This document is part of an archive of postings on Political Correctness Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
My Home Page. Email John Ray here. My other blogs: "Tongue Tied" , "Dissecting Leftism" , "Australian Politics" , "Education Watch International" , "Immigration Watch" , "Greenie Watch" , "The Psychologist" (A summary blog). Those blogs are also backed up. See here for details
With particular attention to religious, ethnic and sexual matters. By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
This page is a backup. The primary version of this blog is HERE
June 30, 2024
This common drink increases the risk of serious heart condition, study finds
The commentary below is greatly over hyped. The "Results" section of the journal abstract below. We see that all the Hazard Ratios were quite low -- meaning weak effects -- with the results from sugar-sweetened and articially sweetened drinks being virually the same. As usual, income was not controlled for so all we are probably seeng here is that poor people (big drinkers of fizzy drinks) have worse health. Richer and wiser people drink orange juice. Rather amusing, really
During a median follow-up of 9.9 years, 9362 incident AF cases were documented. Compared with nonconsumers, individuals who consumed >2 L/wk of SSB or ASB had an increased risk of AF (HR, 1.10 [95% CI, 1.01–1.20] and HR, 1.20 [95% CI, 1.10–1.31]) in the multivariable-adjusted model. A negative association was observed between the consumption of ?1 L/wk of PJ and the risk of AF (HR, 0.92 [95% CI, 0.87–0.97]). The highest HRs (95% CIs) of AF were observed for participants at high genetic risk who consumed >2 L/wk of ASB (HR, 3.51 [95% CI, 2.94–4.19]), and the lowest HR were observed for those at low genetic risk who consumed ?1 L/wk of PJ (HR, 0.77 [95% CI, 0.65–0.92]). No significant interactions were observed between the consumption of SSB, ASB, or PJ and genetic predisposition to AF.
Whether you're looking to satisfy a craving with a crisp can of sugary goodness or offset it completely with the refreshing taste of your favourite diet soda, when it comes to selecting a beverage from a drinks menu, we’re spoilt for choice.
But are our ‘healthier’ drink choices really adding much value to our well-being in the long run? According to a new study, they could be having the opposite effect.
Published in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, the research follows the drinking habits of roughly 202,000 adults aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, examining the results of a 24-hour diet questionnaire.
Specifically, the findings of the study suggest a strong correlation between adults drinking no to low-sugar beverages and their risk of developing atrial fibrillation.
Individuals who reported consuming more than two litres of artificially sweetened drinks in the 24-hour time period were found to have a 20 per cent higher chance of developing the condition (that’s roughly six standard cans).
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a serious cardiovascular disease defined by having a heartbeat that is too slow, too fast or irregular. Additionally, patients diagnosed with AF report symptoms such as lightheadedness, chest pain, extreme fatigue, and shortness of breath. Most notably, atrial fibrillation has been found to be the leading cause of stroke in the United States.
According to the Heart Foundation, atrial fibrillation is the most common recurring arrhythmia found in clinical practice, prevalent in two to four per cent of the population in developed nations such as Australia.
Additionally, the findings indicated that the individuals who reported consuming beverages with added sugars had an increased risk of the disease by up to ten per cent. On the flip side, consuming unsweetened juices, such as natural orange juice, was associated with a reduced risk of up to eight per cent.
“Our study’s findings cannot definitively conclude that one beverage poses more health risk than another due to the complexity of our diets and because some people may drink more than one type of beverage,” says lead study author Dr Ningjian Wang, a professor at the Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.
“However, based on these findings, we recommend that people reduce or even avoid artificially sweetened and sugar-sweetened beverages whenever possible,” Wang added in a statement discussing the study’s findings.
While the results are certainly worth discussing, this is the first study of its kind to examine the correlation between atrial fibrillation and both sugar-sweetened and no-to-low-calorie artificially sweetened beverages, indicating much further research is needed to fully understand the risks associated with each beverage.
So, if diet sodas and ‘no-sugar’ alternatives could be facilitating equally as much damage to our health, what’s the safest drink to turn to? Based on the study’s results, the safest hydration option is plain and simple H2O.
“Do not take it for granted that drinking low-sugar and low-calorie artificially sweetened beverages is healthy, it may pose potential health risks,” warns Wang.
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Panamanian Court Acquits 28 Defendants In 'Panama Papers' Trial
I had totally forgotten about this issue. Rather amazing that it took 8 years to come to a resolution. A lot of people will be pleased
A Panamanian court on Friday acquitted 28 people charged with money laundering in connection with the now-defunct law firm Mossack Fonseca, the epicenter of the "Panama Papers" international tax evasion scandal.
Among those acquitted were the firm's founders, Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca, the latter of whom died in May in a Panamanian hospital.
During the trial, which was held in Panama City in April, the prosecution asked for 12 years in prison for the duo, the maximum sentence for money laundering.
However, Judge Baloisa Marquinez acquitted the pair and 26 others after finding that evidence taken from the law firm's servers had not been gathered in line with due process, raising doubts about its "authenticity and integrity," a court statement said.
The judge also ruled that "the rest of the evidence was not sufficient and conclusive to determine the criminal responsibility of the defendants," the court statement said.
Leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca in 2016 revealed how many of the world's wealthy stashed assets in offshore companies, triggering scores of investigations around the globe.
Those implicated included former British premier David Cameron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, football star Lionel Messi, Argentina's then-president Mauricio Macri and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, to name but a few.
Panamanian prosecutors had alleged that Mossack and Fonseca helped create opaque companies in which executives of the German multinational Siemens deposited millions of euros outside the company's official accounts.
They were also charged with helping divert money from a massive fraud in Argentina.
"Justice has been done, we are extremely satisfied with the ruling handed down by the judge," Guillermina McDonald, lawyer for Mossack and other defendants, told AFP.
However, "we are a little sad because along the way we lost Mr. Ramon Fonseca, and he has not been able to see this result," she added.
The trial began eight years after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) began publishing the "Panama Papers" on April 3, 2016.
The investigation, based on 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca, revealed how personalities from around the world hid properties, companies, assets and profits to evade taxes or launder money.
To do so, they created companies through the firm, opening bank accounts and creating shell foundations in multiple countries to hide money, which in some cases came from illicit activities, according to the investigation.
The scandal led to the closure of Mossack Fonseca and shaped the international image of Panama as an offshore tax haven.
Offshore companies are not in themselves illegal, and there are numerous legitimate reasons for using them. But they can also be used to launder the proceeds of criminal activities or to conceal misappropriated or politically inconvenient wealth.
"Truly there has been a great injustice that has been done," Mossack said after the conclusion of the hearing.
"Both my partner and all the people who have worked with me have been serious, honest and correct people," he added.
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The Supreme Court just ended ‘Chevron.’ What does that mean and how far will its impact reach?
The Supreme Court’s decision to scale back the authority of federal agencies means regulations and rules for the environment, health care, financial services, food safety, transportation and more could be dramatically altered moving forward.
Friday’s decision, ushered by the conservative arm of the court, overturns a 40-year precedent that allowed federal agencies to defer to their own expertise when interpreting ambiguous language, known as the “Chevron deference.”
Now, agencies will have to turn to Congress or the courts for guidance.
Experts are expecting far-reaching repercussions that could cause large delays in implementing rules and regulations since Congress will now have to understand complex issues and decide how to proceed. In the past, the agencies could decide how to handle enforcement or regulatory issues themselves.
Organizations that rely on federal agency’s guidance are warning about the potential for their respective industry.
Environmental
Policies set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency aimed at reducing climate change will most likely see a significant rollback under the new standard.
Already, the federal agency has faced difficulties implementing rules to reduce air pollution and cut greenhouse gas emissions in Congress and the courts.
“This is yet another blow to the EPA’s ability to tackle emerging problems like climate change,” Cara Horowtiz, an environmental lawyer, said in a statement.
She added, “By eliminating the duty of federal courts to defer to agencies in areas where the law is ambiguous about how to handle new or emerging threats, the Supreme Court takes more tools out of the toolbox of our federal regulators."
Public health
Healthcare organizations fear that without the protections of Chevron could cause “significant disruptions” to publicly-funded health programs such as Medicare or Medicaid by allowing courts or Congress to decide how those programs are funded or administered.
“Large health programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, as well as issues related to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, are extremely complex, so it is key that decisions about how to interpret and implement relevant laws are made by experts at government agencies,” a statement from the American Public Health Association and 17 other groups said.
“Yet today’s majority opinion explicitly ends the use of this sensible doctrine,” the statement continued.
Agencies that have been subject to political controversy like the Centers for Disease Control or Food and Drug Adminstraiton will be forced to listen to Congress when determining what they can or cannot do.
Financial sector
The elimination of Chevron could open the door for a slew of legal challenges to financial regulations set by the Securities Exchange Commission, IRS, Treasury and more.
For example, the decision could lead to challenges in IRS oversight, according to Kiplinger. The new regulations could make IRS tax compliance and enforcement more difficult as the agency will have to seek Congressional guidance on how to handle those issues.
Some financial groups that advocate for a more fiscally conservative agenda welcomed Friday’s decision. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation said in a statement that it would “level the playing field for taxpayers and government agencies.”
“Unreasonable IRS interpretations will no longer automatically win in court, which is as it should be, and reasonable interpretations will still have the force of law,” Joe Bishop-Henchman, vice president of the group, said.
The court’s decision could also make it more difficult for regulatory authorities to quickly enact rules that address timely issues - such as cryptocurrency regulation.
Some financial groups that advocate for a more fiscally conservative agenda welcomed Friday’s decision to limit agency oversight, such as those from the IRS (AP)
Labor unions
Labor boards have relied heavily on Chevron to issue guidance and enact protections for workers.
But under the new ruling, workers’ boards such as the National Labor Relations Board will most likely have to turn to judges to issue case decisions and interpret rules. The American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest educator’s union, blasted the decision.
“The Supreme Court’s shameful decision turns democracy on its head. It fundamentally changes the role of unelected judges from interpreters of law to makers of law—and there is nothing in the Constitution that warrants that. By eliminating deference to public agencies, the court has undermined the ability of experts to set strong rules to protect consumers, workers and the public from corporations and other lawbreakers,” President Randi Weingarten said.
“This decision has real-life consequences for American families. It shifts power away from agencies with public-focused missions toward courtrooms and corporate lawyers adept at poking holes in regulations. It injects legal uncertainty into areas like workplace safety rules, overtime pay policies and collective bargaining rights interpretations—all of which have long relied on agencies’ Chevron-backed expertise. It will make it easier for employers to steal wages from their workers, and it could stop the Department of Health and Human Services from directly negotiating prescription drug prices for Medicare.”
https://au.news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-just-ended-chevron-205557210.html
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Trump Commands Stage, Biden Revealed
By Rick Manning
The Trump-Biden debate was at times difficult to watch.
I repeatedly found myself screaming at the television. When I could make out what Biden was saying, I screamed what a bunch of ‘malarkey.’
When I screamed at President Trump, it was because of a missed opportunity. Just one example was the long back and forth on veterans. Rather than argue over who veterans liked the most, Trump should have pointed out that at the end of the Obama-Biden presidency, seriously ill veterans were unable to get appointments with the VA to see a doctor. Why? The career bureaucrats in charge made a decision to put them at the back of the line because they were going to die anyway.
President Trump ended this evil by passing bi-partisan legislation which reformed the VA, and made it possible to fire those VA bureaucrats who didn’t do their job. Vice President Biden left vets on the streets to die, Trump fired the horrible human beings who made the decision to leave them in agony without treatment and put people in charge who made it a priority to take care of sick veterans. It is that simple.
Of course, President Biden glitched at the very beginning of the debate for what was an interminable amount of time, and had at least a couple of other obvious events where he completely lost his place on the script he was force fed over the eleven days he spent preparing for the debate.
But the problem for Democratic operatives is that Biden revealed that he cannot mentally do the job of being president, but didn’t suffer a complete meltdown which could be used to justify removing him from the ticket. Biden likely did just enough to avoid a palace coup leading to his being denied the nomination and removed from the presidency, but not enough to dissuade anyone from the idea that he is not fit to serve for another four years.
And, by the way, if anyone believes Biden has a six handicap, then they probably also think his uncle was eaten by cannibals. Of course, someone who fills his speeches with fairy tales and outright lies about his personal achievements would be exactly the 80 year old golfer who claimed to have a six handicap.
Trump’s strategy in the debate was clear and he stuck to it. Keep pounding on Biden’s border crisis, and throw in the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal as an occasional chaser. This was most effective when he kept reminding viewers about the Biden administration policy of opening up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to the millions of illegals they have allowed to stream into the country, while also putting these illegals up in luxury hotels while our veterans sleep on the streets.
As for Biden, he reminded me of an end of career boxer who was just trying to hang on to the final bell. The only thing that was missing was Corn Pop.
In the end, it was a clear win for President Trump. The format that Biden insisted upon helped focus Trump and kept him from taking Biden’s bait on a couple of issues.
I wish President Trump had immediately answered the question on accepting the election result with a cohesive nuanced affirmative, that win or lose, once the election was certified by Congress, he would accept the results, clarifying that investigating various state election procedures was completely in line, to make future elections more secure and honest.
And I wish he had spent more time talking about what the withdrawal from Afghanistan should have looked like, in contrast to Biden’s giving up our secure air base to the Taliban and then trying to evacuate under duress from a commercial airport, leaving American citizens and our best allies behind. This basic failure of leadership by Commander and Chief Biden which led to 13 of our brave servicemembers deaths is reason enough to deny him four more years.
Obviously, there were questions not answered and at times Biden looked childish and petty.
Overall, Trump earned a solid B, while Biden showing clear decline was at best a D+. I am not certain that anyone who supported Trump going in was not supporting him at the end. Those who are voting for Biden because they hate Trump will still vote for Biden while wishing they had a better option. And those undecideds, either became Trump supporters based upon the issues of their economic interests, or moved off of Biden to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is the candidate who is most likely to see a move in his numbers out of formerly Biden voters.
All in all, national Democratic leaders were the biggest losers as Biden did just enough to keep them from denying him the nomination, but not enough to convince anyone that he is capable of doing the job for another four years – purported golf handicap notwithstanding.
Whether the Democrats remove him or not, this was the debate when the American public learned what the rest of the world knows, the American President is capable of doing the job, and every day he remains in office the world gets to be a much more dangerous place.
If polling tells the Democrat hierarchy that Biden is no longer a viable candidate, they will remove him. The question becomes will they use the 25th amendment to the Constitution to end his presidency as someone who is no longer fit to serve.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/06/trump-commands-stage-biden-revealed/
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June 27, 2024
Taking daily vitamin supplements doesn't help you live longer, may shorten your life
A bit of a chicken and egg problem here. Once again we have to look at who took something and why. Rather obviously: people who were concerned with their healh -- sick people in an extreme. So pill-taking could be an index of poor health rather than poor health being caused by pill-taking.
What happens when generally healthy people take a small amount just as a precaution -- as I do? The amount taken and the reasons for it clearly need to be sorted out before we can draw useful conclusions
And it seems possible that supplements might contribute to well-being, even without a mortality reduction. Let me give an example: I am prone to leg cramps. If take magnesium tablets they go away. If I stop taking them the cramps come back. The pills are unlikely to make me live longer but they make my life better. That probably follows wherever there is a deficiency problem.
And deficiencies might not always be obvious. It was, for instance, only a blood-test that revealed that I had a vitamin D deficiency. It can led to brittle bones, which is a horror. Did I have brittle bones? I don't know. And I don't want to find out. So I now take a supplement that has brought me up to par
They promise health benefits from boosting the immune system to strong bones.
But multivitamins do not help you live longer, a major study has found.
Regularly taking the supplements was found to have no effect on whether people lived longer, according to the research involving nearly 400,000 healthy adults.
In fact, using multivitamins daily was associated with a 4 per cent higher mortality risk, the analysis found.
The vitamins industry is estimated to be worth billions in the UK and US, taken by people in the hope of improving their health.
But the potential benefits and harms of supplementing diet with additional vitamins and minerals remains unclear, often hindered by study size and short follow-up times.
Led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute in the US, researchers followed participants with an average age of 61, who had no history of cancer or other chronic disease, for more than 20 years.
They looked at their multivitamin use from 1993 to 2001 and again between 1998 and 2004 with a follow up period of up to 27 years.
During this time, some 164,762 people died, with 49,836 deaths attributed to cancer, 35,060 to heart diseases, and 9,275 attributed to cerebrovascular diseases.
Researchers assessed for other factors such as education level, whether they were ever smokers, body-mass-index, marital status, alcohol and coffee intake.
They also looked for family history of cancer and factored this into the findings, according to the research published in JAMA.
Those who used multivitamins were also more likely to use individual supplements and have lower BMI and better diet quality.
But there were no longevity benefits found in those who took daily vitamins – in contrast, they were linked to a 4 per cent heightened risk of death.
It concludes: ‘The analysis showed that people who took daily multivitamins did not have a lower risk of death from any cause than people who took no multivitamins.
‘There were also no differences in mortality from cancer, heart disease, or cerebrovascular diseases.’
But the results do not necessarily mean that taking vitamins is a waste of time.
Research published earlier this year by Harvard University finding they can help slow the cognitive deterioration that occurs with age.
Other research has suggested they can help people to feel healthier, although it could be the placebo effect.
Duane Mellor, a registered dietitian and senior lecturer at Aston medical school, said: ‘It’s not surprising to see these do not significantly reduce the risk of mortality.
‘A vitamin and mineral supplement will not fix an unhealthy diet on its own, but it can help cover key nutrients if someone is struggling to get them from food.
‘An example of this might be vitamin D where adults in the UK are encouraged to take as a supplement in winter or vegans and vegetarians who might benefit from a supplement of vitamin B12.’
Writing in a linked commentary, Neal Barnard, Hana Kahleova and Roxanne Becker, of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, said: ‘Refocusing nutrition interventions on food, rather than supplements, may provide the mortality benefits that multivitamins cannot deliver.
‘Vegetables, fruits, legumes and cereal grains are staples in areas of remarkable longevity, known as Blue Zones—Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; the island of Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.’
They suggested that some vitamins in the supplements may have an impact on other drugs being taken, for example vitamin K may reduce the efficacy of the anticoagulant warfarin.
And the inclusion of iron in a supplement adds to that in foods, increasing the risk of iron overload, which is associated with an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and dementia, the commentary continued.
The experts also said similar concerns may apply to copper supplementation, and calcium and zinc may reduce the absorption of certain antibiotics
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Endangering Israel’s Security—and Our Own
While Israel works to fend off terrorists, the Biden administration is withholding both intelligence and military aid—placing a key ally in jeopardy and putting America’s own national security at risk.
The administration is refusing to share valuable information regarding Hamas with Israeli intelligence until Israel halts its Rafah offensive—a decision that follows close on the heels of the administration’s announcement that it would halt weapon shipments to Israel. Yet these appalling decisions are only the most recent in a long string of poor policy choices.
So how did all this start?
Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration lacked any sort of realistic perception of the situation in the Middle East. Mere days before the attacks, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters, “The [Middle East] region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
This misperception led the Biden administration to divert critical assets away from terrorist groups like Hamas—ultimately leading to the failure to anticipate or disrupt the events of Oct. 7. In November, senior administration officials admitted that, following 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies almost completely stopped spying on Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups, believing that Hamas constituted no direct threat to the U.S.
Indeed, Washington deprioritized the Middle East as a whole. After the Biden administration’s takeover, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to reduce the number of civilian intelligence analysts tasked with monitoring the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides testified that this deprioritization of the Middle East had left the U.S. vulnerable and unable to anticipate the attacks.
The Biden administration also spent significant resources in a misguided attempt to appease Iran—a policy that directly led to the Hamas attacks and regional escalation. Less than a month before the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration announced it would issue a waiver giving Iran access to $6 billion that had been previously blocked by U.S. sanctions.
By unfreezing Iranian assets, the administration presented the world’s largest state sponsor of terror with unprecedented resources, allowing it to direct, fund, arm, and train Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the myriads of other terror groups currently attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. This both enabled Oct. 7 and allowed for increased attacks from groups like the Houthis, an Iranian-armed terrorist group that has been disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, causing shipping delays and increased costs to ordinary consumers.
The Biden administration also provided U.S. adversaries with valuable resources in the form of international aid. For example, the administration reversed Trump’s funding cuts and restored more than $200M in aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an organization with direct ties to Hamas—as demonstrated by the alleged involvement of 12 UNRWA employees in the Oct. 7 attacks and kidnappings.
President Biden’s approach to national security poses a stark contrast to that of President Trump. Biden reversed nearly all of Trump’s foreign policies, opting to alienate Israel and appease Iran—a policy that has endangered both the U.S. and its allies.
Absent aggressive congressional oversight to assess the Biden administration’s intelligence priorities—and to investigate its handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the recent decision to withhold information and weapons from Israel—the situation will only get worse. Failure to accept responsibility for the national security malpractice—as demonstrated in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now the Israel-Palestine conflict—will create present and serious consequences for Americans.
Under the Biden administration, rising foreign instability and conflict escalation have become routine. America needs to change course immediately and return to policies that foster peace and stability—both abroad and at home.
https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/endangering-israels-security-and-our-own
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Biden’s Public Health Assault on 2A rights
By Rick Manning
President Joe Biden’s Surgeon General has declared gun violence a health care emergency in a new report issued just in time for the presidential debate.
How dare he?
I’m sorry, but a president and political party that has opened the border to gangs, rapists, drug cartels and human traffickers doesn’t have the moral authority to say anything about law abiding citizens right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves and their families from those violent thugs.
A president and political party that elects prosecutors who fail to prosecute both property crimes and violent criminals simply doesn’t get to sanctimoniously issue a report based upon diagnosing bullet holes and not the hands that pulled the trigger to create them.
A president and political party that defunds and demoralizes the police in many of our major cities making them little more than clean-up crews rather than active interdictors against violent crime have forfeited any credibility in commenting on the crime and squalor that result.
Finally, a president and political party which oversees and benefits from a failed, teacher union dominated public education system where kids are deliberately left behind to suffer under both the tyranny of low expectations and dilapidated schools run by gangs where drugs and violence are the norm, have no business telling those who survive that system that they are what’s wrong and their rights should be shattered.
Yet, it is the pattern of the left in America to break things and then propose solutions that give more power to the government while deconstructing individual rights – all for a good cause of course.
Not surprisingly, Joe Biden’s chief health politician failed to even consider any of these actual causes of violent crime. Instead, the ‘reports’ Table of Contents read like a gun ban seminar.
You have the debunked international comparisons, disproportionate impacts, racial inequities as all included along with some crime data and a section of the effects of gun violence. The 32 page pamphlet seeks solemn legitimacy through its Ivy Tower approved language without even attempting to engage in anything resembling serious, rigorous, unbiased academic review.
Not one section is devoted to the impact of the open border and the failure to deport illegal alien criminals, the ending of broken windows policing on increased violent crime, the disparate impact of failure to prosecute criminals on community violence, the emasculation of many big city police forces or the correlation between failed schools and increased crime.
Imagine that, a bunch of politically motivated public health foofs have created a report on gun violence without bothering to look at actual root causes.
What a shock! Not. The very people who couldn’t figure out that a coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, the home of the Wuhan Institute for Coronavirus Research, likely came from that lab and not some once in a hundred years bat/pangolin virus mutation, are now seeking to drive health care edicts on gun violence without looking at any of the actual causes of criminal behavior.
But the potential impact of this unserious report cannot be taken lightly. The Biden administration continues to try to subject the American health care system to the whims of the Chinese government World Health Organization. The WHO has already declared private gun ownership to be the enemy of world health.
The other reason to take it serious is that Covid proved that due to the regulations, insurance repayment mechanisms and health reporting systems put in place by Obamacare, the federal government health care bureaucrats have extraordinary power to mandate medical procedures and standard questions all the way to the local doctor’s office.
Every time a person gets asked about ‘guns in the home’ by their doctor or nurse it is likely to be recorded into the cloud, creating an accessible, sortable database of gun owners in America, in direct contravention of law.
Because of this, Biden Surgeon General Vivek Murphy’s laughably political report is actually nothing to laugh about. What the left have failed to do legislatively or through the Courts, they are trying to accomplish through the administrative state under the guise of public health. After the past four years, liberty loving Americans should shudder at this very notion.
Barack Obama once said, ‘elections have consequences’ when dismissing concerns that his policies went too far. This report is just one more bit of evidence that the left will use every bit of power they are allowed to hold in the pursuit of growing government power and diminishing the power of the people.
Elections do have consequences and November is coming. Consider your choices carefully and vote for freedom. Remember a failure to vote for a candidate who can win is effectively an abdication of this right to others.
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Here’s the Truth About the ‘Pay Your Fair Share’ Malarkey
Given Leftist dishonesty on the matter,this needs to be repeated often
Politicians on the Left portray the rich in America as a bunch of freeloaders who don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
These politicians suggest that many of society’s problems could be solved if only the rich would be less greedy and hand over more of their money to the government to spend.
There are three problems with this argument.
* First, many of society’s problems are caused by the government spending too much—inflation is a prime example.
* Second, the argument ignores the greed of the politicians who want to spend other people’s money.
* Third—and this is the crux of the matter—the rich already pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes.
In 2024, about 1 out of 180 American taxpayers will make $1 million or more of total income, based on a broad definition of income used by the forecasters.
Altogether, these million-dollar earners will earn about 15% of the nation’s income next year. But they will pay 39% of all federal income taxes.
The million-dollar earners will pay an average federal income tax rate that is 3.5 times higher than the other 99.4% of Americans.
Politicians also peddle the claim that millionaires and billionaires pay a lower tax rate than schoolteachers, nurses, firefighters, sanitation workers, or whatever group they’re pandering to on that particular day.
President Joe Biden has even suggested that millionaires pay not only a lower rate, but “less in taxes” than these other Americans.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Based on the government forecasters’ estimates, those earning a million dollars or more in 2024 will pay an average of about $776,800 in federal income taxes, about 475 times as much as the average American taking home between $50,000 and $100,000.
As a percentage of income, it’s somewhat more even. But still, for every dollar of income, the millionaire category will fork over more than 10 times as much in federal income taxes as their middle-income compatriots.
However you look at it, the rich directly pay a huge share of federal income taxes.
But for politicians who routinely propose trillion-dollar increases in federal spending, the higher priority seems to be convincing voters that somebody else can and should pay for their spending sprees. After all, if every household paid an equal share of taxes, each household would be on the hook for more than $7,500 in additional taxes for each trillion dollars of new federal spending.
The “pay your fair share” malarkey is a diversion meant to distract Americans from seeing just how big of a share the federal government is taking out of the economy.
America’s economic malaise isn’t a consequence of the rich being allowed to keep too much of the money they earn, it’s a consequence of the federal government draining massive amounts of resources out of the private economy by spending about $7 trillion a year—more than $50,000 per American household.
America’s economic troubles are multiplied by the federal government’s regulating businesses to death and by the Federal Reserve’s inflating away the purchasing power of each dollar by printing more and more money to buy up federal debt.
The inflation that comes with a bloated federal government is a hidden tax that hits all Americans, but that doesn’t show up in tax distribution charts.
And that brings us to another Biden claim: that those making less than $400,000 won’t pay a penny more in federal taxes under his policies.
In fact, Biden has implemented and proposed numerous tax increases that would directly hit middle-income Americans. But none of them has hit as hard as the hidden and indirect tax known as inflation that followed Biden’s runaway spending.
And this is a critical point. Tax distribution charts show that the rich pay a disproportionate amount of federal taxes, but they don’t show how much of the economic fallout of excess taxes and spending ultimately lands on the middle class.
When excess federal spending and taxes drive up businesses’ costs and force business owners to raise their prices, nurses and schoolteachers must pay more for their groceries, rent, and gas.
When high taxes lead a manufacturer to eliminate bonuses, cut benefits, or move jobs overseas, workers pay the price.
When high taxes discourage entrepreneurship and stifle innovation, firefighters, sanitation workers, and everyone else who would have benefited from better, more affordable products suffer.
These downstream effects on the middle class don’t show up in tax distribution charts, but they’re no less real than the taxes that come out of Americans’ paychecks.
If the solution to what ails the middle class was more government and high taxes on high-income Americans, then Americans would be sitting pretty right now.
But if that’s not working for everyday Americans—and there’s every indication that it’s not—maybe it’s time to make the federal government tighten its belt for a change.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/26/heres-the-truth-about-the-pay-your-fair-share-malarkey/
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June 26, 2024
A plant-based diet is good for your health. But there’s one exception
The journal article is:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00115-7/fulltext
It's yet another rubbishy diet study. They anaysed their data using extreme quartiles, which means that they threw away half of their data before testing it, which in turn usually means that there were NO correlations in the full dataset. And even then they got only marginal hazard ratios. For instance:
"After adjustment for potential confounders, a 10% increase in the contribution of plant-sourced non-UPF in diet was associated with a 7% reduced risk of incident CVD (adjusted HR 0.93; 95% CI 0.91–0.95) and a 8% reduced risk of incident coronary heart disease (adjusted HR 0.92; 95% CI 0.90–0.94)"
Relationships as weak as that are often not replicable so the study is most safely seen as failing to show that diet has any certain effect on health at all. In plain speech, eat what you like. The best thing to do for your health is probably to have friends
Eating a plant-based diet is good for your health, but not if those plant foods are ultra-processed, a new study has found.
The findings show that all plant-based diets aren’t the same, and that plant foods can have very different effects on your health depending on what manufacturers do to them before they reach your plate.
The new research, published on Monday in the journal, Lancet Regional Health-Europe, found eating plant-derived foods that are ultra-processed – such as meat substitutes, fruit drinks and pastries – increases the risk of heart attacks and stroke. But when plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and nuts are only minimally processed – meaning they are cleaned, cut or squeezed before packaging but served largely as they are found in nature – they have a protective effect against cardiovascular disease. The study treated freshly squeezed fruit juices as unprocessed.
Ultra-processed foods have faced intense scrutiny from health authorities in recent years. What’s unusual about the new study is that it zeroed in on the health effects of ultra-processed foods that begin as plants, comparing them with minimally processed plant foods. Given that plant-based foods are generally healthy in their natural state, the research suggests that there’s something uniquely damaging about ultra-processing that changes a food in a way that can harm a person’s health long term.
“The artificial and heightened flavours of these foods can lead people to become addicted to these flavours, making it difficult for them to appreciate the natural flavours of real foods such as fruits and vegetables,” says Fernanda Rauber, the lead author of the new study and a researcher at the Centre for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
The new study analysed data on 118,000 adults who were followed for roughly a decade as part of the UK Biobank, a study that has been tracking the health and lifestyle habits of people throughout the United Kingdom. As part of the long-running study, the participants answered questions about their diets, habits and environments on different occasions and provided biological samples, and health and medical records. The findings included:
The more ultra-processed foods people consumed, the higher their likelihood of dying of heart disease.
Every 10 per cent increase in kilojoules from plant-derived ultra-processed foods was associated with a 5 per cent higher likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease and a 6 per cent higher risk of coronary heart disease in particular.
For every 10 per cent increase in the consumption of whole plant-based foods — those that were not ultra-processed — the participants had an 8 per cent reduction in their likelihood of developing coronary heart disease and a 20 per cent reduction in their risk of dying of it. They also had a 13 per cent lower risk of dying of any cardiovascular diseases.
Many of the foods studied were not foods people would typically consider a plant food. But the main ingredients in many junk foods come from plants, such as cane and beet sugars, wheat flour, corn, potatoes, fruit juices and vegetable oils.
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Why Even ‘Woke’ Companies are Turning Their Backs on Toxic HR Diversity Schemes
More bosses are pulling the handbrake on costly diversity initiatives after realising they have allowed toxic identity politics to enter their workplace and wasted millions of pounds on pointless schemes. The Telegraph has more.
Behind office doors, HR departments at some of Britain’s biggest businesses have recently been feeling defensive and on the back foot.
Increasingly laid at their doors is the blame for allowing toxic identity politics to enter the workplace, and wasting millions of pounds on pointless diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes.
Pointing the finger are belt-tightening senior leaders scrutinising their returns amid soaring wage bills, with some even feeling betrayed for being shepherded by HR into the vicious culture wars.
Christoffer Ellehuus, the Chief Executive of workplace training company MindGym, says: “A lot of them are blaming HR for not having reined it in and having had a much clearer business focus about what they were doing.”
Fuelling this blame game are recent findings that Britain’s diversity drive is “counterproductive” despite businesses spending millions of pounds on ultimately ineffective workplace initiatives.
It was the conclusion of an independent report commissioned by Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, which discovered popular so-called ESG (environmental, social and governance) practices had little to no tangible impact on boosting diversity or reducing prejudice.
Ms. Badenoch in March warned British companies against outsourcing or delegating to workplace training consultants with “potentially conflicting incentives” which are ultimately selling “snake oil”.
She told the Times: “There are lots of people who just cook up stuff and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got a course. Why don’t you buy my course?’ … They’ve been making money out of selling stuff that is not evidence-based.”
Badenoch’s report is damning for HR departments who now face questions from their superiors about why they fell prey to so-called snake oil sellers in the first place.
This includes decisions to roll out divisive training programmes in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, designed to spread awareness around unconscious bias, white privilege and gender pronouns.
However, what were sold as quick fixes to create a fairer workplace – in online training sessions as short as 30 minutes – many have discovered to be little more than fashionable fads with damaging consequences.
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Srbija walks both sides of the street
Srbija is a significant arms producer. The Zastava factory has been producing quality rifles and other weapons for many decades
Serbia is secretly increasing munitions sales to the West, strengthening Ukraine's defences. At the same time, the country did not join Western sanctions against Russia. Putin is losing an ally…
The British newspaper The Financial Times estimates that Serbia has exported € 800 million ($ 858 million) worth of munitions to its Western allies since Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These weapons then found their way to Kiev via third countries.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vu?i? called the situation a business opportunity. At the same time, Vu?i? stressed that he will not take sides in the war. "This is a part of our economic revival and important for us. Yes, we do export our ammunition," he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
"We cannot export to Ukraine or to Russia . . . but we have had many contracts with Americans, Spaniards, Czechs, others. What they do with that in the end is their job", he also said. " I need to take care of my people, and that’s it. That’s all I can say. We have friends in Kyiv and in Moscow. These are our Slav brothers."
Serbia is not a member of NATO or the European Union. At the same time, Serbs are traditionally attached to Russia and distrustful of the West.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/putin-stabbed-in-the-back/ar-BB1oMK8K ?
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DOJ challenge to laws Banning Sex Changes for Kids Doesn’t ‘Hold Water,’ Legal Expert Says/
The Constitution doesn’t protect sex-change procedures for minors, an expert in civil rights law told The Daily Signal as the Supreme Court announced it would weigh the issue after its next term begins in October.
The highest court in the U.S. agreed Monday to hear a Justice Department lawsuit against a Tennessee law, passed last year, that bans gender surgeries and cross-sex hormones for those under 18.
The Biden administration alleges that the state violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by excluding children who say they are transgender from “essential medical care.”
The administration’s claims “don’t hold water” because a variety of laws reserve significant decisions for adults, Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Daily Signal.
“States have the power to democratically enact laws that protect minor, vulnerable populations—as evidenced by age limits on alcohol, tobacco, contracting, driving, and more,” Perry said. “The Supreme Court has long recognized that minors lack the maturity and intelligence to make life-altering decisions.”
“To overcome this judicial history,” she added, “the DOJ would have to successfully argue that the laws are discriminatory in nature and violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.”
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has sued multiple Republican-controlled states for restricting sex-change procedures. Its petition to the Supreme Court argues that such laws “discriminate based on sex and transgender status” and therefore must pass a judicial standard known as intermediate scrutiny.
“In other words,” Perry told The Daily Signal, “Tennessee would have to prove the law furthers an important government interest and must do so by means that are substantially related to that interest.”
“Even under this heightened standard … the state’s defense would stand,” said Perry, who previously was a senior counsel in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights as well as a civil rights litigator. “There can be no more important interest than protecting vulnerable adolescents from the life-long complications of these interventions, and the possibility of debilitating regret.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued an emergency order in April that allowed an Idaho ban on such medical procedures to take effect amid a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Tennessee case before the high court will decide the fate of children in at least 25 states that have passed similar restrictions.
The Supreme Court’s next term begins in October and a decision in the case is expected by July 2025.
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June 25, 2024
Pro-Abortion Activists Call for ERA on 2nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Reversal
I am rather in favor of the ERA. It would wipe out all the "affirmative action" measures in favour of women and discriminating against men that are now so common. And I don't see that it would impact abortion: Men don't have a right to abortion so I think it could even derail any right to abortion
Pro-abortion activists rallied Monday outside the Supreme Court in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
“ERA now,” the pro-abortion rallygoers chanted as they held signs reading “Safe abortion is a human right” and “Keep abortion legal.”
Competing pro-life and pro-abortion activists stood outside the court, chanting on the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision and sent abortion back to the voters in their respective states.
The rally, which was backed by the Women’s March, was held “to demand President [Joe] Biden publish the Equal Rights Amendment and restore our constitutional right to abortion.”
The Equal Rights Amendment declares: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
The amendment has been debated for more than 50 years, with individuals such as the now-deceased Phyllis Schlafly leading the charge against the ERA, warning it would harm women’s rights by removing all distinctions between men and women.
The constitutional amendment was sent to the states for ratification in 1972, but fell three states short of winning the support of the requisite 38 states, even though the original seven-year ratification period was extended by Congress for 39 extra months. The final ratification deadline passed on June 30, 1982.
While some women at the pro-abortion rally were passionate about the need for the ERA, others did not even know what it is.
“I’m not too familiar,” one of the women said when asked what the ERA would do. “I just moved to this area. Could you tell me what the ERA stands for?”
“What is the ERA?” The Daily Signal asked another woman.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, noting that she lives in Maryland.
Rosie Couture, director of the Young Feminist Party, clearly defined the ERA and called on Biden to make the ERA “a reality” at the federal level.
“Young people are here on the ground protesting to get us toward justice, to not be just on the defense, but on the offense, but right now, the Supreme Court’s rolling back the clock, and we need federally elected leaders to step up,” Couture said.
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Battle Over DEI Is Far From Over
The struggle against ideologies that seek to divide America advances in fits and starts.
This month, we saw great progress in the introduction of a bill in Congress to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates throughout the federal government. But it was a different story a week later, when lawmakers were lobbing rhetorical softballs at the DEI-loving head of the Smithsonian Institution.
The comprehensive Dismantle DEI Act, if passed and enacted, would systematically eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs throughout the federal bureaucracy and among federal contractors. The bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and in the House by Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, co-sponsored by 20 other House Republicans.
That is not a small part of the economy. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “federal spending was equal to 23% of the total gross domestic product (GDP), or economic activity, of the United States” in fiscal year 2022.
The Vance-Cloud bill takes a blowtorch to DEI. It would dismantle DEI programs (such as the “anti-racist” trainings that have cropped up at offices and schools and all other areas of American life), rescind President Joe Biden’s many DEI executive orders, outlaw DEI loyalty pledges, etc.
The bill has no chance of passing and being signed into law while the Democrats have the Senate and Biden is president. But it becomes an important stick in the ground.
If former President Donald Trump is elected president in November, this bill should be his blueprint, something he already championed as president.
So far, so good. But DEI is just one front in the fight against ideologies that divide us mostly along racial and sexual lines, based on race and gender theories that are Marxist in their origin.
Another important front in the culture wars is that ultimate cultural institution: museums.
