Hit

You could blame Victor Hugo. In 1846, the French novelist observed a young man being arrested for holding a loaf of bread he stole.

Deeply touched, he fashioned his novel “Les Miserables,” published in 1862, around the character Jean Valjean, who is imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and pursued relentlessly after his release by Inspector Javert.

You may have followed the story, sort of, in the musical “Les Mis,” which began its run in Paris in 1980 and London in 1985. Or you may have heard the quip by the later French writer Anatole France that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

Curiously, some people, even in the United States in the 21st century, seem to think that the conditions Hugo and France described in their fiction still prevail here — even though their relevant writings were set nearly 200 years in the past, and no one without severe mental handicaps goes hungry today for want of bread in countries such as France and the U.S.

But the assumption persists that if someone steals, particularly if someone steals items worth small amounts of money, that person must be in dire want or acting to help someone who is. Didn’t Karl Marx and others of Hugo’s generation teach that mankind acts always and everywhere primarily out of economic motives?

Something like this line of thought, perhaps without the literary references, explains the laws decriminalizing the thefts of items worth small amounts of money. Primary examples include California’s law, passed in a referendum in 2014, raising from $400 to $950 the amount of shoplifted goods justifying a felony prosecution.

Similarly, in New York State, stealing property worth less than $1,000 is a misdemeanor. So prosecutors, many financed by the left-wing billionaire George Soros, in these two large states and elsewhere have effectively decriminalized shoplifting.

Proposition 47 was pitched as a measure to relieve prison overcrowding and defended by an Associated Press reporter as not preventing misdemeanor prosecutions of those filching goods worth $949 or less. But of course, that’s not what happened.

Instead, shoplifting has become a mass, and scary, phenomenon, encouraged by organized criminals who resell stolen merchandise.

Those who see low-dollar shoplifters as 21st-century Jean Valjeans should realize that theft is not necessarily a nonviolent crime and that low-value theft losses can inflict severe damage on those with modest incomes.

It’s like what Jack Maple, an architect of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s police reforms, concluded when told that burglaries of under $10,000 weren’t investigated in Manhattan. “If you were Donald Trump and had a painting taken,” he recalled, “we would have 30 … cops there. If you’re poor , you could have your life savings stolen from you, and nobody was going to investigate it, which is outrageous! I just saw what the rule was, and I changed it.”

In most cases, the flash mobs swarming into chain drugstores and bodegas in Manhattan and San Francisco, invariably ignored by unformed security and police officers, don’t take much directly from customers. But they do put people just going about their daily lives in fear of injury or death, the common law definition of assault, and increase the cost and availability of goods in their neighborhoods.

So chain drugstores place under lock and key razor blades and toothpaste and shampoos, which can be sold to organized gangsters who sell them at low prices with no sales tax. Other stores just close, such as Nordstrom on San Francisco’s Market Street and CVS branches in Midtown Manhattan.

In southeast Washington, D.C., Giant Foods has removed brand-name merchandise from its supermarket (store brand items apparently aren’t fencible).

That’s supported by local Councilman Trayon White (last seen blaming the Rothschilds for a heavy snowfall), who reports that Giant’s shoplifting loss is 20% of sales and says that, without changes, the store, the only one in the neighborhoods, will close.

It’s an uncomfortable and rarely reported fact that the large majority of shoplifting mobs are young black men, some of whom may believe they’re redressing Jean Valjean-type grievances. White disagrees. “We know it’s tough times, and we know the price of food has skyrocketed in the last three years,” he said. “But we cannot afford to hurt ourselves by constantly taking it out of the store.”

In saying so, he shows an appreciation of the inevitable result of effectively decriminalizing stealing that evidently evaded sophisticated New York state legislators and the 60% of California voters who voted to do so. As the San Francisco longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer put it about 50 years ago, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/100318-legalized-shoplifting-becomes-a-racket-and-minorities-hardest-hit-2023-09-08

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Top Military Brass Press Tuberville

As the Senate returns from its August recess, one of the top focal points for the Biden administration is to smash the roadblock that is Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville.

For months now, Tuberville has held the line on his demand that the Biden administration reverse course on its unprecedented and arguably unconstitutional decision to pay for service members’ transportation to other states in order to obtain elective abortions. Of course, the Biden administration maintains the fiction that such elective abortion services are essential to ensuring “service members and their families have access to reproductive health no matter where they are stationed.” At best, this is a violation of the spirit of the longstanding bipartisan-supported Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortions.

Refusing to back down, Team Biden ran a blitz against the old football coach in the form of a Washington Post op-ed cowritten by the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. They warn of “the dangers of politicizing our military leaders” and insist, “It is time to lift this dangerous hold and confirm our senior military leaders.”

The people politicizing the military occupy the White House.

Since Tuberville took his principled stand, the U.S. military has incurred a backlog of hundreds of pending officer promotions, including the heads of three of the five military branches — the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

The Democrat-controlled Senate could easily take the time to individually vote on these officer promotions, especially the pending heads of the military branches. But rather than doing so, which would involve more time that could potentially derail some of the Democrats’ legislative agenda, they have chosen to play what amounts to a game of chicken.

Democrats and the Biden administration argue that Tuberville’s stand is threatening national defense by impacting military readiness. Yet if that were indeed the case, Senate Democrats would have long ago acted to hold individual nominations. And according to calculations by the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll, “[Senator Chuck] Schumer could have been popping one [confirmation] out every two hours for the past 40 days.”

This is a battle of political wills. Tuberville is standing between Joe Biden and an expansion of the power of the executive branch beyond constitutional limits — all because the commander-in-chief and his administration view elective abortion as a (non-enumerated) constitutional right. (Where do we apply for subsidizing elective gun purchases? Asking for a friend.) But Congress doesn’t see it that way, and Biden knows he can’t get what he wants via the legislative process, so he’s going around it.

Thus far, Tuberville has proven himself much more of a stalwart than the Biden administration bargained for. And it appears this game of chicken is nowhere near ending. As Tuberville rightly sees it, the lives of pre-born Americans are at stake, not just a political agenda.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/100247-top-military-brass-press-tuberville-2023-09-07

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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