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Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

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12 February, 2012

Twelve white American firefighters win $2.5m race discrimination payout after losing out on promotions to black colleagues

Twelve white firefighters have been given more than $2.5 million from the city of Buffalo after they sued the fire department not awarding them promotions they had been expecting.

The men alleged the fire department illegally allowed promotional lists on which they were named to expire so they could promote African-American firefighters instead.

The payouts were based on the level their promotions would have afforded them ranging from $49,000 (£31,000) to $500,000 (£317,000). Emotional damages were also considered, ranging from $20,000 (£12,000) to $30,000 (£19,000) reported NBC affiliate WGRZ.com.

Two men who received the largest awards were selected for promotion to lieutenant late in 2005 by the fire commissioner, and again in early 2006 by a new fire commissioner.

'They had been working 10 or 12 years by 2006. So the judge looked at what their prospective promotions would have been, and ruled that it was likely they would have made battalion commander' an attorney representing the plaintiffs, Andrew Fleming, told msnbc.com. The pair were each given $500,000 based on the judge's calculations, he said.

The ruling of compensation was made by state Supreme Court Justice John Michalek. Fifteen months earlier he made the the initial ruling that Buffalo had illegally failed to promote the firefighters because of racial discrimination

Sleeplessness, marital strain, and depression are all cited in the emotional distress that the men experienced over the past several years.

To be considered for a promotion,firefighters take a promotional eligibility exam, which is designed to test the skills they would need to serve as a lieutenant, captain, or other higher-ranking position in the fire department.

The men alleged they had scored well on their exams, but were passed over for promotions because the city wanted to give minorities, who had not performed as well a chance to fill those positions. 'The word that kept coming up was betrayal,' Mr Fleming said. 'They really felt betrayed by the city.'

Anthony Hynes, a 13th firefighter listed in the suit, failed to receive a payout because there was not enough evidence to support his claim, according to the court.

A spokesman for Buffalo told WGRZ.com that officials are reviewing the decision, and the city may appeal the ruling. Lawyers for the city said they disagreed with the judge's ruling on how much the firefighters should be paid. 'The city, at all times, acted under its rights under federal law,' Attorney Adam Perry told BuffaloNews.com.

'The city has maintained its position that the liability determination made by Justice Michalek was erroneous and should be reversed on appeal.'

SOURCE





A voice of sanity from the real 1984

I mentioned yesterday the travails of Ray Honeyford. What he wrote could well have been written yesterday. He was a true prophet. The first few paragraphs below:

The issues and problems of our multi-racial inner cities are frequently thrown into sharp relief for me. As the head teacher of a school in the middle of a predominantly Asian area, I am often witness to scenes which have the raw feel of reality — and the recipient of vehement criticism, whenever I question some of the current educational orthodoxies connected with race. It is very difficult to write honestly and openly of my experiences and the reflections they evoke, since the race relations lobby is extremely powerful in the state education service. The propaganda generated by multi-racial zealots is now augmented by a growing bureaucracy of race in local authorities. And this makes freedom of speech difficult to maintain. By exploiting the enormous tolerance, traditional in this country, the race lobby has so managed to induce and maintain feelings of guilt in the well-disposed majority, that decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are uncertain even of their right to think those thoughts. They are intimidated not only by their fear of giving offence by voicing their own reasonable concerns about the inner cities, but by the necessity of conducting the debate in a language which is dishonest.

The term ‘racism’, for instance, functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought. It conflates prejudice and discrimination, and thereby denies a crucial conceptual distinction. It is the icon word of those committed to the race game. And they apply it with the same sort of mindless zeal as the inquisitors voiced ‘heretic’ or Senator McCarthy spat out ‘Commie’. The word ‘black’ has been perverted. Every non-white is now, officially, ‘black’, be he Indian, Pakistani or Vietnamese. This gross and offensive dichotomy has an obvious purpose: the creation of an atmosphere of anti-white solidarity. To suppress and distort the enormous variations within races which I every day observe by using language in this way is an outrage to all decent people — whatever their skin colour.

And there are other distortions: race riots are described by the politically motivated as ‘uprisings’, and by a Lord of Appeal as a ‘superb and healthy catalyst for the British people’ — and the police blamed for the behaviour of violent thugs; rather like the patient blaming the doctor because he has a cold in the head. ‘Cultural enrichment’ is the approved term for the West Indian’s right to create an ear-splitting cacophony for most of the night to the detriment of his neighbour’s sanity, or for the Notting Hill Festival whose success or failure is judged by the level of street crime which accompanies it. At the schools’ level the term refers to such things as the Muslim parent’s insistence on banning his daughter from drama, dance and sport, i.e. imposing a purdah mentality in schools committed to the principle of sexual equality

More HERE






British Christian street preacher who allegedly told gay couple they would 'burn in hell' in High Street rant is cleared of wrongdoing

A Christian street preacher was yesterday cleared of harassing a gay couple - after telling them homosexuals would 'burn in hell'. Religious Michael Overd, 47, was accused of using threatening or abusive language against Craig Manning and Craig Nichol as he preached last July.

A court heard that he approached the pair in busy Taunton High Street, Somerset, calling them ‘sinners’ and proclaiming they would ‘burn in hell’.

But Overd claimed he was merely exercising his right to expression by reading from the bible and was acquitted of the charge by Taunton Deane Magistrates yesterday.

Dean Lampard, from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), speaking after the verdict, said: 'We take allegations of this nature very seriously and when we reviewed the case we determined it was appropriate to charge Mr Overd with harassment.

'We examined the evidence and were satisfied that there was a realistic prospect of conviction and that it was in the public interest to bring criminal proceedings.

'Everyone has the right to live their life free from harassment and distress and we will continue to work closely with Avon and Somerset Constabulary to investigate any allegations of hate crime of any sort, be it homophobic, racist, religious or disability hate crime.'

Overd's lawyers claimed his client was merely reciting a passage from 1 Corinthians

The court heard claims the lay preacher was provoked by a previous altercation with Mr Nichol and Mr Manning in October 2010, when he saw them holding hands.

Mr Nichol, giving evidence at the two-day trial, said as soon as Overd saw them from around 10 metres away on July 16 last year 'the expression on his face changed'. He said: 'He said ‘I have already told these two sinners over here that they are going to burn in hell’. 'He looked at us and pointed at us when he said it. His voice was quite loud and very clear. I felt angry, embarrassed and ashamed.

'I asked him who he was to judge me and he said ‘it’s God’s words, it is in the bible’. 'He said I should repent and ask God for forgiveness.'

Paul Diamond, representing Overd, claimed his client was merely reciting a passage from 1 Corinthians. The passage reads: 'Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.'

SOURCE






Tolerance Is Still Not a Two-Way Street

Mike Adams recently reported on the landmark ruling of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Julea Ward case, noting that the decision eloquently defended “fundamental religious freedom against a full-frontal assault from the LGBT community.” In the court’s own words, “Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.”

Unfortunately, there are daily reminders that tolerance is anything but a two-way street in America, and I’m not just talking about extreme personal opinions, like the ones expressed in this email from a man named Boris (yet another listener to my dialogue with gay activist Mitchell Gold). He took exception to my affirmation that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, writing:

“So you advocate for human rights violations against gays. You want gays to be executed, killed and tortured in the name of religion? You don’t think gays deserve ANY human rights or protections and in the name of religion you can do anything to gays.

“You are pure evil. Pure evil personified. I know that it must hurt you not to be able to kill or detain and torture your fellow American citizens just because they are gay but at least you can condone violence against black and Arab gay persons.

“You are [a] sick, vile person without any human decency.

“I despise you and the violent hatred you espouse. I hope that one day you, your children and grandchildren will face precisely the fate you advocate for gays to endure.

“You are one sick puppy."

“Without any respect whatsoever, because I do not respect people who love violence and murder in the name of their religion.”

Ah yes, the enlightened voice of tolerance! It reminds me of a comment posted by a viewer of a YouTube clip which included my interview on the Tyra Banks show where I dared to suggest that the best case scenario for a child struggling with Gender Identity Disorder was that the child be helped from the inside out, with the goal that the child would eventually feel at home with his or her body. (I advocated for this as opposed to a boy going to school dressed in girl’s clothing, then being put on hormone blockers to delay the onset of puberty, then going through sex-change surgery at the youngest possible age, then being on hormones for life, still never becoming a fully-functioning male or female).

In response to this apparently outrageous suggestion on my part, a 16 year-old girl commented, “He [meaning me] deserves to be beaten, just like trans women get beaten worldwide, and murdered even. . . . I would like to do a lot of violent things to him too. I would horse kick him in the [expletives] while wearing high heels. I hate that man. YES!!!!! He is a [EXPLETIVE] IDIOT!!!!! Don’t you just hate him??!!”

And how did she describe herself? “I’m a 16 year old girl, who is fairly intellectually mature; I’m probably the most intellectually mature teenager in my school. I am open minded, and a loving person.” Indeed!

The sad fact is that these individual voices reflect a prevailing sentiment: Extreme intolerance, even to the point of rank hatred, is justified when it is directed against those perceived to be intolerant. As I have been told more than once, “It’s a good thing to be intolerant of the Nazis and the KKK, and you are no better than them.”

And what does this look like in practice? Just ask Martha Boggs, manager of the Bistro at the Bijou in Knoxville, Tennessee. When Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield came in for breakfast, she made clear to him that he was not welcome there. Why? He introduced a bill that “prohibits the teaching of or furnishing of materials on human sexuality other than heterosexuality in public school grades K-8,” and he has stated that AIDS is primarily a gay male disease, with apparent sordid origins.

According to Campfield, who exited graciously, Boggs greeted him with these words, “I’m not serving you, you’re a homophobe and hate gay people.”

As she explained, “When I saw him at the front door, I told him to leave. It’s just my way to show support for the gay community and stand up to somebody I think is a bully. He’s really gone from being stupid to dangerous. I think he needs to know what it feels like to be discriminated against.”

There you have it. “Senator Campfield, you deserve to be discriminated against. You’re a dangerous homophobic bully, and I have every right not to serve you” – in Knoxville, Tennessee, of all places, where blacks used to be refused service because of their color.

For her actions, Boggs has received thousands of affirmative posts and emails, and she is being hailed as a hero in the LGBT community. What was that about tolerance being a two-way street?

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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11 February, 2012

The dog that didn't bark: Who are the antisemites in France?

The Leftist claim below is obviously self-serving and ignores how readily "anti-Zionism" morphs into antisemitism worldwide. So the report below is wise to ask its readers to gather instances that refute the generalization concerned.

But the whole thing is a red herring. It is not the native French (Left or Right) who endanger Jews in France but the large Muslim population there

There was a small segment in the program "C in the air" on France 5, wherein an official from a French polling institute claimed that there is no anti-Semitism in his country from the left and far left, that French anti-Semitism is on the extreme right and being against Israel is not anti-Semitism.

This may be another opportunity for us to gather texts that prove otherwise. Texts that show that the so-called "anti-Zionism" French leftist and far left is often a contemporary form of anti-Semitism and Judeophobia.

SOURCE (Translated)






Someone else is always to blame

Tribe suing beer companies for alcohol problems‏

An American Indian tribe sued some of the world's largest beer makers Thursday, claiming they knowingly contributed to devastating alcohol-related problems on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota said it is demanding $500 million in damages for the cost of health care, social services and child rehabilitation caused by chronic alcoholism on the reservation, which encompasses some of the nation's most impoverished counties.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court of Nebraska also targets four beer stores in Whiteclay, a Nebraska town near the reservation's border that, despite having only about a dozen residents, sold nearly 5 million cans of beer in 2010.

Tribal leaders and activists blame the Whiteclay businesses for chronic alcohol abuse and bootlegging on the Pine Ridge reservation, where all alcohol is banned. They say most of the stores' customers come from the reservation, which spans southwest South Dakota and dips into Nebraska.

"You cannot sell 4.9 million 12-ounce cans of beer and wash your hands like Pontius Pilate, and say we've got nothing to do with it being smuggled," said Tom White, the tribe's Omaha-based attorney.

Owners of the four beer stores in Whiteclay were unavailable or declined comment Thursday when contacted by The Associated Press. A spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch InBev Worldwide said she was not yet aware of the lawsuit, and the other four companies being sued -- SAB Miller, Molson Coors Brewing Company, MIllerCoors LLC and Pabst Brewing Company -- did not immediately return messages.

The lawsuit alleges that the beer makers and stores sold to Pine Ridge residents knowing they would smuggle the alcohol into the reservation to drink or resell. The beer makers supplied the stores with "volumes of beer far in excess of an amount that could be sold in compliance with the laws of the state of Nebraska" and the tribe, tribal officials allege in the lawsuit.

The vast majority of Whiteclay's beer store customers have no legal place to consume alcohol since it's banned on Pine Ridge, which is just north, state law prohibits drinking outside the stores and the nearest town that allows alcohol is more than 20 miles south, explained Mark Vasina, president of the group Nebraskans for Peace.

The Connecticut-sized reservation has struggled with alcoholism and poverty for generations, despite an alcohol ban in place since 1832. Pine Ridge legalized alcohol in 1970 but restored the ban two months later, and an attempt to allow it in 2004 died after a public outcry.

The reservation encompasses some of the nation's most impoverished counties. U.S. census statistics place Shannon County, S.D., as the third-poorest, with a median household income of $27,300 and nearly half of the population falling below federal poverty standards.

The tribe views the lawsuit as a last resort after numerous failed attempts to curb the abuse through protests and public pressure on lawmakers, White said. He said the tribal council voted unanimously about four months ago to hire his law firm.

The lawsuit says one in four children born on the reservation suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The average life expectancy is estimated between 45 and 52 years, the shortest in North America except for Haiti, according to the lawsuit. The average American life expectancy is 77.5 years.

"The illegal sale and trade in alcohol in Whiteclay is open, notorious and well documented by news reports, legislative hearings, movies, public protests and law enforcement activities," the lawsuit states. " All of the above have resulted in the publication of the facts of the illegal trade in alcohol and its devastating effects on the Lakota people, especially its children, both born and unborn."

Nebraska lawmakers have struggled for years to curb the problem, and are considering legislation this year that would allow the state to limit the types of alcohol sold in areas like Whiteclay. The measure would require local authorities to ask the state to designate the area an "alcohol impact zone."

The state liquor commission could then limit the hours alcohol sellers are open, ban the sale of certain products or impose other restrictions.

Nebraska state Sen. LeRoy Louden of Ellsworth, whose district includes Whiteclay, said he introduced the measure with support from county officials who have seen their health care and jail incarceration costs rise.

SOURCE





Pretty mixed up: "Non-Theist" Soldier Wants U.S. Army to Officially Recognize Humanism as a ‘Faith’ Group

Surely a non-theist is an atheist. It sounds like shifty Church of England theology to say otherwise. Anyway, I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear that his form of atheism is a religion

Soldiers who don’t believe in God can go to war with “Atheist” stamped on their dog tags, but humanists and others with various secular beliefs are still officially invisible in the Army.

Maj. Ray Bradley is currently to be the first humanist recognized as a “distinctive faith group leader” by the Army. In the meantime, he can’t be designated as a humanist on his official records or dog tags, although he can be classified as an atheist.

The distinction may not seem like a large one to those unfamiliar with humanism, but the Fort Bragg-based officer says it’s the equivalent of being told that “Christian” is an acceptable designation, but not “Catholic.” “Humanism is a philosophy that guides a person,” Bradley said. “It‘s more than just a stamp of what you’re not.”

Humanism’s core beliefs range from the assertion that knowledge of the world is derived from observation and rational analysis to the conviction that working to help others also promotes individual happiness.

The issue is another sign of the growing willingness of military personnel at Fort Bragg and other military bases to publicly identify themselves as atheists, agnostics, humanists or otherwise without belief in a supernatural higher power and seek the same recognition granted to Christians, Jews and other believers.

“There are a lot more people with these beliefs than just Major Ray Bradley, but he’s in a position where he can stand up and put in a request for this,” said Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and an Army veteran.

Bradley, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who enlisted in 1986, is respectful and protective of the Army, and careful to say his views are his own. He said he has been a humanist since before he enlisted, when “No Religious Preference” was his only option. Now he feels getting his official records to match his convictions is an important symbolic point.

“There‘s no regulation that says I can’t go downtown and get a set of tags made that say `humanist,‘ but I won’t do that because it won’t be on my official record,” he said. “To me, this is an individual right.”

A petition campaign organized by Torpy’s group wants “humanist” and “spiritual but not religious” added to the currently available religious designations.

Bradley said he applied for the change to his record after learning that “atheist” was now an officially recognized choice for soldiers. His request was ultimately rejected by the Army Chaplain Corps, he said, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. Bradley believes some of the resistance comes from a lack of familiarity with humanism. “I don’t think the chaplaincy really understands the difference between atheism and humanism,” he said.

Humanism goes beyond a simple statement of disbelief in the existence of a deity or deities, said Howard Katz, president of the Humanist Society, which is sponsoring Bradley’s application to become a lay humanist leader at Bragg.

“Atheism means just that: you don’t believe in God,” Katz said. “You could have an axe murderer who’s an atheist. Humanists have ethics and a philosophy.”

They also have formal “life-cycle celebrations” for occasions like marriages, funerals, even what Katz calls “humanist bar mitzvahs.” Founded in 1939 and chartered as a religious organization, the Humanist Society also certifies celebrants to perform the ceremonies, who then have the same legal authority as members of the clergy.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that humanists and other non-theists in the military are becoming more vocal, because their civilian counterparts are doing the same thing, said Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who studies American religion.

“There are lots more organizations for atheists, agnostics and humanists now than there used to be,” she said. “This is an emerging identity.”

The organization of non-theists parallels the mobilization of conservative religious believers in American society, Edgell said. As one group asserts its identity, the other feels the need to respond.

“People are aware that if you’re going to claim it, you have to claim it more strongly,” she said. “There’s kind of a cycle of mobilization.”

The Army currently has no humanist chaplains or laypersons authorized to perform limited chaplain duties, a position roughly equivalent to a deacon or elder in a Christian church. A soldier at Fort Meade, Md., has also filed the paperwork seeking the designation, which is a more formal process in the Army and Navy than in the Air Force, where a humanist lay leader is stationed at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., according to Torpy.

Bradley sees his role as essentially organizing the humanists at Fort Bragg and securing a regular meeting place, for listening to speakers or just gather to talk about their experiences.