Museums have become the battle theater of those who want to “decolonize” the culture—that is, strip it of any reverence for America. The decolonizers want to turn the museums into institutions propagating a cultural counternarrative.
The Smithsonian is America’s museum, for better or for worse (it used to be for better, now it’s for worse). And while Republicans are giving signs that they finally get the DEI part, they are missing in action on the museum part.
Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s hearing June 18 before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee was really a replay of the mutual admiration society. Only one Republican showed up, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., the ranking member, and her most probing question of Bunch was about the schedule for repatriating native art to tribes.
Bunch assured her that the Smithsonian Institution’s repatriation schedule is “very robust. … We want to be able to return what the communities really want.”
For those wondering what this is about, a Biden administration rule has given the nation’s 574 federally recognized Indian tribes effective veto power over what museums can exhibit. If they demand that a museum send back a cultural item, the museum will have to comply. New York’s American Museum of Natural History will close two halls with Indian exhibitions.
This is not something conservatives should want to expedite. They should, in fact, fight this nonsense.
There were no Republicans at the hearing asking about two new museums based on identity politics: the Latino and women’s museums. The first has been criticized by myself and others as a “woke indoctrination factory” that aims to fill Hispanic Americans with grievances, and the second will be no better.
But there were Democrats heaping praise on the effort, and asking for more of the same. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., asked Bunch what the Smithsonian planned to do about the “African diaspora,” that is, Americans born in Africa, or who are the children of such immigrants. They encounter great success in America, but apparently the Smithsonian also will have to instill victimhood in them.
The African diaspora “is really important” to the Smithsonian, Bunch assured Warner. To which Warner, not missing a multicultural beat, replied: “What are you doing on the South Asian diaspora?”
Bunch is a soft-spoken, likable individual, but he’s embraced all these ideologies. DEI, he has written, is “integral to excellence in museum practice. FULL STOP.” DEI, in fact, should “shape museums,” he added.
Bunch was also an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Black Lives Matter organizations, which were set up by Marxists to transform society.
In 2014, at the height of the BLM riots in Ferguson, Missouri, when Bunch was director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he assembled his curators and ordered them to collect BLM artifacts and create exhibits.
Black Lives Matter, he said, needed to organize for the long term and come up with a legislative strategy.
In 2020, during the costliest riots in American history, Bunch said that “protest is the highest form of patriotism.”
The fight to take back the considerable cultural ground that has been lost to the Left is too often derided as the “culture wars” by those who want to meet no resistance in their scorched-earth advance.
And it is obviously not for the weak-hearted. Stripping out DEI is a great, brave step. But watch what happens with the museums if you want to know who’s winning.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/24/battle-over-dei-is-far-from-over/
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How California’s Paradise Became Our Purgatory
California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.
How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?
The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.
Gov. Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.
Yet in a year, the Democrat turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.
At a time of an overregulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.
Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.
Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.
California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.
The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.
Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.
The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken health care, housing, and welfare entitlements.
Newsom raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shutdowns and bankruptcies of fast-food outlets.
Fully 27% of Californians were born outside the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California long ago dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.
California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent antisemitism.
Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.
Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives that would restore penalties for violent crime and theft.
Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States (given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still rising, gasoline taxes) and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.
Yet California’s ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.
The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.
As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.
It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.
What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?
Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled in disgust to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states.
In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.
Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.
California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.
California suffers from poorly ranked public schools, but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal, but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.
The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.
In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/24/how-californias-paradise-became-our-purgatory/
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Trump Vows to Combat Agencies Weaponized Against Christians
Citing the federal arrests of pro-life activists, former President Donald Trump vowed to establish a task force to investigate anti-Christian bias if he is elected to another term.
“Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department to viciously prosecute pro-life activists,” Trump said of the current president on Saturday during remarks at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 15th annual Road to Majority Conference in Washington, D.C.
“I will also create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias,” Trump later added. “Its mission will be to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America. It’s taking place at a level that nobody can believe. This is not America any more that we are living in.”
Trump specifically talked about the case of Paulette Harlow, a 75-year-old woman sentenced recently to 24 months in prison for singing in front of an abortion clinic after she was convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act.
Harlow told The Daily Signal earlier this month, “I felt like it was a tremendous privilege to stand in the court on behalf of the unborn, who have no voice.”
For its part, the Biden administration has said the FACE Act is in place to protect the health and safety of women seeking abortions.
Trump delivered a wide-ranging speech, talking almost 90 minutes about the border crisis, the economy and inflation, and crime. He also talked about his own legal problems, which he said were bogus.
He was in front of an enthusiastic crowd that interrupted his speech several times with chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump,” and “USA, USA.”
Trump said he has more political wounds than any other president, but noted Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson come closest.
His remarks come days before the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden on Thursday.
This was Trump’s ninth speech at the Road to Majority Conference.
He is banking on comparing the strong economy under his watch with the lagging economy and inflation under the Biden administration. Biden, meanwhile, is beginning to primarily campaign on Trump’s felony conviction in New York last month.
Trump began talking about the targeting of pro-life activists as a contrast with his position that abortion is a policy that should be decided by the states—not the federal government.
He talked about the three justices he appointed to the Supreme Court who voted with the court’s majority in 2022 to scrap the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal nationwide.
“Thanks to these justices, we have what the pro-life movement has fought for for 49 years and we’ve gotten abortion out of the federal government,” Trump said. “Now, the people will decide, and that’s the way it should be. Some states will be more conservative. Some states will be more liberal.”
Trump insisted Democrats don’t want people in the states deciding.
“If the radical Democrat extremes get their way, they will have a federal law on abortion to rip the baby out of the womb in the seventh, eight, ninth month, or even execute the baby after birth,” Trump said.
The “execute” reference, Trump said, was about former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, who had seemingly supported the idea of allowing a baby who survived an abortion to be killed.
Trump said he is pro-life, but made exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, or incest.
“Every voter has to go with your heart and do what is right. We have to get elected,” Trump told the audience.
Trump is scheduled for a rally in Philadelphia, and wasn’t originally on the conference’s speaking list. Trump said that his campaign staff encouraged him to cancel out of the Faith and Freedom Coalition event, and he joked, “I don’t have the courage to do that.”
Trump told the largely Christian crowd that not enough Christians turn out to vote.
“Christians go to church, but they don’t vote that much,” Trump said. “Do you know how much power you’ll have if you vote? Just this time. In four years, I don’t care.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/22/trump-vows-task-force-investigate-anti-christian-bias/
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June 24, 2024
Trump’s All-Tariff Revenue Plan Won’t ‘Starve the Beast’
I know where he got this idea. He has am economics degree from the Wharton school and economists have long pointed out that the best tariff is a uniform one. It raises revenue without distorting resource allocation while giving ALL American industry some protection from imports. In these days of both general and political supply-chain issues, protecting domestic production has taken on some urgency. If you need a spare part for your car, would you rather it be coming from Dearborn or on a slow boat from China?
So the idea has much to recommend it even though it violates strict "free trade" principles. Sometimes security matters more than money. So, as usual, Trump has the right ideas for the times and ideas that step outside the usual boring old ideas of the Left.
And extending the idea to where the IRS can be abolished has enormous appeal and is an idea that I have often mulled. In an economy as large as America it could well be workable without seriously affecting the availability of goods and services. Capitalistic American businesses would leap at the opportunities opened up
During his recent trip to Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump floated a plan to finance the federal government in large part with revenue raised by import tariffs. The details are sketchy, but the proposal’s main idea is to rely much less on the complex U.S. income tax code, which penalizes work and imposes huge compliance costs on both individual and business taxpayers.
The former, and possibly future, president’s idea draws attention to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. public finance, when, in fact, tariffs ranked among America’s principal sources of government revenue, along with the proceeds from selling public lands and from imposing selective excise taxes on consumer goods—most notoriously Alexander Hamilton’s tax on alcohol, which triggered the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. The national government was of course much smaller then.
It was not until the 1860s, when Abraham Lincoln’s Treasury levied taxes on income to help support the Union’s military operations, that Americans first faced such levies. Although Lincoln’s income tax was declared unconstitutional, the ratification of the 16th Amendment on February 3, 1913—one of the fruits of an earlier Progressive Era—made income taxes a fact of life.
Individual income taxes have accounted for more than half of the federal government’s revenue ever since ($1.7 trillion of the $3.3 trillion total raised in fiscal year 2024). Payroll taxes to finance the New Deal’s Social Security and the Great Society’s Medicare programs rank second (34.3% of total federal receipts). Import tariffs (“customs duties”) generate only $48 billion nowadays, just 1.5% of the total. The Trump plan would stand this on its head.
Implementing Trump’s all-tariff revenue plan would require a major retooling of American public finance. I and many other taxpayers would cheer the elimination of income-tax withholding and doing away with the intrusive and reviled Internal Revenue Service (IRS), some of whose criminal investigating “special agents” are authorized, as we recently were reminded, to carry firearms.
No one has estimated the level of tariff rates necessary to offset $3.3 trillion in income tax revenue that possibly would be “lost” under Trump’s plan. Would some tariffs be set at 100% of a product’s pre-tariff domestic price, as the Biden White House recently recommended for electric vehicles imported from China to “protect American manufacturers from [China’s] unfair trade practices”?
Tariffs are simply taxes that domestic consumers pay when they purchase goods from overseas. If a tariff is set high enough, imports could drop to zero, along with any anticipated tariff (tax) revenue. Many Americans willingly pay 69 cents a pound for bananas; how many would pay $1.40 a pound? Or think big: The base price for a 2024 Porsche Boxster is currently $70,400; would you pay $140,800 for the identical car?
Like income taxes, there are ways to avoid tariffs. Tariffs encourage smuggling, for example, which would likely lead to the hiring and deployment of more customs agents. During colonial times and other high-tariff periods, customs agents often were as abusive as today’s IRS agents.
Tariffs imposed by one country also invite retaliation by others—a tit-for-tat among trading partners known as “countervailing duties.” The problem is: Tariff wars shrink international trade, increasing their harmful economic effects. Many economists are convinced that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, along with other domestic policy blunders, triggered the Great Depression, or at the very least made it worse.
Despite the harm they cause, tariffs appeal to politicians because it gives them an opportunity to do what they do best: give away goodies to special interests at public expense.
The recipients in this case are domestic manufacturers and suppliers—and especially their unionized employees, who in an open, competitive marketplace often can’t compete with overseas producers of the same or similar products. Tariffs exploit the power of government to raise the costs of those overseas products, giving advantage back to the locals. While domestic producers (and their employees) might gain from protectionism, consumers lose, especially low-income consumers, who can least afford the higher prices.
Asking tariffs to replace income taxes and other federal revenue sources asks the wrong question. The right question is whether government is too large. If the answer is “yes,” tariffs would be a plus if they generate less revenue than other methods of public finance.
Unfortunately, in addition to taxing, Washington has other options for financing its profligate spending, including borrowing. The beast cannot be starved—a mantra of tax reformers during the 1980s—if those options remain on the table.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/06/trumps-all-tariff-revenue-plan-wont-starve-the-beast/
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A wise woman
I was going to throw his bath toys away. He’s six and the days of rubber duckies and trucks and action figures in the tub are coming to an end.
“I bet he won’t even notice,” I whispered to myself as I scrubbed. It was deep cleaning day and the older I get, the more stuff I want to throw away.
I grabbed a trash bag in preparation.
One by one, I removed items from the edge.
I cleaned that shower and tub until all marks were removed.
It looked brand new.
And it looked bare.
I picked up the truck, ready to toss it, but my heart couldn’t do it.
“There won’t always be toys on the side of the tub,” I told myself.
I knew I needed this reminder.
To slow down.
To soak it in.
To cherish this clutter because one day, too soon, I won’t have to throw toys away because he’ll do it himself.
I put back the rubber duckies and said hello to the trucks. I carefully placed his goggles, the ones he so diligently uses to search for undersea creatures in his soapy bathwater, back on the edge of that spotless tub.
“Thanks for cleaning my toys, Mom!” he shrieked that night as he got ready for bed.
I hugged him and thanked God for another day filled with a little boy and his little toys.
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Study Shows Israel Supplied ‘Sufficient’ Food to Gaza
Any "famine" is HAMAS-created
The International Criminal Court has accused Israel of causing “deliberate starvation” in Gaza, but the prosecutor might want to read this report.
Yesterday we reported on one of the many problems with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. Namely, the fact that there is scant evidence of the “deliberate starvation” that forms the heart of the ICC’s case, and that Khan ignores abundant evidence that Hamas is hoarding food and medical supplies.
Now, a new study published by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science, and Nutrition brings clarity to the contested question of food security in the Gaza strip. The working paper analyzed the adequacy of the food supply Israel has facilitated into Gaza since January. And the results are devastating to Khan’s case.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, was conducted in conjunction with four other Israeli universities and the country’s ministry of health and found that “the quantity and quality of food delivered to Gaza have steadily improved and diversified since January 2024” and that “the food supply contains sufficient energy and protein for the population’s needs.”
Specifically, the Israeli researchers found that on average, between January and April, 124 trucks carrying food and humanitarian aid entered Gaza per day. That adds up to 3,211 calories worth of nutrition per Gazan, per day. The World Health Organization standard for calorie consumption is 2,900 per day for average-sized men and 2,200 per day for average-sized women.
“Contrary to claims that Israel has deliberately starved Gaza, Israel has gone to considerable lengths to facilitate food aid delivered to Gaza,” the authors write.
One of those authors, Aron Troen, a professor of nutrition science and public health at Hebrew University, told The Free Press, “We wanted to understand what the reality was. To do so we obtained the registry of each and every truck that has entered Gaza through the two southern land routes from January to April.”
Troen said that there were serious problems with a previous UN study on food security in Gaza, published in March, that claimed a famine was “imminent” in the northern part of the territory. For example, it did not examine the steps that Israel had taken to open humanitarian corridors and land routes into the territory.
This raises an important question for Khan and the International Criminal Court. If it’s true, as World Food Program director Cindy McCain recently said, that there is a famine in northern Gaza, who is to blame? Israel has been allowing food to enter Gaza, but as I reported Tuesday, the Israelis have documented how that food is commandeered by Hamas and hoarded for its families.
Troen said the group’s findings “raise significant questions about the failure of the international aid agencies to deliver the food and hold Hamas accountable for their disruption to distribution.”
Perhaps Khan would have benefited from the insights in the new working paper. One Israeli defense official told The Free Press that his government is prepared to share the paper with the court’s investigators.
https://www.thefp.com/p/study-israel-supplied-sufficient-food-gaza
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Australia: Major IVF company accused of using 'wrong sperm' to create children and failing to warn of donor's potential genetic issues
This is a real horror story. Any case of an IVF clinic using the "wrong" sperm shows unbelievable lack of care. It is particularly poignant to me because, for medical reasons, my wife and I used IVF to conceive our son, and QFG was the clinic we used
Fortunately our son is now tall, bright and good looking but the donor sperm issue does not arise in our case. But what if QFG had mixed up my sperm with someone else's? On the account below they might have. Fortunately my son has characteristics that are identifiablly from me so there is no doubt about the matter.
Hospitals normally do multiple and repeated checks to see that the right treatrment is paired with the right patient so it seems to me that the mistakes reported below are clear evidence of negligence. QFG did NOT use the orthodox heavy precautions. Instead of being defensive about the matter, QFG should be energetically trying to track down the erring staff members
Anastasia and Lexie Gunn love their three children no matter what, but the mystery of what went wrong with their conception at one of Australia's biggest fertility clinics haunts them.
"We had IVF and got the wrong sperm," Lexie said.
"It's shattered what we all believe to be true."
Their three sons were conceived through donor sperm at the Queensland Fertility Group (QFG) between 2006 and 2014.
The couple paid for the same donor to be used for each child.
But DNA testing now shows their oldest son is not biologically related to their two younger boys, who have both been diagnosed with serious health conditions.
Anastasia and Lexie discovered their two younger children were not related to their older brother.(Four Corners: Ron Foley)
"It's a catastrophic error … how could they have used the wrong sperm to make children?" Anastasia said.
A Four Corners investigation into the lucrative IVF industry has found when things go wrong, corporate giants like QFG don't always own up. There's a lack of transparency and companies aren't being held to account.
'There was no match'
When Anastasia selected a sperm donor for her family in 2006, she took great care. "I went to QFG and they had a big book with the donor profiles."
"There's an age bracket for the donor, their educational background … and the health history as well. Medical background was definitely of concern to me."
Anastasia decided on Donor 227 — a fit, healthy Caucasian male 25–30 years old.
Four years after their first son was born, Anastasia and Lexie decided to have more children.
"We contacted QFG to check that we could use the same donor," Anastasia said. "We wanted them all to have the same biological father to tie them together so that then when they have children, their children are all tied together with biological history."
The couple had two more sons, born two years apart. Both had serious health issues from birth.
"Our middle child is diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome," Anastasia said. "Our youngest son … has joint hypermobility syndrome also. He also has a diagnosis on the autism spectrum and ADHD."
As the diagnoses kept adding up, Anastasia and Lexie wanted to find out if other children of Donor 227 had similar problems.
They sent their sons' DNA to an ancestry website to connect with other families.
The results floored them. "I was completely perplexed," Anastasia said. "I could see that there was no match between our eldest boy and our younger two."
At first, QFG doubted the reliability of DNA results from the ancestry site. Anastasia and Lexie then had their children tested at an accredited DNA testing lab used by the Family Law Court. Those results were the same.
"[QFG] have not provided any response to that legal DNA testing whatsoever," Anastasia said. "They have offered no rationale."
QFG maintains that its records show the same donor was used for all three children.
QFG is owned by Australia's largest IVF provider, Virtus Health, which has clinics all around the country. The fertility giant was taken over by private equity firm BGH Capital in 2022 following a heated bidding war.
Embryologist and IVF Patient Advocate Lucy Lines said the big business of baby-making had changed the way corporate clinics responded to mistakes. "I suspect that possibly profits are impacting the way these things are handled," she said.
Emeritus Professor Bill Ledger, a fertility specialist who's worked for 30 years in public and private IVF clinics, said transparency was vital when errors occurred.
"If you have a clinic or clinics where mistakes keep happening, then there has to be a significant inquiry and that should be external and it should be visible and 100 per cent transparent," he said.
There is a national regulator, the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee (RTAC), but it isn't independent. RTAC is part of the industry-funded peak body the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand.
RTAC's primary role is to audit clinics against a Code of Practice and grant licences that allow IVF companies to claim millions of dollars in Medicare rebates.
"RTAC has no power to govern the corporate nature of IVF," Ms Lines said. "It looks after the scientific and the medical side of the clinics. And they're very well-respected in that space, but when it comes to the corporate decisions of the businesses, they don't have that power."
Single mum Danielle Patorniti has her own battle against QFG. She's fighting to warn other parents.
Danielle's son was conceived with donor sperm. He was diagnosed with level 3 autism spectrum disorder, the most severe form, as well as hypermobility, ADHD and apraxia of speech.
In 2019, she informed QFG of her son's medical update.
"Early intervention is so important," Danielle said. "I thought there was a process where the information was passed on [to other families]."
At the time, QFG told her there were no other reports of medical issues with the donor's offspring.
Two years later, Danielle connected with another mum who'd used the same donor to conceive her son. Nikita Taylor's child also had a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, speech delays and ADHD.
"We started comparing them … and they were almost identical. Different severities but identical presentations," Nikita said. "That's when we started getting worried that other families needed to be contacted."
Danielle and Nikita asked QFG to share information about their sons' matching health issues with other families. But QFG determined there was no clinical requirement to notify patients.
"They pretty much told us it is just something that happens, 'autism is a neurological condition, it happens to lots of kids'. And we just continued to say 'this is just not autism, though. We are talking about apraxia of speech, we're talking about motor dyspraxia. We're talking about severe anxiety,'" Danielle said.
Late last year, they connected with a third family who used the same donor.
Maree Anderson's daughter had recently been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as well as speech difficulties, anxiety and was being assessed for ADHD. Her four-year-old son's autism diagnosis was also pending.
"When Maree told me about her children, I literally felt sick," Danielle said. "It just felt like for those three years that we had been fighting, she'd missed out on those years."
Months after Maree informed QFG about her two children, the fertility giant finally decided other families with donor-conceived children should be informed, but only about the clinical diagnosis of autism.
"I did ask about why I wasn't told about all of this other information, and they've never specifically answered that question," Maree said.
"There's been things that have been uncovered that weren't disclosed and I think QFG are forgetting that these are people, these are children, born thanks to them, and I'll be forever grateful for that. "I don't think the duty of care ends when the baby is born."
The donor is still being used by QFG to conceive more children.
In a statement, QFG told Four Corners the donor sperm was only available to patients who had previously used the donor and wanted more children.
"Patients … are required to undertake further clinical and genetic counselling so they have all relevant information to make informed decisions as to whether to proceed."
The three mums are extremely concerned. "There is apparently someone that's pregnant, and there's three embryos that have been created sitting in a freezer ready to make another three families," Danielle said.
"It's continuing to be sold as probably gold-class Australian sperm. "I just don't understand how they can create kids with something that there's a higher chance of it turning into disability. It's just money. It's all it is."
Following further questioning by Four Corners, QFG conceded that there was still one family who used the donor who it had not informed of the diagnoses.
Anastasia and Lexie Gunn are now suing QFG in an attempt to hold the clinic to account.
The fertility giant refuses to concede it used the wrong sperm to conceive two of their children
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June 23, 2024
Major study reveals whether eating meat will help you live to 100
The big hole in this study stands out like canine testicles. All it probably does is to reaffirm the most persistent finding in epidemiology: The old, old finding that rich people live longer. Most Chinese live principally on rice and beans. Only the rich can afford a lot of meat, eggs, dairy products etc. So the diet was basically an indirect index of income, which was NOT directly controlled for in the study. So the study conclusions do not support meat eating or anything else. Sorry about that
Americans are often told to cut down on steak consumption to avoid heart disease and diabetes.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands are still turning to veganism in the hope that it will help them live healthier and better lives.
But now a growing number of studies seem to reach the same consensus. Despite the anti-meat scare stories, eating meat makes you more likely to live longer. Specifically, you might have a better chance of living to 100.
The most recent paper that spoke to this conclusion studied the diets of 5,200 people — including 1,500 centenarians — from across China.
It found that those eating a more diverse weekly diet, including meat, were 23 percent more likely to become centenarians than their peers who ate one that was more restrictive.
It adds to other recent evidence, including one 2022 Australian paper on meat consumption and life expectancy by country, that found life expectancy is higher in nations that, on average, consume more meat.
About 81 percent of Americans are meat eaters, with meat considered a great source of both muscle-building protein and a host of other essential nutrients.
These include vitamin B12, which is not found in plants and is used by the body to help extract energy from food and keep our blood cells healthy.
Experts say meat is also a rich source of iron, which helps red blood cells carry oxygen around the body.
The USDA dietary guidelines recommend two to three servings of meat every day, with daily portions equivalent to a small steak or one chicken breast.
In the 2022 Australian study, researchers compared the life expectancy in 170 nations to the amount of meat consumed in the diet according to surveys.
Lead researcher Dr Arthur Saniotis, said: 'While this is no surprise to many of us, it still needs to be pointed out.
'It highlights that meat has its own components contributing to our overall health beyond just the number of calories consumed, and that without meat in our diet, we may not thrive.' ....
In the Chinese study, published today in JAMA Network Open, scientists found those who ate the most diverse diets were more likely to live longer.
The study was based on data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey.
Participants were recruited in 1998 at the ages of 80 years or older and then surveyed every few years.
For the analysis, each centenarian in the database was matched to at least two people who had died before reaching centenarian status.
Participants were 94 years old on average, mostly women, and lived across almost all of China's provinces.
To measure dietary diversity, participants were quizzed on how often they ate nine food groups: cereal, vegetables, fruits, soybeans and its products, eggs, meat, fish, milk and dairy products and oil.
The results showed that those who ate all nine food groups at least weekly were more likely to live to 100.
The analysis also found that never smoking and exercising more made it more likely that someone would live to be a centenarian.
But that education, marital status and alcohol consumption in later life made little to no difference to how long someone lived.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13550999/does-eating-meat-improve-longevity-study.html
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The trouble with calling everyone ‘far right’
The success of the National Rally in the EU elections was not put down to any failings of President Macron, but rather to the infamous march of ‘the far right’. As a term I find this less and less satisfactory. The destruction of the mainstream parties of right and left in France is a fascinating example of what is happening across the continent and indeed the wider West. Every-where, mainstream centrist parties of government have spent recent years promising to lower immigration only to oversee a massive explosion of both legal and illegal migration. That the migrants will integrate was the promise of political leaders for a couple of generations. But the evidence people see with their own eyes suggests to many that their governments have not been truthful with them. So they seek alternative parties who they think may actually listen to their concerns.
My interpretation of why the French just voted the way they did is that the French do not like being blown up. The fact that the French security services seem to be having to constantly work overtime is not consoling to the French public. There was always going to be a political response to that. We are lucky that it has so far only come in the form of Jordan Bardella.
Still, in recent days the media have described all the following parties as being ‘far right’: Giorgia Meloni’s party in Italy, both Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête and the National Rally in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Vox in Spain, the governing party in Hungary, Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord in Italy and (until an apology was offered by the BBC) the Reform party in this country.
There is also an increasing use of the weaselly term ‘hard right’. This now seems to be the preferred term used by journalists who are getting cold feet about describing every-body to the right of Extinction Rebellion as ‘far right’. ‘Hard right’ also seems to be what a party that used to be called ‘far right’ is called once it is in government.
The effect, of course, is a blunting one, because the term already seems to have lost all meaning. This – as I have said for years – may some day become a problem, because the various parties described as ‘far right’ across the continent include parties that are no such thing as well as parties that I would like to keep an eye on. One of the frustrations with the ‘far right on the march’ theme is that there are parties that there are serious questions about. There are people in the AfD who are definitely up to no good, and who have the capacity to destroy their whole party. The Freedom Party of Austria also has a certain whiff around some of its members.
Will this always be the case? Perhaps. Look in depth into any political movements on the continent and you will invariably find some link to the worst movements of the 1940s. Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the old National Front in France not only had dodgy pasts but a question hovering over them about whether they are in some ways harking back to the days of collaboration.
But what is the continent to do about this? And what is our view supposed to be? One of the many problems with throwing everybody into the ‘far right’ bracket is that it raises a question which I don’t know if anyone is brave enough to ask or answer. Essentially it is this: is Europe so toxic that it requires decades or even centuries before anything healthy can grow there? I suspect some people think the answer is ‘yes’. Others haven’t realised that this is the ultimate question. But it is.
My answer would be that the ground is still poisonous in parts. Deciding which parts are to be designated such and which are worth cultivating requires unbelievable care. But too many people are not up to that job, including people whose job it is meant to be.
Incidentally, on Monday night thousands of leftists protested and rioted in Paris in response to the European parliament election results. Members of the French left, including Manon Aubry of La France Insoumise, attended. Late in the evening the police had to disperse the protestors with stinger grenades. This was in fact the far left ‘on the march’. But you don’t have to be a mystic to predict that this is not a headline that made it into any of the newspapers.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/the-trouble-with-calling-everyone-far-right/
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So much for equality! Top school's inclusivity drive 'backfires' as head girl is replaced with, er, a BOY!
One of Scotland’s top state schools has prompted an angry backlash after its head girl was replaced with a boy in what was supposed to be an ‘inclusivity’ drive.
Williamwood High School scrapped its traditional positions of head boy and head girl and replaced them with two gender neutral ‘captains’ elected by other pupils.
However, the move ‘backfired’ after both posts were secured by male candidates, while none of four girls who put themselves forward were chosen.
Securing one of the posts is viewed as a significant moment in a pupil’s career, and can boost university applications and lead to other openings, such as opportunities for public speaking.
Parents and female pupils claimed girls at the school, located in one of Scotland’s most affluent areas, were being denied opportunities as a result of the supposedly ‘progressive’ policy.
Williamwood, in Clarkston, East Renfrewshire, is one of Scotland’s best performing schools, as well as one of the biggest, with a roll of around 1,700 pupils.
The school is applying for charter status from controversial SNP-funded charity LGBT Youth Scotland, which advises against use of words such as boy and girl in classrooms, althogh the local council denied there was any link between this and the move towards ‘captains’.
East Renfrewshire council, which has responsibility for the school, said the move away from head boys and girls was part of a national trend designed to ‘allow for greater equality’.
However, parents pointed out the move appeared to have achieved the opposite of its objective, while feminist campaigners claimed the move would limit opportunities for female pupils while handing an advantage to males.
One parent, who did not wish to be named, said: ‘If this was a move towards equality then it has backfired.
‘If you are going to have two positions, then clearly a move such as this brings the possibility that the vote will end with two boys or two girls, whereas before you were guaranteed a boy and a girl. The whole thing is utter stupidity.’
Another parent, writing on social media, claimed girls had been left ‘furious’ and that teachers had dismissed their concerns by telling them ‘that’s what you voted for’.
Another posted: ‘So, girls are excluded. How very inclusive.’
Marion Calder, a director at the For Women Scotland campaign group, said: ‘This is yet another misplaced policy in the guise of equality which in reality leads to the erasure of females and denies girls opportunities.
‘It is no wonder that parents are up in arms. This school and any others that have adopted this regressive change should scrap it and return to a system that has served them well for decades.
‘There have been multiple studies which show that in this type of election, girls are perfectly willing to vote for boys but boys will typically only vote for other boys.’
LGBT Youth Scotland advises schools that terms such as ‘head pupil’ are ‘more inclusive’ as alternatives may distress pupils who identify as transgender or non-binary.
The charity, largely funded by the SNP government, requires schools to rewrite and update policies to achieve accreditation.
Williamwood boasts the eighth-best exam results in Scotland, out of 361 state schools, and was last year named Secondary School of the Year in Scotland by The Sunday Times.
The school was rebuilt in 2006 and, three years later, became the first in Scotland to be awarded the maximum possible score, five ‘excellent’ ratings across pupil attainment and teaching standards, from education inspectors.
Williamwood has also consistently achieved very high levels of pupil success in national exams.
The council said the ‘captains’ system at Williamwood had been brought in four years ago, replacing the head boy and girl titles, and that this year was the first that two pupils of the same gender had been elected.
An East Renfrewshire council spokesman said: ‘Many schools across Scotland are moving away from a Head Boy and a Head Girl to appointments of School Captains to allow for greater equality.
‘The process for appointing School Captains at Williamwood High has been in place for several years and, following a vote, on this occasion two male pupils have been appointed for the year ahead.
‘The wider pupil leadership team within the school will be made up of both boys and girls to ensure a wide range of views are put forward.
‘It is wrong to suggest this approach to appointing School Captains is in any way linked to attempts to gain charter status from LGBT Youth Scotland.’
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Who are Australia's "moderates"
I refer to those who self-describe themselves as ‘moderates’.
The word no doubt is emotively attractive to users and delivers a frisson of approval and virtue-signalling self-worth, maybe even a tingle down the spine. But it is essentially an empty concept. You need to fill it with specific content before deciding if you approve or disapprove of the political positions of the person or political faction spouting it. So take former prime minister Morrison. His faction grouping notwithstanding, the man as PM purported to govern as a ‘moderate’.
But what did that look like when it came to specific content?
Well, Team Morrison & co. signed us up to the impoverishing net zero without signalling it before the election; they oversaw the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in the country’s history, all while never once finding it in themselves to criticise Dan Andrew’s outright thuggish and brutally heavy-handed response in Victoria (and if the honours system wasn’t broken beforehand it sure is after giving a gong to Chairman Andrews); they blew out the budget with massive spending and high taxes that created huge asset inflation and transferred big time wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich and in a way that would make an ardent left-winger proud; they made appointments to the Australian Human Rights Commission, e-safety Commissioner post, the High Court, cultural bodies, and more, that Labor and on occasion the Greens could have made, with barely a single conservative amongst them; they oversaw a ballooning in the size of government and a surging in government spending as a percentage of GDP; they made huge payments to an activist Barrier Reef group over lunch while not lifting a finger to help Peter Ridd (who was correct down the line, just to be clear); and Mr Morrison made various disparaging but in fact vacuous and uninformed comments about the value of free speech while it was Liberal governments that gave us the first iterations of a number of woeful free-speech restricting Bills, including the absolutely outrageous Acma Bill.
That is what ‘moderate’ delivers as far as the Morrison and indeed Turnbull governments were concerned. (And cards on the table, I have slowly come to believe that in the ‘worst Liberal PM ever’ stakes, Mr Morrison certainly ties Mr Turnbull for top spot and may in fact take the gold medal in his own right.)
Yet incredibly, astoundingly even, the state Liberal parties, who all crawl over broken glass barefooted to describe themselves as ‘moderates’, are worse than their federal counterparts. The best of a woeful lot is Mr Crisafulli in Queensland. Yet he signed up to the recent Labor budget-spending orgy; he commits to not a single conservative fighting position bar some tough talk on youth crime; he won’t repeal the state bill of rights that Labor brought in without running on an election to bring it in; he won’t cut the grossly bloated public service; at best it’s a Tony Blair social democrat offering on the now tired refrain ‘well, at least we’re not Labor’.
The other state Liberal party iterations are worse. John Pesutto in Victoria in my view disgraced himself with his treatment of Moira Deeming and the rest of the party’s offerings are to the left of what Tony Blair would offer. WA? Do I need to say anything about the dynamic duo there? New South Wales is worse than Queensland. In all of these states the Liberal offerings are devoid of any actual classical liberal or conservative content.
Hence the general point that I am reiterating, that labels on their own can be empty, and void of content. Ignore all attempts by politicians to cloak themselves under the banner of ‘we are moderates’ and look at the actual offerings. The reverse of this applies as well, of course. The labels ‘far right’ and ‘hard right’ are now widely used by the mainstream media and even by some Liberal MPs at times to describe a set of policies that includes:
1) the entire Tony Abbott agenda,
2) believing that biological sex is real and imposes a mind-independent reality on the world that trumps subjective druthers and preferences,
3) being against the lockdowns and vaccine mandates (being against now proven to be the right position as it happens),
4) having grave doubts about virtue-signalling net-zero policies that will impoverish Australia while China and India build new coal-fired power stations weekly and we make zero difference to global temperatures (because, you know, we aren’t a moral beacon that other countries will copy as we travel back to the Stone Age),
5) wanting to control immigration and insisting GDP is largely irrelevant as it is GDP per person that matters
The list goes on. Voicing any and all of those can get you labelled ‘far right’ and ‘hard right’ by the legacy media. Voicing some of them has earned the ire of the Liberal-appointed eSafety Commissioner and increased her desire to censor such views. And all the five such positions, without an exception, would have been endorsed by John F. Kennedy. That is the specific content of what today gets one labelled ‘far right’.
Such labels are empty and without content. Ignore the trendy lefties who deal in such platitudes and, in a smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous way, shun debate in favour of cancellation.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/silly-labels-and-meaningless-monikers/
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June 20, 2024
Most illnesses are a combination of symptoms. We should look at the symptoms one at a time
My heading above is a simplified version of the heading below. And I agree in principle with the propositon it expresses. And the conclusion they draw from their survey data supports that proposition.
But it doesn't! The correlations they report are abysmally low so the findings actually DISPROVE what they set out to show
And that happens all the time in medical research. I have documented it many times. What amazes me is that such crazy studies regularly get reported in top medical journals, as they did below. I am glad that I have lived to 80 so that I can continue to point such follies out -- as there is clearly an acute shorage of sanity about the matters concerned.
The sad thing is that Google has search-blocked me so that my critical comments will only ever become known to regular readers of this blog. A Google search of the subject will not disclose these comments. Criticism is essential to science but Google don't seem to care about that
UPDATE: Google appears to have lifted the search block on this blog. Things I write here will now appear in response to a searches for information on topics I have written about here. So my comments above should appear soon in searches
Polygenic Scores and Networks of Psychopathology Symptoms
Giulia G Piazza et al.
Abstract
Importance
Studies on polygenic risk for psychiatric traits commonly use a disorder-level approach to phenotyping, implicitly considering disorders as homogeneous constructs; however, symptom heterogeneity is ubiquitous, with many possible combinations of symptoms falling under the same disorder umbrella. Focusing on individual symptoms may shed light on the role of polygenic risk in psychopathology.
Objective
To determine whether polygenic scores are associated with all symptoms of psychiatric disorders or with a subset of indicators and whether polygenic scores are associated with comorbid phenotypes via specific sets of relevant symptoms.
Design, Setting, and Participants
Data from 2 population-based cohort studies were used in this cross-sectional study. Data from children in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) were included in the primary analysis, and data from children in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) were included in confirmatory analyses. Data analysis was conducted from October 2021 to January 2024. Pregnant women based in the Southwest of England due to deliver in 1991 to 1992 were recruited in ALSPAC. Twins born in 1994 to 1996 were recruited in TEDS from population-based records. Participants with available genetic data and whose mothers completed the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire and the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire when children were 11 years of age were included.
Main Outcomes and Measures
Psychopathology relevant symptoms, such as hyperactivity, prosociality, depression, anxiety, and peer and conduct problems at age 11 years. Psychological networks were constructed including individual symptoms and polygenic scores for depression, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), body mass index (BMI), and educational attainment in ALSPAC. Following a preregistered confirmatory analysis, network models were cross-validated in TEDS. Results Included were 5521 participants from ALSPAC (mean [SD] age, 11.8 [0.14] years; 2777 [50.3%] female) and 4625 participants from TEDS (mean [SD] age, 11.27 [0.69] years; 2460 [53.2%] female). Polygenic scores were preferentially associated with restricted subsets of core symptoms and indirectly associated with other, more distal symptoms of psychopathology (network edges ranged between r = −0.074 and r = 0.073). Psychiatric polygenic scores were associated with specific cross-disorder symptoms, and nonpsychiatric polygenic scores were associated with a variety of indicators across disorders, suggesting a potential contribution of nonpsychiatric traits to comorbidity. For example, the polygenic score for ADHD was associated with a core ADHD symptom, being easily distracted ( r = 0.07), and the polygenic score for BMI was associated with symptoms across disorders, including being bullied ( r = 0.053) and not thinking things out ( r = 0.041).
Conclusions and Relevance
Genetic associations observed at the disorder level may hide symptom-level heterogeneity. A symptom-level approach may enable a better understanding of the role of polygenic risk in shaping psychopathology and comorbidity.
June 2024 JAMA Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1403
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Women have been sold a lie, you can't have it all
Women can't 'have it all' despite being 'given the idea' that they can work and have their independence while raising children, Paloma Faith has declared.
The British singing sensation, 42, split from husband Leyman Lahcine after 10 years in 2022 and has been struggling to balance co-parenting their two daughters, aged seven and three, with her music career.
She told Radio Times: 'I feel a bit disgruntled about society's expectation on women, because we were given this idea that you could work and have your own money and independence while raising children.
'What we've ended up with is far too much responsibility, and I think a lot of women are burning out.'
Indeed, Paloma is not the only woman feeling this way; speaking to FEMAIL, other modern mothers have opened up about their own experiences, echoing how it's 'impossible for one woman to do everything'.
Juggling motherhood while trying to claw back onto the career ladder is a struggle and most agree that giving 100 per cent to career, family, and personal fulfilment is not doable all at once. Here, we speak to the mothers who claim women 'can't have it all'...
'We think we can have it all... the truth hit me like a runaway train'
Holly Matthews, from Coventry, is mother to Brooke, 13, and Texas, 11, and a self-development coach and founder of The Happy Me Project.
Holly said: 'We think we can have it all. When I became a mum, I truly believed that everything would stay the same, only now I'd have a baby on my hip. The truth hit me like a runaway train.
