With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
Edinburgh to apologise over historical links to slavery
Edinburgh will apologise for suffering caused through the city’s involvement in slavery, while statues, street names and buildings associated with the trade will be “re-presented” to explain the consequences to the public.
City councillors on Tuesday unanimously accepted all 10 recommendations made in a report on Edinburgh’s historical links with slavery and colonialism, the result of a review set up in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and chaired by Scotland’s first black professor, Sir Geoff Palmer.
Palmer said the council’s decision to accept the full recommendations was “very significant” and a civic apology was another move towards redress.
“An apology doesn’t buy bread but it gives another form of sustenance,” he said. “It is about feeling that somebody has looked at something and recognised it was wrong. They are saying to you, the person offended, that they regret what has happened.
“Even though many people say ‘we weren’t there, it wasn’t our doing’, we all have responsibilities. We are responsible for what happened in the past, because the past has consequences. We can’t change the past but we can change the consequences of racism.”
The report outlined that statues and other parts of city architecture celebrating people who made money from the suffering of others should not be removed but reframed in order to educate future generations.
Vegan mother jailed for life after 18-month-old son starved to death on diet of raw fruits and vegetables
A vegan mother has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder over the malnutrition death of her 18-month-old son who was fed on a diet of raw fruits and vegetables.
Sheila O’Leary, 39, was convicted by a Florida jury in June of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter of a child, child abuse, and two counts of child neglect.
Prosecutors say that her son, Ezra, was severely malnourished and weighed just 17 pounds when he died in September 2019.
O’Leary and her 33-year-old husband, Ryan O’Leary, told police that they fed their children a strict vegan diet of raw fruit and vegetables. Ezra was also fed breast milk, they stated.
Prosecutors say that in addition to Ezra, three other children, a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and an 11-year-old, also suffered from extreme neglect and child abuse.
O’Leary was convicted after three hours of deliberations by a jury in Lee County, Florida, at the end of a five-day trial.
During the trial, the jury was told by prosecutors that the Cape Coral mother “chose to disregard his cries.”
Ryan O’Leary has also been charged with the same crimes as his wife, as well as sexual assault of a victim under the age of 12, as well as lewd and lascivious behavior/molestation of a victim younger than 12.
He remains in prison and has yet to face trial.
“This afternoon, Sheila O’Leary was adjudicated guilty and sentenced to life in prison for First Degree Murder. She was also sentenced to 30 years in prison for Aggravated Child Abuse and 30 years in prison for Aggravated Manslaughter of a Child,” the Office of the State Attorney for the 20th Judicial Circuit of Florida said in a statement.
“She was sentenced to 5 years in prison on two counts of Child Neglect and one count of Child Abuse.”
Biden’s imposing racism in everything from housing to health care
Unless you’re a person of color or a favored minority, brace yourself to be treated unfairly by the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden is pushing racial equity — which is very different from equal treatment regardless of race. Racial equity means government will treat people unequally, discriminating against whites to equalize outcomes. For Team Biden, it means closing the wealth gap between the white and black populations. By whatever means.
You may think it’s “unfair” to be forced to pay off other people’s student loans after you already paid back your own. But Biden’s White House actually defends debt cancellation as a way to close the “wealth gap” between races, citing data showing that 20 years after starting college, the average black borrower still owes 95% of the loan, while the average white borrower has paid off all but 6%.
At the other end of life’s spectrum, older people who are white will find it harder to get an appointment with a doctor who takes Medicare. The Biden administration is forcing physicians to categorize their patients by race and demonstrate they have an “anti-racism” plan to combat health disparities. To meet that test, black patients will be in demand; white ones not so much.
This is part of Biden's medical equity initiative.
Doctors who insist on treating patients as individuals rather than by race will be punished with lower payments. Most doctors are expected to give in to avoid the penalty.
If you’re white, good luck dealing with the costs of buying a home. Fannie Mae’s new Equitable Housing Finance Plan will help with appraisals and closing costs — but only if you’re black.
If you’re a white company owner who sells to the federal government, get ready to lose business to a competitor who identifies as “underserved,” “marginalized” or “disadvantaged” — all euphemisms for identity groups. The Biden bureaucracy gives preference to minorities in federal procurement. Straight white men can take a hike.
Stunningly, the 2021 Medicare payment rules for physicians printed in the Federal Register parrot the language used by inflammatory college professor Ibram X. Kendi in his 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist.” Physicians must show a “commitment to anti-racism” to qualify for merit pay from Medicare. They’re told it will require “considerable time and resources” to “prioritize” certain “populations.”
That’s instead of treating all patients the same. Kendi argues that colorblindness sustains racial inequality: “The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination.”
Many physicians are horrified, predicting the rule will undermine trust between doctor and patient. It suggests black patients will get more time with the physician and more diagnostic tests. White patients will worry they aren’t getting an antibiotic or a referral to a specialist because of their race.
Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) has introduced a bill banning the rule’s “reverse discrimination.” Eight states and Do No Harm, a physicians’ organization, are suing to overturn the rule. Stanley Goldfarb, Do No Harm chairman, blasts it for pushing doctors to “prioritize some patients over others.”
“Critical race theory has no place in the health-care profession,” says Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, one of the litigants. He says he will not allow doctors in his state “to be penalized for refusing to bend to extremism.”
Extremism it is. It’s being forced on Americans by what Biden calls a “whole of government” approach.
We were warned, even before election night 2020, that a Biden administration would trample America’s commitment to fairness and equal treatment under the law. On Nov. 1, 2020, Kamala Harris tweeted, “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.” Fair warning. Equity is what we’re reeling under now.
Federal courts have struck down several of Biden’s anti-white programs as unconstitutional. More will likely fall. But in the meantime, Biden’s push for equity will foment racial hostility not seen in half a century.
Don’t be fooled by the president’s rhetoric on Sunday, when he commemorated civil-rights leaders who marched on Washington, DC, 59 years ago. They were fighting racial injustice. Biden is not. He’s imposing anti-white discrimination on everything, from housing to health care. It’s racism by another name.
Australia: Transgender righteousness becoming very oppressive
The rise of the gender affirmation industry and its relationship with children is one of the most important stories of our time.
Under the guise of science, we are being told that toddlers can know with certainty that they have been ‘born in the wrong bodies’.
Under the guise of healthcare, we are being told that it is harmful and cruel to do anything other than affirm a child’s belief that they are a different gender.
Under the guise of medicine, we are being told that it is perfectly fine to treat children with drugs that stunt their natural development.
And if you dare criticise any of this, you run the career-ending risk of being labelled transphobic and turned into a social pariah.
In reality, this remains an open social and medical debate that is being pursued across the West where gender affirmation enjoys far less community support than advertised.
Not in Victoria, however, where the Victorian Education Department’s LGBTQ Support Policy, available on its website, encourages teachers to assist minors to transition genders without parental approval, or even their knowledge.
There may be circumstances in which students wish or need to undertake gender transition without the consent of their parent/s (or carer/s), and/or without consulting medical practitioners.
If no agreement can be reached between the student and the parent/s regarding the student’s gender identity, or if the parent/s will not consent to the contents of a student support plan, it will be necessary for the school to consider whether the student is a mature minor.
If a student is considered a mature minor they can make decisions for themselves without parental consent and should be affirmed in their gender identity at school without a family representative/carer participating in formulating the school management plan.
There is to be no debate after the Victorian government made it a criminal offence – on threat of fines and/or jail time – to attempt to counsel a child out of transitioning genders.
Other Australian states are considering similar legislation.
This runs contrary to decades of accepted best-practice which treated gender dysphoria primarily with therapy, as most children grow out of these feelings.
The previous federal Liberal government watched as bureaucrats edited gendered language within Australian health services against the wishes of the general public. Even medicare forms referred to ‘birthing parents’ until outcry led the incoming Labor government to correct it.
It is very much a one-sided conversation in which the media runs a steady stream of pro-transgender stories, while typically ignoring any negative news, such as the tragic stories of de-transitioners seeking to sue for their lifelong injuries.
There was a good deal of media silence when the UK’s main gender clinic, Tavistock, was closed down with 1,000 families threatening to sue the NHS for harm done to their children.
Meanwhile, you are more likely to find trans puff pieces about teenage girls having double mastectomies.
It is the end result of a cultural shift that has seen the entertainment industry increase LGBTQ+ representation targeted at young audiences – from Buzz Lightyear’s gay kiss to a transgendered character in The Umbrella Academy.
Schools and local councils, particularly in America, continue to integrate Drag Queens into the lives of toddlers despite public backlash against what are traditionally adult performers in sexualised attire.
A doctor friend of mine who dared to suggest, in a very well-written and calm email, that his local council should not be promoting a sexualised all-ages drag show, received a curt response from his local member suggesting he was an ‘overly zealous’ religious ‘bigot’ whose ‘wrongheaded’ ideas were ‘harmful to society’.
Whack!
Consider the dilemma Victorian parents face. If you complain that your children ought not be exposed to gender ideology, you will be labelled a bigot.
So you keep quiet.
If your child – having been exposed to gender ideology at school or at a community event – ends up momentarily confused during a time when kids are confused about lots of things related to their changing bodies, you will be criminalised if you fail to agree with them.
So you keep quiet.
Children are effectively at the mercy of schoolteachers, health professionals, and the state – instead of their parents. Many agree that this is fundamentally wrong.
It is also logically bizarre. Your child, who is not able to take a Panadol at school without parental permission, is assumed capable of making life-changing decisions that often result in permanent medical intervention and sterilisation.
Over the weekend, Libs of TikTok, a conservative social media account that highlights Woke progressive videos, released recordings of a conversation with staff at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC.
Libs of TikTok contacted the hospital as a parent asking if they would perform a ‘gender-affirming hysterectomy’ on a 16-year-old.
Both the hospital operator, who took the initial call, and a hospital staff member to whom the caller was subsequently transferred, confirmed that performing such an operation would not be a problem. Hospital staff said that such operations had been performed on children younger than 16.
On the recording you can hear the hospital operator ask:
‘How old is your patient?’
‘Sixteen,’ the caller says.
‘Okay,’ the operator replies. ‘Alright. So they’re in the clear.’
After confirming with a second person over the phone that a 16-year-old would be eligible for a gender-affirming hysterectomy, the caller asks whether it is a common procedure for that age.
‘Yes, we have all different type of age groups that comes in for that,’ the hospital worker responds.
‘For the hysterectomy?’ the caller asks.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the employee says, adding later that she has ‘seen younger kids, younger than your child’s age’ undergo the surgery.
The recording went viral, and the outrage was palpable.
And the next day the story was picked up by the Washington Post under the title: Children’s hospital threatened after Libs of TikTok recording on trans hysterectomies.
It continued:
‘Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said. The torrent of harassment was accompanied by social media posts suggesting that Children’s be bombed and its doctors placed in a woodchipper.’
So the story was not that two hospital staff wrongly told a prospective patient that gender-affirming hysterectomies could be performed on a teenager. The story was that hospital staff had been threatened. Of course, the threatening behaviour is unacceptable, but that does not mean the core of the story should be overlooked either.
The people behind the recording were demonised as ‘right wing’. Later in the story they are called ‘activists’.
The Children’s National Hospital has since corrected the record and confirmed that, despite what its staff said, the surgery is not offered for anyone under 18.
This doesn’t change the scorn with which readers are treated if they raised their eyebrows at gender-affirming surgery on children – even if it is only in speculation.
In this case, the whistle-blowers were slurred as hateful rather than the hospital criticised for managing to make such a strange error about a serious procedure.
It was an error made by the hospital staff, not the reporter – and why did the staff make this error? Why did they hold the belief that surgery was available for young children? And why was their (now corrected) website in error stating that gender-affirming hysterectomies were available to patients ‘between the ages of 0-21’?
They are not the only American hospital to make this mistake, with a hospital in Boston also exposed by the Libs of TikTok. They also had to correct the record.
These are mistakes, but again, why are these patterns of mistakes being made in the field of gender affirmation and young children?
Society is still having a conversation about whether ‘medical care’, as classed by these hospitals, includes giving healthy young girls (at 18) hysterectomies.
I always thought The Washington Post’s adverting slogan – ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ – was meant to imply that the Post existed to shine a light into dark places.
There is a new darkness in our society, and that is the silencing of criticism when it comes to the future health of our children.
Australia doesn’t have a voice in this debate – that has been silenced by the legislation of our premiers – so we must wait to see if legal action in other countries is able to give those harmed by gender affirmation a voice.
Doctors Don't Have to Perform Transgender Surgeries Says Federal Court
Our friends at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty have advised us that a federal appeals court just blocked a harmful Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that would have forced doctors and hospitals to perform gender-transition procedures on their patients against their conscience and best medical judgment.
In Franciscan Alliance v Becerra, the court ruled that a Catholic healthcare network and a group of nearly 19,000 healthcare professionals cannot be required to carry out these procedures in violation of their deeply held beliefs and professional medical judgment.
An association of over 19,000 healthcare professionals, eight states, and two religious hospitals challenged the mandate in the federal court for the Northern District of Texas. (A similar suit, involving other challengers, was filed in North Dakota). In December 2016, the Texas court issued a preliminary ruling that the policy was an unlawful overreach by a federal agency and a likely violation of religious liberty. And in October 2019, the court confirmed its earlier ruling, explaining that doctors must be free to practice in their field of medicine without being forced to perform these controversial procedures that violate their faith.
The court did not, however, issue an order permanently stopping the government from imposing this unlawful mandate on religious hospitals and doctors. Becket therefore appealed on behalf of the challengers. In April 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the district court should consider further whether to grant that lasting protection.
Back at the district court, in August 2021, the judge granted the permanent relief the doctors and hospitals sought. Under the district court’s final ruling, the government may not require the challengers to perform or insure gender-transition procedures contrary to their faith and medical judgment going forward—even if the agency tinkers around the edges with the language of its mandate.
Dissatisfied with not being able to force religious healthcare providers to violate their faith, in late 2021, the federal government, along with the ACLU, appealed the decision back to the Fifth Circuit. Oral argument took place on August 4, 2022.
In the unanimous ruling, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s order “permanently enjoining [HHS] from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs.” The court explained that while the government argued it should get more chances to show why it needed religious healthcare providers to participate in gender-transition procedures, other cases showed that permanent protection was appropriate—including, ironically, cases brought by the ACLU, who had intervened in Franciscan to support the government.
Initially, the lower court's ruling blocked HHS "from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-transition surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs."
“This ruling is a major victory for conscience rights and compassionate medical care in America,” said Joseph Davis, counsel at Becket.
Six years ago, the federal government issued the mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act and tried to apply it to virtually every doctor nationwide. The requirement would have forced doctors to perform these procedures on any patient, including on children, even if the procedures went against their conscience and professional medical judgment. A group of religious organizations and nine states quickly sued and received protection from federal courts in North Dakota and in Texas. Today’s ruling is another successful step in this fight to protect doctors’ conscience rights.
“For years, our clients have provided excellent medical care to all patients who need it,” said Davis. “Today’s ruling ensures that these doctors and hospitals may continue to do this critical work in accordance with their conscience and professional medical judgment.”
Joseph Davis, who works as counsel with Becket, a religious liberty group representing the physicians, said the ruling was appropriate for healthcare workers.
"This ruling," Davis says, "is a major victory for conscience rights and compassionate medical care in America. Doctors cannot do their jobs and comply with the Hippocratic Oath if the government requires them to perform harmful, irreversible procedures against their conscience and medical expertise."
Democrat Slams GOP for Posting 'Child Pornography,' Then People Remind Him Where It Came From
Democrats appeared horrified in response to a Nebraska Republican Party Twitter account posting explicit cartoon-style images of what appears to be young adults (if not underage children) committing sex acts.
“We apologize for the graphic nature of this tweet. We support Republican values/candidates to protect children, their education and parental rights. The tweet showcases the hard facts of what materials and books are in Nebraska Schools, due to Democratic policies and agendas,” the Nebraska GOP wrote in the since-deleted tweet.
One Nebraska Democrat in particular, former chair of the Nebraska Democratic party Vince Powers, was especially put off by the images.
Sadly for Powers, he failed to realize these are the very same images his colleagues in the Democratic Party have been fighting to keep in school libraries for months on end now.
“[The Nebraska Republican Party] has posted child pornography on Twitter . I won’t retweet it. It’s disgusting.@RepDonBacon @Flood4Nebraska @SenatorFischer and Jim Pillen need to condemn this sick public tweet immediately or otherwise it will be fair to say each is ok with child pornography,” Powers wrote regarding the since-deleted tweet, according to Not the Bee.
As it turns out, the disgusting, explicit pictures shared by the GOP account were from a book called “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Powers’s allies in the Democratic Party have been fighting to make that book available to underage school children for months.
“Gender Queer” and other books depicting transgender individuals committing sex acts have appeared in schools in Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, according to an October 2021 report from The Western Journal.
The Western Journal’s report found one potential reason for the book’s wide dissemination: Two prominent national school library organizations have promoted the book as essential reading material for minors.
Establishment media outlets have covered the Republican outcry over the books as if it was some sort of push for Nazi-style book burning. For example, take these excerpts from a CNN piece titled “Book bans move to center stage in the red-state education wars.”
Keep in mind: Republicans are calling to remove porn and other forms of inappropriate subject matter from school libraries.
“Though battles over access to controversial titles traditionally have been fought district by district, and even school by school, Republican-controlled states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, are now pushing statewide rules that make it easier for critics to remove books they dislike from school libraries in every community,” CNN reported in April.
“Supporters of the efforts to restrict classroom teaching and/or ban books, by contrast, often cite a threat to ‘traditional’ morality as a justification. When DeSantis signed the bill easing challenges to school library collections, one of the speakers he brought to the podium was a mother who had been prominent in protests against school masking requirements in Volusia County.”
The most oft-cited book being removed by Republican critics is “Gender Queer,” and yet, in its coverage, CNN failed to mention it even once.
It’s sure nice to hear Mr. Powers acknowledge that the images from “Gender Queer” are in fact child pornography.
Perhaps its time for him to break ranks with his colleagues and demand it be removed from all of our nation’s schools immediately.
The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening.
In an ideal world, a victim’s personal background would be irrelevant to whether their attackers are arrested and prosecuted. But at least in theory, Hershkop is someone with enough of a profile to keep the police and prosecutors focused on his case. The young Chabad Hasid is an energetic yet shrewdly understated local political activist—the kind of person who knows the total number of newly registered voters in Crown Heights off the top of his head, or who you might WhatsApp when you need to reach a particular City Council member later that afternoon. He also manages a large urgent care center in Crown Heights, a position of real civic significance during New York’s COVID nightmare. Hershkop is also a personal friend of mine, although even people I am not friends with should expect the police to move quickly when they’re able to easily identify the people who bloodied them on camera in broad daylight in front of their child.
The police did not move quickly. No arrests were made during the two weeks after the attack, a span in which the getaway car got ticketed in a totally unrelated incident, Hershkop says. On July 27, an exasperated Hershkop tweeted: “No arrests have been made, despite the assailants’ vehicle having been seen all over the neighborhood. My son still has a lot of trauma from the incident & we now Uber instead of walk whenever we need to go out.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the first arrest in the case was made the day after that tweet, some two weeks after the attack. The first suspect was released on bail after the judge ordered a bond of $10,000, significantly less than the district attorney had requested, according to Hershkop. Hershkop is confident that after a long period of delay, the NYPD is now making efforts toward arresting the second individual who physically attacked him.
“This was a perfect opportunity for them to do the right thing,” Hershkop told me. “Nobody was saying this isn’t a big deal and we shouldn’t make an arrest. Everybody was on the same page here.” As he explained, “it was an assault on a 5-year-old caught on camera. I didn’t think I’d have to fight for justice.”
Perhaps the attack, which stemmed from a seemingly innocuous dispute over a parking space—a common enough occurrence in a densely populated place like Crown Heights, and one that almost never ends with anyone in the hospital—was just too fraught of an event for the police to want to handle too aggressively. Maybe someone feared that drawing additional attention to a group of young Black men attacking a prominent Orthodox Jew would threaten to inflame tensions in a neighborhood with a long but mostly improving (and generally misunderstood) history of racial division.
Maybe, but maybe not: Overload in the New York court system, increasingly lenient prosecutors and judges, and a police department in which officers are quitting at a growing clip, all make it easier for even open-and-shut cases to languish, and for people at every level of the system to find excuses not to resolve them.
The dysfunctional handling of public order takes different forms across the city, and across the country: Philadelphia is experiencing record murder rates; San Francisco experimented with decriminalizing certain forms of property crime, at least until its pro-reform district attorney lost a recent recall election. As with various other recent American traumas, the ambient disorder has its own distinct characteristics as far as Jews are concerned. In a study released this past July, the New York-based group Americans Against Antisemitism found that of the 118 adults arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City since 2018, only one has been convicted and sent to prison.
Earlier this month, an Orthodox Jew from Baltimore named Aryeh Wolf was gunned down in broad daylight as he attached solar panels to the roof of a building in a gentrifying neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C. As with Hershkop’s attack, Wolf’s murder was a motiveless crime in which the motive was obvious. To the killer, Wolf and the trendy new technology he was installing might have represented the growing penetration of outsiders, further distilled by Wolf being the ultimate of outsiders: the proud religious Jew. So far, no one has been arrested. The Washington police still consider the motive in the crime to be unknown.
In New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected. The city reported a 76% year-over-year rise in hate crimes during the first three months of 2022—attacks on Jews more than tripled, accounting for much of the spike. When reached for comment by email, the NYPD’s public information office stated that the Hate Crimes Task Force has made 44 arrests related to attacks on Jews so far in 2022 compared to 33 in all of 2021.
The report from Americans Against Antisemitism only dealt with incidents in which the NYPD found enough evidence of a bigoted motive to refer the case to the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force. Not every potential bias-related attack on Jews reaches that threshold, though. In Hershkop’s case, the assailants used no antisemitic language and had no connection to any extremist networks. The question of whether the attackers would have responded with similar brutality to a parking dispute involving a member of any other ethnic or religious group is considered too hypothetical for the New York criminal justice system to handle. The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force was not involved in investigating the attack on him, Hershkop told me.
Israel Bitton, executive director of Americans Against Antisemitism and one of the co-authors of the report, said the study aimed “to answer a simple question: Are there consequences for anti-Jewish hate crimes?” The document gives a clear answer: “In the majority of trackable cases, prosecution has been effectively nonexistent.” Some unknowable number of the 118 anti-Jewish hate crime suspects whose cases showed up in the state’s WebCrims database since 2018 were sent to state psychiatric institutions for an unknown period of time, instead of being criminally charged, Bitton explained. Fifteen took plea deals, although the study found no evidence that any of these agreements involved jail time. In 23 cases, the charges were dropped. The only conviction was for a relatively high-profile incident, in which the suspect choked and beat a visibly Jewish man in his mid-50s while he walked home from Shabbat day services in Crown Heights.
Devorah Halberstam, a veteran anti-hate crime activist based in Crown Heights, co-founded a civilian review board that advises the NYPD on how to proceed with incidents that could be classified as hate crimes. The group has been meeting each month for the past year. She stressed that any failure to punish such attacks isn’t a problem limited to Jewish victims. In a widely publicized case this past January, a 62-year-old Asian woman was attacked outside of her home in Queens. She fell into a coma and died 10 weeks later.
Halberstam said the killing was not prosecuted as a hate crime, even though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians. “It’s not against the Jewish community. It’s not against the Asian community,” Halberstam said of the rarity with which hate crimes charges are pursued. “It’s the broader picture.” Halberstam blames the sparse number of guilty verdicts on the vagueness of New York’s hate crimes statute, leading prosecutors to drop hate crime charges in order to pursue lesser allegations that can be more easily proven in court. “If you make the guidelines stricter, they don’t have as much leeway to get out of it,” Halberstam said.
A backlog in the criminal courts further gridlocks the system. In early 2022, the state had over 47,000 open criminal cases, an increase of 15% compared to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Americans Against Antisemitism found that there were nine anti-Jewish hate crime prosecutions in the city that had been pending for two years or more.
The Americans Against Antisemitism analysis only refers to incidents that generated police reports and entered the criminal justice system. Some unknowable number of attacks on Jews occur beyond any official awareness. “Most hate crimes are not even reported in the first place,” says Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, and a former power broker in the New York State Assembly.
Hershkop agrees. “Eighty percent never even got to the point of making a police report,” he speculated, referring to Jewish victims of bias incidents. “That’s how we’re artificially hiding hate crimes. People are so burnt out and so not believing in the system that they don’t even make a police report.”
Even the Jews who do report what are obviously identity-motivated crimes against them can be treated with a revealing indifference. In June, 26-year-old Yizchak Goldstein was sucker-punched on East 33rd Street near Park Avenue at around 1 p.m. Goldstein, who was visiting from Miami, was wearing a kippah, unlike his nearby cousin. The attacker didn’t run off. “He squared off to fight,” Goldstein said. “He wasn’t afraid of the cops—he literally joked to me, call 911 … he was so confident.” When Goldstein did call the police, he discovered that the assailant, who had disappeared down the crowded street at a walking pace, was right not to be worried. The officers told Goldstein that they could not treat the assault as a hate crime because the attacker didn’t say anything antisemitic to him.
That wasn’t all. “They said that even if we catch this guy he’ll be out in a few hours and that this happens every single day,” Goldstein recalled. But at least the police arrived quickly, he said, “and were honest and upfront with me.” Goldstein said the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force never contacted him, and that he only heard from the department one other time, when an officer wanted to confirm the location of the attack about a month later. No suspect was ever arrested.
A Modern, Americanized Version of a Maoist Struggle Session
Arguing for keeping “presentism” out of history seems like a straightforward argument from an acknowledged history scholar, right?
Wrong. Not these days. The president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, published an essay last week arguing that scholars should bar “presentism” from history.
Sweet’s column in the American Historical Association magazine, Perspectives on History, argued that “doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.”
Pretty basic stuff.
Shortly thereafter, Sweet was mobbed by those who clearly didn’t like his perspective, then issued what looked like a forced confession for his crime.
The whole episode demonstrates how American and other Western institutions have been wholly radicalized in a short amount of time, squandering their reputations and authority.
Here’s how it went down.
The American Historical Association president argued that academic historians should focus simply on bringing to life the world of people in the past as it was and as they saw it, instead of framing every historical person or event through a modern “social justice” lens.
Sweet laid out the problem, which he said is transforming the profession of historian:
This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.
For an example of this, I’d point to the recent book “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe,” written by two history professors. The book devotes much space to debunking “whiteness” and ambles through the history of the Middle Ages making often factually dubious evaluations and value judgments of people and events from over a millennium ago.
This is becoming the norm, especially for social history, not the exception.
Here’s the part that really got Sweet into hot water. While making his argument, he offered a rather mild critique of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, writing that the reimagining of U.S. history “spoke to the political moment,” but he “never thought of it primarily as a work of history.”
That’s a rather tepid way of describing the 1619 Project.
The Times’ endeavor was full of inaccuracies and ahistorical revisionism. Its essays were shredded by historians and writers across the political spectrum, from some of my colleagues at The Heritage Foundation to the World Socialist Web Site.
Sweet also took issue with the increasing description of slavery as a problem unique to the United States. He noted how most of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was in Brazil and the Caribbean, and wrote that it was historically problematic to whitewash the prominent role that African nations played in promoting the slave trade.
Sweet threw a few obligatory shots at the right, perhaps to assure the left-wing ivory tower that he was being balanced in his piece and that the real villains are on the right.
It didn’t work.
The essay didn’t go over well with the apparently all-powerful woke left. Sweet’s generous description of the 1619 Project as not really history and his inclusion of a fuller historical record was too much for activists masquerading as historians in the academe.
After a few days of nonstop frothing from academics on Twitter—and undoubtedly much more out of the public eye—Sweet added a long, groveling apology to the top of his article.
He wrote that his gentle rebuke of presentism and politicization of history caused “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the [American Historical] Association.”
It’s a hallmark of woke activists to claim that arguments they don’t like cause “harm” just before they censor them. The “words are violence” school of thought apparently is universally accepted now among our ruling class clerisy.
The ridiculous apologies went on and on. Here’s more of Sweet’s cringing prose:
I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.
The American Historical Association then locked its Twitter account. When it unlocked the account, the association issued an additional apology, blaming the incident on “alt-right trolls.”
The episode—to make a historical comparison—seemed to be a modern, Americanized version of a Maoist struggle session.
It’s not just that leftists responded hysterically to Sweet’s piece, but they apparently have so much power over the American Historical Association that, in effect, they can force the group’s president to issue cringing apologies at the snap of their fingers.
Shall we put a dunce hat on the professor and allow the mob to throw insults and rotten fruit at him, too?
It’s just the latest example of how institutions in America have been rapidly and totally captured by radical, left-wing revolutionaries. The response to the over-the-top opposition to Sweet’s piece should have been an offer to debate or publish another view at the most.
And if that didn’t work, Sweet’s ridiculous critics should have been told to get bent.
That didn’t happen and a struggle session ensued.
Imagine how different things would be if institutions and bureaucracies had just said “no,” or refused to comply with extremist demands? Because even the slightest resistance has been removed, we are left with situations where, for instance, a small tribute to Abraham Lincoln is removed at a university because a single person complained about it.
Our institutions, public agencies, corporations, and professional organizations are becoming both highly censorious of dissent from the dominant “narrative,” while also allowing woke Twitter mobs and campus activists to dictate their policies.
In one sense, Sweet was correct in his apology. His words did cause “harm.” The fact that he apologized to the mob indicates how the history profession and America’s elite organizations and institutions have been totally compromised and radicalized.
As activists and mobs tore down historical statues that they found offensive, one response from the “measured” left was that offensive history and statues should be removed from public display and placed in a museum. You know, for “context.”
But do you trust organizations such as the American Historical Association or James Madison’s Montpelier—which now aligns with the Southern Poverty Law Center—to provide faithful and accurate representations of the past?
Perhaps the way forward is to keep history in the public eye and out of the clutches of ideologically one-note institutions that are fanatically obsessed with, as Sweet wrote, “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.”
It is with the people and alternative institutions that we should place our trust.
Northern Ireland politician faces criticism after response to new gender inclusive uniform policy for police
A controversy about a hat!
DUP MLA Jonathan Buckley has been subjected to criticism on social media after responding to a PSNI tweet regarding their new inclusive uniform policy.
Marking Foyle Pride on Saturday, the PSNI’s online LGBT+ Network account tweeted: “We're proud to say that this week our Police Service changed its policy on uniform items.”
The post featured PSNI officer Paul Bloomer, co-chair at the police’s LGBT group.
“This means all officers have agency over their gender presentation. Men, women & those with non-binary identities may wear either hat. A small but meaningful step forward for equality,” they added.
In response, the Upper Bann politician was critical of the tweet and replied: “I’m sure you all feel great. Everyone can stand around and clap each other on the back in the ‘politically correct brigade’.
“How about getting on with the real issues affecting people such as tackling drugs, theft and crime?”
Identity politics will be the downfall of Democrats
Sitting in my first-grade classroom back in early 2009, I watched as President Barack Obama was sworn into office. I did not understand the full significance of the moment, but I understood that a milestone in American history had been reached. Love him or hate him, Obama represents significant progress for the United States. But to the Democratic Party, his success solidified the new strategy for future candidates: run a minority who fits the party's social agenda.
Since Obama’s election, Democrats have consistently backed candidates looking first at their race, gender, and sexual identity and second at their qualifications, resulting in our nation’s leaders now lacking the experience and expertise needed to run the country. The Democrats’ insistence on identity politics has hurt their standing within minority communities nationwide.
Look no further than the supposed crowd favorite for 2024. Former Mayor of South Bend turned Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was entirely unknown before the 2020 presidential cycle. Following his failed presidential campaign, securing just 21 delegates, Buttigieg has become the golden child for the Democratic Party. Why? It certainly isn’t his job performance. Since his confirmation, gas prices have hit the roof, and airports across the nation have been plagued by sky-high prices, delays, and cancellations.
So why are Democrats so infatuated with Mayor Pete? He fits the social agenda the Democratic Party is trying to impose upon America. The same can be said of Vice President Kamala Harris, chosen to run alongside President Joe Biden after a disaster of a presidential bid. Harris was chosen, not because her four short years as a senator qualified her to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency, but because her race and gender fit the narrative. Now, the public is seeing firsthand how disastrous selecting a candidate solely for their race, gender, or sexuality can be.
The sad reality for women and minorities in politics is that this strategy by the Democratic Party is only hurting their ability to gain positions of power. Democrats are forcing unqualified candidates to the top to sell themselves as inclusive, abandoning women and minority leaders with experience and instead pushing unqualified candidates such as Buttigieg and Harris. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has many minority candidates whom voters are excited to see throw their hats in the ring. The difference is that when Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott run for president, they won't be just minority candidates; they will be qualified candidates. They have worked their way to the top, not due to the color of their skin or their matching X-chromosomes but because they have done well for their constituents.
This is evidence of a larger problem within the Democratic Party. For years and years, Democrats have taken advantage of minority voters, promising the world but consistently ignoring them once in power. Look no further than Biden’s track record of higher gas prices and a failing economy, devastating minority communities nationwide. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are working hard to earn the votes of minorities. The RNC has made a significant investment in minority communities around the nation through new community centers.
Feeling support slipping among minority voters, Democrats have begun to rely further on identity politics as a tactic to control minority voters under the guise of equal representation. Instead of bolstering unqualified candidates, Democrats should allow their minority leaders time to build positive reputations and run on their expertise and experience.
With their use of identity politics paired with overlooking minority voters and the issues important to them, Democrats are quickly losing support. Now, it is time for the Republican Party to earn the trust of minority voters. Republicans must show minority voters that the values and principles the Republican Party is built on mirror those of the diverse cultures from around this nation. Republican leadership can usher in the greatest political realignment of the last 50 years by showing all people that Republican policies will improve lives from coast to coast regardless of race, gender, or sexual identity.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler are increasingly turning to identity politics as they make overtures to New York voters ahead of next Tuesday's incumbent vs. incumbent primary.
Maloney is framing the race as a gender war, arguing Nadler embodies the "old boys network" after he received the high-profile backing of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Nadler, meanwhile, is billing himself as the sole Jewish representative of New York City left in Congress.
"The old boys network is very, very close, and they support each other," Maloney said of Schumer's endorsement.
Maloney has argued being a woman makes her uniquely qualified to represent New York's newly drawn 12th Congressional District in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the long-standing precedent of Roe v. Wade. The congresswoman, who was among a group of lawmakers who were arrested at an abortion rights rally last month, recently released an ad telling voters, "You cannot send a man to do a woman's job."
Nadler, by contrast, has indicated his Jewish heritage makes him best able to represent New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
"New York has a lot of outstanding leaders, but few of them lead with the courage, conviction, and brilliant legislative effectiveness of my friend, Jerry Nadler," Schumer, who is also Jewish, said of Nadler. "I've watched as time after time, Jerry — a critical partner of mine in the House — was right on the issues years before so many others."
Earlier this month, Nadler sent out a fundraising email with the subject line "The Last Jewish Congressman from NYC???"
"For a century, New York has been the center of Jewish politics and identity in the United States – but Jerry Nadler is the city's last Jewish congressman," the email said, describing Nadler as a champion for defending Israel.
While the two were once close allies, Nadler and Maloney were thrown into the same district under the Empire State's newly drawn congressional map. The lawmakers, aligned on most political topics, have reached back decades to unearth ideological differences, with Nadler blasting Maloney, who represented what was once the more conservative "Silk Stocking District," for her votes in support of the Iraq War and the Patriot Act roughly 20 years ago.
An aggressive map signed by New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul that would have locked in an expected 22-4 partisan advantage for Democrats was stricken by a series of courts, forcing Democratic lawmakers into awkward games of musical chairs with onetime allies. As Nadler and Maloney, both elected to Congress in the 1990s, battle for the 12th Congressional District, other incumbents managed to avoid being set on a collision course. Freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones, who represents a suburban district north of New York City, relocated to the new 10th Congressional District, thus averting a bitter fight against Rep. Sean Maloney or a tense faceoff with ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
New York's 12th Congressional District has a partisan voter index of D+68, meaning whoever wins the Democratic nomination is expected to win the general election in November by a large margin.
In February Joshua Carney, a man with 47 previous convictions, was released from prison early on licence. Five days later, he forced his way into a Cardiff house, locking a terrified woman inside. Her screaming woke her 14-year-old daughter upstairs. Carney raped both daughter and mother in front of each other. On Monday, Carney was jailed for ‘life’; he will be considered for parole in ten years, at the age of 38.
The core principle of British justice isn’t public safety. If it was, Carney would never leave prison.
This isn’t about the preservation of liberty; the threat of crime is a far greater constraint on the average person’s freedom than the threat of prison. Instead, the British justice system is based around an almost pathological need to offer offenders a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, even when these chances come at the cost of somebody else’s chance to live their life free of violence. In Carney’s case, the 47 chances he has already received are deemed insufficient; he will have a chance to return to the streets while still young and able-bodied
British criminal justice isn’t just. Under-resourced and overworked police forces no longer have the capacity to investigate any but the most serious offences. Overcrowded prisons and soft laws mean that in the event someone is caught, offenders will soon be released from jail to reoffend. In effect, theft, burglary, and other offences are no longer meaningfully crimes; there are no consequences for them.
If you feel like things are getting worse, you’re right. Police forces are now solving the lowest proportion of crimes on record, with just 6 per cent resulting in charges, down from 15.5 per cent six years ago. Rape and sexual offences are at record highs, and police resources aren’t keeping pace; a woman who is raped has a one in 77 chance of seeing her attacker prosecuted.
Less serious offences have effectively been decriminalised entirely. Take thefts from vehicles. Last year, the Metropolitan police solved 271 of these incidents, out of the 55,000 that were reported. Now imagine how many more incidents the police didn’t hear about because the victims knew that reporting a crime would have no consequences. Over the last three years, 21,000 neighbourhoods in England and Wales reported at least one burglary; but in 17,000 of those areas, not a single such crime has been solved by the police.
What is deeply frustrating is that it doesn’t need to be this way. Criminal behaviour is remarkably concentrated; in Sweden, 1 per cent of the population commits 63 per cent of all violent crime, while in England and Wales 50 per cent of all prison sentences are handed out to offenders with at least 15 previous convictions. This concentration means that the best ways to prevent crime are remarkably straightforward: put police out on the beat, give them adequate resources to find criminals, and then lock those criminals away so they can’t reoffend.
Right now, our police forces are badly underfunded. The government tells us again and again how proud it is to have put an additional 10,000 police officers on the streets, and how it will soon add an extra 10,000 on top of this figure. Once completed, this recruitment drive will have finally reversed the cuts implemented post 2010. But with a larger population and more crime, this is nowhere near adequate. The court system, too, is crumbling; there are 58,000 cases waiting to go in front of a judge and jury. The average delay between crime and verdict is now almost 15 months.
All of this is worsened by the collapse of Britain’s health infrastructure. The decision to close asylums in favour of ‘care’ in the community has been a disaster; the Metropolitan police now detains someone under the Mental Health Act every 90 minutes, with some officers wasting whole shifts waiting for a hospital place to become available for their treatment. The lack of a place for these people to go means they are eventually returned to a situation evidently unsuitable for them, resulting in more police call-outs. Meanwhile, the permanent NHS crisis means armed police units are regularly dispatched to heart attacks when ambulances are unavailable.
The choice the next prime minister faces is simple. They can find a way to fund criminal justice, or they can continue with the de facto decriminalisation of crime. When they make this decision, they should remember that we ask two things of our criminal justice system. We ask it to keep us safe from criminals, by deterring their activity through policing and incapacitating them through imprisonment. And we ask it to keep the criminals safe from us, by providing punishments which satisfy the fundamental human need to see wrongdoing meet with consequences. When crime is de facto legal, people will eventually take the need to deter and punish into their own hands.
Canada Is Euthanizing Its Sick and Poor. Welcome to World of Government Health Care
Up until a few years ago, it was even worse in Britain. Under the "Liverpool pathway", seriously ill older people would be completely bombed out with morphine and then deprived of all food and drink. They died of thirst in their sleep. You do have dreams even when kept asleep by morphine. Imagine the nightmares affected people must have had while knocked out.
At least in Canada, people's agreement is sought before euthanasia. In Britain there was no prior consultation with either the person or their family. It was all done on the whim of a government doctor.
It was all so obviously evil that a halt was eventually called to it but versions of it probably still quietly go on. Government medicine is not big on pity or sympathy.
What happens does of course vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Seriously ill older people in Australa are admitted to a palliative care ward in government hospitals where they are given morphine for their pain but not otherwise treated. They continue to talk to their family to the end. Real efforts are made to keep them comfortable and they are in general treated very humanely. It shows what even a government hospital can do
Many leftists tout Canada’s socialized health care system as something America should emulate, claiming government-run health care is more humane. But it seems Canadian officials are more interested in urging doctors to help patients to kill themselves than to treat them.
America’s neighbor to the north has some of the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world. Canada’s medical assistance in dying laws allow almost anyone who can claim some form of hardship or disability to receive physician-assisted suicide, regardless of how minor those disabilities might be.
In a recently reported horror story from The Associated Press, Alan Nichols, 61, was successfully killed after a quick one month waiting period as he was suffering from hearing loss. Nichols was an otherwise decently healthy guy, but his brother claimed he was railroaded into killing himself.
Nichols’ family said that hospital staff helped him request euthanasia and pushed him to do it, a story that has been repeated many times by other disabled or sick Canadians.
Roger Foley, whose story was also reported by The Associated Press, became so unnerved by his hospital’s health care providers discussing euthanasia as an option that he started to record conversations. Foley has a degenerative brain disorder.
During one reported conversation, the hospital’s director of ethics tried to guilt Foley into thinking about the cost of his hospital stay. The director told Foley it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.”
When Foley asked what long-term treatments were, the director responded, “Roger, this is not my show. My piece of this was to talk to you, [to see] if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
Foley says he had never discussed ending his own life prior to the encounter.
The fact that the ethics director mentioned how much it cost is essential to understanding why Canadian officials seem so hellbent on getting people to kill themselves.
There is a flurry of stories of Canadians choosing to die over living through crushing poverty. The Spectator reported on a woman who chose because she “simply cannot afford to keep on living.”
As the Canadian government pays for health care, it is incentivized to cut costs as much as possible. Based on how eager some hospitals seem to push euthanasia, the government seems to have concluded that it’s cheaper to kill people than to cure them.
That’s ditto for the disabled and mentally ill.
Global News Canada reported that a Canadian military veteran, pursuing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury, was told, completely unprovoked, that he could receive medical assistance in dying by a Veterans Affairs Canada agent. (Global News did not name the veteran, or the sources for the conversation.)
The man fights for his country, receives injuries in the line of duty, and is told that he can kill himself for his sacrifice. How humane.
While these stories are all disgusting, they lay out perfectly the biggest danger of importing a government-run health care system to the U.S.
When the government decides who gets medical care and when they get care, it also can decide who doesn’t.
With the relatively substandard care that America’s poor and vulnerable get under Medicaid, for example, why would we want to give more power to government bureaucrats over patients’ health care decisions?
Something not often considered in the debate over government health care plays into the country’s current fascination with obliterating gender and sex differences.
Scores of children are being given hormones and treatments that will permanently warp and scar them. What’s to stop some future government-run health care program from destroying a confused child’s body and then encouraging him to kill himself rather than deal with the consequences?
Canada is already beginning to consider allowing so-called mature minors to off themselves if the government determines them competent enough to make the decision.
Dying with Dignity, a pro-euthanasia group, posted a ghoulish blog post on mature minors and medical assistance in dying that urged the government to extend the option to children “at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.”
The left already claims children are mature enough to change their sex, so giving 12-year-olds the ability to legally kill themselves seems like the logical next step.
Worse, this push for suicide seems to be having a tangible impact on the number of people taking their own lives.
Canadian federal data shows that 10,064 people died in 2021 by medically-assisted suicide, a massive 32% jump from the year before.
This culture of government-endorsed death cannot be allowed to come to America.
Our costly health care system is far from perfect, but at least it isn’t wholesale encouraging people to end their own lives.
Some very wise words from Max Dancona. I may be biased but I doubt that a mother could have written this, though
When my daughter was 16, she got onto an airplane in a city in Mexico. I dropped her off at security. After that she was on her own. She went through customs on her own in a city in Texas. After spending some time in this airport on her own, she got on a different plane and proceeded home. Someone was there to meet her at the airport… although she joked that she would have been fine taking public transportation home. Everything went fine as we all knew it almost certainly would.
This was an adventure for her, something new. But there was extremely low risk to this trip. For all of the stories, teenaged girls are not at risk of violence from strangers, particularly in airports. As we were planning this, I did joke that “I have a very particular set of skills”, just in case something happened (of course, reality is significantly more boring than Hollywood).
My daughter is smart, competent and confident. This is the way I would want any young person to enter adulthood.
The real risks to women
Let’s look at some facts.
Women are significantly less than half as likely than men to be a victim of homicide as men are. This is true across demographic groups.
Women are less likely than men to be a victim of a violent crime.
When women are killed, it is more likely that the perpetrator is a close relation, friend or partner. It is less likely that it is a stranger.
All other things being equal, prison sentences are longer when the victim is a woman.
Looking at this, my son is far more at risk of violence, particularly violence on the street, then my daughter is. In our urban middle class neighborhood, there is no reason for her to be any more fearful than my son.
My daughter is more at risk of domestic violence, and she should be learning about consent, and healthy relationships. She is learning about these things from both her parents and her (rather progressive) school system.
The difference between boys and girls
The narrative is that girls are delicate creatures that need to be protected. This message existed since the middle ages; long before the invention of feminism. And yet it persists.
The summer my son turned 18, he took a 1000 mile bus trip to visit someone he met. What he did was crazy… there was a chance he could be assaulted, robbed or killed (as young men are killed every day). I thought it was a little crazy, but that is youth. I accepted the risk… for young men to get out and explore is a healthy part of growing up.
Why don’t we have the same attitude toward girls? Living life comes with some amount of risk, shouldn’t young women have these same experiences? Somehow risks toward women are exaggerated, not just the amount of risk, but the perceived severity.
There has been plenty of discussion of “Missing White Woman syndrome”. Female victims, particularly White female victims make for a story. A missing male person doesn’t grab your attention. The death of a man is somehow not quite as tragic.
Society puts a greater value on the life and safety of women than of men. An offender who murders a woman is significantly more likely to get a death penalty than someone who murders a man, and in general prison sentences are longer when the victim of a crime is a woman. This likely plays into the narrative that women shouldn’t take risks (while men should). But this isn’t a healthy narrative.
If we are going to state that women should have the same opportunities as men, that they should take the same risks and reach for the same goals, we must reject this idea that girls need to be protected. When girls are “delicate, precious creatures” they will never be able to compete or to thrive in the real world.
