PC watch by John Ray -- backup

Black women could see a 33% increase in pregnancy-related deaths post-Roe. Why?

The article below is one-sided. In fact abortion bans are unlikely to affect most black women. In States where blacks are most numerous, their votes normally ensure that they are governed by Democrats -- who generally allow abortion.

So blacks are in fact LEAST LIKELY to be affected by the recent ruling in SCOTUS. Only the minority of blacks in conservative states will be affected.

And, like Americans generally, they will often be able to cross State borders to access abortions. Interstate variety makes the present uproar rather pointless. Americans move about a lot in general. Travelling to a State that allows abortion does not seem a great burden to me

Now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, the legal status of abortion is back in the hands of state lawmakers. And this will have especially damaging consequences for Black women.

It’s no news that being forced to carry a baby to term can be a death sentence. From ectopic pregnancies to other life-threatening complications, pregnant people in these situations are often faced with a choice between their own lives and that of their unborn baby.

In the case of African Americans, that risk of death is much higher. According to the CDC, Black women are over three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication than white women are. And in some parts of the country, this disparity is frighteningly worse. A report by the District of Columbia’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee, for instance, found that Black people accounted for 90% of pregnancy-related deaths in DC, despite constituting only half of all births there. On top of this, Black women are also at a higher risk for pregnancy complications and postpartum issues, such as pre-eclampsia and eclampsia.

A report found that Black people accounted for 90% of
The historical racism embedded within the American healthcare system accounts in large part for why birthing is so much deadlier for Black Americans. They are routinely dismissed, ignored and have their concerns denied while seeking medical care and intervention.

Black women also fall behind in other social determinants of health including housing, employment and socioeconomic status, all of which can affect their capacity to have safe, healthy pregnancies and care for a child.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/us/black-women-could-see-a-33-increase-in-pregnancy-related-deaths-post-roe-why/ar-AAYUEdH?ocid=EMMX&cvid=0b739c53bdd84637bca8d952d089f5d6

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Christian Business Under Assault For It’s Public Faith

A Christian-owned business is being viciously attacked for plans to hold an event about Christian engagement in politics.

For the past several days, there has been a social media firestorm over a Christian-owned restaurant and brewery in Ephrata, Pennsylvania planning to host lectures on the founding of Pennsylvania as an explicitly Christian state and what that fact means for contemporary politics.

The business’s social media erupted with a torrent of left-wing outrage. Other businesses have begun to refuse to serve the brewery’s popular beer. And local politicians are eager to do whatever they can to take this business down.

This controversy is the most important story in Christendom right now because the question of whether small, Christian-owned businesses can exist and operate as Christian in public in America is being answered.

That attention was being called to the undeniable Christian heritage of one of America’s earliest colonies is unacceptable to masses animated by a demonic ideology. In the local liberal rag, the repugnant journalist is forced to admit that, yes, indeed, Pennsylvania required its public officials to be Christians and to profess the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments. But, he notes, clauses like that in State Constitutions were struck down by the United States Supreme Court “almost 50 years ago” and the Pennsylvania State Constitution was amended to remove it in 1968. Weird! What a coincidence that you can almost trace the decline of the country to that very period!

The local, anti-Christian, globalist rag, as it attempts to gin up even more left-wing outrage, even brought in notorious liberal Baptist leader Amanda Tyler, a favorite of the occupational D.C. regime, to comment on the very dangerous threat of Christian Nationalism. Tyler predictably brought up ridiculous secularist canards like the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for Federal office asserting that its existence requires the kind of apostate Christian pluralism that began to take hold in the post-WWII period that liberals who hate Jesus love. What is the problem with this assertion? The story had already admitted the Pennsylvania Constitution’s religious test antedated the U.S. Constitution and remained in place for over 150 years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified!

What does this mean? Right up until 1968 Pennsylvania was an explicitly Christian state. How many people were even aware of this!? This is what the demonic, antiChristian ideology requires: total historical ignorance. They want everyone to believe the way things are are the way they have always been. Their ideology cannot hold power unless the entire populace believes we have always been in the atheistic, materialist, secularist “utopia” and that any suggestion that this might not be the best way to live (much less a revolution against the way our ancestors have always lived for millennia!) is extremely dangerous Christian Nationalism.

But the irony, as you look at the summary of the whole controversy by the anti-Christian press, is that they have to admit that the “dangerous Christian Nationalism” espoused by the speakers of the event is what pretty much everyone believed right up until 1968. There are people still alive who were well into adulthood and who still remember life before this!

What this controversy shows is that the battle over the soul of our nation is not over. The anti-Christian left believes that they have totally and conclusively won. They believe Godless Globalism has defeated Christian Nationalism. And when a restaurant & craft brewery announces they are going to host an event that questions the dominance of Godless Globalism and asks “maybe it might be good to go back to the way it was before our country was a disgusting trash heap?” just to ask the question is a signal that demonic, secular left-wing ideology is not as all-powerful as they think. If to ask the question if maybe it would be better to have an explicitly Christian country causes such outrage, the lady doth protest too much. They have to react this way to a challenge to their power or else the entire house of cards is exposed.

https://news.gab.com/2022/06/24/christian-business-under-assault-for-its-public-faith/

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The globalist agenda

We are definitely living in interesting times. I’d have preferred the 1770s, but I’m here now. For decades we at American Policy Center have been arousing people to see what is actually going on in the world rather than being duped by the globalists’ propaganda arms, the

MSM and the education system. Many people are opening their eyes, but that fact has been hidden by the press. Now, the Globalists, with their Cancel Culture, are opening more eyes than imaginable thanks to their hubris. They began to believe their propaganda – gotta love it! – and thought they had ‘turned’ enough of us into gullible fools or useful idiots.

They, the Globalists, are telling us meat, milk, tuna fish (and anything else natural, except centipedes) are killing us. So, we need to eat bugs to be healthy. Uh huh. I laughed. Even many deeply duped Leftists are gagging on that. How many cockroaches does it take to supply one gram of protein? And will they expect us to eat termites? Probably, because that would be one thing that would help reduce our carbon footprints – termites are more destructive to ozone than cow farts! Bon Appetit, Leftists. I will stick with red meat; I like to have a functioning brain.

Seriously, though, those wishing to take control of the world will help us bring themselves down like all previous wannabe masters of the universe. Yes, they have seduced a sizable portion of the population, but it is not as sizable as they would have us believe. The Globalists have studied, plotted, planned, and tested their hypotheses ad nauseum, but just like Communism, they cannot factor in, let alone control, all the variables needed. Maybe they expect to metamorphose themselves into God via Transhumanism. Good luck!

That doesn’t mean we aren’t in for, probably, the most horrendous times this Earth has ever seen. Noah and Lot were witnesses to cataclysmic events but, because the world now has billions of people, and because the Globalists are ‘all in’ for “whatever it takes”, we will be subject to a truly dystopian world.

While WW I was the “war to end all wars” but didn’t put off a worse war for much more than 20 years, we have been living in WWIII for decades. We didn’t notice because very few guns and no tanks or rockets have been used – yet. This is a war using the asymmetrical weapons of dumbing down, brainwashing, programing, psychological warfare, gaslighting, promoting fear and paranoia, fake pandemics, weaponized “medications”, destroying small businesses through shut-downs, allowing rioting by paid radicals, plus cancelling our culture and replacing it with fake and corrupting values, attitudes, and beliefs. Oh, and there are many, many more weapons being used against us. Obviously, the Globalists figure if we are aware of and fight off 500 of them, one of the other 9,000 should get us, amongst which are:

ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing which, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, means:

ESG practices can include but are not limited to, strategies that select companies based on their stated commitment to one or more ESG factors —for example, companies with policies aimed at minimizing their negative impact on the environment or companies that focus on governance principles and transparency. ESG practices may also entail screening out companies in certain sectors or that, in the view of the fund manager, have shown poor performance with regard to management of ESG risks and opportunities. Furthermore, some fund managers may focus on companies that they view as having room for improvement on ESG matters, with a view to helping those companies improve through actively engaging with the companies.[1]

In simple English, that means if your company doesn’t toe the Marxist, Agenda 21/2030, Sustainable, anti-freedom line, you will be cancelled (or just ignored, shunned, and ridiculed until you learn to follow Big Brother or fail).

This, now, is combined with modern monetary theory (MMT), which only a person educated in our institutes of higher learning now can possibly comprehend. MMT contends that government can create more money – without any backing – just because it needs the money to support the federal spending on ESG issues (along with providing billions for war materials to Ukraine) and and and. Through these weapons, the Globalists are making our money worthless in order to continue wiping out the Middle Class. The COVID lockdowns made major inroads on that goal; this is to finish us off.

Add technocracy to the cache of arms, and they now have a mega-weapon in economics. While technocracy, like MMT and ESG, is made out of whole economic cloth, it, too, is an “invented and unnatural form of economics that expresses itself as totalitarianism and requires social engineering to work. Technocrats in the past defined technocracy as the science of social engineering; controlling the populace is crucial for the system to function.” [2]

Their plan is to not only change governance, but to physically change us humans, to “computerize” us. Then they can not only know everything we do when we do it, they can design us to do what they want us to do – even to die if we are useless eaters (or considered such by the global elite like Gates, Schwab, and their useful idiots – too many to list (starting with Fauci).

And don’t overlook PSYOPs, designed by the military for psychological warfare. Who knew they would use it on their own people (snark)? As Wikipedia states:

Psychological operations are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

Television and movies were major tools in the PSYOPS bag, then they discovered they could use the make-believe of those media and feed it to the people as news. Why were so many so easily fooled? I would guess that one of the reasons is because just about every outlet in print and video was coopted. So-called journalists are now just talking heads, parroting what they are fed. And few notice or care. GIGO should be the buzzword of the day. A perfect example: many people believe the puppet regime in Ukraine is poor, picked on, and pure as the driven snow. They have no idea what is going on in that part of the world, the maneuvering vis a vis NATO, the oil issue, the displaced Russian population of Ukraine. If MSM’s greenscreen slips and shows the 2x4s holding up the screen, they don’t notice. The woke are not awake, they are hypnotized.

And pseudo Climate Change, the raison d’�tre. The Globalists, along with their cohorts, the Deep State, are pushing electric cars when they know that 1. they cannot produce enough batteries to supply the world with electric cars, 2. there are gross human rights violations occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 3. power to charge the batteries comes from electric power plants, and 4, last but certainly not least, these batteries are very damaging to the environment. But most of us realize that the issue isn’t the issue. It isn’t about developing sustainably, it is about bankrupting the middle class (who can afford these cars?) and driving people into Stack n’ Pack housing so they are easier to control.

Add to the list the sequestration of carbon, solar and wind power, “brownfielding” minority neighborhoods to drive the people out of their homes and businesses; there are dozens, if not thousands, of other weapons being used against us.

I was listening to a novel based in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the first planned community established in 1912. It was scary. The designers, the Van Sweringen brothers, were Shakers and railroad mogels (think James Hill, Jay and George Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Edward Harriman, and Collis P. Huntington). The scary part is that, even then, people wanted to plan how everyone lived – and now, where and if they work, where they recreate, and if they are allowed to procreate.

We are being programmed to want to conform, not to stand out. When I was growing up, it was expected that we try to excel, stand out above the crowd. Now, we are to be a crowd – and if we are really good, we will be an unruly, angry, vengeance-seeking crowd (seeking vengeance for unknown atrocities committed in someone’s imagination.

If we truly want to fit in now, we must be indistinguishable from everyone else – Mao jackets, e-cigs instead of joints, tats instead of love beads, and multi or asexuality instead of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. But those were the start.

The scariest part for me is the fusion centers. We are being inundated with propaganda promoting the support of locking those up who disagree with the Sustainable Development lines promoted by the Globalists – and even those who want to own their own home on their own property un-supervised by a homeowners association. MSM watchers are becoming inured to hordes of rioters, a police state, and even their fellow citizens being locked-up for daring to speak out against Newspeak.

As I noted earlier, it is quite unlikely that the Globalist plan will pan out as they have so meticulously and duplicitously scripted. But dystopian will be descriptive of our everyday world, not a scene from a sci-fi novel.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/cancel-culture-is-cancelling-itself

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South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on fighting woke politics over July 4th fireworks at Mt. Rushmore

Gov. Noem

In December 2018, shortly after I was elected governor, President Trump invited several governors-elect to Washington to talk about our priorities and see where he might be able to help. Knowing the president’s bias for action, I understood that bringing up matters we could tackle right off the bat would increase the chances of getting them done. They would also be far more likely to warrant the president’s personal involvement.

"Mr. President, I need a farm bill and trade agreements done. Our farmers and ranchers need access to new markets to level out the playing ?eld to continue to grow our nation’s food supply." The president nodded.

"I’d also like to have your help with moving some opportunity zones," I went on. More nodding.

"And lastly, Mr. President," I said, "I’d like your help getting ?reworks back to Mount Rushmore." He immediately perked up. "Fireworks? What do you mean?"

I told him that South Dakota had a long tradition of a ?reworks celebration on top of Mount Rushmore every Fourth of July eve. But for ten years, I explained, the display had been canceled — ever since the Obama administration had barred them, claiming that the ?reworks might trigger "environmental concerns."

"Mr. President, this is South Dakota’s one opportunity to really become the focus of the nation for one night each year." Bringing ?reworks back to Mount Rushmore would be an incredible tribute to freedom in our country — a western sky lit with red, white, and blue ?reworks illuminating some of our nation’s greatest leaders. Beyond that, tourism is South Dakota’s second-largest industry. Marketing our state on national television on America’s birthday had always been incredibly bene?cial for us.

It made sense to President Trump. And from that moment on, he was ?xated on getting us our ?reworks back.

My team and I worked diligently with the Department of Interior and the White House for almost two years straight on logistics and planning. Every time I saw President Trump in that time, without fail, he would ask, "Kristi, how are we coming along on our ?reworks?"

"We are working it, Mr. President," I assured him.

The truth was that bureaucrats within his own administration were trying to stop it. For starters, the National Park Service (NPS) did not want to facilitate the event. NPS staff brought up ?re concerns, water-quality concerns, cultural concerns, and, once the pandemic hit, health concerns. At one point, a staffer even asked, "How could this event offend people on Twitter?"

I kid you not.

My of?ce made repeated requests to meet with Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt to get an agreement signed, permits obtained, and the planning process underway. When Secretary Bernhardt was slated to speak at the Western Governors Association in Vail, Colorado, in June 2019, I ?nally had an opportunity to speak with him directly.

It was months after my June meeting with Secretary Bernhardt before we heard anything from the federal government. Stop and think about that for a minute. The president of the United States — the "leader of the free world" — was in favor of returning ?reworks to Mount Rushmore. The secretary of interior — who was appointed by the president — was in favor of returning ?reworks to Mount Rushmore. And — not for nothing — the governor of the state in which Mount Rushmore exists was in favor of returning ?reworks to Mount Rushmore.

And yet, it was nearly impossible to get this event through a massive, unelected federal bureaucracy that didn’t want it.

It is never just a simple yes with the federal government. Everything is always draped in miles and miles of red tape. For us to have ?reworks at Mount Rushmore, the federal government insisted on elaborate requirements. It was absurd.

Environmental studies needed to be conducted. Federal permits needed to be obtained. Extensive back-burning had to occur on all the surrounding Forest Service land. We needed numerous sign-offs and agreements between all the key players. And then — because President Trump had expressed interest in showing up — all those agencies had to reach agreements with the United States Secret Service. After all, there might be protests. Then came the engineers who had to determine exactly where we would set up the ?reworks display.

Over the course of this planning period, three different people came into the position of superintendent of Mount Rushmore. Each new person brought new concerns and a fresh face to make us worry about the viability of the event.

Worst of all was the organized, nationwide campaign in the spring and summer of 2020 to rip down references to our nation’s founding and other points in history. From coast to coast, this was a movement that intentionally focused exclusively on our forefathers’ ?aws, and that purposefully ignored their virtues. I believed then and believe now that this was done deliberately to discredit America’s principles to remake our country into a different political image. The attempt to "cancel" the founding generation was an attempt to cancel our freedoms.

One day, early in the summer of 2020, as the whole nation convulsed with ?ghts over identity politics and extreme levels of political correctness, I came across a segment on cable news that remains one of the most mind-boggling displays of ignorance I’ve ever seen on television — and that’s saying something.

Standing in the Black Hills, with the iconic chiseled images of four US presidents behind her, CNN correspondent Leyla Santiago described the impending visit of the president of the United States to one of America’s most popular tourist attractions this way:

"President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans. I’m told that… he’ll be focusing on the effort to 'tear down our country’s history.'"

It’s worth noting that if it were not for the four men carved into the stone behind her, Leyla would be living a very different life in a very different country. The very rights she mindlessly enjoys today — such as getting to say whatever careless thing she wants — would not exist if not for the men who set the foundation for freedom as we know it. What’s more, President Obama had visited Rushmore only a few years before — without any such criticism from the media. It was just more hypocrisy and total loss of objectivity from the media.

The reporter had no idea that she was proving the point about the need to protect our treasured history from ignorant vandals. She was standing there on national television attacking our history to smear Republicans and patriotic Americans as racist, uncaring, and generally supportive of slavery and genocide.

Her report was more than just an attack on the Founders, it was an assault on every American who cherishes our history. Sitting there watching her babble on, I could not help but take it personally. This was, after all, my home state. And, as South Dakota’s governor, preserving this revered national landmark was part of my responsibility. If the Left wants to come after Mount Rushmore, they’re going to have to go through me.

We decided to offer 7,500 tickets to the public — to be distributed via a lottery system. More than 125,000 people signed up in three days.

On July 3, 2020, President Trump and his family arrived at Ellsworth Air Force Base, just east of Rapid City. I welcomed the president and First Lady on the runway at Ellsworth. From there we would ride on Marine One to Mount Rushmore and land at the park’s helipad.

For all the times I have gazed at the faces of Mount Rush-more, I have never seen them quite like I did that day from the inside of Marine One. The skill of the Marine pilots was incredible; they got us close. I remember being eye-to-eye with the spectacles of our nation’s twenty-sixth president — the conservationist, naturalist, historian, and "Rough Rider" Theodore Roosevelt.

Teddy would have loved this, I thought.

Adding to the drama, the production team was playing the radio communications of the helicopter pilots over the loudspeakers so the crowd could hear their commands and approach. As we ?ew past, the crowd below began cheering. Looking down, I saw people dancing.

People needed this, I realized. We all did. After months of a global pandemic, this was the ?rst time for so many that they had done anything that felt normal — human. We were Americans, together again.

My mother was in the audience that day. Later, she told me that looking around the crowd, she saw tears streaming down the faces of the people around her. No masks. No fear. Just profound gratitude for the gift of living in this country.

The ?reworks that night were something out of this world. The sound echoed off the Black Hills like endless rolls of thunder. In the ?ashes of their dazzling light, I could see thousands of people, from all across America, watching in wonder.

This was a de?ant celebration of life — the life of a nation, born from desperate beginnings — and a celebration of the lives of everyone continuing that story now despite a global pandemic — those gathered in the canyon below and those all across the country.

Further, in the months leading up to the Fourth of July, the country had seen so many angry people tearing down monuments from our past, believing they could only be sources of pain and division. Here at Mount Rushmore, we had the opposite. The isolation and fear of the pandemic had been heavy on us all. Here, for the ?rst time in so long, people had come together. We want to be united as much as we want to be free, I remember thinking to myself.

In that moment, I knew in my heart: our country will survive.

Whatever comes, whatever trials from within or without, we can rest assured that the human heart never stops yearning for true freedom, and it never stops yearning for true community. That freedom is not a license to act on whatever whim, but the ability to serve, honor, and love the good things, the true things, the beautiful things. And that community is not something that can be forced on us by of?cial authority, but something that must be freely chosen. Something given.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/exclusive-gov-kristi-noem-fighting-woke-politics-july-4th-fireworks-mt-rushmore

The unemployment figures are meaningless

They ignore the low participation rate

Low labor force participation rate for less-educated Americans
Washington, D.C. (June 23, 2022) – A new Center for Immigration Studies analysis of employment shows that while the overall unemployment rate for immigrants and the U.S.-born has returned to pre-pandemic levels, this obscures the low labor force participation rate of the U.S.-born, particularly those without a bachelor’s degree.

The "unemployed" includes only those who have actively looked for a job in the prior four weeks, while labor force participation measures the share of all working-age people holding a job or actively looking for one. If the labor force participation rate for these less-educated Americans were the same in 2022 as it was 2000, seven million more people would be in the labor force.

“The low unemployment rate is largely meaningless because it does not include all the people on the sidelines,” said Steven Camarota, the Center’s director of research and co-author of the analysis. “With more than 54 million working-age people not in the labor force, we need to adopt policies that get more people back into jobs — not perpetuate the situation by bringing in ever more foreign workers.”

Among the findings:

The unemployment rate of about 4 percent for both the U.S.-born and immigrants (ages 16-plus) in the first quarter of 2022 is similar to what it was before Covid-19, as is the total number (6.7 million) unemployed.

Perhaps more important than the 6.7 million unemployed are the 54.5 million working-wage (16-64) U.S. residents not in the labor force — neither working nor looking for work

Of all 61.2 million not working in the first quarter, 35.3 million (58 percent) were U.S.-born adults (18-64) without a bachelor’s degree.

Among the U.S.-born, labor force participation is lowest and has tended to decline the most among the least-educated — dropouts and those with only a high school education, though it has also declined among those adults with some college.

Prime-age (25-54):

Focusing only on “prime-age” (25-54) men, who traditionally have the highest labor force participation, shows a large decline for the U.S.-born, but not so much for immigrants.
Of U.S.-born men of prime working age without a bachelor’s degree, only 84 percent were in the labor force in the first quarter of 2022, compared to 89 percent in 2000. In contrast, 91 percent of less-educated prime-age immigrant men were in the labor force in 2022, compared to 92 percent in 2000.
Like their male counterparts, the labor force participation rate of less-educated U.S.-born women of prime age has declined — from 77 percent in 2000 to 72 percent in 2022. At 62 percent, the labor force participation rate for immigrant women is lower than their U.S.-born counterparts, but has not changed much since 2000

Race:

While less-educated U.S.-born blacks tend to have lower rates of labor force participation than U.S.-born whites and Hispanics, all three groups show a decline over the last two decades.

Among prime working-age U.S.-born Americans (25-54) without a bachelor’s degree, labor force participation between 2000 and 2022 declined for whites from 84 percent to 79 percent; for blacks it declined from 79 percent to 75 percent; and for Hispanics it declined from 81 percent to 78 percent.

https://cis.org/Report/Employment-Situation-Immigrants-and-USBorn-First-Quarter-2022

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Russia is sidestepping American oil sanctions

When the European Union finally made the decision to ban 90 percent of Russia’s crude oil imports by the end of the year, the bureaucrats in Brussels were jubilant. The EU’s adoption of oil sanctions was thought be a big blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who depends on the revenue generated by his country’s oil exports to fund his war in Ukraine.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why European officials were so thrilled. The EU imported 2.2 million barrels per day of Russian crude last year, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in profits for the Kremlin every month. Prohibiting 90 percent of that supply, with the exception of Hungary (the country received a waiver after its prime minister, Viktor Orb�n, held up a deal for about a month), would be a gargantuan loss for the Russians at a time when its troops are engaged in their largest war since the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan four decades earlier. That was the theory, anyway.

The global oil market, however, isn’t exactly cooperating. Far from celebrating, the EU today is scratching its head over the amount of money the Russians continue to scoop up as a result of high oil prices and Moscow’s ability to counteract the West’s sanctions regime. Indeed, Moscow is earning more money from oil exports than it was before the war in Ukraine began. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an organization in Finland, calculates that Russia’s export prices for fossil fuels in general are about 60 percent higher than they were last year. Asked by lawmakers whether Moscow was raking in more money from oil sales now than in the months before the war, Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s envoy for energy affairs, wasn’t cute with his answer: “I can’t deny that.”

What’s going on here? There are two factors to consider.

The first and most obvious is the extremely high price of crude oil. On June 21, Brent Crude opened at $114 a barrel, approximately 55 percent higher than this time last year. For major petro-states like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, these are the good old days, when high demand and tight global supply produces record profits. Naturally, the more profits Russia earns, the more resources Putin will have available to finance his war of aggression and ensure discontent on the Russian street doesn’t get out of hand.

Current prices are so sky-high, in fact, that Russia continues to make hefty earnings even after offering significant discounts to buyers. At spot rates of about $73 a barrel, and based on current market prices, customers are saving about 51 percent if they go with Russian Urals crude instead of Brent (how long the current supply-demand dynamics will hold is another question entirely).

This leads to the second reason why the EU’s oil sanctions aren’t having an immediate effect: Russia is reworking its entire oil distribution network. The Russians aren’t standing around; they’re creating new opportunities. Before the war, about 60 percent of Russia’s oil exports went to Europe, with the rest going to China. Now, the Russians are redirecting previously Europe-bound oil cargoes to countries in Asia, which are looking for the cheap and most reliable energy supply they can get. In May, Russian crude exports to China increased by 28 percent from the previous month, replacing Saudi Arabia as Beijing’s biggest source of the black stuff. India is receiving 760,000 Russian barrels a day, an exponential jump compared to previous levels, which were near zero.

The Biden administration is obviously disappointed that partner nations are prioritizing their economies over their morals. Biden urged Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a virtual summit in April to lay off buying more Russian crude and offered help in acquiring different energy sources. Some lawmakers, like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, have called India out for giving Putin a financial lifeline; others have hinted at possible US sanctions against the Indians. But would Washington really go as far as undermine a strategic partnership that successive presidents have cultivated since the dawn of the century (and one, it must be stressed, that the administration is hoping to enlist in a balancing coalition against China)? More importantly, should it?

American and European policymakers evidently fooled themselves into believing that cutting off Russian oil would be the beginning of the end for Putin’s war machine — or at least force the Kremlin to deplete whatever reserve funds they have left on the war. But the market has something else in mind.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/russia-is-sidestepping-american-oil-sanctions/

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Leftism triumphant in Philadelphia

There’s “No Price to Pay” for Crime in Philadelphia, Says Mayor and Victim’s Families

Another week in Philadelphia and another major real estate deal—with developers announcing yesterday a $22 million sale for business space and 73 residential units in the Spring Garden neighborhood. Recently redone with the kind of luxury finishes that have become standard on new development projects, the building offers high-end accommodations and nearby amenities like newly opened microbreweries and the city’s peaceful elevated rail park.

Days earlier, eight stops north of Spring Garden on the Broad Street subway line, a young woman named Alyssa Morales was attacked by a group of men in Hunting Park. Beaten and set on fire, she was discovered by others who came to the park assuming there was a trash fire. Because Morales was unable to speak her name at the ICU, it took two days before the staff learned who she was while they attended to the second- and third-degree burns that cover more than half her body.

Before and since the attack on Morales, a cruel, menacing wave of violence has washed over Philadelphia. Blocks from that same park, Loi Nguyen was out on his Monday morning walk, as had been the 76-year-old’s routine for years, when a man shot him dead with a bullet to the skull and ran off, leaving Nguyen’s family bereft and mystified about the cause of the violence. Days before, a man named Malcom White was arrested on charges of one rape and three separate assaults against women, including two attacks in the city’s bustling South Passyunk neighborhood. White had brutally beaten three women walking together, leaving one with a bloody nose, before coming upon another woman, Noelle Liquori, who was waiting on the sidewalk as her boyfriend finished his afternoon shift at work nearby. “The first hit came from behind. He hit me in the ear, put me down, and punched me in the face a couple of times,” Liquori said. “The last thing I remember, I was being dragged on my back. He had my feet, dragging me down the pavement. I kept kicking him and screaming to get someone’s attention.”

Two dozen people traveled to the capital city of Harrisburg on Monday because they, too, are asking for someone to help them. They were at the capitol building to bring attention to an effort to impeach Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia serving his second term. Taking turns at the podium in the rotunda, family members of those who’ve been killed in the city described feeling that the crime in Philadelphia is ceaseless, with no one able to stop it. Since the start of this year, 830 people have been injured in shootings in Philadelphia, with another 200 killed in gun homicides.

“At what point do we hold those responsible to accountability? How many sons and daughters do we have to lose?” said Nakisha Billa, who’s son was murdered last spring while buying clothes for an upcoming job interview. Billa stood beside other parents who held up photos of their children, portraits from graduation days and school sports. The men who killed her son had several previous convictions between them. “The lawlessness that is going on in Philadelphia is beyond control.”

The attempt to impeach Krasner was initiated this week by three Republican members of the Pennsylvania House. Citing the state’s constitutional provision that allows lawmakers to impeach a public official if that person has committed a serious crime or a “misbehavior,” the lawmakers argue that Krasner falls afoul of the latter clause, in breach of his prosecutorial oath and derelict in his duties to protect the residents of the city. It’s unlikely the impeachment will garner the two-thirds majority support it would need in the state’s upper chamber, where at least five Democrats would have to join the Republican-led campaign.

It’s uncertain whether impeaching Krasner would make an immediate or significant dent in what’s happening in Philadelphia. The DA is not wrong when he speaks of systemic, institutional failures that have plagued the city for decades, as developers and city council members have poured money into some neighborhoods while the schools, community programs, and public parks in the less desirable zip codes were left to rot. It’s what has allowed Kensington, the nation’s largest open-air drug market, to flourish into a massive bazaar where the guns trade just as freely as the fentanyl kills scores of people in Philadelphia. On the other hand, the DA’s job is not to cure the root causes of every social ill but to uphold the law and help maintain public order, and while Philadelphia’s problems may not all be of Krasner’s making, the district attorney hasn’t exactly made much of an effort to combat them.

Facing criticism in January for the record number of homicides in Philadelphia in 2021, Krasner brushed off the complaints that there was a problem. “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence,” he said. Since he was elected in 2018, Krasner, following the same agenda as other prominent progressive DAs, has pushed for shorter sentences and for forgoing charges against defendants arrested by police for illegal firearms. “We do not believe that arresting people and convicting them for illegal gun possession is a viable strategy to reduce shootings,” a representative from Krasner’s office said in January, which, when you think about it for a moment, is absolutely fucking insane for the prosecutor’s office to believe, let alone to say out loud. On the district attorney’s website, Krasner keeps a running tally of how many fewer years served convicts have received since he began his tenure: 28,100 years in total.

Krasner’s approach has also led to a startling exodus of prosecutors from his office—including those he’s hired himself. After Krasner took over the office in 2018, at least 70 of the prosecutors Krasner recruited to join the office have since left, adding to the total of some 261 attorneys who’ve departed the office under Krasner’s leadership. “I joined this office for a reason. I came to Philly to work for Krasner because I believed in what he was trying to do,” one member of his staff told a reporter. “I feel betrayed a lot by this office and the promises of what I thought this job was going to be.” The high turnover rate has burdened those who stay with unsustainable caseloads and forced Krasner last month to seek more money from the city so he could entice new hires with higher salaries. One council member said they were reluctant to give more money to the office because of how many complaints they receive from residents who feel they suffer from the “revolving door” of crime committed by the same offenders in their neighborhood.

Following the mass shooting on Philadelphia’s South Street that left three dead and 11 wounded earlier this month, Philadelphia’s mayor, Jim Kenney, expressed dismay at the city’s atmosphere of lawlessness. “It’s gotten to the point where there’s no price to pay for carrying illegal guns, so people carry them because they don’t think anything is going to happen,” said Kenney. Of 303 arrested in 2019 and 2020 for illegal firearms in the city’s 18th police district, two went to prison.

The feeling of being unprotected in Philadelphia has swiftly driven up firearm purchases, with almost 50,000 guns bought in the city across 2020 and 2021, more than doubling the 22,000 guns that had been bought during the two-year period prior. The uptick in people arming themselves for protection has also led to an escalation of justified homicides, aka people using guns to kill people attacking them. In 2018, just six people had been found to be justified in killing someone with a gun in self-defense. Last year, the city’s police department saw justified homicides rise 67% to 20 killings, with six more awaiting approval by the district attorney’s office.

In March, Junwan Perkins-Owens, a 22-year-old assistant manager of a Philadelphia Dollar General, shot and killed a gunman wearing a ski mask and threatening to shoot his cashier as he demanded the money from the store’s register. Perkins-Owens’ store had recently been robbed by a man who held off employees by threatening to stick them with a hypodermic needle. But that wasn’t why Perkins-Owens bought the gun he later used in self-defense. He bought the gun when he suffered a gunshot wound to the leg in a separate incident.

“It’s unfortunate that it happened, but victims are tired of being victims,” said Perkins-Owens. “People are actually standing up for themselves.”

https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/the-killing-of-kensington-life-and

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Biden slams SCOTUS vote to overturn 108-year-old NY gun law requiring 'proper cause' to carry concealed weapon

The Supreme Court has struck down a New York law that severely restricted licenses to carry a concealed weapon, in the high court's biggest Second Amendment ruling in more than a decade.

President Joe Biden said he was 'deeply disappointed' in the ruling, saying in a statement that it 'contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.'

The 6-3 ruling on Thursday reversed a lower court's opinion, which had upheld the 108-year-old New York law restricting licenses to carry concealed weapons in public only to those demonstrating 'proper cause'.

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the majority opinion, writing that the New York law prevented law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights.

New York is not alone in severely limiting who can get a license to carry concealed in public, and the new ruling will likely make it easier to legally carry a gun in major cities including Los Angeles, Boston and Baltimore.

The court decision comes as the Senate was poised on Thursday for a vote to advance a bipartisan gun-control bill, in what could be the first new federal gun legislation in decades.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10946287/US-Supreme-Court-strikes-New-York-law-restricting-concealed-carry-licenses.html

Sunday, June 26, 2022

Liberals slam late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for not retiring

The commenters are right. Conservatives THANK Ginsburg for the same reason. Despite her great age and failing health, she hung on and hung on to her job in the certain belief that the next president would be Hillary. But she got Trump instead. She gambled and lost. She was actually a victim of Leftist hubris and their certainty that they were right

Some liberals are blaming the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after the court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case that federally protected a woman’s right to an abortion in the United States on Friday.

Ginsburg notoriously decided to not retire during the Obama administration when she could have been replaced with a liberal justice, only to die at the age of 87 in September 2020 during the Trump administration.

She was replaced by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was one of three conservative justices appointed by former President Donald Trump — all three of whom were among the six justices who voted in favour of overturning the half-century-old decision.

If she had retired and been replaced by a liberal justice, the decision to overturn Roe would likely still have passed in a 5-4 vote.

Although Ginsburg was a staunch advocate for women’s constitutional right to an abortion, she was critical of how Roe v. Wade established that right.

Outraged, many liberals took to social media to point their fingers at her for Friday’s decision.

“RBG was a hero for many reasons. But the terrible irony is that her decision to stay too long at the party helped lead to the destruction of one of the things she cared about the most,” Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg tweeted.

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/liberals-slam-late-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-for-not-retiring/news-story/53778749f8851f25767db59fdb608f15

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Tucker Carlson brands original Roe v Wade decision 'poison' that 'degraded the legitimacy of Supreme Court'

Tucker Carlson hailed the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v Wade on Friday as a win for Americans and an end to a 'political document' that was 'poison.'

The Fox News host said the landmark 1973 case that secured women's federal right to abortions should have never gone through as it undermined the high court and was merely 'political.'

'Roe was a political document,' Carlson said. 'It was not a legal opinion.

'And for that reason, it degraded and undermined the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, one of our country's central institutions. It was poison.'

He also condemned the protests going on in the Capitol and around the country following the ruling as states scrambled to pass abortion restrictions or expand abortion rights for residents.

Carlson said he was confused by the pro-choice protestors, arguing that the Supreme Court's decision was simply democracy at play.

'This particular ruling dramatically reduces the power of unelected judges to dictate the details of the lives of millions of Americans and returns that power to voters,' Carlson said. 'Voters get to decide how they want to live.

'That's an extreme ideology that upsets the balance of power somehow? We thought that was the whole premise of our system. We thought that was democracy.'

He continued to scoff at the protesters and said that if they didn't like the ruling, they should simply vote for representatives that would pass pro-abortion laws.

The Fox host also drew parallels between the outrage from the abortion ruling to that of the deadly January 6 Capitol riots, mocking liberals who claimed democracy was in danger who are now condeming one of the three branches of government.

'The very people who have been lecturing us for years about democracy – 'It's the end of democracy' – are horrified by the return of democracy,' Carlson said.

'They're telling us the legitimacy of our institutions is at risk. And yet they cannot allow voters to have a say in how they live.'

He specifically called our U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, of California, who called on Americans to defy the Supreme Court and fight the ruling.

'Women are going to control their bodies no matter how they try and stop us,' Waters said as she joined protesters outside the Supreme Court. The hell with the Supreme Court.

'We will defy them. Women will be in control of their bodies. And if they think Black women are intimidated or afraid, they got another thought coming.'

Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted with Samuel Alito to end women's federal right to abortions.

Abortion was automatically outlawed in 18 US states as soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned, thanks to specially-devised 'trigger laws' and historic bans that were automatically reenacted after Friday's ruling.

Thirteen states prepared trigger laws which would automatically outlaw terminations in the event of a ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, which was widely-anticipated.

They are: Arkansas; Idaho; Kentucky; Louisiana; Mississippi; Missouri; North Dakota; Oklahoma; South Dakota; Tennessee; Texas; Utah and Wyoming.

Abortion bans in those states will now become law within 30 days.

Five other states have also now banned terminations, after historic laws superseded by the 1973 Roe ruling automatically came back into place. Among those five are two Democrat-governed states - Michigan and Wisconsin.

Eight other states are also set to enact new anti-abortion laws. Georgia, Iowa and South Carolina all attempted to ban abortion after the six week mark.

Those laws were branded unconstitutional, but will likely be revisited now Roe has ended. And Florida, Indiana, Montana as well as Nebraska are all working on plans to ban or restrict terminations.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10951649/Tucker-Carlson-brands-original-Roe-V-Wade-decision-poison.html

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Destruction and Vandalism by Pro-Abortion Extremists Sweeps America

Shadowy pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge has orchestrated a nationwide campaign of destruction and vandalism against pro-life groups for which police have yet to make an arrest.

The group’s attacks began on May 8 in Madison, Wisconsin, where Jane’s Revenge members torched the headquarters of pro-life group Wisconsin Family Action.

“They had Molotov cocktails. They threw one against the window, and the window didn’t break. So then they broke a window and threw a Molotov cocktail into my office,” said Julaine Appling, Wisconsin Family Action’s president.

When the Molotov didn’t destroy the office enough, the attackers started a fire in Appling’s office using her books.

“The thing that I am missing the most is all the books they burned,” Appling said. “Some of those might at this point be irreplaceable.”

The same day, Jane’s Revenge announced its existence, claimed responsibility for the attack, and promised more nationwide.

“We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle,” its anonymous writer said in an online manifesto.

Since then, attacks on pro-life organizations have only escalated. As of today, at least 28 pro-life groups from Anchorage, Alaska to Hollywood, Florida have been attacked.

The attacks were prompted by the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, a decades-old decision that prohibited states from imposing restrictions on abortion.

Who Is Jane’s Revenge?

The attack on Wisconsin Family Action’s office was the first one claimed by Jane’s Revenge.

The only public channel of communication from Jane’s Revenge is a page on NoBlogs, an anarchist blogging site.

In its first post on Sunday, May 8, the group announced a “declaration of war” against pro-life groups. It demanded the disbandment of all American pro-life groups in the next 30 days.

“As you continue to bomb clinics and assassinate doctors with impunity, so too shall we adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies,” the group wrote.

This “First Communiqu�” also announced that Jane’s Revenge had “not one group, but many” in “every city.”

A second manifesto on May 30 called for a “Night of Rage” on the night the Supreme Court releases the Dobbs v. Jackson verdict. It asked for “courageous hearts to come out after dark.”

It also claimed that Jane’s Revenge had a “few hundred people” but needed more members.

It’s unclear whether Jane’s Revenge has a centralized leadership, cells across the country, or is simply a slogan that unconnected pro-abortion radicals use when attacking pro-life clinics. The group’s true size is also unclear.

Many attacks against pro-life groups nationwide have used graffiti tags connected to Jane’s Revenge.

Jane’s Revenge attacks tend to have cursive graffiti reading, “Jane Was Here,” “Jane’s Revenge,” anarchist symbols, the number “1312,” or some version of the phrase “If abortions aren’t safe then neither are you.”

Federal and local police have yet to arrest anyone for attacking a pro-life clinic since the first attack on May 8.

Attackers on the Loose

The Epoch Times has interviewed seven of the 28 pro-life organizations attacked since the Dobbs v. Jackson leak. Several attacked organizations refused to be interviewed because they feared a higher profile would bring more attacks.

But all organizations that spoke with the Epoch Times said they wouldn’t quit because of the attacks.

“We’re not going to go away. We’re not going to be quiet. We are going to continue to be bold and strong. Because we are on the right side of this issue,” Appling with Wisconsin Family Action said.

The vast majority of groups contacted by the Epoch Times said they had video of their attackers and were working with the police. Several clinics that received threats from Jane’s Revenge have also passed on information to the FBI.

In Long Beach, California, a woman entered His Nesting Place, a church and maternity care home, according to senior pastor Al Howard. The woman screamed obscenities, tore up a Bible, and threw a vase belonging to the church.

While congregants moved her out of the church, the woman attempted to open her backpack, Howard said. “It dawned on us later that she possibly might have had a weapon,” he said.

Both security and phone cameras caught the attack, Howard said. While she was in the church, the attacker said she was local. Later, she shouted and threatened outside the church again. But police still haven’t caught her, he said.

“She said, ‘I’m not finished with you. I’ll be back and I’m going to burn this place to the ground and all of you in it,’” Howard said.

Police didn’t set up a guard on the church while the attacker remained at large, he said.

Compass Care Pregnancy Services in Buffalo, New York suffered the worst attack so far from Jane’s Revenge, according to its director Jim Harden.

The attacker threw Molotovs at the clinic, resulting in “catastrophic” fire damage, Harden said.

The damage will require a full rebuild, he said. But due to the high number of donations the clinic has received, he plans to make a new and expanded building.

“Let’s not only rebuild, let’s build it bigger,” Harden said.

Police and the FBI have told Harden that they have leads on multiple perpetrators, but have yet to arrest a suspect, he said.

“Government failure to act is conspicuous,” Harden said. “Their job is to protect all citizens equally, not just the ones that agree with them.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/destruction-and-vandalism-by-pro-abortion-extremists-sweeps-america_4545276.html

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The newest Dark age

A dark age is not so much an age in which the level of technology degenerates as one in which the level of civilization degenerates. We are walking into the newest dark age with eyes open.

No barbarians are sacking our cities (we only praise urban riots). Nobody is burning the great libraries (we are only banning books). Nobody is tearing down churches (we just close them in the name of public hygiene).

Nobody is liquidating teachers or closing schools (the teachers themselves are destroying them). Nobody is seizing the universities to force them to stop teaching great literature (universities are doing that to themselves). Nobody is enforcing an official religion (you can hold any view of God you wish, so long as you agree that He couldn’t possibly matter to anything).

Nobody is forbidding teaching students to read (they just don’t, and we don’t expect them to). Nobody is forbidding teaching students to do arithmetic (except now they use calculators, and wrong answers are affirmed for the sake of self-esteem). We do know lots of facts (we are merely contemptuous of understanding).