“I don’t want to make it sound too religious,” he said with a laugh, after catching himself using the word “congregation.”

“A minority is always much bigger than what‘s visible on the surface until they’re accepted by society,” he said. “Once people realize that their neighbors are part of this minority, and they’re just regular people like anyone else, they become accepted.”

That’s important if non-theists continue to grow in the larger society, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. Surveys vary, but between 15 and 20 percent of Americans now don’t identify with any particular religion, although not all of those people are non-theists.

“There is that trend in society, and we strive to have our military as representative of our society as possible,” he said. “That’s part of the reason the right to serve became so important for blacks, and then women, and then gays. You’ve got that added dimension of military service being a hallmark of citizenship.”

SOURCE




A British prophet sacrificed to appease the mob



The great Irish writer C.S. Lewis once said that ‘of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive’. That is a perfect description of the bullying authoritarianism bred by the dogma of political correctness.

In the name of promoting tolerance, race-fixated zealots exercise the most extreme intolerance, suppressing free debate and indulging in witch-hunts against anyone who dissents from their creed of multi-cultural diversity.

Nothing ever exemplified this pattern of behaviour more graphically than the downfall of former Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford, who died yesterday, aged 77.

A mild-mannered, popular teacher who devoted his career to the education of disadvantaged children, Honeyford was hounded from his job in the mid-1980s for daring to challenge some of the fashionable orthodoxies of race relations.

Like a character in George Orwell’s 1984, he was deemed to have committed a crime for expressing his views. Branded a racist, he was turned into a figure of national notoriety by a noisy alliance of Left-wingers, municipal ideologues and professional grievance-mongers. The atmosphere of synthetic outrage ensured his reputation was shattered and his career left in ruins.

Yet Honeyford was the victim of a gross injustice. The portrayal of him as a racial bigot could not be further from the truth. As the headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, he spent most of his time working with ethnic minority pupils, since 95 per cent of Drummond’s intake was of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin.

It was a measure of his success that the school was heavily oversubscribed, with the greatest demand for places coming from Muslim parents. Nor was Honeyford anything like the reactionary that his enemies painted. In fact, he hailed from an unprivileged working-class background in Manchester, one reason that he had such a passion for education as a force for social mobility.

Honeyford’s father was a labourer who had been badly wounded in World War I and his mother was the daughter of penniless Irish immigrants. Honeyford himself failed the 11-plus and had to leave technical school at 15 to support his family, though he was so determined to become a teacher that he completed a degree through night classes.

Having qualified, he taught in a variety of inner-city schools before taking over at Drummond in 1981. Honeyford’s experience of running a largely Asian school gave him a special insight into the iniquities of multiculturalism, the official doctrine that had held sway in state education since the 1970s.

According to this policy, ethnic minority children were encouraged to cling on to their cultures, customs, even languages, while the concept of a shared British identity was treated with contempt. Honeyford thought this approach was deeply damaging. He feared that it promoted division, hindered integration and undermined pupils’ opportunities to succeed in wider British society.

He voiced his concerns by writing an article in the obscure conservative political magazine The Salisbury Review, which was then edited by the distinguished philosopher Roger Scruton.

In it, Honeyford stated that white children constituted the ‘ethnic minority’ in many urban schools: ‘It is very difficult to write honestly and openly of my experiences and the reflections they evoke,’ he wrote, ‘since the race lobby is extremely powerful in the State education service. ‘The term racism functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought.’

The race lobby had become so powerful, he added, that ‘decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are even uncertain of their right to think those thoughts.’

Among the points that Honeyford made was a criticism of ‘the large number of Asians whose aim is to preserve intact the values and attitudes of the Indian sub-continent’, while he also condemned certain black intellectuals ‘of aggressive disposition who know little of the traditions of understatement, civilised discourse and respect for reason.’

Despite the journal’s tiny circulation, the article sparked a huge outcry in Bradford. A mood of hysteria seemed to grip the city. The mayor Mohammed Ajeeb stoked the flames of anger by calling on Honeyford to be sacked for demonstrating ‘prejudice against certain sections of our community’.

Honeyford had to be given police protection after a number of death threats, picket lines formed outside the school and subjected him to constant abuse, while pupils were given badges proclaiming ‘Hate Your Headmaster’ along with a ‘Pupils’ Charter’ advocating open disobedience.

When one Sikh shopkeeper privately expressed his support, Honeyford urged him to speak out. The Sikh said he could not, because he feared that his shop would be burnt down.

Soon Honeyford was suspended by the local education authority, and though he was subsequently reinstated by the Court of Appeal, a group of aggrieved, politicised parents ensured that it was impossible for him to do his job. In December 1985, he accepted a financial settlement and retired from Drummond Middle.

A broken man, he never returned to teaching. Instead he dabbled in political journalism and policy-making, as well as serving for a spell as a Tory councillor in Bury.

He wrote of how the episode had made his wife Angela, who was also a teacher, suffer acute anxiety. ‘I was daily watching her grow more and more depressed,’ he said after he finally accepted his settlement. ‘I am relieved the conflict is over. It is a reasonable settlement, but no amount of money can compensate for the loss of one’s career or the anguish which Angela and myself have suffered.’

Ray Honeyford should have been able to give so much more.

When I interviewed him in recent years, he was as courteous as ever, but he remained rightly embittered at what happened to him.

Yet he also derived a degree of satisfaction about having been so prescient in that explosive article. Despite all the abuse he endured at the time, many of his warnings about multiculturalism proved correct. He predicted that, without a unifying sense of national identity, we would become an ever-more divided country, which is exactly what has occurred.

Large parts of urban Britain are increasingly split along racial lines, with many Britons now feeling like aliens in their own land. In London, only six per cent of primary schools have a significant white majority.

Even Trevor Phillips, the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, recently warned that ‘some districts are on their way to becoming fully fledged ghettoes — black holes into which no one goes without fear or trepidation.’ Phillips went on, using words that could have come from Honeyford, that Britain ‘is sleep-walking into segregation’.

When Mr Phillips first began to publicly question the dogma of multiculturalism at the Tory Conference in 2005 — a dogma, incidentally his commission had been enforcing rigorously for many years — Honeyford wrote in the Daily Mail of his surprise and relief.

‘What is so galling,’ he wrote, ‘is that what Trevor Phillips has been saying this week is what I was saying 20 years ago as the headmaster of a predominantly Asian school in Yorkshire. Trevor Phillips calls for integration, the teaching of English and the inculcation of British values, precisely as I did in the mid-1980s.’

The passing of time has shown that Honeyford was equally justified in his warning about Muslim separatism, which has dramatically accelerated in the 28 years since his Salisbury Review article. That process is reflected in the growth of Muslim faith schools and the informal official acceptance of sharia courts. The Department for Work and Pensions even turns a blind eye towards polygamy in its lax distribution of benefits.

We have also seen the rise of Islamic extremism and domestic terrorism, as well as disturbing cases of practices such as honour killings and ethnic gang warfare.

When Honeyford wrote his article, he was branded a heretic. His words had to be suppressed, his influence crushed. But that did not stop him being right.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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10 February, 2012

Workshy UK where hardly anyone lives in hardship... but we also have Europe's highest rate of homes without jobs

Britain has Europe’s highest rate of people living in homes where no one has a job, it was revealed yesterday. But at the same time, the proportion of families who consider themselves to be ‘deprived’ is one of the lowest in the EU.

Analysts point to this contradiction as evidence that our welfare system is too generous to the workshy. Nearly one in eight children and working age adults in the UK live in a home where no one goes out to work. However fewer than one in 20 say they can’t afford to pay their bills, eat properly, go on holiday, run a car or have a colour TV or a mobile phone.

The picture of a country where large numbers of people do not work – yet can afford to live as if they earn good money – was put together by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics arm.

It comes as the Government faces opposition to its attempts to cap families to a maximum income from state handouts of £26,000 a year.

The figures show there is a higher proportion of people living in homes without work in the UK than in EU countries hit by the euro crisis.

In Britain, 13.1 per cent of the population aged under 59 lives in a home where no adult works for 20 per cent of their time. In Germany, the workless proportion of the population is 11.1 per cent, in France 9.8 per cent, and in Italy 10.2 per cent.

Britain’s closest rival in the workless league table is Belgium, where 12.6 per cent of people under 59 are in homes with very little work. However, in Britain only 4.8 per cent of people count as ‘materially deprived’, similar to levels in Germany which has 4.5 per cent.

This means that they cannot afford to pay for four out of nine ‘deprivation items’. The nine things that are considered to lift a family out of the deprived category are the ability to pay the rent or utility bills on time; to keep the house warm; to be able to pay an unexpected bill; to eat meat or fish every second day; to afford a week’s holiday; to run a car; to have a washing machine; to have a colour TV and to have a mobile phone.

In France, the ‘deprived’ make up 5.8 per cent of the population and in Italy 6.9 per cent.

Yesterday critics said the figures exposed flaws in the welfare system. Douglas Carswell, Tory MP for Clacton, said: ‘They show that the welfare system is not doing what it is supposed to do. It is meant to help people who need help because they have fallen on hard times, not people who have learned to play the system.

‘The welfare system has become a means of achieving lifestyle choices for people who do not want jobs, and who are reluctant to get up at six in the morning to go out to work.’

Economist Ruth Lea, of the Arbuthnot Banking Group, added: ‘One factor is that Britain has more single parent families than other countries in Europe. Families with two parents tend to be working families.’

SOURCE




BBC tells its staff: don’t call Qatada extremist

The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”. In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”.

Journalists were also cautioned against using images suggesting the preacher is overweight.

A judge ruled this week that the Muslim preacher, once described as “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, should be released from a British jail, angering ministers and MPs.

Adding to the row, Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, yesterday insisted that Qatada “has not committed any crime” and said his release has nothing to do with the European Court of Human Rights.

A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security.

Despite that background, BBC journalists were told they should not describe Qatada as an extremist. The guidance was issued at the BBC newsroom’s 9.00am editorial meeting yesterday, chaired by a senior manager, Andrew Roy.

According to notes of the meeting, seen by The Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist – we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”

The guidance was criticised by experts and MPs. Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam, a counter-extremist think tank, accused the BBC of “liberal paralysis” over Islamic extremism, saying journalists must be honest about Qatada’s record. He said: “A radical is someone who is different from the norm. An extremist is someone who promotes extreme views and actions, like killing innocents.”

James Clappison, a Conservative member of the Commons home affairs select committee, said the guidance was unjustifiable. He said: “Given the evidence about this man, it makes you wonder what you have to do for the BBC to call you an extremist.”

BBC staff were also cautioned against using library images suggesting the cleric is overweight, because he has “lost a lot of weight”.

A BBC spokesman said: “We think very carefully about the language we use. We do not ban words – the notes are a reflection of a live editorial discussion about how to report the latest developments on this story.”

SOURCE





Australia: How the tune has changed

It is doubtful that the Left have ever done anything of benefit to blacks but their talk these days is good enough to get blacks onside. Both their talk and their behaviour were very different prior to (say) 1960, however. Up to then, blacks were subjected to severe racial discrimination by Leftists. The following is a brief excerpt from a biography of Ned Hanlon, a LABOR party Premier of the Australian State of Queensland and still a revered figure in that party. Labor Premier Peter Beattie named a hospital after him a few years back

"As the minister largely responsible for the development and implementation of the A.L.P.'s welfare policies, Hanlon held assumptions and attitudes that had important consequences for the character of Queensland society. Under his administration Aborigines continued to be subjected to 'enforced population transfers, confinement to particular areas under relatively arbitrary and quite authoritarian regimes, excessive moral scrutiny, interference in intimate human relationships, supervised breeding, imposed placement and calculatedly inferior educational training for their children, control over their labour conditions, wages and personal property, and even suppression of their ''injurious" or menacing ''customs" or practices'. In these ways, Aborigines who, in their 'natural' state—according to Hanlon—were 'about 1,000,000 years behind the white race', were 'protected' by the state."





Some realism in France


French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, truth-teller and Establishment-marked man.

Silvio Berlusconi's finest 1/2 hour came shortly after 9/11 when he became the first and only Western leader to point out the duh-obvious distinctions between Western civilization and Islam -- essentially, one culture enshrines liberty, one does not -- and made the rather modest call for us to be aware of the distinction. For this he was pilloried, excoriated, heaped with scorn the world over, and beat a retreat rapido.

This plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face observation thus successfully purged from the political mainstream, it became the hotly controversial domain of so-called "far right" political figures across Europe, from Filip Dewinter in Belgium to Geert Wilders in Holland to Oskar Freysinger on Switzerland to Heinz Christian Straache in Austria to Pia Kjærsgaard in Denmark and on into Italy, Britain, France, Germany and more.

Now, a French interior minister in Nicolas Sarkozy's government has stepped onto the chopping block with the same message, albeit with more bite. Not only should we be aware of the distinction, we should protect our pro-humanity Western civilization. He made his "outrageous" comments on Saturday. Now, watch the dunications fly.

Suspense: Will he cave? AFP reports:

French Interior Minister Claude Guéant said on Sunday he stood by remarks that not all civilisations are equal, as critics denounced his comments as dangerous and xenophobic.

Guéant, who is also responsible for immigration and is known as a hardliner, provoked a storm of controversy with the comments on Saturday.

"Contrary to what the left's relativist ideology says, for us all civilisations are not of equal value," Guéant told a gathering of right-wing students.

"Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that do not," he said.

"Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred," he said in his speech, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. He also stressed the need to "protect our civilisation".

The sky is blue, the pope is Catholic, Grant is buried in Grant's Tomb and the Battle of White Plains took place in White Plains.

"I do not regret (the comments)," Guéant said on Sunday, though he accused critics of taking them "out of context".

The left denounced his speech as an attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy to woo supporters of the the far-right National Front (FN) ahead of a two-round presidential election in April and May.

Harlem Desir, the number two in theFrench Socialist Party, slammed "the pitiful provocation from a minister reduced to a mouthpiece for the FN".

Bernard Cazeneuve, a spokesman for Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande, denounced the remarks as "divisive and degrading" while former Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal called them "dangerous."

Sarkozy's allies were quick to defend the minister, however.

Defence Minister Gerard Longuet said it was simply "common sense" to suggest that civilisations could be ranked according to values such as "respecting personal rights, rejecting violence or abolishing the death penalty".

Finance Minister François Baroin accused the left of "exploiting the statements for electoral gain".

Foreign Minister Alain Juppé suggested that his colleague had meant to say that "all ideas, all political systems are not equal".

Speaking on BFM television, Juppé said however one should avoid talking of a shock of civilisations, suggesting the term was "inadequate".

Guéant has repeatedly linked immigration with crime in France and last month said the delinquency rate among immigrants was "two to three times higher" than the national average.

In April, he declared that an increase in the number of Muslim faithful in France posed a "problem".

Quelle probleme!

He has also said that he wants to reduce the number of legal immigrants entering France, including those coming to work legally or to join their families.

His latest comments came as the FN's presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is credited with about 20 percent support in opinion polls.

SOURCE


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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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9 February, 2012

Air Force Removes ‘God’ From Logo

A Virginia lawmaker is calling on the Air Force to reverse a decision to remove a Latin reference to “God” from a logo after an atheist group complained.

Rep. Randy Forbes, (R-VA), said the Air Force removed the logo several weeks ago from the Rapid Capabilities Office. The patch included a line written in Latin that read, “Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money.”

But after the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers complained, Forbes said the line was rewritten in Latin to read, “Doing Miracles with Other People’s Money.”

Forbes, along with a bi-partisan group of 35 lawmakers, sent a letter to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz expressing concern over the decision to remove a non-religious reference to God. “It is most egregious,” Forbes told Fox News. “The Air Force is taking the tone that you can’t even use the word ‘God.’”

Forbes said his office contacted the Air Force and officials there confirmed that the logo had been changed after the atheist group complained.

A spokesman for the Air Force told Fox News they had received the letter and would investigate the claims.

Forbes said the removal of “God” is a “bridge too far in terms of the rights of men and women who serve in our services and their ability to express their faith.”

“But the significance of this is what the Air Force is saying with this move – that the word ‘God’ – whether it has any reference to faith or not, can’t be used in the Air Force,” Forbes said.

He said the incident is one of several in recent months that have caused him to wonder if the military is cleansing itself of religious references.

“It’s a very dangerous course to take,” he said. “I am concerned that the RCO capitulated to pressure from an outside group that consistently seeks to remove references to God and faith in our military,” he said. ‘The RCO’s action to modify the logo sets a dangerous precedent that all references to God, regardless of context, must be removed from the military.”

SOURCE





British Gov. Bans Christian Group From Advertising That God Can Heal Illnesses

I wonder when they will crack down on the Prince of Wales' "Duchy originals" -- which is a line of quack medicines

Faith healing comes with a fair share of controversy. For some non-believers, the notion that a higher power would intervene to heal the afflicted it patently absurd. For some believers, even, the practice seems somewhat above and beyond the earthly realm of possibility.

Yet for others, faith healing is an important tenet that showcases the full power and ability of the Almighty. But in England, the government is agreeing with the former cohorts, as an agency is cracking down on the notion that God can cure those in need.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Britain’s media advertising watchdog, has banned a Christian group from making claims on its web site and advertising brochures that God can cure a number of ailments, RNS reports. According to the ad authority, the group Healing on the Streets (HOTS) Baths was being both irresponsible and misleading in its stated claims about God’s power to heal.

HOPS Bath has claimed that ulcers, depression, allergies, asthma, paralysis and sleeping disorders, among other illness, can be cured by the Lord. After an anonymous individual complained about one of group’s leaflets, the ASA investigated and concluded that the ads “could encourage false hope and were irresponsible.” The leaflet reads:

“Need Healing? God can heal today! Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction … Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?

The BBC has more regarding the group’s reaction

“It seems very odd to us that the ASA wants to prevent us from stating on our website the basic Christian belief that God can heal illness.

“All over the world as part of their normal Christian life, Christians believe in, pray for and experience God’s healing; our ministry, in common with many churches, has been active in praying for God’s healing (of Christians and non Christians) for many years.”

The group said it had tried to reach a compromise, “but there are certain things that we cannot agree to – including a ban on expressing our beliefs”.

The ASA has distinguished itself as extremely strict when it comes to oversight. In fact, it‘s considered among the world’s most stringent advertising oversight agencies.