Fear is not Feminism
My daughter is smart, assertive and confident (and I am proud of the part I played in that). She is not afraid to live in the world she inhabits or to go after what she wants. She rejects the notion girls are delicate, at risk and need to be protected. This is a narrative that feminism should reject.
It is troubling to me the number of stories, here in elsewhere, where feminist voices are perpetrating the myth that women are at risk and need to lock themselves away. If I believed this narrative, I would never let my daughter travel, I certainly wouldn’t let her go to college.. Heck I wouldn’t let her out of the house on her own.
I reject this, and I wish people would just stop repeating this narrative.
It’s official. Florida’s 39th district primary officially goes to Airforce veteran Anna Paulina Luna.
She's gorgeous. She has some Hispanic ancestry
The moment this district decided to get woke, they lost to Luna. She represents the real America. Yes, it’s an America built on LEGAL immigration.
Luna set out to represent Latinas, who started flocking to the GOP in record numbers the moment election season rolled back around. Because they can see, first hand, what a “leader” like Biden does to a country. And they showed their support in the best place possible: the ballot box.
El American reported:
With over 95 percent of votes counted, Luna held a six-point lead over her main challenger Kevin Hayslett and some 26 points clear of Amanda Makki.
Luna, who previously worked as El American’s Chief Correspondent, will now go on to November’s general election where she will face former Obama aide Eric Lynn, who won his race uncontested.
The Gateway Pundit adds:
Anna Paulina Luna says being born in America is like winning the lottery and she never gave up in spite of what she faced. Her family dealt with drug addiction and didn’t have a lot of money, yet they persevered. She graduated from high school and joined the US Air Force.
On the day she was ready to go to medical school she received a call from Charlie Kirk, with Turning Point USA that changed her life. She was placed in front of college students and learned the facts, her greatest weapon when arguing with liberals. Today she is running for US Congress in Florida and she wants to be a representative for all the people in her district and Hispanics from across the nation that flocked to the GOP during the Trump years.
From her website:
Anna Paulina Luna is a strong independent leader, earning her stripes by serving her country, not by serving herself. Raised by a single mother in Southern California’s low-income neighborhoods, Anna learned that she must work hard and be independent to succeed.
Although never married, Anna’s mother and father separated when she was very young. Anna’s father suffered from severe drug addiction and, early on, had asked her mother to have an abortion. But Anna’s mother chose life.
As a result, Anna and her mother were on their own. During Anna’s childhood and teen years, her father struggled and spent time in and out of incarceration. Most of how her communication with him during these times was through letters to jail and collect calls. Her grandmother died of HIV/AIDS contracted from heroin use.
By age nine, Anna had experienced an armed robbery and survived. While Anna was on campus at one of the six high schools she attended, a fatal gang shooting occurred. Her young cousin was murdered while Anna was a teenager. And as a young adult, Anna was the victim of a home invasion.
These types of stories are all too common in America’s low-income, inner-city communities, like where Anna grew up.
Anna’s way out was joining the military. While serving in the United States Air Force, Anna met her husband, Andy. He is a Bronze Star recipient who earned a Purple Heart when enemy combatants shot him in Afghanistan. After recovering, Andy redeployed to fight ISIS in the Middle East.
There’s an old definition of news that goes like this: ‘If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But if a man bites a dog, that’s news!’
I was reminded of this when, flicking through The Age newspaper on Friday, I saw an article headlined, Catholic school refuses to show student’s same-sex movie.
Dog bites man, I thought.
That a Catholic school refuses to promote things that undermine its Catholic values is hardly surprising. The Age might as well have reported that Lefties like cancelling people, or that Joe Biden is a walking house plant.
Dog bites man.
But the media is now so appalled by Christian values and so ignorant about Christianity that it is news to them when a Catholic school stands by its doctrine.
The Age reported that a parent was upset his daughter’s film project, which features a lesbian kiss, would not be posted on her Catholic school’s website or showcased at her school’s visual arts exhibition.
Mount Lilydale Mercy College principal Philip Morison told The Age: ‘Some scenes are not in keeping with our values as a Catholic school.’
If you’re unclear, that would be the girl-on-girl action.
The budding LGBTQ+ filmmaker had been told she was welcome to submit her project as part of her VCE assessment, nevertheless ‘a queer film’ would not be promoted by the school at their exhibition.
The student complained to The Age: ‘I thought they would be okay with it. I thought we had gotten past that, but obviously not.’
One can only imagine the Year 12 student’s surprise to learn that the 2000-year-old Catholic church had not gotten past its Catholicism.
The ‘distraught’ student continued: ‘I believe it’s an act of discrimination. All I want them to do is change their minds, so I can be included with my classmates.’
Of course it’s an act of discrimination. Discriminating between Catholic values and non-Catholic values is what keeps Catholics Catholic, just as discriminating between conservative values and Woke progressive values is what keeps the Liberal Party … er, maybe that’s not such a great example.
But I digress.
All the Year 12 student wants is for her school to change their minds about the teachings of Jesus, Saint Paul, and Moses. All the school wanted her to do was to save the lesbian kissing for after-school hours.
Jesus had better change his tune.
As for being included with her classmates, she is. She is enrolled in the school, she is included in classes, and her project was included in VCE assessment. She, however, excluded herself from the Catholic film exhibition when, despite warnings, she went ahead and made an LGBTQ+ film.
Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick has taken the girl’s case to state Parliament where he accused the school of failing to reflect ‘community values’.
He told The Age: ‘I personally believe that if you’re a school, regardless of your religious beliefs, if you’re receiving public funding, then you have a responsibility to reflect the values of the community, not of your particular faith.’
Well Mr Meddick, two can play that game.
I personally believe that if you’re an Animal Justice Party MP, regardless of your political beliefs, if you’re receiving public funding, then you have a responsibility to reflect the values of the community, not of your particular Party.
Incidentally, 20 per cent of Victorians are Catholic while just 2.71 percent of Victorians voted for the Animal Justice Party when Mr Meddick was elected to the Upper House in 2018.
Tell me again who is more reflective of ‘community values’?
Macquarie School of Education Professor Tiffany Jones cast doubt on whether Catholic beliefs are really Catholic beliefs since some Catholics seem not to practice them.
She said: ‘The teaching of the church is arguable … because you will get Catholics who support LGBTIQ+ people, you will get Catholics who are LGBTIQ+ people.’
I think what Ms Jones meant to say was that while Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality has been crystal clear for 2,000 years, the commitment of some Catholics is arguable.
Imagine if Catholics changed their doctrine whenever they came across Catholics who did the opposite of Catholic doctrine so as to ensure Catholic doctrine was fully inclusive of those people who disagreed with Catholic doctrine…
In what way would that still be Catholic doctrine?
But LGBTQ+ activists have no time for such logic. They are not committed to fairness or choice. Gay rights activist Rodney Croome, condemning the Mount Lilydale Mercy College for not allowing the student to show her gay film, said:
‘This kind of discrimination is illegal in Tasmania and now Victorian law. It should also be illegal in federal law. Before the election the new Government promised to act. The time is now.’
It should not be lost on anyone that while the Left love to accuse Christians of wanting to impose themselves on the public, it is the Left who literally make laws by which they will be able to impose themselves upon Christians.
The Left preach tolerance for all beliefs whilst being completely intolerant of Christian beliefs.
And the Left demand inclusivity while seeking to exclude Christian schools from government funding; this despite the fact that Christian parents pay taxes and the state system would collapse if Christian schools suddenly closed for lack of funding.
Some regrets from a woman who drank the feminist Kool-aid
Its been impossible for me to admit this in real life, and the burden of enduring the pain of what I’ve been feeling in utter isolation has successfully worsened my condition, so here I am tricking my mind into believing that I’m not a coward, that I’ve finally found some bravery within me to say that I feel so utterly lonely and to quote the wonderful Charlotte from the Pride and Prejudice movie “I’m frightened”
What I’m about to say is most definitely an unpopular opinion, thus my fear of sharing it with my own real life friends and acquaintances. Making my thoughts public in this piece of writing is by no means easy, I am quite terrified actually, but hiding behind the screen of my computer and not being forced to endure any judgemental gazes regarding the matter makes it all seem a bit safer.
I grew up in quite the traditional household. My father owned a small business whilst my mother took care of me and my siblings all by herself. As a kid, I was pretty wild and I considered myself blessed even if I didn’t fully comprehend the sentiment at the time. I loved playing outside then heading home only to be greeted by the smell of freshly baked cookies which was nearly an everyday thing. Mom truly built a warm haven for us and I loved every bit of my life till I turned 10.
I started developing, my breast grew and I could see my parents, my dad especially, begin to change the way they treated when compared to the way my brothers were treated. Again, I didn’t fully understand things, but it was easy to sense that there was a shift of dynamics occurring in our house, and that it was only going to become more apparent as time passed by.
Normal activities that I used to take part in with my brothers were now deemed a “boys’ only thing”; my mother started coaching me on how to be more feminine, how I ought to behave and conduct myself, how my soft spoken voice should never be raised as loud as that of the men, even when fuming. By the time I hit my teens, I wasn’t allowed to stay out as late as my brothers were, I was meant to talk and walk more elegantly, and my father never let a day pass by without ushering snarky, demeaning comments on the way I dressed.
I didn’t particularly enjoy the new roles I was assigned to play, but the women in my life, my mother being the prime example, all followed the same rules and seemed quite content, so I figured my discomfort was a mere ephemeral thing that’d disappear with time; I’ll grew into the part the same way they did when the time is right. But when I reached high school, a whole new world was opened to me and my life was never to be the same again.
I did a lot of learning when it came to core subjects, but what truly shaped and helped me morph into the woman I am today were the extracurricular stuff I never knew existed. I learned about feminism, a topic never discussed at our dinner table. I was informed about gender roles and the mischievous deeds of the patriarchy. I understood that both my parents, my father in particular, were misogynists and that I’ve been subjected to constant sexist harassments since I first had my period at 10.
My life truly shifted then, I read the “Feminine Mystique”, I listened to everything Simone du Beauvoir had to say about sex, and by the time I was 18; all ready and prepped to go to college and take this world by a storm, I informed my family that I did not wish to get married, I had no intention of having kids, and that I categorically refused to play any role, tiny how it may be, in furthering the tyrannical patriarchal supremacy of the white man.
I worked quite hard during college, I had a great GPA, I was focused on always ending up at the top because I knew I had to perform far better than the average male candidate to guarantee the independent life I very much desired. At the time, I had several folks approach me to ask if I was available for coffee, if they could have my number, if it was possible for them to pick me up at a certain hour to go on date, and my answer has always been a definite “No”. There was a time when many assumed I was “asexual” due to my constant refusal of any attachment beyond that of casual friendship, and I have to admit that for a second; I questioned if I perhaps was.
The truth however was much simpler than that, or much more complicated some may argue. I declined every offer because I was convinced that any form of romantic or sexual attachment with anyone would only work on hindering my career aspirations. I had it all planned, by the time I was 25, I would have finished my master’s degree, I’d have a great income, and I’d be the strong independent woman I’ve always wanted to be. I’d buy whatever I wished using my own money, I’d travel the world, I’d become my own boss and I wouldn’t be forced to listen nor abide to the rules of anyone but my own self, and all of this would, no doubt, contribute to achieving the greatest purpose of them all, making me happy!
Some of those wishes were ticked off of the list. I did get my master degree, I have a job that pays okay, but the money is nowhere near the boss-lady-fantasy-salary I dreamed about as a youngster, I could pay for the things I desire but I’m often coerced into saving up for the things I’m forced to tend to as an adult. I travelled abroad twice, but since the pandemic hit, boarding an airplane has become quite the complicated task. Most importantly though, I am very much an unhappy human being, and a very lonely one at that.
I occasionally find myself contemplating the plethora of choices that led me to be here, and more often than not, I end up stuck in a cycle of blame and utter self hatred. I was set on this career obsession path believing it was the sole righteous route for any true feminist to follow, any divergence would’ve been a huge betrayal to the cause, and on my way I neglected the importance of human contact, I failed to foster a true meaningful relationship when so many eligible candidates graciously presented the opportunity to me to do so. I thought I could delay this to a date of my choosing completely unaware that when you build a fortress around you, you can’t expect many to face the dangers of climbing it because the reality is; they have abundance of doors to knock on instead.
My friends all harbour the same beliefs we had when we first met in college, when such topics sneak into conversations, they’d laugh at women our age getting married or worse, having kids, and I sit there sipping my drink unable to tell them how lonely it has been, even with them around. If my feelings regarding the nuclear family are detected for their severance from the agreed upon consensus of the group, I would be deemed a brainwashed conservative.
When I’m with my parents, my mother especially, I put on a show of how wonderful my life is, how I’ve made every right decision along the way and how being free and liberated equals the true meaning of happiness. She always smiles and tells me how glad she is for me and it only makes me feel worse. I know that if I lay myself bare to her, I would somehow acknowledge a defeat to war I raged at our household since I was a teen. Even if she’s kind enough not to say that she told me so, I’d still see it in her eyes and I wouldn’t be able to bear it. I often screamed and told her that I couldn’t lead a meaningless existence such as hers, I refused to live just so I could cater to a husband and a bunch of children, “I wanted a life of my own” I always said, and now that I am in fact on my own, I just feel lonely.
I am not, by any means, saying that I desire to be a housewife, or that I would choose that path now if presented to me. I like my job, I enjoy the idea of contributing to something larger that myself. I do, however, believe that, us, women have been sold a butchered, disfigured fantasy. We were told, or pretty much taught, that we had to make a choice; its either the career or the relationship, you can’t have both. What’s truly sad about this notion is that it was often pushed on us by our fellow women, many would proudly embrace their kids whilst telling you in a virtuous tone how glad they were to give up a job they once loved to have them, others would scorn on the idea of a family whilst bragging about their newest promotion. In the meantime, male counterparts would proudly inform you that the party they’re throwing to celebrate their new high paid position was delayed because they had to attend their son’s soccer match that day.
Its mid 2022, and though women have indeed made significant progress across the board, they are somehow still gas lighted into believing they’re required to give certain things up for the sake of gaining others; they are simply unable to have it all. A relationship would ruin your career whilst the latter would simply prevent you from having the former, so you need to; after careful deliberation, opt of the one you find more meaningful, more compelling! You simply cannot by any means pursue both, that luxury falls into the “males’ exclusivity package” only.
In our pursuit for independence, we are forced to pay the price of loneliness, and in our pursuit of meaningful human contact, we are occasionally told to abandon our agency. Women will not be truly liberated till the day their choices are made with no external influence, when they’re not required to make a choice, but they do it because they simply wish to.
I don’t believe I’m supporting any political or ideological side by wishing to have a meaningful relationship, I don’t think I’m abandoning my feminist stance, nor should I feel like I am by my peers. I believe as social beings we do crave that human connection, we do desire to be seen and cared for, as we do enjoy showing love to those we hold dear to us. The idea of being independent and not needing anyone is a beautiful concept and it perhaps stems from a genuine, well intended place, however, in the path to secure that financial stability, I wholeheartedly believe every person ought to work on, we confused concepts and we clumped everything together leading women to believe that independence should occur on all fronts including the most basic ones.
Some needs are simply innate within us, and they could never be fulfilled with a thriving career or a global tour, some needs are mundane and could be found in that person next door and it should never be a shame to admit we desire them. Women should not be haunted by the ghost of loneliness as a reward for wanting independence, women simply should be able to have whatever it is they wish with no strings attached, same as their counterparts have been doing for millennia.
Boston Children’s Hospital’s transgender insanity reveals how unhinged elites make money off our kids
Recent events at Boston Children’s Hospital reveal the yawning gulf between the values of ordinary American parents and the decadent beliefs of a venal and increasingly unhinged elite.
When activist “Billboard” Chris Elston broke the story of videos promoting “gender affirmation” for kids as young as 2 at the hospital, the outcry was immediate and immense. The progressive press has retaliated by calling this “right-wing harassment,” and of course any actual threats should be condemned.
But frankly, outrage is the right response to medics promoting the idea that kids young enough to be in diapers have a clear enough sense of their own identity to justify far-reaching changes such as “social transition,” in which everyone around a child agrees to pretend he or she is the opposite sex. A hospital psychologist even insisted in one video that “a good portion of children do know as early as from the womb.”
So when the US Justice Department came out in defense of the hospital last week, normal parents might be forgiven for thinking America’s rulers have taken leave of their senses. But what’s afoot isn’t insanity so much as a government-approved gold-rush. The “resource” these speculators are fighting over? The healthy bodies of American children.
Data show that “socially transitioned” children are far more likely to go on to medical interventions. And perhaps this is the point: After all, transgender is big business. Gender-transition surgery can cost upward of $100,000. The US gender-surgery market was valued in 2021 at $1.9 billion, with predicted annual growth of more than 10%. And when hormone therapy costs $1,500 a year, for the rest of a patient’s life, no wonder entrepreneurial medics want kids on the treatment treadmill as young as possible. Clinics are popping up like mushrooms to take advantage of this new business opportunity: The first American pediatric gender clinic opened in 2007, and there are now more than 50 nationwide.
Trans golfer Hailey Davidson fights to join LPGA amid backlash
This all comes with a federal seal of approval. Rachel Levine, a transgender individual born male and serving as America’s assistant secretary for health, recently declared on Twitter, “Gender-affirming care is medical care. It is mental health care. It is suicide prevention care. It improves quality of life, and it saves lives. It is based on decades of study. It is a well-established medical practice.”
In reality, every sentence of this is contested. Several European nations have suspended or drastically restricted support for this supposedly “well-established medical practice” following new evidence.
Research reveals, for example, that pediatric transition delivers poor or no mental-health improvements for those who undergo it. The cancer drug used off-label to halt puberty has been shown to cause shocking side effects, such as stunted growth, cognitive impairment, brittle bones and even blindness. And of course once a surgeon has cut your teen daughter’s healthy breasts off, they ain’t growing back — even if she changes her mind later on.
I write from Britain, where the UK government recently shut down the Tavistock gender clinic for endangering kids — by taking exactly the treatment approach Levine approvingly promotes.
But you won’t hear any of this from America’s assistant secretary for health. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Federal Court Blocks Biden Rule Forcing ER Doctors to Perform Abortions Against Their Faith
A federal judge in Texas blocked, for the time being, regulatory guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that sought to compel emergency room doctors to perform abortions even if doing so violates their conscience or religious faith.
In a 67-page decision, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Lubbock Division, enjoined HHS from enforcing guidance it issued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that returned legal authority on abortion to state legislatures.
The HHS guidance, which was issued on July 11 along with a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA) requires emergency room doctors to perform abortions regardless of their religious views, even if doing so conflicts with a state law.
The HHS actions were challenged by three plaintiffs, the State of Texas and two private groups—the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA). The plaintiffs are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Arizona-based public interest law firm that specializes in First Amendment religious freedom issues.
But U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix said the HHS guidance and Becerra’s letter went far beyond the intent and letter of the 1986 law.
“That guidance goes well beyond EMTALA’s text, which protects both mothers and unborn children, is silent as to abortion, and preempts state law only when the two directly conflict,” Hendrix wrote.
“AAPLOG and CMDA’s members face a substantial threat of enforcement and severe penalties for their inevitable violation of the Guidance’s requirements with regards to abortion.”
The judge also agreed with the plaintiffs that the HHS actions injured Texas’ sovereign interests, saying “the court finds that Texas plausibly alleges an injury to its sovereign interest based on the differences between the guidance’s interpretation of EMTALA and Texas’s laws governing when abortions are permitted.
“Although the defendants dispute this, the language of the guidance and Texas’s laws are not identical, and the differences are material. This mismatch creates areas where the guidance claims to preempt state law—a type of sovereign injury.”
Hendrix further agreed that the HHS guidance was issued in violation of federal law, requiring a public notice period for citizens to comment on the proposal prior to its being issued and enforced.
As a result, Hendrix granted the plaintiffs’ motion and ordered that “the defendants may not enforce the guidance and letter’s interpretation that Texas abortion laws are preempted by EMTALA; and the defendants may not enforce the guidance and letter’s interpretation of EMTALA—both as to when an abortion is required and EMTALA’s effect on state laws governing abortion—within the State of Texas or against AAPLOG’s members and CMDA’s members.”
A spokesman for HHS couldn’t be reached for comment.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the court order demonstrates Hendrix’s conclusion that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail if the case is appealed by HHS.
“The Biden administration is needlessly, illegitimately, and illegally working to turn emergency rooms into walk-in abortion facilities. Doctors get into their line of work to save lives and care for people—and that’s exactly what they are ethically, morally, and legally required to do,” said ADF senior counsel Ryan Bangert, who argued before the court on behalf of the pro-life OB-GYNs.
“We’re pleased to see the court halt the administration’s attempt to flagrantly disregard the legislative and democratic process, and we’ll continue to defend those in the medical profession who wish to respect and save lives, not take them,” Bangert continued.
“Emergency room physicians can, and do, treat ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. Elective abortion is not life-saving care—it ends the life of the unborn—and the government can’t force doctors to perform procedures that violate their conscience and religious beliefs,” ADF senior counsel Denise Harle said in a statement praising the decision. Harle is also director of the ADF Center for Life.
In their motion seeking the order, the plaintiffs told the court that the HHS action “imposes massive financial penalties and disqualification from federally funded health programs for doctors who do not do abortions …” and that because the mandate to perform abortions “issues yet ill-defined threats requiring abortions, it inherently, and intentionally, imposes substantial pressure for them to do abortions regardless of their religious beliefs. That pressure is an irreparable injury.”
A 24-year-old man charged with murder and torture of 5-year-old in Aboriginal community
Australian Aborigines are notoriously hard on their children
Jason Ross Allan Fourmile, the alleged offender
QUEENSLAND Police have charged a man with murder and torture after the death of a five-year-old boy following an incident in a Far North community.
Initial findings showed that the five-year-old boy was taken to the Yarrabah Hospital with life-threatening injuries and was flown to Townsville Hospital in a critical condition at 12.30pm on Tuesday August 16.
The boy then passed away on Monday August 22.
A 24-year-old man, who was known to the boy, was arrested and charged with one count each of murder, grievous bodily harm and torture.
He has been remanded in custody to also face two counts each of assault occasioning bodily harm while armed and assault occasioning bodily harm in the Cairns Magistrates Court on Wednesday, August 24.
Detectives from Cairns CPIU have established an Incident Centre in the Cairns Police Facility with assistance from Child Trauma Unit detectives from Brisbane after being alerted of the incident.
Shefali O'Hara below makes a good case for the best way through a divorce. She points to the undeirability of involving lawyers in the process. I agree with her. I have had 4 marriages and 4 divorces and none of the divorces involved lawyers.
So what is the secret of that? How can one avoid lawyering up? I think the key is not to be angry. I am almost incapable of anger so I found that easy -- but others may not. In my case I had an understanding of the woman's motivations and did not attack or abuse her over them. And because of that anger absence I was able to have civil discussions with the lady concerned and was ready to be geneous with her. And that was reciprocated. Because I was prepared to be generous and accepting the lady was too. There were no unresolved issues between us.
But being angry would be very destructive to acceptance and generosity. Being able to bypass anger is the key to a good divorce
We can read plenty of stories about messy celebrity divorces, such as that between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. While their divorce was finalized back in 2017, the drama between them still makes headlines.
Celebrity divorces aren't the only ones that can destroy lives.
I have heard some horror stories from friends about divorce. Either their own, or that of one of their children.
An expensive mess of a divorce
One friend of mine told me about her daughter's experience. The daughter's husband repeatedly cheated on her. She tried counseling with him to try to salvage the marriage, but after several years of him continuing to cheat, she finally filed for divorce.
He became vindictive and vengeful.
The couple had two children. Instead of considering what impact the divorce was having on them, he hired an expensive lawyer and quit his job to avoid paying child support. She hired an expensive lawyer to counteract his tactics.
Between the two of them, they spent so much on the divorce that they both walked away deeply in debt. They spent over $60,000 apiece. That ate up all the equity they'd had in their house and then some.
My friend helped her daughter out so at least she is not in debt, but she and her children were left with nothing. The former son-in-law works jobs on the side for cash to avoid paying child support.
Yet divorces don't have to be so messy.
Another friend tried mediation
A friend of mine who was an Air Force pilot is an example.
He and his wife had three children. When the wife filed for divorce, at first he was very angry and was thinking of going down the toxic route. But his mother talked him out of it.
"Think of your children," she said.
The wife had already lawyered up, so he needed to get a lawyer as well, but he asked if they could first try mediation. They ended up using their lawyers to hammer out the final deal, but because most of their issues were resolved during mediation, the total cost of the divorce was only about $10,000.
My friend told me that he'd had to give up on a few things. He felt that overall, the settlement favored his wife, but… it also allowed him regular access to his children and ensured a good working relationship with his ex.
"I gave up part of my retirement account, which was fair, since we both agreed she would stay home with the kids. However, she also got to keep the house, which meant she ended up with about 60% of our assets, and she also gets a good amount of child support due to my salary," he groused.
Yet he also admits that she bends over backwards to make sure his children are available to him, and he gets to spend a lot of time with them because of that. She also does not criticize him in front of their children. By showing generosity towards her, he's received it in return.
Of course, this only worked out because she is not a vindictive person. Aside from trying to assure a secure environment for herself and her children, she has tried to make sure he gets what is important to him.
The two don't fight and the children spend time with both parents. My friend has traveled with his children, had them for birthday parties and at least half the holidays and in general has maintained close bonds with his kids.
My own divorce
With my own divorce, we were lucky that neither of us prioritized revenge. We both tried to treat each other fairly.
We ended up not even hiring any lawyers. We wrote up our own divorce decree, had a lawyer friend look it over, and then filed it in court.
Total cost? Less than $200.
My lawyer friend told me that if we'd gone to court, I might have gotten a larger settlement. But the cost of paying a lawyer would have eaten up any money I might have gained and then some.
By negotiating in an amicable fashion, we both came out ahead.
As if Judy Murray wasn't already a national treasure. When the tennis coach, mother of Jamie and Sir Andy, heard about a biological male poised to be awarded tour status by the Ladies' Professional Golf Association, she tweeted:
No. Not fair at all. Protect women's sport. Listen to the facts, the scientists and the medics. This is wrong.
The replies are what you might imagine but, refreshingly, Murray has not backed down or issued an apology. It's important to have people as popular and high-profile as Murray speak out on the undermining of women's sport. If we left it up to professional bodies and sports journalism, we'd get nothing but an endless stream of platitudes and craven championing of men taking women's spots. It got me to thinking about who speaks out and why.
In his landmark 2018 essay, Andrew Sullivan warned that ‘We All Live on Campus Now', that the melange of absurdities taught and practised at US colleges intersectionality and critical race theory, micro-aggressions and safe spaces were seeping into the mainstream of American society. With them they were bringing an aversion to the free exchange of ideas that proliferates in higher education settings, whether in the form of groupthink, self-censorship, ideological monoculture or the impulse to punish and silence dissenting views. This was, Sullivan wrote:
why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society the individual's uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth are so besieged.
Sullivan has proved to be the Cassandra of our times on this subject. If anything, he underestimated the speed and scope with which the pathologies of the campus would sweep the western world, from governments and corporations to military bureaucracies and scientific and clinical institutions. The successor ideology, which some call wokeism and I call coercive progressivism, has made such advances thanks to four conditions common to liberal societies.
First, the prevalence of elites who resent the institutions they run and the people they serve, who lack the moral or intellectual brawn the will to resist ideological capture. These elites are particularly prone to nicethink words and concepts like ‘anti-racism' and ‘social justice' and too feeble to challenge progressivism's authoritarian theories on race and speech.
Second, the immediacy and reach of social media and its role in disseminating and enforcing the new orthodoxies. If academic theory and culture are the malignancy, social media is the lymphatic system through which its cells spread.
Third, a sincere but superficial desire to be tolerant and a concomitant dread of being on the wrong side of history.
Fourth, the wish for a quiet life.
The last one is perhaps the most powerful. Committed ideologues can capture institutions because they, unlike the rest of us, are committed. Where others seek contentment in family, faith, community and leisure, the project is all the ideologue needs. It gives him his purpose and his rewards. It sustains him.
There is something that has been overlooked in all this. It doesn't detract from Sullivan's thesis and nor is it grounds for sudden optimism among liberals. It is simply a counter-impulse worth noting. Yes, quietlife-ism is the preponderant ideology among the masses but only up to a point. There is only so far you can push even the most determined quietlife-ist and when you stray over that boundary you can drive a bystander in the culture wars to enlist on the side of your enemy.
Political, social, corporate and cultural elites may live on campus but most of the population does not and has no wish to. They shake their heads at the latest fad or inanity then shrug it off because, honestly, who needs the hassle? They do not think in the stilted, paradigmatic fashion of academics but instinctually, relying on their gut to tell them when something is tolerable and when someone is taking the piss. They know when they are being pushed around and, in some, a bloody-minded antagonism towards bullies overcomes the impulse to keep their head down. They come to realise there is no alternative but to push back.
We are in the pushback phase of what is called the ‘trans rights debate' but is properly understood as the elite project to impose gender identity ideology, and especially self-identification, with as little debate or scrutiny as possible. Had this been a debate about arranging accommodations in public services, sport, prisons, facilities, and other areas of life for people suffering gender dysphoria, it would have been over long ago and resolved with sensitivity and compassion. It is because the object is not advancing the interests of dysphoria sufferers or accommodating their needs but the raw exercise of elite power.
Of course, there is a determination to make material reality bend to theory but there is also a certain sadism to be savoured. What could be more delicious than writing women out of womanhood and claiming the mantle of feminism as you do it? Who could forgo a wry smile at the thought of women being told both that their sex-based rights are not affected by gender ideology and that they're bigots for even bringing those rights up? How must it feel to be able to force people to recite mantras (‘trans women are women') that both you and they know to be untrue?
It is the sadism the sadism and the bullying and the gleeful harming of women that have brought about this pushback. It is why so many women who could have settled for a quite life spoke up instead. It is why JK Rowling has gone from beloved author and philanthropist to being listed by BuzzFeed as a ‘major villain' alongside Nazi collaborator Philippe Petain and Jim Jones, the cult leader who orchestrated a mass-suicide that killed 900 people. Martina Navratilova could have rested on her laurels and her nine Wimbledon singles titles but, as she puts it, it was the promotion of 'the cotton ceiling' the notion that women's refusal to have sex with trans women is a form of discrimination that ‘put me over the edge'.
Judy Murray could have concentrated on coaching and using her charity foundation to give more young people the opportunity to take up tennis. But the thought of a biological male being offered a place in golfing set aside for women was evidently too much for her. The campus can come to the mainstream, it can foist its catechisms on us, it can demand submission and punish heresy but there are always going to be people like Judy Murray who are only prepared to be pushed so far.
Leftists display their racism publicly. Sadly, most people don't know how to spot Leftist racism despite it being so obvious. But I don't miss it.
Like the most abhorrent racism that Leftists continually display against blacks. The idea that blacks are too stupid to get an ID, for example. Or the racism of low expectation that allows mostly white Leftist enablers to treat blacks like children, thus excusing bad behaviors.
But Leftists don't just disguise their hatred of blacks in their policies. Leftists hate all minority groups. Openly.
Look at the blatant anti-Semitism of Leftists.
Colleges and universities foment anti-Semitism. They host events that spew hatred of Jews. This hatred is taught at university, then spread to the public by media minions.
One example is Fady Hanona.
Fanona is an Arab freelancer laced with anti-Semite controversy. Fanona condoned killing Jews in a post on social media. Far worse, Fanona endorsed "burning them like Hitler did."
Hanona allegedly wrote, "Jews are sons of the dogs … I am in favor of killing them and burning them like Hitler did. I will be so happy."
In another comment the watchdog group captured, Hanona allegedly wrote:
"I don't accept a Jew, Israeli or Zionist, or anyone else who speaks Hebrew. I'm with killing them wherever they are: children, elderly people, and soldiers."
I can see why The New York Times fired him.
Most outlets tout Hanona as a "fixer in the Gaza Strip". Fixers are typically on-the-ground freelancers hired to help foreign journalists coordinate logistics and translate. However, Hanona has been described as a reporter as well. Regardless, the Times fired Hanona after a pro-Israel watchdog group exposed his violent posts.
"The New York Times had worked with this freelance reporter only in recent weeks. We are no longer doing so," a spokesperson said.
Frankly, I love seeing the New York Times being forced to confront their racism. And their confrontation required them to fire one of their racists, namely Hanona.
Like most racist cowards, Hanona has since deleted his social media accounts. And per the Leftist playbook, he hasn't given any comments to media that we could find.
Clearly, Hanona is not willing to stand by his racism. And I know why. Anti-Semitism should not be tolerated, and he knows it.
How long had the New York Times employed this racist?
According to reports, he had contributed to reporting on the the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians as recently as last week. One can be sure that Hanona reported his one-sided anti-Semitic views.
How many articles did Hanona write for the Times? The Times has so far refused to respond to inquiries about whether Hanona was vetted and how many articles he contributed to. They need to buy a little time to erase as much proof as possible.
Australia: Fighting back against bureaucratic oppression of men and boys
Bettina Arndt
Every day, men are mown down by petty bureaucrats revelling in their feminist-bestowed power to crush ordinary blokes. With my correspondence bearing witness to the ongoing massacre, it's a thrill to occasionally see someone take them on and win.
This week I have two stories, both of people facing injustice, who reached out to me recently for help.
One is a senior medico, working in the health bureaucracy in Queensland, who suddenly found our draconian Child Support Agency (CSA) had overnight taken half his wages to pay for a child who didn't exist. Child support officials simply refused to believe it was a mistake, and piled on the torture, rendering him technically insolvent, potentially wrecking his credit rating and his marriage. When he first wrote to me, he was sleeping in the spare bedroom -- his wife found it hard to believe that he'd never fathered this mythical son.
The other case involved a 15-year-old boy who'd been suspended from his school after a girl in his class made a bizarre allegation that, three years earlier, in the middle of a crowded classroom, he'd suddenly reached under the desk and thrust his fingers in and out of her vagina. She also claimed he repeated the process two days later.
Four months after the suspension his distressed mother wrote to me, describing the family's fear that the school's investigation was going nowhere, critical evidence was being ignored and their son seemed set up as the sacrificial lamb to be summarily tossed out of school to appease the alleged 'victim' and her followers.
After long conversations with both these troubled people, my advice was similar. Take them on. Go in all guns blazing, right to the top of the food chain, armed with substantial threats about guaranteed severe consequences if they failed to address the issue properly.
It worked. Both issues have been resolved. It took three days for the medico to have his income restored, his confiscated money paid back, and the garnishee notice removed. He even received a groveling email from a very senior bureaucrat who wrote: 'I would like to unreservedly apologise for the Agency's errors and the frustration you experienced in having the errors corrected.' That's worth framing, isn't it? The perfect badge of honour to hang on a toilet door.
Amazingly, the teenage boy has been welcomed back to school. His accuser is now being home-schooled, claiming she doesn't feel safe back in class. We suspect she's simply embarrassed that her allegations failed to stack up. The boy's parents are relieved but still contemplating whether they will take further action.
So, the lesson is to fight back -- hard. So many institutions be they government departments, bureaucracies, or schools -- appear to be run by petty, anti-male bullies who can't be bothered to ensure proper rules are being fairly applied. They prefer to target men and boys, winning brownie points from their feminist colleagues in the process. Usually, they get away with it -- because we let them.
Let me tell you more about the doctor's story -- I'll call him 'Alan'. It came as a huge shock when this mild-mannered man checked his bank account and discovered half his salary had been held back. He quickly learned the culprit was the CSA which has the power to garnish wages.
Alan then suffered through a two-hour phone call with someone we will call Owen, a smug child support officer who assured him that it simply wasn't true that they had the wrong man. 'No, no, we have the right person,' Owen assured him, giving 'Robert' as the name of his alleged son, explaining they proposed to garnish Alan's wages until he'd paid off the money they claimed he owed, and adding cheerfully that they were imposing an order prohibiting international travel.
'I can understand why men commit suicide under such circumstances,' wrote Alan, appalled and humiliated by his treatment from this despot who simply refused to believe that he had no such child.
I consulted various knowledgeable people and was told by a child support expert that he should send a legal letter to the big boss, the Secretary of Services Australia, threatening action under CDDA (a body that compensates people for defective administration by Commonwealth agencies). She also suggested Alan should follow up with complaints to the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Privacy Commissioner over the alleged lack of procedural fairness and breach of privacy.
The letter to the Secretary was sent and within two days he learned he officially no longer had a child called 'Robert', nor a child support debt, his legal expenses would be reimbursed, and a full investigation was being made into CSA's handling of the matter. Owen's career advancement is not looking too healthy.
Yes, we realise this all happened because Alan was enough of a big shot to look as if he could cause real trouble, and he still could hock himself to the hilt to pay the bills for his lawyer to handle the whole thing. I have many hundreds of letters from ordinary blokes who shouted from the rooftops over the way they were treated by the CSA and similar bodies, all to no avail. Men who spent their last dollar and then some on lawyers and got nowhere. Many are now totally destitute. I talked recently to a disabled man living in a rotting boat on the Queensland coastline, who has just such a dreadful story.
But the fact remains that many people don't seize the reins when they find themselves being terrorised by these bureaucrats. And if they do employ a lawyer, they often end up with pen-pushers who are lazy, inept, or afraid of rocking the boat.
When the mother of the suspended 15-year-old boy first contacted me, the family had employed a lawyer who was supposed to find a way of stopping their son from being thrown under the bus. But the school was stalling and the boy's prospects didn't look good.
The school claimed to be conducting an investigation into the girl's allegations but hadn't interviewed the two teachers present in the classroom when the girl was apparently being fingered. There was a critical sexy Snapchat conversation allegedly written by the boy which featured perfect grammar and spelling -- unlikely from this kid who had known learning difficulties. The accuser had another Snapchat account where she attempted to solicit dick pics from boys, including their son, in order to blackmail them but that never seems to have been investigated by the school. So much potential evidence is being ignored. It did, however, provide good reason for the parents to fear their son was being framed.
It wasn't hard to find a way of forcing a resolution. Luckily the boy was in a private school, with a school board full of fat cats who wouldn't be at all keen on their fancy school attracting adverse publicity over a sordid lawsuit about an alleged sexual assault in one of their classrooms.
We arranged for the parents to instruct their lawyer to approach the school board, informing them they were planning legal action over the case. When members of the board learned where this was all heading, suddenly the parents were summoned to the school and told their son was welcome to return. They were informed there was insufficient evidence to determine the truth of the allegations. 'We are angry, damaged, and exhausted,' wrote the mother, explaining to me how relieved she was to have her son back in the classroom, a clear signal that the girl's presumed lies had gone nowhere.
And perhaps also a message to the school that they can't always assume they can just ride roughshod over the rights of boys, responding to dubious claims from girls who may not be nearly as innocent as they make out.
That's what we need. More people refusing to sit back and take it. Parents to start yelling loudly about the presumption that girls don't lie and boys are expendable.
More committed, activist lawyers are willing to go that extra mile to ensure fair treatment for male clients.
It would be great to have more support networks to guide people through these battles, planning strategies, finding the right contacts, helping them pick the right lawyers, and ensure they do their jobs. Please get in touch if you have the time and skills to be an occasional cheer squad for men and boys who are being kicked to the kerb.
I reproduce below an enthusiastic summary of a famous study which reported considerable malleability in children's IQ score. Following that report I will offer some remarks about it.
In 1969, UCLA psychologist Dr. Robert Rosenthal did an IQ experiment.
He met with two grade-school teachers. He gave them a list of names from their new student body (20% of the class). He said that each person on that list had taken a special test and would emerge as highly intelligent within the next 12 months.
In reality, those students were chosen totally at random. As a group, they were of average intelligence.
The incredible finding is that, when they tested those children near the end of the year, each demonstrated significant increases in their IQ scores.
The twin studies always point to a large genetic component in IQ -- as high as 80%. That means that IQ is not very malleable. You are stuck with what you are born with.
This is a highly objectionable conclusion to Leftists in particular, who tend to regard people as a blank slate upon whom can be imposed traits desired in some Leftist idea of a good thing. The "new Soviet man" in early Bolshevik thinking is perhaps the best example of that. So various treatments of children have been proposed with the aim of redirecting their growth.
The most decisive test of our ability to change what children become is undoubtedly the long-running American "Head Start" program. It was designed to take children from disadvantaged backgrounds and enrich their early education in various ways. The experiment did give some early hopes of success but the long term conclusion was that the interventions had no lasting effect. "Enriching" the environment did nothing
But what about that 20% which is NOT genetically given? Could that potential be worked on in some useful way? Did the Head Start experiment simply push on the wrong levers?
All the studies so far have not found much that could profitably be changed. Early nutrition is an obvious candidate for change but even in ideal circumstances only about 5% of the variance could be accounted for that way
An interesting possibilty is that people can be made more intelligent by being treated as more intelligent. That unlikely possibilty is in fact the conclusion of the famous Rosenthal study of experimenter expectations above. There are many problems with the study which I will allude to briefly hereunder but what interested me in the study was how large were the differences found. That is not usually mentioned. They were in fact slight.
The results showed that the favoured students' IQ scores (experimental group) had risen significantly higher than the average students (control group), even though these alleged favoured students were chosen at random. They gained an average of two IQ points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning and four points in overall IQ.
So the effects observed were slight. The two points in verbal ability were especially notable as the verbal ability score is usually the best predictor in an IQ test. So the Rosenthal treatment showed no substantial success in making IQ more malleable.
Wikipedia gives a useful summary of other problems with the Rosenthal study. I reproduce it below:
"The educational psychologist Robert L. Thorndike described the poor quality of the Pygmalion study. The problem with the study was that the instrument used to assess the children's IQ scores was seriously flawed.[6] The average reasoning IQ score for the children in one regular class was in the mentally disabled range, a highly unlikely outcome in a regular class in a garden variety school. In the end, Thorndike concluded that the Pygmalion findings were worthless. It is more likely that the rise in IQ scores from the mentally disabled range was the result of regression toward the mean, not teacher expectations. Moreover, a meta-analysis conducted by Raudenbush[7] showed that when teachers had gotten to know their students for two weeks, the effect of a prior expectancy induction was reduced to virtually zero".
How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground
Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills and is now running for Congress in Arizona, has been leaning on a simple three-word phrase throughout his campaign — “the American dream.”
To him, the American dream, a nearly 100-year-old idea weighted with meaning and memory, has become something not so much to aspire to but to defend from attack.
President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are, he says in one ad, “destroying the American dream” with “a border crisis, soaring inflation and schools that don’t teach the good things about America.”
For decades, politicians have used the phrase “the American dream” to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. It has been a promise so powerful that it drew immigrants from around the world, who went on to fulfill it generation after generation. Political figures in both parties employed the phrase to promote both their own policies and their own biographies.
Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies. Many of these Republicans are people of color — including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.
To politicians of old, “the American dream” was a supremely optimistic rhetorical device, albeit one that often obscured the economic and racial barriers that made achieving it impossible for many. To the Republican candidates embracing it today, the phrase has taken on an ominous and more pessimistic tone, echoing the party’s leader, former President Donald J. Trump, who said in 2015 that “the American dream is dead.” In the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.
Politicians have long warned that the American dream was slipping away, a note struck from time to time by former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. What has changed is that some Republicans now cast the situation more starkly, using the dream-is-in-danger rhetoric as a widespread line of attack, arguing that Democrats have turned patriotism itself into something contentious.
“Both parties used to celebrate the fact that America is an exceptional country — now you only have one that celebrates that fact,” said Jason Miyares, a Republican and the child of Cuban immigrants. The American dream was a part of his successful campaign to become Virginia’s first Latino attorney general.
In Texas, Representative Mayra Flores, a Mexican immigrant who became the state’s first Latina Republican in Congress, ran an ad that declared, “Democrats are destroying the American dream.” Antonio Swad, an Italian-Lebanese immigrant running for a House seat in the Dallas suburbs, said in an ad that he washed dishes at the age of 15 before opening two restaurants, telling voters the American dream does not “come from a government handout.”
Television ads for more than a dozen Republican candidates in statewide, House and Senate campaigns — more than half of whom are people of color — cite the phrase, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm. Several other House hopefuls, many of them Latinas, frequently cite the words in social media posts, digital ads, campaign literature and speeches.
“In Congress, I will fight to defend the American dream,” said Yesli Vega, a former police officer who is the daughter of civil-war refugees from El Salvador and who is running for a House seat in Virginia, posted on Twitter.
“The American dream” was a marquee theme in two winning Republican campaigns in Virginia last year: the races by Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaica-born Marine veteran who is now the first woman of color to serve as the state’s lieutenant governor, and Mr. Miyares, the attorney general.
“On the campaign trail, I used to say, if your family came to this country seeking hope there is a good chance that your family is a lot like my family, and it would be the biggest honor of my life to be your attorney general,” said Mr. Miyares.
The Republicans relying on the phrase show the extent to which the party is diversifying its ranks and recruiting candidates with powerful come-from-behind stories. But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.
“The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”
Republicans dispute that their references to “the American dream” promote exclusion and say they are using the phrase the same way politicians have used it for decades — to signal hope and opportunity. “I think the left is far more pessimistic than Republicans are about the American dream,” said Representative Yvette Herrell, a New Mexico Republican who is Cherokee and the third Native American woman ever elected to Congress.
Elaine Miller is one of the grown-ups. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, with a specialism in pelvic health. She also jokes about it. Her comedy show, Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story is currently playing at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s a good one: the production has won awards and a five-star review. Miller is forthright – her audiences are warned about ‘strong language and swearing’ – but her performance is more than mere entertainment. In Miller’s words,
The aim of the show is that the audience leave knowing what a pelvic floor is, what it does and where to take theirs if they think it is a bit broken. It is evidence based, and so counts as CPD – possibly the funniest thing about it.
Surely her ‘laugh while you learn’ approach is something we could all support, even if her comedy is not our style? Not according to the LGBTQIA+ brigade, apparently. Miller claims that she has been subjected to abuse – even ‘spat at on the street’ – while her posters have been obscured by rainbow stickers, presumably to limit attendance.
Miller’s crime, it seems, is to promote women’s health. That is the health of human people with female bodies. While she has been clear that includes trans men and (certain) non-binary individuals, she does not mention trans women like me because we are ‘not relevant to the topic of female biological anatomy’. Quite right! We have male anatomy, even those of us who have had surgery to modify it.
But to the gender identity ideologues, this is heresy. To them trans women are women, and those who think differently can be subjected to all kinds of abuse, presumably in an attempt to shut them up. It is juvenile behaviour; Miller described it as ‘very like high school’, and she is right. She told The Spectator
I am a mother and I have dealt with toddlers and teenagers, and this is very familiar. It is intolerant, bad behaviour.
Children can and do behave badly. As a teacher, my job is to educate young people to listen to other opinions and respect them even if they personally disagree with them.
What is shocking is that other adults have caved into this bullying, even perpetuating it themselves. Miller reported that she has been shunned by fellow comics and staff, some of whom she has worked with for years. This is far more than social media defriending. As Miller told the Scottish Daily Express, ‘It’s the strangest thing for grown… adults. I go into a room and they turn their back on me. This is not appropriate behaviour from an adult.’