We aren’t ignorant of basic right and wrong (we just pretend to be). No one has abolished the administration of justice (it has only been perverted for political ends). No one has prohibited elections (we have only manipulated the polls). We don’t so far practice much assassination (except career and character assassination).

Persons with disabilities are encouraged to seek help (and to consider themselves disabled even if they aren’t). In fact we help people a lot (especially in ways that infantilize them and make them permanently dependent). We no longer approve of victimizing people (we just encourage them to make permanent victims of themselves).

No one is tearing apart families (we break up our homes on our own). No one so far is taking children away from fit parents (parents merely hand them over to be raised by social media). We no longer allow the young to cheer the spilling of blood in the arena (instead we let them spill it themselves in virtual entertainments).

No one has prohibited the free press (journalists has chosen spin over honest reportage entirely on their own). We no longer approve of police brutality (in fact we no longer approve of police). We no longer have illegal drugs (they are all becoming legal).

We no longer prohibit the publication of filth (we only condemn calling it filth). We don’t say that debasement is wholesome (we merely make pop heroes of debased persons). We no longer have prostitution (those ladies are all sex workers now).

We no longer practice compulsory racial segregation, which is degrading (instead we applaud voluntary racial segregation, which is affirming). We no longer approve of racial discrimination (except against Asians and white males). No babies are born into slavery (we just kill them before they are born).

Women can pursue any jobs or professions they want (so long as they put motherhood in second place). In fact, biological women are now entirely equal (since as we now know, there are no biological women).

Yes, we are bringing this on ourselves. We will get exactly what we want. We may not be pleased when we have it.

https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-newest-dark-age

Friday, June 24, 2022

Are the times changing?

In recent decades, the West – like the proverbial frog – has been blas� toward the rising temperature of the cultural waters.

Short-handed by the neologism ‘Woke’, the central idea that immutable characteristics like skin pigmentation should define character and control thought has minted a new social hierarchy. Woke culture stands contrary to Dr Martin Luther King Jr. with its rigid adherence to victimhood, yet is found thriving in preeminent universities, politics, major corporations, medicine, entertainment, and even sports.

This pathetic identitarianism has been allowed to hijack institutions, one after another, because it has become profitable. Its acceleration into every facet of life was ratcheted up by both the Covid pandemic and Marxist race riots. Were burning streets and ruined historic items enough to jolt the average person out of their insouciance? Encouraging signs are appearing in America (despite being the source of most of these bad ideas).

In the media, CNN has gotten itself a new CEO after the ignominious resignation of Jeff Zucker. In light of its tumbling ratings, the new CEO has made reevaluating partisan talents and programs his first priority. That almost sounds like merit creeping into the room…

The equally left-leaning Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, recently suffered the embarrassment of having one of its reporters, Felicia Sonmez, publicly criticise her colleagues and the institution because another reporter, David Weigel, retweeted a mildly sexist joke. Not satisfied with Weigel’s apology and suspension, Sonmez continued her public and relentless attack on her employer and colleagues. Despite the strength of #Metoo and her victim category of ‘womanhood’, Sonmez was fired.

The specious ‘believe all women’ narrative took another hit with Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit win over Amber Heard. In addition to underlining that men can be the victims in relationships and that women lie, it may also make Hollywood pause before cancelling people based on allegations alone.

In the realm of politics, the election win for the Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginian, a usually heavily Democratic state, was largely a referendum on the public school system. Parents who protested against Critical Race Theory being taught to their kids were treated as potential domestic terrorists by the Democratic Attorney General Merrick Garland at the behest of the National School Board Association. They offered their reply at the ballot box.

In extremely liberal San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled in a decisive fashion. His ultra-progressive policies, including reducing the prison population by 50 per cent during the height of the pandemic, has seen crime in San Francisco skyrocket.

California’s progressive Governor Gavin Newsom survived a recall election in 2021, but will face the November election with a track record of losing Californians to other states for two years in a row. It will be the first time in the state’s history that its population has shrunk with many of those who left, including podcaster Joe Rogan, moving to red states like Texas and Florida, forcing California to prohibit state employees from moving to 17 red states. Businesses, likewise have been leaving. Apple moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, as did Elon Musk’s Tesla.

One interesting challenger for the Governorship is Michael Shellenberger, a disillusioned former Democrat running as an independent. He may be representing a large sector of the centre-left in America who find themselves marooned by the radicalisation of their party. He has clear and well-thought-out ideas about tackling widespread drug-fuelled homeless encampments and the energy crisis – two major issues plaguing California.

The shift in politics is also apparent in the recent win by Mayra Flores, a Mexican immigrant who is the first Republican elected to a Rio Grande Valley congressional seat in over a century. Indeed, Biden’s approval rating among Hispanics is only 24 per cent, according to a recent Quinnipiac Poll. An Emerson poll in 2021 saw that Biden approval among Black voters dropped from 72 per cent in February to 52 per cent in November.

Notwithstanding the traditional support from minority groups enjoyed by the Democratic Party, it seems apparent that radical policies, such as the growing southern border crisis that affects many predominantly Hispanic communities, and anti-police policies that damage largely minority inner-city residents, have turned them away. This is before we get to Biden’s record inflation and gas prices.

These represent some small but significant signs of pushback. The American mid-term elections later this year are expected to bring the House and the Senate back to Republican hands. While the Republican Party is not without its problems, compared to the radicalism of the Democrats, it is, to borrow Shakespeare’s phrase, Hyperion to a satyr.

The important lesson is this that vigilance at all times is the price society must pay for not only liberty, but even common sense. It is somewhat lucky that the Woke have shown their hand to be awash with false self-assurance and extremist policies. There may still be time to hop safely out of the bubbling pot.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/boiling-in-the-culture-wars-pot/

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Transgender Fascists

By Debbie Hayton (who is transgender)

Anyone still talking about ‘two sides in the transgender debate’ needs to look at the footage from Bristol yesterday. Actually, there was no debate. What happened was one group of people (mainly men) intimidating a second group of people (mainly women). The video is terrifying.

If you couldn’t catch what was said through their masks, here is my transcript:

Go, get in the sea. Die out. You’re dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Fossils. You’re going to die out (x5). You are ancient history. You are fossils. You are dinosaurs. You have failed (x2). Your ideas have failed. Get in the sea. Get in the sea like Colston. Go home. Get in the sea.

The reference to Edward Colston’s statue – pushed into Bristol harbour two years ago by an out-of-control mob – was chilling. But Colston died in 1721. This time the suggested target was the living. Specifically, a group of women who wanted to meet on College Green in central Bristol to discuss women’s rights.

The protesters’ motivations felt like pure misogyny: when the two men had run out of blood-curdling threats, the masked bandit finished tellingly with, ‘look after your kids’. But this was was no naive young student, this was a fully grown man unleashing his fury on women. Behind him, the mob chanted ‘trans rights are human rights’, as if those ends justified whatever means – however vile.

And the police watched on as all this happened. In a statement, Avon and Somerset police said, ‘Earlier today, officers facilitated around 150 people’s right to protest in Bristol city centre… The right to protest is a fundamental democratic right and we are pleased to have been able to facilitate both these demonstrations.’

No, there was only one demonstration, protest, exercise in brutal intimidation – call it what you like. On the other side of the police line, the women just wanted to talk. Standing for Women who organised the event said:

Standing for Women organised a women’s free speech event ‘Let Women Speak’, not a protest or a rally. It’s an event aimed at combatting the silencing of women’s voices on the erasure of our rights, our spaces and our language posed by the totalitarian transgender promoting ideologues.

I spoke to Bo Novak who had travelled from Wiltshire for the event. Describing the protestors as ‘anarcho-bully boys’, she told me:

They so reminded me of the Socialist Workers party I endured through my younger activist days, as well as Militant, back in the day. Just abusive angry men using a cause… They did everything possible within the law to intimidate women. There was a lot of squaring up to police, there was a lot of shouting, there was a lot of pointing, and screaming and chanting. At one point they just had their megaphone on a drone – high-pitched feedback – so that nothing could be heard.

The silencing of women’s voices, indeed. The cause these men are using is transgender rights. My rights, in other words. It seems that they think by invoking trans rights they can do exactly as they please.

This needs to stop. The mob can never be appeased. For too long politicians and policymakers have prevaricated. Maybe they don’t understand what is going on. Well, they need to learn quickly, and not from the likes of Stonewall. The ideology that those groups have been pushing has got us into this mess. To get out of it we need to restore some common sense. It’s not difficult. There are two sexes – and that has been the case for around a billion years. The two sexes are different in our species and sometimes they need separate provision.

Some people struggle with their sex and their sexed bodies. In recent years we have become more accepting of those people, while medical advances have made it possible for people to change their bodies so that they can be more comfortable with them. But neither hormone therapy nor surgery can change anyone’s sex. Whatever I might have done to my body should give me no extra rights to impose on women. Nor should it give these so-called allies any rights to impose themselves on women either.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/there-is-no-transgender-debate/

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‘Experts’ have been so wrong on just about everything

It’s hard to recall a period in history in which experts have been so comprehensively wrong on so many topics in such a short time. Think Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation.

Intelligence experts looked foolish when it turned out Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction after all.

The Queen took a dim view of economists, who failed en masse to foresee problems in the world’s banking system that precipitated the global financial crisis in 2008.

Economists have a long history of being wrong, at least since more than 300 of them publicly warned Margaret Thatcher in 1981 that the British prime minister’s belt-tightening policies would cause a recession, only to be proved spectacularly wrong a few months later.

But the decade beginning in 2020 appears to have taken institutional wrongness to a higher plane. Economists, even after the embarrassment of calling inflation “transitory” for most of last year, are still at it; they wrote a public letter in September last year playing down concerns about inflation and encouraging Joe Biden to press ahead with his $US3.5 trillion Build Back Better package. But with inflation at almost 9 per cent in the US, supporters of the package have gone strangely quiet in recent months.

Foreign policy experts, though, have given economists a run for their money since Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting the US and Europe to wallop Russia with unprecedented sanctions designed to compel Vladimir Putin to stop his illegal invasion.

They fired a bazooka at their own feet, doing nothing to avert the war while crushing the competitiveness of European industry and slashing the living standards of ordinary Americans and Europeans. Goodbye German car industry, on current trends.

It’s worse, though. In late March Biden, under the advice of experts no doubt, said Russia’s currency would be turned to “rubble” by sanctions. This week the rouble reached a seven-year high against the US dollar, becoming the best performing currency in the world this year.

Interest rates on Russian 10-year government bonds, at about 9 per cent, are one percentage point lower than they were before the war. The Russian central bank is cutting interest rates as the Fed lifts them.

Soaring energy prices, as a result mainly of Western sanctions, have supercharged Russian oil and gas revenues, quadrupling the Russian government’s budget surplus in May compared with the same month a year ago, as Putin gloated in St Petersburg last week.

Security and intelligence experts haven’t done much better, routinely foreshadowing the collapse of Russian forces, or even the imminent death of Putin from a variety of diseases, all while those forces appear to have slowly occupied a fifth of Ukraine, including the crucial land corridor between Crimea and Russia.

Perhaps these are the same US intelligence experts who in October 2020 publicly said they were convinced the files on Hunter Biden’s laptops, which have since raised serious questions about the business dealings of the US President’s family, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. Perhaps, but it was also entirely real, as similarly benighted media experts have now conceded.

Then there’s the climate change and energy experts who have been telling us for years a rising share of solar and wind power in national grids would cause prices to decline, when the two nations furthest down that path – Germany and Denmark – have the most expensive power in Europe. Batteries would continue to get cheaper, the experts told us, seemingly oblivious of the impact an immense increase in mandated demand for electric cars and giant lithium batteries would have on the price of the critical minerals they require. Not very smart.

But no group of experts can compete with epidemiologists and other so-called public health experts for being so militantly and repeatedly wrong about every aspect of their supposed speciality, which will go down as one of the great fiascos of history.

Three weeks to flatten the curve turned into almost 850 days of chaotic, arbitrary restrictions that appeared to do very little in the end to stop the spread of Covid-19, let alone pass any sort of rational cost-benefit assessment.

Cloth masks worked, then they didn’t; vaccines protected against infection, then they didn’t. Two doses were enough, then three, then four. The virus emerged zoonotically for certain, then it didn’t.

“Experts say”, “experts warn” has become something of a joke. It’s not surprising that less than a fifth of American parents, for instance, intend to vaccinate their toddlers against Covid-19, according to a recent Kaiser Foundation survey, even though experts are recommending it urgently.

This false narrative of a consensus among experts risks damaging public respect for all of them. That’s a pity because genuine expertise is valuable.

The handful of people presented by the media as experts are a sliver of the total, among whom there is rarely a true consensus on anything. Social media has supercharged the incentives to moralise and fall victim to groupthink. On top of that, expert ranks have swollen as society has become richer, enabling more people to think for a living.

That means the average quality of advice has declined, providing the media with a greater number of potentially crowd-pleasing, dubious opinions to promote. Experts get it wrong often because they bear few personal consequences of their advice. The accuracy of past predictions or assessments is rarely checked. For experts, it’s much more important to be on the right side of the debate than to be right. Most of all, experts’ incomes typically are guaranteed whatever they say; others bear the consequences.

The past few years have been a crisis for the reputation of experts, but not for experts themselves.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/experts-have-been-so-wrong-on-just-about-everything/news-story/7983402898e9fa5436b64b9fb21bc4f4

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Biden Regulations Adding to Cost of Inflation

The Foundation for Government Accountability’s Jonathan Ingram highlights the role of regulations in driving up prices in a recent op-ed:

The highest inflation in 40 years isn’t driven just by record federal spending, a record government-driven labor shortage and record restrictions on US energy production. President Joe Biden’s record regulation spree is also pushing prices higher. Stopping the bureaucratic assault on the economy is essential to taming inflation and giving families relief.

The role of regulations in the inflation crisis is largely overlooked but shouldn’t be. When Washington wraps the economy in red tape, businesses must spend massive sums on compliance.

That cash doesn’t materialize from thin air. Every dollar that goes toward hiring lawyers, filling out paperwork and redesigning products and assembly lines gets passed to consumers through higher prices. Mercatus Center research finds that a 15% increase in federal regulation hikes the cost of consumer goods by a full percentage point.

This puts the president’s regulation obsession in perspective. In its first year, Team Biden added more than 72,000 pages of regulations, executive orders and agency notices. That’s 25% more than the Trump administration added in its first year, according to my review of the Federal Register. Biden’s team also pushed through more major regulations in his first year than any president in modern US history—69 such regulations compared with 22 under Donald Trump and 52 under Barack Obama.

Unlike the Trump administration’s initiative to reduce the government’s regulatory burden on Americans, President Biden’s regulations achieve the opposite outcome. Dan Goldbeck and Dan Bosch of the American Action Forum estimated the burden of President Biden’s new regulations from his first year in office. They find the Biden administration increased Americans’ costs by $201 billion as they forced businesses to do an extra 131 million hours of paperwork.

The Biden-Harris administration’s regulatory agenda costs Americans both time and money. Its costs are being passed through to American consumers through price increases. Suppose the administration wants to get serious about reducing inflation. In that case, it needs to shrink the federal government’s regulatory burden as part of its plan. Assuming the administration ever develops such a plan.

https://blog.independent.org/2022/06/21/biden-regulations-adding-cost-inflation/

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Biden's sanctions on Russia are a gift to China

Throttling the oil industry while cutting off Russian oil is putting American businesses at a serious disadvantage to those that now buy Russian oil and gas at a discount, namely China and also India, according to an expert on environmental and energy policy. Worse yet, this situation appears to be baked into the geopolitical cake for the foreseeable future.

After Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Western nations tried to punish Russia with a slew of economic sanctions, including by cutting purchases of Russian oil and gas. That made Russia “a distressed seller” forced to accept penalty prices, noted Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

“They’re now shipping much more of their fossil energy to China and India, who are willing still to deal with Russia,” he told The Epoch Times.

Russian oil now sells at a more than 30 percent discount by some estimates.

Meanwhile, Western governments have throttled investment in the oil and gas industry in a quest to “decarbonize” their economies, leading to a tight supply and a market unable to deal with rising demand.

“We’re entering a phase where we will have structurally very high energy prices for years to come,” McKitrick said.

“China and India are buying energy at a deep discount so they will have a structural cost advantage and I think you’ll see that begins to affect trading patterns, manufacturing costs, energy-intensive production costs in the years ahead to our detriment—entirely avoidable, too.”

America’s average gas price has been around or above $5 a gallon for weeks and diesel has already crossed the $6 barrier in many areas.

The economic impact is far-reaching because energy is “very fundamental,” and when its price goes up it makes it “more costly to do everything,” McKitrick said.

Some economists now see fuel prices as the dominant factor in inflation, which reached 8.6 percent in May.

Amid an already tight labor market, tightening credit, and margins eaten away by inflation, another competitive disadvantage is the last thing American businesses need.

A U.S. small business optimism survey recently recorded its lowest ever reading in its 48-year history.

“Small business owners remain very pessimistic about the second half of the year as supply chain disruptions, inflation, and the labor shortage are not easing,” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that runs the survey, in a June 14 release.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-sanctions-on-russia-anti-oil-policy-give-competitive-edge-to-china-economist_4543692.html

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Democrats’ summer dreams turning to heat stroke delusions

Today marks the arrival of the summer solstice, the first official day of the season where the sun reaches its highest annual point in the sky and folks in the northern hemisphere enjoy the most sunlight of any day of the year. It’s a terrific time for outdoor barbecues, picnics in the backyard or along your favorite waterway or just for chilling while taking in the “longest” sunset of the year.

But with the kids out of school, this occasion also initiates the summer travel season. Children and teens love that they won’t have classes or homework assignments for weeks on end, but their parents will have some explaining to do when those same young ones ask why the family vacation has been cancelled or confined to weekends at a nearby beach or lake because mom and dad can’t afford the five-dollar-a-gallon prices at the pump, not to mention the traditional jaunts to restaurants and movie theaters.

Kids are pretty smart these days and news travels fast via social media, but maybe they’ve also spotted an “I did that” sticker depicting our senile dolt president pointing to the big number reflected on the screen of gas dispensing pumps. Or, if the neophytes are really fortunate, their parents will have sat with them at the kitchen table and explained why the family’s shortage of money this year is directly related to the president’s and the government’s policies, that “climate change” is basically a hoax manifested by rich people to take power from poor people, and that political leadership at the top definitely makes a difference. What better way to get young folks engaged with politics? The practical lessons are all around us at this juncture.

This summer will no doubt feel like a long one for everybody. With the COVID hysteria finally died down and Americans feeling freer to live life again, we’re no longer seeing as many masked faces (though there are still quite a few) and people are returning to the public square to conduct business and… sometimes, have fun. In contrast to two years ago, it seems like the world is alive again. Was it the development of the Trump vaccines or simply a realization among citizens that the government authorities overdid the lockdowns?

I vote for the latter. But there’s politics to play, too. Dr. fuzzball Fauci himself tested positive for the bug last week. He barely got sick. I wonder why?

Speaking of highs and lows, on Donald Trump’s birthday, I presented a scenario whereby the 45th president decided not to pursue a second term but instead accepted an invitation from his likely successor as master of the Republican Party and purveyor of the MAGA agenda, Ron DeSantis, to fill the second slot on the GOP 2024 ticket as vice president.

Naturally, Democrats offer their own predictions, including one by a member of “The View” cast regarding the strength of their possible 2024 presidential ticket. Once again, you can’t make this stuff up. Victor Morton reported at The Washington Times:

“The ladies of ‘The View’ can’t wait for the 2024 dream ticket — Kamala and Mayor Pete. In a segment [last] Tuesday, co-host Sunny Hostin called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a murderous fascist (‘DeathSantis’ she deliberately called him) who would easily be defeated by that ticket.

“She said that if President Biden did not run for reelection, as a number of Democrats are speculating about or even hoping for, Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg would be ‘great’ as a ticket.

“’Do you think they could win, really?’ asked co-host Joy Behar. Mr. Biden defeated both of them on his way to clinching the 2020 Democratic nomination. ‘Well, I would vote for them,’ Ms. Hostin gushed. ‘I hope this country is ready for something like that. I think the brain power alone would just obliterate [Donald] Trump or DeathSantis.’”

Brainpower? I confess that I’m not familiar with Ms. Hostin, but she must not possess any extra “brainpower” herself if she thinks this potential pairing of Democrats would dazzle folks by their smarts alone. Harris has such immense “brainpower” that she’s successfully alienated even the identity-politics crazed faithful of her own party, and Buttigieg? Have the cackling hags on “The View” heard anything about that little supply chain problem we’re having under the nose of senile Joe’s I-got-the-job-because-I’m-gay Secretary of Transportation?

With a name like “Sunny”, perhaps Ms. Hostin has already spent too much time outside this season. Heat combined with humidity makes one dizzy and impairs normal cognitive function, and “The View” personality clearly exhibits advanced symptoms of heat stroke, such as delusions. She should immediately seek an air conditioned (by fossil fuel powered electric generators) environment and drink water slowly to stave off permanent damage.

Aside from the ridiculous coupling that Hostin dropped during her airheaded prediction spree, isn’t she forgetting something? Senile Joe Biden is still the head of the party, and until he signals that he’s ready to step aside in favor of Kamala, Pete Butt, or anyone else, he’s still in charge of his own destiny.

It’s remarkable how Democrats aren’t even trying to hide the contempt for their own president lately. It seems like all the Sunday morning news show hosts are querying their Democrat guests on whether they’ll support Biden’s reelection campaign, a topic that’s a tad premature, isn’t it? It’s almost as though they’re supposing Biden either won’t make it to 2024 (this is where the actuarial tables figure in) or he’ll be supplanted by Harris due to the 25th Amendment.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Harris herself could be the catalyst of such a removal attempt, as the Constitution provides the vice president the authority to instigate an investigation into Biden’s fitness for office, and if she can recruit half of senile Joe’s cabinet to go along with her – and Congress to assent – then the scheme could conceivably succeed.

Kamala would then become president and she would run in 2024 as an incumbent, more or less. The House of Representatives would choose a vice president, and with today’s upside-down political environment, could very well elevate a schlep like Pete Buttigieg to be Harris’s right-hand LGBTQ man with the intention of preselecting the Democrats’ next presidential ticket without costly or reputation damaging primaries.

Bernie Sanders and other Democrat socialist radicals might not buy into the combo, but the party establishment would love it. What other partnership would be superior to attract the skin color and alternative sexual orientation worshipping Democrat base? They’d receive hours and hours of media coverage over the potential for the first black/Indian woman to be president, and how about the first male vice president-to-be married to a guy? Novelty galore! The glass ceiling would be history, with rainbows shining proudly overhead!

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (the nation’s first two vice presidents), eat your ghostly hearts out! I bet these founders never considered there would be two men raising twin toddlers living in the vice president’s residence someday. The world certainly has changed!

Fascinating imagery aside, this Kamala/Butt ticket probably will never happen. First, there’s practically no way that Biden would ever agree not to run again unless he was assured of being able to anoint his own successor, and it wouldn’t be Harris. Judging by the fact Kamala has all-but disappeared off the administration’s radar screen recently, senile Joe’s folks aren’t wild about their backup quarterback.

Second, because Kamala’s approval ratings are even lower than Joe’s, the Democrat rank-and-file will be searching for a 2024 nominee who’s electable. Isn’t that why every liberal plugged their nose in 2020 and agreed to the broken-down swamp dwelling Obama default choice castoff Joe Biden in the first place? Kamala didn’t even make it to the first primary state in her own campaign. She was that detestable. She’s a loser!

Lastly, Pete Buttigieg almost certainly won’t be the party’s presidential or vice president candidate because he has nothing to run on – except the fact that he’s gay. Next time around, even Democrat voters will place substance at a premium, and “Mayor Pete” has none. He’s not a new face, either, which was his main selling point in 2020. How would the Democrat pros spin Pete Buttigieg into someone who can run the country if he can’t keep the trains running on time?

Democrats don’t care about resumes – Barack Obama proved that – but Buttigieg needs about twenty years of age to make himself look as though he didn’t just emerge from a college frat party.

Then there’s the matter of the Electoral College. Which of the key swing states would a Harris/Buttigieg combo steal from Trump and/or DeSantis? Are voters outside of the west coast and the northeast really that dumb?

Summer is here and Americans are ready to embrace the fun that goes along with long hot days and vacations away from the daily routine. Inflation plagues the nation, but citizens will do their best to deal with the conditions fostered by our failed political leadership. Prices will go higher, senile Joe’s approval rating will go lower and Democrats can keep fantasizing about beating the Republicans in 2024.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-right-resistance-democrats-summer-dreams-turning-to-delusions-caused-by-heat-stroke

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Why Too Many Vitamins Feels Just About Right

Peter A. Ubel, MD

Currently, US adults spend more than $10 billion per year on vitamins and dietary supplements,1 believing against most evidence that fortified gummy bears and water infused with vitamins will improve their health and well-being. Vitamins are necessary for life, the difference between healthy gums and scurvy, between strong bones and rickets. But, as the recent US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation statement2 and updated evidence report and systematic review3 show, there is little evidence that supplemental vitamins and minerals prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease, or mortality.

No vitamins were found to reduce death from cancer or cardiovascular disease, with multivitamins earning an I statement from the USPSTF (meaning that evidence remains insufficient to recommend for or against taking such supplements). Additionally, beta carotene was found to increase the chance of developing lung cancer in high-risk populations, earning it a D recommendation from the USPSTF (recommending against taking such supplements).

A total of 84 studies were reviewed,3 testing vitamins in almost 700 000 people, and the rosiest conclusion is that more evidence is needed. In the face of such underwhelming benefits, what explains the number of people who regularly consume these unnecessary supplements?

According to population surveys, people take vitamins either to stay healthy,4 feel more energetic, or gain peace of mind.5 These evidence-defying beliefs are bolstered by clever marketing campaigns.6 Advertisements inform consumers that signs of potential vitamin deficiency include fatigue, low motivation, and thinning hair. As if that message does not resonate with enough people, they label their products with enticing names like “True Strength,” “Core Nutritionals” (6-pack abs around the corner), and “Immortal Elite Vitamin Pack” (because who would want to gain immortality in anything other than an elite manner?).

Essential nutrients plus clever marketing: it is clear why vitamin and mineral supplements are so appealing. But that begs the question of why it is so easy to market the unproven benefits of these products while it is so difficult to convince people to receive lifesaving vaccines.

There are several possible theories. First, people have a tendency to see the world in sharp dichotomies: good/bad, with me/against me. In the face of such dichotomous thinking, vitamins have been lumped into the good and healthy (vs bad and unhealthy) category. Once people view vitamins as being good and healthy, a second bit of psychology kicks in—what behavioral scientists call dose insensitivity—and they assume that something either improves health or not while ignoring the possibility that the health benefits of this product will vary depending on the dose.7 In alignment with this mindset, people know that consuming no vitamin C is bad for their health and that consuming a little vitamin C improves their health; therefore, additional consumption should improve health even more. The Hollywood star Mae West colorfully captured this mindset when she quipped that if a little is great and a lot is better, “then way too much is just about right!”8

A third psychological phenomenon reenforces this mindset—a bias people have toward natural substances independent of whether those substances improve their well-being. For example, in one study people were given a choice between 2 medicines: one that was described as natural and the other described as being manufactured.9 They were also told that there was no difference in the harms and benefits of the 2 medications. Nevertheless, they preferred the natural one. Advertising agencies recognize this bias, underscoring that vitamin supplements are natural, with the implication being that they must be good for people’s health and well-being. Better yet, they emphasize that their products are “botanical.” Now, people can make up for the lack of fruits and veggies in their diets by ingesting daily supplements.

The appeal of vitamin supplements is further augmented by a fourth factor, an action bias—a desire, all else equal, to err toward harms of commission rather than omission. This action bias was brilliantly established in a study of elite soccer goalkeepers.10 Large studies have shown that the optimal strategy for blocking a penalty kick is to stay put rather than leaping left or right. Yet, it would feel terrible to stand by while an opponent slams a ball into the back of the net. Therefore, goalkeepers typically hurl their bodies one direction or another, consoled by the thought that when an opponent inevitably scores at least they made a heroic effort to prevent that outcome. A 2005 study illustrated a medical version of this psychology among lay people, the majority of whom say they would choose a 10% chance of dying from cancer surgery over a 5% risk of dying from leaving the cancer untreated.11

People do not always prefer action over inaction, of course. Consider all of the people refusing to receive beneficial vaccines. That is why it is worthwhile to consider differences between vitamins and vaccines that might explain this shift in preference from action to inaction. For starters, people perceive vitamins as natural and vaccines as manufactured; vitamins as essential, vaccines as optional; vitamins as uncontroversial, vaccines as political. In addition, when people receive a vaccine, they experience a sore arm and, occasionally, a day or 2 of flulike symptoms. Despite all of those unpleasant feelings, they never know whether the vaccine prevented them from getting sick. By contrast, when people consume vitamins, they do not have sore arms or flulike symptoms. Instead, they experience a placebo effect: more energy, a greater sense of health and well-being. A group of experts might say that the benefits of vitamin supplements are minimal or nonexistent. But how can scientific facts compete with their lived experience?

The USPSTF has brilliantly synthesized evidence about the health effect of vitamin and mineral supplements.2,3 But the work is not over. If we want people to stop taking unnecessary vitamins and start receiving lifesaving vaccines, we need to address the psychological (and political) factors that cause people to embrace evidence-incongruent beliefs.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2793623

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“Woke” Fed Fell Asleep on the Job

The Federal Reserve has become increasingly concerned with “woke” issues like inequality and climate change. These concerns have distracted Fed officials from their core mission of price stability. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation hit 6.59 percent in March. The price level is now 4.6 percentage points higher than it would have been had the Fed hit its 2-percent target over the course of the pandemic. With inflation raging at the highest rate in 40 years, it is time to reexamine the Fed’s legitimate responsibilities.

Regarding monetary policy, a central bank has one—and only one— legitimate obligation: to maintain price stability via transparent activities that conform to the rule of law.

Actions inconsistent with long-run price stability reduce overall welfare. They also open the door for wealth to be diverted to special interests at the expense of the general public. This is the road to economic inefficiency, arbitrary wealth redistributions, politicization of monetary policy, and chaos.

The best service the Fed can provide is to singularly pursue a stable, transparent, and predictable monetary framework. The Fed can achieve this by creating money at a rate that stabilizes overall spending. Such a policy benefits all members of society. It creates low and steady inflation, which allows households and businesses to plan more effectively so that economic activities are better coordinated. And it dampens business cycles by requiring the Fed to offset changes in private spending to maintain price stability.

Historically, the Fed’s pursuit of goals other than price stability has led to a great deal of monetary malfeasance. In pursuit of higher labor employment, the Fed created money too rapidly in the 1970s, causing the Great Inflation. Similar pursuits led the Fed to adopt an average inflation target in 2020. After letting inflation fall below their 2-percent target for most of the period from 2014 to 2020, the Fed decided to let inflation run over 2 percent for an undisclosed period in hopes of lowering unemployment and reducing income inequality. This deliberate attempt by the Fed to raise inflation has accommodated pandemic-related government spending programs and negative supply disruptions. High inflation is the result.

Even more concerning is the current Fed’s expressed interest in pursuing “inclusive” monetary policies, which attempt to advance the interests of particular “stakeholders” in society. This opens Pandora’s box. The list of potential stakeholder groups to target is limitless, and there is no objective way to resolve conflicts between and among them.

Some progressives have called for the Fed to finance a Green New Deal, while some conservatives want the Fed to finance construction of a border wall. Opening monetary policy to such issues inherently politicizes the Fed and threatens its independence. Monetary policies with explicitly political agendas are inherently divisive, not inclusive. And it is a mistake to assume that a political power, once granted, will only be used by the wise and for the good.

The Fed is the wrong institution to use for pursuing a stakeholder goal of income equality. That is the role of elected officials and the tax and transfer system. The Fed’s monetary policy tools broadly affect macroeconomic variables like interest rates and inflation, and are therefore poorly suited for the task of pursuing particular stakeholder interests.

Yet preoccupation with income equality has inspired the Fed to pursue excessively low interest rate policies. However well-intended, these policies have contributed to our current inflationary predicament. To bring inflation back down, the Fed is now attempting to switch stances and raise interest rates quickly. This will undermine the economy, which already contracted in the first quarter of 2022. No wonder forecasters are predicting a high chance of recession.

If a recession does materialize, it will disproportionately harm the least well-off. During recessions, workers with the least experience and education are the first to be laid off. This disproportionately raises unemployment rates for lower income groups such as students and minorities. These Americans would be better off if the Fed were to focus exclusively on price stability rather than trying to stimulate the economy for their benefit.Since 1977, the Fed has had a dual mandate from Congress to promote price stability and maximum sustainable employment. The employment mandate is superfluous, as a central bank that pursues price stability already does the most it can do to stabilize employment. Yet the employment mandate has been a source of unnecessary distraction. The interests of all Americans would be better served if the Fed’s charter were revised by Congress to have a single mandate of price stability. Explicit confinement to this lone mandate would help prevent the Fed from falling asleep on inflation again.

https://www.aier.org/article/woke-fed-fell-asleep-on-the-job/

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Male blood donor who refused to say if he was pregnant turned away

Leslie Sinclair, 66, who is a retired driver for an engineering company, is a committed donor who has given 125 pints of blood in the last five decades.

However, on his most recent trip to the Albert Halls clinic in Stirling, Scotland, he was barred from donating after he said it was unnecessary for him to answer a question on a form asking if he was pregnant as he is a man in his 60s, MailOnline report.

Staff at the clinic said they could not accept his blood unless he provided a response, arguing that it is not always clear if someone is pregnant and the policy is in place to "promote inclusiveness".

Pregnant women or those with a baby which is not yet six months old are not allowed to give blood.

The father of two said he had been giving blood since he was 18 and had never had any issues before.

He told MailOnline: "There is always a form to fill in and that's fine – they tend to ask about medical conditions or diseases – and clearly that's because the blood needs to be safe. This time around, there was a question I hadn't seen before: 'Are you pregnant, or have you been in the last six months?' which required a yes or no answer.

"It is nonsensical and it makes me angry because there are vulnerable people waiting for blood, including children, and in desperate need of help. But they've been denied my blood because of the obligation to answer a question that can't possibly be answered."

Professor Marc Turner, director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service, said: "We appreciate the support of each and every one of our donor community and thank Mr Sinclair for his commitment over a long number of years.

"Whilst pregnancy is only a relevant question to those whose biological sex or sex assigned at birth is female, sex assigned at birth is not always visually clear to staff.

"As a public body we take cognisance of changes in society around how such questions may be asked without discrimination and have a duty to promote inclusiveness – therefore all donors are now asked the same questions."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/18/male-blood-donor-refused-say-pregnant-turned-away/

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Why detransitioned teens regret changing genders

When Chloe was 12 years old, she decided she was transgender. At 13, she came out to her parents. That same year, she was put on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone. At 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. Less than a year later, she realized she’d made a mistake — all by the time she was 16 years old.

Now 17, Chloe is one of a growing cohort called “detransitioners” — those who seek to reverse a gender transition, often after realizing they actually do identify with their biological sex. Tragically, many will struggle for the rest of their lives with the irreversible medical consequences of a decision they made as minors.

“I can’t stay quiet,” said Chloe. “I need to do something about this and to share my own cautionary tale.”

• • •

In recent years, the number of children experiencing gender dysphoria in the West has skyrocketed. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but, between 2009 and 2019, children being referred for transitioning treatment in the United Kingdom increased 1,000% among biological males and 4,400% among biological females. Meanwhile, the number of young people identifying as transgender in the US has almost doubled since 2017, according to a new Centers for Disease Control & Prevention report.

Historically, transitioning from male to female was vastly more common, with this cohort typically experiencing persistent gender dysphoria from a very young age. Recently, however, the status quo has reversed, and female-to-male transitions have become the overwhelming majority.

Dr. Lisa Littman, a former professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to describe this subset of transgender youth, typically biological females who become suddenly dysphoric during or shortly after puberty. Littman believes this may be due to adolescent girls’ susceptibility to peer influence on social media.

Helena Kerschner, a 23-year-old detransitioner from Cincinnati, Ohio, who was born a biological female, first felt gender dysphoric at age 14. She says Tumblr sites filled with transgender activist content spurred her transition.

“I was going through a period where I was just really isolated at school, so I turned to the Internet,” she recalled. In her real life, Kerschner had a falling out with friends at school; online however, she found a community that welcomed her. “My dysphoria was definitely triggered by this online community. I never thought about my gender or had a problem with being a girl before going on Tumblr.”

She said she felt political pressure to transition, too. “The community was very social justice-y. There was a lot of negativity around being a cis, heterosexual, white girl, and I took those messages really, really personally.”

Chloe Cole, a 17-year-old student in California, had a similar experience when she joined Instagram at 11. “I started being exposed to a lot of LGBT content and activism,” she said. “I saw how trans people online got an overwhelming amount of support, and the amount of praise they were getting really spoke to me because, at the time, I didn’t really have a lot of friends of my own.”

Experts worry that many young people seeking to transition are doing so without a proper mental-health evaluation. Among them is Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist specializing in gender, sexuality and identity. A transgender woman herself, Anderson has helped hundreds of young people navigate the transition journey over the past 30 years. Anderson supports the methodical, milestone-filled process lasting anywhere from a few months to several years to undergo transition. Today, however, she’s worried that some young people are being medicalized without the proper restraint or oversight.

“I’m concerned that the rise of detransitioners is reflective of some young people who have progressed through their gender journey very, very quickly,” she said. She worries that some doctors may be defaulting to medicalization as a remedy for other personal or mental-health factors. “When other issues important to a child are not fully addressed [before transition], then medical professionals are failing children.”

Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist specializing in gender, sexuality and identity, who is herself transgender.
According to an online survey of detransitioners conducted by Dr. Lisa Littman last year, 40% said their gender dysphoria was caused by a mental-health condition and 62% felt medical professionals did not investigate whether trauma was a factor in their transition decisions.

“My dysphoria collided with my general depression issues and body image issues,” Helena recalled. “I just came to the conclusion that I was born in the wrong body and that all my problems in life would be solved if I transitioned.”

Chloe had a similar experience. “Because my body didn’t match beauty ideals, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. I thought I wasn’t pretty enough to be a girl, so I’d be better off as a boy. Deep inside, I wanted to be pretty all along, but that’s something I kept suppressed.”

She agrees with Dr. Anderson that more psychological evaluation is needed to determine whether underlying mental health issues might be influencing the desire to transition.

“More attention needs to be paid to psychotherapy,” Chloe said. “We’re immediately jumping into irreversible medical treatments when we could be focusing on empowering these children to not hate their bodies.”

https://nypost.com/2022/06/18/detransitioned-teens-explain-why-they-regret-changing-genders/

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What is manifesting?

Current pop psychology

On hearing the term manifest, many of you may be struck with images of 'woo woo' practices that are grounded in spirituality and faith, rather than science. And while the way we can approach this practice certainly does vary, there is actually some scientific evidence that shows parts of manifestation are effective for a shifted mindset.

In general, manifestation is the process of visualising a desired reality and believing it into fruition.

Writing for Berkley's Wellbeing Institute, Tchiki Davis, MA, PhD defines manifestation "as the conscious creation of the circumstances and outcomes that make for a fulfilling life".

In more spiritual settings, manifesting can be achieved through prayer or faith in the universe bringing you what you ask for. Whereas those with a more scientific view can benefit from manifesting in the form of adopting a growth mindset and believing in your ability to achieve your goals, Dr Davis explains.

Taking this more scientific approach can be compared to visualisation practices, which are used in sports training a fair bit. Essentially, the belief is that if you imagine yourself in your desired position, you're more likely to land there.

So, whichever way you look at manifesting, you have a shot at gaining something pretty great from giving it a try (granted you also actually put physical time and effort into achieving your goals).

Success is not such a straight-forward concept to grasp. For some, it's about earning a good salary. For others, it's about starting a family; for somebody else, it might be about learning how to play an instrument really well, among many other options. Whatever success means to you, there are some traits that you might not instantly associate with someone who's on the path to becoming successful. Maybe your stubbornness, and even your anxiety, might not be that bad after all...

The 369 manifesting method

Easily one of the most popular manifesting techniques on TikTok at the moment, the 369 method is based around writing your desired goal out a specific number of times.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/lifestyle/smart-living/here-s-a-handful-of-manifesting-tips-and-techniques-designed-to-help-you-actualise-your-goals/ar-AAYERPj

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Baby formula: A case study in government meddling

You may not have been following the baby formula story in the US. But bear with me – it’s a classic case-study in the failure of government meddling, even if the intentions are worthy.

Concerned that some mothers might be unable to breastfeed (am I allowed to say that?) their children but also unable to afford to buy baby formula, the Women, Infants and Children program came into effect in 1975, the result of a federal government initiative.

For low-income families – the cut-off point is around $50,000 per year – with babies, the program provides formula at no cost. The program is administered through the states and each state negotiates separately with the formula producers to secure sizeable discounts in exchange for exclusivity.

The effect is that, by and large, there is no choice of formula under WIC for families, although there are some exceptions for special requirements – for allergic babies, for example. It is estimated that WIC accounts for half of all baby formula sold in the US.

From the point of view of the producers, this hasn’t been a bad deal because foreign producers were effectively banned from the US market because of the absence of accreditation by the Food and Drug Administration and high tariffs. The effect was to carve up the market – worth around $4 billion per year – between four dominant players accounting for 90 per cent of the market. Abbott is the largest producer, accounting for half of the market.

It should come as no surprise, given this government scheme, that the incidence of breastfeeding in the US is relatively low by international standards. While nearly three-quarters of new mothers in the US start off breastfeeding their babies, only around 43 per cent are breastfeeding at 6 months. But here’s the real rub: among African-American mothers, 58 per cent start out breastfeeding, with less than one-third breastfeeding at six months.

To be sure, there are a number of factors that affect the incidence of breastfeeding, including cultural factors. The absence of mandated parental leave in the US means that many mothers have to return to work relatively soon after the birth of a child. But it is common sense to assume that handing out baby formula free of charge will increase its use. (My guess is that there is also a black market in baby formula just as there is with food stamps.)

The reason why baby formula has been in the news lately is that there has been a shortage of formula right across the US, with parents being limited to a small number of cans to allow the available supplies to be spread as widely as possible. With the large Abbott factory in Michigan closed for some time, the gap between supply and demand narrowed to the point of unmet demand. (This one factory had accounted for around one-fifth of the supply.)

Through hurried processes undertaken by the lumbering FDA, interim certification was given to a number of overseas suppliers, including an Australian one, Bubs Australia. To facilitate this outcome, the lobbying expertise of Joe Hockey, former treasurer and Australian ambassador to the US, was called on. Through his contacts, the company was able to obtain access to the US market which is, needless to say, a boon to that company. A2 Milk, another Australian company, is seeking a similar deal.

The end result has seen crates of baby formula being air-freighted to the US from Australia and Europe. The high tariffs that normally apply to imported formula have been temporarily waived.

It turned out that the FDA was told last year about the problems at the Abbott Michigan plant, which included bacterial contamination of the formula. Evidently, four babies had become very sick and two had died. But the powers that be sat on their hands and no investigations were undertaken until well into 2022. Eventually, the FDA insisted that the entire factory be shut down until remediation work had been undertaken, which took several months. (The general view is that the drug side of the FDA is dominant both in terms of resources and speed of decision-making. One current proposal is that food certification is hived off, with a separate agency created.) The Michigan factory has now come back on line and the shortage of formula that was a concern to many parents, including those not eligible under the WIC program, is beginning to subside.