SOURCE






The British army under fire from elf'n'safety and a busybody culture making babies of us all

Once upon a time, when a man chose a career as a soldier, everybody — including himself — knew he was making a deal. In return for more excitement, travel and adventure than he would get as a bank clerk or supermarket manager, he put his life on the line.

Not any more. Last week, the head of the Army, General Sir Peter Wall, made a speech in which he deplored the growing public belief that if wars are fought right, nobody gets killed.

‘I sense there is an expectation in some circles in society that the sort of zero-risk culture that is understandably sought in many other walks of life ought to be achievable on the battlefield,’ he said.

Sir Peter’s dismay is widely shared in the armed forces, and among senior veterans. Recently, I heard General Sir Michael Rose, who commanded the SAS in the Falklands, deplore the new ethic created by coroners, human rights cases and media pressure, which he believes to be gravely damaging the Army as a fighting service.
Litigation

The plague virus of health and safety is seeping into the military, as into every aspect of British life. We are conditioning ourselves to believe that with proper management, we can eliminate risk. Yet as we slither down this sorry road, we diminish the quality of all our lives, and especially those of the young.

For the past month, I have been shooting a documentary for BBC TV, to mark the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War. Again and again during filming, small incidents and exchanges have reminded me how much the world, and especially our society, has changed its attitude to risk since 1982.

First came Mike Rose’s remarks before the camera about risk-aversion. Then we went to view construction of one of the Royal Navy’s new carriers at Rosyth.

Before entering the shipyard, as at almost every modern industrial facility, we had to watch a ten-minute health and safety video. Its message could have been conveyed in ten seconds: wear a hard hat, behave sensibly and watch out.

But the company’s lawyers obviously advise that unless every visitor views a childishly exhaustive safety briefing, the yard could be vulnerable to litigation from one of the vulture flock of compensation lawyers that now crowd the courts.

Next day, we were filming Royal Marines cliff-climbing at a quarry in Argyll. I hate heights and am getting old and clumsy. As I made my way along a slate face to shoot a sequence, I gazed uncomfortably down 80ft or so and thought: ‘If I am fool enough to slip and fall, who will get sued? The BBC or the Ministry of Defence?’ I mean, nobody made me wear a safety harness.

I was tempted to stop and write a last will and testament saying: ‘If I break my neck, I want absolutely nobody to get blamed.’ But even then, some idiotic coroner would probably decide that I could not have been of sound mind to say such a thing, so somebody should be blamed anyway.

It is madness, and most of the young realise this. We filmed a group of teenage schoolchildren from Somerset talking about their attitude to history, and to the Falklands. Several of them said, unprompted, that they regret everybody is now so desperate to avoid exposing them to danger that it is much harder for them than it was for our generation to have adventures — which every right-thinking boy or girl wants to do.

I was thinking of their remarks last week, reading accounts of the tragic deaths of the two Essex schoolchildren Olivia Bazlinton and Charlotte Thompson on a level crossing in 2005. Network Rail admits breaches of health and safety regulations, for which the company faces heavy fines.

Yet am I the only person in Britain who asks the question: ‘Why did they not stop and think before crossing the line when red lights were flashing and yodel warnings sounding?’

It is utterly understandable that their parents, distraught with grief, dismiss suggestions that the girls behaved recklessly. But it seems to me that we now expect government and public bodies to protect us all, and especially children, from even the most ill-advised personal actions.

As a teenager, I sometimes did foolish things on and around railway lines because I liked to live dangerously. But I did not doubt then, and do not doubt now, that if anything had gone wrong and I had been injured or killed, blame should have rested solely with me.

Last autumn, my wife and I were among a group visiting some wonderful castles and monasteries along the Black Sea coast. We made jokes about the fact that, in Turkey, Georgia and Ukraine, we could clamber freely on rickety medieval buildings above sheer mountain drops. In Britain, alas, they would be rigorously fenced off as a threat to public safety.

The National Trust and its staff have suffered shockingly from harassment by the Health And Safety Executive, not least in respect of trees, of which you may notice the Trust owns quite a few.

At one point, a senior NT executive was moved to demand of an H&S gauleiter: ‘Are you expecting us to fence off every tree on our properties in case a branch falls on somebody?’ And by gosh, these tyrants came close to demanding just that.

We should recognise the punitive cash costs we inflict on ourselves by demanding that life should become inexorably safer, safer, safer. The railways are statistically our least perilous means of travel. But every time a fatal accident takes place, following a hue and cry, Network Rail or the regional companies are bullied into spending millions of pounds installing new equipment to insure against any repetition.

It would never occur to us to make the same demands, following car accidents such as happen every day. Expenditures on safety are often wildly disproportionate to risk.

But the real price of health and safety madness is paid by all of us as people, morally enfeebled. If we accept no personal responsibility for our actions — and even children are perfectly capable of bearing some — we become sheep, fit only to be herded from pen to pen.

As for soldiers, to return to Sir Peter Wall’s speech last week, it is almost demented for the media, civilian coroners and judges to try to make their trade as safe as stacking supermarket shelves. Almost every man who serves in Afghanistan admits to the buzz he gains from combat — precisely because it is dangerous.

Although the Army has had to fight its recent campaigns amid a deplorable shortage of helicopters, we should ignore much of the claptrap about alleged equipment failures: our soldiers in Afghanistan are the best-equipped Army Britain has ever put into the field.

If their kit is not perfect, it is because nothing ever is. If commanders sometimes make mistakes which cost lives, and earn magisterial rebukes from ignorant coroners, this is because young men do make mistakes, and in war the price is paid in blood.

I often deplore my generation moaning about how Britain is not what it was in our younger days. We must sometimes bow to the spirit of a new century; certain things have got better.

But the spreading pollution of the blame culture, the corrosion even of the spirit of our fighting men by health and safety, seems wholly deplorable. It suggests a society in moral decline, which aspires to make babes in arms of us all.

SOURCE





Circumnavigating the authorities

Why were the parents of the Dutch teen who sailed the world deemed incapable of deciding what's best for their child?

Last month, Dutch teenager Laura Dekker became the youngest sailor ever to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world. This was a phenomenal achievement, requiring incredible personal courage and endurance. But marring her celebrations was the fact that the Guinness Book of Records failed to recognise her achievement on the grounds that it was deemed ‘irresponsible’. Furthermore, Dekker has claimed she may never return to her home country due to the treatment of her, and her parents, by meddling Dutch authorities.

Laura Dekker began sailing alone when she was just six years old. By the age of 13, she had single-handedly completed a trip from the Netherlands to Britain and back. Her proven ability and determination convinced her parents to let her try to realise her ambition to break the record for being the youngest person to sail around the world solo. And last month, at the age of 16 years and four months, she did indeed beat the unofficial record set by Australian teenager Jessica Watson, who was days away from her seventeenth birthday when she completed her voyage in 2010.

Her struggle to achieve this record almost pales in comparison to the struggle to circumnavigate officialdom in order to make the attempt. Strikingly, it was actually the interfering British authorities that caused Dekker’s troubles to begin back in 2009. Following her solo return trip to Britain, police there intervened and tipped off Dutch child welfare authorities who, as a result, began intervening in Dekker’s stated plans to circumnavigate the world. When she turned 14, the Dutch government ruled that she was too young to sail alone.

The young girl and her father, who supported her trip, were brought to court six times as the Netherlands Bureau of Youth Care attempted to take Dekker under guardianship. After she made an attempt to escape to the Dutch Caribbean island, Saint Maarten, she was arrested and brought back to the Netherlands. In her blog, Dekker recalls that ‘over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up… It was all a frightening and traumatic experience.’

The Dutch authorities’ reaction to Laura Dekker shows that they have become a Frankenstein of the mentality that inspired the introduction of menacing tobacco labels and countless similar policies. The doctrine that individuals need to be saved from themselves has unleashed a swarm of crusading bureaucrats who relentlessly raid our private lives. Joost Lanshage of the Netherlands Bureau of Youth Care exemplified this pervasive creed as he protested, ‘If Laura had drowned we would be accused of not doing enough to protect her.’ Lanshage assumes his responsibility over both Laura and her parents with uncanny ease. More alarming, however, is Lanshage’s testimony that this is what society has come to expect from public authorities.

Forfeiting judgment to a faceless state erodes the importance of personal interactions as it undermines our dependence on family, friends, and community. The state’s hijacking of the responsibility for our lives also robs us of the ability to exercise and develop our personal judgment. This crucial aspect of our development is being debilitated by the craze to squeeze individuals into the shrinking mould of acceptable citizenship. Denying us the right to take risks, enjoy successes and suffer through mistakes restricts our ability to act according to our individual values and develop purposefully. We’re sacrificing our individual autonomy for the comfort of apathetic mediocrity.

As this process continues, unique approaches to life and education increasingly become unacceptable. After Dekker mentioned on her blog that she had to temporarily put schoolwork aside in the face of dangerous storms at sea, Dutch authorities mounted their high horses once again and summoned Laura’s father to court. While the 16-year-old conquered innumerable challenges that the vast majority of adults would not be capable of facing alone, authorities back in the Netherlands fretted at the idea that she would fall behind with her school work. As Dekker rightfully reflected on her blog towards the end of her journey, ‘Now, after sailing around the world, with… the full responsibility of keeping myself and [her boat] Guppy safe, I feel that the nightmares the Dutch government organisations put me through were totally unfair.’

Exhibiting the disturbing nature of our culture of conceded autonomy, Lanshage asserted, ‘I am sorry Laura is traumatised, but I have no regrets about fulfilling our responsibility to this child.’ Ultimately, the authorities’ accomplishments amounted to delaying Dekker’s trip, imposing a series of costly safety regulations, and traumatising her along the way. It is unclear what responsibility Lanshage could be claiming to have fulfilled, if not a responsibility ruthlessly to bully an individual because of her entrepreneurial attitude towards her own life. The state’s appetite for macro-managing society has metamorphosed into the self-indulgent micro-management of individuals, dangerously coupled with an ‘ends justify the means’ mentality.

Personal responsibility and the informal authority of close relationships have been appropriated as sacrificial lambs fit for slaughter at the altar of public paternalism. If Laura Dekker had been harmed during her journey, Laura and her family would have been the ones to suffer. By trampling over their authority, the state disrespectfully undermines this intimate relationship. If people want to take risks with their own lives, it isn’t the role of you or me or the state to do anything about it. We should commend Laura for bravely challenging our complacency by turning off autopilot and steering her own course.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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8 February, 2012


Fascist social workers in Austria too

But I guess they've had more practice in the "Ostmark des Deutschen Reichs "

Social workers seize a baby after his GRANDmother failed to pay a TRAFFIC fine! A total abuse of power. Even hate-filled British social workers have not gone that far yet. Though give them time, I guess

A mother has spoken of her struggle to be reunited with her baby after authorities seized him because the child's grandmother faced jail over an unpaid speeding fine.

Social workers in Austria took one-year-old Jonas Leitner from Ann-Kathrin, two months ago, insisting she would not be able to cope if her mother, Heidi, 50, who helped with babysitting, was imprisoned over the £800 ticket.

But authorities have still not reunited mother and son, despite the fact Heidi quickly paid off the debt.

Distraught Ann-Kathrin, 18, now has even missed her child's first steps and understands he is with his second foster family, while social workers process the case.

Ann-Kathrin said: 'When they took him into care we rushed to borrow the money from family and friends and paid off the fine. 'But they didn't bring him back. It's now been seven weeks and apparently he's already with the second foster family. I don't know why they changed from the first family.’

Social workers in Wels in the province of Upper Austria have refused to discuss the case. Spokesman Josef Gruber said the decision had not been taken lightly and that they were unable to comment on individual cases.

The young mother has now got a lawyer, Ronald Gabl, who has made a request at court for the child to be handed back. He said: ‘Quite apart from the fact that the child was taken away because of the traffic offence, the question is how did social workers find out about the speeding ticket and was that a breach of data protection laws.’

Ann-Kathrin, who lives with the boy's father, Andreas, said they would have been able to manage even if her mother had gone to jail over the unpaid ticket.

Gran Heidi said: ‘Of course a young mother needs support but they were managing fine. The youngster even has his own room. ‘When I realised it was a problem the fine was paid within two hours but it didn't seem to make any difference.

‘Now we're only allowed to see him once a week for an hour. The only exception was on his birthday on 26 January and we were allowed an extra hour. ‘It has had a devastating effect on my daughter- she missed her baby's first Christmas and his first tooth. Apparently he is also now walking.'

SOURCE





Extremist atheism

Alain de Botton has reinvigorated the conversation on religion. His new book, Religion for Atheists, moves away from the tedious debates of recent years to a more reflective consideration of religion's role in sustaining shared values.

Religion as a human phenomenon is too vast, pervasive and complicated to be discussed in simple binary terms of belief and unbelief. The evangelical atheists of the past few years may not be notable for sceptical doubt, but religious practitioners are often quite uncertain in their beliefs. De Botton is writing for the sceptics, whether they belong in any religion or not. It's a welcome shift of focus.

Atheists who aren't bigoted enemies of religion will agree that it has made many positive contributions. They are less likely to accept they should have a religion of their own - complete with a temple in London - as de Botton goes on to propose. Establishing atheist places of worship isn't exactly a new idea. As de Botton himself notes, an ambitious program of atheist church-building was part of the Religion of Humanity, invented by the 19th century French thinker Auguste Comte.

An obsessive and at times unbalanced personality, Comte - a fervent believer in phrenology - developed an elaborate daily ritual that included tapping the forehead at the points where science had supposedly located the impulses of progress, altruism and order. He also created a ''virgin mother of humanity'', based on a married woman with whom he had fallen in love. When she died, he appointed her grave a place of pilgrimage.

Such eccentricities were not destined to last but a number of atheist temples were established - not only in Paris, Comte's base, but in Rio de Janeiro, New York, Liverpool and London. In line with Comte's creed, these were temples where disciples could worship the new supreme being - humanity. As far as I know, none of the buildings is used for religious purposes today, though the Brazilian church seems to have been active until late last century.

When he proposes building a temple for unbelievers, de Botton is reinventing a wheel that never really turned. The fad for atheist temples lasted for perhaps 60 years, while places of worship dedicated to something bigger than humanity have been around for thousands of years. There is a nice irony here. For all his loony notions, Comte was more intelligent than most of the atheists who came after him. He saw clearly that religion is an enduring human need that cannot be denied. Yet despite the formative influence it had on writers and philosophers such as George Eliot and John Stuart Mill, Comte's religion of humanity disappeared, leaving hardly a trace.

Even if Comte's church was ephemeral, he was right in predicting religion would not die out. The world is awash with formless religiosity. During most of the last century, politics was the principal vehicle for religion. Communism and the cult of the free market are examples of large, flimsy ideas being turned into articles of faith.

Today, faith is more often channelled through science. Not only the pseudo-science of crop circle enthusiasts and UFO cultists, but genuine advances in science and technology are being used to promote hopes and dreams that are quintessentially religious. People who believe the human mind can be uploaded into virtual space and so be immune to death are recycling the fantasies of 19th-century spiritualists, who also argued their beliefs were based on science.

The very idea of a science-based religion is an absurdity. The value of religion is it points beyond anything that can be known by the methods of science, showing us a mystery would remain even if all could be explained.

Rather than trying to invent another religion surrogate, open-minded atheists should appreciate the genuine religions that exist already. Better spend the money that is being raised for the new temple on religious buildings that are in disrepair than waste it on a monument to a defunct version of unbelief.

SOURCE




Will the Church of England ever find peace?

Unlikely. The dressup queens in its clergy are killing it

Arguments about women bishops will dominate public proceedings of the Synod, but gay marriage is one of the burning issues behind the scenes.

Across the country, the 477 members of the Church of England’s governing body are bundling reports, agendas and background papers into suitcases ready for next week’s four-day General Synod in London.

But while the wood-panelled walls of the circular chamber at Church House, Westminster, echo to the sound of debates on such matters as the Draft Parochial Fees and Scheduled Matters Amending Order, the real decisions will be made furtively in the tearoom during breaks and, for those lucky enough to have received their gilt-edged invitation card, at the white-tie Dinner to the Archbishops and Bishops held at Mansion House every two years.

At the heart of the most important discussions is the question of whether the Church wants to go along with the increasingly liberal mood of English society, or whether it chooses to stick with its traditions.

There is, as always, a list of contentious issues gripping the Church, but such is the speed at which its bureaucracy moves that only one of them – the decades-long argument over women bishops – is on the order paper at General Synod. Meanwhile, at the top of the “shadow” agenda, and certain to be the subject of heated argument, are same-sex partnerships – specifically, the urgent question of whether or not clergy should be allowed to host civil partnership ceremonies in church.

Thanks to an amendment attached to the Equality Act at the last minute in the House of Lords, and passed into law last December, civil partnerships can now be held in places of worship. But because of fears of lawsuits against conservative clergy, the rules require that the governing body of a religion voluntarily agrees to “opt in” to host the events.

The Church of England’s lawyers say it is under no obligation to perform civil ceremonies, using the memorable analogy that a “gentlemen’s outfitter is not required to supply women’s clothes”. Even blessing services for such unions are banned by the Church of England, although that did not stop one rector from allowing two male priests to exchange vows and rings in his church, the picturesque St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London.

But now 100 clerics in the diocese of London, among them Giles Fraser, the former Canon of St Paul’s who resigned during the Occupy London protest, have signed a letter stating that they should have the right to host civil partnerships on grounds of “individual conscience”, just as they can choose to marry divorcees in their churches.

Their letter follows remarks made by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph last week, in which he insisted that the state did not have any power to change the long-settled definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. “We’ve seen dictators do it in different contexts and I don’t want to redefine very clear social structures that have been in existence for a long time and then overnight the state believes it could go in a particular way,” he said.

Although he was immediately branded “Archbigot” by equality campaigners, despite his making clear he did not disapprove of civil partnerships, no senior clerics have spoken out publicly against him. Many are no doubt weighing up the effects on their existing congregations, and the likelihood of attracting new churchgoers, if they were to declare themselves open for gay weddings. Church of England attendance is now down to 923,700 on an average Sunday. And despite a 4 per cent rise in 2010, the number of church weddings has been in decline for years, so gay couples who have resisted civil partnerships as “second-class” could provide a welcome boost.

