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
31 March, 2024
'Israel Alone': What The Economist unwittingly gets right about the Jewish state
Jeff Jacoby writes below with feeling and I share that feeling. Israel is of great emotional signifiance to me too. I am a Gentile Zionist if that is possible. That has been so since my childhood. I instinctively admire defeating the odds and I see Israel as precious and heroic. Its aloneness is heroic
ON THE cover of the current issue of The Economist is an Israeli flag, covered in grime, being whipped by a sandstorm in a deserted land. The flag tilts precariously, and could fall over at any time. Above it, in heavy capital letters, are two ominous words: "Israel Alone."
The Economist has long been sharply critical of Israel, and its lead essay contains familiar fare. If Israel doesn't replace its government, the magazine warns, it could be facing "the bleakest trajectory of its 75-year existence." It acknowledges that Israel was justified in going to war against Hamas in October but scorns the "dire leadership" of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It concedes that there is no Palestinian partner with whom Israel could make peace, yet it urges Israel to do so anyway, by accepting a cease-fire and pursuing that tired old chimera, a two-state solution. The Economist admits Washington shouldn't try "to force Israel out of Gaza while Hamas could still regroup." It is sure that "a struggle for Israel's future awaits," of which "the battle in Gaza is just the start."
But is Israel alone?
If "alone" means Israel has no allies in the world, then it certainly is not alone.
Some officials who expressed strong solidarity with Israel immediately after the ghastly killings and abductions of Oct. 7 — President Biden and Senate majority leader Charles Schumer, for example — have, it is true, cooled their support in recent weeks, mostly under pressure from the political left, where anti-Israel animus runs deep. The United States refused to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution Monday calling for a temporary cease-fire in Gaza. The Canadian government announced that it would halt all arms sales to Israel.
Nevertheless, Israel retains plenty of defenders. Grass-roots support for the Jewish state in the United States remains solid. Among large swaths of the population — Republicans, evangelical Christians, and Americans 65 and older — it runs especially strong. Foreign leaders, such as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have been at pains to emphasize that their endorsement of a Gaza cease-fire does not lessen their solidarity with Israel as it fights a ruthless enemy. "In these dark hours my country stands by the people of Israel," Scholz said in Jerusalem this month. "Israel has the right to defend itself against the terror of Hamas."
Yet at a more profound level, The Economist's cover message is indisputably true. Israel has loyal friends of inestimable value. But ultimately the Jewish state stands alone because ultimately the Jewish people stand alone. For more than 3,000 years, almost everywhere Jews lived, they sooner or later found themselves isolated, demonized, ghettoized, dispossessed, or exterminated. Again and again they were compelled to wear symbols identifying them as Jewish. Again and again they were expelled en masse from countries where they had lived for generations. Again and again they were persecuted as heretics, barred from joining guilds, and forbidden to own land.
The pioneers of modern Zionism were convinced that only in a country of their own could Jews finally achieve the normality denied them for so long — the normality other peoples take for granted.
But they were wrong.
Israel has never been regarded as a "normal" country. Alone among the 193 members of the United Nations, it is the only one whose very right to exist is under constant assault. Jerusalem is the only capital city in the world where the vast majority of governments refuse to locate their embassies. Every other nation belongs to larger blocs of countries with which it shares historic, ethnic, linguistic, or religious bonds — they are Nordic, Francophone, Muslim, Slavic, African, Arabic, Latino, Buddhist. Only Israel stands alone.
In territory and population, the Jewish state is tiny, yet the passions it arouses — bottomless hatred from some, heartfelt admiration from others — are of an intensity worthy of a superpower. The same has always been true of the Jewish people. Their numbers are minuscule, just two-10ths of 1 percent of the human race. "Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of," wrote Mark Twain in a famous essay, "but he is heard of, has always been heard of."
What The Economist proclaims on its cover, the Biblical prophet Balaam, a non-Jew, proclaimed in the Book of Numbers. Attempting to execrate the Israelites, he intoned: "Lo, it is a people that dwells alone / And shall not be reckoned among the nations." In that singular description — a people that dwells alone — is encapsulated an essential reality of the long, long history of the Jews. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, the Jewish people — and the reborn Jewish state — are fundamentally alone, unlike the "normal" peoples and nations with whom they share the planet. Israel can never be just another country, like Belgium or Thailand. The Jewish state is alone; and that is both its blessing and its curse.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27658/israel-alone
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Psychologist who turned the investing world on its head
I had never heared of Kahneman before I read the article below but my investing followed very simiar precepts to his. I looked for a good track record and modest dividends. And I not only made a lot of money on the stockmarket but I actually hung onto it as well -- which is much rarer. But I too am a psychologist
Daniel Kahneman explained investors to themselves. A psychologist at Princeton University and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Kahneman died on March 27, age 90.
Before the pioneering work done by Kahneman and his research partner, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, economists had assumed that people were “rational,” meaning we are self-interested, use all available information to make unbiased decisions, and our preferences are consistent.
Kahneman and Tversky showed that’s nonsense. Their findings, directly or indirectly, inspired change across the business world, including the redesign of organ-donation programs and improvements in planning for multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
Kahneman was a pioneer of what became known as behavioural economics, although he always saw himself as a psychologist. Investors who take Kahneman and Tversky’s lessons to heart can minimise fees, losses and regrets. Kahneman may well have had more influence on investing than anyone else who wasn’t a professional investor.
I first met Danny, as everyone called him, at a conference on behavioural economics in 1996. For years, as an investing journalist, I had wondered: Why are smart people so stupid about money?
About five minutes into Danny’s presentation, I realised he had the answers – not only to that question, but to nearly every mystery of financial behaviour.
Why do we sell our winners too soon and hang onto our losers too long? Why don’t we realise that most hot streaks are just luck? Why do we say we have a high tolerance for risk and then suffer the torments of the damned when the market falls? Why do we ignore the odds when we know they’re stacked against us?
Danny paced softly back and forth at the front of the room, his blue-green eyes sparkling with amusement as he documented these behaviours and demolished conventional economic theory.
For decades, he and Tversky had conducted experiments, almost childlike in their simplicity, to see how people really think and behave.
No, Danny said, money lost isn’t the same as money gained. Losses are more than twice as painful as gains. He asked the conference attendees: If you’d lose $100 on a coin toss if it came up tails, how much would you have to win on heads before you’d take the bet? Most of us said $200 or more.
No, people don’t incorporate all available information. We think short streaks in a random process enable us to predict what comes next. We think jackpots happen more often than they do, making us overconfident. We think disasters are more common than they are, making us suckers for schemes that purport to protect us.
Ask people if they want to take a risk with an 80% chance of success, and most say yes. Ask instead if they’d incur the same risk with a 20% chance of failure, and many say no.
Noting that the stocks people sell outperform the ones they buy, Danny joked that “the cost of having an idea is 4%.” I wasn’t just struck by his insights; I was stricken by them. I immediately bought all three of the books he had edited. For days, I sat in a windowless room, reading feverishly, red pen in hand, scribbling notes, underlining entire paragraphs, peppering the margins with arrows and exclamation points.
In 2001, a year before Danny won the Nobel, I wrote a long profile of him. “The most important question to ask before making a decision,” he told me, “is ‘What is the base rate?’” He meant you should begin every major decision by figuring out the objective odds of success, given the historical range of outcomes in similar situations.
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As Federal Government Collapses, States Offer Solutions
The increasingly obvious incompetence of President Joe Biden is clearly a serious problem, yet many people see it as a one-off, easily solved if the Democrats can find a way to jettison him and run somebody else this fall, or if the Republicans can defeat him and win control of both houses of Congress.
Unfortunately, the rolling disaster that is our current federal government is much more than that. It is the inevitable outcome of a widespread, thorough rejection of the plain meaning of the nation’s founding documents. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s complaint that adhering to the First Amendment would “hamstring” the federal government is emblematic of this mentality.
The inexorable rise of Progressive politics since the end of the nineteenth century has steadily intensified the centralization of power in the federal government and a small class of people not subject to popular elections, authorized by a political Uniparty devoted to continual expansion of executive rule. This has created a regime that asserts a right to infinite authority.
The nation’s founding documents, by contrast, established the principle of federalism, in which authority over all matters not explicitly assigned to the federal government belongs to the states and the people. Progressivism reversed this, and now here we are. More than a century of unconstitutional actions in Washington, DC has evoked increasing opposition not only in public opinion but also, significantly, from state governments.
Among the most vivid examples of this reaction against the central government is the increasing interest in nullification of federal laws and regulations, in which states declare that federal decisions will not be enforced within their borders.
The states began this movement in recent years by ignoring federal marijuana laws. This was an insufficiently appreciated change in attitudes.
If there is one thing nearly every political faction in the United States has agreed on for the past two centuries, it is that nullification threatens the credibility and stability of the national government by undermining its authority. Chasing votes, campaign money, and potential tax revenue from cannabis sales, however, numerous states legalized or decriminalized possession, and then sales, of marijuana. The federal government stood aside and let it happen. The Obama administration, in particular, cooperated in this nullification of federal law.
Since then, states have become increasingly bold, culminating in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s moves to guard the state’s border with Mexico in defiance of the president’s complaints and direct interference.
Now a bill before the Tennessee legislature, SB 2775, the Restoring State Sovereignty Through Nullification Act, would establish an explicit process for nullification. The legislation would allow a federal law or policy to be declared null and void by the governor, by any state court, or by a legislative vote triggered automatically by any individual member, a petition of the executive or legislative branches of any 10 local governing authorities, or any group of 2,000 registered voters, as columnist Daniel Horowitz notes at The Blaze.
Horowitz makes the case for this process by pointing out that federal supremacy applies only to laws that fit within the enumerated powers of the federal government, which is precisely what is under debate in questions of nullification, and that judicial supremacy is a “dangerous myth” because “an elected state or federal official cannot promulgate, fund, or enforce an edict of a court that violates the Constitution” without violating his or her oath to uphold the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson summed up the case for nullification in his Kentucky Resolution of 1798, writing, “The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers,” Horowitz notes.
Nullification is in fact central to the conception of the U.S. government, which I have described previously as veto power for everyone. Under the Constitution, each branch of the national government has veto power over the actions of the other branches, through votes in Congress, presidential veto authority, and judicial review. In addition, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments extend that veto power to the states and the people, respectively.
The Constitution explicitly limits the power of the federal government and gives all three branches, plus the states and the people through the Bill of Rights, the authority and responsibility to see that the government stays within those boundaries.
Veto power over actions taken by the federal government belongs to each branch of that government, and to the states, and to the people. Unless all agree on any action by the federal government, that action does not have rightful force of law according to the Constitution.
Under the doctrines of unbridled federal and judicial supremacy, the U.S. government has taken on so much power that it can no longer perform its basic functions, let alone do all that it has promised. History shows that an excessive concentration of power leads to the decline of civilizations. The Congressional Budget Office just released a report stating the federal debt will soon reach record levels as a percentage of national economic output, undermining the economy and severely limiting policy choices. We are accelerating down the road to government collapse.
Now, duly elected state governments are rightly pushing for decentralization and a return to rule of law, asserting their prerogatives under the nation’s founding documents. This is the one positive outcome of all the destruction wrought by the current regime thus far.
https://heartland.org/opinion/as-federal-government-collapses-states-offer-solutions/
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LGBTQI+ intolerance prevalent among Australian air force chaplains, inquiry told
Hardly surprising in view of what the Bible says about homosexuality. Are Christian chaplains allowed to believe their Bibles when their Bibles tell them that homosexuality is an abomination to God? (Leviticus 20:13). Asking them to deny the word of God is a bit heavy
Some religious chaplains in the air force hold “unacceptable views about minority groups, women [and] LGBTQI+ persons”, posing a mental health risk to members, the royal commission into defence and veteran suicide has heard.
And part of a review commissioned by the defence department into the air force chaplaincy unit – quietly tabled as evidence to the royal commission – found tension between theology and values, “notably in relation to gender and LGBTI inclusion”.
“Some chaplains perceived other chaplains to be intolerant towards LGBTI people, women and those chaplains who express differing theological views,” the review found.
Collin Acton, a former director general of chaplaincy for the navy, said chaplains were members’ first port of call for mental health help, with other forms of help off base or harder to access.
The “vast majority [of ADF members] are ticking the ‘no religion’ box” and would be reluctant to seek support from chaplains, many of whom were ordained ministers, Acton said.
“A large portion of our workforce would prefer not to speak to a minister as their first port of call when they’re going through difficult times,” he said.
“They might be well-equipped to look after members of their own flock, but they’re under-equipped to look after the rest of the personnel.
“Religious ministers don’t sit down and have a conversation with someone about their worldview, they come with an agenda.”
Guardian Australia revealed last year that the Australian defence force as a whole has a disproportionately high number of pentecostal and evangelical chaplains. For example, there are 13 Australian Christian Churches (formerly known as Assemblies of God) chaplains for the 13 members that identify with that denomination.
Chaplains are also ADF members, so the ratio could be anywhere from one-to-one to 13-to-none, depending on how individuals identified themselves.
Meanwhile, there are five non-denominational Christian chaplains and 4,217 serving members who identify that way, a ratio of one-to-843.
In a commission hearing, the air force chief, Air Marshal Robert Chipman, said the review found there were “deep-rooted cultural challenges” within air force chaplaincy.
“And there was an unhealthy mix of theological beliefs … of a view that things that happen between chaplains should stay within chaplains,” he said.
“Both of those created conditions for an unhealthy culture to develop within chaplaincy branch and that had very significant impacts on the welfare of some of our chaplains.”
Commissioner Erin Longbottom put to Chipman that the review found “there was a conflict between faith-based values of chaplains within that branch and the requirements of a modern defence force”. Chipman agreed.
“We did find chaplains … from certain theological schools that had concerns with female chaplains or LGBTIQA chaplains and so those … beliefs that they bring as chaplains into our organisation did intersect unevenly with our Defence values,” he said.
Chipman also agreed that the review found “unacceptable views about minority groups, women, LGBTQI+ persons”.
“If there are chaplains practising in Defence that cannot abide by our values and behaviours, then they need to find somewhere else to be employed,” he said.
But Chipman said that in general the chaplains did a “phenomenal job” and “save lives every day”.
Guardian Australia has sought the air force chaplaincy review under freedom of information laws since September. The request was initially rejected because it would cause an unreasonable workload. Defence sought an extension to the deadline for a revised request to November. In February the request for “any reports or directives produced from the air force chaplaincy review” returned a directive about the implementation of the review but not the report itself.
But an executive summary of the report was provided to the royal commission.
It found there was “tension” reconciling “strong theological beliefs with Defence values”.
Chaplains dealt “‘in-house’ with unacceptable behaviour complaints within the branch” instead of through Defence processes, it found. Some complaints went without action or resolution.
“Others identified inappropriate behaviour which appeared to them to be condoned within the branch”, it found, while some chaplains said that “unacceptable or undesirable behaviour or comments falling short of unacceptable behaviour was excused within the branch where they were associated with views supported by a chaplain’s faith group but not otherwise consistent with Defence values and behaviour”.
In its submission to the royal commission, the Rationalist Society of Australia pointed to research that found almost 64% of ADF members – and 80% of new recruits – were not religious.
The society claimed chaplains viewed the position as missionary in nature and were “unable to provide non-judgmental care”, which the organisation said could stop personnel getting appropriate support.
“The religious-based nature of the capability opens the door to chaplains identifying problems as ‘sin’ and the solutions as requiring ‘repentance’.”
Acton was pivotal in a push to get a non-religious chaplains into the navy and has since pushed for secular reform despite a significant backlash from some opponents.
“I’m not saying get rid of religious chaplains, but they should be in proportion to the religious portion of our workforce,” he said.
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28 March, 2024
Scientists find the human brain has grown by whopping 7% since 1930... but there are signs IQs have gone backwards in recent years
This is an interesting paradox. There is a long-standing correlation of about 0.3 between brain size and IQ. So the findings are weakly contradictory. I think, however, that I may be able to give an outline of a solution to that puzzle.
I once hypthesized that better perinatal practices were reponsible for the average IQ gains that were observed in many countries during the 20th century
http://jonjayray.com/iqgain.html
If my hypothesis is correct, the benefit of improved obstetric practice should level out once best delivery procedures became normal. And it was so. The growth in IQ scores did level out towards the end of the 20th century.
But we need to ask the old legal question "cui bono?". Which babies did it help most? Babies who were physically normal would be helped to survive with undamaged brains so brain damage due to delivery practices should be rare and hence lead to a rise in average IQ.
And the correlation between higher IQ and larger brains means that less pressure on the head during delivery (due to episiotomy, Caesarians, principally) would be particulary helpful to undamaged survival among individuals with big heads. So a major source of better and undamaged survival among high IQ individuals would be the safer delivery of big headed babies
But what about babies which had some congenital problem that only modern medicine saved from oblivion? In many cases the congenital problem would have affected the brain and Left us with an individual of lower IQ, much lower in some cases
So we have two populations with opposite effects from modernity. "Normals" who avoided damage so became brighter on average and another which survived against the odds and which was on the average of lower IQ. So what we find reported below is the averaging out of those two populations
A note of caution, however. It is much easier and more accurate to measure head size than it is to measure IQ, and the IQ gain reported is quite low and of no certain reliabiity. And in general the higher you go up the IQ scale the lower is the reliability of the differences. So much more segmentaion of the populations concerned would be needed to give any certainty about what is going on
Gen Z and Alpha may have a larger brain than people who were born 100 years ago, yet studies have indicated they also have the lowest IQs of previous generations.
Researchers at the University of California (UC) Davis Health studied different brain sizes of people born from the 1930 through 1970s, finding a 6.6 percent increased in brains among Gen X compared to the Silent Generation.
The team theorized that growth could be caused by external influences like health, social, cultural and educational outside factors and could reduce the risk of age-related dementia.
It comes as more recent studies have indicated that even younger generations' IQ scores have dropped in recent decades, which researchers have linked to an overreliance on phones and the internet.
Brain size doesn't necessarily make people more intelligent, and research has suggested that their is only a slight relationship between the two.
Neuroscientists have found that extra brain mass actually accomplishes very little when it comes to intelligence, and instead it serves to allow people to store more lifetime memories, according to Psychology Today.
However, the latest findings could be a contributing factor to why younger generations have a lower risk for developing dementia or Alzheimer's.
The new study was conducted across 75 years and found the brain consistently grew by 6.6 percent for people in the 1970s compared to those born in the 1930s.
Today's generation's brains measure about 1,400 milliliters in volume, but the average brain volume for people born in the 1930s was 1,234 milliliters.
The researchers reported that factors like greater educational achievements and better management of medical issues might explain why people's brains have grown over the decades.
'The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health,' said Charles DeCarli, first author of the study and professor of neurology at the UC Davis Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
Researchers looked at patterns of cardiovascular and other diseases of people born in the 1930s and introduced MRI tests (brain magnetic resonance imaging) of people of the second and third generations of the original 5,200 participants.
The MRIs were conducted between 1999 and 2019 on people born in the 1930s through the 1970s, consisting of more than 3,000 participants with an average age of 57 years old.
The area of the brain that grew the largest was the cortical surface area which controls motor activities and sensory information.
Scientists have uncovered hundreds of different and unique regions of the brain
They reported that the area increased by 15 percent in volume and the region of the brain involved in learning and memory, called the hippocampus, had also increased in size.
However, the number of people struck by Alzheimer's has decreased by 20 percent since the 1970s, according to a separate study, and researchers are now saying increased brain size may be the culprit.
'Larger brain structures like those observed in our study may reflect improved brain development and improved brain health,' DeCarli said.
'A larger brain structure represents a larger brain reserve and may buffer the late-life effects of age-related brain diseases like Alzheimer's and related dementias.'
The brain growth in younger generations could increase brain connectivity, the study said, which could lead to more accurate and efficient performances on tasks.
Yet, even as researchers report the brain is growing with each generation, Gen Z and Alpha's IQs have dropped by at least two points, according to studies in Finland, France, the UK and other countries.
A 2023 study reported that IQ scores in the US have also dropped, but did not specify the exact drop, adding that the decrease could be due to disruptions to in-person learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The researchers also said the rise in social media use could be at fault, as skills like verbal reasoning, visual problem solving and numerical series tests have all gone down.
Academic and science presenter professor Jim Al-Khalili previously told Dailymail.com in 2022 that despite our ‘vastly increased scientific knowledge… the human brain hasn’t got bigger or more efficient or better than it was thousands of years ago.'
This is in direct contrast to the newest findings that the human brain is getting larger, but also raises the question of how cognitive development is increasing while gen Z and Alpha struggle to meet the same IQ levels as past generations.
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The media gives us not the truth, but their propaganda
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Why Product Safety Regulations Should Be Scrapped
A common objection to unfettered capitalism is that, left to their own devices, greedy industrialists would cut corners with product safety, resulting in tremendous harm to consumers. Dangerous products would flood the market, leading to a dystopia of preventable death and destruction.
Extreme hypotheticals are brought up the moment someone suggests a hands-off approach. Drugs would have life-threatening side effects, we are told, because Big Pharma would be trying to get away with minimal testing. Cars would become killing machines as companies scrap seatbelts and airbags to cut costs. And buildings would surely collapse all over the place, since companies would be using the cheapest materials available.
These fears are not merely hypothetical, either. History, we are told, is replete with examples where the laissez-faire approach was tried and led to predictably disastrous results. “Remember the thalidomide scandal?” one might say. “Remember all the traffic fatalities and building collapses?” “Do you not realize that almost all the safety regulations that exist today were created because free markets failed to ‘regulate themselves’?!”
Examples of tragic accidents are submitted to the court of public opinion one after another, each of them intended to indict unregulated capitalism for the tragedy. How, in the face of all this evidence, could anyone seriously advance the long-debunked idea of laissez-faire?
Well, here’s how.
The Parable of the Safety-First Standards
The first thing to understand about this discussion is that safer doesn’t necessarily mean better. There are trade-offs involved with almost every safety enhancement. To illustrate this point, I like to tell a story that I call the parable of the safety-first standards. It goes something like this.
A local politician is concerned about road fatalities in his town. Sure, car companies have some safety standards for their vehicles, but clearly these standards aren’t sufficient, because people are still dying in car crashes. “This is unacceptable,” he says to himself. “Car companies shouldn’t be allowed to sell death machines.”
Irate at the situation, he devises a plan to solve the problem. The next day, he presents legislation requiring every car company to adopt what he calls the “safety-first” standards, the name implying that he won’t settle for anything less than the highest levels of safety. The regulations go on for pages and pages detailing countless safety features that will now be required in all cars. “We already have a precedent for this in the form of mandatory seatbelts and airbags,” he notes. “Why should we stop there when people are still dying?”
The car companies, of course, are not particularly happy with the new regulations, but that doesn’t bother the politician. They were cutting corners on safety to make a buck, so pleasing them isn’t exactly his top priority. “People over profits,” he proclaims.
What he didn’t expect was pushback from a different set of constituents—drivers. The drivers were mighty pleased at first, to be sure…but then they saw the price tag. “The car companies are telling us that compliant cars will cost $500,000 and up,” they complain. “If these regulations are passed, 99% of us won’t be able to afford to drive at all.”
The politician is stumped. Here he was trying to help drivers, and now they are complaining! Don’t they care about their own safety?
Understanding their concerns, however, he tables an amendment the next day which reduces some of the stringent safety requirements. Compliant cars will now only cost $450,000.
The drivers keep complaining.
“That still leaves 98% of us unable to afford to drive,” they protest. “Please relax the requirements more.”
Reluctantly, the politician relaxes the regulations bit by bit, and every time he does, driving becomes affordable again for more and more people. But then he faces a conundrum: where to stop? People are priced out of the market because of seatbelt and airbag requirements, too. Should those also be dropped in the name of cost saving?
Absolutely not, he reasons. “There is a certain minimum safety standard that is necessary,” he says to himself. “And my experts and I are best positioned to evaluate what that standard should be. Anyone who is priced out of the market because of those regulations—it’s for their own good!”
Lessons from the Parable
What can we learn from the parable of the safety-first standards? For one, there is almost always a trade-off between safety and cost. Safer products means more expensive products, with very few exceptions. Fancy braking systems in cars, more testing for drugs, better materials for buildings…all of these cost more money.
Another key takeaway is that businesses are always making compromises regarding safety. Every product you buy could be safer. You can always create something with better materials, better experts, more testing, and more features. We could have cars with extremely high-tech safety systems, drugs that have undergone thousands of trials, and buildings made of titanium. But the reason we don’t make everything as safe as possible all the time is that it would be way too expensive, and people don’t want that—you don’t want that. You demonstrate this every time you buy a product that is less than the safest possible alternative.
Another thing we can see in the parable is that safety is a difference of degree, not kind. People often talk about products being “safe” or “dangerous” as if it’s a binary. But in reality, there is just a spectrum of compromises, with high safety and high cost on one end and low safety and low cost on the other end.
“That all makes sense,” you might say. “But doesn’t the politician in the parable have a point? Don’t we need to specify a certain minimum degree of safety to protect people?”
Well, that depends on your political philosophy. Clearly some degree of safety is important. But why should the government set one arbitrary standard for everyone? Why not let consumers make their own choices about how much safety they want to pay for, and let businesses cater to those choices?
It’s important to remember that people in different circumstances will have vastly different values when it comes to safety and cost. You might think it’s reckless to take a drug with fewer than 5,000 tests, but if someone else wants to take a drug with only 1,000 tests because it’s cheaper, who are you to stop them?
The question is not whether risk and reward should be weighed. Of course they should. The question is who should make that judgment: the government, or the individual?
The only justification for the government making the decision is the paternalistic one. Like the politician in the parable, those who would ban “dangerous” cost-safety compromises are effectively saying, “We are taking this option away from you for your own good.”
The nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat rightly scorned this haughty attitude. “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free,” he wrote, “how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
By imposing arbitrary safety standards on others, politicians and their supporters are effectively declaring themselves to be smarter and wiser than their fellow man. How else could they justify this blatant interference with free choice? “Apparently, then,” Bastiat continues, “the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.”
The Case against Product Safety Regulations
Another problem with imposing minimum safety standards is that the “dangerous” options that are made illegal by these laws may very well represent the best cost-safety trade-off for many people, especially the less affluent. Ironically, then, the safety laws that are meant to protect consumers actually do a great deal of harm to consumers!
When cheaper options are taken away, people either have to pay an arm and a leg for their products or simply go without. The less-safe product would, in their judgment, be preferable to the expensive one. But the very product they believe would be best for their welfare is the one that—in the name of protecting their welfare—they are prohibited from purchasing.
In his book Power and Market, Murray Rothbard uses the example of medical licensing to illustrate how safety and quality regulations cause harm:
It may very well be, for example, that a certain number of years’ attendance at a certain type of school turns out the best quality of doctors…But by prohibiting the practice of medicine by people who do not meet these requirements, the government is injuring consumers who would buy the services of the outlawed competitors…Consumers are prevented from choosing lower-quality treatment of minor ills, in exchange for a lower price, and are also prevented from patronizing doctors who have a different theory of medicine from that sanctioned by the state-approved medical schools.
The same goes for all other arbitrary standards. When the government mandates standards for drug testing, safety features in cars, or building codes, it is taking away all the cheaper options—options that some consumers may very well have preferred if they had been allowed to take them.
Now, it’s true that in the absence of safety laws some people would make compromises that seem reckless to us. For example, a fellow might commission a $1,000 house that is riddled with cheap materials, is constantly on the verge of collapsing, and is basically the definition of “not up to code.”
But before rushing to criminalize this act of production, we need to consider the impact such a ban would have. Clearly, the person commissioning this house feels like it’s his best option given his circumstances. Perhaps he is extremely poor, and this is all he can afford. Perhaps his only other option is being out on the street. If this is the case, how is it helping him to take away his best option? Just as banning sweatshops only hurts the poor, so too banning shoddy buildings only restricts the options of those who are down on their luck. The choice they face is between a cheap building and no building at all. Insisting on expensive safety standards guarantees they will be left with no building.
To be clear, I’m not saying every cost-safety compromise is praiseworthy. Some compromises should really not be made, even if the person making them thinks it’s a good idea. But even when we disagree, there are good reasons to keep the government out of it. For one, as mentioned above, forcing our opinions on others is rather conceited. What’s more, the people actually involved in any given circumstance are often much better situated to evaluate the relevant trade-offs than are government bureaucrats. One-size-fits-all systems inevitably impose the wrong decision in some contexts, even if it would be the right decision in other contexts. A $1,000 low-safety house might be a bad trade-off for someone well-off, but it could be a life-saver for someone in need.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/03/26/product-safety-regulations/
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Top scientists call for an end to daylight saving time: Experts warn clock change fuels a rise in cancer, traffic accidents and sleep issues
I am rather sympathetic to this. I live in a State that has always resisted daylight saving, mainly because we have here a lot of influential farmers, and farmers loathe daylight saving. But I am glad of it. I don't like people messing around with my clocks. The fact that I have a lot of clocks may be a factor. I have 5 clocks in my bedroom alone. Apologies for being eccentric but at least I always know the time
With the clocks set to go forward this Sunday, many of us will be dreading losing an hour of sleep.
And if you think putting the clocks forward each is a literal waste of time, you are not alone.
Top sleep scientists say that shifting the day by just an hour can have massive consequences and claim it should be ditched entirely.
From increasing cancer rates to making car accidents more likely, daylight savings can do a lot more harm than just ruining your lie-in.
Dr Eva Winnebeck, lecturer in Chronobiology at the University of Surrey, told MailOnline: 'Chronobiologists warn against the clock change to Daylight Saving Time – each spring or even permanently.'
Problems linked with daylight savings time
Putting the clocks forward each year has been associated with:
In the UK, daylight savings time was first introduced in 1916 as a wartime effort to save electricity and provide more daylight hours for making ammunition.
Yet while Britons are no longer churning out tank shells, in the Spring and Autumn each year we still move our clocks one hour forward or backwards.
The argument is that, as the days get longer, shifting our days forward gives people more sunlight hours during their working days.
Proponents of this measure cite everything from lower crime rates in the evening to fewer deer being hit by cars as potential upsides.
However, many scientists say that the change is not only inconvenient, but is also actively harmful to our health.
The biggest and most obvious impact of the change is that we lose an hour of sleep the night the clocks go forward, and have to go to bed an hour earlier the next day.
For the vast majority of people, this will result in nothing more than feeling more tired than usual and the issue should resolve within a few days.
But having an entire nation of people suddenly all become slightly sleep-deprived is bound to have some consequences.
One study found an increase in 'cyberloafing' - the act of spending more of the work day making unrelated searchers online - on the Monday after the clocks go forward.
Another study published in 2016 even found that judges in the US tend to give defendants sentences that are about five per cent harsher on 'sleepy Monday' following the clock change.
More worryingly, it has also been suggested that the risk of fatal traffic accidents increases by about six per cent following the Spring daylight savings time transition.
Estimates suggest that about 28 fatal accidents could be avoided in the US every year if daylight savings were abolished.
Dr Winnebeck said: 'The spring clock change, where we fast forward our clocks by 1 hour, is the clock change that is usually most disruptive to our health and wellbeing.
'Sleep loss can have many negative consequences - and with the clock change it affects millions of people at the same time!'
Having our sleep disrupted in this way can also have knock-on effects on our overall health.
Dr Megan Crawford, a sleep researcher from the University of Strathclyde and member of the British Sleep Society, told MailOnline: 'There's an increased risk of cardiovascular events, increased risk of suicidal behaviours... and increased mortality in the days after switching our clocks: those are all linked to the loss of that one hour of sleep.'
Dr Crawford says the British Sleep Society believes that standard time should be reinstated and used all year round due to the 'short-term impact of the clock change, the potential impact across the summer, and the detrimental impact of potential permanent daylight saving times.'
Our bodies have a kind of internal clock called our circadian rhythm, which determines when we eat, when we sleep, when we are most active, and when our brains are at their best.
While the solar day is 24 hours long, the body's rhythm tends to be just a little bit longer.
This means that someone who lived in the dark would naturally wake up a little bit later each day as their biological clock comes out of sync with the solar day.
Humans are only able to keep our body clocks in line thanks to an initial dose of bright morning sun every day.
'We rely on a cue of bright light to bring them into line with the normal 24-hour solar cycle,' said Dr Sophie Bostock, a sleep scientist and founder of The Sleep Scientist.
'If we don't get that cue first thing in the morning, then we're lagging.'
Since daylight savings time gives us fewer hours of light in the morning, lots of people miss that initial bump of daylight that helps realign our body clocks.
Dr Bostock said: 'From a circadian rhythm perspective, there is definitely a case for ditching daylight savings time.'
There is now a growing, if somewhat contested, body of evidence that this mismatch between the sun and our bodies can have severe long-term health impacts.
The main issue with testing how daylight savings affects us in the long-term is that we don't have a lot of data from times when we did not observe daylight savings time.
Dr Crawford sad: 'The best data we can draw on comes from health differences in individuals who live on different sides of a time zone, with poorer health in those who live on the western side.
'This is because the mismatch between the sun time and our clocks is greatest [in the West].
Studies have shown that those living in the West of a time zone have higher risks of leukaemia, stomach cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and more.
Those in the west also experience lower life expectancy, higher rates of obesity, amd diabetes, and even lower income.
Since this mismatch is very similar to those experienced when the clocks go forward, some scientists say daylight savings might be having a similar impact.
Yet some scientists say the damage to our health might be even more direct.
Dr Rachel Edgar, a molecular virologist from Imperial College London, told MailOnline that these kinds of disruptions could even make us more susceptible to illness.
Dr Edgar says: 'Evidence from different animal models suggests that disruption to our circadian rhythms increases the severity of different infectious diseases, such as influenza A or herpes virus.'
While she adds that more research is needed to see if this is the case in humans, she notes that 'body clocks can impact both virus replication and immune responses to these infections'.
She concludes: 'There is a broad consensus from scientists who work on circadian rhythms and sleep that any advantages of daylight saving time are outweighed by potential negative effects on our health and well-being.'
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27 March, 2024
Russia could launch a large-scale attack on the West as soon as 2026, classified German intelligence documents have reportedly revealed
I am tired of reading scare reports like this. They are patent nonsense. Ukraine has destroyed almost all of Russia's tanks and half of its airforce so what is Russia going to attack with? They could rebuild but that would just be repeating a mistake. If it cannot defeat Ukraine who can it defeat? The war in Ukraine has revealed that Russia is a paper tiger
German spooks are said to have recently observed a “significant intensification of Russian arms”.
The classified report, seen by Business Insider, reportedly suggests Russia is preparing for a large-scale conflict with the West.
The reorganisation of Russia’s army, troop movements, and missile deployments in the west of the country are among the signs said to be identified in the document, The Sun reported.
The outlet said: “Analysis by German intelligence services is currently circulating in the German government.
“According to this, a significant intensification of Russian arms production is being observed, which could lead to Russia doubling its military power in the next five years compared to today, especially in conventional weapons.”
The projections reportedly led intelligence services to conclude that an attack on NATO territory could “no longer be ruled out” from 2026.
NATO officials were said to be concerned about Russia’s growing military capabilities but did not believe, necessarily, that it meant the West will be dragged into war with Russia, Business Insider reports.
An American intelligence assessment found it might take Russia five to eight years to restore its military strength to what it was before Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The report has not yet been made public by German spies, the outlet noted.
Vladimir Putin this week warned he is prepared to launch nuclear weapons if he feels the West is threatening Russia’s sovereignty.
He declared weapons “exist in order to use them” in his most chilling World War Three threat yet.
“We have our own principles.
“We are ready to use weapons, including any weapons, including [nuclear], if we are talking about the existence of the Russian state, harming our sovereignty and independence.”
Leaked government documents were claimed by Ukrainian hackers to prove the tyrant is preparing for a major conflict.
The bombshell papers, seemingly signed by Putin, supposedly revealed his chilling plans to attack Europe if Ukraine is defeated.
Ukraine’s National Resistance Centre said its hackers intercepted the documents via email. [propaganda]
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Young Women Favor Femininity Over Feminism, Survey Finds
A majority of young women say they prefer traditional femininity to radical feminism, an online survey has found.
The survey results also show that 82% of women ages 18 to 24 align themselves with “femininity” while only 50% say they consider themselves feminists.
In other results, 79% of the 800 young women surveyed agreed that stay-at-home mothers can be “just as successful as a woman who chooses to be in a professional field.” Large majorities said they agreed with the conservative position on various issues, even if they didn’t identify as conservative.
The online survey, steered by pollster and former Trump White House special assistant Kellyanne Conway and her company KAConsulting LLC, was commissioned by the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women and conducted from Jan. 31 through Feb. 6.
Among all young women, the survey found, the top issue was abortion at 32%, followed by the economy and inflation (30%) and two issues that drew 24%: mental health issues and health care.
For 428 self-identified Republican women, which the Clare Boothe Luce Center called an oversample, the survey found that the economy was their most important issue, at 39%, followed by immigration and border security (25%) and three issues clustered at 18%: education, crime, energy and gas prices, and health care.
Among other results, 79% of young women said they agree with the statement that “releasing violent criminals without bail does not make a community safer.”
A total of 69% said they agree that “since fentanyl is the number one killer of 18- to 45-year-olds in the country, we should do all we can to secure our border to ensure drugs are not pouring over the border.”
Those surveyed also said they agreed with conservatives on school-related issues, with 74% agreeing that “every kid should have the opportunity to go to a school of their choice, regardless of their ZIP code.”
The nationwide survey found that 71% of the women said they agreed with the statement that “it is appropriate to have children wait until they are adults before having irreversible sex-change surgeries.”
In a press release, the Clare Boothe Luce Center said its survey stresses that “the beliefs and aspirations of young women often unify around conservative principles, particularly those centered on femininity and family values,” regardless of political affiliation.
Most women surveyed also said their mothers had the biggest influence on their lives, with 70% of Republicans agreeing as did 66% of everyone else.
This poll comes as American conservatives continue efforts to win over more female voters.
The official GOP response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address March 7 was given by Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., 42, who has two school-age children with her husband.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/25/young-women-favor-femininity-over-feminism-survey-finds/
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Married People More Likely to Be ‘Thriving’: Gallup Survey
A new Gallup survey has found that, over more than a decade, one variable has consistently predicted whether people described themselves as “thriving”: marriage. Married couples are more likely to be happy today, anticipate future happiness, and have a “strong and loving” relationship with their children than cohabiting partners.
Gallup classified respondents into one of three groups—“thriving,” “struggling,” or “suffering”—based on how they rated their home lives. Surveying data over 14 years, Gallup found that married couples consistently rated their current lives, and their likelihood of future happiness, better than those who lived together outside marriage or had a committed relationship without living together. The happiness differential ran into double digits.
“Within the U.S., it is clear that married adults rate their lives more highly than others and have done so for the past 15 years,” the survey, released last Friday, concluded. “From 2009 to 2023, married adults aged 25 to 50 were more likely to be thriving—by double-digit margins—than adults who have never married. The 16-percentage-point gap between married adults (61%) and those who have never married (45%) in 2023 is within the range of 10 to 24 points recorded since 2009.”
Marriage’s emotional bonus held true “for men and women across all major racial/ethnic groups” and “is not explained by other demographic characteristics—such as age, race/ethnicity or education.”
Gallup researchers found wedded couples less prone to communication breakdowns in their relationships. Married couples were half as likely (26%) to say they experienced two or more days in the last month where they or their partner felt so angry they could not speak to each other than those living together (46%) or dating exclusive (41%). Interestingly, living together outside marriage made people 12% more likely to argue than dating exclusively while living separately.
Lawfully wedded husbands and wives also experienced greater closeness with their children: 83% of married couples with children between the ages of three and 19 say they have a “strong and loving” relationship with their kids, compared with 69% in a domestic partnership, and 61% in a “non-domestic exclusive relationship.”