But there are some broader lessons that should be learnt from these recent events. First, notwithstanding the worthy aim of the WIC program ensuring that infants are well fed, a targeted scheme such as this has downsides – the dreaded unintended consequences.

The alternative is to provide additional income support for new parents with low incomes – we do this through our system of Family Tax Benefits. In this way, parents can choose how best to spend the additional money; it is neutral between breastfeeding and formula-feeding.

The second lesson relates to the mixing up of social policy with industry protection – an undesirable and unnecessary combination. The decision to subsidise baby formula could just as easily have taken place in the context of a free and open market for the product, including imported formula.

But the local producers took the opportunity to make the case for industry protection on the basis that the scheme benefitted from the discounts offered for bulk orders. Sadly, the legislators were too willing to oblige, no doubt patting themselves on the back for killing two birds with the one stone.

Arguably, one longer-term benefit of this fiasco is that overseas producers have now been allowed into the huge US market, which may ultimately drive down the price of formula, including for the half of purchasers who do not quality under the WIC program.

Thirdly, questions need to be answered in relation to the effectiveness of the FDA, both in terms of acting on a potential problem with one of the major accredited producers as well as the thicket of regulatory procedures that has prevented overseas suppliers from breaking into the market. Of course, regulatory incompetence is a perennial issue both in the US and elsewhere.

But without the determination of governments – in this case the US federal government – to ensure that regulations are efficiently and openly administered, many market and social outcomes will continue to be distorted because of regulatory incompetence.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/a-case-study-in-government-meddling/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UNFI%20%2020220620%20%20AL&utm_content=UNFI%20%2020220620%20%20AL+CID_29ebdf13e899e56da631c62840aac5cb&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Australia&utm_term=A%20case%20study%20in%20government%20meddling

I'm proud of the British Empire, black lady proclaims

The Attorney General has slammed left-wing people for being 'ashamed' of Britain's colonial past and said she was 'proud' of the British Empire.

Suella Braverman, whose parents are from Mauritius and Kenya and emigrated to the UK in the 1960s, said people should honour 'the ingenuity and the genius of the British people'.

Many people have railed against celebrating the British Empire, with a number of institutions set on decolonisation, which critics say is an attempt to censor history.

Last month the University of Salford even scrapped sonnet-writing from a creative writing course in a bid to remove itself from 'white Western culture' amid its push to 'decolonise the curriculum'.

At the height of its power in 1921 the British Empire was known as the 'empire on which the sun never set' and was home to some 413 million people.

However, Mrs Braverman said she was 'proud of the British Empire' in an interview with The Telegraph.

She said: 'I am informed by the experience of my parents.' '[They] were born under the British Empire in the 1940s, and they have nothing but good things to tell me about the mother country'. 'It was Britain that gave them opportunity and safety when they were young adults.'

She said Mauritius's legal and educational system took inspiration from the British Empire, while in Kenya it was a 'force for good' as it put in place infrastructure and roads.

She admitted 'awful things' happened in the Empire because of the culture at that time but accused the Left of being apologetic for patriotism.

She said: 'It's born out of a left-wing apology for patriotism and for Britain. 'Ashamed of our history, fearful of our past, not the ingenuity and the genius of the British people.'

The Attorney General previously told the Conservative Home blog there was no need to apologise for the British Empire.

She said: 'My background is one that is ferociously proud of Britain, Britain's history, Britain's welcome. My parents were born under the British Empire. They came to this country with a huge fondness for the empire.

'What Britain brought to their countries... was remarkable. And I get very saddened by this apology and shame, promulgated by the Left and commenced by the collective guilt that started under Tony Blair that is pervading our society.'

Mrs Braverman, MP for Fareham, added she got 'very frustrated with leftie activists who want to decolonise our curriculum and cancel our culture and pull down statues'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10928237/Im-proud-British-Empire-Suella-Braverman-proclaims.html

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Missouri and Louisiana strike back against DHS disinformation board in federal court: ‘Federal social media censorship already in full swing on a massive scale.’

By Robert Romano

“DHS’s so-called ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ [DGB] … was not a novel initiative by the federal government to launch a new censorship program to silence disfavored voices on social media. On the contrary… federal social-media censorship program is already in full swing at DHS and other federal agencies, on a massive scale. A scale so massive, in fact, that the DGB was created to centralize, normalize, and impose a bureaucratic structure on the enormous campaign of online censorship that Defendants have already launched.”

That was Missouri Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt in a joint petition to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana with Louisiana Republican Attorney General Jeffrey Landry, arguing that efforts by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to coordinate with social media “suppressing core political speech about election security and COVID-19 restrictions” that was otherwise protected by the First Amendment have been going on for years, and even predates the Biden administration. He’s right.

In 2018, Congress unanimously passed legislation, H.R. 3359, which authorized the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to disseminate information to the private sector including Big Tech social media companies in a bid to combat disinformation by potential foreign and domestic terrorists.

The law authorizes CISA to share information with the private sector in order to “deter… terrorist attacks”: “to disseminate, as appropriate, information analyzed by the Department within the Department, to other agencies of the Federal Government with responsibilities relating to homeland security, and to agencies of State and local governments and private sector entities with such responsibilities in order to assist in the deterrence, prevention, preemption of, or response to, terrorist attacks against the United States.”

In 2021, DHS under the Biden administration renamed the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF), which was run under CISA, to the Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation (MDM) team was altered by the Biden administration in 2021.

According to the agency’s website, CISA says it the MDM team “rout[es] disinformation concerns” to “appropriate social media platforms”: “The [Mis, Dis, Malinformation] MDM team serves as a switchboard for routing disinformation concerns to appropriate social media platforms and law enforcement.”

The website adds, “This activity began in 2018, supporting state and local election officials to mitigate disinformation about the time, place, and manner of voting. For the 2020 election, CISA expanded the breadth of reporting to include other state and local officials and more social media platforms. This activity leverages the rapport the MDM team has with the social media platforms to enable shared situational awareness.”

The censorship also includes what DHS says is Covid disinformation: “COVID-19 has demonstrated that a rapidly evolving event creates opportunities for adversaries to act maliciously… The MDM team supports the interagency and private sector partners’ COVID-19 response efforts via regular reporting and analysis of key pandemic-related MDM trends.”

And this has led to hundreds of thousands of social media accounts to be censored, Schmitt argued: “This censorship encompasses social-media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, including many thousands of followers in Missouri and Louisiana.”

That is was confirmed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on May 4 in questioning from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), stating, “Allow me to share when we become involved in the Department of Homeland Security. We become involved when disinformation poses a threat to the security of our country. It is when there is a connectivity to a threat to our country.”

Why is the Biden administration using social media to identify Americans it perceives to be “a threat to our country”?

The implication is that DHS views American citizens dissenting against either the outcome of elections, or to teaching Critical Race Theory at public schools, or to Covid policies including masking and vaccines on social media to their friends and family to not be First Amendment-protected political speech normal in a functioning democracy, but actually terrorist threats.

And the Biden administration appears to be proud of its record of censorship. As Schmitt notes, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on July 15, 2021 stated: “[W]e are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff… We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation… We engage with them regularly and they certainly understand what our asks are…” And on April 25, 2022, Psaki stated “we engage regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken.”

This is censorship out in the open, and it must be ripped out by the roots in Washington, D.C. by Congress, by defunding DHS and CISA’s capacity in the 2018 law to share information with private sector social media companies. In the meantime, Missouri and Louisiana are standing up for the First Amendment in federal court. This fight has only begun.

Big Brother is watching. And now so are the American people, too.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/missouri-and-louisiana-strike-back-against-dhs-disinformation-board-in-federal-court-federal-social-media-censorship-already-in-full-swing-on-a-massive-scale/

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Major Sports Publication Just Ripped A Coach For Praying On The Field!

A smear story on high school football coach Joe Kennedy was published in Sports Illustrated on Monday.

According to SI, Kennedy is destroying America by praying after football games. Kennedy is a threat to American Democracy, SI says.

Greg Bishop, an American football player also claims that Joe Kennedy praying on the field after a football game would be an “erosion of a bedrock of American democracy.”

Bishop is seriously arguing that a coach praying on a field, not over the PA system, but quietly by himself, would bring an end to the American way of life.

On Monday, Sports Illustrated tweeted, “SCOTUS will soon rule on the case of a public school football coach who wants to pray on-field after games.”

It added, “[Greg Bishop] on Joe Kennedy, the machine backing him and the expected result: a win for Kennedy and an erosion of a bedrock of American democracy.”

Now, the Supreme Court is weighing the case of Joe Kennedy. Kennedy is a former high school football coach who lost his job after praying on the 50-yard-line. He accused the Bremerton School District of violating his constitutional rights to free exercise and free speech when he was fired.

The case is explained in full by ‘Just the News’:

Kennedy, a retired Marine, coached the football team from 2008 to 2015 and would kneel and quietly pray at midfield after every game.

While he initially prayed alone, after several games students and players joined him, even inviting players from opposing teams.

Eventually, Kennedy started giving short motivational speeches to the players who gathered after games, which sometimes included religious content and a short prayer.

After seven years of Kennedy praying on the field after games, a school administrator from a visiting team complimented Bremerton High School’s principal on the coach’s practice. The school district subsequently investigated the situation, directed Kennedy to cease the ritual, denied him a religious accommodation request, implemented a new policy to stop him from praying publicly on the football field, then suspended and fired him for continuing to do so.

According to the school district, Kennedy could not pray publicly following the end of a game while still being on duty as a coach. The district offered to let him pray in “private locations within the school building or athletic facility, or … press box.”

Kennedy filed a lawsuit with First Liberty Institute against the Bremerton School District in a federal district court in 2016, asking that he be allowed to continue coaching as the case made its way through the courts. The district court, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court all denied Kennedy’s request.

However, the Supreme Court sent the case back down to the district court for further litigation. The district court and the Ninth Circuit both decided for the school district. The lawsuit was refiled with the Supreme Court in September 2021, which in January decided to hear the case.

“[T]his case presents an opportunity for the Supreme Court to review — and possibly rectify— legal precedent that has been harmful to religious freedom for decades,” First Liberty said last month.

“Public employers, especially school districts, often misinterpret their civic obligations under the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment,” argued the religious liberty legal defense group. “But now, we’ll be asking that the Court clarify the interaction of these clauses.”

The nonprofit law firm added that “a ruling in Coach Kennedy’s favor could impact public school employees nationwide, helping safeguard their constitutional rights and ensure they won’t face a difficult choice between their careers and their faith.”

https://independentminute.com/2022/06/16/major-sports-publication-just-ripped-a-coach-for-praying-on-the-field/

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McEnany Rips Biden Administration Over Lack of Action on Pro-Life Threats

There is nothing better than Kayleigh McEnany all fired up against Joe Biden. After the lack of action taken against the group Jane’s Revenge, she has every right to be.

As McEnany states, this administration could care less because this is not a liberal interest. If you are unfamiliar with what is happening on this front, here is a quick rundown.

A radical leftist pro-abortion group called Jane’s Revenge basically gave pro-choice groups 30 days to stand down. The threat was made after the Roe v. Wade SCOTUS leak.

When those groups did not stand down, attacks started to happen, many of which this group took responsibility for.

The threat was made in an open letter, yet our Department of Justice has done nothing about it. This is a legitimate domestic terror threat, and Garland and Biden are sitting on their hands.

https://quicknewsupdates.com/mcenany-rips-biden-adm/

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British explorer Captain Cook cancelled in Australia: when will we call this out as racism?

Peaceful explorer, cartographer, and navigator Captain James Cook has been removed from the Australia versus England Test match crystal Cook Cup.

After a quarter of a century, one of the greatest men in history will be replaced by the ‘Ella-Mobbs Trophy’ due to be unveiled in Perth this July.

The hyphenated name is for two people, an English winger and casualty of the first world war on the Western Front Edgar Mobbs, and the Indigenous Australian Mark Ella who served as the first Indigenous captain.

Ultra-Woke Rugby Australia is believed to have led the move to rename the cup.

Bowing to the ridiculous cancel culture of the foreign Marxist-driven social movement set on committing acts of cultural vandalism in the West, Rugby Australia and the Rugby Football Union said that this change would ‘better represent’ the history of both nations.

‘The majority of Indigenous people wouldn’t want that [Cook’s name] on the cup,’ said Glen Ella, Mark’s twin, in a comment that would be deemed highly offensive and inappropriate if it were said about an Indigenous person.

‘I don’t have a problem, personally, it doesn’t really worry me. But to do the right thing by Aboriginal people, yeah, I understand why they’ve made that call. There is still a lot of angst about that among the elders, so they’re doing the right thing and making an effort to change the name to something more to do with rugby, and not carry those connotations.’

Considering Cook discovered Australia, no one would be playing rugby and certainly not an Australia-England Test match if it weren’t for Captain Cook.

‘The Wallabies’ England Test series will see a new trophy introduced for all future series between the nations. Australia and England first played against each other in a Test match in 1909 in London. With such a vast history between them, Rugby Australia and the Rugby Football Union made the decision that the trophy should better represent the proud rugby history of both nations,’ said an RFU spokesperson.

The claim is that Cook is a divisive figure in Australia – except that he isn’t – or at least he wasn’t until the Black Lives Matter mob latched onto the navigator and tried to tear down his achievements to elevate their race-driven revenge activism.

It has become Woke and ‘cool’ to hate the people who contributed the most to the founding of Australia, even when they were decent human beings.

Captain Cook quite literally put Australia on the map. By all accounts, his morality, ethics, courage, and leadership stand in better stead than most activists screeching at the nearest microphone. He was revered and honoured across Australian culture because he deserved it. He is also the link between England and Australia, hence his significance for the Test match trophy.

Despite being a good and peaceful man, he was killed and cooked in 1779 by Hawaiian natives.

The only criticism activists can level at Cook is that he ‘enabled Colonialism’ but if activists were being honest with history and themselves, every culture on Earth went out and explored lands. The Indigenous people of Australia are themselves explorers from Asia who came down in successive waves with today’s people having warred with, intermarried, and in many cases killed existing tribes.

As far as anyone can tell, Cook never killed anyone. At one point, he fired three non-lethal loads toward antagonistic Aboriginal warriors with the intention of scaring them away. One shot slightly injured a warrior in the leg after the warrior had thrown stones and other projectiles at Cook’s men. The object was to keep his crew safe after cultural misunderstandings arose during otherwise peaceful trade negotiations which the Aboriginal people had previously been engaged in. What is often left out of the story is that at the time of the shots being fired, the Aboriginal warriors were throwing poisoned darts with the intent of killing. Cook was merely trying to hold them back without causing harm while his men retreated.

This trade exchange between two peoples who were unable to communicate except through the most crude of hand signals and offerings is exaggerated by activists into an act of imperialism or aggression. It is a complete nonsense and fabrication of history designed to re-paint the world as a ‘struggle’ between victims and oppressors instead of human beings trying to navigate the world and its challenges.

Cook was an adventurer that greatly expanded our scientific knowledge of nature and geography – something that the Left proclaim to value and yet refuse to praise or acknowledge the individuals who actually did it because they don’t like the colour of their skin.

Cancelling people because of their heritage, culture, or skin colour is a racist trend imported from jealous, hateful Marxists looking to tear down their ideological betters and replace Australia’s truly equal political system with a race-based society of victimhood and division which can be easily extorted for money and power.

The Left love to go on about ‘offense’ well, it is offensive to attack, malign, and paint an historical figure like Captain James Cook with fabricated hatred. It shows a complete lack of respect to Australia, its history, and the story of how we all came to be here together in peace.

Shame on Rugby Australia and RFU for cancelling one of the greatest men in Australian history – especially considering they chase balls around for a living. Perspective…

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/cook-cancelled-when-will-we-call-this-out-as-racism/

Sunday, June 19, 2022

What Mayra Flores Victory Shows About Hispanics and Conservatism

Doug Blair talks to Cesar Ybarra:

Cesar Ybarra: Great to be back at The Heritage Foundation.

Blair: Of course. Well, we’re always happy to have you. Let’s talk about that election in South Texas. Republican Mayra Flores just won a massive victory in a South Texas district that hasn’t elected a Republican in more than 100 years and that went for President [Joe] Biden back in the 2020 election. So, how did we get here? How did this shift happen?

Ybarra: Yeah, I think this speaks to Ronald Reagan’s message of Hispanics are Republican, they just don’t know it yet. And I think since then, Republicans have been doing a better job at explaining the Republican Party platform to Hispanic voters.

This has been amplified just by the terrible job that President Biden and the congressional Democrats have been doing with the economy, right? We have high-rising inflation, the border is in a state of disaster.

… A recent poll just came out and they polled people in Texas 34 District on what the biggest issues were for them. No. 1, the border. No. 2, inflation. Guess what? The Democrats did not have a plan to get that fixed, which is how Mayra Flores was able to promote her message of what she was for, and she got across the finish line with 51%.

I mean, we would’ve been happy if she would’ve gone to a runoff in August, but she crushed it and got that 51%, and is going to be a U.S. congresswoman next week. I mean, I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. It’s awesome.

Blair: Let’s talk about Flores herself. Can you give us a profile on Flores? What’s she like; is she a moderate, is she pretty conservative?

Ybarra: She’s pretty conservative. I wouldn’t say she’s a moderate. She came to America when she was 6 years old, through the legal way. Grew up in South Texas.

Her husband is a Border Patrol agent, so she has some skin in the game when it comes to how our Border Patrol agents are being treated by this administration. She has some skin in the game in living in a border town, in a border community where her constituents are living the day-to-day flaws of the border insecurity that is being perpetuated by the Biden administration.

So, I wouldn’t call her a moderate. I would say she’s strong conservative. I mean, if you look at her yard signs, they said, “Dios, Familia, Patria”—God, family, country. Those three things are super conservative.

And again, I was talking to some of my friends today who were sending me stories about Mayra Flores. And I said, “When I tell you guys that Hispanics are conservative, this is exactly what we’re talking about.” We’re talking about someone like Mayra Flores. And she spread that message, and I think she speaks on behalf of all Hispanics when they talk about God, family, country.

Blair: Given that there was such a radical shift, obviously, this district, like we said, hadn’t elected a Republican in over 100 years, and it still went for President Biden just two years ago. Is this something where we’re seeing Latinos shift based on their own policy preferences changing, or is it based on the parties, like the Democrats and the Republican change?

Ybarra: I would say it’s more on policy. I would say it’s more on policy because again, right, when you start talking about inflation and border insecurity, you talk about, well, what’s causing this? It’s policy. And it’s policy that is being driven by Democrats, and frankly, by squishy Republicans. We know that Hispanics identify more as conservative than as Republican or Democrat.

So that’s what I would say. They’re starting to realize that their policy preferences are best aligned with Republican candidates. And that’s something that is being demonstrated in the polls that we’ve done at FreedomWorks through our Hispanic Grassroots Alliance. And it was definitely validated in Mayra’s race.

Blair: Now, you’ve mentioned you’ve done some polling data about this. Are we seeing this race as a one-time, a one-off, or are we seeing this pattern emerge in other elections?

Ybarra: Yeah. I mean, you have Adam Laxalt in Nevada. I’ve been seeing a lot of trending topics of him kind of doing well with Hispanic voters out in Nevada. Hopefully we can perform well in Arizona. In the polling that we’ve done, it seems like Hispanics down in the Tucson area are not as strong as folks in Florida or in Texas, or maybe Nevada.

So there’s still some work to do. This is not something for us to puff our chest and say, “We’re there.” I just think Mayra Flores is a good case study of what happens when we do the right kind of messaging and campaign investing. But I just think that it’s not going to happen in two years or four years; this is a 10-year, 20-year project, where we have to continue spreading our message and not get complacent.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/17/what-mayra-flores-victory-shows-about-hispanics-and-conservatism/

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Ministry of Truth 2.0? WH Launches New 'Task Force,' And the Woman in Charge Is Even Worse Than Jankowicz

President Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board didn’t even survive a month.

On May 17, just weeks after she was appointed to lead the Orwellian-named branch of the Department of Homeland Security, Nina Jankowicz abruptly resigned and the administration announced the pause of what many described as the “Ministry of Truth.”

The reason? Disinformation, of course!

“The Board has been grossly and intentionally mischaracterized: it was never about censorship or policing speech in any manner,” DHS said in a statement.

This was in spite of the fact the board would have lent the resources and the bully pulpit the federal government enjoys to amplify the narrative it chooses in online discourse, and that it had chosen Jankowicz — who had once argued she, as a disinformation expert who was verified by Twitter, should be allowed to edit or provide context to other users tweets — to amplify it.

But never mind. Pop the champagne bottles, as so many opposed to the proposed board did.

“It’s a cause of momentary celebration that the Department of Homeland Security was forced by popular anger to ‘pause’ its Disinformation Board and the absurd Resistance cartoon they hired to run it,” independent journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted at the time.

The key word in that tweet may have been momentary.

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, another body to address online “disinformation,” inter alia, with amorphous powers and a similarly vague purview to the Disinformation Governance Board.

Its name sounds a lot more neutered than the “Straight Outta 1984” moniker the DGB was slapped with. That said, the administration managed to find the one member of the distaff gender who might be less welcome in the job than Jankowicz was: Vice President Kamala Harris.

(Here at The Western Journal, we chronicled the disquieting nature of the proposed Disinformation Governance Board, from its inception to Jankowicz’s sudden resignation last month. We also noted how it could come back to life in a form very much like this. We’ll remain vigilant about the left’s attempts to punish what it deems “disinformation,” “misinformation” and “malinformation” — and you can help us by subscribing.)

That’s right, America. We could be seeing the Disinformation Governance Board 2.0, just led this time by Cap’n Cackle and a blue-ribbon panel of Biden Cabinet members, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Now, there are similarities and there are differences.

Just like the DGB, the powers and reach of the task force are more of a rough sketch than a final draft.

The DGB, you may recall, was intended to focus originally on Russian propaganda and “irregular migration.”

The task force, meanwhile, is supposed to be focused on “gender-based violence,” specifically against “[w]omen, adolescent girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals, who may be additionally targeted because of their race, ethnicity, religion, and other factors,” according to a White House memo.

The memo gave the task force until Dec. 13 to develop a “whole-of-government approach” to tackle the issue, which includes working with Big Tech to try to nip it in the bud.

“This affects all of us if it affects any one of us,” Harris said in remarks Thursday, according to a White House transcript. “And we therefore, all of us, have a responsibility to stand together to support those who have gone through this, but to also recognize they shouldn’t have to be alone fighting on this issue.”

“Hate has become so common on the Internet that, as a society, it’s kind of becoming normalized, and for users, some might say unavoidable,” she continued.

The vice president added that “recent events have also made it clear that we face new threats” — and while the context doesn’t make it clear what was being discussed, the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York were the clear inferences to be made from that statement.

Neither one of those, it’s worth noting, has the slightest whit to do with “women, adolescent girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals” specifically.

And, as the New York Post’s Steven Nelson said during Thursday’s White House media briefing, while reporters were told the task force would be different from the DGB, the memo specifically mentioned combatting “disinformation” as part of its mission.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn’t have any specific answers as to why it would be different from the DGB, saying she “was not on the background call” and that Nelson should talk to Harris’ team.

Further questions arise when one looks at where “disinformation” is mentioned in the memo.

The first mention: “Online harassment and abuse take many forms, including the non-consensual distribution of intimate digital images; cyberstalking; sextortion; doxing; malicious deep fakes; gendered disinformation; rape and death threats; the online recruitment and exploitation of victims of sex trafficking; and various forms of technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse.” [Emphasis added.]

Now, curious it would mention “online harassment” and “doxing.” That brings up whether the case of Taylor Lorenz would be covered.

Lorenz, you may remember, is the Washington Post reporter who doxed the founder of the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, opening her to death threats and other harassment. Lorenz was unapologetic about that — but here was the lachrymose journalist just a few weeks prior, crying during an interview when she talked about the online harassment she had received, in part because of doxing:

Guess which one of these is likely to draw the attention of the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse?

More ominously, we have the nebulous category of “gendered disinformation.” What does that include?

We obviously don’t know — which is interesting, because a lot of hot-button issues can fit under the aegis of this vague term.

An opinion on transgenderism that departs from liberal orthodoxy? The belief children shouldn’t be subjected to transgender treatments? The idea that men are born men and women are born women, with innate physical and psychological characteristics?

Those could all comfortably fit under the umbrella of “gendered disinformation.”

And that leads us to the equally problematic second mention of the word “disinformation.”

In a section where it described how the task force would “assess and address online harassment and abuse that constitute technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” the memo said it would work at “developing programs and policies to address online harassment, abuse, and disinformation campaigns targeting women and LGBTQI+ individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists in the United States and globally” and “examining existing Federal laws, regulations, and policies to evaluate the adequacy of the current legal framework to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence.”

If views about gender or transgenderism that fall afoul of the left are covered under the deliberately nonspecific term “technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” one could theoretically interpret this as an invitation for the Biden administration to put its thumb on the scales of social media — and silence what little freedom is left to speak out on the issue on Silicon Valley’s tech platforms for good.

Now, is this the “Ministry of Truth” 2.0? It’s thoroughly unclear — but the writing on the wall isn’t an appealing augury.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/ministry-truth-2-0-wh-launches-new-task-force-woman-charge-even-worse-jankowicz

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Have we reached an American Tipping Point?

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “The Tipping Point,” which has since been rolled into the conventional wisdom. The idea is that viral products start very small, gain new adherents, tap into a special something that relates to the fear of missing out, and the climb goes higher and higher until that one magic day when everyone has to have it. That’s the tipping point. The burden of the book is to demonstrate this thesis.

It works in reverse, too, and here we can draw on Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962). His book is more about failure than success. In his model, the orthodoxy that everyone accepts without question is challenged by a new way of thinking that is dismissed out of hand and censored. Its adherents are denounced as cranks.

Then reality begins to change the outlook. The real world gradually stops reflecting what the prevailing orthodoxy would predict. There are too many anomalies. Doubters appear and grow. Eventually it becomes unbearably obvious that the orthodoxy has flopped in its promise. It fails and its promoters gradually go away and its scions go into hiding.

The proponents of the orthodoxy never admit error, but their disappearance creates what he calls a pre-paradigmatic moment. It makes room for debate and argumentation over what will replace what failed and who or what will come to represent the new orthodoxy.

These stories of how ideas rise and fall apply not only to business and science, but also to economics and politics. In that sense, we’re certainly arriving at the pre-paradigmatic moment in many areas. The orthodoxy in science, politics, and economics is all failing at the same time and at a remarkable pace, so much so that it can’t help but disorient everyone.

There are some major events that signal this change, and they’ve all happened in the last half year or so.

First, after a year and a half of the preposterous attempt to “slow the spread,” “track and trace,” “flatten the curve,” “quarantine and isolate,” and otherwise do the scripted dance somehow to control that which is remarkably good at evading all control, COVID finally swept the whole of the American Northeast in the United States. For the first time, the respiratory virus hit the Zoom class that had been hiding in homes for 18 months.

It was obvious at this moment that the entire effort had been pointless and destructive. Every study that had pretended to correlate infection with distancing, masking, capacity restrictions, school closures, and vaccine mandates all went belly up. None of them were reproducible after this point. Fully 18 months of fake science was in tatters while the “heretics” who said lockdowns would never work were vindicated.

Nothing was more devastating than the realization that the vaccines don’t work in any of the ways we normally define what it means for a vaccine to work. They don’t prevent infection. They don’t stop transmission. What that means is the complete end of the public health rationale for vaccine mandates, or for getting vaccines at all.

For a small cohort of the population, they provided time-limited assistance against severity, but that’s on the clock before you have to get another and another, and that raises another problem of creating a compromised immune system. None of this is in dispute anymore. So much for the carnage of coercion, job losses, political division, and institutional upheaval they’ve created!

Second, the ferocious arrival of inflation this year has shocked everyone and infuriated the public like no other trend in my lifetime. It has devastated the Biden administration at the polls. Not even CNN is able to defend him anymore. And you have this ridiculous presidential spokesperson muttering gibberish that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and doing it in front of the television every single day. Not one reporter can figure out what she’s saying. It’s so incoherent that it’s not worth reporting.

Meanwhile, in the same way the Biden administration couldn’t control the virus, it can’t control inflation. That’s become perfectly obvious. Their only answer is to demonize the meat packers, shipping companies, and oil producers for not pumping enough and overcharging for their products. But this is the same administration that has waged a ruthless attack on meat, commerce, and oil for 18 months, as if they had no idea what the effect of that might be on the markets!

It truly boggles the mind.

Here’s a picture of how the Biden inflation has devastated commerce domestically and internationally. And notice the date of the change here: January 2021 is the turning point. There’s simply no way that the culpability can be assigned elsewhere. Even if the monetary roots of this inflation date back a year earlier, the administration did absolutely nothing either to prevent or repair this.

Third, a remarkable special election just took place in Texas. Republican Mayra Flores snatched a congressional seat from the Democratic Party. It’s a stunning win for the GOP. Flores herself is not a fancy Ivy Leaguer, but rather an immigrant who attended plain schools and began as a heroic health care worker—one of the front-line workers who was early on exposed to COVID. She was braving it out while the Zoom class elites were hiding.

As for her politics, let’s just say that she has mercifully avoided the woke virus. As an immigrant, she’s profoundly aware of how the immigration chaos in the border areas of Texas has violated people’s property rights and appears to be a deliberately constructed policy solely for the purpose of securing political control for the Democrats. In other words, this isn’t the immigration I’ve long championed: It’s a political ploy to game the political system.

Flores called it out and won the hearts of the whole district regardless of previous political allegiances. It’s a terrifying scene for the Democrats, raising the prospect not only of a full takeover of the House and Senate by Republicans, but even bringing about a rout so huge as to raise real questions about the party’s future.

Let’s put this all together. First, you have the failure of the official “science” that wrecked the country through lockdowns and mandates. Second, you have the failure of official “economics” that somehow thought it was fine to wage war on commerce and paper over it with new money from the Fed. Third, you have the failure of woke-based identity politics, which denies human volition based on biology such that certain “races” and certain genders are only allowed to think one way.

If one had failed, that would be notable. All three failing at once is beyond belief. It creates an awesome moment, a shattering of an orthodoxy that had been shoved down the throats of everyone, but which is now very obviously failing in every respect.

The political fallout will be the most conspicuous, but there’s much more at stake. It isn’t really about one party over another. This is the failing of an entire administrative state, that class of permanently employed bureaucrats that has taken over the management of science, society, and economy from the people and their representatives. That’s the paradigm that has failed. Now comes the pre-paradigmatic moment and the struggle for a new orthodoxy. Let us hope it’s freedom itself.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-american-tipping-point_4537705.html

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A welfare explosion in Australi

It is one of life’s sad realities that, as soon as there is an attempt to improve the population’s welfare, unscrupulous individuals take advantage of the best of intentions.

Our welfare system could be said to discourage work and self-reliance, it also tests the ability to pay for it.

Over the years, we have seen solo parent support encourage more pregnancies for financial gain, without financial input from fathers. The unemployment benefit was established as temporary support for those out of work, for some it has become a permanent and sometimes multi-generational way of life; while jobs in agriculture and hospitality are unfilled, we have an unemployment rate which, although temporarily improved, is high by OECD comparison.

Accident Compensation is another scheme that has become blighted by ‘permanent invalids’, who seem capable of mowing the lawn whilst incapable of work. The cost of aged care continues to rise, whilst their children expect the government to pay the bills – and complain when they consider care to be substandard. Welfare demands are still higher in the Aboriginal population, with average benefits at $40,000 per capita, compared with $20,000 for non-Aboriginals.

The cost of these good intentions has risen rapidly, from $160 billion in 2017, to currently $200 billion, with an increasing proportion funded by the federal government.

The latest addition to the welfare bill is the NDIS, a scheme introduced by the Gillard government designed to support those under 65 with significant, permanent disability.

The scheme was initially trialled in 2013, in Tasmania for young adults, in South Australia for children, in Victoria for general groups, and in New South Wales for older adults. It was formally launched in July 2016 and, by year’s end, covered 30,000. West Australia joined in 2020.

The initial cost was estimated at $4 billion for the year 2016-17, with funding provided by an increase of half a per cent in the Medicare levy. It was planned to cover Musculoskeletal conditions, cancer, visual and hearing impairment, and neurological conditions such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injury.

In August 2017 mental health disorders, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and autism, became eligible; by November that year, the number of enrolments had increased to 120,000.

At the completion of enrolment, it was estimated that 400,000 would be supported at a cost of $14 billion. By 2019-20, the first full year of operation, the cost had ballooned to $22 billion (1.1 per cent of GDP). By June 2021 there were 463,000 claimants, now 480,000, with an average individual cost increasing to $71,000.

Forward estimates now suggest a spiralling increase to $42 billion by 2024-25 (1.5 per cent of GDP), and $46 by the following year; future figures up to $60 billion have been suggested, with as many as 860,000 supported. The government is rightly concerned as to why this has occurred, and what can be done to control costs.

One aspect of the increase is the increasing inclusion of behavioural disorders, once considered the result of bad parenting, now reclassified into the psychiatric domain as new conditions are invented. Autism is a clear-cut diagnosis, autism spectrum diagnosis in Australia increased from 30,000 cases in 2003, to 60,000 by 2009 and 120,000 by 2012; as diagnostic boundaries expand, the latest estimate is 230,000 cases (approximately 1 per cent of the population), with around half being children.

The same increase has been noted in other countries: in Canada, it expanded from 4 per 10,000 in 2003, to 20 per 10,000 and by 2020 to 1 per cent (100 per 10,000). In the UK, the incidence was 5 per 10,000 in 1990, now increased to 1 per cent of children and 2 per cent of the general population. The estimated incidence in India remains low at 3 per 10,000 (0.03 per cent), and worldwide 60 per 10,000 (0.6 per cent). A recent Japanese study suggests this increase in incidence may be a consequence of exposing children to excess screen time at a young age; the study also revealed that 90 per cent of 1-year-olds were exposed to between 1 and 4 hours daily. The WHO has advised total bans on use in the very young.

Projections are the total number here will continue to rise, to 1.5 per cent, 350,000 cases, as diagnostic criteria are refined and milder degrees are included. With no specific test the diagnosis is subjective and, as milder degrees are added, the autism spectrum becomes a major cost. The proportion claiming NDIS support because of mental or behavioural problems has progressively increased, reaching 66,000 by the end of 2021 and predicted 90,000 by 2030; other, new psychological disorders have the potential to add further to the numbers.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCDC) is now estimated at 3 per cent of the Australian population, around 500,000; attention deficit disorder (ADHD) is now found in 5 per cent, and Asperger’s syndrome has now been reclassified as part of the autism spectrum. The latest behavioural problems to add to the diagnostic alphabet are oppositional defiance disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD).

It seems that bad behaviour, as well as being a problem in the classroom, is becoming a cost to the taxpayer and a source of income for some parents and psychologists.

The latest conditions are not, as yet, included in the NDIS list, but parents of children with ADHD are being encouraged to explore the additional diagnosis of the autism spectrum to qualify for payment. As of June 2019, one-third of those funded by NDIS for psychological disorders had autism spectrum as their primary diagnosis; evidence is accumulating that the explosion in numbers is due to young children having excess screen time exposure, instead of parental input. Care now involves psychology, counselling, and even art and music therapy.

Since the Covid pandemic disability diagnoses have soared with up to one in five now eligible for assistance. Claims relate to ‘social-emotional’ disability (7 per cent), cognitive disability conditions (12 per cent), and physical disability (3 per cent). Since the start of the pandemic, an extra 43,000 children have been added, a 12 per cent increase; the increase in ‘lockdown’ Victoria was even more pronounced at 17 per cent.

Another explanation for the cost blowout is the increasing severity of disability classification, with individual payments increasing by an average 12.5 per cent annually.

After an increase of 23 per cent in 2 years, the federal government has become concerned about spiralling costs: attempts to rein in costs have reduced per capita spending from $71,200 in 2020 to $68,500 in 2021.

The states, (who had historically been responsible for the disabled) had initially been responsible for 50 per cent; their contribution had been limited to a 4 per cent annual increase, meaning the federal proportion is rising to 60 per cent of the total.

Following a revue this year, it wanted to introduce an independent assessment of both diagnosis and severity of both current and future eligibility. This review and subsequent planned legislation, has inevitably produced an outcry from the welfare lobby groups, as well as the left of politics who are always happy to spend other people’s money. A simple (but unlikely) solution would be to revert to the original premise and exclude psychiatric disorders.

Welfare and disability advocates demand yet more support for the NDIS, and even suggest it saves money! Currently, the Australian government spends around 40 per cent of GDP gross domestic product, with around half that amount spent on welfare. The leaders in welfare are the Swedes at around 25 per cent, now overtaken by the French who spend 30 per cent of their GDP on welfare. Not only has the proportion spent on welfare increased, but the total spending is now increasingly supported by borrowing and accumulated debt; this has increased from about 40 per cent of GDP to nearly 100 per cent since the Covid lockdowns.

Future projections of NDIS costs are heading toward $60 billion, with a new Labor government the problem remains the same- how to pay for it. They need to grasp the nettle and assess the worth of this and other welfare schemes – ultimately, we must accept what we can afford, rather than what we want.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/ndis-used-or-abused/ ?

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Friday, June 17, 2022

Amnesty International UK is ‘colonialist and institutionally racist’, damning inquiry concludes

Many years ago I joined Amnesty because of the work they did helping victims of dictatorships. When I saw instances of anti-semitism among them, I resigned, however. And that was a long way back -- maybe 40years

Amnesty International UK is “institutionally racist”, “colonialist” and faces bullying problems within its own ranks, a damning inquiry has concluded.

Initial findings of Global HPO’s independent inquiry into the charity were published in April but now the scale of the organisation’s issues with race have been laid bare in their final report.

Released to Amnesty staff members on Thursday, the 106-page document explains that equality, inclusion and anti-racism are “not embedded into the DNA” of the organisation.

“White saviour”, “colonialist”, “middle class” and “privileged” were among the words most used during the testimony and focus groups to discuss Amnesty.

Diversity was also found to be a major problem within the charity itself, with white applicants more likely to be appointed to roles within the charity than all other groups – and black people least likely to be given a job.

Examples of racist incidents that left black and Asian staff uncomfortable include:

Being regularly mistaken for other colleagues with similar skin tone

Negative comments about fasting during Ramadan

Treating black skin, hair and appearance as matters of fascination and touching hair without consent

Rude comments about minority celebrities, politicians or events

“Our view is that ‘white saviour, middle class and privileged’ is a perception that forms an important part of the AIUK narrative about its history and legacy,” the inquiry found.

“A perception that has not been addressed and as such manifests in the negative cultural paradigm of exclusion and racism at AIUK. There is a need for the impact of this legacy to be acknowledged and addressed as part of the transition to becoming anti-racist.”

Recommendations for improvement include refraining from collating diversity data into one homogeneous black, Asian and minority ethnic (Bame) group and providing training to improve equality monitoring.

“Dysfunctional internal activism” – in which staff view anti-racism and fair treatment as “unwinnable” endeavours – also needs to be addressed, the report adds.

Particular attention should paid to the employment and retention of black African and black Caribbean staff at AIUK , the inquiry ruled, as these groups fare the worst within the charity.

Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said: “It is critical in the change that we need to make at Amnesty UK that we acknowledge that this report makes abundantly clear the scale of the transformation we must make to change lots about Amnesty UK as a place to work.

“GHPO have helped us to identify where we must make changes and we will not shy away from this work, especially as it is clear it is long overdue.

“I am glad that the inquiry team have recognised that some improvements have started here in the last year, but that doesn’t in any way diminish the seriousness of the findings nor should it make us at all complacent about the task ahead of us.

“But I do believe that with a transformation we can make Amnesty UK an example of a cause-driven organisation with an excellent working environment and culture for all colleagues.

“That should be our goal, and it is our duty not just to our colleagues but to our hundreds of thousands of supporters that we deliver it.”

The independent inquiry conducted by Global HPO was commissioned by a joint group drawn from different parts of Amnesty UK, including the Section Board, Amnesty activists, the staff trade union shop, management and former staff, in October 2021.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/amnesty-uk-inquiry-institutional-racism-b2102523.html

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Liz Cheney and Jan. 6 Committee Demonstrate How Hate Makes You Stupid

Hate is a dangerous emotion for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it interferes with, often even destroys, your ability to think rationally. It can turn your personality inside out to such a degree you will spend your life regretting what you did.

And it all will have been for nothing.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo., for now) is an object lesson. Cheney comes from a rich conservative tradition. Her mother Lynne wrote an estimable biography of James Madison. Early in her career, Liz herself consistently voted for and advocated for conservative causes.

Then, along came Mr. Hate.

The instigator: Donald Trump said mean things about her father, blaming him for the Iraq War. I will admit that Trump’s statements were a tad excessive since Dick Cheney, although clearly a key player, was far from alone in supporting that ill-conceived war. An extraordinary percentage did, including most of Washington, the pundit class (yours truly included), and, on occasion, Trump himself.

We were hoping the war would turn Iraq into Denmark. We couldn’t have been more wrong. Trump used that as a lynchpin in his 2016 campaign, attacking Dick Cheney, among others, but Liz reacted to Trump with a level of hate out of all proportion to the situation. A political campaign was underway, the likes of which she had participated in since childhood, and like it or not, insults were part of Trump’s political style. The businessman had insulted all sorts of people, many of whom (like Sens. Rubio and Cruz) now play ball with him on a regular basis.

Not Liz. She made an alliance with people whose views she considered anathema for all of her previous life just to get Trump. It was hate taken to the nth power.

As it turns out, those people she made an alliance with—the Jan. 6 Committee of Democratic Reps. Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Zoe Lofgren, and so forth—themselves also permeated with the most obvious hate— have failed miserably at their endeavor and now have abruptly postponed their third Show Trial telecast. The previous telecasts were a ratings disaster and, in some cases, they got caught lying. (“Adam Schiff lie?” Mon Dieu!)

Further, if you believe that eventually, the truth comes out, and I do (mostly), sooner or later the supposed “insurrection” of Jan. 6 will be seen by a majority of our citizens as an FBI put-up job. Many do already.

Liz Cheney, whether she knows it or not, is headed for oblivion after the Wyoming Republican primary. She has no real political friends—does she think the likes of Raskin will support her after this is over? He’s politically closer to Pol Pot. And as of this moment, it looks as if Trump will still be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 with a good chance of victory. Everything Liz did was for naught.

Still, the politics of hate is hard to resist. It is for people on both sides. I am often prey to it myself. When I watch MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or CNN’s Brian Stelter on television, I want to tear my hair out—only I don’t have any.

But this is no way to create change. The lesson of the Jan. 6 Committee—built on hate—was that it hasn’t moved the needle at all. The public—smarter than the politicians—is inured to this nonsense. With inflation running at a reported 8.6 percent (probably well in excess of that), the stock market and people’s retirement in free fall, more illegals coming across the border in our history, bringing with them unheard-of levels of crime from human trafficking to massive amounts of death-dealing fentanyl, not to mention the appalling violence in all our big cities, who could be interested in the self-serving mouthing of these political hacks?

One other thing about the Jan. 6 Committee. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but what I think I saw was fear in their eyes. Somewhere, not so deep down, they all knew they were being fundamentally dishonest. They saw what was going on in our society, how things are falling apart at a rapid clip under the worst administration of all time. Unless they are extraordinarily willfully blind, it’s hard to miss.