However powerful the voices of the 100 London rebels may be, they must know that any move to grant them rights of individual conscience would have to be considered by Synod first and would also wait on a House of Bishops review of policy on civil partnerships in general.

While that issue fizzles in the corridors and tearoom next week, the Church will once again put its arguments about women bishops centre stage. Although most in the Church now accept that women will soon be fitted for mitres, about 1,000 outright opponents have departed for Rome over the past year and more are expected to follow, and it is still by no means sure that the lengthy legislative process will proceed smoothly. The Synod will be an opportunity for substantial revisions to the plans, which could see them sent back to the 44 dioceses for further consideration rather than sent forward for the deciding vote at York this July.

Yesterday’s visit by the Prince of Wales and the Bishop of London to a bastion of traditionalism, three Anglo-Catholic churches in north London where no women are allowed to preach, may be seen by liberals as a glimpse of the vanishing world of “smells and bells”. But others may view it as supportive of an important statement made by both Archbishops in the Synod background papers – that they want the C of E to remain a broad church “in which conscientious difference of theological judgement is fully respected”.

The question of how the Church is perceived by the outside world is of crucial importance to its future, though it is likely to be ducked at Synod. There will be much back-slapping in the corridors over the recent performance of the Lords Spiritual – the 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords. Long regarded by the Left as an embarrassing anachronism in multicultural, democratic Britain, they became the toast of liberals last week for leading a defeat of government plans to cap benefits at £26,000 a year (though that has since been overturned in the Commons).

What most bishops will be talking about is the intervention of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who missed the Welfare Reform Bill debate but then used a newspaper article to declare that benefits dependency encourages “fecklessness”.

A remarkable degree of unity was on show in the Church as clerics weighed in against their former leader, who faced accusations of buying into evil Tory ideology as well as being “yesterday’s man”. But few seemed to consider that Lord Carey, who previously had a column in the multi-million-selling News of the World, was expressing the views of many ordinary people, as well as government ministers.

Next week will also be the first gathering of Synod since the “debacle” – to quote Lord Carey again – at St Paul’s, another example of how the leadership of the Church, convinced of its moral superiority and used to getting its way, was unable to see how it looked to the outside world. First it welcomed the protesters, then it tried to blackmail them into leaving by closing the cathedral doors, then it sided with the Corporation of London in trying to have them evicted, then it backed down and was forced to deal with the resignation of its dean and canon chancellor.

Since then, we have been treated to a stream of articles by bishops declaring that Jesus would have camped out with the Occupy crowd and denouncing the robber barons of capitalism (who for years have funded their cathedral restoration projects). Again, of course, none of this will be discussed on the record at Synod.

All present will be wondering if the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, will be making his last appearance in the chamber. Lambeth Palace has noticeably failed to deny reports circulating since October that Dr Williams is to return early to his natural home of academia, and the choice of his successor will help determine how the Church is seen by the public as well as affecting its internal wranglings.

Dr Sentamu is the bookies’ favourite, with opinion divided over whether his strident opposition to gay marriage will dent or boost his chances. Despite his meteoric rise through the Church’s ranks, he accepts that Canterbury is a near-impossible job and he would likely be happier were he to remain in York.

After all the unwanted headlines generated by Dr Williams – such as his comments on sharia law and the democratic illegitimacy of radical Coalition policies – Church officials are now expected to put up younger bishops who rarely express their opinions on contentious issues and are not associated with either the conservative or liberal wings.

But it remains unclear if this stance will be welcomed by the people who still make their way to the pews every Sunday, whose average age is now 61 and who have long been characterised as the “Tory party at prayer”.

But, of course, none of this will be discussed in public at the General Synod next week.

SOURCE






Trial by jury: The case for the defence

We should fight hard to defend the right to a jury trial, which remains the ‘lamp that shows that freedom lives’

This week, the UK Ministry of Justice revealed plans to save £30million by restricting the right to trial by jury in ‘minor cases’. The reforms would target offences currently referred to as ‘either way’, because the defendant has the right to choose between being tried by a jury in the Crown Court or by a magistrate in the Magistrates’ Court.

The reforms have been championed by the Magistrates’ Association and the ‘victims’ champion’ Louise Casey, a one-woman quango who in March 2010 was appointed by the New Labour government to represent the interests of victims in the criminal justice system. In November 2010, Casey called for identical restrictions to trial by jury in her report, Ending the Justice Waiting Game: A Plea For Common Sense, in which she derided ‘the administration of law that concerns itself with due process and the rights of offenders’. Speaking to The Times (London) this week, she said: ‘We should not view the right to a jury trial as being so sacrosanct that its exercise should be at the cost of victims of serious crime.’

Many have pointed out that Casey is just the latest in a long line of members of the English establishment who have sought to limit trial by jury. Lord Roskill’s 1986 report on trial by jury in cases involving serious fraud advocated abolishing juries in fraud trials to make the process more ‘expeditious’, despite finding no evidence that jurors were less capable of understanding fraud than judges were. The Runciman report in 1994 recommended abolishing the right to elect trial by jury for certain offences, saying that for many crimes the view of the jury was ‘unnecessary’. Jack Straw called the right to trial by jury ‘frankly eccentric’ in his failed bid to push his doomed Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill on to the statute book in 2003.

Judges, politicians and quango-staffers may see the system of trial by jury as an ‘eccentric’ waste of time and money. But at a time when successive governments have engaged in a prolonged assault on the rights of defendants in criminal trials, standing up for the jury system - famously described by Lord Devlin in the 1950s as the ‘lamp that shows that freedom lives’ - has never been more important. Its value in rebalancing the hugely unequal relationship between the accused citizen and the powers of the state cannot be underestimated.

Juries ensure that the law is applied in a way which is consistent with the social values of the day. This is why juries have the power to acquit a defendant in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt. In the nineteenth century, juries in the United States used this power to acquit law-enforcement officers charged with offences under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 for harbouring escaped slaves, even when they had been directed to convict by the judge. These acquittals led the Wisconsin High Court to become the first state court to rule the Fugitive Slave Act to be unconstitutional in 1854. Later, in the 1930s, many juries acquitted those charged with producing alcohol during the days of Prohibition. These acquittals eventually forced prosecutors to stop taking Prohibition cases up in the first place.

More recently, juries have acquitted defendants accused of murder even on overwhelming evidence of their guilt, if they have taken the view that they are not deserving of punishment. For example, Kay Gilderdale was cleared of attempting to murder her 31-year-old daughter, who was suffering from chronic ME, despite clear evidence that her daughter was unconscious when she injected her with morphine. The unfettered discretion afforded to juries enables them to hold the black letter of the law up to contemporary social norms and to make a democratic decision as to whether the defendant is guilty or not.

The jury also represents one of the last areas of public life where we, as members of the public, are absolutely trusted to make important decisions for ourselves. The judge is highly restricted in what he can ask a jury about their deliberations; if he is seen to be putting undue pressure on them to convict, the verdict will be overturned. This esteem has ancient roots. The Athenian speech writer Lysias described the jury’s verdict as ‘sovereign over all the city’s affairs’ and said juries had the power to decide whether the law was ‘powerful or powerless’. In the Roman republics, the decision of the single magistrate was only appealable to the citizen courts made up of up to 1,000 citizens, the verdict of which was absolutely final.

Today, however, the idea that a defendant’s guilt should be determined democratically is being eroded. More and more criminal offences are punishable by way of a fixed-penalty notice, dished out without any need to go before the courts. Bureaucratic organisations like the Independent Safeguarding Authority can effectively punish individuals by restricting their right to work without the need for any criminal conviction. Reams of new legislation encourage defendants, through discounts on their sentence or with prohibitive restrictions on legal aid, to plead guilty as quickly as possible.

All of these measures, along with the attacks on the jury system, are part of the same anti-democratic trend that places efficiency and cost saving before the rights of defendants to a fair trial. We should resist this trend by standing up for the principle of the jury trial, as one of the last remaining guarantors of our stake in criminal justice.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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7 February, 2012

Store security guard is fired for chasing a thief who swiped 20 DVDs... because of crazy British 'elf and safety obsession

When security guard Charles Oloro spotted a shoplifter slipping out of his store with an armful of DVDs, he knew exactly what to do. He gave chase through the shopping centre before catching him and marching him back to the store.

But instead of being congratulated by his bosses, the 42-year-old HMV worker was sacked for apprehending a suspect outside the shop premises.

HMV policy is for security guards to avoid all confrontations with suspects that have the potential to escalate into something more serious. That includes trying to catch thieves once they have carried their stolen goods through the exit doors.

A spokesman for the chain said the rules were introduced in 2007 after a member of staff was stabbed to death in Norwich after apprehending a thief.

Mr Oloro, who has worked for HMV for 14 years, caught the thief in the St Nicholas Centre, Sutton, South London, on New Year’s Eve. He had been watching him acting suspiciously around a display of DVDs. The man had picked up about 20 films before making his way towards the exit.

Once he was close to the doors, he darted out pursued by a quick-thinking Mr Oloro – who caught him 30ft away.

The security guard then frogmarched him back to the shop where he called police. But despite recovering the stolen goods, his actions saw him hauled in front of his bosses, and led to him losing his job.

Mr Oloro, who has two mortgages to pay, said he was just trying to help the shop and save them from losing money. He said: ‘Twenty DVDs is £200 for the shop and that was too much to lose. ‘In a time of recession, I just wanted to save the shop money, and this is how they repay me.’ He said he even went to his manager after the incident to apologise for leaving the shop.

HMV later issued a statement defending their actions.

A spokesman said: ‘While I am not in a position to give specific details of why Mr Oloro has been dismissed... not least because he still has a right of appeal, which we would not wish to prejudice, I can confirm he was asked to leave for an accumulation of reasons.’

But HMV customer Kieran Spears, defended Mr Oloro’s actions. ‘Charlie is a hero,’ he said. ‘He has been there as long as I remember, he’s such a nice guy and everyone knows him. ‘What is the point in having security guards if they cannot tackle thieves?

SOURCE





Let people wear the cross with pride: Bishops join motion to defend Christianity against human rights zealots

Three bishops will call for the Church of England's national assembly to stand up for the right of Christians to wear a cross. They are among more than a hundred members of the Synod to sign a motion condemning the 'silencing' of outward displays of Christianity.

Supporters say the Church should defend Christians against the 'overzealous' interpretation of human rights and equality legislation by judges, politicians and employers.

The motion also calls for the Church to make a landmark statement that wearing a cross is an integral part of the Christian faith. It cites 'ludicrous' cases of Christian practices and symbols being forbidden.

The motion also adds that attempts to scrap prayers at council meetings and to ban employees from wearing the cross could ultimately lead to religion being confined to the home.

The Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Rev Donald Allister, told The Sunday Telegraph: 'It is to say, OK, if you say wearing a cross isn’t a compulsory part of Christianity, we agree. 'But it is a duty of a Christian to be public about their faith as well as private, and that is clear New Testament teaching.'

The intervention by clergy and lay members of the General Synod comes as four Christians who believe they have suffered discrimination for their beliefs fight a landmark legal battle in the European Court of Human Rights.

The motion highlights the case of Gary McFarlane, a marriage counsellor who was fired for refusing to give sex therapy to homosexual couples.

Mr McFarlane is one of four Christians taking legal action at a landmark European Court of Human Rights hearing because they believe British laws have failed to protect their human rights to wear religious symbols or opt out of gay rights legislation.

Mr McFarlane, from Bristol, was sacked by marriage guidance service Relate in 2008 after he said he could not do anything to promote gay sex.

The former church elder has again appealed on the grounds of religious discrimination that Relate had refused to accommodate his religious beliefs.

He lost his appeal for unfair dismissal at Bristol Crown Court in April 2010 and accused senior judges of being biased against Christianity.

The other cases in the action are of Shirley Chaplin, a Devon nurse banned from working on the wards after she failed to hide a cross she had worn since the age of 16, Nadia Eweida, a check-in clerk for British Airways who was told to remove her small crucifix at work and registrar Lilian Ladele, who was disciplined by Islington council in North London after refusing to officiate at civil partnership ceremonies.

The Rev Stephen Trott, a rector in Boughton, Northampton, who drew up the motion, said: 'There are four cases being appealed currently to the ECHR and that’s an example of the sort of court action where we would be able to say that the established Church, which is part of the law of the land, takes the view that it’s not only a right, it’s a duty of Christians to manifest their faith in public.'

In December, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, appealed to Prime Minister David Cameron on their behalf.

But the Government told the European Court of Human Rights that it backed the British judges and does not accept that the Christians have suffered discrimination. To the dismay of Lord Carey, the Government even said that wearing a cross or a crucifix was not a 'generally recognised' Christian practice – even though Church leaders say it is a hugely significant symbol.

Lord Carey said: ‘I am very disappointed for the individuals concerned who have simply followed their conscience. 'Such is the result of a liberal establishment that has become deeply illiberal.'

SOURCE







No chance of the Church of England connecting with British youth

As if the Guardian were not already preachy enough, it has signed up an actual preacher to write its leaders and op-eds. The Rev Dr Giles Fraser resigned as a canon of St Paul’s in sympathy with people camped on its doorstep for whom I think the kindest word is “troubled”. His departure puzzled his colleagues, who had detected beneath his right-on sound bites a Trollopian eagerness for preferment. They were wrong. Giles is now a professional hack, and he has used his first big article to suggest that the Occupy movement may “revitalise traditional Christianity”.

Of all the delusions nurtured by Left-wing Christians, perhaps the loopiest is that anyone under the age of 40 gives a monkey’s about their opinions. Let me spell this out for ex-Canon Fraser (who, like his former boss Richard Chartres, is jolly keen on his “Doctor” title, though unlike the bishop he at least has a proper doctorate).

Chartres could don mitre and nose-peg and ordain the Occupy protesters as priests of the Church of England and it still wouldn’t revitalise Christianity. England’s few remaining churchgoers have lost any sympathy they had with the smelly fanatics, who yesterday locked boy scouts out of their London headquarters so they could squat in it.

But the crucial point is that the sharpest young opinion-formers are atheists. This is a development that seems to have been missed by the old boobies who pass for bishops in the Anglican and Catholic Churches. It’s a rapid and startling change in our religious landscape and not one that is going to be reversed.

The average bright 25-year-old Briton isn’t looking for supernatural solutions to existential problems. Senior churchmen speak of the “spiritual hunger” of the young. That’s wishful thinking. The next generation don’t believe in God. Few of them frame their arguments as rabidly as Richard Dawkins; they don’t all use the word “atheist” – “humanist” is cooler – but that’s what they are. If they worship anything, it’s “human rights” or, in the case of Johann Hari, Laurie Penny and Owen Jones, themselves.

Their attitude towards Christians ranges from indifference to hatred. This is partly thanks to the paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. We can argue about the extent to which this has been misreported, but not about the fact that crimes against children were covered up by bishops (and not just conservative ones, either). These crimes were seized upon by academics, writers and opportunistic publishers to create an indestructible caricature of institutional Christianity.

One reason that caricature isn’t challenged is that this is the first generation of young people whose parents didn’t go to church themselves. Their religious education consists of nativity plays, visits to Sikh temples and lectures about energy-saving light bulbs.

But that doesn’t make the new atheists stupid, despite their intergalactic levels of conceit. The brightest of them are far, far cleverer than the bishops, who (if you ignore the puzzling anomaly of Rowan Williams) are men of middling intellect – and that’s being polite, in the case of the Catholic hierarchy. All that drivel about “religion in the public square” makes me want to convert to a more rigorous creed, such as a Prince Philip-worshipping cargo cult. I was going to suggest that, for all the good they do, the bishops might as well join Giles Fraser and write Guardian leaders for a living. But, frankly, they’re not up to it.

SOURCE





The lessons of the fall of communism have still not been learnt

The air is filled with noisy outrage about the moral emergency of the day. We are, according to the leaders of every major political party, in the midst of a crisis of capitalism. However bountiful the free market system may have been at its best, it is now in such deep disrepute that any politician who wishes to remain credible must join in the general vilification.

Even in this storm of condemnation, everyone has to admit that there is actually no alternative to free market economics or to the private banking system. So the competition is strictly between adjectives: “responsible” or sometimes “socially responsible” banking are great favourites, but now Ed Miliband has produced something called a “national banking system”, which is presumably not to be confused with a nationalised banking system. The Miliband neologism is intended to suggest banking that takes the concerns of the nation (or the population?) as its own. Whether he sees this role as voluntary or enforced was unclear from his speech last week.

But in spite of the official agreement that there is no other way to organise the economic life of a free society than the present one (with a few tweaks), there are an awful lot of people implicitly behaving as if there were. Several political armies seem to be running on the assumption that there is still a viable contest between capitalism and Something Else.

If this were just the hard Left within a few trade unions and a fringe collection of Socialist Workers’ Party headbangers, it would not much matter. But the truth is that a good proportion of the population harbours a vague notion that there exists a whole other way of doing things that is inherently more benign and “fair” – in which nobody is hurt or disadvantaged – available for the choosing, if only politicians had the will or the generosity to embrace it.

Why do they believe this? Because the lesson that should have been absorbed at the tumultuous end of the last century never found its way into popular thinking – or even into the canon of educated political debate.

Can I suggest that you try the following experiment? Gather up a group of bright, reasonably well-educated 18-year-olds and ask them what world event occurred in 1945. They will, almost certainly, be able to give you an informed account of how the Second World War ended, and at least a generally accurate picture of its aftermath. Now try asking them what historical milestone came to pass in 1989. I am willing to bet that this question will produce mute, blank looks.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism which followed it are hugely important to any proper understanding of the present world and of the contemporary political economy. Why is it that they have failed to be addressed with anything like their appropriate awesome significance, let alone found their place in the sixth-form curriculum?

The failure of communism should have been, after all, not just a turning point in geo-political power – the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact – but in modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy, about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power. Where was the discussion, the trenchant analysis, or the fundamental debate about how and why the collectivist solutions failed, which should have been so pervasive that it would have percolated down from the educated classes to the bright 18-year-olds? Fascism is so thoroughly (and, of course, rightly) repudiated that even the use of the word as a casual slur is considered slanderous, while communism, which enslaved more people for longer (and also committed mass murder), is regarded with almost sentimental condescension.

Is this because it was originally thought to be idealistic and well-intentioned? If so, then that in itself is a reason for examining its failure very closely. We need to know why a system that began with the desire to free people from their chains ended by imprisoning them behind a wall. Certainly we have had some great works of investigation into the Soviet gulags and the practices of the East German Stasi, but judging by our present political discourse, I think it is safe to say that the basic fallacies of the state socialist system have not really permeated through to public consciousness.