Marriage is also linked to another predictor of happiness: having children. “Marriage also increases the likelihood of having children and is associated with better relationships with those children,” write Gallup researchers, pointing to the group’s 2023 Familial and Adolescent Health Survey.
Married parents, and even divorced parents, say they have more affectionate relationships with their own children than those who were never married, the report discovered, in addition to finding that “married parents are significantly less likely than divorced or never-married parents to report that their child is frequently out of control.”
“Finally, ideologically conservative parents report higher-quality and more harmonious relationships with their children compared with liberal or moderate parents,” Gallup’s team noted.
The new Gallup research report speculates the likelihood of entering a permanent, lifelong, and (in Christianity) unbreakable union must “encourage greater partner selection, as well as greater investments and effort to develop and maintain a high-quality relationship.”
Although married people report higher levels of happiness regardless of their religious status, “[m]arried people are also more likely to practice a religion, and religious practice is also positively correlated with subjective wellbeing.”
Gallup’s research reinforces numerous other studies showing married people, parents, and Christians who actively practice their faith enjoy greater happiness, contentment, and quality of life than unmarried couples, agnostics, atheists, and “Nones”:
“Americans who have never married, are not religious, and have lower levels of formal education feel their lives have meaning less often than other Americans do,” according to the November 2023 American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life. “Overall, religious Americans tend to believe their life is meaningful more often than do those who are not religious.”
Americans who believe in God and value marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than non-believers and single people, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll taken last March.
Parents “with two children had a risk of suicide 70% less than their childless peers,” wrote Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Institute of Family Studies, summarizing a Scandinavian study.
Americans who attended religious services regularly were 44% more likely to say they were “very happy” than those who never or rarely attended, found a 2019 Pew Research Center study.
Christians who read the Bible regularly rated a higher score on the Human Flourishing Index than non-practicing Christians or the religiously unaffiliated, found a American Bible Society report last June.
Active Christians and non-Christians diverged the most when it came to whether they felt their lives had “meaning & purpose.”
A Harvard study found childhood religious activities, such as prayer, paid great dividends later in life, even if the children subsequently left the faith. “[P]eople who attended weekly religious services or practiced daily prayer or meditation in their youth reported greater life satisfaction and positivity in their 20s—and were less likely to subsequently have depressive symptoms, smoke, use illicit drugs, or have a sexually transmitted infection—than people raised with less regular spiritual habits,” according to a summary of a 2018 study conducted by researchers from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The “Handbook of Religion and Health” has “reviewed 326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of “religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction,” finding that 79% of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1% reported that they were less happy (the rest found no or mixed findings),” reported Stephen Cranney, a nonresident fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for the Studies of Religion who teaches at The Catholic University of America.
Despite these robust findings, Americans are less likely to believe marriage and an active Christian life make people happy.
“The General Social Survey documented a decline between 1988 and 2012 in the percentage of U.S. adults who agreed that married people are generally happier than unmarried people,” Gallup notes in Friday’s survey.
Similarly, a Pew Research Center poll last September found 71% of Americans say a fulfilling job makes for a good life, while only 23% say being married (and 26% say having children) are “extremely important in order for people to live a fulfilling life.”
Instead, culture celebrates the LGBTQ movement, despite the well-attested links between transgenderism/same-sex sexual behavior and poor mental health outcomes:
“Female students, LGBQ+ students, and students who had any same-sex partners were more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,” said a February 2023 report from the Biden administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Teenagers who identified as LGBTQ were twice as likely to report “poor mental health” as those who identified as heterosexual, three times as likely to have “seriously considered attempting suicide” or “made a suicide plan,” and 366.6% more likely to have attempted suicide, the CDC found.
“A higher prevalence of substance use and mental health issues has been well-documented among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (also referred to as sexual minorities) than among those who identify as heterosexual or straight,” noted a 2023 report from the Biden administration’s U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Women who have sex with members of both sexes (bisexuals) were six times as likely to have attempted suicide within the last year as women who identify as straight, and three times as likely to abuse opioid drugs. Bisexual men were three times as likely to have had a serious mental illness in the last year, SAMHSA found.
Two-thirds (67%) of Americans who identify as bisexual, and half (48%) of self-identified gays, said they felt “uncertain about who they were supposed to be” in the last year, as compared to about 1 out of 4 (29%) of those who identify as straight, the American Enterprise Institute’s survey found.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/25/married-people-more-likely-to-be-thriving-gallup-survey/
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She gave up a career to be a full-time mother: How unsisterly!
Eva Mendes has revealed that she and Ryan Gosling had somewhat of a 'non-verbal agreement' when it came to her giving up acting and being a 'full-time mom' to their two young daughters.
Eva, 50, and Ryan, 43, are parents to Esmeralda Amada, nine, and Amada Lee, seven, and while the Canadian actor has continued to make movies since welcoming his children, Eva has taken a backseat and hasn't starred in a film for a decade now.
During an appearance on Today on Tuesday morning, Eva was asked what it was like going from acting to being a full-time parent, to which she replied: 'It was like a no brainer. I'm so lucky, and I was like, if I can have this time with my children... and I still worked, I just didn't act because acting takes you on locations, it takes you away.'
Referring to her partner of 13 years, Eva continued: 'It was almost just like a non-verbal agreement that it was like, "Okay he's going to work and I'm going to work, I'm just going to work here."'
Eva and Ryan met one another when they starred alongside each other in the 2012 film The Place Beyond the Pines, and she explained that she 'pretty much stopped acting after that.'
'I have never experienced anything like that. The way he works, his commitment to his craft, how he wants to make everything as best as it can be, and that means making his costars as best as they can be. But unfortunately - or fortunately - there is only one Ryan!' she said.
Eva went on to share her thoughts on Ryan's memorable performance of the hit Barbie song I'm Just Ken at this year's Academy Awards, which saw him take to the stage with Mark Ronson and Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash.
'He went and he did his job. He just happens to be really good at his job, and he did it and he came home,' she said, before explaining her hilarious Instagram post in which she told Ryan to 'come home' to 'put the kids to bed.'
'Because that's what it's about,' she said. 'You go, you do your job the best you can and then you come home.'
Ryan recently revealed how Eva and their two daughters gave him helpful 'tips' for his performance at the 96th Oscars.
During an interview at SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this month he told People: 'It was great. It was so fun because they came to the dress rehearsal the day before and so they were in the front row.'
'They gave me some tips and some notes, all great notes,' the La La Land star added.
'It was great,' Gosling told the outlet as he gushed about Mendes, 50, and their daughters Esmeralda, nine, and Amada, seven; seen on stage at the 2024 Oscars
'They are such a huge part of this for me... it was my girls' interest in Barbie and disinterest in Ken that got me into this in the first place. It was beautiful to have them there at the end.'
However, Eva was noticeably absent from the Oscars red carpet - with Ryan opting to take his sister, Mandi, as his plus one instead.
Eva previously spoke about the reason why she doesn't do red carpet events with Ryan when she posted footage from 2012's Place Beyond The Pines.
She wrote: 'Magic is Real. We did not meet on set. The magic started way before, but here's a little magic captured on camera.'
A fan commented: 'Eva, I want to be honest [with you], but I hope Barbie will get through the Awards Season just to see you [with] Ryan. I know I'm selfish and probably a dreamer, but I will never stop to dream about it!! (sic).'
To which she responded: 'You're the best! What a cool comment; thank you. But we don't do those things together... Like these photos I've been posting, I'm only comfortable posting because it's already out there.'
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26 March, 2024
For whom do I write and why?
There would seem to be three possible audiences. Leftists are the least likely one. Leftists have deeply entrenched views that are very important to them. Their self-esteem depends on their beliefs so they zealously avoid contradiction. They try to get contrary information censored so they will never hear it. So they would read something by me only if they came across it by accident and would mentally blot it out
A more promising audience is middle-of-the-roaders -- swinging voters. And I think that is realistic to some degree. But my outspoken conservatism probably defeats that objective to some extent A person more polite about Leftist nonsense would probably be more persuasive to that group.
So I mainly write to reinforce the beliefs of people who already tend conservative. Leftist thinking bombards us from all angles so I like to offer an antidote and alternative to that. Leftist claims do often appear to be reasonable at first sight and I like to show just where and why they are not -- so that those who are uncomfortable with Leftist claims will see in detail why such claims fail. I offer food for alternative thought.
My son tells me that I am wasting my time. He says that events will pan out in their own way driven by large forces and that there is nothing we can do to derail the inevitable train of events. It was a similar train of thought when a young journalst some years back asked aristocratic British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan what could upset his government in the next few weeks. MacMillan replied: "Events, dear boy, events".
I am a drop in the bucket theorist. One drop or one person can have a negligible effect but lots of drops can fill the bucket. I think that many conservative voices combined can have a useful effect in causing bad policies to be abandoned. Some Biden policies have at least been watered down and it seems to me that many voices opposing them have done that. So I hope to be one of such voices and to encourage other such voices.
I have at least had the satisfaction of being proved right on occasions. When Covid arrived, I saw that it was almost entirely only the elderly who were dying with it so thought that under-65s should be left alone by governments so that the economy and society could function normally. I saw all the restrictions imposed in the name of controlling the pandemic as pointless and harmful. Many people are now coming around to that view. And the country that did as I thought best -- Sweden -- ended up with the lowest level of excess deaths in Europe during the period concerned. So those who read what I write can sometimes get ahead of the game in their thinking. I feel that is worthwhile.
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Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman swamped with support for trans athlete ban
The Long Island county’s executive, Bruce Blakeman, has received more than 500 emails and 700 phone calls, with over 80% supporting the trans athlete ban at competitive sporting events at Nassau’s ballfields and sports facilities, according to his office’s correspondence unit.
The controversial ban also has generated tens of thousands of comments, mainly positive, on social media.
“I am a gay woman who also coaches women’s sports and I am so incredibly grateful for Mr. Blakeman who is protecting all that we have fought for decades to earn a place in sports. It’s wild to me that this isn’t a COMMON SENSE cause, but people fear retaliation/cancel culture,” wrote A. Shields of Port Washington in Nassau.
Former Olympic rower Valerie McClain said, “As a 2 time Olympian and retired female executive, I want to thank you for protecting girls and women in sports.
“Sports teaches so many leadership skills that girls would not be exposed to if not for participation, least of all FAIRNESS.”
A transgender woman from California, Nicole Standard, told Blakeman that she supports the ban, too.
“I myself am MTF [male to female] Post Op Trans and I support your action to keep biological males from competing in women’s sports. For someone like myself to compete in `Women’s Sports’ would be like an `abled bodied athlete’ identifying as `handicapped,’ then competing in `Special Olympics,’ ” Standard wrote.
“I’m embarrassed by any hate you may get from your ‘correct/sane sports policies,’ ” she said.
In a publicity coup, Blakeman’s edict was also backed by one of the world’s most famous transgender people, Caitlyn Jenner, who won the Olympic gold medal in the 1976 decathlon as the former Bruce Jenner. Jenner appeared alongside Blakeman at a press conference last week.
Biological female athletes applauded Blakeman, too.
“I took a risk and decided to write about how biological men should NOT be allowed in women’s sports because of the proven biological differences, the unfairness, and so much more,” said a local high-school female student. “I know it was probably a tough decision to actually go through with banning transgenders from our sports but I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you did.
“I am from Suffolk County but it makes me feel confident that our society will be able to look past the media and actually realize how transgenders in our sports is hurting us more than helping. Thank you so much Sir. Have a GREAT day!!!” she said.
Blakeman’s trans ban is opposed by state Attorney General Letitia James, who sent him a “cease and desist” order, claiming the policy discriminates against trans athletes and violates the state’s human-rights and civil-rights laws. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in a bid to overturn the edict on those grounds.
Blakeman countersued AG James in federal court, insisting the trans ban is legal because it protects the rights of biological women.
The issue is a hot-button one both nationally and elsewhere locally.
Manhattan’s largest neighborhood school board district last week approved a resolution that could lead to a local ban on transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Community Education Council District 2, which serves Manhattan from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side, passed the controversial measure in an 8-3 vote that demands the city’s Department of Education allow a public review of its policy allowing transgender girls to play female sports.
The resolution is advisory and could be rejected by Mayor Eric Adams, schools Chancellor David Banks and the citywide Panel for Educational Policy, which has the final say.
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Dutch darts players quit national women's team over transgender teammate
Darts players Anca Zijlstra and Aileen de Graaf have announced their departure from the Dutch women's darts team because they refuse to team up with trans woman Noa-Lynn van Leuven.
Zijlstra announced she was quitting the team in a post on Facebook.
"The moment you're embarrassed to be a part of the Dutch Team, because a biological man is playing in the women's team, it's time to go," she wrote.
"I have tried to accept this, but I can not condone or justify this.
"I think that with sports there has to be an equal and level playing field which is to be used and accepted in good faith. After all, we have worked so hard to be relevant and competitive in this sport."
De Graaf, who was also on the Dutch national team, commented on the post, announcing her departure too.
"At some point you have to make decisions if something goes against your feelings," she wrote.
"You have to do what feels right for you. Hence my decision to also leave the Dutch team."
Van Leuven told Dutch national broadcaster NOS the controversy had taken an emotional toll.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-25/dutch-darts-players-quit-over-transgender-teammate/103627072
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Canada is the country to watch for conservatives
Pierre Poilievre is the gambler’s choice to become Canada’s next Prime Minister and he is becoming an international political superstar in the process. With Justin Trudeau’s government looking worse by the week, Canadians are buying into Poilievre’s blend of traditional conservative principles and economic populist flavour.
If polling trends hold, Poilievre’s Conservative Party will win the next election with a super-majority not witnessed since the 1980s. How could stereotypically progressive Canada become the home of a revitalised conservatism?
Context is a major part of it. Trudeau’s progressive government has presided over a toxic stew of lagging productivity, across-the-board inflation, and paycheques that have not kept up.
Even if wages have modestly risen in the past year, and the rise of inflation has slowed, it is not enough to dull the indignity of a young couple forking over almost 50 AUD for a greasy fast-food meal. The dispiriting cost of living remains a fact that Trudeau’s own Cabinet ministers will acknowledge.
Monthly payments for new automobiles are historically bruising, and above all, the middle-class dream of owning property requires a considerable fortune. The latter is made worse by exorbitant monthly rents making it nearly impossible to properly save for a down-payment.
For Australian readers, perhaps this sounds familiar.
Instead of changing course, Trudeau’s government seems intent on tripling down on its ambitious and aimless social democratic agenda. More than shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, they’re stacking as many as possible and hoping the ship will stay afloat.
Trudeau is not the root cause of all these problems, but his government’s policies have done little to soften them, let alone fix them. His supporters have settled on a strategy of telling Canadians that they’re actually doing very well despite everything, and should be glad about it.
Unsurprisingly, Canadians appear far more enthusiastic for Poilievre’s stridently different alternative. That alternative is certainly not the mouldy, religiously pro-business rhetoric of the 1980s, reheated and re-served ad nauseam for 40 years.
The formula of Poilievre’s appeal is contained in a book titled Right Here, Right Now, published in 2018. It was written by his old boss Stephen Harper, Canada’s former Conservative Prime Minister. One of Harper’s main points is a call for conservatives to stake out the middle ground between traditional political principles and full-blown populism.
‘Reform conservatism to address the issues that are driving the populist upheaval,’ urged Harper in the book. ‘That is to say, adapt conservatism to the practical concerns, interests, and aspirations of working and middle-class people.’
Someone on Poilievre’s team has certainly read the book many times. The recommendations of Right Here, Right Now are clearly reflected in Poilievre’s agenda, like his plan to restore affordable, or perhaps less unaffordable, housing to Canada.
Poilievre has pledged to slash the taxes and red tape that discourage the building of new housing. He had also promised to punish municipalities that block new housing starts, and to sell federally-owned buildings for conversion into affordable units.
In effect, Poilievre is pledging to thumb the eyes of those who constrict market forces, and to cheapen and streamline the process of building new homes. This is fully aligned with traditional faith in the market by presenting a tailored, market-oriented solution, rather than merely repeating your uncle’s conservative ramblings.
Poilievre has promised to tie federal funding for municipalities to their yearly housing starts. Any municipality that misses the annual target of increasing the local housing supply by 15 per cent will have their funding clawed back, while those exceeding the 15 per cent will receive a bonus.
There is palpable anger in Canada over the housing market’s brutality. Promising accountability for the ‘gatekeepers’ who helped cause the housing crisis satisfies a justified and populist anger.
Critics of Poilievre have slammed the plan as poorly conceived, but Canadians appear to like that the Conservatives have hatched a bold plan in the first place.
After Poilievre’s populist and popular rhetoric on housing Trudeau’s government released their own affordability plan, but there is no doubt that Poilievre has led the debate. The increasingly unpopular government has not escaped the perception that they are playing catch up with the Conservatives on affordability.
On the topic of affordability, Canadians pay some of the highest cellular phone bills in the world, to the tune of over AUD 50 per month on average. Canada’s telecommunications giants have bathed in a warm protectionist bath since 1994, resulting in no more than three major carriers on the Canadian market.
With near-criminally high cell phone bills, Poilievre has promised to open the market for more competition so Canadians can enjoy more dynamic and diverse pricing. Do not expect Canada’s artificially enriched telecommunications giants to be an ally of Poilievre’s Conservatives.
For the corporate world, their formerly automatic alliance with the centre-right has been shattered. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is feuding with Disney, and the London financial establishment fiercely opposed the Tory-led Brexit.
In an address to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade earlier this month, Poilievre slammed corporate lobbyists in the national capital who sucked up the Trudeau government and never pushed back against its policies.
Poilievre declared that natural resource giants would have to justify any attention paid to it under a future Conservative government. He praised his Vancouver audience for being productive and worthy economic players, unlike their Ottawa counterparts.
It may surprise many that a conservative politician would establish that kind of relationship with big business. Nonetheless, is it not keeping with free-enterprise principles to demand that companies demonstrate their economic value before getting special attention?
In Right Here, Right Now, Stephen Harper wrote that conservatives need to adapt to a changed world.
‘This does not mean changing our core beliefs. It means applying them in ways that are relevant now. It means shifting from the macroeconomic issues of more than 30 years ago to the challenges emerging today,’ wrote Harper.
Poilievre is applying this to his Conservative Party, even if it still must win the next federal election. Even so, he is disproving that conservatism must reform itself to appeal to Guardian subscribers, be the slavish voice of the corporate world, or abandon its principles altogether in favour of right-wing authoritarianism.
For those in Australia and elsewhere wondering how to push back against their progressive political rivals, Canada is the country to watch.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/canada-is-the-country-to-watch-for-conservatives/
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25 March, 2024
I was wrong
I was having a chat with my son about Christianity recently. We were both religious in our early years but are now atheists. We have however had enough contact with Christianity for us both to regard it as "a good thing". More precisely, we agree that in our present time of all values and rules being seriously challenged, Christianity provides guidelines for behaviour that can guide us safely through the large and small decisions of modern life
I certainly experienced that personally. I was 17 in 1960 and the 60s was another era of all values being challenged and all customs questioned. It was a great era of drug and alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity -- "free love". Many young people went off the rails in that era and were permanently damaged in various ways. I particularly member the vagueness of mind and speech of pot-heads.
But I was by that time already firmly ensconced in a very evangelical form of Christianity that demanded adherence to Biblical standards of behaviour. And I enjoyed it! I knew who and where I was and what to do and not do. I had certaintly and fellowship. It is still a warm memory. And to this day I do try to live a Christian life, even if I no longer share the religion behind it.
So I came out of the 60s in the army, with a degree, in good health, with substantial savings and with no addictions. I was of course teetotal. And there were various female persons whose company I enjoyed. I became an atheist at around 19 years of age but by then Christianity had been good to me when I needed it.
My fundamentalist background still influenced my thinking in some ways, however. In particular, the Church of England has always had a weird fascination for me. It is about as opposite to Christianity as I had known and practiced it as could be. It had the form of a Christian church but seemed an empty shell by my standards. What kept such a strange institution going?
In particular, their permissiveness towards homosexuality seemed simply anti-Christian to me. There are such strong and repeated condemnations of it in the Bible that I had to regard the C of E as a pretend church, a pretend form of Christianity, with a higher value for "bells and smells" than for the Bible. Central Christian doctrines of redemptoion and salvation were mentioned by them only in passing and then with some embarrasment. Someone once said that all you need to be an Anglican is to have good taste and that seemed to sum it up to me
But I now think I was too hasty. My son pointed out to me that attitude to homosexuality is only the tiniest part of the Christian message and that in other ways the C of E and other mainstream churches did still preach a lot of the Christian message. They have helped keep some awareness of Christianity alive. In particular they actually took the Christian message to homosexuals. So even in a diluted form, receiving the Christian message did create an awareness of a set of guidelines that could offer a way through the totally challenged values in modern life. I now see the C of E as missionaries -- missionaries to non-Christians and wobbly Christians. I now think they do a good work and can even forgive their "bells and smells"
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Is reform of government spending bloat possible?
By Theodore Dalrymple
President Javier Milei of Argentina has had a certain degree of success already with his radical economic policies: That is, if certain macroeconomic statistics are a sign of success. Inflation, though still very high, has declined somewhat. The budget has been in surplus for the last two months. The official exchange rate for the peso is beginning to approximate its rate on the open market, something that has not happened for a long time.
But for how long? It remains to be seen whether these successes can be maintained, for there are problems ahead both economic and political. Argentina has for decades stubbornly pursued such disastrous economic policies that any rectification is now bound to be painful and to result in at least temporary hardship for many. People who are already hard up will not take kindly to sacrifices for the sake of a supposed and still uncertain long-term advantage (no one can eat a balanced budget), and when people are living precariously, they cling to any tiny privileges or subsidies as the shipwrecked cling to whatever floating object they can find, and never mind that the grant of those privileges or subsidies caused the problem in the first place.
Those who organized the disaster will take advantage of the inevitable discontent arising from efforts to overcome it, for if there is one thing that they are skilled in, it is demagoguery. Everything about them is demagogic, from their reading of history to their opposition to any kind of real change. Their aim is the preservation of their power and their hold over the people at all costs; Mr. Milei is a real threat to them and they are not going to surrender easily. Moreover, it is likely that Mr. Milei will himself make terrible mistakes, because all powerful people do so before long. His decision, albeit quickly reversed, to accept a huge augmentation in his pay while so many Argentinians are growing poorer was a very foolish error.
But Argentina is far from the only country in dire straits. The problems both of Britain and France strongly resemble those of Argentina, though perhaps they are not (yet) so dramatic. But they too find themselves in a situation in which reform is desperately needed. Indeed, they are in Argentina’s bind: Reform is imperative; reform is impossible.
Reform is imperative for economic reasons. The governments of both countries have undertaken obligations that they cannot meet out of their own resources and increasingly must resort to borrowing to meet some other way. In a recent article in the newspaper Le Figaro, the former candidate for the French presidency, Eric Zemmour, pointed out that the French budget for the police, armed forces, and administration of justice combined now constitutes between them only a very small proportion of the whole state budget, as if the maintenance of the country’s peace, internal and external, were but some kind of minor task for the state, an afterthought, something that it can afford to attend to only once the demand for children’s creches or free abortions has been met. And unfortunately, servicing the debt that has been contracted in the meantime largely to pay for all the creches, abortions, etcetera, is likely to become the single largest call on government expenditure.
The situation in Britain is even worse, because of the greater incompetence and corruption of its public service than that of France, combined latterly with increasing costs and inefficiencies imposed by obedience to politically correct goals.
But reform is impossible because so many people have now become dependent on the state, either directly because the state pays them to do nothing, or because they are employed by the state, or because the enterprise or business for which they work is employed by the state, such that the difference between the public and the private sector is increasingly blurred. When I look around me, for example, I see a neighbor, the owner of a prosperous private consultancy whose business is helping people to obtain subsidies from various levels of government. I came across another consultancy whose business was to assist local government in reducing their payment of taxes that the central government imposes on their suppliers.
It follows that attempts to reduce government expenditure, imperatively necessary for financial reasons, would, if carried out, cause genuine hardship or discomfort to many. And if there is one thing that a modern democracy promises its members, it is increasing comfort, or at the very least the avoidance of discomfort. It would not be very difficult to trigger social discontent and violence on a large scale.
There is a kind of dialectic at work here: First, the government makes people dependent on it; then the government becomes dependent on the people whom it has made dependent on it. From this infernal cycle, it is not easy to escape. The former head of the European Commission, Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, once said, of European politicians, “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
Mr. Milei came to power with a clear majority because the situation in Argentina was so bad that it was obvious to a large proportion of the population that something in the country had to change, and change drastically. But if 55 percent of Argentinians voted for him, 45 percent did not; and while psephologists might consider this a very large difference, I do not think it would take very much for it to melt away and reverse. After all, euphoria has more in common with despair and anger than with good sense. Most of us live in the short term and are reluctant enough to make sacrifices for our own good, let alone for the good of others.
People in Britain and France should pay close attention to what is happening in Argentina, for it is a laboratory for their own future. There are differences of course; the French economy, for example, has already in effect been dollarized by its adherence to a currency that it does not control, the euro.
Incidentally, I saw an unintentionally funny line in an article about Argentina’s proposed dollarization. It would, it said, halt Argentina’s addiction to the money printing machine. Ha! Try telling that to an American monetarist!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/is-reform-possible-5611408
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Fitness organization pays a price for letting gender-confused men into its women's locker rooms
But only a sharp drop-off in their female membership is likely to change their minds
At Planet Fitness, you can exercise everything but your right to privacy.
That’s the message customers are taking to heart after an Alaskan woman had her membership revoked for complaining about a man in the women’s locker room.
The gym is a “no judgment zone,” Patricia Silva was told. Well, it’s about to become a profit-free zone, too, thanks to angry Americans who are putting the company’s stock in a $400 million free-fall.
In a perfect snapshot of where corporate wokeness will lead these days, the media is reporting that within five days of Silva’s story hitting social media, Planet Fitness lost almost a half-billion dollars in value—crashing 7.8% in less than a week. “The company’s value dropped from $5.3 billion on March 14 to $4.9 billion on March 19,” reports show, “and its shares are down by 13.59% compared to a month ago.”
Despite the pushback, the business stubbornly stuck by the mixed-sex policy, insisting that it doesn’t matter if members felt uncomfortable. “This discomfort,” the company’s operational manual argues, “is not a reason to deny access to the transgender member.”
In a video she took from the Fairbanks location, Silva said, “I just came out of Planet Fitness. There is a man shaving in the women’s bathroom,” viewers find out later after she posts a picture.
“I love him in Christ,” she makes clear. “He is a spiritual being having a human experience. He doesn’t like his gender so he wants to be a woman, but I’m not comfortable with him shaving in my bathroom. I just thought I’d say it out loud.”
When Silva confronted the man in the restroom, he replied, “Well, I’m LGB … .” She interrupted, “But you’re a man invading my space!” She ultimately walked away and went to the front desk. “‘Are you aware that there is a MAN shaving in the women’s bathroom?’” she asked. “‘ … I’m not OK with that.’ The two men standing at the desk, put their heads down and their tails between their legs!” Silva recounted. “As I was walking out the door … at my back, a woman shouts, ‘It’s a girl!’ … I shouted back, ‘It’s a man!’”
Silva was especially irate that a young girl, who “could have been 12 years old,” was exposed to the same man. She stood in the same room in a towel and “kind of freaked out.”
The next day, she posted on Facebook that she got a call from Planet Fitness “announcing that they have chosen to cancel my membership rather than protect [young] girls and women … that enter the women’s locker room from men with a penis. … Despicable.”
And yet, even now, flooded with complaints and nationwide criticism, the company stands by its decision, telling Libs of TikTok that the staff will “work with members and employees to address this discomfort [sharing facilities with transgender members] and to foster a climate of understanding consistent with the ‘Judgment Free’ character of Planet Fitness.”
Then, doubling down, the business vowed to continue calling trans-identifying customers by their preferred pronouns and “other terms consistent with their self-reported gender identity, if reasonably known to the Planet Fitness staff.”
None of this should come as a surprise, since the company has a long and unflattering past of siding with trans activists over women who feel victimized by their male presence. In 2015, Yvette Cormier, a member of a Michigan branch, had the exact same experience—well before the movement had risen to the public prominence it has now.
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Gay conversion banned in NSW after all-night debate
It seems that most talk is unaffected by this bill so that is good but some more active therapy offered by non-psychologists will clearly be banned. That clearly affects the offerings of certain church-based groups.
What is unclear is if qualified pychologists are allowed to offer more than talk. Are active therapies such as behaviour therapy allowed? Such therapies can be very effective. Restrictions on proven active therapy are unfair to the minority who WANT all available help towards normalizing their feelings. Not all homosexuals are happy about the way they are
Gay conversion practices will be banned in NSW after the state’s parliament passed new laws following a marathon debate that stretched into the early hours of Friday morning.
Bleary-eyed members of the upper house supported Labor’s Conversion Practices Ban bill just after 6.30am on Friday after debate kicked off at 11pm on Thursday with a number of attempted amendments from the Coalition, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and the Greens.
However, the government had stressed it would not be changing its bill and when it returned to the lower house just before 7am, NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley said, “history is made”.
“Our friends in the LBTQ+ community deserve that history,” Daley told parliament, thanking MPs for the “respectful way in which this debate has been conducted”.
The ban, which was the focus of months-long discussions between the government, LGBTQ advocacy groups and religious organisations, will outlaw practices that attempt to change or suppress a person’s sexual identity, following a 12-month introduction period. It will also be illegal to take someone outside of NSW to undergo conversion therapies.
NSW follows Victoria and the ACT, where conversion therapy has already been outlawed.
The bill has some exceptions for religious groups, meaning, for example, it is still legal to give a religious sermon that preaches against homosexuality or pray with someone experiencing same-sex attraction.
Exemptions are also given to registered psychologists and families, with conversations in those settings still legal under the bill.
NSW Premier Chris Minns said he was comfortable with the exemptions. “The exemptions relate to medical professionals and counsellors, those that are governed by a professional association … There [are] also exemptions for families because we recognise parents are primarily responsible for raising their kids and they need to be able to have honest conversations with their children,” he said on 2GB on Friday morning.
Independent MP Alex Greenwich, who withdrew his own version of a bill to ban the practice last year to work with the government on its own legislation, celebrated the news outside Parliament on Friday morning.
“NSW is waking up as a safer place for LGBTQ people today,” he said, adding that the bill sends “a really clear message that LGBTQ people are loved, are beautiful, and now, any futile attempts to change who we are is against the law”.
Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown said the passing of this legislation shows that governments shouldn’t be afraid of pursuing LGBTQ reform.
“This is a historic day and this law will save lives,” she said, saying conversion practices are “alive and well in NSW”, with people aged in their 20s coming forward as victims of these practices in recent years.
Teddy Cook, the director of community health at ACON and a survivor of conversion practices, praised the legislation for being inclusive of transgender Australians.
“We truly wake up today with more pride and more euphoria than the state has perhaps ever experienced,” he said.
“As a proud trans man, I wake up here after a huge night knowing that this state is telling us loud and clear that we are perfect.”
Announcing the news outside Parliament on Friday morning, Penny Sharpe, the leader of the government in the upper house, said the passing of the bill was “a very long time coming”.
“It’s been many years of advocacy for many people,” she said.
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24 March, 2024
The psychological problems among modern youth
We are told below that the recent rise in anxiety and depression among young people can be attributed to the increased use of social media. There is a case to be made that media generally have become more depressing. Great horrors are now more often reported in the news and they are more often accompanied by vivid graphics. But social media is a distinct subset of the media and we are told that social media in particular is a malign influence. Perhaps as a psychologist with a lot of publications in the field of anxiety and other psychological problems, I can be allowed to doubt that and suggest that there is another rather obvious explanation for poor mental health among young people
http://jonjayray.com/anxiety.html
http://jonjayray.com/alien.html
http://jonjayray.com/dogma.html
The use of social media by the young is certainly notable and a very large part of modern experience. We have very little history to guide us about it, which makes it a handy whipping boy. But the idea that improved communication between people is bad is surely misanthropic and seems contrary to a lot of experience. POOR communication is normally blamed for a lot of things.
We are told that online bullying is now a big problem and I have no doubt that it is frequent and can severe consequences. But it is typical one-eyed Leftism to look at just one one half of a problem. At least the kid these days is physically safe when the bullying concerned occurs, whereas in a less wired world the kid would be outdoors somewhere being exposed to the possibility of physical bullying. Maybe a case can be made that online bullying is more harmful than physical bullying but no-one seems to have even tried to make that case and it seems intrinsically unlikely. Kids have always bullied one another and always will. And there have always been and still are severe consequences from some instances of it
So I think we have here in the attack on social media another case of something being suspected because it is popular, a familiar reaction from the Left, a reaction that is distracting our attention from the real problem
I think the problem we see has a rather obvious real cause: The long march through the institutions by feminism is now complete. From all sides the kids are now being told that their natural reactions are wrong. Masculinity is toxic and women should want careers, not families. How disorienting and confusing that must be! And disorientation and confusion is surely what we are seeing. From all sides kids are being told that they are wrong in their feelings. No wonder they are depressed!
And now we have transgenderism as an even more sweeping attack on instinctive sex roles. Kids are told that there is really no such thing as male and female. You can be anything you want and saying otherwise can get you seriously attacked. Just feeling clearly male or female is wrong and feeling ambivalent is highly praised. No wonder the kids are confused and disoriented! Confusion is thrust upon them
As usual, Leftist thinking is highly destructive and grievously so for kids growing up today
Is there any cure for that? Only Christianity is obvious. Transgenderism is firmly rejected in the Bible: Genesis 5:2 says "Male and female He created them ..." and alternative sexuality is also firmly rejected: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them". (Levitius 20:13). St Paul lifted the death penalty on homosexuality (Romans 1 & 2) but it is clear that the Bible favours traditional sex roles.
So it should be no surprise that Christians seem to be shielded from the pernicious effects of Left-dominated conventional thinking, They are routinely found to be in better mental health. The Nurses' Health Study demonstrated that those who attended any weekly religious services were 84% less likely to complete suicide compared with the never-attenders. Among Roman Catholics, those who attended once or more per week were 95% less likely to complete suicide than those who attended less frequently. So I am rather glad that I spent my teenage years in the grip of Christian fundamentalism
By Sophie McBain
At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”.
Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer “play-based”, it’s “phone-based”. Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm.
Haidt is a professor at New York University and frequently collaborates with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first to attribute rising rates of mental illness among gen Z (those born in the mid to late 1990s) to smartphones. Sceptics of this research sometimes argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, between climate change, rising inequality, global conflict and political perma-crisis. But Haidt makes his case persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, and collective crises don’t typically produce individual psychological ones, perhaps because they often engender a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose. Instead, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and social media use is mounting.
The Anxious Generation ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools
The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that, among girls especially, rates of depression rose in tandem with hours spent on social media. Girls who spent more than five hours a day on social media were three times more likely to become depressed than those who didn’t use it at all. This study alone isn’t enough to prove that social media causes depression (it’s possible that depressed people spend more time online) – but there’s more. Facebook was initially offered only to students at a small number of universities, so one study compared the mental health of students at institutions with Facebook with those who didn’t yet have social media – and found that Facebook increased poor mental health on campus. Five other studies have demonstrated a link between the arrival of high-speed internet and rising rates of mental illness.
So why might “phone-based” childhoods have this effect? Smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, “forever elsewhere”. Teens are not only the most compulsive smartphone users – one 2022 Pew Media report found that 46% of them are online “almost constantly” – but they are also the most vulnerable, partly because adolescence is a period of rapid social and emotional development. Smartphones are “experience blockers”, Haidt writes: consider how many enriching activities were displaced when young people began spending hours a day online, chasing likes, following vapid influencers, substituting the richness of real-life friendship with shallow online communication. Social media encourages constant social comparison, and it can be unforgiving and cruel. These observations might sound old-fashioned, but they are also true. What middle-aged adult doesn’t feel relief to have grown up before smartphones? Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are.
One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events – or at least to coverage of them. Could the internet’s 24-hour news cycle, its emotional fever-pitch and the sharing of graphic frontline footage, be contributing to a permanent sense of threat? It has certainly distorted our perspective on current affairs, amplifying people’s sense of personal danger. As the Oxford climate scientist Hannah Ritchie observed in her recent book, Not the End of the World, death rates from natural disasters have fallen tenfold in the past century, but almost everyone thinks they have risen. It’s also clear that today’s defining crises, such as the pandemic and climate change, won’t necessarily deepen social solidarity in an era of filter bubbles and “alternative facts”.
Haidt’s theory that overprotective parents are contributing to the mental health crisis is much less substantiated than his research on phones. He argues that children are “antifragile”: like saplings that need to be buffeted by winds in order to grow properly, they need to experience setbacks to develop resilience. Mollycoddled kids become defensive and insecure, Haidt writes, starting to view ideas as dangerous and demanding safety from beliefs they find challenging. This is an argument he advanced in his 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. In the years since, it has become painfully apparent that the groups most likely to treat ideas as dangerous are the ultra-conservatives who organise book bans – and most of these rightwing activists are old enough to have enjoyed free-range childhoods themselves. I actually agree with Haidt that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, but he overstates his case.
The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media. As well as calling for school phone bans, Haidt argues that governments should legally assert that tech companies have a duty of care to young people, the age of internet adulthood should be raised to 16, and companies forced to institute proper age verification – all eminently sensible and long overdue interventions.
I felt a gnawing anxiety as I read the book, thinking not only of my three young children, who I’d like to keep away from the badlands of social media for as long as possible, but also of the uncounted hours I have spent on my phone, mindlessly scrolling. “There’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart,” Haidt writes, paraphrasing the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” Maybe we ought to start thinking more about all the things we didn’t look at, all the people we didn’t speak to, all the thoughts we didn’t allow ourselves to finish, because we were glued to our stupid smartphones.
At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”.
Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer “play-based”, it’s “phone-based”. Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm.
Haidt is a professor at New York University and frequently collaborates with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first to attribute rising rates of mental illness among gen Z (those born in the mid to late 1990s) to smartphones. Sceptics of this research sometimes argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, between climate change, rising inequality, global conflict and political perma-crisis. But Haidt makes his case persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, and collective crises don’t typically produce individual psychological ones, perhaps because they often engender a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose. Instead, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and social media use is mounting.
The Anxious Generation ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools
The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that, among girls especially, rates of depression rose in tandem with hours spent on social media. Girls who spent more than five hours a day on social media were three times more likely to become depressed than those who didn’t use it at all. This study alone isn’t enough to prove that social media causes depression (it’s possible that depressed people spend more time online) – but there’s more. Facebook was initially offered only to students at a small number of universities, so one study compared the mental health of students at institutions with Facebook with those who didn’t yet have social media – and found that Facebook increased poor mental health on campus. Five other studies have demonstrated a link between the arrival of high-speed internet and rising rates of mental illness.
So why might “phone-based” childhoods have this effect? Smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, “forever elsewhere”. Teens are not only the most compulsive smartphone users – one 2022 Pew Media report found that 46% of them are online “almost constantly” – but they are also the most vulnerable, partly because adolescence is a period of rapid social and emotional development. Smartphones are “experience blockers”, Haidt writes: consider how many enriching activities were displaced when young people began spending hours a day online, chasing likes, following vapid influencers, substituting the richness of real-life friendship with shallow online communication. Social media encourages constant social comparison, and it can be unforgiving and cruel. These observations might sound old-fashioned, but they are also true. What middle-aged adult doesn’t feel relief to have grown up before smartphones? Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are.