At some point, it’s time to pick up your marbles and go home. Onward to November.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/liz-cheney-and-jan-6-committee-demonstrate-how-hate-makes-you-stupid_4536211.html

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More than half of Britons want trans women BANNED from female sports, poll reveals

Transgender women should not be allowed to compete in female-only sports, 57 per cent of respondents to a new poll have said.

The majority of Britons surveyed felt transitioned females are 'giving the other competitors a physical disadvantage'.

But every group questioned wanted there to be a way that trans women could be able to compete in the sport they loved.

Most raised the idea of having a separate or mixed category for trans athletes to take part in.

The controversial topic - magnified by cancel culture and social media storms - was examined by think tank More In Common.

Its survey of more than 5,000 people and 20 focus groups featured partly anonymised comments from those quizzed.

Lara, 38 from Pitney said: 'No one's saying they're not female in sports. It's just, they're saying that they're giving the other competitors a physical disadvantage. I don't think it's that they're being categorised as a male. It's just that physically they'd smash the shit out of the other side. It would be so unfair.'

Ian, 61, from Glasgow added: 'People can pick and choose their gender nowadays, or what and do what they want and dress as they want. That's absolutely fine.

'But when it comes to competitive sport, just looking at her, you get a substantial advantage with her build or strength. So she shouldn't be competing against genetic females. I just don't think it's... I don't think it's right.'

Only 19 per cent supported allowing trans athletes in women's sport.

It comes the week after as a fresh transgender row broke out after trans cyclist Emily Bridges laughed off claims she has a competitive advantage over biological women.

In a series of tweets, British Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies said Bridges is 'not a woman', called her inclusion in women's sports 'unfair' and claimed that she would be banned from competing if she had 'as much testosterone in my system as Emily Bridges is allowed'.

The former GB swimmer also posted: 'Emily Bridges has never been barred from sport or ever will be. EB was competing last year & earlier this year successfully in the men's category. Inclusion is being able to compete, its not getting an unfair advantage'.

And she added: 'If we get to the point where we can't talk facts because it might hurt someone's feeling where the hell is this going to lead us? How can we measure feelings? Why is one persons feelings more important than another persons feelings? See… feelings cannot be a measurement of truth.'

In March Labour leader Keir Starmer refused to say if a woman can have a penis during a debate about trans rights.

Starmer, appearing LBC radio for his regular phone-in, was asked about trans athletes and the success of Lia Thomas, a trans woman who won the 500-yard freestyle title at the women's NCAA championships.

The victory has sparked a debate around trans athletes taking part in competitive sport, with critics claiming they may have an advantage over other participants.

But Starmer said it is for 'sporting bodies to decide for themselves' who can and cannot be included in events.

Asked if a woman can have a penis, Starmer said: 'I'm not... I don't think we can conduct this debate with... I don't think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone in the long run.'

Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, has also told the BBC that her party still had a 'confused' position over the transgender debate.

She came under fire for her opposition to 'male-bodied biological men' being allowed to self-identify as female in order to access women-only spaces such as prisons and domestic violence refuges.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10922715/Nearly-two-thirds-Britons-want-trans-women-BANNED-female-sports-poll-suggests.html

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The Selfish Californian

We hear plenty of reasons for the perfect storm that imploded California. One-party, progressive government, of course. Decades of unchecked illegal immigration, without doubt. Years of mass flight out of state of the productive middle classes, certainly.

But perhaps the most important, but overlooked, reason has been the infusion of trillions of dollars of mostly tech capital into the state. Unimaginable sums of market capital warped politics and led to a top-down, feudal society, run by progressive elites who are shielded from the ramifications of their own toxic ideologies.

More specifically, the common denominator was the emergence in California of a selfish, monied, left-wing political class. In concrete terms, it cared little for others but masked that unconcern with abstract leftism, emulating medieval penance and indulgences to assuage guilt over its enjoyment of sheltered and very good lives.

California’s recent premier politicians at the local, state, and federal levels—Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, and Nancy Pelosi—all enjoyed wealth and power, whether by inherited money and family brand names, through marriage, or using their positions to leverage lucrative family and personal business with the Chinese.

Their lifestyles before, during, and after office-holding reflected both their privileges and the vast material differences between their own lives and the millions of Californians who suffered enormously from their utopian bromides. Yet a world away from their homes in Grass Valley, Kentfield, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Pacific Heights, or Rancho Mirage, the rest of the state’s residents who voted for them currently cannot afford a house, a full tank of gas, a chuck steak, or an air-conditioned afternoon.

At least the Church of the 15th century offered formal contractual indulgences and personal penance manuals for the guilt-ridden elite eager to abort their earned inferno-to-come. In California, however, to enjoy affluence and leisure without guilt or recriminations, left-wing power elites virtue signaled their progressivism, even as it wrecked the lives of distant others.

If it were a question of drilling more oil while transitioning to clean power or shrugging that nobody Jos� Martinez in Sanger would pay $6.50 a gallon to commute to work, it was a no brainer: Mr. Martinez was simply out of sight, out of mind collateral damage.

So too all of California’s poor and lower middle classes who could not afford to flee and now cannot afford shelter, food, fuel, and safety, due to decades of policies that zoned away new home construction, strangled the gas, timber, and mining industries, taxed and regulated gas and diesel to the point of unaffordability, neglected the needs of the state’s once rich farming industry, and loved fish far more than people. Apparently, these well-educated and self-declared Socrateses believed that Californians could drink Facebook, eat Google, drive Twitter, and live on Snapchat.

The far-left Atlantic’s various contributors for years have been cheerleading most of the policies adopted by the Bay Area elite—defunding the police, decriminalizing an array of crimes, appeasing homelessness, ignoring dangerous drug use and dealing, and urging more redistributive taxation and entitlement.

But now Atlantic essayist Nellie Bowles warns us that San Francisco is a “failed city.” And she is correct in that the city is increasingly medieval. Its downtown is emptying, filthy, toxic, dangerous, and pre-civilizational—perhaps an unfair term since it was rare in pre-Roman Gaul or nomadic North Africa for tribal residents to sleep in the village pathways, fornicate and defecate openly among children, and violently attack random passersby.

In truth, the implosion of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and California more broadly is no accident. Destroying all the bounty that was inherited from far better and far-seeing generations was the logical result of deliberate policies—reflecting the self-interest of a few million rich, educated professionals. They apparently decided that their genius and superior morality had transcended worries over ancient challenges of food, water, shelter, transportation, and received law and custom.

California’s anointed enjoyed safe neighborhoods from Malibu to Presidio Heights. They inherited or purchased beautiful coastal corridor homes worth $1,200 a square foot, from La Jolla to Berkeley. They drew income from the trillions of dollars invested in Silicon Valley and the new globalized and Asia-centric economy that opened markets of multibillions of consumers for entertainment, media, finance, law, academia, corporations and the accompanying credential professional classes.

And so, they grew hubristic and stupid. In their arrogance and ignorance, they began to feel their own bounty and leisure were birthrights. Free from worries about who brought them their water, food, safety, energy, and shelter—or how—they were liberated to institutionalize their own visions of 21st-century-correct living to less fortunate others, albeit from a properly segregated distance.

Freeways were obsolete ideas. The fewer built, and the even fewer maintained, the more likely the clueless could be crowded into cost-effective, clean, and safe mass transit.

So, a $15 billion high-speed rail disaster arose and remained inert like Stonehenge monoliths. Meanwhile, thousands of the poor on the obsolete Highway 99 continued to die and were maimed in daily accidents on a Road Warrior-esque obstacle course. The nearby Amtrak trains still sat delayed on side-tracks, for want of a simple, 19th-century two-track rail. How strange that bankrupt 21st-century visions came at the cost of easy 20th-century solutions.

Aqueducts, reservoirs, dams? These were likewise relics of previous delusional generations. That the coastal corridor’s water came from aqueducts across vast distances was mostly unknown by those who crowded into one of the most naturally unsustainable regions on the North American continent—a coastal strip mostly dry and bereft of an aquifer to sustain its tens of millions.

So, the state stopped building water storage. More often, it released snowmelt and runoff water into the ocean rather than to farms and to replenish aquifers.

Fires? Let forests of evergreens burn as they had in primordial times, better to burn to provide mulch for worms and birds—and scare away the deplorable foothill folk who had no business living in the mountains, anyway.

The elite now dreamed of returning to a half-million person California of the 19th century, reputedly with lush riverbanks from the sea to Sierra, with salmon runs to the mountains. They recoiled at the very idea that a 40 million-person state of mostly poor immigrants—over a quarter of the state’s population was not born in the United States—might need water for their towns or for the farms they worked.

How ironic that millions fled Mexico and Central America to enter, often illegally, the once golden California, land of plenty. They were welcomed by the state’s business and political elite but not to be housed, fed, and schooled as were the elite. Their directive was to vote correctly for their supposed betters and to supply janitors, landscapers, nannies, cooks, and housekeepers for those who welcomed them in—on the condition that they not dare demand the state’s green resources for good homes, affordable gas, or a nice lawn or long shower.

Let them instead eat a solar farm, bike path, or Tesla.

And so it went, each carefully placed brick in the once sturdy long wall of California, laid carefully over the past 150 years—to ensure a naturally fragile state with affordable food, energy, security, housing, transpiration, schools, and education—was ripped out, mocked as obsolete, and written off an embarrassment to the present.

Californians who look at their aging dams, their granite classical civic buildings, and their large municipal parks, are like Dark-Age Greeks who stumbled around the ruins of Mycenaean palaces and walls, wondering who were the demi-gods who built such things that now were impossible to emulate. So, too, we are bewildered at Balboa Park or the California aqueduct, or rather saddened that simply copying them is beyond our moral power or expertise.

The state was once rich and secure in gas and oil, nuclear power, cutting-edge freeways and airports, water storage, law enforcement, a topflight public school system, and an effective higher education triad. All these resources have become either politicized or taboos that are neglected, dismantled, or destroyed by a class that commuted little, was nonchalant about their power bills, put their kids in private schools, and enjoyed neighborhoods whose zip codes and private security patrols bounced away revolving-door felons and homeless far distant to the haunts of the middle class and poor.

Rich leftists quote the Gini coefficient chapter and verse, oblivious that they have created a state of affairs in which California ranks second to the bottom—below even New York—in such calibrations of inequality. The Silicon Valley motto should be, “I create inequality by hating inequality.”

We have not built a major mountain reservoir outside of Los Angeles in over 40 years even as the population has soared. The main north-south laterals of the state—the 101, I-5, and 99—often narrow into four-lane deathtraps. SFO and LAX are among the more nightmarish airports in the nation. California’s test scores rank in the nation’s bottom 10 percent of schools.

Over one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty rate. Urban geographer Joel Kotkin recently noted that African Americans and Latinos in California suffer among the lowest real incomes in the nation, 48th and 50th respectively. How could that be true in the land of Mark Zuckerberg, Nancy Pelosi, and Jerry Brown?

One-third of Americans on public assistance live in California. To drive through the rural center of the state is to revisit the 1930s world of the Joads. Ramshackle farmhouses now house 20 or some immigrants. Many of them reside here illegally, in trailers, shacks, and illegal add-ons. A state famous for regulating the life out of the middle classes simply ignores systemic flagrant violations of sewage, water, power, and building codes, in the manner of the exemptions given the homeless: out of sight, out of mind.

California’s mid-size cities nudge out other blue-state metropolises to rank among the nation’s leaders in property crimes. The nation’s highest gas taxes, income taxes, and near highest sales taxes either do not mitigate the above pathologies or perhaps help fuel them.

If our liberal political elites lived in crime-ridden Stockton, San Bernardino, or Modesto, had two children in the Los Angeles City public schools, commuted daily on the 99 from Delano to Visalia, flew weekly commercial out of LAX, tried to buy a California home on their salaries as public officials, rode BART to Oakland each evening home, or depended on a business supplying the state with lumber, gas or oil, food, transportation, or construction—the stuff of life—then they might fathom how assuaging their left-wing guilt in the abstract destroyed the lives of those they never see and never wish to see.

So, in a word, California’s debacle was the work of the self-absorbed.

The self-declared most caring, virtuous, and moral in the end proved the most narcissistic, selfish, and self-centered. Yes, the rich left-wing California elites are many things, but utterly selfish explains what they do unto others.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/12/the-selfish-californian/

Thursday, June 16, 2022

AARP is an organization that purports to represent seniors 50 years of age and older, but who do they really represent?

By Rick Manning

It might surprise people to learn that AARP members sign up to be marketed to by one of the largest insurance companies in America – United Healthcare. And that AARP earned more than $1 billion dollars from royalties from this health insurer and other partners according to their 2020 tax reporting documents. Of these royalties, it is estimated that hundreds of millions came from their partnership with United Healthcare.

So the question any AARP member might ask is whose side is this multi-billion dollar “non-profit” on?

This is particularly true when one finds out that AARP is busily carrying water for big insurance concerns like United Healthcare when it comes to the issue of federal government prescription drug price setting.

Traditionally, seniors have been amongst the largest beneficiaries of advances in medical care whether it be better medical devices that solve mobility issues, or more efficient medicines and cures which extend quality of life. And no one can miss the obvious fact that the long private research effort dedicated to conquering Alzheimer’s Disease is one of the most important senior health issues facing America.

Yet, AARP’s fronting for their health insurer benefactor bottom lines runs directly counter to the health interests of their members.

Let me be clear. Medicare dictating the prices that will be paid for medicines seniors can get will result in seniors not getting the medicines that their doctors have decided work best for them. It will also significantly limit investment in developing new medicines that would be covered under Medicare should the federal government gain the power to effectively decide the price of medicines.

On the medicine availability issue, we already see this regularly at the state government level where drug formularies determine which medicines people on Medicaid may receive. It doesn’t matter if the ‘approved’ medicine works well for that individual patient, it only matters that it costs the government less to provide. And in many cases, these formularies are changed regularly to reflect annual or semi-annual negotiations, leaving patients to switch medicines due to the not-so-tender mercies of government bean counters instead of their doctors who know best what works for them.

If anyone thinks, after the last two years of the COVID debacle that one-sized fits all medical systems make sense, they haven’t been paying attention. Yet that is exactly what Congress would open the door to happening should they allow Medicare to negotiate prices with the obvious end result of pushing seniors into the least expensive treatment alternatives regardless of individual patient’s interests.

But an even more devastating outcome of this Medicare pricing scheme will be the drying up of research money for medicines intended to expand quality of life for seniors. New medicines cost more money, and all the FDA approvals in the world won’t mean a thing if the price bureaucrats won’t allow new treatments to be sold for a profit.

There are those who want people to believe that companies would spend billions of dollars in research to bring new innovative medicines for seniors to market under a Medicare price control regime. Of course, they are the same people who argued that our nation could increase our national debt by trillions without any fear of inflation. They are wrong on both accounts, but fortunately, legislation has not yet passed the Senate to impose deadly Medicare drug price controls under the guise of negotiations.

Which brings us back to AARP, and their willing push for a Medicare pricing scheme that provides pricing certainty to their big insurance partners, while doing violence to their members hope for the development of future cures and the ability to readily receive the medicines their doctor deems in their best health interest.

An article from earlier this month by Kaiser Health Network quotes Joshua Gordon, the director of health policy for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget as stating about AARP’s position on drug price controls, “It’s hard to know whether they’re advocating for their business interests or for the seniors that they are supposed to represent.”

Maybe it is hard for Mr. Gordon to know, but the answer should seem pretty obvious to the rest of us.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/aarp-is-an-organization-that-purports-to-represent-seniors-50-years-of-age-and-older-but-who-do-they-really-represent/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=b1c98e09-851d-4440-ae90-1c84f3b0643b

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The Uvalde Police Chief’s Latest Excuse Is Absolutely Sickening -- and stupid

Uvalde School District Chief of Police Police Chief Pete Arredondo’s latest excuse is a bit awful and infuriating as you probably imagined.

He’s trying to spin the narrative to get away from his pathetic and incompetent response to the active shooter who invaded a Uvalde elementary school and methodically murdered children and teachers.

Here’s his latest excuse reported by The Texas Tribune:

Only a locked classroom door stood between Pete Arredondo and a chance to bring down the gunman. It was sturdily built with a steel jamb, impossible to kick in.

He wanted a key. One goddamn key and he could get through that door to the kids and the teachers. The killer was armed with an AR-15. Arredondo thought he could shoot the gunman himself or at least draw fire while another officer shot back. Without body armor, he assumed he might die.

“The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible,” Arredondo said.

The chief of police for the Uvalde school district spent more than an hour in the hallway of Robb Elementary School. He called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside, holding back from the doors for 40 minutes to avoid provoking sprays of gunfire. When keys arrived, he tried dozens of them, but one by one they failed to work.

Our friends from ‘The Gateway Pundit’ commented further:

I am not Monday morning quarterbacking. In my previous life, I supervised the U.S. State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Training Program. The courses offered included training foreign police SWAT teams. In 1992 I traveled to Quito, Ecuador with the head of Miami’s SWAT team, Bill O’Brien (Bill later became Chief of Police for Miami, Florida) to conduct an evaluation of Ecuador’s SWAT team (Grupo de Intervencion y Rescate). I learned a lot from Bill. (I also learned to not go jogging with him in Quito, which sits at 9,350 feet above sea level. He almost killed me, but I survived the run.)

Why did Pete Arredondo not grab a shotgun loaded with slugs to breach the door? I find it hard to believe that none of the police on scene or nearby did not have a shotgun. Here is what American Cop has to say about the utility of a shotgun as a breaching tool:

When it is properly employed, a shotgun can provide teams with safer and faster door breaching than other methods of breaching. It is not limited to just doors. Shotgun breach can also be employed to breach iron-barred windows, and take out sliding glass doors and defeat padlocks.

Utilizing a shotgun for breaching offers tactical teams several advantages. It is quicker than manual breaching, jamb spreading or ramming and is safer and requires less training than thermal and explosive entry.

Watch it here: TacticalRifleman/Youtube
This tale that Arredondo told the Tribune contains some huge reversals and contradictions. Too many witnesses have described the police standing around outside the school for at least forty minutes. But now the chief is saying that he was trying to enter the classroom and stop the shooter from the moment he arrived but was thwarted by a lack of keys.
It just seems obvious that he knows precisely how bad this looks for him and the national attention being drawn to his failure to respond to an active shooter situation as standard training would suggest is making matters worse.
He’s trying to shift the blame for the deaths of all those students and teachers and make himself out as a would-be hero who was tragically thwarted by logistics. And I’m not buying it for a minute.

https://dailyallegiant.com/the-uvalde-police-chiefs-latest-excuse-is-absolutely-sickening/

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Liberal Lunatics Broke Into Joel Osteen’s Church And Stripped Down During Service

Abortion-rights activists shouted at the top of their lungs and stripped down to their underwear during a mega-church service held by prominent televangelist Joel Osteen in Houston on Sunday.

One protester took off her dress to reveal a pair of green hands painted onto her white bra and exclaimed, “It’s my body, my (expletive) choice,” as Pastor Joel Osteen finished his prayer and worshippers began to take their seats.

That protester was quickly joined by a woman standing next to her, who unveiled a similar outfit.

“Overturn Roe?” she chanted. “Hell no!”

A third protester joined the two women. As they were led through a surprised but seemingly calm crowd, the group continued to shout. From the stage, Osteen continued to talk.

The three women waved green bandanas — a symbol of the pro-choice movement.

Activist refers to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, which established a legal right to abortion. According to a recently leaked Supreme Court draft, the increasingly conservative court, which includes three justices chosen by former President Donald Trump, might overturn the decision.

The Catholic News Agency claims he said:

“Alright y’all, we love everybody so we just thank the Lord that he’s in control and he has all things in his hand, and I think as long as I keep talking you can’t hear what everybody else is saying.”

The women were removed from the church, allowing Osteen to continue preaching, to the delight of the congregation.

According to the site, the activists continued their protest outside and were joined by other sympathizers.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, a group of activists has opposed the idea of the Supreme Court reversing Roe v. Wade. v. Wade after a draft decision was released last month.

Activist Julianne D’Eredita told KPRC 2 of the protest:

“I know it seems very outrageous to do it in a church in a private space. However, the people that are enforcing these laws have no qualms coming up to women in private spaces such as doctors’ offices and medical clinics to harass them and call them murderers.”

Among the tweets Osteen posted Sunday was one telling his congregants that messages come in different forms.

“We don’t always realize how God speaks to us,” he said. “But most of the time, God speaks to us in a gentle whisper. It’s not something loud; it’s not forceful. It’s called the still small voice.”

Osteen, 59, has two children. The Christian Post quoted him saying “Every baby should live,” during a 2011 interview though that doesn’t seem to be an issue he often addresses. Osteen will preach in Yankee Stadium on Aug. 6.

https://dailyallegiant.com/liberal-lunatics-broke-into-joel-osteens-church-and-stripped-down-during-service/

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California Pride...?

Children in Los Angeles came across Drag Queens throwing lube while exposing bare breasts and male buttocks at the weekend’s Pride Month parade.

Sky News Australia broadcast censored footage of the event.

Australia’s equivalent parades take place at other times of the year, but many Australian governments have promoted the global festival throughout June.

For instance, the streets of inner Sydney are decked with taxpayer-funded rainbow flags, but few understand the consequences of buying into this political symbol.

Mainstream Australians support dignity and non-discrimination for same-sex attracted people so they can get on with their lives, something most want to do without fuss. But it’s quite another thing for mainstream Australians and their children to be forced to celebrate Pride Month and pay for aspects of it through their taxes.

After all, the 1970s rallying cry of the gay rights movement was ‘what happens in the privacy of the bedroom is no one else’s business’.

If only that’s where the political activists left things…

For the duration of June, global Pride Month fosters gender fluidity and radical sexual expressionism onto the rest of the population, including (and especially) children.

We’ve seen all this at Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade held in March each year. Like its LA counterpart, it’s not a family-friendly event.

Victoria’s taxpayer-funded ‘Pride Centre’ in St Kilda is also hosting events this month, including for children who must be ‘accompanied by an adult’.

Since de-gendering marriage, there’s been an aggressive push in schools to indoctrinate children into gender fluid ideology, teaching them their gender was ‘assigned at birth’, not observed, and that it can be changed.

This is having consequences here and abroad.

The number of children and young people in America now identifying as transgender, (or who are confused about their biological gender), has more than doubled since 2017.

Australian statistics from our secretive gender clinics are hard to come by, but it is widely acknowledged Australia has an unprecedented epidemic of gender-confused children.

This comes as international and Australian medical experts urge caution before putting children on the pathway to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery related to the permanent alteration of breasts and genitals.

That hasn’t stopped politicians in Queensland, Victoria, and the ACT banning children from receiving help from anyone other than a therapist who will affirm LGBTQ+ gender-fluid ideology.

New South Wales and Tasmania are about to debate similar laws banning the tried and tested ‘watch and wait’ protocols that successfully helped children (who overwhelmingly grow out of gender confusion) avoid puberty blockers, hormones, or the gender surgeon’s scalpel.

Pride Month seeks to amplify gender fluid ideology and further normalise it.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris did her bit, posing for a photo on social media with a scantily clad person who appeared to a man presenting as a woman.

Another senior American politician, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, celebrated Pride Month by making an appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race television program.

‘Your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about!’

This is something most parents concerned about Drag Queen Story Time events in public libraries might question.

Pelosi finished by saying, ‘God bless America!’ The rest of us mutter, God help America.

Meanwhile, still in the land of the free, the New York Post reports this week that $200,000 of taxpayer money is being spent sending LGBTQ+ drag queens into schools to indoctrinate children into gender fluid ideology, often without parents’ knowledge.

Pride Month is global and it is here. Even Woke corporates like ANZ are getting into the swing of things, folding Marxist Black Lives Matter movement imagery and LGBTQ+ flags into corporate logos.

A legitimate battle for equality before the law has been won, but LGBTQ+ political activism didn’t stop there.

Under the guise of tolerance, the movement demands affirmation, validation, and celebration for everything LGBTQ+.

Politicians and corporates kowtow. No one questions the agenda. None speak out.

So this June, when you see a rainbow flag hanging from a public lamppost in the Sydney CBD or lighting up the taxpayer-funded Pride Centre at St Kilda, remember that your child’s gender is fluid and you were a bigot to ‘assign’ his or her gender based on what the midwife observed at birth. (Or something.)

Happy Pride Month, mainstream Australia.

Perhaps it’s time to get involved in politics because politics sure is getting involved in your kids’ lives.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/california-pride

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

The antiabortion movement fuels a growth industry: Pregnancy centers

Rayenieshia Cole did not want another child. She couldn’t afford it. A single mother who made her living dancing at a strip club, she had few relatives in Texas to help raise her three boys.

When Cole learned she was pregnant last fall, she visited an abortion clinic, where she passed an ultrasound screening — Texas had just enacted a law prohibiting abortion after about six weeks — and made an appointment to return the next day to end her pregnancy.

As Cole was leaving the clinic, several antiabortion activists approached. They directed her to a nonprofit a couple of hundred yards away called Birth Choice, which they said could help her financially — if she chose to keep the baby.

Cole had never heard of a pregnancy center. Curious, she walked over and was struck by how the staff did not judge her.

“They were really willing to help. They had a lot of resources,” said Cole, 27. “Housing resources, helping you get a job resources.”

In March, she gave birth to a son, Kanye, three months premature. Birth Choice provided a car seat, stroller and other items and promised continuing support for three years.

Pregnancy centers vary in what they offer and their religious affiliations, but they have the same goal: persuading “abortion-minded” women to reconsider and supporting those who continue their pregnancies.

Even with Roe vs. Wade in place, low-income women struggle to get abortions in Texas
May 8, 2022

Abortion rights advocates accuse the facilities — which they often refer to as crisis pregnancy centers — of deceiving women by setting up shop next to abortion clinics and dressing staff in doctors’ coats and surgical scrubs despite being exempt from medical standards of care and monitoring.

“The state calls them pregnancy resource centers,” said Dr. Bhavik Kumar, staff physician at the Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston. “I call them state-funded fake clinics.”

He said the centers don’t provide enough financial support or address the many other reasons that women seek abortions.

“Simply providing diapers and baby clothes is not going to make this go away,” Kumar said. “This is years of caring for people and probably the children they have at home.”

The first center opened in 1967 in a home in Hawaii as the movement to legalize abortion was gaining momentum. Today they operate as nonprofits in every state, with more than 2,500 centers nationwide — about triple the number of abortion clinics. Most belong to one of four Christian antiabortion networks.

The Associated Press recently found that 13 states have spent $495 million since 2010 to help fund the centers — including at least $89 million this fiscal year.

That is expected to grow if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade, a ruling expected this month that could lead to abortion in effect being banned in 26 states.

“We pray for an end to abortion. We hope that day will come,” said Ronda Kay Moreland, chair of Birth Choice’s board. “But that won’t put an end to the need for what we do. We’re going to be inundated, and if anything, we’ll need to grow our services.”

As tensions build over the looming court decision, pregnancy centers are finding themselves facing backlash.

Since a draft opinion overturning Roe was leaked last month, centers in New York, Maryland, Ohio, Washington, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia and a Dallas suburb have had windows smashed and been set on fire and splashed with red paint.

They were also tagged with messages that included “Forced birth is murder” and “If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either” — a signature slogan of an abortion rights group called Jane’s Revenge.

Moreland said Birth Choice has consulted with local police and increased security ahead of the Roe ruling. “Anyone associated with the pro-life movement needs to practice good safety measures now more than ever,” she said.

Texas has about 200 pregnancy centers — more than any other state — and over this year and the next will spend $100 million on them, a total that includes some federal welfare dollars.

Birth Choice received $116,000 in state funding this year.

“We’re blessed to live in a state that does have an active approach,” Moreland said. “I mean, the state of Texas is giving, providing financial support and resources.”

The rest of the center’s budget — roughly $500,000 — comes from private donations and grants.

Moreland, executive producer of a local conservative talk radio show, said she supports Birth Choice because she was adopted in the fall of 1974, less than a year after Roe.

“My birth mother could have chosen to have me aborted,” she said. “I had a really good life, so I do this to give back.”

Started by a local Catholic activist, Birth Choice opened in 2009 in the same office complex as a new abortion clinic, the Southwestern Women’s Surgery Center. Moreland said the goal was “to have a last line of support next door.”

Some of the regular protesters in the parking lot handing out antiabortion pamphlets and rosaries belong to the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. While they don’t have a formal affiliation with Birth Choice, staffers call them “sidewalk counselors.”

Located in a second-floor office near an accountant and a spa in a sprawling middle-class neighborhood, the center has nine employees, including two nurses. It offers counseling, pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and other services aimed at helping women through pregnancy and early motherhood.

Some assistance comes without strings, but the women they help can get more by using “baby bucks” they earn by attending classes.

Moreland said the center sees about 1,000 women a year and over the last dozen years has prevented at least 2,000 abortions.

The center belongs to Heartbeat International, a nonprofit founded in 1971 that describes itself as an “interdenominational Christian association” that aims “to reach and rescue as many lives as possible, around the world, through an effective network of life-affirming pregnancy help.” It claims more than 3,100 affiliated centers in 80 countries.

In a recent speech at the group’s annual conference this spring, the group’s general counsel, Danielle White, spoke proudly of a brief she filed in the abortion case now before the Supreme Court.

“I had the distinct honor and opportunity to tell the court women don’t need abortion,” she said. “Because I know what we know here in the pregnancy help movement: That we are here for them.”

It’s unclear how many women have been denied access to abortion because of the new Texas law banning the procedure after detection of fetal cardiac activity — usually at about six weeks of pregnancy. But some have ended up at Birth Choice.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-06-12/the-antiabortion-movement-fuels-a-growth-industry-pregnancy-centers

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Sorry, Democrats: Other Opinions Exist

This week, my company, The Daily Wire, premiered a blockbuster new documentary starring Matt Walsh. Titled “What Is A Woman?”, the documentary investigates radical gender theory and its peculiar hold on the elites in our society—and how the insane proposition that men can become women and vice versa has become so well-accepted that even normal Americans now live in fear of questioning it.

The film has been the single largest success in the history of The Daily Wire; hundreds of thousands of Americans have subscribed to view it. Yet Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregator for film and television, has not a single traditional review of the film.

That’s because, according to the legacy and entertainment media, the film doesn’t exist. When the Daily Wire press team sent out invitations to reviewers to watch the film—knowing, of course, that the vast majority of reviewers are left-leaning and would undoubtedly pan the film—reviewers began responding with insults and declarations of preemptive hatred.

“Hard pass,” wrote one. “Unsubscribe,” wrote another. “Lose my email. Forget my name.” A third reviewer, this one a member of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, wrote, “Hard f—-ing pass. I won’t give that transphobic bigot a platform on my site. Never email me again!” Thus, the current Rotten Tomatoes audience score for the film is 96%; the reviewer score remains empty.

Reviewers’ willingness to pretend that there is no controversy with regard to gender and sex perfectly reflects the left’s beliefs about transgender ideology more broadly. One gender reassignment surgeon—a medical doctor who performs body-mutilating surgeries—told Walsh that nobody believed in traditional ideas about biological sex anymore; only “dinosaurs” would believe such antiquated notions.

Such denial of the mere existence of a countervailing argument is a common feature of the left these days. The idea is that by pretending opposition to bizarre ideas doesn’t exist, you can mainstream those bizarre ideas.

Thus, “everyone believes” that climate change is not merely a byproduct of human activity, but that it threatens life on earth; to deny the latter proposition is tantamount to Holocaust denial. “Everyone believes” that America is systemically racist; to do otherwise is to mark yourself as a bigot.

But what if everybody doesn’t believe such propositions? What if there are millions of Americans—the majority of Americans, in fact—who believe precisely the opposite? Then the only option is to reinforce denial with censorship. Which is why former Barack Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer went on the air at MSNBC to declare the very popularity of conservative viewpoints a threat to democracy.

“Right-wing content,” Pfeiffer observed, “dwarfs progressive content [on Facebook]. It dwarfs mainstream media content, which actually should be the part that scares us the most, that Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire has more followers and engagement, many times more than The New York Times or CNN … That is a problem for democracy.”

Democracy, you see, simply means the Approved View. If the Approved View is somehow unpopular, that must be a problem of propaganda, which is in turn a problem for democracy. The only solution is to ban such propaganda, thus leaving a monopoly on behalf of the Approved View. If the echo chamber isn’t strong enough to drown out the outsiders, simply silence those outside the chamber, then declare democracy safe.

There’s only one problem: It won’t work. Democrats have siloed themselves into an increasingly progressive universe, one in which the most controversial imaginable propositions are utterly uncontroversial. In this universe, the other side doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately for the left, the other side does exist. And they vote. And come November 2022, the ostrich strategy of the Democratic Party and its media apparatchiks is likely to bear devastating electoral fruit.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/09/is-ignoring-the-other-side-a-winning-strategy-for-the-left/

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Graphic Designer Asks Supreme Court to Allow Her to Say No to Same-Sex Weddings

“All of us should be free to say what we believe, even if the government disagrees with those beliefs,” Colorado graphic designer Lorie Smith says Thursday outside the U.S. Capitol, flanked by, from left, Rep. Doug Lamborn, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. James Lankford, and Alliance Defending Freedom's general counsel, Kristen Waggoner. (Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)

The Supreme Court next fall will hear arguments in the case of a Colorado graphic designer who says a state law forces her to supply services for same-sex weddings, a violation of her religious beliefs and right to free speech.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit legal organization focused on protecting religious freedom and free speech, held a press conference Wednesday outside the U.S. Capitol to highlight Lorie Smith’s lawsuit against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

“All of us should be free to say what we believe, even if the government disagrees with those beliefs,” Smith said at the event.

Lawmakers in attendance included Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; James Lankford, R-Okla.; and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; as well as Reps. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo.; Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz.; and Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo.

A total of 18 senators and 38 House Republicans filed an amicus brief June 2 in support of Smith.

“Free speech is an inalienable human right, and it is the foundation for self-government,” Kristen Waggoner, ADF general counsel, said at the press conference. “The government doesn’t grant us this right, but fortunately, our Constitution protects it and we are stewards of that freedom.”

Smith went to court in 2020 over the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which the graphic designer argues would force her and her company, 303 Creative, to create projects that violate her personal religious beliefs about marriage.

Smith refuses to create custom wedding websites for same-sex couples, saying the creation of such work would require her to condone the content. “Lorie enjoys working with people from all walks of life, but, like most artists, can’t promote every message,” an ADF press release says.

Smith’s case is similar to the long-running legal fight of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, a Christian who the Human Rights Commission determined had discriminated against homosexuals because he declined to create a custom cake to celebrate the wedding of two men.

ADF argues that like Phillips, also its client; Smith; and others should be allowed to “create freely.”

The graphic designer is appealing a July 2021 decision by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Colorado could force Smith to design projects that blatantly violate her beliefs, because of the state’s so-called duty to ensure equal access to her “custom expression.”

The 10th Circuit ruled against Smith while acknowledging that her refusal to create projects for same-sex couples was based solely on her objection to the content, not the customers, and affirming that creating a website is a form of speech protected under the First Amendment.

At the press conference, Cruz said Smith’s Supreme Court case has universal importance and would set an important precedent for free speech:

Colorado wants to compel the speech of Christian artists and business owners who decline to use their God-given talents to celebrate events that run contrary to what their faith teaches. Colorado law restricts the fundamental First Amendment rights of Lorie and other business owners like her. And it doesn’t just target Christians only.

Consider it this way: Should a Muslim artist be compelled by the government to draw the image of Muhammad? Should Jewish artists be forced to create art that they consider to be antisemitic? Should a Democrat political firm be forced to take on Republican clients?

Smith appealed to the Supreme Court last September and the high court accepted her case in February. The high court will hear oral arguments in 303 Creative v. Elenis in the fall.

According to a court brief, Smith seeks permission to “design wedding websites promoting her understanding of marriage” and to “post a statement explaining that she can only speak messages consistent with her faith.”

In effect, she seeks the high court’s protection from the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which “requires her to create custom websites celebrating same-sex marriage and prohibits her statement—even though Colorado stipulates that she ‘work[s] with all people regardless of … sexual orientation.’”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/10/graphic-designer-asks-supreme-court-to-allow-her-to-say-no-to-same-sex-weddings

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Australia: Culture of violence in remote communities drives attacks on Aboriginal women

The article below is very instructive. It shows how gross the problem with Aborigines is and how insoluble it is. Governments have tried all sort of approaches to improve the Aborigine lifestyle but nothing works. The article below shows why. You would have to transform an entire culture. And how do you do that?

And I haven't even mentioned the different range of cognitive skills among Aborigines

A high-profile crown prosecutor says a major factor in the domestic violence epidemic afflicting Northern Territory Indigenous women is an “enculturation of violence” on remote communities.

In a rare and candid interview, Victorian Senior Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, one of the nation’s most experienced criminal barristers, said resolving the Territory’s family violence crisis required “profound change’’ to address such violence, which was “predominantly male-on-female”.

“It’s really trying to change that enculturation of violence; that culture of entitlement to assault or using violence on any person.’’

Ms Rogers also said some “remote communities tend to be very punitive towards a victim or someone who has helped a victim or sought help from the police’’.

On such communities, victims of domestic abuse had sometimes “been punished by their family members as well as the perpetrator’s family members” for reporting such crimes.

Ms Rogers is the former Central Australian prosecutor who stunned the nation in 2006 when she spoke out about horrific cases of physical and sexual abuse of Aboriginal children and women. She also spoke about how a male-dominated Indigenous culture and kinship connections had helped to create a conspiracy of silence.

READ MORE:‘Epidemic of violence’ plagues women: judge
Her revelations led to the 2007 report Little Children Are Sacred, which was followed by the Howard government’s contentious NT Intervention.

Ms Rogers, who left the NT almost nine years ago, said she was shocked by how little things had changed for Indigenous women from remote Territory communities in recent decades.

“What is disappointing for me is that nothing’s changed,’’ she said. “That is the takeaway point for me. I find it shocking that nothing has changed.

“… My understanding is that the violence towards Aboriginal women and children by Aboriginal men continues unabated.’’

Remote communities, Ms Rogers said, could be “extremely unsafe” for Indigenous women.

She was responding to comments by NT Supreme Court judge Judith Kelly, who said last week that Aboriginal women in remote communities remain trapped in an epidemic of violence caused by disadvantage and intergenerational abuse, and a culture that privileges the rights of perpetrators over those of victims.

Justice Kelly wept as she described cases in which women who had tried to flee violence were effectively kidnapped and endured beatings and rape on outstations.

“I just want people to know what’s happening to Aboriginal women,’’ she said, as she argued they were bearing the “absolutely dreadful” brunt of society’s failure to address high levels of welfare dependency, substance abuse and other problems on far-flung Indigenous communities.

Ms Rogers agreed that better education and more jobs for men and women on remote communities were needed to help build individuals’ self-esteem. She added: “On top of that you’ve got this enculturation of violence that is predominantly male-on-female.’’

Ms Rogers has conducted successful prosecutions against Victorian murderer Adrian Basham, who killed his estranged wife in 2018, and sexual sadist Jaymes Todd, who raped and murdered aspiring comedian Eurydice Dix-on in Melbourne in the same year.

Ms Rogers said that since she left the Territory, she had noticed a change in “the judicial language” used there, with some judges and magistrates more likely to call out “toxic” relationships between perpetrators and victims, especially if a perpetrator had abused his partner for years before severely injuring her. “Judicial officers are much more prepared to say it doesn’t matter whether you are an Aboriginal person or not; this is unacceptable,’’ she said.

“It must be really soul-destroying as a judge from the bench to see time and time again these horrific acts of violence that never stop.’’ She said that for such judicial officers “there must be a point at which you go ‘This is outrageous, no matter how liberal my attitude is towards Indigenous people and the Indigenous cause’.’’

According to a 2017 NT government report, Indigenous women in the Territory are 40 times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be hospitalised following family violence assaults. The same report quotes an NPY Women’s Council estimate that Aboriginal women from the NT, South Australia and Western Australia border region are about 60 times more likely to be murdered than non-Aboriginal women.

In a three-part series, The Australian recently revealed how a young Aboriginal woman, Ruby, was raped and bashed by her father in Yuendumu in Central Australia, and then forced to leave the desert town after he was jailed.

Last year, another NT Supreme Court judge, Justice Jenny Blokland, called on the NT government to address a potential, emerging pattern of sexual assault victims “being incidentally punished in their home communities through a form of banishment’’.

She made this remark while sentencing 32-year-old Simeon Riley, who pleaded guilty to raping an adolescent girl he had kidnapped and kept as a sex slave for several weeks in 2005. During that time, the girl, then aged 13 or 14, was kept in one room, sexually assaulted and forced to urinate and defecate through a hole in the floorboards.

The judge added that the victim of this “chilling” crime, who came forward to police in 2018, had been further punished as she felt she could not return home. The judge urged leaders from the girl’s otherwise “well-functioning” community to “seriously” reflect on that.

Justice Kelly also described a culture within some remote Indigenous communities that protected perpetrators of violence rather than their victims, and Ms Rogers said this was a longstanding problem. She said courts had traditionally assumed that when a victim of violence left the NT “that it’s a choice’’. But she said often, “their lives have been made so unlivable’’ and so “horrible and difficult” they have no choice “but to leave”.

In the wake of Justice Kelly’s remarks, Indigenous academic Marcia Langton called for a permanent group of experts to advise the federal government on how to improve safety for Indigenous women and children. Professor Langton argued that “lives are being lost while people in the women’s safety sector dither about irrelevant issues’’.

Ms Rogers said that like abuse victims in the wider community, some Indigenous women were torn between love and hate for an abuser. They could also have mixed feelings about their own relatives, whom they loved but who might have banished them for reporting abuse.

“It’s a double burden for those who have to leave,’’ she said, as they dealt with their violence-related trauma and being exiled from close relatives – sometimes including a mother or grandmother. “It’s an enduring situation – the woman has to leave, never the man … in that way, it’s not unlike any other culture.’’

Ms Rogers said domestic violence on remote NT communities was often intergenerational, with a father being sentenced for acts of violence and his son coming before the same judge for similar crimes 15 years later.

She said the unacceptably high levels of abuse endured by Indigenous women on such communities was not adequately acknowledged by the wider community.

Most people who live in Sydney or Melbourne “have never been to the Northern Territory. Most people have never been to a remote community. Most people have never met an Aboriginal person.’’

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/culture-of-violence-in-remote-communities-drives-attacks-on-indigenous-women/news-story/d36e67f2d427673bf07272bd80d78029

Biden's brain is a black lady

For more than a year, Democratic lawmakers and like-minded advocates have pleaded with Joe Biden to create a “gun czar” to address the epidemic of violence.

Each time, the president’s team pushed back with force, contending it has the perfect person already in place, someone with command over the issue and extraordinary access to the president himself.

That person is Susan Rice.

As director of the Domestic Policy Council, Rice leads a team of roughly a dozen staffers examining ways to push through modest gun reforms should Congress again falter, and explore new executive orders even if lawmakers succeed.

Her ascendence to the role of point person on guns marks the latest chunk of policy turf over which she has claimed jurisdiction, joining a sprawling portfolio that stretches from policing and racial justice to student loan debt, immigration and health care policy, including a prime piece of protecting abortion rights.