It isn’t. But, sadly, exposing the behaviour does not make it stop. It will only stop when those adults become sufficiently self-aware to recognise it and do better. Perhaps it is mere coincidence that Miller’s experience has happened in Edinburgh, but Scotland is home to an SNP government that seems to have made a habit of avoiding inconvenient truths about biology.
It was Nicola Sturgeon’s government that passed the Gender Representation on Public Boards Bill, that enshrined in law the concept of processes that people can undergo, ‘for the purpose of becoming female.’ The country of a government that seems determined to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow anyone over the age of 16 to self-identify as a woman, whatever the impact on women’s sex-based rights and boundaries.
Joanna Cherry, the SNP MP for Edinburgh South West plans to be in the audience on Sunday evening. If Sturgeon is genuinely clueless about what it means to be female, then maybe she should also book a seat and listen to what Miller has to say.
My beef with QR code menus and other digital stomach turners
I quite agree with Helen Pitt's rant below. I walk out of a restaurant if they refuse to take my order in person. Doing things on the net is usually murderous. I am using the net right now but I am using a process that I am very familiar with. Doing any unfamiliar task on the net is to subject yourself to great frustrations, without any guarantee of eventual success.
I of course sound like an old cumudgeon in saying all that and perhaps I am, given that I am pushing 80, but I wrote my first computer program in 1967 so I am not unfamiliar with computers. It is just that some tasks are not really fit to be computerized. The programs I wrote were to do statistical analysis and computers are brilliant for that. But for dealing with government departments? Not so much
Permit me if you will a moment to share my beef about a dining trend: the QR code menu.
It’s the COVID-19 hangover that annoys me most. I’ve seen it in restaurants all over Sydney – most of them high-end – which like everyone in the hospitality game may be struggling to return to post-pandemic profitability; but this is not the way to do it.
I understand why the QR code gained traction during these past few years because of the need to minimise points of contact between patrons and restaurant professionals. Yes, I get that a paperless restaurant provides a more sanitary alternative to physical menus, and means waiters don’t need to touch potentially germ-laden credit cards. But for me, ordering from a digital waiter is dehumanising and disconnecting.
Not only do I not like ordering this way, but I am appalled that after you use the app to order, it asks for a tip. Really?! They should be giving ME a discount for moonlighting as my own waiter.
Surely I’m not the only one to feel that the joy of restaurant dining comes from the personal touches: the interaction with the waitperson who can recite the menu like a piece of poetry, or the sommelier who can explain the slope of a valley where a wine comes from and why it goes with a particular dish.
I still get misty-eyed at the memory of some of the best meals of my life in France and California, and it has not just been the food, wine and setting, but the wait staff that have made them special. I’m happy to tip for the part people play in creating the ambience. But to tip an app? That’s a bit rich.
Not only that, I can’t help but hear myself as a parent insisting the phone, like any screen, should not be a dining table utensil. I find it loathsome in my home, so why should I feel differently at a dining establishment? Not to mention elderly people who don’t have a mobile phone or know how to use it, or others who simply refuse to use it for such purposes.
As we know too well, technology often lets you down. Often the app doesn’t work, or you are asked for a PIN that has to be entered and re-entered on your phone and has you going around in digital circles. Surely getting up and walking to the bar and ordering from a real bar tender is quicker in this case.
I’m equally miffed by self-checkouts at supermarkets, especially during COVID-19 lockdowns when a trip to the grocery store was as close as it got to a fun outing. I’ll still queue up in a long line at my local Woollies to have a real-life exchange (and say hi to Di and Deidre) rather than the impersonal checking of every item yourself, which invariably doesn’t work and requires a staff member to come help anyway.
Any mental health expert will tell you it is these small but meaningful daily exchanges with people in real life in your own community that help as much as authentic honest intimate relationships with family and friends, fulfilling work and an optimistic outlook.
As for other digital discourtesies, don’t get me started with Uber. Have you noticed it defaults to not just rating your trip and driver, but adding a tip? This is deceitful carpetbagging and enough to make me want to go back to using taxis and tipping if I have a good experience.
I’m also finding the latest update to Google maps most frustrating. Perhaps it is a user fail but I’ve found myself lost so often lately because of incorrect directions. It’s enough to make me retreat to the reliable old Gregorys’ I still keep sentimentally in the back seat of the car.
And have you tried to book an airline ticket other than online lately? It’s enough to make me waltz to the local shopping centre and walk into a Flight Centre just to talk to a real-life travel agent (those who still have jobs) and pay them handsomely to sit on the telephone to the airline for me.
As for online banking – now we have banking apps I wonder what must have happened to the legions of bank managers. They already take their own form of compulsory tipping in the ridiculous fees they charge to keep our money.
I lost interest in Wordle a few months back because, despite joining an online community to humble-brag results with, it wasn’t real. It was a digital creation. I’d rather return to an old-school crossword or paper quiz where you can ask your coffee companion, or waiter or barista at your local cafe for input in real life.
Sandra Thom-Jones is on theautism spectrum and offers below her experiences as a guide to other autistic people. What she offers is hower just standard female advice: You need to "work" on yourself to discover who you really are.
In case a male reading her advice tries to heed it, I think I should point to different advice. I am a high functioning autistic in a relationship with a female high functioning autistic so I may have some generalizable advice.
Over the years (I am now pushing 80) I have had many good relationshps that I really enjoyed -- including four marriages. So the question for me, as it was for Sandra, is clearly why did not any of the relationships endure?
And the answer is that I have the characteristic autistic insensitivity to the feelings and motivations of others -- so behaved insensitively to the women in my life. I did not give them the attention that they needed emotionally. That caused them to feel unloved and they left me. People need to love and be loved.
I did not however have much insight into my deficits so I kept making the same mistakes. On a recent occasion, a woman in my life suggested that I was autistic and I recognized that as an accurate diagnosis. So I have subseqently changed my behaviour. I now take a greater interest in what the woman wants and needs. And I endeavour to supply it. I am much more apt to express affection, in particular. And it seems to be working. Being in a relationship with another autistic is difficult but my partner and I do seem to be very firmly attached.
So my advice to male autistics is the opposite to that below. I think we need to follow the wants and needs of others MORE than we otherwise would do. I am, for instance, much more into kissing, cuddling and caressing than I used to be -- and that is very well received
If social relationships are tricky for autistic people, then romantic relationships are like walking through a minefield in size 13 boots with your eyes closed. I share the relationship experiences I have had not because I want to embarrass myself, but because if you are loving or supporting an autistic person it is important to understand the predicaments our lack of awareness of social cues can lead us into.
I was shy, geeky and socially awkward as a teenager. I didn't have close female friends whom I could go to for relationship advice, so I learnt the "rules" of dating from reading Jane Austen novels and watching family-friendly television shows. As I progressed through my teens and adult years, I had my heart broken several times and apparently I broke a couple of hearts myself.
My lack of insight into the motives and thoughts of others, combined with my inability to read subtle cues and body language, has resulted in some serious misunderstandings and conflict. I am not suggesting this is unique to autistic people: unrequited love is a common enough theme in movies and songs that I realise it happens to everyone. The difference is that my inability to read non-verbal communication or to have insight into the thoughts of other people means that I often do not see what I later discover was obvious to others.
Have you seen the 1999 movie Runaway Bride? If you haven't, I highly recommend it as a great representation of how many autistic people adapt to be the person others want them to be. Don't focus too much on the plot -- just focus on Maggie's character and the way she metamorphoses in each relationship. She changes her clothes, her interests, and even the way she likes her eggs cooked, morphing into the perfect girlfriend for each different partner.
That movie really struck a chord with me. When I look back on my relationship history, I underwent a similar process in each relationship as I tried to be the person my partner wanted me to be.
Girlfriend, like daughter and friend, was a role to be learnt, with clear expectations of what I was meant to look like and how I was meant to act. So, in each relationship I became the person my partner wanted me to be.
I didn't realise it at the time, but looking back I can see that in each relationship I changed the way I dressed, the way I spoke, the interests and hobbies I had, and even my life goals. Some of those relationships lasted for months and others for years, but in the end they all fell apart. As we all know, masking is exhausting and eventually the mask slips. When that happens, either our partner realises that we aren't the person they want us to be or we decide we don't have the energy to keep being that person.
Eventually, after a number of failed relationships, I decided it was all too complicated and I was much better off staying single. Then I met the man who became my husband.
At the end of each relationship, I found myself even more confused about my identity. For me and for many autistic women, relationships are the ultimate masking experience. We know that we need to hide the parts of us that annoy or frustrate our partner, and that we need to be better at being who they want us to be. It's one of the things that makes many of us vulnerable to domestic violence and other forms of relationship abuse. When a partner tells us that we aren't good enough, we believe them -- because most of our lives we have told ourselves the same thing.
At the end of the movie, Maggie moves to New York to live by herself and discovers her own interests and style (including how she likes her eggs).
I did not have the same lightning moment, perhaps because, unlike Maggie but like so many other autistic people, I wasn't only masking who I was in romantic relationships, I was also hiding my real self at work, with friends, with family, and even from myself.
Eventually, after a number of failed relationships, I decided it was all too complicated and I was much better off staying single. Then I met the man who became my husband. Our relationship began in much the same way as others I'd had. I figured out who I was meant to be and played that role for quite a while. As in all of the other situations in which my mask is on, this was physically and emotionally draining.
After a while -- just like in my previous relationships -- my mask started to slip. I became less eager to please and more confrontational; I declined invitations to events I didn't want to go to; I stopped listening to music and watching movies that he chose unless I actually liked them. We had a few rocky patches but came through them still enjoying each other's company.
Over time, as I have come to be aware of and accept my autistic self, I have continued to morph into the real me. I think I am a very different person from when we met, but my husband seems to think that what has changed is surface stuff that doesn't matter too much. I don't know whether this is because he has a wide tolerance for change or because I let him see much more of myself from the beginning than I realised.
If you are an autistic person, you have probably had (or probably will have) your share of failed relationships. My advice is not to buy into the myth that you need to be better or different to find and keep a meaningful relationship. What you need to do is to be yourself and to be comfortable with yourself. If you find someone who realises how awesome you are, that is terrific. If you don't, it is better to be the single but genuine you than the partnered replica of someone else.
They are getting their rocks off imagining a "vast Right-wing conspiracy" (again)
As President Joe Biden's polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover.
This time, the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a "civil war."
The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump's Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy "civil war" conjectures.
Recently "presidential historian" Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned "civil war."
Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to his supposed mishandling of "nuclear secrets." Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss' death-penalty prompt, adding that it "sounds about right."
Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump's continuance of the Obama administration's border detention facilities to Hitler's death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden's lost and incriminating laptop was likely "Russian disinformation."
So, like the earlier "Russian collusion" hoax, and the Jan. 6 "insurrection," the supposed right-wing inspired "civil war" is the latest shrill warning from the left about how "democracy dies in darkness" and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months.
On cue, Hollywood now joins the "civil war" bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white "insurrectionists" who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various "marginalized" peoples.
Pentagon grandees promise to learn about "white rage" in the military and to root it out. But never do they offer any hard data to suggest white males express any greater degree of racial or ethnic chauvinism than any other demographic.
When we do hear of an insurrectionary plan -- to kidnap the Michigan governor -- we discover a concocted mess. Twelve FBI informants outnumbered the supposed four "conspirators." And two of them were acquitted by a jury and the other two so far found not guilty due to a mistrial.
The buffoonish Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is often cited as proof of the insurrectionary right-wing movement. But the one-day riotous embarrassment never turned up any armed revolutionaries or plots to overthrow the government.
What it did do was give the left an excuse to weaponize the nation's capital with barbed wire and thousands of federal troops, in the greatest militarization of Washington, D.C., since the Civil War.
In contrast, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters were no one-day buffoons. They systematically organized a series of destructive and deadly riots across the country for more than four months in the summer of 2020. The lethal toll of their work was more than 35 dead, $2 billion in property losses, and hundreds of police officers injured.
Such violent protesters torched the iconic St. John's Episcopal Church and attempted to fight their way into the White House grounds. Their violent agenda prompted the Secret Service to evacuate the president of the United States to a secure bunker.
The New York Times gleefully applauded the rioting near the White House grounds with the snarky headline "Trump Shrinks Back."
As far as secession talk, it mostly now comes from the left, not the right. Indeed, a parlor game has sprung up among elites in venues such as The Nation and The New Republic imagining secession from the United States. Blue-staters brag secession would free them from the burden of the red-state conservative population.
Over the past five years, it was the left who talked openly of tearing apart the American system of governance -- from packing the Supreme Court and junking the Electoral College to ending the ancient filibuster and nullifying immigration law.
Time essayist Molly Ball in early 2021 gushed about a brilliant "conspiracy" of wealthy tech lords, Democratic Party activists, and Joe Biden operators.
Ball bragged how they had systematically poured hundreds of millions of dark money into changing voting laws and absorbing the role of government registrars in key precincts.
What was revolutionary were new progressive precedents of impeaching a president twice, trying him as a private citizen, barring minority congressional representatives from House committee memberships, and tearing up the State of the Union address on national television.
In contrast, decrying the weaponization of a once-professional FBI and the scandals among its wayward Washington hierarchy is not insurrectionary. Nor is being appalled at the FBI raiding a former president's and possible presidential candidate's home, when historically disputes over presidential papers were the business of lawyers, not armed agents.
Historic overreach is insurrectionary, not objecting to it. And those who warn most of some mythical "civil war" are those most likely to incite one.
Consequences of Political Activism Are No Longer Only One-Sided
Conservative states have a warning for corporations that have "gone woke": The consequences of political activism are no longer one-sided.
This month, West Virginia declared it would no longer do business with five Wall Street banks over the companies' anti-coal or anti-fossil fuel policies.
"You have your right to be able to boycott the fossil fuel industry, but we're not going to do business with you. We're not going to pay for our own destruction," State Treasurer Riley Moore said. "They've weaponized tax dollars against the very people and industries that have generated those dollars."
Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation, added, "If you want to make social change in this country, we have a democratic process that you should utilize to get that done."
In recent years, corporate board rooms have been smitten with a movement of "ESG" principles, which elevate "environmental, social, and governance" issues -- fancy words to describe a preference for progressive policies -- over profits when making business decisions.
The movement encompasses everything from reducing their carbon footprint to expanding employee benefits, lobbying legislators to using rainbow logos in June.
The well-intentioned activism can sometimes fulfill expectations, but often it causes harm instead. For example, at least 60 corporations responded to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision by expanding employee abortion benefits.
Corporations believed woke activism would win over progressives by demonstrating that they were one of the "good" businesses, while the pro-business policies of Republicans would prevent them from retaliating.
Oh, how wrong they were!
As major corporations have increasingly embraced ESG activism, conservatives have increasingly requited their animosity.
U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., publicly broke with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last fall, saying, "I didn't even know it was around anymore." Not too long ago, such a public break between Republican leadership and the Chamber of Commerce would have been unthinkable.
But the era of good feelings between Republicans and major corporations is no longer. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-leaning association of state legislators, recommended this spring that state pension funds remove their investments from stocks associated with ESG.
"Politically motivated investing, by definition, takes rates of return off the table," explained Jonathan Williams, chief economist for the American Legislative Exchange Council.
One state this summer to begin divesting from woke funds is Florida, whose governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, called the ESG movement a type of "financial fraud."
Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis called ESG political activism "anti-American, anti-freedom, a deliberate attempt to subvert our democracy," adding, "for years now, the cult of ESG economic activists has been working overtime to infuse unwanted, woke ideology into the American economic system because they know their social policies wouldn't pass the sniff test from voters."
DeSantis also gained national attention earlier this year for out-boxing the Florida-based heavyweight, Disney.
Disney abandoned its brand to publicly criticize the state for passing a law protecting parental rights and childhood innocence. Florida Republicans not only evaded the blow, but landed one of their own in return, stripping Disney of long-standing privileges to essentially act as its own government. The fight ended with Disney crying "uncle."
Now, West Virginia has opened a new chapter in the fight against woke corporations by severing state banking contracts. Legislators in at least 16 states have proposed legislation to follow suit.
Calls for shark nets to be removed at Australia's busiest beaches - just months after a man was mauled to death by a shark while swimming
This is an old issue. The Green/Left care more about animal lives than human lives. So even sharks they don't like killing. The talk below is about higher tech instead of trapping them but why not do both?
A mayor has led calls for shark nets to be removed from Sydney's world-famous beaches this summer to protect marine life, just months after a man was mauled to death.
Waverley mayor Paula Masselos has divided opinion on her push for beaches in Sydney's east to go without nets this summer, including Bondi Beach.
Beaches will be without shark nets for the first time since they were introduced 85 years ago if the mayor gets her way.
The calls come six months after former British RAF engineer Simon Nellist was mauled to death in front of horrified beachgoers at nearby Little Bay by a 4.5metre great white shark during his daily swim.
It was Sydney's first fatal shark attack in 60 years and prompted the Department of Primary Industries to install 15 SMART drumlines from Little Bay to Bondi.
More than 50 nets are usually installed along beaches between Newcastle and Wollongong from September to April.
But Cr Masselos said locals are 'very concerned about the bycatch' getting caught in shark nets and argued they're ineffective.
'Shark nets are only 150m long. They're 6m high and set at a depth of about 10m. They're not there to actually create a barrier between swimmers and sharks, but they sort of help disrupt some of the swimming patterns,' she told the Today show on Thursday.
'We actually often see sharks on the inside of the shark nets. When you look at Bondi, it is actually a kilometre long. So the shark net isn't creating a huge barrier at all.
I think it's actually creating a false sense of safety. There are other technologies like smart drumlines and aerial surveillance that are far more effective in spotting sharks and advising people.'
She understands beachgoers' concerns but argued shark nets were old technology.
'We're driven by the science and the data and we believe that there are far better ways of actually keeping our community safe, because we take that responsibility very, very seriously,' Cr Masselos added.
'I'm an ocean swimmer myself. I totally understand the issue and people's concerns.
'Shark nets are very old technology. They were first introduced in 1937. We're in the 21st century now. I believe we can do much, much better.'
Canada: PM Justin Trudeau nominates the first Indigenous Supreme Court judge
Canada seems to have caught the Australian disease of regarding "one drop of blood" as sufficient to call a person indigenous. For what it is worth, she looks like a pleasant lady and may well make an impartial judge. One hopes so. The lady is clearly a pink-skinned Caucasian so it actually dishonours native people to call her indigenous. It conveys the message that they cannot succeed as wholly native people.
Does my mention of the one-drop rule ring a bell? The one-drop rule is a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the early 20th century United States among Southern racists. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood") is considered black. Like it or not, Justin Trudeau is in the same camp as the Ku Klux Klan. Their thinking is the same even though the object is different
Michelle O'Bonsawin is expected to take up her position at Canada's Supreme Court next month
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday nominated Michelle O'Bonsawin as the first Indigenous person to serve on the country's Supreme Court.
Her selection is a historic moment for a country seeking to make amends for abuses against native peoples.
Trudeau said O'Bonsawin was a "widely respected member of Canada’s legal community with a distinguished career."
"Her nomination is the result of an open, nonpartisan selection process. I am confident that Justice O’Bonsawin will bring invaluable knowledge and contributions to our country’s highest court," Trudeau said.
Popular chocolate brand is slammed for being 'too woke' after launching new packaging to celebrate Indigenous culture
A New Zealand chocolate company has come under fire for its new 'woke' packaging designed to honour Maori native language week.
Whittakers released its new packaging on Tuesday featuring a label which translates Creamy Milk to Miraka Kirimi - the equivalent term in Te Reo M?ori, the official M?ori language.
The new packaging received massive backlash after right-wing commentator Cam Slater tweeted a picture of the chocolate bar alongside the caption: 'Go woke, go broke..see ya Whittakers'.
Some critics accused the chocolate company of going too far to appease 'woke' customers while others compared it to 'forced mandated injections'.
'Shame on you Whittaker's we certainly won't be buying your chocolates anymore,' one wrote.
However, the dissenting tweets were followed by a frenzy of supportive Whittakers fans vowing to 'stockpile' the chocolate's limited wrapper to 'stick it to the haters'.
'Huge shoutout for Te Taura Whiri for continuing your mahi (work) to normalise our reo, the latest being the Whittaker’s Miraka Kir?mi,' one person wrote
'Thank you both for sticking your necks out on the line while racists slam you from all directions with hate and disgusting comments.'
'Almost never buy chocolate, it's a luxury my wallet and waistline can do without, but I bought four large Whittakers blocks this afternoon. Tonight we party,' another said.
'What Whittakers have done is make chocolate inaccessible for racists. I approve - they don't deserve chocolate,' another joked
Uproar over festival's plan to hold a talk about 'ZOOSEXUALITY' by professor who calls sex with animals 'society's last taboo'
A Sydney festival has sparked uproar for describing sex with animals as one of society's 'last taboos' in an ad for a renowned professor's talk about the ethics of bestiality.
Historian and author Joanna Bourke plans to discuss the morals behind 'humans loving animals' and 'zoosexuality' at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) next month.
The festival, to be held at Carriageworks in inner-city suburb Redfern next month, has been touted as Australia's original festival of provocateurs with speakers tasked with 'holding uncomfortable ideas up to the light'.
The description of Ms Bourke's controversial session states that while bestiality is 'generally' regarded as abhorrent, the subject is still depicted in a number of books, films, plays, paintings and photographs.
The historian plans to present a modern history of sex between humans and animals and will invite audience members to look at the 'changing meanings' of bestiality and zoophilia and the ethics of 'animal loving'.
'It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality,' the speaker is quoted on the website. 'Are their arguments dangerous, perverted or simply wrongheaded?'
Outraged Australians took to social media to lash festival organisers for allowing a presentation they argued was intellectualising animal abuse.
Russian crops, fertiliser must move 'unimpeded': UN chief
Russian fertilisers and agricultural products must be able to reach world markets "unimpeded" or a global food crisis could strike as early as next year, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Saturday.
"It is important that all governments and the private sector cooperate to bring them to market," he said from the Joint Coordination Center.
The agreement also guarantees Russia the right to export its agricultural products and fertilisers despite Western sanctions.
"Without fertiliser in 2022, there may not be enough food in 2023. Getting more food and fertiliser out of Ukraine and Russia is crucial to further calm commodity markets and lower prices for consumers," he said.
He headed to the southern city of Odessa on Friday.
Earlier Saturday, he visited the first aid ship chartered by the United Nations to transport Ukrainian grain on the southern shores of Istanbul in the Sea of Marmara.
The UN chief vowed Thursday that his organisation would try to "step up" grain exports from Ukraine before the onset of winter, as they are crucial for food supplies in many African countries.
Ukraine's Ambassador to Ireland, Larysa Gerasko said the continuation of shipments ultimately "depends on Russia, on Russian actions", she added.
Under the terms of the July agreement, 650,000 tons of Ukrainian grain and agricultural products have left the Ukrainian ports of Odessa, Chornomorsk and Pivdenny since August 1.
Cereal exports from Ukraine, one of the world's leading producers and exporters, were blocked for several months due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, raising fears of a global food crisis.
Phoebe Kirke's analysis of her own feelings below is probably correct. But I also think it illustrates a great divergence between male and female attitudes towards breakups. Like Phoebe, most women see a breakup as a occasion to spend time "working" on themselves, presumably to become more independent of men. Their interest in men during that time is minimal. The period concerned can last for years.
Men, by contrast are much more likely to go by the motto that the best cure for a broken heart is a new love. And they move on to another partner rapidly if they can -- as Phoebe reports.
The surprising thing is that women seem to see their slow recovery from a disappointment as a virtue, not a loss. And the quick recovery by men is seen to indicate a weakness of some kind. Perhaps because I am a male I see it the other way around: I see it as rather sad that women are so emotionally weak as to be unable to move on promptly. They waste valuable years of their life wallowing in negativity, when they could possibly have the joy of a new love
But I am no doubt biased. I have very clearly followed the typical male pattern in my life. When my second marriage ended, for instance, I met my third wife just two weeks later -- leading to a ten-year marriage that produced a child. What is there to criticize in that? I can see nothing but it is probably contemptible to many women
So how can women avoid the pain that they undoubtedly suffer in a breakup? I also suffer emotionally from breakups but I have a way of minimizng that pain. I go to considerable lengths to remain friendly with an "ex", including being very forgiving. Resentment is for fools. Remaining friends is not as good as remaining lovers but it goes half way and helps greatly with adjusting to the new circumstances.
Just to illustrate that: The third wife I mentioned above and I separated a quarter of a century ago but I had a very pleasant dinner with her last night, even though -- true to male form -- I do have another partner
Truly forgiving another person can be difficult but it is a great Christian virtue and well worthwhile in adjusting to breakups
Phoebe Kirke
Shortly after I broke it off with my ex, he started a new relationship. I was devastated. Not because I wanted him back, but because I wanted him to hurt just as much as I did. And I wasn’t ready for a new relationship, so why was he? I found that being at peace with the relationship ending doesn’t automatically translate into no longer feeling anything when finding out that our ex has moved on. Why is that?
You’re not in love or loss — it’s a normal reaction.
It’s weird to feel hurt after seeing your ex with someone new, especially if you’ve moved on and are currently dating someone new. However, it’s a normal reaction. And it certainly doesn’t mean that there are still feelings involved or that breaking up was a mistake.
See, after my last breakup, I was devastated. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and how I would continue without him — note, I was the one finally leaving after the relationship had inevitably broken down. Slowly but solemnly, I started to build my life in a new city, job, and apartment.
Yet, despite my efforts and trying to become my true self again, I was hurt to hear he had a new girlfriend only weeks after I left him. They were parading around; he’d take her to mutual friend’s parties while I was left alone in another city, trying to focus on myself. Did I doubt my decision to leave him during that time? No, I didn’t.
However, the thought that I could not be important to him and, therefore, he quickly found someone else was very difficult. I then asked myself how it could be that he just put away our relationship so quickly. Were the wonderful experiences and moments together for nothing? After a while, I understood that it was less about him dating and more about him obviously not mourning that he had lost me.
Seeing your ex move on has more to do with your ego getting bruised than wanting your ex back.
Let’s be honest, ego is a factor in dating and relationships. We can’t get hurt and not take it personally. If we’re in it, we’re in it. And when we lose, we need time to find our way back to ourselves. An exciting journey, I found.
Here’s how long it takes until we don’t care anymore.
In my opinion, being completely over someone is the moment they move on, and it doesn’t provoke any reaction. However, it takes time to get to that place. But how much time must have passed until we’re at a place where we literally couldn’t care less about the ex?
It takes half of the time the relationship lasted.
Why exactly half? We concluded that it’s because, as humans, our memory is very forgiving in many ways. We forget quickly, paint the dark truths a bit brighter, and have a selective recollection of past events. I don’t think we could overcome heartache if it weren’t for these little tricks.
Everybody who has ever suffered from a broken heart knows it will heal. But, obviously, like any other injury, it will leave scars. And yes, mending a broken heart changes us in both positive and negative ways. Sure, we become more careful with our hearts and don’t give them away so easily anymore. But a failed relationship also allows us to find out what we want in life and what we want our next relationship to look like.
If we take our time and admit that it is quite normal not to be completely unaffected by the ex’s actions, then I believe that time will work for us all by itself. With each new day, each new acquaintance, and each great evening with friends, thoughts of my ex visibly disappeared.
And then, exactly halfway through the time our relationship had lasted, it became clear to me: I didn’t care anymore. It was exhilarating.
Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who directed the CIA and the NSA during his career but has since become a partisan clown, CNN talking head, and member of the advisory board for establishment media watchdog NewsGuard, recently agreed that even compared to other movements around the world, Republicans are the most “nihilistic, dangerous, and contemptible.”
This allegation means that in Hayden’s worldview, Republicans outrank Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Chinese Communist Party among others in terms of their danger to the world.
Hayden made his comment in response to Financial Times associate editor Michael Luce, who said “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.”
“I agree,” responded Hayden. “And I was the CIA director.”
Hayden’s comments reinforce the picture of a national security deep state that has become overwhelmingly partisan, viewing half of the country as a threat.
It will also add to evidence that NewsGuard, the establishment media watchdog that purports to fairly rate the trustworthiness of news sources but consistently trashes conservative media, is also a partisan outfit intended to quash and delegitimize dissent.
Hayden, who is a member of NewsGuard’s advisory board, is a spreader of false news narratives himself, having failed to retract his claim that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story is “Russian disinformation.”
In a comment to Breitbart News, NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski emphasized that Hayden plays no rule in determining its ranking of news sources.
“As we disclose on our website, we have advisors across the political spectrum,” said Skibinski. “NewsGuard’s advisors, which include a former Secretary General of NATO and the first Direct of Homeland Security, under President George W. Bush, “provide advice and subject-matter expertise to NewsGuard. They play no role in the determinations of ratings or the Nutrition Label write ups of websites unless otherwise noted and have no role in the governance or management of the organization.”
Hayden is also a principal for strategic advisory services at the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm headed by another stalwart of the national security state, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
Chertoff was the man the Biden administration tapped to “review and assess” the future of the DHS “disinformation governance board,” a project of Biden’s DHS that quickly became farcical after its appointed head, Nina Jankowicz, was exposed as a far-left loon who made pro-censorship sing-song TikTok videos.
In a comment to Breitbart News, a spokeswoman for the Chertoff Group distanced the company from Hayden’s remarks.
“General Hayden’s tweets are his own and do not reflect the firm,” said the Chertoff Group.
"Self-silencing" — people saying what they think others want to hear rather than what they truly feel — is skewing our understanding of how Americans really feel about abortion, COVID-19 precautions, what children are taught in school and other hot-button issues, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The best predictor of private behavior is private opinion. People's actual views are far more likely than their stated views to drive consumer and social behavior — and voting.
"When we're misreading what we all think, it actually causes false polarization," said Todd Rose, co-founder and president of Populace, the Massachusetts-based firm that undertook the study. "It actually destroys social trust. And it tends to historically make social progress all but impossible."
The big picture: People are often more moderate than they'll readily admit when "being pulled toward a vocal fringe," whether left or right, Rose said.
But in some cases, he said, people reshape their privately held views to conform to what they think their group believes, even if that assessment is inaccurate.
The gap between real and stated views can have a generational impact, he said, because media amplifies perceptions that then cue young adults: "This generation's illusions tend to become next generation's private opinion."
How it works: Respondents were provided a mix of traditional polling questions and other questions using a list experiment method, or item-count technique, that provides them with a greater sense of anonymity. This process allows researchers to find the gap between what people say versus how they privately feel.
By the numbers: On abortion, the study found men are much less likely to privately agree with the idea that the choice to have an abortion should be left solely to a woman and her doctor (45%) than would say so publicly (60%).
Republicans, meanwhile, were less likely to privately say Roe v. Wade should be overturned (51%) than publicly (64%).
On COVID-19, only 44% of women privately feel wearing masks was effective at stopping COVID-19 spread, though 63% felt they should say they did.
An astonishing four times as many Democrats say CEOs should take a public stand on social issues (44%) than actually care (11%).
On education, Americans overall are privately more supportive of parents having more influence over curriculum (60%) than proclaim this publicly (52%).
That may help explain why GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin's messaging on schools appealed to swing voters in Virginia last year, and why GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) championed "parents' rights" in signing prohibitions on classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.
One in three Democrats think parents should have more influence over public school curriculum — even though only one in four say so publicly. Among independents, 71% agree privately agree, though only 55% say so when asked in a more direct polling format; 85% of Republicans privately feel that way.
Yes, but: Americans are actually less concerned about teachers talking about gender identity or how much public schools focus on racism than they say publicly.
Only about half of Americans actually think it is inappropriate for schools to discuss gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade, compared to the 63% who say so publicly.
This misconception is particularly stark among independents. Just 42% privately have an issue with discussions about gender identity in K-3rd, despite 67% saying they take an issue with it publicly.
Even though 63% of Republicans privately said they believed racism was too much of a focus in public schools — far more than Democrats or independents— the number is a lot lower than the 80% who felt compelled to say so publicly.
The intrigue: The study found the biggest disparities among Hispanic respondents and political independents. On 14 out of 25 topics, these groups had double-digit gaps between what they say and believe.
Racism and sexism in hiring practices is bad in any industry, but it is especially dangerous when the job relates to the defence of the nation.
Adding to this pile of racist ideology (that is better suited to long-gone centuries), the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the UK has put a hiring freeze on ‘white’ staff – particularly men – saying that it wishes to focus on hiring women and ethnic minorities.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston was immediately accused of being willing to ‘compromise UK security at a time of growing threats from Russia and China’.
Which is correct. The West is not living in a post-war Utopia of eternal global peace – it is teetering on the edge of foreign and domestic disaster where rising communist superpowers in Asia and Europe are looking to team up with theocratic regimes in the Arab world to flip the balance of power in favour of authoritarianism. At the same time, Western governments are behaving like collectivist Bowerbirds, nicking the worst parts of Marxism and trying to weave them into the nest of democracy.
‘I think he [Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston] needs to be hauled up by the Ministry of Defence and told: This is the defence agenda, get on it,’ said one defence source.
If the object is ‘defence of the country’ the only criteria that matters is ability. That’s it. I am a woman, and I would rather see a 100 per cent male military if it meant that they were the strongest and fittest RAF members. Why? Because if we hire based on ‘inclusivity’ and ‘diversity’ above ability – there won’t be a country left after the first firefight.
A senior female officer serving as the head of recruiting, with more courage and morality than the upper echelons of the RAF, handed in her resignation in protest asserting that such ludicrous hiring practices threw into question the fighting strength of the RAF. She added that the RAF were attempting to hire using ‘impossible’ diversity targets under its policy.
Instead of hiring pilots by making them stand next to a paint chart to gauge their colour, the RAF could focus on paying its existing pilots more money to stop them being poached by the private industry.
It was previously reported that there had been a shocking 65 per cent drop in trainee demand for the Typhoon fast jets because of ‘operational tempo’ which is now being blamed on the war in Ukraine, despite the crisis being talked about for two years. A more believable cause is the slash to defence funding which saw its frontline fighter squadrons drop fro 30 in 1990 down to 7.
This is insanity.
When asked about attempting to attract desperately needed pilots, a RAF spokesperson said: ‘Our people are our greatest asset, and we’re committed to ensuring we attract and retain the best and brightest talent to meet current and future threats.’
Surely they mean, ‘the most diverse and inclusive quotas’?
A spokesperson for Rishi Sunak released a statement scorning the RAF: ‘The only thing that should matter in recruitment is the content of your character, not your sex or the colour of your skin. The Minister of Defence would allow Britain’s security to potentially be put at risk by a drive for so-called “diversity” is not only disgraceful, it is dangerous.’
According to the RAF, they are not an ‘Air Force’ they are ‘A Force for Inclusion’.
The front page of their site is not dedicated to technical prowess, defending the UK, or even the sheer thrill of buzzing around the sky in multi-million dollar aircraft – it is a long ramble about how virtuous they are.
Diversity and Inclusion:
The nature of the RAF means that we live and operate in close-knit communities where we rely on each other for support. The Royal Air Force family is rich in diversity and culture, and it is important that we value and respect everyone, regardless of their background.
To make sure everyone feels safe and included, we provide a range of services and support for those that may need them. This includes staff networks which play a crucial role in promoting change, role modelling, mentoring circles and coaching. We also provide specific support to those that would benefit – Women, LGBTQ+, Disability, Religion and Belief and Ethnicity.
It includes phrases such as: ‘We understand people’s history is important and we continue to review and adjust our uniform rules so that individuals can more easily express their cultural heritage within the forces.’
You wouldn’t know, reading the recruitment page, that people are signing up to wage war and very likely die were a conflict to break out. Worse, this type of Woke nonsense lessens discipline and directly endangers all members of the RAF should they come into a genuine hot conflict.
The black writer below has a glancing familiarity with the research on his topic but fails to give sufficient weight to the fact that academic talk about IQ is concerned with AVERAGES
In everyday situations, averages hardly matter. What matters are the individual characteristics of the person we are interacting with. What group they belong to will not usually matter. But there are some situations where averages DO reasonably concern people.
A major example of that is Leftist concern about black educational attainment. For perhaps a couple of decades, Leftist psychologists and educators used all their ingenuity in an effort to overcome the "gap" between black and white educational attainment. And the gap was and is large. About a third of blacks do not even finish High School. They "drop out"
But no matter what the Leftist academics tried, nothing could budge that gap. Black education failure strongly validated what average black IQ tests showed: That most blacks are not very good at intellectual tasks.
And that was a concerning finding. The Leftist academics were understandably concerned. They were well aware of how important education is in our society. Educational failure predicts economic failure and a whole lot of other problems. It was reasonable to be concerned about that. But they found no solution to it. The low level of black educational attainment remained as average black IQ predicted it would be
So the characteristic Leftist dogma that all men are equal was greatly challenged. They were confronted with strong long-term evidence that IQ tests did in fact predict what they purported to predict. The differences were real and had real-life implications. IQ tests were highly valid in a psychomentric sense.
But that COULD not be accepted by Leftists. There HAD to be something other than IQ behind black life failures. And so we got a new dogma: Entrenched but covert white racism was behind black failure -- so called "Critical Race Theory"
But whatever the reason, the concern was with averages. Blacks were on average failures in much of life and that had to be explained. So for some people in some situations, averages do matter. So average IQ can matter too. The author below dismisses the importance of average IQ but the saga of efforts to close the black/white "gap" in education shows that it can indeed matter to some people
It is interesting that the concern about averages is mainly a Leftist concern. Conservatives just accept them without doing much about them. The members of the Ku Klux Klan were after all overwhelmingly members of the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans
In 1971, Michael Cole, and a team of his fellow psychologists, travelled to West Africa to settle a question about race and intelligence.
They gave members of the Kpelle tribe various items (food, tools, cooking utensils, clothing) and asked them to sort them into categories. They then compared the results to a group of American students.
The Kpelle failed miserably.
Or rather, instead of grouping the items by type, as the students had, the Kpelle divided the objects into functional pairs. Here’s how Joseph Glick, one of Cole’s colleagues, described the experiment:
When the subject had finished sorting, what was present were ten categories composed of two items each — related to each other in a functional, not categorical, manner. Thus, a knife might have been placed with an orange, a potato with a hoe, and so on. When asked, the subject would rationalize the choice with such comments as, “The knife goes with the orange because it cuts it.” When questioned further, the subject would often volunteer that a wise man would do things in this way.
When an exasperated experimenter asked finally, “how would a fool do it,” he was given back sorts of the type that were initially expected — four neat piles with foods in one, tools in another, and so on.
As Cole noted in his report, the Kpelle weren’t less intelligent than the students because they thought oranges should be paired with knives instead of potatoes, they’d just grown up in a different environment with a different set of cognitive and cultural biases.
Or, to put it another way, the Kpelle weren’t wrong, but they weren’t white either.
Racial intelligence is one of those topics that’s a trainwreck no matter how you approach it.
Virtue-signalling politicians like Kate Brown lower test standards to “help students of colour,” race essentialists like Nicholas Wade publish pseudoscience about racial disparities, sociopaths like Payton Gendron use memes about IQ to justify racist mass shootings, the topic is so radioactive that most people just avoid it.
So let’s get one source of confusion out of the way from the start:
There are obviously going to be IQ differences if you group people by skin colour.
I say, “obviously,” because there will be differences if you group human beings by literally any measure.
If you group people by hair colour, you’ll discover that one shade is statistically more intelligent than the others. If you group people by height, you’ll find that one height has the highest percentage of mathematical savants. Somewhere, if some maverick ever decides to search for it, is the most eloquent penis size.
But when we try to draw meaningful conclusions with this quirk of statistical analysis, we run into a few problems. The first of which is what a black person even is.
According to a 2015 analysis of genetic data, around one in 10 self-identified African Americans have less than 50% African ancestry. And around one in 50 have less than 2%. We’ve become so comfortable with the idea that people whose skin is a roughly similar colour are the same “race” that we forget that a good suntan can throw the whole thing up in the air.
But okay, let’s get all “one drop rule” about this, and say that a black person is anyone whose skin is “milk chocolate or darker,” and who has some African ancestry in the past few generations. Very scientific.
The next problem is figuring out whether IQ differences are genetic.
For example, in support of the idea that “racial” differences are genetic, it’s often pointed out that Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate long-distance running. And they do. But does this mean “black people” are better distance runners than “white people?”
Well, if we take a closer look at these dominant athletes, we notice that they come, almost exclusively, from just three tribes (specifically the Kalenjin, Nandi and Oromo). All of which benefit from low oxygen/high altitude conditions, in a country that has numerous programs designed to identify and nurture long-distance running talent.
So instead of, “black people are genetically better at long-distance running.” We get, “black people who grew up in certain high-altitude regions of Ethiopia and Kenya, and who were encouraged to nurture their long-distance running talents from an early age, are better than everybody, including other black people, at long-distance running.
I admit this is a bit more of a mouthful.
But none of this addresses the biggest problem with IQ differences; the concept of IQ itself.
I mean, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that IQ is a perfect predictor of culturally-neutral, genetically-predetermined intelligence. And let’s even assume that people with African ancestry have, on average, lower IQs than anybody else.
What do we do about this?
Should black people be shipped off to separate schools if our average grades are a few points lower? Should we be denied access to opportunities or jobs if a slightly smaller percentage of black people turn out to be geniuses? Is a high IQ more valuable than creativity? Or people skills? Or persistence?
Well, it turns out that Dr Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University and one of the pioneers of IQ research, had similar questions.
In 1921, in one of the longest-running studies on intelligence ever conducted, Terman began tracking the progress of 1521 children who scored highest on his intelligence test, confident that they would all be “at the top of their fields,” as adults.
But almost none of them were. Instead, “willpower, perseverance and desire to excel,” were far better predictors of success. As Terman concluded, “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”
Honestly? I’m surprised his IQ wasn’t high enough to figure that out in advance.
The controversy over racial IQ differences was born out of a desire to justify slavery and colonialism. But it persists because our obsession with this vague, unscientific concept known as “race” persists. It persists because the delusion that our skin holds some identity-defining significance persists. It persists because the belief that we’re divided by these arbitrary differences persists.
But why are we so focused on skin colour and not eye colour or ear shape or hand size? Why do we define ourselves and each other by the actions of people who died centuries ago? Why are we still talking about genetic racial differences when, thanks to the fact that we’ve decoded the entire human genome, we know there’s more variation within the “races” than between them?
Because instead of wasting time ranking ourselves by our skin or our hair or our other…attributes, maybe we should be fixing the impoverished schools that leave young children functionally illiterate. Maybe we should stop teaching kids that rational thinking and hard work is “whiteness.” Or better yet, maybe we should stop teaching kids to think about the colour of their skin at all.
Maybe we should follow the Kpelle’s example and sort ourselves into more meaningful categories.
His name is Blake Masters, and he just won the Republican Primary for the Arizona Senate. At 36, he beat older and more experienced candidate Jim Lamon, and in September will face off against ex-astronaut and establishment Democrat, Mark Kelly. ‘I’m going to win,’ Masters said.
Masters is part of a movement known as the New Right. They are a group of young, ‘post-leftist, heterodox and dissident’ right-wingers who see themselves as ‘counter revolutionaries’ fighting against what they refer to as ‘the regime’ – the neoliberal, globalist world order’. Rather than preserving the status quo – which they’d consider essentially over – they see their role themselves as agents of restoration, building a new path forward.
James Pogue, one of the first journalists to cover the movement in more depth, told Vox recently:
‘Globalisation was sold as if it would make all of our lives better. But largely speaking, it has enriched a very small, well-connected, international, sort of, elite set of schools, elite set of institutions. This trend of “open borders” is pushed forward in the name of progress and liberalism.
‘But actually, what it’s doing is driving down wages and impoverishing people.’
Nate Hochman writes in the National Review:
‘There’s not a lot left to conserve in the contemporary state of things. Conservatism today means radicalism.’
This ‘fractious family of dissenters’ may come to represent a political shift that reaches further, runs deeper, and is more operationally effective than the Trump years (but don’t count him out yet). One that – thanks to its hipster, hyper-cool online following – may quickly spread abroad.
There is no New Right/America First playbook, but there are policies that have remained consistent, including stopping illegal immigration, dramatically cutting legal migration, and tackling big tech (including, interestingly, its addictiveness). On a domestic level, Masters wants a median wage increase so people can ‘raise families on one-single-income’ and to bring schools and universities ‘back to reality’. Manufacturing needs to return – ‘jobs, not iPhones, or pill bottles’, and on foreign policy, American families always come first – ‘I don’t care what happens in the Ukraine, frankly.’
From the outside, one key difference to Trump is that the New Right isn’t a one-man army, seeming to be far more organised. To the north in Ohio is JD Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy. He recently won the Republican senate ticket by taking on the ‘community destroying’ effects of globalism. To the south in Florida, there’s Governor Ron DeSantis – whose star is rapidly rising, thanks, in part, to his stance on lockdowns and mandates.
The New York Times put it this way: ‘One way or the other – whether he ever runs for president or not – Ron DeSantis is the new Republican Party.’
Behind the scenes, Curtis Yarvin, a tech-founder turned political theorist – considered by many as the philosophical heft of the group – lends intellectual insight and certainly interesting ideas with meandering Substack articles laden with internet-speak (he claims to have been the first to use the term ‘red pilled’ in a political context).
‘Basically, you’re looking at something that calls itself a democracy, and is actually an oligarchy,’ he told Unherd.
‘The administrative state has practical control over the ceremonial politicians. The politicians you elect are not in charge, so you are not in charge.’
This, he said, is thanks in part to what he calls ‘The Cathedral’: a complex explanation of why most of the media institutes and experts seem to say the exact same thing at the exact same time, despite there being no clear top-down directive.
‘The Cathedral is just a short way to say ‘journalism plus academia’ – in other words, the intellectual institutions at the centres of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the centre of medieval society.’
To simplify this, Yarvin’s idea is that the ‘Cathedral’ represents the brain, whereas the deep state – or administrative state – is the body.
‘The brain,’ he reminds us, ‘generally controls the body.’
And then there’s Peter Thiel. Both a major financial backer and controversial figure in his own right, Thiel’s involvement in right-leaning politics – backing Trump and now Masters – draws continued ire from America’s media class.
‘Thiel and Masters are willing to move fast and break things. But instead of disrupting taxi companies or hotels, they’ve got American democracy in their sights,’ wrote Mother Jones.
Thiel’s involvement is arguably less about gaining power and seems more out of fear of what is around the corner. His view is that the globalised world we now live in was arrived at absent-mindedly, expecting no consequences. With no plans for the future, mankind has unwittingly progressed itself into a corner with scarily few exit options. Mildly prophetically, he envisions either a monumental shakeup of globalism and politics, or ‘total war and annihilation’.
‘In every possible future, all of today’s bubbles will burst, and their ideological scaffolding will prove to be but lint in the winds of history…
‘The waning of globalisation in the near future will be a reaction to the excesses of the recent past.’