One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events – or at least to coverage of them. Could the internet’s 24-hour news cycle, its emotional fever-pitch and the sharing of graphic frontline footage, be contributing to a permanent sense of threat? It has certainly distorted our perspective on current affairs, amplifying people’s sense of personal danger. As the Oxford climate scientist Hannah Ritchie observed in her recent book, Not the End of the World, death rates from natural disasters have fallen tenfold in the past century, but almost everyone thinks they have risen. It’s also clear that today’s defining crises, such as the pandemic and climate change, won’t necessarily deepen social solidarity in an era of filter bubbles and “alternative facts”.
Haidt’s theory that overprotective parents are contributing to the mental health crisis is much less substantiated than his research on phones. He argues that children are “antifragile”: like saplings that need to be buffeted by winds in order to grow properly, they need to experience setbacks to develop resilience. Mollycoddled kids become defensive and insecure, Haidt writes, starting to view ideas as dangerous and demanding safety from beliefs they find challenging. This is an argument he advanced in his 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. In the years since, it has become painfully apparent that the groups most likely to treat ideas as dangerous are the ultra-conservatives who organise book bans – and most of these rightwing activists are old enough to have enjoyed free-range childhoods themselves. I actually agree with Haidt that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, but he overstates his case.
The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media. As well as calling for school phone bans, Haidt argues that governments should legally assert that tech companies have a duty of care to young people, the age of internet adulthood should be raised to 16, and companies forced to institute proper age verification – all eminently sensible and long overdue interventions.
I felt a gnawing anxiety as I read the book, thinking not only of my three young children, who I’d like to keep away from the badlands of social media for as long as possible, but also of the uncounted hours I have spent on my phone, mindlessly scrolling. “There’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart,” Haidt writes, paraphrasing the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” Maybe we ought to start thinking more about all the things we didn’t look at, all the people we didn’t speak to, all the thoughts we didn’t allow ourselves to finish, because we were glued to our stupid smartphones.
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Viagra might make you live LONGER, scientists discover - but they admit they've got no idea why
This is not a strong study methodologically but I would be rather pleased if there is something in it. I took Viagra with entirely satisfactory results for a number of years when I was younger and even a couple of times recently
Sildenafil, the powerful chemical that gives men erections, may have a 'beneficial effect on lifespan', French and Swiss researchers say.
Men prescribed the impotency drug were found to be 15 per cent less likely to die during the course of the study which examined 40 years of data.
The apparent life-extending effects were so clear that the team claimed the results 'warrant further investigation'.
Medical records of around 500,000 Brits were analysed in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed — the process that irons out any flaws in the methodology.
Armed with that data, experts at biotech start-up EPITERNA could see any potential health outcomes linked to certain medications.
Most of the 400-plus drugs they assessed, which included the antibiotic amoxicillin and the cholesterol medication simvastatin, had a 'negative' effect on lifespan.
For instance, the opioid painkiller morphine was linked to a 456 per cent heightened risk of dying during the course of the study.
The researchers, working alongside experts from the universities of Zurich, Lausanne and Toulouse Hospital, said this was 'probably due to the underlying negative effect of the disease the drug is intended for'.
Conversely, experts were unable to pinpoint the exact reason why the little blue pill might help people live longer.
However, they flagged recent studies which highlighted how sildenafil may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, as well as heart disease, as being potential factors.
Similar longevity benefits were observed with atorvastatin, naproxen and estradiol, too.
Writing in their pre-print, the team said: 'These retrospective results warrant further investigation in randomized controlled trials.'
Researchers used data from the UK Biobank. Patients were aged between 37 and 73. Only 46 per cent were men.
They had to have been prescribed a drug for at least three-months for it to be included in the data, although it was unclear how often patients would be taking the medication.
Patients were matched one-to-one to a 'control' who had the same health conditions but not taking the same drug, allowing the scientists to compare any differences.
The researchers didn't detail the average period of years they followed patients for in the study.
While the researchers looked at multiple drugs, they only examined men prescribed sildenafil.
Researchers said it was impossible to determine if healthy people taking sildenafil would enjoy the same longevity-boosting effects observed in their study.
It also was not possible to determine why patients were taking sildenafil in the first place.
While famed as an impotence drug, sildenafil is also used by men and women who suffer from pulmonary hypertension — a type of high blood pressure in the arteries that supply the lungs.
The same process by which the drug increases blood flow to the penis also relaxes blood vessels in the chest to help treat the condition.
Scientists behind the study also said the dataset doesn't account for other factors which may have boosted a patient's life expectancy, such as diet or exercise.
Sildenafil became an over-the-counter medication in the UK in 2018.
The study comes a week after MailOnline revealed that popular erection pills such as Viagra and Cialis have been linked to more than 200 deaths in Britain.
None of the fatalities — all of which have occurred since 1998 — are proven to have been caused directly by the drugs.
Experts also insisted the pills are safe and many incidents could actually reflect deaths linked to sex in men with heart issues instead.
Men can buy sildenafil, and other impotence pills over the counter for as little as £15, tablets are also available online for as little as £1.30 per pill.
Millions of British men now take drugs to help impotency.
The latest NHS backed data shows 22million prescriptions for these drugs were handed out by GPs in England between 2019 and 2023, at the cost of £91million.
Medics already know drugs like sildenafil can be dangerous in some circumstances. For example, those with known heart problems are advised to avoid taking them.
Even leaflets handed out with sildenafil acknowledge cases of sudden death in men having taken the drug though it insists such cases are rare and mostly in men with heart problems.
'It is not possible to determine whether these events were directly related to sildenafil,' it also adds.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13224085/Viagra-make-live-LONGER-scientists-discover.html
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Detransitioner Explains How She Was Duped Into Transitioning
Detransitioner Camille Kiefel says that she and other victims of transgender surgeries “have been dismissed” by doctors pushing so-called gender-affirming care.
“I struggled with childhood trauma,” Kiefel told The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan. “My best friend had been raped by her brother when I was in sixth grade.”
A detransitioner is someone who attempts to transition to the opposite gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “detransitioned.” Many of these individuals, such as Kiefel, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignore biological realities in favor of radical ideology.
“For me, it was being afraid of being vulnerable and wanting to protect myself,” she said, adding:
I just started to identify with the male characters in anime manga reading … trying to reject my female identity, dressing more masculine, trying to hide my breasts and my hips, so that men wouldn’t see.
Kiefel confirmed that her father’s stories of “how men his age talk sexually about girls my age … was what started me on that.”
“It was when I was 26 that I saw a ‘gender-affirming care’ therapist, and then started to believe I was nonbinary, and then I got surgery when I was 30,” she said.
“The crazy thing is that they transitioned me into a nonbinary sex, one that doesn’t exist in nature,” she said.
“This freeing idea, with being nonbinary for many people is, like … I can just be me, and I’m not sexualized,” Kiefel explained. It was an idea that she learned in women’s studies classes, adding:
The gender ideology really co-opted it. There was this idea that you can be a third sex.
“I didn’t know what I wanted,” she said. “I just really wanted my breasts gone.”
Explaining the approval process for getting a double mastectomy, Kiefel said, “The ideology says that you can be trans and have trauma. They’re not accounting for the people who are transitioning because of trauma … it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
She explained the affirmation she received for the transition, saying, “I actually told the gender therapist what had happened to my friend and yet … but they didn’t push back at all.”
“I dealt with all these physical health issues after the surgery,” Kiefel said, “and the doctors took me seriously at first, but then became dismissive when they thought it was psychosomatic fever.”
In the face of that dismissal by the doctors, Kiefel took matters into her own hands and began working with a naturopath.
“I started adding meat back into my diet and some other holistic treatments,” she said, “and all of a sudden, I was, like, ‘Wow!’ My mental health is getting better!”
“All I needed to do was address my physical health, but nobody was doing that because … you’re depressed. … [T]hey just pegged me as someone dealing with mental illness.”
When Olohan asked Kiefel about her contact with the surgeons after she realized the mistake, the detransitioner said, “I just don’t feel comfortable reaching out to those doctors” after having experienced a doctor who treated her like she was wasting his time.
“I think a lot of detransitioners have those feelings of, like, we’ve been dismissed. I know many detransitioners who have been told that this is part of their gender journey,” Kiefel said.
Many detransitioners are suing the medical establishment, accusing doctors and therapists of manipulating them into undergoing brutal sex-change experiments.
Olohan asked Kiefel, “What would you say to doctors and therapists who are considering being a part of these so-called gender-affirming surgeries and interventions?”
“Make sure that no one who is struggling with severe mental health issues should do any of these surgeries,” Kiefel said. “They need to get their mental health under control.”
“Particularly with women who have histories with sexual trauma,” she added, “there’s a lot of them who are transitioning … . It’s partially escapism and to protect themselves. “
Olohan stated, “It sounds like we need more medical professionals that want to help detransitioners.”
Kiefel agreed: “We do.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/21/wanted-my-breasts-gone-detransitioner-duped-transitioning/
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SPLC Uses ‘Terrorist Tactics’ to Silence Dissent, Religious Freedom Lawyer Says
Mike Farris, general counsel with the National Religious Broadcasters and the founder of Patrick Henry College, says the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to be “buried down deep.”
“It’s not that they’re left-wing,” Farris told “The Daily Signal Podcast” in an interview at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in February. “They hate the principle that you’re allowed to differ, and that is un-American.”
Farris, a lawyer who has been representing clients in religious freedom and free speech cases for more than 40 years, served as president of the nonprofit Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom for five years. In 1993, he won the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia, though he lost the general election.
Farris recalls that when he started handling religious freedom cases, “I was probably among the first three full-time Christian lawyers doing this kind of work.” Now, there are four major firms and hundreds of lawyers representing clients.
He calls that a “source of encouragement” for him, but the opposition has also gotten fierce.
The SPLC, which began as a civil rights law firm representing poor people in the South and established a name for itself by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian organizations like ADF alongside Klan chapters, insinuating that they are driven by a similar form of hate. Amid a sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal in 2019, a former employee said the SPLC’s “hate” accusations are a “highly profitable scam” to scare donors into ponying up cash. The SPLC has an endowment of more than $740 million.
“They don’t care about rights. They don’t care about America,” Farris says of the SPLC. “They care about using the progressive ideology to raise a ton of money and spend it on themselves. But they’re using it by terrorist tactics. You know, terrorist tactics wrapped in a little bit of velvet.”
In 2012, a terrorist used the SPLC’s “hate map” to target the Family Research Council, a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. The council’s building manager foiled the attack by the terrorist, who later told the FBI he had planned to massacre everyone in the building.
The Family Research Council remains on the “hate map” to this day.
The SPLC claims that ADF is an “anti-LGBTQ hate group,” accusing it of having supported “forced sterilization” in France. Farris says that’s a “flat lie.”
“We wrote a brief in the European Court of Human Rights supporting the law of France,” the former ADF president explains. ADF supported France’s right “to make laws on the subject” of gender ideology, arguing “that there are areas that states get some freedom to rule, and there shouldn’t be one international standard for that.”
“The word ‘sterilization’ does not appear in our brief, ever,” Farris notes. “We never talked about it, and so somebody claims that the French law could be interpreted to force sterilization if [French people who claim to be transgender] wanted certain rights.
“We were not talking about the details of the French law, nor were we advocating that French law should be written in a particular way,” he adds. “We were just saying this is France’s choice, not the international community’s choice.”
“So, it’s a lie. It’s a flat lie,” Farris said.
He also noted that many defamation lawsuits against the SPLC end up dismissed.
“Most of the defamation cases that have gone awry against the Southern Poverty Law Center have been on the basis that what they were saying was opinion, rather than fact,” the former ADF president explained.
However, last year a federal judge rejected the SPLC’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit. D.A. King, founder of the pro-enforcement immigration reform group the Dustin Inman Society, claimed the SPLC had reason to doubt the veracity of its claim that his organization was a “hate group”—because the SPLC had previously stated that King’s group was not a “hate group.”
“If we get the right case for defamation, I’m going to be the first one to sue them—where it’s so clear it’s a statement of fact and it’s false,” Farris pledged.
Of the SPLC, he says, “They deserve to go down, and they do hurt people.”
“I think that if [judges and juries] apply the defamation law correctly, they’re going to get buried someday,” Farris predicts. “When they get buried, they need to be buried deep.”
He also shared an anecdote that he found revealing.
At a religious freedom event, Farris said that if the State Department wants to support religious freedom, “the first thing we need to do is take down the rainbow flags we were flying at embassies all over the world, because the Christians in that country see that, and they go, ‘They can’t be for religious liberty if they’re flying the rainbow flag. Because the point of the rainbow flag is to crush Christianity.'”
He recalls a “lesbian Episcopal priest from Philadelphia” who told him, “All we want is to be celebrated by everybody.”
“They want to be celebrated by everybody. Why? Because in their soul, they know it’s, they feel the pangs of sin,” Farris says.
He emphasizes that conservative Christians should defend everyone’s religious freedom.
“It’s our conservatism that makes us stand up for the rights of everybody,” the lawyer says. “You know, I believe in the rights of Buddhists because I am a Christian, not in spite of the fact that I am a Christian, but because I am a Christian.”
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21 March, 2024
Model wife reveals how brutal attack in broad daylight changed her life forever: 'I live in fear'
This woman asks a good question. I can answer it. I long ago argued that those who commit violent crimes should be permanently detained. That would eliminate most crime as most offences are committed by people who have previously offended.
https://jonjayray.tripod.com/protcomm.html
More than a decade after she was attacked by a stranger in her own street, Tahlia Giumelli has asked the grim question on the minds of so many Australian women. 'Will there ever be a time where as women, we feel safe even when walking in broad daylight?'
The model, mother-of-two and wife of South Sydney Rabbitohs player, Tom Burgess, took to Instagram to share the experience that still impacts her to this day, revisiting the moment she was attacked in broad daylight.
'14 years ago today, the day after my 17th birthday, I was walking home after school and was followed and attacked in my street at random,' she said in a post to Instagram. 'That one event would forever change my life.'
'Spending months in and out of police stations, interview rooms, working with the police to draw up a sketch and months later eventually lead to a positive ID and arrest, which would then turn into more months of trials and waiting before a sentence hearing and ultimately a jail sentence for multiple offences against women.'
In an Instagram post in 2018, Ms Giumelli spoke out about the attack and shared her anger at Australia's 'growing problem' of violence against women. The post coincided with the murder of Melbourne women, Eurydice Dixon.
Ms Giumelli said the man who attacked would go on to reoffend after he was released from jail.
'Unfortunately in the last 14 years nothing has changed, women still can't go for a run or walk without being attacked or worse as proven recently in the media.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph in 2018 she said her experiences as a teenager left her with post-traumatic stress disorder, and nightmares.
'I live in fear. I live in fear because it has happened to me and it is still on the rise,' Ms Giumelli said. 'I have a six-foot five (196cm), built boyfriend and I am still scared. 'I will always look behind me, I will never walk at night.'
Ms Giumelli said as a mother, she is now forced to teach her daughters to remain aware of their surroundings at all times, simply by virtue of being born female.
'Now as a mum of two girls, it's my duty to teach them to constantly be alert to the dangers around them and to teach them the confidence to defend themselves because they are female,' she said.
'To think 14 years on, women are still as vulnerable as ever.'
Ms Giumelli posed the question to her followers: 'When (will) we stop feeling vulnerable because of our gender.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13220817/Tahlia-Giumelli-speaks-moment-changed-life.html
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Brave bus driver who stepped in to help teenager who was allegedly bashed and robbed by a gang is SACKED
Forbidding employees from intervening to stop crime is a very "woke" and totally obnoxious policy
A bus driver who tried to help a teenager who was allegedly being robbed and bashed has been sacked.
The driver was at the wheel of the 250 bus in the Brisbane suburb of Cleveland at about 1pm on February 18 when three teenagers boarded the vehicle, Redlands Community News reported.
The youths allegedly took off with the victim's possessions, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) said, and the teenager chased after them.
But when the youngster was allegedly attacked by the group, the driver stepped in.
'The driver intervened by verbally and physically separating the youths to prevent a further attack,' a union spokesman said.
TWU Queensland Director of Organising Josh Millroy said the bus driver was later fired for his actions by Transdev, which operates bus transport in Brisbane.
'The driver bravely intervened in the (alleged) violent assault and protected their passenger but was subsequently stood down and later had his employment terminated for misconduct,' Mr Milroy said.
'This driver should be praised for standing up … and protecting their passengers, not punished for having the bravery to act.'
Queensland Police said a 16-year-old boy had been charged with attempted robbery in company and he faced Cleveland Children's Court on March 1.
A 15-year-old boy was cautioned. Police are still investigating.
'Safety is paramount on board all our services, this is why our drivers are professionally trained in all aspects of heavy vehicle transport from driving, customer service to de-escalation training,' a Transdev spokesman said.
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I live in Finland, this is why it's NOT the best place to live despite what the world happiness rankings say!
It's that time of the year again: crappy weather and people sliding around in the Helsinki slush – and the seemingly inevitable confirmation that Finland is, yet again, the happiest place on the planet.
For the seventh year in a row, Finland has landed the top spot in the annual World Happiness Report, followed by its northern neighbours Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.
The stats supporting this conclusion are based on the Gallup World Poll covering more than 140 countries.
Nobody is more skeptical than the Finns about the notion that we are the world’s happiest people.
Yes, we do have speeding fines that are based on income, and probably the highest concentration of metal bands in the world. But being the happiest seems like a bit of an overstatement.
The recently elected Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, took to the social media website X to share his reasons for the country’s success – basically, nature, trust and education.
But then he would say that, having a untypically optimistic personality and an annoyingly positive approach to life and everything. Begrudgingly, I have to agree with him on these three topics, but only to some extent.
We actually love our reputation for having the best educational system, but also let's be loud and clear about the fact that the latest PISA results (Program for International Student Assessment) reveal that performance in Finland has collapsed even though it remains above average.
A sustainable and strong economy? Not really. In less than three months Finland has had two major political strikes affecting many sectors of the economy, and the government and trade unions are still failing to negotiate a happy way forward.
And let's not forget that Finland used to have one of the highest suicide rates in the world thanks to alcohol abuse and antidepressants. These days the suicide rates have been halved but it is still slightly higher than the EU average.
For some reason, the Finnish youth are now failing to follow in the drunken footsteps of the previous generations.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has added to our sense of insecurity. We have even joined NATO.
The 1340 kilometres long border with our annoyingly expansionist neighbour is currently closed because the wise men in the Kremlin decided to start funnelling migrants to the border.
It's quite annoying for all the business near the border that depended on tourism from Russia.
So I would say that Finland is definitely not among the unhappiest countries in the world, but we still have some work to do before the average Pekka would agree with the UN-sponsored happiness report.
However, if and when Russia loses the war in Ukraine and is forced to withdraw with its tail firmly between those wobbly imperialist legs, then we definitely would actually be very happy.
So happy, in fact, that the happiness results for the next decade or two would be a foregone conclusion.
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Once again, achieving the feminist dream turns out to be a nightmare
In the end it was not what she wanted at all
A high-flying financial services executive has described the moment her life fell apart while looking at herself in billionaire James Packer's bathroom mirror.
By age 30, Jo Wagstaff was responsible for a $40million budget and 150 staff working as an executive at wealth management firm Colonial First State across brand, marketing, product and client services.
She was then poached to help improve the Packer-controlled Challenger Financial Services Group, one of the Australian Stock Exchange's 200 largest companies.
Wagstaff had made her way to the top of the male-dominated financial services industry by age 32 and thought she had everything she wanted.
She drove a brand-new BMW paid for with cash, flew business class, and wore designer clothes.
Wagstaff and her investment banker husband had a healthy 14-month-old boy and were building their dream home on Sydney's lower north shore.
You’ve made it honey. You did what you set out to do. You showed them.
Then one day her whole perfect world came to a crashing halt.
Wagstaff, who is now an international leadership coach, mentor and mental health/ mindfulness speaker, details how her old life unravelled in her new book Lead Like You.
The last evening of that existence began in a corner office on the top floor of an office building with spectacular views over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House.
Ahead of a meeting at Packer's multimillion-dollar Bondi pad, Wagstaff's assistant brought her a black lace Collette Dinnigan dress and a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes.
Dressed for success, Wagstaff took a lift down to a waiting limousine which took her to the front door of Packer's beachfront apartment.
There she was welcomed by Packer and joined her male business colleagues for a welcome cocktail party, she recounts in the book.
Packer and his father Kerry were major shareholders in Challenger Financial Services Group and James sat on the board.
Wagstaff says in her book that arriving at Packer's home was 'a heady experience being surrounded by so much masculine intellectual horsepower'.
'I was desperate to feel safe, to feel equal, to not feel powerless,' she writes. 'To feel seen and acknowledged, to belong, to feel enough.
'Alternatively, I would try to compete with them, try to be like them - just one of the boys, living my masculine traits of doing, striving, achieving, competing.'
Wagstaff felt she had finally made it and was awestruck as Packer led her on a tour of his home.
'I vividly remember excusing myself from the group, walking past a huge, stunning fish tank and entering the powder room,' she writes.
'I looked at myself in the mirror, but this time was different. It wasn't a superficial glance to check if I looked attractive enough.
'I looked deep into my own eyes, and said out loud, "You’ve made it honey. You did what you set out to do. You showed them".'
At the same time, Wagstaff saw in her reflection 'the saddest, loneliest eyes'.
'In that moment, while I was not yet ready to admit it to myself, I saw the truth,' she writes.
'I had dishonoured and abandoned myself in my need to feel liked, loved, important, successful, powerful and, ultimately, safe, particularly in a very male-dominated world.
'That was the day it all began to unravel.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13220975/James-Packer-Jo-Wagstaff-bathroom-mirror.html
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20 March, 2024
Biden’s Bloodbath: The $1 Trillion Trade Deficit With The World Has Never Been Worse
Robert Romano (below) means well but he is exaggerating the trade problem. The deficit itself is not a big problem. It simply means that foreigners are accepting greenbacks in return for real goods -- such as cars and avocados. It costs about nothing to print greenbacks so America is getting a very good deal out of it
But there is a problem if the situation affects American jobs. But that is not an immediate problem. Unemployment at the moment is very low and just about anyone who wants a job can get one.
The real problem is strategic. Does America want to lose the abiity to make a lot of things? Is it, for instance, wise for America to stop making cars? Is the immediate capacity to make cars important to Americans strategicaly?
It was in WWII. Thanks to a Mr H. Ford, America had a huge range of automobile factories for their mass market in cars and those factories could easily be switched to making military aircraft. Automobile motors and aircraft motors were basically the same. By comparison, Germany made some nice cars but only for their elites and Toyota was making bicycles
But it is different today. Car factories could be switched from making cars to making armoured personnel carriers and maybe tanks but that is not going to win any wars. The Ukraine has shown us that. They have completely wiped out Russia's tanks with just a few relatively cheap drones and missiles. They have even decimated the Russian navy and airforce,
So the stretegic argument for trade barriers has never been weaker. What will win wars now is smart technology. We are back to foot soldiering so what we can do to protect and equip our troops is the issue. And that requires brains not manufacturing. If America was exporting its Jews there might be a problem but there is not much sign of that. They certainly would not want to go to Russia and Chinese is too hard to learn. And we know about Israel at the moment.
But there can be real sociological problems from trade at times. If China wiped out the American automobile indistry with its cheaper cars, that could throw whole communities out of a job, with recovery from that being slow and difficult. And that is what Trump is talking about. He protected American steel manufacture for similar reasons when he was President. So using trade barriers to slow down social change is entirely legitimate where the change looks like being very disruptive.
“Now, if I don't get elected, it's going be a bloodbath for the whole — that's going to bet the least of it — it's going be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it.”
That was former President Donald Trump at a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio on March 16, describing the impact of Chinese dumping cars into U.S. markets via Mexican manufacturing plants.
Trump said he would not allow China to enter the U.S. auto industry and to attempt to take advantage of the U.S., Mexico and Canada (USMCA) trade agreement, “They think that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border. Let me tell you something to China. If you're listening President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal: Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans and you're going to sell the cars to us — no.”
Instead, Trump promised to put a 100 percent tariff on any Chinese cars: “We're going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those guys, if I get elected!”
Trump then warned that if he wasn’t elected, it would be a “bloodbath” on trade. He’s not wrong.
In fact, the U.S. trade in goods deficit with the world has never been greater according to U.S. Census data, ballooning to $1.07 trillion in 2021, $1.18 trillion in 2022 and $1.063 trillion in 2023, much of which can be attributed to the higher rates of inflation experienced after close to $7 trillion was printed, borrowed and spent into existence during and after the 2020 Covid pandemic.
As a result, the cost of everything including cars, apparel, oil and other goods and commodities imported has increased, widening the trade gap even as U.S. exports similarly increased in prices. And it came even as the trade deficit with China sank to $279 billion in 2023 after big spikes to $352.8 billion in 2021 and $382.3 billion in 2022 amid slower growth there and an overall drop in exports by China worldwide in 2023.
For comparison, the trade deficit with the world was $792.4 billion in 2017, $870.4 billion in 2018, $845.8. billion in 2019 and $901.5 billion in 2020. And with China it was $375.2 billion in 2017, $418.2 billion 2018, $342.6 billion in 2019 and $307.96 billion in 2020.
While in office, Trump had raised the tariff level on imports from China to 30 percent for goods and 15 percent for the other basket of goods, levels that Biden has not reduced, more or less leaving the Trump trade policy with China in effect. Now, Trump warns China is trying to get around those tariffs by manufacturing in Mexico instead.
In fact, Mexico is one of the main drivers of the trade deficit increasing in recent years according to U.S. Census data, going from $105 billion in 2021, to $130.5 billion in 2022, to $152.3 billion in 2023. For comparison, it was $69 billion in 2017, $77.7 billion in 2018, $99.4 billion in 2019 and $110.9 billion in 2020.
Overall, imports from Mexico have increased from $312 billion in 2017 to $475 billion 2023, a record.
And he warns it could be a “bloodbath” economically if Chinese capital into Mexico is not averted. Naturally, Biden seized on his opponent’s colorful language rather than talk about trade policy, with Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer stating the trade commentary had something to do with “political violence”: “This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience doubles down on his threats of political violence.”
Are we even having the same conversation in this country anymore? When Ross Perot warned of a “giant sucking sound” from Mexico in 1992, he did not mean that there was a physical, giant vacuum cleaner being set up on the border by Mexico. He was talking figuratively about jobs that would go to Mexico in the wake of the then-North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was being proposed.
Something that Trump is warning will get worse if China is allowed to set up manufacturing within the USMCA trade zone, noting that additional tariffs will be needed as China adapts to the stronger trade posture the U.S. set up after Trump was elected in the first place in 2016, promising to get tough on trade.
It might suit Trump just fine for Biden to ignore the trade issue, as Democrats did in 2016 as they pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump rejected, with the only figurative bloodbath that might occur being at the polls when the American people vote in November.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited G
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‘My four-year-old could pass’: Police fitness test mocked
A US police force has been accused of lowering its fitness standards in a bid to recruit more women, after footage of its revised “agility test” went viral online.
Tennessee’s Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) in 2021 signed up to the 30X30 Initiative, which sets a goal of US police departments increasing their representation of women to 30 per cent by 2030.
A report last week by local news station WSMV 4 outlined steps the department had taken to achieve that target, after the number of female officers rose from 11 per cent last year to 13 per cent as of February this year.
“I think we’re definitely growing so if we can just keep that momentum going I think it is definitely attainable,” MNPD’s first female director of training, Commander Tiffany Gibson, told the outlet.
“We still have some time, and we’re just going to keep working really hard to keep making sure that we get there, at least very close to it.”
Ms Gibson said one of the biggest changes the department had made to attract recruits, especially women, was replacing physical “ability tests” with “agility tests”, designed to mirror tasks in the field.
MNPD has also added lactation rooms for nursing mothers and more flexible schedules in bid to attract more recruits. That’s in addition to already existing paid maternity and sick leave.
“We’re trying to get going, possibly help sponsor our own childcare facility, I think that would be really helpful for females,” Ms Gibson added.
MNPD trainee Kaitlyn Dalena told the broadcaster, “It’s a male-dominated profession. So women are scared to take that step maybe thinking that they’re not able to do it, but you can do it if you have that right mindset.”
But footage of the MNPD’s new physical test was slammed by Daily Wire host Matt Walsh.
Departmental video showed a woman demonstrating various elements of the test, including the “chain link fence climb”, “solid wall climb”, “99 yard agility run” and “rescue simulation”.
“It looks like an obstacle course set up for third graders at recess,” the conservative commentator wrote on X.
“My four-year-old daughter could pass this test. As a resident of Nashville I can only hope that the only people committing crimes in this city are 600 pounds and have no legs. But even then they could probably roll away fast enough to escape.”
He added, “Do you think this woman would be able to run down and incapacitate any male suspect who is in even vaguely good physical shape?”
Tesla and X owner Elon Musk also weighed in. “Physical fitness tests have been lowered for the military too,” he wrote.
Speaking on his podcast, Walsh said the old “ability test” required police recruits to complete sit-ups, a 300-metre sprint and a 1.5-mile run.
“Even those standards were not all that demanding,” he said.
“If anything, in a sane world we would be talking about raising those standards. But instead we’re going in the opposite direction.”
Walsh said while some people might hear “chain link fence climb” and “solid wall climb” and think it sounded “somewhat challenging”, “what they don’t tell you is the wall and the fence are like three-and-a-half-feet high”.
“You don’t have to climb them so much as sort of skip over them,” he said.
“It’s effectively a test to make sure you’re not in a wheelchair. It’s like a parody of a physical fitness test.”
Walsh argued that “30 per cent by 2030” were “two completely arbitrary numbers that no one ever attempts to explain or justify”, even though more than 200 US law enforcement agencies had signed the pledge.
“Supposedly according to the 30X30 Initiative, women are better cops because they ‘use less force and less excessive force, and they’re named in fewer complaints and lawsuits and they’re perceived by communities as being more honest and compassionate’,” he said.
But Walsh claimed “female officers almost without exception are much less capable of doing their jobs effectively”, before playing several video clips of officers struggling to physically detain suspects.
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Salt Deficiency Could Be Life-Threatening; Here Are the Lesser-Known Dangers
Excess salt intake is normally excreted so for non-hypertensive individuals and those without cardiovascular health issues, you should be able to use as much salt as you want. I use it liberally and my blood pressure is uniformly in the healthy range for my age-- usually 140/65
We are constantly reminded of the dangers of consuming too much salt. However, some people may be unknowingly deficient in salt while simultaneously trying to reduce their salt intake—which could be as harmful as overconsumption.
The Importance of Salt
Salt has been used since ancient times for food preservation and seasoning. Ancient people obtained salt by boiling spring water rich in minerals. In fact, some of the world’s oldest known salt mines can be traced back to around 6,000 BC.
The term “salary” originates from the Latin word “salarium,” which referred to the allowance given to Roman soldiers to purchase salt, reflecting the importance of salt in daily life. Throughout human history, certain wars and the rise and fall of cities have been closely linked to salt.
However, when it comes to salt, our immediate thoughts are often, “I shouldn’t consume too much,” “It causes high blood pressure,” or “It is bad for my heart.” In reality, salt is indispensable for our life functions.
The scientific name for table salt is sodium chloride, the primary sodium source in the diet.
“Sodium is really what we need to maintain our life functions,” Cindy Chan Phillips, a registered dietitian, told The Epoch Times. “Sodium is one of the electrolytes. Without that, we will die.”
As an essential nutrient in the human body, sodium regulates the balance of fluids and electrolytes, keeping blood pressure within a healthy range. Ms. Phillips described sodium as a sponge that can absorb and carry water. “Where sodium goes, water goes,” she said.
Sodium is also responsible for the transmission of signals in muscle and nerve cells. “Without the adequate level of sodium, our nerve cells will fail to fire,” explained Ms. Phillips. Sodium also allows our muscles to contract when we need them to contract and relax when we need them to relax. “Our heart and our lungs are also muscles, too. For a heart to pulse, it also needs to know when to contract and relax by itself.”
The chloride ions in table salt are essential components of stomach acid. In other words, the secretion of digestive fluids also requires salt.
The mean sodium content in an adult male is 92 grams, half of which (46 grams) is found in the extracellular fluid (including plasma and blood). Approximately 11 grams is located in the intracellular fluid, and the remaining 35 grams is found in the skeleton.
Who Is Prone to Salt Deficiency?
“To say salt deficiency is rare is simply not looking at the data or looking at the people suffering around us,” James DiNicolantonio, a cardiovascular research scientist and doctor of pharmacy at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, and author of “The Salt Fix,” told The Epoch Times.
For many years, Mr. DiNicolantonio has studied the impact of salt on the human body. Since 2013, he has published 15 research papers on salt in academic journals. He explained that the misconception that people do not lack salt is due to few people undergoing proper salt deficiency testing. Low sodium levels in the blood are the most common electrolyte abnormality among hospitalized patients. He also stated that in the United States, millions of people are diagnosed with hyponatremia every year. Additionally, millions are hospitalized due to hypovolemia, “many times due to lack of salt.”
Hyponatremia occurs when the sodium level in the blood is abnormally low. It is a common electrolyte abnormality among both outpatient and hospitalized patients. Low salt intake is considered one possible cause of hyponatremia; according to an earlier study, low salt intake and high water intake led to the hospitalization of 5,259 people in England between 2006 and 2007.
Hypovolemia refers to a decrease in extracellular fluid volume when the loss of salt and liquid exceeds intake. Salt plays a crucial role in maintaining adequate blood volume, ensuring that our tissues are filled with oxygen-carrying blood and nutrients.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine conducted a study in which they measured plasma specific gravity in over 300 individuals, including young adults, retirees, and older patients sent to the emergency room. Among the older emergency room patients, nearly 40 percent had probable or confirmed hypovolemia. Even among young adults and older individuals who did not report any abnormalities, 5 percent and 8 percent had hypovolemia, respectively.
Hypovolemia may also be related to insufficient water intake. “Older people are prone to volume depletion, as they have blunted thirst mechanisms and, therefore, may not realize they are getting insufficient salt and water,” Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist specializing in Type 2 diabetes, told The Epoch Times. He also mentioned that dementia could affect the diet and drinking habits of older people, leading to inadequate blood volume.
However, he also noted that salt deficiency is not common in most parts of the world because salt is cheap and widely used, often added to food for flavor enhancement.
Ms. Phillips stated that while salt-deficient patients seeking consultation with her are rare, salt deficiency in the population cannot be dismissed. She added, “In epidemiology, sometimes a low incidence could also be due to inadequate diagnosis.”
Older adults living in care facilities or hospitals may have insufficient sodium levels in their blood due to medication use or certain health conditions such as heart disease, kidney disease, or cancer. Additionally, excessive vomiting, diarrhea, and sweating can result in significant salt loss from the body.
Mr. DiNicolantonio pointed out that excessive caffeine intake, high temperatures, sleep apnea, diuretic use, excessive consumption of plain water, low-carbohydrate diets, and fasting can all lead to salt loss. He also mentioned that individuals with hypothyroidism are prone to salt deficiency, as thyroid hormones play a role in regulating sodium reabsorption in the kidneys.
Salt Deficiency Can Damage the Heart and Increase Mortality
Despite some dietary guidelines that recommend limiting salt intake for the general population to a relatively low level (less than 1 teaspoon), numerous studies have shown that for non-hypertensive individuals and those without cardiovascular health issues, maintaining salt intake at 1 to 2 teaspoons per day is healthier. Salt intake that is too low may actually lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular events and mortality.
One teaspoon of salt is approximately 5 grams, of which 2.3 grams is sodium.
A study published in the European Heart Journal in 2020 examined sodium intake and life expectancy in 181 countries and found that sodium intake was positively correlated with life expectancy and inversely correlated with all-cause mortality. The study concluded that dietary sodium intake is not the culprit in shortening lifespan or a risk factor for premature death. However, it also emphasized that “these data are observational and should not be used as a base for nutritional interventions.”
The detrimental effects of high salt intake on the heart are undeniable, but surprisingly, consuming too little salt can also increase the risk of heart disease.
A prospective cohort study published in The Lancet in 2018 involving nearly 10,000 individuals from 18 countries over a median follow-up of eight years revealed that the risk of cardiovascular events significantly increased for participants in the highest tertile of sodium intake (more than 5 grams per day). However, the risk of cardiovascular events also increased considerably for participants in the lowest tertile of sodium intake (less than 4.5 grams per day).
A review published in Nutrients in 2021 suggested that the optimal sodium intake for the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality is between 3 grams and 5 grams per day. The researchers called it the “sweet spot.” Both higher and lower intake levels were associated with increased adverse health outcomes.
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Australia: Feminist lawyers a danger to justice
It was a riveting moment. Here was Tasha Smithies, a lawyer for Channel 10, appearing as a witness in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation action.
This is the lawyer who advised television celebrity Lisa Wilkinson to go ahead with the disastrous Logie Speech praising Brittany Higgins for her “unwavering courage,” which ended up delaying the criminal trial for four months.
It was advice that clearly left Justice Michael Lee unimpressed.
“It is inconceivable to me that any legally qualified person could have given [such] advice,” he told the court, describing the advice as “inadvisable and inappropriate” and suggesting this was something that “someone who did a first-year criminal law course” should have known.
So, what was it that inspired this bizarre action from Ms. Smithies, the senior litigation counsel for one of Australia’s largest media organisations?
She told the court that she greenlit the speech because she felt it was important for Ms. Wilkinson to show she was not “wavering” in her support for Ms. Higgins.
“It was my view that from the time after the broadcast of the story, Ms. Wilkinson was inextricably intertwined with Ms. Higgins,” she said.
Even when she was grilled about the damage caused by that advice, she was unapologetic.
“I am not professionally or personally embarrassed by the advice I gave Ms. Wilkinson,” she said.
It was astonishing watching this woman, eyes shining as she proudly proclaimed that it was more important to support the celebrity journalist in her believe-the-victim crusade than to give appropriate, lawyerly advice that would not prejudice the fair trial of an accused person.
Bruce Lehrmann has made a complaint to New South Wales (NSW) Legal Services Commissioner, stating that Ms. Smithies has “displayed legal conduct that is wholly inadequate, deceptive, unacceptable and that breaches her obligations as an officer of the court to uphold the fundamental principles of the rule of law.”
Activism Over Professionalism
This appears to be the latest in a new breed of female lawyers.
Women who make no effort to disguise their feminist goals, from blatantly discriminating against men in the workplace, to flagrantly ignoring important principles in our criminal justice.
Thank goodness they are a small minority. But with women comprising the bulk of law graduates for the last 30 years, there’s been a huge wave of female lawyers flooding into every sector of the legal system.
Many are excellent, extremely competent, and appropriately focussed simply on doing their job in the best possible way. But examples keep popping up of feminist lawyers exploiting the legal system with all sorts of antics which show where their real commitment lies.
These are just the ones we hear about—heaven only knows what chaos such women are creating behind the scenes.
Remember Annette Kimmitt, CEO of Australia’s largest law firm Minter Ellison, who was fired after sending out an email to staff saying she felt “triggered” by the company’s decision to act for then Attorney-General Christian Porter after he was subject to a historic rape allegation?
Ms. Kimmitt emailed 2,500 staff expressing her displeasure that a senior partner was acting for Mr. Porter.
In her email, Ms. Kimmitt said the matter “has certainly triggered hurt for me. I know that for many of you it may be a tough day and I want to apologise for the pain you may be experiencing.”
She claimed the decision to act for Mr. Porter should have been considered “through the lens of our Purposes and Values.”
Ms. Kimmitt apparently had substantial support from young members of the firm, who obviously also support these “Values”; values which happily ditch the principles that everyone is entitled to a presumption of innocence and legal representation.
Then there was Emma Covacevich, Clayton Utz’s first female chief executive partner, who announced when first appointed that she had firm views about how to achieve gender parity.