'We aren't enough, we aren't enough to do everything. No one is. This myth that we can juggle it all, or that women are 'great at multitasking' sends us into burnout (and FYI we don't choose to multitask, we are cornered into this behaviour). Truthfully, we are only ever doing one thing well at any one time.
'When I'm working on my business, I am not spending time with my kids, when I'm spending time with my kids, my business admin piles up high and when I'm doing either of these things the piles of washing and dishes pile up higher than that.
'My mental load is so high every day that socialising or time for me must be so heavily scheduled in advance, or it would never happen.
'Women can be whatever the hell they like, of course they can! Women are strong, resilient and brave but when we win in one area, another area pays the price.
'We can do our very best to juggle it all, but this eventually just erodes our sense of self and is ultimately just another form of people pleasing.'
'I don't think it's fair to have another child as life is so crazy'
Mother-of-one Laura Kay is founder of permanent makeup business Laura Kay London in Hertfordshire.
Laura said: 'Many women enter motherhood with the optimistic view that they can balance a successful career with family life, striving to 'have it all.'
'But the reality is a different picture. Juggling the demands of work and raising children can be a big challenge, leading to sacrifices in various aspects of life.
'For some women like me, this means sacrificing precious time with our families, as work commitments take over our days. There is very little room for quality time with loved ones and most certainly no time for self care days!
'I would say personally I was so career focused that I feel I don't really remember the early years of having a baby.
'I went back to work after six weeks after having a caesarean section on New Year's Day in 2017, I never had maternity leave and watched my friends have a year off with their babies but I was so career focused that I didn't even think what I was missing out on.
'Now seven years later I try and have more of a balance and I make sure I do school pick ups as I feel these are things I remember as a child.
'I also decided to only have one child as I don't think it's fair to have another child as life is so crazy and I want to now give all my energy to him and give him the best life I can.
'I've always wanted to be independent and not rely on anyone so I know I can fend for myself if I need to, I think that sets a great example to my little man.
'In my parents generation things were very different, my mum didn't work due to the cost of child care it was better for her to stay at home but things are very different now as most of my friends do work and juggle everything.
'I actually love my work and I call it my hobby. I'm so lucky to enjoy what I do, I wish I could get some of those baby years back now as time soon goes by and I can't believe how quick seven years has gone!'
'I've acknowledged that it's impossible for one woman to do everything'
Mother-of-one Rebecca Tidy, 37, is a freelance writer and researcher, from Falmouth. She has a daughter, Mabel, six.
Rebecca said: 'I worked hard for the PhD that I proudly obtained from the same Russell Group university as my dad. And afterwards, I secured my dream job as a policing lecturer.
'Nothing made me happier than the validation of publishing my research in the best academic journals. In fact, I was so dedicated to my career that I worked from my hospital bed on the night before my emergency C-section.
'Maternity leave was tough, as I was alone with a newborn. Mabel was born prematurely, leaving her with breathing difficulties until the age of two and severe allergies.
'It felt ironic that my then-fiancé was promoted to partner at his prestigious accounting firm soon after I gave birth. He was out of the house for 12 hours a day, while I got to grips with nappies and vomit.
'Though I returned to work when Mabel was aged one, I found myself taking weeks off – or working from home – as she was poorly. I was too embarrassed to admit it, but I was exhausted and unwell too. Despite my best efforts, I was failing everyone.
'The final straw came when my boss texted to ask why I missed a deadline, while I was in A and E with Mabel. I politely handed in my notice the next day with the intention of spending a year working from home as a freelance writer. However, I've not returned to my academic career since.
'It's been a financial stretch, as my income has halved. I'm often jealous of my 'mum' friends that kept their full-time careers. They're professors now, whereas I'm single parenting and doing twice-daily school runs.
'I do, however, still think that reining back my career goals was the right decision. Mabel's now a healthy, happy six-year-old with bags of confidence. We have wonderful memories together from gardening to baking cupcakes.
'Though I've been recovering from cancer, I'm feeling energetic and cheerful once again. I've acknowledged that it's impossible for one woman to do everything.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/parenting/article-13542469/Paloma-Faith-mothers-all.html
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The constitution is NOT a "social contract" and nobody can define what "the common good" is
Two abiding myths that fall apart when you look at them
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia hosted an online discussion recently about the new book The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning. The conversation featured the book’s author, journalist A. J. Jacobs, and NCC president and CEO Jeffrey Rosen. I encourage readers to watch the entire discussion; this post will focus on only a short excerpt.
During the discussion, Mr. Jacobs said, “You have natural rights, you were born with natural rights, but those rights, once you enter into society, you made a contract, and those rights have to be balanced against the common good” (clip at 24:17).
It is unclear whether Jacobs was expressing his own viewpoint or reciting a common perspective (my guess, based on the context, is both). Regardless, Jacobs’s statement contains several enduring, dangerous myths that have been retold in classrooms so many times that they are seldom challenged despite being wrong.
Myth #1: The U.S. Constitution is a contract between the People and the State.
The Constitution is not a contract. It does not contain, and never has, the elements of a contract. According to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School,
A contract is an agreement between parties, creating mutual obligations that are enforceable by law. The basic elements required for the agreement to be a legally enforceable contract are: mutual assent, expressed by a valid offer and acceptance; adequate consideration; capacity; and legality.
The People have never entered into a contract with the State. This was emphasized by Independent Institute senior fellow Robert Higgs in his essay titled “Consent of the Governed, Revisited”:
[I]n regard to the so-called social contract, I have often had occasion to protest that I haven’t even seen the contract, much less been asked to consent to it. A valid contract requires voluntary offer, acceptance, and consideration. I’ve never received an offer from my rulers, so I certainly have not accepted one; and rather than consideration, I have received nothing but contempt from the rulers, who, notwithstanding the absence of any agreement, have indubitably threatened me with grave harm in the event that I fail to comply with their edicts.
No one in their right mind would voluntarily consent to a document that binds them to a group indefinitely that can “legally” take their income, wealth, and liberty at any time based on an institutional majority vote. American philosopher Lysander Spooner pointed out in 1867, “To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.”
A randomly selected individual in the United States has greater certainty of service delivery at a specified price by their wireless provider because of a contract than they do with their federal, state, or local government based on any constitution or charter. For example, many people may be surprised to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the police do not have a general constitutional duty to protect someone from harm. Tragically, parents in Uvalde, Texas, among others, have learned this the hard way. Ordinary citizens would be better served by private security agencies operating under contracts that specify the terms (duties) of protection than they are currently served by government law enforcement agencies operating under local or state authority.
The U.S. Constitution is not a contract. It has never received the consent of the governed, and based on how governments treat their subjects, few people would voluntarily consent to its terms if given the opportunity.
Myth #2: The “common good” exists and it can be discerned.
Despite having been slain more than 70 years ago, the notion of the “common good” is a myth that lives on like a zombie. In a 1951 monograph titled Social Choice and Individual Values, Nobel laureate economist Kenneth J. Arrow demonstrated that it is generally impossible to determine the “common good.” The Arrow (impossibility) theorem, as it became known, assumes several noncontroversial conditions, for example, that each individual has complete and transitive preferences regarding the outcomes under consideration in a collective-choice context, such as voting.
According to MIT researcher S. M. Amadae, Arrow’s theorem proves that it is impossible to construct “any mathematical procedure [i.e., a social choice rule] for amalgamating individual preferences that results in a collectively rational preference ordering of all the possible outcomes.” The implications of Arrow’s theorem are profound. As Amadae explained, “The theorem rejects the notion of a collective democratic will, whether derived through civic deliberation or construed by experts who paternalistically apply knowledge of what is best for a population.”
Individual rights, preferences, and interests do exist, and those often motivate individuals to align into groups or factions. However, there is no “common good,” “general welfare,” or “the public.” Those are aggregation fallacies.
Returning to A. J. Jacobs’s statement above, since there is no common good, it is nonsensical to say that “balancing” natural rights achieves outcomes closer to the common good.
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Why Are So Many Food and Beverage Products Being Recalled?
A Newsweek investigation finds that at least 350 food and beverage products are under recalls mandated by the Food and Drug Administration. A short list of these products includes cookies, shellfish, cucumbers, frozen pizzas, frozen fruits, pasta, salad kits, smoked salmon, hummus, shrimp, lemonade, granola bars, cantaloupes, and ice cream.
It’s a long, extensive, and confusing list. Some products have been under recall since 2018, meaning the FDA has taken six years to find the issue, reinspect the goods, and confirm newer production meets its standards.
Others remained on the list well after their producers addressed any sanitation concerns. Newsweek also reports, “Items like enoki mushrooms stayed live on the FDA website for more than a year… when the outbreak was declared over last year.”
It’s also unclear if some items were linked to hospitalization or other illnesses before being recalled. Newsweek’s list includes 31 meat, dairy, and egg products. These are partially regulated by the Food and Safety Inspection Service, a subagency of the US Department of Agriculture. Despite being recalled by the FDA, the FSIS does not report any illnesses or other noteworthy issues associated with these products.
Perhaps most concerning, some of these recalls have been disastrous recently. As part of this list, the FDA recalled four infant formula producers, some of whom received official warning letters. The catastrophic infant formula shortage of 2022 began with one recall. Due to a single FDA-mandated recall, there is an ongoing national shortage of hypoallergenic infant formula.
There are many reasons that products can be contaminated—and should be recalled or safety issues. But clearly, that’s only part of this story. Much of the problem boils down to incentives.
Whether it’s regulating apples, formula, cancer drugs, or birth control, the FDA’s incentives as a regulatory bureaucracy are to minimize the risk of harmful goods reaching customers. Consequently, it lengthens, increases, and intensifies scrutiny over the goods it regulates—even to an excessive level. That’s a big reason the FDA’s recall list is long enough that the agency itself can’t keep current or accurate.
Fortunately, with few exceptions, foodborne illnesses across the United States have decreased since 2009—largely thanks to health and agricultural technology improvements. We have fewer reasons to be concerned about whether our food and beverages are safe to consume. On the flip side, we have more reasons to be skeptical about the regulators deciding this for us.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/06/13/why-are-so-many-food-and-beverage-products-being-recalled/
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19 June, 2024
Are there enough fighting aged men? Senate Armed Service proposes drafting women in National Defense Authorization Act
Women are needed at home to produce the children who will replace the fallen but there are always a lot of women who have a vocation to serve in the armed forces instead. They voluntarily want in to the armed services so it is reasonaable enough to accept their service if they meet the physical standards. But forcing them to get shot at is evil
One of my ex-wives served in the army for nine years. She served in the transport corps and told me that lots of women are keen on driving the army's big trucks and are actually safer drivers. She also told me me that most army women are queer. So in camp she actually had to fight off sexual approaches from both the men and the women. She is however 5'11" tall and a former reprentative athlete so defended herself effectively. I can testify that she was VERY heterosexual. I have some very happy memories of our times together
She was also good-looking. See our wedding photo below. She had it all
The Senate Armed Services Committee voted 22 to 3 on a bipartisan basis in favor of the current year National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision for requiring women to sign up for the national draft via the Selective Service.
Why? The bill’s executive summary does not provide any stated reason, but ostensibly, the reasons given for doing so in past years’ proposals have merely centered around issues of equity and sexual discrimination and whether it’s fair if only men are drafted, or that women would be excluded from the draft.
But another issue might have to do with the population of fighting aged men 18-to-24, currently 15.1 million, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accounting for about 4.5 percent of the total U.S. population of 335.2 million as of 2023 per U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data.
That’s not much better than the 14 million seen in 1980, when the male population aged 18-to-24 as a percent of the population peaked at 6.19 percent, back when the population was just 230 million.
Meaning, although the U.S. population has increased by 115 million since 1980, the population of fighting aged men has only increased by 1.1 million, as the number of 18-to-24-year-old men as a percent of the population declined from 6.19 percent to 4.5 percent.
When compared to potential adversary nations such as China, where conflict in Taiwan or the Koreas or Japan could break out any day, the potential size of U.S. fighting forces of able-bodied, young men is considerably dwarfed.
In China, there are about 102.3 million 18-to-23-year-olds, of which about 51 percent are male. And that’s with the one-child policy in effect there since 1980. That means there are about 52.2 million fighting aged men in China, compared to just 15.1 million in the U.S.
In the U.S., without any laws requiring less than two babies per woman, the FDA’s 1960 approval of birth control has nonetheless resulted in less than population replacement birth rates as more and more women have entered the labor force, attended college and opted either to not get married or not have children at all, with the numbers still plummeting, from 3.65 babies per woman in 1960 to 1.61 babies per woman in 2023.
If the U.S. had maintained more robust birth rates, the population might be more than 520 million today, and the number of fighting aged men would be considerably larger, more like 23 million. That’s still less than China, but it also underscores that the current prolonged demographic deficit of fewer marriages and fewer challenge may in fact pose a real and present danger to national security not easily offset even with immigration.
Either way, in a hypothetical conventional war of attrition where the draft was employed by both the U.S. and China, China would have a considerable advantage in terms of wearing down personnel, since theoretically it could withstand more than triple the losses U.S. forces could.
Such a conflict might seem unlikely with the U.S. nuclear deterrent, on one hand, but on the other, mutually assured destruction might make a conventional war more likely if neither side was willing to go nuclear for fear of retaliation and national or global destruction. In any event, such a conflict might start out conventionally but ultimately come down to the use of nuclear weapons if it looked like one side or the other was losing.
That said, even if such a war was unlikely, the presence of nuclear weapons might not be enough to deter such a conflict from beginning. If U.S. armed forces were to employ a draft of both men and women, the pool of potential recruits would jump from 15.1 million to 30 million, with 14.9 million females aged 18-to-24 as of 2023.
That’s still 20 million less than simply the number of men China could potentially deploy if necessary, and still more than 70 million less than the number of men and women China could deploy.
According to the CIA World Factboook, China has already similarly decided to put women into the military via conscription: “18-22 years of age for men for selective compulsory military service, with a 2-year service obligation; women 18-19 years of age who are high school graduates and meet requirements for specific military jobs are subject to conscription.”
All talk of equity aside, that appears to be a far more compelling rationale for expanding the draft in the U.S. and other Western countries, even if it is unstated. The fact is, in traditional wars of attrition, larger nations tend to prevail over smaller nations and in a war against China, the personnel deficit would pose a considerable challenge.
That means even enlisting women would likely not be enough to match simply the number of potential fighting forces China could muster for a conventional war, and would require the U.S. to team up with other countries via alliances if China were to ever become a global threat akin to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union after World War II.
Given the global scale and the likely, eventual resort to nuclear weapons, such a conflict would certainly be undesirable, but if it did occur, assuming it did not immediately go nuclear, who has the most fighting men and women might be more important than the Senate currently dares to admit. All talk of equity aside, in wars numbers matter.
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No time to fiddle as Hezbollah burns northern Israel
Northern Israel is on fire. Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon, launched more than 300 rockets and drones across the border between June 12 and June 13.
The attacks came in response to Israel’s killing of Taleb Abdullah — a commander south of the Litani River — on June 11. Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire over the weekend. Israel Defence Forces Spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Sunday that “Hezbollah’s increasing aggression is bringing us to the brink of what could be a wider escalation, one that could have devastating consequences for Lebanon and the entire region.”
The war, launched by Iran-supported militias on Oct. 7, has long exceeded the single front in Gaza. Yemen’s Houthis have closed the Red Sea to international shipping and, along with Iraqi Shiite militias, regularly launch drones and missiles at Israel. The attacks aren’t directed only at the Jewish state: More than 170 attacks took place on U.S. and allied forces in Syria and Iraq between October and February.
Yet the prospect of open warfare between Israel and Hezbollah dwarfs these developments. The Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank, estimates that the group has around 200,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided munitions capable of hitting targets in Israel within a few yards’ radius. Hezbollah also has missiles such as the Fateh-110 and M-600 systems, which could hit Israel’s central cities. The group boasts a ground force of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 fighters.
War between Israel and Hezbollah could lead to a wider regional conflagration. Iran has control of a contiguous corridor from the Iraq-Iran border, through southern Syria and into Lebanon. Iranian client fighters could easily make their way along this line to an Israel-Hezbollah combat zone. Its forces could likewise launch missiles and ordnance from Iraqi and Syrian soil.
Neither side appears to want immediate confrontation, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come. Senior Hezbollah official Naim Qassem recently described Hezbollah’s current level of engagement as representing a “complete” but not “all out” intervention. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly prevented the swift response to Hezbollah’s Oct. 8 attacks that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant favoured.
The status quo is disruptive. Some 60,000 Israelis have left their homes, from Rosh Hanikra to Kiryat Shmona. The country’s north has effectively been shut down for the past eight months. Hezbollah’s rockets and drones have hit the cities of Acre, Tiberias and Nahariya.
Such a departure is unprecedented. More than a century ago Jews’ determination to hold the remote settlement of Tel Hai against a Shiite Arab militia gave birth to a central national myth. The eight Jews killed in the fighting at Tel Hai on March 1, 1920, entered the Israeli pantheon as a symbol of determination to hold the ground, no matter the cost.
Kiryat Shemonah, the “Town of the Eight” in Hebrew, is named after them. Today the border communities are empty. Hezbollah is using antitank missiles to destroy the neat red-roofed houses of Metula.
Israel maintains the tactical advantage. Hezbollah has reported the deaths of nearly 350 fighters in recent fighting. Israel has lost 10 soldiers and 15 civilians near the border area. Yet despite this disparity, Hezbollah’s losses aren’t significant enough to deter it from further attacks.
Israel thus faces a dilemma. The present state of affairs is untenable, unless Jerusalem wishes to concede a de facto security zone of control to Hezbollah on Israel’s side of the border. If the fire is spreading south, the natural response is to spread it north. Increased air attacks up to Beirut, possibly accompanied by a ground incursion, would be among the list of options. The 36th Armored Division, which played a prominent role in the invasion of Gaza, is training close to the border.
Yet such an incursion would need to consider what would happen after Hezbollah’s forces were pushed north of the Litani. Would it merely be a punitive hit-and-run raid? If so, is it worth the losses that would come from it, given the likelihood that Hezbollah would return to the border once the fighting concluded? If not, what is Israel’s preferred arrangement on the Lebanese side of the border after the fighting?
Israel’s leadership is considering these questions, and it doesn’t have time to waste. An agreement to end the Gaza war might have led to a messy de facto ceasefire in the north. But the fighting likely won’t end anytime soon. With more than 60,000 displaced Israelis, and daily missile attacks in the north, Israel must answer soon.
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Appeals Court Deals Blow to Racial Discrimination by Big Money Corporate Interests
A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has thrown a wrench into the blatantly discriminatory practices of big-money corporate interests.
In American Alliance for Equal Rights v. Fearless Fund Management, over a bizarre dissent by a third judge, Judges Kevin Newsom and Robert Luck upheld an injunction against a venture capital fund with tens of millions of dollars in assets that gives money only to businesses owned by black women. Nobody else is eligible even to apply.
The plaintiff, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, sued on behalf of three of its members—business owners who aren’t black women and, therefore, aren’t allowed to compete in Fearless Fund Management’s funding process.
Fearless Fund was apparently fearless about violating anti-discrimination laws.
The threshold question was whether the American Alliance for Equal Rights had standing to sue on behalf of its members. Each member provided an affidavit showing he was “able and ready” to participate in Fearless Fund’s competition, meet all prerequisites but the racial one, and have concrete plans to use the funds they would get to build up their businesses if they weren’t racially excluded.
That is all that’s required to establish standing, according to Newsom and Luck, and they are correct—these business owners have an obvious claim since they are explicitly excluded from applying for the $20,000 in venture capital offered by Fearless Fund in its grant contest.
Yes, Fearless Fund discriminates against members of the Alliance for Equal Rights because of their race, but that isn’t enough to establish standing, according to Judge Robin Rosenbaum, an Obama appointee. In her dissent, Rosenbaum accused the alliance of “flopping”—that is, faking an injury the way soccer players do by flopping on the field—“to manipulate the referee into inappropriately exercising his power to award a penalty kick in the box.”
That’s a strange position to take in the 21st century. According to Rosenbaum’s illogic, members of the NAACP who, during the Jim Crow era, avoided hotels, restaurants, and buses where they knew they’d be turned away would be “flopping” because they didn’t go in and actually get turned away.
This retrograde view of civil rights ignores that, as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it recently, “discrimination is harm.” It would also force victims of discrimination into humiliating and even potentially dangerous situations before letting them seek justice.
It’s curious, isn’t it, how efforts to defend the race discrimination that is now trendy and politically correct in academia, the media, and the corporate world so often end up tolerating the race discrimination that was trendy in the past? The only difference between today and the 1960s is which race is being discriminated against and which is benefiting.
But Newsom and Luck took a principled view and reminded Rosenbaum, their fellow judge, that
we’re talking about real-live, flesh-and-blood individuals who were excluded from the opportunity to compete in Fearless’s contest solely on account of the color of their skin. Respectfully, victims of race discrimination—whether white, black, or brown—are not ‘floppers.’
They face very real race discrimination, and that discrimination, Newsom and Luck recognized, is forbidden by federal law.
The lawsuit was filed under 42 U.S.C. § 1981, which, as the judges pointed out in their June 3 ruling, prohibits race discrimination in the making and enforcing of contracts. In fact, the entry form for applicants specifically said it was a “contract.” But Fearless Fund “conspicuously” changed that to take out the contract language after the lawsuit was filed in an obvious attempt to avoid the legal consequences of violating federal law.
In defense of its discrimination, Fearless Fund argued, in essence, that it was allowed to discriminate “so long as there are prospective funders out there who aren’t discriminating.” Newsom and Luck dismissed that argument as “anathema to the principles that underlie all antidiscrimination provisions.”
There is no doubt that the Southern racists of a long-gone era would have loved that argument. By Fearless Fund’s logic, so long as some hotels, restaurants, and buses served black people, they would be free to discriminate against black Americans.
We know that was wrong then. And it is still wrong today, as is discriminating against anyone on the basis of race.
In a last-ditch attempt to defend its discrimination, Fearless Fund argued that it had a free-speech right to engage in racial discrimination. But Newsom and Luck dismantled that argument too. There is a “critical distinction between advocating race discrimination and practicing it,” they said.
And again, an example from the past proves the point. If a restaurateur banned black people from his restaurant, he would certainly be making a statement, but while the First Amendment would protect his right to say racist things, it would not protect his act of discriminatory exclusion.
So, too, today.
Of course, the trendy race discrimination that Fearless Fund practiced has its defenders. A quick internet search will reveal angry pundits saying that the decision is racist, that it “fails black women,” that it represents “a sick victory,” and that it amounts to “using historic civil rights laws to attack black people.”
But take their arguments out of the thick cloud of rhetoric that pervades our era and apply them to the discrimination of the last one, and you will find what Rosenbaum missed—that to defend discrimination today is to excuse discrimination yesterday. There were angry pundits then, too, who no doubt argued that the ending of segregation and discrimination against blacks was a “sick victory” and an “attack on white people.”
The wiser path is to rise above our era and find the principles that transcend all of them, as Newsom and Luck did. Racial discrimination is always wrong—there is never any justification for it. And it is about time that the corporate world of American business recognized that, just as American universities have been forced to do.
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Pope Francis bans traditional Mass at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s
This is a disgraceful fiat by a "progressive" Pope. The Tridentine mass is one of the few growth areas for the church, as well as being comforting to older Catholics
In a move that has shocked and upset hundreds of Catholics in Melbourne, the Vatican has banned the traditional Latin Mass from the city’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
The final traditional Mass will be offered on Wednesday, June 19, at 5.30pm. By essentially ordering traditional Catholics to get out of their own cathedral, the ban is stirring up tensions and divisions.
On Wednesday evening Mass, which has been a regular feature of cathedral worship for 13 years, drew a crowd of more than 150, mainly young people, including city workers not aligned with traditional parishes.
Veronica Sidhu, who attended the Mass, said it was solemn, uplifting and sad because worshippers knew it was coming it an end, as well as devotional, with “heavenly’’ choir singing.
“There was a mix of people – city workers and tradies _ including a dad who went to Communion with one toddler on his shoulders and was holding another by the hand,’’ she said. “Has Pope Francis or Archbishop Comensoli ever attended a Mass like it?’’
Ms Sidhu said that after years of contributing energy and resources to the church in Melbourne she felt “appalled’’ to be excluded from her own Cathedral.
The priest who said that Mass, Father Shawn Murphy, 34, who was ordained a year ago, told The Australian: “The Cathedral is the mother church of the Archdiocese and like a mother should be welcoming to all her children.’’
Father Murphy, the Assistant priest of the St John Henry Newman old rite parish in Caulfield North in Melbourne where he leads the young adults’ group, said members of the group were distressed, shocked and disbelieving about the decision.
“What is so tragic is that unlike previous oppressions of the Mass and the faithful, in England under the Tudors, during the French Revolution and in prison camps of the Soviet Union and China, this oppression is coming from within the church,’’ Fr Murphy said.
It was a blow against Christian and Western cultural heritage and causing confusion, especially among the young, he said. St Patrick’s Cathedral had been built for the traditional Mass in the late 19th century, he said.
The ban was imposed by Archbishop Peter Comensoli, who had no choice, following a direction from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship.
It is the next step in a campaign by Pope Francis to crush the traditional rite, which evolved through the early centuries of the church and was largely unchanged for about 1500 years until the mid-1960s. It was phased out following the second Vatican Council, replaced by the more prosaic novus ordo (New Mass), usually said in the vernacular.
The traditional Mass was given fresh impetus by Saint John Paul II in the 1980s and by Pope Benedict in 2007, who affirmed the right of all priests to say Mass using the traditional rite (now known as the “extraordinary form”), without the permission of bishops. Benedict’s letter also clarified the fact that the Traditional rite was never abrogated.
While those changes were initially expected to accommodate older Catholics who remember the pre-1969 Latin Mass, the growth in attendance stunned church leaders as young families and 20-something and 30-somethings discovered the Old Mass and stayed. Along with Pentecostalism, it is one of the main growth areas of Christianity around the world, with new societies of priests established in the US and Europe to train priests in the Old Rite.
Francis overturned his predecessors’ initiatives three years ago, in a document ironically entitled Traditionis Custodes (Custodians of Tradition), which crushed centuries of tradition.
Cardinal George Pell, an adherent of the New Mass, who respected the principle of choice and inclusivity for Catholics who preferred the Old Mass, predicted that Traditionis Custodes “would not outlive the current pontificate’’.
In June 1992, an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne, the then Bishop Pell celebrated the first Solemn Pontifical Mass (an extraordinary form High Mass said by a bishop) in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, or in any Australian cathedral, since 1969.
Ms Sidhu said the latest decision from the Vatican was divisive, denied Catholics choice, and had an element of coercion – trying to force worshippers to attend the New Mass against their will.
Traditionis Custodes stipulates that the traditional Mass is “not to take place any longer’’ in normal parishes. But bishops around Australia, including Archbishop Comensoli, have used their authority and discretion in implementing it, with a view to the pastoral needs of growing numbers of worshippers, especially the young and converts, who were drawn to the transcendence and gravitas of the Old Rite.
The Wednesday evening Cathedral Mass survived, until Archbishop Comensoli sought further guidance from the Vatican.
In a letter to Archbishop Comensoli, Archbishop Vittorio Viola, Secretary of the Dicastery for Worship, said it was not “appropriate for the antecedent liturgy to be celebrated in the place that should serve as an example for the liturgical life of the entire diocese’’.
Father Glen Tattersall, Parish Priest of Newman parish in Caulfield in Melbourne, said the weekly traditional Latin Mass began at St Patrick’s in 2011, granted in response to a petition by Catholic laity. “I had the privilege of celebrating the majority of those Masses over the following years,’’ Fr Tattersall said. “There was a pause during Covid, but we returned after the lockdowns.
“This Mass was loved by many. It was fitting that the rite of Mass for which the Cathedral was built was returned to it, and had an honoured place in the life of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
“It was also a particular demonstration of the communion of Catholics attached to this form of the Mass, with the Archbishop of Melbourne. The Mass was celebrated peacefully up to now with the blessing of the former and current Archbishops.
“I can personally attest to the many graces, including those of conversion, that have been granted through this Mass. It has borne only good fruit. But now, we learn that the Holy See has directed that the Mass be discontinued – causing widespread sadness and distress.
“In fact, the historical form of Mass is a constituent part of tradition and cannot be lawfully suppressed or forbidden. But in this Pontificate neither orthodox doctrine nor the law of the Church counts for anything.
“Everything is about power, and those in power in Rome insist that this Mass must stop. Archbishop Comensoli has been treated by the Holy See not as a Successor of the Apostles – which he is as Archbishop – but as the flunky of a remote and heartless bureaucracy. It seems that Pope Francis has suppressed Vatican II as well as the old Mass!’’
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18 June, 2024
Farage for Westminster
The Farage factor is inbound and on board for the July 4 UK General Election in what is fast becoming a metaphorical D-Day.
The political difference between now and 80 years ago?
This isn’t a Battle for Britain, it’s a fight to save what’s left of Britain.
By entering the race, Nigel Farage’s former Brexit Party has put what he calls the social democrat uniparty – made up of the Conservative-lite Tories and Marxian-Woke UK Labour – on notice.
His chief political aim is modest.
Prompted by political realism, Farage isn’t overestimating his chances, or underestimating those of his opponents.
With conservative infighting and relentless inaction, he believes the election is done and dusted.
UK Labour will win government, Nigel predicted, adding all that’s left to find out is what kind of majority UK voters will hand them.
Alongside widespread concerns about uninvited Islamification, and un-vetted mass immigration, Nigel Farage said his decision to step up was influenced by supporters.
In an intimate update on X, Farage explained his reasons, saying, he realised the reluctance to lead Reform UK into the carnage was letting millions of supporters down.
‘How could I. In fact, how dare I, let down these millions of people who helped me gain the biggest constitutional win for centuries by getting the UK out of the EU.’
He added, ‘I changed my mind. I’m going to do it.’
Crediting Tony Mack for stepping aside – Mack will take on a role as campaign manager – Farage said, first, ‘I’m going to stand, and I’m going to stand in Clacton.’
Second, ‘I’m coming back as the leader of Reform UK, not just for this election, for the next 5 years, up until the 2029 General election.’
Farage said he believes the election is ‘done already’, stating, Labour will win and there’ll be no real opposition, because the Tories will be too busy fighting each other.
‘They will not form a coherent opposition to a Labour government led by socialist, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer, that is going to be at best incompetent, perhaps even worse than that,’ Farage argued.
‘They’re going to nationalise energy production, to turn us all Green; well, I think, goodness only knows what that’s going to cost everybody.’
Determined to make Reform UK a tour de force with serious political punch, he said,
‘For Democracy to function there needs to be a proper coherent opposition voice, and that is the short-term aim of Reform UK.’
The aim is to ‘get a bridgehead into that Parliament to provide the voice of opposition’.
Farage then welcomed any conservatives on the ‘right side of the argument’ to join Reform UK.
‘We’re not here as wreckers. We’re here as builders.’
As Caldron Pool reported in January, Farage’s decision to enter the fight is neither a backflip, nor is it an act of desperation.
Although cagey, Farage has never completely ruled out another Westminster re-run.
He also polled well in Clacton earlier this year, suggesting he could win the Essex seat.
Notably, the Brexit pioneer’s bombshell announcement triggered the usual left-wing double standard on extremism and political violence.
In what could have been anything from acid to anthrax, Labour supporter, and OnlyFans ‘model’ Victoria Thomas-Bowen, allegedly lunged at Farage, throwing her milkshake over him, as he left a pub on the campaign trail.
Responding, popular public thinker, Konstantin Kisin, said the acceptance of left-wing political violence is ‘largely a product of the fact that left-wing extremism is never actually described as extremism’.
‘What is considered extreme is pointing out that there is a problem with any of this.’
‘Destroying your country’s history and culture is not considered extreme, but defending it is,’ he concluded.
Tommy Robinson, another ‘Stand up to Racism’ target, rightly criticised the left’s intimidation tactics, saying, ‘Whatever you think of Farage, he shouldn’t have to live like this.’
Woke-Marxian extremism is another reason for Farage’s fight to save what remains of Britain.
He was infamously debanked in 2023 for political reasons. He was berated, threatened, and accused of spreading misinformation when he called that out.
To this is said, ‘If they can do it to me, they can do it to you.’
Reform UK isn’t just the party of BREXIT, it’s also the first anti-lockdown party. In April 2020, an initially supportive Farage baulked at Covid rules saying, ‘I will not be put under house arrest by police and politicians, or anybody else.’
Farage furthered the Left’s hatred by joining the groundswell of discerning voters who rejected the West’s ‘ridiculous,’ walk hand-in-hand with the CCP down lockdown lover’s lane.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/farage-factor-anchors-reforms-fight-to-save-britain/
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Parents, Not Lax Regulation, To Blame for Tweens' Excessive Screen Time
Instead of calling on the federal government to regulate tween and teen use of social media, perhaps we should look a little closer to home. A new study suggests parental policies and habits around screens are a significant predictor of problematic use among adolescents.
One major finding: Kids getting too much "screen time" are more likely to have parents who get too much screen time.
"One of the biggest predictors of adolescents' screen use is their parents' screen use," pediatrician and lead study author Jason Nagata told The Washington Post.
'Associations Between Media Parenting Practices and Early Adolescent Screen Use'
This was a massive study looking at the screen habits of more than 10,000 kids ages 12 and 13. Published in the journal Pediatric Research, the study—"Associations between media parenting practices and early adolescent screen use"—looked at how often parents used cellphones or other screens around their kids and family policies surrounding technology, such as whether screens were often employed during meal times (35.6 percent said yes), whether kids had access to screens in their bedrooms (46.2 percent said yes), and whether parents monitored and/or limited screen time during the week (67.4 percent and 76.2 percent said yes).
Researchers also examined how often the children of these parents engaged in tech-based activities (including using social media, playing video games, and being on a cell phone generally) and how this affected various aspects of their lives.
The researchers found that "parent screen use, family mealtime screen use, and bedroom screen use were associated with greater adolescent screen time and problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use."
In addition, "parental use of screens to control behavior (e.g., as a reward or punishment) was associated with higher screen time and greater problematic video game use."
On the flip side, "parental monitoring of screens was associated with lower screen time and less problematic social media and mobile phone use," and "parental limit setting of screens was associated with lower screen time and less problematic social media, video game, and mobile phone use."
Challenging Conventional Wisdom
The findings challenge several prominent ideas in the teens and tech space, including the idea that parents are powerless to influence their children's screen-time habits. That alleged parental powerlessness is often offered as a reason for regulating digital spaces by setting age minimums for joining social media sites and banning "addictive" features like algorithmic feeds and endless scrolling.
Likewise, the study challenges the idea that tween and teen peers are the main influence on their screen habits, suggesting that parental habits as well as family policies around screens can have a significant—maybe more significant—effect.
There are various ways in which this influence could work.
Perhaps ample screen time by parents has an instructive influence, normalizing the idea that it's OK to be on one's phone or computer all the time. Perhaps parents who use screens a lot are just more permissive of kids' screen use. Perhaps excessive childhood screen time is spawned as a response to a lack of attention or guardrails from parents who are enmeshed in their own screens.
In any event, the findings "were consistent with various prior studies, which have suggested that greater parental screen time use is associated with greater screen time in younger children and more frequent co-use of screens with children," note the researchers.
A Missing Link in the Mental Health Puzzle?
The new findings could also represent a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to technology and youth mental health.
There are a lot of folks intent on blaming social media—or screens more broadly—for a rise in teen mental health issues. Megan Moreno, co-director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, told the Post that the message about social media and mental health has spread "almost to the edge of moral panic" despite the fact that the evidence "hasn't been there."
Part of the trouble with these "tech makes teens sad/anxious/etc." narratives is that they tend to ignore other explanations for rises in self-reported symptoms, self-harm activities, or mental illness diagnoses. The other big issue is that they look at links between symptoms and screen usage and simply assume the direction of causality, positing that too much screen time causes social, psychiatric, or behavioral problems when it's possible that existing problems lead some kids to turn to screens as an escape.
If kids who spend too much time on screens also have parents who spend too much time on screens, that could suggest other mechanisms for the mental health and screen time association.
Parents who find themselves susceptible to addiction-like behavior with screens may possess some genetic traits that their offspring share, predisposing both to problematic tech use.
Ample parental screen time could mean a parent has a heavy workload that leaves too little time for their kids, and this lack of parental investment could lead to both mental or behavioral problems and a lot of screen time.
Or perhaps too much parental phone use signifies a sort of parenting style that spawns various negative issues with children.
Any or all of the above scenarios seems plausible and posits a link between screen time and mental health issues that goes beyond the simplistic idea that using social media or smartphones directly triggers depression and anxiety.
https://reason.com/2024/06/17/parents-not-lax-regulation-to-blame-for-tweens-excessive-screen-time/#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20suggests%20parental,get%20too%20much%20screen%20time .
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Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released Despite FBI Resistance
A Leftist transgender!
The 2023 Nashville Covenant School murders understandably received massive news coverage when they occurred. The fight over obtaining the murderer’s diary also received news attention. But when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released earlier this month, the mainstream media completely ignored it.
It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary.
Five days after the release of the diary, with the exception of the New York Post, which is a national news outlet, the news coverage was limited to seven other conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire and Newsbusters.
The school murderer was transgender, and her diary reveals a suicidal left-winger who hated whites. The FBI expressed concern that the release of the diary from a transgender person could lead the public “to dismiss the attacker as mentally ill,” which would “further permeate the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill.” It worried that the diary could “potentially inflam[e] the public.”
The FBI worried that releasing the diary could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” Self-professed “experts,” the FBI fears, will “proffer their perspectives” in the press.
But there is a lot of important information in the diary. As is very typical of mass public shooters, the murderer was suicidal: “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead.” She was also on the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone, whose potential side effects include “abnormal dreams, outbursts of anger, tremors, and physical weakness.”
The FBI worries that the diary will help create a link in people’s minds between mass murderers and mental illness, but suicidal people presumably have some mental health problems. Nor should the link be particularly surprising given that the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that 51% of mass public shooters in the last 25 years were actually seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks. That is 2.5 times the rate in the general public.
The FBI acknowledged that Americans want to “understand what led to such tragic events.” But the FBI argued these statements “seldom provide the answers” and the diaries and manifestos were “often misleading.” Yet the national media appears completely uninterested in why these murderers pick the targets they do and how their motivation to get media coverage is important in understanding how to stop these attacks.
The diary showed that the murderer had picked the Covenant School because it was a soft, unprotected target. Even if the national media ignored these comments, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake, who had access to the diary, said on the day of the attack, “There was another location that was mentioned, but because of a threat assessment by the suspect of too much security, they decided not to.” A couple of days later, Nashville Council member Robert Swope stated that the murderer “looked at” two other Nashville public schools before deciding “the security was too great to do what she wanted to do.”
While the FBI worries that many of “the offenders themselves do not fully grasp or comprehend” what they are writing, there is a logic to attacking facilities assumed to be gun-free zones, like the Covenant School, and trying to maximize the amount of media coverage that they receive. The FBI may not want to acknowledge this, and the media may not want to cover these points, but we see it consistently in these attacks.
The mass murderer wanted to get attention for the difficulties facing transgender individuals. She compared trans individuals to other groups in a way that indicates she clearly believed that transgender people didn’t have the same rights: “Disabled have rights, civil races have rights, LGBTQ have rights, gun owners have rights.” But referring to the life of transgender people, she declared: “ … with no rights, anyone’s country is a s—– dictatorship.”