The scope of her fiefdom is as remarkable as how she managed to secure it. Having eschewed a public-facing role, Rice has relied on a combination of internal maneuvering and bureaucratic know-how to place herself at the nerve center of some of the fiercest debates roiling Washington. And she’s further cemented her status with the president in the process.

Rice and Biden meet multiple times a week. As the president prepared for his recent prime-time address on guns, she joined him on several occasions in his residence. Senior aides say Biden’s trust in her is so profound that she can see him whenever she needs to.

“I’ve seen it,” a recently departed senior White House official said of the relationship. “You see it in the meetings. You see how he talks about her in meetings even when she’s not around.”

In interviews with 21 current and 13 former White House and administration staffers, along with two dozen officials on Capitol Hill and from across the party and advocacy worlds, Rice is described as an underappreciated political operator, a pragmatist consumed with putting points on the board, and a process obsessed micromanager. She personally goes through and edits her staff’s typos in the memos they draft.

Rice’s elevated stature in the West Wing has come with fierce loyalty from colleagues and praise so superlative-laden that it borders on deification. More recently, it has led to speculation inside the White House that she will succeed Ron Klain should he leave the chief of staff post. Rice has privately told people in recent days that she has no interest in the job, describing herself as a policy person at heart.

“There is a reason that she is the only person in American history to have led both the White House’s National Security Council and its Domestic Policy Council,” Klain said. “She has unique talents, intellect, and determination to get results.”

But her style has also irritated lawmakers and high-ranking officials on Capitol Hill. To some former colleagues and outside advocates, Rice has come to personify a kind of risk-averse, incremental approach to policy-making that they fear falls far short of addressing the country’s needs — and will ill-serve Democrats in the midterms and elections beyond.

“Rice is seen as a domestic policy lightweight and a block to any good things that happen to cross her desk,” said the leader of one progressive organization, who asked to withhold their name out of fear of angering Rice and the White House. “So everybody who wants to do big things has a vested interest in her desk being as empty as possible.”

Regardless of one’s views on her, Rice’s rise resembles one of the great Lazarushian tales in modern politics. She was too hot to touch even for some in her own party by the end of the Obama years, having become the chief protagonist in Republicans’ investigations into the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

She weighed running for the U.S. Senate in Maine; then saw her stock rise as an alternate to presumptive frontrunner Kamala Harris during Biden’s veepstakes. But both those prospects fizzled. And with little chance of being nominated for a Senate-confirmed position, there was uncertainty about what her next step would be.

In less than two years time, she’s become one of the more influential domestic policy operatives of her generation

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/12/susan-rice-domestic-policy-profile-00038938

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Cowardice by any other name....

Heavily armed officers delayed confronting a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, for more than an hour even though supervisors at the scene had been told that some trapped with him in two elementary school classrooms needed medical treatment, a new review of video footage and other investigative material shows. Instead, the documents show, they waited for protective equipment to lower the risk to law enforcement officers.

The school district police chief, who was leading the response to the May 24 shooting, appeared to be agonizing over the length of time it was taking to secure the shields that would help protect officers when they entered and to find a key for the classroom doors, according to law enforcement documents and video gathered as part of the investigation reviewed by The New York Times.

The chief, Pete Arredondo, and others at the scene became aware that not everyone inside the classrooms was already dead, the documents showed, including a report from a school district police officer whose wife, a teacher, had spoken to him by phone from one of the classrooms to say she had been shot.

More than a dozen of the 33 children and three teachers originally in the two classrooms remained alive during the 1 hour and 17 minutes from the time the shooting began inside the classrooms to when four officers made entry, law enforcement investigators have concluded. By that time, 60 officers had assembled on scene.

“People are going to ask why we’re taking so long,” a man who investigators believe to be Chief Arredondo could be heard saying, according to a transcript of officers’ body camera footage. “We’re trying to preserve the rest of the life.”

More than a dozen of the 33 children and three teachers originally in the two classrooms remained alive until the police entered.Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Investigators have been working to determine whether any of those who died could have been saved if they had received medical attention sooner, according to an official with knowledge of the effort. But there is no question that some of the victims were still alive and in desperate need of medical attention. One teacher died in an ambulance. Three children died at nearby hospitals, according to the documents.

Xavier Lopez, 10, was one of the children who died after being rushed to a hospital. His family said he had been shot in the back and lost a lot of blood as he awaited medical attention. “He could have been saved,” his grandfather Leonard Sandoval said. “The police did not go in for more than an hour. He bled out.”

Supervisors at the scene at some point became aware that there were people inside the classrooms who needed saving.

“We think there are some injuries in there,” the man believed to be Chief Arredondo said several minutes before the breach, according to the transcript. “And so you know what we did, we cleared off the rest of the building so we wouldn’t have any more, besides what’s already in there, obviously.” It was not clear from the transcript whom he was speaking to.

But even with additional documents and video, much about the chaotic scene remained unclear, including precisely when Chief Arredondo and other senior officers became aware of injuries inside the classrooms. It is not known whether Chief Arredondo or other officers inside the school learned of the 911 calls from a child inside the classrooms who said that some had been shot but were still alive.

Among the revelations in the documents: The gunman, Salvador Ramos, had a “hellfire” trigger device meant to allow a semiautomatic AR-15-style rifle to be fired more like an automatic weapon; some of the officers who first arrived at the school had long guns, more firepower than previously known; and Chief Arredondo learned the gunman’s identity while inside the school and attempted in vain to communicate with him by name through the closed classroom doors.

But with two officers who initially approached the door shot at and grazed, Chief Arredondo appeared to have decided that quickly breaching the classrooms without shields and other protection would have led to officers possibly being killed. He focused instead on getting other children out of the school while waiting for additional protection equipment.

The response by the police at Robb Elementary School is now the subject of overlapping investigations by the Texas state police and the U.S. Justice Department. It was the subject of a closed-door hearing at the State Capitol in Austin on Thursday that featured the director of the state police, Steven McCraw.

But details of what took place inside the school have been slow to emerge, and aspects of the early accounts delivered by Gov. Greg Abbott and top state officials, including Mr. McCraw, have had to be amended or completely retracted. The official narrative has shifted from a story of swift response by the local police to one of hesitation and delay that deviated from two decades of training that instructs officers to quickly confront a gunman to save lives, even at a risk to their own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/uvalde-shooting-police-response.html

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Leftist political violence tied to dangerous Democrat rhetoric

This week, a man from California was arrested outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home and charged with attempted murder. He had a gun, a knife, pepper spray, and tools to break into the home — he freely admitted that he was there to kill Kavanaugh. Thanks to brave police officers, the threat was taken care of. But the situation never should have happened in the first place. Unfortunately, this attempted assassination can be traced directly to a longstanding pattern of violent rhetoric from Democrat officials.

Think back to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s incendiary comments about the Supreme Court in 2020. Speaking to a crowd of enraged activists, Schumer poured gasoline on the fire, shouting that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would "pay the price" for refusing to rule the way liberals wanted. "You won’t know what hit you," Schumer raged, in a stunning example of a high-ranking political leader openly threatening members of another branch of government. Similarly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised left-wing activists for channeling "their righteous anger into meaningful action." Joe Biden condoned this rhetoric by refusing to condemn it, illustrating that he’s comfortable with calls to violence from his party’s leadership.

This week, a deranged left-winger came dangerously close to following Schumer’s orders. And it comes in the wake of House Democrats refusing to pass legislation to expand security protection for Supreme Court justices and their families. They know that violence may continue to occur, but don’t want to take tangible steps to stop it. Why? Elected Democrats may not be committing violence themselves, but they are creating an environment that makes it likely to occur.

This is a widespread pattern. Just a few weeks ago, when asked if he condoned protests at the homes of justices, Schumer answered "yes." When asked a similar question, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki refused to condemn the threatening protests, saying "I know that there’s an outrage right now." She was speaking for Joe Biden and refusing to defuse an obviously dangerous situation. Pelosi also dodged the question and refused to condemn the protests – but then again, this is the same person who suggested there should be "uprisings all over the country" in 2018 because she disagreed with President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.

It’s stunning to write this, but let’s be very clear: showing up at someone’s private residence to harass and intimidate them into carrying out your political agenda is unacceptable. Violent rioting is unacceptable. Political violence is unacceptable.

Democrats’ comfort with violent rhetoric and conduct should disappoint you, but it shouldn’t surprise you. Think back further. Remember in 2019 when Rep. Maxine Waters instructed a crowd of angry activists to harass members of the Trump administration if they saw them in person? How about when a crowd of protestors attacked Senator Rand Paul and his wife as he walked the streets of Washington, DC in 2020? Or in 2017, when a Bernie Sanders devotee shot and almost killed Rep. Steve Scalise – along with four others – having been driven to commit unspeakable violence by angry, divisive far-left propaganda?

Every American remembers the devastating riots that took place in the spring and summer of 2020. However, Democrats would like you to forget the role they played in stoking the fires of resentment that led to billions in damage and dozens of deaths. Then-candidate Kamala Harris said that the riots "are not gonna stop…and they should not," shortly before promoting a bail fund for violent rioters.

We all know that there’s a reason we don’t hear much about the left’s pattern of violence: their allies in the mainstream media carry water for them. Who could forget the infamous shot from CNN in which a reporter stood in front of a burning city with a headline describing riots as "fiery, but mostly peaceful?" Just imagine the media coverage if a gunman had shown up at a liberal justice’s house instead of Justice Kavanaugh.

Nothing can conceal the truth: today’s Democrat party is more than comfortable condoning, encouraging, and demanding violence to achieve its political aims. The American people understand this radicalism for what it is — and they won’t forget it come November.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/left-political-violence-dangerous-democrat-rhetoric

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Bye bye Massachusetts

Jeff Jacoby

A FRIEND of mine who lived for many years on the North Shore of Massachusetts relocated to Kentucky in 2018 and has rejoiced ever since that it was among the best decisions he ever made. Compared to the Bay State, he reports, the housing where he lives now is more affordable, the taxes are lower, the winters are milder, the people are friendlier, and the politics are more congenial. Not even the tornadoes that tore up western Kentucky last month have dampened his satisfaction in no longer having to put up with all the things that he found so irksome about life in Massachusetts.

My friend's experience isn't anomalous. Each year, more people leave Massachusetts for other states than move to Massachusetts from other states. According to the Census Bureau, between April 2020 and July 2021, the population of Massachusetts shrank by more than 45,000. Only three other, much more populous, states — California, New York, and Illinois — experienced a greater net outflow of residents.

When it comes to domestic migration — the movement of people within the United States — Massachusetts has been on the losing team for quite a while. Back in 2003, the Donahue Institute at the University of Massachusetts noted with concern that over the previous 12 years, Massachusetts had experienced a net loss of more than 213,000 people (not including foreign immigrants). The out-migration hasn't stopped. While the influx of people moving into Massachusetts from elsewhere in the United States has been steady, the Boston Business Journal observed in 2020, the tide of those moving out has swelled by 24 percent. And where are they going? The numbers fluctuate from year to year, but the Journal identified Florida and New Hampshire as the two "top states draining Massachusetts of the most residents."

Real-world evidence confirms that far more people relocate from Massachusetts to Florida or New Hampshire than the other way around.

Consider U-Haul's rental rates. To rent a 26-foot truck for a one-way move from Boston to Orlando this month will cost you $5,325, but the rate is just $887 for a move from Orlando to Boston. Why the steep disparity? Because the demand for one-way trucks from Boston to Florida is very high, while demand for trucks going in the other direction is very low.

The imbalance shows up even for destinations as close as Massachusetts and New Hampshire. U-Haul's rate to rent a truck from Boston to Manchester is $473. But it's just $208 if you're driving from Manchester to Boston.

To be sure, the choices Americans make about where to live and work are affected by all kinds of individual considerations — school, work, weather, family, cost of living. But the persistent attraction of Florida and New Hampshire also reflects the fact that they offer something Massachusetts doesn't: Could it be that neither imposes an income tax? When the states are ranked by overall tax burden, Florida and New Hampshire are among the least onerous. That can't be said about Massachusetts. Taxes are not the only reason that people pull up stakes and move, of course. But the steady (and costly) flow of Massachusetts residents to the Granite and Sunshine states speaks for itself.

Economist Mark Perry, who analyzes national domestic migration patterns, shows that on a range of economic and political measures, the Top 10 "inbound" states (currently Florida, Texas, Arizona, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada) differ significantly from the Top 10 "outbound" states (California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Louisiana, Maryland, Hawaii, Minnesota, and Michigan). By and large, inbound states have lower taxes, Republican governments, cheaper energy, greater fiscal stability, and a more pro-business environment. Outbound states are more likely to lean the other way.

Admittedly these are only broad patterns, and no state in either category fits the description precisely. And, as noted, every family's decision to move from one state to another is shaped by personal circumstances. But the data keep reinforcing the patterns. "There is empirical evidence that Americans and businesses 'vote with their feet' when they relocate from one state to another," writes Perry. "The evidence suggests that Americans are moving from blue states that are more economically stagnant . . . to fiscally sound red states that are more economically vibrant."

Massachusetts certainly has its charms and advantages; countless Bay Staters would never consider moving anywhere else. But plenty of their neighbors feel differently. Year in, year out, tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents leave for good, and their numbers aren't replenished by newcomers from other states. My friend in Kentucky is happy he left, and he's clearly not alone.

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/25924/bye-bye-bay-state

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Peter Gleeson: Some people are born bad so let the grubs rot in jail

Comment from Australia

There’s an 18-year old man languishing in a jail cell right now, having killed a young couple and their unborn baby while driving a stolen car, high on alcohol and drugs.

Before that fateful killing in Brisbane on Australia Day last year, the perpetrator had a 12-page rapsheet, a juvenile delinquent in every sense of the word.

We can’t name him because he was 17 when the offence of manslaughter was committed. So he will retain his anonymity for a crime that shocked the country.

He will also be out of jail on Australia Day, 2027, having served six years for a crime so heinous – so far reaching and evil – that it has sparked an outpouring of anger and grief. The teen ran a red light and collided with a truck before rolling and hitting the couple as they were out on an afternoon walk.

The families of Kate Leadbetter and Mathew Field gave victim impact statements to the sentencing court that were as raw and emotional as they were shocking.

Kate’s mother Jeannie Thorne said she is now living another life – the life that she never wanted. “I should be in my other life, the one that’s been ripped away,’’ she told the court.

All she wants is her old life back with her daughter, son-in-law and the prospect of being a grandmother to the boy they were going to call Miles.

Instead, they are living every parent’s worst nightmare, having to lay to rest two beautiful young souls, taken in the prime of their lives by a young man who was a menace to society and an accident waiting to happen.

It is little use debating the pros and cons of soft sentencing. On any measure, serving six years in jail for the callous disregard and loss of human life experienced during this tragedy is clearly not in keeping with community expectations.

Everybody knows a similar case in their own backyard.

But Judge Martin Burns has a job to do, noting no sentence would ever be enough for the families, giving the offender a sentence commensurate with what the law allowed.

Here’s what I think. Throw the key away for the little grub. Let him rot in a jail cell forever. Change the law. Mandatory life for such a terrible crime.

This cretin should never enjoy the comforts and luxuries afforded to law-abiding people. His social licence has been revoked. Some people are just born bad. He is one of them.

Mind you, vigilantism is never the answer. Yet, I’ve had several emails in the last few days from men suggesting they’d take justice into their own hands if it was their daughter and son-in-law. It’s an emotive and some would say entirely natural response.

But the big question remains; How do we weigh up the rehabilitation prospects of a young man who clearly has no regard for the law, or for the general wellbeing of people?

Is this person capable of redemption, of being able to go straight and learn from this enormous tragedy?

Or is he to be forever consigned as bad to the bone, a threat to society, a person who will die early, either through his own actions or those of somebody else?

My sense, my fear, is that this guy is evil. As such, when he gets out in 2027, he’ll go back to his old ways.

Hopefully, I’m wrong. However, the real truth in this sad story is that two families, and the many friends of the dead couple, are living a life of sheer hell. For that, there will never be justice.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/peter-gleeson-some-people-are-born-bad-so-let-the-little-grub-rot-in-jail/news-story/cd7bc6d2f1509174f0ee853413c5dae3

Monday, June 13, 2022

Anger as eight Iranian men convicted of theft face having four of their fingers chopped off EACH with guillotine in 'cruel and inhuman punishment'

I am not entirely sure I disapprove of this. Property crime is rare where Sharia law is enforced. A huge contrast with the USA

Eight Iranian men convicted of theft and held outside Tehran are in imminent risk of having their fingers cut off, an NGO warned on Friday, decrying the punishment as 'inhuman'.

The men are being held in the Greater Tehran prison waiting for their fingers on one hand to be amputated, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABC) said in a statement. Three of them had been transferred from Orumiyeh prison in northwestern Iran specifically for the amputation.

It added they had been told that their punishment would be implemented once a guillotine-like device for the purpose was operational in Evin prison in Tehran. On June 8, all eight were summoned for transfer to Evin for the amputation which was postponed for unknown reasons.

In a joint statement with the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), the ABC said it was concerned by 'credible reports' that the device had now been installed in a clinic in Evin and had already been used for at least one amputation in recent days.

'Carrying out such a cruel and inhuman punishment violates the minimum standards of humanity and decency,' said ABC executive director Roya Boroumand.

'The international community can and should react urgently to stop the implementation of these amputations,' she added.

Finger amputations are permitted in the Islamic republic under sharia law, but have been rarely carried out until now.

The ABC said it had collected reports on at least 356 sentences of amputation issued since the Islamic revolution in 1979, but added the real number is believed to be much higher.

If the sentences are carried out, the men will have four fingers of their right hand cut off, according to Iran's penal code.

The concern over their pending punishment comes as rights groups also raise alarm over surging numbers of executions in Iran at a time of protests over price rises.

According to Norway-based Iran Human Rights, at least 168 people were executed by Iran authorities in the first five months of 2022, 50 percent more than in the same period last year.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10904615/Eight-Iranian-thieves-facing-imminent-finger-amputations-despite-human-rights-groups-protests.html

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UK: Trans women cyclists who used to compete as men take first and second place in new 'non-binary' race - leaving young mother in third

An 'inclusive' cycling race that saw male-born trans athletes trounce women competitors has been condemned by critics.

The event on Friday finished with two transgender women in first and second places, with a young mother in third.

Gold in the ThunderCrit race at Herne Hill velodrome in South-East London went to Emily Bridges, a trans cyclist who was barred from a woman's race in March and who had competed in men's events only the month before.

In second place was Lilly Chant who, despite identifying as a woman, is still designated as male on official records.

The tournament's best-performing biological woman, Jo Smith, of Thanet, Kent, won bronze and celebrated with her rivals by posing on the winners' podium with her young daughter.

A photograph quickly spread on social media, sparking fury from female athletes and campaigners.

British Cycling, the governing body that has recently found itself embroiled in the controversy around trans competitors, said the event was independent and it had not been involved.

Sharron Davies, who won a swimming silver at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and has spoken out before on trans athletes, said she was 'very disappointed' at news of the race.

Fiona McAnena, director of sport campaigns at Fair Play For Women, said: 'It's inevitable that if we're going to allow people who have been through male puberty into the category that is supposed to be for females, those people are going to outperform.

'Sport is based on your body, and we have a female category in most sports because male puberty confers such an advantage and it is a lifelong advantage. It cannot be undone.'

In an attempt to devise an 'inclusive' event, the ThunderCrit organisers created two new non-binary races called 'thunder' and 'lightning'.

Its website said: 'Thunder category is for cis men, non-binary people whose physical performance aligns most with cis-men, trans men and women whose physical performance aligns most closely with cis-men.

'Lightning category is for cis-women, non-binary people whose physical performance aligns with cis-women and trans men and women whose physical performance aligns most closely with cis-women.'

Cis – or cisgender – describes a person who still identifies as the gender they were born as. Non-binary refers to people who say they are not solely male or female.

Bridges and Chant competed in the lightning race, despite Bridges being barred by British Cycling from racing against five-times Olympic gold medallist Dame Laura Kenny in March after international sporting bodies claimed she was ineligible.

British Cycling is now reviewing its transgender policy.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10885307/Trans-women-cyclists-second-non-binary-race-leaving-young-mother-third.html

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Want to Do Less Time? A Prison Consultant Might Be Able to Help

Hugo Mejia remembers when his Xanax habit ran off the rails. It was around when his small-time Bitcoin-cash exchange business blew up and he was handling millions of dollars, and the whole thing turned into what federal prosecutors called a money-laundering operation.

Then, one very early morning last winter, it all fell apart. Some 25 federal agents from a joint Homeland Security and I.R.S. task force stormed his house in Ontario, Calif. “They pounced on my home like I was El Chapo,” he said. His aunt and mother were handcuffed, and Mejia was detained in his den by agents who grilled him for hours.

Of course, he hired a lawyer — one who described himself as a cryptocurrency expert. But soon, Mejia discovered that their expensive sessions mostly involved Mejia’s tutoring his own attorney in the complexities of the blockchain. He was already going to plead out and sensed that he was in the grip of an inescapable process, so he fired that lawyer (and the next one) and wound up being represented by a court-appointed attorney.

In the meantime, he started scouring the internet madly, to see what he could learn about his future. “I would scare myself watching videos of jail,” he said. Mejia had entered one of the Kubler-Rossian periods of the prison-bound, self-terrorism. But then Mejia stumbled on a video of a guy named Justin Paperny, himself a former financial criminal, who was all over YouTube dispensing “so you’re going to prison” advice in a confident peppy patter, answering questions newly charged defendants might not even think to ask. Mejia loved this guy and spent hours watching his videos. “It would kind of calm my anxiety,” he said. The big fears started to seem less terrifying. He learned that he would most likely be going to a low-security prison, where “violence is not even common, let alone rape or anything like that.”

Justin Paperny leads White Collar Advice, a firm of 12 convicted felons, each with their own consulting specialty based on where they served time and their own sentencing experiences. After a deep dive into Paperny’s YouTube lessons, Mejia knew he had to hire him. This was 21st-century America, and this was precisely what he needed: a prison consultant.

Maybe you’ve heard of these consultants recently. After a prominent felon is sentenced, a spate of stories often appear about these backstage fixers for the wealthy, consultants who can help get a client into prisons that one might prefer — say, a prison that has superior schooling or CrossFit-level gyms or lenient furlough policies or better-paying jobs or other refined specialties. The federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., for example, is also known as “federal Jewish heaven” because of its good kosher food (decent gefilte fish, they say, and the rugelach’s not bad). When those Varsity Blues parents were busted for paying backdoor operatives to engineer their kids’ college admissions, it was also reported that many hired prison consultants to game out the aftermath.

Paperny’s business is a natural market outgrowth of a continuing and profound shift in America’s judicial system. Almost everyone facing charges is forced to plead guilty (or face an angry prosecutor who will take you to trial). In 2021, 98.3 percent of federal cases ended up as plea bargains. It’s arguable that in our era of procedural dramas and endless “Law & Order” reruns, speedy and public trials are more common on television than in real-life courthouses. What people like Mejia have to deal with as they await sentencing is a lot of logistics.

The idea of a prison consultant might conjure an image of an insider broker or fixer, but they’re really more like an SAT tutor — someone who understands test logic and the nuances of unwritten rules. Yet prison consulting also involves dealing with a desolate human being who has lost almost everything — friends, family, money, reputation — and done it in such a way that no one gives a damn. So they’re also a paid-for best friend, plying their clients with Tony Robbins-style motivational insights, occasionally mixed with powerful sessions about the nature of guilt and shame.

On television, the journey to prison is nearly instantaneous: a jump cut to a slamming cell door. But in the real world, it’s a set of steps, routine bureaucratic actions that involve interviews, numerous forms to complete and dates with officials. A lawyer is your legal guide to staying out of prison, but once that becomes inevitable, a prison consultant is there to chaperone you through the bureaucracies that will eventually land you in your new home, easing your entry into incarceration — and sometimes even returning you to the outside, utterly changed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/magazine/prison-consultants-fixers.html

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‘What Is a Woman’ Exposes Disturbing Transgender Agenda

Matt Walsh and The Daily Wire's "What Is a Woman?" documentary:

“I’ve heard people say that there are no differences between male and female. Those people are idiots.”

Thus begins Daily Wire host Matt Walsh’s new “What Is a Woman?” documentary, which highlights the left’s ever-growing reluctance and inability to define gender. Think that defining the qualities of men and women is easy for most people today? Think again.

While some may struggle to “figure out” women, Walsh identifies that Western culture’s obsession with gender identity has paralyzed people from defining what a woman is. As the documentary progresses, we see further evidence that the transgender narrative has not only rejected the definitions of “man” and “woman” as insensitive and transphobic, but has dismantled the very concept of universal truth and reality.

Fittingly released on the first day of Pride Month, Walsh’s documentary is a thought-provoking, humorous, yet often emotional and disturbing film that illuminates the contradictory and dangerous narrative of the transgender agenda.

In the documentary, Walsh interviews “the experts,” such as “gender-affirming” therapists, sex-change surgeons, and gender ideology professors (most of whom are transgender themselves or members of the LGBTQ+ community), asking them, “What is a woman?”

The majority of responders say they have no idea how to define womanhood or refuse to answer the question, calling it bigoted and pointless. Not only are they unable to provide a simple definition of a woman, but they find the entire concept offensive and transphobic.

The documentary begins on a humorous note, as Walsh asks a family therapist, “How do I know if I’m a woman? I mean, I like scented candles and I watch ‘Sex and the City.’”

“What a great question!” the therapist (who has every indication of being a woman) says, nodding and smiling encouragingly.

“So, what is a woman?” Walsh asks. A disconcerted look enters the counselor’s eye: “Great question! But I’m not a woman, so I can’t really answer that.”

“I thought therapy would make me less confused,” Walsh said. Us too, Matt.

So, he takes to the streets to ask the common American if they can solve this conundrum. Surprisingly, most of the interviewees responded to the “What is a woman?” question with a blank stare and nervous laughter. Most said it couldn’t be defined and said they would accept Walsh as a woman if that’s what he believed he was.

Especially entertaining is Walsh’s trip to the Women’s March—surely they’ll know what a woman is if they’re marching for them, right? But no, the marching women either ignored Walsh or yelled, “Why are you here?”—insinuating that he was a man (without even asking his gender identity, the audacity!) and that a man had no right to attend a women’s march. “How can you have a women’s march if you don’t know what a woman is?” he asked. Touch�.

What is the female gender, according to the transgender community? Walsh spoke with a transgender surgeon who differentiated between sex and gender, saying that sex-change surgery is “altering the physical characteristics of an individual to fit better with a gender identity that is female.”

In that case, what is a woman, according to this surgeon? “A woman is a combination of your physical attributes, what you’re showing to the world and the gender clues you give, and hopefully those match your gender identity.”

As if the issue couldn’t get any more confusing, Walsh speaks with a pediatrician and professor who has worked in Planned Parenthood and advocates for “gender and reproductive justice.” She provides “gender affirmation care,” saying that a good doctor is there to listen to the patient and act on what they’re expressing.

Walsh asked whether it was ethical for minors to be making life-altering decisions such as taking puberty blockers or opposite sex hormones, since children often have a fantastical, unrealistic interpretation of reality, such as believing in Santa Claus.

“Well, he’s real to them,” the pediatrician said. “But the fact that Santa exists isn’t true,” Walsh countered. “Whose truth are you talking about? It’s very real to the child,” the pediatrician responded.

The documentary makes it clear that Americans can no longer ignore the transgender movement. It is permeating every aspect of society, politics, and education and now targets children as young as preschoolers.

The push for children to define their own realities and irreversibly change their bodies is perhaps what is most disturbing about the transgender agenda. In what other sphere of medicine do patients, especially young children, prescribe both their malady and remedy to the affirmation and acceptance of a counselor or physician? As clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson said to Walsh, “It’s not my job to affirm as a therapist, you come to see me because there’s something wrong.

The fact that the transgender agenda is increasingly targeting young children is what psychiatrist Miriam Grossman finds most disturbing. Grossman explains to Walsh the history of the transgender and sex-ed movement and highlights the unethical, traumatic techniques and flawed studies that have shaped it over the years. “It’s unspeakable what these people have done to our children,” she says.

Not only is the transgender movement harming women’s sports, exposing children to inappropriate material, and encouraging them to reject science and universal truth, it is also irreparably damaging children’s bodies and destroying their futures.

The most moving and persuasive interview occurred with Scott Newgent, a biological female who transitioned to a male as an adult but passionately argues against the rise in gender surgery among children and the subjectivity of gender. “I’m a biological woman that medically transitioned to appear like a man through synthetic hormones and surgery,” Newgent said. “I will never be a man. Is it transphobic for me to tell the truth?”

Newgent describes the details and horrific side effects of gender-reassignment surgery that are so conveniently hidden from public discourse. Having undergone multiple surgeries, illnesses, and painful, permanent side effects, Newgent told Walsh, “Nobody would help me, including the doctor who did this to me, because I lost my insurance. I probably won’t live very long.”

Newgent said the possible risks and side effects were never discussed when considering gender-reassignment surgery, and warns parents and anyone considering sex-change surgery that “the truth is that medical transition is experimental.”

Revealing an arm mutilated from skin grafts, Newgent broke down in tears on camera, exclaiming in horror that minor children are regularly operated on without any discussion of the risks and permanence of the surgery, or any discussion as to whether children should ethically be allowed or able to consent to such procedures.

“We’re butchering a generation of children because no one’s willing to talk about anything,” Newgent said. “This is wrong on so many levels. Kids aren’t able to consent.”

The transgender movement is ultimately an attack on scientific fact, the concept of reality, and the meaning of language. No longer are words allowed to mean one thing. No longer is the word “truth” socially acceptable, because who are we to deny “your reality” or “your truth”?

A professor of women (whatever those are, anyway), gender, and sexuality responded to Walsh’s statement that he was seeking the truth with, “I’m really uncomfortable with that language of ‘getting to the truth’ because it sounds deeply transphobic to me. The word ‘truth’ is condescending and rude.”

Sensing that this concept is a purely Western phenomenon, Walsh heads to Nairobi to immerse himself in the customs of a local tribe. In this culture, gender norms and roles are crucial to the survival of the tribe. The men protect and provide, and the women maintain the home and nurture the children. It’s an honor to be a man or a woman in this tribe, and every member knows their distinct duties and privileges.

A group of men laugh in disbelief when Walsh asks what they would do if a man wanted to look and act like a woman—the entire concept is ridiculous and unheard of. “The Maasai people don’t think much about gender,” Walsh observes on the way back home to America, “but they have a firm sense of their identity.”

Instead of solving gender dysphoria and body image discomfort, Americans’ infatuation with identity has only created greater societal instability and refused to answer the most foundational of questions. “What Is a Woman?” succeeds in highlighting the inconsistencies and dangerous agenda of the transgender movement.

Walsh’s angle is particularly effective, as he gives the majority of the screentime to pro-trans activists and medical professionals. The lack of data or persuasive argument for the trans community isn’t the producers’ fault, the “experts” simply couldn’t provide any. Walsh’s sarcastic, borderline dark sense of humor in the delightfully ridiculous street interviews breaks up the more serious, unsettling information and gives a sense of hope and common sense to the insanity that’s been normalized.

Bold, humorous, thought-provoking, and undeniably chilling, “What Is a Woman?” equips its audience to better face the ever-growing reality of the transgender agenda and its far-reaching effects through civil discourse, empathy, and a firm grasp of truth, science, and reality.

At the end of the film, it’s Walsh’s wife who’s the true MVP. “Hey honey, what’s a woman?” Walsh asks. “An adult human female,” she responds.

Of course, who knew it could be that simple?

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/03/daily-wire-and-matt-walshs-what-is-a-woman-documentary-sheds-light-on-disturbing-transgender-agenda

America's largest newspaper chain Gannett orders USA Today and other publications to roll back op-eds after 'repelling readers' with biased articles

The worm is beginning to turn

America's largest newspaper chain Gannett has instructed its newsrooms to scale back opinion pieces which are 'repelling readers' who do not want to be told what to do.

The newspaper chain owns the USA Today network which takes in hundreds of local newspapers in almost every state across the country.

At a recent editors committee meeting in April, editors said in a presentation: 'Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.

'They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues. 'They perceive us as having a biased agenda,' according to The Washington Post.

Now, the company will do-away with opinion pieces almost entirely and they will also not allow any endorsement of politicians aside from in local races. They will no longer endorse presidential candidates, or candidates in House and Senate races. The only elections they will now cover will be local.

'Today’s contemporary audiences frequently are unable to distinguish between objective news reporting and Opinion content.

'In the old days, content appearing on print pages that were clearly labeled helped alleviate those concerns, along with a society that possessed a higher news literacy.

'But in today’s digital/social environment, we as an industry have been challenged to make these differences clear,' the editors said in an earlier advisory from 2018.

The editors said they had been losing reader subscriptions as a result of their perceived bias.

Readers this week reacted to the news by telling the media company to hire 'writers that aren't left-wing activists.'

Americans' faith in the media has nose-dived in recent years thanks largely to the widely left-wing bias of many national publications and news networks.

The lowest point on record was in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected. Many felt the media was biased against Trump from the beginning.

In 2021, faith in the media dipped to the second lowest point, with only 36 percent of people saying they had a fair amount of trust in journalists.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10904853/Gannett-tells-USA-Today-roll-biased-articles-repelling-readers.html

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It's So Bad Even Californians Have Had It: LA DA Loses Appeal After Not Enforcing Law

The signs continue to grow that Californians have had enough of “progressive” district attorneys’ soft-on-crime policies as the futures of the district attorneys of Los Angeles and San Francisco look very uncertain.

On Thursday, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Los Angeles DA George Gascon cannot refuse to charge criminals under the state’s three-strikes law, Fox News reported.

After Gascon took office in December 2020, he implemented a series of what he characterized as reforms designed to end “mass incarceration.”

“The measures included barring deputy DAs from prosecuting strikes, special circumstances and sentencing enhancements,” according to Fox.

The Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County responded by suing Gascon that same month to stop him from forcing them to break the law.

“While an elected District Attorney has wide discretion in determining what charges to pursue in an individual case, that discretion does not authorize him or her to violate the law or to direct attorneys representing the district attorney’s office to violate the law,” Michele Hanisee, president of the ADDA, said in a December 2020 news release announcing the suit.

Fox reported, “California’s Three Strike Law was enacted in 1994 after voters approved Proposition 184 by an overwhelming majority.”

The law mandated at least a 25 years in prison to a life sentence for those convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, referred to as “strikes.”

A California appeals court sided with the ADDA on Thursday.

“On the merits, we conclude the voters and the Legislature created a duty, enforceable in mandamus, that requires prosecutors to plead prior serious or violent felony convictions to ensure the alternative sentencing scheme created by the three strikes law applies to repeat offenders,” the ruling said.

“The district attorney overstates his authority. He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion,” the judges added.

Eric Siddall, vice president of the ADDA, celebrated the ruling, tweeting: “Today, the judiciary affirmed the rule of law. Gasc�n’s authority is not absolute. He must follow the rules.

“While we are heartened by the Court’s ruling, we continue to be disappointed that LA’s chief prosecutor forced us to take him to court to stop him from breaking the law.”

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/bad-even-californians-la-da-loses-appeal-not-enforcing-law-san-francisco-da-faces-recall

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San Francisco too: Voters oust DA Chesa Boudin over soft-on-crime policies

Fed-up San Francisco voters ousted their progressive district attorney on Tuesday in a recall election that rejected his soft-on-crime policies following surges in shameless shoplifting, car break-ins and rampant, open-air drug dealing.

The recall effort against Chesa Boudin, a former public defender and the son of convicted Weather Underground terrorists, was supported by 61% of voters in early returns, according to NBC.

Tuesday’s recall election, Proposition H on the ballot, could prove a bellwether of voter sentiment across the US, including in New York City, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced widespread criticism since enacting a slew of progressive policies after taking office in January.

“Around the country, we have seen the rise of the so-called progressive DAs,” Richie Greenberg, a former Republican mayoral candidate and spokesman for the recall effort, told The Post before Tuesday’s vote.

“We here in San Francisco have lived it and we don’t want to see the great city of New York fall in the way that San Francisco has.”

New York does not have recall elections but its governor is empowered to remove district attorneys who fail to do their jobs.

Boudin’s loss followed February’s recalls of three San Francisco school members amid outrage over their decision to spend time renaming one-third of the city’s schools instead of re-opening classrooms closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mayor London Breed — who in December announced a crackdown in which cops would be “less tolerant of all the bulls–t that has destroyed our city” — will name Boudin’s replacement until a special election is held in November.

The selection process could be complicated, however, by another ballot measure, Proposition C, that, if passed, would bar Breed’s pick from running in the special election, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Boudin, 41, was narrowly elected in 2019 amid a nationwide wave of victories by progressive DA candidates who vowed to reform a criminal justice system they called historically racist and unfair.

But residents of ultra-liberal San Francisco, population 815,000, soon soured on Boudin’s vision of “radical change to how we envision justice,” which included prohibitions on seeking cash bail, prosecuting juveniles as adults and seeking tougher sentences under California’s anti-gang or “three strikes” laws.

Viral videos have revealed shoplifters running rampant during smash-and-grab thefts at high-end stores, with city police Lt. Tracy McCray lamenting to Fox News last year that “we can have a greatest hits compilation of people just walking in and cleaning out the store shelves.”

Offenses against Asian-Americans also proliferated amid the pandemic, with lifelong resident Henry Wong, 74, who worked for the late comedian Robing Williams saying that people “spit on me on elevators, on the streets” and calling Boudin “the worst district attorney the city has ever had.”

“These are crimes,” Wong told the Washington Post. “And he doesn’t care. It’s just so easy to break the law.”

The latest official police statistics show that overall crime in the city is up nearly 8 percent this year, with a 20 percent surge in larcenies, as well as spikes in homicides, rapes and assaults.

Most polls conducted in the run-up to Tuesday’s election indicated that voters were poised to get rid of Boudin by a wide margin, with a Friday survey published by the San Francisco Examiner showing 56% in favor of removing him.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/08/san-francisco-da-chesa-boudin-ousted-over-soft-on-crime-policies/

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The man taking on the anti-free-speech left

For the anti-free-speech left, the most dangerous man in America today is Greg Lukianoff. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for the past 16 years, the free-speech attorney has now decided to guide the organization, previously focused on free-speech battles within academia, into the broader territory of free-speech battles across the nation. FIRE has been rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Lukianoff intends to take it into space once occupied by free-speech stalwarts like the ACLU. He has a massive new investment from supporters to the tune of $75 million.

Lukianoff is part of a generation of new Gen X leaders for the conservative movement in America, though he thinks of himself less as a conservative and more as a classical liberal. The arrival of this new broadened agenda is something long planned but now accelerated.

“People have been approaching and asking since day one, the whole time we faced pressure to expand beyond campus,” Lukianoff said in an exclusive interview with The Spectator. “We were thinking about expanding in 2024, but 2020 was such a bad year for freedom of speech, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

This degradation of free speech in America, thanks to the pandemic and the increasing power of bureaucratic actors, led FIRE to adopt an approach that no longer pretends the anti-speech efforts of the college kangaroo court system are confined to the campus.

“There should be a thumb on the scale on not firing people over a political view or ruining their lives over a drunken tweet,” Lukianoff said, while admitting: “The good news is that we’ve been dealing with an extra-constitutional situation on campus for a long time, but taking on the administrative state is going to be a real challenge.”

The tension FIRE will need to navigate is that both the left and right seem inclined in recent years to deploy the power of government to effect their ends — including eradicating protections against the meddling of bureaucrats in order to achieve a government-mandated arrangement of balance.

“We don’t want the heavy hand of government coming in,” Lukianoff said. “What we’d like to do is encourage a culture where we get back to a point where firing someone for a political view is a drastic option. The state of free speech law is pretty good — B+ — but culturally, we are not where we need to be.”

FIRE’s efforts will be focused on communication and rebuilding the value of free speech as central and bipartisan. Lukianoff wants to address issues like qualified immunity and push back against the devaluation of free speech by online social media entities in creative ways: “To remind people of the old idioms, and good small-d democratic values.”

Yet much of this effort may be a last stand for pluralism at a moment when it seems cast aside by right and left. “If you’re deciding you’re going to fire people for saying heterodox or partisan things, you’re going to hurt yourself, and deny yourself people with skill,” Lukianoff said. Citing the situation with Georgetown professor Ilya Shapiro, he commented, “That was an insane case but it was not at all atypical… When everyone is their Twitter avatar 24 hours a day, it’s not good. We are all on stage all the time, when ‘The Purifiers’ will go after you.”

FIRE is looking for help within this space, not just in terms of donor support, but talent and staff from those who are dedicated to the cause of free speech, and plaintiffs who will help them make the case within court systems and battles worth fighting within HR departments and corporate America. Not every battle will be one in which they can engage, Lukianoff warns, but they will choose to weigh in as much as possible on the side of those fighting for their right to speak freely.

“Major parts of the left don’t understand that without free speech, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement, would all be a bird without wings,” Lukianoff said. He intends to remind them.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/the-man-taking-on-the-anti-free-speech-left/

Friday, June 10, 2022

Eating meat is healthier than going vegan: The provocative message in a book which argues much of the so-called evidence supporting a plant-based diet should be taken with a pinch of salt

Jayne Buxton’s son was recently working in a Central London delicatessen. A customer who had ordered a coconut-milk latte announced that she used to be a vegan. ‘It was the best diet,’ she said. ‘I felt so great on it.’

Buxton’s son asked why she was no longer vegan. ‘Oh, well my hair and nails started to fall out,’ came the reply, ‘so I had to stop.’ He asked whether this might be a sign that the diet wasn’t particularly healthy after all. ‘Oh no,’ insisted the woman. ‘It’s a really, really healthy diet. I felt incredible.’

As an example of the level at which much of the debate on this subject is conducted, it’s hard to beat. Extremes rule, and nuance can sling its hook.

The direction of travel is clear. In October 2019, the mayors of 14 cities around the world (including London’s Sadiq Khan) committed their citizens to the near-vegan Planetary Health Diet. The students of three UK universities have banned beef from their campus bars and shops. At least one company has forbidden staff to claim meals containing meat on their expenses.

Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, thinks omnivores should be treated like smokers: ‘If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant’. Meat has been taken off the menu at the Golden Globe Awards, and Joaquin Phoenix urged the world to go vegan in his 2020 Oscar acceptance speech.

Of course, as soon as you hear an actor pontificating on something you know the truth has to be far more complicated than they make out. (It’s called the Rule of Cumberbatch.) Thankfully, Jayne Buxton is here to fill us in on some of the complexities.

For a start, is meat really as bad for you as its critics claim? Buxton devotes many pages to studies on heart disease and cancer, finding the ‘evidence’ that these conditions can be linked to meat is questionable at best. Much of this analysis is, by its nature, fairly complex. But for simplicity’s sake, she also quotes a former director of medical research for the Royal Navy: ‘For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life... We’ve been eating meat since before we became humans.’

And can plants on their own supply all the nutrients we need? Some experts talk of ‘end-stage veganism’, where years of the diet lead to muscle wasting, skin conditions and other disorders.

Vegans suffer hip fractures at more than twice the rate of omnivores — indeed, the pop star Miley Cyrus cited hip pain as one of the reasons she went back to eating fish and meat, along with the feeling that she was ‘running on empty’.

Her ex-husband, the actor Liam Hemsworth, also changed his vegan diet after his morning smoothies, which included five handfuls of spinach, ‘almost certainly’ gave him kidney stones.