“It’s about more women coming in and more men going out,” she explained.
What about the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Sally Dowling SC, who had a melt-down when District Court judge Robert Newlinds claimed her office was taking a “lazy and perhaps politically expedient” approach to rape cases by failing to interrogate complainants’ allegations and sometimes putting hopeless cases before the court.
(His comments occurred in relation to a case where a man had spent eight months on remand in jail—and the jury took one hour to throw the case out. Then it turned out the woman had made similar allegations against about eight other men.)
Three other judges had made similar comments last year about unmeritorious cases being pushed through into court.
Then, a few weeks ago, another District Court judge, Peter Whitford really went to town, pointing out that pushing through such cases risks “drawing the criminal justice system into disrepute.”
Ms. Dowling’s response was once again an emotional attack on Mr. Whitford, before she finally backed down and announced an audit of all NSW sexual assault cases committed for trial.
Women Over Men
Female lawyers have been out in force publicly celebrating the demolition job Labor inflicted on our Family Law Act.
Canberra family lawyer Debra Parker was quoted in a local online paper praising the “overdue” and “transformative” overhaul of family law. She proudly proclaims that the move takes the law back to 1976—when the “best interests of the child principle” was central.
Oh yes, those were the glory days of uniform maternal custody, before parliament was convinced into thinking dads actually matter.
The only time fathers rate a mention in Ms. Parker’s comments is through posing a risk of exposing children to family violence, as she justifies the new laws that toss out the assumption of shared parental responsibility, let alone equal shared time.
Perhaps ironically, given the historical underpinnings of feminism, what most of these women have in common is a disdain for the principle of equality before the law.
Their goals appear to be primarily about promoting and protecting women’s rights at the expense of men’s rights. Their priorities are to do everything they can to protect and cosset women, believing their every story.
Too often, the effect of their actions is to undermine long-standing and legitimate legal safeguards. Safeguards that are designed to ensure that innocent men are not convicted.
There are very good reasons for men to be nervous about the increasing power of feminist lawyers.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/beware-the-latest-wave-of-feminism-5607078
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19 March, 2024
Explaining narcissism
I have already written on narcissism a few times and have noted some versions of what it is and how people get like that. Is there something that turns a person into a narcissist?
There are few attempts to answer that out there but all are highly theoretical with very little objective research supporting the explanations. The explanations sometimes reflect clinical experience but inferences from clinical experience are inevitably subjective and incapable of proving anything. It should be noted that even Freud was not satisfied with the explanation he offered for its origin.
The big problem with all the theories is that narcissism does not really exist as a single coherent syndrome. The two recurrent themes in theories about narcissism are an inflated sense of self-esteem and a feeling of insecurity about one's own worth and competence. For short, the two traits are grandiosity and vulnerability. And the basic claim of narcissism theories is that the two traits belong together in some way.
But they do not. The survey research tells us that the two traits are NOT correlated. People with grandiose feelings about themselves MAY also have feeling of vulnerability but that is not automatically so. There are many grandiose people who do NOT feel vulnerable. Many grandiose people are perfectly confident that their ideas about themselves are perfectly correct and not open to serious challenge. They are not bothered by people who doubt them. Such people are sometimes said to have "a thick hide".
And of course many people with feelings of vulnerability do not also think that they are wonderful
So in asking what causes narcissism, we are essentially asking the wrong question. There are really three questions there: What causes feelings of grandiosity, what causes feelings of vulnerability and how does it happen that some people have both feelings at once?
The programmatic explanation for all three questions is that all human personality traits occur along a continuum. There are always strong and weak tendencies towards a particular behaviour type. And thinking well of oneself, for instance, is normal and as such in no particular need of explanation.
It does beg for explanation when it is extreme but the explanation needed is about degrees of self-esteem, not degrees of "narcissism". And there is a very large literature on self-esteem in the annals of psychological research. I am not up to date with it so will not endeavour to summarize it
Similarly there is a HUGE literaure on anxiety and neuroticism so that literature tells us about feelings of vulnerability. I have had rather a lot of research published in that field so I will suggest the elements of an explanation for it.
http://jonjayray.com/anxiety.html
Neuroticism/anxiety just seems to be one of the basic ways people differ. It affects all sorts of behaviours. We all have it to some degree and it matters a lot how strong it is in us. It seems in fact to be hard-wired in our neurology. We are born with it but to different degrees. As such, there is no way to "cure" it but we can of course do some things to ameliorate its effects. Valium being an obvious example.
So how come both vulnerablity and grandiosity sometimes co-occur? It may need no particular explanation. The processes that cause both tendencies just sometimes overlap. Some people may simply be both neurotic and full of themselves. The one tendency does not cancel out the other, perhaps surprisingly. They are the people we often identify as narcissists but they appear to be not the outcome of any single influence.
My previous posts on the matter give more detail
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2022/10/narcissism-and-sam-vaknin-vaknin-is_0.html
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2023/05/revolutionary-leftists-are-narcissists.html
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/02/are-leftists-narcissists-mayo.html
Self-confidence
So where does self-confidence fit into the two factor picture I have outlined?
Self confidence is clearly the opposite end of feelings of vunerabiity. It is a lack of self confidence that plagues the vulnerable person. Confidence is clearly one part of a broader factor -- a continuum of confidence/vulnerability
So is the grandiose person self-confident? It might seem automatically so. But the answer once again has to be that there are two factors involved. As we see from the statistical correlations, it is perfectly possible -- but not automatic -- for grandiose people to feel vulnerable. Some people with grandiose views of themselves are not at all confident that they are so admirable and tend therefore to do things to prop up that belief.
As I have argued previously, the subset of people who are both grandiose and vulnerable often find relief as active political leftists. They actively promote themselves as good and kind and wise and righteous, with sometimes unfortunate results when they get something wrong. It is precisely their vulnerabiity which makes them so keen to censor the views of anybody who disagrees with them
Coincidentally, a well-sampled study has recently appeared which found that "woke" attitudes correlated with "depression, anxiety, and (lack of) happiness". The correlation with depression was particularly high -- clearly vulnerable feelings.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjop.13018
I have always had self-confidence in spades. I inherited it from my mother. A non grandiose example may be of interest:
After completing Junior school, I saw that Senior school took a further two years to do and disliked that prospect. So I looked at the Senior syllabus and its listing of the knowledge required to pass the Senior exam. I thought that I could easily acquire the knowledge required in one year. So I quietly did just that. I taught myself the requirements for the Senior exam in one year and got respectable passes in it, including a couple of "A"s. I was confident of my abilities and it paid off.
So self confidence is pretty good stuff. And I am not remotely grandiose. I have never sought the limelight despite several opportunities in that direction. It always seemed too much bother.
JR
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Do Americans have the will to fight?
I am pretty sure most Trump supporters do but I don't know about the rest
For those of you who do not know her, Bari Weiss is the journalist who had the courage and intellectual honesty not only to leave her gig as an opinion writer at The New York Times in 2020 but to pen a public resignation letter that exposed the oppressive culture there that prompted her departure.
Weiss thereafter launched The Free Press, a subscription-based online news and opinion journal that has already acquired a reputation for ideological balance, in-depth coverage of complex issues, and willingness to interview and publish articles from individuals who have been effectively banned from “traditional” media.
Weiss has written extensively about the horrific terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as what those attacks portend for America. The address Weiss gave at the Federalist Society’s annual Barbara K. Olsen Memorial Lecture (“You Are the Last Line of Defense”) garnered a standing ovation and made headlines across the country, not least because the Federalist Society is a politically conservative legal organization, and Weiss is neither an attorney nor a conservative.
This week, Weiss published a piece titled “The Holiday from History Is Over.” In it, she describes conversations she had on her recent visit to Israel with survivors and family members of those killed on Oct. 7. According to Weiss, Israelis believe they are fighting “a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state.” Israeli journalist Gadi Taub told Weiss that “one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! which loosely translates to ‘do not fall short of the ‘48 generation’”(referring to 1948, the year the modern state of Israel was founded).
Weiss opines that it’s “nearly impossible to imagine” a comparable sentiment in the United States, a “rallying cry about not falling short of the 1776ers.” Toward the end of the piece, she asks rhetorically:
“What would the people I know do if we ... had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? ... Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came?”
Weiss fears that Americans think we live “outside” of history.
I think she’s wrong.
Does this country contain citizens who view themselves as inheritors of the mantle of the Founders? Would Americans step up to defend their homes and families, and those of their neighbors? Do we have the courage we would need in a crisis?
The answer to each of those questions is “yes,” and the proof is in the headlines every day—although perhaps not in the way Weiss might see it.
Americans who take seriously the wisdom of the Founders are fighting vigorously to defend the natural law principles in the Declaration of Independence, for judges who use originalist interpretations of the Constitution, for the preservation of the Electoral College and the current composition of the U.S. Senate, for checks and balances and limited government.
And for that, they are denounced as beneficiaries of “white privilege,” defenders of “systemic racism,” and (most recently) as “Christian nationalists.”
Millions of Americans are prepared to defend their homes, families, and communities; they are the ones fighting for our rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
And for that, they are blamed for the deaths of children at the hands of every lunatic who decides to commit mass murder, for urban gun violence and for crimes committed by those unlawfully in possession of a weapon. If they happen to live in the country, they are now accused of harboring “rural white rage.”
And as for courage? The average American displays it every day in droves. Courageous Americans are fighting school administrators and teachers trying to insert pornography into school libraries and curricula. They are fighting against activists encouraging vulnerable young people to undergo chemical castration or surgical mutilation to “change” their gender—often without the knowledge or over the objections of parents. They are fighting to preserve sports and safe places for women and girls. They fought for truthful science and against COVID-19 lockdowns and forced inoculations of experimental drugs. They fight for the free exercise of religion, free speech, and the lives of unborn children, praying and protesting outside abortion clinics. They fight for the integrity of our elections and government accountability, and against vote fraud.
And for displaying the courage to fight for their rights—and the rights of others—these Americans are denounced as racists, bigots, “deplorables,” “domestic terrorists,” and “insurrectionists” by the same “elites” Weiss accuses (rightly) of having “all of the noblesse with none of the oblige”; they are doxxed, censored, shamed, silenced on social media (other than X), sued, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and even incarcerated.
These Americans are not too blinded by bread and circuses to see the very real threats facing us.
The Americans who are paying attention—and there are millions—are all too aware. These are the same Americans fighting to close our borders, for the enforcement of our immigration laws and the deportation of those who violate them. They are fighting against the two-tiered “justice” system and the use of “lawfare” by the politically powerful against their opponents. They are the Americans who decry the degeneration of our cities and the proliferation of homelessness and substance abuse in our streets. They are demanding that crime be punished and criminals be imprisoned. They want an end to foreign policies that kill millions of innocents abroad, enrich sponsors of terrorism, and embolden our enemies.
No, Bari, Americans do not think we live outside of history. But they do understand that those in power at present are setting the stage for a disastrous future. When the inevitable crisis comes, will Americans “answer the call”?
Some already are.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/responding-to-bari-weiss-5607459
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JK Rowling vows to defy Scotland's 'ludicrous' new hate crime laws and refuses to delete posts calling trans TV presenter 'just a man'
JK Rowling has called Scotland's new hate crime laws 'ludicrous', as she vowed not to delete social media posts describing a transgender TV presenter as 'just a man'.
The Harry Potter author was cleared of any wrongdoing by police in England earlier this month over an online post about broadcaster India Willoughby, who complained she had been 'misgendered'.
But Ms Rowling has now been targeted by activists who claim she could be prosecuted under the controversial new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, due to be introduced on April 1.
The 58-year-old wrote on X that she would not be taking down any of her posts about Ms Willoughby.
She said: 'If you genuinely imagine I'd delete posts calling a man a man, so as not to be prosecuted under this ludicrous law, stand by for the mother of all April Fools' jokes.'
Ms Rowling was responding to a post from a user claiming to be a British lawyer who wrote: 'Delete the posts about India Willoughby as they most likely contravene the new law. Start deleting!'
Supporters of Ms Rowling praised her for 'standing up against the woke mob'.
And feminist group For Women Scotland wrote: 'Not sure anyone claiming to be a lawyer should be posting misleading info.'
Police Scotland has indicated that only incidents after April 1 will be investigated under the new law, meaning Ms Rowling would not face retrospective action.
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Faith-Based Schools Can’t Maintain Ethos Under New Religious Discrimination Bill: Australian conservatives
It is actually the Bible which is the problem. It describes homosexuals as an abomination and says that God will judge them (Romans 1 & 2). And Christians are commanded to preach Christian teachings actively (Matthew 28: 19 & 20). Legislating against the Bible is surely a vast cultural leap that can only end badly. Christian beliefs must be allowed or there will be big consequences. Prime Minister Albanese is already headed for the boot. If he enacts this he will go out in a landslide
Faith-based schools could find themselves getting bogged down in litigation as a result of the Labor government’s religious discrimination bill, according to the federal opposition.
Shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash has taken aim at the Albanese government’s upcoming religious discrimination protections, which she said could obstruct religious schools from maintaining their religious ethos.
What Is The Proposal About?
The bill, which was initially introduced by the former centre-right Coalition government in 2021, set out to protect Australians from discrimination on the basis of religious belief.
However, the Coalition failed to pass the law prior to the 2022 federal election after five Liberal MPs crossed the floor to support amendments by the then-opposition Labor Party, which were designed to prevent discrimination against gay and transgender students by religious schools.
On the other hand, faith-based groups have expressed concern that the bill would do little to legislate protections for religious Australians, arguing the protections were too narrow to be effective.
The topic would soon resurface in public debate as the Australian Law Reform Commission prepared to release a long-awaited report in March 2023 that would recommend “making discrimination against students on the grounds of sexual orientation … unlawful.”
This would be done by repealing section 38(3) under the Sex Discrimination Act, a move that could potentially bar faith-based schools from preferencing candidates who share the schools’ spiritual outlook during recruitment. It could also prevent schools from asking students to abide by the school’s belief system.
The shadow attorney-general warned that under Labor’s religious protection bill, faith-based schools wouldn’t be able to conduct themselves in a way that is consistent with their values.
“What they’re saying to me is ‘Michaelia, we just want to educate; under Mark Dreyfus and Anthony Albanese, we’re going to wind up litigating,’” Ms. Cash told Sky News on March 17.
She also said she had heard “very concerning things” about the new amendments, adding that this would likely include an anti-vilification provision, which criminalises speech that is considered hateful.
‘A Cure That Is Worse Than The Disease’: Think Tank
Similar concerns have been voiced by Morgan Begg, the director of the Legal Rights Program at the Institute of Public Affairs. He said the religious freedoms of Australians would be under siege due to the “weaponisation of anti-vilification and anti-discrimination laws.”
“This notoriously ambiguous concept creates an opening for bureaucrats and courts to tie up supposedly legitimate speech in legal limbo,” he wrote in an opinion article for The Epoch Times.
“For example, saying ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ is something that many religious Australians believe, but saying so could be considered ‘hateful’ by some in the community.”
Mr. Begg warned the religious discrimination bill would “add more laws on top of bad laws” and described it as “a cure that is worse than the disease.”
Pressure To Conform
In recent years, faith-based schools have been facing mounting pressure to compromise on their spiritual values with LGBT groups.
The conflict was highlighted during the controversy surrounding Citipointe Christian College in 2022, which saw the school’s principal stand down over an enrolment contract that described homosexuality as a sin.
The contract, which stated that the college would only enrol students on the basis of the “gender that corresponds to their biological sex,” had attracted public protests and criticism, with some parents accusing the school of stigmatising a “vulnerable community.”
Former Principal and Pastor Brian Mulheran said at the time that his intention was “only to offer families a choice about how their children educated, and to be open and transparent about our religious ethos.”
“I am sorry, sorry that some students felt that they may be being discriminated against at Citipointe. We would never discriminate against any student on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity,” he wrote in a letter.
Ahead of the 2022 election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised he would resume addressing the religious discrimination bill during their term of parliament.
“We’ll do it in a way which is much more consultative and brings people together in a way that I hope characterises the way my government functions,” Mr. Albanese said, adding that he “respected people of faith.”
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18 March, 2024
Being a trad wife these days is not as safe as it was in the old days
Women in the past had more security in their marriage due to laws, social pressures and customs. These days a trad wife could have her husband walk out at short notice, leaving her with a greatly disrupted life
I have seen these posts about traditional living and being a “trad wife” all over social media lately.
My mom hasn’t chosen that lifestyle. Same as my mom’s mom. However, I spoke my dad’s mom. My paternal grandma.
And she very much lived that lifestyle. That and more. She has lived all her life in semi-rural Sicily. And she raised six kids. And she was a housewife, and the picture perfect homemaker.
Except that as she would tell you it was much less “instagrammable” as the kids say these days than you would think.
Six children and a household to manage, her everyday — as I heard through various stories — was a testament to resilience and sense of duty. And with one income and six children, money was also tight.
The community was tight-knit and neighbors leant on each other for support and occasional gossip.
When I talked to my grandma and showed her some clips, she raised some interesting points.
First she pointed out that while she enjoyed her life, that lifestyle was hardly a choice. It was what was normal really. It was how it was.
But then she raised a good point. She said back then, women had fewer choices but so did men.
I started right away disagreeing with her as to me the men held all the power. But then I understood what she meant.
Divorce was frowned upon in the past. So a man deciding to leave his wife was much less common. And it would receive a lot of pressure, from society, his own family, his colleagues, his boss, his social circle and so on.
A man deciding to leave his wife was pretty big deal (I am sure things where different in different part of the world but at least in relatively terms I feel there is some common ground — especially compared with today).
Today — if either one, decides to leave.. well nobody is going to make a big deal out of it. The barrier to exit are much lower, shall we say?
Social expectations solidified the family unit and these dynamics provided a form of security, although not leaving much room for individual needs or aspirations outside of predefined roles.
Back then if you were a husband who decided to leave your (financially very much dependent) wife you would have a number on people on your case. Her family for sure but also your own family. And your own social circle and friends.
You truly risked being ostracized.
Fast forward to the present — the situation has dramatically changed. And I am not saying it is bad — people finally have some agency that is good news.
But as my grandma pointed out if you choose a trad wife scenario where you are financially dependent on your husband (or partner), you still have the lack of financial independence minus the safety net that society’s expectations provided.
Separation or divorce is far less stigmatized leaving traditional wives potentially more vulnerable than in the past.
https://medium.com/long-sweet-valuable/i-spoke-about-trad-wives-to-my-sicilian-grandma-and-she-told-me-what-she-thinks-ae0a70b7b3bf (Condensed)
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SC Is Protecting Its Children With “Help Not Harm” Bill
South Carolina legislation HB 4624 is called the “Help Not Harm” bill—and with good reason. Approved by the House in January, it bans so-called “gender affirming” medical interventions for minors under the age of 18 and prohibits Medicaid coverage of those procedures for anyone under the age of 26.
After passing a Senate subcommittee just days ago, the bill now heads to the full Senate Medical Affairs Committee for a vote. Lawmakers there must show the courage of their colleagues in the House because the bill is precisely the kind of legislation that America’s children need—and need immediately.
In increasing measure, vulnerable pubescent and pre-pubescent children are being proselytized into a fictional belief that they can be “born in the wrong body.” In fact, so effective have been the influences of social media, peer pressure and pro-trans narratives in this space that UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute reports that more than 300,000 high school-aged (ages 13-17) children in the United States today identify as “transgender”—making them the largest and fastest-growing share of the overall trans-identified population in the country.
Between 2017 and 2021, the number of children in the United States taking puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones doubled. And double mastectomies performed on adolescent girls increased by nearly 400% during the same period.
These increases aren’t organic. They are a direct result of what appears to be a national social experiment targeting children who are not old enough to vote, get tattoos, buy cigarettes or enter into contracts. The federal government has been working overtime to convince the nation that these experimental procedures are “life-saving care” and that if children don’t have access to these “gender affirming” treatments, they will commit suicide.
But the support for such inflammatory rhetoric simply doesn’t exist. We’re being asked to believe that minor children possess the maturity to make life-altering medical decisions and can fully comprehend the risks of these procedures—those that include everything from incontinence to tissue death to lack of fertility, and worse.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The increase in a new cohort of the population—de-transitioners—is proof positive of the regretfully life-altering and experimental nature of these kind of “gender affirming” medical interventions. It also demonstrates that children, as easily influenced as they are, must not be used as pawns in a political play that caters to a small but vocal and well-funded minority.
This legislation isn’t hateful or bigoted. It’s a common-sense bill that protects minors when the integrity of their bodies and mental health are on the line. It’s also representative of the widespread and bipartisan support for these kinds of bans, as the majority of Americans oppose “gender affirming care” for minors.
But the tide is turning. Several European countries that once uncritically embraced “gender-affirming care” for minors have already reconsidered or reversed course as the lack of evidence supporting the safety of these procedures and increasing evidence of long-term complications surfaces. The FDA is being sued for allegedly concealing records regarding the off-label use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on minors. Medical malpractice claims against hospital systems that rushed minor children into “gender affirming” surgeries with little to no investigation of the minor’s underlying mental health co-morbidities are on the rise.
Nearly two dozen states have already enacted laws prohibiting “gender-affirming” interventions for minors in most circumstances. Now is the time for South Carolina to join them.
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DEI, Sold as a Way To Promote Racial Harmony, Does Just the Opposite
Programs designed to instill “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) do not promote racial harmony. The trainings, which have become commonplace in schools, workplaces and government agencies nationwide, may in fact be manipulative, unlicensed attempts at psychology.
Just ask Chad Ellis.
Ellis, a former researcher at Chevron Philips Chemical Company, holds a Ph.D. in chemistry. He was forced to undergo DEI training and “received confirmed mental health damage from coerced, mandatory workplace attendance at a psychological video series,” according to Ellis’s complaint in district court against the Oklahoma State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. The techniques used in the training mirror the psychological coercion used in military interrogations, according to expert witness testimony in the complaint.
Chevron used a DEI training series called “Here and Heard,” which attacked viewers’ loyalties and personal appearances, accusing the viewers of maintaining bias based on their skin color. The program uses images of abuse and genocide to create distress in viewers’ minds—which are psychological, not instructional, techniques.
DEI sessions are not simply teaching tools. In fact, the DEI trainer in the Here and Heard video said that the approach was “purposefully designed to cause visceral reactions,” which sounds like emotional manipulation, not instruction.
The trainer was not a psychologist, though (she was a part-time real estate agent), which means the training program could be unlicensed practice of psychology. In an interview, Ellis said the training was “very provocative…highly graphical [with] emotional content.” He says he told his supervisors, “You don’t have my consent to do this,” but, “I didn’t get anywhere.” Ellis says he is not opposed to some DEI activities, but someone with a psychology license should be accountable for the trainings’ effects.
Ellis is not asking for sympathy for facing DEI training. Rather, he asked Oklahoma’s board of examiners to investigate the Chevron program to determine whether it constitutes the practice of psychology. The board dismissed his complaint.
In the legal battle that ensued, with Ellis contending that the state board should at least make a determination, the chemist said, “Just like if I’m exposed to a chemical spill, I deserve to know what’s in that. If I’m exposed to something like this, I deserve to know where it’s coming from and who stands behind it.”
Ellis is not the first to make claims such as this. In Pennsylvania, a former professor at Pennsylvania State Abington alleged he faced racial discrimination and experienced harm as part of a DEI program at the college. A district judge is allowing the case to proceed, despite university opposition.
Ellis said Here and Heard was “pushing the levers of guilt and shame and humiliation to coerce belief change.” This helps explain why researchers have found that DEI fails to change individual attitudes and behavior. DEI does not appeal to our better natures, but accuses anyone who does not see racism everywhere of being racist. It holds that if you do not see racism everywhere, you are trying to maintain power over others. That’s hardly a message that helps build camaraderie.
Policymakers in six states, including Oklahoma, have either prohibited the use of taxpayer spending on DEI programs or called for an end to DEI in public spaces. Officials in nearly a dozen other states are now considering similar proposals in favor of civil rights over DEI.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, reminded residents in his executive order that the state constitution prohibits “preferential treatment” or discrimination based on race, ethnicity or sex. These are the very racist ideas DEI programs advocate for.
Chevron Phillips is a private joint venture between Chevron and Phillips 66, so the DEI prohibitions may not apply to them, but allowing the practice of unlicensed psychologists is still illegal. Ellis’s legal filings say Here and Heard is “trying to mold the minds of these employees and, again, practicing psychology without any consent and without any license.”
If DEI sessions are psychological treatments—from unlicensed psychologists—all the more reason to bolster state and federal civil rights laws, protect equality under the law, and reject DEI and its racist results.
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The Phantom Economic Benefits of SCHIP Expansion
Proponents of federal spending programs commonly extol the many jobs that would be created if their spending wishes were met. Defense contractors do it. Highway bill supporters do it. Now even proponents of higher federal health care spending are claiming more funding translates into more jobs and higher wages. The trouble is that such claims are almost never true. A case in point is analysis published by Families USA in support of the reauthorization and expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).[1]
Families USA's Research on SCHIP Expansion
SCHIP was created in 1997 to provide health insurance to children in low-income families whose earnings are too high to qualify for Medicaid but below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Like Medicaid, SCHIP is jointly funded by the federal government and state governments. States can make their SCHIP program a simple extension of their Medicaid program, design a stand-alone program, or craft some combination of the two. The federal government's role is essentially to approve the program design and provide a chunk of funding to the respective states.
Federal SCHIP funding was originally set at $40 billion over 10 years. A straight extension of the program would cost $25 billion over the next five years, but there is great pressure to expand the program by allowing it to cover adults and children in wealthier families--those with incomes as high as 400 percent of the federal poverty level in some proposals.
Families USA, an advocacy organization, favors a much expanded SCHIP program as part of its broader effort to achieve nationwide government-run health insurance. To bolster its case, the group released projections of the economic effects of a doubling of the SCHIP program to $50 billion over five years.
To make its analysis more useful to state-based advocates and Members of Congress, Families USA created reports for all 50 states and the District of Columbia emphasizing how much additional federal money a state could expect if SCHIP were expanded to a $50 billion, five-year program, and how much "business activity," wages, and employment would rise due to the expansion. For example, the analysis suggests that business activity in Alabama would increase by $331.1 million a year; wages in Missouri would increase by $137 million; and employment in Wisconsin would rise by 3,032 jobs. Altogether, according to the analysis, business activity in the United States would increase by $21.4 billion, total wages by $7.7 billion, and employment by 227,065 jobs.
Erroneous Analysis
The problem is that higher government health care spending would not create net economic activity or increase real wages and jobs. There is still a debate in some quarters as to whether government spending can boost the economy when the economy is operating well below full employment. There is no serious debate, however, that such effects do not occur when the economy is operating at roughly full capacity, as it is today.
As a rule, a change in the composition or level of federal spending will shift the composition of demand in the economy from one area to another, such as from business investment to consumption or from consumption of goods to consumption of health care services. As demand shifts, the allocation of capital and labor resources shifts accordingly. For most federal spending, there is no resulting increase in the amount of capital or labor employed in the economy.
Expressed another way, there would almost certainly be an increase in employment in health services if SCHIP spending were doubled, and the increase could even be around the 227,000 jobs predicted by Families USA, but there would also then be 227,000 fewer workers employed in the rest of the economy. Higher health sector employment due to increased government spending on SCHIP would crowd out other types of employment; it would not increase employment.
Shifting the composition of demand by increasing federal spending does not generally increase overall economic activity, because it does not increase the level of productive resources available to the economy--that is, labor and capital. There are exceptions, such as when federal spending materially raises the quality of the infrastructure on which the private economy depends--which is rare today--or when federal spending expands the frontiers of technology applicable to producers. But these are exceptions, not the rule, and an expansion of SCHIP funding is not among the exceptions.
Herein lies an important distinction between tax relief and spending increases. A wide variety of tax relief options would increase the level of productive resources available to the economy. Reducing marginal individual income tax rates, for example, improves the incentive to work and, therefore, increases the supply of labor and the level of potential output. Reducing the tax rates on dividends, capital gains, or corporate income would each reduce the tax disincentive to invest in new plants and equipment, thereby encouraging growth in the capital stock and raising productivity and, therefore, wages and output. In general, spending increases lead to none of these things.
To argue that an SCHIP expansion would have no economic effects is actually generous toward Families USA's cause, because to do so ignores the increase in inefficiencies in the economy due to such spending, inefficiencies that would reduce wage and income levels. For example, expanding SCHIP would divert resources from other uses in which, according to economic incentives, they are more valuable. One can certainly make moving and valid arguments about the importance of health insurance for children. Those arguments move the heart, but they do not move the GDP.
Further, the Congressional Budget Office notes that increasing health care spending is likely to decrease, not increase, employment and output.[2] The reason is that, to the extent that additional health care spending is valued by consumers, the additional health resources "reduce people's incentives to work and save."[3] Thus an SCHIP expansion would reduce total employment by encouraging workers to leave the workforce.
In addition, this increase in spending must somehow be matched by a like increase in taxes, and this is the case whether the Budget Resolution or the economy dictates the outcome. Higher taxes--even higher taxes on tobacco, which is the announced intent of the Senate Finance Committee--distort the allocation of resources and reduce economic output. Taxing tobacco may be popular, but that popularity does not displace the reality of economic incentives and the consequences of distorting those incentives with taxes.
Conclusion
Poor economic analysis only confuses those who receive it and muddies debate. Family USA's state-by-state economic analysis of an SCHIP expansion should be withdrawn or at least simply ignored.
https://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform/report/the-phantom-economic-benefits-schip-expansion
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17 March, 2024
The Politics of Inflation
The article below omits to mention that inflation came down in response to the Fed stifling demand, people being unable to buy what they usually would, which was and is hard on a lot of people. So Biden is far from off the hook
February’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) showed prices up by 0.62% in the past month. If that rate of increase kept up for the rest of the year, the annual inflation rate would be 7.4%. But the CPI won’t keep rising that fast.
Over the past several years, almost all of the annual increase in the CPI came in the first half of the year, so if this year is like past years, month-over-month inflation will come to a halt after mid-year. That would seem to be advantageous to the Biden administration in November.
The annual rate of inflation is coming down, if slowly. It was 3.4% for 2023 and has fallen to 3.2% from February 2023 to February 2024. If it keeps dropping at that rate, the Federal Reserve will hit its 2% inflation target in six months—another seeming advantage to the Biden administration’s November hopes.
However, most people are not concerned about inflation per se, but rather high prices. Whether inflation is up or down is not something most people keep track of. People are looking at how much they have to pay for stuff. So, even if the Fed’s inflation goals are met by November, prices will still be higher than they were a few years ago, and people will still associate those few years with the Biden administration.
For that reason, no matter how successful the Federal Reserve is in curbing inflation, inflation will weigh as a negative on the Biden administration’s reelection prospects. People will remember that the Biden administration claimed that inflation was a transitory phenomenon. However, prices are still higher than they were a few years ago.
Is this fair to the Biden administration? Inflation has subsided more rapidly than I expected (but less rapidly than Biden and Jerome Powell said it would). I’m willing to call that a success and credit Powell and the Federal Reserve.
Most voters will not see it that way. Prices are still high, and they will not be coming down. People care about that, and this issue will matter in November.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/03/13/the-politics-of-inflation/
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The NHS puberty blocker ban for children is long overdue
Debbie Hayton
Children in England will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at NHS gender identity clinics. This is good news: it was never appropriate to halt the normal physical development of young people struggling with the concept of growing up into the men and women that nature intended.
Puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones, were a so-called solution that, in my view as a transgender adult, created a very serious problem. A cohort of young people identified as transgender, non-binary or maybe something yet more mysterious. They demanded powerful and life-altering drugs to ward off what they – or their parents – feared might be a mental health catastrophe. All too readily, those demands were met.
Hundreds of under-16s have been prescribed puberty blockers on the NHS
Now, Hilary Cass – the paediatrician who is conducting an independent review of gender identity services for children and young people – has helped put the brakes on this madness. She said, in a 2022 review, that there is a lack of clarity over whether the drugs simply ‘pause’ puberty or if they act as ‘an initial part of a transition pathway’ with most patients becoming ‘locked in’ to changing their gender. The landmark guidelines issued yesterday back Cass up: these said that there is not enough evidence that the drugs are safe and from now on they should only be given as part of clinical trials. This is long overdue.
Hundreds of under-16s have been prescribed puberty blockers on the NHS since 2011, having been referred to the gender identity clinic run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London. In recent years, demand for treatment has overwhelmed the limited provision and waiting lists for children – as well as adults – have mushroomed. According to reports, fewer than 100 children are now currently on puberty blockers through the NHS Gender Identity Development Service, though how many more have their lives on hold is unknown. Waiting forlornly for a call from a distant clinic is no way to live.
The fact that the treatment may ultimately be worse than the wait is hardly comforting to children who have been led to believe that it would solve their problems. It won’t – and that is a particular tragedy for children who would otherwise benefit from timely community mental health support. If the promises made by gender clinics cannot be delivered, then it is better not to make them at all. As such, yesterday’s news is welcome all round.
Unfortunately, that is not the full story. The interim policy on which NHS England consulted last year suggested that, ‘access to puberty suppressing hormones for children and young people with gender incongruence/dysphoria should only be available as part of research’. One would hope that further research involving clinical trials would now be struck down as unethical, but a loophole is left open for further meddling with children’s development.
Then there is the rest of the United Kingdom to worry about. NHS England’s remit is for England. Scotland, whose government seems desperate to be ever more wokier-than-thou, has a separate NHS. While increasing caution has been applied south of the border, Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), part of NHS Scotland, outlined the need for prescribing to continue outside research because of rising numbers of adults and children seeking help.
Finally, there are private providers ready to sell into a market that will pay. Last year, GenderGP asserted that NHS England Specialist Services does not govern what GPs and hospital consultants do in their own services, and has ‘no impact on private doctors and what they decide is the right care for their patients.’ GenderGP says it will ‘continue to provide puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones to patients who need them’.
So, while yesterday’s announcement is a step in the right direction, more is needed to protect children. Liz Truss’s private members’ bill to Amend the Health and Equality Acts is due to be debated on Friday. This bill would make it an offence to prescribe, administer or supply medicinal products to a child as part of a course of treatment for gender dysphoria for the purposes of stopping or delaying the normal onset of puberty, or affirming the child’s perception of their sex where that perception is inconsistent with the child’s sex.
It’s a worthy and valuable aim, but one that is unlikely to be delivered without the active support of the government. To make progress, this bill needs time and expertise to ensure that the drafting is watertight. The Tories look doomed whatever Rishi Sunak does between now and the election. But what better legacy to leave than the protection of children? If Sunak means business, this is an opportunity to make a lasting difference.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/the-nhs-puberty-blocker-ban-for-children-is-long-overdue/
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The dangers of the TikTok bill
“The TikTok bill gives Biden the power to ban websites & apps run by ‘a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity.’ Given that Biden routinely smears political opponents as being under the control of Putin, the danger should be obvious.”
That was entrepreneur David Sacks on X (formerly Twitter) on March 13 noting the fact that H.R. 7521, which has easily passed the House and is now on a fast track in the U.S Senate will give the President, right now it’s Joe Biden but also future presidents, can force divestiture of any website or application or else have it removed from hosting services if the President determines it is run by “a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity” including Russia, China, North Korea or Iran.
To get there, according to the legislation, the application must be “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States”.
It applies to the Chinese-owned TikTok app, but the bill goes further to leave it to the President for all future determinations about who is “subject to the direction or control” of Russia, China, North Korea or Iran.
That’s actually dangerous because Sacks is right. The U.S. government has been routinely accusing political opponents of being foreign agents who are “subject to the direction or control” of Russia and other countries.
The biggest recent example was Russiagate. In fact, to obtain surveillance of the Trump campaign, as happened in Oct. 2016, the FBI and the Justice Department had to give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court a “statement of the facts and circumstances relied upon by the applicant to justify his belief that… the target of the electronic surveillance is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power…”
The Oct. 2016 application to the FISA Court stated, “The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a U.S. person, and an agent of a foreign power… The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the U.S. State Department…”
In part, those allegations relied on the Clinton campaign and DNC-financed Christopher Steele dossier that there was a “well-developed conspiracy” by Russia and the Trump campaign to hack the DNC and give their emails to Wikileaks.
But they also stated as part of the justification for that interference in the Trump campaign that Russia was attempting to convince the Trump campaign to not send weapons to Ukraine and to instead recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, telling the FISA Court that the Trump campaign, per the FISA application, “worked behind the scenes to make sure [the Republican] platform would not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces” stating Trump “might recognize Crimea as Russian territory and lift punitive U.S. sanctions against Russia,” citing news reports.
The Justice Department also included an Aug. 2016 Politico story highlighting Trump’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Ukraine, including his suggestion the people of Crimea preferred to live in Russia, and his doubts that the territories Russia had seized could be reclaimed suggested without risking World War III.
At a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Politico report relied upon by the Justice Department quoted Trump saying a military conflict to take back Crimea would risk nuclear war: “You wanna go back? …You want to have World War III to get it back?” And it quoted Trump on ABC’s “This Week” suggesting the people of Crimea supported Russian annexation: “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
So, that was the predicate before the FISA Court: A foreign power was allegedly attempting to influence the candidate, Trump, via campaign volunteers like Page but also hired help like Manafort, to simply recognize Russia’s claims to Ukraine’s sovereign territories in order to avert war. But these are also political and policy differences Trump had with the Obama administration and his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
During the convention, Paul Manafort was campaign chairman, who was swiftly removed by Trump after the New York Times non-coincidentally ran an erroneous hit piece in Aug. 2016 stating he had corrupt dealings in Ukraine, with a supposed ominous sounding “black ledger.” Manafort was the campaign manager of deposed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych when he was first elected in 2010. He also helped Gerald Ford secure the Republican nomination on the floor against Ronald Reagan in 1976, and then helped Reagan do the same thing in 1980. In 2016, Trump tapped him to win the convention by ensuring Trump delegates he won in the primaries would vote for him on the floor.
Page was similarly removed from the campaign when a Sept. 2016 news story appeared alleging, falsely as it turned out, he was a Russian agent.
Ultimately, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller found there was no Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia to hack the DNC and give the emails to Wikileaks. According to Mueller’s final report to the Attorney General, “the evidence was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.”
The report added, “In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government — or at its direction, control or request — during the relevant time period.”
Manafort was brought up on unrelated tax and bank fraud charges. As for Michael Cohen, “Cohen had never traveled to Prague…” and so, he very well could not have been there meeting with Russian intelligence officials as Steele had alleged.
As for Page, he was never charged with anything.
But all it took for federal intervention in the presidential campaign to occur was a mere accusation of being a foreign agent.
And that is precisely how the TikTok bill could be used against other apps besides TikTok, Sacks now warns.
On March 14, he noted some on X who believe “X is ‘foreign adversary controlled’”.
And others who believed “Tucker Carlson Network is ‘foreign adversary controlled’”.
And others who believed “Rumble is ‘foreign adversary controlled’”.
And others who still believe “Of course Trump is ‘foreign adversary controlled’ — and through him the entire Republican Party.”
The legislation now under consideration, if it became law, and if the President agreed that Donald Trump who also runs Truth Social, Rumble, X and Tucker Carlson were “foreign adversary controlled” then the federal government could force divestiture or else have the websites and apps removed from hosting services.
https://dailytorch.com/2024/03/if-h-r-7521-was-only-about-tiktok-it-would-only-apply-to-tiktok
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High-Income Earners Pay Much More Than Their “Fair Share”
What is your fair share of what someone else has earned? That’s the fundamental principle being tested when discussing “the wealthy paying their fair share.”