The news media and the FBI under the Biden administration are attempting to control the information available to Americans about a mentally troubled woman who identified as a man. The Biden administration is free to argue against linking transgender issues to mental illness or mass murder, but censoring the information is not the right approach.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/17/nashville-shooters-manifesto-released-despite-fbi-resistance/
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Texas Doctor Faces Prison for Whistleblowing on Secret Child Gender Procedures
The Department of Justice is targeting a Texas whistleblower who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital secretly performing attempted gender-transition procedures on children.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced Monday that it had indicted 34-year-old Eithan Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.”
If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.
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Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender-transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive January 2024 piece.
“I worked at the hospital as a surgery resident, and I knew that these interventions didn’t stop,” Haim wrote. “Three days after the announcement, a surgeon implanted a hormone device in a healthy 11-year-old girl for gender dysphoria. Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria.”
“Meantime, the director of a program that supposedly no longer existed was given the opportunity to speak at the hospital’s most prestigious lecture series in January 2023,” he continued. “I knew that it was my moral responsibility to expose what was happening to these children.”
Haim told The Free Press that before he gave Rufo any of the documents, he made sure that the patient’s names and identifying information were redacted (to protect himself from violating HIPAA and to protect the patients’ privacy).
The very next day after Rufo published Haim’s (then anonymous) May 2023 expose, the Texas Legislature banned these experimental gender-transition attempts for minors.
A month later, two federal agents came to Haim’s home to speak with him. They told him that he was a “potential target” of an investigation into federal criminal violations related to medical records.
“It was clear to me that this was a political investigation; I refused to submit to an interview without an attorney,” he wrote in City Journal.
After this, Haim went public with his story.
“To these agents, the prosecutor, and their political handlers, I was a criminal because I had told the truth,” he wrote. “It didn’t matter that we exposed the fact that the largest children’s hospital in the world was lying to the public about the existence of a program in which children were manipulated, mutilated, and even sterilized. It didn’t matter that the practice that they were lying about had now become illegal. It didn’t matter that I had committed no crime.”
“None of this mattered, I believe, because I had exposed a truth that threatened their ideology,” Haim added. “This was the reason for their frightening show of force. The intent was to intimidate me. If I agreed to stay silent, though, I would be legitimizing their lies and sacrificing the truth. Instead, I decided to fight back.”
Haim is now set to make his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Yvonne Y. Ho in Houston, Texas.
“The four-count indictment alleges Haim obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes and the attending physician from Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) electronic system without authorization,” says the U.S. Attorney’s Office release. “He allegedly obtained this information under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”
Texas Children’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
Haim joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” in March to share his story.
“What’s going to happen now is we’re going to do everything we can, [with] every fiber of my being, to hold them accountable,” Haim told The Daily Signal at the time. “We’re never going to stop until we succeed. So they thought they were going to intimidate me. They thought I was going to bend the knee to their evil ideology, like most doctors would have done. But as they were coming to find out, they had knocked on the wrong door.”
Haim is one of a number of Americans who have faced DOJ charges related to hot-button culture war issues. Armed FBI agents arrested Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven and pro-life activist, in front of his children over an incident outside an abortion clinic that had been dismissed by local authorities.
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17 June, 2024
What is 'tolyamory'?
A good new word. I obviously won't go into details but I have been involved in a version of this in the past -- with no hard feelings involved
You might have heard of polyamory, the practice of more than one romantic partner, but we bet not many of you have heard of tolyamory.
This new term, recently coined in the US, might not be as uncommon as you think.
Tolyamory is not discussed or agreed upon by both parties, whereas polyamory is. If you haven’t already guessed what it could be, here’s what you need to know.
What is tolyamory?
The term tolyamory was created by podcaster and sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage. It's a portmanteau that combines the terms "tolerate" and "polyamory" and describes a relationship dynamic where one or both parties tolerate or put up with the other's extramarital or sexual encounters.
In contrast to other consensual non-monogamy practices like polyamory, this one isn't something the couple have formally discussed and agreed upon.
The word was introduced in a January episode on Savage’s podcast, where he described it as “someone willing to turn a blind eye to a lap dance or a brief affair after years of marriage”.
He added: “They’re able to focus on all the ways their spouse demonstrates their commitment and shows their love. And all of those other ways compensate or make the cheating that might be happening tolerable. These people aren’t fools or dupes.
“They’re not to be pitied - they know what they signed up for and long ago made peace with what they got. They’re willing to put up with it - a certain amount of it - reconciled to it, willing to tolerate it. They are, in a word, tolyamorous.”
Although we don’t know how prevalent it is at the moment, it is becoming quite common, according to relationship researchers.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/what-tolyamory-infidelity-relationships-cheating-b1163403.html
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Shocking moment black woman slaps random white child in the face before facing instant karma
More of the racial antagonism that Leftists foster
This is the shocking moment a woman randomly attacks a child before a bystander stepped in to deliver instant retribution.
Surveillance footage shows a mother casually walking with her daughter on a sidewalk in Brazil as the assailant approaches them from the opposite direction.
The woman suddenly extends her arm and smacks the girl in the face as they pass each other in broad daylight.
The mother prepares to retaliate when her frightened daughter pulls her back just as the wild woman took another swing at them but this time missing.
However, a man who witnessed the attack, did not hold back and bolted toward the woman, kicking her in the mid-section.
The woman immediately falls to the ground and the man tries to kick her three more times, but only connects once.
She then admonishes the man and appears ready to fight him, too, when a female bystander intervenes.
Other onlookers can be seen checking on the well-being of the mother and her daughter.
Social media users sided with the man's decision for coming to the aid of the defenseless mother and child.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13527337/moment-woman-slaps-stranger-daughter-karma.html
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James Carville Concedes There's One Voter Bloc Dems Are Absolutely Going to Lose
Democratic Party strategist James Carville ruffled many a feminist feather when he said that the messaging for liberals had become too female-oriented. It was preachy, whiny women telling everyone else how to live their lives. He was criticized by hordes of liberal commentators, many of whom will never come close to the political achievements Carville has amassed. Whether you love or hate him, Carville knows how to win elections. We should be happy Democrats aren’t listening to him—he could turn things around for his party with his ‘don’t be a snob’ attitude.
On Donny Deutsch’s podcast, Carville expounded on how most people want to live their lives. Working Americans like to drink and watch football games. Some might even participate in recreational drug use. Who cares—we have these shrill women telling us not to eat meat, not to watch sports, and to be carbon copies of the insufferable masses who shop at Whole Foods. One voter bloc Carville seems resigned to losing is Hispanic males.
“We’re going to f**king lose them,” he exclaimed.
And it’s not just Hispanic men; it’s a male problem across the board.
But the overall problem Carville highlights for liberals is that people are sick of the “cosmopolitan condescension” from the Left, which Carville notes gives Donald Trump a massive appeal to voters. The Left couldn’t care less, being more preoccupied with whether they’re on the right side of this arc of history. That’s a privileged position; most of us have to go to work.
No one likes a snob. Democrats are the embodiment of that arrogance because they’re a regional, coastal, and urban-based party. They’re the people who kill the mood with debates about issues that don’t impact most of the country, like pronouns. They’re the ones who decide who can speak in a discussion based on education level. How often have you heard people say, ‘I have a degree,’ as if that’s a valid point in a debate? Most degrees are worthless.
These people also have a very dark affinity for radical Islamic terrorism and antisemitism. So, if you see a Democrat, they probably hate Jewish people. How that hasn’t become a topic—a neo-Jewish diaspora from the Democratic Party—remains a mystery.
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Inside the push to scrap NSW’s ‘no body, no parole’ laws
This is a stupid and evil law that could well keep innocent people in prison. Finding the body is important in securng a conviction but after that is of sentimental importance only. A discretionary 10% cut in the parole period after a conviction would be a much better way of encouraging disclosure
On September 20, 2022, just weeks after Chris Dawson was convicted of murdering his wife Lynette following a trial that gripped the country, then-NSW premier Dominic Perrottet announced a tightening of the state’s parole laws.
Convicted killers who “wilfully and deliberately” refused to reveal the whereabouts of their victims’ remains would be ineligible for release on parole, Perrottet said. The changes, referred to as “Lyn’s law”, were rushed through parliament and passed on October 13.
Dawson’s appeal against his conviction for the 1982 killing of Lynette Joy Simms was dismissed last week by NSW’s top criminal appeal court. He was sentenced in December 2022 to a maximum of 24 years in prison with a non-parole period of 18 years.
A year was added to his non-parole period last year, after he was convicted of unlawful sexual activity with a then-pupil in 1980.
Dawson is first eligible for release in August 2041, aged 93, but Lyn’s law will keep him behind bars until he is 98, unless he co-operates with authorities about the location of her remains.
Lynette’s family and the couple’s elder daughter have pleaded with Dawson to allow them to “bring her home”, and the “no body, no parole” laws are backed by advocates for victims of crime.
But the changes may have no practical application to Dawson at all.
NSW Supreme Court Ian Harrison acknowledged in his sentencing decision that Dawson, now 75, would “not live to reach the end of his non-parole period” or would be “seriously disabled well before then even if he does”.
It is the potential application of the laws to other prisoners that has raised alarm bells.
Folbigg, Chamberlain-Creighton unite
This month, the women at the centre of two of Australia’s biggest miscarriages of justice, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and Kathleen Folbigg, joined a coalition of high-profile lawyers fighting for the “no body, no parole” laws to be overturned.
In an open letter, organised by the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative (BOHII) at RMIT University and delivered to Attorney-General Michael Daley, more than 100 signatories including Folbigg and Chamberlain-Creighton called for the laws to be scrapped due to their “disastrous” consequences for wrongfully convicted prisoners.
Lawyer Rhanee Rego, who acted for Folbigg in the inquiry that led last year to her acquittal over the deaths of her four young children after 20 years in prison, said the laws “should be repealed”.
“Wrongfully convicted people cannot help locate a body if they have not committed the crime,” Rego said.
“Importantly, the same legislation enacted in 2017 in Queensland is not having the desired effect. The legislation does not appear to increase the instances of offenders assisting to locate bodies.”
In the first case to test the new laws, Keli Lane, who was convicted in 2010 of the murder of her infant daughter, Tegan, was denied parole last month after serving her minimum sentence of 13 years and 5 months.
Tegan’s body has never been found and Lane maintains she gave the baby to her daughter’s father, who has never come forward. BOHII has called for an urgent review of her case. The 49-year-old is set to remain behind bars until her 18-year sentence expires in December 2028.
Judge in Lane case speaks out
Anthony Whealy, KC, a former judge of the NSW Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, presided over Lane’s jury trial and is a signatory to the open letter.
“The general proposition is this: hard cases make bad law, and [these laws] … stemmed essentially from the Chris Dawson trial,” Whealy said.
“One can understand that that was a traumatic trial, and it was certainly so for [Lynette Simms’ family], very much so, and so the government rushes to make a law without thinking of the consequences.”
Whealy noted that “it was always possible under the existing law for the parole body to take into account the fact that somebody was refusing to cooperate indicating where a victim’s body might be found”.
‘The impact of that [parole] door slamming shut, the emotional, psychological damage that would do to someone, [is profound].’
“The fact that they can’t tell you where the body is should be merely a discretionary factor and not a mandatory exclusion from parole,” he said. “We should go back to what the law was originally.”
Judges imposing murder sentences “will have very carefully given a sentence which embodies the principal period during which someone must be in jail and the period where it’s reasonable for them to be released on parole”, Whealy said.
“That would have taken into account the fact that they were refusing to admit that they were guilty … and had [not] demonstrated any remorse.”
During his second reading speech, the then-corrections minister Geoff Lee said the “no body, no parole” bill “recognises the pain and ongoing suffering experienced by victims’ families and friends who have not only lost a loved one but are unable to locate their remains and put them to rest”.
But Whealy said that in Lane’s case “the person whose grief and distress would need to be recognised was Keli Lane herself”, in the absence of Tegan’s biological father, and it was “absolutely ludicrous to say that this law should be applied to her”.
Professor Michele Ruyters, director of the Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative, said: “If the purpose of the legislation is to provide closure to victims’ families, and if that’s not possible because the families are not lobbying for this outcome, or there is no family, as in Keli’s case, then the only purpose of these laws is to punish.”
“That’s not the job of the [State] Parole Board,” Ruyters said.
In Lane’s case, she had been taking steps preparatory to release and then “all of a sudden that door is shut and then she’s back into the mainstream prison”, Ruyters said.
“From a human rights aspect, the impact of that door slamming shut, the emotional, psychological damage that would do to someone, [is profound].”
The government response
A NSW government spokesperson did not respond directly to the open letter but said the laws require an offender to “cooperate to locate the remains of the victim, not that the victim’s remains are actually found.”
“If the offender cooperates satisfactorily, they could be granted parole. If the offender does not cooperate, they will not be granted parole.”
Parole “rewards good behaviour”, the spokesperson said, and the laws were designed to “incentivise offenders to disclose the location of a victim’s remains, to provide closure to the victim’s family.”
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16 June, 2024
Is fake meat bad for you?
This is a funny one. Food freaks are suspicious of highly processed food, but overlook that fake meat is a highly processed food. There has been quite an upsurge in sales of fake meat in the last couple of years so it seems that lots of people think they are doing themslves some good by avoiding the dreaded red meat. So some journalists are having fun with that. They are condemning fake meat as unhealthy.
Real vegetarians won't be bothered. They mostly live on lightly processed legumes -- nutmeat and the like -- as a protein source. Fake meat would be a low priority for them
I have never had any time for fake meat. I had a very nice piece of thinly sliced Scotch fillet steak for dinner last night washed down by a good Australian Shiraz. The wine:
So it is all a non-issue to me. I have always eaten whatever I fancy and at age 80, living with no pain or discomfort, I think I have had the last laugh. But it is nice to see a piece of research intelligently dissected below. I don't agree with all her conclusions but for someone writing in a mainstream source she does pretty well. She is a clever Greek girl, judging by her name
By EVANGELINE MANTZIORIS
We're hearing a lot about ultra-processed foods and the health effects of eating too many. And we know plant-based foods are popular for health or other reasons.
So it's not surprising new research out this week including the health effects of ultra-processed, plant-based foods is going to attract global attention.
And the headlines can be scary if that research and the publicity surrounding it suggests eating these foods increases your risk of heart disease, stroke or dying early.
Here's how some media outlets interpreted the research. The Daily Mail ran with:
Vegan fake meats are linked to increase in heart deaths, study suggests: Experts say plant-based diets can boost health – but NOT if they are ultra-processed
The New York Post's headline was:
Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death: study
But when we look at the study itself, it seems the media coverage has focused on a tiny aspect of the research, and is misleading.
So does eating supermarket plant-based burgers and other plant-based, ultra-processed foods really put you at greater risk of heart disease, stroke and premature death?
Here's what prompted the research and what the study actually found.
Remind me, what are ultra-processed foods?
Ultra-processed foods undergo processing and reformulation with additives to enhance flavour, shelf-life and appeal. These include everything from packet macaroni cheese and pork sausages, to supermarket pastries and plant-based mince.
There is now strong and extensive evidence showing ultra-processed foods are linked with an increased risk of many physical and mental chronic health conditions.
Although researchers question which foods should be counted as ultra-processed, or if all of them are linked to poorer health, the consensus is that, generally, we should be eating less of them.
We also know plant-based diets are popular. These are linked with a reduced risk of chronic health conditions such as heart disease and stroke, cancer and diabetes. And supermarkets are stocking more plant-based, ultra-processed food options.
How about the new study?
The study looked for any health differences between eating plant-based, ultra-processed foods compared to eating non-plant based, ultra-processed foods. The researchers focused on the risk of cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease and stroke) and deaths from it.
Plant-based, ultra-processed foods in this study included mass-produced packaged bread, pastries, buns, cakes, biscuits, cereals and meat alternatives (fake meats). Ultra-processed foods that were not plant-based included milk-based drinks and desserts, sausages, nuggets and other reconstituted meat products.
The researchers used data from the UK Biobank. This is a large biomedical database that contains de-identified genetic, lifestyle (diet and exercise) and health information and biological samples from half a million UK participants. This databank allows researchers to determine links between this data and a wide range of diseases, including heart disease and stroke.
They used data from nearly 127,000 people who provided details of their diet between 2009 and 2012. The researchers linked this to their hospital records and death records. On average, the researchers followed each participant's diet and health for nine years.
What did the study find?
With every 10% increase of total energy from plant-sourced, ultra-processed foods there was an associated 5% increased risk of cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease or stroke) and a 12% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
But for every 10% increase in plant-sourced, non-ultra-processed foods consumed there was an associated 7% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 13% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
The researchers found no evidence for an association between all plant-sourced foods (whether or not they were ultra-processed) and either an increased or decreased risk of cardiovascular disease or dying from it.
This was an observational study, where people recalled their diet using questionnaires. When coupled with other data, this can only tell us if someone's diet is associated with a particular risk of a health outcome. So we cannot say that, in this case, the ultra-processed foods caused the heart disease and deaths from it.
Why has media coverage focused on fake meats?
Much of the media coverage has focused on the apparent health risks associated with eating fake meats, such as sausages, burgers, nuggets and even steaks.
These are considered ultra-processed foods. They are made by deconstructing whole plant foods such as pea, soy, wheat protein, nuts and mushrooms, and extracting the protein. They are then reformulated with additives to make the products look, taste and feel like traditional red and white meats.
However this was only one type of plant-based, ultra-processed food analysed in this study. This only accounted for an average 0.2% of the dietary energy intake of all the participants.
Compare this to bread, pastries, buns, cakes and biscuits, which are other types of plant-based, ultra-processed foods. These accounted for 20.7% of total energy intake in the study.
It's hard to say why the media focused on fake meat. But there is one clue in the media release issued to promote the research.
Although the media release did not mention the words "fake meat", an image of plant-based burgers, sausages and meat balls or rissoles featured prominently.
The introduction of the study itself also mentions plant-sourced, ultra-processed foods, such as sausages, nuggets and burgers.
So it's no wonder people can be confused.
Does this mean fake meats are fine?
Not necessarily. This study analyzed the total intake of plant-based, ultra-processed foods, which included fake meats, albeit a very small proportion of people's diets.
From this study alone we cannot tell if there would be a different outcome if someone ate large amounts of fake meats.
In fact, a recent review of fake meats found there was not enough evidence to determine their impact on health.
We also need more recent data to reflect current eating patterns of fake meats. This study used dietary data collected from 2009 to 2012, and fake meats have become more popular since.
What if I really like fake meat?
We have known for a while that ultra-processed foods can harm our health. This study tells us that regardless if an ultra-processed food is plant-based or not, it may still be harmful.
We know fake meat can contain large amounts of saturated fats (from coconut or palm oil), salt and sugar.
So like other ultra-processed foods, they should be eaten infrequently. The Australian Dietary Guidelines currently recommends people should only consume foods like this sometimes and in small amounts.
Are some fake meats healthier than others?
Check the labels and nutrition information panels. Look for those lowest in fat and salt. Burgers and sausages that are a "pressed cake" of minced ingredients such as nuts, beans and vegetables will be preferable to reformulated products that look identical to meat.
You can also eat whole plant-based protein foods such as legumes. These include beans, lentils, chickpeas and soy beans. As well as being high in protein and fibre, they also provide essential nutrients such as iron and zinc. Using spices and mushrooms alongside these in your recipes can replicate some of the umami taste associated with meat.
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Mikhaila Peterson slams 'evil' fat positive movement
Peterson Academy CEO and podcast host Mikhaila Peterson has hit out at people for making “morbid obesity a positive thing”.
It comes after controversy erupted over social media following the crowning of plus-sized model Sara Milliken as Miss Alabama 2024.
“I think that making morbid obesity a positive thing is evil, to tell you the truth,” Ms Peterson said.
“There have been many studies, like Oxford I think has a study done on a hundred thousand people who died linking obesity to a ten-year earlier death, which is similar to lifelong smoking.
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Southern Baptists Vote on Women Pastors Rule, Reject Use of IVF
The Bible is very clear about a traditional role for women but obviouly says nothing about IVF, so I think this is rather an over-reach by the SBC
Representatives of the largest Protestant body in the United States narrowly rejected a proposal to ban churches with woman pastors.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 2023 had provisionally passed an amendment to their constitution that would have required member congregations to appoint only men to pastoral leadership positions or face expulsion. The measure required a second vote to become effective. That vote failed on June 12. Although 61 percent of some 10,000 delegates, referred to as messengers, voted in favor of the change, a two-thirds majority was needed.
The outcome of the vote may have little practical effect on this denomination, which has long opposed placing women in pastoral leadership.
Its doctrinal statement continues to assert that the pastoral role is for men only, and the denomination already has the ability to expel congregations who differ from this teaching.
The convention later approved a measure that opposes the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), calling it “dehumanizing” and asking “the government to restrain” the practice.
The SBC statement of faith holds, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
The document cites several Bible passages in support of this view, including the apostle Paul’s statement that he does not allow women to serve in positions of authority over men in the church.
While some denominations view that as an absolute prohibition on the ordination of women, others, including Evangelical denominations such as the Church of the Nazarene, interpret it as guidance given to specific congregations relevant to their cultural setting.
Some SBC churches have appointed women as associate pastors under the direction of a male senior pastor.
The proposed constitutional amendment would have limited “friendly cooperation” with the SBC to a church that “affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
Mike Law, the author of the proposed amendment and pastor of Virginia’s Arlington Baptist Church, argued that the measure was not meant to discourage women from serving in churches.
“This amendment is not about women in ministry,” Mr. Law said. “It’s specifically about women in the pastoral office.”
Noting that some 1,800 women hold pastoral roles in the SBC, Mr. Law cited Bible verses that appear to limit that role to men.
He said, “Our culture may see this prohibition as harsh, but our God is all wise and wrote this word for the flourishing of both men and women.”
Objections, Implications
Some opponents of the constitutional change were not necessarily in favor of allowing women to be pastors but objected to adding the ban to the denomination’s constitution.
Churches ordaining women have been expelled from the SBC in the past.
Last year the convention refused to reinstate Saddleback Church, an Orange County, California, megachurch listed by Lifeway Research as the seventh largest congregation in the country, because of its use of women pastors and its belief that they may hold high-level leadership positions.
On June 11, the convention voted to expel a Virginia congregation that employed a woman as an associate pastor and maintained that women could serve as senior pastors.
Other opponents argued that the amendment would disproportionately affect black congregations in the SBC because they are more likely to have women serving in pastoral roles.
SBC congregations operate independently, so the denomination cannot prevent a church from having a woman as pastor.
But it can disassociate with congregations that do not comply with SBC doctrine.
The practice of IVF, a laboratory procedure used to assist women who have difficulty conceiving a child, has been the focus of greater attention since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos qualify as children under state law.
The Alabama court ruling has implications for both IVF and abortion since it recognizes an embryo as a human life.
Conservative politicians including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), a Southern Baptist, support IVF. Sens. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have cosponsored legislation to protect the procedure.
The SBC, though still formidable, has seen a steady decline in membership for the past 17 years.
After reaching a high of 16.3 million members in 2005, membership fell below 13 million by 2023, according to Lifeway Research.
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Australia's narcissist government
When narcissists get something wrong they aways blame other people, never themselves. Leftists have many narcissist traits. See:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/narcissist-accountability.html
and
http://jonjayray.com/leftism3.html
So the events described below are vivid evidence of how narcissistic Leftists can be
Everyone knows the story of the boy stealing apples in the orchard. When confronted by the farmer, he simply holds the apples behind his back and declares, ‘Who? Me?’
Our current prime minister fits the description of that boy very well. But his colleagues are doing an impressive impersonation as well. As Chris Kenny would say, their theme song should be ‘Not Responsible’. The rule of thumb is never cop anything on the chin; rather blame someone or something else, preferably the previous Coalition government.
You really have to laugh. In the last election campaign, Albo made much of the fact that the buck would stop with him when in government. ‘If I become prime minister, I’ll accept responsibility each and every day, not always seek to blame others.’ Yeah, right.
It’s been a wild ride. I’m tempted to award a prize for the best alternative to the dog ate my homework. ‘I’ve been travelling in the car’ is a strong contender. This was the excuse pathetically given by the Prime Minister for not commenting on the arrival of an illegal vessel to our shores. I guess because he doesn’t have a mobile phone or a phalanx of minders keeping him up to date.
And then there was this clanger: ‘This is not my proposal, but the Australian people’s proposal’, thereby diverting blame for the thumping No vote he received in the Voice referendum.
To confirm that he is still in top ‘boy in the orchard’ form, Albo recently declared that, ‘I don’t comment on court proceedings overseas to which Australia is not a party.’ This was in reference to the absurd proposal of the dubious International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, for war crimes.
Barely drawing breath, Albanese then started banging on about the overseas court proceedings involving Julian Assange. I guess he never actually promised to be consistent but that should surely be a sine qua non for any head of government.
Given that the leader sets the tone for the rest of the team, it’s hardly surprising that other team members would follow his lead in blaming anyone or anything other than themselves. Heaven forbid that they should actually take responsibility for their own actions.
How many times have we heard Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, blame the ten years of neglect by the Coalition government for her inept handling of her portfolio? (B1 also frequently uses the ten years of neglect line.) Gosh, she even had to commission an ‘independent’ review or two to criticise the handling of aspects of the migration program by the Coalition government, so we would be convinced. Of course, she had no idea what those reviews would conclude, no idea at all.
Her offsider, the hapless Andrew Giles, has developed one skill during his time in the outer ministry – attempting to throw his department under the bus for the multiple errors that he’s made. You know the sort of thing: the department didn’t tell me; the department failed to keep me informed; the department misled me.
As for the howler about drones tracking the movements of released asylum seekers, if he had thought this through, he would have quickly realised that it was an absurd proposition. But it probably sounded like solid precautionary action by one of the weakest ministers in living memory. That’ll show them a thing or two, he doubtless thought.
The fact that drones were not being used for this purpose was surely an acute embarrassment, even for a man of the left whose real aim in entering parliament was to usher in a gentle and compassionate treatment for asylum seekers, even ones who had committed heinous crimes. (Not their fault, you must understand.)
But here’s the thing: throwing your department under the bus carries real risks. The bureaucrats will always know more than the minister and they don’t appreciate their hard work – pause here for laughter – being disparaged. There are plenty of examples littering the annals of political history where the careers of ministers have been ruined by revengeful Sir Humphreys.
Giles is also wont to blame Peter Dutton for his current problems. Dutton as home affairs minister simply didn’t cancel enough visas, evidently, even though he cancelled many hundreds of them.
One example of Dutton’s strength in this portfolio was his refusal to allow the father of celebrated Richmond footballer, Dusty Martin, to enter the country from New Zealand. Mr Martin had a criminal record as long as the Nile and Dutts would simply not be moved to allow him to enter the country, even to watch his son play a Grand Final.
And even ScoMo, who was as weak as water on most issues when he was prime minister, was not having a bar of the New Zealand government’s plea to keep Kiwi criminals in Australia if they had a strong association with our country. It was only when Albo came to office and the compliant Giles, who is a strong factional mate of the PM, sloppily drafted Ministerial Direction 99 to appease fellow lefty-luvvie, Jacinda Ardern.
And then we come to Billy Boy, Bill Shorten, Minister for the NDIS. He has been around the corridors of Parliament House for some time and so he knows all the excuses. The recent information about the massive rorting of the NDIS and the infiltration of criminal groups has led Shorten to blame this entirely on the Coalition.
Well, he’s only had the job for two years. Who could expect him to have achieved anything substantial in that short time? (Speccie readers, perhaps.) The fact that Shorten emotionally rejected the Coalition’s sensible suggestions to stop some of the rot within the NDIS – independent assessment, benchmarking plans – is quietly forgotten.
Then comes the news that Services Australia engaged the services of a speechwriter for the minister costing the taxpayer a cool $620,000 for a two-year contract. Given that newspapers pay one dollar per word (or less or nothing at all), this sum was simply outrageous. We were also informed that all those zingers – yep, most of us missed them – in the minister’s speeches were his own work. Obviously, zingers would have been extra.
But Billy Boy was not taking any responsibility for this outrage. It was Services Australia’s fault. He didn’t have anything do with negotiating the contract and he was unaware of the sum of money involved. Who? Me?
It’s a very long time since a minister resigned in response to an acknowledged mistake. Ian McLachlan, who is an old-school gentleman, resigned in 1998 as defence minister when he inappropriately received some information.
To be sure, there have been ministers sacked or demoted since that time, but the idea of a senior member of the government falling on their sword because of a serious error now looks like a remote possibility. The most incompetent ministers will now grab any lifesavers floating by in order to retain the perks of office – and these days, these perks are substantial. Another case of following the money.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/ive-been-travelling-in-the-car/
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13 June, 2024
Scientists raise alarm over common sunscreen ingredient being found in frozen pizzas and candies
Another scare about a "possible" harm. The link to the main article is here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38367662/
There are HUGE barriers to using this study a a basis for policy:
* How were the respondents selected? Were they a representative sample of any specifiable popuation? If not, no generlizations can be made from them. That may seem a harsh stricture but in my extensive reseach I always used representative samples. You can do it if you try. If you don't do it you are just playing games
* Once again only high and low scorers were used in the analysis. What happened to the middling scorers? Would including them have made the overall corelations insignificant? It often does.
* I have not been able to see details of the confounders that they alowed for but I doubt that they allowed for the big confounder: income
* They had NO clinical evidence of health problems. The differences they found may or may not lead to illness. Many ingested substances lead to physiological changes without ill effects. We call them drugs
* Since it is ubiquitous, if it did lead to illness of any kind we would surely by now have heard a raft of complaints about it. We have not. If people have ingested it a trillion times without harm, what more do we need to call it harmless?
Scientists have raised concerns of the effects of a common ingredient of sunscreen being used in foods including frozen pizzas, bakery products, and children’s candies.
Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) is a synthetically produced substance that is not classed as hazardous and is used in a vast range of industrial and consumer goods.
It is found in products including sunscreen, sunscreen, cosmetics, paint, plastics, paper, and wallpaper due to its non-flammable and insoluble properties. It also absorbs UV light, though cannot penetrate through the skin.
TiO2 is also regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a type of food coloring and used in a variety of FDA regulated foods, including cottage cheese, salad dressing, and brightly colored sweets such as Skittles – so long as the quantity does not exceed 1 percent by weight of food.
In foods that contain TiO2, it will appear on the ingredients label as either “artificial color” or “colored with titanium dioxide”, though it is not required to be listed, according to the FDA.
Though it is currently approved by the FDA in the US, the substance is currently under reviewed following a 2023 petition by environmental groups, which are seeking to have it banned from foods.
In February, California lawmakers advanced a bill to bar foods with titanium dioxide from being served in public schools. The substance was banned by the European Union in 2022.
Chief among the concerns is that TiO2 contains nanoparticles which – due to their miniscule size – can get inside cells and cause harm to internal organs.
An article in npj Science and Food cited studies done in animals that found that consumption of titanium dioxide nanoparticles led to damage to the liver, immune and reproductive systems, as well as DNA.
Other research found that as well as such damage, the particles can inhibit the spread of beneficial gut bacteria.
A study of 35 healthy adults, published in February, found that those with higher levels of TiO2 in their stool also had higher levels of certain gut inflammation. They also had indications of more gut permeability or how “leaky or separated the cells are,” said Dr Kelsey Mangano, lead scientist of the study.
The concern is that chronic increased gut inflammation and permeability could increase the risk of health issues including colon cancer, nutrient deficiencies and the low-grade inflammation, Dr Mangano said.
Despite this, organizations including the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) have opposed a “knee-jerk” ban on the substance, stating that it would have “far-reaching consequences”.
A statement released by the CHPA in August 2023, in response to the FDA announcement of a review of the use of TiO2 described a ban as “unjustified”.
“We strongly urge the Food and Drug Administration to deny the petition to repeal [a section of its regulations], which permits the use of TiO2 in food and dietary supplements,” the statement read.
“While consumer safety is of paramount importance, a knee-jerk ban on TiO2 in food and dietary supplements would be unjustified. Based on extensive scientific research and regulatory evaluations, TiO2 is deemed safe for use as a food additive when consumed within established regulatory limits.
“Furthermore, its regulatory approval, manufacturing oversight, and industry best practices ensure the responsible use of this ingredient. Continued adherence to these safety measures and ongoing research will contribute to maintaining the safety and integrity of TiO2 as an essential food additive.”
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Secret Bible text changes everything
It changes nothing. When the earliest example of the story was written down centuries after the events it purported to describe, there is no warrant for its truth or accuracy. It could well be fiction, And the earliest mentions of it do say it was fiction
At least if a newly discovered papyrus about Jesus Christ’s childhood is to be believed. He fibbed. He tantrumed. He killed.
If so, little wonder the canonical (accepted) Gospels of the Biblical New Testament don’t say much about the Christian messiah’s early years.
The books of Matthew and Luke offer the only accounts of his birth.
Luke adds the story of a 12-year-old messiah-to-be stunning the theologians of the Second Temple in Jerusalem with his deep understanding of Jewish lore.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is significantly more comprehensive - and less righteous.
It purports to be an eyewitness account of the juvenile Jesus’ life in Nazareth. By implication, it’s written by his brother Judas Thomas.
This text was one of many put before Christian bishops drawn together from across Europe and the Middle East in 325 AD by Emperor Constantine.
The powerful convert wanted a standardised religion to help unify his rapidly disintegrating Roman Empire.
The 27 books of the New Testament as we know it today, were their final choice.
Dozens of texts claiming to be gospels, letters from the disciples and collections of Jesus’ sayings were rejected.
These were declared to be, at best, apocryphal (of dubious authenticity), or worst - heretical (against the religion).
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas didn’t make the cut.
Early Christian theologian and Bishop of Rome Hippolytus had previously declared it a dangerous fake in his decree Refutation of All Heresies, written around 230AD.
A century later, Constantine’s bishops agreed.
As such, all copies were ordered to be destroyed on sight.
Almost all were.
But a mislabeled fragment of Egyptian papyrus filed away in a German library has turned out to be the oldest known surviving copy of the original text.
This fragment of papyrus, long labelled as being a hastily written note, has turned out to be a Fourth-century copy of the Infant Gospel of Thomas - an account of Jesus’ childhood banned as heretical by the founders of the Roman Catholic Church.
This fragment of papyrus, long labelled as being a hastily written note, has turned out to be a Fourth-century copy of the Infant Gospel of Thomas - an account of Jesus’ childhood banned as heretical by the founders of the Roman Catholic Church.
The 11cm by 5cm fragment contains just 13 lines of Greek text.
It sat ignored at Berlin’s Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library for decades.
But researchers Dr Lajos Berkes and Professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo recognised its true significance.
“It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list because the handwriting seems so clumsy,” explains Dr Berkes.
“We first noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitised papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter…”
Previously, a codex dating from the 11th Century was the oldest known fragment of the Infancy Gospel written in its original form.
“From the comparison with already known manuscripts of this Gospel, we know that our text is the earliest,” adds Dr Berkes. “It follows the original text, which, according to the current state of research, was written in the 2nd century AD.”
While the papyrus is a tiny fragment, most of the stories contained in the Infancy Gospel have survived through the centuries in some form or another.
It had been widely quoted by early theologians probing the boundaries of acceptable belief. And the tales of the young Jesus persisted in popular storytelling through Antiquity and into the Middle Ages - possibly for their shock value.
But it’s because there is so little surviving of the original text that determining the gospel’s origins is problematic. The general consensus of Biblical scholars is that it was most likely first written down somewhere between 110AD and 130AD.
This particular fragment survived by chance. It is believed to have been discarded from a monastery’s scribe school. That’s because the handwriting is so poor.
“The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” adds Dr Berkes. “On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text.”
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‘I’m Passionate About God’s View of Marriage’: Woman Sets an Example for Her Children by Caring for Her Husband
Thirty-year-old Jessi has been using her social media platform to demonstrate the power of a healthy marriage by sharing anecdotes and lessons from her life as she cares for, loves, and prays with her husband.
The stay-at-home mom met her husband, Skylar, now 32, at a Bible college in 2014.
“I had to get to my early 5 a.m. work in the coffee shop and had 10 minutes to grab breakfast,” she told The Epoch Times. “He was just about to start his security shift and was making a waffle with the waffle maker that was never out. I came in and saw he was making one, which meant I didn’t have time to.”
On seeing Jessie disappointed, Skylar gave her his waffle, and they both left for their respective shifts.
That chance meeting led to a relationship, marriage, and eventually, four children.
I shed a little tear on seeing the pic above. How blessed to have so many little ones in one's life -- JR
Since childhood, Jessi has aspired to be a stay-at-home mom, and her husband supported the idea. Skylar was happy to provide for the family.
“We both view our roles through the lenses of scripture, and it’s very important to us that we put God first, then our family,” Jessi said. “Skylar and I both were in agreement that our children are a blessing from the Lord, and I needed to be the one to pour into their little minds all day long.”
Today, they have four children aged 8 and under and are expecting their fifth soon.
At the center of their marriage is Jessi’s belief that “the greatest gift you can give your children is to love their father well.”
“Loving one another only second to God gives your children a deep sense of trust in your family unit,” she said, adding this helps her children see their parents as reliable and stable and gives them confidence that they can rely on them.
The couple prioritizes spending quality time with each other and ensures they have actual meaningful conversations with each other without their devices.
“We want our kids to see the joy that we have together,” Jessi said.
Jessi’s family eats breakfast together every morning before memorizing hymns. They then tend to their animals and garden before starting their homeschooling session.
By midday, they’ve completed school, and the little ones take a nap.
The afternoon for the older children is spent on games and reading.
Jessi loves seeing her children learn new things. “Reading and math have been so fun to watch my kids discover!” she said.
“Usually we bake something at this point because we love baked goods in this house,” Jessi said.
After baking, everyone works to get the house cleaned so that Skylar can come home to a clean house. Then, the whole family eats supper together—a priority for Skylar and Jessi. A bedtime routine comes next complete with hymns, prayer, and family time.
Jessi feels content in her role as a wife and mother and is grateful to see Skylar fulfill his role as the provider.
Not only does Skylar provide for the family with his income, but he handles most of the bills, having been blessed with a talent for managing finances.
“We talk through our finances and budget,” Jessi said.
Balancing household chores isn’t always easy with little ones underfoot.
“I have specific days for specific things,” Jessi said. “I try to be flexible though. With five kids, it definitely takes creativity!”
Needless to say, the proud mother is devoted both to her husband and her children.
“Our faith has shaped our family from the beginning,” Jessi said.
‘I’m Passionate About God’s View of Marriage’
“My goal is to encourage wives to lean into the role that God has so graciously given to them and not take it for granted!” Jessi said. “I’m passionate about God’s view of marriage, and I think it’s something that many couples need encouragement in.”
To achieve this, Jessi began sharing her perspective on building a “holy and strong marriage” on social media and has been able to build a community of nearly 17,000 followers and is grateful to them.
As for feedback from women online, Jessi’s content has received “a mixture of beautiful, encouraging support and some very unkind words,” she said, although she added that “the good outweighs the bad.”
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Was footballer Jarryd Hayne the victim of a false rape accusation?
This matter is even more problematical than it at first appears. The obvious problem is that he was released on technical grounds -- on the grounds that his most recent trial was not properly conducted. He was NOT exonerated. He was NOT found to be innocent. Bully for his lawyers, I suppose.
So in theory he could be tried on the same matters for a fourth time. That is unlikely to happen as he has already spent enough time in jail to satisfy most of the penalty that a new guilty verdict would bring
The problem that is not being highlighted, however, is the really big one. He could well be the victim of a false rape allegation. There have been several instances in the past when women have been found to be false accusers. Britain at one stage not long ago locked up some of the false accusers.