It would, if one were so inclined, be fairly easy to assume that the grotesque activities of the Stasi, or the Soviet labour camps, were aberrations or betrayals of the true communist philosophy – and a great many people (even within the mainstream Labour party) did believe precisely that for decades. When the entire edifice simply dissolved with an almost bloodless whimper and its masses were free to tell their stories of what life had actually been like under the great alternative to capitalism, that was the end of self-delusion – and it should have been the beginning of the serious discussion.

But in our everyday politics, we still seem to be unable to make up our minds about the moral superiority of the free market. We are still ambivalent about the value of competition, which remains a dirty word when applied, for example, to health care. We continue to long for some utopian formula that will rule out the possibility of inequalities of wealth, or even of social advantages such as intelligence and personal confidence.

The idea that no system – not even a totalitarian one – could ensure such a total eradication of “unfairness” without eliminating the distinguishing traits of individual human beings was one of the lessons learnt by the Soviet experiment. The attempt to abolish unfairness based on class was replaced by corruption and a new hierarchy based on party status.

If the European intellectual elite had not been so compromised by its own broad acceptance of collectivist beliefs, maybe we would have had a genuine, far-reaching re-appraisal of the entire ideological framework. And that might have led to a more honest political dialogue in which everybody might now be talking sensibly about capitalism and how it needs to be managed. It is people – not markets – that are moral or immoral.

Communism’s fatal error was in thinking that morality resided in the mechanisms of an economic system rather than in the people who operated them. There is no way of avoiding the need for individual responsibility, which lies with citizens, not governments – or with bankers as people, not with the “banking system”. Some political leader (David Cameron?) needs to have the nerve to say this or we shall be talking nonsense forever.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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6 February, 2012

Irish Bishop accused of incitement to hatred in homily

A HOMILY delivered at Knock shrine by the Bishop of Raphoe, Philip Boyce, is being investigated by the Director of Public Prosecutions following a formal complaint by a leading humanist who claims the sermon was an incitement to hatred.

The gardai have confirmed to former Fine Gael election candidate John Colgan that they have prepared and forwarded a file to the DPP after he made allegations that the address by Dr Boyce was in breach of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, 1989.

The homily, entitled: "To Trust in God" was delivered to worshippers during a novena at the Marian shrine in Co Mayo last August and subsequently reported in the media, including The Irish Times, under the headline: "'Godless culture' attacking church, says bishop."

Mr Colgan, a retired chartered engineer and economist from Leixlip, Co Kildare, referred in his formal complaint to two key passages in Dr Boyce's homily which he believes broke the law.

One of the passages referred to the Catholic Church in Ireland being "attacked from outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture".

A second passage, which was included in the complaint, stated: "For the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is the fact they have a future; it is not that they know all the details that await them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness."

Mr Colgan, who was a leader in the 'Campaign to Separate Church and State' in the late 1990s, said in his complaint: "I believe statements of this kind are an incitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaning of the [Incitement to Hatred] Act, who are perfectly good citizens within the meaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathy towards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in the ostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share the aims of the Vatican's Irish Mission Church."

To back up his complaint, Mr Colgan referred to two statistical surveys carried out two decades apart by the Jesuit sociologist and academic Fr Michael MacGreil, entitled: 'Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland' and 'Prejudice in Ireland Revisited' which Mr Colgan claims showed "marked prejudice by Roman Catholics and other Christian denominations against agnostics and atheists" (humanist was not an option offered to respondents in either survey).

In his complaint, Mr Colgan said he attributed this prejudice to "hostile propaganda disseminated in school and chapel in the main by or for the institutional churches, for there is no rational or temporal reason".

In a statement to the Sunday Independent, Martin Long of the Catholic Communications office said: "Bishop Boyce's homily 'To Trust in God' is available for anyone to read at catholicbishops.ie.

"I advise any person to read it and judge it for themselves. It is clearly a reasonable, balanced, honest -- and indeed self-critical from a church perspective -- analysis of the value of the Catholic faith. Bishop Boyce is a good and holy man and much loved by those who know him."

After the homily was delivered late last summer, Mr Colgan wrote personally to the cleric seeking a corrective statement.

Dr Boyce responded saying that in his homily he did "not wish to disparage in any way the sincere efforts of those with no religious beliefs, atheists, humanists etc.

"I have too much respect for each human person, since I believe all are created in the image of God. At Knock I wished to encourage and confirm the hope of believers, even in the present challenging times, since trust in God was the theme I was given."

SOURCE





Epidemic of violence in Muslim area causes Swedish hospital to close its doors

Police in Malmö have taken the unusual decision to cordon off the entrance to the accident and emergency department at the Skåne University Hospital following the latest in a rising number of fatal shooting incidents.

”There is a continual threat,” said Hans Olsson, assistant security manager at the hospital to daily Dagens Nyheter (DN), adding that they have taken this extreme measure in response to the rising number of shootings recently.

In a bid to tighten up security arrangements at the hospital, the main way in will be closed off for only the second time in living memory, as early as next week, according to reports in Dagens Nyheter.

Monday saw the latest in a spate of murders that has caused panic throughout the city. Police immediately cordoned off the crime scene where the incident took place, but also decided to stop anyone getting into the A&E building.

As a crowd of some 60 people began to gather outside the entrance, the police were forced to push them back in a bid to secure those inside. "The staff felt threatened by the large quantity of people trying to push in," said Mats Hansson of the Malmö health care union to DN.

The authorities claimed that it was necessary to close the entrance to reduce the risk of criminal gangs who are involved in the ongoing escalation of violence in Skåne getting inside and causing even more trouble.

Security at the hospital in both the previous and current location has gradually been ramped up since the mid 90s, following the fatal shooting of a patient by a policeman.

After that incident, staff were equipped with voluntary panic alarms, although new measures have since come into force making it compulsory to carry them at all times.

In addition, staff have received training in self-defence and how to deal with threatening situations, while extra security guards and surveillance cameras have also been installed at the hospital.

SOURCE






Political Correctness and Muslims

Bill O'Reilly

The story is grisly: a husband and wife murdering their three young daughters, ages 19, 17 and 13, by drowning them along with their stepmother. The couple was assisted by their 21-year-old son. All were found guilty of first-degree murder in Ontario, Canada. They were sentenced to life in prison.

Mohammad Shafia and his wife, Tooba, immigrated to Canada from Afghanistan in 2007. Being Muslims, they believe in Sharia law, which in some cases allows so-called "honor killings" -- that is, if a family member deviates from strict Muslim teachings, other family members can execute them. Of course, that's insane. But under the Taliban in Afghanistan and in some other parts of the world, "honor killings" are allowed.

In his eyes, Shafia's three daughters were guilty of becoming westernized, wearing nontraditional Muslim clothing and associating with the dreaded Christians. So this demented father ordered the girls killed, as well as his first wife, whom he believed was aiding them in their alleged transgressions.

Reporting on the story in America has been scant and strange. According to the Media Research Center, the initial Associated Press report made no mention of the fact that the convicted murderers are Muslim. They were described as "Afghan." In fact, the only theology mentioned in the AP dispatch is Christianity, used while describing the boyfriend of one of the daughters.

On NBC's "Nightly News," anchor Brian Williams said this: "A verdict has been reached in a murder case that's gotten a lot of attention because it involved so-called honor killings of family members. In this case, an Afghan family living in Canada. It is a culture clash getting a lot of attention to our north."

Culture clash? Between whom? Afghans and Canadians? What is Williams talking about?

The reporter on the story, Kevin Tibbles, also avoided using the word "Muslim." He described the motivation for the violence as "a strict religious family that felt it had been disgraced."

What religion? Incredibly, the reporter didn't say.

This is no coincidence. The politically correct U.S. media are frightened by Muslim violence. They avoid the issue whenever they can.

Just think about what would happen if a Catholic father murdered his daughter for having an abortion. Would the AP and NBC News not have mentioned the religion involved? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Political correctness is dangerous because it obscures the truth. It allows certain people and groups to avoid scrutiny for destructive actions. Today, the press in America is dominated by liberal editors who believe they are protecting "minorities" by failing to mention facts that might cast them in a negative light. Thus, honest reporting is becoming almost obsolete when certain groups are involved.

Shafia, his wife and his son are Muslim fanatics who believe they have the right to commit murder in the name of their religion. Somebody get that dispatch to the media.

SOURCE






Damning British report finds £2 billion free nursery scheme 'has failed'

Theory trumps facts again. The American equivalent -- Head Start -- has been failing for 40 years

Labour's multi-billion pound investment in free nursery education has failed to raise school standards, a damning auditors’ report revealed yesterday. Free sessions for all three and four-year-olds - costing up to £1.9 billion-a-year - have failed to translate into improved exam results at age seven.

The scheme was specifically intended to boost children’s development throughout primary and secondary school. But a report by the National Audit Office found ‘it is not yet clear that the entitlement is leading to longer-term educational benefits’.

The authors found that the quality of nurseries was patchy across the country, partly due to poor qualifications among some staff.

Providers were allowed to go an average of 47 months between official inspections, denying parents current information about nursery standards.

Labour introduced free nursery places for four-year-olds in 1998, adding three-year-olds to the scheme in 2004. By September 2010, both three and four-year-olds were eligible for 15 hours per week of free education, for 38 weeks a year.

The Coalition plans to expand the scheme still further, reaching 40 per cent of two-year-olds by 2014/15.

But the public spending watchdog found no evidence the scheme had improved children’s learning - despite the introduction of a so-called ‘nappy [diaper] curriculum’ for nurseries setting down a raft of developmental milestones.

The first children to benefit from two years of free nursery sessions from age three sat national tests for seven-year-olds in 2009, auditors said. Yet results in the so-called ‘key stage one’ tests have shown barely any improvement since 2007.

‘The department did intend that the entitlement would have lasting effects on child development throughout primary school and beyond,’ the report said. ‘National key stage one results, however, have shown almost no improvement since 2007, so it is not yet clear that the entitlement is leading to longer-term educational benefits.’

There was tentative evidence of an effect on children’s learning at five, the report said, but it had failed to last until age seven.

The findings come as a blow to the Government, which has estimated that better education standards driven by the free nursery places will boost national wealth.

Civil servants claim that a pupil achieving five GCSEs at grade C or above will go on to reap lifetime earnings £45,000 than a classmate with no GCSEs.

It needs to bring 5,542 extra children to the five GCSEs benchmark to ensure the nursery places scheme breaks even.

Auditors found that the free nursery entitlement cost £1.6billion in 2010/11, rising to £1.9billion in 2011/12.

The Department for Education has no clear information on how much the scheme cost prior to this, it emerged.

But the best nurseries were not necessarily the best-funded, and quality was variable across the country, the research found. In some areas, just 64 per cent of nurseries were judged by Ofsted to offer a good standard of education, against 97 per cent in others.

Overall, three in 10 children received their free sessions at nurseries not rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said the Department for Education needed to do more to assess the long-term benefits of the scheme. This was necessary ‘to get the best return for children from the £1.9billion spent each year.’

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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5 February, 2012

Whine! whine! whine! Would YOU be devastated if you found that most physicists are men?

In a profoundly unscientific article, two female physicists are apparently deeply disturbed by the reality concerned. Under the heading "Women in physics: A tale of limits" Rachel Ivie and Casey Langer Tesfaye have written a long screed that can be summarized with both brevity and accuracy by a very fashionable whine: "We bin discriminated against".

A physics education does however seem to have given them some faint attachment to the scientific method, so they go to considerable lengths to substantiate their claims. But do they turn to physics to substantiate their claims? Not at all. Far from offering any comparison of male and female work in physics, they turn to sociology! Like sociologists they have faith that questionnaire surveys will tell them something about reality. I did such surveys for many years and eventually concluded that they don't.

Their anti-scientific orientation is most clearly revealed by "the dog that didn't bark", however. They ignore over a hundred years of research that repeatedly reveals women to have better verbal ability and men to have better mathematical ability. And since physics these days is little more than applied mathematics, that datum could hardly be more relevant. It suggests that not many women have what it takes to be good physicists.

They could of coures disagree with what is one of the most replicated findings in science but instead of disagreeing with it, they simply ignore it -- thus violating one of the most fudamental canons of science: That you must have regard for what others before you have written on your subject.

So their own writing suggests one very good reason why there are not many women physicists: They are just not very good scientists. Their own work suggests that hormones take the place of rationality.

And in the end why does it matter that most physicists are men? I can't see that humanity is badly served by that reality but the case that it does matter is presumably arguable. But they make no attempt to argue it. They just resort to that terminally destructive and totally unrealistic Leftist obsession with "equality". They are very poor intellects indeed. Procrustes would be proud of them.

For reference, I reproduce below the concluding section of their article:

The global survey follows a body of work that has examined the importance to career success of access to resources and opportunities. The survey found that women are less likely than men to report access to various resources and opportunities that would be helpful in advancing a scientific career. It also confirmed, consistent with cultural norms, that men are more likely than women to have a spouse who will shoulder the burden of housework. We noted the cultural expectation that women are responsible for child care and documented survey results showing that parenting affects the careers of women more than it does the careers of men.

Admittedly, our results are derived from the testimony of survey respondents, and it is conceivable that the sex differences we have found exist not because women are treated differently but because they differ from men in their expectations about work. However, the results reported here will come as no surprise to the researchers who have already found that resources, opportunities, and family responsibilities affect women’s careers.4,6 We believe the results reflect an underlying reality of disadvantage—not differing work expectations—and that all the sex-based differences documented here adversely affect the careers of women physicists.

The low representation of women in physics is a problem the community needs to address, but the community also needs to address inequities in access to resources and opportunities. Cultural expectations about home and family also inhibit the progress of women physicists; those, of course, are much more difficult to change. Nonetheless, we look forward to a future in which science truly means science for all.

Eccentric (mainly black) religion causes ire

Black worship services are famously energetic, enthusiastic and active so I see the report below as not very surprising and no cause for concern -- just enthusiasm running riot. Tolerance anyone?

Jewish leaders are criticizing a ceremony that involved a controversial megachurch leader being wrapped in a religious scroll and exalted as a “king” to the applause of his parishioners.

The video from a service last Sunday at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church shows Rabbi Ralph Messer, a Messianic preacher, instructing two men to slowly wrap Bishop Eddie Long in a large scroll that’s purported to be the Torah.

“It doesn’t matter where you go, how you try to attack him. He’s sealed,” Messer proclaims, before the scroll is opened to reveal a teary-eyed Long. Moments later, Long was seated in a plush chair, covered in a prayer shawl while holding the sacred scroll and lifted by four men.

“He now is raised up from a commoner to a kingship,” Messer proclaims, as the men walk Long’s seat around an adoring crowd.

Messianic Jews believe that Jesus Christ, or Yeshua, is the Messiah, putting them at odds with traditional Jewish theology. Most Jews consider the faith to be a form of evangelical Christianity.

Rabbi David Shiff of Congregation Beth Hallel, a Messianic Jewish synagogue in Roswell, condemned the actions in the video.

“Ralph Messer in no way represents Messianic Judaism,” Shiff said. “He is not affiliated with any legitimate branch of Messianic Judaism. His actions in no way reflect the position of Messianic Judaism. I found the presentation to be repulsive and inappropriate.”

The Torah is one of Judaism’s most sacred objects and Jewish groups said the notion that it was used in a ceremony at the church was offensive.

“The notion that he wraps Bishop Long in a Torah is horrifying simply because it’s completely inappropriate. It’s an awful way to use the Torah,” said Bill Nigut of the Anti-Defamation League. “And it doesn’t in any way approximate any Jewish ritual.”

Long was accused of sexual misconduct in September 2010 by four male former church members who accused him of abusing his spiritual authority. He settled out of court in May for an undisclosed amount.

He took a leave of absence last year to deal with his divorce and other personal issues, but returned to the pulpit in January.
Jewish Leaders Speak Out After Bishop Eddie Long Wrapped in Torah

The video, which was recorded Sunday, shows Long sitting on a chair under a spotlight as Messer repeatedly chants, “It’s a new birth.” The camera pans to congregation members, who cheer.

Long’s church, which is in Lithonia east of Atlanta, issued a statement from Messer saying that the ceremony was based on a passage from the Old Testament on restoring the Kingdom of David.

“My message was about restoring a man and to encourage his walk in the Lord,” Messer said in the statement. “The presentation of the Scroll of Torah was simply a way of bringing honor to a man who had given his life to the Lord and had given so much to his church, the Atlanta metro area and throughout the world. “It was not to make Bishop Eddie L. Long a king.”

SOURCE





Flemish politician uses picture of teenage daughter dressed in burka and bikini for campaign against Islam



A Belgian politician has risked causing uproar among Muslims after starting a 'Women Against Islamization' campaign featuring his 19-year-old daughter wearing a burka and a bikini. Filip Dewinter, leader of the far-right Vlaams Belang party, uses a shot of his daughter An-Sofie Dewinter in the dark blue bikini for the political campaign.

The glamorous teenager dons a burka that covers her head and face, while the rest of the Muslim garment is draped over her back.

The provocative image is likely to inflame tensions among Islamic groups and nationalists in the racially-divided country.

The poster shows the words 'Freedom or Islam?' written on a red bar across Ms Dewinter's breasts. Further down the poster a black panel with the words 'You choose!' is seen covering the teenager's crotch.

The extremist Vlaams Belang party claims that it wants to convince women to take a stand against Islam. Ms Dewinter told the Belgian press she does not feel used by the party. She said: 'I've suggested (the poster) myself, I have learned to live with it but I have had everything up to death threats made at me.'

She said that she 'wanted to make this statement.' She added: 'What is the greatest contrast with a niqab? Nude. 'The campaign fits in perfectly with how I feel about the whole issue. As women, we must choose: freedom or Islam.'

The teenager claimed that she had been threatened by Muslim groups. She added: 'Death threats and criticism no longer scare me off.'

Her father, the party's leader, said: 'Women are always the first victims of Islam. We want to make clear that they have a choice.'

The potentially incendiary poster comes after The Islamic fundamentalist group Shariah4Belgium was slammed for its aggressive stance. The group opened the country's first Sharia court, a putting it on a collision course with the country’s nationalists.