Then there’s the argument that animal farming is bad for the environment. Again, Buxton’s forensic examination of the evidence raises questions. The 2020 documentary Apocalypse Cow claimed that livestock farming is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector. This simply isn’t true — in the U.S., for instance, the respective figures are 3.9 per cent and 28 per cent of the total.

As I say, a lot of this book is number-heavy. But even if the details might occasionally fog your brain, Buxton is brilliant at reminding us of some basic statistical truths, ones that are usually forgotten these days. For instance, you shouldn’t confuse ‘correlation’ with ‘causation’ — just because two things happen at the same time, it doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.

If you plot the number of people who drowned in swimming pools between 1999 and 2009, the rise and fall almost perfectly matches the number of films in which Nicolas Cage appeared each year.

That is clearly a coincidence. Yet when there looks like there could be a link, we’re often too ready to believe it. If a study finds that red meat is associated with higher rates of cancer, ‘how can we be sure it’s the red meat that’s at fault, and not the bun, fries and cola consumed alongside it, or the lifestyles of the people who eat more meat?’

Another crucial mistake is focusing on relative rather than absolute risks. ‘Eating x,’ screams a headline, ‘increases your risk of cancer by 100 per cent.’ You’re terrified, and you start avoiding x. Yet your risk might just have gone from one in a million to two in a million. Still so scared?

Why are some people convinced that veganism is the only way to save themselves and the planet? The young have always loved simplistic slogans that make them feel superior, and Buxton mentions the influence of Greta Thunberg. But she also points out that three-quarters of the world’s vegans are women in the U.S., who are more likely to prioritise weight and appearance over health.

Fear of causing offence, as ever in the modern world, constrains what experts are willing to say. Buxton cites examples of media doctors refusing to criticise veganism, but muttering reminders about the need to take vitamin and other supplements. In other words, they’re admitting that a vegan diet on its own is not enough. Not unless you’ve got a very big plate — for a teenage girl to get her recommended daily intake of iron, for example, she would need to eat 2kg of beetroot.

It’s refreshing to read a book which recognises that life is complicated. Buxton clearly isn’t saying that fruit and veg are bad for you, and she thinks that ‘factory farming is abhorrent’. But equally, she knows that for the entire world population to stop eating meat tomorrow would be absurd.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-10901489/Eating-meat-healthier-going-vegan.html

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A woman fails to have it all -- and suffers

Sheryl Sandberg released her battle-cry of a book, Lean In, nine years ago – in which she urged women to lean in to their careers

And now that Sandberg has announced that she’s quit her job as the number two at Facebook (now Meta), I have a few thoughts about the pressure she heaped on women to create a “better world”.

For one thing, it helped leave some of us depressed and medicated.

At the time of Sandberg’s book’s launch, I’d been “leaning in” to work while trying to raise my children for seven years – picture one of those clown heads at a circus side show, swivelling left and right and missing the balls being thrown at it at every turn, but with a soundtrack of howling babies. Rather than “underestimate [my] own abilities”, as Sandberg cautioned, I kept my foot “on the gas pedal”.

And I had a lot more help than many. It’s not just that I’m white and middle class, with the privileges that come with those realities. I was also born tightly wound and raised by a dad with only intermittent work and a mum who never had the luxury of having a job she actually liked. This gave me a lifelong fear of failure and a burning desire for meaningful work.

So, when I was experiencing the abdominal cramps that I knew would soon lead to a miscarriage early in a pregnancy many years ago, I carried on with that day’s assignment with a smile.

This is the price you just had to pay, I’d say to myself, for your kids to know that women’s careers are just as important as men’s careers.

When my kids would tell me, with downcast eyes, that I’d forgotten to attend another school event, I’d feel my heart in my throat, but also, secretly, the internal glow of queasy righteousness. This is the price you had to pay, I’d say to myself – backed by Sandberg’s lauded “movement” – for your kids to know that women’s careers matter as much as men’s.

Sometimes, this righteousness turned to anger – sometimes directed at my children – as I struggled with my fear about the loss of career, the meaning and status it provided, and my guilt over how often I turned my kids away.

They’re the sort of gut-punch experiences that have driven a lot of women I know to feel depressed.

Recently, a friend’s six-year-old declared that when she becomes a mother, “I’ll pay attention to my kids”. “That really hurt,” says my friend, who is writing a book after many years of rejection. “I fantasise about a life where I can just drink wine and watch cat videos, which is probably exactly what I was doing before I went on this Sheryl Sandberg-esque journey.”

Another woman I know quit her much-cherished job as a designer not long after she lashed out at one of her kids.

“I smacked her out of complete frustration,” she says of the incident, which happened in the car in the chaotic morning rush. “I hit her hard. I hit her with intention. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Now, she’s on antidepressant medication. “I should have gone on it way sooner,” she says. “We’re [expected to be] superhuman and we don’t need help, we can do it all ... [and] be like the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world.”

They’re moments that are driving more women to lean out – and find greater happiness in doing so.

“They’re having these conversations with themselves; what would be their biggest regrets on their deathbed?” says Kirsty Levin, creator of The Parents Village. “That they haven’t hit that C-level on their career, or that they don’t have a great relationship with their family?”

“They’re having these conversations with themselves; what would be their biggest regrets on their deathbed? That they haven’t hit that C-level on their career, or that they don’t have a great relationship with their family?”

Leaning out won’t be the answer for all women – and it’s an unimaginable luxury for many – but leaning in is a goal with flawed assumptions: that women gaining power and wealth is the only factor needed for a “better world”, and that professional productivity is the ultimate sign of success. (Sandberg might be a billionaire, but she’s also been labelled the Typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism for her role in helping Facebook profit from monitoring its users.)

My designer friend who has leaned out is not only calmer than ever and present for her children, but on her way to reinvigorating her career in a more joyous, and sane, form. “For the first time in 10 years, I actually can breathe,” she says.

I love my career and find more meaning in it than I ever have. But I’ve been inspired by a different manifesto.

A life of meaning is not synonymous with living an achievement-oriented existence focused on “usefulness”, wrote Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who wrote the 1946 book, Man’s Search For Meaning. Rather, it is love that is “the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire... The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

As for Sandberg? She’s announced she’s moving into philanthropy.

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/gender/we-tried-to-lean-in-it-left-some-of-us-medicated-and-depressed-20220609-p5asfm.html

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We Urge Conservatives To Stand Against LGBTQI+ Pride Month

George Rasley

June has been declared LGBTQI+ “Pride Month” by the Biden administration and various arms of the homosexual and transgender lobby and their supporters in Big Business and academia. That’s "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex" for those not already indoctrinated in woke-speak.

As Ben Shapiro explained in a column for American Family News, “…we are told by the White House that we must ignore the internal contradictions of Left-wing sexual ideology, and simply pretend the incoherence away. We are told that we ought to stand for women's rights by the same people who insist that 'Lia' Thomas is a woman; we are told that one need not be a biological female to be a lesbian; we are told that biology dictates behavior, but that biology must never be used as an identifier. None of this makes one whit of sense. But we ought to be proud of it, because after all, it liberates us to celebrate our inner sense of authenticity, free of society's strictures.”

From that perspective, what “Pride Month” is really all about is normalizing the abnormal and grooming your children to become more willing victims of the predatory promoters of deviance – and your government is using your tax dollars to advance this destructive agenda.

Our friend Sara Carter reports, Biden’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it will change interpretation of Title IX prohibitions on discrimination based on sex “to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The Biden Administration rule ties billions of dollars in federal education funding to such policies. The change means “schools that accept any kind of funding, including receiving FAFSA or Pell grants or students who receive federally subsidized school lunch funding, will be subject to the new Title IX LGBT interpretation” reports The Center Square.

In a statement, the USDA stated “As a result, state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from FNS must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.”

“Those organizations must also update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”

This will bring the schools of more than a dozen states with prohibitions against men participating in women’s sports into conflict with the federal government and provide an opportunity for litigation which will allow an unelected federal judge to overturn those laws passed by elected state legislatures.

And the result of this society-wide promotion of sexual deviance is a tidal wave of sexual confusion among our children.

As our friend Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association, explained in a recent email to supporters, a February Gallup poll found that 7.1% of Americans now identify as LGBTQ – a 100% increase over 2012 numbers and a 26% increase over 2021!

The general consensus among experts is that this jump among all Americans is being driven by a sharp increase among younger people. For example, last year George Barna found that among those ages 18-24, an astounding 39% self-identified as LGBTQ.

Here is the part that is tragically fascinating. Rather than claiming to be "born that way," many of these young people – for a variety of reasons – are choosing to identify as LGBTQ. In other words, identifying as LGBTQ is seen as a popular choice as much as piercings and skinny jeans.

In a recent article in World magazine, Joseph Backholm of the Family Research Council wrote this:

It is not a coincidence that the rise in LGBT identity has corresponded with the relentless promotion of LGBT characters and storylines in entertainment. Much of the world now conducts a monthlong, annual celebration of all things LGBT. … For many young people, straight is boring and the natural desire to be special is exceeded only by the ease with which one can become special through a simple declaration.
In the face of this concerted effort to normalize the abnormal conservatives must take a strong stand against what amounts to an open conspiracy to destroy our children by making them emotional cripples.

We urge conservatives to speak out should any church, organization or club in which you are involved promotes June as LGBTQI+ “Pride Month.” If you see a “Pride” commercial, change the channel, and if a corporation or business promotes “Pride Month” make a point of letting the management know you don’t patronize businesses or buy products from businesses that promote the destruction of children. And finally, call your Senators and Representative (1-866-220-0044) and tell them you demand that the federal government stop funding this campaign to normalize the abnormal by promoting sexual confusion among our children.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/we-urge-conservatives-to-stand-against-lgbtqi-pride-month

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Pro-Abortion Rioters Target Churches in Hate Attacks

Lots of people are attacking churches in the wake of Roe v Wade possibly being overturned by the United States Supreme Court. The thought of some states not allowing unborn baby murder has sent shockwaves through pro-abortion groups.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights took to the streets during an organized riot on Mother’s Day. This was in response to a leaked draft report by the Supreme Court showing that there may be enough votes to overturn Roe v Wade.

The abortion group’s website shows their calculated plans to target churches.

“Several cities will be hosting protests outside of prominent churches in their towns, these can look like a group of people holding signs wearing Handmaids Tale outfits, passing out flyers outside to church goers or doing a die-in,” their website states.

The riot grew in New York City outside the St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They then proceeded to call churches “a symbol for the enslavement of women.”

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and other pro-abortion groups are focusing on Catholics and Christians in their places of worship as tensions rise. The groups are focusing on putting extreme pressure on the Supreme Court justices to change their votes to keep Roe v Wade. They themselves say that they want to create as much unrest as possible in an attempt to get their way.

Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights says its goal is “to create a situation where those who run this society have to fear the loss of legitimacy if they go forward with revoking abortion rights.”

“Through Rising Up 4 Abortion Rights together on the campuses, in the streets, in the arts and sciences, and everywhere else, we aim to create such political protest and resistance across this country that Supreme Court does not feel they can get away with taking away abortion rights.”

https://rightwingnewshour.com/pro-abortion-rioters-target-churches-in-hate-attacks/?utm_source=RNH%20BS3%20PIB%200522

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Why men kill themselves

Bettina Arndt

Over twenty years ago, federal member of parliament Greg Wilton took his own life. The tragedy was the culmination of a series of events which highlight how poorly we deal with vulnerable men. Three weeks earlier, Wilton had been found “in a distressed state” with his children in a car in the national park, apparently rigging a hose to the exhaust. It was widely reported as an attempted murder-suicide.

He spent time in psychiatric care, but with his Labor colleagues maneuvering to force him out of parliament and relentless hounding from the press, it wasn’t long before he tried again. This time he succeeded. On June 14, 2000, the 44-year was found dead in his car, with the exhaust hose attached.

A few years earlier Wilton had given a speech to parliament pointing out that group most likely to commit suicide in this country were men like him – adult males struggling with marital separation. He mentioned extensive research that had emerged over previous years showing “men kill themselves due to an inability to cope with life events such as relationship breakups of the kind I myself have suffered.”

In the two decades since then, that research has piled up. The case is now overwhelming that men facing relationship breakdown should be a key target of Australia’s suicide prevention policies.

There’s no way our health bureaucrats are going to let that happen. The March 2022 budget allocated $2.1 billion to services for women and girls and just $1 million to “improve long term health outcomes” for men and boys. Isn’t that extraordinary? Somehow females are seen as deserving of 2000 times more investment in their health than men, despite their more robust health resulting in four extra years of life expectancy.

What a tribute to the mighty efforts of our feminist health bureaucracy which for decades has strenuously ignored the enormous elephant sitting in their room - namely, the ever-increasing male suicide rate wiping out so many younger adult males.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for people aged 25-44. Male vulnerability is at the heart of the problem. Look at these statistics:

· Men account for 3 in 4 of the lives lost to suicide.

· 7 of the 9 people who kill themselves every day are male.

· There have always been more male than female suicides.

· Over the past ten years males have become even more at risk.

· The male suicide rate is twice the annual road toll.

Men wiping themselves out is a hugely important health issue – yet there’s a very good reason why our politicians and feminist bureaucrats don’t want to go there. As Greg Wilton pointed out, the evidence is piling up that a key reason many of these young men are at risk is they are casualties of family breakup.

The consequent minefield that hits these men, who are frequently fathers, often proves unbearable. Most face some combination of stressful legal battles, false accusations, crippling child support payments; financial ruin and most importantly, the loss of their children.

Marty Grant could have been one such casualty. He had it all planned. The tough young farmer from the West Australian wheat belt had the wire around his neck.

The other end was tied to a tree and the car ready to surge into motion. But he stopped himself. “I realized I couldn’t do it to my family and friends.” Marty pulled back, drove himself home, packed a bag and set off to seek help from the local nurse.

I wrote about Marty many years ago in an article on bush suicide for the Australian Women’s Weekly, covering all the stresses these farmers were going through, including crippling drought, dropping commodity prices, succession problems. But it took some doing to persuade the magazine editors to let me tackle the major suicide research issue emerging at that time – family breakdown. It was the loss of his loved ones which pushed Marty over the edge. His partner took off because she didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife, and then the son from a previous relationship – a child Marty had cared for a decade as a single parent - went off to live with his mum. Marty’s family disappeared.

This was the type of story highlighted in research published around that time by the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University which found relationship breakdown to be the main trigger for suicide, with male risk four times that of females.

According to the researchers Drs Chris Cantor and Pierre Baume, men are most vulnerable in the period immediately after separation – with separation from children a major source of their despair.

That’s a red flag, crying out for suicide prevention intervention. Just think what usually happens when we discover one of these trigger points. Like mothers at risk of suicide due to post-partum depression. When that first made the news, support groups got to work, government funding started pouring in, and now prevention programs are everywhere.

Currently the federal government is targeting anorexic girls. Wham, the latest suicide funding promised $20 million for eating disorder treatment services. Then there’s indigenous suicide. Righty-o. They’ve come up with $79 million in the budget for that one.

Yet for the last two decades there has been absolutely no government funding to follow up Cantor and Baume’s work on vulnerable divorcing men, even though recent Griffith University research still shows relationship difficulties to be the major triggering life event, accounting for 42.5 % of suicides. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data lists relationship disruptions/problems as the key suicide psychological risk factors after self-harm, which is more a symptom of distress than a trigger.

But this key issue never features in the public narrative. Instead, we are presented with carefully constructed red herrings. Remember the lavish 2016 ABC television program, Man Up, which spent three episodes claiming we need to teach suicidal men to show their feelings. Hours of television about men having to learn to cry, but not a word about what they were crying about.

Then they announced a mental health expert, Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer, and followed up with $5.6 million from mental health funding to encourage men to seek help. Don’t they love this new diversion, focussing on encouraging men to rid themselves of their toxic masculinity and show their softer side?

But the fact is that even though many suicidal men have mental health problems, our authorities are strenuously ignoring the key event which might push them over the edge. Data from the Queensland Suicide register shows that 42% of men who die by suicide have a mental health diagnosis but 98% have experienced a recent life event, such as relationship breakdown.

Given the ongoing male suicide crisis, it is an absolute scandal that our suicide policies are still proudly “gender neutral” with up to 4 of 5 beneficiaries female, according to analysis by the Australian Men’s Health Forum. Read the case AMHF makes for a male suicide prevention strategy here.

Yet finally there are tiny green shoots appearing midst the ongoing gloom. In January this year Suicide Prevention Australia, the peak body for suicide prevention organisations, announced that “it’s time to talk about male suicide prevention.”

“Of the 3,000 lives tragically lost to suicide each year, over 75% are men. They are our husbands and fathers, our brothers and uncles, our colleagues and friends”, wrote CEO Nieves Murray, announcing they were pushing for an “ambitious male suicide prevention strategy,” guided by “the evidence” and “addressing underlying issues that might lead men to the point of crisis,” and actually mentioning support for men in family courts.

The Morrison government announced last November that some suicide prevention funding would be targeted at risk groups including men but didn’t manage to get this up before the election. No doubt the health bureaucrats have no interest in rushing this one through and it’s hard to imagine this happening if a Labor/Green government gets into power.

Look what happened after Pauline Hanson had the guts to speak out about false allegations and bias against men when appointed Deputy Chair of the recent parliamentary inquiry into family law. She was ripped apart in the media and her Labor/Green committee members stymied any hope of addressing these issues, despite hundreds of submissions documenting how men are being done over.

Tackling male suicide means highlighting the way the family law system is now weaponised against men. This will attract huge resistance from the feminist mob controlling our media, so adept at cowering politicians into inaction. But too many people now know and care about what’s driving so many men to take their lives.

The time is right for a mighty campaign to galvanise public opinion and demand real change

https://www.thinkspot.com/discourse/jMua25/post/bettina-arndt/why-men-kill-themselves/bvZtjy

Thursday, June 09, 2022

Real campaigning in South Dakota

This reminds me of the time I used to do survey research. Most such surveys are carried out by employess of various kinds. For my surveys I went and knocked on doors myself. So I knew my results were real. Odd that my results were often different from results reported by others!

If I were to live in the USA I think it would be in S. Dakota. And it doesn't hurt that Kristi Noem is such a dish

SIOUX FALLS, S.D.—Many politicians turn to social media platforms or television ads to get their message out. But South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) decided they wanted to “take the pulse of the people” themselves, opting to travel door-to-door through a subdivision in Sioux Falls to meet their constituents on June 4 and listen to their concerns.

Noem and Johnson, both Republicans, also wanted to thwart negative ads that have recently begun airing throughout the state.

“The air war is not what wins elections in South Dakota—it’s the ground game,” Johnson told The Epoch Times during his door-to-door tour of the neighborhood. “It is going out and talking to voters and answering questions—this is how victory gets done.”

The top issue for the people of South Dakota is inflation, Noem told The Epoch Times as she walked with Johnson through the neighborhood. She said people are worried about the price of fuel and food—kitchen table issues.

“We are hearing a lot of concern about inflation,” she said. “People feel it every single day.”

Noem and Johnson agree that inflation is “higher than it should be” and blame the current administration, as “trillions of dollars have been spent unnecessarily.”

Sioux Falls resident Sondra McFadden said she “couldn’t believe her eyes” when she answered the front door of her home and saw the governor and a congressman. “She’s really here,” she said of the visit. “I just love her [Noem] because she stands up for what she believes, and she looks out for all of South Dakota.”

McFadden said the governor is doing a “fantastic job” in protecting the conservative values that South Dakotans have maintained for many years. She said she’s “worried about the state of the nation” but is thankful to live in the state, and she’s “thankful for her governor.”

McFadden gives the governor credit for “keeping the state open” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“She kept the state open, which helped the economy during the pandemic,” she said. “I look at other states who locked down and they are so much worse off for it—we are thriving because of the decisions the governor has made for our state.”

Noem said there’s a reason why people are “grateful to live in South Dakota.”

“Our state has the number one economy,” she said. “Everybody works—our incomes are rising faster than in any other state—so we’ve got a great story to tell. It’s a story of helping people make the best decisions for themselves and South Dakota is thriving because of that.”

Johnson agreed.

“The thing I love about South Dakotans is their optimism, and they’ll listen and ask you the tough questions,” he said of his constituents. “But they know how lucky they are to be living in South Dakota. Because of Kristi’s administration, people realize that their freedoms were not reduced here. … We did it right here.”

Neither the governor nor the congressman are fans of the policies of the Biden administration and the president’s latest move to punish states such as South Dakota with reduced funding for approving legislation that outlaws transgender males from competing in girls’ sports.

“It’s a horrific thing to take food off the plates of our children in order to push your agenda,” Noem said. “It’s a dangerous threat—a terrible threat. If he moves forward with this policy, then I will sue them in federal court. And we will win.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/noem-johnson-practice-old-fashioned-campaigning_4512629.html?

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Another disgruntled black lady

What she says below may be true of black men for all I know but it is a far too cynical a judgment as it applies to white men I know. As an elderly Australian male, I am often in receipt of kindness from others, both male and female. The kindness is obviously real, as they have nothing to gain from it.

I think of myself as a kind person and women occasionally confirm that but I guess kindness to women is always suspect. But suspicions can be wrong. Genuine kindness can be real

All men benefit from most men harming women, including those self-proclaimed nice guys women love to fawn over. They are involved and intentionally benefitting from your pain as well!

I am going to say this once: no man on planet earth is a nice guy. There are millions of these types, yet the world looks the way it does! And you ladies accept this “good man” shit as truth?

Wouldn’t the world look much differently if men were actually nice, instead of giving us lip service solely to reap any sexual benefits that may manifest from treating women the way we should be treated in the first place?

I have said this before and I will say it again: men, and human beings in general, do not do anything out of the kindness of their hearts.

Think about it: why are nice guys only willing to protect you when you are with them; meaning, when you are fucking them and catering to their needs? How come they are not so protective of women they aren’t attracted to? Why are these “nice guys” given permission to provide half-assed protection for one woman while this same man can exist as a perpetrator to many others?

When it comes to half-assed protection, I am referring to the fact that all he has to do is stand beside you. Other men will know you are taken and they will leave you alone for the most part. Hardly any effort is involved at all! But if you are out by yourself you still are subjected to the same treatment and harassment that single women face regularly. This is why the wife cults tell women they should never be out in public without a man present.

Analyzing The Irony Of Asking Women “Who Hurt You?”
“It is time we accept trauma as a valid reason to avoid anything that may compromise us emotionally, physically, and…
thesannilark.medium.com

According to the opposite sex, two wrongs make a right: as women we need a man to protect us from men. I don’t know about you, but their “logic” is so entertaining to me. This is the extent by which men care about your safety; when you are with one of them.

So what is the connection between relationships and the dangerous world of gangs and cartels? Why on earth did I use “pussy cartel,” a completely made-up term, in the title? I’m glad you asked! Men beg women to be with them by infiltrating our heads with cat lady stories and dying alone narratives. This is how single ladies are being targeted by these self-proclaimed good men for protection money. Only our protection money isn’t actual dollars; these good guys are compensated in the form of sex.

Why do you think random guys are obsessed with knowing your relationship status? It is really because they are genuinely interested in you?

These so-called nice guys see very clearly the struggles and anxiety you experience from their own kind. And instead of actually enacting any real change for women to be safe on a permanent basis, regardless if they are single or not, they tease us with protection in exchange for pussy as compensation.

It’s kind of like the police being corrupt (in certain places). While everyone believes them to be unsung heroes who are working tirelessly to eradicate drugs and drug-related crimes, they are cashing out on the underhanded deals they make with the cartels.

This, ladies, is the reality of men.

Nice guys finish last my ass! Nice guys put themselves first, just like the men they claim are their opposites that you need to be protected from.

https://thesannilark.medium.com/pussy-cartels-and-how-nice-guys-benefit-from-women-being-harmed-8d512fdc8553

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Eating two portions of fish a week linked to skin cancer, study suggests

We have been told more or less forever that fish is good for us so this is amusing

Often lauded as a superfood, fish has its clear nutritional benefits, providing the body with vital fatty acids and vitamins.

However, too much fish could well be a bad thing. According to a new study, eating two portions per week – as recommended by the NHS – has been linked to an increased risk of skin cancer, the most deadly of its kind.

In the new research, experts from Brown University found that people whose typical daily intake of fish was 42.8g (equivalent to about 300g per week) had a 22 per cent higher risk of malignant melanoma than those whose typical daily fish intake was just 3.2g.

Those eating more fish also had a 28 per cent increased risk of developing abnormal cells in the outer layer of the skin only – known as stage 0 melanoma or melanoma in situ (also sometimes referred to as pre-cancer).

The findings were based on a study of 491,367 US adults and published in the journal Cancer Causes & Control.

Author Eunyoung Cho said the research has “identified an association that requires further investigation.

“We speculate that our findings could possibly be attributed to contaminants in fish, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, arsenic and mercury.”

Other experts said fish was an important healthy food and there was no need to stop eating it.

Dr Duane Mellor, senior lecturer at Aston Medical School, said: “The authors suggest that there could be a link between contaminants in the fish which could increase risk of cancer, but this is likely to affect the risk of more than just skin cancers.

“This study does not have a clear mechanism of how fish intake could increase risk of melanoma – there is no clear evidence that eating fish can lead to an increased risk of developing skin cancer.

“It is important to remember eating two portions of fish per week ... can be a way of including important nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids as part of a healthy diet and this study should not discourage people from including fish as part of a healthy diet.”

Those in the study were aged 62 years on average and reported how often they ate fried fish, non-fried fish, and tuna during the previous year as well as their portion sizes.

The researchers then calculated the frequency of new melanoma cases that developed over 15 years using data obtained from cancer registries.

They took into account factors that could influence the results, such as people’s weight, whether they smoked or drank alcohol, diet, family history of cancer and average UV radiation levels in their local area (to take account of exposure to the sun – a known risk factor for skin cancer).

Overall, 5,034 people (1 per cent) developed malignant melanoma during the study period and 3,284 (0.7 per cent) developed stage 0 melanoma. A breakdown of the results showed that total fish intake was linked to higher risks.

Meanwhile, people whose typical daily tuna intake was 14.2g had a 20 per cent higher risk of malignant melanoma compared with those with a typical intake of 0.3g.

Eating 17.8g of non-fried fish per day was associated with an 18 per cent higher risk of malignant melanoma and a 25 per cent higher risk of stage 0 melanoma, compared with eating just 0.3g.

However, no significant link was found between eating fried fish and skin cancer.

Also, average daily fish intake was calculated at the beginning of the study and may not represent how much people eat over the course of their lives.

Dr Michael Jones, senior staff scientist in genetics and epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “The authors found a higher intake of non-fried fish and tuna was associated with melanoma. These results were statistically significant and therefore unlikely due to chance.

“It is possible people who intake more non-fried fish or tuna have other lifestyle habits that increase their risk of melanoma. The authors considered this and adjusted for some potentially confounding factors.

“However, as the authors acknowledge, this is an observational study (not a randomised trial) and it is possible there are (known and unknown) factors that the authors did not adjust for, or adjust for sufficiently.

“The authors speculate that the association may be possibly due to contaminants in fish, but they did not measure levels of these contaminants in the participants.

“A general healthy balanced diet should include fish and the results from this study do not change that recommendation.”

https://au.yahoo.com/news/eating-two-portions-fish-week-231712938.html

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Locking up some criminals actually can save them — despite what soft-on-crime pols say

For all the patronizing attitude toward New York’s low-level criminals on the part of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his supporters — that thieves and burglars bear no responsibility for their own behavior because they “need help” — not all criminals are mentally ill or irrational in the choices they make.

Exhibit A is Isaac Rodriguez, The Post’s “Man of Steal.” Like most of us, Rodriguez, 23, is a mostly rational person: When the reward or punishment for his behavior changes, he’ll change his behavior accordingly.

Last year, police arrested Rodriguez 46 times for shoplifting, including 37 times at a Jackson Heights Walgreens. Was Rodriguez newly destitute because he lost his job in the pandemic and desperate for bread?

Nope: As he forthrightly notes, shoplifting was his job. He stole high-value goods to resell, to feed his drug habit.

Now, he’s finally at Rikers, serving a sentence until the end of the year for shoplifting at a different drugstore that had taken out a restraining order against him. And Rodriguez is OK with that. He told The Post that “I would’ve died sooner or later” if he “was still out there.”

A reasonable prediction, considering that New York City suffered 1,233 overdoses during the first two quarters of last year (the latest data available), up 80% from pre-pandemic levels and the highest number on record.

Now, Rodriguez wants to get his GED and progress from there. Good for him, and good luck to him — and let’s hope the city does give him the help he needs to achieve this goal.

But how did Rodriguez change his attitude? The carrot may work for some people — but many of us also need the stick. Rodriguez stole, over and over again, because he perceived — correctly — that there was no punishment for such behavior.

Now that he does face such a punishment, he wants to change that behavior so that he doesn’t face such punishment again. With the cycle he got himself into now broken — doing the immediate “work” of stealing for the immediate “reward” of getting high — he wants to think longer term.

What broke the cycle? Not an “alternative to incarceration.” Incarceration.

Look at the ’90s

Indeed, what many people miss about the early-1990s “tough on crime” era in New York City is that it wasn’t an era of mass incarceration. Between 1990 and 2019, the population held at Rikers Island fell from 22,000 on an average day to 7,000. Though the declines started later, the trend is similar at the state-prison level.

This wasn’t because New York had gone soft on crime. It was because people were committing less crime, from shoplifting to car theft to murder.

Why would they do that? It wasn’t because we started making better people or that the drug trade hasn’t long offered an easy temptation above an entry-level minimum-wage job. It was because people knew that pursuing a career of crime wasn’t a rational decision: They would get in trouble.

Incarceration skyrocketed, by contrast, in the ’70s and ’80s. People could get away with lots of low-level crime — until they did something really bad and went to jail and then prison for a long time. This trend is reviving itself, as both crime and the number of people in jail rise again.

Based on what Rodriguez says, it’s a good thing he stole stuff in Queens rather than in Manhattan. As Manhattan DA Bragg has put it, people who commit crime to feed addictions should be afforded “repeated opportunities” to avoid jail because “relapses are part of the road to recovery.”

So is dying. These second — and third, fourth and 46th — chances run out on the street, as the OD rate shows. As Rodriguez told The Post, “This is a blessing in disguise.”

https://nypost.com/2022/06/07/locking-up-some-nyc-criminals-actually-can-save-them/

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U.S. Senate gets ‘Dazed and Confused’ on guns

By Rick Manning

You just cannot make this stuff up. The very politicians who demanded that police be defunded and supported prosecutors who don’t prosecute criminals are pushing their agenda to ban law-abiding citizens from having guns.

And some GOP politicians are now meeting with the blame America first crowd to discuss what “reasonable” gun laws they can enact.

It is enough to make me sick.

But it is the natural result of the Mitch McConnell philosophy to avoid any tough issues so he can squeak by with a 51-vote majority in the Senate in 2023, all with the promise that they can’t do anything positive until the White House is won and occupied on January 20, 2025.

I am a life-long Republican. My family handed out Barry Goldwater for President rulers (gold colored we want a President, not a ruler) to trick or treaters for Halloween in 1964. I was the head of the University of Southern California College Republicans and the Executive Vice President of the California College Republicans.

After running or being campaign and consulting staffs for political campaigns supporting conservative causes like ending the California state inheritance and gift tax and the No on 15 campaign which stopped a statewide handgun ban, I became a state lobbyist for the National Rifle Association.

Unfortunately, time and again, when the going got tough, GOP legislators looked for ways to be “reasonable”. You got bullet bans, background checks, one gun a month sales, restrictions on individual transactions, and guess what, the left wasn’t satiated.

I became an NRA lobbyist right after a small Chicago suburb, Morton Grove, passed a handgun ban, and the slogan instilled in our then-young lobbying team by NRA Executive Vice President Harlon Carter was “Morton Grove, Never Again.”

So, today years later, we have actor and erstwhile politician Matthew McConaughey wandering the Senate halls urging “reasonable” gun laws. His idea of reasonable is to not allow the same kid we send off to war to be able to buy a rifle at home. His idea of reasonable is to empower police to break into someone’s home to confiscate their firearms due to a random call saying something might be amiss (and good luck getting your guns back once they have been stolen.)

The “Dazed and Confused” actor cannot be faulted for not understanding that the simple act of smoking a joint can get the cops called to storm your castle to find guns. Based upon his personal history, I’m certain that isn’t something he intends.

He cannot be faulted for not realizing that a spousal claim of abuse would be justification for having SWAT teams raging through your home at the break of dawn in search of firearms. Anyone paying attention to the Johnny Depp trial this past week can understand the damage done by false accusations. For someone without the financial means and Hollywood glint in their eye that both Depp and McConaughey possess, good luck getting your stolen property or reputation back.

What he and those politicians who are sworn to uphold the Constitution cannot be excused for is not recognizing that these types of search and seizure raids effectively end the primary concept of our criminal justice system that an American is innocent until proven guilty.

The failures of the Uvalde police and the school resources officer to do their jobs will be litigated in court. The failure of the cower in place hoping, praying active shooter policy predicated on the lie that help is on the way needs to be fully examined. The human instinct of fight or flight exists for a reason, yet we train people to stay and pray with disastrous consequences time after time.

Somewhat obviously, if school buildings were properly secured and willing teachers and school staff were empowered, equipped and trained to fight, our nation’s children would not be sitting ducks.

No one can see what happened in Uvalde and Buffalo and not be affected.

But rather than cower and stay, or just “do something,” isn’t it time for honest members of Congress to be smart and consider real alternatives that get to the root cause of the evil that drives these attacks, rather than acting upon the knee-jerk irresponsible actions demanded by the media?

Somehow, I don’t think this is too much to ask. Even for those politicians who would cower than stand up for individual liberty.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/u-s-senate-gets-dazed-and-confused-on-guns/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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8 June, 2022

A damaging obsession?

Since ancient times, women have long sought to improve their appearance by colouring their faces and hair in various ways -- and that is a major industry to this day. Modern times differ in the availability of surgery -- with face-lifts and boob-jobs being well-known.

The article below is aimed at curbing the surgical adventures. But it is not clear why that should be so. Where the procedures do harm, one can be critical with some justification but otherwise if it gives satisfaction, why not?

The small point in the critique below is that people sometimes feel pressured into undergoing the procdures and are not really happy with it. But that is a personality matter. Susceptibility to social pressure is real but so can the the ability to withstand it be. And if that resistance is lacking, who else is able and entitled to supply it?.

I personally inherited a "Roman" or "aquiline" nose, which is both unusual and sometimes regarded as ugly. I have never felt the slightest urge to alter it but I understand that affected women sometimes do. The President of France has such a nose

Australians' body image problems are getting worse. Amidst an 'epidemic of body image anxiety', could one simple act change everything?

The term 'body modification' covers everything from hair-dye and braces, to lip fillers, nose jobs and butt augmentation.

What's considered normal or extreme comes down to who you hang around with: depending on your social circle, you might consider make-up unusual, or regular botox injections the norm.

But across the spectrum of procedures, there are two powerful common points. More of us are opting for body modification than ever. And more of us are judging the choices others are making. UK philosopher Heather Widdows says we are increasingly comparing ourselves to others online, with a "moral judgement that goes both ways"�.

It's directed towards those who do and those who don't modify their bodies, she says. And it's becoming a destructive force. "We have an epidemic of body image anxiety,"� Professor Widdows says. "We have to move away from that."�

In Australia, more than 43 per cent of people are highly concerned about their body image, according to Monash University's Body Image Research Group.

In a study of over 3,000 mostly female Australians, aged 18 and over, the Butterfly Foundation found that over 70 per cent said appearance was "very important"� and wished they could change the way they look.

Roughly one-fifth of the respondents had attempted to change themselves to look like images they saw on social media. Nearly half felt pressure to look a certain way.

Behind statistics like these is the influence of beauty ideals on body image "� and it's time to talk about that, Professor Widdows says. "We need to start taking it seriously."�

Joseph Taylor, 36, says he grew up hating his "stereotypical [ethnic] big nose"�. He's since had three nose jobs, the first when he was 17.

Schoolyard teasing played a part in his decision. "Kids can be horrible,"� he says. "Someone probably said something like, 'Oh, you big nose'. "It must have, at some point, really got to me."�

"When we're young, we're constantly trying to be the best that we can be on the exterior because we feel that's all that matters "� and we're so impressionable,"� Mr Taylor says.

But it's not only in our youth that we are susceptible to this influence. For young people and adults alike, beauty has become "our primary obsession"�, Professor Widdows argues.

She's not out to criticise beauty rituals. After all, as she notes, "we are embodied beings; we live in our bodies. It's how we see other people, how we relate to them"�.

The cosmetic enhancement industry in Australia is booming. We meet the people chasing their aesthetic ideal and those jumping off the cosmetic enhancement conveyor belt.

And plenty of beauty practices are enjoyable. Mr Taylor, for example, says today he is happy and confident with his appearance, and he feels in control of the influence of beauty in his life. "I've definitely grown to like the way I am,"� he says.

It's when beauty ideals tip into an obsession that problems can arise. For example, when not weighing what you'd like ruins your day. When getting one selfie right takes hours of preparation and editing before posting. Or when not being happy with the way you look might even stop you leaving the house.

These, Professor Widdows says, are things she's observed in researching her latest book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. She believes they signal a "very profound shift"� in values.

"We've gone from beauty being one thing we care about to it being almost defining of who we are,"� she says. "How we present success used to be the car or the house. Now it's how we look."�

Professor Widdows suggests several reasons for this shift.

* We live in a more "visual culture"� today, where "the image always speaks louder than words"�, she says.

* Courtesy of social media, we are able to constantly examine our appearance in relation to that of others.

* Also, where once beauty treatments were "very topical and superficial"�, now "we literally can change the shape of our bodies"�, she says. "You go from the cut of the dress to the cut of the breast."�

Philosopher and physician Yves Saint James Aquino argues that with an increase in accessibility, there's now a "normalisation"� of body modification, which has also fuelled its rise. "Now because it's so common, it's part of people's lives, they feel less stigmatised "� and therefore they feel freer to do it,"� he says.

Dr Aquino says another factor has led to the rise of body modification: prolonged exposure to our own faces on video calls throughout the pandemic.

Yves Saint James Aquino says body modification has become normalised and destigmatised. ABC RN: Siobhan Marin
"People are encountering their faces more than ever,"� he says. "That's when they start noticing things that they haven't really noticed before."�

This, Dr Aquino says, has led to an uptick in cosmetic surgery around the world.

In the last five years or so, there's been a sharp increase in the use of injectables (such as in wrinkle-reducing or lip-filling procedures) in Australia. And the Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) operation is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world today.

At 2018, Australians were spending more per capita on cosmetic surgery than people in the US, with anti-wrinkle (Botox) injections the most popular operation at the time. And while it is mostly women choosing cosmetic surgery, the number of male clients is growing.

Former Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Kirstie Clements had the majority of her cosmetic procedures in her 40s, including lip fillers, Botox and collagen injections.

A decade later, she'd had enough. "I didn't like that sort of overworked look that it gives you, the kind of chubby cheeks and squinty eyes,"� she says. "When I got to my 50s, I thought, 'Oh, who are you kidding now?' "So I gave it up."�

Ms Clements, now 60, believes ageism is a driving force in the increase of cosmetic enhancement. "The pressure is for us to try and keep up and to stay young and to be fresh,"� she says.

And cosmetic procedures are even more readily available today. "There are now literally lunchtime procedures where you can go back to work and nobody cares that there's a few marks in your face,"� Ms Clements says.

"They're not taboo. It's as fashionable as getting a piece of clothing, which is quite sobering. It's your skin that's being punctured."�

Ms Clements calls out the "constant hammering"� of edited or altered images that prompt us to question if we should benchmark ourselves against them. "It's the brave woman who says, 'No, I don't care what any of you do. I'm happy in my own skin',"� she says.

But resisting pressure isn't just about bravery or defiance; it's about deflecting messages that arrive with increasing frequency. Where once we might have encountered beauty images 12 times a year in a monthly magazine, today "you're seeing things 12 times in 10 minutes"� on social media, Ms Clements says. "It's getting more and more pervasive ". So it's the strong person who can stand back and say 'no'."�

Professor Widdows is concerned about a future in which we might "begin to see exceptionally modified bodies as normal"�.

To downgrade the status of beauty in our lives, she is calling for a culture shift.

What do people of colour, who've often been racially vilified for their appearance, have to say about others cherry-picking their features?

She wants us to ditch the negative comments about other people's bodies and appearance. "Often, cosmetic surgery recipients report that their insecurity began with a nasty comment,"� she says.

Professor Widdows believes more of us need to understand the harm that negative comments and body shaming can cause, arguing that it should be considered as seriously as any other form of discrimination.

"I say, if you don't do [body modifying], don't feel smug because you don't feel the pressure,"� she says. Similarly, if you do engage in body modification, don't question those who don't.

"Rather let's think about, culturally, do we want to live in a society where people feel pressured to engage more and more? That's the bit I want to push back against, the social pressure,"� she says.

Professor Widdows' plea? Stop talking about other people's bodies "� full stop. "Let's not look at what people do or don't do. Let's not say, 'this practice is okay, that perhaps is not',"� she says. "Let's just take the pressure completely off."�

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-03/body-image-beauty-face-value-heather-widdows-kirstie-clements/101109500

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CASES TO WATCH

This is a quick update on a few cases for you to be watching as summer begins and the U.S. Supreme Court�s term comes to an end:

Cake artist Jack Phillips continues to be harassed for living and working consistently with his religious beliefs. He�s now been pursued in court for 10 years! In the latest bout, an activist attorney filed suit against Jack for not designing a cake celebrating a gender transition. We are currently appealing a trial-court ruling in his case.

College of the Ozarks, otherwise known as �Hard Work U,� is challenging a Biden administration directive that could force religious schools like itself to open girls� dorms, showers, and other private areas to males. If the college operates according to its beliefs, it risks devastating financial penalties. Right now, we�re waiting on a federal appeals court to issue a ruling in the case.

Emily Mais, a former assistant principal in Virginia�s Albemarle County School District, is suing the district for creating a racially hostile environment. Emily had no choice but to resign after a period of intense harassment by coworkers and administrators because she questioned the school district�s radical policy rooted in critical race theory. Her lawsuit was filed in April and is currently before the Albemarle County Circuit Court.

Email from adflegal.org

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Seattle Implodes After Defunding Police

Seattle�s efforts to defund its police department and transfer its duties to other city agencies resulted in $5 million worth of wrongful parking tickets and other administrative dysfunction, according to The Seattle Times.

Seattle is refunding roughly 100,000 parking tickets worth approximately $5 million total after transferring parking enforcement duties from police to civilian parking enforcement officers in the fall of 2021, finding that the civilian officers lacked the legal authority to write the tickets, according to The Seattle Times. Parking officers also conducted more than 10,000 car tows and impounded 1,700 cars without the proper authority during this period.

�What�s going to happen here is that we�re going to get sued, I can guarantee it,� said Chuck Labertew, president of Lincoln Towing, which has the sole contract for city-initiated towing, according to The Seattle Times. �And I�m going to forward every one of those lawsuits on over to the city.�

The decision to remove this responsibility from police was part of a push in 2020 to reduce police funding and have civilians take on jobs typically handled by police, according to The Seattle Times. The City Council cut the police budget by 17% in 2020, far short of its 50% goal.