There appears to be no doubt that he had been promised sex when he arrived at the woman's place but what happened after that is in dispute. The woman claims he forced himself on her until she bled. Messages that she sent to friends after the event, however suggest that she had not told the full story. And that would make her open to have given false testimony, which would make HER the guilty party
So why would she lie? It's pretty clear. Hayne told the taxi driver he would only be a few minutes, showing that what he wanted and expected was a "quickie". But she could well have been dissatisfied with that. She was clearly heavily "into" him and expected a more prolonged and affectionate interaction. So her cry of rape could well be revenge for not getting what she expected from him.
But the truly obnoxious part of the whole affair is that the messages casting doubt on her story were NOT shown to the jury nor were Hayne's lawyers allowed to question her about them. Why on earth would that be? I suspect that it was part of another determination to enforce the feminist "believe the woman" doctrine. I suspect that Hayne has been much maligned. I suspect that he was at most guilty of bad manners
Former rugby league star Jarryd Hayne has walked out of prison after his sexual assault convictions were quashed on appeal.
Mr Hayne left a correctional facility in Sydney's west just before 5pm on Wednesday after being granted his release on bail.
The 36-year-old was found guilty in May last year of sexually assaulting a woman at her Newcastle home on the night of the 2018 NRL grand final.
It was the third time he had been tried over the incident and the second time he was found guilty.
His first trial ended in a hung jury, he was convicted after the second but then won an appeal, and the third trial resulted in this now-quashed conviction.
The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal was split 2-1 over the decision.
Justice Stephen Rothman said the appeal succeeded on two grounds: one concerning the trial judge's decision not allow further cross-examination of the complainant and another concerning a direction to the jury about how to treat allegations the woman had lied.
"The outcome is that the appeal from each conviction is allowed … and the court will quash the two convictions in order that there be a new trial," he said.
"Whether there in fact is a new trial is a matter for the Director of the Public Prosecutions."
Mr Hayne, who has been in prison at a minimum-security jail at Lidcombe in Sydney's west since last year, has been granted bail, which was not opposed by the prosecution.
It was granted on a number of conditions, including that Mr Hayne pay a $20,000 surety and not attempt to contact the complainant or enter the Newcastle local government area.
The Director of Public Prosecutions said it would consider the Court of Criminal Appeal's ruling before deciding whether Mr Hayne should face a fourth trial.
In his written judgment, Justice Rothman noted: "In the current circumstances, it is unlikely that a new trial will occur before the expiry of the non-parole period and most of that period has already been served" and suggested there is "good reason for there not to be a fourth trial."
Mr Hayne, who appeared via videolink from prison, gave little reaction upon hearing the news his convictions would be quashed.
His lawyer Lauren MacDougall said Mr Hayne was "really, really looking forward to getting home to his family".
Hayne's lawyer argued the interaction was 'entirely consensual'
During the trial the jury heard the woman had contacted Mr Hayne via Instagram a little less than two weeks before their first in-person meeting and the messages progressed to a "sexualised" nature.
It heard he arrived at the woman's home, having negotiated a $550 taxi fare back to Sydney, and told the driver to wait outside.
The court heard Mr Hayne tried to kiss the woman, at one point grabbing her by the face, with "forceful" actions despite her telling him to stop.
The jurors were told Mr Hayne's charges were in relation to two forms of sexual activity — oral and digital penetration — and the complainant had said "no" and "stop".
It allegedly lasted for about 30 seconds, and stopped when the complainant's genitals started to bleed.
During the trial Mr Hayne's barrister, Margaret Cunneen SC, said the activity was "entirely consensual" and he "didn't mean to cause her any harm at all".
Mr Hayne's lawyers argued in the appeal that messages deleted from the woman's phone showed that she was consenting and should lead to his acquittal.
The complainant was said to have told the friend Mr Hayne "went down on her", but made no reference to her injury and blood, or to the sexual activity having been forced.
Mr Hayne's lawyers argued that the judge should have allowed them to further cross-examine the woman about why she had failed to disclose the messages to police around the time of the sexual assault.
They argued the issue was central to assessing the witness's credibility.
'The jury were deprived of evidence'
In the judgment Justice Rothman wrote that the cross examination should have been allowed as "it was for the jury to determine whether to believe the complainant" and that "demeanour would have played a significant role".
Justice Deborah Sweeney concurred writing: "The jury were deprived of evidence which had significance for their assessment of the honesty of the complainant."
"By not permitting counsel to cross-examine the complainant on those topics and then telling the jury that in considering the submission that the complainant had lied about matters including deletions from her phone, they should consider whether that was "fairly put", this created an unfairness in the accused's trial".
"The combined effect of those circumstances was to cause a miscarriage of justice in the trial."
Mr Hayne was sentenced in May 2023 to four years and nine months in prison, with a non-parole period of three years.
With time already served, he was eligible for parole from May next year.
Mr Hayne's first trial ended in a hung jury.
He was convicted after the second, but then won an appeal before being tried for a third time.
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12 June, 2024
A 10 percent inflation rate imposes a tax of nearly 7 percent on the real wealth of the average family
The most obvious effect of inflation is that it robs your savings of their value. If everything costs more, your savings will buy less
Most people dislike inflation for obvious reasons. If the prices of the things you buy are rising faster than your income, you are clearly worse off. But even if your income is keeping up, most people tend to think they deserve their pay raises, but don’t deserve the higher prices.
There is another aspect of inflation that people tend to overlook. When there is inflation, the government gains and most people lose a result.
Why the Government Gains from Inflation and You Don’t
One reason government gains is that large sections of our fiscal system are not indexed—that is, they do not adjust for inflation. The tax on Social Security benefits is one example. When this tax was first adopted in 1983, it hit only 10 percent of seniors. But because the income thresholds for the tax are not indexed, more than half of all seniors are paying the tax today. Every time the inflation rate ticks up, more beneficiaries pay more taxes to the government.
Capital income is another example. Interest payments on bonds, dividends on shares of stock and capital gains on any asset are all taxed on inflationary gains, even if there has been no increase in real income
When Joe Biden says the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, he can take partial credit for making them pay more. Above $200,000 of income, wage earners are subject to a 0.9% additional Medicare tax. But since that amount is not indexed, inflation under the Biden administration has made more people and more income subject to it. Similarly, higher-income enrollees are paying higher Medicare premiums because inflation has made them subject to income-related rates.
Even Inflation “Protection” Is Much Less than We Think
Even those parts of our fiscal system that are indexed for inflation don’t offer people the protection they might think they have.
Take Social Security benefits. As is well known, benefits are increased each year, through a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that is supposed to protect people against an inflationary reduction in their standard of living. But these adjustments are made with a lag.
The Social Security administration calculates the COLA adjustment by comparing prices from October to the previous October. Then, the adjustment in benefit levels is not made until the following January. This creates a fifteen-month lag.
Suppose a beneficiary is receiving a monthly Social Security check of $3,000 and suppose the annual rate of inflation is 10 percent. Each month, this person is losing $300 to inflation. A fifteen-month lag in the COLA adjustment means this individual has lost $4,500. If the inflation continues, this “inflation tax” also continues—every year.
Inflation in this case helps the government because it pays less than it was supposed to pay and beneficiaries receive less than they should have received.
The income brackets in the federal income tax code are also supposed to be indexed. Here, the adjustment process is a bit more complicated. But roughly speaking, there is about a 12-month lag in making the adjustment.
Suppose that a household’s tax liability is otherwise $10,000 and suppose that liability rises by 10 percent because of 10 percent inflation. A 12-month lag in inflation indexing means that the household will pay (and the government will receive) $1,200 more than should have been paid—all because of inflation.
Inflation also affects taxable business income. Instead of expensing an investment at the time it occurs, firms are generally required to depreciate the expense over time. But when inflation reduces the real value of those tax-deductible amounts, real after-tax profits will be lower. That hurts shareholders and workers in the process.
Virtually all entitlement programs base eligibility on income in one way or another. Suppose a family’s income from the government rises with the rate of inflation, but the criteria for eligibility are adjusted with a lag. In that case, a family that would otherwise be eligible for benefits might find itself perpetually ineligible because of inflation alone.
The System Is Enormously Complicated
Our fiscal system is enormously complicated. In addition to federal taxes, each state has its own state and local taxes, along with such state-run programs as Medicaid and Food Stamps. Since the 20 largest entitlement programs can be administered differently by 50 different states, there are in principle 1,000 different entitlement spending programs.
Estimating how nationwide inflation affects people living under all these different systems would seem to be a complex impossibility. Yet this herculean task has been tackled by Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff and his colleagues in a multi-year study.
To simulate the effects of inflation, the authors assume that we begin with zero inflation and increase the rate to 5 or 10 percent. The higher inflation rate affects all wages and prices evenly and persists indefinitely for all future years.
How Inflation Shifts More Money to the Government
The authors find that a permanent increase in inflation from zero to 5 percent reduces the average household’s lifetime resources by 3.62 percent. An increase to 10 percent permanent inflation reduces lifetime resources by 6.82 percent.
Note that, in these simulations, the country’s real income doesn’t change. A 10 percent inflation rate is a way of imposing a tax of almost 7 percent on the real wealth of the average family and transferring that amount to government.
These numbers are averages. For some households (especially higher income households), the inflation tax can be much worse. Take a simulated Delaware couple, in their fifties, both working and earning a combined income of $190,000. With 10 percent inflation, the present value of the couple’s lifetime loss from Social Security is $142,000. Their loss from income and other taxes is almost $170,000. In this case, inflation imposes a 17 percent lifetime tax on the couple’s wealth.
In the worst cases, the authors find that California households with large capital gains can face a lifetime inflation tax of over 50 percent!
This last example illustrates one more effect of inflation. It gives people strong incentives to relocate to lower-taxing states. One answer to these problems is instantaneous indexing—both in private contracts and in public programs. That is inflation adjustment with no lags. Another option is to avoid inflation in the first place.
Milton Friedman once said that persistent inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Since government controls the money supply, responsibility for controlling inflation begins and ends with government itself.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14948&omhide=true&trk=title
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Mom Smiles Through Online Hate, Keeps Cooking From Scratch for Her Family: ‘I Never Take Any of It to Heart’
Alexia Delarosa, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom and content creator from California, often faces sarcasm for her videos on preparing meals from scratch for her kids. The young mom has devised a quirky response to brush off the negativity and continues to highlight the beauty, value, and power of motherhood,
Mrs. Delarosa and her husband, Mathew Delarosa, 38, who owns a café in San Diego, live with their two toddler sons. Though many have thought the young mom’s social media channel is trying to recreate 1950s housewife appeal, she says she is just trying to do what comes naturally to her, sharing the daily moments of a good mother.
“I always had very maternal instincts,” Mrs. Delarosa told the Epoch Times, noting that she has loved to bake since she was little and worked as a nanny before she was a mother.
For Mrs. Delarosa, taking care of the home is just a small part of a mother’s work. She says it’s vital that moms “raise good human beings” and that children should not be thrown into the world with the “hope that they turn out OK.”
“That’s going to be the future generation and the people that are making decisions,” she said. “I see great value in [motherhood], and I think everyone else should too.”
Traditional Gender Roles
Her traditional take on life, in general, was probably what led her to her husband. She met Mr. Delarosa at his coffee shop. Gradually, their friendship evolved, and they began dating.
The young couple discussed the kind of relationship and marriage they wanted to have. For both of them, fulfilling their traditional gender roles was important.
“Our vision for life aligned,” Mrs. Delarosa said, adding that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, and Mr. Delarosa had no intentions of scaling back his business.
“That’s naturally who he was. I don’t think it was something that I had to shape him to be to make him fit into my life,” she said.
With their lives and desires fitting together like puzzle pieces, they chose to get married. Now they work together, making their family life run smoothly as they both embrace their roles as parents.
While Mr. Delarosa runs the coffee shop, much of Mrs. Delarosa’s day is spent nurturing and looking after their two boys. They spend their days baking, cleaning, and playing outside. The proud mom has also chosen to homeschool her children, though they are still young and aren’t currently spending much time on schooling.
Recognizing that some people think stay-at-home moms live lives of lazy luxury, she remarked that it’s a “full-time job.”
“Just being home and tending to tiny humans all day is hard work, and taking care of a home all day is hard work. And I think it gets devalued a lot,” she said.
Mrs. Delarosa believes American families are in crisis today, and parents and kids seem to be “living very separate lives.” The school system and the world in general, is “just scary now,” she says.
“There’s just so much disconnect and very little time spent [together],” she said. “Even when I went to school, there’s absolutely things at certain ages that I should not have been exposed to, that my parents had no control of because I’m gone for eight hours a day. I’m kind of at the whip, the will of the adults that I’m around and the other kids that I’m around. So ... having too much freedom as a young child can be damaging sometimes.
“I think it’s a great decision if people are able to [homeschool their kids]. But I get that it’s not possible for everyone. Some families, they have to go to work. There’s no one that can do the homeschooling.”
Dealing With Online Negativity
Amid her busy schedule as a mother, homemaker, and home educator she has also found the time to create content for social media. To Mrs. Delarosa, this has become a job that enhances the work she does in her home.
“I have a full-time job being a stay-at-home mom,” she said, “and I’ve stacked on extra responsibilities with the social media stuff. It doubles as my creative outlet. It’s good for me mentally to be doing that—something on the side that I can do for myself.”
The videos she creates usually stem from her doing creative things for her family like making a birthday cake, homemade cereal, or homemade crayons. Often her kids are involved in the process. She’s become known for a specific quirk of holding a slight smile in the videos while focusing on the task before her. Some have even commented that she looks “miserable” with that smile or that she looks like her eyes are closed.
“My eyes are not actually closed,“ she said. ”I know that people say it looks that way for sure. If I’m looking down at what I’m doing, it looks like my eyes are closed.”
She explains why she chose this specific quirk for her videos: “Early on, when I first started sharing my life online, like making food in the kitchen, basically what I’m doing now, people would comment like, ‘Oh, you look so miserable. Why aren’t you smiling?’”
And when she started smiling in her videos, she got the flip side, people commented, “Why are you smiling? You’re so weird.”
Mrs. Delarosa’s cheeky sense of humor shines through in her videos and in how she deals with negativity in the comments.
“I am not saying anything controversial,” she said. “I’m not doing anything controversial. So the fact that people find something negative to say ... is almost humorous.
“It’s not about me. I’m like, ‘You’ve some issues that I’ve triggered somehow with this video of me making a birthday cake, and you’re taking it out on me.’ So I have that separation and that awareness that this person doesn’t know me—I didn’t do anything to elicit a negative comment. So I never take any of it to heart.”
She also says it’s easy to brush off the negative comments when there are so many other positive comments from people who love and are inspired by the content she creates.
Though the crafts and recipes she showcases in the videos can be intricate and time-consuming, she doesn’t expect other moms to try and copy what she does, but, rather, she wants to highlight the importance of motherhood.
“I hope that people find value in being a stay-at-home mom or see the value in stay-at-home moms [or] just moms in general,” Mrs. Delarosa said. “I would love for the world to collectively agree that it is a full-time job. There is great value in having a mom in the home taking care of the kids that you created.”
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Trump in Nevada: ‘[W]hen I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips!’
“[W]hen I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips — people making tips. We’re not going to do it. And we’re going to do that right away first thing in office because it’s been a point of contention for years and ye$4.ars and years, and you do a great job of service.”
That was former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nev. on June 9, making the case for eliminating taxation tips received by waiters, waitresses, bartenders and so forth.
Clearly the appeal is to workers in Las Vegas, many of whom work at bars, restaurants and other establishments where collecting tips is a significant portion of a person’s annual income.
In 2018, the IRS reported that there was $38.2 billion of taxable tips reported by individuals. Assuming the lowest bracket of taxation at 12 percent, the Trump proposal would amount to $4.6 billion less revenue collected.
That’s out of $4.4 trillion the government collected in total revenues in 2023, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. That’s a mere 0.1 percent of revenue — and that could make Trump’s pitch for tax-free tips to be quite compelling to the more than 4.4 million tip workers nationwide in the 2024 election.
In other words, it’s a smart political move, and one which the government in the great scheme of things won’t really miss in the way of revenue — although members of Congress will undoubtedly quibble about any loss of their tax powers, especially when their pinching lower income Americans who often lack a voice in government.
Trump’s pitch comes as he is attempting build on his current lead in the polls of swing states like Nevada, where Trump leads incumbent President Joe Biden 48.3 percent to 43 percent, according to the latest average compiled by RealClearPolling.com.
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Javier Milei Shows Newsom and Biden How It’s Done
Residents and businesses fleeing California have left the Golden State with a budget deficit as high as $73 billion, a sharp contrast to a $31 billion surplus in 2022. Gov. Gavin Newsom has responded by cutting some 10,000 “vacant” state jobs.
“These are programs, propositions that I’ve long advanced—many of them,” Newsom told reporters. “But you’ve got to do it. We have to be responsible. We have to be accountable.” If the governor really seeks accountability for taxpayers, he should take aim at positions and programs that serve little if any purpose. Consider, for example, the California Coastal Commission (CCC).
A legacy of recurring Gov. Jerry Brown, this unelected body overrides the duly elected governments of the state’s coastal cities and counties on land use issues. The CCC rides roughshod over property rights and commissioner Mark Nathanson served prison time for extorting bribes from Hollywood celebrities.
In 2022 the Commission voted unanimously to reject the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Orange County, which would have provided 50 million gallons of fresh water a day. More recently, the CCC told the organizers of a Huntington Beach surfing event that they must allow a biological man calling himself Sasha Jane Lowerson to participate.
Gov. Newsom could also target the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) the $3 billion state stem cell institute that in 2004 promised life-saving cures for Alzehimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other deadly diseases. By 2020, CIRM had produced not a single promised cure but wanted $5 billion more. To get it on the ballot, they indulged in some shady signature gathering practices that have yet to be audited.
CIRM works best as a soft landing spot for over-the-hill politicians such as former state senator Art Torres, former chairman of the state Democratic Party. Torres had no medical or scientific background, but in 2009, then-Lt. Gov. Newsom nominated Torres for vice chair of CIRM. Now governor, Newsom should not neglect wasteful infrastructure projects.
California’s high-speed rail project, the vaunted “bullet train,” boasts a Sacramento headquarters and three regional offices but has yet to carry a single passenger. The costs have soared from $33 billion to $100 billion, with no completion date in sight. As UCLA economist Lee Ohanian contends, the bullet train was a fantasy from the start and “the only reasonable decision is to end a project that should never have begun.”
Other candidates for elimination include the State Board of Equalization, a wasteful tax agency that can’t seem to get its own books straight. As veteran California commentator Dan Walters contends, a genuine reform effort would “abolish the board entirely.” A true reformer would also target the state’s network of licensing boards, which limit Californians’ job opportunities
In 1997, the state legislature eliminated the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology but brought it back in 2003. The board now claims to “protect consumers by licensing and regulating the state’s barbering and beauty industry.”
If he wants to make a run at the presidency, Gov. Newsom might cast a glance at Argentina’s president Javier Milei. He took over a nation in worse financial straits than California.
President Milei reduced state spending, cut in half the number of federal ministries, halted new infrastructure projects, and reduced government subsidies in energy and transportation. He also targeted the parasite class of political appointees who perform no work but show up once a month to pick up their salaries. These tough-minded reforms have lowered inflation, and Argentina could soon see single-digit monthly inflation rates for the first time since October of 2023.
Gavin Newsom prefers to cut “vacant” jobs and leaves wasteful state bureaucracies in place. In similar style, the Biden administration has left in place agencies such as the federal Department of Education, which dates from 1979, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a more recent creation of dubious utility. The paradigm seems to be shifting.
In the old “North-South economic dialogue,” the nations of the northern hemisphere supposedly exploited those of the south. In the new “South-North” economic dialogue, Argentina shows the U.S. how it’s done. Embattled Americans, especially in California, will have to see what happens.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14946
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11 June, 2024
Postcolonial Theory and its consequences — Why the academic-activist demonisation of Israel is so dangerous
Ingo Elbe:
Since the pogrom of October 7, a wave of hatred against Israel has flooded Western universities. What we are currently seeing is a significant radicalisation of left-wing actors, even if the trend of which this is the result itself goes back a long way.
What is playing such a significant role in all of this is a type of thinking that has become increasingly popular in many areas of academia, namely postcolonial theory. It is a theory that claims to be able to detect traces of colonialism within forms of knowledge and social structures long after colonial rule itself has formally ended.
The motif of “coloniality” — a collective term for the diagnosis of a Western world order that is supposed to have covered the so-called global South with racist exclusion and genocide for some 500 plus years—is declared to be the main yardstick for historical analysis and social criticism.
Adepts of this new grand narrative are convinced that with the notion of “coloniality” they have also hit upon a key for the understanding of Judaism, Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Shoah. Which leads to deep-seated theoretical distortions that are systematic: Antisemitism is dissolved conceptually into racism, the Holocaust is relativised as a colonial crime, Israel is demonised, and Islamic and Arab antisemitism is ignored.
The Israeli historian Anita Shapira puts it aptly: “The Jew as victim becomes an ideal.”
The demonisation of Israel is a long-standing practice in this movement, and it can take various forms. A direct transference of antisemitic motifs onto Israel is common. For example, an icon of the postmodern left, Judith Butler, speaks of Israel “murdering children”. In her accusation that Jews who defend a nation state are betraying their essence, there is an echo of the legend of the Jew condemned to eternal exile, to a diaspora existence of surrender to the Other. In an apt formulation by the Israeli historian Anita Shapira, “The Jew as victim becomes an ideal.”
This is where the notorious formula ‘National Socialism equals Israel’ kicks in. Here’s the source of the idea of Israel supposedly continuing the process of nationalism leading to the Holocaust, which is why prominent postcolonials resort to such grotesque analogies: the situation in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank is supposed to remind of Nazi concentration camps or the Warsaw Ghetto.
For Ramón Grosfoguel, “Hitlerism as a continuation of colonial racist ideology came back to hunt Palestinians, this time at the hands of European Jews”. In the fight against Israel, “the future of humanity is at stake”, no less. According to this redemptive anti-Zionism, “The Palestinian victory will take humanity to a higher level of consciousness.”
Israel is seen as the incarnation of all Western colonial crimes, “eliminating” the “indigenous people”, in this case the Palestinians. The US activist Linda Sarsour goes so far as to defend the dehumanisation of the supposedly white Jewish settlers. Pointing to the Zionists, she warns: “If you’re on the side of the oppressor, or you’re defending the oppressor, or you’re actually trying to humanize the oppressor, then that’s a problem”.
So it’s no wonder that London professor Gilbert Achcar, who as recently as June 2022 was still a guest at the “Hijacking Memory” conference organised by the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) and the Einstein Forum, celebrates the Hamas massacre of October 7 as a “quasi-desperate act of bravery”.
The more elegant strategy, however, is the humanistically draped demonisation of Israel through the de-realization of the antisemitic brutality itself, as can be found in the popular “contextualisations” of the October pogrom. An open letter signed by leading representatives of Postcolonial Studies such as A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, but also by the director of the ZfA, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, states: “Seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade have generated an ever-deteriorating spiral of violence that can only be arrested by a political solution.”
Here, Arab pogroms against the Yishuv in the 1920s and 30s, the Palestinian refusal to accept a Jewish state, the wars of aggression by Arab armies against Israel and its peace offers in 2000 or 2008 are completely ignored—in such Manichean formulations by leading academics, there is apparently room only for one victim and one perpetrator.
At the root of this type of demonisation, within postcolonial studies, there is however a very basic methodological and political deficit.
If one takes, as a point of departure, Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism—a key example for this way of thinking—then the West invents the image of a degraded Oriental Other in order to define itself, to purge its self-image from all that is negative, to create a self-justication for its imperial claim to power.
Much of the writing from the postcolonial movement cultivates a double standard: one needs only to take a closer look at the representation of how the “West” is said to discuss the “global South”. This is always represented as the exercise of illegitimate colonial power, with the substance of such discourse being entirely dismissed.
The “global South” is often presented as victim, or is treated as a mute object for projection.
The “global South” comes to be seen as a victim or as a mute projection surface, and thereby presented as conceptually incapable. The Islamic Studies scholar Bernard Lewis has spoken ironically of the “white man’s burden of guilt”, a negative superiority mindset that assumes that only white Europeans can be responsible for the world’s ills.
The “Other”, Islamist regimes and movements such as Iran or Hamas for instance, seldom feature as protagonists at all. Should their acts of violence and power relations be discussed, they are not taken seriously, antisemitic statements are trivialised as the mere rhetoric of desperate victims, and their behaviour is interpreted as merely reactive to the actions of the West or those of Israel.
At the same time, what are presented as more complex variants of postcolonial thinking suffer from systematic flaws all of their own. Coloniality and liberal democracy are presented as two sides of the same coin. With the result that what is to follow on from ‘colonial modernity’ remains obscure. A ‘multipolar world order’ is often praised as an alternative, following a notion of left-wing ethnopluralism, which lends legitimacy to authoritarian powers such as Russia, Iran or China. Such ‘alternative modernities’ are presented under the heading of ‘hybridity’.
Where this leads, is that the colonised (whether real or imaginary) are encouraged to engage in a subversive reinterpretation of concepts such as human rights or democracy from within their own specific ethnocultural perspective: culturally specific human rights or ‘Islamic democracy’ thus become desirable goals in the struggle against Western hegemony. It is this that leads to ideological alliances between postcolonial leftists and jihadists—one needs merely to read the unambiguous statements of left-wing protagonists like Judith Butler, Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Mignolo or Ramón Grosfoguel.
Preventing insight through the simulation of overcomplexity.
Large swathes of the academic left, however, are engaged in a defence against critique: one labours to block understanding through the simulation of over-complexity—one proclaims that postcolonial theory, as a unitary idea, does not exist. Or one claims that there is an enormous gulf between highly differentiated postcolonial studies and their simplistic reception in activist circles. But for all that, for all the internal differences of postcolonial approaches, the above-mentioned argumentation patterns appear so regularly and so often, especially amongst its high-profile representatives, that it is necessary to speak of a dominant mindset.
Finally
And finally, these academics themselves often act as activists, presenting themselves as such. Manifesting itself not only in the manichean* and simplistic arguments—sometimes reaching excruciating levels—to be found in the now almost endless number of open letters against Israel.
Jews have nothing good to expect from such academic activism in the 21st century.
*Manichean or thinking in “dualities,” solely in black and white.
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FBI Suspends Employee’s Clearance After Probing Trump Support, COVID-19 Views
The FBI revoked the security clearance of an employee after asking colleagues questions–under threat of discipline–about his support for former President Donald Trump and views on the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a complaint to the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.
The employee attended the rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington before it turned into a riot, and reported his presence to the FBI the next day, according to the whistleblower advocacy group Empower Oversight, which issued a complaint to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on June 8, in a letter made public Monday night with the client’s name blacked out.
The complaint comes on the heels of the FBI reinstating the security clearance of whistleblower Marcus Allen, a former FBI staff operations specialist, after allegations of politicized retaliation.
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The 12-year employee also volunteered to an FBI polygraph, in which the Office of Inspector General found “no deception” when he said he did not enter the Capitol or a restricted area.
In March 2022, then-FBI Executive Assistant Director Jennifer Leigh Moore suspended the employee’s security clearance, and made an indefinite suspension without pay. The employee then made confidentiality protected disclosures to the House Judiciary Committee that alleged politicization of the security clearance process.
“The FBI Security Division (“SecD”) improperly pursued a broad, sweeping investigation into our client’s political opinions, questioning other protected First Amendment activity and Second Amendment advocacy while off-duty,” Empowerment Oversight President Tristan Leavitt said in the cover letter of the complaint to Horowitiz, the inspector general.
Empower Oversight obtained the investigative files from the FBI. Leavitt said the “shocking documents” demonstrate the FBI Security Division’s “political bias and abuse of the security clearance process to purge the FBI of employees who expressed disfavored political views or concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine requirement.”
The FBI sent the former employee’s colleagues a questionnaire, asking such questions as whether the employee did “Vocalize support for President Trump,” “Vocalize objection to Covid-19 vaccination,” and “Vocalize intent to attend 01/06/2021.”
Empower-Oversight-Whistleblower-ComplaintDownload
“Instead of limiting its investigation to legitimate issues, SecD [the FBI’s Security Division] acted as if support for President Trump, objecting to COVID-19 vaccinations, or lawfully attending a protest was the equivalent of being a member of Al Qaeda or the Chinese Communist Party,” the Empower Oversight complaint to the inspector general says. “The FBl’s intentions are made clear by the questions it chose to put in black and white on a government document.”
Whistleblowers and former FBI agents have come forward with stories about the FBI focusing on pro-life protesters, developing a “threat tag” to monitor parents who spoke up at school board meetings, and relying on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization that brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” putting them on a map with the Ku Klux Klan.
The FBI’s Richmond office cited the SPLC in targeting “radical traditional Catholics” for surveillance in a memo last January, before the national office officially rescinded the memo. The Justice Department took a briefing with the SPLC when it released a “hate” report in 2023.
According to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, FBI agents worked about 16,000 more hours during the pay period after the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, than they did during the pay period of the 2020 riots in Washington, D.C.
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French voters have delivered a damning verdict on Macron
I sensed something significant was going to unfold on Sunday as I took my morning coffee at our village café. Enjoying the June sunshine I watched as a steady stream of men and women walked past on their way to the voting booth in the village hall. Forty-eight per cent of them cast their ballot for Jordan Bardella of the National Rally. The next best was Valerie Hayer, representing president Macron’s party; she managed 12 per cent.
The people chose Macron, and got chaos
The voter turnout in my village in Burgundy was 60 per cent, an eight per cent increase on the 2019 elections and 17 per cent superior to 2014. Overall in France, the turnout was 52.5 per cent, the highest in European elections since 1994.
But this election was never about Europe. It was a French mid-term, an opportunity for the people to pass judgement on president Macron two years into his second term. That judgement is damning.
Macron has never been a popular president. He was elected in 2017 almost by default. The favourite, the centre-right former prime minister Francois Fillon, was brought down by a financial scandal, and the Socialist candidate was punished for the sins of the outgoing president, Francois Hollande. That left Marine Le Pen.
Macon styled it as a choice between ‘me or chaos’, a phrase first coined by Charles de Gaulle during the 1965 presidential campaign.
The people chose Macron, and got chaos. Crime, immigration, Islamism and the cost of living have all risen sharply under Macron. In the two years since he was re-elected – defeating Le Pen once more but with a reduced majority – these increases have soared. It’s almost as if Macron, knowing the Constitution precludes his running for a third successive term, has forsaken boring domestic issues for the glamour of the global stage.
He may enjoy playing this attention but his people are increasingly concerned by his belligerent rhetoric towards Russia. As Marine Le Pen put it last week, ‘you get the feeling that Macron wants a war’.
Furthermore, the French can’t help contrast his bullishness towards Putin with his cowardice towards Islamism. In a long television interview on Thursday evening, Macron spoke of the need to defeat Russia, and to that end France would be supply some fighter jets to Ukraine.
In the same interview he lamented the 300 per cent increase in acts of anti-Semitism in France this year, calling it ‘inexplicable’.
The right-wing leader of the Reconquest party Eric Zemmour, himself a Jew, swiftly offered the president an explication. ‘We are suffering from imported anti-Semitism from the Arab-Muslim culture,’ he said. ‘The more immigrants there are from these countries where this culture has a foothold, the more anti-Semitism there will be in France.’
In one of his first major television interviews as president, in October 2017, Macron vowed that any illegal immigrant who committed an offence ‘of any kind will be deported’. He made his announcement a few days after two young women were stabbed to death at Marseille railway station by a Tunisian.
It was the first major security crisis of his presidency and a stony-faced Macron assured the French ‘he would be ‘uncompromising on this issue’ and he acknowledged that border control had become shambolic. ‘We no longer take all the measures that need to be taken. Well, that’s going to change.’
It hasn’t. It’s got worse. And the two young women murdered in Marseille were the first of a long list of people killed by people who were in France illegally.
During campaigning for the European elections, Macron’s go-to issue was Ukraine and Bardella’s was immigration/ insecurity. The result of the election proves what troubles the French most.
Among the many guests who were in Normandy last week for the D-Day commemorations was Keir Starmer. According to a report in the Sunday Times, the Labour leader made the most of Rishi Sunak’s decision to cut short his time in France by rubbing shoulders with Macron. One of the president’s aides told Starmer that he ‘really liked’ him because he is ‘fascinated by men like him who can suddenly achieve stunning results’.
Presumably then Macron is also a fan of Jordan Bardella, as the result he achieved on Sunday was stunning. His victory in the European elections has forced Macron to call a snap election on 30 June. The second round of voting takes place on 7 July, just three days after Britain goes to the polls to choose its prime minister.
If Starmer is elected Premier he would be advised to look to Macron only as an example of how not to lead. His divisive presidency has been a disaster for France. Anger and demoralisation hangs in the air wherever one goes. It is as well that Macron has called a snap election; had he ignored Sunday’s result and carried on as arrogantly as ever, I suspect there may have eventually been some form of uprising.
Consequently, there is a strong likelihood that the Republic’s next prime minister will be Jordan Bardella, the working-class lad from the Parisian suburbs. One can’t see him and Sir Keir doing much to improve the entente cordiale.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/french-voters-have-delivered-a-damning-verdict-on-macron/
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‘There’s no safe level’: Carcinogens found in tap water across Australia
Not PFOS again! This scare is like Global Warming: No facts will dent belief in it.
The WHO study referred to was just a meta-analysis, which is very vunerable to manipulation, but even its conclusion was very weak. It found that PFOS is "possibly carcinogenic to humans". Note the "POSSIBLY". It was no basis for any action at all. It was actually an exoneration of PFOS. No matter how hard they tried, they could find no evidence against it
Tap water across parts of Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Victoria, Queensland and the tourist havens of Rottnest and Norfolk islands has been found to contain contaminants that US authorities now warn are likely to be carcinogenic, with “no safe level of exposure”.
Experts say widespread testing of Australia’s drinking water must be an urgent priority after the US Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic policy shift in April found there was no safe level of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water and they were likely to cause cancer.
The World Health Organisation’s cancer agency has gone a step further, concluding in December that PFOA is carcinogenic to humans.
Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith, a toxic chemicals campaigner who has served on United Nations expert committees, slammed it as a “national disgrace” that PFOA is now permitted in Australia’s tap water at 140 times the maximum level the US will allow.
This masthead has analysed publicly available data which indicates the chemicals have been found in the drinking water of up to 1.8 million Australians since 2010, including in the Sydney suburbs of North Richmond, Quakers Hill, Liverpool, Blacktown, Emu Plains and Campbelltown, along with the NSW regional centres of Newcastle, Bathurst, Wagga Wagga, Lithgow, Gundagai and Yass.
The pollutants have also been detected in tap water in Canberra, the inner Melbourne suburb of Footscray, inner-city Adelaide, the Queensland regional centres of Cairns and Gladstone, Kingborough in greater Hobart and locations across Darwin and the Northern Territory.
The most comprehensive data comes from a federally funded University of Queensland study published in 2011, which sampled 34 locations across the country.
Various water providers have carried out their own localised surveillance in recent years, which confirms the chemicals are still turning up in some of the same locations they were first found in 2011, in some instances at even higher concentrations.
However, this masthead wasn’t able to locate any further widespread studies of Australian tap water funded by Commonwealth agencies since the 2011 study.
During the past decade, the federal government has been defending class actions over its use of the chemicals in firefighting foam and denying they cause “important” health effects.
It reached the first of settlements with 11 communities collectively worth $366 million in the weeks after the Federal Court’s expert umpire concluded there was good evidence the chemicals potentially cause harmful health effects, including cancer.
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10 June, 2024
Australia's new boss of men's behaviour
SHAMEFUL and SEXIST World First says Bettina Arndt
A broadcast from Sydney by "Other side" with Damian Coory: https://www.adh.tv/
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General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice
I am pleased to see that George Monbiot (below) is getting disillusioned by the limits of government. We might get a libertarian out of him yet
Everything hangs on them but little changes. For weeks or months, elections dominate national life. Media reports and public conversations are monopolised by furious jostling and frantic speculation. All else – policymaking, problem-solving, reason itself – grinds to a halt. Unsurprisingly, when the frenzy is over, we discover we have solved almost none of our problems.
An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.
Communities are set against each other: see how the Tories appeal to their elderly base by treating young people as a problem to be solved, currently through national service. The parties reduce our complex choices to a brutal binary; sometimes, as in the 2019 election, to a three-word slogan (Get Brexit Done). Vast questions, such as the environmental crisis, the spiral of accumulation by the wealthy, the possibility of food system failure or the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned. All that is left to us, except for a 10-second action every five years, is to sit and hope. We end up, in our supposedly representative system, with a highly unrepresentative parliament and a perennial sense of disappointment.
Just as capitalism is arguably the opposite of markets, general elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
Earlier societies recognised the distinction. Aristotle and Montesquieu observed that elections generated (respectively) “oligarchical” and “aristocratic” rule. After the American and French revolutions, the designers of the new political systems chose elections as a way of excluding the majority, whom they did not trust, from a meaningful involvement in power. Some of them, such as John Adams, James Madison, Antoine Barnave and Boissy D’Anglas, inveighed against the frightening concept of democracy, and insisted those elected should be a class apart, distinguished from the common people as a “natural aristocracy” of the wise, virtuous and competent. I think we can determine how well that worked out.
In the UK, our political model was settled in the 18th century, when democracy was a dirty word and parliament regarded the people with a mixture of contempt and fear. It survived the introduction of the universal franchise almost intact. Why does our system keep electing people whose incomes, assets, interests and psychology are hugely at variance with ours? Because that is what it is designed to do.
There are many alternatives, stifled not by infeasibility but by the determination of powerful people to retain control. In previous columns I’ve mentioned Murray Bookchin’s popular assembly model, implemented in Rojava in north-eastern Syria, in which decisions are handed up from local communities, rather than down from a distant centre; and the highly successful participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, which ensured that money went where it was needed most, rather than to favoured interests. But I don’t want to be prescriptive about the form that deliberative, participatory democracy should take. There are dozens of potential models.
In David Van Reybrouck’s excellent book Against Elections, he favours “sortition”: choosing members of political bodies by lottery. This is how much of political life was run in ancient Athens and in Venice, Florence and other European cities in the second millennium. Today, algorithms can be used to ensure the results of the lottery closely reflect the composition of society.
Hang on, you say. What if incompetent, corrupt, reckless, self-interested people, without expertise, were to find themselves in powerful roles? It’s likely, of course. But deliberative processes possess the extraordinary property of transforming their participants. This is why they work better in practice than in theory. Ordinary citizens tend quickly to take responsibility, to inform themselves, listen respectfully and seek to build consensus. Their decisions tend to be fairer, greener, bolder and more inclusive than those of elected chambers.
Every argument against participation can be returned with interest against elected representation. Incompetent, corrupt, reckless, self-interested? Don’t get me started. Those chosen by lot, whose selection cannot be influenced by money or lobbying, are likely to be more resistant to both. No expertise? Our representatives certainly possess expertise, but generally in self-promotion and electioneering. As we keep discovering, many, elbowing their way from one ministry to the next, are incapable of addressing our predicaments.
Much of the critique of participatory democracy is classist. The working classes cannot be trusted to think for themselves; they must be steered by enlightened guardians. This snobbery extends all the way from Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, to Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto.