Vlaams Belang spoke out against the Muslim courts and said that all legal disputes should be settled in the country’s civil judicial system.

Mr Dewinter claims Shariah4Belgium’s leadership said he should be killed for expressing his views. Sharia4Belguim was fined 550 Euros in January for inciting hatred towards non-Muslims.

Moderate Muslims say they do not agree with the group's hardline stance.

SOURCE






Child's right to see an absent father: New British law to help millions from broken homes

Already in place in Australia

Millions of children from broken homes are to be granted new rights to a 'full and continuing relationship' with both their parents.

The move is designed to ensure that the parent who leaves the family home – most commonly the father – cannot be cut out of their children's lives following an acrimonious separation.

Ministers have decided that a change in the law is vital in the face of heartbreaking evidence that huge numbers of youngsters whose families split up lose contact with one parent for ever.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke have been at odds over the proposals

Courts will be put under a duty to ensure that unless their welfare is threatened by staying in touch with either their mother or father, children have an 'equal right to a proper relationship with both'.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg have dismissed objections from Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke and overturned the findings of a major review of family law which was published last year.

On Monday, the Government will announce a ministerial working group that will draw up radical changes to the 1989 Children Act.

The Act states that the child's needs come first in law courts, but campaigners for fathers' rights complain that judges repeatedly pander to the idea that mothers are 'more important' than fathers.

Unmarried fathers say they are often at a particular disadvantage, having to apply for a 'parental responsibility order' through a court or have one granted through an agreement with the mother.

'The Act is going to be rewritten,' said a Government source. 'The welfare of children must of course remain paramount – but alongside that there will be an equal right for a child to have a proper relationship with both parents.
Children's Minister Tim Loughton said courts are 'rarely the best place' for resolving conflicts between parents about the care of children

'There should be no inbuilt legal bias towards the father or mother, and where there are no welfare issues, we want to see this principle reinforced through law.

'This is about children. We want to be clear that both parents should have a full and continuing role in their children's life after a separation.'

Ministers will pledge £10million for mediation services to encourage more couples to settle their disputes out of court.

Children's Minister Tim Loughton told the Mail: 'The courts are rarely the best place for resolving private disputes about the care of children. That's why we want to see greater use of mediation to solve parental disputes out of court.
Betrayal of the family

'It is also right that we continue to encourage fathers to take responsibility as equal parents and to be fully involved with their children from the outset.'

The decision overturns the main finding of a family justice review, conducted for the Ministry of Justice by businessman David Norgrove, which was published in November.

It concluded that giving fathers shared or equal time, or even the right to maintain a meaningful relationship with their children, 'would do more harm than good'.

The proposals immediately sparked a Cabinet revolt, led by Mr Duncan Smith and Mr Clegg, who insisted that the law must be amended to strengthen fathers' rights.

Official figures show that one in five children from broken homes lose touch with their absent parent, usually their father, within three years and never see them again.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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4 February, 2012

Right-wingers are less intelligent than left wingers, says study

I debunked this study last month. The only well-justified statement below is the last sentence

Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study.

Conservative politics work almost as a 'gateway' into prejudice against others, say the Canadian academics.

The paper analysed large UK studies which compared childhood intelligence with political views in adulthood across more than 15,000 people.

The authors claim that people with low intelligence gravitate towards right-wing views because they make them feel safe.

Crucially, people's educational level is not what determines whether they are racist or not - it's innate intelligence, according to the academics. Social status also appears to play no part.

The study, published in Psychological Science, claims that right-wing ideology forms a 'pathway' for people with low reasoning ability to become prejudiced against groups such as other races and gay people.

'Cognitive abilities are critical in forming impressions of other people and in being open minded,' say the researchers. 'Individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate towards more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo. 'It provides a sense of order.'

The study used information from two UK studies from 1958 and 1970 , where several thousand children were assessed for intelligence at age 10 and 11, and then asked political questions aged 33. The 1958 National Child Development involved 4,267 men and 4,537 women born in 1958.

The British Cohort Study involved 3,412 men and 3,658 women born in 1970. It's the first time the data from these studies has been used in this way.

In adulthood, the children were asked whether they agreed with statements such as, 'I wouldn't mind working with people from other races,' and 'I wouldn't mind if a family of a different race moved next door.'

They were also asked whether they agreed with statements about typically right-wing and socially conservative politics such as, 'Give law breakers stiffer sentences,' and 'Schools should teach children to obey authority.'

The researchers also compared their results against a 1986 American study which included tests of cognitive ability and questions assessing prejudice against homosexuals.

The authors claim that there is a strong correlation between low intelligence both as a child and an adult, and right-wing politics. The authors also claim that conservative politics is part of a complex relationship that leads people to become prejudices. 'Conservative ideology represents a critical pathway through which childhood intelligence predicts racism in adulthood,' says the paper.

'In psychological terms, the relation between intelligence and prejudice may stem from the propensity of individuals with lower cognitive ability to endorse more right wing conservative ideologies because such ideologies offer a psychological sense of stability and order.'

'Clearly, however, all socially conservative people are not prejudiced, and all prejudiced persons are not conservative.'

SOURCE




MPs' 'sexist' beer ban: Top Totty ale outlawed in the Commons bar

And the brewers are laughing all the way to the bank



Like many real ales, its quirky name helps it to stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately for a brew branded 'Top Totty', it stood out a little too much for one female Labour MP who has managed to have it banned from a House of Commons bar.

Kate Green, the party's equalities spokesman, said she found the beer – which has a pump plate with a cartoon picture of a bikini-clad bunny girl – offensive, adding later that it 'demeans women'.

Despite never having even seen the pump in question – and the bar not receiving a single complaint – Miss Green yesterday stood up in the Commons chamber to demand it be removed from sale.

Last night, however, her stance provoked a backlash from men and women alike who branded her 'humourless' and criticised her 'knee-jerk puritanism'. Slater's Ales, meanwhile, the ale's family-run Staffordshire brewery, said the outcry had seen its orders double.

The £2.70-a-pint beer was banned from the Strangers' Bar, where MPs can take guests, within an hour of Miss Green's complaint. Leader of the House Sir George Young intervened to rid Parliament of what he called 'offensive pictures'.

Miss Green, MP for Stretford and Urmston in Greater Manchester, brought up the issue at business questions in the Commons, where she called for a debate in the House on 'dignity at work in Parliament'.

She took up parliamentary time to say: 'I was disturbed last night to learn that the guest beer in the Strangers' Bar is called Top Totty, and that there is a picture of a nearly naked woman on the tap.' She said later on Twitter that it 'demeans women'.

But many MPs did not share her outrage. Tory Tracey Crouch asked on Twitter: 'Why is a beer called Top Totty offensive & now banned from Commons?' Fellow Conservative MP Nadine Dorries tweeted: 'Westminster = sense of humour-free zone. Banning of the Top Totty beer was weak PC decision and gives sensible pro-women advocates a bad name.'

The ale – described as 'blonde, full bodied with a voluptuous hop aroma' – had been introduced as a guest ale by Tory Jeremy Lefroy, MP for Stafford, where it is brewed. Mr Lefroy said: 'These guest ale slots offer a very welcome opportunity for small independent breweries like Slater's to reach a wider audience with their products, some of which have cheeky names.'

The ban was also denounced by Mike Nattrass, Stafford's UKIP MEP, and Claire Fox, director of think-tank the Institute of Ideas. Mr Nattrass said: 'Miss Green really is a humourless sort. This sort of knee-jerk puritanism does more to damage the cause of equality than a thousand beer labels.' And Miss Fox said: 'What really demeans women is the idea that we've no sense of humour – and MPs acting as sanctimonious killjoys in our name.'

Last night Vicki Slater, of Slater's Ales, said: 'At first I just couldn't believe it that in this economic climate a Labour MP would get exercised about the name of a beer.

'But all this publicity has been a blessing. After the fuss, it sold out immediately. People have been phoning from all over Britain asking us to supply their pubs. We're delivering twice as much Top Totty tomorrow as we ever have before.'

SOURCE




"Wrong" Speech Is Also Free Speech: "Citizens United" at Two

In the past week, many commentators have used the second anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee to reiterate their critiques of the controversial decision. Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Public Citizen's Robert Weissman, for example, write that the decision "poisoned our political process" and ask whether the "merits or the money" will now "tip the balance when an issue comes before Congress."

I sympathize with Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman. We all hope that our nation's policies are chosen due to merit rather than some other influence. But our valuation of a policy's merit is intertwined with our ideological commitments. Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman make this clear when they list policies that they believe would be in effect if corporate speech were suppressed, that is, if "merit" won out over money. Among these: a national health care program, rectifying the "collapse of the middle class," fixing the high price of prescription drugs, and ending gratuitous military spending.

Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman thus demonstrate a crucial fact: many who oppose Citizens United do so because they want to silence speech that promotes policies they oppose. They want to silence it because they think it is bad speech that gives a disproportionate influence to bad ideas. Yet there can be no greater violation of the First Amendment than to act with this motive.

Critics of the decision cite the "undue influence" corporations can have on elections through such mechanisms as "drowning out [candidates'] messages" with "misleading negative ads." Sean Siperstein writes about a new campaign by Public Citizen to expose the "mega-corporations" that are most "responsible for greedy, disastrously short-sighted policies, to the detriment of the rest of us."

These critiques blur the line between one type of influence that the Supreme Court has acknowledged should be stopped--outright candidate bribery--and other types of influence that are strongly protected by the First Amendment--such as affecting the national debate or influencing candidates' policies by making both them and the public aware of issues. Critics of Citizens United often conflate these two types of political spending, regarding all corporate spending as either corrupting the national debate through disproportionate influence, or corrupting politicians through something tantamount to bribery.

But tellingly, their critiques are one-sided. Missing from any of the articles linked above is any discussion of the "disproportionate" effect that unions have on the American political landscape. Although it is rarely acknowledged, Citizens United permitted both unions and corporations to make independent campaign expenditures. And make no mistake about it, unions are significant moneyed interests in American politics, comprising nine of the top 15 "heavy hitter" campaign spenders over the last 22 years, according to OpenSecrets.org. It is striking, to say the least, that those who rail against disproportionately loud voices and the "undue influence" of political speech are so silent when it comes to the effects of union spending. Perhaps it is more difficult to be critical of the undue influence of speech that one believes is meritorious. If you agree with the speaker, why not buy him a megaphone?

The omission of any discussion of union money in essentially every critique of Citizens United published in the past month is glaring. A dispassionate assessment of the effects of money in politics demands attention to union spending. But an ideologically committed assessment would tend to view the ideas that one finds convincing as being the result of merit, while viewing the ideas one believes unconvincing and harmful to the nation to be the result of "undue influence." This predilection is not because of any inadequacy on the part of Citizen United's critics, it is a result of human nature.

Yet I do not want to unjustly besmirch Rep. Sanders and the other critics of the decision. Perhaps they believe that union spending should also be curtailed. If so, I wish they would make more of a fuss about it. Otherwise, they demonstrate bias that is extremely harmful to their argument. They also underscore my broader point: it is difficult, if not impossible, for any ideologically committed person to assess which speech, if any, is "unduly influential."

The reasons for this are rooted in human psychology. It can be difficult to explain to ourselves why people disagree with us. This observation is simultaneously mundane and profound. On some level we expect disagreement, but on another level, we scratch our heads at how others can believe in ideas that are so obviously, well, wrong. This is more true for the ideologically committed who have devoted their lives and careers to pushing for a society that they believe would be happier and more just, a category of people to which I fully belong.

There are many possible explanations available to us for why there is opposition to our views. Perhaps those who oppose us are evil. Maybe they're selfish and only care about themselves. But the hardest explanation to accept is that your opponents are honest, well-meaning, informed people who have rational reasons for their views. It's easier, and more self-rewarding, to believe that your opponents are being misinformed by speakers who shout the loudest and actively spread lies.

This last explanation has become a crucial part of the modern debate over campaign finance reform. Understandably so. After all, why should we let liars and shouters stand in the way of a better world?

The First Amendment, that's why.

The First Amendment does not allow anyone to pursue his vision of a better world through censorship. Although we'd all love the liars and shouters to be silenced, the First Amendment forbids such censorship precisely because there is no way to agree on who is a liar and who is "too loud." Those determinations are too intertwined with our ideological commitments.

Although I agree with Rep. Sanders and Mr. Weissman that money may have too much influence on politics, perhaps we should address this problem by creating a government that lacks the power to reward undue influence — that is, a limited government that cannot determine whether someone succeeds or fails in life — and not by stifling free speech.

SOURCE






Australia: Debate rages after call for spanking children to be made illegal

READERS have overwhelmingly rejected a call for an outright ban on parents smacking their own children. At 1.15pm, more than 91% of 6500 votes cast said the practice should not be outlawed as debate raged among commenters.

The debate was sparked by this morning's Herald Sun report of comments by Dr Gervase Chaney, the head of Australia's peak paediatric body, who called for mums and dads to be banned from disciplining their children with physical force. He said it was no longer OK for parents to argue "it never did us any harm" - and called on colleagues to stand up for children's rights.

Speaking today, World Vision Australia head Tim Costello admitted smacking his own children but backed calls for an outright ban. Rev Costello admits he smacked his own children and sympathises with parents who have, but said it is not the right way to discipline. “I think smacking should not be allowed, it should be banned to prevent abuse,” he said.

He has been echoed by Dr Joe Tucci, CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation, who said his organisation had been campaigning for a ban for the past 15 years. "We think children should be afforded the same level of protection under law as an adult," he said.

"I don't believe parents necessarily set out to hit their kids, but if they are frustrated, angry or upset with the child it can inadvertently lead to them hitting too hard or in places where it does leave an injury and I don't think parents want that."

Ban 'too interventionist'

But former Australian of the Year and CEO of Child Wise Bernadette McMenamin rejected calls for a ban and said it would leave parents thinking they lived in a nanny state.

Ms McMenamin, whose brother was the victim of abuse as a child, said smacking needed to be stopped – but through education, not the law. "I think it would make parents feel like the Government is going too far, taking over the parental role,” she said. "Setting a law for no smacking, I know where the professor is coming from, but parents would find that far too interventionist and a nanny state."

Ms McMenamin has a child of her own whom she has never smacked and said parents who do smack their children did so for the wrong reasons – and risked escalating smacking into child abuse. "I do not believe that smacking is a useful disciplinary tool, it's about the parent taking out their frustration on a child,” Ms McMenamin said. "If you smack a child, how can you tell what is a smack and what is a punch? "It may start with an odd smack, but it can escalate.”

Political reaction

A spokesperson for Premier Ted Baillieu said this morning there were "no plans to change the law as it relates to the smacking of children".

Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews also said he did not support a change in the law. "A parent's first duty is to care and protect their child, and Victoria already has strong child protection laws in place," he said. "Parenting is hard and it's not made any easier by unenforceable and intrusive proposals like this."

Federal political figures have also opposed a ban on smacking kids, saying criminal law should not be applied to parents. Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey told Sunrise that parents had the responsibility to protect their children. “There are some things that the criminal law shouldn't be involved with,” he said. “In raising children, parents have a responsibility.”

His thoughts were echoed by Minister for Population and Communities, Tony Burke, who also appeared on the program. “These experts, there are helpful ideas they come up with, the naughty corner and these different ideas for raising kids,” he said. “I’ve found a lot of that really helpful with my own kids, but to start saying the criminal law and legal penalties is the way to deal with this - parents do it tough enough already."

Australia 'lagging behind'

Dr Chaney says Australia is lagging behind other countries in outlawing smacking, describing some cases as tantamount to child abuse. He is pushing for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians paediatric and child health division to officially support a ban as the body reviews its policy on smacking.

His comments come after The Royal College of Paediatrics in Britain this week called for a ban on smacking, saying too often "today's smack becomes tomorrow's punch".

In Victoria, parents can smack their children as long as the punishment is not "unreasonable" or "excessive".

The issue has polarised opinion in Australia - the Presbyterian Church last year backed the right of parents to smack their child within existing common-law parameters. The church's submission to a state government inquiry said there was "a significant body of research confirming its utility in raising children well".

Victorian Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary said he did not support smacking, but he was worried a ban could be misused and unfairly punish some parents. "The way children are disciplined should be thoughtful and respectful," he said.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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3 February, 2012

The Double Standard on 'Hoes'

Remember when Don Imus saw his cushy CBS Radio and MSNBC career go up in smoke in 2007 when he tried very early one morning to make one of his fake misanthropic jokes about the Rutgers women's basketball team being "nappy-headed hoes"? Black activists demanded his firing. Advertisers fled. The corporate suits, appalled and fearful of the terrible publicity, canned him.

But if you're a black rapper, terms like this advance your career. The female rapper Nicki Minaj has a very hot new video called "Stupid Hoe." She uses that same term to snap at other women -- "We ship platinum, them b----es are shipping wood / Them nappy-headed hoes, but my kitchen good." (Don't hurt your brain trying to make sense of it.) Minaj even threw the n-word in the lyrics: "How you gon' be the stunt double to the nigga monkey?"

The video broke YouTube records by clocking up 4.8 million views in its first 24 hours on the site and 11 million over the weekend. But outrage from our elites? Hello? Anyone? So far, the silence is deafening from America's major race-card players.

Back in 2007, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- the dynamic duo of racial correctness -- met with CBS chairman Leslie Moonves to demand Imus be given the boot. When they won, Jackson called the firing "a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation."

Sharpton added: "It's not about taking Imus down. It's about lifting decency up...We cannot afford a precedent established that the airways can commercialize and mainstream sexism and racism."

Sumner Redstone, chairman of the CBS Corporation board and its chief stockholder, had told Newsweek that he had expected Moonves to "do the right thing." Translation: Bye-bye, Imus.

It seems rather clear that Imus deserved some punishment, even if his dismissal might be excessive. So why were the reverends applauded universally for their activism?

Because all of their fuss wasn't about "public decency" or "degradation" or media companies "mainstreaming racism and sexism," not really. It was about race, and about how whites can't say "indecent" things about blacks, not even in jest. But blacks can use those very same words -- however they wish -- with the ugliest of intentions, if desired, with impunity. Where are Jackson and Sharpton over "Stupid Hoe" now? Cricket, cricket.

The Washington Post is running a major series this week on the self-esteem issues of black women in America. But when will the Post and other media scolds discover this song and what it says -- and shouldn't say -- about black women?