But his more recent comments have been more hopeful, or, at least, less biblical. ‘I think the tide of globalisation is just going out,’ he said.
‘Politics is becoming more important, it’s becoming more intense, the range of outcomes is becoming greater… we’re in a world in which there’s a bull market in politics that’s getting started.’
Thiel may be bullish on this brand of politics because, in people like Masters and the New Right, he sees a chance to arrest American decline. Many others hope he is right.
If these figures are anything to go by, the New Right is young, energised, digitally shrewd, highly intelligent, and not afraid to court controversy. They see globalism as a corrosive force on society, mainstream media outlets as elite self-serving institutions, and America as a nation in spiritual and economic decline.
‘It feels like everything is coming apart at the seams. If we don’t right this ship, America is gone,’ said Masters.
Maurice Newman, writing in Flat White, also acknowledges the dark turning-point the Western world has found itself in. He concluded by asking; ‘Do we have the courage to turn back?’
This, the New Right would argue, is the wrong way of looking at it. The idea of ‘returning to our roots’ or ‘turning back’ – though noble and true to the conservative instinct – doesn’t match the needs of the day. The Right today cannot just be the party for ‘less tax, more globalism’. Conservatives are fighting a cultural, economic, and spiritual civil war using Reagan-era weapons. They’re losing.
What Vance, Masters, and others on the New Right do is voice what many on the right-wing are thinking. First, the neoliberal world order that promised to make our lives better did the exact opposite, and second, that a globalist type of conservatism is indictable for this decline.
Vance put it another way:
‘We’re in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives are uncomfortable with.’
‘Woke’ Military Policies to Blame for Recruitment Crisis, Servicemembers Say
The U.S. Army is expected to fall nearly 40,000 troops short of its recruiting goals over the next two years. Fiscal year 2022 is expected to miss the mark by 10,000 troops, while the number in fiscal year 2023 could reach 28,000. These figures mean that this year is on track to be the Army’s worst recruiting year in almost 50 years.
The Army plans to circumvent the problem by offering $1 billion for its recruiting program and placing more emphasis on the use of its reserve units.
The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Army Recruiting Command for comment, and Maj. Charles Spears of the Combined Arms Center replied to various inquiries about the state of recruiting. Spears offered several reasons for the Army’s recruiting challenges in the years ahead.
First, he said, “only 23 percent of American youth are qualified to serve without a waiver, [noting that] obesity, addiction, medical, and behavioral health are the top disqualifiers for service.”
The Army is also competing with corporate America, he said, adding that “social media’s virtual public square shapes the values and perceptions of American youth, which is increasingly unfamiliar with the benefits of Army service.”
According to Spears, the American population is “increasingly disconnected” from serving in the Army and military service, Spears said. “Oftentimes, influencers [like parents, teachers, and coaches] do not recommend military service.” He also added that “the share of youth who have seriously considered military service is at a historic low of nine percent.”
Finally, Spears said, “the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the ability of recruiters to interact with prospects in person, [and] also exacerbated academic and physical fitness challenges, limiting the pool of qualified applicants.” As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, there has been a nine percent decrease in Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) scores as well as increased applicate obesity.
In addition to these factors, servicemembers have expressed other concerns that they say have contributed to the recruitment crisis.
Army Boots on the Ground
The Epoch Times spoke to an active-duty Army soldier with over 15 years of service on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. He is gravely alarmed about the Army falling short on recruitment numbers.
“In the past,” he said, “the Army targeted a specific demographic of people based on their values, [and these recruits] were patriots and loved America.” In today’s general population, he doesn’t see the same interest in patriotism. “Much of the country doesn’t love America like it use to,” he said. “And with a military no longer upholding the values, the oaths, or the creeds it once did, what kind of new recruits should we expect [to join the Army]?” he asked.
“From a macro perspective, we had a significant breach of trust in the last election.” By oath, he said, the military swears to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But the U.S. military has said nothing about the previous election, according to the soldier. “I’m not saying there is a final answer, but as defenders of the Constitution, they owed open and transparent conversation to the force and to the American people,” he said.
Instead, he said, “they happily encourage mandated vaccines, back the transgender issue, and speak out in opposition to the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to Roe v. Wade—all of which are very political.”
In his opinion, “we now have a Department of Defense [DoD] that has taken various political positions that are very much opposed to the heart of America.”
All the while, he said, the size of battalions is shrinking. “Some are less than two-thirds of where they need to be,” he said. And many of those who remain are not “usable deployables.”
On July 28, the Commerce Department announced that in the second quarter U.S. gross domestic product shrank by 0.9%. If that number isn’t revised upwards, it will mean that 2022 has been a year of negative growth. Two back-to-back quarters of negative growth, as we’ve now had, has long been considered the very definition of “recession.”
Preparing for the possibility of a second negative quarter of GDP with its negative implications for the midterm elections, Biden officials issued talking points to their minions that a recession is most definitely not two consecutive quarters of negative growth, but rather a complex combination of other factors that we proles needn’t concern ourselves with. However, “a recession by any other name” would smell as foul.
To be fair, maybe the classical definition of recession is a bit too simplistic. But it’s not as though GDP measures some discrete thing; GDP is whatever economists say it is. If they reconfigure GDP’s components, then its growth will be different.
The reason that the Bidenistas are so intent on redefining the word “recession” is because there is another economic indicator that cannot be redefined, and that’s “price inflation.” Though recession can be debated, the prices of energy and food can’t be; they are what they are, end of story. If a gallon of gasoline is $5, you won’t allow some pointy-headed policy wonk in D.C. to tell you different. That’s why the Democrats are so anxious to say we’re not in a recession, because having both inflation and recession going into an election smells too much like 1980.
Normal people might be a mite miffed at the Democrats for their infernal redefinitions. That’s because the Dems have been so consistently wrong lately about so many things that touch on the economy, especially their assurances that inflation would be transitory. Some analysts say that price inflation will be “sticky,” i.e. it will stick around for a while.
Recessions are officially dated by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Therefore, Biden can continue to deny that the U.S. is in a recession until the NBER chimes in, which, conveniently, won’t be until after the election.
The NBER may well side with Biden and rule that the U.S. was not in a recession during the first half of 2022. After all, it called the March-November period of 2001 a recession, despite its lack of two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. You see, the “Dot-Bomb [sic] Recession” of 2001 occurred under a new Republican president. And not only that, but the 2001 growth decline was only 0.3%, less than what we’ve had this year. One could be forgiven for wondering if the NBER has a bias.
Reminiscent of the stagflation of 40 years ago, Democrats are caught on the same sticky wicket of recession and inflation. But of these two, which is worse?
If one has lost one’s job due to recession and is standing in a breadline, one might think that recession is surely the greater evil. But inflation hits everybody, including those who have managed to retain their job. Inflation is a cancer that can metastasize throughout an economy, and even destroy a nation’s currency.
If inflation is the greater evil, how do we deal with it while creating less pain for folks? To kill inflation, former Fed head Paul Volcker triggered two painful recessions by jacking up the federal funds interest rate to 20%. This writer knows of no one advocating such a stratospheric rate.
On July 28 at CNBC, economics professor Frederic Mishkin suggested that the Fed hike the funds rate to 4%. Mishkin didn’t explain why that number should be the target, but noted that it’s twice the Fed’s desired inflation rate of 2%.
Besides raising interest rates, there are two other ways to tackle inflation. The first is to attack inflation head-on by reducing the money supply, which the Fed does by reducing its balance sheet. We’re talking QT here, quantitative tightening, i.e. withdrawing money from the economy. The Fed hasn’t had much experience at QT nor has it been very good at it.
As this writer noted in July, the Fed acquired assets in the early days of the pandemic at a rate that is more than ten times faster than the rate it plans to reduce its balance sheet. Also, the Fed is unwinding its position passively, by letting securities mature and then run off. It’s called “portfolio runoff,” which means that the proceeds of maturing assets aren’t reinvested, they’re destroyed.
The Fed could be more aggressive in reducing its portfolio. If the Fed tries to control inflation with only interest rate hikes and passive portfolio runoff, we may be in for a more painful recession than is necessary. Given that, shouldn’t the Fed also reduce its balance sheet actively, by selling its assets prior to maturity? That way the Fed would be taking even more money out of the economy to fight inflation, and perhaps have less of a reason to raise interest rates to ruinous heights.
The second way to fight inflation is with the elective branches of government. Congress could end its excessive borrowing and spending, both of which contribute to rising prices. But with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, members of Congress seem to think that they can spend their way out of inflation. Indeed, Sen. Chuck Schumer once said that “the Fed is the only game in town.”
The president could help on the inflation front by reversing his disastrous policies on energy, but his handlers might not let him. So neither Congress nor the president are likely to deliver any relief. It seems the Fed really is the only game in town.
In combating inflation, Prof. Mishkin opined that the Fed needs to establish some “credibility,” as it had gotten “behind the curve,” and had been insufficiently “aggressive.” Correctamundo!
The Fed has been wrong and it’s been tardy. With an inflation rate of more than four times the 2% desired rate, the Fed can’t continue to pussyfoot around our inflation problem. To lessen the pain of recession, the Fed shouldn’t rely on passive portfolio runoff. The Fed also needs to actively sell the assets it bought with money it created. And, as with portfolio runoff, the Fed needs to destroy the proceeds of such sales. The Fed should rev up QT to soften the recession.
Recession is the price we pay for living beyond our means. Recession is a necessary corrective. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the federal government has borrowed, printed, and spent trillions of dollars to prop up the economy and asset prices. It needs to end.
If we want to kill inflation, rather than deny that we’re in recession, we should embrace recession, painful though it be. We must disabuse ourselves of the idea that we can continue running trillion-dollar deficits and printing a trillion dollars of new money in a single month.
Normal people should resent the Dems for their transparent attempt to control them by controlling the language and redefining inconvenient terms. They tell us that the invasion at the southern border is not an invasion and that the raid on President Trump’s home was not a raid. Who are these mental defectives trying to take over the mother tongue? If we allow them, the Left may even try to redefine “redefinition.”
The 20 questions every woman should ask on a first date: Do you have a dog (bad)? Do you like quinoa (good)? After years of dating, Julie, 54, swears she's found the perfect formula
What a nut! No wonder she is still single at age 54. Has it occurred to her that she may not be getting good offers because she is flat-chested and has hair like a barbed-wire entanglement?
You may imagine the perfect first date should include flowers, candles and perhaps some sultry background music to set the mood.
My first date must-have, however, is something rather different: a list of 20 questions for any potential suitor, enabling me efficiently to weed out any dating duds, and easily identify those precious 'keepers'.
Among other things, my dating questionnaire allows me to discover whether my potential Mr Right likes quinoa or chips, is in bed by 9.30pm, like myself, and, vitally, whether he speaks kindly of his mother.
On a deeper level, it helps me quickly establish a picture of the heart and soul of the man, whether he is trustworthy and if we might be compatible. Time is of the essence when you get to 54 and are still single, after all!
Clearly, I am very fussy when it comes to dating. But why shouldn't we women of a certain age be fussy? After all, I've been dating for nearly half my life, now, and simply haven't the time or patience to leave much to chance any more. That's why I wholly agree with TV presenter Trisha Goddard who -- with two divorces, and 64 years on the clock -- said last month that she gave a questionnaire to the man who is now her fiance in order to 'cut the c***'. She said her questionnaire meant she didn't waste time dating someone who would ultimately not be the right fit for her.
Some might think this approach is unromantic, or impatient -- but to me, it just sounds like good sense.
Because there are some definite romantic red lines for me that instantly rule out potential Romeos. For example, as a nutrition and wellness consultant, it's important any partner of mine doesn't mistreat their body or drink too much. I also prefer to sleep with my head on an incline -- raised higher than my feet -- as studies have shown it can be good for your health. So if a man couldn't get comfy in my specially adapted bed, that would be something of a deal-breaker for me.
Aside from this, I'd love someone with whom I can enjoy day trips and holidays. Someone to laugh with. Looks? I admit I prefer dark features, but they must have a friendly, smiley disposition. And if a man remembered my favourite flowers are freesias, then that would mean the world to me.
In my 20s, I told my father about the kind of qualities I wanted in a man and he replied, 'Julie, enjoy spinsterhood!' But the reality is, like so many middle-aged women, I'm at the stage of life when looks just aren't enough of a pull any more.
While I once tried a dating website, I prefer to be matched by friends who know me. I've always assumed this is the best approach to find someone like-minded to share my life with. I wouldn't mind a divorcé; I've been married too, once, in my 20s, but it was over before I turned 30. We just weren't on the same wavelength any more.
Since then, I've had several short-term relationships, and a few dates, but have yet to find someone long-term who meets my needs. People so often comment 'Why can't you find a keeper, Julie?' After all, I'm slim, attractive, own my home and am financially independent. But the men I have dated! Oh dear. They've generally been one of two extremes: either very demanding of my time and controlling, or terrible at maintaining regular contact and a bit lazy.
Atlantic op-ed claims Catholic rosary has become 'an extremist symbol'
Has he forgotten that it is just a string of beads?
Atlantic contributor Daniel Panneton declared that the Catholic rosary has become a "symbol" of religious radicalism.
The rosary is a string of beads or knots used by Catholics as they pray a sequence of prayers, but one writer warned they have taken on a far darker meaning in modern times. "Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or 'rad trad') Catholics," Panneton claimed in the Sunday piece titled, "How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol."
He added, "On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal."
Panneton slammed an entire online ecosystem for disseminating imagery featuring Christian warriors both historical and modern, suggesting that "social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult ('God wills it') crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants."
He observed that rosary beads "provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Catholic theology's concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan."
The Atlantic contributor gave a wide variety of examples of how the modern association between rosaries and fighting men has become marketable to a niche audience, noting that "radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services," such as one store that "sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as 'combat rosaries.'"
Biden Executive Order on Abortion Access Is Misleading and Full of Misinformation
After the Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden directed his administration to find ways to provide increased access to abortions. That includes potentially funneling taxpayer dollars to transport women and girls who live in states with stricter abortion laws across state lines into states with more lenient ones.
Biden's Aug. 3, 2022, executive order "Securing Access to Reproductive and Other Healthcare Services" "directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to consider action to advance access to reproductive healthcare services, including through Medicaid for patients who travel out of state for reproductive healthcare services."
While this order will create some drama and headlines, it will not change the underlying prohibition on using federal funds for abortions.
For over 45 years, the Hyde Amendment rider to the Department of Labor-Department of Health and Human Services Appropriations Act prohibiting federal funding of abortions has applied to all programs funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, including Medicaid. And if the federal government is prohibited from paying for the service, it cannot pay for transportation costs to get to the service either.
Despite this clear prohibition, under the executive order, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will likely be pressed to see how far the secretary of health and human services can use his authority under Section 1115 demonstrations to waive certain provisions of the law to achieve the order's goals.
Using Medicaid to pay for traveling to medical care is not new. For example, a Medicaid enrollee that lives in a rural county in State A may already cross over state lines to a larger city in State B to receive medical care.
Medicaid also requires the federal government and states share in the cost of providing "nonemergency transportation" to medically necessary services covered under a state's Medicaid plan. This can mean Medicaid may, under individual circumstances, pay for fuel, lodging, and meals for enrollees, including for family members' overnight stays.
However, coverage for out-of-state travel is not automatic. The Medicaid agency typically requires documentation that the service cannot be rendered by a provider enrolled in the patient's home state. Moreover, the out-of-state provider must become enrolled in the originating state's Medicaid program.
The first avenue -- and obstacle -- the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will likely be pressed to consider with this new executive order is who would cover the costs.
As previously noted, under Medicaid, the federal government and the state share in the costs. Does the administration envision the federal government assuming the full cost of providing transportation services? The secretary's waiver authority has never been found to permit the federal government to assume 100% of funding.
Hitting a dead end on full federal funding, the agency might consider ways to split the costs with the states. Under this scenario, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would have to consider which state would share in the cost -- the state of origin or the state to which an individual traveled?
Does the administration envision states like California spending state taxpayer money to fund abortions and related services for out-of-state residents?
During Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used its authority to waive certain requirements as thousands of Medicaid enrollees left Louisiana and spread to more than 30 states. In those instances, the agency held Louisiana responsible for the nonfederal share of the costs.
Keeping with this standard, would states like Mississippi be willing to spend state taxpayer money to assist in the transportation for out-of-state abortions? Highly unlikely.
The second avenue -- and obstacle -- the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services might be pressed to consider are ways to circumvent the limitations by detaching funding from the individual Medicaid enrollee and instead directing the payments to the service provider, such as a transportation service.
Here too, however, even in those states that have received waivers to use Medicaid funding for activities that are not attached to an individual Medicaid enrollee, such as providing funding directly to hospitals, the Hyde Amendment applies to those federal funds as well, prohibiting their use for abortion-related services.
Thus, despite the anticipation of the executive order, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will likely report back that states wanting to expand access to abortion for women enrolled in Medicaid outside of their state can only do so by using their own state dollars with no federal match.
States like Oregon, California, and Washington already appear willing to divert state taxpayer dollars away from critical state priorities to fund abortions for out-of-state residents.
When the Biden administration refers to "reproductive health care," it means abortion. Period. The public should not be confused that it means anything else. It hopes the executive order will miraculously present a new pathway to fund abortions. Yet, under any of the scenarios, such action would be incredible. For policymakers, this only further underscores the importance of protecting -- and strengthening -- the Hyde Amendment.
Though I will avoid mentioning him by name, one of my friends has a fine aristocratic title, if nowadays a somewhat less splendid estate. Many years ago, having nothing better to discuss, we took opposite sides in the class war. "Oh, it's all right for some," I said in my bitterest man-of-the-people voice. "While your people were living it up in those castles, mine were scratching in the dirt. Do you feel no shame at twenty generations of shiny leather boots, all polished with the sweat of my ancestors?" His reply was that twenty generation of experience had shown beeswax to give a better shine to boots than the sweat of smelly peasants. He had a point. But, had I taken the trouble to bore him with the facts of my own ancestry, he might have had a better point.
In or about 1909, one of my great grandmothers was a parlour maid in a big house in Donegal. She seems to have been a pretty girl -- or at least an available girl. The young man of the house took a fancy to her, and things took their usual Catherine Cookson course. As soon as her belly grew too big to be disguised, the young man's father kicked her out. What happened next is one among many blank entries in my family tree. But the mists clear in the early 1930s, when her son took a job as a coal miner in Kent. He was something of a trouble-maker there, and was soon in search of new employment. He found this as a sailor on one of the Channel ferries, where his own fancy settled on the daughter of the manager of the rope-making factory in Chatham Dockyard. Their romance proceeded through a drink-sodden party somewhere between Ramsgate and Dieppe, where the captain presided over a grossly invalid marriage ceremony, followed, just under nine months later, by a hurried shuffle through the Chatham Registry Office. From this emerged my mother, followed in due course by me.
Now, when she explained all this to me, my grandmother took an aggrieved view of her late husband's origins. Never trust the upper classes, she assured me -- they were all wicked people. If she may have been right, I have no reasonable choice but to take a more balanced view of the matter. It was my great grandmother who was got into trouble, and, for all I can tell, was kicked out into the winter snow. All the same, it was my great grandfather who got her into trouble, and my great-great grandfather who kicked her into the snow. I have no more reason to feel bitter about how that girl was treated than I have to exult in the pleasure that young man of the house took in her, or to join in the self-righteous curses his father heaped on her. For all the lawyers and priests may disagree, blood is indifferent to what side of the blanket it flows.
I can go further. That young servant girl may have been the pure-bred descendant of blameless victims going back all the way to when they first tried standing on two legs. But I strongly doubt that. Given full knowledge, I am sure I could point to generation after generation of fruitful couplings with landlords and priests and army officers. My friend can show a complete family tree going back to the Conquest and beyond, and can plausibly deny that any of his female ancestors so much as looked at a serf. Outside his exalted order, the bloodlines are more complex.
For the past three centuries, first in England, then elsewhere, we have grown used to the idea that social mobility is on the whole upwards. Those of us who take the trouble to dig through the records can find ancestors in much humbler circumstances than our own. From this, the idea has emerged that social mobility has always been upwards, and therefore, that, unless our own immediate ancestors did well enough to rise into the higher classes, those of us in the humbler classes can look back with masochistic resentment on centuries and millennia of oppression by their ancestors of our ancestors. The conversation with which I began this piece was not serious on either side. Add in the element of race, however, and it is now the source of much social and economic bitterness -- a source both false and dangerous to the improvement that mankind has enjoyed for the past three centuries.
Rather than upward, most social mobility in the past was downward. Obviously, if you see a mediaeval king who had five surviving sons, only one of them could ordinarily become the next king. The other four would join the senior nobility. But, in those countries where titles and property descended to the eldest son, these would often have more sons than could inherit their fathers' status. These in turn would move down a rank. The surplus children of the nobility would fall into the gentry. Their surplus would join the professions. So it would continue downwards. Looking at the bottom of society, the workers on the land might be more fecund than their betters, but had the least salubrious lives, and the least means of getting through the periodic crises of pre-modern societies. Therefore, the less fortunate descendants of those at the top would eventually find themselves at the bottom. That is without the irregular unions I have mentioned that could short-circuit the downward genetic drift. Therefore, the poorest he that ever was in England has always, and often in a significant sense, been the progeny of the greatest he.
This is the case too for the Mediterranean world, where I also have ancestry. I will not deny that some of my ancestors must have been slaves or the more or less unfree lower classes of the Roman Empire. But slaves notoriously did not reproduce, which is one of the causes of those endless wars of conquest that filled the slave markets of the Empire. The free poor were the first and heaviest victims of the plagues and famines that swept the Empire from the second century onward. If I were able to trace that side of my blood back far enough, it would terminate more than anywhere else in the senatorial or equestrian classes, whose own families had always been at or near the top of their societies. I suppose that justifies, for anyone who wants a justification, my obsession with the Ancient World. When I read Livy and Herodotus, I am not reading the equivalent of some modern court circular, about the doings of the betters and therefore the oppressors of those who actually begot me: I am reading about my own most probable ancestors. And if I or you were to go back far enough, we would all find ourselves descended from those horrid raiders on horseback, usually with slanted eyes and scars carved on their faces -- Indo-European raiders, Huns, Avars, Mongols -- who were the continual parasites on every ancient settlement -- men who, having murdered their competitors, filled the genepool with their own seed.
This much is plain for England and for the Eurasian landmass in general. But, making such changes as may be obvious -- but that, in a country as unfree as England now is, it may not be convenient to spell out in detail -- the same has been true in other parts of the world. Therefore, every age has had a class of oppressors and of oppressed. But these have never been separate bloodlines. The oppressed have always been the less fortunate cousins of the oppressors.
The cult of hereditary victimhood in which our society now wallows is a sham. All of us -- my noble friend excepted, or excepted so far back as he can trace -- can point to ancestors who suffered ill-treatment. But it is a selective tracing of family trees if we choose to focus on those and not on the other ancestors who themselves treated others badly. Let there be full knowledge of our family trees, and we are all the progeny of rapists, of slave-owners, and of mass-murderers. We owe each other nothing today -- not financial compensation, nor so much as an apology. The most we owe is a resolution to ourselves and each other not to behave in the future as our ancestors behaved in the past.
I suffer from a condition called Dupuytren's contracture. You can look this up for yourself -- it is more a nuisance than a danger. It is most likely that I take this from the Vikings who invaded and made trouble in England between the eighth and the eleventh centuries. At least one of my ancestors on that side must have gone about murdering monks and burning churches and raping and impregnating nuns. That and the intervening thousand years are somewhat more than another blank entry in my family tree. But the generality of descent is probable enough. One of those wicked ancestors may even have assisted in a "blood eagle execution." He would have taken a prisoner from one of his raids -- a young man like himself -- and hacked his ribs away from the spine, and pulled out the bones and skin and guts to form a semblance of wings. He would then have danced to the sound of dying screams and got drunk afterwards -- assuming he was sober at the time. Do I look at the palm of my left hand and feel bad about that? If you want to hold your breath while waiting for an answer, I hope you have powerful lungs.
As a statement about societies this is a reasonable argument. The most authoritarian regime of recent times was Communism and it was certainly atheistic. But are individual atheists automatically more supportive of authority? As a libertarian and an atheist I would have to say No.
There is certainly not a 1-to-1 correspondence between atheism and personal authoritarianism but there would appear to be some connection. Leftists are great promoters of government control of most things and Leftists are often atheistic. So faith would appear to be some protection against government authoritarianism
On the other hand, religion can be very authoritarian. Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses (etc.) demand a lot of their followers -- and get obedience to it
Perhaps it all boils down to what authority you respect, as my research into political authoritarianism suggested. Left and Right simply respect different authorities. See here and here
Conservative Christian author and radio host Eric Metaxas has written several best-selling biographies, including one about the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxas released another book not long ago with the provocative title Is Atheism Dead?. The title was clearly intended as a nod to the 1966 Time Magazine title "Is God Dead?"
Metaxas argues that recent scientific research and historic archeological discoveries have served only to further point to God's existence and against the atheist claim of there being no compelling evidence for God.
So, while Metaxas makes his impressive case that science is indeed favorable to theism rather than opposed to it, the answer to his question as to whether atheism is dead has long been answered. And that answer is "no."
In fact, the Bible itself says as much. In the first chapter of the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul points out that the truth of God's existence and power has been made plain to all humanity in creation (Rom. 1:19-21). However, humans in their state of sinful rebellion actively work to suppress this truth. God, therefore, gives them over to their foolish thinking and as a result they become effectively blind to Him. Practically speaking they become atheists, rejecting any evidence for God that is built into the fabric of creation everywhere as merely a convent coincident but with no greater reality behind it.
There have been times throughout history where atheism has ebbed and flowed. One of those times when it ebbed was during the birth of this nation, as America's founders, though not all Christians, still recognized the fact that only a God-believing people could be motivated to uphold the virtues necessary for a free society. Logically, less government is needed when everyone is careful to do the right thing by their neighbor. A free people that is law-abiding doesn't need a big controlling government.
However, as Metaxas observes, "When we become less active in governing ourselves we look to the government for solutions. Government thereby grows and our abilities to govern ourselves quickly atrophy." When atheism grows, so does authoritarian government. If people don't recognize that our Creator God is watching their every action and thought, and that He will hold every individual to account for not only their actions, but their very words and thoughts, then immorality and lawlessness grows.
A truly free people are those who are held by a personal virtue that is based upon a knowledge of God. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people," said John Adams. "It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Why is the Globe theatre making a play about Joan of Arc non-binary?
Julie Bindel
Feminists tend to be fascinated with the story of Joan of Arc. She was irreverent, impertinent, way more intelligent than her enemies, and was true to herself and her beliefs right to the end.
War hero and religious martyr, Joan has been described as 'Jesus with a sword'. A 16-year-old peasant girl who decided to take on an entire army is a female to admire and hold up as a role model. But it would seem that we have to make allowances for an 'intersectional' and 'inclusive' approach and consider whether Joan was female after all.
A tweet from Shakespeare's Globe theatre explained: 'Our new play I, Joan shows Joan as a legendary leader who uses the pronouns 'they/them'. We are not the first to present Joan in this way, and we will not be the last. We can't wait to share this production with everyone and discover this cultural icon.'
Why the title of the play was not changed to I, John I do not know. Surely, Joan is not androgynous enough?
As feminist writer Claire Heuchan pointed out on social media, arguing that Joan of Arc was not a woman is similar logic used by the church to burn her alive at the stake: the idea that wearing men's clothes, military acumen, leadership and political authority are skills belonging to men.
Joan was all the more impressive and courageous because she was a woman. For many little girls growing up in a male-dominated, sexist society with male historical figures, both real and fictional, dominating the school curriculum and libraries, Joan existed as an exhilarating possibility about what one young girl could do against ranks of powerful men. Rewriting her as not female and presenting it as progress is deeply offensive and totally ridiculous.
Joan was charged with the crime of heresy, as have those of us that speak out against transgender orthodoxy, but we refuse the labels of TERF, bigot and fascist, just as Joan refused to surrender. She took on an entire army, but so do feminists when we resist the patriarchal boot.
I remember reading about Joan in a book about brave women in history, when I first became a feminist. There were few female figures that made it into literature and were it not for feminist historians there would be even fewer.
Playwright and directors have long swapped the sex of famous historical characters and mixed it up a bit. This can work brilliantly to make the point, often by feminist directors, that not all historical heroes were male. But unfortunately, the demand that we all capitulate to extreme trans ideology has made it impossible for Joan being re-represented as non-binary to be anything but the erasure of women's achievements.
With swathes of young women being enabled to opt out of puberty, as we have seen with the emerging medical scandal at the Tavistock and elsewhere, it is even more important that females are accepted and celebrated.
Joan has long been a feminist icon, and the suffragette movement used her image on some of their posters. She lived in the 15th century when sex was the defining characteristic, when women had little or no rights, freedom, or choice. This is what made Joan extraordinary -- she was female and challenged the constraints placed on women. The idea that a dead historical figure can be portrayed as though she existed as a different gender identity is quite unbelievable.
The whole point of Joan is that she was a woman in a man's world. When the English held her as a prisoner and tried to prove she was a religious heretic they failed to find anything she had done that could justify her execution. The only heinous crime she was found guilty of was that she had dressed as a man. They said that was enough to deserve death and pronounced her guilty. When a woman is killed because she has dared to transgress rules and laws about how we should dress and act, as decided by men, that makes her a feminist martyr, not a they/them.
The most powerful force in British politics is the veto
England is in the grip of its most widespread drought in 20 years. Water companies are implementing hosepipe bans. Half the country's potato crop is expected to fail. Photographs of reservoirs show them drained, dry banks open to the sky. Another heatwave is here, bringing little prospect of imminent relief.
Britain hasn't built a reservoir since 1991. The population has grown. Hot weather has become more frequent. Water use has become more strained. The barriers to actually doing something about it remain in place. Take Layla Moran, Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West. As late as March, she was doing the media rounds vigorously opposing the construction of a new reservoir in Abingdon; it would be unsightly, the population projections might be wrong, she said. Something needed to be done for 'our water supply'. Just not this. Her efforts to block it even extended to securing a parliamentary debate.
The most powerful force in British politics is the veto. Britain is a country carefully constructed on a system of checks and balances. Wherever there is a need for economic development, a need for housing, a need for infrastructure, and a risk that this need might overcome local objections in the service of the national interest, there is a check: planning laws; and a balance in the form of judicial review. The end result of this vetocracy is stasis.
People wield these vetoes in the happy expectation that the government will bail them out if they are ever in danger of facing the consequences of their own actions, trucking in bottled water to meet their demand. The Abingdon reservoir's construction is meant to meet a potential supply shortfall in 2040 of 1.1 billion litres a day. Local residents would instead prefer 'the transfer of water from other parts of the country'. In other words, they want the benefits of infrastructure, but not the costs.
This isn't exactly surprising, but it doesn't mean we should indulge it. Water is heavy and difficult to transport; the longest transfers in England are around 120km from source to tap, and there is no national water grid. Unlike electricity, where everybody can be a Nimby (not-in-my-back-yard) in the confident but inaccurate expectation that there'll be an offshore wind farm somewhere to pick up the slack, water infrastructure needs to be relatively local.
We've known we need new reservoirs for a long time. The 2008 water strategy emphasised the need to 'speed up the process of planning permissions for reservoir development'. We still haven't built new sources of supply. Even when the layers of Nimby objections are overcome, there are further layers of vetocracy at Ofwat. When Bristol Water won permission to build a £100m reservoir in 2014, no budget was allocated to its construction in Ofwat's 'final determination'. Nothing has been built since, although Ofwat would later list the plan as a possible solution for future water supply.
At times it feels like every problem in Britain is neglected due to the government's terror that someone, somewhere, will be upset by change. The layers of vetocracy are built in to prevent the headlines that would result. We can't build housing because of vetoes. We can't build lab space because of vetoes. Even something as basic and essential as making sure water comes out when we turn on the taps can be vetoed, because we wouldn't want an unsightly reservoir over the road, or for a village to put up with construction vehicles rumbling by.
If it's any consolation when you're freezing this winter, these vetoes have also made sure that our electricity supply is as insecure and strained as it can possibly be. When the Business Secretary granted permission to build one of the world's largest offshore windfarms -- the type of plan meant to shut Nimby objections up -- a single man who lives nearby brought a legal challenge complaining that the project would affect the view of the sea. The High Court then quashed the planning permission.
This attitude might just pass muster if nothing else ever changed: no people were born, no people moved to Britain, the climate remained stable, and nobody had any desire to ever be financially better off. But none of these things are true, so instead we end up bursting at the seams with infrastructure built for a population from the past.
Monday's shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump's magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.
Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: "outrageous," "unprecedented," a "crossing of the Rubicon" moment. Regrettably, all of that is true.
The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival -- especially when that rival is the head of state's predecessor and perhaps likely future opponent -- is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a Third World country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin's alleged quip, "a republic, if you can keep it."
America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East German Stasi -- and barely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boot.
Attorney General Merrick Garland's Thursday press conference, remarkably defensive and defiant in tone, did not dispel any concerns or assuage any critics. (Those critics, incidentally, include even former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.)
The scuttlebutt is that Trump was hoarding deeply secretive, classified information deep in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the back-and-forth between the National Archives and Trump's personal legal team surrounding the boxes of material, entirely routine for an ex-president when it comes to things like establishing a presidential library, was by all accounts unfolding amicably: A subpoena was issued this spring, Trump's lawyers were cooperative, and archivists had already recalled 15 boxes earlier this year.
Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act isn't even a criminal statute, and probable cause for the violation of a criminal statute is the necessary precondition for a magistrate to sign off on a search warrant.
As the case may be, the magistrate who signed off on this particular warrant, Bruce Reinhart, is a Jeffrey Epstein-connected ex-defense attorney who just so happened to donate thousands of dollars in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Go figure.
Many of the Biden regime's apologists are out in full force, suggesting that the raid was necessary because Trump was obstructing the return of existentially vital documents. This is demonstrably specious.
First, whatever documents Trump may have had in his private Mar-a-Lago possession, there was absolutely nothing there that is new to Biden, Garland, and FBI Director Christopher Wray; Trump has been out of office for nearly 19 months, by now.
Second, as a former president, Trump had unilateral, plenary authority to declassify any document that he wanted to declassify -- period. Without seeing the specific search warrant, then, it is impossible to know whether the documents the feds sought had already been declassified.
Third, all ex-presidents receive various taxpayer-funded accoutrements, among them a staff with security clearances and secure facilities for the maintenance of classified records. It simply beggars belief that any document at Mar-a-Lago was at risk of falling into the wrong hands.
The FBI, at this point, is also undeserving of any benefit of the doubt.
We are now two years after former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty for lying to a court to obtain a FISA warrant against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The FBI under Wray's predecessor, James Comey, of course, was complicit in the propagation of the bogus "Steele dossier" and the general Russia-collusion hoax, whose raison d'etre was solely to delegitimize Trump's presidency from the outset.
That would be the same Comey, incidentally, who let 2016 Trump challenger Hillary Clinton off the hook for -- you guessed it -- storing reams of classified documents on an unsecured personal server on the grounds that she merely exhibited "extreme carelessness."
Most recently, the FBI disgraced itself during the controversy surrounding the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer -- a plot that bears all the markings of a nefarious deep state entrapment scheme.
Similar entrapment speculation remains about the role Ray Epps played during the Jan. 6, 2021, jamboree at the U.S. Capitol, although one is usually lambasted as a "conspiracy theorist" for this entirely reasonable inference.
There are three primary conclusions to draw from Monday's unprecedented raid -- an epochal moment in the history of American law enforcement, opening up a Pandora's box that will never be put back into place.
First, it seems that Trump's fundraising and support metrics have only increased due to his perceived martyrdom, thus bolstering his prospects in his likely-impending 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Since this "rally around the flag" effect was so easily foreseeable, it seems likely that this was a factor in Garland's decision to approve the raid. The regime seems to think that, since it defeated Trump in 2020, it can do so again in 2024.
The other two conclusions are even more nefarious.
The second conclusion to draw is that every alarm conservatives have sounded over the past few years about the spiraling out of control of America's two-tier system of justice has now been vindicated.
The Biden regime is completely unapologetic about its targeting of political opponents -- just ask Peter Navarro, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Steve Bannon, or even Project Veritas' James O'Keefe.
The imperative for conservatives is to respond not merely by tsk-tsking but by recognizing "what time it is" in this ailing, late-stage republic and to demonstrate a willingness to counter the left's brazen assaults with our own willingness to prudentially engage in escalatory, tit-for-tat, mutually assured destruction tactics. Sometimes, the only way out is through.
The third and final conclusion is the most terrifying: The Biden regime has demonstrated its willingness, and indeed its eagerness, to take America to hitherto unprecedented depths of depravity -- and it has done so for the very simple reason that it can. For this was an act of power qua power -- an act of public humiliation intended to make a political opponent bend the knee once and for all before The Regime.
There are a lot of such songs and they are very popular. Best known is perhaps Harry Belafonte singing "Jamaica Farewell", or Sarah Brightman & Andrea Bocelli singing "Time To Say Goodbye". And Americans will probably know Glenn Campbell singing "Galveston". They are undoubtedly very good and catchy sentimental songs
Video links for those three songs are:
But I can't see that such songs are romantic. They are more foolish than anything else. Truly romantic behaviour would surely be to make good and certain that the lady does NOT slip from your grip. As someone who has been married four times, I think I can say that I practice what I preach. And I still have in my life a lady who looks good with her clothes off. Her conversation is high-level too. Last night her topics included both Spinoza and Chekhov. I am glad to have "caught" her. Farewells are for losers
The best of the well-known romantic songs to my thinking is "My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose" by Robert Burns. A good version sung by Kenneth McKellar here:
There is a "Farewell" element in it but the point of the song is that the singer is coming back, not abandoning the woman.
My favorite romantic song is, perhaps regrettably, in German: "Als geblüht der Kirschenbaum". There is no good version of it online but there is below a rather overacted verson by a very strangely-dressed lady. Her singing is good, however, and its expression tracks the words
It's undoubtedy one of the great love songs of all time. In the song, the lady says she thought her husband looked beautiful when she first met him and also behaved beautifully on their wedding night.
The point of the song in the operetta it comes from is that she has just been informed of apparent infidelity by her husband. She comments that it could not be so -- because she remembers him in their early life as being beautiful in both looks and behaviour. And her faith is of course eventually justified. Operetta has good endings.
Someone should do a singable translation of it. Here are the words with my rough translation:
Als geblueht der Kirschenbaum,
As the cherry tree was blossoming
Ging ich zum Walde wie im Traum;
I walked to the woods as in a dream
An des Brunnens kuehlen Rand,
At the cool edge of the fountain
Wo hell die weisse Birke stand.
Where brightly the white beech stood
An dem blauen Himmelsbogen
Under the blue bow of the sky
Ging der Mond, die Sterne zogen
The moon came out and the stars shone
Einen Reiter hoert' ich jagen
I heard a horseman hunting
Und mein Herz hub an zu schlagen
And my heart gave a leap
Denn er hielt sein Roesslein an
When he reined in his dear horse
Ach ja, er war ein schoener, ein schoener Mann!
Oh yes. He was a beautiful, beautiful man
Still verklang der Hochzeit Pracht
The wedding bells no longer rang
Und von den Bergen stieg die Nacht
And night was climbing up the mountains
Bang trat ich ins Brautgemach
I anxiously entered the bridal chamber
Und leise, leise schlich er nach!
And softly, softly he followed me
Draussen fielen Bluetenflocken
Outside flower petals fell
Drin der Kranz von meinen Locken
Inside the garland from my hair
Heimlich fluestend half der Freier
Softly whispering my suitor helped me
Mir zu loesen Band und Schleier
To take off my ribbons and veil
Sah dabei mich zaertlich an
Looking at me so tenderly
Ach, er war doch ein schoener, schoener Mann!
Oh! He certainly was a beautiful, beautiful man
************************************************
America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system
There are some real differences underlying caste differences but the use of caste as a barrier to upward mobility is obnoxious
Apple, the world's biggest listed company, updated its general employee conduct policy about two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste, which it added alongside existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry.
The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism.
The update came after the tech sector - which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers - received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.
Cisco, which denies wrongdoing, says an internal probe found no evidence of discrimination and that some of the allegations are baseless because caste is not a legally "protected class" in California. This month an appeals panel rejected the networking company's bid to push the case to private arbitration, meaning a public court case could come as early as next year.
The dispute - the first U.S. employment lawsuit about alleged casteism - has forced Big Tech to confront a millennia-old hierarchy where Indians' social position has been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin "priestly" class to the Dalits, shunned as "untouchables" and consigned to menial labor.
Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation - and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism.
Their efforts have produced patchy results, according to a Reuters review of policy across the U.S. industry, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers from India.
"I am not surprised that the policies would be inconsistent because that's almost what you would expect when the law is not clear," said Kevin Brown, a University of South Carolina law professor studying caste issues, citing uncertainty among executives over whether caste would ultimately make it into U.S. statutes.
"I could imagine that parts of ... (an) organization are saying this makes sense, and other parts are saying we don't think taking a stance makes sense."
Apple's main internal policy on workplace conduct, which was seen by Reuters, added reference to caste in the equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment sections after September 2020.
Apple confirmed that it "updated language a couple of years ago to reinforce that we prohibit discrimination or harassment based on caste." It added that training provided to staff also explicitly mentions caste.
"Our teams assess our policies, training, processes and resources on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are comprehensive," it said. "We have a diverse and global team, and are proud that our policies and actions reflect that."
Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale.
IBM's only training that mentions caste is for managers in India, the company added.
Several companies do not specifically reference caste in their main global policy, including Amazon, Dell, Facebook owner Meta, Microsoft and Google. Reuters reviewed each of the policies, some of which are only published internally to employees.
The companies all told Reuters that they have zero tolerance for caste prejudice and, apart from Meta which did not elaborate, said such bias would fall under existing bans on discrimination by categories such as ancestry and national origin policy.
Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss appears to recognise or acknowledge the looming problems Britain faces, both in the short and the long term. Analysts predict that this winter the energy price cap will hit £4,400. For the average household, this will represent 14 per cent of their post-tax income. As an isolated threat, that would mean deep discomfort for many households. Combined with other price rises and increasing interest rates, it will mean destitution. Government will have to act to prevent this, yet everything promised so far is lacklustre.
The grants already in place will cover less than 10 per cent of the cap limit. Abolishing VAT on domestic fuel would knock another 200 quid or so off, while removing the green levy would drop it by £155. It's piecemeal help in the face of a massive problem and failing to address this now will only mean more hurried help when the bills start dropping on doorsteps.
This might be forgivable if that were the only issue where the candidates seemed oblivious. But everywhere you look, the country faces massive challenges that the governing party has no answer to. Many have written at length about the Tory failure to tackle the housing crisis. I won't repeat their arguments, save to say that throughout the leadership contest there has been no serious attempt to look at housing. Rishi Sunak has swung behind defending the greenbelt, whilst Liz Truss has prevaricated and developed an obsession with Whitehall's current 'Soviet style' housing targets. But as anyone who has managed key performance indicators will tell you, if there is no target for something, the target is zero.
Beyond this, Britain looks forward to running out of water and electricity. Infrastructure projects that could have alleviated these problems have been bandied around and frustrated for decades, and little can be done to turn this around on short notice. Yet equally, there is limited planning now for the threats in future decades. They say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second-best time is today. In Britain, the second-best time to begin is after three preliminary reports, two judicial reviews and a general election. The best time is never.
Even in foreign and military policy, the natural home of the Conservative politician, things look bleak. Whilst the country has performed well in arming Ukraine, its own defence commitments have been mealy mouthed. Promised spending rises have been undermined by inflation and clever accounting, while procurement remains scandalously wasteful -- the UK eliminates its own tanks more efficiently than its Javelin missiles deal with Russian ones. In a fit of beautiful bureaucracy, a chunk of our defence spending goes on consultants planning the next round of cuts and another chunk on how to cope with the last ones.
This isn't, however, meant to be a mere catalogue of the UK's woes. Instead, these issues are served up to highlight what is arguably the most pervasive and surprising problem the Tory party faces: that it doesn't care about politics.
That is not to say that the party doesn't care about winning elections. It remains ruthlessly committed to that and its record is clear. Even after the crashing scandals of the Johnson era, the incoming PM has a fighting chance of securing the next election, leaving the Tories in government for nearly 20 years. The problem is that the party no longer understands why or to what end they wield such power.
Many on the left would be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative party is. There is currently no theory in conservative politics. I suspect no more than a handful of Tory MPs have ever read Burke or Hayek, unless they cropped up on a PPE reading list. They will be far more familiar with Isabel Oakeshott than Michael.
Factionalism within the party is driven far more by aesthetics than by ideology. One (former) MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for a safe seat, he was told 'It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection'. Many MPs come to parliament without any real belief other than a view that 'good things are good, and we should do more of them, and bad things are bad'. I've met less than half a dozen mainstream Tories who could be classed as ideologues.
At its best, this makes the party flexible and pragmatic, able to pivot around the issues of the day. At its worst (and it really seems to be falling into the worst now) it becomes listless, incapable and slightly baffled by the power it holds. It's the cat that has finally caught the laser pointer.
Rather than principles or goals, the Tory party today lives for day-to-day reactions to the things that catch its eye. Most MPs have no understanding of economics, but instead repeat half-remembered maxims about lower taxes (we are, it seems, forever to the right of the Laffer curve), whilst at the same time celebrating the latest boondoggle that happens to land in their constituency. In the same vein, you see the Tory MPs who have started to get their head around the housing crisis call for more housebuilding everywhere except where it threatens some historic carpark or 'sacred' waste site on their patch. They will tweet almost back-to-back about the unaffordability of homes and their objection to any new development.
This track record of the current government is testament to this. Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, as close to total control of the British state as you can have, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. It is bizarre to see left wing commentators talk of the 'rise of the far right' or the democratic backsliding associated with post 2019 Conservatism, when those I know on the right laugh darkly at the impotence of the government.
A government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. A government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. A government that complains about 'woke-culture' has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.
The Tory party is not driven by some grand policy agenda, but simply grasping at shiny objects. It passes repetitive, unnecessary and ultimately inoffensive laws that criminalise things that are already illegal -- like dog theft or assaults on emergency workers. Or else spends its time complaining that the world, the civil service and the blob is against it. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose, now it campaigns and governs in tweets.
Even on its beloved Brexit, the Conservative party tries to stoke an ongoing threat that it might be undone or revoked or strangled at birth rather than engage with the realities of leaving the EU. With the simple in and out completed, there is no clue whether Britain's future is Singapore on Thames or shoring up the dying embers of Red Wall industries. Instead, it jumps to silly-season headlines on imperial measures and crowns on pint glasses.