Politicians frequently use this hackneyed phrase with ill-defined terms in their calls to raise taxes. Still, the numbers don’t support the idea that the wealthy are skirting their financial responsibility to the nation.
According to the U.S. Treasury, the bottom 10% of income earners pay no taxes, and the second income decile has an average tax rate of minus-4.8%. Mechanisms like refundable tax credits mean this group receives more from the Treasury than it pays in taxes, creating a negative rate.
Those in the 20% to 30% of income earners pay an average tax rate of just 2.8%. Predictably, as a person earns more, he or she pays a higher percentage of his or her income in taxes. Still, no one in the bottom half of income-earners pays more than a 10.1% average tax rate.
The average tax rate has climbed 27% for the top 10% of income earners, but many Americans are surprised to learn that the threshold for this group is just $136,000 for individual income earners.
Most people in the top-income decile are considered middle class. To find the “wealthy,” we must look at a much narrower portion of the income distribution.
The threshold for the top 0.1% of income earners is $3.3 million, and their average tax rate is 33.5%, meaning just over one-third of their income is confiscated in federal taxes.
Then, there are state and local taxes to consider. In places like California and New York, these can push average tax rates close to 50%.
Is it fair to take half of what someone else has earned? And who is wealthy? A high income is not the same as wealth, which is only acquired through saving and investing.
It’s disturbing that the current political climate tends to demonize wealth. The saving and investing of income, not dissipation through spending, generates economic growth. Without savings, capital will decline. That means fewer factories and machines, fewer homes available, slower technological advances and medical breakthroughs, etc.
Investment in capital puts tools in the hands of workers, making them more productive, which increases their incomes. More capital also means more houses and apartments, something America desperately needs amid a housing shortage and cost-of-living crisis.
Capital investment also results in higher living standards because it drives economic growth. As capital accumulation spread across the globe over the last century, technological improvements exploded. The percentage of people living in poverty was cut from 80% to less than 10%, even as the population grew exponentially.
Those who think the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes should also remember if you tax something, you get less of it. Wealth is no different. A reduction in wealth means a reduction in economic growth, leaving everyone worse off, particularly low-income earners.
The top 0.1% of income earners provide a disproportionate amount of America’s economic growth, which is why they also earn a disproportionate amount of the nation’s income. But the amount of taxes they pay are even more out of proportion, accounting for 14.9% of all federal tax receipts from just 8.9% of family incomes.
That indicates high-income earners are already paying more than their fair share.
Unfortunately, complex data like these rarely involve conversations around amorphous words like “wealthy” and “fairness.” Instead, bureaucrats gin up class envy by cherry-picking data to promote a false narrative of imagined animosity between income groups.
The facts are very different. While capital investment and innovation undoubtedly make investors and inventors wealthier, they make society wealthier too. More than 90% of the benefits created by inventors fall on society broadly, with less than 10% going to the inventors themselves.
For example, the creators of smartphones have obviously received substantial benefits from selling their invention, but everyone who owns a smartphone has clearly benefited, too. (You may be reading this on one right now!)
High-income earners already pay disproportionately high taxes and receive disproportionately low amounts of the proceeds from their economic activity. They’re paying their fair share as is. Confiscating even more is a surefire way to kill innovation and hurt middle-class America.
https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/high-income-earners-pay-much-more-their-fair-share
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14 March, 2024
Consanguinity and miscegenation
Consanguinity refers to the degree of "blood" (genetic) relationship between two people, first cousins, second cousins etc.
Christian churches have always had some prohibions against consanguinity in marriage. At one time it was forbidden to marry even your 7th cousin, though more usually the prohibition stretched only to 4th cousin. These days almost anything goes. Only brother/sister relationships are really frowned on.
From a geneticist's viewpoint, consanguinity prohibitions do have some benefit. If a person has a genetic defect, such as a deformity, it is usually found in more than one member of a family. But it is often the case that the defect is recessive, meaning that it only becomes visible in the progeny if both partners to a marriage have it. So marrying "out" reduces the chances of that happening.
Another benefit is "hybrid vigour", meaning that the progeny from quite different bloodlines are often more healthy, vigorous etc than either of the parent populations. So consanguinity prohibions undoubtedly helped keep Christian populations healthy.
The scene is very different with Islam. The laxity of Muslim divorce law means that a woman and her children have no security or protection from her marriage. She can lose her marriage and any bebefits it conveys in a matter of minutes.
So how does she get any security in her marriage? She has to rely on social pressures, and family pressures in particular. If her husband is her cousin and he tries to divorce her, both families will come down heavily on him with condemnations. So that is why consanguinity in marriages, cousin marriages, is very common in Muslim populations
And the genetic consequences follow as night follows day. In Britain, almost all birth deformities presented to the NHS come from Muslim families.
That is all reasonably well known but I want to extend the point a little further. Mental abilities such as IQ are a brain function and the brain is just another organ of the body. So cousin marriage should affect that too. There should be a lot more poorly functioning brains among Muslim populations. Real bright sparks should be rarer. And they are. The average IQs in the Middle East are markedy lower than they are in Europe, around 90 compared to 100 in Europe. So Muslims exemplify well the laws of genetics. Their failure to regulate consanguinity has dumbed them down and made them less fit generally on average.
So how does that affect interracial marriage or "miscegenation"? It should in theory be an extreme example of the benefit of avoiding consanguinity. The progeny of such unions should display hybrid vigour. And I have seen many rather obvious examples of that happening -- where one of the parents is East Asian, usually Chinese. I have often seen good-looking and very capable offspring from such unions. Australia's population is about 5% Chinese by ancestry and young Chinese-origin women often choose Caucasian men as partners, almost invariably tall ones, so Eurasian children are common. I have written at some length on Eurasians in Australia below:
http://jonjayray.com/eurasian.html
But now we come to the tricky one: black/white marriages. Miscegenation was historically forbidden in America but the grounds for the ban are not entirely clear. There was a clear belief that whites were superior in many ways so mixed race chidren were undoutedly regarded as inferior, but in what way was not systematically argued. Should not mixed race children benefit from hybrid vigour?
It would seem that they have done. The term "black" is very loosely used in America today -- covering skin tones from almost Mediterranean to literally black And in the "black" population, lighter skinned blacks cruise. They are generally looked up to by other "blacks". They are more prestigious. And part of that prestige is probably fairly earned. They probably really are healthier and more capable. But it is a topic that would be too fraught to study systematically. I have probably said too much already
But, as even the APA has conceded, the black/white gap in average IQ in America is still large. The APA has put it as one standard deviation, which is a lot. The gap is even greater if we consider blacks back in Africa so miscegenation in America has reduced the average black/white IQ gap but not by a lot.
But however you look at it miscegenation has been BENEFICIAL
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Is Britain's NHS choked by bureaucracy?
"Support" staff don't usually replace anything the doctors do. On the contrary, they just create more paperwork for the doctors
It used to be that our beloved NHS was in crisis every winter. But now the NHS seems to be permanently in crisis. And every year we’re told the NHS needs ever more of our money and ever more staff. In this week’s budget it was handed another few billion which will no doubt disappear down the massive toilet of waste and profligacy that is our national healthcare service.
I realise we have had the pandemic and then seemingly endless strikes by doctors and others. But the NHS’s problems started long before the pandemic and the strikes.
Last week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released data showing the number of staff by main work categories for each of the constituent parts of the U.K. – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (These figures are expressed as FTEs – full-time equivalents – so this takes account of people who may be working part-time.)
As each of the countries classes NHS employees in slightly different ways, it’s difficult to get reliable total NHS employee figures for the whole U.K. However, if we just look at the largest part of the NHS – NHS England – we can get a reasonable idea of what’s going on.
Now let’s look at the numbers:
The number of doctors increased by 37,467 (up 37%) from 101,137 in 2013 to 138,604 by 2023.
The number of nurses and midwives increased by 68,063 (up 23%) from 295,163 in 2013 to 363,226 in 2023.
The number of scientific staff increased by 42,938 (up 13%) from 123,912 in 2013 to 166,850 in 2023.
The number of support staff increased by 125,510 (up 45%) from 279,579 in 2013 to 405,089 in 2023.
The number of infrastructure staff increased by 62,758 (up 41%) from 152,437 in 2013 to 215,195 in 2023.
The number of ambulance staff increased by just 1,721 (up 10%) from 17,537 in 2013 to 19,258 in 2023.
Here are just a few things you might have noticed:
The total number of staff increased by 338,4577 (35%) from 969,765 in 2013 to 1,308,222 in 2023.
The largest increases were in non-medical staff, with support staff shooting up by 45% and infrastructure staff rising by 41%.
The smallest increase was in ambulance staff – up just 10%. Some people might find that slightly worrying. But don’t worry, at the same time as the number of ambulance staff has gone up by only 1,721, the number of DIE (diversity, inclusion and equality) managers has shot up from virtually none in 2013 to more than 800 now. So, if an ambulance does actually manage to reach you before you croak it, the ambulance workers will no doubt be wonderfully racially and gender diverse, which is what you absolutely want from an ambulance service.
We’re constantly told that one reason the NHS is collapsing is a rising population. But the population of England only rose by around 7% between 2013 and 2023. At the same time the number of doctors rose by 37% and the number of nurses and midwives rose by 23%. In Scotland the number of NHS staff rose by about 20% while the population only rose by around 2.7%. In Wales NHS staff numbers increased by 32% while the population only went up by 2%. And in Northern Ireland, NHS staff numbers rose by 20% while the population only increased by 4%. So the excuse of the NHS needing many more staff to cope with a rapidly rising population doesn’t hold water.
Another reason given for the NHS’s constant state of disintegration is that the U.K. population is getting older. Over the period from 2013 to 2023 the mean age of the U.K.’s population rose from 39 years to about 41.5 years – a rise of 6.4%. So this excuse seems pretty flimsy, too.
And then there’s the usual bleating that we don’t spend as much on health as other developed countries. It’s true that we spend less per capita than several European countries. But U.K. health spending per capita is on the OECD average:
While there is some truth in the claim that some other countries spend much more per capita on health, many spend less and we don’t hear about their health systems collapsing like our beloved NHS. So levels of spending and staffing cannot be the only reasons for the utter chaos in our health service.
A better explanation for the NHS’s floundering failure can possibly be seen in the massive increase in non-medical staff – an increase in support staff in the NHS England of an astonishing 45% and in infrastructure staff of 41%. It’s not obvious why a population which has increased by just 7% between 2013 and 2023 and which has got very slightly older should require such a huge rise in non-medical NHS staff. And there has been a 22% increase in NHS administrative staff in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland yet the population served by the NHS there has only gone up by around 2.7%.
But you can look at the numbers, think about your own, your friends’ and your families’ experiences of our pitiful NHS and make up your own minds about the competence of NHS management and the fact that our NHS seems to be doing ever less with ever more money and ever more staff.
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This Masculine Woman Realized How “Crazy” She Looks to Men
A young woman on TikTok recently went viral for her video about why men don’t seem interested in marrying her.
She explains how all the men she’s interested in are already married to women who are soft and feminine.
In contrast, the woman making this observation has tattoos, nose piercings, big burly muscles, fake eyelashes, and nearly a pound of makeup.
“I look crazy!” she says, recognizing how her aesthetic is completely different from the women she initially describes.
She also goes on to say that she thought men liked tough girls. She runs her own business, is a fitness influencer, and has always worked hard to be independent and strong.
But apparently, these qualities are not what men want.
How did she get it so wrong?
Yet another lie of modern feminism
Modern feminism has completely missed the mark when it comes to the qualities that make a woman attractive to men.
We’ve been told that a successful career, being strong and independent, and not “needing a man” are the qualities that men seek out in their female counterparts.
There’s nothing wrong with having those qualities if you genuinely want to live your life that way.
But if you think that the average man will find it attractive, that’s where your thought process has gone wrong.
Women today are being encouraged to act more like men.
Put your career first, be loud and assertive, forgo childbearing, and objectify your body in the name of “sexual liberation.”
By all means, women are free to choose this path. But if they’re hoping to be whisked away by Prince Charming at the end of it, they are sorely mistaken.
Men want feminine women
This shouldn’t be controversial, but this reality is hitting young women like a bucket of ice-cold water.
Typically, men prefer kind and agreeable women with natural beauty and feminine charm. Masculinity and femininity are natural complements that draw two people together. (Generally, masculine men are attracted to feminine women, but feminine men may be attracted to masculine women as well).
The irony here is that most women want masculine men, while simultaneously assuming that having masculine qualities of their own will make them more attractive to said men.
Having a “high-paying job,” a substantial amount of sexual experience, and a go-getter attitude isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
At least not in the dating world.
What can women do?
Re-learning what it means to be feminine
In some circles, there has been a return to classical femininity.
Dressing more modestly, being sexually selective, enhancing natural beauty, and embracing marriage and motherhood are some ways that women are choosing against modern feminist culture.
But femininity is not just checking certain boxes. It also involves being comfortable letting others lead, learning how to nurture and care for those around us, and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.
While independence has been drilled into us as an aspirational concept, it also results in emotional detachment, an inflated ego, and a false sense of self-reliance.
The reality is that being ‘strong and independent’ does not make most women happy.
In the same way that men want to feel needed, women also thrive while being an active part of a community.
Final thoughts
Everyone is free to choose how they live their lives, how they act, what they prioritize, and how they present themselves to others.
However, we don’t get to choose how others perceive us.
The woman on TikTok is free to have tattoos, build her physique, wear nose piercings, and as much makeup as her heart desires. If that’s what makes her feel happy and confident, more power to her.
But — she cannot demand that the men she desires also find her attractive.
If better luck in the dating market is what you desire, a return to classical femininity might not hurt.
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The decline of marriage
A lot of marriages in the past s were pretty unhappy so this may not be a wholly bad thing
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in Holy matrimony, which is an honourable estate…’
This once-standard ceremony has seen a dramatic decline, but this decline is perhaps not terminal.
The recent Irish referendum, with its goal to rewrite definitions of marriage and the role of women and parenthood into the Constitution, has been a dramatic failure. Despite support from all major parties, the two proposals went down by 67 per cent and 74 per cent respectively. After successful referenda on divorce in 1995, same-sex marriage in 2015, and abortion in 2018, the progressive agenda has gone too far.
In Christian terms, the Holy rite was ordained for the procreation of children, to avoid fornication, and for the mutual help and society that one ought to have for the other. It was also intended to last ‘through sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, forsaking all others as long as you both shall live’. For many hundreds of years, this institution prospered and provided stability in the English-speaking world. In the last 50 years, this stability has been increasingly under threat.
Examples of changed attitudes are provided by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the latest American Presidents. There have been multiple progenies through multiple liaisons. Even Barnaby Joyce is enjoying a second round of parenthood. Darling of the Left, ex-Kiwi Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, has belatedly signed up. The latest political surprise is Prime Minister Albanese’s announcement that, after a failed marriage, he will marry Jodie Haydon. Maybe all is not lost?
Attitudes to marriage have changed dramatically and, compared with a level of 85 per cent 50 years ago, only 20 per cent of modern couples are married. This, in combination with effective contraception, has resulted in a different attitude to sexual relations and a falling birth rate.
The origins of the institution of marriage are lost in the mists of time. The first recorded marriage ceremony was held in around 2,300 BC in Mesopotamia where the institution developed when humans moved from hunter-gathering to permanent settlement and acquisition of property. Prior to this, family units consisted of small groups of men, women, and children. All were shared in sexual polygamy.
Subsequently, the wedding ceremony was later found in Greek, Roman, and Jewish communities, binding women and their heirs to men.
In other societies, a man was allowed to have as many wives as he could afford. In Shiite culture a temporary marriage, be it for hours or days, (known as Sigheh), is allowed to permit sexual relations. A worldwide survey in 1949 documented 1,200 different groups and found 186 had a monogamous society, over 1,000 with polygamy (multiple wives), and in the Himalayas, 4 with polyandry (multiple husbands). Polygamy is still allowed in many societies, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, and in the Mormon Church in the American State of Utah.
Historically, marriage was used to secure economic or political advantage, with little concern about compatibility. This approach is still normal in many cultures, with the husband not eligible for marriage until financially secure, usually resulting in a significant age gap. It was not until the 1500s that, although marriage was frequently arranged, consent of the individuals was required by the church. These concepts remained firmly established until the last few decades.
In the UK, the Clandestine Marriage Act of 1753 required all couples to be married by a minister of religion, subsequently the Marriage Act of 1836 allowed for non-religious weddings in registry offices. Child marriage was common until the 19th Century, and is still practised in India with a legal age of 14, and Islamic countries following puberty.
In the UK divorce was rare, and individuals required an act of Parliament until a legal process was introduced in 1858. Up to this point, there had only ever been 324 documented cases (only 4 brought by women). Divorce in India, although only around 1 per cent, is increasing in both Hindu and Muslim communities, as recent legal changes mean the wife is less disadvantaged. Australian statistics from 2017 show there were around 110,000 marriages (a fall of 5 per cent on the previous year, and 30 per cent compared with 1975, (when the population was half that of now), and around 40,000 divorces that year. The top 10 countries for divorce are all communist.
The social and religious stigma attached to divorce declined in the 1960s, and the contraceptive pill reduced unwanted pregnancies and forced marriage. Women’s liberation increased, with their involvement in the workforce producing greater independence and less subservience. With the introduction of no-fault divorce legislation in 1975, the divorce rate rose dramatically, at its maximum the rate was 4.6 per thousand of the total population. This has declined, to 2 per thousand in 2017, as fewer now marry.
The number of marriages in Australia continues to drop, falling from 6 per 1,000 in 1999 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2019, and a low of 3 during the Covid years. Those who cohabit surprisingly have a five times higher separation rate than those who marry, and experience a lower sense of well-being. Around 50 per cent of those who cohabit ultimately marry. Surprisingly, their divorce rate is a third higher when compared with non-cohabitation before marriage.
Surveys of both men and women have demonstrated a greater satisfaction, stability, health, economic development, and commitment in marriage compared with cohabitation, which is associated with increased infidelity and conflict. Studies continue to show that the most successful marriage is the old-fashioned breadwinner/homemaker relationship.
Those who do marry do so at a later age, for men the average is 32 (it was 23 in 1976), for women the average is 30 (it was 21). A consequence of this delay is the increasing age of motherhood, now averaging 31, and an increased likelihood of infertility. Despite this supposed maturity, the expectations of personal freedom, lack of commitment, and boredom have undoubtedly increased the rate of changing partners. The influence of Christian religion in marriage has declined from over 95 per cent of church weddings in 1902, to 50 per cent by 1999, and 22 per cent in 2016. This mirrors falling church attendance, with the 45 per cent attending in 1950, falling to 16 per cent by 2016. The latest 2021 Census showed around 43 per cent still identify as Christian.
The effect of marital breakdown on children has been extensively researched. Studies suggest they are more prone to behavioural problems as they tend to blame themselves for the marital failure. They have worse educational achievement and are more prone to the development of anxiety, depression, aggression, drug use, poverty in later life, and a criminal record. This has to be compared with the stress of being brought up in a dysfunctional relationship.
With divorce or separation comes the likelihood of a new relationship and the arrival of a step-father, many studies have suggested that the new relationship, now labelled the Cinderella effect, maybe more dangerous for the child. Nevertheless, a good male role model is believed important for the child’s future development. The latest Census statistics from 2021 show that there are more than a million one-parent families, a steady increase to now 16 per cent of families.
As heterosexual marriage declines, the demand for homosexual marriage has increased. Gay marriage is rare in history but not unknown. The Roman Emperor Nero had two formal weddings to men and the acceptance increased in 2nd and 3rd Century Rome. It was finally banned in 324 A.D., but this failed to halt the empire’s dissolute decline. Same-sex marriage was recognised in many indigenous cultures in the Americas and in Asia. In 2005, the Civil Partnerships Act was introduced in the UK to accord the same rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples.
Australia introduced legislation in 2017. The number of heterosexuals marrying fell soon after, perhaps with Covid, but these marriages are now at 60 per cent of the pre-Covid level. Same-sex marriage peaked at 6,000 couples in the first year following the legislation, now around 4,000 annually. The cost of the plebiscite was $130 million, around $100,000 for each marriage that year. This legislation is still not enough for the activists. They seem bent on the destruction of traditional life and the marriage that previously sustained it. This is best exemplified by the incomprehensible statement by a lesbian activist that, ‘Future generations will thank us for eliminating heterosexuality!’
Currently, over 30 countries have legislated to formalise same-sex relationships. Australian Census figures from 2016 revealed there are 46,000 couples (around 0.4 per cent of the population and 0.9 per cent of couples) in same-sex relationships, half male and half female. This was an increase from 33,000 recorded in 2011, which was itself a 32 per cent increase from the numbers from 2006. The latest Census figures, from 2021 show there have been 25,000 same-sex marriages.
Statistics for the 10 years from 2005-15 show a failure rate of 30 per cent for lesbian relationships and half that rate for gay males, with a comparison rate of 20 per cent for heterosexual couples.
Historically, Western society has been held together by several important threads. Christianity has been a stabilising force, providing a moral compass while marriage has provided a structured basis for family life. In the post-modern era, our traditions and religion are also under threat. There are increasing demands from intellectuals that we apologise and compensate others for supposed sins of the past.
These pillars of tradition are weakening, we are becoming increasingly selfish and self-centred and losing compassion for others as we fail to commit. The traditional nuclear family has been a target of Marxism since the 19th Century, with the goal of its replacement by the state.
The Millennial generation are increasingly following what has been labelled polyamory, with an expectation of partner rotation or multiple partners. This lack of commitment (currently estimated at 5 per cent in this group, compared with 2 per cent in the homosexual group) is resulting in increased sexually transmitted disease, (levels tripled from 2001-11), financial difficulties, and poorly functioning offspring.
This triumph of self-fulfilment ignores the need of children for stable parenting.
Marriage in many societies will continue to be dictated by their culture, with the rapid expansion of Islam perhaps an important factor for the future of women. In the West we have gone through the stages of marriage for tribal reasons, financial gain, religious requirements, and love. Sexual freedom is now widespread with its self-centred concept of relationship without responsibility. The modern generation need two incomes to support their conspicuous consumption. This has resulted in delay or even abandonment of procreation and a falling birth rate. In Australia there were 23 births per thousand in 1950, this has progressively declined to half that number in 2019, well below replacement levels.
Twenty years ago, some were calling these trends a marriage crisis. It may also prove to be a crisis for our Western society. The advent of Covid produced its own challenges, with the number marrying falling further by 31 per cent in 2021. Perhaps Albo can re-invigorate the institution with his own marriage? The result of the recent Irish referendum indicates that all is perhaps not lost.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/marriage-a-fading-institution/
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13 March, 2024
Another pathetic PFAS study
PFAS is a class of chemicals that is totally harmless to humans. But because there is a lot of it around the do-gooders are determined to find something wrong with it. They have been at it for years -- always finding nothing like what they theorize. Attention-whore Erin Brockovich was one of the early players. The latest attempt is below. As usual, no harm from PFAS was found. But they scratched around in their data to find something to talk about
They were, fortunately, honest enough to admit that their reults were inconclusive. But the results were more than inconclusive. They totally vindicated PFAS. I simply quote from the journal article:
"In the overall analyses, no associations were found between PFOA, PFOS, or PFHxS and the clinical lipid measurements when adjusting for age, sex, and education"
Get that: NO ASSOCIATIONS
Toxic chemicals lurking in cookware, make-up and toiletries might be harming the heart, another study suggested today.
Scientists have for years warned about the dangers of perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
Dubbed 'forever chemicals' because they can linger in the environment for hundreds of years, they have been linked to everything from cancer to infertility.
But the latest evidence by Dutch and German researchers suggests that the impact of PFAS on human health could be even greater than suspected.
Tests showed 'clear' signs PFAS led to higher levels of 'harmful' blood lipids, such as cholesterol and other fatty substances.
Excess lipids or fats in the blood can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, studies show.
The findings do not prove the chemicals, added to cookware, carpets, textiles and other items to make them more water- and stain-repellant, cause any adverse heart issues because other factors could be at play.
Scientists said the results, however, should serve as a warning that 'there may be no safe levels below which exposure is without health hazard'.
Study author Professor Monique Breteler, director of population health sciences at German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), said: 'We see clear signs of a harmful effect of PFAS on health.
'We have found at the same PFAS concentration in the blood, the negative effects are more pronounced in younger subjects than in older ones.
'Our data shows a statistically significant correlation between PFAS in the blood and harmful blood lipids linked to cardiovascular risk.'
However, she noted: 'The higher the PFAS level, the higher the concentration of these lipids.
'Taken strictly, this is not yet proof that PFAS chemicals cause unfavorable blood lipid profiles.'
PFAS are a class of chemicals that are more properly known as per and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
Famed for their durability and stain resistant properties, they have been used in a host of products from nonstick cookware, to clothes, packaging, cosmetics and even children's toys.
But industries are now moving away from them because of their detrimental impacts.
When PFAS enter the body either through food and water that people eat and drink or by inhaling contaminated air, they can distribute throughout the body in tissues and organs.
PFAS has previously been linked to kidney cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer, among others.
While these links are not definitive and research is ongoing, part of the concern is because PFAS are so ubiquitous in modern life and persist so long in the environment they could infiltrate water supplies, further increasing exposure.
The Government's Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) currently sets a limit of 0.1 micrograms per litre (?g/L) for PFAS in UK tap water, with the body running a specific programme testing for levels in British water supplies.
In their study, researchers at DZNE and Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands analysed blood samples from over 2,500 Dutch men and women aged between 30 and 89.
PFAS were detected in the blood of almost all test subjects.
Professor Breteler added: 'Even if we don't see an immediate health threat for the study participants we examined, the situation is still worrying.
'In the long term, the increased risk may very well have a negative impact on the heart and cardiovascular system.'
The findings, based on three of the most common types of PFAS (PFOA, PFOS and PFHxS) were published in the journal Exposure and Health.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13186847/chemicals-scientists-toxic-PFAS-blood-heart.html
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Crazy priorities from Joe Biden
Before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, the pundit class was predicting that he would deliver a message of unity and calm, if only to attract undecided voters to his side.
He did the opposite. The speech revealed a loud, cranky, angry, bitter side of the man that people don’t usually see. It seemed like the real Joe Biden I remember from the old days, full of venom, sarcasm, disdain, threats, and extreme partisanship.
The base might have loved it except that he made reference to an “illegal” alien, which is apparently a trigger word for the left. He failed their purity test.
The speech was stunning in its bile and bitterness. It’s beyond belief that he began with a pitch for more funds for the Ukraine war, which has killed 10,000 civilians and some 200,000 troops on both sides. It’s a bloody mess that could have been resolved early on but for U.S. tax funding of the conflict.
Despite the push from the higher ends of conservative commentary, average Republicans have turned hard against this war. The United States is in a fiscal crisis and every manner of domestic crisis, and the U.S. president opens his speech with a pitch to protect the border in Ukraine? It was completely bizarre, and lent some weight to the darkest conspiracies about why the Biden administration cares so much about this issue.
From there, he pivoted to wildly overblown rhetoric about the most hysterically exaggerated event of our times: the legendary Jan. 6 protests on Capitol Hill. Arrests for daring to protest the government on that day are growing.
The media and the Biden administration continue to describe it as the worst crisis since the War of the Roses, or something. It’s all a wild stretch, but it set the tone of the whole speech, complete with unrelenting attacks on former President Donald Trump. He would use the speech not to unite or make a pitch that he is president of the entire country but rather intensify his fundamental attack on everything America is supposed to be.
Hard to isolate the most alarming part, but one aspect really stood out to me. He glared directly at the Supreme Court Justices sitting there and threatened them with political power. He said that they were awful for getting rid of nationwide abortion rights and returning the issue to the states where it belongs, very obviously. But President Biden whipped up his base to exact some kind of retribution against the court.
Looking this up, we have a few historical examples of presidents criticizing the court but none to their faces in a State of the Union address. This comes two weeks after President Biden directly bragged about defying the Supreme Court over the issue of student loan forgiveness. The court said he could not do this on his own, but President Biden did it anyway.
Here we have an issue of civic decorum that you cannot legislate or legally codify. Essentially, under the U.S. system, the president has to agree to defer to the highest court in its rulings even if he doesn’t like them. President Biden is now aggressively defying the court and adding direct threats on top of that. In other words, this president is plunging us straight into lawlessness and dictatorship.
In the background here, you must understand, is the most important free speech case in U.S. history. The Supreme Court on March 18 will hear arguments over an injunction against President Biden’s administrative agencies as issued by the Fifth Circuit. The injunction would forbid government agencies from imposing themselves on media and social media companies to curate content and censor contrary opinions, either directly or indirectly through so-called “switchboarding.”
A ruling for the plaintiffs in the case would force the dismantling of a growing and massive industry that has come to be called the censorship-industrial complex. It involves dozens or even more than 100 government agencies, including quasi-intelligence agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which was set up only in 2018 but managed information flow, labor force designations, and absentee voting during the COVID-19 response.
A good ruling here will protect free speech or at least intend to. But, of course, the Biden administration could directly defy it. That seems to be where this administration is headed. It’s extremely dangerous.
A ruling for the defense and against the injunction would be a catastrophe. It would invite every government agency to exercise direct control over all media and social media in the country, effectively abolishing the First Amendment.
Close watchers of the court have no clear idea of how this will turn out. But watching President Biden glare at court members at the address, one does wonder. Did they sense the threats he was making against them? Will they stand up for the independence of the judicial branch?
Maybe his intimidation tactics will end up backfiring. After all, does the Supreme Court really think it is wise to license this administration with the power to control all information flows in the United States?
The deeper issue here is a pressing battle that is roiling American life today. It concerns the future and power of the administrative state versus the elected one. The Constitution contains no reference to a fourth branch of government, but that is what has been allowed to form and entrench itself, in complete violation of the Founders’ intentions. Only the Supreme Court can stop it, if they are brave enough to take it on.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, and surely you have, President Biden is nothing but a marionette of deep-state interests. He is there to pretend to be the people’s representative, but everything that he does is about entrenching the fourth branch of government, the permanent bureaucracy that goes on its merry way without any real civilian oversight.
We know this for a fact by virtue of one of his first acts as president, to repeal an executive order by President Trump that would have reclassified some (or many) federal employees as directly under the control of the elected president rather than have independent power. The elites in Washington absolutely panicked about President Trump’s executive order. They plotted to make sure that he didn’t get a second term, and quickly scratched that brilliant act by President Trump from the historical record.
This epic battle is the subtext behind nearly everything taking place in Washington today.
Aside from the vicious moment of directly attacking the Supreme Court, President Biden set himself up as some kind of economic central planner, promising to abolish hidden fees and bags of chips that weren’t full enough, as if he has the power to do this, which he does not. He was up there just muttering gibberish. If he is serious, he believes that the U.S. president has the power to dictate the prices of every candy bar and hotel room in the United States—an absolutely terrifying exercise of power that compares only to Stalin and Mao. And yet there he was promising to do just that.
Aside from demonizing the opposition, wildly exaggerating about Jan. 6, whipping up war frenzy, swearing to end climate change, which will make the “green energy” industry rich, threatening more taxes on business enterprise, promising to cure cancer (again!), and parading as the master of candy bar prices, what else did he do? Well, he took credit for the supposedly growing economy even as a vast number of Americans are deeply suffering from his awful policies.
It’s hard to imagine that this speech could be considered a success. The optics alone made him look like the Grinch who stole freedom, except the Grinch was far more articulate and clever. He’s a mean one, Mr. Biden
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-grinch-who-stole-freedom-5603861
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Diversity Row Erupts at National AI Institute After 180 Staff Sign Letter Questioning “Inclusivity” of Hiring Four Male Scientists
Why is it so difficult to accept that men and women are good at different things? They always have been and always will be
It's part of the restless nature of Leftists. They are never happy with how things are. So they press for change to anything that seems restricted. But that can easily be destructive. Wanting women to do things that they are less good at just diverts them from things they are good at, resulting in a general decline of capability
A diversity row has erupted at the U.K.’s national AI institute after staff signed a letter questioning the “inclusivity” of the appointment of four male senior scientists. The Telegraph has more.
Employees and researchers at the Alan Turing Institute, Britain’s flagship data science and AI research organisation set up in 2015, questioned whether its “commitment to inclusivity” was being followed in its hiring process.
More than 180 people signed the letter, which was first reported by the Guardian, after four top male academics were appointed in February. The signatories said the hiring suggested a “continuing trend of limited diversity within the institute’s senior scientific leadership”.
In the letter, addressed to Chief Executive Dr. Jean Innes and its Operations Lead and Chief Scientist, the staff said: “This is an excellent time to reflect on whether all voices are being heard and if the institute’s commitment to inclusivity is being fully realised in our recruitment and decision-making practices.”
The protest comes after the Government agreed to hand the institute a further £100m over the next five years for research focusing on “grand challenges” in the use of data and AI in healthcare, defence and sustainability.
Four new scientists, including experts from UCL and Imperial College London, were hired to help lead those efforts. All were men.
The staff who signed the letter to the Turing Institute’s leadership said their intention was “not to undermine” the scientists’ credentials, but they added: “Our aim is to highlight a broader issue within our institute’s approach to diversity and inclusivity, particularly in scientific leadership roles, with a specific eye towards gender diversity.”
Four of the 12 research programme directors at the institute are women.
Dr. Innes, the chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute, said: “Our appointments are made through free and fair competition and on the basis of merit. We recognise the critical importance of diverse leadership and welcome dialogue with our community about what more we can do.
“As the national institute for data science and AI we are committed to increasing the proportion of under-represented groups in these fields.”
Let’s face it. The activists were never going to be happy with equal opportunity. Only the full-on socialist ‘equity’ of equal outcomes between identity groups was going to be acceptable to those bent on bringing down the ‘evil oppressors’.
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Envy and the left
We are all familiar with the concept of envy. As we know, this corrosive, malignant state of mind is one of the seven deadly sins of Christianity, but it’s also condemned in Islam, Buddhism, and most secular ethical systems. Writing in 1930, Bertrand Russell identified envy as a major, and largely unacknowledged, cause of unhappiness in Western societies. If anything, its pernicious hold is stronger than ever today and growing. Social media is widely blamed for this, but progressive ideology is also a culprit, and perhaps the most important one. True, the left has always appealed to envy, but as its Utopian ambitions have grown, so too has its demonetisation of the successful.
Let’s start with the government’s ditching of the Stage Three personal income tax cuts. In a classic Robin Hood ploy, it is taking money from all those who earn more than $150,000 (compared to what they would have received under Stage Three) to pay for higher tax relief for those on lower incomes. The latter could have been funded by spending cuts, preserving the reform intention behind stage three.
So why was this option apparently not even considered? Doling out benefits to the needy does not provide, for the envious, the frisson of pleasure that penalising others in the community does. Envy was the leitmotif of Bill Shorten’s leadership. Under Prime Minister Albanese, the appeal is less overt, but still unmistakably there: a dog-whistle rather than a campaign slogan.
Envy’s reach extends well beyond tax. It is hard-wired into identity politics. Consider what kind of world its adherents aim to create. Their goal is not equality in the true sense of the word: a colour-blind society where all enjoy the same rights and freedoms. No, they crave hierarchy and privilege. Power must be stripped from imagined oppressor groups (white males and Jews, to take two favourite targets) and transferred instead to their supposed victims (women, Indigenous people, and Palestinians). Where the traditional left at least paid lip service to the abolition of all privilege, progressives covet it for themselves. Covetousness, as we know, is a close relation of envy.
Nor is climate change ideology free of envy. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, many people mask their envy in virtue. I suspect this was a large part of the psychological appeal of last century’s prohibition movement. I have no doubt that it motivates climate change moralisers today, who insist we give up – for our own good, of course – cheap and reliable power, viable agriculture and industry, and even the type of cars most of us want to drive. For many of them, I suspect, this harsh prospect provides a warm inner glow. Not only can they indulge their worst envious instincts, they can pose as morally superior at the same time.
If you think I am drawing a long bow, consider why renowned economist and climate believer Bjorn Lomborg is so despised by the left. By rejecting the need for emissions austerity, he is denying climate zealots the opportunity to take others’ petrol-powered SUVs away.
Of course, none of us is immune from envy. This vice can afflict conservatives as well as progressives, libertarians as well as socialists, in their personal lives. Equally, no political philosophy is free from morally corrupting influences and ethical blind spots. For conservatism, at least in the eyes of its critics, a lack of compassion toward the less fortunate is highlighted in this regard. For the left envy is the age-old moral hazard, given how easily compassion can morph into the urge to hurt the better off.
Mainstream social democratic parties, to their credit, used to keep this malign instinct within certain limits, confining their ambitions to income redistribution. In the past, the tall poppy syndrome was about pricking the pretensions of high and mighty rather than outright cancellation. Today’s progressive left, like its socialist predecessors, has given envy far freer rein. Indeed, it is an inevitable by-product of progressivism’s basic worldview.
By denying the existence of individual merit or excellence, progressives are suspicious of success of any kind, which is attributed to privilege, luck or the lottery of the free market. By rejecting traditional religion, they blind themselves to the darker realities of human nature, not least their own. And consider the effect of the depressing, zero-sum view of the world progressivism adopts: the belief that everything we value, whether material wealth, cultural riches, and indeed treasured historical memories, must have been stolen or appropriated from some oppressed group.
Rather than giving in to envy, we can respond to the success of others in a constructive way. We can admire them. We can seek to emulate, and possibly even surpass them. This competitive impulse, while decried by some, is a positive social and economic force. It has always been the key to capitalism’s dynamism and social mobility.
This truth was recognised by our greatest Prime Ministers, Bob Hawke and John Howard. Their policy settings, which put aspiration (and where merited, compassion for the less fortunate) before envy, yielded enormous economic and social dividends. We became richer and more socially cohesive as a result. I suspect we were happier and more content. Yet this era seems a world away.
If you want to know why socialism, for all its manifest failures, retains its attraction, you don’t need to look beyond its appeal to envy. After all, there is a reason why the major political party of the left in Australia is called the Greens. Progressive ideology, the socialism of the 21st Century, has given this vice new impetus and cover, pulling the impressionable young into its orbit. They may initially have good intentions, but for too many envy’s seductions (and addictive effect) eventually take over. This is a recipe not for happiness and fulfilment, but for anger, emptiness, and demoralisation. We can see every day in the faces of progressive protesters.
Envy can be overcome. People can change for the better. The ancients, in their wisdom, gave us the clue we need. Envy, they believed, is a form of selective blindness (as its Latin word invidia suggests). Those afflicted by it must remove their self-imposed blinkers. Yet for progressives who, whether from hubris or vanity, refuse to see this is no small task.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/envy-and-the-left/
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12 March, 2024
Taking two popular supplements after the menopause could raise women's risk of heart attack
I have reproduced above the original headline of the article below. It is totally misleading. The research was high-quality and if you look at the the orignating journal article what you find is that "There was no overall effect on other measures, including all-cause mortality". In other words taking the pills did not help you live longer or shorten your life. The pills increased your risk of heart attacks but reduced your risk of cancer, with the two effects almost perfectly balancing one-another out. So old ladies will not be harmed by those pills. They will live just as long with or without them.
Another important inaccuracy is that the pills are not usually taken "to stave off the effects of menopause". HRT is used for that. The pills in this case are used to prevent crumbling bones. So the pills may give some comfort without killing you. That sounds like good news to me
Taking two popular supplements after the menopause could raise women's risk of heart attack, according to major 20 year study
US researchers followed more than 30,000 women for two decades
They found that those who took certain supplements had raised heart risk
Taking supplements to stave off the effects of menopause could leave you more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease, according to a landmark study involving 36,000 women.
Researchers from The US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute looked at the health outcomes of roughly 18,000 women who took daily calcium and vitamin D pills for seven years - all of whom were between the ages of 50 and 79.