The cost of the city�s mistake may not be limited to the $5 million in refunded tickets: People will likely contest the tows and impounds authorized by the non-police parking authority, Labertew told The Seattle Times, but the city will not refund those tows automatically.

On top of the $5 million parking ticket debacle, efforts to defund the police have limited law enforcement�s ability to prosecute serious crimes: The Seattle Police Department is not investigating new sexual assault cases due to understaffing after more than 400 officers left the force, according to The Seattle Times.

Crime has soared in Seattle in recent years: the city saw a 95% increase in shots fired and a 171% increase in people being shot from 2021 to 2022, according to The Seattle Times. Seattle�s violent crime rate, which had been steady for 30 years, suddenly jumped 20% in 2021.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/06/seattle-implodes-after-defunding-police/ ?

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Rep Ocasio-Cortez Moves to Take Over Sen. Elizabeth Warren's Reservation, Claims 'Indigenous Heritage'

Wanna-be socialist superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just made a big move to take over Sen. Elizabeth Warren�s reservation by claiming she is in touch with her �indigenous heritage:�

Via Fox News:

�Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Saturday her connection to her �indigenous heritage� was awakened while protesting the Dakota Access pipeline with Native American tribes at Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Responding to a comment on Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez said she wanted to connect more with the ancestral roots of the Ta�no, an indigenous people group of the Caribbean, and that American Indian tribes welcomed her as family.

�One of the things that first started awakening and connecting me in a deep to my indigenous heritage was connecting to the Lakota Sioux at Standing Rock,� Ocasio-Cortez says in the video.

�It really just clicked that this is nuts, like, the grace that they extended to say �no, you are a relative,� was really formative for me. While we may not be and come from the same exact lineage, there is a commonality to that ancestry. And it�s important for us to recognize that we were raised and we were told growing up that we were extinct, that Tainos don�t exist, and it�s really important for Puerto Ricans to understand that that narrative is being challenged right now.�

In addition to indigenous and Hispanic roots, Ocasio-Cortez, whose family emigrated to New York City from Puerto Rico, has over the years claimed to have Jewish, European and Black ancestry.�

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/rep-ocasio-cortez-moves-take-sen-elizabeth-warrens-reservation-claims-indigenous-heritage

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Obeying the law now optional in NJ

Acting New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced a new directive last week aimed at reducing the amount of time police officers spend on low-level municipal bench warrants.

Police will no longer be arresting residents with outstanding bench warrants in cases where the bail amount is set at $500 or less, according to NJ Spotlight.

A bench warrant is issued when an individual fails to show up for a court date or otherwise �violates the rules of the court.�

Platkin issued a statement that read, �Residents will no longer be subjected to unnecessary and intrusive custodial arrests for hundreds of thousands of outstanding low-level warrants � and officers across New Jersey will avoid spending time effectuating and processing such arrests that by and large do not further public safety.�

This will allow police �to use law enforcement resources more efficiently and safely,� the statement claimed.

Under the new order, defendants will be �given notice of a new court date and released on scene.�

According to NJ.com, there is widespread support for this measure. It is backed by �the state association of police chiefs, the ACLU, black clergy and the state�s largest police unions.�

The media outlet spoke to Sayreville police chief John Zebrowski who said, �These are low-level offenses in which municipal courts routinely issue new dates. This directive allows police officers to remain in-service and on patrol by reducing the time spent encountering the public about municipal court bench warrants.�

Jeanne LoCicero, the legal director for the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, considers this �an important step in preventing unnecessary arrests and jail time, which disrupt lives, jobs and families.�

There is one major problem with this new leniency. It strips the legal system of one of its most useful tools. What incentive is there for a defendant to show up for a court date or to pay a fine if there are no consequences? Why would anyone bother to take responsibility for their actions?

As for the argument that police will no longer have to use their valuable time and resources to chase down low-level offenders, the courts, which have allotted a period of time on their schedules to hear a particular case, will be the ones whose time is wasted.

The move toward relieving offenders of accountability for their actions has become a growing trend lately, particularly in Democrat-run states.

Last year, lawmakers in deep-blue Washington state passed House Bill 1054, a package of police �reforms aimed at addressing racial disproportionality in policing,� according to The Associated Press.

One of the law�s provisions bars police from engaging in �high-speed pursuits except in very limited circumstances,� the AP reported.

Unfortunately, one of the effects of the law has been that many drivers have stopped pulling over for police officers.

A report from the Northwest News Network cites data from the Washington State Patrol that found that since January, 934 drivers have refused to stop for law enforcement.

WSP spokesman Sgt. Darren Wright told the network, �Something�s changed. People are not stopping right now. It�s happening three to five times a shift on some nights and then a couple times a week on day shift.�

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/acting-new-jersey-ag-prohibits-police-arresting-many-just-skipped-court

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Pandering to women won�t save Australia's conservatives

Bettina Arndt

�Women were the forgotten people in this election�, pronounced Katherine Deves on Sky News Australia, following the election. The Liberal candidate for Warringah claimed, �Women want to be listened to and they need to have a voice,� suggesting the Morrison government�s failure to pay attention to women contributed to the 6 per cent swing against her in Tony Abbott�s former seat.

Deves took a brave stance arguing for females not only in women�s sports, but supporting the notion that the Coalition government didn�t do enough for women � which is absurd.

For decades our conservative governments have bent over backwards to pander to feminist demands in an extravagant display that failed to win them votes but repelled their true base � namely, the majority of men and women keen that both genders in this egalitarian country should receive fair and equal treatment.

Yet Deves is joined by a mighty chorus of Coalition figures indulging in the same delusion. The newly appointed Deputy Opposition Leader, Sussan Ley, told Australian women that her party �hears them� and is determined to �win back women�s trust�.

Give me a break. Won�t these people ever learn that the folk who created this notion of the Coalition�s �women problem� would never think of voting for a conservative party? This is the same mob who ignored the fact that Julia Gillard�s famous misogyny speech was a desperate attempt to detract attention from her political reliance on Speaker Peter Slipper, who was then in trouble over a text comparing female genitalia to �a mussel removed from its shell� salty c***s in brine�.

We�ve seen successive Coalition governments cowering to the feminist lobby, throwing endless money trying to appease their insatiable appetite for an obscenely large slice of the cake. Malcolm Turnbull�s first act as Prime Minister was his plea for �respect for women� as he announced the first $100 million of the never-ending bucket-loads of funding poured into the domestic violence industry. Last year, Scott Morrison topped up these rivers of gold with a 150 per cent increase in funding, from $100 to $250 million per year, as a result of the feminist�s Covid scare campaign about women being locked up with dangerous men � money paid out even as official statistics showed decreased violence during lockdowns.

Just last week, Tom Burton in the Australian Financial Review named the �shameful failure to end family violence� as the greatest social policy issue which he claims led women to vote for �real change�. Do these journalists really have no idea that domestic violence rates are being artificially inflated by the current epidemic of false accusations related to family law battles?

The former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson has published a conversation with me covering, in detail, the evidence of how feminist ideology has risen to dominate public policy. It reveals how the movement has set about advantaging women at the expense of men through the distortion of the Australian media, tilting law, promoting anti-male ideology in schools and workplaces, and consistently manipulating government statistics to demonise men. This is the alternate reality that is usually kept well hidden from the world of powerful men.

It wasn�t that the Morrison government didn�t listen to women. This whipped crew sniveled and groveled, like a cuckolded man clutching desperately at the ankles of his departing wife. Remember the awkward apology to Brittany Higgins? Or Morrison�s forced smile when Grace Tame gave him the side-eye? Or the cowardly act of allowing Christian Porter and Alan Tudge to be pushed out of their ministerial roles over unproven sexual assault allegations? Or the cringing over the parliamentary harassment report, denying the very low incidence of actual harassment and high rates of female bullying�?

Recent Coalition governments have gone in for the shameless promotion of women into every conceivable public role. We had Susan Kiefel appointed Chief Justice of the High Court. Ita Buttrose as Chair of the ABC. Lorraine Finlay for Human Rights Commissioner. Cathy Foley as Chief Scientist. Women, women, women. A constant stream of beaming female faces endlessly gracing our news.

Consider the extraordinary appointment of Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer, at a time when six of the eight people killing themselves each day were men and 4 of every 5 beneficiaries of their �gender neutral� prevention programs were women.

The results of the Coalition government�s relentless push to get more women into higher levels of the public service are all too apparent in grossly biased policy outcomes, like the March 2022 budget allocation of $2.1 billion to services for women and girls and just $1 million to �improve long term health outcomes� for men and boys.

For the last few weeks we�ve been treated to unabashed celebration from our biased media about the ousting of the Coalition and wild assertions that this was all due to angry women turning on Morrison. No mention, of course, of the fact that conservative parties everywhere are now struggling to attract women.

Irrespective of how desperately the Coalition tried to win them over, women are turning left. Five years ago, I wrote about the growing power of left-wing women, making the point that women are becoming more left-wing in their policy preferences � not only in Australia, but across much of the Western world. Analysis by the Australian Election Study (AES) of 2019 election results confirmed an ever-widening gender gap, starting back in the 1990s marked by dropping female support for the Liberal Party.

By 2019, 45 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women voted Liberal, while the split for the Greens was 15 per cent to 9 per cent.

The AES asked voters to rate themselves on a scale from left to right, where 0 is left and 10 is right. In 2019 the average position for men was 5.2 whereas for women it was 4.8, a significant shift from the 1990s when there were minimum gender differences.

One of the key factors I identified back in 2017 for why the shift was occurring was leftist university education.

�The hearts and minds being captured in our universities belong mainly to young women�, I wrote, pointing to fascinating research from the AES showing women emerge from university education notably more left-leaning than women without degrees, whereas male graduates aren�t very different from less educated men in their political views.

Women�s increasingly left-wing policy preferences have been showing up in AES data on issue after issue: asylum-seekers; government spending on indigenous affairs; stiffer criminal penalties; positive discrimination for women and same-sex marriage. The 2017 postal survey on same-sex marriage showed that more women voted yes in every age group from 18 through to 75.

Over 60 per cent of graduates are now female, so women are disproportionately affected by the ideological indoctrination taking place in our universities, particularly as they are mainly the ones studying humanities subjects steeped in identity politics and neo-Marxist propaganda.

Unlike many men who become more conservative as they age, the work/life patterns in most women�s lives simply reinforce these beliefs. Women predominantly work in education, health care, and welfare services or as public service professionals. They make up 58 per cent of public service positions and are more likely than men to work in unionised jobs. All this means their working environment provides a culture that supports rather than challenges their political beliefs.

Then there�s the motherhood issue, with mothers particularly receptive to the Left�s big spending promises � and scare campaigns � on health and education. The growing number of single mothers significantly dependent on government benefits is another key issue, with the left-wing parties playing up their support for such disadvantaged families.

So, it goes on. Hardly surprising then that polling suggests the indoctrinated mob of professional women flocked to the Teal faux Independents with their trendy list of leftist policy proposals. No doubt when proper analysis of the gender gap in this election is available, we will discover even more women across the board may be turning their backs on traditional conservative beliefs.

But the biggest risk for the conservative parties currently licking their wounds is to believe the mad left media claim that they were ousted by the wrath of angry women. Somehow, we need to convince Coalition politicians that they have long been bleeding votes from ordinary folk who have had a gutful of seeing women endlessly privileged whilst the men they love, their fathers, sons, brothers, and friends, are pushed to the back of the bus and at every point denied fair treatment.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/pandering-to-women-wont-save-the-libs

Tuesday, June 07, 2022

June 6, 2022, is the 78th Anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy

I am afraid that I have to disagree with the article below. The invasion did NOT save the world from tyranny. It removed one tyranny and empowered a more comprehensive tyranny. As a libertarian, I am no fan of Nazism but Communism was at least as bad

On June 6, more than 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified French coastline to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France.
The invasion was supposed to happen on the 5th, but the weather forced Eisenhower to delay:

Capt. James Martin Stagg was the chief meteorologist of the British Royal Air Force and was the one to brief Eisenhower about the rough seas and lashing rain affecting the shore on June 5. Stagg previsioned the small window of better weather for early morning June 6….The Germans did not foresee this brief break in the bad weather. In fact, they forecast unsettled weather until mid-June. In charge with the defense of the invasion of beaches with the Germans, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was certain there would be no invasion between June 5 and 8 because the tides would not be favorable.

Rommel was very wrong. On June 6, more than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end, the Allies gained a foothold in Continental Europe. Within ten days, there were half a million troops ashore, and within three weeks, there were two million. Allied invasion of Normandy

The invasion was the most massive amphibious military assault in history.

The cost of lives on D-Day was high. More than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded. Not all the deaths were from Nazi bullets. Some drowned while walking from landing boats to their assigned beach. Their sacrifice allowed the allies to begin the slow, hard match across Europe, defeat Hitler’s troops, and save the world from tyranny.

The movies call D-Day “The Longest Day,” but a more apt description would be “The Day That Saved The World From Tyranny.”

https://lidblog.com/nazi-tyranny/

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Biden is "Lining the Pockets of a Dictator": Maduro

It appears the United States is going from supporting one dictator to another when it comes to influencing the purchase of oil around the globe. In an effort to slow down Russian President Vladimir Putin and his campaign in east Ukraine, the Biden administration is poised to allow the shipment of oil from Venezuela into Europe, according to a report by Reuters.

“Eni SpA and Repsol SA, which are Italian and Spanish respectively, could ship Venezuelan oil to Europe as early as next month after the Biden administration authorized the plan last week.” according to The Hill which used Reuters as its source. The article by The Hill goes on to mention that “The Biden administration’s reported permission to allow for the use of Venezuelan oil comes as part of a push to rely less on Russian oil and redirect Venezuela’s shipments from China.”

On Sunday, Congressman Mike Waltz (R-FL) tweeted out the story from The Hill and called out the Biden administration for what he seems to think is hypocrisy.

“Biden is choking off American energy while lining the pockets of a dictator. Got it," stated Rep. Waltz.

This is not the first time conservatives have been critical of this move, however. In early March, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) shared his displeasure with the mingling of the Biden administration with Venezuelan oil.

“So now we’re in a situation where people are really, really hurting. And rather than just recognize, rather than acknowledge that their policies have been ineffective, they are trying to justify what they’re doing, to say no more in America, and they’re going to Maduro.” Said the Florida Governor. “They’re going potentially to the Ayatollah in Iran. So you say you don’t want to with Putin because he’s a dictator. Fine. I’m all for that. But then don’t turn around and go to Maduro.”

https://floridianpress.com/2022/06/waltz-biden-is-lining-the-pockets-of-a-dictator-maduro/

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NZ co-governance is a recipe for privilege by an inherited tribal elite

In 2006, the former US President Barack Obama, then a Senator, used a speech at the University of Nairobi to rail against tribalism:

“Ethnic-based tribal politics has to stop. It is rooted in the bankrupt idea that the goal of politics or business is to funnel as much of the pie as possible to one’s family, tribe, or circle with little regard for the public good. It stifles innovation and fractures the fabric of the society. Instead of opening businesses and engaging in commerce, people come to rely on patronage and payback as a means of advancing. Instead of unifying the country to move forward on solving problems, it divides neighbour from neighbour.”

New Zealanders from all sides of the political spectrum have been horrified to find Jacinda Ardern – under the guise of implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – is forcing tribal rule onto our country, with virtually no openness nor transparency.

The path to tribal rule started with the public being blanketed with Maori language and culture, state employees being forced to undergo Treaty “retraining”, and media tapping into the government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund being required to promote Treaty propaganda.

However, things have taken a more sinister turn over recent months, with our Prime Minister now privatising – under the banner of 50:50 “co-governance” – essential services, including health care and water services, to the tribal elite – the iwi who run multi-million-dollar business development corporations.

As Victoria University’s Dr Bryce Edwards explains: “The co-governance model is a form of privatisation. The new companies will be half controlled by private organisations – iwi, which are increasingly highly corporate in their business operations.”

It is a scandalous situation – as Auckland University’s Professor Elizabeth Rata explains in an article in The Australian: “New Zealand’s constitution is currently undergoing a major heart and lung transplant via co-governance arrangements between Maori corporate tribes and the government … the Labour government is determined to embed racialised policies across a swathe of the nation’s laws and institutions.”

Professor Rata describes those pushing this tribal takeover as “radical intellectuals of the corporate tribes”, ably assisted by “social justice warriors armed with an unassailable moral righteousness”.

Those “social justice warriors” in our universities, government agencies, and the media are spreading the disinformation that underpins Jacinda Ardern’s tribal rule agenda – namely that the authority for co-governance comes from a Treaty ‘partnership’ between Maori and the Crown. They allege this was affirmed by the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Robin Cooke in the 1987 State-owned Enterprises case between the Maori Council and the Attorney General.

Former Judge and Law Lecturer Anthony Willy has examined the case, and, by exposing the ‘partnership’ claim as a gross fabrication, he reveals the deception being used to persuade New Zealanders to accept tribal control. Referring to a NZ Herald article about co-governance and “a ‘partnership’ between those with some Maori genes and the remainder of New Zealanders”, he wrote: “The writer concludes that such a unique constitutional arrangement results from the decision of the NZ Court of Appeal in NZ Maori Council.

“It is beyond question that nothing in the case suggests that the Treaty in any way creates a partnership between Maori and The Crown or brings into question the legitimacy of our democracy. To argue the contrary on the basis of this court case is either ignorant or wilfully dishonest.”

By using the Treaty ‘partnership’ deception to justify giving control of essential services to the Maori elite, Jacinda Ardern is robbing New Zealanders of crucial democratic safeguards, placing them instead at the mercy of unelected and unaccountable iwi business leaders working in their own best interests, not in the public good.

The reality is that once co-governance is put in place, the opportunities for tribal enrichment will be endless, with contracts, fees, and other mechanisms able to be used to secure taxpayer funding.

In fact, investigations have now found that a number of the family members of Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta – the member of Labour’s powerful Maori Caucus who has been leading the drive for co-governance – have been given government positions of significant influence.

The Herald reports that a company run by Ms Mahuta’s husband Gannin Ormsby was awarded contracts by the Ministry for the Environment for work described as “Maori expert ropu” (advice) during a period when she was the Associate Minister, while a second consultancy owned by Ormsby’s nephew Tamoko Ormsby and his wife Waimirirangi was paid $65,000, for work described as ‘support for Maori expert ropu’ over the same period.

Mahuta family members were also involved in the development of He Puapua, the UN Declaration plan for tribal rule.

Presumably Nanaia Mahuta saw no conflict or perceived conflict in any of this.

Doesn’t this raise questions about the legitimacy of the whole tribal rule agenda, since ‘co-governance’ could deliver significant ‘benefits’ to certain tribal groups?

Jacinda Ardern’s path to co-governance is already proving to be a recipe for Maori privilege by an inherited elite that will divide and weaken our society. Their end goal, of course – as outlined in He Puapua – is to ‘take the country back’ to tribal rule by 2040.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/nz-cogovernance-is-a-recipe-for-privilege-by-an-inherited-tribal-elite/news-story/8f03c0ecaa1bd1a033df04acd6830b14

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MLB Players Stand Up to Woke Owners, Refuse to Participate in Team's Stunt for 'Pride Month'

A massive number of companies have chosen to plaster rainbows all over their social media and physical buildings for the month of June, which the left has dubbed “Pride Month.” This political posturing is supposed to display support for the LGBT community.

On Saturday, MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays participated in this celebration.

However, at least five players chose to take a stand for their beliefs, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The Rays wore hats with a rainbow-colored version of their signature “TB” logo as well as arm patches that were rainbow versions of their secondary “sunburst” logo.

Yet some players decided their Christian faith compelled them not to wear the “pride” uniforms. The Times reported they included five pitchers: Jason Adam, Jalen Beeks, Brooks Raley, Jeffrey Springs and Ryan Thompson.

These players chose to remove the rainbow patches from their sleeves and wore the traditional hat.

Speaking on behalf of the group, Adam explained their reasoning to the Times.

“A lot of it comes down to faith, to like a faith-based decision,” he said. “So it’s a hard decision. Because ultimately we all said what we want is them to know that all are welcome and loved here.

“But when we put it on our bodies, I think a lot of guys decided that it’s just a lifestyle that maybe — not that they look down on anybody or think differently — it’s just that maybe we don’t want to encourage it if we believe in Jesus, who’s encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior, just like [Jesus] encourages me as a heterosexual male to abstain from sex outside of the confines of marriage. It’s no different.”

Just as Adam said, Jesus did not call us to hate sinners but to love them. At the same time, he did call us to hate sin itself.

Loving someone is not always synonymous with encouraging his or her behavior. In fact, loving people often means holding them accountable by identifying their sin and helping them work to overcome it.

Adam further clarified to the Times that these players were not trying to exclude anyone. Even if they do not support the sexual choices of LGBT individuals, Adam said, the players still love and care about each of them.

“It’s not judgmental,” he said. “It’s not looking down. It’s just what we believe the lifestyle he’s encouraged us to live, for our good, not to withhold. But again, we love these men and women, we care about them, and we want them to feel safe and welcome here.”

This is a perfectly logical explanation, and it seems like the response Jesus would call his followers to have in this situation.

That did not stop many on social media from demonizing these players.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/mlb-players-stand-woke-owners-refuse-participate-teams-stunt-pride-month

Monday, June 06, 2022

DeSantis Blocks Transition Healthcare for Transgenders

Florida is taking major steps to prevent young people from making hasty, life-long health decisions that are being pushed by the woke left.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is teaming up with a campaign to ban young people from undergoing transition-related procedures such as sex-reassignment surgery and taking medications such as hormone blockers.

According to a letter from Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, he and DeSantis’ team is urging the state’s Board of Medicine to stop providing transition care for minors and adolescents.

“While some professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, recommend these treatments for 'gender-affirming' care, the scientific evidence supporting these complex medical interventions is extraordinarily weak,” Ladapo said., adding “the current standards set by numerous professional organizations appear to follow a preferred political ideology instead of the highest level of generally accepted medical science.”

Ladapo said that “Florida must do more to protect children from politics-based medicine.”

This comes hours after the state Agency for Health Care Administration said it would ban Medicaid coverage for transgender people regardless of their age. The 46-page report claimed “treatments for gender dysphoria like hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers and surgeries are under-researched and ineffective.”

Defending its actions, the AHCA said “the research supporting sex reassignment treatment is insufficient to demonstrate efficacy and safety…considering the weak evidence supporting the use of puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures when compared to the stronger research demonstrating the permanent effects they cause, these treatments do not conform to [generally accepted professional medical standards] and are experimental and investigational.”

DeSantis has gone full throttle in his fight against the woke mob. In March, he signed the Parental Rights in Education Act banning classroom instruction of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade while also giving parents the right to know what their kids are being taught. He also banned biological males who “identify” as girls from participating in female sports.

Additionally, the Florida Department of Health pushed back against "gender affirming care" days after the Biden administration said it supports such related-surgeries.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/06/03/desantis-blocks-transition-healthcare-for-trans-youth-n2608192

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It's So Bad Even Californians Have Had It: LA DA Loses Appeal After Not Enforcing Law, San Francisco DA Faces Recall

The signs continue to grow that Californians have had enough of “progressive” district attorneys’ soft-on-crime policies as the futures of the top prosecutors of Los Angeles and San Francisco look very uncertain.

On Thursday, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Los Angeles DA George Gascon cannot refuse to charge criminals under the state’s three-strikes law, Fox News reported.

After Gascon took office in December 2020, he implemented a series of what he characterized as reforms designed to end “mass incarceration.”

“The measures included barring deputy DAs from prosecuting strikes, special circumstances and sentencing enhancements,” according to Fox.

The Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County responded by suing Gascon that same month to stop him from forcing them to break the law.

“While an elected District Attorney has wide discretion in determining what charges to pursue in an individual case, that discretion does not authorize him or her to violate the law or to direct attorneys representing the district attorney’s office to violate the law,” Michele Hanisee, president of the ADDA, said in a December 2020 news release announcing the suit.

Fox reported, “California’s Three Strike Law was enacted in 1994 after voters approved Proposition 184 by an overwhelming majority.”

The law mandated at least a 25 years in prison to a life sentence for those convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, referred to as “strikes.”

A California appeals court sided with the ADDA on Thursday.

“On the merits, we conclude the voters and the Legislature created a duty, enforceable in mandamus, that requires prosecutors to plead prior serious or violent felony convictions to ensure the alternative sentencing scheme created by the three strikes law applies to repeat offenders,” the ruling said.

“The district attorney overstates his authority. He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion,” the judges added.

Eric Siddall, vice president of the ADDA, celebrated the ruling, tweeting: “Today, the judiciary affirmed the rule of law. Gasc�n’s authority is not absolute. He must follow the rules.

“While we are heartened by the Court’s ruling, we continue to be disappointed that LA’s chief prosecutor forced us to take him to court to stop him from breaking the law.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that homicides hit 397 in 2021, which was the highest number in 15 years and a 50 percent increase from 2019.

Robberies involving firearms were also up 57 percent from 2020 and 60 percent from 2019, and so far 2022 is outpacing 2021 at the same point in time.

“Violent crime of all types through April 23 was up 7.2% compared to last year, with much of the increase from aggravated assaults and robberies, many of which involved firearms, according to police. Robberies are up 18.5% over last year,” the Times said.

Angelinos sought to recall Gascon last year due to his soft-on-crime polices, but failed to gather enough signatures.

A second recall campaign has already collected over 500,000 signatures, with just 67,000 more needed by the July 6 deadline to qualify for the ballot, the group “Recall District Attorney George Gascon” said in Thursday news release.

Gascon was previously the district attorney in San Francisco, a position he was initially appointed to by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. Gascon served from 2011 until 2019.

His progressive successor, Chesa Boudin, faces major discontent himself, due to a spike in violent crime.

In fact, Tuesday San Franciscans will vote whether to recall him, and polling suggests he is going down.

Like Gascon, Boudin has followed a soft-on-crime approach at a time when a firmer hand was needed, and the results were predictable.

“In 2021 homicides in San Francisco were up 36% compared to 2019. Last year 222 people were wounded or killed by gun violence in the city, compared to 137 in 2019,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

“Motor vehicle theft is up 36%, arson 40%, and larceny up 20% in 2021 compared to 2019. These official property crime numbers are likely low, as some victims no longer bother to report crimes they know won’t be investigated or punished,” the news outlet added.

Walgreens spent 46 times the chain average on security for its San Francisco locations and five have closed due to the high theft rate, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

And it appears city residents are finally fed up.

A May San Francisco Standard Voter Poll showed 57 percent of respondents favored recalling Boudin, while a mid-May poll conducted by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce found that 67 percent want him out.

In should be noted that in January, San Franciscans ousted three school board members from their city’s district who had become overly woke.

All this taken together means that “progressives” have apparently gone too far even for deep-blue California’s liking — and they’re going to pay for it at the polls.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/bad-even-californians-la-da-loses-appeal-not-enforcing-law-san-francisco-da-faces-recall

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Biden Admin Holding Children's Lunch Money Hostage to Force Schools to Push Transgenderism

The Biden administration is holding lunch money for schools hostage to secure concessions on LGBT issues, conservative advocacy group Fight for Schools said.

Schools receiving federal money under the Food and Nutrition Service are now required to investigate allegations of what the Biden administration considers to be “discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation,” the Department of Agriculture announced in a May 5 news release.

The USDA will require those schools to change their “non-discrimination policies and signage” to include bans on what the Biden administration considers “discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation,” the news release stated.

The agency would also expect schools that receive federal money for school lunches to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of the opposite sex, Fox News reported.

“What you’re seeing here is really the Biden administration saying ‘you’re going to do what I want or I’m going to take your lunch money,'” Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior told Fox News.

“For the federal government to come in and really tie school nutrition and school lunch programs to this radical ideology is terrifying, and it’s appalling.”

“They discuss equity nonstop in the Biden administration,” Prior said. “But in reality, if you want to talk about equity or equal opportunity, the best way to do that is to make sure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.”

“One way to do that is to make sure that they are properly fed,” Prior added.

The Food and Nutrition Service is a federal agency under the USDA tasked with helping administer domestic nutrition assistance and food security programs nationwide.

School lunches under the National School Lunch Program, which helps low-income families across the country get access to at least one nutritious meal every day, fall under the FNS’ purview.

“I honestly have no idea how providing food to children in schools is somehow connected to transgender policies. What we see here is the Biden administration using children as pawns in this social justice, gender ideology game that they are playing,” Prior said, according to Fox News, slamming the USDA policy as a “vast overreach of federal power.”

The USDA justified its actions, according to Fox News, by pointing to an Executive Order President Joe Biden signed that, according to the Biden administration, helps “support the mental health of transgender children, remove barriers that transgender people face accessing critical government services, and improve the visibility of transgender people in our nation’s data.”

“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” the order stipulates.

However, allowing students to access the bathrooms of the opposite gender simply because they claim they are of that gender even if they don’t biologically belong to that gender threatens the privacy rights of the students of that gender biologically.

“We will not allow Biden to force Floridians to choose between children’s food and parents’ rights,” Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw told the Washington Free Beacon. “That is the kind of ‘decision’ that a totalitarian regime would force upon its citizenry.”

Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem vowed legal action from her state against the USDA order.

“Joe Biden has threatened to take away children’s school lunch money to pursue his radical agenda,” Noem told the Free Beacon. “He’s targeting states like ours that make it clear biological men do NOT belong in girls’ bathrooms and sports. If you act on this, Joe, we’ll see you in court and we will win.”

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/biden-admin-holding-childrens-lunch-money-hostage-force-schools-push-transgenderism?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=brief-FP&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=2022-06-05&ats_es=6bed8ec6c23532f964400caf5c21036b

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Australian mother loses kids after spanking child with wooden spoon

Excessive government intervention. Smacking a child is allowed in Queensland as long as the force used is "reasonable under the circumstances". That would seem to be the case here. As the child was autistic, smacking was probably needed to get his attention

A single Gold Coast mum who smacked her 10-year-old with a wooden spoon has been placed on probation and she is now fighting to get her kids back.

The mum, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty in the Southport Magistrates Court on Thursday to assault occasioning bodily harm.

The court was told the mum hit the 10-year-old once on the bottom with the wooden spoon after she found out he put $600 on her credit card through mobile phone games.

The child, with autism and attention deficit disorder, was left with bruises on their bottom.

The court was told after the incident the Department of Child Safety got involved and she lost both of her children. It is not clear how the smacking incident came to light.

She is currently having supervised visits with the children.

Magistrate Mark Bamberry placed her on nine months’ probation. No conviction was recorded.

Outside of court Antonious Abdelshahied, of Abdelshahied Lawyers, said: “It was a one off incident. “There was no previous violence.

“She is extremely remorseful and her focus is on trying to get her children back.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/gold-coast/gold-coast-mum-loses-kids-after-smacking-child-with-wooden-spoon/news-story/b0881f01e053d1e5a622a9522cdfb1e3

Sunday, June 05, 2022

Tory imperial measures plan ‘utter nonsense’ and will add costs, says Asda chair

I will of course be derided as a dinosaur for saying so but I believe that the Imperial/American system is much safer than the metric system. You just have to misplace a decimal point in metric for disaster to ensue. That cannot happen with Imperial measures. I still use Imperial myself. Imperial and American measures are 99% identical

Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit plan to bring back imperial measurements is “complete and utter nonsense”, according to Asda chair Stuart Rose.

In a scathing attack, the Conservative peer said the push to boost the use of pounds, ounces and other outmoded weights and measures would only “add cost” and confusion to businesses.

“I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life,” Lord Rose told Times Radio on Thursday, branding it a “backwards” step aimed at pleasing nostalgic voters.

“I mean, we have got serious problems in the world and we’re now saying let’s go backwards. Does anybody in this country below the age of about 40 know how many ounces there are in a pound?” the Asda chief asked.

Lord Rose said the government was pushing ahead with the plan “just to actually please a small minority of people who hark for the past. It’s complete and utter nonsense and it will add cost to those people who have to put it into place.”

The former boss of Marks & Spencer added: “I am shocked. It’s one thing having a crown on your pint glass, which is a bit of fun and a bit of nostalgia. It’s quite another having a whole dual system of weights and measures.”

The government is set to consult industry on how to reintroduce imperial units in Britain after quitting the EU, with ministers expected to officially announce the move today to coincide with the Queen’s platinum jubilee.

The idea has already faced criticism from the Tory backbenches, with Rutland and Melton MP Alicia Kearns branding it “a nonsense”. Labour has accused Mr Johnson of trying to “weaponise nostalgia”.

Last week, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis claimed voters and businesses would be “pleased” that the government was set to open the door to greater use of imperial units.

But the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the umbrella body representing the big supermarkets, has warned that the move could be “distracting” and costly at a time when food chiefs were trying to tackle inflationary pressures during the cost of living crisis.

Ministers have argued that it would give the likes of greengrocers and pub landlords greater choice over running their businesses, as well as bringing “national culture” back into shops.

Mr Lewis said that, while the policy was “light-hearted”, there were many people who “want to go back” to using pounds and ounces, and measures such as yards and miles.

The EU weights and measures directive came into force in 2000, with traders legally required to use metric units for sale by weight or the measure of fresh produce.

It remains legal to price goods in pounds and ounces, but they have to be displayed alongside the price in grams and kilograms.

The consultation, which is being coordinated by the department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), could change those stipulations, allowing traders to choose how they price fresh items.

The Independent understands that there will not be a move away from metric units, but the consultation will look at where it makes sense to incorporate or switch to imperial measurements such as feet and yards, and pints and gallons.

A Tory minister struggled to convert imperial measurements during an interview on Sky News earlier this week, despite Downing Street claiming the system is “universally understood”.

Arts minister Stephen Parkinson gave incorrect answers when Kay Burley asked him to convert ounces and grams into pounds.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-imperial-measurements-supermarkets-asda-b2092872.html

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Are Video Games Harmful or Will They Make Your Kids Very Intelligent?

There was a big debate about this in 2009. See here. Computer games were generally found to be beneficial

The debate about whether or not screen time is harmful has been around for years. Some people believe that screen time, especially for children, is bad because it stunts their development and impairs their ability to think creatively.

Others claim that screen time can actually have positive effects. A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides some evidence for the latter claim.

Researchers at Karolinska University in Sweden studied how screen time relates to intelligence. The study produced some interesting results about the effects of various screen activities on intelligence.

The study looked at thousands of US children

In the study, conducted over a two-year period, the IQ scores of a group of children aged 8–10 years were followed.

The study examined the cognitive abilities of more than 9,000 boys and girls. In the beginning, the children completed a series of tests to measure their intelligence. The tests included measures of memory, attention and problem-solving skills.

Parents were also asked how much time their child spends watching TV and videos, playing video games and using social media.

The researchers studied 5,000 of the children again after 2 years. They asked the children to repeat the psychological tests to examine how their performance changed from one testing session to another.

The researchers also controlled for individual differences in the first test, such as genetic differences that might affect intelligence and differences that might be related to parents’ education level and income. This gave them a more accurate picture of how different factors influence intelligence.

Playing video games is better than watching TV

The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence by about 2.5 IQ points between the two measurements.

No significant positive or negative effect of TV -watching or social media was found. These results suggest that not all activities are equal in terms of screen time.

Playing video games appears to have a positive effect on intelligence, while time spent on social media doesn’t appear to have a significant effect.

This study provides valuable insight into how different screen activities affect children’s intellectual development.

Conclusion

Contrary to popular belief, spending time staring at screens doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on children’s cognitive abilities, as this recent study shows.

In fact, the study found that playing video games can boost intelligence.

The researchers haven’t yet examined how screen time affects other factors, such as physical activity or school performance.

We didn’t examine the effects of screen behaviour on physical activity, sleep, wellbeing or school performance, so we can’t say anything about that,” says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

However, these findings are consistent with several experimental studies on video game playing, which suggest that this activity can improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills, and more.

https://medium.com/our-world-tomorrow/are-video-games-harmful-or-will-they-make-your-kids-very-intelligent-21f4ad6b9cb8

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Many American men are not OK

A characteristic common to suicides and mass killings is that the perpetrators are disproportionately men.

Men—generally young men—commit indiscriminate mass murder, and men take their own lives at a rate almost four times higher than women.

So, men demonstrate in a most unpleasant way another truth that our liberal friends want to deny. Men are different from women—not just in physical makeup but also in spiritual, psychological makeup.

For whatever reason, our increasingly Godless, materialistic, morally empty culture seems to take a particularly heavy toll on men.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Nick Eberstadt has looked into the recent phenomenon of prime-age men—ages 25-54—who have bailed out of the labor market. These are men who have stopped working and seeking work. The official label is NILF—not in the labor force.

According to Eberstadt, the total number of NILF men held steady in the 1940s and 1950s at around 1 million. Then in the late 1960s it exploded. There are now 7 million prime-age men who have withdrawn from the workforce.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the labor force participation rate of men—the percent of working age men in the work force—was 86.2% in January 1950. In April 2022, it was 68%.

The labor force participation rate for women has almost doubled over the same period—33.4% in January of 1950 to 56.7% in April 2022.

We’ve gone from a culture centered on church to a culture centered on government.

According to Gallup, in 1950 over 70% of Americans belonged to a church. In 2020, it was 47%. Among those born between 1981 and 1996, it’s 36%.

Over the same period, take of all levels of government from our GDP went from 22.6% to 43.4%.

Sanctity of life was devalued with Roe v. Wade. Military conscription was abolished around the same time, erasing any personal responsibility, beyond paying taxes, that men have to serve.

In this vacuous culture of entitlement and meaninglessness, lost young men periodically make their presence known through violent expressions, sometimes directed at others, sometimes toward themselves.

I do not pretend that this is simple. I certainly agree that security measures should be taken, particularly in schools.

George Washington warned the nation in his farewell address that there is no freedom without faith, tradition and personal responsibility.

The same liberals that have helped wipe this out now want more government in the way of new gun laws to solve what is a cultural and spiritual crisis.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/01/gun-laws-wont-fix-a-problem-of-culture-and-spirit

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LGBTQI+ Pride Month Caught in Its Own Contradictions

June marks LGBTQI+ Pride Month—a month honoring those who are “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex.”

This ever-expanding rubric revolves around a particular value system entirely embraced by the modern left: the notion that a person’s core identity ought to lie not in the relationship between individual desires and societal duties, but instead ought to revolve around a subjective sense of self, unverifiable by the world at large and justified against all societal roles and rules.

President Joe Biden has said as much from the White House. In a proclamation urging Americans to “wave their flags of pride high”—it is worth noting that an entire side of the political aisle in the United States now finds the so-called pride flag far less controversial than the American flag itself—Biden stated, “This month, we remind the LGBTQI+ community that they are loved and cherished. My administration sees you for who you are—deserving of dignity, respect, and support.”

Of course, seeing people for who they are typically requires some sort of objective standard; it is literally impossible to see someone for who he is based on his own internal self-perception. This means that Biden is using perfectly Orwellian euphemisms to say that we all ought to validate the self-perception of any he, she, xe or catself.

This perspective is absolutely incoherent. Ironically, this incoherence is exposed by the conflict between the different letters within the alphabet soup of the supposedly sexually marginalized. The case for tolerance of lesbian and gay Americans used to be that biological drives should not be regulated by society at large, because such drives were inborn and innate; that idea at least had the merit of internal consistency.

Now, however, that idea has been jettisoned for its logical opposite, the belief that biology has no hold on us whatsoever, and that we ought to be free to define ourselves in opposition to our own biology, changing our gender and sexual orientation at will.

Homosexual orientation relies on the continued distinction between the sexes—after all, why prefer males or females if those sexes are mere social constructs? Transgenderism relies on the absolute malleability of sex. This is the reason that so-called TERFs—“trans-exclusionary radical feminists”—are so bewildered by the suddenly mainstream view that women’s rights ought to be extended to biological men.

And yet here we are, told by the White House that we must ignore the internal contradictions of left-wing sexual ideology, and simply pretend the incoherence away. We are told that we ought to stand for women’s rights by the same people who insist that Lia Thomas is a woman; we are told that one need not be a biological female to be a lesbian; we are told that biology dictates behavior, but that biology must never be used as an identifier.

None of this makes one whit of sense. But we ought to be proud of it, because after all, it liberates us to celebrate our inner sense of authenticity, free of society’s strictures.

There is only one problem, of course: This sort of illogic quickly devolves into anarchy. There is no way to speak coherently with one another absent objective meaning, let alone to reach consensus.

Suggesting that the world at large owes each of us validation for our innermost desires is a recipe for complete chaos. Unity can only come from opposition to something—and in this case, that means opposition to tradition, institutions, and the roles that actually facilitate human flourishing.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/01/the-anarchic-philosophy-behind-lgbtqi-pride-month

Welcome to post-truth America

"Bagel Times" = NYT

Taki

What used to be extreme radicalism is now the reigning ideology of every major American city. Speech patterns have changed, and the meanings of words are perceived not in the way they were intended. Everything is politicised and crime rates have gone through the you-know-what. Political and racial differences stoked by the internet threaten major US cities, as contempt for the police and American institutions in general becomes the default stance of the ruling elite. I’ve never seen it this bad, even at the height of the Vietnam conflict, when Black Panthers were openly shooting at cops and Hollywood and the left were rooting for them. Now it’s much worse, and only Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV network stand between the maintenance of some semblance of the past and total chaos.

And speaking of Rupert Murdoch, his Fox News is the most popular cable network by far, something the left simply cannot abide. So what do they do? They openly fabricate, associating his commentators with any crime du jour, as with the recent outrage in Buffalo, where an 18-year-old white madman gunned down 11 black people and two whites after immersing himself in racist content easily found in internet forums.

Not content with innuendo and libellous hints, subversive know-nothings employed by the Bagel Times then quoted some obscure left-wing professor who blames the Fox star commentator Tucker Carlson for inflaming the killer moron. When a black assailant ran down 70 white Christmas marchers in Wisconsin late last year, killing six, he was described by the lefty media as being momentarily mentally impaired. So I ask you: who do you think that 18-year-old was when he killed ten black people in cold blood, Albert Einstein?

About ten years or so ago, before he became a star at Fox, I had lunch with Tucker Carlson. We exchanged numbers, but have not communicated since. I found him to be a very polite and well-informed young man, with good manners, something that is almost unheard of among American journalists. At present the Bagel Times is running book-length stories about him, singling him out as the prime mover behind the ‘great replacement’ phrase, which claims that sinister elites, especially Jews, are deliberately bringing in immigrants to displace white Americans. The theory has its origins in France, when Renaud Camus used it as the title of his book back in 2011. When the slogan was used in Charlottesville, Virginia – where a young Taki went to university and where no plaque commemorating that event is to be found – Carlson said on his nightly programme on Fox that he ‘didn’t like’ the protesters because ‘race was at the centre of their worldview’, so the links made by the Bagel Times ignoramuses are wrong. What is worse, however, is what lies behind the organised attack against him.

At a very chic dinner party last week, a lady lamented what would happen if 91-year-old Rupert were no longer around. I assured her that he is in excellent health and that his legacy will continue. Which is why the left in America is trying desperately to silence Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the NY Post. Link Murdoch’s media to white supremacists and the ‘great replacement’ theory and – abracadabra! – you have an excuse to discredit his media empire. Link Tucker Carlson with the Buffalo madman and – abracadabra! – Carlson is toast. The fact that the madman’s 180-page manifesto doesn’t mention Carlson is irrelevant. As is the truth where the left is concerned.