We should not accept any change to our political system without evidence that it works. But plenty is accumulating, as citizens’ assemblies and constitutional conventions are used by governments to resolve issues that are too divisive, complex or long-term for the dominant system to handle. When they are well designed, they have proved highly effective at addressing issues that left elected representatives floundering. Ireland used citizens’ groups to help resolve its debates on equal marriage and abortion, overcoming apparently intractable divisions in a largely Catholic nation. France has used a citizens’ assembly to help find a way through the complex and politically hazardous issue of assisted dying.
Between 2021 and 2023, 160 new citizens’ assemblies were set up to resolve difficult problems. Forty of these bodies are now permanent. They help address, for example, homelessness in Paris, urban design in Lisbon and climate policy in Brussels. In the German-speaking part of Belgium, a citizens’ council forms the regional parliament’s second chamber.
A next step, as Van Reybrouck and others have suggested, could be to generalise this model, replacing one parliamentary chamber, such as the House of Lords or the US Senate, with a people’s assembly. This could evolve towards an entirely participatory system, largely based on sortition, in which everyone has an equal chance to make the decisions on which our lives depend. You care about democracy? Then you should hope to see an end to elections like this one.
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Our kamikaze elites
Sometimes you get a better view of your own society from the outside than the inside, where the steady, daily drip of declining standards can inure you to what’s going on. A recent trip to Japan demonstrated that there are still societies where honour and integrity matter, they’re just mostly not in the Anglosphere.
In Japan a school principal, 59, was recently fired for repeatedly helping himself to larger coffees than he had paid for at a store; he had his retirement pay of around AUD$180,000 cancelled and his teaching licence revoked. His offences had cost about $5. A council employee elsewhere also lost his job for paying for a $1 coffee and serving himself a $2 coffee. Harsh? Yes. It is a shock to lax Westerners to see honesty and laws taken so seriously.
In case you think these offences are trivial, here’s a serious example. When former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated in July 2022, the Nara police chief apologised copiously for security failures, head bowed in shame, in a public press conference the very next day. He admitted fault both personally and corporately. One month later both he and the national police chief resigned over the matter.
Contrast this with the infamous Uvalde school massacre in Texas, which occurred two months before. The disgraced school police chief, whose forces waited over an hour to engage the shooter, neither apologised nor resigned, defended his indefensible actions and had to be sacked three months later. His men had been clustered in the corridor outside the killing field of the schoolroom, cravenly killing time, checking phones and applying hand sanitiser as the killer executed 19 victims, most schoolchildren.
Pundit Mark Steyn has taken to commenting that countries become more Western the further east you go, which is to say, Western in the old sense of abiding by Judeo-Christian values. I can’t vouch for that, but I do remember when Labor Minister Mick Young stood down from the Hawke ministry over failing to declare the import of a Paddington Bear, a high bar for a sackable offence if ever there was one. These days, PM Albanese takes no responsibility for the failed Voice campaign, although we all know he would have crowed from the rooftops had it got up. Former UK PM Boris Johnston partied willy-nilly with staffers during Covid lockdowns and failed to even show shame at being found out, while in the US Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have ever heard of the notion of accepting blame or responsibility. Did US heads roll over the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, where civilians fell from aeroplanes and terror groups looted an army’s worth of abandoned military hardware? Is anyone responsible for the many millions of invading illegals at the US border? What about the secret Washington censorship campaign revealed in the Twitter files, any apologies or sackings? Has Biden junior or senior apologised for the litany of debauchery emerging from Hunter’s digital devices – images of himself cavorting naked with prostitutes, weighing drugs with a hooker and far worse. No apologies or jobs lost over the Russia collusion hoax that the Democrats and the intel services perpetrated on Trump, and the dirty dealing with Chinese labs that saw gain-of-function funded by US monies, despite Covid supremo Tony Fauci’s denials. Instead the Biden regime continues the Uvalde police chief’s tactic of deny, dodge and delay.
Japan seemed exceptional in other ways, not only in honesty and integrity. One day in the Ginza, we ran into some acquaintances who were starry-eyed at what they had experienced. ‘Our first trip but it won’t be our last,’ they said, joining the surging throng of Australian tourists to Japan, it now being our third-most-popular destination. Apart from a plummeting yen and top ski fields, Japan also offers an exemplary cultural homogeneity, a society that prioritises beauty, order and politeness, spotless and quiet streets even in the midst of a 37-million strong city, no graffiti, no hobos, no litter, the locals trim, relaxed and well-dressed. The Ginza has been greened, with newly tree-lined streets, walls and balconies; gusts of jasmine-scented air greeted us in one main street. That’s climate action we could all get behind. Compared with Bourke or Pitt streets, this is an urban paradise.
Of course, Japan has its problems, such as its plunging fertility rate, and a hyper-ageing society where 29 per cent are already aged over 65. The Ginza is an upmarket area and hardly typical. But on the question of values, it is clear that Japan’s leaders still believe in and uphold the Japan project.
In his book 1984, George Orwell listed ways in which societies could collapse; one was when elites lost faith in their own society’s core principles. Christianity, the rule of law, our British-derived institutions, equality not equity, a justice system blind to special pleading, even the idea of men and women, few of these are defended by our current crop of politicians.
Free speech is now our latest casualty, with eSafety Karen, Julie Inman Grant, demanding Twitter/X censor a video of a Muslim youth stabbing a bishop, and Australian media incomprehensibly piling on to attack the hated billionaire, Elon Musk and by extension, free speech. That the offending video was pulled down in Australia, that an infinite number of other violent videos such as the George Floyd incident can be seen everywhere at will, that other platforms such as YouTube were not prevented from showing it, and that the video itself showed little that was graphic, seemed not to matter.
In an essay, Orwell talked about generations of Western intellectual ‘destroyers’ who fought to overturn religious belief. ‘For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.’
Australia’s elites, following the US and UK lead, seem to have lost faith in their nation’s values.
Japan shows us what we have squandered.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/our-kamikaze-elites/
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Christianity under increasing attack from a much more intolerant and authoritarian religion: Leftism
Is the Bible hate speech? Could a Christian minister, or any ordinary person, be prosecuted for reading out sections of the New Testament?
In fact, this is almost the case in law already, as we’ll see. A slew of legal, legislative, bureaucratic and cultural trends make it likely to become a practical reality in time.
It will not only be the Bible. Countless Christian classics from almost every denomination will be liable to be, if not banned from sale, banned from public display, recital or reading aloud. The Catholic catechism, the official compendium of belief for the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, may well have to be trafficked in brown paper envelopes under the counter.
Christianity may become like smoking, tolerated at law for a while, but ever more narrowly, with ever more restrictions, actively discouraged by punitive financial measures.
The Albanese government, like the Morrison government, has abandoned the attempt at a religious discrimination law to protect people of faith. Like the Morrison government, it won’t even present a bill for public consideration.
Both sides of politics, when in government, are paralysed by fear of having the debate about religious freedom and how that interacts with other freedoms. Surely the voice referendum demonstrated the danger of not having a big open debate before implementing fundamental change.
This political timidity indicates cowardice in the face of rising prejudice, in some cases hatred, against Christianity in the activist class, and the anti-Christian assumptions increasingly permeating the bureaucratic and institutional elites. Former Labor senator Jacinta Collins, now executive director of the National Catholic Education Commission, tells Inquirer: “In the public policy class, the political elite and the policy bureaucracy, it’s becoming more common not to see Christianity as a social good.”
Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop, Peter Comensoli, remarks: “Step by small step, the path of living a life of faith in our country is being undermined. But there are always seeds of hope.”
A fundamental cultural change is under way here, perhaps the most destructive we’ve seen. Official Australia, more the bureaucrat/academic/media class than politicians, no longer sees Christianity as a social good. Rather, they see it now as anti-social, something to be constrained.
This is not a story about a perfidious left-wing Labor government assaulting Christian churches. Both sides of politics are flummoxed and scared by this. Neither handles it well. Anthony Albanese and at least some of his ministers are sympathetic to Christian churches. But there’s a severe limit to how far this sympathy will take them in defending Christian institutions against bureaucratic, activist and sectional effort to destroy their independence and religious integrity.
There’s a lot of legislative action, but the seething cultural dynamics suggest no prospect of lasting settlement.
The Sex Discrimination Act contains an exemption, section 38, for religious bodies. Otherwise, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, conservative Anglicans and others couldn’t have an all-male priesthood. Religious schools are allowed to preference teachers who support their core ethos. So Christian schools don’t hire gay activists. They knowingly hire plenty of gay people but they don’t want activist teachers running campaigns against the core beliefs of the school.
Almost none of them hires exclusively co-religionists. Most exhibit common sense; they want enough teachers who share the faith of the school so as to promote those beliefs. Thus, Collins says: “We (Catholic schools) have lots of teachers from diverse religious backgrounds and from none. That’s great, so long as they operate in sympathy with the ethos of the school.”
Most religious school authorities therefore want the right to “discriminate” in hiring staff and to accept and reject whatever students they choose. No Catholic or Anglican I spoke to for this story, or whom I’ve ever met in a lifetime’s involvement in Christian schools, could recall any student ever being expelled for any reason related to sexual identity.
However, non-government schools can expel a student who behaves unacceptably. It’s possible you could get a student who, at age 16 or 17, decided they hated the church their school is affiliated with and campaigned against it. If that student clothed their campaign in a protected characteristic, such as gender status or sexual identity, the school wouldn’t be able to deal with them if the exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act is removed.
It’s wrong to think of this as Christian institutions wanting to discriminate. Rather, they want the right of free association. Christians, like everyone else, should be allowed to associate with each other and form institutions that reflect their values.
Kanishka Raffel, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, tells Inquirer: “Our (Anglican) schools have young people who identify as LGBT, and are happy and supported and not desperate to go somewhere else – nor would we want them to. We’re only asking for the same rights as political parties have.”
Raffel means that the Labor Party is not required to employ, or even admit as members, people who oppose Labor and support the Liberal Party. Increasingly Christian institutions are denied this elementary freedom.
Raffel continues: “Christianity accepts a pluriform world. The New Testament advises Christians, even if unfairly attacked, to ‘give an answer for their hope’ and to do so with ‘gentleness and respect’.
“That’s the biblical seed of contemporary pluralism. It’s religious. It’s Christian. But at one end of the spectrum there’s a totalitarian secularism that doesn’t countenance religious speech. In Australia we’ve had a confident pluralism. It’s that kind of practice which is now under attack. It (this attack) is driven by activists in thrall to the prevailing ideology of identity and sexuality, who will not countenance alternative world views.”
Raffel’s view, that this intolerance threatens pluralism, is widely shared among Christian denominations. Mark Varughese, founder of the international Kingdomcity Pentecostal church, and a member of the Australian Christian Churches executive, accuses elites of weaponising tolerance.
“The trend appears to be to almost suffocate the ability of faith-based organisations to employ according to their ethos,” Varughese says. “But you don’t have to go to any of these schools. Those who choose to go to them have a right to expect an environment which reflects their beliefs. Weaponising tolerance to erode the freedom of those who want a unique space to grow is the ultimate irony.
“This is not about hating any part of society. The faith of the gospel is based on the belief that we are all sinners and we all need a saviour. People can choose not to believe in God. Why would you be offended by the principles of a God you don’t believe exists?”
The government blames the opposition for not reaching bipartisan agreement on a religious discrimination bill. The opposition says it won’t support a bill the major faith leaders oppose, so the government should get the major faith leaders onboard, then there would be the basis for bipartisanism.
The Catholic and Anglican leaders, plus a group of other faith leaders including non-Christians, wrote to the Prime Minister and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, outlining in detail where they thought the draft legislation was inadequate. They argued strongly that removing the religious exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act and passing the religious freedom legislation as it was shown to them would leave Christian schools seriously worse off in their ability to run effectively.
Everybody has somebody else to blame and nothing gets done. The Christian leaders are in a tough, uncertain spot. Some of them think they must press for the best deal they can get from the Albanese government, get something resolved now. A future parliament, with Labor perhaps in minority government and dependent on the Greens, would likely use the “progressive majority” to attack the churches much more aggressively.
The counter-argument is that the churches cannot willingly accept legislation that gravely weakens their ability to run their schools and other institutions with integrity. A weak settlement now would easily be undone by a more aggressively anti-Christian parliament and the churches, having surrendered now, would be in a weaker position then.
The key is they must fight, even if they fight in a kindly way. The Scripture passage Raffel referred to occurs in the first letter of Peter, who advises Christians: “Even if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.”
Albanese has promised Christian leaders their schools won’t go backwards in their ability to operate independently. However, now it has abandoned a religious discrimination bill, the government plans to introduce hate speech legislation and insert criminal penalties for vilification or hate speech. Christian leaders find this alarming because, as I suggested at the start of this piece, modern anti-discrimination bodies, extreme LGBTI lobbies and others, now regard normal Christian teaching as hate speech
Comensoli puts the broader cultural context: “It’s death by a thousand cuts. Places of influence like the media, academia, corporations, are all signing up to agendas that see the Christian Church as the problem. We’re disappointed that a religious discrimination bill won’t go ahead. And given that, we’re concerned about the proposed vilification legislation and the very low threshold at which vilification cuts in.”
The proposed hate speech law is a needed response to the shocking, appalling outbreaks of anti-Semitic abuse that Australia, like many Western nations, has witnessed.
How then could such legislation be weaponised against Christians? This is likely because the legislation will not just protect religious and racial identities but all protected characteristics, including sex, gender status, sexual orientation and various other categories. It will introduce criminal penalties, including harsh jail terms, for offensive speech in these areas and will not override state anti-discrimination commissions and laws.
A number of states, Tasmania, Victoria and now Queensland, already have anti-discrimination laws with no or little religious exemption. But generally federal laws take precedence. They won’t do so in this case.
Now, discrimination “offences” incur mainly civil penalties. With hate law legislation they would become criminal offences. Numerous state anti-discrimination commissions have already shown an inclination to regard normal Christian teaching and passages of the Bible effectively as hate speech.
The New International Version of the Bible translates a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians thus: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
That’s isn’t a condemnation of anyone’s identity but of certain behaviours. The gospels and the letters of Paul, Peter and the others never condemn anyone’s identity. They do teach against certain behaviours and attitudes. A gay sexual orientation in traditional Christian teaching is not a moral fault, but sex outside marriage is immoral. Paul is assuredly not saying that anyone who doesn’t live up to the moral ideal is condemned to hell. But as Varughese put it, all human beings need forgiveness.
Similarly, the Catholic catechism, in explaining human sexuality, comments: “Homosexual acts are inherently disordered.” This also refers to behaviour, not identity. Is it hate speech? In Christian theology, disordered means not in accordance with the order God wants in creation. But in modern parlance disordered has a medical connotation. The catechism also says of gay people that “they must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity” and there must not be discrimination against them.
No one is required to accept, or even pay any attention to, Christian teaching on this or any other matter. The question is whether Christians will be allowed to speak and teach their faith.
Michael Stead, Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, says the proposed hate speech law “has the potential to criminalise religious speech that expresses traditional understandings of human sexuality”.
Everyone is free to disagree with, lampoon, contest or ignore Christian teachings. But should it be a criminal offence for Christians and Christian institutions even to express them? This is not theoretical or far-fetched. In 2015, Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous was subject to 12 months of harassment and inquisition by the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission. He had published the gentlest defence of traditional marriage. The activist class encouraged people to take offence and lodge a complaint. Eventually the complaint was withdrawn, never adjudicated in Porteous’s favour.
Recently Porteous wrote another pastoral letter and circulated it to Catholic parishes and schools. It taught the positive Christian case for universal human dignity but also said, inter alia: “We are now witnessing the imposition of certain ideological positions on social and moral questions by means of legislation … This has included the attack on the biological reality of being male and female.”
Porteous argued proposed legislative changes allow “for a priest to have a complaint made against him for simply presenting Catholic teaching while preaching at a Sunday mass”. Two Tasmanian politicians threatened to make complaints to the Anti-Discrimination Commission.
I wrote and spoke in favour of a Yes vote in the same-sex marriage plebiscite because I thought it implausible for the state to enforce elements of Christian teaching for which there was no longer a consensus. Also, we’d long ago allowed gay couples to adopt kids. Therefore it seemed better for the kids if their parents had the status of a civil marriage. But in holding that view it’s not necessary to demand Christian churches abandon their teachings of 2000 years or be prosecuted if they don’t do so.
Recently the Productivity Commission argued church school building funds should lose tax deductibility. This seems a vicious assault on religious schools’ ability to build and expand. Every parent who sends a kid to a non-government school pays a massive subsidy to the state by shouldering a large part of the financial burden that the state would otherwise pay for fully.
The Productivity Commission proposal is just one more bit of evidence of how pervasively hostile to Christianity ruling elites have become. Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher recently delivered a brilliant speech imagining Australia in 2035, where he has to submit his weekly sermon in advance to a government censor – under a Greens-teals coalition – that determines what can be said in all religious pronouncements.
That situation prevails in some countries, just not in democracies.
As historian Tom Holland demonstrates so elegantly in Dominion, everything Western society likes about itself – welfare, human rights, equality of the sexes, concern for the poor – comes directly from the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet we now inhabit a cultural moment in which you can scream “F..k the Jews!” and suffer no legal consequence at all. But read out the wrong bit of the New Testament …
For Australian institutional life now to become so irrationally hostile to Christianity is a mark of madness, a terrible cultural mistake. But mistakes can be corrected.
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9 June, 2024
Real Reasons for the Current Societal Breakdown
I think most of what Israeli writer Tessa Schlesinger says below is broadly right. I do here regularly write about the undesirable happenings in our society. But I think we need a broader view. Where I differ is with her belief that we are in a Societal Breakdown. To me society seems very orderly and functions to the benefit of most of us pretty well most of the time. Though Japan is the only place where the trains always run on time. Governments, particularly, mess things up with stupid policies and actions but nobody starves and even born losers are accommodated to some extent.
There are indeed social problems but they are minor compared with living through two world wars and the Great Depression of the interwar years. We have seen much worse than the world of today
Let me give an example of how well-functioning society is. I am a regular customer of Doordash. I go online and order from a very large menu a meal that sounds good and 15 minutes later a young person on a two-wheeler of some sort comes to my door and hands me a chef-cooked meal. And I pay only a few dollars more than if I had driven to the restaurant and sat for a time at one of their tables to get the same food. The convenience of it is to me a modern miracle.
So how does this great convenience come about? Think of the steps involved:
There has to be a website that passes on my order and take smy money via my credit card number. Then the restaurant accepts my order and makes my meal in their usual way. Then the deliverer has to be ready for a phone-call telling them to collect the food and then he/she has to find his/her way to my place. And it all functions smoothly. No breakdown there. Very reliable.
And so it is with most things in our day. Everything goes pretty much to plan and we sleep safely in our beds at night. There are some places where Leftist governments have allowed racial antagonisms to flourish so we cannot safely go out at night but that is because Leftists WANT to create disorder. Society is not broken down enough for them. Vote them out of office and order will return
That is of course very simplistic but my point is that we concentrate on disorder and overlook the extent to which society is NOT broken down and not in need of fixing. And when something goes wrong people often can fix it thenselves, Feminist-inspired divorce laws make marriage perilous so lots lots of people live together without government paper-work. And finding a partner for a relationship has always been difficult but dating sites sometimes offer a solution for that. After a lot of knockbacks I met my present girlfriend that way. But I agree that sometimes things do go badly wrong. See below
And there is one example of what Tessa Schlesinger wants that is actually in existence. She focuses on the loss of religion and wants some replacement for it. But both America and modern Israel were founded by profoundly religious people. What happens when a society was largely founded by criminals?
I live in such a place: Australia. And Australians are very skeptical religiously. There are churches but most people who go there are ethnics or Pentecostals of one sort or another. So do Australians lack an effective moral code? Far from it. They may never have set foot in a church but they have a traditional moral code founded in traditional English working class values.
Only "old" Australians (people whose roots go back to the time before the postwar flood of immigration) follow it but among them it is very influential:
* Thou shalt not dob in thy mates
* Thou shalt not bung on an act.
* Thou shalt not be a tall poppy
* Thou shalt give everyone a fair go
* Thou shalt be fair dinkum
* Thou shalt not crawl to the boss
And Australia is a very relaxed and pleasant place.
So an ethical non-religious society is not only possibe, you can actually go there on an airliner. And they speak English and you can drink the water!!
For a translation of the above commandments into standard English see:
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2005/10/australians-only-have-five-commandments.html
One of the causes of the west’s current breakdown goes back to the 60s — when some very silly people wanted to create a better world, and they thought that not judging people, or making them strive so hard academically, would make the world a better place.
Another major cause was the work of Dr. Benjamin Spock whose book on how to rear a baby resulted in parents not disciplining children adequately, and in allowing children to grow up with the idea that their uninformed opinions were just as valuable as an informed opinion.
In the 1960s and 1970s, blame was placed on Spock for the disorderliness of young people, many of whose parents had been devotees of Baby and Child Care. Vice President Spiro Agnew also blamed Spock for “permissiveness”. These allegations were enthusiastically embraced by conservative adults, who viewed the rebellious youth of that era with disapproval, referring to them as “the Spock generation”. Wiki
Spock was a pediatrician who was interested in psychology, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud. In his book, Spock said, “John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will.”
Those widespread consequences
Consider that if the zeitgeist of the age was that children could bring themselves up, that the only reason they turned out to be ‘unwise’ people was because parental discipline and forced education made them forget their natural creativity and goodness. Without the limiting areas of discipline and education, all children would grow up to be brilliant and kind adults. There would be no more crime.
So many things came into being as a consequence.
English teachers no longer taught grammar because children would learn grammar on their own. They would just magically pick it up as they went along.
Children should always be happy. Flower power, smoking weed, taking hard drugs, having sex outside marriage, and living together were new values replacing the old. Consequently, in later years, women started complaining that men didn’t want to make a commitment. Of course, they didn’t. Why should they? They had all the sex they wanted. Interestingly, while I was living in the States, I read that one third of baby boomers never got married.
The number of children growing up in single families (divorced parents, kids born outside holy wedlock) escalated. So kids hD no fathers.
Homework disappeared from schools, difficult subjects were no longer mandatory, exams went the way of the dodo, and any form of knowledge was dumbed down. In fact, by the end of the 60s, the classical system of education was outlawed, and the bs system of education that is now regarded as ‘education’ became the norm.
The new rule was that no matter how wrong someone’s response was at school, they were praised in order to give them confidence.
The outcome was that a lot of very ignorant people thought that their opinion had the same weight as people who were a lot smarter and a lot more knowledgeable. So, today, there are an increasing number of very un-smart people in positions of power.
Formal religion went out the window. With it, ethical teaching disappeared. Unfortunately, the only source of ethics (not morality) was religion. When that disappeared, there was nothing to replace it.
Duty became a dirty word. Self-involvement replaced society commitment.
Gossip became widely accepted (inviting endless slander and destruction of innocent people).
Societies are built on ethics — not money
Ethics and morality are not the same. Morality is mostly taught by religions. They are also based on the supposed commands of non-existent gods.
For instance, there is no good reason why people shouldn’t have sex outside marriage — provided that the resulting children have a stable environment in which to grow up and mature.
Structures in society evolve over hundreds of years. They are the invisible pillars that ensure that a community works in such a way that optimal outcomes are ensured for both survival and well being.
If you look at the different religions of the world, many of them had opposing beliefs, but Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and others all survived because they ensured that people had a definite way of handling various situations. Those ways did not conflict with each other — there was social cohesion.
As an atheist, I do not believe in many of the tenets of religion, yet much of it can be interpreted in solid ways that ensure optimal survival and well being.
There is no doubt that there were some extremely cruel rules in all these societies. The Spartans of ancient Greece left babies outside their front doors. If they survived, they were considered strong enough to live. Then there was senicide.
The Inuit, in times of famine left their old people outside to die in the cold.
A few days ago, I read that the harsh laws of Islam were there to protect the greater number. Once people saw others stoned to death or their hands cut off, then others would not repeat that action.
In Christianity, when a single young woman became pregnant, she was outlawed from society.
Structure in society came at a cost.
That cost was immense cruelty to some.
Of course, during the 60s when all these rearrangements of culture was happening in the west, many people were concerned about that kind of cruelty inflicted on individuals. So they outlawed those rules. What they didn’t do was create a replacement system in which those new rules would flourish.
Of course, during the 60s when all these rearrangements of culture was happening in the west, many people were concerned about that kind of cruelty inflicted on individuals. So they outlawed those rules. What they didn’t do was create a replacement system in which those new rules would flourish.
Let me give some examples of that.
Senicide would be considered barbaric by most of us. We would insist that food be shared by everybody. Yet, if there were a tribe of 100 people, and there was barely enough food for 50, what is to be done. In those days, the elders decided that the young were important to the survival of the tribe. The old, they decided, had lived their lives, and their need for food was endangering the survival of the rest of the tribe.
Morality, in my opinion, never came from the gods. They were rules that evolved over a period of time, and as it became known to the leaders of the tribes that some behaviors were harmful to the tribe, they outlawed them. What better way to ensure obedience than to say that the gods commanded it?
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the rules are, so long as the rules ensure that the community survives, and that it survives in a better way than it would survive without those rules. Those rules are the pillars on which all societies are built.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the rules are, so long as the rules ensure that the community survives, and that it survives in a better way than it would survive without those rules. Those rules are the pillars on which all societies are built.
Multiculturism and individualism
Neither multiculturism nor individualism bind the community into a cohesive whole. Multiculturism breaks down society because everybody is playing by different rules (in my opinion) and individualism breaks down society because everybody is playing by different rules (in my opinion).
Societies, nations, communities are built on behavioral structures, and change
Societies evolved. Because they do, a rule that worked well in the past may no longer work in the present. Perspectives change. What was viewed as an unbreakable command of the non-existing god might now be perceived as enormous cruelty.
Clearly, society cannot remain the same — it needs to grow and change to meet new needs and new perspectives. So when change comes, it needs to be accompanied by new rules and new structures. For instance, it’s all very well to stop condemning single mothers for daring to have sex outside marriage. However, if so, then society also needs to build the facilities and resources to prepare for those children. Single mothers are the poorest demographic on the entire planet.
The poverty gap that leads to increased violence
History has shown us that whenever there is great inequality in society, there is a point at which violence erupts. It was the study of history that led to the implication of welfare systems, public education, and better working conditions for worker at the start of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, because history, and the deep study of it is no longer mandatory, the highly destructive idea that greed was good, that the economy was everything, that competition brought out the best in people, that ‘diversity’ was good, and that the rich should not be taxed, made its appearance. Most people simply did not understand the relevance of those changes made at the start of the 20th century.
It is not poverty itself that leads to violence — it is resentment against others. When people live by vastly different rules, sooner or later they clash. If one culture believes that it’s okay to murder their daughters if they marry out of their religion, and another culture sees that as murder, then, sooner or later, the nation which is home to these two opposing cultures will begin to fall.
Yet, in Hinduism and Islam, where those beliefs are part of the culture, societies have survived. In the west, where those values were seen as horrendous, those societies survived as well. Again, the point is not that some cultures are wrong while others are right. My point here is that differing precepts and decreasing standards inevitably lead to the breakdown of societies. (I do, however, believe that some societies have contributed far more to the modernization of the world than others.)
And that is where we are now.
We are in decline because we never understood the real structures of what made a nation (or society) sustainable and strong.
What we should have done was outlaw those horribly cruel rules that made the lives of some so very miserable, and then we should have implemented more rules which prevented the harm that would result from eliminating those rules.
What we should have done was outlaw those horribly cruel rules that made the lives of some so very miserable, and then we should have implemented more rules which prevented the harm that would result from eliminating those rules.
Life in the future
Nations, cultures, societies come and go. They last for a time, and then the rot from within invariably brings them down. Look at the USSR which dissolved into the Russian nation. The totalitarian regime which forced people to become nothing more than utility objects meant that when that system dissolved, there was no societal structure to replace it.
In the past, it hasn’t mattered if a society disappeared. We are all here despite the Babylonians, the Hittites, and the Prussians no longer existing. One lot of people replaces another lot of people. Now it matters. It matters because our actions have resulted in the possible destruction of environmental systems on which human life (and other life) depends. It matters because the enlightenment of humanity, arrived at through many millennia of learning, is now being destroyed. It is now, once more, being replaced by religious garbage, philosophical tenets that do not work, and the blind leading the blind.
I am reminded of a verse in Proverbs in which it says something about it being an unwise course of action for a fool to give instructions to a wise man. That, unfortunately, is where we are now. Interestingly, Proverbs (in the bible) is full of ancient wisdom, long forgotten. It is also, as with all these holy books, full of ideas that have long been proven wrong.
The world is over-populated. Those without wisdom are leading. Those without knowledge are opining everywhere. Those with power are destroying what does not suit them. And so it goes.
I started writing very young. My first pieces were published by a national newspaper magazine.
Ethics
In the years that I have been writing, the underlying ethos has been about ethics. During the sixty-odd years of my putting pen to paper (that was how it started), I have always been concerned about benevolence, about the rules that so many seem to break without regard for the consequence.
Of course, sometimes, I’ve written the occasional light-hearted piece, but the general gist of most of my words has been about what is ethical. Sometimes this has been interpreted by readers to mean that I’m on the left, and other times it has been interpreted to mean I’m on the right. In reality, I’m apolitical. I support those who have an underlying ethic to their policies.
I define ethics as those rules that lead to the greatest chance of survival and the greatest opportunity for well being for the greatest number over the longest period of time. Ethics are not based on empathy (as some would have you think). They are based on determining outcomes before the outcomes arrive, and putting into operation those laws/rules which would prevent the worst and result in the best.
For instance, the ethical course of action would have been to consider better ways of production in the early 20th century in order to prevent further climate change. That would have resulted in the greater good for the greatest number over the longest period of time.
The breakdown in society and nations is a direct result of the destruction of the pillars of society — without replacing them with something better.
There is no point in my writing further on these topics. I have done so for a few decades (as have others). It is pointless. The only readers I have are those who already agree with all of this, and they are the few — not the many. Also, the few pennies I am paid is not worth it.
It is not nihilism that makes me conclude that we are in the last few generations before there is nothing left of modern civilization. Our descendants, if there are any, will be living a barren existence.
https://medium.com/tessas-web-log/real-reasons-for-current-societal-breakdown-3498da0e4ce4
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If You Thought the $2 billion Obamacare Website Was Bad…
James Hickman
It was March 23, 2010, when Barack Obama signed his infamous “Affordable Care Act” into law. And in theory it was a nice idea. Healthcare in the US was incredibly expensive, and he wanted to bring costs down. But the execution was abysmal.
Since 2010, the number of uninsured Americans is still far, far beyond their most conservative projections. Medical costs in the Land of the Free have soared to record highs, vastly outpacing both inflation and wage growth.
According to the US Labor Department’s Consumer Expenditures data, for example, Americans spent 6.6% of their household budgets on healthcare back in 2010 before Obamacare was enacted.
That share has now risen beyond 8%. This means that Americans are spending more money on healthcare than before, and in many respects, they’re getting lower quality care: longer emergency room wait times. Longer referral wait times. More bureaucracy.
So, sure, making healthcare more affordable was a nice idea. But the execution was terrible.
And with Obamacare’s execution, one needn’t look any further than the debacle that became the healthcare.gov website.
They started development for the Obamacare website as soon as the legislation was signed. Its cost was originally supposed to be $93.7 million— which itself is an astonishing figure for a website. But, as usual with the government, spending quickly spiraled out of control.
According to an internal Inspector General report at the Department of Health and Human Services, healthcare.gov ended up costing a whopping $1.7 billion. And a separate analysis from Bloomberg had the total at $2.1 billion.
(It turned out, of course, that a senior executive at website development company was a college classmate of Michelle Obama’s at Princeton.)
Well, the Biden administration is not about to be outshined by the Obamas when it comes to gross financial mismanagement. And that leads us to our latest Inspired Idiot of the Week: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Buttigieg is already a distinguished passionate ignoramus.
When a train derailment last year was spewing toxic chemicals all over the town of East Palestine, Ohio, Buttigieg couldn’t be bothered to deal with it… because he was too busy making sure that automobile manufacturers were using female crash test dummies.
(He later on blamed Orange Man for the train derailment).
When it came time to spend $1 trillion from the federal infrastructure bill, Buttigieg went on a series of bizarre tirades claiming that “racism is physically built into some of our highways” and wailed that there were too many white construction workers.
And when a Singapore Airlines flight hit major turbulence last month, Buttigieg immediately shrieked “climate change” as the reason… even though major turbulence events were far more common 60+ years ago than they are today.
His latest crusade is the ill-fated cause of electric vehicles— which US consumers have been soundly rejecting. Today only 8% of consumers buy electric vehicles… and that number is falling.
Electric vehicle demand is so bad that auto manufacturers are starting to seriously scale back production and investment. It was only a few years ago that several major brands insisted they were going 100% electric… only to see their sales plummet.
They’re now walking back those designs and resurrecting the good ole’ internal combustion engine.
This is where the Biden administration has stepped in, recently mandating that, by 2030, 50% of passenger vehicles sold in the US must be electric or hybrid. Again, that’s more than 6x higher than today’s level.
It’s not enough that the government is ignoring consumer demand. They also want to make sure that you pay out the nose.
Like it or not, other countries (especially China) manufacture electric vehicles for far, far less than the US automaker can produce.
Yet rather than allow consumers to comply with the mandate by purchasing cheaper, foreign EVs, Team Biden is slapping huge tariffs on those cars. So, they’re going to force you to buy an EV, and they’re going to force you to spend a ton of money on it.
They’ve also completely ignored basic infrastructure issues.
US energy supply and demand fundamentals are so out of whack that there will likely be electricity shortages within the next 10 years… and that’s even without factoring in the massive new electricity demand from EVs.
A big part of this shortage is demand from power-hungry AI data centers. But there are major supply challenges as well.
Government policy at the state and federal level has forced many electric utility companies to shift to incredibly expensive and inefficient wind and solar production, while shutting down cheap nuclear power plants.
Naturally there are plenty of times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, so the end result is less reliable electricity.
Consider that over the last 15 years, thousands upon thousands of acres of solar panels and wind turbines have been installed across the US. Yet over the same period, total electrical generation in the US has barely moved. In fact, electricity generation today is almost at the same level it was back in 2007.
Electricity supply is simply not growing to keep up with demand. And again, that’s before taking into consideration the huge bump in electricity demand that will take place when the EV mandate goes into effect in 2030.
There’s also a ton of other infrastructure to take into consideration… like the electrical charging stations that will need to pop up all over the country. Every lonely highway, every small town, every backwoods speed trap, is going to need to bring in new, expensive electric charging equipment.
And this is where Pete Buttigieg is once again on the case; he has trained his gaze now on building charging stations across America… and allocated $7.5 billion to do so.
How many charging stations do the American taxpayers have to show for this $7.5 billion investment?
7. As in… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Seven.
Buttigieg admitted this himself on TV recently, downplaying his failures by suggesting that it will ultimately be the responsibility of consumers to charge their vehicles at home. So, it’s ultimately your problem.
Buttigieg is one of the purest representations of an Inspired Idiot. They don’t even bother trying to understand the problem, let alone the solution. When confronted with a problem, they beat out one of the accepted lines— racism or climate change or Orange Man.
They push idiotic, impossible mandates and then issue contradictory tariffs without even realizing what they’re doing. And just like Obamacare, their mandates make people worse off.
And even when they only have ONE JOB to help the process along— build some charging stations— they can’t even manage to get that right.
With a $7.5 billion budget and just seven charging stations to show the taxpayers, Pete Buttigieg is putting the Obamacare website to shame. And he’s only getting started.
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‘Almost Certainly Illegal’: Blue State Poised To Force Nonprofits To Disclose Racial Breakdown Of Boards
The Illinois Legislature recently passed a bill requiring nonprofits based in the state to report the demographic makeup of their board members —but the law may be unconstitutional.
Democratic state Sen. Adriane Johnson introduced Senate Bill 2930, which requires nonprofits that donate over $1,000,000 to charitable organizations to publicly disclose the “race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, and gender identity.” Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker also supports the bill, according to Politico.
“We are taking vital steps to support diversity and inclusion in the nonprofit sector,” Johnson told Politico. “We are creating these spaces where people can show up as their true, unassimilated and authentic selves.”
Yet legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the bill is likely unconstitutional.
“This law is a prime example of the fundamental incoherence of leftist identity politics,” America First Legal Senior Vice President Reed D. Rubinstein told the DCNF. “Demanding that only non-profit corporations reporting grants of $1,000,000 or more to other charitable organizations post ‘demographic’ information on their directors and officers is almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have a conversation during the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting in New York City. (Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images)
GianCarlo Canaparo, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the bill raised major constitutional concerns.
“First, the state has no legitimate interest in forcing people to disclose this information,” Canaparo told DCNF. “As the Supreme Court recognized in Students for Fair Admissions, the racial and ethnic categories that we so often use in America are arbitrary—they tell you nothing meaningful about the persons they lump together.”
“Second, ?the bill likely violates the free speech or associational rights of organizations who believe that this sort of information is irrelevant and that collecting it is divisive,” Canaparo said. “Third, it likely violates the free speech rights of employees who will be forced to disclose this information even if they object in principle to classifying themselves.”
Canaparo said the underlying motivation for the bill is to enforce liberal ideology.
“Lurking behind the scenes, is the real reason that Illinois wants to do this: It wants liberal activists and lawyers to pressure nonprofits to ‘diversify’ their boards, which will mean explicit race, ethnic, and gender discrimination,” Canaparo told DCNF.
Illinois state Democrats have branded the bill as a measure to highlight “diversity and inclusion of nonprofits,” according to a press release.
“Illinois is extremely diverse and – in requiring this transparency of nonprofits – we further embrace that diversity,” said Democratic state Sen. Adriane Johnson in the press release. “This sets a positive example for other organizations, and hopefully encourages broader progress in the future.”
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a similar, Senate Bill 54, into law in October 2023. Also known as the Fair Investment Practices by Investment Advisers law, the bill requires venture capital companies to disclose “specified demographic information for the founding teams,” including their race, sexuality and gender. (RELATED: ‘Out Of Control’: Here’s How California Pumped Hundreds Of Millions Into The ‘Diversity’ Industrial Complex)
“This bill resonates deeply with my commitment to advance equity and provide for greater economic empowerment of historically underrepresented communities” Newsom wrote in a press release.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/05/blue-state-illinois-bill-race-breakdown/
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Bannon imprisonment demonstrates banana republic two-tiered justice system
“The decision to revoke Steve Bannon’s bail and require him to report to prison by July 1 with his sentence set to end in early November is a stark reminder of the two-tier justice system. Bannon’s ‘crime’ was filing an appeal based upon the mainstream legal theory that counselors to the President have a legal shield when it comes to providing official advice. This shield is important as without it, outside advisors on foreign policy would be required to testify under penalty of perjury about whatever was discussed between them and the President. It is common and necessary for presidents to seek consultation with people outside of their administration, particularly as it pertains to political matters. After the Court ruled against Bannon’s immunity from interrogation, he agreed to appear before the laughable and reprehensible January 6 Committee of the House of Representatives, only to be told that they didn’t really want to hear from him, they wanted to jail him. Imagine a world where David Axelrod went to jail for not appearing before Congress to discuss political discussions he had with Barack Obama. That is the world that is being thrust upon us, as Steve Bannon’s decision to have the Court determine whether he was compelled to testify has resulted in his conviction and imprisonment.