They followed the women up 20 years later, and compared the incidence of heart disease and cancer to a group of a similar number who didn't take supplements in their later years.
The results, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, showed that those who'd taken the pills - which are said to strengthen bones - had a six percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, compared to the other group.
However, those in the supplement arm of the study were also seven percent less likely to die from cancer.
Notably, the authors said the increased risk of cancer was only seen in those who had been taking supplements in their younger years, before the study launched.
This is the largest randomized trial of women using these supplements, according to the study's authors.
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Out-of-Control HR is Destroying Britain
An all-pervasive ‘just be kind’ mindset in every walk of life is turning the economy to mush, says Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph. And it’s being driven by out-of-control HR. Here’s an excerpt.
One way to respond to this [explosion in worklessness] would be to say that Britain is a sicker country than it used to be. But as one noted psychiatrist put it earlier this year, the “rate of defined disorders has not changed for 50-60 years”. What may have changed instead is our willingness to describe ourselves as being mentally unwell, and the willingness of the state to accept that claim without excessive interrogation.
Indeed, in the HR state, attempts to shift people into employment are frowned upon as unkind, even though work can be beneficial for mental health. And so the taxpayer continues to fork out for workers who don’t work, public services decline and the tax burden grows.
Once you start to see the growing power of HR culture, it’s everywhere. It’s in the way we speak to each other, with normal, everyday interactions increasingly governed by rules on what can be said, on what level of rudeness incurs civil or criminal liability.
Rather than taking offence – with the implication that we can choose how to respond, including shrugging ill-judged words off – we are harmed by insensitive language. And the HR state intervenes to protect us, levelling jail sentences at people who are rude online, or handing massive payouts to those offended by their colleagues at work.
It doesn’t matter if that offence is given with good reason. Demanding excellent performance from highly paid civil servants and employees is out. And getting rid of employees isn’t always an option either: in one notable case, a judge found in favour of an employee complaining about being let go after 808 sick days (and racking up £96,000 in sick pay).
You aren’t even really free to choose what you pay your employees. At any point, the state could decide your arrangement is insufficiently fair.
Take the de facto bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council. Poor decisions, like spending millions of pounds taxiing students to school, played a role in this affair. But perhaps the biggest blow came when a judge determined that completely different jobs, with completely different demands – and market rates – met a nebulous definition of equal worth.
It didn’t matter that men and women in the same roles were paid the same wages. The simple fact that some jobs – such as street cleaners and refuse collectors – received bonuses that others – such as cooks and care workers – did not was enough to show that the council had breached the law. The result was £1.1bn in payouts, with possibly another £760m in liabilities remaining, and a torrent of follow-on lawsuits against councils, supermarkets, and all sorts of other employers.
From an economic perspective, this is nuts. It’s closer to old Marxist theories of value than it is to anything modern economists would recognise. Different jobs earn different wages because they are different; they differ in staffing levels, capital intensity, travel time, injury risk, hours, unpleasantness, and any number of other features.
Wages reflect all of these things and more. Of course different jobs pay different wages! But in the eyes of the HR state, none of this matters. All that matters is that a judge believes they are of equal worth.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/08/out-of-control-hr-is-destroying-britain/
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Surviving in black America
When I was 15-years old, I rejected the advances of an aggressive young Jamaican boy who had recently moved into my Harlem neighborhood.
My dismissal of his passes made him angry and he verbally threatened to hurt me. At first, I brushed it off and didn’t take him seriously. But after the initial incident, there were other times I would see him around the neighborhood and he would physically grab me by the arm and make the same threat. He wasn’t afraid of anyone seeing or hearing him terrorize me. Although I didn’t show it or express it to anyone, but eventually I did begin to fear him.
By this point, I was used to the familiar feeling of being unsafe in my environment.
One Saturday night in the summer, I went outside to meet up with my friends. It had been a hot day and my block was crowded with kids and teenagers who had been having water fights. My apartment building was located on 8th Avenue and I started walking towards 7th Avenue, before I could reach the end of the block, I saw the the Jamaican boy walking towards me and noticed he was pulling a gun out of his waistband.
I immediately stopped walking and froze in place. As he got closer, I could see the sinister grin on his face. He grabbed me and we tussled for a few moments with the gun in his hand. The next thing I remember is being hit with the butt of the gun on the right side of my head. He laughed as he walked away from the scene of the crime.
I was dizzy from the assault but I stumbled back to my building and sat there for a while trying to make sense of what had just happened while my head throbbed in pain. As I wiped the tears streaming down my face, I decided it was time to climb the three flights of stairs to my family’s apartment and tell them about the assault. I didn’t realize that my younger brother had jumped in to help me. That might’ve been the action that saved my life. Although there were many witnesses, no one else intervened.
I continued to attract aggressive boys and men who felt the need to exert their predatory prowess over my feminine nature and petite frame.
That incident was not the first time I had to physically struggle or was attacked by a young boy or a man, that I knew personally, for violating me. I kept these incidents to myself but I wasn’t aware that being silent about it would be detrimental to my health and my future self.
I was slapped in public a couple of times and date raped by one of my boyfriends. I fought off a rape attempt by a “friend” I was not involved with the incident happening only a few steps from my apartment door. Another attack involved an older family friend inside of my apartment when no adult was home. Later on in my early twenties, a guy I worked with locked the supply room behind us and also attempted to sexually assault me.
All of these occurrences slowly eroded my spirit leaving my perpetrators free of consequences because of my swift compartmentalization of each offense.
After years of normalizing the propensity of violence towards me, I lost the strength to fight back in intimate relationship dynamics that were rooted in my complacency. Any drop of self-respect I may have had was gone if it ever existed. I found myself saying yes to things that I really wanted to say no to because I was exhausted of hoping they could see my worth and treat me better. My malaise was a sure sign of low self value.
The external harm manifested into an internal behavior pattern of self-betrayal, self-harm and a strange addiction to destructive sociopathic behavior in men. Experiencing a repetition of trauma lead to insanity and the scale had finally tilted to the other side.
The day came in 2018 where I had to face the truth of my past and my violent history with men. The rude awakening was after another dangerous man that made vile attempts against my well-being.
After spending four years in a psychologically abusive and mentally draining relationship, I had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with a second autoimmune disorder. I had wasted more of my precious time with someone whose intention was to bring forth destruction and disturb my peace.
The troubling red flags were the warning signs I needed to escape another troubling situation but I ignored after months of his persistent pursuit. It only took a couple of days after he moved into my home for his sinister planning and unpredictable actions to take root thus destabilizing the sacred environment I had created for my son and I. Later he confessed with a badge of honor his lack of empathy and narcissism.
His admission and self awareness of his dark traits did nothing for the lack of self respect that I exhibited that became a playground for his abuse.
Self deprecation was not a new experience. I had deep feelings of unworthiness that I carried since I was a child. I was unaware of the subconscious attraction to violent men until one day, I suddenly remembered the incident that contributed to my dissociation from over thirty years ago. It was time for me to reflect on my habits and behaviors that continued to welcome this malevolent spirit.
I had spent many years blaming myself for what the Jamaican boy had done to me and not dealing with the remnants of that trauma. I had not allowed him to be solely responsible for his violent behavior. Even though he did not physically kill me that night, a part of my spirit died. He didn’t pull the actual trigger on the gun but shot a bullet through my soul.
Living life in victimhood did not serve me well.
Deep down in the recesses of my mind and body, I did not want to represent the damsel in distress personae so I covered up these infractions towards me and hardened my feelings that blocked any real long term opportunities for a genuine and healthy intimate connection, one in which my safety would be a priority.
https://saidbysimone.medium.com/the-night-i-was-hit-with-a-gun-554d4887d614
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Is this the beginning of the end of America's woke madness? The Democrat cities rolling back progressive policies
In San Francisco and Portland, leaders are reversing liberal drug policies after they led to a sharp rise in addiction and deaths by overdose.
And across the country in New York, Mayor Eric Adams wants changes the Big Apple's sanctuary status following a surge in migrant arrivals. The city has also announced the drastic step of stationing National Guard troops on its subway in response to a rise in crime.
These policy shifts come as moderate Democrats in some blue strongholds attempt to oust their most progressive leaders, including in Washington DC, where activists are trying to oust two prominent councilmembers following a sharp rise in violent crime.
The policy shifts mark a stark tilt away from radical policies including drug decriminalization and the defunding of police forces - measures which have been blamed for causing the crises.
New York
New York Mayor Eric Adams has called for an overhaul of its sanctuary city status as his administrations battles with the impact of 180,000 migrant arrivals since the beginning of last year.
The city is also taking radical steps to tackle rising subway crime. On Wednesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced National Guard soldiers and State Police will be deployed onto platforms to solve the crisis.
The measures indicate the willingness of both leaders to take an increasingly tough stance on the city's most pressing issues.
Adams took office with a pledge to maintain the city's sanctuary status - which protects people from detention or prosecution based on their immigration status.
But that was before the recent influx which Adams has conceded could 'destroy New York City'.
More than 560 cities, states and counties have declared themselves sanctuaries since the early 1980s and New York adopted the status under former Democrat Mayor Ed Koch.
Speaking on Monday, Adams told a town hall meeting: 'We need to modify the sanctuary city law that if you commit a felony or violent act we should be able to turn you over to ICE and have you deported.'
Two days later, Governor Hochul was announcing the drastic measure of drafting in almost 1,000 National Guard to try and preventing spiraling subway crime in the city.
She is working with Adams to solve the issue after figures published in mid-February revealed there were 266 crimes on the subway network since the beginning of the year, a 22.6 percent increase on the same period in 2023.
The crackdown will also see subway riders subjected to 'random' bag checks while the number of plainclothes cops patrolling the station will be increased.
Adams stressed the subways are particularly seeing an increase in attacks on MTA workers, which he blamed on a small number of criminals being able to target people hundreds of times each.
He noted that 38 people were arrested for a staggering 1,126 attacks on MTA workers in 2023, while 542 people were arrested last year for over 7,600 shoplifting crimes.
Portland, Oregon
Oregon lawmakers passed a bill on March 1 to recriminalize possession of drugs in response to a statewide fentanyl crisis which has brought Portland, the state's most populous city, to its knees.
The bill recriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs reverses a key part of the state's drug decriminalization law, which was the first of its kind in the U.S.
Progressive leaders who touted decriminalization promised it would end criminal convictions for the city's most vulnerable citizens and also refocus efforts on recovery from addiction.
Instead, Oregon has seen a 190 percent increase in overdose deaths since the initial decriminalization bill went into effect in February 2021, according to the CDC. Areas of downtown Portland have been taken over by homeless drug addicts who openly use fentanyl in broad daylight.
In the 12 months leading up to February 2021, there were 861 overdose deaths in Oregon; that number increased to 1,650 deaths in the same 12-month period ending in September 2023.
The decision to walk back on the policy has been couple with an increase in funding for police after budgets were slashed in the wake of BLM protests and the 'defund the police' movement.
Homicides hit record highs in 2022 and violent offences also surged, but crime was down markedly last year after the budget increases were implemented.
The sharp rise in crime started in 2020, when Portland City Council voted to approve $15 million in reductions to the police bureau and 84 sworn staff positions were cut.
Portland's homicide rate exploded from 36 in 2019 to 85 last year, which followed a record 97 homicides in 2022, according to Portland Police Bureau data.
Violent crime rates also increased significantly since 2019, according to separate FBI statistics.
In November 2021, little more than a year after police budgets were cut, Mayor Ted Wheeler acknowledged 'many Portlanders no longer feel safe' and the city council voted to increase police spending by $5.2 million.
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11 March, 2024
Understanding national conservatism
National conservatism sounds suspicuously like Trumpism, particularly on trade issues. "Free trade" has always sounded good to conservatives but Trump showed that it should not be an all-powerful consideration.
And Trump was not really being unorthoox in his trade restrictions. Economists have always recognized exceptions to the desirabiity of free trade: "Infant industry" and the "Australian" cases for instance. And the "supply-chain" difficulties presently besetting trade rather vindicate that
The Economist, the British magazine well-known for its particular metropolitan liberal worldview, had a pearl-clutching cover piece last week where it bemoaned ‘the growing peril of national conservatism’.
‘It’s dangerous and it’s spreading,’ the editorial warned its readers – making it sound like some new Covid variant.
What exactly is national conservatism?
Australians could be forgiven for being a little in the dark, for while there have been national conservative conferences in Washington DC and Florida in America, and in London, Brussels, and Rome in Europe, there has been nothing similar so far here. There are no mainstream Australian journalists who describe themselves using that label. Nor, unlike elsewhere, are there leading politicians or any groupings in any of our mainstream parties who march under that banner. I have found it a struggle to get those involved in the think tank world and in centre-right politics in Australia to even understand the concept properly.
The Economist labelled national conservatives as those ‘seized by declinism’, ‘the politics of grievance’, and those who see the ‘state as its saviour’. But that is unfair and does not do this intellectual movement justice. National conservatives have a deep philosophical critique of the assumptions held by policymakers in the capitals of the West. As some of the leading intellectuals of the movement, like Yoram Hazony, have explored in great depth, they are critical of aspects of classical liberalism and the dominant worldview which over-emphasises the sovereign individual, rather than the family, the nation, and our religious traditions as the source of our prosperity and freedoms. They believe the focus in centre-right circles has, in recent years, gone awry. In the words of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, it is time to ‘put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity’.
Perhaps the most obvious areas where national conservatives differ from the current centre-right are in relation to immigration, trade, and foreign policy.
First and foremost, national conservatives reject the long-standing consensus on immigration. They believe that mass immigration perhaps poses more of an existential threat to the West than Soviet missiles ever did. Nations like Poland and Hungary recovered from years of communist domination. But it is far less clear whether parts of Western Europe and elsewhere will survive the ethnic conflicts and other threats to social cohesion that have been carelessly imported into their homelands. This is not simply about ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘building the wall’ – although many Western governments struggle to do even that. It is emphatically also about legal immigration. There needs to be a reassessment from first principles as to what level and what type of immigration, if any, makes sense for Western nations and our peoples going forward. In the Howard era, there was an oft-repeated line that because the government was able to control illegal immigration Australians welcomed higher levels of legal immigration. If that was ever actually true, it is not true now.
National conservatives also recognise that the trade and investment policies of the West need a serious rethink. They reject the idea that the end goal, beau ideal, should be open borders trade and investment between nations, without regard to their differing economic, social, or political circumstances. To be clear, this means large numbers of Australia’s existing trade and investment agreements, including but not limited to, the one we signed with China, will need to be torn up or at the very least significantly redesigned. Our trade and investment policies have created boom towns in places like Shenzhen and Bangalore and rust belts in places like Stockbridge, Elizabeth, and Youngstown. They have gutted our national industrial capacity and destroyed communities. They have turned us into exquisite connoisseurs of imported goods, rather than producers of anything other than primary produce or overpriced housing to sell to foreigners. The idea, so beloved by The Economist, that it should be as easy to import manufactured goods from China to Australia as it is to import the same from England to France needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history.
National conservatives also believe that our foreign policy needs to change. The reckless evangelicalism that has characterised Western military adventures for well over the last quarter century needs to stop. What is needed is a new prudence that is focused instead on our vital interests (narrowly defined) and which is far more selective about the conflicts we allow ourselves to be dragged into. Large numbers of our people are simply sick to the back teeth of endless and pointless wars in places like Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. These are places that they do not really care that much about, but which they or their children have been expected to die for. These interventions always seem to follow a similar storyline: some bad guy is the ‘next Hitler’, a particular incident is the ‘new Munich’. Unless we get involved and offer unlimited economic or military support, we are Neville Chamberlain-like appeasers. Certain politicians then get to globe-trot around the globe pretending they are the next Winston Churchill. Inevitably what then follows, many years later, is a loss of blood, treasure, and national prestige, the destabilising of entire regions and a flood of refugees, and all manner of second-order unintended consequences. In nearly all cases these are not grand ideological struggles, but messy intractable ethnic disputes where there are no pure actors on either side.
There are other areas of policy where national conservatives have new and constructive things to say, including on social policy – where a reconstitution of family structures and traditional ways of life is going to be as important as the reconstruction of our national borders and identity. But if there is one theme that unites this movement, it is that they are anti-Utopian. The left was in the past the utopian ones, the ones who liked to ‘imagine there is no countries’. But since the great victory in the Cold War the centre-right has also become increasingly un-moored from reality. It has ignored the importance of the nation-state when it comes to trade, immigration and foreign policy and many other issues. All national conservatives are asking is that we get real again.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/understanding-national-conservatism/
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Transgenderism is an attack on women
The 21st Century Australian woman has greater freedom and opportunities afforded to her than at any other time in history, and to truly honour this legacy, we must reflect, be proud and thank those who led the way.
However, in the abundance of blessings, women face a new battle. It is not to do with votes or pay but an attack on our very being – an attack on the identity of a woman.
What is a woman? An adult female human.
Plain and simple I would have thought. Not so, according to some. Sadly, the movement to let men parade as women and demand female recognition has erased the uniqueness, beauty and femininity of a woman by claiming that womanhood is merely a subjective feeling that can be experienced by any person, notably men!
This modern tendency to question basic biology places women in greater danger than even the suffragettes would have thought possible. It disgraces the hard-fought battles women have mounted and won, to achieve equality.
Women deserve to feel safe and respected. We have achieved this through removing the marriage bar, criminalising marital rape and legislating against sex discrimination.
However, despite this progress women today now find themselves in a fight for the right even to be recognised as biological women. The right to safe spaces including single-sex toilets, change rooms and female-only prisons has now also been denied.
It is becoming increasingly common to have all-gender and trans-inclusive bathrooms to cater to a minority of men who feel like women. Women can’t even be guaranteed a safe place to champion women’s rights, including on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne. This idea would outrage suffragette women and the early feminist movement and rightly so.
The fact is that today, feelings trump women’s safety and very existence. And for what?
The logical fallacy that people should choose the restroom that they feel most comfortable using over the protection of vulnerable girls is unacceptable. The fact that women can be raped in a woman’s prison by a man masquerading as a woman is deplorable.
The dignity of women is further disgraced by rhetoric that distorts the truth of motherhood.
The ability to produce and nurture life is a phenomenon that only women can experience. But today, inclusivity has overridden our right to be called a mother, in favour of ‘person who gives birth’, ‘chest-feeder’, or simply ‘parent’. For the record, I’m not a birthing parent but a proud mother.
Gender blindness, including the use of gender-neutral language, destroys the significant differences between men and women, a basic biological factor in life.
Our over-sensitivities today strip women of their dignity and right to existence.
I never thought that upon my entrance into the Victorian Parliament in 2018, I would have to fight to uphold the definition of womanhood and argue for the protection of rights for women and girls.
We do a great disservice to those women who achieved equality and respect by allowing the identity for which they were really fighting to be erased.
As we approach International Women’s Day, let us celebrate the achievements of women yesterday, be thankful for the blessings we have today, and proudly and boldly proclaim the uniqueness and dignity of womanhood for tomorrow and the foreseeable future. And we must also applaud our modern-day heroes, fighting at the barricades of social media and legislative halls to preserve the unique and precious identity of what is, a woman.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/women-back-to-the-barricades/
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San Francisco overwhelmingly votes in favor of law and order ballot measures and new rule that'll force welfare recipients to pass drug tests
Reality breaks through
San Francisco voters pivoted away from their progressive reputation Tuesday night, as a number of ballot measures meant to rein in crime and drug use overwhelmingly won the vote of city residents.
San Franciscans voted in favor of two measures - Measures E and F - which will, respectively, expand some police powers in the city and require drug screenings for adults receiving welfare.
Proposition E will, among other things, make it easier for police officers to pursue suspects. It will also provide the force with new cameras and drones that are meant to make their daily job of fighting crime easier and more effective.
And Proposition F is designed to help adults struggling with drug addiction, by telling them that they will only remain eligible for cash welfare assistance from the city if they enroll in a treatment program. Drug testing will be required to ensure they comply.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed backed each of the measures on the ballot and called it a win. The Democrat has herself pivoted back from extreme progressive positions - including defunding the police - with her re-election widely believed to be in peril in the city's November mayoral election.
'It is clear that people want to see changes around public safety. What’s exciting about this for me is I get the kind of tools I need to continue the work we're doing,' said Breed, who is up for re-election in November.
As the results rolled in Tuesday evening, Breed thanked the voters for passing the measures. Prop E, said wrote, gives 'our officers more tools to do their jobs.'
While Prop F will be used to 'bring more treatment and accountability to San Francisco. This is how we get more people the help they need and change what’s happening in our City.'
A spokesperson for Breed told Fox that the election results indicate residents are 'fed up and want more action to address crime.'
'Over the last few years, the City’s policies swung too far to the left. Now, it’s time to send a message that San Francisco is closed to criminals and brazen theft will not be tolerated,' he said.
Breed is facing a tough battle to hold on to her position. Voters in San Francisco have increasingly become fed up with the city's relaxed attitude toward drugs and violent crime.
Last year, more than 800 people in the city died of an accidental drug overdose - many of them were addicts living on the streets of the city, which are plagued by an abundance of fentanyl and xylazine.
Breed's campaign has, to some extent, read the tea leaves and is trying to mold a campaign around a more moderate platform that takes into consideration the quality of life of tax-paying, law-abiding San Franciscans.
For many years, the city has voted for hyper-progressive politicians and measures, but the tide began to change in 2022, when voters recalled far-left District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was well-known for letting violent criminals back out onto the streets following their arrests.
Those who opposed the propositions said they will be detrimental to privacy and civil liberties and will only hurt the marginalized communities the city prides itself on helping.
But Breed, the first black woman to lead San Francisco, said at a January campaign stop that residents from poorer, black and immigrant neighborhoods are pleading for more police.
Non-profit leaders who work primarily with low-income people endorse Breed's drug-testing measure.
Trent Rhorer, executive director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency, which provides cash assistance and employment services to low-income residents without dependent children, said the current situation is in the city is not improving lives.
'To give someone who's addicted to fentanyl $700 a month, I don´t think it helps improve their lives,' he said. 'In fact, I think it does the opposite.'
Rhorer said the welfare program for single adults - which serves about 9,000 people per year - already asks applicants about substance abuse, with about 20 percent self-reporting an issue.
A data check with the Department of Public Health revealed that almost one-third of recipients have been diagnosed with a substance use disorder, he said.
The ballot measure would replace that question with a more rigorous screening test that would be verified by an addiction specialist.
If substance abuse is discovered, Rhorer said, the specialist and applicant would agree on treatment options that include residential care, a 12-step program, individual counseling and replacement medication.
There is no requirement the person be sober, only that they make good-faith efforts to attend their program, with the hope that 'at one point a light bulb will go off,' Rhorer said.
The measure calls for the city to pay the rent of those accepted into the program for 30 days or longer to avoid eviction.
About 30 percent of the people who fatally overdosed in 2023 were homeless, and more were living in subsidized city housing.
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Drake, Raleigh and the irony of ‘inclusivity’
The past has been cancelled at Exeter School in Devon. The names of Elizabethan naval heroes Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake are being erased from their school buildings. For so long central to Britain’s national story, the pair have now been tried and found wanting. Forget their brave exploits: the head teacher Louise Simpson has decreed that neither Raleigh nor Drake ‘represent the values and inclusive nature’ of the school. Deemed inappropriate for today’s children, their names must be scrubbed out, their legacy forgotten.
A by-now familiar irony of ‘inclusivity drives’, such as the one being undertaken by Exeter School, is that they almost always involve exclusion. Drake and Raleigh, Simpson explains, have ‘less than positive connotations’ in modern times. In other words, Elizabethan sea dogs do not stand up to woke scrutiny. They are tainted by association with a less than perfect past and must be expelled.
Removing Raleigh and Drake’s names from buildings tells us far more about today than it does about the past
The children of Exeter School will be spared exciting tales of British victory over the Spanish Armada and the circumnavigation of the globe for fear they might accidentally imbibe some of those ‘less than positive connotations’. This is a grim view of the past. Raleigh’s ventures contributed to the colonisation of North America and Drake helped captain trading vessels carrying slaves across the Atlantic but neither was primarily involved in the slave trade. These dark allusions to slavery and imperialism brand Drake and Raleigh with the very modern stamp of ‘racist’. At a stroke, their remarkable achievements and contributions to British naval history have been deleted. Exeter’s head teacher hardly thinks highly not just of the past but of her own pupils if she deems them too stupid to comprehend the nuance of historical context.
This is not the first time that Drake in particular has been targeted by the history-erasers. A petition was launched in 2020 calling for the removal of a statue of Drake in Plymouth. Signatories incorrectly claimed he was a ‘pioneer’ of the slave trade. And just last year the Sir Francis Drake primary school in south London was renamed Twin Oaks following a vote by parents and teachers. Tellingly, the BBC’s online coverage of the school renaming had to be amended. The broadcaster’s initial report ‘suggested Sir Francis Drake was predominantly known for his links to the slave trade’.
One argument against plaques, statues and buildings named after historical figures is that they do not simply inform but valorize. They help transform men into heroes by literally putting them on a pedestal. But what is wrong with children having heroes? Mythologising of the two began while Drake and Raleigh were still alive. Over the centuries, they have come to represent idealised British values. Whatever the truth about either man, their names came to stand for bravery, daring, courage and determination. Beyond even this, they became powerful national symbols of British identity, recalling an age of heroism and – yes – British military might. It is precisely these values, and the idea of a positive sense of British identity, that are now considered ‘less than positive’.
Bravery, a spirit of adventure, a desire to travel further and faster than any Englishman has ever done before. These ideas have the power to excite, inspire and also, crucially, to unite.
They have been ditched for an identikit set of woke platitudes: justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. These are not values to aspire towards but meaningless soundbites. In place of historical figures, Exeter School will name buildings after local woodlands, castles and topographical features. Woodland is certainly beautiful but it hardly represents the pinnacle of human achievement. It is to be admired, not emulated.
In terms of history, the same rejection of nuance in favour of mythologizing is taking place today as in the past. But instead of idealising Drake and Raleigh as representatives of the best of British, they have been transformed into monsters who symbolise all that is shameful about Britain’s past. The hope of the revisionists and the erasers is not so much that erstwhile heroes will be forgotten, but that they will be remembered only for their sins. Rather than offering a new generation inspiration, they serve as a lesson in the dangers of national pride and hubris.
The charges against Drake and Raleigh are historically illiterate. Removing their names from buildings tells us far more about today than it does about the past. It tells us we are a country uneasy with our national history and determined to dislocate future generations from all positive associations not just with the past but with national identity. This is a mistake. Few things are more inclusive than the nation. Citizenship has no regard for race, sex or religion.
If head teachers want to promote inclusivity, then making pupils aware of their nation’s story is a good place to start. Children raised in ignorance of their past, with scant knowledge of only national sins, are not ‘included’ but left rootless and alienated from their country.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/drake-raleigh-and-the-irony-of-inclusivity-drives/
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Pure unadulterated hate
From a religion of hate
A Sydney imam has described Jews as a 'criminal, barbaric, tyrannical enemy' in an anti-Semitic sermon, claiming Jihad was the 'only solution' to restore Palestine.
Australian Imam Abdul Salam Zoud delivered the sermon to his congregation at Masjid As-Sunnah Mosque in Lakemba, southwest of Sydney, on February 9.
The sermon, which was streamed live on the Mosque's Facebook page, was unearthed and translated by the Middle East Media and Research Institute - an American group that monitors Muslim extremists.
Imam Zoud said the Jews had trespassed on land and oppressed the people of Palestine.
He praised Jihad and Hamas, claiming the Prophet Muhammad and the Righteous Caliphs did not conquer the world by peaceful means, negotiations or concessions.
'These people (Jews) only understand the language of force,' Imam Zoud said.
'Do not even dream that [Palestine] can be regained through negotiations. By Allah, Palestine will only be restored through Jihad.'
'Jihad for the sake of Allah is the only solution when it comes to the infidels.'
He said'all the billions that were spent to improve, beautify, and highlight the image of the Jews have all gone in vain'.
He added the goal of Jihad was not to kill people and take over their land but rather to remove obstacles preventing the spread of Islam.
The sermon has outraged MPs and Jewish leaders in Australia, with many claiming the hateful speech should not be tolerated.
Liberal Senator Dave Sharma labelled the sermon 'disgusting' and 'un-Australian', claiming the imam was inciting violence.
'If it is not unlawful it should be,' Senator Sharma told the Daily Telegraph. 'That crosses the line from free speech into inciting violence.'
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies David Ossip said the sermon was 'incredibly dangerous' and 'inconsistent with Australian values'.
'If we are serious about maintaining the communal cohesion and harmony we all treasure, we surely cannot tolerate hate preachers poisoning the minds of their adherents by vilifying other Australians and calling for jihad,' Mr Ossip said.
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10 March, 2024
How not to retire from the mating game
One frequently hears of both men and women who have given up on finding a partner, usually because their attempts at finding a suitable partner have been very frustrating.
Some people have genuinely lost interest in pairing up, often because they have other satisfying activities in their lives. But I am talking here of people who have given up because of failure, not because of lack of interest.
I am reminded of them by the writings of Yael Wolfe, a frequent contributor to medium.com. Her latest post is a long screed about how satisfied she is to be single.
It reeks of desperation. She writes at great length in an effort to convince herself, it seems to me. In her previous entries she has often mourned her attempts to find a lasting partnership with a man. She has had relationships but none have lasted. And she really still badly wants a relationship.
I don't know her so have no real idea of where she has gone wrong. I suspect, though, that she has set her sights too high. She goes for men who are of a higher quality than is really available to her. Her own qualities are not attractive enough to hold the men she aspires to.
So what should she do to enhance her lasting attractiveness? I have no knowledge of her particular situation but I think there is a clue for us all in a story that a smart and attractive woman told me not long ago. It is a story that could apply to both men and women, it seems to me.
It is really a simple story. For background, the woman concerned is rather pretty and has a university degree. She is in a fairly well-paid semi-professional job.
The odd thing is that she had for a time been in a relationship with a working class man who had very little money. So how did he attract and hold her? He did it by being very attentive. He would listen carefully to what she said about what she liked and wanted. So if she mentioned in passing that she liked mangoes, there would be a mango or two on the table the next day.
They were mainly little things that he did but he was simply very good at listening and finding ways to give her things she liked. She became quite entranced and for a time thought she had found a life partner. So, as a certain cat has argued, being poorer than your partner or prospective partner is not necessarily an obstacle to a good relationship.
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A powerful affection can be created just by doing little things
Sadly, other obstacles arose in the relationship concerned which ended it, to the considerable disappointment of the woman concerned. Last time I heard, she was one of those people who are "off" relationships, but I hope that is not permanent.
So her personal story is in the end a sad one but I think it does contain within it a a powerful account of how to create affection in challenging circumstances.
There are of course many other things that generate good relationships: Good looks, self-confidence and a good sense of humour being prime. But the power of attentiveness should be added to those.
I have myself retired from the mating game but that is because I already have a bright and good-looking girlfriend. And if a geriatric 80-year old like me can have a girlfriend, there is hope for everybody. There are some details of that relationship on my personal blog, in the unlikely event that anybody is interested. She is referred to there as "Z":
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/
JR
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The Left-Right Divide Is Not Bridgeable
Millions of Americans, depressed by the ideological divide in America, harbor a wish that something or someone can bridge this divide.
This wish is understandable. But it is fantasy. The divide is unbridgeable. One might as well wish that daily consumption of a hot fudge sundae will lead to weight loss.
To cite a few samples:
* How are we to bridge the gap between those who believe men can become women and women can become men, and those who don’t believe this? Between those who believe men menstruate and those who believe only women menstruate?
* How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe “colorblind” is a racist notion and those who believe “colorblind” is the antidote to racism?
* How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe Israel is the villain and Hamas is the victim, and those who believe Israel is the victim and Hamas, which openly states its dedication to annihilating Israel and its Jewish inhabitants, is the villain, morally indistinguishable from the Nazis?
* How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe young children should be brought to drag queen shows and those who believe this sexualization—and sexual confusion—of children is morally detestable?
* How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe reducing the number of police will reduce violent crime and those who believe reducing the number of police will increase violent crime?
* How are we to bridge the divide between those who believe in suppressing free speech if they deem any given speech “hateful” or “misinformation” and those who believe in free speech?
Every one of these positions is mutually contradictory. And this is just a partial list.
Ironically, even those who hold these mutually contradictory positions agree that these positions are unbridgeable. Only the naive (usually meaning non-Left liberals) believe otherwise.
I recommend that any American who believes the Left-Right gap is bridgeable read the comments submitted by New York Times readers to any column that discusses a Left or Right position. These comments are a superb indicator of what those on the Left, including liberals (I often distinguish between liberalism and leftism) believe.
To submit a comment to a New York Times article or column, one must be a subscriber to The New York Times. So, virtually all those who comment are on the Left, graduated from college, and have enough disposable income to subscribe to The New York Times.
This came to my attention again this past week when reading all the most popular comments reacting to a column on “Christian nationalism” written by Ross Douthat, the one New York Times columnist who defends Christian conservatives.
“Christian nationalist” is the latest left-wing smear of conservatives. It joins “sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” “transphobic,” “xenophobic,” “fascist,” and “threat to our democracy” as the Left’s way of smearing—rather than responding to, let alone debating—those with whom progressives differ.
Douthat wrote an intelligent column explaining four distinctive conservative Christian positions and groups.
The comments rated highest on the list of “Reader Picks” are not only left-wing; they are irrational. Few, if any, actually define “Christian nationalism.” They simply declare conservative Christians “Christian nationalists,” just as they declare “transphobic” anyone who opposes hormone blockers for minors or opposes men who say they are women competing in women’s sports.
These comments also reveal a lack of self-awareness I believe is a defining characteristic of leftism. Nearly every commenter writes that any American who seeks to advance policies rooted in Judeo-Christian values is a Christian nationalist and therefore a “threat to democracy.” But if you seek to advance policies or laws rooted in a secular value system, that is perfectly in accord with American democracy.
“We progressives can advance our agenda based on our values, but when our opponents promote their values from a biblical perspective, they threaten democracy.” In other words, leftists can bring their values into American life, but conservative Christians (and Orthodox Jews) may not.
As for the lack of self-awareness, the Left never perceives itself as imposing its values. The Left forced as many Americans as possible to get the frequently harmful COVID-19 vaccine. The Left forced young people who were at minimal risk from the virus to get vaccinated and forced children to miss school for nearly two years.
But New York Times readers do not see themselves as imposing their values on Americans. In their minds, they never “threaten democracy”; only conservative Christians who wanted open churches and open schools did. And they never explain how, if a majority of the citizenry wants and votes for a particular value (or candidate) deemed conservative, democracy is “threatened.” Isn’t that the very definition of democracy—the candidate or policy with the most votes wins?
If you still think the Left-Right divide is bridgeable, it is only because it is too painful to confront the tragic reality of contemporary American life: Today’s Left-Right divide is at least as great as the North-South divide before and during the Civil War. The only thing that remains the same is that it was the Democratic Party that opposed freedom then, and it is the Democratic Party that opposes freedom today.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/05/the-left-right-divide-is-not-bridgeable/
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Ban of WWII kiss picture part of the left’s mad crusade to erase history
A busybody undersecretary at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, RimaAnn Nelson, declared the famous Aug. 14, 1945 Times Square kiss picture “inappropriate” because the smooch wasn’t consensual, and said it needed to be “promptly” removed from all VA property.
Never mind that Greta Zimmer, the nurse, didn’t have a problem with the photograph, and understood that sailor George Mendonsa was caught up in the joy of Japan’s final surrender when he randomly kissed her.
Zimmer later became friends with Mendonsa and his wife, Rita.
The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Denis R. McDonough, reversed the removal decision — when he found about it.
Which makes you wonder how many woke middle managers are out there in the government declaring what is “appropriate” based on whatever they learned at Oberlin.
Throughout society, progressives are pulling this exact nonsense every day, tearing down statues, emptying museums, erasing history.
As George Orwell warned: “Those who control the past control the future.”
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The numbers prove it: Bail reform drove a 66% recidivism rate for repeat crooks
In a recurring theme in the debate over New York’s criminal-justice reforms of recent years, the outfit Data Collaborative for Justice offers a new study meant to show the no-bail laws worked — when its numbers indicate the exact opposite:
Among the most worrisome criminals, they boosted crime. To alarming rates.
As former Queens prosecutor Jim Quinn explains in The Post, the study — which focused on parts of the state outside the city — openly admits that two out three defendants freed under bail reform despite recent prior arrests got picked up for new crimes within just two years.
That telling number includes perps who’d been nabbed for violent felonies, then rearrested and released for committing new crimes.
And get this: Nearly half (49.3%) were hauled in for new felonies — a quarter (26.2%), violent ones.
Not only are the rates are up since bail reform, but they were troublingly high to begin with.
Oh, and with far more people being freed at higher rates, the total number of crimes they commit has soared.
It all adds up to overwhelming proof that bail reform has been an unmitigated disaster, not the success that the Data Collaborative and other progressives claim.
The group boasts that the reforms “tended to reduce recidivism for people facing less serious charges and with limited or no recent criminal history.”
Fine. Yet it also admits they “tended to increase recidivism for people facing more serious charges and with recent criminal histories” — that is, precisely the ones who account for most crimes, including the worst ones.
And “minor” crimes can add up to a plague.
Per NYPD stats, just 327 people were responsible for 30% of city shoplifting arrests in 2022. Bail reform created a revolving door for these repeat offenders, and retail theft is now killing shops large and small across Gotham.
Perps with priors are likely to re-offend if and when they’re released — not just because crime is simply the chosen career of many, but also because their repeated releases send the message that they’ll pay no consequences for their anti-social actions.
Let’s be honest: It’s no mere coincidence that crime shot up after the 2019 no-bail laws, which came after Albany had already relaxed other criminal-justice reforms, via measures like Raise the Age, and as the city passed more and more rules handcuffing cops.
Shoplifting, thanks to repeat offenders freed on no bail, has gone through the roof.
Nor did it help that the city and state used the pandemic as an excuse for early release of thousands of career criminals.
The numbers don’t lie: Bail reform — as even researchers who support it quietly admit — has played a key role in fueling the recidivism that’s driving crime.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/opinion/how-bail-reform-drove-a-66-recidivism-rate-for-repeat-crooks/
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7 March, 2024
New Research, Psych Experts Call Left-Wing Leaders ‘Psychopathic’
I have previously put up an extensive survey of the evidence for Leftism being psychopathic:
http://jonjayray.com/psycho.html
The psychopathy is sub-clinical, meaning that its sufferers do not normally get locked up or medicated. Depending on how you define it, sub-clinical psychopathy is probably widepread, meaning that not all sub-clinical psychopaths are focused on politics. But people who are heavily focused on Leftist politics do appear to be psychopathic to a significant degree
The Biden administration – which insists Donald Trump’s reelection would be very bad for America – enthusiastically supports amputating the breasts and sexual organsof thousands of troubled children, is obsessed with ushering as many millions of illegal aliens (including terrorists, fentanyl smugglers, MS-13 gang members, child sex traffickers and legions of surly, military-age Chinese men) as possible into America, and – just to pick one of many examples of bureaucratic insanity – recently demanded, via its FAA, that U.S. airlines employ more people, including pilots, with “severe intellectual” and “psychiatric” problems.
It’s increasingly clear that many of America’s current leaders are, to put it plainly, stark raving mad.
But stating this is not an exercise in hurling nasty epithets at one’s political opponents, as the left does continually.
Rather, what follows is a brief but serious look at the proposition that America’s current leaders are genuinely insane – in a clinically diagnosable way. This is about rampant Borderline Personality Disorder, Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder and other scary-sounding conditions whose clinical symptom-pictures perfectly match many of today’s leaders.