What is more interesting, and far sadder, is the fact that on the day that ten died in Buffalo, similar numbers of people were shot in Philadelphia and New York. But it was everyday crime, and America is now so used to it that it did not figure in the equation used to discredit Fox and company. The fact that Schumer, the senator from New York, a man who would sell his own mother for publicity, and deliver her also, tried to tie Carlson to the Buffalo case illustrates the depth of Democratic corruption and dishonesty. These so-called elites really take the rest of us for less than numbskulls, dunderheads. There is something warped about their attacks on truth and refusal to accept facts. Bile against whites does not alter the fact that gangland crime is the real scourge.

There is no conspiracy, but when a Bagel Times editor, Sarah Jeong, is revealed to have said how much ‘joy’ she gets at ‘being cruel to old white men’ and is defended by fellow clowns at the paper, that might be a legitimate cause of concern to some.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/high-life-284

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Liberals Now Saying That Owning Property Is Racist!

Strange logic

Recently, a woke assistant professor from Boston University, Saida Grundy, called property a racist construct and urged people to refrain from judging the actions of minority communities to events such as the death of George Floyd.

Grundy says that the looting during the riots that followed the George Floyd case is similar to Black Americans “looting themselves” out of the place of being slaves. The video was produced to mark the second anniversary of Floyd’s death.

Here’s what Grundy said in the University’s video:

“We hear President Biden say, you know, I understand your frustrations but don’t destroy property. Well, when you say that to Black people who historically have been property, one of our greatest weapons against injustice was the looting of ourselves as property from the system of slavery.”

https://2020conservative.com/liberals-now-saying-that-owning-property-is-racist/

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The supremacy of the incompetent

As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether President Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success.

A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges.

But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit—and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.

Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law.

But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes.

While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises his board will carry on.

In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools.

In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members.

The FBI recently has been knee-deep in political controversies. It illegally doctored a FISA application to entrap an American citizen. Its former directors, under oath before Congress, either claimed faulty memory or admitted lying to federal investigators.

The last thing a scandal-plagued FBI needed was to go undercover at school board meetings to investigate parents worried over their children’s education.

We are in a fuel price spiral that is destroying the middle class.

Yet when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about plans to lower gas prices, she laughed off the idea as “hilarious.”

Later Granholm preposterously claimed, “It is not the administration policies that have affected supply and demand.”

Apparently haranguing those who finance fossil fuel production, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, suspending new federal oil and gas leases, and stopping production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all had nothing to do with high fuel prices.

Currently, supply chain disruptions are paralyzing the U.S. economy.

The huge Port of Los Angeles has been a mess for over a year. Since last fall dozens of cargo ships have been backed up to the horizon. Thousands of trucks are bottlenecked at the port.

During the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not at work. Instead at the height of the crisis, he took a two-month paternity leave to help out his husband and two newborn babies.

Such paternal concern is a noble thing. But Buttigieg is supposed to ensure that life-or-death supplies reach millions of strapped Americans.

This winter, trains entering and leaving Los Angeles were routinely looted in the Old-West style of train robbing—without much of a response from Buttigieg’s transportation bureau.

In Senate testimony Secretary of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland refused to explain why her department is slow walking federal oil and gas leases at a time when Americans are paying between $5 and $6 a gallon for gas.

Haaland was unable to provide simple answers about when new leases will result in more supplies of oil and gas. Her panicked aides slid talking points to her—given that in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she seemed incapable of providing senators with basic information about U.S. energy production on federal lands.

The United States is sending many billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to Ukraine to combat Russian aggression. We rightly claim it is not a proxy war against Russia but instead an effort to help stop a brutal Russian invasion.

Why then did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tell the world the very opposite in a fashion that could only convince Russians that our real aim in Ukraine is to destroy Russia as a superpower?

As Austin put it publicly, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Even if that description of the agenda is true, why broadcast it—given Russia has over 6,000 nuclear weapons and its President Vladimir Putin is increasingly erratic and paranoid?

The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.

They seem indifferent to the current border, inflation, energy, and crime disasters. When confronted, they are unable to answer simple questions from Congress, or they mock anyone asking for answers on behalf of the strapped American people.

We don’t know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up running the government, only that they are here and the American people are suffering from their presence.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-cabinency-of-dunces_4492973.html

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JK Rowling Doled Out a New Term That's Eye-Opening

J.K. Rowling was a darling of the Left. She is a devoted leftist. There is nothing politically conservative about her. What was nauseating about Rowling was not her per se, but liberals using Harry Potter references to describe their resistance to the Trump administration. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, there was reportedly a group of anti-Trump staffers who called themselves “Dumbledore’s Army,” and communicated through encrypted apps.

Now, she’s public enemy number one to the Left for being pro-science. She believes in two genders. She thinks women are women and men are men. She’s now no better than a Nazi. It’s been this way for quite some time, but when commenting on biological men being housed in female prisons—she also used a new term that should cause you to chuckle.

Enter “the penised.” They’re dudes, guys. We all know that.

She was referring to a story from New Jersey where a female prison, Edna Mahan Correction Facility for Women, saw a few pregnancies occur because the transgenders there were screwing around with the female inmates. These were reportedly consensual sexual encounters, but the whole thing exists in a world that’s upside down.

To make things even more insane, we have British members of Parliament saying that women can have male genitals.

Yeah, how dare JK Rowling have rational opinions about this stuff, right? Well, in the left-wing realm, it’s earned her a cancellation notice which only exists in the minds of these warped folks. Rowling is already rich. Her Fantastic Beasts books are being made into movies. Those movies will still make money. She doesn’t doesn’t think that “the penised” are women. Deal with it. She’s also right.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/06/01/jk-rowling-has-been-targeted-for-transphobia-againand-has-a-new-term-thats-eyeopening-n2608082

Thursday, June 02, 2022

Johnny Depp and the truth about male domestic abuse victims

Hmmm ... My girlfriend hits me often. But it's neither harmful nor malicious so it it does not bother me. I attribute it to her Southern European origins

James looks nothing like Johnny Depp. For one thing, he is a lot taller than the 5 foot 8 star; and unlike Depp, he doesn’t sport 37 tattoos. But James identifies with much the Pirate of the Caribbean star is telling the court in Virginia (and the millions following proceedings through social media).

The first time James was attacked by his wife, he convinced himself it was a one-off. They had had a row over the quality of a meal they’d shared at the local restaurant. Suddenly his wife rushed at him, battering him with her fists. He was shocked, but thought she must have drunk too much. He caught her hands in his and spoke soothingly until she stopped trying to hit out. Life resumed as normal. Until that is, one night when James was lying in bed, and his wife pinned him down and began spitting on him.

This was back in 2001. It took James six years, during which time he suffered repeated assaults with cutlery, bottles of wine, books and food thrown at him, to finally consult a GP. When he arrived in the surgery, despite sporting bruises and welts all over his arms, the doctor dismissed him with a weary, man-of-the world sigh:

‘Look, for some individuals a degree of physicality is normal in their relationships – perhaps due to circumstances in their upbringing – I see no legitimate cause for concern or action.’

The GP was the first of a long list of practitioners who made James feel like he was either a wuss or a fantasist.

Being one of the more than 700,000 male victims of domestic abuse in England and Wales is a bit like the Man Bites Dog story: arresting, but so counter-intuitive, few can take it seriously. Domestic abuse is routinely portrayed as a gendered crime, perpetrated by men against women. And as Amber Heard taunted Johnny Depp: ‘See how many people believe or side with you’ when you’re a hunk claiming to be abused by a woman. Yet the truth is that one-third of domestic abuse victims are men.

‘The default narrative is that the victim is a heterosexual woman with an abusive partner,’ Mark Brooks, Chairman of the Man Kind charity, says, ‘and this is so widely accepted that many of the men who call us are not sure they are victims of domestic abuse because they have been told for years that men can’t be victims of domestic abuse. But if professionals do not overcome their cognitive bias with respect to men in this situation, how can they help them?’

Dr Elizabeth Bates, at the University of Cumbria, has been interviewing male victims for more than a decade. The men she has spoken to have highlighted the humiliation they suffered, not only at the hands of their perpetrators, but in their encounters with police and social workers.

‘They did nothing,’ one 47-year-old victim told her, ‘I reported abuse to police several times and they took no positive action. Social workers took matters very lightly and even took the perpetrators’ side, as if they didn’t believe me.’

Even specialist helplines could not overcome their scepticism. Another 40-something victim described calling a domestic abuse helpline:

‘They listened and then rapidly the tone changed, and she told me I only thought I was being abused and that I was the abuser and that I needed help dealing with all of the anger and violent abuse I was causing….and that I needed to turn myself in. I hung up, terrified.’

Health professionals are typically apprehensive when it comes to asking patients about domestic abuse. In our report, ‘No Honour in Abuse: harnessing the health service to end domestic abuse’, which examines the issue through a health lens, the Centre for Social Justice found that GPs, health visitors and clinicians routinely failed to ask questions about home life or couple relationships. Domestic abuse was the elephant in the room and health professionals approached it on a fear-to-know basis. This was all the more so when the potential victim was a man.

A survey of 1,368 men attending 16 general practices in the Southwest of England found GPs had never asked them about domestic arrangements, their relationship with their partner or spouse. No surprise then that the men were more likely to seek support from family and friends.

Even doing this is difficult. The stigma attached to being a male victim of domestic violence means that only a fraction will come forth and admit to being abused by the woman in their life, according to Mark Brooks. Yet one in ten men in contact with mental health services were experiencing, or had experienced, domestic abuse.

The effects of abuse on men includes sleep deprivation, increased substance abuse, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and suicide ideation. Coercive control is also present, with reports of starvation, 24/7 monitoring, threats of having their children taken away or losing their relationship with their children: and then there is being forced to penetrate a female partner – a practice disclosed by as many as one in five male victims – that leads to guilt, shame and, needless to say, sexual dysfunction.

Fewer disclosures and fewer resources have left male-focused services and refuges under-represented, under-funded and patchy. Covid-19 lockdowns saw a surge in disclosures by male victims. Mark Groves, CEO of the National Centre for Domestic Violence reported a 50 per cent increase in male victim requests from March to September 2020.

‘The increase in men coming forward is positive but puts a huge burden on those organisations supporting male victims,’ he said. ‘We are lucky to be able to cope with an additional overall 30 per cent increase but smaller agencies seeing increases of 50 per cent are facing massive stretches on their resources.’

Limited resources to tackle domestic abuse sets up damaging competition between supporting female and male victims. Groups supporting women have the advantage of an argument that packs an emotional punch: harrowing images of battered wives are all-too familiar, but a bloke cowering in a corner as his wife approaches him with a burning hot iron, not so much. Yet the lack of support for male victims, let alone male perpetrators and, probably the least supported of all, female perpetrators, fails women as much as men and their children most of all. Refusing to engage with the perpetrator allows them to go on abusing: one in four male perpetrators will go on to abuse several more women in their lifetime. Refusing to support the male victim risks perpetuating the cycle of abuse that can trap children into repeating their parents’ behaviour.

A recent survey carried out by the For Baby’s Sake Trust found that parents who experienced domestic abuse as children were more likely to experience domestic abuse as grown-ups and shame is the biggest barrier to seeking help.

‘This helps to explain the kind of support that mothers and fathers need to break the cycle of domestic abuse for themselves and their children,’ explains Amanda McIntyre, CEO of the Trust. ‘Parents want to give their baby the best start, but when they grew up with domestic abuse, their support needs to address unresolved trauma from their own childhood.’

The Trust’s own intense (and often months-long) therapeutic intervention has been engaging perpetrators and victims when they are expecting a baby – the most ‘teachable moment’, according to their practitioners. A King’s College London evaluation described the programme as the first to address key limitations in responses to domestic abuse. They are transforming parents’ and babies’ lives, reducing levels of abuse in 70 per cent of cases, according to an evaluation conducted by the university.

This kind of work is vital, though all too rare. We at the CSJ are calling for a parallel strategy in healthcare and charities to provide equally strong support for female and male victims of domestic abuse – and for male and female perpetrators.

The jury is still out on whether the Depp-Heard trial has raised awareness sufficiently about this issue for male victims of domestic abuse to step out of the shadows. But leaving one in three victims of domestic violence to fend for themselves simply because of their sex cannot be right. It’s time to ditch our preconceptions.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/johnny-depp-and-the-truth-about-male-domestic-abuse-victims/

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Sussmann Jury Nullification Marks the End of American Justice as We Knew It

Roger L. Simon

American justice isn’t only dead, it’s decomposed. Long live totalitarianism!

We can join the world now. Au revoir, American Exceptionalism. We are China. We are Putin’s Russia. We are the European Union, drifting ever more swiftly into Davos globalism and the Great Reset. We are the Ayatollah’s Iran. We are Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and then some.

Most of all, goodbye to the rule of law. Was it ever there? I seem to have vague memories.

The jurors in John Durham’s trial of attorney Michael Sussmann—which resulted in the Clinton campaign lawyer’s acquittal—will be remembered, by those allowed to remember, if any, as the moment our already decaying justice system went completely south.

The D.C. jurors, revealed in the voir dire to have been completely biased in the first place, demonstrated that the English language itself—and the evidence available therein—was of no interest to them. They not only nullified a possible verdict, but they also nullified English by ignoring the email that Sussmann wrote then FBI attorney (now Twitter stalwart) James Baker the night before their meeting.

“I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. I’m coming on my own—not on behalf of a client or company—want to help the Bureau.”

Baker testified that Sussmann told him the same thing in person, yet billing records, and much subsequent activity, clearly show that Sussmann was lying. He was working for Hillary Clinton via the Perkins Coie law firm. Several years of ugly U.S. history flowed from that.

Did the jury care? Evidently not. Their decision was close to immediate.

The jurors’ justification, assuming they bothered to use it, of the questionable “materiality” of Sussmann’s lies has some small justification, but only up to a point. Yes, the FBI’s feelings for Donald Trump were already somewhere between repugnance and revulsion—as evidenced by many emails we have seen and probably even more that we haven’t—but if we are to believe that makes Sussmann’s lie irrelevant, we are also to believe there wasn’t a widespread conspiracy in which he was very willing participant against the candidate and then president, an entente cordiale, as they say.

Surely there was.

And that entente cordiale was among the most despicable acts ever performed by Americans against their fellow citizens.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sussmann-jury-nullification-marks-the-end-of-american-justice-as-we-knew-it_4503087.html

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'I can still hit a golf ball 280 yards after seven YEARS of hormone therapy - there's a lot of testosterone left over!'

Caitlynn Jenner doubled down on her criticism of trans swimmer Lia Thomas being able to compete against girls, saying on Wednesday that she still has a male athletic advantage even after seven years of hormone therapy.

Jenner, 72, appeared on FOX News on Wednesday morning, a day after Thomas gave her first on-camera interview. She said she does not blame Thomas for taking part in the sport and that she supports her right to transition, but that it's down to the NCAA to make stricter rules.

'Just one year of hormone replacement therapy is not enough. I've been on, for seven years, full transition hormone replacement and I can still hit the golf ball 280, 290 yards. There's a lot left over.

'And so I'm not blaming her, I'm just blaming the system right now - that has to be seriously looked at,' she said.

Thomas, 22, has caused a storm in the sporting world by competing as a woman after beginning transitional hormone therapy aged 19. Before that, she had competed as a man.

As a woman, she has bumped UPenn seven places up in the NCAA league tables at this year's championships. Now, she says she wants to compete in the Olympics and that she should be allowed to.

Jenner - who competed in the Olympics as a man and started transitioning in 2015 - said that she does not blame Thomas for the row she now finds herself at the center of.

'I thought she did a very good job and this is not Lia Thomas' fault. 'She played by the rules and she did a good job. Really, my concerns are with the NCAA. Their rules have to be a lot more stringent. They have to be more difficult.

On Twitter, she added: 'The woke world we are living in today is what has allowed for Lia Thomas to compete and take away medals from biological women.'

Thomas thinks she should be able to compete as a woman. She says that if she is banned, other biological women who have larger hands and feet and are taller than competitors should be too.

In an interview with Good Morning America yesterday, she said: 'I don't need anybody's permission to be myself.

She also said anyone who says she isn't allowed to compete as a woman is transphobic, regardless of whether or not they support her right to transition. 'You can't go halfway and be like "I support trans people but only to a certain point. If you support transwomen and they've met all the N.C.A.A. requirements, I don't know if you can say something like that. 'Trans women are not a threat to women's sport,' she said.

In a later interview with ESPN, she doubled down. 'Trans women competing in women's sports does not threaten sports as a whole because trans women are a very small minority and the NCAA rules regarding trans women competing have been around for 10 plus years and we haven't seen any massive wave of trans women dominating,' she said.

She dismissed the controversy surrounding her place in the women's category, saying she is now happy. 'There's a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do. The biggest change for me is that I'm happy and sophomore year where I had my best times competing with men, I was miserable.

'Having that be lifted is incredibly relieving and allows me to put my all into training and racing.'

Teammates have anonymously spoken out to criticize UPenn and reveal that they were 'silenced' by the college.

In a new documentary about gender ideology that will air tomorrow night, the anonymous teammates said they were told never to question Lia's place and warned that doing would seal their fate. 'Lia’s swimming is a non-negotiable,' one swimmer says she was told by an unnamed college executive.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10875187/Caitlyn-Jenner-says-lot-testosterone-left-despite-years-hormone-therapy.html

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Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Texas Social Media Anti-Censorship Law

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 late on May 31 to temporarily block a Texas law that prevents social media platforms from censoring users based on their political views.

Known as HB 20, the state law makes it unlawful for tech platforms to restrict or remove content based on “the viewpoint of the user or another person” or “the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression.”

The statute also requires the platforms to establish procedures users can use to appeal a platform’s decision to “remove content posted by the user.” The law applies to platforms that have more than 50 million active monthly users in the United States.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the bill in September 2021. The case is Netchoice v. Paxton, court file 21A720.

The applicants are two trade associations representing big tech—Netchoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA). The respondent is Ken Paxton, a Republican who is the attorney general of Texas.

Silicon Valley giants oppose the legislation, claiming it is unconstitutional.

After the new ruling CCIA president Matt Schruers praised the order. “We are encouraged that this attack on First Amendment rights has been halted until a court can fully evaluate the repercussions of Texas’s ill-conceived statute,” he said in a statement.

“This ruling means that private American companies will have an opportunity to be heard in court before they are forced to disseminate vile, abusive or extremist content under this Texas law.

“We appreciate the Supreme Court ensuring First Amendment protections, including the right not to be compelled to speak, will be upheld during the legal challenge to Texas’s social media law,” Schruers said.

“The Supreme Court noting the constitutional risks of this law is important not just for online companies and free speech, but for a key principle for democratic countries. No online platform, website, or newspaper should be directed by government officials to carry certain speech. This has been a key tenet of our democracy for more than 200 years and the Supreme Court has upheld that.”

The emergency application was filed with the high court on May 13. The opinion was released at the end of the business day on May 31.

The decision cut across the court’s ideological lines. Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer joined with conservatives John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to slap a hold on the law. The five justices did not explain why they voted to approve the order.

Netchoice and CCIA characterized HB 20 in the application (pdf) as an attack on Silicon Valley companies.

The statute “is an unprecedented assault on the editorial discretion of private websites [like Facebook.com, Instagram.com, Pinterest.com, Twitter.com, Vimeo.com, and YouTube.com] that would fundamentally transform their business models and services,” the document stated.

“HB20 prohibits covered social media platforms [many of which are members of Applicants NetChoice and CCIA] from engaging in any viewpoint-based editorial discretion.

“Thus, HB20 would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints—such as Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is warranted, neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust, and encouraging children to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior like eating disorders.

“HB20 also imposes related burdensome operational and disclosure requirements designed to chill the millions of expressive editorial choices that platforms make each day.”

Alito rejected the social media platforms’ arguments in his dissent, saying whether the companies’ will ultimately win their case “under existing law is quite unclear.”

“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” the justice wrote.

“This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this Court’s review. Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news,” Alito wrote, referencing a Pew Research Center report from a year ago that stated that more eight out of 10 Americans obtain news from digital devices.

Describing HB 20 as “a ground-breaking Texas law,” Alito wrote that it “addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

A federal district judge previously enjoined Texas from enforcing the law but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that order on May 11, as The Epoch Times reported.

Attorneys representing Texas told the 5th Circuit that social media platforms “control the modern-day public square, but they abusively suppress speech in that square.”

A federal judge blocked a similar Florida law, finding it unconstitutional.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-temporarily-blocks-texas-social-media-anti-censorship-law_4503784.html

Wednesday, June 01, 2022

Single career woman divides opinion by insisting the 'best way for women to be financially comfortable is STILL through marriage' - after being surrounded by wives with 'easier lives'

A woman has provoked debate after stating that 'the best or most common way' for women to be financially comfortable or create wealth is still through marriage and the merging of assets with a man.

Writing on British parenting forum Mumsnet, the woman explained her frustration that she had worked hard for 30 years to be independent, like 'the teachers at school told us girls to be,' and yet believes that women who didn't further their education seem and got married seem to be far better off.

She said: 'It's not just about the merging together of two salaries, but about how much easier financial life is when you have the benefit of a man's higher average income.'

Responses were somewhat divided, with many people sharing their own personal situations and others accusing her of 'generalisations.'

The woman said: 'I've been single most of my adult life, worked full time and built up a good career but despite this... I'm always struck how much better off women who are married are than me.'

She asked people to consider: 'The many women I work with on low salaries or working part-time who are living much nicer lifestyles than I as they have a man significantly supplementing them.'

She concluded: 'I understand: all the constraints on women to generate their own income especially the gender pay gap and the impact of childrearing; that the above scenarios don't apply to all couples; that I'm assuming a heterosexual set up; that women contribute within marriages in other way than bringing in income; and that assets in a marriage are shared as is any income that comes into a marriage.

'I know people might think I'm being anti-women for challenging women's choices or women's rights or just plain bitter...

'[But] is it not depressing that the best or most common way for women to be financially comfortable or create wealth is still through marriage and the merging of assets with a man?'

One user said: 'Your proposition is full of holes. You've been extremely selective.'

Whilst another commented: 'You've made huge generalisations. Most of women I know who are single and in their late 40s/50s have a great standard of living. They've worked hard, not had children and had fantastic careers without a break from children.'

A third posted: 'Massive generalisations here. I'm the higher earner in my marriage. We are a team and have gone through highs and lows together as a team. Marriage takes work.

'And if we look on the flip side, there are numerous posts here every single day of women who are left vulnerable by not working or working part time in marriages because if they feel trapped or have an abusive husband, they massively struggle with getting out.

'Single parenting has its difficulties. Parenting with your spouse has its difficulties. Not having children and focusing on a career has its difficulties. It's not a competition. Things are just different.'

Others however, agreed with one user saying: 'Yes, it is amazing that even now, in 2022, so many millions of women earn less than men.'

Someone else posted: 'Yes, the sexism that is the pay inequality is something that we should all be angry about.'

A third women said: 'It's true. I got married and now only have to make a bit of money as my husband works for the main wage. 'In my experience men enjoy this. As society grows out in-built natures grow less quickly.

'I could go out and have a career but instead I'm happy to have lots more free time, get up later, enjoy projects alongside work. It really is a dram. The family unit is a dream.'

Someone else pointed out: 'Two incomes will always make things more comfortable than one. 'Not all men are high earners. Not all women earn the lower of the two household salaries.'

Another commenter questioned: 'I'm still not entirely sure your point is. 'There are millions of men on low wages. You're just picking out your friends who have married men who earn well. 'Also, nothing is free. A lot of these women you mention will feel trapped in their marriages. I'd rather my freedom.'

Other people used their own experiences to highlight their problems with this argument.

One user posted: 'You've also forgotten that the best or most common way for men to be financially comfortable and professionally successful is still through marriage? A woman at home can enable a man to be able to go on business trips or work hours much longer than nurseries can provide.'

A second person said: 'I out earn my husband and brought a property our marriage, he did not.

'I know very few women who are financially dependent on anyone other than themselves, and that includes women on low income (possible even more so in this bracket as they know they can only truly rely on themselves), but I guess it depends on who you choose to socialise with, I obviously surround myself with very independent women.'

Someone else pointed out: 'It's more to do with running one household instead of two. The daily standing charge for gas, for example, has only to be paid once if you live together. Sadly, this is the main reason people are so keen to live together these days.'

Another commented: 'It works both ways because it's the two adults in a single household that brings the most benefit. So men benefit financially from marriage too, not only if their wife also earns but also if she's providing childcare etc.

'However, what's also evident is that men still earn more than women so if you hook up with a man then you are effectively mitigating the gender pay gap.'

A third posted: 'Statistically any two people who live together probably have more wealth be that man and woman or two men etc. 'Two salaries will also be better than one in most cases. I know rich single people and poorer single people, married couples who do well and those who struggle. There are more heterosexual couples though.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10868717/Woman-sparks-debate-stating-women-financially-comfortable-married.html

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Joe Biden’s cognitive challenges have stripped away his political savvy and left him in the raw, revealing his real essence—a racialist of the first order

Joe Biden has had a long history of racist outbursts. Can we even remember them all? The “put y’all back in chains” insults to an audience of black professionals, his dismissal of black interviewers variously as “you ain’t black” or ”junkie,” his he-man racialist Corn Pop mythologies, his recent condescending reference to a black professional as “boy,” and on and on.

The Left has always contextualized his racial outbursts in the same fashion his decades-long creepy touching, sexual harassment, grabbing, and blowing into the hair and ears of young women and teens were always “just Joe being Joe.”

So it was ironic but predictable that Biden went to Buffalo on Tuesday to leverage the recent carnage from the deranged, eco-fascist, racist, and insane lethal mass shooter of 11 African-Americans. Read the gunman’s manifesto: it is an unhinged collage of green fascist, racist, and politically incoherent mishmash.

Purported right-wing monsters usually don’t hate Fox News and Ben Shapiro or go on endless green screeds. No matter. For Biden, as his midterm rendezvous looms ominously, the Buffalo shooter was useful in smearing his own political opponents. So Biden saw a trip to Buffalo as an opportunity, in a way other mass shootings were not, and made a rare excursion out of his secluded compound.

The Great Asymmetries

Biden’s despicable effort at blaming his political adversaries for the deaths failed for lots of reasons. He mangled his recitations of prior white-on-black shootings by including the recent Dallas shootings of three Asians by an African-American in his catalog of white-supremacist murders.

Biden by intent ignored the near simultaneous mass shooting of Taiwanese parishioners by a deranged Chinese gunman.

Of course, he has said nothing either in the past or in the present about the mass murdering by the black nationalist and BLM sympathizer Darrell Brooks. The latter deliberately used his car to mow down white children and elderly people. Most media outlets, given their selective indifference to the loss of human life, described the killings as done by a wayward SUV, as if it was driven on some sort of autopilot.

The Left in general and Biden in particular scan the daily news for opportunities for racial demagoguery. When black shooters try to gas and maim white commuters on the subway, or when there is an epidemic of anti-Asian hate crimes committed disproportionately by black males, or an unhinged Bernie Sanders activist attempts to murder House Republican leaders, the Left is silent or insists the hard ideology or racism the shooter embraces is either irrelevant or somehow a natural response to some sort of provocation. Again, it selectively sees or does not see connections between political discourse and crazy people who commit mass mayhem—depending entirely upon the political ore to be mined.

The effort to pigeonhole mass shootings for political gain necessarily results in hypocrisy, fantasy, and outright lying. Suddenly cars are animated objects. Black nationalist racial hatred expressed on social media is derided as right-wing talking points. Joe Biden cites African-American shooters of Asians as white-supremacist killers.

In the end, we are left only with the surreal: an Al Sharpton screaming about the culpability of conservatives for the Buffalo shooting—this, from the racial arsonist of the age, who originally came to notice through his racial hatred and anti-Semitism that led to riots and death. Or a raving Joy Reid, known previously for her homophobic tweets and more recently for her nightly harangues about a current white collective that is communally guilty for the sins of those long dead.

One of the strangest ironies is the Left’s denunciation of supposed conservative adherence to the “great replacement theory”—or the fear that nonwhite populations are by design replacing a dwindling white minority, and both are politically predictable by reason of their race or ethnic background. But if that were so, why would white conservatives abhor abortion that disproportionally destroys black and brown lives in the womb?

In contrast, why do good progressives like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confess that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”) Further, why did current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argue that black abortions were economically rational? “In many cases abortions are of teenage women, particularly low income, and often black, who aren’t in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability, often, to continue their education to later participate in the workforce,” Yellen said last week. “It means that children will grow up in poverty and do worse themselves.”

So once more, the Left projects. Replacement theories are a hallmark of leftist political science. They usually appear in triumphalist books and articles gushing about how “demography is destiny” and “the new Democratic majority” that will doom supposedly white Republicans and conservatives.

Boasts about flipping red and purple states blue follow, as we are lectured that California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are now blue due to unchecked immigration. So too, we are told, will Arizona and Texas soon follow.

More perniciously, the Left does its best to restrict immigration from areas deemed problematic such as Cuba. So the “great replacement theory” is largely the Left’s name for conservative anger at the intentional destruction of our southern border—most recently in a time of a pandemic—to mainstream illegal immigration for largely selfish political interests. Demographic obsessions are largely a progressive fixation.

Note that the Hispanic populations, galvanized by Biden’s culpably for high fuel prices, hyperinflation, support for radical abortion on demand, and, ironically, open borders, may soon split its political loyalties in November in a way once deemed unimaginable.

If that happens, then the Left will likely recalibrate Mexican Americans as virtual Cubans and thus close the southern border, given illegal immigration will no longer be seen by their own admission as useful demographically.

From Hypocrisy to Projection

Three final points about the Biden demagoguery of race.

First, the hypocrisy on race simply follows the hard-left double-standards on a host of issues.

By all means let us sanction, condemn, and oppose Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine. But the Left shows no such animosity toward a far greater existential threat to the United States—Communist China. It has destroyed an independent Tibet. It has absorbed and ruined a once democratic and free Hong Kong. It promises to end autonomy and democracy for Taiwan. And it has bullied and threatened every other consensual government in its neighborhood, from Australia and Japan to South Korea and the Philippines.

The Left ignores Chinese culpability for hiding and obstructing the truth about the Wuhan lab origins of COVID-19 that has nearly wrecked civilization as we once knew it. It calls racist anyone who worries that China is waging a systematic effort to steal all the technology and research it can from the United States.

Almost every leftist dominated institution, whether defined as corporate America, professional sports, Hollywood, or academia, refuses to call out systemic Chinese racism, reeducation camps, and the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur minorities, largely due to lucrative joint ventures.

Similarly, the Left applies different standards to its own. In summer 2020, some 120 days of rioting, $2 billion in property damage, over 35 deaths, 1,500 police injuries, and the torching of an iconic church, police precinct, and federal courthouse were all contextualized.

We were told the destruction of property was not really a crime, that the United States always has embraced violent protests, that flames licking the skies were not evidence of violence, and, by our current vice president, that such violence would not stop.

And she was correct. The street violence did not cease, because it was seen as helpful for the 2020 election. When the looting, arson, and killing began to boomerang against the Left and was deemed no longer advantageous, the violence magically ceased in the final weeks before the election and throughout the Biden transitions and tenure.

Contrast all that with the buffoonish, despicable riot in the Capitol by an ad hoc group of crazies. It was labeled an “insurrection.” The media then systematically lied about the five deaths that occurred on January 6, creating fables about the tragic natural demise of Officer Brian Sicknick. It smothered mention of FBI informants in the crowds, hid information about the circumstances of the lethal shooting of Ashli Babbitt and smirked about suspects put in solitary confinement for months without being charged or tried.

The strangest embarrassment on the Left is its current neo-Confederate impulse. Many blue progressive states are becoming one-party, feudal societies reminiscent of the antebellum, plantationists, solid-Democratic South. They are likewise inimical to the middle classes who are fleeing California, Illinois, and New York. The new Left fixates—in the fashion of the old South—on one-drop racial identification integral to race-based preferences, oblivious of class and wealth.

It promotes segregation on campuses, with racially exclusive safe spaces, dorms, and graduations. Its Southern embrace of nullification of federal law through over 500 sanctuary city jurisdictions is reminiscent of South Carolina in the 1830s. And it talks of state rights as if blue-state environmentalism, abortion, and illegal immigration should be exempt from federal statutes—in the fashion of George Wallace resisting federal mandates on integration. More recently, we see parlor talk of blue-state secession in journals like the Nation and The New Republic in the fashion of 1850s pamphleteering in the Carolinas.

If Donald Trump did not accept the vote count of 2020, then it is legitimate to criticize him. But he was only following in the footsteps of the denialist Stacey Abrams. She toured the country after losing the governorship of Georgia by over 50,000 votes and was hailed by the Left for months as the “real” governor of Georgia.

Lest we forget in 2016, the Left claimed a fraudulent election due to wired voting machines. Jill Stein sued to invalidate their ballot counts. Grade-C movie stars cut commercials urging electors to renounce their constitutional mandates. Hillary Clinton boasted of joining the “resistance,” claiming the elected president was illegitimate while urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 popular vote if he lost it.

So why does the Left use these mass shootings, involving unhinged, hate-filled killers of all races, as fodder for their agendas? Why is it OK to harass Supreme Court justices at their homes or to threaten them by name outside the Supreme Court chambers?

Hypocrisy is not hypocrisy when the Left feels its moral superiority justifies any means necessary to achieve its utopian ends.

Smear Rather than Defend

Second, the Left must have fungible standards and leverage tragedies for political advantage because it cannot run on its agenda. America was founded on principles of liberty and individualism, rather than French revolutionary government-mandated equality of result.

Socialism has never appealed to Americans—and never more so than in the past 18 months. If Joe Biden had gone to both Waukesha and Buffalo, preached nonviolence and tolerance, and urged Americans not to judge one another as collectives but as unique individuals, he would have seen it as an opportunity missed to gin up furor by racializing tragedy.

Indeed, what else could Biden do—run on a secure border and adherence to current federal immigration law? His wisdom of printing trillions of dollars, keeping interest rates artificially low, subsiding labor non-participation, and thus spiking inflation?

Would he point to his brilliance in restricting gas and oil leases, suppressing energy development, and canceling pipelines to deny us affordable energy?

Will he boast of embracing critical race and legal theories, defunding the police, backing city and county prosecutors who don’t prosecute, and emptying the jails and prisons, all resulting in a drastic increase in crime?

Will he preen to midterm voters about the brilliant logistical effort that allowed Americans to flee Afghanistan near instantaneously while abandoning allies and leaving helpers behind while enriching the terrorist Taliban with billions of dollars in sophisticated U.S. weaponry?

America Is a Great Experiment

Finally, we should remember America has always been a fragile country. After all, it is history’s first successful and longest-lasting multiracial constitutional government—the logical reification of the ancient ideas of human political equality, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

The idea of America has always tried to overcome innate, deeper, and darker human impulses, especially the tic to identify by race, religion, and tribe. That is the historical virus that once unleashed, infects and destroys a society. Witness most recently Rwanda, Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia.

The ancient human pathology to identify by superficial appearance—to see race, for example, as essential rather than incidental to one’s essence—destroys democracies. It must consciously always be repressed, not cultivated to frighten people to support agendas that are otherwise failing them.

Joe Biden is said to be an inert puppet of left-wing masters. Perhaps. But more likely his cognitive challenges have stripped away his political savvy and left him in the raw, revealing his real essence, a racialist of the first order, who will use any tragedy to salvage what has become the worst two years of a presidency in modern memory. And most of the people now know it

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/24/joe-biden-and-racial-demagoguery/

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There are systemic issues rotting the military': Marine Lt. Colonel Stuart Scheller says 'politician-pleasing' generals are more focused on woke programs than fighting after he was discharged for criticizing the Afghanistan withdrawal

Generals who are more intent on pleasing politicians than warfighting are responsible for introducing woke initiatives and undermining U.S. military prowess, according to the Marine who was drummed out of the service for his public criticism of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.

Five months later, Stuart Scheller says he has no regrets about how his 17-year military career ended.

And now he is writing a book that lays out his concerns about the way senior officers are more focused on equal opportunities or COVID-19 than winning wars - with a 13-point plan to fix what he sees as a rotting institution.

'The problem is, you have generals that try to please their bosses,' he told DailyMail.com in an interview to coincide with Memorial Day.

'So what happens is you get generals that will just do anything to please the politicians because it takes Congress to get appointed to be a three or four-star general.

'And so they're willing to inject into the military the initiatives of the politicians of the time without advocating for what's best for the military, which is what a general should do.

'So it's not necessarily woke - but that you just have people-pleasing generals, and they cater to whatever person is in charge at that time, rather than advocate for what's best for the military.'

He said the only thing the military should be focused on is warfighting. Other factors such as equal opportunities initiatives, extremism training or COVID-19 were a distraction from that central mission, he continued.

'The Secretary of Defense made a comment after 100 days in office that said the biggest problem facing the Department of Defense was COVID,' he said.

'And that is just a perfect example of how misguided the focus of the military is. There are systemic issues rotting the military.'

Conservatives have criticized senior leaders in the past year for running a more inclusive recruitment push - which Sen. Ted Cruz risked turning the military into 'pansies' - and singled out Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after he said it was important to understand 'white rage.'

Scheller's book, 'Crisis of Command: How We Lost Trust and Confidence in America's Generals and Politicians,' is published by Knox Press on September 6.

It builds on his explosive condemnation of the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan.

After 13 U.S. service members were killed in a suicide attack on Kabul airport, the lieutenant colonel sat down in uniform to record a video in which he rebuked senior officers for the way they planned and executed the end of America's 20-year war.

'I want to say this very strongly,' he said in a message that quickly went viral.

'I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders: I demand accountability.'

He won sympathy and support from veterans who shared his concerns but was quickly relieved of his command. And he was thrown in the brig at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, a month later after further social media posts criticizing military leaders and calling for 'revolution.'

He was charged with six violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and ultimately struck a plea deal.

As part of the deal, he resigned his commission and left the Marines at the end of the year.

For an officer who had long been considered a star of the service, it was a difficult end to a career.

It also triggered the collapse of his marriage, he told DailyMail.com, but he has no regrets.

'I think it would have been easier to sit in the stability of my retirement with my wife my three sons, but for my entire life my goal has been to leave a better America for my three sons,' he said.

'And I think had I not done what I did my sons wouldn't have as good of a future.'

He described how his questions and criticisms had been building for years, before the nature of the withdrawal from Afghanistan - conducted to President Joe Biden's political timetable - triggered his public condemnation.

'They conducted the last evacuations from April to September,' he said.

'Anyone that's deployed there knows that the Taliban hides in the mountains of Pakistan during the winter. That's why we have a spring fighting season.

'We could have done it in the second half of the year from September to March, and we would have been unmolested by the Taliban.

'Because of the BS PR date of September 11, we risked American soldiers and Marines and our coalition partners lives.'

He also criticized the decision to close Bagram Air Base, rather than use it for the evacuation.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10868213/Stuart-Scheller-Politician-pleasing-generals-focused-WOKE-programs-warfighting.html

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My son was found not guilty

Bettina Arndt

Last week, a long ordeal finally ended for an ordinary Australian family. Their son, Lucas, was found not guilty of sexual contact with a child. The female judge who delivered this verdict said she believed Lucas’ version of events – not the vile accusations that led him to spend seven months in prison, nor the vicious rumours in the local paper describing him as a ‘pedo’ and leading to death threats on social media.

I’ve just made a video with Lucas’ mother, Debbie Garratt, a brave woman who has made the considered decision to go public with what happened to them, to warn other parents of dangers awaiting young men in this hypervigilant anti-male culture. Her story suggests we are reaching the point where it is just too risky for men to take jobs caring for children.

Debbie is actually a step-mum to Lucas, but he’d had been part of their large, blended family since he was a small child. He was in his early twenties when he decided on a career in childcare, a prospect which made his parents somewhat nervous, but they knew children had always flocked to this easy-going, considerate young man and he thrived in the job, with families often seeking out his babysitting services after hours.

One evening in August 2018 he was babysitting for a family he knew well, having cared for their children many times, including the five-year-old girl he’d looked after since she was a toddler in nappies. During the evening, he noticed the little girl seemed to be ‘fiddling’, apparently bothered by an irritated vulva. When he found her scratching herself half asleep in bed, he quickly swiped the area with a baby wipe, hoping the moist towelette would ease the irritation.

It didn’t occur to him that this could create a problem until the police came and interviewed him at work the next day. It transpired that early that day the little girl had mentioned to her mother that, ‘Lucas licked me.’ The mum went on high alert, told the girl to stop talking, screamed for her husband, and then subjected the child to a grilling, recorded on an iPhone.

In her verdict, the judge commented that the parents’ reaction contributed to setting in place the whole disastrous sequence of events that followed, which sadly included the girl being interrogated at the police station and taken for internal examinations. When initially questioned by the police, the child denied that Lucas had put his head near her vulva, or even that he had touched her, but these negative responses were omitted from the evidence used for the charges and not conveyed to the child’s parents.

I hope you will listen to this whole extraordinary story as there are important lessons to be learned.

It’s quite something to hear how the legal aid barrister sold out this young man, bullying him in a corridor outside the courtroom, telling him he had to plead guilty to avoid further distress to the child, convincing him that he was bound to be convicted and this was the only way to get a reduced sentence.

Any parent would identify with Debbie’s emotion as she describes the result – Lucas was convicted and simply whisked off to prison. They weren’t even able to find out where the authorities had taken him for ten days, by which time his guilty plea was all over the newspapers and social media alive with advice about hanging the ‘scumbag animal’.

We can all imagine the family’s relief when the judge affirmed Lucas’ version of events, stating a number of times that the child must have been mistaken. This was not a case of the accused being found not guilty due to insufficient evidence but rather, a female judge determining a male was to be believed. And that’s quite something.

What’s inspirational is Debbie’s advice to Lucas during the years he spent living at home with his parents, unable to get a job, and nervous about leaving the house. Debbie would make him come with her to the supermarket, telling him to ‘put your head up’ and demonstrate to everyone that he had no reason to hide away. ‘It’s important not to be caught in shame,’ she told him.

But the same applies to parents. Most parents like Debbie, even after their sons are found not guilty of this type of allegation, get caught in shame. The whole ordeal is so overwhelming that they choose to just hide away and try to get on with their lives – which is perfectly understandable.

How rare it is for someone whose child has slipped the noose to come out fighting, willing to subject herself and her family to still more public scrutiny in the hope that others will take heed.

A word of caution – I know some people reading this will be shocked at the naivety shown by Lucas. Many smugly assume their own children would have the good sense never to touch a child in that way, even though the judge agreed this had been done ‘for hygienic purposes and in good faith’. Men today know good faith isn’t enough to protect them.

Yet in this current climate, with false allegations rampant, all men working with children are at risk, however they behave. Talk to a few teachers and you hear the stories. Like the newly graduated teacher working in a school in Port Macquarie who ran into problems with a female student who refused to finish the assignment he’d set for the class. ‘If you try to make me, I’ll tell them that you touched me,’ the little miss told her teacher. He was lucky. He reported her to the school principal who suspended her. The teacher’s story was believed because she was a known troublemaker but it could easily have turned out badly for him instead.

It’s a tragic irony that just as the world is finally waking up to the damage to children who miss out on masculine influence in their lives, the moral panic over sexual abuse is driving away the very few men still working with them – men who play a particularly vital role for kids in single mum households. Naturally, this sad state of affairs receives no public scrutiny

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/my-son-was-found-not-guilty