“As someone who has cautioned against an eye for an eye approach to these political prosecutions, the imprisonment of top Trump White House advisor Peter Navarro, impending imprisonment of Steve Bannon, along with the kangaroo court conviction of former president Donald Trump demonstrates that those responsible for weaponizing the criminal justice system against their political enemies must be held to account. The dangerous game being played by those who clearly have no fear of legal consequences due to their elite status protecting them from prosecution by their friends and wealthy neighbors is shredding any semblance of a politically blind justice system. Trust in an honest the judicial system is the most important American social contract holding our nation together and the Bannon imprisonment will provide more evidence that the very fabric that holds our nation together has been breached. As every person who has ever recited the Humpty Dumpty rhyme knows, once something is broken, it is impossible to put back together.
“For those who embrace ‘fundamental transformation’ of a country that valued a blindfolded justice system the damage done by the Obama-Biden lawfare may be their crowning achievement as the country which once had a judicial system that was the envy of the world has made banana republics shrink in horror at what it has become.”
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6 June, 2024
Leftist Media Gatekeeper Power Is Crumbling
The Washington Post is melting down because it leaned hard into the Year Zero cultural revolution that’s completely transformed almost every elite institution in the past several years and the newspaper is now bleeding money. People are no longer buying what they’re selling.
What’s happening at the Post is a microcosm of a much larger and more significant phenomenon. More on that later.
First, let’s review what’s happened at the Post this week.
Publisher and CEO William Lewis announced Sunday that the newspaper would remove Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, hired in 2021 from The Associated Press.
Buzbee is being replaced by former Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray, who will remain in an interim capacity through the 2024 election cycle, according to Fox News.
Buzbee decided during her tenure that The Washington Post wasn’t nearly left wing enough and chose to limit the publication’s appeal to the same demographic as NPR’s.
The result was that the newspaper found a way to lose $77 million last year amid collapsing readership numbers.
NPR gets taxpayer dollars (rather shamefully, in my mind); the Post doesn’t. So, the higher-ups looked at the Post’s dwindling readership and catastrophic financial losses and decided enough was enough.
“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,” the Post quoted Lewis as saying. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
The people who run The Washington Post seem to understand that there is a crisis—losing lots and lots of money being the prime indicator. The question is, do they understand what the real source of that problem is?
The response to Buzbee’s removal dropped hints about the deeper, underlying issue with the Post and other institutions that decided to replicate the culture and power structure of American higher education.
The Post’s issues aren’t just the result of changing social media algorithms or mundane difficulties finding revenue streams.
Instead, they come from the fact that the newspaper chose to prioritize DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) over everything else and to empower a militant clique of employees who seem to think that promoting their agenda is a privilege that doesn’t have to adjust to reality.
According to Vanity Fair, after the announcement of the Buzbee ouster one reporter complained that “we now have four white men running three newsrooms.”
The Post will reportedly be subdivided into three newsrooms. One for news, one for opinion, and one for “service and social media journalism,” which I imagine will be the loony bin.
Vanity Fair reported that the Post had a meeting Monday about the shakeup and it went about how you would expect, with employees obsessing over diversity initiatives rather than the journalistic merit of the new editors.
The New York Times had more, worth quoting at length:
During the meeting on Monday, the executives were grilled by reporters at the Post on the lack of diversity in the hires replacing Ms. Buzbee — Mr. Murray, Mr. [Robert] Winnett and Mr. [David] Shipley are white men.
According to a recording obtained by The New York Times, one of The Washington Post’s star political reporters, Ashley Parker, asked how the newspaper had arrived at its decision, adding that one skeptical interpretation might be that Mr. Lewis was simply hiring his associates to help run the Post.
…
“When you were here before, you talked very movingly about how you care about diversity—and people talk about diversity—but then when push comes to shove, they say, ‘Well, I looked around and I couldn’t find anyone,’” Ms. Parker said.
In response, Mr. Murray said that diversity would be a “constant commitment” at the Post, adding that he had “the most diverse masthead that the Journal had ever had” during his years as the top editor at The Wall Street Journal.
It’s clear that the DEI today, tomorrow, and forever folks aren’t going to let go, nor will they accept a direction that doesn’t entirely align with their narrow political ideology.
The people who foisted left-wing dogma into every corner of The Washington Post’s newsroom aren’t used to not getting their way.
The question is: Will the new management be able to make a genuine pivot? It’s doubtful.
It appears that those in charge of The Washington Post—whether Buzbee or the new bosses—are unwilling to fundamentally challenge the central tenets of DEI. At no point are they willing or able to say, “My commitment is to running the best, most effective newsroom regardless of the race, gender, or background of our reporters and editors.”
Instead, we get a quasi-religious kowtowing to the “constant commitment” to diversity.
Maybe that will change in the coming days, but the early returns aren’t great. As independent writer Wesley Yang noted in a post on X, several other massive media companies have been given this choice in the past: Go woke or go broke. They chose to go broke.
This may seem surprising, but from an individual perspective, this has often been the “right” decision.
It’s far easier to jump ship from one failing newspaper or corporation and hop on to another as long as one maintains commitment to the overarching left-wing faith. That’s how the game has been played.
Rebuking or even wavering in commitment to DEI has been a one-way ticket to never working in an elite, “mainstream” institution ever again. It’s better to fail or demonstrate outright incompetence than to question orthodoxy and risk excommunication.
Welcome to life in the USSR.
This is in many ways the heart of the problem, not just for The Washington Post but for our country and even Western civilization more broadly.
In the interlocking world of elite institutions, where even the gap between what is governmental and what is private has become blurry, ideological gatekeepers determine who is promoted and who is denied employment, who is worthy of praise or destruction.
The Washington Post has acted as one of the more prominent gatekeepers.
But it isn’t 2020 anymore. Although most elite institutions remain as compromised as ever, the “racial reckoning” and DEI revolution have created a serious and determined “populist” backlash.
Huge numbers of Americans, even ones who have generally found themselves on the Left, are tired of the nonsense. They are tired of being fed a constant diet of left-wing agitprop and refuse to live by lies.
The prophets of DEI made huge profits, but now a critical mass of Americans are on to the scam.
This doesn’t mean the revolutionary fever has entirely broken, or that everything will now return to normal. Far from it. We will continue dealing with the profound and terrible consequences of what this ideology has done to our society for a long time to come.
What it does mean is that the power of DEI gatekeepers has waned. The revolution has literally been eating itself, as similar movements have in the past. And now there is a serious counterrevolution—both legal and political—to reduce their poisonous influence on our society.
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Pride Month Success: Daily Signal Reporter’s Book Tops LGBTQ Charts
A Daily Signal senior reporter became Amazon’s bestselling author for LGBTQ books after releasing her book last week.
With a five-star rating on Amazon, Mary Margaret Olohan’s “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult” shares the stories of individuals who “transitioned” into the gender opposite their biological sex, later regretted it, and then began the process of reversing the effects of transitioning.
“Detrans” surpassed gender studies scholar Judith Butler’s book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” and a true crime novel about teen lesbiansim titled “Cruel Sacrifice” in Amazon’s “LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies” book section.
Olohan has made numerous TV and podcast appearances to speak about “Detrans” in recent weeks. She spoke with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on his weekly news and talk show “Huckabee.” She also appeared on Newsmax personality Sebastian Gorka’s “America First” podcast, and on the Catholic news show EWTN News Nightly.
Olohan told Huckabee that the stories of detransitioners represent “the strongest weapon in combating gender ideology.”
“I felt like it was really important to talk to the detransitioners — the young people who tried to do the unthinkable and change their gender — and put their real, raw stories in a book that can go out to the world,” Olohan said.
Outlets like the Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller have written positive reviews of Olohan’s book.
“Perhaps the most fascinating part of ‘Detrans’ is learning about the thought processes that led each of these women to question the choices they had made,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s Ben Appel.
Daily Caller Deputy News Editor Dylan Housman called Olohan’s book “one of the most powerful books anyone will ever read.” The descriptions of the procedures and the lies told to the victims “will make the reader’s heart sink and trigger a shudder,” he wrote.
Conservative figures such as Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire and Riley Gaines have posted on X promoting “Detrans.”
Gaines said she’s “learned so much” from Olohan “on this issue.” Gaines added that Olohan is “the reporter who first broke [her] story and helped [her] feel confident in speaking out.”
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SPLC Adds Openly Gay Group to List of ‘Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Groups’
The Left’s main smear organ has targeted an openly gay organization and groups of doctors who oppose “gender-affirming care” in efforts to silence opposition to the transgender agenda and drag queen story hours.
The Southern Poverty Law Center released its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report Tuesday, warning about encroaching “theocracy” and an “authoritarian takeover” as part of the “organizational infrastructure … upholding white supremacy in the United States.”
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained fame by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy. It later took the project it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it against mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits, putting them on a “hate map” along with Klan chapters.
On Tuesday, the SPLC raised the alarm about having “documented 86 active anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups—about 33% higher than 2022, and the highest number ever recorded by the SPLC.”
Of course, the SPLC isn’t “documenting” these “hate groups”—it’s smearing organizations by comparing them to the real hate of the Klan. By warning about the “increase” of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” it is ratcheting up the alarmist rhetoric and demonizing Americans who dare to dissent from its transgender agenda. It’s also scaring donors into ponying up cash in what a former SPLC employee described as a “highly profitable scam.”
Most of the increase in its count of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups” comes from the SPLC’s decision to add state-based family policy councils, groups of doctors who oppose transgender medical interventions, and chapters of the group Gays Against Groomers to the list. These groups don’t support “hate”—they merely oppose the SPLC’s agenda.
The SPLC added to the list policy groups that oppose radical laws to promote transgender identity. These groups support legislation to ensure that males cannot enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and prisons in the name of gender identity; legislation to protect children from “gender-affirming care” that may sterilize them; and legislation to prevent schools from hiding children’s “transgender” identity from parents.
These new “hate groups” are: Advocates Protecting Children in Virginia, the California Policy Council, the Center for Christian Virtue in Ohio, the Child and Parent Rights Campaign in Georgia, the Family Action Council of Tennessee, the Florida Family Policy Council, Frontline Policy Council in Georgia, the Louisiana Family Forum, Massachusetts Family Institute, the Montana Family Foundation, the Pennsylvania Family Institute, and the Family Foundation of Virginia.
The SPLC also demonized groups of doctors who oppose experimental “transgender” medical interventions. These interventions, euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care,” involve drugs to block puberty, cross-sex hormones to make males seem female and vice versa, and surgeries to remove healthy reproductive organs. While much of the medical industry has been captured by gender ideologues who champion these interventions, many brave doctors have spoken out against them. Now, they find themselves on a map with the Klan in a report on “white supremacy.”
These groups include Do No Harm, Genspect, Partners for Ethical Care, and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.
The “Year in Hate” report also cites another report the SPLC released last year that demonized opposition to transgender orthodoxy as “pseudoscience” and a tool of “theocracy.”
In an ironic twist of fate, the SPLC also added an explicitly homosexual group to the anti-LGBTQ+ category this year: Gays Against Groomers. The group began as a Twitter account created by Jaimee Michell, and according to the SPLC, it has four chapters. The headquarters in Milwaukee has three offshoots in Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington.
Michell started Gays Against Groomers to warn against the sexualization of children and to highlight the fact that not all people who identify as LGBTQ+ support sexual lessons and events geared toward kids. The SPLC condemns Gays Against Groomers for making “amplifying anti-trans and anti-drag messaging key to its online and in-person activity.”
The SPLC dismisses any concern that LGBTQ+ lessons and events might sexualize children and make them vulnerable to abuse. In fact, the report on “Hate and Extremism” trumpets the phenomenon referred to as “Drag Queen Story Hour,” in which scantily clad men in exaggerated feminine dress and makeup read books to children.
“Drag, which often challenges strict adherence to binary gender roles, poses a problem for hate and antigovernment groups because it offers freedom from the restrictive ideologies they espouse,” the SPLC’s R.G. Cravens claims.
He also argues that “drag performs an important role in American democracy in addition to its artistic value,” because “drag artists” can use their platform to “educate people on the importance of voting and other forms of democratic engagement.”
Cravens never admits the sexualized nature of Drag Queen Story Hour. Instead, he demonizes opposition to it by suggesting that it is rooted in hatred. He claims that “the activities of anti-LGBTQ+ groups overlapped with white nationalist, neo-Nazi, antisemitic, and antigovernment groups who targeted LGBTQ+ people and events for intimidation and violent campaigns designed to drive LGBTQ+ people from public life.”
He also suggests that any criticism of drag’s hyper-sexualized interpretation of femininity is rooted in knuckle-dragging misogyny.
“By upending the notion that women are inherently feminine and men are inherently masculine, for example, drag challenges long-held sexist notions that women are a ‘weaker sex’ who should be subservient to men because they are only valuable for procreation,” Cravens writes.
Cravens claims the SPLC tracked “195 incidents of right-wing protesters targeting drag events across the country” in 2023, suggesting these protests were violent. He mentions isolated incidents of real violence unconnected to any of the mainstream organizations the SPLC brands “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.”
The SPLC again kept many mainstream conservative Christian groups on the list of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups,” most notably the law firm Alliance Defending Freedom and the think tank Family Research Council.
Alliance Defending Freedom has won numerous cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, including free speech and religious freedom cases like 303 Creative v. Elenis and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Even Alliance Defending Freedom’s ideological opponents, such as former American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen, have condemned the SPLC’s smear against the law firm.
Both Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council have repeatedly debunked the SPLC’s accusations against them, yet the SPLC continues to repeat its claims.
In 2012, the Family Research Council suffered a terrorist attack from a man who used the SPLC “hate map” to target the organization. While the SPLC condemned the attack, it has kept the Family Research Council on the map.
Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups—including Moms for Liberty—to the “hate map,” in part because they oppose transgender lessons in school.
The SPLC has suffered many scandals. It paid more than $3 million to settle a defamation lawsuit from a Muslim reformer the SPLC had branded an “anti-Muslim extremist” in 2018. It fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019. Even so, many legacy media outlets, Democrats, and companies use the SPLC as an arbiter of what is considered “hate.” The Biden administration has repeatedly worked with the SPLC, with a Justice Department division listening to an SPLC briefing on the “hate map.”
The SPLC owes its bread and butter to demonizing conservatives, and no one should take its claims at face value.
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‘Godmother Of Queer Theory’ Admits Her Work Champions Pedophilia And Turning Kids Gay
The “Godmother of Queer Theory” admitted Tuesday that her work “makes it easier” for pedophiles and the indoctrination of minors into gender and sex ideologies.
The mask is completely off of Judith Butler, who sat down for an interview co-presented by Pioneer Works and Dia Art Foundation with host Jack Halberstam at the New York art gallery to promote her new bool, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” Within the first five minutes of Halberstam’s questioning, Butler addresses attacks made against her work, where she says that it “make[s] it easier” for people with all sorts of deviant lifestyles, including pedophilia, to live out their desires publicly.
“… I was identified as representing gender ideology and a threat to children. My work would indoctrinate them. Or my work would license pedophilia. Or my work and the work of gender more broadly would teach them how to become homosexual or teach them they must become homosexual,” Butler told Halberstam. (ROOKE: Anti-Groomer Moms, The Biden Admin Is Coming For You)
Halberstam then interrupted the author, saying, “Kinda true. Kinda worked, yeah!” to the laughter of Butler and the crowd.
“Of course, we know Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick said, ‘Yes, we do teach that!’ And that is one answer. If that is your desire and you’re looking for ways to live according to that desire, come along, and we’ll make that easier for you,” Butler admitted.
While Butler was trying to scoff at the idea that her work helps promote pedophilia into the public sphere or that she’s turning children gay after the host laughs and says that’s precisely what it does, she agrees. All it took was a progressive host fanning positive affirmations her way to get her to reveal the dark reality behind gender theory, which is that these theorists have no issue using children to promote the sex life of adults.
In fact, they’ll “make that easier for you.”
https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/05/rooke-judith-butler-lgbt-pedophilia/
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5 June, 2024
Trump Verdict Makes NYC ‘Venezuela on the Hudson’
It’s hard to adequately describe what happened to Donald Trump in Venezuela-on-the-Hudson. Outrageous? A travesty of justice? A devasting blow to the sanctity of our justice system and its reputation for fairness and nonpartisanship? An American repetition of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s?
It’s all of those things. And you don’t have to be a Trump supporter to understand that.
A former president was convicted of 34 misdemeanors for paperwork errors (whose statute of limitations had run out) that were changed to felonies because he had supposedly violated another state law—nowhere mentioned in the indictment—that makes it a crime to use “unlawful” means to promote or oppose the election of a candidate.
And what was that “unlawful” means? Well, the defendant didn’t know because those other “unlawful” means (i.e., other crimes) weren’t mentioned in the indictment, either. The judge told the jurors that they didn’t need to even agree on what other crimes the defendant had committed, seemingly in conflict with hundreds of years of English and American jurisprudence, including the Constitution’s guarantee of due process of law.
No, said the judge, the jury could consider violations of tax law or a violation of federal campaign finance law or of some other unnamed law for listing as a legal expense—instead of as a campaign expense—a settlement payment made to an individual who was represented by counsel in a perfectly legitimate, and perfectly legal, transaction. But no need for a unanimous decision on that issue.
A violation of federal campaign finance law? What were a local prosecutor and a state court judge doing bringing up a violation of federal law over which they have no jurisdiction whatsoever?
And if that was something the members of the jury—who know nothing about federal campaign finance law—could consider, why did the judge tell the defendant he would not allow Brad Smith, a former federal election commissioner and one of the nation’s leading experts on federal campaign finance law, to explain to the jury what is considered—and what is not considered—a campaign-related expense under federal law?
The judge acted like a member of the prosecution team throughout this case, a case so lacking in merit that the prior district attorney—the one who preceded the Soros-supported rogue prosecutor Alvin Bragg—refused to file it.
Judge Juan Merchan consistently ruled against Trump and allowed the prosecution to essentially do whatever it wanted, including admitting evidence and allowing testimony to matters that were completely irrelevant to the actual charges and whose only purpose was to confuse the jury and blacken the character of the defendant.
Merchan committed the same sorts of error that recently prompted the New York Court of Appeals in People vs. Weinstein to throw out Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction. How so? Because the trial judge in that case abused his discretion by admitting irrelevant testimony and evidence that was comprised of, as the appeals court said, “untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”
Moreover, Merchan should never have presided over this case in the first place, just like this prosecution should never have been brought in the first place. Merchan should have recused himself from handling it from the very beginning. In addition to the fact that he donated money to the Biden campaign as well as to a group called “Stop Republicans,” his daughter is a Democratic political consultant who worked for the Biden-Harris campaign and whose clients have been raising money off of this kangaroo court trial.
After a six-week trial, the jury took less than two days to find Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. This hardly seems like enough time to take a hard, objective look at the lack of evidence produced by the prosecution that an actual crime had been committed. This suggests that political bias and animus toward the defendant for reasons unconnected to the case may have been a decisive—if not the decisive—factor during their hasty deliberations.
This is especially true given the only people who could provide any insight into what Trump did and what he knew with respect to the alleged offenses were Allen Weisselberg—the Trump Organization’s CFO whom the prosecution did not call as a witness—and Michael Cohen—who lied under oath on innumerable prior occasions, admitted that he hates Trump, blames Trump for everything that has gone wrong in his life, stole from Trump, recorded their conversations in violation of the attorney-client privilege, and said he would profit handsomely if Trump is convicted.
When the defense team files its appeals brief, it will probably have to be the size of the novel “War and Peace” to list all of the legal errors and fallacies committed by the judge and the prosecution.
The Appeals Court of New York should follow the example of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Trump’s lawyers filed an appeal with that court over Colorado’s unconstitutional action in disqualifying Trump from the ballot, the court acted with unprecedented speed to put the matter on an expedited schedule in order to get a decision out as soon as possible.
The New York courts have a duty and responsibility to do the same thing. I don’t have a lot of faith in those courts, many of whose judges, as we have seen in this case and the meritless civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, seem infected with partisan politics influencing what they do.
One final point about all of this. One of my colleagues just got back from an international conference that had representatives from all over the world, including many Third-World countries. Their reaction to these prosecutions of the former president was that the United States had finally joined the ranks of their home countries where their governments use the judicial system to go after their political opponents.
It is a sad day for America and a justice system that was, until now, much admired and copied around the world.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/04/trump-verdict-makes-nyc-venezuela-on-the-hudson/
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Beyond the Verdict: Bureaucrats Continue to Punish the Innocent
Why do anonymous bureaucrats have the power to ruin the lives of people found not guilty in a criminal court?
“Michael” was a confident, popular Aussie kid who spent his whole childhood in the surf. By 18, he was a qualified beach lifeguard. That’s all he’d ever wanted to be.
But then, in August 2021, came the accusation. Sexual intercourse without consent. She claimed he’d beaten her up and forced her to have sex against her will. He said she’d come on to him at the party and initiated the whole thing.
He was charged, and sent to jail for a couple of nights, before being let out on strict bail conditions. Eighteen months later a 6-week court case resulted in a unanimous verdict of not guilty.
It was revealed in court that his accuser had lied consistently to the court and police.
But it didn’t end there for this family. Despite the not-guilty verdict, Michael discovered there was a whole new phase of punishment about to kick in. Bureaucratic punishment.
Saved By His Father
Even though the lifesaving organisation had kept his position open, Michael needed his “WWCC”—the working with children check cancelled when he was arrested.
The family discovered that the bureaucrats who administer the WWCC—from the Office of Children’s Guardian—set themselves up as another judge and jury. They take it upon themselves to decide if this young man should be kept away from children.
Michael plunged into despair as this mob spent months putting him through a series of phone interviews, whilst the deadline for resuming his job slipped away.
In stepped Michael’s dad, a professional man well versed in bureaucratese, who placated the officer in charge, digging out court transcripts, references, and detailed chronology of events.
Seven months later, the officer rang to announce that Michael would receive the precious certificate. She told him that without his dogged dad, Michael most likely would never have received it.
How sickening is that? It turns out these bureaucrats have power to decide whether a person can resume work—lifeguards, or teachers, paralegals, doctors, you name it.
Endless professions in Australia now require anonymous strangers to determine whether these men are safe around children. And they almost always err on the side of caution.
The Power of Bureaucracy
And it’s happening everywhere.
Ros Burnett is a senior research associate at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford who has published a series of studies on the impact of false allegations of abuse.
One study, which involved 30 people who were investigated but never charged, or charged but then acquitted, found many who “faced impassable barriers against working with children or vulnerable adults ever again.”
The upshot is “damaged reputations and ruined careers. Innocent men and women are left without a career, while institutions lose skilled and caring employees,” reported Ms. Burnett and her colleagues.
I’ve talked to many families whose sons had their careers destroyed, even after an allegation was found to be false in court.
Well-qualified young men have been forced to shelve life plans to become a pharmacist, or chiropractor, or paramedic, after authorities refused to issue the required certificate.
A Story Of A University Teacher
Five years ago, I tweeted about the “poor, sad face” of a teacher shown in a newspaper story leaving court after being acquitted of all 13 charges of sexually assaulting three schoolgirls. I suggested he would never recover from this ordeal.
That teacher contacted me and now sends occasional updates on the ongoing indignities he has suffered. It’s just unconscionable how bureaucrats have made him jump through hoops.
Like the phone call from a case officer from the Office of Children’s Guardian, which came out of the blue sometime after he’d applied for the WWCC. He received the call whilst sitting on a bus surrounded by people.
The former teacher reports: “She demanded that I explain why I should have the certificate back. Why did the girls make their accusations? What behaviour had I been doing that was wrong? I asked if I could set a time to speak later and in private. The lady said this was my only chance to explain. I received a letter not long after rejecting my application.”
He still can’t get that WWCC, despite using a lawyer for many subsequent applications. The only work he has been able to secure involves menial tasks: working as a store cleaner, stock person and now in retail sales.
I recently heard from a university lecturer who’d been facing sexual assault charges, despite overwhelming evidence that the accusations were false.
A few weeks ago, he learnt the charges were being dropped and costs awarded against the police. But now his WWCC certificate has been suspended “pending further investigation”—just in case there’s a student in his class who happens to be under 18.
We dangle freedom in front of these people only to snatch away any chance of returning to a normal career or life. The presumption of innocence simply doesn’t matter.
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San Francisco's business hub is deserted with eerie footage showing boarded up shops, for lease signs and empty sidewalks after spiraling crime and homelessness drove businesses out
Being soft on crime at both the State and local level bears fruit
The desolate reality of San Francisco's hollowed out city center has been laid bare by footage showing every store in an entire retail block shuttered and empty.
Lloyd Chapman of the American Small Business League visited the city's once-thriving Union Square area at the heart of its retail district.
The prime real estate was once home to outlets including Uniqlo, H&M, Rasputin Records, and Lush, but all have disappeared in a city center plagued by crime, drugs and homelessness.
'Unbelievable!' he exclaims as his camera pans round the ghostly remains of former stores now defaced by graffiti.
'This whole street is vacant, every store is empty.'
The retail exodus is mirrored in nearby streets with 22 out of 33 stores now vacant in a three-block section of Powell Street from Market Street to Union Square, according to a survey by the SF Chronical.
And the entire Union Square district now has a record vacancy rate of 20.6 per cent, helping drive the city's overall retail vacancy rate to a new high of 7.9 percent according to a survey last month by Cushman and Wakefield.
'The decline in retail performance was primarily due to the worsening conditions in Union Square and the surrounding downtown areas,' analyst Soany Gunawan wrote in the report.
Assaults are up by 10 percent in Union Square's police district so far this year and vehicle thefts are up by a third despite police setting up a new command center in the area.
Figures for most crimes have fallen across the city this year but Chapman claimed the damage has already been done after years of increases, pointing the finger of blame at California governor Gavin Newsom.
'He has devastated California with his failed policies,' the business leader tweeted.
'San Francisco is a ghost town. Oakland looks like a refugee camp.'
California spent $24 billion tackling homelessness in the five years to 2023 but did not track if the money was helping the state's growing number of unhoused people, a damning report revealed last month.
Homelessness jumped 6 percent to more than 180,000 people in California last year, federal data show. And since 2013, the numbers have exploded by 53 percent with the state accounting for a third of America's entire homeless population.
It has contributed to California's budget deficit of at least $45 billion, a shortfall so large it prompted Newsom to propose painful spending cuts impacting immigrants, kindergarteners and low-income parents seeking child care in a state often lauded for having the world's fifth-largest economy.
Retail stalwarts Old Navy, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, Anthropologie and Office Depot were among those announcing their exodus last year.
They were followed by North Face, Jeffrey's Toys, Lacoste with Macy's expected to close its flagship store next year.
'As someone who grew up in San Francisco, Macy's has always meant a lot to the people of this city. It's where families came to shop for the holidays,' San Francisco Mayor London Breed said when the news was announced in February.
'It's where many people from my community got their first jobs, or even held jobs for decades. It's hard to think of Macy's not being part of our city anymore.'
Workers at the store told The San Francisco Standard they believe the decision was made because of daily rampant shoplifting, with thieves taking at least four blazers, 10 wallets and 20 packs of underwear a day on a regular basis.
American Eagle announced last month that it will leave the former Westfield San Francisco Centre over the summer, citing more 100 significant security incidents that allegedly occurred between May 2020 and May 2023.
Breed hailed new figures last month suggesting that trough sleeping in the city has hit a five-year low with 360 tents and structures counted on the streets in April, a 41 percent reduction on last summer.
At one point a man with a hoodie seemingly burnt off his
Visitor numbers to Union Square are down nine percent so far this year according to Cushman & Wakefield, and the crisis is not confined to retailers with office vacancies now at a record level as businesses of all types desert the city center.
Scenes of homeless drug addicts stumbling on sidewalks and fears of violence and petty crime have become a national political issue, with Donald Trump making it part of his campaign platform.
In a video on homelessness released by his campaign, Trump said that 'hardworking, law-abiding citizens' were being sidelines and made to 'suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few.'
He vowed to 'ban urban camping' and create 'tent cities' on 'inexpensive land' for homeless people that will be staffed with doctors and social workers to help people address systemic problems.
A recent DailyMail.com/TIPP Poll showed that more than two thirds of US adults said homelessness was out of control and that officials needed to move those sleeping rough into tented encampments outside towns and cities.
The survey revealed that 67 percent of Americans are fed up with the country's fast-rising number of homeless people and want mayors to take drastic steps to tackle the scourge.
'San Francisco was like Disneyland for adults,' Chapman wrote.
'Tons of cool stores and fabulous restaurants and night clubs. They're all gone now. Maybe someday it will all come back.'
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Is the chief justice of the Australian Capital Territory a crusading reformer or a judge? Time to pick one, Lucy McCallum
This is all about rape victims. Rape is a heavily penalized crime so false rape allegations have to be rigorously tested for. But testing that can be hard on real victims.
Feminists want a way around that but there is none. Telling Leftists that some problem cannot be solved is however alien to thems so they keep trying to solve it, usually by creating more and often bigger problems
It’s one thing to try to reduce delays for sexual assault trials. But when a Chief Justice says ‘there’s an intractable problem in that our overriding task and function is to ensure an accused person has a fair trial’, you had better believe it.
The intractable problem is that the ACT’s most senior judge Lucy McCallum may well have put herself on a collision course, not just with senior barristers, but potentially with the separation of powers.
Our liberal democracy is built around the clear separation of powers. The government and the legislature make the laws. Judges apply the law. Judges do not make the law and should not interpret or administer it in a way that in substance changes the law.
No wonder lawyers in the ACT are in revolt. McCallum, they say, has given the impression to many people, especially lawyers, that she can hold down two roles: that of a chief justice of the Supreme Court, and that of a law reformer.
When a judge signals that she wants changes to how sexual assault cases are conducted in such a way as to correct some “imbalance”, some lawyers in the ACT believe there is a significant risk she’s entering the political realm.
If law reform is where her passion lies, it would be far better for the criminal justice system if she joined an advocacy group, or put herself forward to parliament.
This collision course between the Chief Justice and lawyers could have profound consequences one way or the other, not just for people accused of sexual assault, and their defence lawyers. If judges, of all people, appear to step into the political arena by suggesting that a fair trial is an intractable problem, then we could all be in trouble.
A fair trial is not a problem, let alone an intractable one. A fair trial is the principle that underpins our justice system. Without it, we may as well get rid of courts – and judges – and pack an accused directly off to jail on the basis of an untested allegation.
McCallum’s other comments are equally troubling. She said that the unfortunate message for sexual assault complainant – given the presumption of innocence afforded to an accused person – is that “We are entitled to think you might be lying until you prove that you’re not.
“That’s not quite how the system works but that’s the messaging,” she said.
What garbled nonsense from the territory’s most senior judge.
Of course, a complainant does not have to prove they are telling the truth. They are not a party to a criminal action. They are a witness giving evidence, as in any other trial. It is up to a prosecution to prove that a witness claiming they were raped is telling the truth.
If McCallum is suggesting that a jury is not entitled to think that a complainant might be lying, she is on a collision course with the presumption of innocence. This fundamental principle means that the prosecution bears the burden of proof, meaning that they must prove that a complainant who alleges rape is not lying. In other words, a jury may well find that a complainant is lying.
McCallum has put lawyers, and people accused of sexual assault, in a dreadful position. When they appear in court in front of McCallum, what are they to think after her public comments? Are they to wonder whether the Chief Justice is favour of a fair trial or not? She said a fair trial was “immutable” but she also described a fair trial afforded to an accused as an intractable problem.
Does McCallum believe in the presumption of innocence? Does she understand how these fundamental principles work?
Lawyers are also troubled by the way McCallum described a judge’s duty to disallow “annoying, harassing, humiliating or repetitive” questions, without including the critical qualifier of “unduly” found in the Evidence Act. Does McCallum intend to run cross examinations in her courtroom in accordance with the Evidence Act, or rather as if subject to her own personal amendment to the Act?
Lawyers who express concerns about McCallum’s public foray face another problem. She will know they disagree with her. How will that play out in court? It may have no impact at all, but the fact that senior lawyers are asking these questions shows how inappropriate it is for McCallum to make these comments at all.
Leave it to others to explore law reform. They don’t hold a position of power over an accused, and their lawyers, in a courtroom. That’s why we have the separation of powers, to stop the abuse of power, and the perception of powers being abused.
Given her troubling and muddled comments to a local newspaper, if McCallum was misquoted, she needs to tell us. If she didn’t explain herself as best as she might have, she had better do that.
This debacle shows why judges should stick to their day job, behind the bench, overseeing trials rather than giving the impression that they would rather be law reformers.
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4 June, 2024
'Islamism is a murderous ideology that has nothing in common with our democracy' German minister declares after police officer stabbed by Afghan knife attacker loses his fight for life
Islamic hate is a plague on the WORLD
Islamism 'is a murderous ideology that has nothing in common with our democracy,' Germany's vice-chancellor has declared following the death of a police officer two days after he was stabbed in a frenzied attack at an anti-Islam rally.
The policeman, identified as Rouven L. by German media, was 'stabbed several times in the area of the head' while trying to intervene as the knifeman went on a rampage, local police said in a statement.
The 29-year-old officer - along with five others, including a well-known German Islam critic - was wounded when a knifeman launched the rampage in the city of Mannheim on Friday, with the attack captured on a harrowing live stream.
There has been an outpouring of grief for the officer, with vice-chancellor and economics minister Robert Habeck saying that his death was 'shocking and bitter' and that he died 'because he wanted to save lives and protect people'.
The Green party politician added that Germany 'must fight Islamism with all the severity of our constitutional state and act consistently,' while Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Islamist extremists 'have us as their toughest opponents.'
Following Friday's horrifying attack, the injured policeman underwent emergency surgery following the attack and was put in an artificial coma but died of his injuries on Sunday.
He was being kept alive by a heart-lung machine, and reportedly donated his organs and had his parents as well as his partner by his side when he died.
Chancellor Scholz said he was 'deeply saddened' by the death of the officer.
'His commitment to the safety of all of us deserves the highest recognition,' Scholz said on X, formerly Twitter.
His colleagues were heard screaming 'throw the knife away!' However, with the knifeman not responding, the officers opened fire from near point blank range.
The attacker has been identified as Sulaiman Ataee, 25, who immigrated to Germany from Afghanistan in 2014 when he was just 15.
Ataee - who lived with his German wife and their two children, aged almost 1 and 3, - is still alive despite being shot at the scene.
Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the German newspaper, BILD that the death of the police officer 'moves me deeply and makes me angry about what is happening in our country'.
'We must defend ourselves against Islamist terrorism with determination, and we will also strengthen the security authorities financially,' Lindner said.
Michael Stuerzenberger, an anti-Islam campaigner who was stabbed at the rally organised by Pax Europa, described the attack as an 'absolute nightmare'.
After hearing about Rouven's death, Mr Stuerzenberger said: 'I had hoped he would make it. This is dreadful, horrible. I can't find any words for this.'
'I want to say the greatest condolences to the family, to the loved ones he leaves behind. I give all of them my sympathies. It is terrible.'
Speaking from his hospital bed, Mr Stuerzenberger told BILD: 'It was like an apocalypse. He was stabbing me, even when I was lying on the floor and was trying to fight him off with my feet. It really was a nightmare.'
He added: 'Every attack is an attack against all of us, against our free democratic state and those who ensure our security. Who attacks a police officer launches an attack against all of us.'
Describing the attack, he said: 'We were about to start the event when he suddenly came storming at us like a hurricane and stabbed one after the other. It was insane. I guess even the police were surprised.'
He explained: 'He stabbed my thigh which someone immediately isolated. One stab wound above the knee, it could have been worse. Another on the side of the chest, my upper arm is injured and three stab wounds to the head. My upper lip was cut and I have a deep cut to my jaw.'
The 59-year-old yesterday posted a picture of himself on his Telegram channel from his hospital bed, showing a long, bandaged cut on his upper lip and cheek.
In a separate interview with Deutschland-Kurier, he said: 'I'm alright given the circumstances. I'm happy for all involved that yesterday went somewhat mild. There could have been deaths. It was really bad what the Afghan did with his knife.
'I've seen parts of the videos and the stab in the neck, twice, of the police officer. Hope his life is not in danger anymore. It was a clear attempted murder. Seven or eight stab wounds for me, one near lung, a bit closer and that would have been it.'
Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on Friday called for a thorough investigation into the circumstances of the attack.
'If the investigations reveal an Islamist motive, this would be a further confirmation of the great danger posed by Islamist acts of violence,' she said in a statement.
Germany has been on high alert for possible Islamist attacks since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, with the country's domestic intelligence chief warning that the risk of such assaults is 'real and higher than it has been for a long time'.
The country had also seen a spate of attacks on politicians at work or on the campaign trail ahead of EU elections on June 9.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said last week that he was worried by the growing trend and said Germans 'must never get used to violence in the battle of political opinions'.
Police officers arrived at the scene of the attack - which took place in the city's market square - almost immediately.
Neighbours of the attacker told MailOnline of their shock at what had happened.
In a building with 14 residential flats, it's easy to keep to oneself, which Ataee mostly did, according to a man living in the area.
The 35-year-old, whose parents live in the same high-rise as the knifeman, told MailOnline: 'None of the residents who I know or my parents know have seen the police even raid the flat on Friday night - let alone the attacker.'
One neighbour told Focus about Ataee's wife: 'She was cold, not as friendly as him.' Another added that while both were quiet and appeared friendly, they never really spoke to anyone at all.
'I just feel sorry for his wife and kids. They have to suffer now because of what that man did,' a woman, who lives on the same floor as the killer, said.
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Justin Trudeau Is in Deep, Deep Trouble
Justin Trudeau was once the darling of Canadian liberals and hailed by American Democrats as the example par excellence of a progressive leader. During the Trump presidency, Democrats extolled Trudeau as the leader up north whose support for progressive values and multiculturalism — as well as his intensive economic policies — made him a saint in comparison to Donald Trump.
It’s been eight years since Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister of Canada, and the good feelings toward him have all but vanished. In a Postmedia-Leger poll released Thursday, 66 percent of Canadians surveyed said they are “dissatisfied with Trudeau’s government,” while only 27 percent said they are “satisfied.” Further, a full 47 percent said they believe Trudeau is failing to resign from his position as Liberal leader for selfish reasons. Worse, only 16 percent said Trudeau “makes the best prime minister” of any of the party leaders.
The dissatisfaction is rooted in the numerous crises that have emerged following Trudeau’s aggressively progressive policymaking, including a housing crisis that has rendered affordable housing virtually nonexistent in many Canadian cities and rapidly inflating essential goods prices. The cost-of-living crisis is so acute that the Toronto Star calculated in March that over the past three years, the cost of rent and groceries has increased nearly 40 percent in Canada. This is a number with which wages are not even close to catching up. Real wages declined 1 percent in 2021 and 2.5 percent in 2022 before increasing slightly in 2023.
That’s just the beginning of it.
There’s also Trudeau’s carbon tax scheme, which has further spiraled Canada’s cost-of-living crisis. The tax, which was introduced in 2019, aims to reduce carbon emissions by placing a high tax on fuel sources, including coal, oil, and gasoline. Households then last receive “rebates” to account for the increased cost. Currently, the tax is set at $80 per ton of carbon. The law is failing to have its intended impact: Last fall, an independent estimate found that carbon emissions actually increased in Canada year over year in 2022. Of course, there is also the issue that the giant tax undertaking of the federal tax on carbon can be counteracted by nature. In 2019, Canada’s carbon emissions amounted to 730 megatons of carbon, but, in 2023, Canadian wildfires produced 480 megatons of carbon. (Moreover, it’s unclear how staving off global warming is beneficial to Canada, which constantly has to deal with extremely cold temperatures.) The opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, has hammered Trudeau over the carbon tax, criticizing the ever-present hardship it presents to Canadians.