There is ultimately an emptiness at the heart of the current Conservative party. Its politics and principles are skin deep and conflicted. It is apparent in almost everything it does, from Remainer Liz Truss becoming the 'Brexit candidate' for leadership to the pious Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the serial liar and philanderer Boris Johnson to the hilt, or the Tory MPs who claim to be cost conscious whilst vetoing the cheapest way to repair the Palace of Westminster because they like being surrounded by old oak and stone. Everything is an image; everything is a meme.
There is an almost complete absence of policy innovation. The party grasps around for yesterday's answers to yesterday's problems, copying the homework of Thatcher, a leader who has been out of power for 30 years and dead for ten. It's why the party recycles so much from policy interns and fails to come up with anything equal to the challenges we face. It does not even propose simple answers for complex problems -- just no answers beyond the triple lock and ever rising house prices.
It is not that the Conservative party is deliberately and mindfully pursuing ends inimical to British interests. Tory MPs do, mostly, want a prosperous and safe country. They've just lost any sense of what that means beyond platitudes, or how to engage with the challenges that stand in our way. The party would rather hide behind the curtain, pulling at levers that aren't attached to anything.
I'm often amazed at the image the popular left has in this country of a scheming, conniving Conservative party, like the one it alleges is running down the NHS to sell it off to private interests. The reality is far scarier.
In a world where the British economy is stagnating and the population is ageing, there is no way to square the circle without raising taxes or reducing services. The Conservative party is afraid to do either, so lets the problem spiral. Those that do foresee the problems look to the magic cure of 'efficiency savings', promised in the same way I promise that next summer I will have a six pack: lacking both a concrete plan to do it, and the discipline to implement it.
Instead, all the party can do is say things that appeal to the voters who keep backing it -- generally older, wealthier suburban dwellers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leadership contest. This weekend, Twitter was ablaze with shock when Rishi Sunak talked about cutting degrees that don't lead to good jobs. Many on the left took this as an attack on the university sector, or even part of a grand plan to exclude the working classes from the humanities.
In truth, it is neither. It is Sunak appealing to an electorate who came of age when 10 per cent of the population went to university and economic growth carried them to prosperity, who now see their grandchildren laden with debt, unable to buy a home. It's the 'common sense' of the bloke at the end of the Conservative Club bar, nothing more than a trope. It's not something that will ever seriously happen.
Liz Truss's plan for every child with three As to be offered an Oxbridge interview is similar politicking. It pays no heed to (i) the burden this places on the university (ii) that for many reasons such a person might not want to go to Oxbridge or (iii) that the highest A-level grade has been A* since 2010. It ignores many of the challenges of widening access, and in particular how universities like LSE, UCL and Imperial, which have fewer admissions resources per student and make more paper-based decisions, can bias against poorer children.
There are of dozens of announcements like these from the candidates -- the theme remains the same. Tory MPs and Tory leaders are saying what they think their voters want to hear. But there is no implementation, no plan for adverse consequences, and no underpinning logic or principle. They are throwing bricks through windows with no notes attached.
It is much like those panic filled cockpits. With an impending crisis, Tory leaders have lost sight of what levers they hold and what they can do. They've lost sight of the mission they need to fulfil as the altitude warnings flash. The Conservative party has fallen into a fundamental problem -- it is unwilling and unable to address the needs of the day.
Many people reading this will disagree about what those solutions might look like. I am, after all, firmly rooted in the right of centre. But when I look at my own (nominal) party, it is hard not to feel disappointed at the lack of any action. From the housing crisis to the stagnating economy, to law and order, to the health service, there are solutions out there -- yet the Conservative party has given up on seeking them, seduced instead by the 24 hour news cycle, the focus group and the Twitter grifters. Neither leadership candidate offers much hope. Sunak looks like he will run the country like a private equity project, cutting any expense he can and damn the consequences, whilst Truss will run it like a village fete, with boundless enthusiasm and harking back to the old hits.
Whoever wins in September, the party will be stuck. Even in power it remains incapable of generating and delivering credible policies, incapable of using its resources to tackle the challenges ahead. In an uncertain world it struggles to decide what it wants to do, and struggles to implement the few ideas it has. The party has become a machine for garnering headlines and votes but is now starting to stall. Insulated by a media which also focuses on the day-to-day rigmarole of politics as soap opera, our leaders are missing the signs of short- and long-term crisis which will soon hit. They are failing to adapt, failing to plan. Disaster is coming.
Justin Welby, nominal head of the Anglican communion, is undoubtedly on board with environmentalism. He made this clear in a keynote speech on Sunday at the Lambeth Conference. Unfortunately, if you expected him to put the religious argument for environmentalism at the forefront of his speech, you would be disappointed. His approach was rather different. It was all a matter, he said, of an unjust society and the need to deal with it. The church's function was, we were told, to 'seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.' On the environment this came down, broadly, to differences in wealth and other inequalities. Our current environmental woes are the fault of rich countries, who he said had 'declared war on God's creation' in the past and now continued, while they dumped refuse in the oceans, to tell poor nations not to use carbon generating fuels and discover new paths in order to enable the rich to remain rich. His answer? Recognise a climate emergency and insist on urgent action on it, especially in Britain and the west.
This sounds good, and certainly few disagree that as far as possible we must all do our bit to limit global warming. But if you dig below the surface, any reader, and certainly any worshipper, should perhaps be a little sceptical.
For one thing, Welby is quietly seeking to run together two ideas -- a radical egalitarian attack on 'unjust structures' and environmental activism -- as if they were much the same, and as if promoting the former was the key to the latter. But this is not necessarily so.
Take the implication that climate action is the responsibility of rich countries emitting more than their fair share of pollution with poor ones continuing to emit less. This statement is partly true. But it is a very partial truth. Rich countries are not all at the top of the CO2 league, nor poor countries all at the bottom. In 2019, for example, the UK ranked roughly forty-first in consumption-based emissions per capita: below Botswana, Lithuania, Iran, Slovakia, Russia and Oceania, and above rich France and seriously wealthy Sweden. It is also worth noting that rich countries in general do more by way of legislation and government initiatives effectively to reduce emissions. In the 20 years to 2019 the US, the EU and the UK all appreciably reduced their emissions, while China, India and Brazil increased their emissions and are likely to continue to do so. In this instance, you can have redistribution between rich and poor, or you can have environmental improvement which benefits everyone. It is hard to see how you can have both at the same time.
Secondly, the veiled suggestion that Britain is a rich country and that its people must therefore confess their guilt and put up with a change to their lifestyle runs into a further problem. For all Welby's demands to dismantle unequal social structures, this is a call for measures that will disproportionately impact the poor. At a pinch the urban middle class can rip out gas boilers and invest in green heating; the church too will no doubt grit its teeth and divert funds that might otherwise have gone to pay for more priests to altering clergy housing (and bishops' palaces) in good green fashion. But suggest to a person in Dartford, Dudley or Darlington who is at present barely scraping by with difficulty that they must give up a heating system they know and like in favour of storage radiators or temperamental and expensive heat pumps, and you will get a dusty answer. Indeed, it's hard to think of anything better calculated to repress whatever goodwill the church still retains in less prosperous areas than the kind of posturing we saw at Lambeth.
But all this still leaves out the biggest problem with Welby's speech. In describing the environmental issue as one of economic and global inequality and the need to intervene for social change, it's not easy to see anything that is particularly Christian about the Archbishop's message. Apart from a rather wooden reference to 1 Colossians about Jesus having reconciled himself to 'all things', rather than just all people, Welby's environmentalism could very plausibly have come from a Liberal Democrat politician, or for that matter (especially with the mention of unjust structures) a postmodernist professor.
This point matters. As Edward Norman pointed out in his 1979 Reith lectures on Christianity and the World Order, much to the fury of liberation theologians and other fashionable ecclesiastics, a church turns from arguments based on the kingdom of heaven to those founded on secular political ideas at its peril. If archbishops talk in this way, substantial numbers of their flock, and certainly any potential converts, will undoubtedly begin to wonder whether it's necessary to bring God into the equation at all. And, in a sense, who can blame them if they do?
Delayed gratification is just not my style, and that's OK
The story below is one womnan's story of how generalized her inability to delay gratification is. I found much the same in my research. I found that there is a consisent tendency to delay or not delay gratification. It is not a wholly consisent tendency. Some alleged indices of delay of gratification do not correlate with others so we have to be careful which index we use if we want to show a consistent tendency. But the consistent tendency does exist.
Parenthetically, I must say I share the lady's difficulties with toast
I was standing in my kitchen impatiently waiting for my toast to pop up. It had been in there for hours, and I was hungry.
"It's been less than a minute!" my partner said. "Be patient!"
I was not patient. I hovered irritably for another few seconds before pushing the button and retrieving my toast.
"Wow," my partner said. "You really are a one-marshmallow person."
"Marshmallow shmarshmallow," I told him, smothering my warm bread in butter and Vegemite and cramming it into my mouth.
Still, I knew what he meant. In 1972, psychologists at Stanford University gave groups of four-year-olds the choice of eating one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows later, to test their ability to delay gratification. I was not included in the study, but if I had been, I'd definitely have eaten the one marshmallow straight away. I am genetically incapable of waiting for anything. Two marshmallows might be better than one, but waiting for a marshmallow is far worse.
I know that being able to delay gratification is an important life skill, but it is a skill I have never mastered. Whenever I want anything, whether it is a marshmallow or an answer, it feels exceptionally urgent. I'm unsettled and agitated until the marshmallow is in my mouth, or the question answered.
The upside is that I get my needs met pretty quickly. The downside is that I make rushed decisions, and frequently annoy other people.
"Couldn't this have waited until morning?" Mum will ask tiredly when I call her late at night to ask a pressing question. And yes, I probably could have waited until morning to ask whether my old bedspread is still in storage, or what her plans are for the holidays, but then I would have been thinking about it all night. It is so much easier to just get it done now.
"Why didn't you wait for your appointment?" my hairdresser will ask, shaking her head as she contemplates my uneven fringe. I wanted to wait, I really did, but my hair was too long, and the scissors were in my bathroom, and a week felt like an eternity.
I am genetically incapable of waiting for anything. Two marshmallows might be better than one, but waiting for a marshmallow is far worse.
I am fascinated and awed by people who calmly wait for marshmallows. My elder daughter, for example, will realise she needs a new pair of shoes, and not buy them for weeks, or even months. She will think, "No biggie, I'll get them later," and park the desire in the back of her mind.
This is sensible and mature but it is not how my brain functions. My brain thinks, "I need a new pair of shoes." Within minutes I am online, browsing through catalogues until I find a pair that will suffice. Often, I realise down the track that I would have found a better pair had I taken my time, but that is the price I must pay to eat my marshmallow now.
I have tried over the years to learn to delay gratification, with very minimal success. I once put a jumper on lay-by, way back in the days when Buy Now Pay Later was several inventions away. I paid a deposit, arranged to pay the jumper off in instalments, and left that beautiful jumper in the store.
It did not go well. I thought about the jumper all the way home, and in bed that night as I tried to sleep. I thought of how soft it was, how it would complement my jeans, how much I longed to wear it. The next day, I returned to the store, paid off the lay-by and never attempted that exercise again.
The Stanford marshmallow study found kids who could delay gratification grew into smarter, more competent adults than those who could not. (I know this because I skipped to the conclusion.)
Follow-up studies have questioned these claims and I'd like to add there are advantages to being a one-marshmallow person, which the Stanford team failed to note. For one thing, I'm extremely punctual. Whether I am meeting a friend for lunch, going to a movie or catching a flight, I will be there on time, if not early. I simply can't wait a second longer than necessary.
For another, I never agonise over decisions. I like having issues resolved quickly, so if there are several options I'll just pick one that looks okay and stick with that. I won't spend hours debating which sofa to buy, or which holiday destination to visit, or which movie to watch. I'd rather have one good-enough option sorted now than a better option further down the track.
"A marshmallow in the hand is worth two in the bush!" I tell my partner.
He shakes his head. "You know that's not actually true? Two marshmallows in the hand are worth twice as much!"
But I am not listening. I am too busy eating the froth off my cappuccino. It's my favourite part! I always have it first.
According to Science, This Woman Has The World's Most Beautiful Face
She may not be attractive in your opinion, given everything you know about her now. But in the eyes of science and new study reports, she has the world's most beautiful face.
Why does she have the world's most beautiful face?
The woman's facial features are near-flawless, based on scientific standards. Researchers discovered years ago that people love symmetry and find it sexy.
"I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance." -- physicist Alan Lightman in The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.
A British cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Julian De Silva, did the most beautiful face study using images. He assessed the woman's face with digital-mapping technology.
Her face was close to perfect with 91.85% symmetry. The research got done in 2016 using the Greek Golden Ratio of Beauty of 1.618. The technology measured the distance between her chin, nose, eyes, and lips. It then assessed her entire face to produce a score of 92%. Who is the woman?
Sex, after consent, is rarely an act of emotion. It's almost mechanical. It's depressing for women. After casual sex the man can just walk away. The woman is left wondering, confused, lonely and unsure what such automated sex means, if anything. She expected more.
INSTITUTIONAL BRAINWASHING: Over multiple generations, young people are raised to believe sex is sinful.
Eventually men and women got sick of it. They wanted freedom at about the same time the pill became available.
Covid let up and people went sex crazed. There's lots of sex in the 2020s but much of it is bad sex. Bad sex for men is, "oh well." Bad sex for women is really bad. Aside from disappointment, wondering if I'm good enough, there can easily be real physical pain.
EMOTIONAL QUOTIENT: Lots of men still have trouble expressing emotions, let alone understand that women want an exchange of emotions.
THE CLOCK: Women are more invested in having a committed relationship than men. Many women want to have a family. Lots of men don't. Women may consent to bad sex just in case he might be a keeper. When he reveals he's not, that hurts.
IF ONLY MEN KNEW THIS. It isn't taught anywhere. He may as well be from another planet.
Women have a brief time span to find a decent, loving man for a committed relationship. Many evaluate men not only as a loving man for her but a potential good father. They nurture the relationship toward those ends. That can be not fun for women at all.
Porn
Since the US and its churches don't believe in sex ed, we have a population learning about sex from porn, free and on their phones. We stumble into marriage in spite of a 50% divorce rate. This whole scenario is out of control.
MARK LATHAM fears for Australia's future as entitled young sooks claim they've been BULLIED when told how to do their job:
Something strange is happening in Australian workplaces - even here in the NSW Parliament on Macquarie Street.
It is now classified as 'bullying' to tell an employee their work is not up to scratch and they need to improve. It is now regarded as 'harassment' for a boss to lose their temper and blow up in reaction to staff incompetence.
It is now so touchy-feely that no staff meetings can be held before 10am, when everyone has completed their 'carer responsibilities' for the morning.
The younger generation has responded to these entitlements with a 'you can't talk to me like that' view of their employer.
Consultants are everywhere conducting workplace reviews that encourage and enable staff to be snowflakes, perpetually offended, upset and complaining.
In the NSW Parliament, the recent Workplace Review has cost a small fortune in taxpayers' money, even though, in establishing the process, no specific problems were identified in our building.
Emails were sent to staff in our One Nation office but none saw the need to participate in the consultant's review.
Ironically, one received so many emails he felt bullied to participate.
I thought the review was a waste of money with an entirely predictable pre-scripted outcome, so I never agreed to be interviewed. I'm interested in solving real problems in NSW, not ones invented by Snowflake Lefties.
Every MP should be responsible for their own office and staff -- that is why we elected them. Instead, the new trend is to establish special Complaints Officers (as they now have in Macquarie Street) to add to the culture of complaint and dobbing.
The Parliamentary Workplace Review is being released on Friday, and undoubtedly it will make findings of a 'toxic culture' and recommend that everyone go on training courses (run by other consultants at further taxpayer expense).
I don't see it myself.
Before getting into parliament, I worked as a staffer for two fairly volatile politicians: Bob Carr and Gough Whitlam.
Gough would explode like a volcano, his body shaking, his teeth grinding with anger. But a few minutes later he would come around to my desk and say, 'What are you working on now, comrade?' and give me a friendly hug.
I took this to be his way of letting off steam. Busy people in public life who work hard, come under pressure and expect perfection in their work standards, are likely to go off when things go wrong.
I never thought for a moment Whitlam was disrespecting or harassing me. A mature, sensible worker would immediately know that.
Ultimately, taking offence is a choice, and I chose never to be offended. I recommend this for the younger Snowflake Generation: to take a teaspoon of cement and harden up.
Most of all, I worry that the woke 'respect at work' agenda is diminishing our standards and performance as a nation.
If incompetent staff are allowed to survive without anyone being allowed to point out their failings, then many more businesses are going to go broke, many more governments are going to mess up public policy and many more public agencies are going to be out-of-touch and incapable of meeting community needs.
Yellowstone? It’s the conservative syndrome, stupid
Frank Furedi below rightly points to the pervasive view among our Leftist elite that conservatives are psychologically defective. Research alleging to prove that has been going on since 1950 and I spent 20 years critiquing it, from 1970 to 1990.
Basically all the research concerned bent over backwards to prove its point and I was routinely able to show the big holes in it. If you know your psychometrics, the faults in such research are often glaring. Let me give an example by making a few comments about the Canadian article Furedi highlights -- called “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact”,
It purports to tell us about political conservatism. But it doesn't. I quote from the body of the article itself:
"socially conservative ideology was assessed in terms of respect for and submission to authority"
Respect for authority is conservative? The way the Left swallow "expert" pronouncements about global warming, the wonderfulness of homosexuality and the importance of transgenderism, I would have thought that respect for authority is a hallmark of the Left. You either conform to Leftist shibboleths these days or get "cancelled". No deviation from the party line is allowed: A very authoritarian system. And was Communism conservative? It was certainly very authoritarian.
And in any case respect for authority is an overgeneralization. There is basically no such thing. Different people respect different authorities at different times. A prime example is SCOTUS. For many years conservatives condemned it becauseof its rulings on homosexual marriage, abortion etc. Now the worm has turned and it is the Left who are furiously condemning SCOTUS and trying to undermine it. There is no doubt that SCOTUS is a major authority but that has nothing to do with respect for it. Respect for it is entirely due to whether its rulings favour the political Right or the political Left.
And the lack of coherence between attitudes that allegedly express attiutude to authority is borne out in the research in question. We read
"scale reliabilities ranged from .63 to .68".
That means nothing to the layman but to a psychometrician it means that the items in the questionnaire showed little correlation with one-another. It shows, in fact, that the questionaire was not suitable for the use it was applied to. A research instrument is normally held to have a minimal reliability of .75. Reliabilities in the .60 range show the scale to be suitable only as the preliminary form of a research insrument, not to be used until further refined
I knew what I would find before I looked up the article. I immediately went to the details of the measures used and knew that I would find junk. It's a common feature of such articles. So the article proves nothing about conservatives or anybody else. The journal editors were very indulgent to publish it, but no doubt they liked its conclusions
As far as Hollywood, Netflix and the American cultural establishment are concerned there is little point in taking conservatives seriously. They are seen and represented as basically hillbillies and rednecks who feed on a diet of kitsch and trashy reality shows. That is why the don’t know what to make of Yellowstone – one of the most watched cable series in the US.
Even the most bitter critic of conservative values cannot dismiss Yellowstone as trash. TV Guide refers to it as “prestige TV for conservatives” before adding that “prestige TV is for liberals”. TV Guide’s commentator correctly notes that “in the genre of conservative prestige drama, Yellowstone is almost alone”. That’s because Hollywood patronises conservatives to the point it seriously believes that conservatives lack the taste and artistic sensibility to appreciate prestige drama.
In the main, cultural critics have responded to Yellowstone by not responding to it. Since they are not interested in engaging with people who are not like them, they have ignored a program watched by tens of millions. Writing in Vanity Fair, one commentator wrote “Here’s to Yellowstone, the Most-Watched Show Everyone Isn’t Talking About”. The few critics that have bothered to review it can barely hide the contempt for a modern Western that extols traditional virtues and avoids the woke cliches much loved by Hollywood.
Writer Kathryn VanArendonk was seething with anger when she described the show as “a desperate and threatened appeal to American identity and white masculinity”. She acknowledges that she feels anger towards John Dutton, the main character in the show played by Kevin Costner, since he is “so blind to his privilege”.
That Yellowstone has become caught up in America’s culture war was acknowledged by The New York Times this week. One of its commentators, Tressie McMillan Cotton, noted “while liberal audiences mostly ignore it, this soapy conservative prestige television juggernaut is gobbling up audience share”. In an attempt to account for the culturally polarised reception to this show, she drew on academic expertise. As one expects, her expert, Clayton Rawlings, asserted that conservatives are narrow-minded people with limited cultural interests. He added that in contrast to liberals, “conservative audiences do not consider reading, watching or listening around a mark of status or identity”. Evidently prestige television is not for them.
Tragically, McMillan Cotton, like America’s cultural oligarchy, cannot maintain a distinction between art and politics. She treats Yellowstone as if it is a political advert for the Republican Party. She warns that the “show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future”. Almost imperceptibly, the fictional characters in a television drama are denounced for their lack of political vision. From her perspective the conservative folk who inhabit Yellowstone are just as bad as the ones that vote Republican. “They buy guns and hoard stolen power” is her concluding remark.
The cultural establishment that dominates the media landscape in the Anglo-American world actually believes conservatives are both aesthetically and morally inferior to people like them. In their fantasy world, the people not like them are in search of simplistic black-and-white answers. In private conversation they refer to people who watch Yellowstone as rednecks, Nascar dads, tabloid readers, who are likely to be crass, materialistic simplistic, sexist, racist and homophobic.
That is why Hollywood, Netflix and the television media tend to portray conservatives as unpleasant and not very nice people. Like Mr Garrison in South Park, they are not only small-minded and racist but are psychologically messed up. In typical conservative fashion, he refuses to acknowledge his emotional and psychological issues. Like many other fictional conservative characters, Mr Garrison is in denial.
Homer Simpson is a blue-collar conservative. Therefore, the producers of The Simpsons felt obliged to portray him as a bumbling and insensitive husband and father, who over the years has turned into a self-aggrandising fool. Fortunately, Homer’s psychological deficits are compensated for by his daughter, Lisa, who because she is very liberal must be portrayed as sensitive and emotionally literate.
The media is particularly unkind to conservative women. The abusive mother Adora Crellin in miniseries Sharp Objects is one of the most repulsive characters you are likely to encounter on your screen. She is cast in the role of a small-town, Southern conservative woman, whose Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome has led her to poison and kill daughter Marian.
But it is Sue Sylvester in Glee who more than anyone else offers an over-the-top caricature of a right-wing conservative woman. Her authoritarian personality coexists with a profound sense of personal insecurity and unrestrained narcissism. She exudes malice. That she calls for the abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the left’s favourite federal arts agency, signals that her politics are not only wrong but also sick.
As far as media culture is concerned, conservatives possess unattractive psychological characteristics. Typically, conservatives are portrayed as mediocre and undistinguished characters who possess outdated and often, repulsive sentiments. Predictably, woke media culture can draw on academic experts, particularly psychologists, to reinforce its anti-conservative prejudice.
If the numerous research papers recently published in psychology journals are to be believed, conservatives are sexually repressed, lacking in empathy and intensely conformist.
The invention of the unimaginative, humourless and intellectually challenged conservative originates from the 19th century. At the time, JS Mill, the 19th-century liberal philosopher, described the Conservative party as “the stupid party”.
He took great delight when he went a step further and stated that his attribution of intellectual inferiority was not merely directed at the party but also at people who possessed a conservative outlook. When criticised for his remark, Mill replied that “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative”.
In recent decades, Mill’s verdict about the inferiority of conservatives has been recast in the language of psychology. Numerous so-called studies have published research purporting to prove the intellectual inferiority of conservative people. An example of this form of tendentious research is the study published by two Canadian academics a decade ago. Titled “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact”, it suggests that stupid simpletons go on to become prejudiced right-wingers.
Some psychologists claim their research shows that socially conservative people feel more insecure than liberal. Others have discovered that liberals are far better at reorganising their thoughts in flexible ways than conservatives. Advocacy research claims to have discovered that “religious conservatives make poorer moral decisions than liberals”.
Some psychological studies have concluded liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. As you would expect, liberal cognitive styles are far more attractive than those of their conservative peers. “Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers,” argues one paper. Liberals also possess greater “neurocognitive sensitivity” to cues than their far more rigid conservative counterparts.
The representation of conservatives as less intelligent than their left-wing counterparts is frequently communicated by “research” on the so-called conservative syndrome. The flattering hypothesis of this syndrome is that conservatism and low cognitive ability are directly correlated.
A commentator in progressive magazine Mother Jones wrote in 2014, that “10 years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it’s becoming hard not to”. As it happens Hollywood has been talking about this for a very long time. Through its alliance with advocacy research, it has succeeded in constructing a stereotype that deprives conservatives of any redeeming features. That is why it has to either ignore or lay into Yellowstone.
UK: Rishi Sunak blasts 'political correctness' among authorities who are 'scared of calling out' Asian child sex gangs as he promises new life sentence for groomers
Rishi Sunak has said that 'political correctness' is standing in the way of tackling child sex grooming gangs.
The former chancellor blasted authorities who are 'scared of calling out the fact that there's a particular group of people who are perpetuating these crimes'.
If he wins the Tory leadership contest, Mr Sunak vowed to force police to record the ethnicity of those involved and promised new life sentence for groomers.
An inquiry revealed that police failed to tackle widespread abuse by south Asian men in Telford for fear of looking 'politically incorrect'.
In an interview with GB News, the prime ministerial hopeful said: 'I have two young girls who are nine and 11, and I think for too long we just haven't focused on this issue.
'It's a horrific crime. It's far more pervasive across the country than actually we all realise.
'We all know the reason that people don't focus on it. It's because of political correctness and they're scared of calling out the fact that there's a particular group of people who are perpetuating these crimes, and I think that's wrong, and I want to change that as prime minister.'
He added: 'I want to make sure that all police forces record the ethnicity of those involved, which currently is not done because people don't want to do that.
'I want to create a brand new life sentence for those involved in grooming with very limited options for parole because I'm not going to let political correctness stand in the way of tackling this absolutely horrific crime.'
Woke Airline Policies Threaten Safety, Workers Say
Hiring practices driven by diversity are 'a recipe for disaster'
Southwest Airlines Co. is basking in accolades for its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts, award-winning customer service, and record-breaking quarterly revenues.
Behind the scenes of that rosy picture, heartaches are afflicting Southwest, called “the airline with Heart” because of its heart-shaped logo and a corporate culture steeped in “The Golden Rule,” treating others the same way they’d like to be treated.
But eight current Southwest employees, including three minorities, told The Epoch Times that “woke, leftist” DEI policies, as implemented, have tarnished the cherished Golden Rule principle, fractured a once-cohesive workforce, and, ultimately, may put safety at risk.
Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.
One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”
Southwest, one of America’s largest air carriers, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Similar issues have spread industry-wide, according to 10 airline employees who agreed to be interviewed. Four are pilots and six are flight attendants; most have 20 or more years of experience. All of them, including two American Airlines pilots, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.
While no one thinks the policies are causing an imminent threat of a plane falling out of the sky tomorrow, all of the interviewees agreed that each time a standard is lowered, or a less-qualified employee is hired, the risk that something can go horribly wrong inches forward a notch or two. In an industry that depends on a near-miracle integration of people, machinery, and computers, even a few deviations can culminate in catastrophe.
Still, some employees worry about what could happen if current trends continue to stress out and distract safety professionals. Said one flight attendant: “It’s a recipe for disaster. I just hope I’m not at work when it happens.”
Us-Versus-Them Mentality
While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.
Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.
At the same time, veteran workers—especially those who are white, heterosexual, and conservative—find themselves in the crosshairs for almost anything, including making a personal statement of religious or political beliefs, the Southwest workers said. Even minorities can be shifted into this targeted group if they espouse personal beliefs running counter to causes that the company supports.
“There are two sets of standards: One for us and one for them,” said an experienced flight attendant.
One of her colleagues said: “The company is trying to eliminate anybody who does not agree with their agenda. The last few years, anybody who speaks up against them, they want gone.” That flight attendant said she had no problems at work until she posted her Christian religious beliefs on her personal Facebook page, along with her support of President Donald Trump. A coworker reported the posts to Southwest, and the flight attendant said she has faced repercussions ever since.
She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.
‘Targeted Assassinations’ of Conservatives
Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.
The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Marchers were protesting Trump’s inauguration; one of the primary sponsors of the event was Planned Parenthood. Southwest also showed “solidarity” with the protesters by bathing its airplane cabins in pink lights on some D.C.-bound flights, Carter’s lawsuit says.
Documents in the case revealed that some union officials and political activists were singling out dissenting Southwest employees for “targeted assassinations,” meaning that they would try to get the company to fire them, using the company’s social media policy as a bludgeon.
In an interview with The Epoch Times on Aug. 8, Carter, who lives near Denver, Colorado, said she can’t believe that some leaders of Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, who helped set her up to be fired, are still working for Southwest.
Carter also validated her coworkers’ concerns about the disparate treatment of employees who dare to oppose leftist agendas. “I think there are a ton of cases out there just like mine,” she said. Terminated employees from Southwest and other airlines have been continuously contacting Carter for help after learning about the July 14 verdict in her case.
Carter spent five years fighting in court; she thinks she was one of the first casualties of the erosion of Southwest’s unique corporate culture, which she witnessed during the latter part of her 20-plus years at the airline.
“We all loved our jobs; we all loved each other—our CoHearts, that’s what we called each other,” Carter said, pointing out that the airline’s stock ticker is LUV, a nod to its birthplace at Love Field, Texas.
Gender behind bars: Housing trans prisoners is not straight forward
Tanveer Ahmed
As a psychiatrist who visits jails, I’m concerned about biological men being placed in women-only facilities. We’ve been through heated debates about the trans issue in elite sport and in our schools, but prisoners are not a group that is flush with advocates.
Biological female prisoners are some of the most victimised people on Earth. The vast majority experience sexual abuse or physical violence, chaotic upbringings, foster care and many descend into drug abuse.
The policy self-declaration of gender identity hurts biological women. Yet it has been adopted in the bulk of Australian jails as an established norm in our criminal justice system, even though the principle has not yet been incorporated into common law.
This is not just the case in NSW, where the Daily Telegraph confirmed this month that there are three trans women in jails, but also in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT. Western Australia has no clear policy whereas South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland assess inmates on a case-by-case basis.
Definitive, uncontested figures about the size of the trans prison population are not available however a lawyer writing in Lawyer’s Weekly in November 2020 estimated that there may be as many as several hundred trans inmates in jails around the country. Whatever the number now, you can bet it will go up in parallel with the cultural zeitgeist. If referrals to a single gender clinic can go up by a factor of eighty, as they have done in Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital between 2011 and 2021, you can guarantee some of these individuals will filter through into our jails, especially given the markedly higher rates of mental illness trans people suffer, which automatically put them at greater risk of committing crimes.
Although jails have mostly adopted the policy that an individual’s declared gender identity should take priority over their biological sex, this is widely contested. One reason the policy should not be adopted is because it prioritises the wishes of those who identify as transgender over the rights of others, particularly biological females, not least their right to single-sex facilities. Why should the interests of a trans minority be put ahead of biological women? Why should the trans tail keep wagging the dog?
Sex remains the single biggest predictor of criminality. Ever since such statistics have been collected, for over a century, males make up around eighty per cent of offenders. But when it comes to sexual crimes, the figure is above ninety per cent.
The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that biological males who identify as trans women retain male patterns of criminality including a much higher risk of committing acts of sexual violence in jails. Furthermore, recording trans women as anything other than biological males has the potential to skew future data on criminality.
Female prisoners can be physically violent but much like society in general, aggression in women-only prisons is more likely to be relational, taking the form of damaging gossip or exclusion.
The environment in jails, especially among males, acquires a primitive edge. Inmates often organise themselves into tribes, often linked to their ethnicity. There are the Lebs, the Kooris, the whites, and the Islanders. Those that don’t fit neatly into the designated tribes try to make changes to do so. Inmates feel under threat and act in more primal ways. Conversion to Islam is one such way to ensure a degree of protection.
While the NSW Department of Corrections says that it considers security risks and assault-related crimes of the inmate, reserving the right to overturn the policy, the probability remains that trans women are at a much higher risk of committing a sex-based crime in jail. Britain’s the Prison Service estimates that trans women are five times more likely to carry out attacks in women’s prisons.
I don’t suggest the issue is clear cut. It never is with the trans debate. The calculus changes further if the inmates have had or are planning to have reassignment surgery.
I have assessed several clients who identify as trans women. None were incarcerated. All were terrified of being placed in male prisons for fear of being attacked. I am sympathetic to such fears. International studies show higher rates of trans females being attacked in male-only prisons. As a result, civil rights groups, such as the Human Rights Commission, are usually at the forefront of those advocating for inmates to be incarcerated according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Yet just last month, the state of New Jersey opted to alter its policy of treating its inmates on the grounds of their chosen gender identity in response to the discovery that a trans inmate, Demi Minor, had impregnated multiple inmates. Minor, who is serving thirty years for manslaughter, was housed in a women’s prison, following a court case mounted by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of another transgender prisoner who successfully sued the New Jersey prison administration in 2019 for preventing her placement in a women’s jail. Other US states and Britain are now reviewing their policies given the spiraling growth of the trans category in the wider population.
In a recent paper for British think tank, Policy Exchange, lawyer and feminist Maureen O’Hara outlined some of the risks I have alluded to, arguing in her conclusion: ‘All trans-identifying prisoners should be housed within the prison estate which aligns with their biological sex or housed in a separate unit which does not form part of the women’s estate if being housed in the general men’s estate is considered unsafe for them.’ Granted jails are overcrowded, and resources limit the extent to which the special needs of trans prisoners can be met with unique facilities, but such a recommendation should be strongly considered within our criminal justice system.
All people, even those who face serious charges or are guilty of serious crimes, should be treated with dignity and compassion but it’s time to reconsider housing prisoners based on their self-declared gender. By doing so we are the placing the rights of trans-identifying male-bodied offenders above those of women in fear of male violence.
An article under the above title will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Independent Review. A summary of it follows
Where does the fascism of Mussolini’s Italy fall in the spectrum of political doctrines? Italy’s fascist government conducted a policy of partial socialization of private property, total collectivization of consciousness, and large-scale redistribution of wealth. Therefore, even if fascism was theoretically conceived by its founders as not belonging to either the Right or the Left, its practical implementation showed that the whole building of fascism gravitated toward the right flank of the Left.
You can however download a preprint in PDF. I give an excerpt below from it
Fascism: Left, Right, or Neither?
Although it was short-lived from a historical perspective, its basic ideology and practice have confounded political scientists until the present day. There is no consensus among various political and academic circles (sociological, historical, and economic) regarding its place on the political spectrum. Fascism has become the most controversial politico-economic doctrine, for which no answer has yet been found that would satisfy all interested parties.
The reason is that fascism was theoretically conceived as a compromise between liberal capitalism and socialism, and as such, was deemed to possess the properties of both doctrines. One of the disputing parties has the opportunity to exaggerate the features of individualism in fascism and to assert its belonging to the reactionary form of capitalism. Another sees the features of collectivism and classifies fascism as a kind of socialism. Finally, the third argues that fascism occupies its own unique niche on the political spectrum: it is neither the left nor the right.
The unprecedented ambiguity in defining and understanding fascism was, first of all, the result of vicious interspecific struggles among different socialist currents. In particular, the initial response to the phenomenon of fascism predictably came from the communist camp in the inter-war period. It also marked the beginning of the direct and thoughtful falsification of the nature of genuine fascism. Bolsheviks insisted that fascism did not dismantle a capitalist state. They asserted that fascism was the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie, which had captured the state’s machinery.
The Marxist-Leninist arguments were as follows: The fascist core consisted of former social-chauvinists, reformists, and revisionists, who, in Lenin's words, “went to the right” and therefore are agents of the petty bourgeoisie. It follows, then, that fascism is a counter-revolution organized by this reactionary class stratum. Trotsky (1932) stated, “Italian fascism was the immediate outgrowth of the betrayal by the reformists of the uprising of the Italian proletariat.”
However, the identification of fascism with the petty bourgeois counterrevolution turned out to be a rather unconvincing and to some extent emotional explanation. Indeed, as a subclass that did not receive due attention in Marxism, except that it had to disappear from the face of the earth because of the concentration of capital tendency, could arrange a counter-revolution? Surely other, more powerful and understandable forces described by Marxism had to be involved. Of course, the Marxist ideologues immediately found such counter-revolutionary forces. Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov (1935) asserted that “fascism in power was … the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” Furthermore, he stated, “Fascism is the 4 power of finance capital itself.”
The communist camp began discrediting fascism on several fronts. They did not accept a mass character of the fascist movement; they described bourgeoise of all ranks as a driving force of the fascist counter-revolution; they theorized about various forms that fascism could take in different countries and assigned all authoritarian regimes to fascism, except the Soviet one. Such lines of thought have remained unchanged for years and were reinforced after World War II, as the Soviet Union and Western allies were victors, and the Left had an opportunity to write and rewrite history at will.
Marxists tried hard to camouflage the actual features of fascism, producing several conflicting explanations of the phenomenon that all insisted the doctrine has nothing to do with either socialism or the worker movement. Reverberation of the Marxist approach can be found in many scientific treatises on fascism and its place on the political spectrum that appeared after World War II
It is truly amazing the way the Left distort reality to support the Marxist view of Fascism. You can see it in summary form in that well-known Leftist rag "Wikipedia". Wikipedia says Fascism was Rightist on two main grounds: Its authoritarianism and its nationalism. The first ground is a real laugh. Without a doubt the most authoritarian form of politics is Communism. So is Communism Rightist? Its authoritariansm in fact identifies Fascism as Leftist
The second focus in Wikipedia is on Fascism's Nationalism. That argument has better traction because modern-day Leftists reject Nationalism. But Leftists did not always do that. Hitler was born in the 19th century (1889) and in the 19th and early 20th century, many Leftists were nationalist. One of the most fervent 19th century nationalists was in fact Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx. So the nationalism component of Fascism was thoroughly Leftist in its day. Wikipedia deliberately ignores history.
For a fuller historical treatment of Fascism, see my extensive article on the subject
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Trump Raid Brings Us One Step Closer To Civil War
There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeeds, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice... Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776
The shocking FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida has escalated America’s 21st century crisis and, as we predicted in our four-part series “The Coming Civil War” made a civil war all the more likely.
Right now, one thing, perhaps the only thing, keeping America from devolving into civil war is the refusal of conservatives to emulate the city-burning violence of the ANTIFA cells in Washington, DC, Portland, Oregon and Seattle and the BLM organizers across the country.
What it will take to release that cork from the bottled-up rage on the Right is unknown, but we must assume that conservative tolerance for injustice and oppression is not infinite and that the unjust arrest of former President Donald Trump would certainly be an incitement to violence from his supporters.
And maybe that’s what Democrats and their Deep State allies want.
Some wise observers have suggested that Democrats and their allies on the Left would like nothing better than an excuse to follow-up the J6 witch hunt with a more general crackdown on conservatives. There’s a certain logic to that analysis, because the Left has never been stronger than they are now, while at the same time the 2022 midterm election threatens them with losing the power they corruptly seized in the 2020 election.
It would be entirely logical for the Left to provoke the confrontation now when they are in complete control of the government and all the levers of power and means of state violence.
What’s more, having seized all the levers of power and means of state violence they have completely corrupted the law enforcement and judicial institutions that might have restrained them just a few years ago.
If reports are to be believed, the raid was prompted by complaints from the head librarian of the National Archives that the former President had taken classified materials from his office in the White House to his home in Florida.
This is a completely specious justification said Kash Patel, a former top Trump administration official, who told Breitbart News back in May that a report claiming classified materials were found at Mar-a-Lago is misleading and that the documents were actually already declassified by then-President Donald Trump, but the classification markings had not been updated.
“Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves,” Patel told Breitbart News.
However, as our friend Ben Weingarten wrote in his latest column for Newsweek, the specific legal grounds for the raid, like the grounds for the coming indictment, are really beside the point.
Trump's crime, wrote Mr. Weingarten, was and always has been, that he threatened The Regime's power and privilege—in so doing, representing tens of millions of Americans who The Regime considers an impediment to its total control, and who it holds in utter contempt.
That's all the "predication" The Regime needed to pursue him from the day he emerged in Trump Tower to declare himself an unprecedented political force, and, since, treat all manner of like-minded Wrongthinkers the same.
The pretense of the rule of law is gone, said Weingarten, and to delude oneself into thinking otherwise after the two-tier, Soviet standard of justice we have seen applied again and again over the last six years would be dangerous folly.
Having suffered what it perceived to be a near-death experience in the election of Donald Trump, Ben Weingarten concluded The Regime must now show that anyone and everyone from the lowliest of non-violent January 6-ers held in pretrial detention to Trump himself can, and will, be crushed if they dare to not submit.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the raid of Trump’s home represents “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents,” while noting that people like President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden “get treated with kid gloves.”
“Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic,” DeSantis said.
Banana Republic it is, and if we don’t repel it now, a Banana Republic is what we will become.
When a prominent researcher leaves the far-left Center for American Progress and lands at the much more conservative American Enterprise Institute, it is something that makes you scratch your head.
When that researcher is the co-author of the 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority” which predicted that the browning of America was destined to create an unstoppable Democrat majority, you sit up and notice.
But when the author, Ruy Teixeira, is telling anyone and everyone that the Democrats are losing the middle class, it forces you to question what is happening and why?
Market Research Foundation has been at the forefront of the shift of blue collar voters with special focus on Hispanics from the reliable left to their new status as swing voters who have increasingly rejected big government policies and those who care more about race than prosperity.
Big change is happening, and our friends at Market Research Foundation are all over it. Click here to learn more about their research that has predicted the shift that manifested itself in Mayra Flores’ victory in a Texas border congressional district special election in June.
Lawyers say Australian gender clinics may face legal action following news that Britain’s Tavistock clinic is facing a major medical negligence law suit from youngsters who claim they were “started on a treatment pathway that was not right for them”.
The legal action may have significant implications for several Australian gender clinics based at children’s hospitals across the country, where Tavistock’s contentious practices have played a strong influence in treatment.
Leading compensation law firm Gerard Malouf & Partners is exploring the prospects and feasibility of a similar class-action lawsuit in Australia.
In Britain, The Times reports that 1000 families are expected to join the medical negligence lawsuit, which is understood to allege that the gender-identity clinic “rushed” some young patients into treatment.
The Tavistock clinic is accused of recklessly prescribing puberty blockers with harmful side effects and is also alleged to have adopted an “unquestioning, affirmative approach” to children identifying as transgender.
The clinic is to be shut down after an independent review, led by Hilary Cass, found it was leaving young people “at considerable risk” of poor mental health and distress, and was “not a safe or viable long-term option”.
University of Queensland law professor Patrick Parkinson, who was involved in a landmark British High Court ruling that prohibited children under the age of 16 from consenting to puberty-blocking treatment, said the prospects of similar action in Australia were “very likely”.
“I’m expecting to see it here, I’m expecting to see it against hospitals and against individual doctors. Sooner or later, this is going to end up in the courts as a negligence issue,” he said.
“I think Australian gender clinics apart from Sydney are probably less conservative and less cautious than the Tavistock was. The decision of the British government raises serious questions about the continuation of the model in Australia and really justifies a major inquiry being set up.”
Professor Parkinson said the British government and the National Health Service lost confidence in the model of treatment that Tavistock promoted.
“The results of the closure of Tavistock is going to be that a mental health approach will be the first line, and I suspect that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will only be prescribed as a last resort in the most serious cases where psychotherapy does not prove to be effective,” he said.
Queensland paediatrician Dylan Wilson said he believed several young adults around the country who had been injured as result of being prescribed puberty blockers or hormone treatments as minors might have recourse to the courts.
“One hundred per cent there are children who have been harmed,” Dr Wilson said. “Even if they think it was worth it at the time, there are children who have suffered infertility and sexual dysfunction as a result of treatments and they may only be realising that now.
“If you’re puberty-blocked at an early stage, there are inevitable consequences. You can’t not be infertile if you’re puberty-blocked in the very first stages of puberty.”
Dr Wilson questioned the standard of care in gender clinics that take a gender-affirming approach. “The standards of care have never been held in high regard outside of gender clinics themselves,” he said.
“They publish their own papers and they say the paper we publish is evidence that what we’re doing is right. “They write the guidelines and they say ‘We’re following the guidelines’. “These are not internationally accepted guidelines.”
Archbishop of Canterbury condemns gay marriage, but Anglican bishops remain divided
Welby is showing some spine in the matter. He might make a good Cantuar yet. He even seems to believe in God, not always guaranteed in the Anglican episcopate. Runcie clearly did not
The head of the Anglican Communion attempted to reinforce the church's stance against homosexual marriage this week, but the move was squashed by outcry from various bishops.
The controversy came to a head during the ongoing 2022 Lambeth Conference — a rare meeting of Anglican Communion bishops from around the world.
The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) — self-described as "a worldwide fellowship of orthodox Anglican Provinces and Dioceses within the Anglican Communion" — came to the conference with the gay marriage ban firmly on their agenda.
"We often feel that our voices are not listened to, or respected," South Sudanese Primate Rev. Justin Badi told The Church Times. "Today, in Canterbury, we may be ‘gathered together’, but we most certainly cannot ‘walk together’ until Provinces which have gone against scripture — and the will of the consensus of the bishops — repent and return to orthodoxy."
He continued, "The Communion is not in a healthy condition at present, and only major surgery will put that right."
They were bolstered in private, if not publicly, by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. The archbishop, by the nature of his office, is the most senior cleric in the Anglican Communion but holds limited powers of governance on his own.
Welby met with the GSFA in private on July 29 and offered to write a letter backing the traditional view of marriage, according to Anglican Church journalist George Conger. A call was scheduled for the conference — a sort of vote amongst the bishops to endorse or abandon proposed belief statements.
The next day — after word got out about the push for a formal rejection of homosexual marriage — the conference was threatened with chaos.
Many bishops reportedly stayed seated and did not receive the Eucharist during the mass. Protests against recording votes on church calls arose, and eventually, the conference ceased keeping track of individual bishops' decisions.
The call to reinforce Lambeth 1.10 was eventually dropped.
However, there was no demonstration against the archbishop nor the conference, and proceedings continued.
Despite the fervor, Welby made good on his promised letter, released to the faithful on Tuesday.
"I wanted to write this letter to you now so that I can clarify two matters for all of us. Given the deep differences that exist within the Communion over same-sex marriage and human sexuality, I thought it important to set down what is the case," Welby wrote in his letter.
He continued, "I write therefore to affirm that the validity of the resolution passed at the Lambeth Conference 1998, 1:10 is not in doubt and that whole resolution is still in existence. Indeed the Call on Human Dignity made clear this is the case, as the resolution is quoted from three times in the paragraph 2.3 of the Call on Human Dignity."
The archbishop went on to point out that the 1998 statues cited did not make mention of sanctions or exclusions based on obedience. Welby said that the "Pain, anxiety, and contention" caused by Lambeth 1.10 was "very clear."