Of course, many cases of what the secular psychiatric world labels “mental disorders” ultimately boil down to individuals who, one way or another, have fallen into the grip of dark spiritual forces.
Yet it’s illuminating to briefly explore how current research in psychiatry, a field ironically dominated largely by the left, nevertheless has concluded that leftist radicals and leaders are, more often than not, certifiably crazy.
For example, in a groundbreaking study published in March 2023, titled “Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,” authors Dr. Ann Krispenz and Dr. Alexander Bertrams found that left-wing extremism is closely associated with “psychopathic tendencies.”
“Narcissistic individuals and those with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to strongly endorse left-wing antihierarchical aggression,” summarized the widely cited PsyPost website, which reports the latest research on human behavior.
“Individuals with dark personalities – such as high narcissistic and psychopathic traits – are attracted to certain forms of political and social activism which they can use as a vehicle to satisfy their own ego-focused needs instead of actually aiming at social justice and equality,” the authors explain.
Stated simply, left-wing psychopaths pretend to care about “social justice and equality,” but in reality are just feeding their massive “ego-focused” lust for power, glory and revenge, the authors say.
“In particular,” they add, “certain forms of activism might provide them with opportunities for positive self-presentation and displays of moral superiority, to gain social status, to dominate others, and to engage in social conflicts and aggression to satisfy their need for thrill seeking.”
Likewise, retired psychiatrist Brad Lyles, M.D., explains that “one way of understanding the increasingly outlandish beliefs and behaviors of the left is through the lens of Borderline Personality Disorder. The Borderline diagnosis,” he notes, “is among the most infamous diagnoses in psychiatry. It is the diagnosis that keeps therapists up at night, covered in sweat, fearful of every encounter with this sort of patient.” Lyles writes:
Understanding the long-researched processes driving Borderline Personality Disorder provides unique insights into the processes driving the more extreme politics of the left. The Borderline model explains not only the often inexplicable behaviors of the left – but also why the left is so legitimately dangerous.
The most dangerous feature of the Borderline model – and the process most dangerous in our politics – is “psychological” projection, as distinct from the “political” variety.
Psychological projection hardens a patient’s mere belief or suspicion that the OTHER (person, organization) is bad into a CONVICTION the other person is bad. In particular the patient KNOWS the other person is bad.
On the contrary, political projection – “accusing the other guy of what you are doing” – is merely a STRATEGY. A prominent – and execrable – example would include the three years Democrats accused President Trump of “colluding with the Russians” while they themselves were in fact colluding with the Russians.
Psychological projection is not a strategy. It is a threat.
With psychological projection there are no gray areas in the belief structure: The other person is ALL BAD. There is no circumstance in which a person (or political party) is understood to possess a combination of both good and bad features.
This “ALL BAD” belief structure is what the late Pulitzer-winning columnist and trained psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer was getting at when he famously wrote,“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
Of course, it’s this same “conservatives are evil” belief that underlies the left’s continual and epically deranged comparison of President Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler, hands-down the most reviled, genocidal mass murderer in world history. Yet top Democrat politicians including Joe Biden – as well as the “mainstream” media – have continually likened Trump to Hitler since before he was elected president in 2016 and continuing to today, eight years later.
Yet if Trump really is another Hitler, where exactly are all of his Hitler-like policies and actions? After all, the man was president of the United States and leader of the free world for four extremely important years. So, what are all these evil practices that justify such a comparison?
In reality, of course, Trump’s policies were right in line with the values and sensibilities of the vast, center-right American middle class that has long constituted this nation’s moral, economic and spiritual backbone. America’s economy was stable and strong under Trump, unemployment was at historic lows, perverse trade agreements were replaced with fair, pro-American ones, border enforcement was a priority, America’s military was being rebuilt, and the world was free of major wars due to Trump’s personal strength and leadership.
Meanwhile, the current president, Joe Biden, having degraded and just about destroyed America in every conceivable way, has sunk to the level of a third-world dictator by casting hundreds of American patriots into prison, destroying their lives and their families, all for protesting his theft of the 2020 election.
Therefore, seeing as Biden’s has been hands-down the worst administration in American history, the playbook governing leftwing power politics demands that Trump simply must be Hitler – period – or else the Democrats will lose power. And that’s not an option for them.
Expert diagnoses Obama
But hold on. Can all this really be true? Is it actually possible that many of America’s top Democrat leaders are ruthless psychopaths?
Let’s rewind a few years and briefly focus on Barack Obama, since much of today’s societal madness began or accelerated because of him, and a great many people believe Obama is calling the shots in Washington, D.C. today. And of course, Obama’s wife Michelle is increasingly considered a top contender for becoming the Democrats’ presidential candidate later this year.
Many Americans believe, and some widely respected voices have said so publicly, that Barack Obama is a “sociopath” or “psychopath.” (For the record, though numerous psychology articles attempt to differentiate between “sociopathy” and “psychopathy,” in the end the analysis always boils down to the two being essentially the same, with “psychopaths” just being a little worse than “sociopaths.”) In 2016, Dr. Ben Carson referred to Obama on camera as a “psychopath.” The aforementioned columnist-author Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training, dubbed Obama a “narcissist” who “talks like the emperor, Napoleon.” Pulitzer prize-winning columnist George Will wrote about “Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy.” And so on.
Closely consider this typical description of sociopathy: “Sociopaths are often well-liked because of their charm and high charisma, but they do not usually care about other people. They think mainly of themselves and often blame others for the things that they do. They have a complete disregard for rules and lie constantly. They seldom feel guilt or learn from punishments.” Remind you of anyone?
During the Obama administration, this writer communicated frequently with veteran forensic psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter, M.D., who suggested a slightly different diagnosis for Obama, but similar to “sociopathy” – namely, “Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” The modifier “malignant” signified the version of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” that may cross over into criminality, he explained.
Rossiter, who has since passed away, had been retained as an expert in more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases and was a genuine world-class authority in forensic psychiatry, which is the intersection between criminal behavior and mental disorders. He carefully reviewed with me a list of some of the major symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, comparing them with Obama’s behavior as president. Here are a few of the key markers:
1) a grandiose view of one’s achievements (everything with Obama was “historic”),
2) an utter inability to handle criticism (everyone criticizing Obama or his policies was attacked as an “extremist” or “racist”), and
3) lack of genuine empathy. (For just one example, Obama gave a televised speech on the day of the Fort Hood terror attack in which a Muslim U.S. Army major shot 45 Americans, 13 fatally.
With the entire nation reeling in total shock and horror, and yearning for strong, reassuring words from their commander in chief, Obama instead engaged in small talk and an inane “shout-out” for two full minutes before even mentioning that the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 had occurred just hours earlier.)
Now fast-forward to today. From President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the presidential Cabinet – including in particular Attorney General Merrick Garland, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra – all of these people lie literally all the time. It’s what they do for a living. And to all appearances, they do so easily, reflexively and without conflict or conscience.
Even Karine Jean Pierre, whose daily job is to tell absurd and embarrassingly obvious lies to the nation in order to put a good face on the most destructive, corrupt and mentally incompetent president in U.S. history (not to mention the head of a crime family) has publicly described herself as a “historic figure,” as the first black lesbian ever to serve as White House press secretary.
Democrats twice as likely as Republicans to be mentally ill
Interestingly, it’s not just the left’s leaders who are “mentally ill.” Gallup pollsters conducted an extensive study involving more than 4,000 interviews conducted over the course of four years, which concluded that Republicans had “significantly” better mental health than Democrats.
Likewise, a SurveyMonkey survey commissioned a few years ago by the left-wing news site BuzzFeed (which has since shut down) found that Democrats suffered significantly more mental illness than Republicans. In fact, Democrats were found to be twice as likely to have been diagnosed with a mental disorder as Republicans in almost every category, from anxiety, depression and PTSD to bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder.
Yet, it is the left that is continually accusing Donald Trump and his supporters of being deranged, delusional and engaging in projection – accusing others of the very evil of which they are guilty.
Recently a “gender-affirming” psychologist, Dr. Harriette Wimms, gave an extraordinary demonstration of projection, a favorite tactic of the left: At the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s 27th annual training symposium in Montreal, Canada, Wimms, who is the clinical director for the Village Family Support Center in Baltimore, Maryland, announced that parents who oppose cutting the breasts and/or sex organs off of their precious children – wait for it – have a “mental illness.”
Yes, there is a lot of “mental illness” in America today. And as mentioned earlier, most serious psychiatric diagnoses in the “sociopath,” “psychopath,” “malignant narcissist” arena really amount to very dark and demonic spiritual conditions being described through a secular, non-theistic lens.
Meanwhile, the general population also sadly includes large and growing numbers of genuine casualties of today’s deranged, sociopathic leadership, whether in government, education, medicine or culture – especially among the youth, where depression, delusion, anxiety and suicide are rampant.
They are true victims.
But as for the increasingly totalitarian ruling elites themselves – from the “let’s cut off kids’ body parts and engineer a massive foreign invasion of America” Biden administration to the “let’s terrify everyone about global warming and insist they eat insects while we dine on steak” globalist crowd?
They’re just evil.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/new-research-psych-experts-call-left-wing-leaders/
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‘Let the Reckoning Begin’: Detransitioners Vindicated by Expose of WPATH Experimentation on Minors
Detransitioners have been trying to warn the public that so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers—is both experimental and dangerous, especially for minors.
Now, thanks to the efforts of journalist Michael Shellenberger, we know that World Professional Association for Transgender Health doctors and medical experts pushing these practices were well aware of the experimental and lasting nature of the procedures they were recommending. Yet these so-called health professionals pushed forward, despite alarming awareness of tumors developing from hormones, reduced sexual function, lack of proper informed consent for minors, and more, according to Shellenberger’s reporting.
“Let the reckoning begin,” says Luka Hein, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy when she was only 16 years old, believing that she would be happier if she could become a boy. “Because of organizations like WPATH I’m missing body parts and struggle with pain.”
The WPATH medical professionals acknowledge in the messages that some of the minors who are being given puberty blockers have no idea that they will be sterilized. Other messages reveal WPATH doctors saying they went ahead with performing surgery on patients with severe mental health problems, even though they were worried the patients couldn’t give full informed consent.
“I’m relieved the files are out in the world for everyone to read,” Shellenberger told my colleague Tyler O’Neil, sharing that the files reveal WPATH’s “whole paradigm falling apart over the last three years.”
“Nobody can claim to understand the gender issue without reading ‘The WPATH Files,’” he added.
The news prompted a number of detransitioners to speak up, sharing the mental and physical anguish that they have gone through as a result of this ideology.
“I was a scared kid who thought doctors were going to help me … and look at how these butchers talk about what happened to those like me behind closed doors,” Hein added in another X post.
A detransitioner is someone who attempted to transition to another gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “de-transitioned.” Many of these individuals, like Hein, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignored biological realities in favor of ideology.
I document numerous stories of these transitioners in my upcoming book, “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” an intimate look at the lived experiences of detransitioners, including the manipulative therapy sessions, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts.
“WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body,” said Abel Garcia, a young man who attempted to transition to become a girl by taking hormone and undergoing breast augmentation surgery. “The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.”
“These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth,” he added. “Let the truth prevail.”
Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy as part of her teenaged gender transition, specifically addressed WPATH conversations reported by Shellenberger about developmentally delayed 13 year olds attempting transition.
“There is no ethical approach to taking an already developmentally delayed child and preventing them from going on the only path they have towards growing into an adult,” she said. “We are leaving vulnerable children stunted for life.”
“This is unimaginable levels of cruelty,” added Cole.
Laura Becker, another female detransitioner who has become an outspoken advocate against gender ideology, commented on Shellenberger’s revelation that doctors asked permission of all the “alters,” or alternative identities, of one client who had dissociative identity disorder (DID).
“I can’t believe this,” she wrote. “WPATH doctors got ‘consent’ from all a patient’s ‘alter’ personalities before doing surgery … instead of you know, treating the DID symptoms. Absolutely unethical.”
Some detransitioners called for punishments for the medical professionals who led them down this path.
“Justice for all victims,” wrote Richie, a man who attempted to transition to become a woman. “Jail time for the surgeons that held the scalpel, and the therapists that signed off the surgery. If I took everything from them, we still wouldn’t be even.”
“I didn’t think anyone should be jailed when I first ‘came to’ post-transition,” chimed in Michelle, another detransitioned woman, on X. “Changed my mind now. Probably would’ve still had some mercy in me if we hadn’t been gaslit so badly.”
Prisha Mosley, a young woman who has detransitioned and travels the country testifying in defense of biological sex, emotionally shared on Monday evening that she could not yet bring herself to read “The WPATH Files”: “No one deserves this monstrous form of irreversible medical harm … “
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Austin ‘at the brink of disaster’ as police staffing shortages set city back over 15 years: ‘Policies epically failed’
Austin, Texas residents are expressing outrage over police staffing shortages and longer 911-call response times in the aftermath of the city council’s vote to defund the department in 2020.
In February, a section of the city was notably left without a single police officer for a few hours on a Saturday due to the ongoing shortages.
Austin Police Association President Michael Bullock, who called attention to the vacancy on X, told Fox News Digital that a steady decline in public safety has put the city on the “brink of disaster.”
“Previous councils and leadership have actively worked against our officers and department, which has now put us in a free-falling staffing crisis,” Bullock warned. “Twice now we’ve had our contract voted down or it has been allowed to expire. Each year since 2017, we’ve lost more officers than we’ve hired. We had to gut our specialized units and force detectives to work backfill on patrol just to try and respond to 911 calls.”
Last year, the department was on the verge of a staffing collapse after 40 officers filed retirement papers following a 9-2 city council vote to scrap a four-year contract that the city had previously agreed to in principle and instead pursue a one-year contract that the police union’s board had rejected.
“As a result,” Bullock continued, “our staffing has been set back at least 15 years and at the same time we’ve dealt with a population growth of over 250,000 new residents. Combine that with a district attorney who has made it very clear that targeting officers and releasing criminals is his priority – not public safety.”
In 2020 following the Black Lives Matter riots, Austin’s city council voted unanimously to cut up to $150 million from its police department budget — about 34% of its current total — and reinvest the funds in other services. The following year, the Texas Legislature passed a law essentially forcing Austin to restore the funding, but the officer shortage persists.
Lauren Klinefelter, a longtime Austin resident, told Fox News Digital that the days of knowing you’d receive help when placing a 911 call are “long gone” after she was unable to get help following a 2022 car accident involving her young children.
“We needed an ambulance and some emergency assistance because not only was my car totaled, but my children were both bleeding and visibly injured,” she said, adding her kids were only eight and two-years-old at the time. “I called 911 and, to my surprise, it rang and rang endlessly, only to be routed to a 311 operator for non-emergencies.”
Klinefelter said she was left to take a Lyft to the nearby hospital after being unable to obtain help.
“My children were bleeding and over an hour had passed, so with no other option, we got a Lyft to the hospital and back home. The police never showed up, I was never contacted by anyone to follow up on the incident.”
Nick Kantor, whose brother Doug was killed in one of the most high-profile mass shootings in recent Austin history, said his sibling would still be alive today if the police department was not defunded.
Twenty-five-year-old Doug was visiting Austin in June 2021 to celebrate earning his master’s degree with friends when two rival gangs of teenagers opened fire on each other in the city’s packed Sixth Street entertainment and nightlife hub.
The New York native, who had just bought a new home and was set to marry his high school sweetheart, was killed in the shooting and 13 other innocent bystanders were injured.
“I found out that the anti-gang task force, along with most of the preventative crime measures, were the ones that were defunded due to prejudicial concerns about the ethnicity of the people being targeted by these factions of the APD,” Nick told Fox News Digital.
Kantor’s family became highly critical of far-left Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza in the two years leading up to the shooter’s trial, including his decision not to pursue charges against the several other gang members who were at the scene. De’ondre White was convicted and sentenced to 30 years for the shooting in September 2023.
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UK: Sarah Everard report sparks demand for urgent action to restore trust in police
Sarah Everard’s “devastating” murder was “entirely preventable”, campaigners have said, as they called for urgent reform of policing to restore women’s trust.
The Angiolini inquiry found that Wayne Couzens should never have been given a job as a police officer and that chances to stop him were repeatedly ignored or missed.
Elish Angiolini, the inquiry’s chair, said that without a radical overhaul of policing practices and culture, there was “nothing to stop another Couzens operating in plain sight”.
Responding to the damning 347-page report, women’s groups called on the government and the police to take urgent action to address the inquiry’s findings.
Harriet Wistrich, the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said: “The report must make devastating reading for the family of Sarah Everard who know now that her murderer could have been stopped many times before the ultimate horrific outcome.
“Its recommendations must of course be acted on not just by the Met police but by all forces across the country.”
The report said that as long as “vile behaviour and deeply abusive language” were normalised and accepted as banter in policing culture and elsewhere, “people like Couzens will be able to continue to commit atrocious crimes undetected”.
Wistrich said that those who failed to report wrongdoing and managers who did not “stamp out misogynistic culture within policing units” should also be held accountable.
Andrea Simon, the director of the End Violence Against Women coalition, said the government and police must work with women’s organisations “to transform the culture of policing to root out misogyny, racism and other forms of discrimination, and demonstrate transparency and accountability at all levels”.
She added: “It is absolutely devastating that the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard was entirely preventable. It is clear from this report that Couzens should never have been employed as a police officer or permitted to continue a career in policing.”
Following the publication of the inquiry, the home secretary, James Cleverly, told MPs that police officers would be automatically suspended in future if charged with certain criminal offences.
But Amy Bowdrey, a policy and public affairs officer at Refuge, said the government’s measures did not go far enough.
She said: “Refuge is calling on the government to act. Our message is clear: suspend officers and staff in policing accused of any form of violence against women and girls pending quick and thorough investigation.
“Vetting standards are far too low and must be urgently pulled up to standard. There should be zero tolerance to misogyny within policing, the consequences for women and girls are far too high.”
Claire Waxman, London’s commissioner for victims, said the report was “a difficult read”.
She posted on X: “This report is a defining moment and we must resolve to tackle VAWG [violence against women and girls] in all its forms and dismantle a culture that attracts officers who exploit and harm others.”
Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, said the report was “seriously damning”, adding: “We can have no more empty words.”
Women’s Aid said that urgent reform was desperately needed to rebuild women’s trust in the justice system to ensure that no one had to go through the horror that Everard suffered.
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6 March, 2024
California Transformed Prisons to the ‘Norway Model,’ Insiders Reveal the Deadly Cost
This is an old, old story. Claims that "humane" treatment of serious criminals will "reform" them go back at least a century, with the Glasgow Barlinnie experiement being best known. The Barlinnie experiment pulled out all stops, including significant funding, to rehabilitate offenders, but in the end most offenders backslid to criminal ways once released. The sad truth is that it needs harsh treament in prison to have much deterrent effect on future offending
It is true that treatment of offenders is lighter and recidivism is lower in Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations but the populations concerned are not the same. In both Glasgow and the United States, levels of criminality are higher to start with. Glasgow Saturday nights are notorious
Prison reforms in California aimed at rehabilitation and release are a ticking time bomb according to current and formerly incarcerated individuals, whistleblowers, active and retired correctional officers, and other staff who spoke to The Epoch Times.
As part of the reforms, which are based on Norway’s model, California’s prisons are moving away from punishment and toward rehabilitation, education, and re-entry.
The transformation dovetails with a decade of sentencing and parole reforms as authorities move to depopulate and close facilities statewide.
But the reality inside California’s prisons, insiders say, is increasingly dangerous for both inmates and staff.
In the first six weeks of 2024, there were six homicides in California prisons, according to the corrections department. Five were inmate-on-inmate homicides and one involved a correctional officer shooting an inmate to prevent him from fatally stabbing another inmate.
Additionally, an Epoch Times review of the department’s statistics reveals a dramatic increase over the past several years in total incident reports, as well as in important categories including assault and battery on inmates and officers, use of force, and sexual assaults.
From January to October 2023, the most recent data available, there were 17,993 total incident reports—compared to 14,138 and 12,717 for the same periods in 2022 and 2021, respectively.
Assault and battery incidents on corrections officers and non-inmates have risen steadily from 2021 through 2023, the latter increasing 35 percent from January to October 2023 over the previous year. In the same period, assaults on inmates rose 29 percent, use of force increased 46.3 percent, and sexual assaults jumped 62 percent.
Patrick “Jimmy” Kitlas, who began serving a life sentence in 2007 and is now eligible for parole, told The Epoch Times by phone that there have been many “really sweeping and drastic” policy changes—but they are often contradictory or not implemented.
“This place has definitely become a less structured, a less secure, and a much more violent place,” he said from San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he’s been since 2015.
Mr. Kitlas and others who spoke to The Epoch Times blamed a top-heavy administration disconnected from reality on the ground.
“The guys up top who aren’t actually in the buildings with the officers and inmates providing custodial supervision, they’re making a lot of insane and violence-provoking policies without regard to the staff that have to enforce them,” Mr. Kitlas said.
A new policy will often hit inmates and staff at the same time, he said, resulting in chaos.
“No one ever seems to really have a firm grasp of where the policy came from, what its purpose is, and how is the best way to implement it—which is super dangerous,” he said.
San Quentin is California’s oldest prison and one of the country’s most notorious, conducting all of the state’s executions since 1937. Now, it’s the blueprint for California corrections reform, offering innovative programming to help inmates like Mr. Kitlas transform their lives, overcome trauma, and become community leaders.
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Appeals Court Overturns Jan. 6 Defendant’s Sentence, Potentially Impacting Dozens of Cases
An appeals court in Washington unanimously ruled that a Jan. 6 defendant’s sentence was improperly enhanced, a move that could impact numerous other Jan. 6 cases.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Larry Brock, who was convicted for a range of crimes related to Jan. 6, improperly had additional charges of “interference with the administration of justice.” The judge who wrote the court’s opinion wrote that the charge doesn’t apply to a sentencing enhancement, however, and struck it down.
“Brock challenges both the district court’s interpretation of Section 1512(c)(2)’s elements and the sufficiency of the evidence to support that conviction,” wrote the judge, Patricia Millett.
The judge, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, concluded that any interference with Congress’ certification of the 2020 electoral votes isn’t tantamount to a sentencing enhancement.
“Because Section 2J1.2’s text, commentary, and context establish that the ‘administration of justice’ does not extend to Congress’s counting and certification of electoral college votes, the district court erred in applying Section 2J1.2(b)(2)’s three-level sentencing enhancement to Brock’s Section 1512(c)(2) conviction,” the judge wrote.
The judges, in siding with Mr. Brock, wrote that Congress’ function on Jan. 6 was not judicial but was only a part of the 2020 presidential election process.
“Taken as a whole, the multi-step process of certifying electoral college votes—as important to our democratic system of government as it is—bears little resemblance to the traditional understanding of the administration of justice as the judicial or quasi-judicial investigation or determination of individual rights,” the panel concluded.
Law enforcement officials who were there at the Capitol on that day, they added, were “to protect the lawmakers and their process, not to investigate individuals’ rights or to enforce Congress’s certification decision.”
“After all,” the judges wrote, “law enforcement is present for security purposes for a broad variety of governmental proceedings that do not involve the ‘administration of justice’—presidential inaugurations, for example, and the pardoning of the Thanksgiving Turkey.”
Now, Mr. Brock’s sentence under the statute will be vacated and will be remanded to the district court for resentencing, according to Friday’s order.
But it’s not clear whether Mr. Brock’s sentence will be reduced or whether it will apply to a number of other people who were charged with interference in the administration of justice related to the Capitol breach. However, the ruling could impact plea negotiations for future Jan. 6 defendants who are charged with the felony.
Dozens of Jan. 6 defendants have been convicted and sentenced for interference in the administration of justice, according to data provided by the Department of Justice. It may mean that their time in prison and other penalties need to be reduced.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has often asked judges to apply the enhancement charges to the defendants, saying that the Congressional session on Jan. 6, 2021, to count electoral votes and certify the election was the same as a judicial proceeding.
But Mr. Brock’s lawyers successfully argued in an appeal that the charges shouldn’t impact his sentence after he was given a two-year prison term in 2023. At the time, the lower court judge who convicted and sentenced Mr. Brock calculated that the obstruction charge meant he should spend more time in jail.
The court made the sentencing decision as it simultaneously upheld Mr. Brock’s felony conviction regarding his activity on Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands breached the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the election.
During court arguments in September, Mr. Brock’s lawyer noted that he committed no violence on Jan. 6 and said the man believed the 2020 election was stolen. “Mr. Brock thought he was acting righteously, patriotically and with a eminently proper purpose,” attorney Charles Burnham said at the time, according to reports.
That argument was rejected by the panel of judges on Friday. “Brock participated in a riot that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force, and that he was himself prepared to take violent action to achieve that goal,” the judges wrote.
Because of his social media posts about the election, the court added, “Where a defendant announces his intent to use violence to obstruct a congressional proceeding, comes equipped for violence, and then actually obstructs that proceeding, the evidence supports a finding that he acted with an impermissible purpose or knowledge of the wrongfulness of his actions.”
Some Jan. 6 defendants have argued in court motions that the law have been improperly applied to charge them with felonies. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a Jan. 6 defendants’ appeal in April on the application of the law, which could also impact special counsel Jack Smith’s case against former President Donald Trump as he faces two obstruction charges in Washington.
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UK: How a tranquil oasis for female swimmers became a front line in the culture wars: Bitter row over whether trans women are allowed to bathe in historic single-sex pond comes to a ferocious head...
Ever since she moved to London more than 20 years ago, Venice Allan has made a point of carving out time to visit a place she finds brings her particular pleasure.
It means a lengthy trek across the city on the Tube from her home in south London. But such is the magical pull of Kenwood Ladies Pond, a natural swimming lake on Hampstead Heath, that she goes as often as she can.
‘It’s the most beautiful, special place,’ says the 48-year-old jewellery designer. ‘It really feels like an oasis.’
Many hundreds of other women have long felt the same, among them local celebrities including Helena Bonham-Carter and Emma Thompson, who live in and around this fashionable – and achingly liberal – part of London.
And certainly, for decades the Ladies’ Pond has been a unique space. Designated women only in 1926, for nearly a century it has been billed as a place of refuge and security for women of all ages, something underlined on the sign at the entrance which makes clear that men – who have access to their own male-only pond, as well as a mixed pond nearby – are not allowed ‘beyond this point’.
You might think that message could not be clearer – except, of course, that the definition of ‘woman’ has latterly become a vexatious, highly contentious issue.
So perhaps it was only a matter of time before it reached the once tranquil setting of the Ladies' Pond, which now finds itself mired in an ongoing and increasingly ugly row.
On one side are 11 of the 12-strong committee members of the Kenwood Ladies' Pond Association (KLPA) – backed, it must be said, by a sizeable contingent of other regular swimmers – who have declared that anyone who identifies as a woman has a right to swim there and that to suggest otherwise is a breach of the 2010 Equality Act.
On the other is an equally large band who believe that the committee has become overtly politicised and ‘captured’ by gender ideology, and is trying to strong-arm those who do not subscribe to their views.
The latter insist that the committee is ignoring the wishes of members who want the pond to become a female-only space again.
They also accuse the committee of stoking division between women who swim all-year round and those who are unable, or unwilling, to swim every week. They point to a failed attempt by the committee to establish a form of ‘pond apartheid’ which would have limited the rights of fair-weather swimmers to have any say in Association matters.
The row is set to come to a head this Sunday at the pond’s annual general meeting, at which one committee member, Janice Williams, has submitted a resolution asking that the organisation recognise that the definition of woman can - in this context - only apply to those born biologically female.
There has been some wrangling over whether the resolution can be aired at all: co-chairs Pauline Latchem and Beth Feresten have made clear the proposal may be unlawful, sending a note to AGM members reading ‘Pending further legal advice, the amendment may be removed from consideration at the AGM’ – something Janice labels ‘nonsensical’.
‘How can a vote be unlawful?’ she asks. ‘It is a cornerstone of the democratic process.’
It is certainly all a very long way from the genteel pond’s inception. Along with the other bathing ponds on Hampstead Heath, the Ladies’ Pond was originally created in the 17th and 18th centuries as one of the reservoirs to meet London’s growing demand for water.
Some were repurposed for swimming, used mainly by male swimmers, until in 1926, the Kenwood Pond was designated as women-only.
Over the years thousands have visited, enjoying the magic of swimming in fresh water in the heart of a busy urban capital.
‘You walk down the pedestrian lane to get to the entrance, and it is like being in the heart of the countryside,' says Sally Kennedy, a 46-year-old teacher and devoted swimmer who loves the pond so much that she moved to north London from her native east London ten years ago so she could be nearer to it.
Three years ago, the writer Esther Freud wrote of the way it unified women across the social and age spectrum. ‘At the height of summer, as many as 2,000 women of every shape and size, all classes, all ages, from across London, across the country, even from abroad, arrive to swim and sunbathe on the meadow,’ she wrote in an article for Vogue magazine.
In more recent times, however, controversy has started to lap round the edges of this once untroubled space. In 1989, the running of Hampstead Heath and its ponds came under the control of the City of London Corporation which, in 2005, to the dismay of many, instigated a ‘self-policed’ charging system suggesting a contribution of between £1 and £2 be made by swimmers each time they visited.
Many believed this went against the fundamental ethos of the pond, and protests followed, but the City of London went on to make the charges compulsory in March 2020. Entry is now strictly controlled by barriers and a gate, a turn of events that is the subject of an ongoing legal challenge.
But this controversy pales when set against the backdrop of today’s increasingly toxic row about access, which dates back to 2019 when the City of London adopted a new policy to allow trans women (biological males who identify as women) to use the pond, citing the Equality Act.
The policy was overseen by Edward Lord, a City of London councillor and diversity champion (pronouns ‘they/them’) who launched an online survey consultation on whether trans people should be able to access services relating to their gender identity.
On paper the answer was an overwhelming yes, as 12,390 had voted in favour of transgender users, and 8,610 against – until it emerged that nearly 19,000 other responses had been disregarded as users were deemed to have not answered the survey in full.
Either way, Lord was very clear on the issue: ‘It shouldn’t be a debate,’ they declared. ‘Trans women are women; trans men are men.’ The self-ID policy was duly ushered in, which allowed any male to access the Ladies’ Pond merely on their claim to be a woman.
A series of protests followed, including a demonstration during which around 20 women ‘identified’ as men next to the men’s pool of Hampstead Heath.
One woman sported a pantomime beard; another wore a lime green mankini (a Borat-style male version of a bikini) before demanding access to the nearby men’s pond to highlight the absurdity of ‘gender self-identification’. They were promptly ejected by staff.
Undeterred, Venice Allan went on to found Let Women Swim – a campaign to reclaim the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond as a female-only space by 2025, in time for the centenary of its foundation.
In August 2022 she staged another protest, in which 130 women lined the pedestrian lane to the pool. ‘The only buoy allowed’ read one placard, sported by a woman with a lifebuoy round her neck.
‘I don’t want to live in a female-only society, I’m not a separatist,’ Venice told the Mail this week. ‘But it’s a special, iconic place that has now become unnecessarily politicised. It’s also deeply ironic that the City of London talks about inclusion, when its policy clearly discriminates about women.
‘Trans women can swim in the mixed pond, but the female-only pond is the only place where women of certain religious faiths like Orthodox Jewish women and Muslim women can swim, as they cannot be in a space with someone who is biologically male. I know for a fact that some women from those backgrounds now no longer come.’
Venice herself is clear that she has swum in the presence of biological males. ‘I’ve been there when someone with hormone-induced moobs is at the edge of the pond letting it all hang out and it is hard to feel that it isn’t a statement,’ she says.
Another regular swimmer, who asked not to be named, said that she had watched in amazement as a man in tiny trunks showing his genitalia entered the pond unchallenged. He then went on to sunbathe nearby.
Such infractions – as they are seen by many pond users – have fundamentally changed the feel of the place, according to Sally Kennedy.
‘For many women the pond serves two quite separate functions,’ she says. ‘Yes it’s a place to swim, but it’s also this very special outside female-only space in which to just relax, hang out, and that’s really rare. In the wider world we have our guard up but not there. That has now changed, certainly for me.’
Venice acknowledges that others beg to differ. ‘Leaving aside the politics on the committee, there is a conflict amid pond users which is pretty much divided by age,’ she says. ‘There are many women who have been swimming there for decades who are bitterly opposed to the changes. Many – but not all – younger women are not as bothered.’
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Popular Australian media figure tells renters to ‘love your landlord’
Unusual wisdom in a public figure
Former Sunrise host David Koch has weighed into the rental crisis debate, urging renters to “love your landlord” and instead point the blame at governments.
Writing for The Nightly, Koch said it may sound like “heresy, but tenants should direct their anger towards all three levels of government — not their landlords — when it comes to skyrocketing rents”.
“Governments, not landlords, have been derelict in not foreseeing and planning to avoid this rental crisis,” he said.
“It’s complex and there is no silver bullet solution. But so-called ‘greedy’ landlords are being unfairly targeted as the scapegoat. You probably have one in your family, or among your friends, and I bet they have increased the rent to cover rising loan repayments. But vilifying property investors is going to make the crisis a whole lot worse. The reality is many of those landlords are now saying it’s simply not worth it and are selling up, which just adds to the problem.”
Koch noted that there were around 2.2 million landlords in Australia, according to Australian Taxation Office (ATO) data, or one fifth of the population, the vast majority of whom own just one investment property.
“They aren’t property moguls, they’re ordinary Australians trying to build a nest egg,” he said.
He argued the reason rents were rising — in some cases by more than 50 per cent — was not “greed” but a combination of “rising interest rates, a lack of new developments because of a shortage of land, delays in approvals, banks reducing borrowing capacity, and developers going broke”, as well as “a lack of commitment from governments to develop enough affordable low-cost rental housing”.
Koch did not mention Australia’s record immigration intake of 518,000 net overseas arrivals last year, which a growing number of experts have conceded is a key driver of housing demand.
He echoed comments last month from billionaire property developer Harry Triguboff, who said a large reason developers were going broke was the lack of investors due to the low net return of about 2.5 per cent.
“The only way to quickly resolve the rental crisis is to love your landlord and encourage more property investors to make more stock available,” Koch said.
“So when debating the merits of negative gearing, be careful what you wish for. Between 1996 and 2021, private investors provided 1.1 million rentals. Community groups added 41,000 but there was a reduction of 53,000 in government properties. Rather than castigate landlords, governments should be trying to match them in the amount of new properties coming onto the market.”
He added that the federal government’s “much-vaunted $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund will only provide an additional 30,000 social and affordable homes which is tiny compared with what is needed”.
“So private investors will have to continue to do the heavy lifting,” he said.
The piece, for Seven West Media’s newly launched online news site, received mixed reaction online.
“The Nightly — off to a flyer delivering bangers,” former union boss Tim Lyons wrote on X. “Perspectives we don’t hear from new, interesting voices.”
Another user wrote, “This daring pro-boomer pro-landlord position is exactly the sort of fearless principled stand that has been missing from the Aussie media landscape. Well done to the editorial team at The Nightly.”
Anne Crarey, executive general manager of property services at Little Real Estate, told news.com.au last month that the rental crisis was “only getting worse” and “I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to change where we’re at”.
Ms Crarey also argued the solution to the crisis has to be “encouraging people to be buying investment properties”.
“I don’t foresee any other way out of it,” she said.
“I don’t think the government’s going to be able to build what we need to build to make the rental crisis go away, so the solution firmly lands with the government in regards to making incentives to invest in properties more enticing.”
Australia’s rental crisis has seen a “marked escalation” with an increasing number of suburbs recording the “highest possible distress score”, according to Suburbtrends’ February Rental Pain Index.
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5 March, 2024
Psychologist tells Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast why couples stop having sex
A factor omitted below is that the harmony between a couple can become so good that the two feel like brother and sister -- and you don't have sex with your sister!
A leading sex therapist has shed light on why couples often gradually stop having sex, saying the 'sexual currency' that keeps passion alive at the beginning of a romance fades with familiarity.
Appearing on Dragon's Den star Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast, Dr Karen Gurney, who is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychosexologist, told the entrepreneur that she's constantly seeing couples who are struggling to keep the flames of ardor alive saying the same thing.
The mental health professional, whose new book is called How Not to Let Having Kids Ruin Your Sex Life, explained that couples regularly tell her: 'I didn't really feel like it but we had sex and it was great, and afterwards I said "why don't we do it more often?"'
Dr Gurney told the podcast that it's often a case of the more you have, the more you want, saying: 'That's responsive desire, it emerges out of sexual activity.'
Discussing the concept of sexual currency, she said that sometimes it's the small gestures that diminish over time - but collectively, they're crucial for keeping a relationship alive.
She told Bartlett: 'The problem of long term relationships is that we see a decline in what I call sexual currency.
'We start to see sex a bit like an on/off switch. We're having sex, but the rest of the time we're not being sexual together.
'We're not passionately kissing unless it's part of sex. We're not sending the flirty messages like we used to do at the beginning, we're not spending time lounging around naked in bed on a Sunday morning being naked together in a way that might kickstart desire.'
Preventing the death knell sounding for a happy sex life long into a relationship is, she said, all about keeping those smaller gestures going.
'Low levels of sexual currency with high levels of familiarity - seeing the same person every day - means our brains just don't code them as sexual stimuli in the same way.'
She also had advice for new parents, saying tending to a newborn can leave one partner with sex on their mind, and the other feeling like it's the last thing they want to do.
'A crying child has an impact on what's happening in your sex life and for your desire. We tend to see that the more times you get up [in the night], the less happy you are with your sex life.'
Dr Gurney explained that not getting a good night's sleep affects how your body responds to sexual response in terms of 'the chemicals in the body that help us be prepared for arousal to build, but also it's the cognitive distraction of being woken up by something quite upsetting [a baby crying]'.
Parents should share the workload, she suggests, because 'if one of you is getting a good night's sleep and feeling horny all the time and another one's getting up three times and sex is the last thing on their mind, probably the best thing that you can do is try and share it'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13145529/Diary-Ceo-couples-stop-having-sex.html
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Is there a way to make losers attractive to women?
There is an underwear enthusiast who claims that there is. Catboy is skeptical:
Catboy is a fast talker so it may help to click on the subtitles (wheel icon)
The link is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThiA30bPzME&t=162s
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Step inside the ‘dangerous’ mind of Douglas Murray and you will find a fierce defence for civilisation as we know it
To some, Murray is the new Christopher Hitchens, the late Anglo-American journalist and political shapeshifter, who was an early supporter of Murray’s work. The theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, a friend of both men, recently observed: “Douglas is more conservative, Christopher was in some ways more liberal, but their deep reserve of knowledge combining literature and current events makes listening to either one of them compelling.”
It’s not easy to put Murray in a box. He is gay, but trenchantly against the LGBT movement; a poetry aficionado and English scholar who appals the left-wing literati. He doesn’t believe in God, but calls himself a Christian.
This month, Murray arrives in Australia for a national tour in conversation with podcaster Josh Szeps. After a number of shows sold out, more have been added – a sign of his growing worldwide profile, although Murray insists his tour is not about feeding that. “Anyone who’s a writer should not seek fame, because this is a very bad profession to go into if you just want to become famous,” an exhausted Murray says. He’s speaking from a London hotel room following an extended stint of reporting in Israel, where he has rock-star status. “It’s very moving,” he says of his warm reception in that country. But, he adds, “it’s sort of saddening to me because it suggests they feel that they don’t have very many sympathetic voices in the non-Jewish world. I think that’s terrible; it saddens me enormously.”
When talking to Murray you get the sense of a man completely secure in his opinions. There is no trace of arrogance or malice. The subjects on which he writes are rarely uplifting, but he does not come across as a lugubrious or cynical personality. In conversation Murray is warm, humorous, even playful.