The drug-overdose crisis is another issue over which Poilievre has gone after Trudeau. Famously, it was Poilievre’s calling Trudeau “a wacko” over his decriminalization of hard drugs that led to Poilievre’s being ejected from the House of Commons. More than 30,000 Canadians died between 2016 and 2023 as a result of the drug epidemic.
Despite all these crises, Trudeau has continued to push policy in a direction so absurdly progressive that it is dictatorial. In February, his Liberal Party proposed an “online harms bill” that would call for life imprisonment for promoting genocide — and presumably other “hate speech” will receive similarly harsh punishment. The bill makes it illegal “to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet.” In other words, the Liberal Party is seeking to punish those who speak in ways with which the party disagrees — with prison sentences. The bill refers to crimes that will be prosecuted under this basis as “hate propaganda offences.” There was also Trudeau’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests to freeze protesters’ personal bank accounts. The move was later ruled unconstitutional.
This all sums up to disaster for Trudeau and the Liberal Party. Polls indicate that, were the election to be held today, Poilievre’s Conservative Party would win the popular vote by 18 percentage points. The libertarian-minded Poilievre, who was made party leader in the political environment that followed the truckers’ convoy in Ottawa, has a pugnaciousness that appeals in Canada’s era of discontent. Trudeau must call an election by October 2025, and most predict that the election will take place next year.
There has been talk of replacing Trudeau given the party’s tattered state — with even some Liberal members of Parliament calling for such a change. But it seems that Trudeau is not backing down. He continues to reiterate that he will maintain his position as party leader and face off against Poilievre. And, with the national election set to take place within the next 17 months, the time for him to pull out and allow the Liberal Party to put on a race for party leader is slipping away. “He could leave in early summer,” John Manley, a former Liberal member of Parliament, told Politico this week. “After that, it becomes just too tight for the party to put together a race that they would want to have a lot of profile on.”
However, the margins appear so insurmountable for the Liberal Party that a Conservative victory is virtually guaranteed, no matter who the Liberal Party’s leader is. Justin Trudeau went too far, and Canadians will not make the mistake of electing him prime minister again.
America is just waiting to see if the backlash to progressivism up north carries down to us.
https://spectator.org/justin-trudeau-is-in-deep-deep-trouble/
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The Sick, Sociopathic Symbiosis of the Woke Left and Jihadi Enthusiasts
Following Hamas’ bloodthirsty Oct. 7 assault on Israel’s southern border communities, woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts on campuses and beyond formed a perplexing alliance.
The Left advocates social justice; celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion; and professes special concern for historically oppressed minorities. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Iran-backed jihadists torture and kill based on race, ethnicity, and sexual preference; loathe and wage war against Israelis, Jews, Americans, and the West; and, by all available means, seek to establish Islamist theocracy.
What could unite two such seemingly mutually exclusive camps?
Not for the first time a common enemy makes allies out of adversaries. A shared disdain for the United States and Israel draws together woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts. Sustaining their cooperation is a common resentment of the principles that the United States and Israel embrace—individual freedom, democratic equality, free-market dynamism, toleration of a diversity of beliefs about faith and human flourishing—and an antipathy to Israel’s character as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
The shared disdain and common resentment and antipathy give rise to more puzzles.
Some of these concern students. How in the space of only a few years have numerous leftist students moved from trembling in fear and rage at opinions with which they disagree to donning masks and kaffiyehs, occupying prime campus real estate, and siding with terrorism and religious war? How have they gone from insisting that all women must be believed to serving as apologists for Hamas’ raping of Israeli women? How have they set aside the dogmas that speech and even silence are violence in favor of harassing fellow students by openly celebrating the perpetration of mass atrocities and publicly chanting slogans that call for Israel’s destruction?
Elite Universities as Ground Zero
Other puzzles concern America’s institutions of higher education and those who run them and teach there. How have our elite universities become ground zero of the alliance between leftism and jihad? Where are the responsible educators—administration officials and faculty—who will day in and day out soberly explain the difference between peaceful protests subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, and disruptive demonstrations that impair the university’s mission, which is to acquire and transmit knowledge, enliven the moral imagination, and cultivate independent thought?
What steps should be taken to correct course so that instead of inculcating campus orthodoxies that condemn the United States as a uniquely awful regime and that deem dissent from institutionally approved narratives as proof of ignorance or bigotry, our universities foster civility, toleration, curiosity, and intellectual acuity, and teach a reasoned, historically informed understanding of constitutional government in America?
In “The Woke Jihad,” Commentary Magazine’s June cover story, Abe Greenwald brings these puzzles into sharper focus with essential background and incisive analysis. His rhetoric occasionally overheats. Then again, the provocation is severe—the routinization of antisemitism and anti-Americanism on campus. And the stakes—the future of our educational institutions and hence the nation’s future—could hardly be higher.
A “hybrid enemy of the West,” the alliance between woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts that burst out into the open following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacres, Greenwald reports, “won’t stop soon, as it is well-funded and impressively organized.”
Moral impulses that higher education has long incubated, moreover, fuel the partnership. Even after colleges and universities remove the pro-Hamas encampments, the alliance will live on in the hearts and minds of many students, and in those of the professors and administrators who have accommodated or endorsed them.
According to Greenwald, the allies “enjoy a valuable symbiotic relationship.” The woke Left needed a new cause. Three years had passed since protesters, prompted by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, established encampments in many cities. Many were peaceful. Many, though, were not, leaving behind more than a billion dollars of damage.
And “with the liberal rank and file no longer interested in police defunding, the public turning against DEI schemes, whistleblowers revealing the horrors of ‘gender-affirming care’ for trans kids, and the term woke a source of liberal embarrassment,” the woke Left found a new calling in coming to Hamas’ defense.
Meanwhile, “the jihadists needed the American left for tactical purposes: to propagandize for their cause and fit antisemitic terrorists—alongside gays, the transgendered, and African Americans—into the intersectional Left’s pantheon of victims.”
Strange Bedfellows
The allies’ feelings toward one another do not match. Woke leftists, Greenwald writes, “love the jihadists … for their ferocity and exoticism, as much as for their bottomless self-pity.” In contrast, fidelity to core beliefs impels the jihadist to experience “disgust for the unchecked females, sexual libertines, heathens, and even Jews he’s been forced to instrumentalize in the cause of Islamist domination.”
At the same time, woke leftists—“Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ groups, intersectional feminist organizations, and others”—converge politically with jihad enthusiasts to “salute October 7 as righteous resistance and condemn the Israeli response as genocide.”
Both revel in violence and victimhood, maintains Greenwald, and both denounce the West as essentially exploitative, Jews as quintessential exploiters, and Israel as the epitome of Jewish exploitation.
The woke Left cloaks its revolutionary aims under appeals to justice that resonate with decent people. If Black Lives Matter focused on saving black lives, asks Greenwald, why would it “have seized on a statistically tiny number of police killings as justification to rid black neighborhoods of police?”
If the trans movement was principally concerned with equality, why would it lavish energy on “denying solid biological reality, throwing kids into emotional disarray, scaring the hell out of parents, endorsing ruinous medical procedures for minors, and trolling everyone who’s not convinced?”
Rhetoric Doesn’t Match Reality
And if diversity, equity, and inclusion aimed to overcome differences and bring people together, why do DEI programs intensify animosity, not least by classifying all white people and all Jewish people as oppressors? Rather than pursuing equality under law, the woke Left endeavors to replace American principles and remake the nation’s norms and institutions.
Similarly, the pro-Palestinian campaign on campus does not serve Palestinians’ reasonable interests. If it did, it would not support Hamas, whose theocratic dictatorship deliberately uses noncombatant Palestinians as human shields; employs Palestinian homes, schools, and mosques as military facilities; and steals humanitarian supplies meant for noncombatants.
All this the jihad enthusiasts overlook. Instead, they concentrate on turning worldwide public opinion against, and spurring the imposition of economic and legal sanctions on, the Jewish state. By damaging Israel, which they regard as an outpost of Western imperialism in the Middle East, they strive to weaken and fundamentally transform the United States.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/01/confronting-woke-left-jihad-enthusiast-alliance/
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Cellphones ‘Do Not Affect Cognition’: WHO Review Concludes
This old scare will probably never die
Exposure to mobile phones does not impact learning, memory, attention span, or other cognitive functions like coordination, according to a review commissioned by the World Health Organisation into studies examining radio wave exposure from mobile phones.
The systematic review aimed to undertake an updated health risk assessment of radio wave exposure, which will be used to help draft a new Environmental Health Criterion on the subject.
Conducted by Monash University and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), Associate Professor Ken Karipidis said the review addressed a long-held community concern.
“One of the motivations for this research was to assess effects on the brain because mobile phones are usually held close to the head during calls,” he said.
“One of the challenges of studying the effects of mobile phones on health is that it’s hard to separate radiation exposure from behavioural effects from social media and gaming on our cognition. [But] overall, [it] found that radio wave exposure from mobile phones does not affect cognition.”
Initial research found 3,945 papers on the topic, but only five used appropriate methods and so were included in the final analysis.
These studies involved 4,639 participants, consisting of 2,808 adults and 1,831 children, across three countries: Australia, Singapore, and Switzerland. They were conducted between 2006 and 2017.
Researchers examined studies that investigated learning and memory, executive function, complex attention, language, perceptual motor ability, and social cognition in relation to radio frequency exposure. Various tests administered to the participants detected “little to no effect” related to cellphone use, measured as calls per week or minutes per day.
Even among elderly people, mobile phone usage did not appear to affect cognition, although this finding had “very low certainty” due to only one of the five studies including this demographic.
Given the limited number of studies included in the review, further research is needed to address various populations, exposures, and cognitive outcomes, “particularly studies investigating environmental and occupational exposure in adults,” the researchers said.
Future research should also address uncertainties in exposure assessment and standardise the testing of cognitive functions to enable more accurate comparisons.
Concerns Linger
While this review suggests that cellphone radiation does not impact cognitive functions, other research warns that a high level of exposure caused by long periods of use can cause cancer (though findings are debated), eye strain, neck pain, back pain, and mental health issues, particularly among adolescents.
Numbers from Statista show that mobile phone users and penetration levels in Australia are constantly rising. From 19.9 million users in 2017, the number of Australian smartphone users is expected to increase by 3.7 million to 23.6 million by 2026.
For those concerned about the possible health risks, ARPANSA provides advice on how to reduce radiofrequency exposure.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/cellphones-do-not-affect-cognition-who-review-concludes-5660074
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3 June, 2024
Good survey methodology
I was talking to my son about the quite stupid study of the Mediterranean diet that I critiqued yesterday. He challenged me to nominate a feasible methodology that I would accept as credible. I have done a heap of published survey research so I think I can do that
For a start, I accept that a classical before-and-after study of diet is virtually impossible because of the long lag needed to detect lifespan effects. But a correlational study can still have considerable credibility if it makes extensive use of statistical controls. The first computer program I ever wrote way back in 1967 was to do partial correlations so statistical controls are nothing new. When the "Summer of Love" was happening in San Francisco, I was writing FORTRAN code!
But to use statistical controls you have to have measures of the likely confounders, and getting measures of some of the confounders can be pesky. Both income and IQ are broadly influential and very influential in the case of income. Poor people routinely do badly on almost all ill health measures. But to make your findigs credible you usually have to take at least income into account, with neuroticism (chronic anxiety as measured for example by the Eysenck N scale) an important third factor)
And the although the difficulties are great, they are not insusuperable. I have managed them at times. The Goossen hidden scale of intelligence is particularly useful as long as it is kept up to date. And the usual demographics should of course be used. Other confounders examined will depend on the study concerned
And how do we deal with the problem of "faking good" on self-reports? That is actually one of the easy ones. I have almost always embedded a social desirability or "lie" scale in my questionnaires
And of course the study must be double blind. That is as important in survey research as it is in experimental research. So persuasive survey research can be done but such research is sadly rare in epidemiology. Epidemiologists generally seem to be blissfully unaware of the precautions psychologists routinely take in survey research.
JR
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A summer of hate?
We all now have heard of the eruptions of hate towards Israel and Jews that pervade many of our universities and the younger political Left generally. So I thought that I might put up a reminder that youthful energies can defy conventional norms but be much less vicious than they are today. I refer to the "Summer of Love" of 1967. It was often mocked at the time but shows that we can do better than we do today.
My own summer of love was a year later in 1968 and I still have fond memories of it. It was however drug-free so it also shows what is possible. A link to an account of my "Summer" below, followed by a piece on a notable time in history
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2023/06/a-memoir-of-1968.html
The year 1967 was designated the “Summer of Love” when somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 youth flooded 25 blocks in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Beforehand, the neighborhood was home to a small community of “hip” residents interested in art, music, theatre, and literature. Afterward, it was known worldwide as the center of countercultural activities. For many, the Summer of Love calls to mind an ambitious attempt at cultural revolution when America’s youth championed values like peace, love, and freedom of expression.
Fifty years later, that utopian vision of the Summer of Love prevails. But underground papers like those in Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices Collection testify to the dark underbelly of that fateful season. The June 23 edition of the Berkeley Barb, for instance, includes an advertisement for the Berkeley PROVOS, a group of people who intended to help deal with the influx of people into the area. Although embracing the spirit of the Summer of Love, the article amounts to a plea for help. It reads, “We still need food, clothes, places to stay, beds, sheets, soap, blankets, coat hangers and HELP.”
Even the participants varied in what they understood the meaning of the event to be.
In fact, the hippie demonstrations and the publicization of hippie culture that coalesced in the Summer of Love were met with controversy rather than acceptance. Even the participants varied in what they understood the meaning of the event to be. They knew something was happening, but it was hardly the simple introduction of peace and love to American culture.
The Role of Mass Media
For many in the counterculture, the Summer of Love was an accident precipitated by the widespread consumption of music, television, and magazines. Songs, programs, and articles began documenting the activities of the countercultural community in the Haight-Ashbury district with the advent of the Human Be-In. According to Chet Helms, after the Human Be-In, a relatively small group of counterculturally minded people in the Haight issued an invitation for young people to come to San Francisco. They formed a council that they called the “Council of the Summer of Love” and attempted to organize summer activities in Golden Gate Park.
Articles on the “new” hippie lifestyle appeared in magazines like the New Yorker, and the hit song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” cemented the idea that something was going to happen in San Francisco in the summer of 1967. By most accounts, the arrival of so many young people was more an accident of popular culture than the result of any planning performed by the council.
As the Summer of Love progressed, it became increasingly clear to many committed participants in the community that the Summer of Love, and the idea of a “hippie,” was being defined by the media more than anything else. Many in the counterculture became deeply suspicious and then hostile toward what they considered “the media,” by which they meant photographers, magazine and daily newspaper reporters, and documentarians. Columnist Joan Didion recalls being labeled a “media poisoner” by countercultural leaders who were part of a group known as the Diggers.
Jef[f] Jassen of the Berkeley Barb writes nostalgically of the Haight-Ashbury district before the Summer of Love: “Nowhere was a camera visible.” Perhaps the event that highlights most clearly the role of the media in relation to the Summer of Love is the “Death of the Hippie Parade,” which was meant to conclude the Summer of Love. The event, documented in underground papers like the Berkeley Barb, included a funeral procession that marched through the Haight-Ashbury district, participants carrying a coffin filled with symbols of hippies: beads, mandalas, hair. A funeral notice was passed around the neighborhood that read, “Funeral Notice / HIPPIE / In the Haight Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media…” The demonstration was meant to call attention to the role that the media had played in creating a hippie stereotype and to replace the image with that of a “free man.”
https://daily.jstor.org/the-summer-of-love-wasnt-all-peace-and-hippies/
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What a wonderful angry face
It is convicted rapist Connor Jay McLachlan. I know I should not call it wonderful but I have never before seen such an extreme picture of anger. It is truly epic.
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The Youth Are Revolting. This Time, They’re on the Right
Most people are aware that there is often a generational pendulum when it comes to politics.
Not so long ago, the youth of the age were getting tattoos and piercings, experimenting with sexual freedom at music concerts, and donning awkward-looking bandanas. Like most cultural phenomena, two things happened: The youthful revolutionaries who attended Woodstock eventually got married (then divorced) and put on business suits; and the generations that followed were subsequently expected to go through a rebellious phase that looked very much like their parents’ some 18 years prior.
And they did. They experimented with drugs and promiscuity on college campuses, dabbled in activism, and even broke a window or two when the Left told them to. It became a right of passage for Gen Xers and millennials.
Of course, it’s hardly a harmless right of passage. It turns out that religious moralists, bespeckled cynics, and your church-going grandma were right all along. When Western society rejects age-old Western sensibilities, it starts rolling down a slope that grows steeper the closer we get to societal hell.
But the pendulum inevitably swings.
I’m a young conservative. I grew up in conservative circles. I graduated from Hillsdale College. You could credibly accuse me of living in an echo chamber, but hear me out.
In Europe, an uptick in support for right-wing political parties has the mainstream “centrist” politicians worried, according to the European Conservative’s Tamás Orbán. Which population is driving votes for conservatives in Europe? Gen Z. That’s true in Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Portugal, Belgium, Finland, and Spain. It’s also true in the U.S.
While Orbán admits that there is a massive divide between young men and women (one that is echoed in the United States), he concludes that “Europe is turning more right-wing with every passing year and it is not despite but because of the established parties’ awkward efforts to cling to power in a world that no longer wants them.”
And the youth of the world have plenty of reasons to rebel. Gen Zers are now in their 20s. They’ve mostly graduated from college, they can’t afford to buy houses, and there’s a good chance their graduation ceremonies were canceled due to the pandemic or social unrest. When they speak out, the ruling class promptly silences them — a rather ineffective tactic when dealing with the youth.
“The stronger an attack on an idea, the more support it gets among young people, because that’s how it works. Nothing can make the phrase ‘Germany for Germans’ more appealing to a 20-year-old than knowing it’s banned,” Orbán points out.
That brings us to the U.S. My colleague Nate Hochman is always quick to point out that young men on college campuses are far more right-wing than they will ever admit to being outside of the privacy of locker rooms and frat houses.
In terms of numbers, “Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents” when compared with millennials, Rachel Janfaza reported on her Substack page the Up and Up in March, citing numbers from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation’s Gen Z Panel.
While it’s certainly true that women (especially single women) tend to vote Democrat (The American Spectator’s Scott McKay likes to point this out constantly), it’s also true that young women are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the role assigned to them by feminists of previous generations. It turns out that sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day, five days a week doesn’t make for a fulfilling life for the feminine psyche, which is hardwired for motherhood. It’s not inconceivable that politics will follow.
Whether they’re in Europe or the U.S., that original generation — the ones who listened to Elvis when their parents said not to and who chose to defy traditional Western cultural sensibilities — have clung to their revolution even when it ceased to be revolutionary and became mainstream. Now, as the pendulum swings back, they find themselves shocked that Gen Z wants to have a revolution of its own.
https://spectator.org/the-youth-are-revolting-this-time-theyre-on-the-right/
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The tragedy of Diane Abbott
Here’s the tragedy of Diane Abbott. She entered British politics as a trailblazer for black Britons and now she leaves public life on the sour note of insulting Jewish Britons. She started out as a warrior against racism but ended up seeming to minimise racism. She devoted her political career to standing up for beleaguered minorities and then made the grave moral error of playing down the beleaguering of Britain’s Jewish minority.
The moral fall of Diane Abbott tells a broader story about the moral decay of the left
How did this happen? How did our first black female MP end up in the eye of a racism storm? How did this consummate foe of racial hatred end up putting her name next to that now infamous letter to the Observer last year in which she said Jewish people do not experience racial hatred? Prejudice, yes, but not racism. Jews get similar flak to gingers, she said. I cringe even now when I think about it. (Abbott claims a wrong draft of the letter was sent to the paper and she withdrew from the remarks.)
The moral fall of Diane Abbott tells a broader story about the moral decay of the left. It was more than misjudgement that led her to write the letter that sealed her political fate. Rather, her odd missive spoke to the corruption of the left by the poison of identity politics; to the left’s shift from the ideals of solidarity to the dead end of competitive grievance. That a resolutely anti-racist MP should end up essentially saying ‘I experience worse racism than you’ tells you everything you need to know about the crisis of progressive politics.
According to reports, Ms Abbott has had the Labour whip restored but has been banned from standing for Labour in the election in July. It was the Observer letter, of course, that led to the veteran Corbynite getting the heave-ho. Her comments were ‘deeply offensive and wrong’, Labour said shortly after the letter was published in April last year. Then it launched an investigation into Abbott which was apparently wrapped up five months ago.
Whatever one thinks of the party’s decision to readmit Abbott while banning her from standing for re-election – it seems a tad harsh to me, but I’m a softie – it’s worth looking back at the letter that landed her in this mess. It really was nuts. She was responding to a comment piece that said Irish, Jewish and Traveller people, like people of colour, experience racism. No they don’t, Abbott essentially said. They ‘undoubtedly experience prejudice’, she wrote, but ‘they are not all their lives subject to racism’.
Let’s leave to one side Irish and Traveller people (my view is that anti-Irish racism has declined hugely in recent decades). The idea that Jews are not affected by racism is just morally and historically illiterate. Abbott’s reference to redhead prejudice in the same breath as anti-Jewish prejudice is one of the maddest, most tone-deaf things I’ve ever heard an elected representative say.
Anti-Semitism is the oldest racism. The destruction it has caused is incalculable. It’s the racism that refuses to die. Indeed, mere months after Abbott penned her career-ending letter, Jew hatred returned with a vengeance to western societies. In the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom there has been an explosion in anti-Jewish racism in Europe.
Of course, Abbott could not have predicted the future. But it is unfortunate indeed that she seemed to minimise anti-Jewish racism just six months before we witnessed the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, followed by a truly alarming spike in the persecution of Jews across the West. Show me one ginger who’s ever feared walking the streets of his own city because anti-redhead hate mobs are on the rampage.
The hypocrisy of the pro-Abbott left has been something to behold. These are the kind of activists who are hyper-sensitive to racism. Criticise the Koran and you’re ‘Islamophobic’. Ask someone where they’re really from and you’re ‘racist’. As for minimising the suffering of racial minorities, especially black Britons – that’s blasphemy in their circles. They’ll damn you as an excuse-maker for race hatred and cast you out of polite society.
And yet they were quick to forgive Ms Abbott for seemingly minimising anti-Jewish racism. In fact they rallied around her. They’re demanding she be allowed to stand for re-election in Hackney in July. Do you think they’d be so understanding if a Tory right-winger had said black people don’t experience racism? Of course not. Perhaps anti-Jewish racism just isn’t a big deal for these supposed anti-racists.
Beyond all this cant, the Abbott scandal shows what happens when anti-racism is replaced by identitarianism. When the old left that really did care for equality is superseded by a new left consumed by self-pity. When the noble goal of defeating racism is elbowed aside by the petty one-upmanship of victim politics, where every social group seems hell-bent on outdoing each other in the suffering stakes. You end up with an anti-racist MP saying the racism her people experience is worse than the racism other people experience. As if fighting racism were a competition rather than the moral duty of all good people.
The tragedy of Diane Abbott is the tragedy of the British left. Parliament may have lost an MP but British society has lost something infinitely more important: the principled anti-racism of yesteryear. Which is terrible because we need it now more than ever with everything that is happening to our Jewish citizens.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/05/the-tragedy-of-diane-abbott/
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2 June, 2024
Ultra-processed foods do NOT cause obesity, says US government's top diet advisors in bombshell review of current evidence: 'Studies have been biased'
At last! Some sanity and honesty! I have been pointing out the inconclusiveness of existing food & health studies for many years. I give a new example immediately following the report below
Ultra-processed foods — demonized for years for their supposed effect on our waistlines — do not actually make people fat, according to a bombshell report.
The US government's top dietitians found 'limited' evidence these foods cause people to gain weight faster than any other food, after reviewing more than a dozen studies dating back to the 1990s.
The report has not been released in full and only segments have been uploaded online.
But the snippets suggest there is nothing intrinsic about processed food that causes obesity and that the amount of calories one eats is the most important factor for weight gain.
People have been hearing a lot about the health risks of ultra processed foods recently, which might make this report surprising, Carolyn Williams, a registered dietitian who was not involved in the review told DailyMail.com.
The report comes from the US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), whose findings inform nutrition labels and public health recommendations for food.
'What they're saying is not that there is no relationship between ultra processed foods and larger body size or greater body fat,' Dr Williams told DailyMail.com.
'They're saying, right now, we don't have enough conclusive research to come out and say, avoid all ultra processed foods.'
This report comes from a group of 20 nutrition experts from across the country that are elected by the Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture to draft new national nutrition recommendations. T
The current group has gathered to make recommendations about what Americans should eat from 2025 to 2030, this report will likely inform their new guidelines.
They recommend that more research needs to be conducted before they are able to make rules about ultra processed foods.
The report has yet to be made live online, but two slides were shared in a screenshot from Kevin D Hall, a nutrition scientist at the National Institutes of Health, in an X post.
In their report, the DGCA said they had 'serious concerns' about bias in the studies that have linked ultra processed foods to weight gain.
This is chiefly because the definition of ultra processed food isn't an exact science, which means that the studies may be subject to 'misclassification bias'.
This means that studies that use variables that are hard to categorize may lead researchers to draw inaccurate conclusions.
There is a system for classifying ultra processed foods, called NOVA, that was developed by Brazilian scientists who first started looking into the topic in the 1990's. But there's a lot of 'room for interpretation' in these guidelines, Dr Williams said.
Generally if a food has ingredients you wouldn't use in home cooking - additives and stabilizers with long names, for example - then it's probably an ultra processed item.
This system doesn't classify foods based on the nutritional content within them.
For example, mountain dew is ultra processed, which has next to zero nutritional benefit, but so are many brands of multigrain bread, which contain fiber, vitamins and even some protein.
This, nutritionists like Dr Williams said, brings the validity of ultra processed foods as a label into question.
Another issue that the DGAC seems to have is that many of the studies they felt were robust enough to include in their review have taken place in other countries and only one study has been performed in a lab.
Without laboratory studies of a topic, it's difficult for scientists to conclude that ultra processed foods are definitely causing health problems.
Some commentators are striking back at the report, saying it doesn't address many of the other concerns people have about processed foods.....
It's understandable that people would read this portion of the DGAC's report and react angrily, Dr Williams said. It doesn't seem in line with what most people have been hearing recently, but it represents how science works, she said.
In her opinion, and many other dietitians, these foods likely have contributed to some of the public health problems we've been seeing in the US. But science is a slow process, and the body of research isn't 'definitively' there yet, she said.
The report merely highlights that ultra processed foods need to be investigated further.
She added: 'This is really what you want. You don't want your federal committee jumping to conclusions.'
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Harvard scientists find new incredible benefit of following Mediterranean diet
Incredible is the word. This study has so many holes in it that I found it hard to know where to start pointing them out.
So I'll start with the big picture: Japan has the longest lived national population by far. So shouldn't we all be living on a diet of rice and fish with a side-salad of sea-weed? That may suggest that a Mediterranean diet is NOT optimal. Another permissible inference is that both diet and geography do not matter as influences on lifespan
OK: On to the study below. The journal article is here:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2819335
I think the most obvious point is that the hazard ratios were tiny, indicating extrememly marginal effects. And very weak effects tend to be unreplicable -- nothing to be relied on for policy purposes.
And as a study based on self-reports it is very questionable. Pychologists have known since the '30s that self reports often misrepresent behaviour: Mainly because respondents tend to "fake good" on questionnaires.
And it's alarming that no allowance for confounders was reported. Income is the big confounder. Poor people regularly have worse healh. So was it poor people who did less well on the qauestionnaire. Were the less long-lived people in the study simply poorer? We don't know.
And possible psychological confounders are ignored too. Was it more stable personalities or higher IQ people who stuck more to the diet? Was it their characteristics that extended life? We don't know. High IQ people do in general tend to live longer
So there was a tiny tendency for the diet regulars to live longer but was it really the diet that mattered? What if the regulars lived longer because they were also smarter, richer, more emotionally stable etc? Was the diet simply a marker for something else? Was the real cause of the longer life something other than the diet? We do not know and the researchers appear to have done nothing to find out.
They did put a lot of work into their study so it is quite sad that the safest conclusion we can draw from their work is that we do not know if diet matters
The Mediterranean diet has been found to reduce the risk of death by all causes by nearly a quarter in women.
A study of more than 25,000 healthy middle-aged American females with an average age of 55 found that following a diet rich in fish, legumes, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains was linked with a 23 percent lower risk of dying by the end of the 25-year study.
Every woman was quizzed on their adherence to the diet annually, and thos who stuck closely to it over that 25-year period enjoyed a 16 percent lowered risk of death from all causes.
The Mediterranean diet, which has been crowned the best diet for seven years in a row, has been shown to reduce inflammation in the body, improve the body's regulation in insulin, and manage weight, all of which protect against heart disease, dementia, and diabetes.
The diet is common in Greece, Italy, and Spain, countries that border the Mediterranean Sea.
The latest study from Harvard University is among the largest, with 25,315 women involved and perhaps the longest-running, with the women being followed for more than two decades.
At the start of the study, women filled out health questionnaires about their dietary habits, their health, their height and weight to calculate BMI.
They also had their blood pressure assessed.
Participants filled out health questionnaires every six months during the first year and annually thereafter.
Researchers assigned scores for adherence to the diet on a scale from zero to nine, with a higher score indicating that the woman stuck to the diet closely.
The scoring was based on the intake of nine dietary components, including a high intake of vegetables (except potatoes), fruits, nuts, whole grains, fish, and monosaturated fats.
If a woman ate less red and processed meats, she got points. If their alcohol consumption fell between five to 15 grams per day, they got an additional point.
Then, the participants were broken into three categories based on their scores, with low adherence scores ranging from zero to three, intermediate adherence scores being a four or five, and high adherence scores falling between six and nine.
Over about 25 years, researchers counted 3,879 deaths, including 935 from heart disease and 1,531 from cancer.
Women with high adherence scores of six or higher were 23 percent less likely to die from all causes, while those with a score of four or five had a 16 percent lower risk.
The researchers said: ‘Our results suggest that a proportion of the lower risk of mortality may be accounted for by several cardiometabolic risk factors, in particular, biomarkers related to metabolism, inflammation, TRL pathways, insulin resistance, and BMI.
They added: ‘Most of the potential benefit of adherence to the Mediterranean diet and mortality remains unexplained, and future studies should examine other pathways that could potentially mediate the Mediterranean diet–associated lower mortality as well as examine cause-specific mortality.’
Their study was published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Few diets are loved by doctors as much as the Mediterranean diet. In addition to reducing one’s risk of heart disease, obesity, and dementia, it has a protective effect against stroke and can extend one’s life.
A 2016 study in the journal Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care reported that people who followed the diet lived about four and half years longer than those who didn’t.
It is meant to be as enjoyable as it is straightforward. It prescribes loading up on veggies and fruits, cutting back on red meat, and incorporating fats, especially extra virgin olive oil, nuts, peanuts, olives, and avocados.
The diet also recommends exercise, the first dietary pyramid to do so. The prescription is based on the lifestyles of people in Mediterranean-bordering countries, specifically Sardinia, Italy, and Ikaria, Greece.
Both are considered Blue Zones – areas of the world where people consistently reach 100 years old. People in Blue Zones plant gardens, go on walks with fellow members of their community, dance with friends, and perform manual labor that anchors them to their surroundings.
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How a narrative of black victimhood and white guilt has torpedoed a tribute to one of the noblest episodes in our history, says PROFESSOR NIGEL BIGGAR
The heroics of HMS Black Joke, a Royal Navy clipper that waged a fearless five-year war to put an end to the slave trade, are worthy of a Hollywood action movie.
She was once a slave ship herself, sailing under the Brazilian flag and known as the Henriqueta. But when the British captured her in 1827, this brave little vessel was transformed into the scourge of mercenary slavers who traded in human beings.
Her crew took unimaginable risks to hunt down Spanish and Portuguese ships and free the men, women and children crammed below decks in conditions of horrific misery.
On the last day of January 1829, Black Joke sighted a Spanish vessel, the El Almirante, sailing toward Havana in Cuba. She gave chase. And she kept on chasing for 31 long hours, until she came within firing range of the Spaniard.
El Almirante sported 14 cannon to Black Joke's two but, after 80 bloody minutes of broadsides, the British prevailed and 466 African slaves were set free — at a cost of six wounded sailors, of whom two subsequently died.
In another engagement two years later, Black Joke (named after the filthy lyrics of a street ballad, the sort enjoyed by sailors through the centuries) captured a 300-ton ship called the Marinerito, also flying the Spanish flag, and saved 496 slaves.
One sailor, Midshipman Pierce, had his hat blown off by a musket ball, before he was knocked overboard by a sword thrust. Yet he hauled himself back on to the deck by clambering up a sheet of trailing canvas, and rejoined the fight.
When the battle was over, the rescued slaves showed their gratitude with songs. Perhaps they were able to express their thanks in words, too, since a good many British sailors 200 years ago were African-born themselves — escapees from the slave trade who could act as translators.
We should all be proud of this noble, humanitarian action, part of the Royal Navy's anti-slavery campaign carried out for most of the 19th century. Yet a proposal for a memorial has now been refused in the Royal Navy's hometown.
Landsec, the commercial owner of Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, has turned down plans for a statue honouring these ships and their crews. This week it announced that, after consulting its 'employee diaspora network', it had decided the tribute was out of keeping with the 'inclusive environment' and lacked 'sensitivity to what is a very emotive topic and dark part of our history as a nation'.
In other words, Landsec is afraid of looking racist, though it is apparently not concerned about revealing its utter ignorance of history.
Presumably, the 'diaspora' refers to people of African descent. Some of them may be the distant descendants of slaves.
But they might also include descendants of those African slavers, and the traders who dragged their fellow Africans to the coast for sale to Europeans — as they had been doing for centuries, first to the Romans and then to the Arabs.
So why on earth would they or anyone else regard a statue as 'non-inclusive' and 'insensitive' for commemorating the Royal Navy's heroic anti-slavery West Africa Squadron? Why would they not want this important, admirable part of the truth about Britain's history remembered?
The obvious reason is that it's a story of white Britons doing good to black Africans. As such it distracts from the Black Lives Matter-inspired mission to keep our focus absolutely fixed on the evils of African enslavement and on British guilt for it.
Any celebration of how Britain fought against the slave trade disturbs the politically advantageous, comic-book narrative of unremitting black victimhood at the hands of white oppressors.
Landsec's response exactly echoes the one I received earlier this week from the Kelvingrove Museum in Scotland. On Monday I wrote an eight-page letter to the museum's manager in protest against the travesty of history represented by its display, 'Glasgow — City of Empire'.
In this display, every possible association between Glasgow and slavery is highlighted. But as for the city's world-leading role in the abolition of slavery, what has the Kelvingrove got to say?
Nothing at all.
In answer to my complaint, Duncan Dornan, head of museums at Glasgow Life, which runs Kelvingrove, defended the display, saying that it had been designed in response to extensive discussions with 'diverse communities'.
By 'diverse', we can assume he meant 'non-white ethnic minorities'. What he implied was that these communities all think the same thing about Britain's imperial record... and that what they think represents the only acceptable view.
The fact that there's a diversity of opinion within ethnic minorities, that the average non-white Briton knows no more about history than their white counterparts, and that certain ethnic minority activists have political reasons for deliberately distorting our understanding of the past — none of this seems to have crossed his mind.
After abolishing slave-trading throughout her empire in 1807, Britain took the lead in suppressing slavery at sea and on land, worldwide, over the course of the following century.
One sailor whose diary has survived, Midshipman C. Henry Binstead aboard the HMS Owen, described a voyage in the 1820s. 'Upwards of 200 rescued slaves are lying about, most of them sick. There are also several bad cases of fever amongst our own crew,' he wrote. 'Many large whales and sharks are about us, the latter is owing to the number of poor fellows that have lately been thrown overboard.'
A week later Binstead recorded that he had lost one of his closest friends, Midshipman Richard McCormick — 'a most amiable young man beloved by all his messmates. He died of the African Fever [probably malaria], which had attacked him while away in the boats up the Old Calabar River [in Nigeria].'
Royal Navy ships, sometimes 30 or more, were stationed for decades off the coast of West Africa, to disrupt the export of slaves. At its height, the West African Squadron employed 13 per cent of the Royal Navy's manpower.
By 1845, the Slave Trade Act authorised the Navy to treat as pirates Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves, to arrest those responsible, and to have them tried in British admiralty courts.
Royal Navy ships sometimes even entered Brazil's harbours and on one occasion exchanged fire with a fort.
In 1850 Brazil yielded to the pressure, enacted legislation outlawing the slave trade, and began to enforce it rigorously.
It is estimated that, between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron alone seized about 1,600 slave-ships and liberated 150,000 African slaves. In the process, more than 2,000 sailors lost their lives.
Economic historian David Eltis says the cost to British taxpayers of transatlantic suppression alone was at least £250,000 per year — billions in today's values. The British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade between 1816 and 1862 as they got in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807.
The American political scientists Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape conclude that Britain's effort to thwart the Atlantic slave trade was 'the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history'.
Some would argue there was an obvious commercial advantage to Britain in disrupting our European rivals' slave trade. But Kaufmann and Pape found the real driving force was not economic but religious: in the churchgoing 19th century, moral duty counted for more than any financial incentive.
The British were among the first people in history to repudiate and abolish slave-trading and slavery — at colossal cost in money, diplomatic effort, naval resources and lives.
Rather than kowtow to the distorted, biased agenda of the BLM movement, imported from the U.S., Landsec should try to copy the moral courage of HMS Black Joke's heroic sailors — and salute one of the noblest episodes in our national history.
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UK: Teachers MUST tell parents if children question gender: They have right to know unless pupil is at 'significant risk of harm', say new rules
Teachers now have to inform parents if a pupil is questioning their gender unless doing so would put the youngster at 'significant risk of harm', the Mail can reveal.
The safeguarding measure is part of updated statutory guidance which was quietly published on the Department for Education's (DfE) website.
It comes after the publication of the Cass Review's final report on NHS England's gender identity services for children in April.
In a significant departure from previous policy, the updated DfE guidance has dropped the word 'transgender' and replaced it with 'gender questioning'.
It says schools should support a gender-questioning child by working 'in partnership' with parents, 'other than in exceptionally rare circumstances where involving parents would constitute a significant risk of harm to the child'.
The revised blueprint is statutory, meaning teachers are legally obliged to implement the policy.
Senior Whitehall sources told the Mail that the DfE had been due to issue an official response within weeks after it received more than 15,000 responses during a public consultation on gender-questioning children.
The guidance change was applauded by campaigners. Maya Forstater, chief executive of charity Sex Matters, said: 'It's a big relief to see that statutory guidance on keeping children safe in education has been updated.
'[Previous guidance] encouraged schools to view some children as being trans, and to socially transition them behind their parents' backs. This should never have happened.'
Given that the move is an interim measure, the incoming government would be expected to go through a full consultation process.
But political observers say it could put huge pressure on a Labour administration, which would risk a public outcry if it tried to change the guidance.
A Labour spokesman said: 'The Conservatives spent months squabbling about this guidance while schools were crying out for clarity.
'This election is a chance to turn the page on 14 years of Tory chaos.'
Meanwhile, a Conservative spokesman said: 'The Education Secretary introduced changes to guarantee schools act with extreme caution, including ensuring parents are involved, in line with our guidance on gender-questioning children.'
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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