He concluded, "To be reconciled to one another across such divides is not something we can achieve by ourselves. That is why, as we continue to reflect on 1 Peter, I pray that we turn our gaze towards Christ who alone has the power to reconcile us to God and to one another."
Anglicanism has been fracturing for decades over gay relationships, women's ordination and other issues. Those rifts blew wide open in 2003 when the New York-based Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in New Hampshire.
The year prior, the top U.S. Episcopal legislative body, or General Convention, voted to authorize gay marriages in their churches.
In 2009, Anglican national leaders in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and other church provinces helped create the Anglican Church in North America, as a theologically conservative alternative to the U.S. Episcopal Church.
Anglicans, whose roots are in the missionary work of the Church of England, are the third-largest grouping of Christians in the world, behind Roman Catholics and the Orthodox.
An exploration of the unhinged workplace culture gripping the halls of our country’s most important companies
At this point, most people have internalized a sense the tech industry is run by crazy people. In fact, the industry is run by cowards terrified of a very small fraction of their employees — a legitimately crazy subset of political activists with many friends in the activist (establishment) press. For the last couple years, we’ve spent a great deal of time criticizing tech leadership for ceding authority to the deranged excesses of cultural authoritarians. But there’s a larger story we haven’t yet explored: what about the greater majority of tech workers, terrified of being targeted by their most unhinged colleagues, who just want to do their jobs?
Liz Wolfe is an associate editor at Reason and a weekly guest on The Hill’s YouTube show, Rising. She guests today for Pirate Wires with a wild exploration of the hostile workplace culture increasingly normalized in the halls of our country’s most important companies.
-Solana
At the Amazon fulfillment center where Leonard works, auditing how other employees on the floor pack boxes, everyone walks under a rainbow arch of balloons each day of Pride month, which is celebrated each June.
The rainbow balloon arch wasn’t a total shock to Leonard. Amazon has forced affinity groups on its employees, both those who work in warehouses and those who sit at desks all day. There’s PWD (people with disabilities), BEN (Black Employee Network), Indigenous@Amazon, and BPP (Body Positive Peers). There’s Glamazon, which Leonard says is for LGBT people.
Most of the warehouse’s Pride activities are relatively innocuous, but silly — dress-up contests, for example, and morning briefings reminding people how to be a good ally. Company-issued notices placed on bathroom stalls talk in glowing, over-the-top terms about Amazon’s commitment to queer employees and, just a column over, remind fulfillment center workers that their bags will be X-rayed when they leave the warehouse to go home. “I couldn’t care less who the folks over there loading trucks at the ship dock like to sleep with,” says Leonard. “Not my business.”
“Maybe if I was a two-spirit polyamorous noncomforming whatsit I could celebrate my sexuality on the company dime,” Leonard snarks, noting that he’s a heterosexual guy who’s put off by all this stuff. “Seems like a real double-standard.”
He’s far from alone in feeling this way. Few people dispute that it’s a good thing that more gay people than ever before can safely mention their spouse at work, without fear of being discriminated against or being cautioned to shut up. But there’s a big difference between rightful, overdue expansion of civil liberties, and where we’re at now.
Many employees of tech companies, both large and small, express frustration with work time being diverted to mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) sessions and Ibram X. Kendi talks; anger at being hassled to join affinity groups — employee groups for people to gather with others who share the same identity or characteristics — or waste meeting time declaring their pronouns; discomfort with managers sounding off about police brutality or the recent Dobbs abortion ruling. They point to a broad sense that work has become the land of extracurriculars, as if it’s freshman orientation on a college campus or a summer camp and you have to pick an activity schedule.
Harry, who works at a fully-remote expense management software company, says a whole DEI bureaucracy has sprung up in the last few years including “cultural events” around “ridiculous things like ‘the rich history of AAPI mixology.’” (Names have been changed throughout to protect people’s anonymity; company names have been noted where possible.)
With “explicit pressure from management to put your pronouns in your Slack profiles and your email signatures” and “company-organized ‘safe space’ and ‘coping workshops’” (featuring therapists!) in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Harry’s learned not to push back. When he lodged dissent a few years ago, it yielded nothing; he learned to lay low.
Sandy, who works for the email marketing company Mailchimp, says after the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, “everyone was posting about it in various slack channels, talking about it as if it was something that would cause you not to be able to function at work.” The company matches certain charitable donations, like those dealing with racial justice and LGBT issues — including the nonprofit Drag Queen Story Hour. “I don't feel comfortable saying I don't want to contribute to these things because I don't agree with them,” says Sandy.
The company has chosen to provide its services, free of charge, to certain organizations — like racial justice organizations, in the wake of a newly reinvigorated Black Lives Matter moment that started following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. But such generous pro bono provisions only go one way.
Until recently, Kasey worked for a company based in Santa Barbara that makes doctor-patient portal software. If you make the foolish mistake of using the word guys in Slack, “a slackbot would pop up and tell you to use a more inclusive term,” she says. People on her team would get 45-minute lectures on Fridays by what’s termed “equity groups” on topics like proper pronoun usage.
The worst part, she adds, is that the software was actually really good. The company was “KILLING it.” She’d watched it progress from summer 2020 until recently, when “the woke [stuff] happened, then their competitors passed them and innovation fell behind.” She didn’t end up leaving because of wokeness, but because the product was suffering — which is a related issue, she notes, if company resources are being frequently diverted to glorified HR efforts in lieu of improving the product. “Far more effort was spent on pronouns than on what we were paid to do.”
“My big concern is that DEI is driving away employees who lean more conservative culturally and politically,” says Abby, who adds that she’s a leftie with some “libertarian sympathies.” “I might not agree with their world views, but we didn't hire them for those, we hired them for their skills.” At her 1,200-person company which does single sign-on authentication, “it’s not one individual or group of individuals doing anything extreme, rather it's the perception that there's some institutionally correct way of existing, even if that way runs contrary to your beliefs.”
Sam works for GitHub, an internet hosting/software developing provider with sub-5,000 employees. A three-hour meeting was held for employees on the anniversary of George Floyd’s death. Affinity groups are robust, holding biweekly hourlong meetings, for queer people, black people, and women. “Microsoft made all their subsidiaries’ employees watch a series of videos featuring legal scholar and author Kenji Yoshino about covering and allyship, and how we shouldn't make people feel like they need to hide their true selves because he used to feel like he had to hide the fact that he was a gay Asian,” says Sam. “Covering is always bad, [Yoshino] said, unless you hold certain types of views, then you may want to just accept the way things are and keep your head down.”
“I'm shocked they haven't ended up with an Antonio Garcia Martinez type situation where a small group of employees Slack-bully someone into getting fired,” Sam says. “I know it's coming.”
Two former tech employees’ names popped up as I chatted with today’s disillusioned workers, one fired from Apple, the other from Google, for being purported misogynists.
James Damore is widely regarded as the original workplace-wokeness whistleblower, though he landed in that spot accidentally. While lonely in China, he wrote a document that he circulated internally at Google, where he’d been an engineer for four years.
Calling Google’s culture an “ideological echo chamber,” Damore argued that disparities between men and women in tech roles could be partially explained by biology — something advanced by prominent clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. He circulated his memo internally in July 2017; Gizmodo published a leaked copy of it on August 5; Damore was fired two days later.
He pursued a National Labor Relations Board complaint, then a class-action suit, then private arbitration. He now lives far away from Mountain View, and doesn’t do many speaking events or TV appearances.
President Joe Biden and ‘conservative’ Democrat Joe Manchin’s alleged inflation fighting legislation passed through the Senate this past weekend. It will be surprising to many Americans that the inflation fight includes hiring 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents, who are supposed to squeeze $200 billion out of their pockets over the next ten years.
Senate Republican Mike Crapo (R-ID) reports that the Biden inflation bill will make the IRS, “one of the largest federal agencies — larger than the Pentagon, State Department and Border Patrol combined.”
The magnitude of the expansion cannot be overemphasized. Currently, the IRS has just over 78,000 total full time employees doing all of the business of the Agency. This number will be dwarfed by the newly incoming 87,000 enforcement agents. Just the seating charts will be a logistical nightmare.
By comparison the entire Border Patrol only has 19,500 agents. With the immigration crisis at the border, perhaps Biden is planning on auditing the under the table earnings of the millions of newly arrived illegals to make them think twice about their choice to invade our country, but somehow I don’t think so.
But there is a snag in Biden’s plan to audit America into oblivion. Congress revisits the appropriations for the IRS at least once a year through the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill. Due to Congress being completely broken procedurally, this appropriation bill is often passed as part of a Continuing Resolution (CR) or by an Omnibus bill each of which lumps multiple spending bills together.
To pass a CR or Omnibus bill doesn’t require 51 votes, but instead needs the magical 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Meaning that 41 GOP Senators can lay down a line in the sand and simply just say no to this dramatic expansion of the Internal Revenue Service by refusing to fund it.
Ending Biden’s weaponized IRS enforcement army before it ever gets hired should be a non-negotiable part of the upcoming government funding negotiations. After all, the best way to stop an infestation is to stop it before it spreads.
Our last visit to Hobart was a few years ago, but I remember it well. The waters were a bright blue, the views breathtaking, and the scenery spectacular. The locals were friendly, the beer taps were flowing, and the pubs abundant. The seafood was incredibly fresh, the restaurants diverse and plentiful, and the wines scintillating. But something was not right.
Even a delightful high summer day, the heat mitigated by a gentle sea breeze, was not enough to dispel the onset of melancholy. Morose and listless, I returned to the apartment.
By late afternoon, I had lost interest in our plans for the evening. A sleepless and restless night followed. By next morning, my despondency had given way to a burning anger at a monumental and longstanding injustice, the source of which I could not identify.
For several years I wondered what troubled me so. But thanks to the Hobart City Council, I now know the cause of my angst. It was the fact that the city’s named statues feature white men exclusively. Yes, all seven of them. As The Australian reported this week, the council will deliberate on a report which has found the city has too many monuments to “Caucasian males”.
The catalyst for this epiphany is a statue in Central Hobart of William Crowther, a nineteenth century naturalist, surgeon and premier. In 1869, he was accused of decapitating the corpse of an Indigenous man, William Lanne, for anatomical study. The council has all but decided the monument will be removed, which conveniently opens the way for a cultural purge of other colonial figures.
If it accepts the report’s recommendations, the council will decide on a policy for further statue “additions and removals”. Mind you, that’s not to say all seven statues will be toppled. For example, former premier Albert Ogilvie’s statue is likely to have the backing of the city’s Greens councillors. As the University of Tasmania website notes, the former Labor premier was “sympathetic” to the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1930s.
As for the remaining statues, well, decolonisation. No more being confronted with the monument to Abel Tasman, the first European to reach what was known as Van Diemen’s Land. No more steeling oneself when passing by King Edward VII’s likeness. Question the activists who parrot this nonsense, and you will be accused of waging a culture war. As for the council’s meek acceptance of this mantra, how does it sit with the organisation’s vision statement as outlined in its last annual report? You know, “We resist mediocrity and sameness”?
Citing numbers compiled by Monument Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported this week that 38 monuments across the country are dedicated to Captain James Cook. But if activists have their way, that number will fall. According to Nancy Cushing, an associate professor of history at the University of Newcastle, every statue should be assessed as to its relevance every 50 years or so.
“People say if you take down a statue you are changing history, but I don’t quite see it that way,” she told the SMH. “Statues manifest a set of beliefs held at least by some people at the time they were erected.”
The latter may be so, but nonetheless to remove statues, especially ones that date back to the colonial era, is to remove historical objects from the landscape. And increasingly the motivation for doing so is not to change history – that would be impossible – but to change our interpretation of history to suit a militant narrative.
In any event, you might assume the historian’s default position would be to preserve historical statues as opposed to assigning them a use by date. Maintaining their existence does not prevent academics from rigorously and objectively reassessing the legacy of the people they depict.
But apparently that is no longer the case. If you want to know where the discipline of history is heading, I suggest you read Cushing’s essay ‘#CoalMustFall: Revisiting Newcastle’s coal monument in the Anthropocene,’ which this year was awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Marian Quartly Prize.
The subject of her paper is self-evident, a monument that was erected in 1909. To my mind, the display is innocuous, but not to Cushing. Its presence, she writes, “silently contradicts the weight of scientific opinion which indicates that continued reliance on burning coal will lead not to wellbeing but to cataclysm”.
She imagines the monument being wrested from its base and thrown into the harbour by protesters. “Even without such a violent intervention, it is timely to consider what is to be done with a memorial to a substance which is now known to be an agent of irreparable harm to the planet.” The urgent situation justifies what Cushing calls “activist histories”.
You will be relieved to know she does not call for mob intervention. Instead Cushing wants the monument shifted to a museum. The original would be replaced with a “counter-monument” to “manage the grief associated with the exposure of coal’s role in the slow disaster of climate change”.
And her parallels aren’t exactly subtle. “As was the case with Jochen Gerz and Esther-Shalev Gerz’s 1986 counter-monument against fascism in Hamburg [Germany], the coal counter-monument would soon be covered with a ‘conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity’”.
Cushing also envisages a counter-monument on the coastline where Newcastle’s former gaol was built in 1816. “From this position, a counter-monument would be visible to locals and visitors including the crews of the bulk coal carriers waiting to enter the port, and like the gaol in its time, offer up a warning to observers that behavioural change is necessary to avoid dire consequences.”
Excuse me, but is this a history lecture or did I walk into the drama class by mistake?
As for Hobart City Council, its ‘Community, Culture and Events Committee’ will today decide the fate of the Crowther statue. If it adopts the report’s recommendations, it will spend $20,000 on removing and storing the bronze component while retaining the plinth. Another $50,000 will be spent on “interpretive elements onsite”.
The result? Well, you could say these grand plans resemble the councillors who are in favour of them. A total waste of space.
Note that the figures below are based on what degrees people got, not what sort of job they actually went into. But nonetheless what goes on is pretty clear overall. Women tend to flock into certain jobs where they are most biologically fit -- such as nursing, teaching and childcare -- and the high level of supply in those jobs tends to drive the prices (wages) in those jobs down
Broad new data on wages earned by college graduates who received federal student aid showed a pay gap emerging between men and women soon after they joined the workforce, even among those receiving the same degree from the same school.
The data, which cover about 1.7 million graduates, showed that median pay for men exceeded that for women three years after graduation in nearly 75% of roughly 11,300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs at some 2,000 universities. In almost half of the programs, male graduates’ median earnings topped women’s by 10% or more, a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 2015 and 2016 graduates showed.
At Georgetown University, men who received undergraduate accounting degrees earned a median $155,000 three years after graduation, a 55% premium over their female classmates, the analysis showed.
Men who completed law degrees from the University of Michigan earned a median $165,000 three years after graduation, compared with $120,000 for women.
And men who graduated with a dental degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio earned a median $140,000 three years out, compared with $103,000 for women who got the same degree there.
The data, compiled by the Education Department using graduates’ federal tax records, provide evidence that pay gaps between men and women often form earlier than is widely perceived. Nationally, women across the workforce earn an average of 82.3 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the Labor Department.
Economists who have long examined pay gaps between men and women cite the so-called motherhood penalty—referring to the perception that mothers are less committed to their jobs—and say this affects hiring, promotions and salaries.
Determining why those gaps appear earlier isn’t simple. The federal data don’t account for such factors as recipients of the same degrees seeking different types of jobs and career paths, some of which pay far more than others. Studies have shown that men tend to negotiate salaries more aggressively than women, and women at times shy away from ambitious goals for fear of being unprepared. Even when women and men have identical academic credentials, women sometimes choose lower-paying career paths, pursuing a passion rather than a high paycheck.
The median pay for men from the California State University, Fullerton, nursing master’s program, for instance, was $199,000 three years after graduation, compared with $115,000 for women. The school said that is largely because women in the program gravitated toward nurse midwifery, which pays less than specialties like anesthesiology.
Researchers also say that discrimination, despite laws against it, remains a factor in the gender pay gap at all career levels.
The data don’t cover every student. Nationwide, about 55% of undergraduates, 40% of master’s students and 70% of professional school students receive federal loans or grants, Education Department data show. While that represents a large share of graduates at some schools, it covers only a fraction at other programs—particularly bachelor’s degrees from wealthy universities with generous scholarship aid. The Education Department also didn’t release figures for many small programs.
We are confused and adrift because our moral guideposts have gone missing, ripped out from under us by the Marxists calling themselves the “Great Reset”. Every parameter of our morals and values, things we have learned in our churches, schools and at our parents’ knees – literally, everything we have held dear – is being destroyed. History is being rewritten. Our bedrock is crumbling into shifting sands, and we are responding with either anger or denial.
It’s no wonder we feel like we’re going nuts.
Evil has invaded our country. We see incredible hostility on a daily basis. There is so much hate-filled rhetoric on the news and among acquaintances and family, that we tend to turn it off and back away.
People you know are uttering things you never thought you’d hear them say, and they can’t/won’t explain themselves in a rational way. If you asked them to defend their argument, they can’t. They just spew a mantra of learned derangement, if they answer at all.
The media hypes stories of theft and robbery, killings and maimings 24/7. This seems to get worse, more frequent, not better every day. Have another dose of horror with your coffee.
We are the bad guys for denying the existence of 58 genders; it makes US the haters, we are told. What happened to “follow the science”?? That little mantra also goes out the window when we are demanded to believe that men can give birth and provide all that is physically necessary therein. Whatever.
It is un-American for the Census to count how many American citizens live here, but the 2020 count made sure to catch as many illegals as possible. Russian interference in elections is bad, but voting by illegals is good. Border security ($5 billion) is too expensive, but free health care and housing for illegals ($1.5 trillion+) is just fine.
Our illegitimate government showers the Fascist dictator of Ukraine with trillions, but denies our own military what they need, to fight AND to live through their life-altering injuries sustained in our service.
Bidens (and Clintons AND Obamas) went to bed with the crooked Ukraine government, financed bio-weapon labs there, blackmailed its leader and that is somehow ignored (or accepted??), all day every day. Let Trump place a phone call the Ukraine president and ASK about those offenses, and it is worthy of impeachment. Daily, it seems, the current ‘resident and his Congress perform impeachable offenses but, since Trump left office, the word has not been whispered in those hallowed halls.
The party that says there is no such thing as gender, and whose SCOTUS nominee cannot define a “woman”, demands female candidates for public office and special healthcare “rights” (murder of the unborn) for women. Our children are being physically and chemically castrated in our own public schools, and parents are not even in the loop! This is pure Luciferian construct. Incredible!
Unbelievable! We are utterly incredulous. Again.
Illegal aliens are welcomed into our country by the millions, carrying every kind of disease known to man. (Of course, we don’t know what they are. Yet.) But Americans lose jobs and freedoms if they do not submit to an untested treatment, which has proven to be killing millions. “My body, my choice”, anyone?” Let’s not even mention the incredible amounts of lethal drugs like Fentanyl gushing into every state, while American citizens are prohibited from buying tested and effective remedies such as Ivermectin.
People are being held responsible for things they never did, stuff that happened before they were born – like slavery – but those committing crimes every day are being held responsible for nothing, notwithstanding video and/or eyewitness evidence of their crimes.
On this note, while it is NOT OK to execute murderers, it’s just fine when they kill innocent Americans. Attempted murder doesn’t even rate temporary incarceration or a trial. The entire act of a deranged Leftist trying to kill Congressman Lee Zeldin was caught on camera, but the perp was out of custody in two hours. Don’t forget, too, that under this New World Order, killing babies is somehow a human right, a necessary part of a woman’s (pardon me, “baby-maker person’s”) health care freedom.
And, oh, yes. Those evil law enforcement professionals are labeled fascists for trying to stop the anarchy, because, somehow, being arrested and held accountable violates the rights of the criminal.
Insanity.
Our Constitution and its body of law, on which we have depended to enjoy the finest form of government in history, has been thrown out. We are staring totalitarianism in its Luciferian face. Those forms of governance (socialism, Marxism, Communism, whatever) have killed millions around the world, but the Globalists want to try again.
After decades of undercover efforts to bring us to this point, we are facing the demise of our country. Now it is visible, the rot is all around us, and many of still can’t bring ourselves to believe, OR to work against it.
OK. I am somehow “racist” for pointing all this out. Heck…I’m in good company: Calling Covid the Chinese flu after its country of origin is racist, too. (“French” fries? “Italian” seasoning? “Greek” pastry? How far is this going? If I like all of the above, am I a hater??)
This insanity is invading every aspect of our lives. It is making us incredulous. We want to hide or run, or just deny. We just want it to go away, but it won’t, unless we acknowledge it, and realize what this turmoil is doing to us and our country.
Acceptance must precede knowledge which precedes the power to stand and fight. If we are going to be able to deal effectively to get our republic back, I repeat, we must act.
Many don’t want to get involved in activism because what is out there is just too crazy to believe, and too frightening to consider.
However, if you value your freedoms, IF YOU WANT TO ENJOY THE BLESSINGS OF LIVING IN A FREE COUNTRY, you will open your mind to reality, take a deep breath, and jump in. The water’s NOT fine, but it is navigable, and the only danger comes from NOT swimming with your pack. We do not have a choice.
Take heart. WE are far more numerous than THEY, because WE are the Constitutionalists, who want to save our freedoms. “Our pack” is no longer defined by a party label, “R”, “D”, “I” or any other. If you approach members of your community with the simple choice of which they support – the Constitution or Communism – you will raise the flaps of the tent, and expand your group to include a great many who have been frustrated, trying to find their old party allegiances. WE, who believe in our Constitution and the blessed life it has given us, ARE a vastly larger group than those who crave totalitarian control.
There are local action groups in counties and towns across the country, doing great work. They consist of members of all former political parties. More groups are forming every day, in every state. Join arms with your friends and neighbors and get involved. Form a Freedom Pod and learn what is happening in your own town. You might be surprised, but you will be armed for action, with understanding. Knowledge is power.
First priority, secure the November 2022 elections. Without that, we will be at a serious, perhaps fatal, disadvantage.
For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid “transition” to “green” energy was the world’s preordained future—regardless of the costs.
Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to “renewable energy.”
Most citizens were afraid to object that in cloudy, cold Germany solar panels were not viable methods of electrical generation—especially in comparison to the country’s vast coal deposits and its large, model nuclear power industry.
As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood—the dirtiest of modern fuels—to endure the cold. And there is further talk of “warm rooms,” where, like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive.
Sri Lanka may be the first modern nation to adopt deliberate policies that have led to mass hunger and bankruptcy. The government, for a variety of reasons, listened to foreign advocates of back-to-nature organic farming, specifically outright abandonment of highly effective synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
The result was endemic crop failure. Cash crops for export failed. Widespread hunger followed. Without foreign exchange, it became impossible to import key staples like food and fuel.
Sri Lanka once had a per capita income twice that of nearby India. Now it cannot feed or fuel itself.
Unfortunately, its incompetent government trusted radical environmental advisers, many of them foreign experts. Sri Lanka believed it could become the woke darling of the “environmental, social, governance” movement, and in that way draw in unlimited Western woke investment.
Instead, it has embraced a policy of national suicide.
Recently, a group of 55 distinguished pro-administration economists assured us that President Joe Biden’s massive borrowing and new entitlements agenda were not inflationary. In September 2021, these economists with 14 Nobel Prize winners among them declared that Biden’s inflationary policies would actually “ease” inflation.
Last month, inflation spiked to an annualized rate of 9.1%.
None of these “blue chip” economists have offered any apologies for lending their prestige to convince Americans of the absurd: that inflating the money supply, spiking new government spending, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates artificially low would not cause inflation.
In late July 2021, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that the Taliban takeover “was not a foregone conclusion.” He bragged that 34 provincial capitals were still in Afghan government hands.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nodded in approval. Less than a month later, the entire Afghan government collapsed. The American military fled in its most ignominious retreat in over 50 years. Milley had been parroting Biden’s earlier prompt that a Taliban victory after the American evacuation was “highly unlikely.”
On the eve of the 2020 election, news accounts revealed some of the lurid contents on Hunter Biden’s lost laptop. Emails and photos began to incriminate the entire Biden family for leveraging millions of dollars from foreign grandees for access to a bought Joe Biden.
Fifty retired intelligence officers, however, without evidence, swore that the laptop’s appearance could be due to “Russian disinformation.” Yet after authentication—Hunter Biden himself never denied the lost laptop was his—few, if any, of those marquee “experts” apologized for their election-driven dissimulation.
At the height of the massive 2020 enforced quarantine and lockdowns, some 1,200 medical and health “professionals” signed a petition claiming that thousands of left-wing protesters should be exempt from the very quarantine they had insisted on for others.
The experts absurdly claimed that denying tens of thousands the right to break quarantines to protest in the street was a greater health threat than COVID-19.
FBI Director James Comey doggedly pursued the “Russian collusion” hoax. At one point he hired the discredited Christopher Steele to supply the FBI with information from his fantasy dossier.
Once called to account, on some 245 occasions before Congress, Comey swore that he could either not remember or had no knowledge about the questions asked of him.
His successor, FBI interim Director Andrew McCabe, admittedly lied on four occasions to federal officials. Special counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller himself swore under oath that he knew nothing either about the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts for his entire investigation. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith admitted to altering a federal court document in efforts to convict an innocent suspect.
All these depressing examples have one common denominator: Elite experts and degreed professionals massaged and warped their knowledge to serve ideological masters, rather than the truth.
In the process, they caused untold damage to their country and fellow citizens. They disgraced their profession. They tarnished the scientific community. And sold their souls to ideologues.
Is it any wonder why the Western public has lost confidence in their degreed and credentialed elites?
Laurence Fox – the British actor cancelled for famously flopping over in exhaustion after being dismissed as a ‘white, privileged male’ by a BBC audience member – has spent his banishment defending liberty.
It is a war waged in the digital realm and fought with mobile phones, Tweets, and virtual armies of followers. Those who can move public outrage in the direction of politicians claim crucial victories in the Culture Wars. In the absence of genuine conservative parties, personalities such as Fox find themselves defending Western Civilisation alone – like the Battle of Thermopylae, but with more barbarians and fewer handy cliffs.
The latest battle took place during the high-profile arrest of Darren Brady, a 51-year-old army veteran. Police showed up at Brady’s door after a social media user accused him of causing them anxiety for retweeting an image of Pride flags arranged into a swastika. It is a common meme that draws attention to the increasingly intolerant, bullying, and authoritarian nature of fringe activist groups. When a version of the Gestapo showed up on Brady’s doorstep, they rather proved the point.
Fox was also briefly suspended from Twitter for the post. Speaking on TalkTV, he pointed out that Brexit flags had been turned into swastikas by Remainers without a peep from the media, while the Union Jack was compared to Nazi flags during Jubilee celebrations. Fox posted the meme as a ‘social experiment’ to show that some flags are more equal than others…
While praising the original Pride movement for seeking equality, Fox described the current LGBTQ+ ideology as a Trojan horse.
‘This is a movement which is hostile to gay people, it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of women, it encourages and promotes the mutilation of children, it hates free speech, it will ruin your job, and it will remove you from your job if you don’t bow down in worship to it. It is an ideological hell-storm.’
When the police arrested Brady, they lectured him in front of his neighbours about his ‘crime’ of causing anxiety to a stranger on the internet – which can only mean that the police officer involved has never been on social media.
Death threats are issued over trivial disagreements, while packs of trolls hunt down accounts with the aim of having them suspended or bullied into silence. It is a ruthless jungle of both creativity and abuse – tilting more toward the latter in recent years – caused by the clashing of global cultures and encouraged by heavily biased platform operators who delete people mid-debate. As for causing ‘offence’, it is a physical impossibility to put up a post that doesn’t cause offence. Even videos of adorable pets have hundreds of furious replies from animal welfare activists triggered by the ‘distress’ of a puppy posing for a photo.
‘Someone has been caused, obviously, anxiety based upon your social media post,’ said the arresting officer – to which the correct response is, ‘So what?’
The veteran was handcuffed and shoved into a police van. Evidently, Tweets are more important than knife crime to Woke Cops who can be found doused in glitter at Pride parades while in uniform. Footage of the arrest shot by Fox went viral as it was happening, turning it into a matter of public interest. Harry Miller, the Chairman of the Reclaim Party and ex-policeman, was also detained. Harry has been working tirelessly with Fox to end political policing and help those who are hounded by ideological zealots.
‘We have a rule that we only punch up. So, I’m less interested in those small fry officers, I’m much more interested in the toxicity that is being poured out from the college of policing, that is being adopted by constables, that is being taught by these officers, and I am also much more interested in the power vacuum that is being left by a disinterested Home Secretary and government. It is absolutely shocking that we, as a very small group of people, are basically doing the job of the Home Secretary. We are doing the job of the government. We are small, but we are fierce,’ said Harry.
Fox said of the event:
‘People in this country should not fear their doors being knocked on for sharing a meme, that’s not how we operate. I don’t want a politicised police force. Every single one of our foundational national institutions has been totally captured by this horribly divisive ideology.’
Had this arrest happened in the silence of anonymity, no one would have done a thing to stop it. Instead, the sheer weight of public pressure caused by Laurence Fox’s personal fame caused the police a fair bit of ‘anxiety’ – so much that the Hampshire Police later had to cancel the ‘hate crime awareness courses’ that led to the arrest.
It was a victory for freedom won in the Left’s battleground of social media. According to Harry, they have been contacted by many old-school police officers who want to see the end of this terrifying era of ‘thought crime’.
Interviewed on Sky News Australia’s Outsiders, Fox said, ‘Two people turned up and stood up to the police, and we have just changed the entire precedent of the British legal system in a week…’
He added that it should serve as a reminder to people around the world that it is possible to stop the tide of anti-freedom policing, remembering that it wasn’t Fox or Harry that achieved the change – it was the subsequent outrage of ordinary people.
Regardless, it takes a measure of bravery to stand against the forces of Woke. Fox has decided to take on the government, its institutions, the bureaucracies, international bodies, his celebrity peers, mainstream media, and the wrath of a brainwashed collectivist youth – all at the same time. He must win, or he has no future.
‘Bravery’ and ‘politics’ are two ideas rapidly separating since the rise of cardboard cut-out ministers. Policy is increasingly scripted in the bowels of international bureaucracies, smuggled across the Channel, and then regurgitated on the Prime Minister’s letterhead. The direction of social order is dictated by Tik Tok, Westminster is frequently herded around the chamber by activist Tweets, while elected representatives fear a viral Facebook meme far more than the fury of disgruntled constituents.
This talent-less backwater of surviving MPs who are yet to be caught throwing parties, touching things they shouldn’t, or shagging each other’s spouses, tick all the ideological virtue boxes but fail to notice the structure of British law collapsing around them – even after they’re crushed under a falling beam. We have reached the point where you’re likely to make more progress with the pigeons shitting all over the pavement outside than you are with the suits and stilettos inside.
It is no wonder that Laurence Fox is able to pick up a pitchfork and reshape policy with a few good prods.
As Leader of the Reclaim Party, he is involved in twin projects Reclaim the Media and The Bad Law Project. The latter is particularly interesting in the modern age of increased ‘compliance’ and social coercion to blindly obey the demands of authority. Conservatives are wrongly told that they must follow bad laws rather than engage in the English tradition of questioning, challenging, and disobeying fits of political nonsense.
Australia has the same problem as Britain. Our conservatives are weak and rotten, sitting in the corner of Parliament turning green. The people who once voted for them have no idea what to do – trapped between nostalgia and mounting economic pressure. When they want to speak out, they find rainbow barbed wire fencing off the public square.
Bad laws are inescapably tied to social justice because laws based on ‘offence’ are invalid and unenforceable by definition. The more resources funnelled into policing them, the more obvious their incompatibility with basic civil liberty becomes. They are, as the Bad Law Project states, ‘political ideology disguised as law’. Given that society is split more-or-less in half by politics, ideological laws serve as an attempt to use state-sanctioned intimidation to settle political debates.
Right now, we need political heroes ready for battle, and in that respect, Lozza is a legend.
Let me be clear: I am a committed feminist and a passionate supporter of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Indeed, I have been the beneficiary of those ideals in ways unimaginable to most people in the western world. I traveled from a genuinely patriarchal society poisoned by Islamism to a free, secular society where women, whatever issues we might still have, were equal to men under the law and able to pursue opportunities I could scarcely have dreamed of growing up.
As I have written before, however imperfect western civilization might be, we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in human history. The progress we have made is dizzying. One of western civilization’s greatest achievements is the emancipation of women. For most of human history, and still across large swaths of the world, women have been, at best, second-class citizens and, at worst, chattel. In the West today, women are freer than they ever have been. Why would a woman want to be born anywhere other than in the modern West?
But however grateful I am, I cannot pretend that the legacies of feminism and the Enlightenment are perfect. Like many women born into societies that oppressed them, I fully embraced western feminism, warts and all. But these days I am beginning to really see the warts.
When I first read Christina Hoff Sommers’s 2000 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, I admit that I was puzzled. Now I realize that Sommers was on to something. I paid too little attention to her argument that boys were being left behind by badly thought-out policies which penalized them as being privileged and as barriers to the equality of girls. I am grateful to Sommers and other writers who have offered enlightening critiques of modern feminism and the sexual revolution, among them Mary Eberstadt, Louise Perry, Caitlin Flanagan and Heather Mac Donald.
Much of modern feminism — and I want to emphasize that I in no way mean to denigrate all modern feminists — seems to be more interested in vengeance than fairness. Whereas feminists of the past focused on attaining legal and social equality between men and women, too many today desire power rather than real justice. How else to explain the authoritarianism evinced by many feminists over utterly trivial issues like so-called “manspreading”? Even one of the world’s most powerful women, Hillary Clinton, has recently complained about manspreading — in this case, from Vladimir Putin. So while Ukrainian women are being raped by Russian soldiers and women in Iran face beatings and imprisonment for daring to remove their hijabs, western feminists shriek at the way men sit on public transport.
You would also not know from mainstream feminism that Sommers was right: boys and men face daunting challenges of their own because of their gender. A 2019 study on how gender stereotypes impact adolescent health in fourteen low-income countries found that boys were more likely to report neglect, abuse and involvement in violence than girls. The study’s co-author Robert Blum notes that “the only group where life expectancy has gone down is white men over fifty, mainly due to self-directed violence and access to guns.”
This holds for wealthy countries, too: the Basic Index of Gender Inequality, which claims to use a less female-biased methodology, shows that in the US, boys are, among other inequalities, less likely than girls to be enrolled in secondary education and that men have a lower life expectancy than women. The great emancipation of women has gone hand in hand with the great emasculation of our brothers.
None of this is to deny that women and girls still have issues in the West. Indeed, my nonprofit, the AHA Foundation, works hard to end female genital mutilation, child and forced marriage and honor violence right here in the United States. But it is accurate to say that male issues are often ignored because mainstream feminism is too preoccupied with laughable “problems” like “mansplaining.”
Why the silence? As I said, I suspect it has to do with vengeance. The popular slogan “the future is female” is very telling: the past was male-dominated, so now we women must dominate the future — and who cares if that means men have a few problems of their own? This spirit is also apparent in other emancipation movements. Racial equality is out. “Equity” is in.
In universities, I see countless beautiful young women angry at their supposed victimhood. I have come to think of this as the Titania McGrath phenomenon, named for British comedian Andrew Doyle’s parody of ultra-woke activism. These Titanias shout and scream about the silliest of non-issues while ignoring the very real issues facing women — and men. Titania, to me, is a stand-in for the new, vengeful form of feminism. She would rather deconstruct patriarchal norms in movies than do anything as genuinely meaningful — or as uncomfortable — as challenging the misogynistic values of, for example, many Muslim communities in the West and beyond, let alone advocating for boys and men.
If feminism is to reclaim its radical, transformative, humanist spirit, then it must tame Titania. It must knock her from her powerful perch in education, entertainment and beyond. It must rediscover its universal ideals. It must stand up for minority women and recognize that men, too, are victims of gender inequality.
Inside a Pregnancy Center That Pro-Abortion Vandals Attacked
LYNCHBURG, Virginia—Something didn’t feel right to Susan Campbell as she checked the security camera feed from Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center, where she is executive director.
It was less than a day since the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending pregnancy on demand across America. And to Campbell, things seemed a little too quiet.
Campbell’s fears were confirmed June 25 when she arrived from home to learn that the pregnancy center had been attacked.
“They had taken crowbars to almost all of our windows, two of our doors, and just shattered all of the glass,” Campbell told The Daily Signal. “They had spray-painted [the shapes of] coat hangers on the sidewalks, on the brick facing of the buildings, and [wrote] political things like ‘Vote blue.’ In red on the stamped concrete, it read ‘If abortion ain’t safe, you ain’t safe.’”
Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center, in Lynchburg, Virginia, is one of about 40 pro-life organizations attacked since May 2, when someone leaked the Supreme Court’s draft majority opinion in the case called Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
That draft previewed the high court’s official 5-4 decision, released June 24, to end abortion on demand and return the issue of abortion to Americans and their state representatives.
“Anybody who thinks that it’s OK to vandalize a center that’s aimed at helping women [in] their most desperate needs are cowards by every definition,” Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said during a visit to the Lynchburg pregnancy center following the act of vandalism.
“They hide behind a mask and they think they’re making a political statement,” Miyares, a Republican, said of those who vandalize pregnancy centers. “They’re absolutely victimizing the very women they claim that they’re standing up for.”
Pregnancy centers such as the one Campbell runs exist to provide women with an alternative to abortion when they face unexpected pregnancy. They often offer parenting classes, adoption resources, and emotional and financial support to women in crisis pregnancies.
“We do not want financial resources to be one reason or any hindrance,” Campbell said, explaining that all the resources offered by Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center are free, from diapers and baby clothes to counseling and ultrasound.
The Lynchburg center serves about 50 to 75 women a month, Campbell says.
Shortly after the attack on the center, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., made headlines for speaking openly against pro-life pregnancy centers.
“In Massachusetts right now, those crisis pregnancy centers—that are there to fool people who are looking for pregnancy termination help—outnumber true abortion clinics by 3 to 1,” Warren said. “We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts, and we need to shut them down all around the country.”
In response to the Massachusetts Democrat’s remarks, Campbell says she would “love to invite Elizabeth Warren to walk through these doors.” She said she would “take her through on a tour, show her, shadow an appointment, show her the life-saving measures that we are able to do.”
And to those who vandalized the Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center, Campbell says, her message is “immediate forgiveness.”
“If you were to dwell on what they had done, … it would be easy to fall into unforgiveness and even bitterness because you felt so violated,” she said. “But I know as a Christian I’ve walked that path many times, and I won’t allow my heart to go down that direction.”
Now more than ever, Campbell says, she and her team are committed to keep on offering “guidance and support” to women facing crisis pregnancies.
“[We] not only help save the crisis pregnancy,” she said, “we care about the whole person.”
Contrary to Mainstream Narrative, Black Americans Want Criminals Behind Bars: Horace Cooper
Black Americans in urban areas are suffering the consequences of the progressive Democrats’ anti-police “soft on crime” policies, despite the fact that these are the communities the policies were supposedly going to help, said Horace Cooper, senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, in a recent NTD interview.
Cooper told NTD that because progressives Democrats are too soft on crime and conservatives are afraid of being called racist by the left, crime has come to an all-time high in urban areas and is disproportionately harming black people.
The black community wants criminals to be prosecuted, said Cooper.
“I would argue that it would be smart to stand up, find out where black Americans are, and champion the kinds of policies and issues that interest them,” he said. “On the issue of crime, black Americans are ready to bring in law enforcement, are ready to increase penalties, and they are ready to stop the violent wave of crime that we see.”
Cooper is also chairman of the board for Project 21, which established a network of black conservative and libertarian leaders in 1992 to highlight the diversity of viewpoints within the black community.
Project 21 has identified 10 key areas for reform that, if accomplished, would help black Americans reach their potential and attain the American dream.
Black Americans Want Less Crime
Cooper said that out of the 10 areas, one of the key issues that need to be addressed is the crime in black communities.
“We have a ‘Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America’ that we’re releasing this fall, and one of the core issues is going to be the idea of crime control,” said Cooper.
Crime disproportionality affects black communities, and the people who live there don’t support policies like “Defund the Police,” he said.
“During the Rodney King riots, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, there were a lot of voices that came out that said when you saw this violence, when you saw this mayhem, that it was justifiable. It was a natural outworking. ‘This is what blacks just do,'” Cooper said.
“In fact, most black Americans don’t believe that this kind of behavior is acceptable.”
In a Gallup poll conducted in June 2020 at the height of the George Floyd riots, 61 percent of black people surveyed said they wanted to keep the same level of policing in their neighborhoods, and another 20 percent said they wanted more police presence.
In late 2021, a consortium of news organizations surveyed 800 voters in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died in police custody, and asked them what they thought of the city’s police department. Three-quarters of the black respondents said the city shouldn’t reduce its police force.
Cooper said that Democrats and the Biden administration do not understand what the black community really wants, and instead perpetuate racist ideas about blacks.
“We’re seeing the outworking of that during the Biden administration, this tacit idea that it’s criminals who are the victims, and if you really want to support blacks, you’ve got to support criminals.”
In addition, Democrats install radical prosecutors who double-down on this narrative in Democrat-run inner cities, he said.
“We’re seeing what I would call the ‘woke prosecutors’ who actively say to criminals, ‘there will be no accountability. There will be no punishment.’”
‘Woke’ Prosecutors Won’t Punish Criminals
Cooper said that while black men make up just 7.5 percent of the American population, they commit 40 percent of all violent crime.
“That’s staggering,” he said. “But these woke prosecutors and their supporters, they say, ‘Well, the truth is just America’s unfair, America is bigoted, America systematically mistreats,’ and that these people who prey on the rest of us, ‘They’re not predators. They’re just fighting back.'”
The problem with this narrative is that there is no evidence to support those claims, Cooper said. The way to stop this type of predatory behavior is to punish it, he added
Owner of Australian antique centre that sells golliwogs, Nazi memorabilia, ivory and indigenous artefacts forced to put warning sign up after 'outraged' visitors abuse staff
The owner of an antiques market which trades in golliwogs and Nazi memorabilia has taken on outraged visitors who say such historical relics should not be offered for sale.
A sign has been placed outside Morpeth Antique Centre in the New South Wales Hunter Valley describing the dealership as a 'purveyor of history' and warning customers about some of the controversial items they might confront inside.
The sign says the emporium's stallholders stock golliwogs and other 'black Americana', World War II German militaria, 'child and slave labour objects' and Barbie dolls.
The centre also sells stuffed animals, fur, whale bone, ivory, religious icons, 'colonial and empire jewellery' and indigenous artefacts from around the world.
'Entry is free,' the sign states. 'At your discretion.'
The antique centre, which operates from the 180-year-old Campbell's Store on Morpeth's main street, is one of the two-pub town's biggest weekend tourist attractions.
In recent years it has also become a target of 'politically correct' antagonists who object to some of the wares on offer, particularly Nazi war relics emblazoned with swastikas.
The sign, which went up about three weeks ago, is the work of centre owner Trevor Richards and his daughter Kylie, who refined the wording over several months of considering how to get their message across.
The pair was sick of having to deal with outraged visitors, some of whom were abusive to their staff.
'We put it up just to try and minimise people being offended by some of the products we sell,' Mr Richards said.
'And explain to them what the expectation is when they enter Campbell's Store.
'As the sign indicates at the top, we are purveyors of history and history includes things like gollies, which were very fashionable in the 1900s.'
Golliwogs - black dolls with frizzy hair and minstrel faces that first appeared in children's books in the late 19th century - were popular toys in Australia into the 1970s. There is a large display of them on the centre's first floor.
The most contentious material for sale is World War II memorabilia from Nazi Germany's Third Reich. The centre has Jewish relics from the Holocaust era as well.
Stallholder Matt Robinson, who sells German World War II uniforms, weapons, medals and books including Hitler's Mein Kampf, previously told Daily Mail Australia that Nazism appalled him.
'It's history,' Mr Robinson said. 'I don't sell it to glorify it.
'I also sell Japanese World War II items which are extremely popular as well. As Australians, technically we probably should be more offended by that than anything with a swastika on it.'
Ms Richards said it was a only tiny minority of visitors who took issue with what was on sale at the centre but she and her father wanted to diffuse any trouble.
'Usually you can have a good conversation with a customer about whatever it is that's caused them offence but sometimes they really do get quite defensive about it all,' she said.
'The team managing the counter downstairs don't need to put up with people walking in the door and abusing them about this, that and the other.
'Finally it got to the point where we just got one too many comment.'
Ms Richards said the sign was meant to advise anyone who came into the centre 'that it's chock-a-block with thousands of years of history and that some people might be offended by what they see.'
'Our position in a very polite way is to say well, it's a part of history and we shouldn't be writing history out of books and society,' she said.
'We're not confrontational. We don't want to be that. We just want people to come in and enjoy themselves without it necessarily becoming a woke issue. 'But it's their choice. It's a private business, we're not forcing you to come in the front door.'
Ms Richards said the first complaints staff received when the centre opened five years ago were about the large number of golliwogs in a cabinet filled with black Americana.
She dealt with those protests by displaying a pamphlet which explained the origins of golliwogs and how it spread as a marketing icon for Robertson's jam in the early 20th century.
When Ms Richards was told that brochure presented a 'rose-coloured' view of the dolls she wrote a second one which recognised their racist connotations in modern times.
'That got handed to every person who made a comment and it was just there as a general information sheet for customers as well,' Ms Richards said.
'But of course we get a fair few comments about other things, which is basically all the things that are written on the sign out the front.'
There was seemingly no end to the items that could cause offence including uranium glass which contains the radioactive metal. When put under an ultra-violet light it glows.
'We've had people have a go about Barbie dolls, the taxidermy, fur, blood diamonds, whale bone, colonial and empire jewellery, anything Edwardian,' Ms Richards said.
'There's some about indigenous artefacts as well, and we get the odd one about antiquities too - "you shouldn't have Roman coins" and things like that. We get a little bit of that as well.
'Semi-precious stones that have been mined out of Sri Lanka and Burma - that type of thing.
And Noddy.' The fictional character Noddy was created by English children's author Enid Blyton for a series of books published between 1949 and 1963. The original publications featured golliwogs, often cast as villains, and in recent decades Blyton has been accused of being racist, sexist and xenophobic.
Barbie, the collectable fashion doll launched by Mattel in 1959, is blamed for perpetuating gender stereotypes and conveying an unrealistic body image to girls.
'Even Smurfs - we get the odd comment about Smurfs too,' Ms Richards said. 'But it's mainly Noddy and Barbie.' Asked how Smurfs could offend anyone, Ms Richards said: 'I don't know about that one'. French academic Antoine Bueno claimed in 2011 the little blue figures represented an 'archetype of totalitarian society imbued with Stalinism and Nazism'.
The centre's loudest critic has been Dr Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, who lives in Victoria and has never visited the store.