While the progressive orthodoxy may demonise him, Murray delivers his arguments with clinical precision. Appearing on Britain’s Talk TV, Murray was asked by host Julia Hartley-Brewer about “proportionality” in Israel’s response to Hamas. “Proportionality in conflict rarely exists,” he said. “But if we were to decide that we should have this fetish about proportionality, then that would mean that in retaliation for what Hamas did in Israel, Israel should try and locate a music festival in Gaza, for instance (and good luck with that), and rape precisely the number of women that Hamas raped, kill precisely the number of young people that Hamas killed …”
To his enemies, Murray is a dangerous man and thinker. In response to his vocal support of Israel, a lecturer at King’s College London – during a course on counterterrorism – branded Murray a figure of the “far right” (when Murray founded the think-tank The Centre for Social Cohesion, he described it as apolitical) and likened him to American podcaster Joe Rogan. The lecturer even speculated on how to silence such people. “To deplatform them would cause issues,” he told students, “so society needs to find other ways to suppress them.”
Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson observes that Murray engages in a kind of “judicial pitilessness”, in which he marshals his rhetorical powers and sends them into combat. Peterson said of his friend in a recent interview: “He doesn’t let anyone off the hook”.
Szeps, whose Uncomfortable Conversations podcast hosts figures from across the political spectrum, says he wanted to bring Murray to Australia because he’s one of the few intellectuals who can question taboos in a “bullshit-free manner”. Murray has a knack for “puncturing the self-certainties and biases that we don’t even know we hold”, says Szeps. “He flirts with subjects and opinions that are close enough to being beyond the pale among polite society” even if people may “take the worst possible interpretation of what he’s saying and frame it as if he’s not worth listening to.”
Szeps believes Australians are eager to listen to a fearless speaker who will add something “unusual, fresh and heterodox” to the national debate. “People have said, ‘When you Google Douglas Murray you see that he’s been peddling [far-right] conspiracy theories’,” Szeps says. “And when I ask, ‘What far-right conspiracy theories?’ they always say, ‘I don’t know but, you know, it’s on Google.’”
Szeps says Murray’s early critique of treatment for transgenderism in children has turned out to be prescient: “He spoke out at a time when it was incredibly toxic to discuss transgender pediatric care and now we’re in a climate where many reasonable people in the medical field feel that the way things were being done, maybe three years ago, was probably a bit ideological, and probably wasn’t in the best interests of young people with gender dysphoria. He was a clarion call at a time when it was incredibly unpopular to be saying those things … the world has continued to vindicate his concerns.”
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Why cash should not be abolished
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
I’ve found myself in furious agreement with Queensland politician Bob Katter about one issue – that businesses should accept cash.
Last month Katter was fired up because a cafe in the Australian Parliament House initially refused to accept his $50 note, telling him it was a cashless business. Katter told them it was too bad for them because cash was legal tender, and they legally had to accept it.
He went on Sky News to explain himself. “If you have a cashless society, the banks control your life, you’re not able to buy a loaf of bread without permission from the banks,” Katter said. “It’s bad enough now but it will become infinitely worse.”
Like most Australians, I lost the cash habit at some point in the past decade, content to tap away to pay for everything from coffee to groceries. I often have no cash in my wallet.
Recently, though, I’ve been trying to change that. I started noticing that more and more retailers, especially cafes and small shops, were imposing surcharges for card payments. Being the former Money editor of this masthead, I knew how quickly little amounts can add up. I’ve also been finding that an increasing number of businesses no longer accept cash. I’ve encountered this several times in the month since Katter’s run-in at the Canberra cafe.
On the Saturday before last, I was unfortunately not at the second Taylor Swift concert, having failed to find tickets. Nor was I at the Bondi Beach Party, murdering the dance floor with Sophie Ellis-Bextor. But I was at the Capitol Theatre, seeing the entrancing Australian Ballet production of Alice with my daughter.
I was surprised to find that the bar at the theatre is cashless. The bartender informed me that this was stated in the terms and conditions of sale when I bought my tickets. The website confirms the policy but does not state a reason.
Earlier in February, I came across the same phenomenon at Spice Alley, off Broadway, where there is a collection of small food stalls and shared tables in a central courtyard. I wanted to give my teenagers cash, so they could go and choose their own meals, but the stalls were all cashless, forcing us to go one by one. One of the stallholders told me that Spice Alley management did not allow them to take cash, but customers could load currency onto a cashless payment card at a central cashier. The Spice Alley website says the policy is to improve “speed of service, safety and hygiene”.
Like Katter, I thought cash was legal tender and that businesses had to accept it. It turns out we were both wrong. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission website states that businesses can choose which payment types they accept, but consumers have to be informed before they make the purchase.
Informing customers can be as simple as a sign at the cash register, or a notice on a website, which feels like a loophole. There’s no doubt card payments are convenient, but we’re all paying the price, and we should have a choice.
A cashless society is not a globalist conspiracy, but it is a capitalist one because the banks and other financial institutions are making a fortune from card payment fees.
How much exactly? I’m glad you asked.
Reserve Bank figures show, in the year ended December 2023, there were about 3.6 billion credit and charge card transactions and 11 billion debit card transactions in Australia. The business is charged a merchant service fee every time someone pays with a card. Sometimes they have a package deal, but on average, it ranges from 0.35 per cent of the transaction for eftpos to 1.69 per cent for Diners Card. The merchant acquirer – the big four banks and newcomers such as Stripe – and the card issuer all get a cut.
Businesses are legally allowed to pass on the cost directly to consumers in the form of a surcharge. My hunch that surcharging is becoming more common was on the money: businesses passed on a surcharge to consumers on 7 per cent of transactions in 2022, up from 5 per cent in 2019. The median surcharge was 50c per transaction.
My rough and ready calculation is that Australian consumers are directly paying $511 million a year for the privilege of paying with a card. The rest of the time, the retailers pay instead – and consumers pay indirectly.
Lance Blockley, the managing director of The Initiatives Group, a payment consultancy, estimates that Australian businesses are charged $5.8 billion a year – $3.5 billion for credit and charge cards and $2.3 billion for debit cards.
In Katter’s Sky interview, he made a leap from talking about cash to warning against “intermittent power” aka renewable energy. At this point, he lost me. He’s wrong about renewables, but not about cash.
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4 March, 2024
There’s One Thing Husbands Love More Than Sex
I am reluctant to believe this. Or at least I ask what is the frequency of this? It sounds plausible but is surely found only in shaky marriages. But all women should undoubtedly take note of it.
Even my ex-girlfriend strokes my bare skin on appropriate occasions. I recognize and enjoy it and see it as something that normally accompanies affection. I hope I am far from alone in that experience
Women’s jaws would drop if they could listen in on my conversations with married men. Our discussions contradict just about every misconception wives utter about their husbands.
Husbands don’t want to hurt. They don’t want to argue. They don’t want to control. And they definitely don’t “just want sex”.
These guys are desperate for her to know the truth. And they shed tears at the thought that their wife may never WANT to know the truth.
The truth for these men lies in the end of her pinky finger. In that finger is packed an unspeakable power many wives choose to ignore or have yet to discover.
It’s so simple and so tender that men are afraid to even ask for it. We barely talk about it with each other! We don’t want to appear soft. We don’t want to risk a woman’s reaction to our weakness.
What is it?
It is the power of a delicate, skin-to-skin touch of feminine acceptance and approval.
When a woman calmly grazes the end of her pinky finger across any part of a man’s body and offers a verbal or non-verbal vote of confidence or support, his world changes at that instant.
It is so powerful we are often left speechless. Our throats and tear ducts begin to swell and we quietly indulge in the comforting reassurance of the moment. If we could package the word “love”, it would feel like this when the bottle was opened.
Our “well-being meter” pegs out and our heart rate and breathing slows.
Every husband I know is dying to feel this. Simple, easy-peasy feminine acceptance and approval. Nothing else. Just…this.
A World of Men Speak About Pinky Power
These are real examples of how men across the globe describe it. In every case I can hear their clenched voice of vulnerability trying to sound “strong” as they speak. Just for fun, try to imagine their accents as you read these.
Oklahoma
“She reached over during the movie and put her hand on my knee and looked at me and smiled and said ‘I’m happy you brought us here, thank you.’ ”
Alberta
“She touched my arm and giggled and called me ‘stud’ “
UK
“She scratched the top of my head for about two minutes and didn’t say anything. It was awesome.”
Turkey
“She touched my elbow and whispered, ‘You’re such a good father and a sweet man, I love that about you.’ “
Jordan
“When I told her about my idea for a better vacation spot she grabbed my arm and said, ‘I f#cking love you!’ “
New Zealand
“She just reached across the car seat and scratched the back of my head softly as I drove. It’s intoxicating.”
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A wise cat discusses the importance of money in male/female relationships
If there are points where the cat is hard to follow, the subtitles may be helpful. To activate them, click on the wheel icon at the bottom of the video
If the embed does not work, the link is:
https://youtu.be/i83EZLn76YM?si=RHZhgVfSmCR6dgxk\
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Conservative Leaders Urge Lawmakers to Back Amendment Protecting Traditional Views on Marriage
Dozens of leaders of conservative organizations planned to send a letter Friday to members of Congress demanding that the lawmakers adopt protections for religious Americans who support the traditional idea of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
The signees urged House Republicans to protect religious freedom by prioritizing passage of the so-called Roy Marriage Amendment, named after Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Advancing American Freedom, a conservative policy organization founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, spearheaded the letter.
It also includes signatures, among others, of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Joe Waresak, president of the James Dobson Family Institute; and Tom McClusky, director of government affairs for Catholic Vote.
If adopted, the Roy amendment would prohibit the government from engaging in “any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially on the basis that such person speaks, or acts, in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief, or moral conviction” regarding marriage between a man and a woman, according to the text.
The amendment also would prevent the federal government from eliminating a religious group’s tax exemption status for their beliefs on marriage.
Roy submitted the amendment to the House in 2022 in an attempt to include it with the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states and was passed in December of that same year.
The House has been attempting to avoid a partial government shutdown after failing to pass a new budget for fiscal year 2024 in September. Members voted Thursday to extend the deadline to March 8, prompting Advancing American Freedom to encourage lawmakers to push the Roy amendment through before a potential shutdown.
“This provision is needed now more than ever, for no one should ever fear government punishment for holding to traditional marriage as the unique blessing that it is for all. We strongly encourage you to once again include the Roy ‘Marriage Amendment’ in upcoming appropriations bills,” the conservative leaders’ letter concludes.
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Trump has been called racist - so why are growing numbers of black and Latino voters now backing him?
There is a certain predictability about Donald Trump's rallies. A sea of red 'Make America Great Again' hats, tons of stars and stripes flags and an enthusiastic crowd of predominantly white, working-class fans who make up his loyal base.
But in recent months there has been a noticeable shift in the people turning out to cheer the former President on as he campaigns from North Carolina to Nevada and Arizona to Arkansas in his bid to return to the White House in November's presidential election.
Increasingly, supporters wearing 'Blacks For Trump' T-shirts and brandishing 'Latinos For Trump' placards are standing alongside his traditional supporters – and their numbers are growing each week.
Recent polls have shown working class minorities, who historically vote for the Democratic Party headed by President Joe Biden, are turning their backs on him in droves. A poll by AP-NORC showed only 50 per cent of black adults said they approved of Biden, down from 86 per cent in July 2021. At the same time, 25 per cent of black adults said they approved of Trump, up from 18 per cent in 2021.
Craig Scott, 54, a black filmmaker and Trump supporter from North Carolina, isn't surprised in the slightest. 'When it comes down to it, people vote with their wallets and no one can argue life in America today is better under Biden than it was under Trump. A trip to the grocery store or gas station is hitting folks where it hurts. Biden is old and out of touch. Ask most people if they were better off under Trump and the answer is 'yes'.'
Facing multiple lawsuits for everything from election fraud to tax evasion – which Trump describes as 'a political witch hunt' – has, ironically, garnered him sympathy from minority voters.
Scott, who joined a black militant group as a teenager in the 1980s and was jailed for 26 years for holding up a white-owned bank and depositing the money he stole into a black-owned bank, said: 'Black communities are used to feeling persecuted. When Trump had his mugshot released a lot of us felt sympathetic towards him.
'His run-ins with the law and what seems like an unfair obsession with putting him behind bars, reminds us of what has historically been done to us.'
For Latinos, predominantly Mexican immigrants and those from Central and South America, the decision to back Trump is more personal. It is a backlash against Biden's disastrous 'open border' policies which have seen 7.3 million migrants illegally cross the southern border of the US since he took office, according to US Custom and Border Protection official figures.
There are 36.2 million eligible Hispanic voters in 2024, up from 32.3 million in the 2020 election. Latinos are now almost 15 per cent of America's electorate and will likely hold the key to whoever wins in November, particularly in battleground states such as Arizona and Nevada, which Biden narrowly won in 2020.
In January, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed Trump was ahead with 39 per cent among Latino voters, compared with Biden's 24 per cent – a massive slump since the 2020 election when Bidden garnered 65 per cent of Latino votes.
Texan dentist Alma Arrendondo-Lynch, 67, took part in a 'Take Our Border Back' rally: 'I'm not against people coming into America but they should do it legally,' she said.
Another woman who arrived in Los Angeles 20 years ago from El Salvador and who preferred not to give her name, said: 'It took me years and thousands of dollars to get a Green Card and US citizenship. It's wrong Biden is letting millions of illegals flood in. Why should they be given work visas and be allowed to stay when they haven't followed the same rules as the rest of us?
'It's our communities that are hurting because of these illegals. They are taking resources away from poor areas. Our schools can't cope, our hospitals can't cope. That's why I'm voting for Trump.'
Professor Taylor Dark, of the political science department at California State University, said people should not be surprised minorities are supporting Trump.
He said: 'Many of the predominantly working-class blacks and Latinos feel Biden isn't prioritising their interests. Economically they feel worse off under Biden.
'The Democratic Party is dominated by college-educated people and their focus on issues such as trans rights doesn't align with the views of these working-class groups. They are turned off.
'Many blacks and Latinos don't like the scale of illegal immigration. They don't like it in principle and they view illegal immigrants as people who will potentially take their jobs. These minority groups are turning towards Trump for the same reasons the white working classes embraced him in 2016.'
Neither blacks nor Latinos seem bothered by claims Trump is a racist who once declared he didn't want immigrants from Haiti and Africa and 'other s***hole countries'. 'Trump isn't perfect and he's said stupid things and has been photographed with some stupid people but I don't care about that,' said a film executive who is a member of the group 'Blacks For Trump'.
'This is a fight for America. When he was President, Trump introduced prison reforms which helped African-American communities, he gave grants to black colleges, he gave stimulus cheques to promote black-owned small businesses. What has Biden done for us?
'Biden talks the talk but he's a limousine liberal who has done nothing of any real importance to change the lives of ordinary black people in this country. We've traditionally voted Democrat but many were disillusioned by Barack Obama.
'He arrived in the White House offering change and hope, but nothing changed. Black people are sick of being fed lies. Trump can't do any worse than Biden.'
Trump has said he is considering Tim Scott, the first black senator from South Carolina in America's historically racism-riven Deep South, as a potential vice-presidential running mate. Scott, who briefly stood against Trump before dropping out of the race to be the Republican nominee, dismissed Trump's legal woes and previous racist statements, saying: 'The American people are more focused on the future than on his past.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13149759/donald-trump-racist-joe-biden-election.html
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It’s time to eliminate the concept of ‘mental health’
Theodore Dalrymple
The concept of mental health is a hypochondriac’s, narcissist’s, shirker’s and social security fraud’s charter: for who can prove that someone does not so feel depressed, anxious, or grief-stricken that he is unable to work? Who can distinguish between can’t, won’t and would rather not?
Unfortunately, mental health has come to mean any deviance from a state of perfect equanimity and satisfaction
Fragile mental health, and especially mental health issues, are said to be preventing large numbers of young Britons from working, with people in their early twenties now more likely to be out of work than people in their early forties as a result. One even hears people nowadays say that ‘I’ve got mental health’ – not meaning something positive but negative. Mental health means something bad, something incapacitating.
Those with mental health issues, or just plain mental health, can get by economically without working. This is a powerful cause, I would guess, of considerable psychological unease, for even now most people do not like to feel useless to others. The frauds among them, of course, are delighted to be paid to do nothing, especially if they can supplement their income on the side.
But the difference between the genuine cases and the fraudulent, insofar as the genuine cases really do experience wretchedness of one kind or another, is not absolutely categorical. If you play a part long enough, after all, it is what you become: habit changes character.
What is mental health? The only definition I can think of is the absence of outright lunacy. Unfortunately, it has come to mean any deviance from a state of perfect equanimity and satisfaction. A long time ago, I noticed that the word ‘unhappy’ had disappeared from the everyday lexicon, in favour of the word ‘depressed’. For every person now who claims to be unhappy there are a thousand who say that they are depressed, and this is irrespective of the conditions that are making them so. When I used to say to depressed women that there would be something wrong with them if they were happy while their disgusting boyfriends were pulling them by the hair and banging their head on the floor, they would laugh, as if they knew all along that to complain of depression in such circumstances was absurd.
But the semantic change from unhappiness to depression, in so many cases absurd and even laughable, is not without its deleterious effects. If you are unhappy, you seek the causes and, if you have what used to be called inner resources, confront them. (Unfortunately, there are circumstances, truly tragic, in which this is not possible.) But if you claim to be depressed, you pass the responsibility over to professionals who are expected to do something to or for you that will remove the depression as a diseased appendix is removed.
This is fatuous and explains why expanding so called mental health services will always resemble an animal chasing its own tail. The supply creates its own demand. The psychiatrist Colin Brewer formulated a quasi-law: misery increases to meet the means available for its alleviation.
I once calculated that if you look through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 5th edition (in which British judges believe with all the fervour of a Latin American peasant praying to a miracle-working Virgin for the recovery of his pig) you would conclude that the average citizen in the western world suffered from two and a half mental disorders a year.
Of course, there are fashions in diagnosis. A generation ago it was multiple personality – The Three Faces of Eve kind of thing – and the DSM 5 suggested that the prevalence might be as high as 1.5 per cent of the adult population, that is to say one in every 66 people. Multiple personality has since become very rare.
These days it is gender dysphoria that is fashionable, with child gender-identity referrals increasing from 210 per year in 2011 to 5,000 per year in 2021. Either there must be something new in the water supply, or we are dealing with a socio-psychological epidemic.
I do not deny that there is real madness or that physical illness may present with psychological symptomatology straight out of the DSM 5. Both the psychiatrist and the ordinary physician must be aware of this. But this overlap does not explain the vast increase in diagnosis of psychiatric disorders among the young. Nor do I deny that there are many reasons for the young to be dissatisfied or anxious about the future, from the instability of family life to the uncertainty of economic prospects. But no army of nurses, psychologists, therapists or doctors will improve matters: on the contrary, it will dig a pit from which it will be difficult for the young to escape.
The ever-expanding gamut of psychiatric diagnosis encourages the belief that all departure from a desired state of mind is a medical condition susceptible to medical or some other technical solution. This results in a propensity to hypochondria of the mind, with people taking their mental temperatures, as it were, as hypochondriacs take their blood pressure. But it precludes honesty or genuine reflection and leads to the search for bogus cures of bogus diseases. A corollary is the neglect of those who genuinely require care, who drown in a sea of inflated need.
There are ways to ameliorate the situation. The first is the complete abandonment of the concept of mental health. The second is the abandonment of the automatic legal equivalence of psychiatric disorder and physical illne
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/its-time-to-eliminate-the-concept-of-mental-health/
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3 March, 2024
Blow for tissue maker Kleenex as lawsuit accuses company of polluting entire Connecticut town with cancer-causing PFAS chemicals
The old PFAS scare again. The chemicals "Have been linked to". What weasel words! Some dummy has just got to claim that X causes Y and X "has been linked to" Y. No need for actual evidence of a connection. And in this case the evidence is sadly deficient. It is a much tested connection but NO LINK among humans has routinely been found in the studies concerned. See some previous reports below:
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/2018/06/professor-bragged-about-burying-bad.html
https://antigreen.blogspot.com/2023/06/more-pfas-excitement-ever-since-erin.html
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-pfas-panic-continues-see-below.html
Tissue maker Kleenex has been accused of polluting a town's air and drinking water with toxic 'forever chemicals'.
Locals in New Milford, Connecticut — about two hours from New York City — say the company's plant has been releasing these substances which have been linked to cancer and infertility.
The lawsuit — which is seeking millions in damages — says the chemicals are being released by the factory's smokestack and also leaching from its 165-acre landfill site into the local water systems.
Locals say the company has put them at risk of numerous health issues and is driving down house prices in their area.
The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Connecticut Federal Court against Kimberly-Clark, Kleenex's parent company.
The plant is said to use per- and poly-fluoroalkyl (PFAS) chemicals to make its tissue paper
PFAS are toxic forever chemicals that get their name because they are extremely hard to break down, persisting in the environment for centuries.
Tea, meat and peanut are some of the unassuming foods that lead to a build-up of PFAS 'forever chemicals' in the body, new research suggests.
Over time, they can build up in waterways and even inside people's bodies — with previous studies also linking the chemicals to weakened immune systems.
PFAS chemicals may be mixed with tissue paper during the manufacturing process to help make pulping the paper more efficient.
They may also end up in the paper if they come off machinery, which is coated in the chemicals in order to stop paper pulp from sticking.
PFAS are also used in a range of other products including cooking equipment, food packaging such as microwaveable popcorn bags and waterproof clothing.
Kimberly-Clark says it does not use PFAS in its tissues, that the claim is 'unfounded' and that it plans to 'vigorously' defend itself in court.
The lawsuit was filed by Bethany DePaul, Arlene Quaranta and Meredith Quaranta who all live less than three miles from the factory in New Milford.
The suit states: 'Kimberly-Clark's manufacturing practices caused stack emissions containing PFAS chemicals to go airborne, travel and ultimately deposit PFAS chemicals on the real property and in the drinking water wells of plaintiffs.
'Kimberly-Clark knew, or reasonably should have known, that PFAS chemicals are toxic, harmful to human health, resist natural degradation, render air, soil and drinking water unsafe and/or non-potable and are capable of being removed from air and water supplies if proper steps are taken.'
The suit accuses the company of being negligent, arguing it has a duty to take reasonable care not to expose the residents to toxic chemicals.
They say the company violated that duty because it failed to warn them that PFAS was being used and failed to take steps to stop its release.
The proposed lawsuit would include all residents living in the area, with New Milford having a population of about 6,700 people.
It seeks damages for financial losses and punitive damages and would require Kimberly-Clark to install water filters and create a fund to pay to monitor the health of residents.
The court will now need to determine whether the case meets the requirements for class certification — or that it represents people in the area — and both parties will then need to start gathering evidence for PFAS chemicals in the area.
Both parties will be encouraged to settle their differences out of court before the case goes to trial.
It is not clear how much money the locals are seeking, but in a case against DuPont over PFAS pollution last year the company had to pay more than $1.2billion for damages and to help clear up the local area.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed in recent years against manufacturers of PFAS and the companies that use the chemicals to create a diverse array of products, including lawsuits against other companies that produce paper products in Wisconsin and Maine.
Chemical manufacturers including 3M, DuPont de Nemours, Chemours and Corteva have also been hit with lawsuits.
Kimberly-Clark said in a statement: 'We believe the allegations raised in this lawsuit are unfounded and plan to vigorously defend against them.
'We do not use PFAS in any of our US consumer products.'
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Vilifying Israel is the left’s new form of anti-Semitism
The Left actually hate us all. Jews are just a scapegoat
Henry Ergas
When the crowds, wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags, gathered in Sydney immediately after October 7, their chant wasn’t “where are the Zionists?”; it was “where are the Jews?”. Nor were the writers and artists whose names and details were recently “doxxed” by Hamas’s local supporters targeted for being Zionists; they were targeted for being Jews.
And if angry protesters surrounded Raheen in Kew the other night, it wasn’t because it was a Zionist hub; it was because it is owned by Jews.
Now, as we reel from the news that a pro-Palestinian militant in Melbourne allegedly kidnapped and tortured a man, there can be one question and one question only: How has it come to this?
That Labor is less culpable than the Greens for fanning the flames of hatred is beyond doubt; however, as the party of government, it cannot avoid its responsibility. Anthony Albanese has repeatedly claimed, with palpable sincerity, that the government aims at balance; but whatever its intentions, it has, at best, appeared equivocal – and, at worst, has risked encouraging the rage against Israel that is undeniably a rage against Jews.
Time and again, it has called on Israel to respect international law, with the implication that it hasn’t. Time and again, it has lamented the plight of the people of Gaza while ignoring the fact that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been forced to flee their homes by rocket attacks that, starkly violating international law, target schools, hospitals and homes.
But all that is mere kindling. If the fire has burned so high and spread so fast, it is because there is, on the Australian left, a dense undergrowth of anti-Semitism on which the blaze could feed.
That anti-Semitism is not the conventional Jew-hatred that marked the Australian labour movement from its earliest days. Explicitly based on repulsive stereotypes – Jews, wrote the Sydney Worker in 1932, are naturally “unscrupulous, callous, resourceful, insidious and cunning” – the traditional anti-Semitism centred on denunciations of “Shylock” and “the money power”.
Reaching fever pitch in the Depression, which the Labor press blamed on “the London Jews” who “conspired with the Bank of England” to protect their “fat rake-off”, it resurfaced, in the late 1940s, during the battle over bank nationalisation. Discredited by the Holocaust, that anti-Semitism was eventually consigned to a shadowy existence on politics’ lunatic fringe. Yet the underlying pathogen survived. Mutating into a new form, it obtained a fresh lease of life in the intellectual chaos of the 1960s New Left and, later, of Corbynism.
The new form’s essence was simplicity itself: each and every one of the traditional anti-Semitic tropes – Jewish arrogance, vindictiveness, tribalism, unbridled desire to dominate and the global tentacles with which to do so – was projected on to the state of Israel. What could no longer be said directly about Jews could, it seemed, be said with impunity about the Jewish state; and, by implication, about the Jews who were its champions. At the same time, just as traditional anti-Semitism cast Jews as the uniquely evil source of the world’s ills, so this new variant cast Israel not as a complex society with real people embroiled in internal and external conflicts, but as a caricatural representation of all that is illegitimate in the international community.
Responsible, according to prominent British academic Jacqueline Rose, for “some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation state”, the Jewish state stood as a fundamental obstacle – if not the fundamental obstacle – to a better world. It goes without saying that Rose made no attempt to test her contention, as any comparison to historical reality would have demonstrated its complete absurdity. All that mattered, for her countless disciples, was the conclusion that so monstrous an evil could only be cured by being eliminated.
The existential fight to the finish between “the Jew” and the “healthy elements” in society that permeated traditional anti-Semitism was thereby seamlessly transposed into the disease’s new form. There was, however, an additional feature of the variant that became increasingly pronounced as its prevalence grew. In conventional anti-Semitism, “World Jewry” was the West’s mortal enemy.
But in anti-Semitism’s new guise, the Jewish state, far from being the West’s “Other”, was transformed into the distilled, if entirely mythologised, image of what the radicals viewed as the West’s most despicable features. Israel was not the West’s antithesis; it was its apotheosis.
Here, after all, was a country that, in an age of appeasement, rejected fashionable pieties, defending itself from every attack. In a world of disposable selfhood, where you are whatever you want to be, it remained stubbornly attached to an identity gained by birth and forged by faith. And most of all, at a time when the “nowheres” were triumphant and the nation denigrated as a straitjacket, it harboured an intense, widely held patriotism.
There was, however, even worse: like Australia, Israel bore the indelible stain of “settler colonialism”. But rather than cringing apologetically, it celebrated the country the settlers had built: a country that, for all its faults, is a prosperous democracy in a world of tyrants, provides world-class education and healthcare to all of its citizens and that cherishes life, instead of worshipping, as the Islamists do, at the shrine of death.
Little wonder then that it provokes our leftists into uncontrollable fury. Consumed by self-loathing, trapped in a vision of Australia that imputes perpetual virtue to themselves, perpetual guilt to everyone else, they cannot forgive Israelis for standing proud. And when they act out their tantrums, it is not just at Israel that they are shouting. It is at all those who believe Australians too should stand proud, and unashamedly defend the achievements of our country, our culture.
Israel deserves our support. In the end, however, it will take care of itself. As for the Jews, we know hatred. Yet we also know the strength of faith and the power of resolve.
But what about Australia? Each civilisation, said Edward Gibbon, breeds the barbarians it deserves. Ours, brimming with rage, are no longer at the gates – they have stormed the citadel and seized important parts of the commanding heights. Marching arm in arm with the Islamist apologists for terrorism, their calling card is venomous threats and poisonous anti-Semitism.
However, as the incidents accumulate, each more shocking than its predecessors, they may finally have gone too far, inciting the reaction we desperately need to have. Nothing can erase the horrors of recent months. But if we fail to act on their lessons, it is us, not the barbarians, history will call to account.
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The obvious reason behind Trump’s undying political strength is somehow still dumbfounding ignorant Big Media elites
It is not my habit to read Paul Krugman’s screeds, much less recommend them, but every dog has its day.
And Krugman’s latest piece commands attention because of what he inadvertently reveals about elite ignorance.
Under the headline “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” the New York Times columnist approvingly cites a book that details the decline of rural America.
Spoiler alert, technology gets the blame.
But Krugman, an economist, quickly adds, “I still don’t get the politics” of rural Americans, and later writes “I still find it hard to understand” recent voting patterns.
What he means, of course, is that nearly nine years after Donald Trump came down that escalator to launch his first campaign, Krugman still hasn’t figured out the source of the former president’s enduring political strength among people living in what media masters call “fly-over” America.
Choice to be dumb
Even now, as Trump rolls through primaries on his way to a third presidential nomination, Krugman professes to be in the dark.
Perhaps he is, but, if so, it’s a choice.
Willful ignorance is the only way to explain his bizarre claims, which include that New York is a “relatively safe” city compared to the “hellscapes” of rural America.
He also ridicules the idea that illegal immigration, wokeness and the deep state are real problems, blaming nearly every rural ill on technology.
He concludes by declaring that white rural rage is “arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy.”
There you have it, a naked display of the know-nothing cosseted class.
His echo of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, a slur that will live in infamy, shows how stuck they are in their mental swamps.
In fairness, it’s not just leftists who are confused by Trump’s remarkable comeback.
Nikki Haley is roadkill because she believed his GOP support was soft and that the party was looking not only for a new generation but also a new direction.
It is more than a footnote that her campaign has been kept afloat in large part by Democrats, voters and donors.
The first primary challengers to fall, including Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Tim Scott, took a different path by offering personal versions of Trumpism without Trump.
They, too, were quickly dispatched.
All the wannabes discovered that Trump’s GOP base had essentially doubled since the start of 2023, from the mid 30s to 75% now.
Polls show he is also gaining support among black and Latino voters in the population at large.
Against that backdrop, Krugman’s ignorance strikes me as especially revealing.
At this late stage of the Trump era, there is no mystery, only an arrogant refusal to accept truths that don’t fit neatly into a blinkered worldview.
Most of the left still believes America would thrive if only it traded its patriotic and cultural distinctions for the warm embrace of globalist institutions, and that anybody who rejects that vision is stupid.
That’s hardly a new development at the Times or Big Media in general.
Recall that after Trump’s stunning 2016 victory over Clinton, the editor and publisher of the Gray Lady wrote a mea culpa letter to subscribers conceding their failure to realize Trump could win.
“Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” they wrote.
Here we go again
While insisting the Times staff had “reported on both candidates fairly,” they also vowed the paper would “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor.”
Baloney.
If they had actually reported the campaign fairly and honestly, even Krugman might have learned something.
Instead, here we go again, with virtually every Trump story in the Times these days an opinion piece arguing he’s not fit to be president again.
It’s a replay of 2016 and 2020, so much so that we can probably expect some kind of Russia, Russia, Russia hoax any day now.
The paper and its ilk have no problem with the unprecedented onslaught of prosecutions against Trump.
No former president had even been indicted, but Trump has been hit four times, with a total of 91 felony counts.
The leftist media have been cheerleaders for all four cases and the civil ones, too, including the outrageous show trial concocted by New York state Attorney General Letitia James and a “Gong Show” judge.
Once again, the hatred for all things Trump has blinded them to the impact the cases are having on the electorate.
Rather than scare away most of the GOP and independent voters, the cases are drawing supporters to him.
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Nothing ‘false’ about my choice to be a stay-at-home mum
By JANET ALBRECHTSEN
I thought we were done with misery-guts feminism. It turns out not by a long shot. This week prominent director Diane Smith-Gander claimed women were making a “false” choice to stay home to care for kids. She was quoted as saying women were being forced to make this “false choice” by taking on lower-paid work in order to care for children. She bemoaned a society that perpetuated a “gender stereotype that Dad goes out to work and Mum stays home with the kids”.
Reading that took me back to a conversation from my late 20s. Some girlfriends, all young mums of little kids, were hanging about a playground by a Sydney beach one morning. Kids playing, shrieking, grubby little mouths and dirty feet, one kid probably crying because there is always a kid crying.
The young women spoke in hushed tones, swearing each other to secrecy. We agreed never to tell anyone quite how much we loved staying at home caring for our noisy, messy, beautiful little children. The pact was a joke. But only partly.
We knew better than to rave in public about loving being stay-at-home mums – for two reasons. Hanging about playgrounds, wiping little noses and hands and bums wasn’t what we were meant to be doing after graduating from university with fine degrees, suiting up and working hard for big flash law practices and other professional firms. The other reason was we didn’t want our husbands edging us out of a role we loved.
I turned my back on a legal career with a big law firm because I wanted to be at home with my kids. If someone had offered me a heap of money to return to work when they were babies, I would have said “no thanks”. That’s not for me, that’s not what we want for our kids. So I stayed home, had help with the kids, worked from home and earned less.
There was nothing false about these choices. Nothing coerced or unpleasant, which is the underlying message in Smith-Gander’s claim about false choices.
Some years later, I was encouraged by a senior politician to stand for a safe seat in politics. It was flattering. I had the full support of my husband. But I decided against that, too. I didn’t want to be a member of a political party. More important, my kids were moving into their early teens and while they most assuredly didn’t think they needed me at home, I suspected they might. I didn’t want what the books call “quality” time because you can’t pick and choose those moments when kids need you most.
So I remained at home, writing, managing work and deadlines, and being there for the quotidian challenges and enchantments of children pushing the envelope in different ways.
One afternoon, racing to finish some work at home in my office, one child kept coming up behind my chair with questions about sex. That was the inconvenient moment she picked for The Talk. I was busy, so to tide her over I plucked from the shelf beside me a book that I had bought months earlier in anticipation of this moment. The book was possibly meant for an older age bracket.
Being a fanatical reader, she appeared to devour it faster than she did Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Soon enough she was lurking behind my chair again, seeking clarification, stumbling over a big new word from one of the later chapters that I wrongly assumed she wouldn’t get to so soon. I wished my office was not at home.
I was far from the perfect mum, but that’s not the point. Each of us makes deeply personal decisions, tweaking this, changing that, as the years go on. We fumble through, mostly doing our best, in the belief that the decisions we make to work or look after kids, or both, are the best ones.
There are many trade-offs, of course. If we go to work, we miss out being at home with children. The more time we spend at home, the more we trade from our working lives. The sliding scale doesn’t render our decisions any less free, informed – and thrilling.
Many highly educated women I know started out in interesting, well-paying jobs, on paths to stellar, clever careers, but chose to step away. Working long hours in big professional careers, jumping on planes maybe for a meeting here, a meeting there, eating croissants on International Women’s Day with like-minded women, nannies for during the week, and on weekends, is not for everyone.
Many women, including me, would rather wipe the bums of many babies than live like that. My choice to alter the trajectory of my career, trading potential professional success for raising kids, was a no-brainer because raising three children will always be, for me, life’s greatest success.
Not every woman can choose to stay at home with their kids. I freely acknowledge my good fortune in being able to make my choice. There are many women for whom the choice to stay at home to care for little children is much more financially difficult than it was for me. But to demean any of these choices as false is obnoxious paternalism. It’s also deeply insulting to women who would have loved to have had children and would have loved to have stayed home to care for them.
So why does Smith-Gander presume to speak for women? How can she and her ilk possibly know about our lives, our personal decisions, our deepest desires, what we value? It is terrific that this high-profile corporate woman has risen to the top of her chosen fields. Given Smith-Gander is older, perhaps she experienced some big and nasty hurdles to get there. Good on her for pulverising them. I have nothing but respect for her choices. Her views about stay-at-home mothers, well, that’s another matter.
How great it would be if respect were reciprocated. Instead, there is an underlying assumption that caring for kids is a second-rate job, a forced and false choice. It’s a common affliction among gender ideologues to perpetuate miserable generalisations. Their message is that caring for kids is a burden. They never, ever talk about it as a prize.
The Albanese government’s National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality discussion paper, from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, devotes a chapter to women who “bear the burden of care”. The joyless language perpetuates this idea that caring for little children is a rotten choice. It asserts that “patterns of care” are “generally driven by social and economic structures that reflect and reinforce gendered care norms”. Nowhere does the paper mention that many women desperately want to stay at home to care for children. Norms be damned. Many of us make that choice from meandering paths.
I wasn’t mentally prepared to fall pregnant at 27. I thought I had a lingering stomach bug. I fainted with shock when the petite female doctor told me it was a baby. For months I could barely say the word pregnant. I was annoyed at these foreign big breasts that arrived many months before the baby did. Why the rush? My reticence turned into a fierce desire to stay at home to care for our kids.
For some, the deep, primordial tug from a newborn child defies ideology and ambition. It can’t be measured in dollars. We are bombarded with the work side of the equation: we are told women need to work to maintain an identity, to exist on equal terms with men, to support the family and to maintain their own financial independence.
But the culture of “I work, therefore I exist” denies the falling in love with baby so central to most women’s experience. I would have fought off my husband like a banshee if he’d said he wanted to stay at home and care for our kids. He did stay at home for many, many weeks, and those periods were some of the most special times of our lives.
There is a misery to the views of Smith-Gander and other gender ideologues that is untethered from the privilege and pleasure of caring for kids. The ideologues pine for a wretched world where men and women all work exactly the same way and every workplace is made up of equal numbers of men and women, and women’s choices to live differently are demeaned as false.
The other glaring omission from all these discussions about women and work is the wellbeing of children. Back in 2017 there was a kerfuffle when American psychoanalyst Erica Komisar published Being There: Why Prioritising Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters. As The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, one agent told her they wouldn’t touch a book like that. Conference organisers disinvited her because her book, they said, would make women feel guilty.
Alas, as a society, we still don’t seem interested in exploring whether having a mum – or dad – at home in the early years is best for a young child.
The Prime Minister’s Gender Equality paper repeats recent Australian Institute of Family Studies data showing that, as at December 2021, women in 54 per cent of families usually looked after the children, while 40 per cent of families reported equal sharing of responsibility. Only 4 per cent of families reported that a man usually or always looked after the children.
In other words, even with women pouring out of universities at higher rates than men, leaving with more degrees than men, filling the professions in equal numbers, many women continue to embrace what Anne Roiphe in A Mother’s Eye calls the “whole complicated warm messy frustrating dear and dreadful business of raising children”.
Change is afoot, of course. And if gender ideologues treasured the important job of caring for young children instead of treating it as a chore, maybe more men would choose to do it sooner.
For good reasons, Western women have spent years telling the patriarchy where to get off. Why would a man presume to know what we want? It’s time to let that go. Right now, the biggest enemy of women’s choices is a small group of professional women who have the temerity to tell women what we really want.
Is there a polite way to say “f..k the matriarchy”?
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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