As for degrading public decency, the song has 10 uses of "bitch," 10 F-bombs and unsurprisingly, 37 uses of "hoe." The refrain, if you want to call it that, is "You a stupid hoe" -- repeated 14 times. A verb, like the word "are," was apparently not necessary. This has to be one of the dumbest, most illiterate songs ever to go viral.

Just because Minaj caused a major YouTube splash and just because the elites were silent, doesn't mean the reaction was favorable. Anyone who clicks on it quickly learns this is not a song, but a droning, rapid-fire, hip-hop headache. The video is so jumpy it could cause epileptic seizures. In the first few days, YouTube watchers gave the Minaj video about twice as many dislikes as likes -- 176,000 to 87,000.

Some commenters just nailed it: "You know, if she's trying to call someone else a stupid hoe, it doesn't help her case too much when she's on all fours, dressed like a leopard, trapped in a cage and whipping her hair everywhere."

But this is my favorite: "36 seconds in and I was losing the will to live."

Last summer, Minaj shocked many by having a breast pop out as she performed on ABCs "Good Morning America." Why the Disney-owned network put this woman on is anybody's guess. She was performing the song "Where Them Girls At," with classy morning-TV lyrics like "You can suck a d--k, or you can suck a ballsack." In her "Stupid Hoe" song, Minaj raps twice "you can suck my diznik."

Minaj is an artist for Cash Money Records, now a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, which brags that it is "the world's largest music content company." (The French media conglomerate Vivendi did not include UMG in its NBC-Universal deal.) If one accepts these boasts, no one in the world can "mainstream racism and sexism" faster than these people. Let's see if the Imus firing squad ever says a word.

SOURCE





The High Cost of Being a Tiger Mom

American women are both incredibly dogmatic and anxious about our mothering. When Amy Chua described her intense efforts to push her two daughters into high achievement in school, in music and, hence, in life, she caused an uproar among many Americans who consider her methods bordering on child abuse. (What? No playdates!?) Two new studies do point out that there are costs to tiger mothering.

A study by professor Desiree Qin and colleagues was published this month in the Journal of Adolescence and is titled, “Parent-Child Relations and Psychological Adjustment Among High-Achieving Chinese- and European-American Adolescents.”

Qin looked at survey data on 295 Chinese-American and 192 European-American ninth-graders at Stuyvesant High School, a well-regarded public magnet school in Manhattan.

Chinese-American teens reported lower levels of psychological well-being, less family cohesion and more conflict with their parents, on average.

The ethnic differences on psychological adjustment disappeared once family conflict and cohesion were controlled for, suggesting “such perceptions may be a key factor in understanding the high academic achievement/low psychological adjustment paradoxical pattern of development among Chinese-American adolescents.”

“(Chua) said Western children are not happier than Chinese ones,” Qin told the New York Daily News. “But at the same time, research from our study does show that when parents place a lot of pressure on their kids, the children are less happy.”

Tiger mothering works, in other words. But having a mom or dad who constantly push you to perform well can also take a toll.

It takes a toll on the moms as well.

Professor Esther Chang and colleagues also have just published a new study on tiger moms in the January 2012 issue of the Asian-American Journal of Psychology, “Parenting Satisfaction at Midlife among European- and Chinese-American Mothers with a College-Enrolled Child.”

“Chinese-American mothers reported significantly lower parenting satisfaction than did European-American mothers, as well as less positive relationship quality (i.e., lower mutual warmth and acceptance and higher parent-child conflict) and poorer perceived college performance by their young-adult child (i.e., grades, academic investment and satisfaction with students' college experiences),” the study found.

Chinese-American moms whose children did not appear to be doing as well at college reported less parenting satisfaction; Euro-America moms' satisfaction wasn't affected by their children's college performance.

The most important factor in parenting satisfaction for all mothers turned out to be the degree of mutual warmth. Pushing your child to achieve more and more can (but may not always) push your child away from you emotionally.

And yet, and yet, and yet ...

Amy Chua's daughter was just accepted into Harvard this month. And according to the Daily News, this particular tiger cub is also a piano prodigy and “an able writer who eloquently defended her mother in the press.”

Alexander Nazaryan, a member of the Daily News editorial board, points out the overall results of the American emphasis on fun and warmth over achievement: “In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment exam, American teenagers placed 31st in math, 17th in reading and 23rd in science among 65 competitors. Shanghai, China's largest city, topped all three categories -- by far.”

As Amy Chua noted, “In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70 percent of the Western mothers said either that 'stressing academic success is not good for children' or that 'parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.' By contrast, roughly 0 percent of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.”

I did not have a tiger mom. I'm a Spock baby, and I raised my children the same way, emphasizing support and closeness over pressure, routine and discipline.

Frankly, I worry about that a lot. It worked for me -- will it work for them? We mothers can't know until it is too late, hence the anxiety. All parenting strategies have costs as well as benefits.

The only thing I'm certain of is that every mother sacrificing to raise decent kids deserves respect, and not uproarious, dogmatic, overanxious condemnation.

SOURCE






British shopper, 25, asked for ID to buy TEASPOONS – as shop worker says they could be used as drug paraphernalia

A woman was asked to prove her age when buying a packet of teaspoons - as a shop worker claimed they could be used as drug paraphernalia. Elinor Zuke, 25, was told by the self-service checkout at Sainsbury's that she needed age verification as she tried to buy a £1.19 pack of spoons.

A shop worker then intervened and said it was because of the risk they could be used for drugs - heroin users 'cook up' the drug in teaspoons.

Heroin is an illegal Class A drug - so it is irrelevant whether someone is over 18 - the spoon should not be used for that purpose anyway. The maximum sentence for possessing heroin is seven years in prison or an unlimited fine.

Ms Zuke said yesterday: 'I could not understand what the problem was -- when the supervisor said it was because they could be used as drug paraphernalia I was completely shocked. 'I would imagine the vast majority of spoons sold by Sainsbury's are used for nothing more nefarious than stirring a cup of tea. Having to prove I was over 18 to buy them seemed total madness.'

Sainsbury's blamed the mistake on a problem with its stock-keeping units which provide a unique identifier for each product on the shelves. A problem with the system meant that it asked for identification automatically. A spokeswoman said: 'The self-scan system recognised the spoon's SKU as one for a knife. This had now been rectified.

'We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused. Our Think 25 policy is designed to ensure age-related products are sold safely.'

In October 2009, Emma Sheppard, 21, was asked for identification when buying spoons in a Tesco store in Evesham, Worcestershire. She was forced to leave the store without the 57p pack of five spoons because she did not have a passport or driving licence with her. Tesco later apologised for the mistake.

SOURCE





Let’s have a proper debate about the welfare state

Hooked on poverty porn, getting the unelected Lords to do their dirty work... there’s little progressive about today’s welfare-defenders

What is worse: elected politicians proposing to reform the welfare state, or unelected Lords, cheered on by liberals, unilaterally shooting down such reform? It’s the latter. Even if you aren’t a fan of Lib-Con plans to trim the welfare bill (I think it’s daft to imagine such trimming will reverse the economic downturn), you should be far more concerned by the patronising and profoundly undemocratic turn that the so-called radical side in this debate has taken. Today, the defenders of welfare are doing far more harm to what we might term progressive politics than the right-wingers seeking to rethink welfarism.

Yesterday, to the chagrin of liberal activists, the House of Lords failed to support a peer-proposed amendment to the government’s welfare reform bill. Having inflicted a triple defeat on the bill last week, by voting 224 to 186 against proposals relating to disability and incapacity allowances, the Lords had won a special place in the hearts of leftists opposed to the Lib-Cons. These unelected lords and ladies are ‘the only decent politicians left’, chirped one commentator. Another described them as ‘a blessing’. These observers will no doubt be disappointed that the Lords yesterday failed to deliver a fourth blow to the government’s plans, though hopefully they’ll have learned a lesson about how daft it is to rely on the whims of the rich and aloof when pursuing political agendas.

There are two problems with the notion that state welfare is so sacred it should never be reformed, even if that means getting the most undemocratic layer of the British political class to ringfence it from those grubby inhabitants of the elected Commons. Firstly, such an allergic reaction to the idea of having a serious debate about the size and shifting nature of state welfare means that the problems associated with welfarism – which are myriad – are never clarified, far less tackled. And secondly, calling on the unelected second chamber to fight the Commons over welfare is an insult to democracy and to the British public, who are reduced to the level of paupers who need good-hearted Lords to fight their battles and preserve their pennies.

You don’t have to be a fellow traveller of the Lib-Cons (I’ve never voted for either party) to recognise that the welfare system in Britain does need reform – radical reform. The problem with the government’s proposed reforms is that they’re driven by a penny-pinching mentality, designed to save the state cash. The real motivation behind welfare reform should be a humanist one – a recognition that intensive welfarism, the intrusion of the ‘caring state’ into every aspect of less well-off people’s lives, has damaged both individuals and communities and therefore should be questioned and challenged and, in part, done away with.

Of course, all civilised societies should provide for those who, for whatever reason, lack the capacity to feed and clothe and house themselves. Discretely distributed as a fund for those too poor or disabled to provide for themselves, welfare can be a good thing. The problem with the ever-growing welfare state in Britain is its permanency, the way it is now used to sustain, forever, huge swathes of people, including able-bodied people, and the impact that this has on people’s view both of themselves and their communities. When you’re encouraged to become reliant on the state rather than on your own wits or your own mates, your sense of individual resourcefulness declines, and your feeling of attachment to and reliance upon your community becomes corroded.

The social destructiveness of the cult of welfarism can best be seen in that part of welfare that is now most feverishly defended by liberal campaigners: the realm of incapacity and disability benefits. In recent decades, more and more people of working age have been redefined by the welfare state as ‘incapable’ of working or as disabled. This is, to say the least, curious at a time when we are healthier and longer-living than ever before. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Britain has one of the highest rates of incapacity/disability benefit-claiming in the Western world. Young people in Britain are more than twice as likely to claim sickness benefits as their Western European counterparts. Strikingly, there has been a big shift from the unemployment camp into the ‘incapable’ camp. In the 1980s, the number of people claiming unemployment benefit was nearly four times higher than the number claiming some kind of disability benefit; by 1997 the numbers were equal; today, the number claiming a disability benefit exceeds the number claiming unemployment benefit. Now, more than three million people are categorised as incapable of working, out of a non-working population of around five million.

Of course, there are many people who have serious impairments or illnesses that prevent them from working, and they should be provided for generously by society. But it’s pretty clear that, in recent decades, society has cynically cast the ‘incapacity’ net ever-wider, leading to more and more people effectively being rebranded as physically or mentally deficient rather than simply unemployed. That way, the unemployment stats can be massaged, and society’s failure to provide people with gainful employment can be redefined as an individual rather than a social failing – apparently it is because these people are weak, pathetic and ‘incapable’ that they cannot work, not because of the structural malaise of capitalist society and the lack of vision amongst those who govern it.

In a twisted irony, the leftists now fighting tooth-and-nail to protect incapacity/disability benefit from any criticism or reform are actually upholding a right-wing creation. Invalidity Benefit, which later became Incapacity Benefit, and which is now mixed together with various disability allowances, was first introduced under Ted Heath’s Tory government in 1971. The number of claimants grew exponentially under the Thatcher and Major governments in the 1980s and 90s – in 1981, 463,000 men and women were claiming invalidity/incapacity benefit; by the mid-1990s it was more than one million. The cynical rebranding of capable men and women as incapable was a useful tool for Tory governments that were throwing people out of work but which didn’t want the unemployment figures to look too shocking. It is remarkable that so-called progressives should now go to the wall to protect this cynical, Tory-invented idea that massive numbers of working men and women are actually too useless or mental or weak to work.

The end result of the spread of the concept of incapacity, and the relativistisation of the category of disability to include increasing numbers of people, is that individuals become both decommissioned and alienated. They are put out to pasture, told that they cannot work, which frequently becomes a self-fulfilling thing; and through their reliance on the faceless state, they become separated from their own communities, coming to be more dependent on the pity and favour of outsiders than on the support and tips of people they know and see every day.

Even worse than uncritically defending such a pernicious system is defending it in an undemocratic fashion. Today, the pro-welfare lobby, clearly disillusioned not only with the Commons but also with the dumb people who elect it, have turned to the unelected Lords to try to preserve the entire welfare state. Radical campaign groups and trade unions call on their members to ‘Adopt a Peer’ – that is, email a lord begging him to vote against government plans on the NHS and welfare – while commentators sing the praises of the peers, saying, yes, they might be ‘ennobled and stuck in an anachronistic institution’ but they are nonetheless willing to ‘speak up for the very poorest and sickest among us’.

A quick glance at history should be enough to shoot down the batty idea that the Lords are potential class warriors defending poor people’s welfare from evil elected officials. The constitutional crisis of 1909-1911 was brought about by the Lords’ refusal to back an early welfare package – Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith’s ‘People’s Budget’ – and the Asquith government’s subsequent decision to override the Lords helped to define and bolster the ideal of democracy in Britain. Today’s welfare-defenders seem keen to turn the clock back, to revert to a time when the Lords, described by Thomas Paine as the ‘remains of aristocratical tyranny’, were expected to reprimand the Commons. Even if you do your peer-cheering in the name of standing up for ‘the very poorest and sickest’ (what’s with all the patronising Dickensian lingo?), the end result will be the same: the further concentration of moral authority and political power in the hands of a tyrannical few.

With their poverty-porn images of families too sick and destitute to care for themselves, and their love of Lords who stand up and make grandstanding speeches about ‘helping the poor’, today’s welfare-defenders are taking us into Downton Abbey territory – back to a pre-welfare state world of poor laws and posh pity where the very rich were pleaded with to help the lame and the weak. That is the essence of much modern welfare thinking. ‘Please, my lord, stop the evil politicians from taking away my grub and my blankets.’ Screw that. The less well-off are more than capable of looking after themselves, and don’t need to have democracy overturned in their name by unelected twits and their dizzy cheerleaders in the media.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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2 February, 2012

Useless British police put on the spot

'Three strikes' rule to tackle yob gangs: Police must act on complaints or face the sack

Police will no longer be able to ignore homeowners whose lives are being made a misery by yobs, the Home Secretary is set to announce. Once three separate complaints have been lodged, officers will have no option but to take action, Theresa May will say. The same will apply if five individuals from five different households in the same neighbourhood complain about the same issue.

If they still fail to respond, they can be hauled in front of a ‘crime commissioner’, who will have the power to fire chief constables.

Ministers hope the ‘community trigger’ system will halt a string of shocking cases where police and councils have failed to intervene to prevent homeowners being tormented.

They want to prevent a repeat of the case of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her disabled 18-year-old daughter Francecca – who had a mental age of four – when her cries for help went unheeded.

An inquest heard that yobs screamed obscenities at them, hurled stones and eggs at the windows, shoved dog excrement and fireworks through the letterbox, and threatened Miss Pilkington’s dyslexic son Anthony with a knife.

Despite receiving 33 desperate 999 calls in ten years, police said Miss Pilkington, 38, was ‘over-reacting’ and dismissed her as ‘low-priority’.

Unable to bear the torment any more, she decided death was her only escape, and killed herself and her daughter by setting fire to their car near their home in Barwell, Leicestershire, in October 2007.

A separate report by the police watchdog revealed officers were failing to visit tens of thousands of families whose lives are made a misery by louts. The Chief Inspector of Constabulary’s report said the true number of anti-social behaviour incidents could be twice as high as the 3.6million estimated by the Government in 2008-9.

In a speech in London today, Mrs May will say: ‘It’s too easy to overlook the harm that persistent anti-social behaviour causes. 'Many police forces, councils and housing providers are working hard, but I still hear horror stories of victims reporting the same problem over and over again, and getting no response.
Will police revert to Dutch protocol

‘These long-running problems – and the sense of helplessness that goes with them –can destroy a victim’s quality of life and shatter a community’s trust in the police. ‘The “trigger” will give victims and communities the right to demand that agencies who had ignored a problem must take action.’

The new power will target Community Safety Partnerships, which are joint panels of the police and local authority officials. It specifically deals with anti-social behaviour: low-level offending such as vandalism or intimidation.

Officers have in the past viewed it as a council job – leading to criticism they do not take bad behaviour seriously. But now either the police or council will be required to take steps to resolve a problem once it has reached the trigger stage, and reply to the complainant detailing a plan. Only ‘malicious’ complaints can be rejected.

From November, that reply will be copied to elected police and crime commissioners – who will be elected for the first time in November. These commissioners will have the power to fire under-performing chief constables.

SOURCE




‘A Significant Victory’: Atheists Lose Battle Over Jesus Statue Atop Montana Mountain

Last October, we reported about atheists’ attempts to have a Jesus statue removed from government-owned land on a Montana mountain. Now, months later, it seems non-believers have lost their battle to have the religious symbol banished. In a press release delivered this afternoon, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) announced:

"…today’s decision by the federal government to renew a lease that keeps in place a World War II memorial on a Montana mountain — a statue of Jesus — is a “significant victory” and represents a sound defeat for an atheist organization that challenged the memorial."

The Blaze previously reported that the statue was on U.S. Forest Service land and, thus, was being threatened by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a church-state separatist group. The Forest Service has teetered back and forth regarding whether the statue would be able to stay on federal land, as the group initially said that it would no longer permit a renewal contract last year. The Missoulian has more about this challenge:

"Last August, a Wisconsin atheist organization challenged the Forest Service permit, arguing it was an unconstitutional state endorsement of religion. The Forest Service initially opted to remove the statue, but suspended that decision for a public review."

In October, though, supporters received a small victory when the agency changed course. Now, following public support for the statue, the government has officially announced that the land will, again, be rented to the KOC.

“This decision by the National Park Service represents a significant victory in defense of the history and heritage of the region,” said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ. “We’re delighted that federal officials understood what we have argued all along — that this statue of Jesus does not convey any government religious endorsement of religion. Instead, this historically important memorial is designed to commemorate the sacrifice made by those killed in World War II.”

“The special-use permit that originally allowed a local chapter of the Knights of Columbus to install the memorial was granted in 1953, the Blaze’s Chris Santarelli originally reported. “The KOC installed the statue as a memorial to local veterans of World War II.”

The community, as corroborated by the massive movement in support of the statue, has revered the statue for decades and was intent on seeing its placement remain. The National Park Service announced today that it will renew the KOC permit for another 10 years and acknowledged the statue‘s importance to the region’s history.