Dr Abramovich has been spearheading a national campaign to ban the sale of Third Reich paraphernalia and believes the trade encourages neo-Nazism.
First Disney, Now PayPal: DeSantis Takes Matters Into His Own Hands, Defeats Another Woke Giant
For years, the woke CEOs running many of America’s biggest companies spat in the faces of their conservative customers, force-feeding them partisan, anti-American messaging. Thanks to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, many such CEOs are now thinking twice. After all, no one wants to become the next Disney.
Unfortunately for the wokesters running PayPal, that’s exactly what happened. Florida’s Voice reported that Moms for Liberty, a conservative non-profit that advocates for parental rights in schools, has received many of its donations through PayPal.
On July 15, while DeSantis was giving a speech at the Moms for Liberty National Summit, the organization’s co-founder, Tina Descovich, received a notification from the company. The Moms for Liberty accounts had been frozen.
“While he’s speaking, I started getting emails … that PayPal has stopped processing one by one all of our monthly donors,” Descovich said, according to Florida’s Voice.
That’s when PayPal decided to pull what appears to be a very dirty trick.
“PayPal told Descovich that they could not operate on the platform until the IRS approved the organization’s paperwork. However, Descovich said [that] PayPal had already accepted the paperwork they filed with the IRS, which is backlogged, in January of 2021,” Florida’s Voice reported.
Over the course of several days, Descovich attempted to set things straight with the company to no avail. PayPal refused to release the money that belonged to Moms for Liberty.
And that’s when DeSantis proved yet again to be the strongest leader in American politics.
During a news conference on Wednesday, DeSantis announced he would be launching an initiative to “prohibit big banks, credit card companies and money transmitters from discriminating against customers for their religious, political, or social beliefs.”
Then, all of a sudden, PayPal released Moms for Liberty’s funds.
“Last week Tina Descovich, Co-Founder of [Moms for Liberty], shared that PayPal locked their account and withheld funds with no warning or justification. Days after our event, their funds were released. Florida has put WOKE banking on notice,” DeSantis tweeted on Monday.
Descovich believes PayPal backtracked in direct response to DeSantis’ announcement. “I do think it helps. I have no other explanation why I have no messages from PayPal that they reversed anything. I have not sent them any more documents to change the status,” Descovich said. “So the only thing I have to point to is that they saw the governor’s press conference and decided to change their minds.”
This isn’t the first time DeSantis has chosen to take action when no one else would.
On April 22, the Florida governor signed a bill effectively terminating the Walt Disney Company’s special tax district surrounding the famous Orlando theme park. DeSantis did so in direct response to Disney’s inappropriate LGBT agenda and partisan political posturing.
This decisive action created a significant ripple effect. According to a May 1 report from The Wall Street Journal, in response to the bill, many American CEOs began reconsidering involving their companies in politics.
This victory over PayPal will likely have a similar effect. It’s very clear: Ron DeSantis has put the fear of God into woke CEOs.
Red States Engage in All-Out Assault on Woke Banks: 'We're Not Going to Pay for Our Own Destruction'
Energy-producing states in America are fighting back against banks that are lining up against the economic lifeblood.
As major banks are supporting anti-fossil-fuel policies and so-called environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, states such as West Virginia are refusing to do business with them.
“We’re not going to pay for our own destruction, we’re not going to subsidize that,” West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore told Fox Business recently.
West Virginia has put five financial firms — including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase — into timeout, barring state agencies from doing business with them, because the banks all called for limiting their connections to the fossil fuel industry – a sector that paid $769 million in West Virginia state taxes.
Moore said the state is fighting fire with fire.
“They have weaponized our tax dollars against the very people and industry that have generated them to begin with. That is why we’re pushing back against this ESG movement,” he said, noting that U.S. Bancorp changed its tune of any such ban and stayed off the banned bank list.
West Virginia is the first to act but soon might have a lot of company.
“We’ve really seen, frankly, a weaponization of capital by some of the largest banks and fund managers in the world,” said Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation. “If you want to make social change in this country, we have a democratic process that you should utilize to get that done.”
Kreifels said states are forming an alliance to flex their collective muscle.
Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar has asked banks for their fossil fuel investment policies as Texas compiles a list in response to a new law.
Kentucky and Oklahoma also are compiling lists.
Officials in Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Louisiana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Arkansas and North Dakota are looking at ways to deal with banks that will not do business with the fossil-fuel sector.
“These industries are economically integral to Kentucky,” a spokesman for State Treasurer Allison Ball told Fox Business. “They provide jobs for Kentuckians, fuel commutes and the supply chain, and keep the lights on. We want to support these signature industries.
“We hope we have sent the message that if you won’t do business with Kentucky, we won’t do business with you.”
Said Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis: “For years now, the cult of ESG economic activists has been working overtime to infuse unwanted, woke ideology into the American economic system because they know their social policies wouldn’t pass the sniff test from voters.
“It’s anti-American, anti-freedom — a deliberate attempt to subvert our democracy and not in the best interest of Florida businesses, retirees or investors.”
South Carolina State Treasurer Curtis Loftis said he will battle what he termed “out-of-state or international activists and institutions.”
“I will not allow these wealthy and powerful elites to supplant the voices of our citizens and the decisions of their elected representatives,” Loftis said.
Democrat Senate nominee has created a false persona for himself
In his ads, and much of the public imagination, John Fetterman is a tattooed everyman from a rugged steel city outside Pittsburgh.
The phrase “blue collar tough guy” flashes across one of his TV ads as a grim-faced Fetterman poses before billowing smokestacks. A narrator says, “He’s looked different and been different his entire life.”
That persona has long irked Republicans, who say Fetterman’s distinctive visual cues leave an impression that he’s more working class — and more moderate — than he really is. Now, as Fetterman campaigns as Pennsylvania’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Republicans are aiming to challenge his story and undercut one of his greatest political strengths. They say his image obscures his roots in a comfortable, suburban family that provided his financial security deep into adulthood.
Public records show — and Fetterman has openly acknowledged — that for a long stretch lasting well into his 40s, his main source of income came from his parents, who gave him and his family $54,000 in 2015 alone. That was part of the financial support his parents regularly provided when Fetterman’s only paying work was $150 a month as mayor of Braddock, a job he held from his mid-30s until he turned 49. Partway through his tenure, in 2013, he moved to an industrial-style loft he purchased from his sister for $1 after she paid $70,000 for it six years earlier.
“He’s a pretend populist,” Republican Senate nominee Mehmet Oz, an ultra-wealthy TV star, said in a recent interview on Fox News. “Many folks think it’s because of the way he dresses with his hoodies and his shorts that he’s been working his whole life. It’s quite the opposite.”
Fetterman, 52, grew up, in his own words, in a “cushy” environment in York County. His upbringing helped him get an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a master’s degree from Harvard without taking on student debt. He got his undergraduate degree at Albright College in Reading.
Fetterman now earns $217,610 as lieutenant governor, a job he started in 2019, and his family’s assets top $700,000. His parents supported him financially for nearly all of his 13 years as mayor, aid that he says allowed him to devote himself to public service. He no longer receives that assistance, his campaign said. The campaign did not answer when asked if the $54,000 disclosed from 2015 was typical of his parents’ aid.
Fetterman has long acknowledged his parents’ support. He has said he could have continued living a comfortable life with a lucrative job but made an abrupt change to dedicate himself to people who were less fortunate — including mentoring an orphaned child, leading a program to help high school dropouts, and eventually becoming mayor of Braddock, a hard-hit steel town. He made little money doing so and disclosed his parents’ aid during his 2016 Senate run, even when he wasn’t required to.
“John has spent his career rolling up his sleeves and fighting for forgotten people and communities in Pennsylvania,” said Fetterman spokesperson Joe Calvello, contrasting the Democrat with the “ultra-millionaire” Oz.
Fetterman “has dedicated his life to public service and helping others,” Calvello said. “John had a good job with a good paycheck but gave it up to focus on serving the forgotten communities in Pennsylvania.”
Fetterman’s rugged image and blunt style have underpinned his rise from mayor to lieutenant governor and, now, Democratic nominee in one of the country’s most crucial Senate races. They even got him featured in Rolling Stone (”The Mayor of Hell”) and a Levi’s ad campaign.
While Fetterman’s suburban childhood and his parents’ financial assistance have been reported many times, Republicans say they’ve been obscured by his blue-collar branding.
Some liken his persona to a pro wrestling gimmick, with a look (once Dickies work shirts, now hoodies and gym shorts), origin story, and incessant trolling. Republicans hope his image wilts under the intensity and scrutiny of Fetterman’s first major general election battle.
“John Fetterman is not who he seems to be. He is a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” said David Urban, a longtime Republican strategist in the state. “Nobody’s ever laid a glove on him.”
Added Bill Bretz, chairman of the Westmoreland County GOP in Southwestern Pennsylvania: “We need to debunk the mythos that he’s created about himself and talk about the platform that he has.”
Former Australian governor-general Peter Hollingworth faces judgment day over sex abuse crisis
The treatment of Peter Hollingworth has been monstrous. A genuinely holy man has been given great anguish only because he was not politically correct. I did not know him well but I have spoken with him, shaken his hand and observed his joyous leadership of a eucharistic procession. And I have no doubt that he is a genuine Christian, a rarity in the Anglican episcopate.
His offence was to adopt a proper judicial attitude towards a serious accusation against one of of his priests. That was a great secular sin. Accusations of sexual abuse are expected by the Leftist press to be believed without question. In such matters the presumption of innocence is thrown out the window
He was a proper servant of his God in acting as he did. As it says in Deuteronomy 1:17: "Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s"
Time is running out for Peter Hollingworth over the child sex abuse crisis and Beth Heinrich wants him to be judged by his church with a biblical sense of urgency.
The former governor-general’s theological licence to officiate in basic tasks such as delivering sermons and overseeing family church events in the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne has not been renewed but this is only a small part of a much bigger problem he faces.
The Anglican investigative body Kooyoora is inching closer to deciding whether Dr Hollingworth, 87, should be stripped of holy orders – defrocked – after several complaints about his conduct while archbishop of Brisbane in the late 1980s and 90s and his comments as governor-general.
Multiple victims of church abuse – like Ms Heinrich, who was abused at a hostel as a teenager in the 1950s by an Anglican minister – are relentlessly pursuing Dr Hollingworth, her victim impact statement to the inquiry a shattering account of how she was groomed and then abused from the age of 14 in NSW.
Dr Hollingworth’s reputation was battered in 2002 when he suggested Ms Heinrich, at the time of the offending a child at a boarding school, had instigated sex with disgraced Anglican minister Donald Shearman.
Ms Heinrich is preparing to write a book on the intimate details of how she says Dr Hollingworth and others intensified her pain, testing her will to live and destroying her relationship with the church she loved.
“You are looking at me and perhaps I look OK on the outside, but that’s not how I feel,” Ms Heinrich’s statement prepared for the Kooyoora tribunal reads.
“If I allowed myself to be me I would have to start cutting my arms to show people how much I was hurting. I am afraid to be me because it hurts too much. I feel like I am someone else.”
While Dr Hollingworth mulls what logic and fairness suggests must be the looming end of the years-long Kooyoora inquiry, Ms Heinrich wants the elderly bishop held to account for his failures, blasting the prolonged nature of the investigation.
“Of course none of this dragged out drama is necessary,” she writes. “It can easily be solved. He should find the integrity, finally do the right thing and quietly resign.”
Dr Hollingworth was never an abuser, but was exposed falling short of basic community standards in his handling of the crisis.
Puberty blockers earned a warning label from the Food and Drug Administration earlier this month after six minors (ages 5-12) experienced severe symptoms. The puberty blockers in question are known scientifically as “gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) substances.”
The minors, who were all biologically female, suffered from symptoms of “pseudotumor cerebri” (tumor-like masses in the brain), including visual disturbances (seeing bright lights that aren’t there), headache or vomiting, papilledema (swelling of the optic nerve), increased blood pressure, and abducens neuropathy (eye paralysis).
“We’re just going to keep seeing more bad reports,” Jennifer Bauwens, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Family Studies and a licensed clinical psychologist, told The Washington Stand. “Our bodies were not made for these drugs.” So, the unscientific campaign to push these drugs on children “isn’t going to have a good outcome.”
Bauwens said she was “a little surprised” by the FDA’s announcement because the medical establishment has suppressed information regarding the harmful effects of puberty blockers.
Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics forbade the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine from exhibiting at its annual conference, rejecting its application without explanation, while L’Oreal, the National Peanut Board, and Infinity Massage Chairs were accepted.
At the 2021 conference, 80% of American Academy of Pediatrics members supported a resolution calling for “more debate and discussion of the risks, benefits, and uncertainties inherent in the practice of medically transitioning minors,” but such discussion has not been forthcoming.
This year, the American Academy of Pediatrics “is suppressing support” for a similar resolution that calls for “rigorous systematic review of evidence and policy update for management of pediatric gender dysphoria,” according to Genspect, a group that supports “an evidence-based approach to gender distress.”
“At the same time, there comes a point when they [the FDA] have to do something,” continued Bauwens. “We already have studies showing the negative effects of both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones,” but “any time we see more evidence and more publicity on the damage that these drugs do to kids, it’s helpful.”
She added, “Good science is on our side. Truth is on our side. Those things always prevail when given the opportunity.”
While Bauwens believes the FDA’s warning for puberty blockers is good news, she doesn’t think this is the end of the debate.
In treating minors experiencing gender dysphoria, “the medical side will change faster than the psychological side,” she explained. “The medical side deals with physical realities where solid data is difficult to ignore. The psychological side is far more abstract and has been more completely captured by the mistaken notions of identity that gave rise to the transgender movement.”
What the FDA’s warning does show, explained Bauwens, is that it’s “very disingenuous for someone like Rachel Levine to stand up and say, ‘This is lifesaving medical care.’ It’s dangerous.”
As assistant secretary of health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Levine said last month, “Gender-affirming care is lifesaving, medically necessary, age-appropriate, and a critical tool for health care providers.”
According to Bauwens, and now the FDA, Levine’s rhetoric is simply not true.
Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.”
Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984.”
“Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.
Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency.
But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American left like the cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism.
In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.
This week, new governmental data revealed that the American economy, measured by gross domestic product, contracted for the second straight quarter. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.”
This was not a partisan issue; indeed, well-known liberal, Democratic Party economists have frequently defined recession in precisely these terms.
Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”
Democrats are now singing a different tune. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has stubbornly refused to concede that America is now in an economic recession.
Deese apparently also disagrees with his old self of 2008: Following the release of the data evincing the second straight quarter of economic contraction, Deese stipulated that we are “certainly in a transition,” but also added that “virtually nothing signals that this period … is recessionary.”
The ruse is transparent and obvious to the point of comedy. As famed investor David Sacks tweeted: “A lot of people are wondering about the definition of recession. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth if a Republican is president. The definition is far more complicated and unknowable if a Democrat is president.”
Democrats similarly seem interested in changing the definition of “inflation,” which currently sits at four-decade highs and is disproportionately responsible for Biden’s dismal job approval ratings and Democrats’ unfavorable political outlook this fall.
The widely accepted economic definition of inflation is when there is too much money chasing too few goods. The way to tamp down inflation is thus to limit the money supply and/or increase the production of goods.
Just this week, around the same time as when the U.S. formally entered a recession, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally reached an agreement on a version of the White House’s long-sought after Build Back Better domestic initiative. But Democrats renamed the bill: It is now not called Build Back Better but the Inflation Reduction Act.
And the revised bill includes new government expenditures to the tune of nearly $400 billion in energy- and climate-related spending. Authorizing such a fiscal boondoggle is the precise opposite of limiting the money supply. It is the logical equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a blowtorch.
Remarkably, it is the same ideologues who are eager to change the well-accepted definitions of “recession” and “inflation” who remain perplexed as to what exactly a “woman” is.
In March, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to define what a “woman” is. Her excuse was that she is “not a biologist.”
Related, in Matt Walsh’s excellent new documentary “What Is a Woman?,” the myriad “gender studies” professors and gender ideology-bewitched “doctors” interviewed by Walsh invariably define a “woman,” in circular fashion, as being “someone who identifies as a woman.”
Whether it is a Supreme Court justice herself or the vogue flatulence that now constitutes “gender studies” in the American academy, then, the left is incapable of defining what a “woman” is.
That confusion appears to be ubiquitous: Lia Thomas, the biological man who has been wreaking havoc in women’s collegiate swimming, was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
Alinsky would be proud of such an imperious enforcement of regime-approved orthodoxy; “he who controls the language controls the masses,” after all.
The left’s fundamental problem is that its haughtiness, fervor, and zeal for gaslighting us sane Americans is belied by its unpopularity. It is curious that the left can talk and act this way when its most notable avatar, Biden, is as severely unpopular as he currently is.
Perhaps the left will be chastened by its impending November defeats at the ballot box. But don’t bet on it.
Is the Labor Market Really as Good as Biden Administration Says?
Between out-of-control inflation, ongoing supply chain struggles, the crisis at the southern border, foreign policy concerns, exploding energy prices, rising crime, and a high likelihood that the country is either already or soon will be experiencing stagflation (an inflationary recession), it’s no wonder that Democrats and the Biden administration are talking up the strong labor market.
A recent tweet on the Democrats’ official Twitter page stated, “Under Joe Biden, the private sector has recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic—and added jobs on top of that.”
That statement is only half true, at best.
According to the official jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private-sector jobs are up by about 140,000 since the low in April 2020, but only 4 in 10 of those job gains occurred on the Biden administration’s watch, while 6 in 10 were recovered during the Trump administration.
While the labor market appears to be going well by some metrics, that’s not the whole story.
Metrics like a nearly half-century-low unemployment rate, high nominal wage gains, and 11.3 million job openings that equal two jobs available for every unemployed person didn’t arise naturally. They were artificially induced through bad government policies that have included a lot of unintended consequences.
Most significantly, 18 months’ worth of bonus unemployment benefits that paid most people more to stay on the sidelines than to work caused millions of people to leave the labor market. Meanwhile, Washington stimulated consumer and business demand for goods and services by flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in so-called COVID-19 relief, about half of which was money printed by the Federal Reserve.
Too few workers is also adding to the inflationary cycle.
When employers have to compete for workers, they have to increase their compensation. According to the National Federation of Independent Business survey, 48% of owners reported increasing compensation in June and 28% said they plan to increase compensation over the next three months.
But paying workers more to do the exact same thing requires hiking prices.
The future isn’t looking good. Small business owners’ expectations for better business conditions reached an all-time low in June, owing to “inflation and worker shortages,” along with “policy talks that [have] shifted to tax increases and more regulations.”
Government policies to spend more, tax more, regulate more, and produce less will only make labor shortages and inflation worse.
If lawmakers want to be able to tout metrics like increased labor force participation and real rising wages, they should start by removing the government-imposed barriers they’ve created for work and productivity.
DeSantis Calls for Harsh Repercussions for Doctors Performing Life-Altering Surgeries on Children
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave a speech on Wednesday where he condemned doctors who perform sex-changing surgeries on children. Ultimately, he suggested that such professionals should be sued.
During the conference, the Republican governor stood firm in his belief that the government should not give children the ability to castrate their bodies.
His proclamations about the subject prompted cheers of support from his audience. “They talk about these very young kids getting ‘gender-affirming care.’ They don’t tell you what that is,” DeSantis said in a video tweeted by Florida’s Voice.
“They are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies. They want to castrate these young boys — that’s wrong,” DeSantis said.
“And so we’ve stood up and said, both from the health and children well-being perspective, you don’t disfigure 10-, 12-, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria. Eighty percent of it resolves anyways by the time they get older, so why would you be doing this?” DeSantis added. “I think these doctors need to get sued for what’s happening.”
It was after this suggestion that applause erupted from the governor’s audience.
DeSantis’ movement to restrict a minor’s access to sex-changing procedures has been grossly countered by Democrats. In the first half of 2022, the Biden administration announced its new healthcare proposals, which promoted “gender-affirming care” and suggested that minors have access to gender reassignment surgery, puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
Fortunately for DeSantis, others in Florida’s leadership are in favor of restricting the “gender-affirming care” for which Biden and other Democrats are pushing.
In April, the state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo released new public health guidelines for Florida minors struggling with gender dysphoria — guidelines which counter those proposed by the Biden administration, WPEC News reported.
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration also pursued restricting the Biden administration’s proposal. After Ladapo’s announcement, the state’s ACHA similarly suggested blocking payment for transgender medical treatment, such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery, WPEC noted.
These measures alongside DeSantis’ proposal to sue the doctors who participate in the castration of young children is yet another one of the state’s trailblazing moves.
By restricting a minor’s access to gender-changing procedures, Florida’s leadership is leaning into the well-known fact that children lack a firm grasp on the world around them.
Just as a 12-year-old believes that having the coolest shoes will make them popular, so too are they susceptible to the promise that changing their gender will resolve the discomfort they feel in their own bodies.
Every adult has lived as a 12-year-old, and surely, each remembers a time where he toiled with an insecurity about his ears being just a little too big, his frame being a little too skinny or his stature being a little too short.
The difference — today’s adults struggled with their childhood body discomforts in a society that promoted the trope, “This too shall pass.”
Children are young and impressionable. Everything is new for them as they learn about the dynamics of the world and grow accustomed to their changing bodies.
To trust that a 12-year-old confidently knows that they don’t identify with their gender is far from logical.
To trust that a 12-year-old’s happiness will come from cutting off her breasts or castrating his genitalia is wishful thinking, and to believe that the child won’t regret it or change their mind later is ludicrous.
No current adult looks back and thinks that their 12-year-old self was reasonably capable of make good life-changing decisions.
DeSantis is right to suggest that doctors who perform gender-altering surgeries on minors should be sued.
No matter what the general arguments are for gender-altering surgeries for adults, it should be accepted that those surgeries are not appropriate for children who are not physically or mentally mature enough to make life-altering decisions.
A new Harvard study throws cold water on characterizing the breaching of the Capitol by rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, as an “insurrection.”
According to the study conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, more than 40 percent of rioters were motivated by former President Donald Trump’s claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, as well as a desire to see him re-elected.
According to The Harvard Crimson, researchers found that 20.6 percent of rioters were motivated by wanting to support Trump, while another 20.6 percent of rioters cited Trump’s election claims as the reason they stormed the U.S. Capitol more than 18 months ago in a bid to thwart certification of now-President Joe Biden’s election.
Less than 8 percent were motivated by a “desire to start a civil war or an armed revolution,” the Crimson reported.
The study has been released as a working paper because it has not yet been peer-reviewed, according to the Crimson. It is titled, “‘President Trump Is Calling Us to Fight’: What the Court Documents Reveal About the Motivations behind January 6 and Networked Incitement.”
It found a smattering of other causes as well, including “pursuit of historical significance” (7.43 percent), “protect the country or ‘take back'” the country” (5.76 percent), and even “Marxism, socialism, communism” (5.76 percent).
Study authors Joan Donovan, Kaylee Fagan and Frances E. Lee wrote that their analysis found the largest portion of defendants were “motivated, in part, to invade the U.S. Capitol Building by Donald Trump,” according to the Crimson.
Donovan is research director at the Shorenstein Center. Fagan is a Shorenstein research fellow. Lee is a professor of politics and acting chairwoman of the department of politics at Princeton University.
The report explained how the former president was able to persuade a number of his supporters that the country faced a catastrophe.
“The documents show that Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline, but in imminent, existential danger,” the study said.
“This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to D.C. from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.”
In other words, it was the exact opposite of “insurrection.”
While the Harvard study is not complimentary toward Trump, of course, in that it paints a picture of a cult of personality as the main reason for the violence, it does damage the narrative put forth by Democrats and the mainstream media that an “insurrection” took place that day.
An insurrection has traditionally been defined as an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence.
As legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote, the study showed that while there was violence involved in the Capitol incursion, the attack was not a serious, organized attempt to take over the U.S. government.
In his online column “Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks,” Turley, a professor at George Washington University wrote:
“Once again, none of this exonerates or excuses those who rioted on January 6th or those who fueled the riot. However, the use of ‘insurrection’ by the politicians, pundits, and the press is not an accurate characterization of the motivation of most of the people who went to the Capitol on that day. It was clear that this was a protest that became a riot.”
Turley went on to say that most of the people who showed up in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021, only wanted to peacefully protest.
“There is no question that there were people who came prepared for such a riot, including some who are extremists who likely would have welcomed a civil war,” Turley wrote. “Yet, the vast majority of people on that day were clearly present to protest the certification and wanted Republicans to join those planning to challenge the election.”
Labeling the awful events of that day as an “insurrection” is all about politics, according to Turley.
“It is possible to express revulsion about what happened on Jan. 6th without claiming that this was an insurrection and attempt to overthrow the nation,” he concluded. “This was a collective tragedy for the entire nation, a desecration of our constitutional process. The effort to mandate ‘insurrection’ as the only acceptable description prevents the country from speaking with a unified voice. It clearly serves political purposes but only makes a national resolution more difficult as we approach a new presidential election.”
It’s unclear what, if any, impact the Harvard study will have on the House select committee investigating what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, but it certainly provides ammunition to those who think the committee is in a clearly wrong direction.
As the only Republican on the committee who is seeking re-election this year, possibly no House member should be getting that message more than Liz Cheney.
Earlier this month, Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the panel’s vice chairwoman, told ABC News that a decision on criminal referrals is in the works. “We’ll make a decision as a committee about it,” she said when asked about the prospect of referring Trump for prosecution, as Breitbart reported.
“The Justice Department doesn’t have to wait for the committee to make a criminal referral, and there could be more than one criminal referral,” Cheney said.
Cheney has essentially staked her political career on smearing Trump and his supporters over the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and painting their actions as an “insurrection.” This study isn’t going to help that at all.
Just a few days after the miserable provocation—in the midst of commemorating the Vel’ d’Hiv’ Roundup—by Mathilde Panot, the head of the left-wing party La France Insoumise in the Assembly, 38 of her colleagues from La Nupes (the New Ecological and Social People’s Union left-wing alliance) piled on in abjection.
The resolution they were planning to present must have been truly disgusting for it to have disappeared from the National Assembly’s site.
But agencies have provided enough extracts for us to know that we were dealing with an unprecedentedly violent attack against the “apartheid regime” supposedly imposed by Israel on the “Palestinian people,” calling for BDS-style reprisals.
We should first note that such calls for boycott are illegal in France: Two memorandums said this in 2010 and 2012 … it was confirmed in 2020 in a dispatch dedicated to the “suppression of discriminatory calls for boycotts of Israeli products …”
Then we might note that the delegitimization of the State of Israel is also not very legal: Doesn’t it go against a resolution initiated by President Macron that, using the definition of antisemitism promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, criminalizes anti-Zionism?
And so we observe that we have, in France, 38 elected legislators whose first initiative would have been to place themselves, twice over, outside the law.
The will to annihilate Israel is not lacking champions in my country. But never before, in this body, had we gone so far. Recognizing immediately a unitary Palestinian state? To be clear, that would include everything between Gaza and the West Bank—and therefore, if words mean anything, the full territory of Israel.
We can then observe the push of a fully uninhibited left-wing antisemitism.
It was a strong current, at the start of the 20th century, among a young French Socialist Party: Wasn’t it common then, among the friends of Jules Guesde, to call oneself “republican, socialist, and anti-Semite”? To castigate, along with Edouard Drumont, “the yids of finance and politics”? And wasn’t Jean Jaurès himself capable of writing, before the Dreyfus affair, that “the Jewish race” is “devoured by profit fever” and that it was the duty of a line of socialists of “the old Catholic race” to “crush” that “mechanism of pillaging, lies, corruption, and extortion”?
It’s a current that reappears, at the height of the 1930s, in the ranks of the pacifist left: The socialist Fernand Buisson, accusing George Mandel of wanting war “like all Jews”; the radical Yvon Delbos, foreign minister for the Popular Front, explaining that “the Jews chased out of everywhere look for salvation in a world war”; or the head of the party, Paul Faure, indignant with Blum, “ready to have us all killed for the Jews.”
These quotes are cited by Michel Dreyfus in two published studies, one, in 2009, by the Rennes University Press, and the other, in 2010, available on Cairn.info.
We have to believe that this third crisis, today, of the liberal and democratic conscience is happening in a France that has learned nothing, forgotten nothing.
Of Mélenchon insulting the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (the umbrella body of French Jewish communities), parading with Islamists who shout “death to Jews,” or accusing a grand rabbi of dual loyalties, they say he is “Corbynizing.” Yes and no. He is above all loyal to a dark part of the European and French left. It haunts our memory. It should be not flattered but exorcised.
And to the good-faith men and women who no longer understand anything and ask the question, “What is, exactly, the fate of Palestinians in Israel?” we would note the following.
Of the territories occupied in the 1967 war, there is already one, Gaza, where the accusation of apartheid is grotesque, since it is empty of Jews ever since Ariel Sharon decided in 2005 to withdraw.
In the other, the West Bank, it would take a lot of bad faith, or stupidity, or both, to confuse the fight against terrorism with segregation.
As for Israel itself, the one which the Nupes resolution declares is “since 1948” governed by “a single racial group,” we must tirelessly remind of how it is a multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic country where 2 million Arabs, Muslim and Christian alike, enjoy the same economic, political, and social rights as their fellow Jewish citizens; we should repeat and say again that it’s a parliamentary democracy where that Arab minority has representation in the Knesset through several parties, of which one, the United Arab List, is currently in the kingmaker position between the centrist Lapid and the opposition leader Netanyahu; and finally we should retain that it’s a lawful state where not a single construction, not the breaking of one branch of a centenary olive tree or a hint of discrimination, is not open to be brought before a sovereign court where one judge out of five is Arab and of which no serious person doubts the equity.
Evidence of all this is innumerable. I’ll return to it if necessary. What the German leftist August Bebel called more than a century ago the “Socialism of Imbeciles” should pipe down and bow its head.
Biden Executive Order on Abortion Travel Funding Appears to Violate Hyde Amendment
President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday to authorize taxpayer-financed transportation for women seeking an abortion.
Biden’s order directs the Department of Health and Human Services to consider using Medicaid dollars to pay expenses for pregnant women who live in states with pro-life laws when they travel to other states for an abortion.
However, the Hyde Amendment, first enacted in 1976, prohibits federal Medicaid funding for abortion. As a senator for three decades and later as vice president, Biden expressed support for the Hyde Amendment.
Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and other administration officials attended a White House meeting Wednesday of the interagency Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access.
Because he is still recovering from COVID-19, Biden addressed the group remotely.
The president said his executive order “responds to the health care crisis that has unfolded since the Supreme Court overturned Roe.” That was a reference to the high court’s June 24 ruling overturning its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide.
“This executive order also helps women travel out of state for medical care,” Biden said. “Secretary Becerra will work with states through Medicaid to allow them to provide reproductive health care for women who live in states where abortions are being banned in that state.”
As a senator, Biden said that federal funding of abortion “flips the bird” by forcing taxpayers to endorse and pay for the procedure. The Republican National Committee released a video of past news clips documenting Biden’s prior position.
The president’s move will not be popular, said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. In a written statement, she added:
Biden and the Democrats make a serious error in assuming Americans nationwide agree with their radical agenda—using the full weight of the federal government to impose abortion on demand up to the moment of birth, illegally forcing taxpayers to fund it, ‘cracking down’ on nonprofits that provide life-affirming alternatives, and threatening to destroy any guardrails of democracy that stand in their way.
Before Biden signed his executive order, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was unable to respond clearly to reporters’ questions about the Hyde Amendment during a press briefing.
“How will you be able to pay, to help women pay, to cross a state line to get somewhere else where they need to go, given the restrictions of the Hyde Amendment?” a reporter asked.
The press secretary responded: “That is something HHS will come up with the details on.”
“This is what the president is doing,” Jean-Pierre added. “He is looking at everything that’s available to him on the table—whatever is legally possible, what he can use, his executive authority—to move forward on.”
UK Cracks Down While US Doubles Down on ‘Gender Affirming’ Care
American lawmakers need to follow the lead of another country and put the brakes on “gender affirming” procedures for children.
Health officials in the United Kingdom are acknowledging the damage being done by pushing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones onto children at exactly the same time as the Biden administration is demanding that education and health professionals endorse these “affirmative” treatments or face penalties.
The contrast between the direction of gender-related policies in the United States and the U.K. could not be starker. The U.K. is shuttering its sole “gender clinic,” Tavistock, following a comprehensive review, while the U.S. is opening scores of new gender clinics, following the refusal of the American Academy of Pediatrics to conduct a review of the evidence.
The U.K., along with other European countries, started widespread use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children identifying as transgender almost a decade before clinics opened in the U.S. for the same purpose.
With that extra decade of experience, European health officials have accumulated more evidence of the long-term damage being done and have started to reverse course.
The U.K. review led by Dr. Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, noted that gender clinic “staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach … ” in which children’s claims about gender dysphoria are not carefully examined and underlying mental health issues are not properly addressed before prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
The review also expressed concern about the gross over-representation of girls and children on the autism spectrum being recommended for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. If the rise in prescribing these drugs were simply a matter of children feeling freer to express their true selves, rather than the result of social contagion and recruitment among vulnerable groups, then those treated would better reflect the broader population.
It is increasingly clear that we are witnessing a dangerous craze among children with mental health challenges rather than the liberation of the sexually oppressed.
When these kinds of dangerous crazes manifested themselves in the past in the form of eating disorders or cutting, responsible adults and health officials recognized the problem and coordinated their responses to address the underlying depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.
No one thought to “affirm” these children for expressing their true malnourished or scarred selves. But that is precisely what school and health officials in the U.S. are doing right now as they mistreat children with gender dysphoria.
The pressure to “affirm” expressions of gender identity and prescribe drugs rather than address underlying mental health issues is resulting in a dramatic increase in youth suicide in the U.S.
I was able to examine a natural policy experiment that resulted from some states having an extra barrier to children accessing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by requiring parental consent while other states allowed exceptions.
There was no difference in youth suicide rates between these different kinds of states prior to 2010, when clinics began to open across the U.S. to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. After 2010, however, the youth suicide rate spiked in states that lacked the parental consent barrier, resulting in a 14% increase in suicide rates in those states relative to states that required parental consent.
The U.S. needs to follow the example being set by the U.K. and other European countries by reversing the rush to put large numbers of girls and children with autism on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
If the Biden administration is determined to step on the accelerator, governors and state legislatures can pump the brakes by raising minimum ages for who can receive these treatments and imposing stricter liability on practitioners who place children’s life, health, and fertility at risk.
State policymakers and school officials can also pump the brakes on “social transition” in which children change their names and pronouns, which is often the gateway to the “medical transition” of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and eventually surgeries.
State laws should ban schools from using names or pronouns for children that differ from those listed on their birth records without the written permission of the parents. Such a ban would prevent school staff from facilitating social transition in secret from parents and without their consent.
We need all of the responsible adults—parents, school staff, doctors, and policymakers—working together to recognize and address the underlying mental health issues children are experiencing.
When education and health professionals rush children onto life-altering medication, and either deceive or coerce parents to get on board, we see the kinds of disasters that forced the U.K. to shutter its national gender clinic.
Let’s hope the U.S. can learn this lesson without having to produce another decade of damage.
Homosexual gatherings get approval while patriotic gatherings are treated with suspicion. Guess which of the two is a major health risk.
Just three days after Daniel Andrews expressed doubts about whether it would be safe to hold an Australia Day Parade, the Victoria Premier has announced a Pride street party.
With Covid still circulating in the community, the government is taking a cautious approach to January 26 Australia Day celebrations.
You might imagine that with the Monkey pox being declared a global emergency and circulating in a very specific community, the government might also take a cautious approach to Gay Pride gatherings.
Not so much.
We are told that associating the Monkey pox with gay men risks creating stigma. This is despite 98 per cent of cases reportedly occurring in gay men presenting at health clinics and the World Health Organisation releasing a specific health warning to the LGBTQ+ community advising them to ‘reduce their sexual partners’.
An LBGTQ+ health advocate quoted last week by SBS said: ‘The virus doesn’t discriminate … this virus could infect anyone.’
Technically, that is true, but in practice there are significant risk factors. There have been almost 20,000 Monkey pox cases worldwide, with around 19,600 of those contracted by ‘men who have sex with other men’ – as the WHO put it.
Accuracy is meant to be crucial for health matters, so why are the media choosing to run with ‘this virus could infect anyone’ as if you might pick it up grocery shopping?
Sure, the Andrews government told children to stay away from playgrounds to avoid catching the Covid, but it hasn’t even thought about restricting high-risk LGBTQ+ events.
While Australia Day festivities are still very much up in the air, a press release from the Premier’s office yesterday enthused:
‘The Andrews Labor Government is throwing a massive summer street party as part of a statewide celebration of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) communities.’ Woohoo! Monkey-Covid for everyone!
The double standard applied by the Labor government is breathtaking.
Remember when two elderly women sitting on a park bench during the Covid pandemic were surrounded by five Victorian police officers anxious to avert a super spreader event?
There are no such concerns with the worldwide Monkey pox outbreak and a Pride street party. Everything is LGBTQ-A-OK in the Republic of Danistan.
The Premier said:
‘The street party will support the Government’s continued efforts to achieve equality for LGBTIQ+ Victorians, by breaking down the stigma and discrimination they continue to face and providing opportunities for rainbow communities to connect and celebrate who they are.’
With the emphasis on ‘breaking down the stigma’, one could be forgiven for asking whether the Andrews government was prioritising ‘Woke’ over public safety.
Mr Andrews tweeted excitedly:
‘It was one of last summer’s best parties – so we’re doing it all again in 2023. Live music and performers are coming together to celebrate pride, love and diversity in Victoria – where equality is non-negotiable.’ The tweet goes on to say, ‘Daniel Andrews invited you’ and asks people to RSVP.
I’m not sure that an invitation from Daniel Andrews is all that appealing. But I digress.
There is another double standard that will not be lost on long suffering Victorians.
Mr Andrews, who created a ‘vaccinated economy’ where the unvaxxed where shut out of employment and commerce, says the street party will demonstrate that in Victoria ‘equality is non-negotiable’.
Tell perfectly healthy Victorians who are unable to work because of their vaccination status that equality in Dan Andrews’ Victoria is ‘non-negotiable’.
And will admission to the LGBTQ+ festival be restricted to those who have had the Monkey pox vaccine? Will LGBTQ+ revellers be forced to show their Monkey pox vaccination status before being granted entry?
Of course not. The Victorian government would never stigmatise anyone, I mean, aside from everyone who dares to exercise their own judgement about medical treatment for their own body.
It’s hard to see any equality at all in Victoria for having one’s vision blocked by very selective applications of the ALP’s version of equality that continually creates division and discrimination.
Fortunately, there is a Victoria state election on November 26. People – gay and straight – who value their liberty will be hoping to party that evening, without Daniel Andrews.
The article below claims that the definition of Fascism is vague; But asserts that Vladimir Vladimirovich is a Fascint anyway. Both assertions are wrong.
What the central features of both Mussolini's Italian Fascism and Hitler's German Nazism were is clear. It had three major features: Assertive nationalism, a capitalistic economy and extensive social welfare innovations, socialism, in short.
It is the latter feature that embarrasses the Left and leads to their unwillingness to define Fascism frankly. That both Hitler and Mussolini were assertively socialist gives the present-day Left so much embarrassment that it can only be denied. The historical record is clear, however, from Mussolini's "Dopolavoro" organization to Hitler's "Kraft durch Freude" organization.
Vladimir Vladimirovich displays only the first two features of Fascism. He is not a notable welfare innovator. Russia is actually less socialist than many other European economies
The author below has a very complex account about why the current invasion of Ukraine has taken place. It is true that Ukrainians tend to resent "big brother" Russia but the major cause of the war becomes clear only when we know what Vladimir Vladimirovich really is
He is a traditional Russian ruler, very much in the mould of the Soviets and back to Ivan the Terrible. Ivan was oppressive ("terrible") and controlling to his population while also being a very successful expansionist of Muscovite rule. That latter actually made him broadly popular among ordinary Russians.
And when it comes to political police, Vladimir Vladimirovich has the FSB,the Soviets had the KGB and the Tsars had the Okhrana.
The map below shows something that will undoubtedly loom large in the mind of Vladimir Vladimirovich: A map of the Russian empire as it was in the 19th century. The Soviets were pikers compared to the Tsars. Most of the world saw the collapse of the Soviet regime as a great advance and were puzzled when Vladimir Vladimirovich called it a disaster. From the viewpoint of a Russian ruler it was. Russia's destiny is to expand, not contract
So in the context of history Vladomir Vladimirovich's actions are perfectly normal and require no particlar explanation. It is only in the context of Western thinking that his actions seem to require explanation. But he is not Western. He is Russian. He wants to expand his empire. Russians have historically been very good at that. Even shorn of its Soviet appendages, Russia is still the world's largest country, stretching right across the Eurasian continent from the Baltic to the Pacific. Vladimir Vladimirovich is acutely aware of that heritage and is determined to live up to it
What matters most in Moscow these days is what is missing. Nobody speaks openly of the war in Ukraine. The word is banned and talk is dangerous. The only trace of the fighting going on 1,000km to the south is advertising hoardings covered with portraits of heroic soldiers. And yet Russia is in the midst of a war.
In the same way, Moscow has no torch processions. Displays of the half-swastika “z” sign, representing support for the war, are rare. Stormtroopers do not stage pogroms. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ageing dictator, does not rally crowds of ecstatic youth or call for mass mobilisation. And yet Russia is in the grip of fascism.
Just as Moscow conceals its war behind a “special military operation”, so it conceals its fascism behind a campaign to eradicate “Nazis” in Ukraine. Nevertheless Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale University, detects the tell-tale symptoms: “People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism,” he wrote recently in the New York Times, “but today’s Russia meets most of the criteria.”
The Kremlin has built a cult of personality around Mr Putin and a cult of the dead around the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. Mr Putin’s regime yearns to restore a lost golden age and for Russia to be purged by healing violence. You could add to Mr Snyder’s list a hatred of homosexuality, a fixation with the traditional family and a fanatical faith in the power of the state. None of these come naturally in a secular country with a strong anarchist streak and permissive views on sex.
Understanding where Russia is going under Mr Putin means understanding where it has come from. For much of his rule, the West saw Russia as a mafia state presiding over an atomised society. That was not wrong, but it was incomplete. A decade ago Mr Putin’s popularity began to wane. He responded by drawing on the fascist thinking that had re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This may have begun as a political calculation, but Mr Putin got caught up in a cycle of grievance and resentment that has left reason far behind. It has culminated in a ruinous war that many thought would never happen precisely because it defied the weighing of risks and rewards.
Under Mr Putin’s form of fascism, Russia is set on a course that knows no turning back. Without the rhetoric of victimhood and the use of violence, Mr Putin has nothing to offer his people. For Western democracies this onward march means that, while he is in power, dealings with Russia will be riven by hostility and contempt. Some in the West want a return to business as usual once the war is over, but there can be no true peace with a fascist Russia.
ON WEDNESDAY morning at 11, Hal Shurtleff and Camp Constitution will finally get to fly their flag on Boston's City Hall Plaza.
Word of the scheduled ceremony came the other day in a press release from Liberty Counsel, the public-interest law firm that represented Shurtleff and his group after their request to host a flag-raising ceremony was rejected by City Hall in 2017. Boston officials had approved hundreds of such requests in the past, but said no to this one because Shurtleff wanted to fly the Christian flag (a white banner with a cross in one corner). The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which in May ruled 9-0 in Shurtleff's favor. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that Boston had unlawfully "discriminated based on religious viewpoint and violated the Free Speech Clause." So now, after a five-year legal ordeal, Camp Constitution's flag-raising can proceed at last.
The high court's unanimous ruling was, obviously, a total vindication for the plaintiffs. I asked Shurtleff whether anyone from City Hall had reached out to congratulate him or in some other way graciously acknowledge his (and the First Amendment's) victory. No one, he said. There hasn't been "one peep from any city official, elected or appointed."
I wish I could say I was surprised by such churlishness. But in politics and public affairs these days, the ability to lose with grace or to salute an opponent's accomplishment has gone the way of floppy disks and 8-track tapes.
In other areas of life, especially athletics, displaying class after a defeat is a highly valued quality.
Professional hockey has many traditions, but none is more striking than the handshake offered by every member of the losing team to every one of the winners following even the bitterest Stanley Cup fight. Similarly, at the end of a football or basketball playoff series or championship, the coach or key players of the team that lost make a point of offering congratulations to their opponents. When the Milwaukee Bucks last year beat the Phoenix Suns to capture their first NBA title in decades, Suns head coach Monty Williams went to the Bucks' locker room to praise the players who beat his team. "You guys made me a better coach," he told them. "You made us a better team."
In January, when Rafael Nadal won the Australian Open and became the first man in tennis history to win 21 Grand Slam titles, his archrival Roger Federer didn't sulk or sneer or throw a tantrum. Instead he publicly hailed his adversary for his "incredible work ethic, dedication, and fighting spirit."
There have been times when politics, too, has served as a showcase for exceptional graciousness. Al Gore's concession speech after the 2000 presidential election, which followed a ferocious month of post-election litigation over the results in Florida, was a model of democratic gallantry. "I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside," Gore told the nation. "May God bless his stewardship of this country."
In 2008, on the night that Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for president, his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, aired a TV commercial extolling the first Black man to top a major party's national ticket. "Senator Obama, this is truly a good day for America," McCain said. "Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed, so I wanted to stop and say: Congratulations."
Today, when many prominent politicians revel in refusing to concede defeat, unabashed displays of good sportsmanship and character like Gore's and McCain's have become all too rare. One remarkable exception was the joint message delivered by Utah's Democratic and Republican candidates for governor in 2020. The two men recorded a video to emphasize that they "could debate issues without degrading each other's character" and to show the country that "win or lose, in Utah we work together."
Public life in America badly needs more of this. Gracious concession speeches, paying tribute to an honorable competitor, being a good loser — those aren't mere grace notes or niceties. In a democracy, especially one as troubled as ours, they are essential components of the legitimacy and goodwill that social health requires.
When Shurtleff holds his flag-raising on City Hall Plaza Wednesday morning, it will represent a victory for freedom of speech and the peaceful resolution of an honest constitutional disagreement. It would be a fine thing if Boston's mayor or her designee were on hand to mark the moment, and, like a hockey player who failed to win the championship, shake hands with the rival who prevailed.
Time to Eliminate the Federal Gas Tax—and Federal Road Building
President Biden returned from the Middle East recently without the hoped-for promise from Saudi Arabia to ramp up oil production. Not only that, he announced during his trip that he planned to double down on his efforts to wean the United States from fossil fuels—and, if Congress fails to act, would do so through “strong executive action,” which he previewed several days later (July 20) in a brief speech in Massachusetts.
This means Americans hoping for relief in high energy prices will have to be content for now with the White House’s proposal for a three-month federal gas tax holiday, an idea that hasn’t been picking up much support outside of endangered Democrats in marginal congressional districts.
The proposal will, however, perform a valuable service if it opens a long-overdue discussion over how and when to consign the gas tax, and the Highway Trust Fund it replenishes, to bureaucratic oblivion.
Signed into existence by then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower in June 1956, the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways was to be paid for by various taxes—including a truck and trailer sales tax and a heavy vehicle user tax—that would finance the Highway Trust Fund. Most notable was the tax on gasoline, which was set at three cents per gallon.
In defiance of every known law of taxation, the gas tax was supposed to be halved, to 1.5 cents per gallon, in 1972. That, of course, didn’t happen. It currently sits at 18.4 cents per gallon, with the tax on diesel fuel at 24.4 cents a gallon.
The only senator to vote against final passage of the legislation creating the Highway Trust Fund was Russell Long, a Louisiana Democrat. Long, who later in his long career served as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, immortalized his philosophy of taxation in verse: “Don’t tax you / Don’t tax me / Tax that fellow behind the tree.”
Long’s doggerel captures the subsequent evolution of the federal gas tax.
In the 1970s, Congress began diverting a portion of the Highway Trust Fund to public mass transit, light rail buses and bike lanes. Today, about 20% of Highway Trust Fund monies are diverted to other purposes. The percentage going to mass transit—12.8% on average during fiscal years 2010 through 2019, according to the nonpartisan Eno Center for Transportation—is more than two-and-a-half times the percentage of Americans who use mass transit, 40% of whom live in just one city: New York.
Looking at the big picture, what this means is that rural and suburban Americans are subsidizing big-city transit riders. Bond traders and investment bankers taking the train from Chappaqua, New York; Darien, Connecticut; and Short Hills, New Jersey, may be fine people, but why should their transportation costs be subsidized by Chevy Celebrity drivers in Maine, Montana and elsewhere?
When the Highway Trust Fund was created in the 1950s, variations in miles per gallon were not large for most automobiles. Hybrids, electric cars and other alternatives to gas-powered vehicles have widened that difference to a chasm.
Very few hourly wage earners—and especially working poor—can afford to own electric vehicles, hybrids or BMWs. Their automobiles tend to get significantly worse gas mileage than those driven by the affluent. The federal gas tax, in effect, is a regressive weapon aimed at these lower-income Americans.
A mileage-based user fee would be “fairer”—but it also would call down the wrath of the Natural Resources Defense Council and other deep-pocketed Green Establishment organizations.
It seems that half the country is at war—rhetorical war, thank goodness—with the other half. California is not Nebraska, and Vermont is not Montana. America is a big place, and the needs of its 50 states are diverse. A return to serious federalism is in order.
To that end, Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Republican, has introduced versions of his Transportation Empowerment Act in successive Congresses. The latest iteration would slash the federal gasoline tax to 7 cents per gallon, revenue from which would be expended only on projects related to the 46,876-mile Interstate Highway System.
The states would resume their constitutionally appropriate role in transportation policy. And pickup truck drivers in Wyoming would no longer be subsidizing well-tailored Manhattan straphangers.
The Interstate Highway System, while an impressive engineering achievement, cut a devastating swathe through many American cities, displacing upward of a million Americans—typically low-income working people with little political clout—and destroying many historic African American neighborhoods through the government’s exercise of eminent domain.
For better or worse, it is a finished product. Washington hates to sunset any program, but it’s time for a federal government whose competence and prestige are at historic lows to get out of the road building and maintenance business. This should be turned over to states, municipalities and private enterprise, whose promising experiments with toll roads would help restore the “user pays” principle that was embedded, however imperfectly, in the Highway Trust Fund as originally conceived.
Mr. Biden’s federal gas tax holiday proposal is just a three-month gimmick. Let’s make this holiday permanent.
Australia: Queensland birth certificates changes to recognise trans, gender diverse people coming to parliament
Major changes that would better recognise trans and gender diverse people on Queensland birth certificates are expected to come before parliament later this year.
Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman on Wednesday also confirmed the Palaszczuk government was considering allowing transgender people who have not undergone gender-affirming surgery to change their gender on the certificate.
Reforms to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act were expected last year however Ms Fentiman told her Budget Estimates hearing that there had been “some further feedback” from LGBTIQA+ stakeholders.
“There is now an exposure draft of the Bill where we are directly consulting with stakeholders and I hope to be able to introduce a Bill in the next few months - certainly before the end of the year,” she said.
The Attorney-General said the key purpose of the Act’s review was to ensure the state’s registration services remained “relevant, responsive and contemporary.”
“And that includes the consideration of arrangements which will allow trans and gender diverse people to have their gender identity accurately reflected in a birth certificate,” she said.
“And I do acknowledge this is such an important issue to many Queenslanders and consideration has been given to reforms that have happened in other states and the reforms as considered will bring Queensland into line with pretty much every other jurisdiction.”
Asked by Greens MP Michael Berkman whether these changes would include removing the surgery provision, Ms Fentiman said the government wanted Queenslanders’ lived identity to match their legal identity.
“Queensland is one of the only jurisdictions in the country that does require people to undergo gender reassignment surgery before changing that on their birth certificates and certainly that is one of the key reforms that we are continuing to consult on for this Bill,” she said.
The Attorney-General also confirmed that consideration was being given to how the Act could better recognise non-binary people as well.
“We are doing a lot of consultation on that issue and we are looking at the reforms in other jurisdictions, particularly Victoria and Tasmania, and that’s the work we’re doing now on the draft Bill, and we are continuing to work with stakeholders on those issues,” she said.
Australia: Enshrined voice for blacks betrays ideals of liberalism
By Journalist Greg Sheridan
Let’s get straight to the point. A constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament is a terrible idea, wrong in principle and harmful in practice.
It contradicts the essence of liberalism. It’s tragic the Liberal Party doesn’t have the strength of intellect or character to oppose it in principle. Liberalism’s great historic idea, which it got from Christianity, is that all people are equal in fundamental status. Liberalism’s defining project over 200 years has been removing race and gender from civic status, from rights and obligations.
This is a magnificent vision. Humanity is utterly distinctive, meaning it has ineradicable human dignity, and utterly universal, meaning every human being is equally endowed with rights and obligations. The state has no business distinguishing one citizen from another by ethnicity, heritage or gender. Yet the voice does exactly that.
Aboriginal Australians were at times brutally mistreated in our history and many have suffered continuing disadvantage. Like most Australians I honour Aboriginal culture. None of that provides any justification for breaching the principle of a colourblind state.
I oppose a constitutionally enshrined voice not because I’m a conservative but because I’m a liberal. It is not that a voice will give Indigenous Australians too many privileges. Rather it contains the message that Aboriginal Australians are fundamentally different from other Australians.
However grandiloquent the rhetoric, or benevolent the platitudes, this is a toxic and dangerous message. It represents a terrible wrong turn in Aboriginal activism towards identity politics, which is destructive anywhere it’s prominent. Identity politics is the enemy of human dignity because, in it, virtue and vice come not from your choices and actions but from your identity, defined by race, gender or other characteristics.
The purpose of identity politics is not to solve a problem but to create permanent rage and dissatisfaction, never more than temporarily assuaged by endless rituals of apology and ideological conformity.
New Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Price expressed this far more eloquently than I can in her magnificent maiden speech – a kind of Australian Gettysburg Address that should be read by all Australians. She said:
“It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right who are not defined by our racial heritage but by the content of our character … It’s time to stop feeding into a narrative that promotes racial divide, a narrative that claims to try to stamp out racism but applies racism in doing so and encourages a racist over reaction.”
Warren Mundine, a former federal government adviser on Indigenous issues and a star Liberal candidate for a winnable seat in the 2019 election, argues a similar case. He tells me:
“I’m a liberal democrat. I love and believe in liberal democracy. The basis of liberal democracy is that everyone is equal before the law. We fought for decades to be treated as equals. Now there is no law that is discriminatory against Aborigines. Some people talk of two sovereignties – how can there be two sovereignties in one country?”
Price made the further point in a television interview that having the voice forever in the Constitution implies that Aborigines will be marginalised forever, for the whole basis of the voice is that parliamentary democracy doesn’t work for Aboriginal Australians. The voice, like all identity politics, is a partial repudiation of parliamentary democracy.
Anthony Albanese could hardly have started better as Prime Minister. His shrewdness and judgment are evident in his advancing the least damaging model possible of a voice, one that is entirely inferior to parliament and can be designed and changed by parliament. Albanese has a shrewd sense of achievable change. It is a very useful set of limitations he has put around his proposal. The best attribute of the voice in Albanese’s model is that it will have no power.
Nonetheless it is still an extremely bad idea in principle. It is also the case that no one can predict what doctrines an activist High Court might dream up in relation to a race-based political institution whose existence is guaranteed in the Constitution.
It will of course be an interesting question whether Albanese can hold the line on his preferred referendum wording. Further, the very limitations that Albanese proposes demonstrate the illogicality and self-contradiction that accompany this damaging proposal at every stage.
The voice proponents claim it is needed so Indigenous Australians can have a say on laws that affect them, as though all Australians do not have that right, and as though mainstream society today is deaf to Aboriginal voices. But at the same time it is proposed that parliament can design, amend and determine the membership, scope, functions and operations of the voice.
Parliament can do all that today if it wants to. So if there really is a practical problem of consultation to be solved, there is no reason to change the Constitution, and thereby change the very nature of citizenship for all Australians. Similarly, while it is certainly true that much policy towards Indigenous Australians has not been successful, it is just not accurate to say Aborigines have not been consulted regarding policies that affect them.
In any policy regarding remote and distinctive communities today, consultation with those communities ought to be a paramount concern for state and federal governments. Consultation in itself doesn’t necessarily solve all problems.
I was working in the Canberra press gallery when a former Aboriginal affairs minister Gerry Hand created the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The Hawke government held out the same hopes for practical benefit from ATSIC as voice proponents hold out today. ATSIC was a failure. That doesn’t mean something better can’t be tried today. But there is no reason at all for this to go in the Constitution.
Previous Liberal prime ministers ruled out a constitutionally enshrined voice but the Liberal Party never argued the case in a sustained way and continued to lavishly fund pro-voice activities.
Here’s a tip for the Liberal Party: if you don’t enter an argument you can’t win it. When Peter Dutton appointed Julian Leeser, in every way a good person but a committed proponent of the voice, as Indigenous Australians spokesman. I presumed the Liberal Party was preparing a characteristic surrender.
Price’s maiden speech alone probably makes full surrender – that is, formal support for the voice – less likely. Instead the Liberals may adopt a fatuous neutrality, which is just a more ambiguous form of surrender. Thus liberalism declines, one defeat at a time.
In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration concluded that “the quality and strength of evidence” for medicalized gender transition was “low” and insufficient “to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.” Six years on, such skepticism has evaporated. In June, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order directing the departments of health and education to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” What changed? Not the evidence, only the politics.
At a special Pride Month ceremony for LGBT activists at the White House, the president promised to use the “full force of the federal government” in implementing their policy agenda, from education to healthcare. He also promised to direct the Federal Trade Commission to consider whether “so-called ‘conversion therapy’ — a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people” amounts to a deceptive act requiring consumer warnings. And he instructed the secretaries of State, Treasury and HHS “to develop an action plan” to help end the “dangerous discredited practice” in the United States and “around the world.”
The order, Biden explained, represents a countermove to “hateful attacks” by “ultra-MAGA” Republicans. He was referring to conservative pushback to LGBT activism at the state level, like Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, smeared by critics as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as various states’ female-only sports bills.
These bills enjoy broad support. A Morning Consult/Politico survey found that over half of Florida voters supported restricting teaching sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten through third grade. A poll conducted by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that most Americans opposed allowing trans-identifying males to compete in high-school girls’ sports, and even more opposed male participation in women’s college and professional sports. As for “conversion therapy,” a growing number of clinicians — including gay and liberal ones — have been vocal in their concern about the way the term is being misapplied to treatments for children struggling with gender dysphoria.
Of course, this is not the only instance of Biden finding executive shortcuts to push woke policies that are at odds with the views of the American public. His Title IX regulations, released on the fiftieth anniversary of the measure’s passage, would effectively redefine sex to include gender identity for every federally funded education program in the country. This would eradicate single-sex services, spaces and sports teams, and undermine parental rights when children tell their teachers they’re trans. Despite what the president may think, this is not a winning culture-war strategy.
The history of American medicine is blotted with its fair share of scandals. Among them, there’s a grisly history of medicalizing homosexuality, involving voluntary and involuntary treatment with depressants, testosterone, estrogen and other chemicals; electroshock therapy, castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy and lobotomy. Between 1952 and 1973, the American Psychiatric Association pathologized homosexuality by including it in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Of course, in the decades since, these controversial clinical practices have been rejected by medical associations and abandoned by practitioners. And, though it may be politically convenient to pretend otherwise, there is little evidence to suggest either the treatments or such attitudes persist as systemic problems.
In a 2018 op-ed for the New York Times, Sam Brinton, an LGBT activist with the Trevor Project, detailed how, at the behest of his Christian parents, he “endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor” listening to how he was an “abomination” and inevitably going to “get HIV and AIDS.” Worse still, he recalled how he was “bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity” applied to his body, and “forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging and having sex.” All this while he was only a middle-schooler. (Earlier this year, Brinton was appointed a deputy assistant secretary in Biden’s Department of Energy.)
Forcing a child to watch pornography is a felony. Causing him serious physical or emotional harm in the way Brinton describes constitutes child abuse. As for religion, the more orthodox expressions of Christianity separate acts from inclination, sin from sinner, and emphasize the dignity of each human person. That’s not to say that religious zealots, hypocrites and sadists don’t exist. Only that it is not at all clear that the abuse described by Brinton is common practice, either among licensed mental health professionals or in America’s churches.
Part of the difficulty in establishing the prevalence of “so-called ‘conversion therapy’” is the reliance on self-reporting. The UCLA Williams Institute estimates that approximately 698,000 LGBT adults (ages 18 to 59) in the US have received conversion therapy, 350,000 of whom received the treatment in adolescence. Seven percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the United States have experienced some sort of conversion therapy: 81 percent from a religious leader and 31 percent from a healthcare provider. And that among LGBT adolescents (ages 13 to 17) living in states where conversion therapy is banned, some 6,000 would have otherwise received it from a licensed professional, if not for the ban. But how is conversion therapy being defined?
Again, the rather vague Biden definition includes any practice that “seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people.” First, this makes no mention of method — surely exploratory talk therapy is very different from castration? Second, it does not distinguish between religious counselors and licensed therapists. Third — and here is the biggest problem — it conflates sexual orientation with “gender identity.” This conflation amounts to a Trojan horse deployed by transgender activists to use opposition to conversion therapy to discredit watchful waiting and other time-tested talk therapies designed to help gender-distressed children feel more comfortable with their bodies.
As the journalist Helen Joyce explains in an essay for Quillette, the concept of gender identity “originated in America in the 1950s and fused into a single, dominant narrative half a century later.” In the 1960s Robert Stoller, a psychoanalyst, understood it to be a matter of one’s inner sense of “masculinity or femininity.” John Money, a sexologist, believed in the power of “gender roles,” “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.”
With advances in medical technology came an increased appetite for experimentation. In the 1990s, European endocrinologists birthed “the Dutch protocol,” the off-label use of puberty-blocking drugs, imagined as a “pause button” for children (then mostly boys) with severe and early onset “gender identity disorder” (later, “gender dysphoria”). Just as abortion was promised to be “safe, legal and rare” yet grew to epic proportions, trans activists began to champion medicalized transition on demand.
And demand is only rising. With the mainstreaming of transgenderism, the past decade has seen a massive explosion in the number of children identifying as transgender, and in a new demographic: adolescent girls. The United Kingdom’s main gender youth clinic has seen a 5,000 percent increase of adolescent female patients since 2010. Figures for the United States are harder to come by, but the ever-growing number of gender clinics gives an idea. Alix Aharon and her Gender Mapping team have documented over 600 clinics. A recent article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine reported that, between 2013 and 2019, “the number of gender dysphoria diagnoses per 100,000 enrollees increased by 695 percent,” while the “number of hormone therapy users with gender dysphoria diagnoses per 100,000 enrollees increased similarly by 781 percent.”
When Lisa Littman, a medical doctor and researcher at Brown University, first warned about “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among teenage girls identifying as trans in 2018, she attracted much activist ire. The trans activist and English professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, writing in the New York Times, complained that conservatives were “inventing a ‘syndrome’ to undermine young people’s transitions.” Yet already, Littman has been vindicated. In her most recent survey of “detransitioners” (those who stop identifying as trans), she found that 55 percent of them “felt they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.”
Moreover, in the UK, the National Health Service’s main gender youth clinic at Tavistock has been dogged by whistleblower reports of “woefully inadequate” standards of care. Sweden, Finland and France have put the brakes on medicalized transitions for minors. And even Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center, and Marci Bowers, a vaginoplasty specialist have urged greater caution. The New York Times, late to the conversation, published a lengthy report in June about how “the medical community” treating young people seeking medicalized transition “is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them.”
As the Obama administration rightly noted in its 2016 Medicare memo, “many studies that reported positive outcomes were exploratory studies (case-series and case control) with no confirmatory follow-up.” One high-quality follow-up, a 2011 Swedish study that tracked over 300 patients for thirty years, found “the overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up… particularly death from suicide.”
As a matter of principle, LGBT activists would like to outlaw even voluntary therapy that tries to help mitigate or redirect unwanted sexual desires. They conflate talk therapy with long-abandoned practices and take the view that sexual orientation is immutable and to suggest otherwise amounts to “false advertising.” How strange, then, that they don’t object to the egregiously misleading claim that it’s possible to change one’s sex. Or the reckless hormonal and surgical experiments that compromise the fertility and sexual functioning of LGBT-identifying youth.
The irony is that gender affirmation, both in method and in motive, looks more like the historic conversion therapy than any other modern-day practice. Janice Turner, Times of London columnist, reported that “gay clinicians” at the NHS gender clinic in London “began to discuss how they had experienced an adolescent phase of gender dysphoria as ‘effeminate’ boys or ‘butch’ girls.” With the long-term interests of their young patients in mind, they complained to management that “we are medicalizing some people who would later identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual, not trans.” For this, they were “silenced.”
“Everything to the right of LGB is straight people,” as one LGB activist put it. Indeed, the differences between sexual orientation and gender identity are only growing more apparent. But most Democrats are not paying attention. Then there’s Joe Biden, whose views on gay rights — from his endorsement of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to promising to sign the Equality Act on his first day in office — change with the wind.
Every medical scandal is time limited. As more wake up to the fact that the real conversion therapy in the twenty-first century is “gender affirmation,” Biden is busy making it his legacy — with young and vulnerable Americans paying for his recklessness.
British government policies are geared towards benefiting the stupid and the bone idle
Rod Liddle
I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more of his money to the Conservative party. The term ‘rich bastard’ is the one which I was habituated to use when I was a member of the Labour party and which I have disinterred now to give my opening sentence a little more punch. It was axiomatic to us that anyone with sufficient dosh to consider squandering a few hundred thou on a political party must be a bastard and was both immoral and undeserving of his wealth. Wealth in any shape or form appalled us in an almost Freudian fashion – Sigmund, you may recall, equated potty training with the accumulation of money, and the supposedly subconscious link between faeces and money has never quite been expunged from the left. The rich are still seen, rancorously and jealously, as the enemy.
Indeed, the left goes even further these days and does not like to see people who are simply reasonably comfortable and who use the food bank only because it’s a little closer to home than Waitrose and the stuff is usefully free. It is a very odd sort of selling point for a political party – to make yourself the implacable enemy of hard work, success, good luck, happiness etc. But that is what the left has done and that distrust of wealth has migrated to the centre and the centre-right parties, too, both here and across much of western Europe.
Increasingly policies are geared towards benefiting the stupid and the bone idle, or people who have made ‘questionable life choices’. There is no notion of a deserving poor any more – those who have done the right things and work hard but are still skint and could maybe do with a bit of a leg-up from the state. Virtue now tends to be viewed with suspicion and penalised rather than rewarded. The success of capitalism, unforeseen by Marx and Engels, was its adaptability, and its receptiveness to the notion that it must shift from the necessarily rather brutal system in its early untrammelled form to the welfare capitalism we have today.
But it can shift too far – and that seems to be happening now. Welfare capitalism today is concerned with subsidising a magnificently useless underclass, which is in truth a very small proportion of society, and ensuring that the virtuous poor pay for them through their taxes. At the same time, any indication of acquired wealth is looked upon darkly. Look for a moment at the odium heaped upon both Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi. Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch is reviled on the left for having prospered from a more modest background without having clambered into any one of the Labour party’s victim bunkers. Labour loves only failure. I assume that’s why it holds the NHS in such high regard.
Australian conservative senator has attacked Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe’s description of the Queen as a “coloniser”, suggesting if she doesn’t like parliament she should stop taking her $211,250 salary.
The One Nation leader has told news.com.au that Ms Thorpe was engaging in “hypocrisy” after she was forced to repeat the oath of allegience, having inserted criticism of the royal family the first time.
“Lidia Thorpe obviously does not take her elected position seriously,” said Ms Hanson.
“She’s filling a position she does not respect, to represent people she obviously despises, in an institution she does not recognise as being legitimate.
“What we saw this morning was a stunning exercise in hypocrisy, made worse by her happily taking $211,000 a year from taxpayers for work she clearly does not intend to do.”
Ms Thorpe, an outspoken Victorian Greens Senator, has previously stated that the Australian parliament has no permission to be here and that her role as an Indigenous woman was to “infiltrate” the Senate.
Asked to recite the oath of allegiance this morning, she marched towards the despatch box with her fist in the air and then stated: “I sovereign, Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”
MPs then interjected, warning that “you’re not a senator” if she failed to correctly recite the oath.
“Senator Thorpe, Senator Thorpe, you are required to recite the oath as printed on the card,’’ Senate President Sue Lines said.
Senator Thorpe then took the oath again, mispronouncing heirs as the Queen’s “hairs” and successors.
She later took to Twitter to declare: “Sovereignty never ceded.”
It’s not the first time the Greens Senator has raised concerns about colonisation.
Speaking to ABC radio in June, she argued the Australian flag represents “dispossession, massacre and genocide” and accused the media of pitting her against Liberal Senator Jacinta Price.
“The colonial project came here and murdered our people. I’m sorry we’re not happy about that,” she said.
“If people are going to get a little bit upset along the way, well that’s just part of the truth telling. The truth hurts.”
Investigation Reveals Sick Truth About Child Sex Change Facility - Closing Its Doors
All the cool kids are trans.
OK, nobody is actually saying that. But young people — children — sometimes have questions of sex identity, especially at puberty and apparently as a result of not-so-subtle cultural messages.
That’s probably why a U.K. clinic involved in “sex changes” for children reports increasing numbers of referrals: 5,000 in 2021 compared to 250 about 10 years ago, according to The Times of London.
To make sex changes on individuals too young to vote, drive, work full-time or enter into contracts is crazy.
And since the opposite condition, or at least good reasoning on the part of the staff of the clinic — the Tavistock and Portman National Health Service Foundation Trust — seems to be lacking, the British National Health Service is stepping in.
And, as of next spring, shutting it down.
Which means the clinic will no longer be rushing children into radically changing or perhaps destroying their lives by taking puberty blockers.
While not addressing the judgment of Tavistock and Portman clinicians, the NHS is concerned about the mental state of gender-confused children.
So the NHS says children will be treated in a decentralized fashion at children’s hospitals in methods described as more holistic and involving the services of mental health professionals.
The change is the result of an interim report by The Cass Review led by Dr. Hilary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Following the interim report, released in February, are a final report and recommendations to come out next year.
In a letter in the report addressed to children and young people, Cass said some are concerned that she will recommend that hormone treatments be stopped.
Cass replied, “We know quite a bit about hormone treatments, but there is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects.
“Whenever doctors prescribe a treatment, they want to be as certain as possible that the benefits will outweigh any adverse effects so that when you are older you don’t end up saying ‘Why did no one tell me that that might happen?’ This includes understanding both the risks and benefits of having treatment and not having treatment.”
Among the problems with Tavistock and Portman’s sex change efforts are, according to The Cass Review, that they “developed organically” and were not “subjected to some of the usual control measures that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced.”
The treatments were developed despite “significant gaps in the research and evidence base.”
And The Cass Review indicated that unlike other children in distress, kids in states of gender confusion are, under current practices, being denied “psychological and social support.”
Which brings up another problem — that of “diagnostic overshadowing.”
“Many of the children and young people presenting have complex needs, but once they are identified as having gender-related distress, other important healthcare issues that would normally be managed by local services can sometimes be overlooked,” the review said.
The Cass Review recommends that “any child or young person being considered for hormone treatment should have a formal diagnosis and formulation, which addresses the full range of factors affecting their physical, mental, developmental and psychosocial wellbeing.
“This formulation should then inform what options for support and intervention might be helpful for that child or young person.”
While following The Cass Review, the NHS will presumably still be involved in child sex changes, not acknowledging the reality of XY and XX chromosomes.
But at least the NHS is recognizing some of the psychological issues surrounding what it refers to as confused “birth-registered males” and “birth-registered females.”
And there are the haunting possibilities Cass raised in her letter to young people who may later regret allowing sex change procedures to be enacted upon them: “Why did no one tell me that that might happen?”
Sad that the overall outlook of the NHS prohibits it from examining the spiritual aspects of some truly hurting children and young people.
Calls to review Australian transgender treatment for kids after British Tavistock Clinic is closed
Australian gender clinics are under fresh scrutiny and face calls for an independent review of their prescription of puberty blockers to teenagers after a leading British clinic was closed down over safety concerns.
The ordered close of the Tavistock Clinic – the model for treating trans people around the world – on Thursday followed concerns raised by doctors that young patients were being referred on to a gender transitioning path too quickly and that there was insufficient evidence as to the long-term cognitive and physical impacts of puberty blockers.
With several major Australian gender clinics based at children’s hospitals having been strongly influenced by the Tavistock Clinic, some doctors say the findings of the British review by Dr Hilary Cass are likely to apply equally in Australia amid a dominance of a “gender affirming” approach to treating gender dysphoria.
Some of the nation’s leading trans clinics, including the centre at the Royal Melbourne’s Children Hospital, defended their methods on Friday and said they followed best Australian practice.
Queensland paediatrician Dylan Wilson said the closing of Tavistock should lead to Australian authorities reconsidering the treatment of children experiencing gender dysphoria.
“The concerns that have been raised with the UK Tavistock Clinic translate directly to the same concerns that can be applied to gender clinics here in Australia,” Dr Wilson said.
“The fact that Dr Cass noted that there is insufficient evidence to recommend puberty blockers but they have been used by gender clinics in Australia is of huge concern.
“They are now only going to be used in the UK as part of research trials with significant ethical oversight which is the same pathway that Sweden has followed, but the gender clinics in Australia continue unabated to prescribe them on a regular basis without any oversight or scrutiny whatsoever.
“The concern is that children are, as the Cass report found, instantly socially and medically affirmed without any exploration of any other diagnoses or contributing factors to their gender identity being considered, which means as soon as they are affirmed as children that are transgender, they are placed along a pathway which leads them to medical treatment, and medical treatment pathway leads them to lifelong medicalisation.”
The National Association of Practising Psychiatrists – which has adopted a cautious, psychotherapy-first approach to treating gender dysphoria – is also calling for a review of gender clinics in Australia.
“The longer-term studies of what happens to children and adolescents when they’re treated with puberty blockers is not known. The evidence base is lacking,” said association president Philip Morris.
Public gender clinics in Australia all say puberty blockers and hormone therapy is prescribed only after comprehensive clinical assessment.
The Royal Melbourne Hospital’s gender clinic led by Michelle Telfer, head of the hospital’s Department of Adolescent Medicine and director of the RCH Gender Service, developed the Australian standards of care for the treatment of gender dysphoria.
The hospital says the clinic’s service “is underpinned by research methodology to monitor outcomes that will continuously inform best practice”. Critics say published research on the long-term outcomes of hormone treatment of children is non-existent.
“We will continue to closely monitor how services nationally and internationally develop and evolve, and welcome all actions that ensure that trans children and young people continue to receive the highest possible quality of care, regardless of where they live,” a hospital spokesman said.
The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, which has a trans and gender diverse service, said all patients referred to the clinic underwent a specialised and comprehensive assessment involving consultation with specialists in psychological medicine, adolescent medicine and endocrinology.
“Children are only ever considered for stage 1 treatment (puberty blockers) once this assessment has taken place and in close consultation with the patient, parents and treating medical teams. This treatment is reversible,” a hospital spokesperson said.
Transcend Australia, an organisation that supports trans, gender diverse and non-binary children, rejected the calls for a review and said Australian standards of care had been developed by best practice.
Transcend Australia chief executive Jeremy Wiggins said treatment often gave young people a chance to consider their identify for longer and said the effects of puberty blockers were reversible.
“The treatment is highly considered and given to people who demonstrate that they meet the criteria for gender dysphoria. It is considered for them to be lifesaving treatment so they can continue and get on with their lives,” he said.
“I’d be concerned for any government in any country to remove access to treatment for a highly vulnerable population.”
The close of the Tavistock Clinic comes as Dr Cass recommends a shift to a more “holistic” mode of care amid concerns that other clinical presentations including mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.
Puberty blockers will now only be able to be prescribed in the UK as part of a clinical trial that follows children until adulthood.
“Puberty blockers, rather than acting as a “pause button” allowing children time to explore their identity, seem to lock them into a medicalised treatment pathway,” Dr Cass’s interim report said.
How progressive groups like the ACLU make New York City more dangerous
On a recent July afternoon in The Bronx, 19-year-old Franklin Mesa went up to Nathaniel Rivers, 35, who had just parked his car, and allegedly stabbed him to death in front of his wife.
Mesa’s family members described him as schizophrenic. Police said he was arrested last year for punching somebody, twice, in the face. And a neighbor told The Post that he was often the source of “hostile, aggressive” situations, including preventing a woman from getting on the bus.
And yet it appears that nobody did anything to see if Mesa was taking his psychiatric medicine, which his sister said he had been on since he was 15.
Rivers’ horrifying death rekindles a debate over the violent mentally ill in New York. Between 2015 and 2018, 911 calls reporting emotionally disturbed people have jumped by nearly 25% in New York City, while the number of homeless people with serious mental illness rose by the same percent.
At bottom, the blame for this trend rests with progressive groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society, which have sought to de-fund psychiatry, de-police New York, and de-stigmatize untreated mental illness. They are expert at persuading courts to release mentally ill people in the name of freedom. They convince their clients to push for maximal freedom rather than for the care that’s best for them.
Consider the case of Martial Simon, a 61 year-old mentally ill homeless man, who early this year confessed to pushing 40 year-old Michelle Go onto the subway tracks, killing her instantly. Simon, who the ACLU defended in court, is now at a psychiatric facility where he will remain until he’s found mentally fit.
The fact is, he should never have been released.
Simon had already been under the supervision of New York’s correctional authority until last August for two cases of armed robbery in 2017. His sister wanted him permanently hospitalized.
“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’” she told The Post, “because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going.”
A homeless advocate who saw Simon’s medical records reports that Simon even told a psychiatrist in 2017 that it was only a matter of time before he pushed a woman onto the subway tracks.
“People with mental illness who harm other people usually do it because of paranoid delusions in which they fear for their own lives,” Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke told me. “They become convinced, based on psychotic delusions, that they need to kill to protect. What looks on the outside like pure aggression is often a deeply disturbed attempt to protect.”
The seriously mentally ill, who also often suffer from drug addiction and homelessness, are some of the most difficult sick people to treat, which is why even many very caring medical professionals and social workers avoid them.
This is partly because the ACLU and other progressive groups have sought to weaken Kendra’s Law, claiming it is authoritarian and racist, while also seeking to prevent police officers from even responding to 911 calls relating to the mentally ill.
Kendra’s Law, passed by New York legislators in 1999, is named after a writer who was killed after being pushed onto the subway tracks by a mentally ill man who had stopped taking his medications. The law allows courts to order medical treatment of the mentally ill without hospitalization, which is known as “assisted outpatient treatment,” and at a lower standard than the “imminent dangerousness” criteria for in-patient commitment in New York.
Assisted outpatient treatment is aided by injectable antipsychotic medicines, which last a full month. They are tailor-made for delusional schizophrenics who convince themselves that they are not sick and stop taking their daily medicines. Most conservatives and liberals agree Kendra’s Law worked to prevent violence by the mentally ill. It allows for action to be taken before a mentally ill person, like Mesa or Simon, hurts somebody.
And yet there was an 8% decline in the number of individuals treated under Kendra’s Law between 2017 and 2021.
In my reporting for my book, “San Fransicko,” an attorney for the ACLU told me that her organization believes the mentally ill are too impaired to be held accountable for breaking the law, but not impaired enough to justify the same kind of treatment we provide to other people suffering mental disabilities, such as dementia.
In short, the ACLU effectively believes that it’s better to accept the deaths of people like Nathaniel Rivers and Michelle Go than to deprive the civil liberties of potentially violent mentally ill people like Franklin Mesa and Martial Simon by mandating they take once-a-month injections. In 2018, just 3,158 patients were under active Kendra’s Law court orders in New York state, even though around 8,000 could have qualified, according to advocacy group Mental Illness Policy Org.
Another statue down? ‘Caucasian male’ statues face cull in Tasmanian premier row
Hobart is poised to tear down the statue of a former premier, while flagging a broader purge, after a report found the city had too many monuments to “Caucasian males”.
The city council has been considering the removal of the large Franklin Square sculpture of William Crowther, a naturalist, surgeon and premier who, in 1869, was accused of severing and stealing the skull from an Aboriginal corpse.
A new council report, to be voted on this week, recommends spending $20,000 to remove the statute to storage, pending finding it another home, and $50,000 on “interpretive elements onsite”.
The report complains there are too many white men memorialised across the city and recommends a new policy be adopted to guide further statue “additions and removals”.
Aboriginal groups welcomed the moves, but some historians expressed concern the council was “opening the floodgates” to revision or erasure of colonial history.
Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania chairman Michael Mansell said removing the Crowther statue was long overdue, but that countenancing later placing it elsewhere was illogical.
“If the reason you’re taking a statue down is because what the person did was so offensive, you couldn’t put it up in any other context because people will remember what that guy stood for,” Mr Mansell said.
He was unaware of any other Hobart statues the Aboriginal community would want removed, but believed further decisions should be based on “balance” and “scale”.
British army veteran is arrested 'for causing anxiety' after retweeting meme of swastika made out of Pride flags
It's just an image but it can get you locked up in Gestapo Britain
Darren Brady, 51, has slammed Hampshire Police for 'impeding his right to free speech' after he was placed into handcuffs on Friday at his home in Aldershot for sharing a meme.
Footage of the arrest was widely shared on social media and showed an officer who told Mr Brady he was being apprehended because his post had 'caused anxiety' and been reported to authorities.
The image Mr Brady retweeted was of a swastika that had been digitally manipulated and was made out of four LGBT pride flags.
In the video, shot on a mobile phone, Mr Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: 'Why am I in cuffs?'
One officer responds: 'It didn't have to come to this at all.'
Mr Brady replied: 'Tell us why you escalated it to this level because I don't understand.'
The officer adds: 'Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.'
Harry Miller, a former police officer, was also arrested after claiming he had tried to prevent the former serviceman from being detained.
He told MailOnline: 'Hampshire Police showed a blatant disregard of the law. They approached Mr Brady and acted as summary judge, jury and executioner - but didn't know what offence he'd actually committed. They said he was being arrested for causing anxiety, which is utterly ridiculous!
'Mr Brady is a British Army Veteran and they were trying to extort him for money by making him pay around £80 for educational course so he could downgrade from a crime to a non-crime, which would still show up in a basic Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. 'They thought they could get away with it. It was the world's worst shakedown.'
Mr Miller, who in December won a Court of Appeal challenge over police guidance on 'hate incidents', said police visited the man 10 days earlier and has informed him that he could take the option of attending an £80 education course to avoid being arrested and possibly charged with a criminal offence.
The veteran said he needed time to mull it over, before the officers agreed to return at a future date.
Writing on Twitter on Sunday, Mr Brady told his followers: 'It's nice to be able to enjoy a Sunday morning in peace without being harassed by Hampshire Police trying to extort money from me, or have me "re-educated" for sharing a meme on the Internet.'
In a statement, Hampshire Police said: 'Officers felt it was necessary to arrest a man at the scene so they could interview him in relation to the alleged offence'
Police Commissioner Donna Jones: 'I am aware of the video published on Twitter which shows the arrest of two men in Hampshire yesterday, one for malicious communications and one for obstruction of a police officer.
'I have taken this issue up with the Constabulary today and have been advised officers made the arrests following a complaint from a member of the public of an alleged hate crime.
'It follows a post on social media of Progress Pride flags in the shape of a Swastika.
'I am concerned about both the proportionality and necessity of the police’s response to this incident. When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong.
'As Police Commissioner, I am committed to ensuring Hampshire Constabulary serves the public as the majority of people would expect. It appears on this occasion this has not happened.
'This incident has highlighted a really topical issue which Hampshire Constabulary and other police forces need to learn from. In order to support this I will be writing to the College of Policing to make them aware of this incident and encourage greater clarification on the guidance in order to ensure that police forces can respond more appropriately in the future.'
Mr Brady shared the meme, which was originally posted by Laurence Fox, a 44-year-old actor turned campaigner, on social media. Mr Fox said the image reflected his belief that LGBT pride month is 'enforced with a sense of hectoring authoritarianism'.
THE GUNMAN charged with murdering 10 people two months ago in a racist shooting spree at a Buffalo supermarket pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges on Monday. But Attorney General Merrick Garland still can't seem to decide whether the government should seek the death penalty in the case.
In the eyes of the law, of course, Payton Gendron remains innocent until proven guilty. But everyone knows his guilt is not in question. Not only did numerous people at the scene see him open fire as he approached and then entered the busy store, sweeping his rifle right and left and shooting indiscriminately, but he wore a body camera and livestreamed the massacre on the online platform Twitch. When he was arrested, eyewitnesses said, he was laughing. CNN reported that he told authorities — in statements that "were clear and filled with hate" — that he had deliberately targeted the Black community. And if all that weren't enough, he had posted lengthy screeds online detailing his murderous intentions and the elaborate preparations he had made to carry them out.
The slaughter in Buffalo was evil at its most unspeakable. If any accused murderer personifies the "worst of the worst" — the sheer, remorseless malevolence for which death is the only conceivably just punishment — it is the man who wantonly gunned down those shoppers at the Tops supermarket in May. So why is Garland hesitating? Of course prosecutors should ask for the death penalty. It would be indecent not to.
Yet suppose Gendron is sentenced to death. Then what? Even if the jury returns verdicts of guilty on all charges and then unanimously recommends that he be executed, the likelihood of the sentence ever being carried out is negligible.
Homicidal mass killers like the Buffalo gunman are almost never put to death in the United States any more. Dylann Roof, the neo-Nazi murderer who in 2015 calmly shot nine Black parishioners dead during a Bible study at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., was sentenced to death in 2017, and the sentence was unanimously upheld on appeal. But he remains alive today and will for the foreseeable future. So does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon terrorist whose death penalty was upheld months ago by the US Supreme Court. So does Nidal Hassan, the Army major-turned-Islamist terrorist, who was sentenced to die by a US military court for his 2009 rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, which left 13 innocent victims dead and 32 others wounded.
A majority of Americans have long favored the death penalty for murder. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 60 percent of US adults support capital punishment even though they acknowledge the possibility of executing an innocent defendant by mistake. That support climbs even higher in the most infamous cases. In the wake of the Marathon bombing, for example, 70 percent of Americans said they supported the death penalty for Tsarnaev. Under the Constitution, even such monsters as Roof, Tsarnaev, and Hassan, whose guilt is absolutely certain, are entitled to due process of law. Yet once due process has run its course — once these depraved butchers have been fairly tried, fairly convicted, fairly sentenced to death — what justification is there for flouting the dictates of justice and disregarding what for many of us is a deep-rooted moral intuition about punishing evildoers?
On the same day that Gendron was being arraigned in Buffalo, the sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz — the gunman who killed 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school four years ago — was getting underway. He too is guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt. Cruz admitted his guilt nine months ago; the sole purpose of his trial is to decide whether he should be punished with death or with life imprisonment.
Again, though — what is the likelihood of any death sentence actually being imposed on Cruz? Or on Patrick Crusius, who gunned down 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 and announced "I'm the shooter" as he was arrested? Or on Robert Bowers, the defendant charged with murdering 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018?
In all these cases, the public devotes enormous sums of money to ensuring scrupulous impartiality in judging accused mass killers, even though their guilt is open and shut. But when the judgment so conscientiously reached is that the perpetrators should die, what almost invariably happens afterward is — nothing. A rare exception was Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death in 2001 for killing 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
It has become the norm, in the wake of horrific massacres like the ones mentioned here, to expend torrents of words in heated debates about guns, racism, and mental health. Rarely is the focus directed to what ought to be society's first priority: doing justice. It is a disgrace that barbaric assassins like Roof, Tsarnaev, and their ilk remain on death row for years, getting three square meals a day and endlessly evading the punishment that judge and jury agreed on. Perhaps one of the reasons mass killings have been multiplying is that mass killers, even when sentenced to death, go right on living.
Government Forcing Man To Pay $30,000 In Fines For Tall Grass Or They Will Steal His House
Jim Ficken is not a criminal, has never been in jail, and is a model citizen in the town of Dunedin, Florida. However, the government dealt a massive blow to property rights by fining him $30,000 and threat of foreclosure — because his grass grew too tall while he looked after his mother’s estate.
The entire police state overreach began for Ficken in 2018 when he was out of town trying to take care of his late mother’s estate and his grass did what grass does, it grew. Knowing that it is unpleasing to neighbors to grow long grass, Ficken hired a friend to cut it for him while he was away, but that friend died and Ficken had no idea.
”The grass did what grass does… and a code inspector saw it was more than the 10 inches the city allows and Jim was on the hook,” said Andrew Ward, one of Ficken’s attorneys from the Institute for Justice.
This month, a judge with the 11th Circuit Federal Court ruled against Ficken and demanded that Ficken pay $30,000 in fines for his tall grass. These exorbitant fines could cost Ficken his home.
“If a $30,000 fine for not mowing your lawn isn’t excessive, what is?” Ward said after the ruling. “A city or state cannot pass an unconstitutional law, and argue that because it is the law, it’s constitutional.”
Unfortunately for Ficken, the court disagrees and stated that Florida statutes allow the fines for repeated violations of local ordinances and municipal code.
Because Ficken’s grass was over 10 inches, the city government claimed Jim owed them money. Every day that Ficken kept his grass over the “legal limit,” the government would steal $500 from him. This went on for 57 days, and now, the government claims Ficken owes them nearly $30,000.
“I was out of town when code enforcement officials first noticed my grass was too tall,” Ficken said. “They came back almost every day to record the violation, but never notified me that I was on the hook for fines. By the time I found out, I owed them tens of thousands of dollars. Then, they refused to reduce the fines and voted to authorize the foreclosure of my home. I am disappointed that the court sided with Dunedin, but what happened to me is wrong, and I will continue to fight.”
“The city’s behavior toward Jim is outrageous,” said IJ Attorney Ari Bargil. “This ruling emboldens code enforcement departments across the state to impose crippling financial penalties and it empowers them to do so without first notifying a property owner that they are potentially going to be fined.”
Ficken, who is retired and on a fixed income, cannot pay this insane amount of money. Being unable to pay immoral fines imposed on one’s private property by goons in the local government is of no concern to said goons and they intend on getting their money—by any means necessary. So, they are going to take his home.
Ficken and the folks at the Institute for Justice plan on fighting this case all the way to the Supreme Court if they have to.
“I’m astounded the court agreed the city could fine me $500 per day, without my knowledge, and then try to take my house — all to settle a bill for tall grass,” said Ficken, in a statement included with a media release issued by the Institute for Justice. “The court’s ruling is outrageous. If this can happen to me it can happen to anyone. That just can’t be right, and I’m looking forward to continuing my fight.”
While these excessive fines and theft of property may seem over the top, force, extortion, and theft is how the government maintains its power. As Ficken is learning, anyone who stands in the way of that power pays a heavy price.
Indeed, as TFTP has previously reported, the government has gone so far as to issue arrest warrants for elderly women for tall grass. Seventy-five-year-old Gerry Suttle was stunned when she received a call from the local police chief, informing her that she had a warrant issued for her arrest for tall grass.
In an extreme case in Austin, Texas last October, a man was killed over his tall grass. Austin police attempted to serve a warrant to man whose grass was too long and it resulted in a standoff, shots fired, a house fire, and that man’s death.
Insanely enough, that was the second story last year in which a Texas resident engaged in a standoff with a SWAT team over their tall grass.
In July of 2021, a man in Fort Worth, Texas decided that he wasn’t having it anymore either. When police were dispatched to his home over grass that was too long to meet the city’s arbitrary requirements, the homeowner had a message for them — in the form of bullets.
Plans to light up one of Australia’s most famous war memorials in rainbow colours are SCRAPPED after ‘hateful’ threats and abuse aimed at staff
Plans to light up Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance in rainbow colours have been abandoned after staff were subjected to 'hateful' threats and abuse.
The display was intended to commemorate LGBTQI people in service as part of the upcoming exhibition Defending with Pride, which chronicles their stories of denial and exclusion, along with recognition and inclusion.
The Shrine of Remembrance organisation announced on Saturday afternoon that while the exhibition and Last Post service scheduled for Sunday would go ahead, the lighting of its colonnades would not.
'Over several days, our staff have received and been subject to sustained abuse and, in some cases, threats,' chief executive officer Dean Lee said.
'We have seen something of what members of the LGBTIQ+ community experience every day. It is hateful.'
In the interests of minimising harm, the shrine sought guidance from partners and others including veteran associations, the Victorian government, and representatives of the LGBTQI veteran community.
Some media commentators and members of the community opposed the light show.
Mr Lee noted that, 50 years ago, creating a memorial to women's service was controversial and opposed by many, as was the introduction of an annual service commemorating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
'We are proud to recognise and celebrate the history and service of LGBTIQ+ people, something that has traditionally been absent or under-represented within Australia's war memorials,' he said.
'A decade ago, conversations around veteran suicide were taboo, yet today it is the subject of a Royal Commission.
'Society's values change, and the Shrine is a participant in that change and will continue its efforts to honour the service and sacrifice of all who have served Australia.'
The shrine's pride exhibition officially runs from August until July 2023.
The notes and pix appearing in the sidebar of the blog that is reproduced above are not reproduced here. The sidebar for this blog can however be found in my archive of sidebars
Most pictures that I use in the body of the blog should stay up throughout the year. But how long they stay up after that is uncertain. At the end of every year therefore I intend to put up a collection of all pictures used my blogs in that year. That should enable missing pictures to be replaced. The archive of last year's pictures on this blog is therefore now up. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and clicking will bring the picture up. See
here (2021). See also here (2020).