“I understand the statue has been a long-standing object in the community since 1955, and I recognize that the statue is important to the community for its historical heritage based on its association with the early development of the ski area on Big Mountain,” proclaimed Chip Weber, the supervisor of Flathead National Forest.

SOURCE





Recruiting for the Church of Atheism??

Atheists in Minnesota stand firmly opposed to parents “indoctrinating” their children to believe in a higher power. So, like their counterparts in Colorado (among other localities), they’ve erected new billboards that make their anti-God messaging loud and clear. Only these atheists are taking a unique route: they’re using pro-life advertisements as the inspiration for their billboards.

According to the Christian Post, Minnesota Atheists, a group associated with American Atheists, recently erected the massive signs in Minneapolis. One of the ads reads, ”Please don’t indoctrinate me with religion. Teach me to think for myself.” Another says, ”We are all born without belief in gods. Learn how to be a born-again atheist.” Smiling babies are featured on the billboards, which will remain up until Feb. 19.

The purpose of the billboards is apparently to attract people who are already non-believers to become members of American Atheists and the local Minnesota Atheists groups. According to Eric Jayne, a board member and project leader at the local organization, his group wishes to curb ”the practice of indoctrinating young, impressionable minds with religious dogma that cannot be substantiated with evidence.”

The cute pictures of the babies that accompany the anti-God messages were inspired, according to August Berkshire, the president of Minnesota Atheists, by Prolife Across America, a Minneapolis-based group. This particular organization uses babies on its ads and billboards to support its efforts against the practice of abortion. Berkshire said:

“It’s (billboards) turning out to be a pretty popular way to get the message out. [Prolife Across America] use[s] a lot of images of children and that got us thinking: religious indoctrination begins with children as soon as they’re old enough to learn. If they weren’t given this indoctrination, they probably wouldn’t believe. It’s for people to realize, where did this religion come from? You weren’t born with it. It was taught to you. And it’s possible to unlearn it.”

While local church leaders disagree, some seem open to the debate that the signs is spawning. “We believe that people are actually born with a natural desire to connect to a higher power. So, the billboards are wrong, but if they stimulate some thinking — certainly no harm in that,” said Pastor Kevin McDonough, a faith leader at Church of St. Peter Claver, a house of worship located near one of the billboards.

According to the Star Tribune, Prolife Across America director Mary Ann Kuharski is fine with her group serving as the atheist campaign’s inspirational status. ”Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” she says, “They’re (babies) eye-catching. We can’t help noticing them. Frankly, they (atheist billboards) may be helping us. They’re still identifying babies for what they are, which is precious.”

SOURCE






God Bless the Hungarians

Hungary is almost broke. That is the country's great tragedy. It needs financial help from the other members of the European Union (EU), who are already helping EU states in financial difficulties, and from the IMF. But both the EU and the IMF refuse to come to Hungary's aid because they dislike the new Hungarian Constitution and a series of new laws that came into effect on January 1st.

Last week, the European Commission initiated legal proceedings against Hungary over its new constitution and legislation. It gave Hungary one month to enact changes with regard to the independence of the central bank, the judiciary and the national data protection authority, or else face the prospect of being fined by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU's supreme court. American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also voiced concern over democratic freedom in Hungary.

In April last year, the conservative Fidesz party won a landslide victory in the Hungarian Parliament. Fidesz, led by current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, won over 52% of the votes and more than two thirds of the seats. The Conservatives owed their victory to the deep dissatisfaction of the Hungarians with the Social-Democrat MSZP which led the country since 2002 and has bankrupted its economy.

The MSZP is the successor of the former Communist Party which ruled Hungary until the end of the communist dictatorship in 1989. For the sake of national conciliation, the former Communists were left largely undisturbed when democracy was reintroduced in Hungary. Many members of the old Communist Party were allowed to keep their top positions in the civil service, the judiciary, the universities, the media and the army. Former communists who had enriched themselves by liquidating state assets were also left alone.

As in many other East European countries, the Communists rebranded themselves as Social Democrats. Like the former communist parties in several other East European countries, the MSZP was welcomed into the international networks of the West European social democrat parties. The MSZP even got to hold several high-ranking functions at the European Parliament and in the European Commission.

The Communists' rebranding tactics seemed to have worked. From 1994 to 1998 and from 2002 to 2010, the Hungarians voted the former Communists back into power. In September 2006, however, their reputation received a major blow when a tape was leaked of a private conversation in which the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány could be heard admitting to party officials that he had lied to the nation. Gyurcsány said that the MSZP had won the elections by deliberately concealing how dramatic the economic situation in the country was. The leaking of the tape led to protest demonstrations by thousands of Hungarians who felt cheated by a party that had simply camouflaged its dictatorial core with democratic theatrics. The demonstrators were savagely beaten up by the police, but the Hungarians took revenge in last April's elections. The MSZP was trashed and fell to 19.3% of the popular vote from 49.2% four years earlier.

After the elections, Fidesz set out to do what it had promised the Hungarian electorate it would do: break the power of the old Communist elite. To this end, the Hungarian parliament adopted a new constitution. Its preamble is an ode to traditional values, patriotism, the family and freedom. It even mentions God, which undoubtedly annoys the EU elites in Brussels who refused any reference to God in their own constitution.

Although there is a strong case to be made for a woman's pregnancy not being in the purview of governments but a private matter between her physician and her, the Hungarian constitution protects human life from the moment of conception and, even though same-sex couples may legally register their partnership, defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The country's name is also changed from "Hungarian Republic" to "Hungary," and although Hungary remains a republic, the preamble contains references to the Holy Crown of King Stephen, the first king of Hungary.

The Constitution also refers to "the inhuman crimes committed against the Hungarian nation and its citizens during the National Socialist and Communist dictatorships." It explicitly mentions that the self-determination of Hungary was lost between March 19, 1944 (the date of the German invasion) and May 2, 1990 (the date of the first free elections in the post-Communist era), and asserts the invalidity of all legislation dating back to that period: "We do not recognize the Communist constitution of 1949 because it has served as a foundation of tyrannical rule. For this reason that legislation is hereby invalid."

Referring to the damage done by four decades of Communist rule, the constitution says that Hungary has "an eminent need of spiritual renewal since last century's developments have undermined moral values."

With its emphasis on traditional values, historic continuity, Christianity and the need for spiritual renewal, Hungary's constitution is an affront to the ruling liberal elites in the European Union and the world, who are hostile to Europe's Christian heritage and national traditions.

The New York based NGO Human Rights Watch criticized the Hungarian constitution, saying that it "could lead to efforts to overturn Hungary's abortion law and result in restrictions on abortion that would put a number of fundamental rights for women at stake." It also complained that, by defining marriage as a bond between a man and a woman, the constitution "denies LGBT people access to state protection for their families and relationships, and is inconsistent with Hungary's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union Charter on Fundamental Rights."

Hungary has also angered the liberal elites in the West by curbing judicial activism. To this end the retirement age for judges has been lowered from 70 to 62 and the president of the Supreme Court is required to have at least five years' Hungarian judicial experience. This eliminates the incumbent who served for 17 years in the activist European Court of Human Rights.

With regard to the economy, the new Hungary has introduced a flat tax of 19% and has capped the budget deficit to a maximum of 3% of GDP. It is also merging the Hungarian central bank (MNB) with the institution that supervises commercial banks, thereby restricting the power of András Simor, the MNB governor. Simor, an economist who worked for the MNB during the Communist era, is an appointee of the previous MSZP government. While Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is not dismissing Simor, the new constitution wants the MNB governor to take on oath of fidelity to Hungary and its interests. The case is being used by the EU and the IMF to deny Hungary credit guarantees and to justify other sanctions.

Both institutions argue that Hungary has violated the central bank's independence. The European Commission also objects to the oath because the MNB governor is a member of the council of the European Central Bank – a neutral pan-EU body. José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission (and a former Maoist), said last week, as the Commission was initiating legal procedures against Budapest, that the Hungarian authorities had failed "to guarantee respect of EU law" and that the Commission is determined "to make sure that EU laws, both in letter and in spirit are fully respected [in Hungary]. We do not want the shadow of doubt on respect for democratic principles and values to remain over the country any longer."

"The independence of Hungary's central bank will be a precondition for a European Union and International Monetary Fund precautionary financial support program for the country," said Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner For Economic and Monetary Affairs.

In the European Parliament, Orbán was attacked for violating the fundamental values of democracy and freedom. Liberals, Greens and Socialist said that the new Hungarian constitution is an undemocratic document. Liberal group leader Guy Verhofstadt, and Green group leader Daniel Cohn Bendit both called on the EU to suspend Hungary's voting rights in the EU Council because its constitution is a "serious and persistent breach" of EU principles. Cohn Bendit, a former Communist, said that Orbán behaved the same way as Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Socialist group leader Hannes Swoboda said that Orbán is destroying the very freedoms that the Hungarian people fought for.

The threat that Hungary will not receive the loan of €20bn ($25bn), which it urgently needs to avoid bankruptcy after years of Socialist economic mismanagement, is forcing Orbán to appease his critics. He has promised to amend the measures to restrict the powers of the MNB and the early retirement of judges.

Last Saturday, however, the Hungarians made it clear that they are still standing behind Prime Minister Orbán. Over 100,000 people gathered in Budapest in support of the government. During the last century, the Hungarians played a prominent role in opposing Soviet tyranny. Today, they are taking the lead in opposing the European Union. "May God bless the Hungarians!" says the opening phrase of the new Hungarian constitution. May He, indeed.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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1 February, 2012

Non-Darwinist doctor refused job

A doctor was denied employment at a Norwegian hospital because he did not believe in the Theory of Evolution.

Saying, “we are quite far apart when it comes to a view of the world”, an Oslo University Hospital official claimed the doctor would not get the job “because I don’t think this will quite work.”

The psychiatrist, who wished to remain anonymous for his future professional career possibilities, told Christian newspaper Vårt Land, “Both I and colleagues reacted strongly to that such a justification could be allowed.”

“I therefore decided to bring the matter further before an independent body to verify this was unacceptable.”

The Equality and Discrimination Ombudsman subsequently found in favour of the doctor, saying he had been subject to discrimination.

Agreeing that considering views about the theory was legitimate for an employer, as it central to understanding how the human mind develops, the ombudsman nevertheless ruled the hospital had violated the Equal Opportunities Act by not giving other grounds for refusal.

The psychiatrist accused hospital officials of narrow-mindedness, saying, “It’s about tolerance for thinking differently, [...] and having more openness to other perspectives, which should be seen as a resource.”

“An employer should be allowed to ask about philosophy, even if they cannot handle the answer. The problem is how my view has been used as an argument to disqualify me as a professional. The refusal has not affected me, but it was an important matter of principle.”

SOURCE




Parents must have the right to spank their children to instil discipline, says Boris Johnson

The Mayor of London spoke after a senior Labour MP blamed his party’s partial ban on smacking children for last August’s riots.

Former education minister David Lammy called for a return to Victorian laws on discipline, saying working-class parents needed to be able to use corporal punishment to deter unruly children from joining gangs and wielding knives.

He claimed parents were ‘no longer sovereign in their own homes’ and feared that social workers would take their children away if they chastised them.

Labour’s 2004 law did not completely ban smacking, but said a smack should cause no more than a reddening of the skin.

Last night Mr Johnson supported Mr Lammy, saying the current law was ‘confusing’, meaning that parents do not know how far they can go in terms of smacking their children.

‘People do feel anxious about imposing discipline on their children, whether the law will support them,’ he told the Pienaar’s Politics programme on BBC Radio 5 Live.

'Obviously you don’t want to have a licence for physical abuse or for violence and that’s very important.’

The Mayor said he believed he had the support of Education Secretary Michael Gove.

‘I know that people will have their own views, but let me just say on the issue that’s been raised a lot of times with me; the issue of are you allowed to chastise, are you allowed to impose discipline?’

SOURCE





Pet-loving people haters in America

They sound a lot like Leftists and Greenies

People who rescue animals can be reluctant to believe anyone deserves the furry creatures. Some rescue groups think potential owners shouldn’t have full-time jobs. Others reject families with children. Some rescuers think apartment dwelling is OK for humans but not for dogs, or object to a cat’s litter box being placed in a basement. Some say no to people who would let a dog run around the fenced backyard “unsupervised,” or allow a cat outside, ever.

It used to be that people who wanted to get an abandoned or abused animal went to the local pound, saw one they liked, paid a small fee, and drove home with a new pet. Since the 1990s, however, the movement to reduce animal euthanasia and the arrival of the Internet have given rise to a new breed of rescuer. These are private groups, or even individuals, who create networks of volunteers to care for needy animals.

The new organizations take potentially adoptable pets out of the shelters and foster them, usually in private homes, until the right owner comes along. They control the fate of an increasing number of animals. In New York City, for example, almost 45 percent of the dogs and cats that come into the Animal Care & Control system are passed to one of more than 150 private rescue groups.

Groups like these have high standards for who gets to adopt. Applicants are sometimes subjected to an interrogation that would befit Michael Vick. After receiving this hostile treatment, several would-be pet owners told me, they got offended and gave up. Others push on, answering pages of questions (“As a dog ages, it often becomes incontinent and arthritic. How do you intend to handle your dog's age-related problems?”), supplying personal and veterinary references, and submitting to home inspections. Even after going through that ordeal, you can be told that you are unworthy for pet ownership, for reasons often left mysterious.

At this point, many frustrated animal lovers can commit an act they’d previously thought abhorrent: They buy a dog, cat, bird, or guinea pig from a pet store or breeder. I know because that’s what happened to me.

A few months ago during a Dear Prudence chat, I mentioned in passing how ridiculous some rescue groups were. When my family decided to get a second rescue dog, I felt it was my job to prove to the groups we contacted that I wasn’t a vivisectionist. Fed up, we decided to buy a puppy and found a lovely breeder, and our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Lily, has made us all ecstatic.

After I wrote this, I expected to be skinned alive by animal lovers. Instead, dozens of people posted comments about their own humiliation and rejection at the hands of these gatekeepers.

Katie wrote that she wanted to adopt a retired racing greyhound but was told she was not eligible unless she already had an adopted greyhound. Julie got a no from a cat rescue because she was over 60 years old, even though her daughter promised to take in the cat if something happened to Julie. Jen Doe said her boyfriend’s family lives on fenced farm property with sheep, but they weren’t allowed to adopt a border collie—whose raison d’être is herding sheep—because the group insisted it never be allowed off-leash. Philip was rejected because he said he allowed the dog he had to sleep wherever it liked; the right answer was to have a designated sleeping area. Molly, who has rescued Great Danes for more than 30 years, was refused by a Great Dane group because of “concern about my kitchen floor.”

My friend M., who looked into getting a family dog when her children were 6 and 9, had a similarly vexing experience. After she and her husband decided rescue was the right thing to do, they looked online and found a mutt named Rusty. Rusty’s rescue group was having an adoption day and the family made the long drive to see him. Adopters were told not to mingle with the animals, but that specific dogs would be brought to them. While Rusty was otherwise engaged, M. asked if they could look at some of the other dogs but almost all were declared not suitable for children.

As the family waited, the children sat on the ground and started writing in the dirt with sticks. A volunteer came over, alarmed. He reprimanded them, saying that if a dog sees a stick in a person’s hand it will expect that stick to be thrown, and it’s not fair to frustrate a dog.

Eventually, Rusty was brought over. He was a little hyper but everyone agreed he was fine. M. told the rescue group they wanted him, and when the family returned home they started buying dog supplies. But a call from the group aborted their plans. “We had a report about inappropriate behavior by your children,” M. was told, which meant they would not be allowed to adopt.

M. and her husband were astounded and the children were crushed. “We still really wanted a dog, so we did the wrong thing and went to a breeder,” M. says. They bought a Bernese Mountain Dog who basks in constant attention from M. and her husband, who both work at home. “He loves his life,” she says. “Too bad for Rusty.”

Let’s posit that many people who are drawn to humane work don’t have a particularly positive view of humanity. This natural aversion is exacerbated by years of helping abandoned, abused, and neglected animals, which means seeing the worst people do to innocent creatures. Unfortunately, a subset of these people who dislike people have become like admissions officers at selective colleges, rejecting applicants who don’t fit an ideal template.

Besides being as much fun to fill out as a Form 1040, many group’s applications are full of tricks and traps. Some are obvious. Anyone who gets to this question on one group’s application—“Do you plan to tie or chain the dog out at anytime?”—should know the answer is “never.” (I agree that dogs shouldn’t be chained outside). And you should know that the answer to this inquiry—“Have you ever had a cat declawed? Will you be declawing your new cat?”—is, “I would rip out my own fingernails with a pliers before declawing a cat.”

But other questions are conundrums. If you think having a dog would be great for your kids, or that your personal reproductive plans are not the business of strangers, then consider how to answer this question from a Labrador rescue group: “Are you considering having children within 10 years?” And who knows what number is disqualifying when answering this one: “How many steps are there to reach your front door?”

If an applicant manages to get approved, the adoption papers should be read carefully before signing. It turns out the contract often specifies the adopter is not the actual owner of the animal. Sure you’re responsible for the pet’s food, shelter, training, and veterinary care, but the organization might retain “superior title in said animal.” This means the group can drop in unannounced at any time for the rest of your pet’s life and seize Fluffy if it doesn’t like what it sees.

There are people in the rescue community who are aware that zealotry is damaging their cause. After all, since fewer than 20 percent of new pets come from rescue groups, driving down that proportion is self-defeating. Jane Hoffman is the president of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, the organization that transports potential pets from animal control to private groups and provides training and other services. “You have two ends of the spectrum,” she says. “Pet stores will sell to anyone with the money. And then there are rescue group who won’t adopt to anyone. We need a happy medium.”

Being an animal rescuer can be a potent source of identity, combining salvation and self-sacrifice. But in recent years the ASPCA has seen that, for some people, this identity crosses over into pathology. Dr. Randall Lockwood, a senior vice president of the ASPCA, says that around 25 percent of the 6,000 animal hoarding cases reported in the United States each year involve purported rescuers, up from less than five percent 20 years ago.

“They are trying to do something good,” he says, “and they end up doing something bad.”

More HERE




Segregation is back in Knoxville, TN: Anti-Gay Senator kicked out of restaurant

Stacey Campfield and I don't agree on much, he thinks only gays spread AIDS, he supported a "Don't Say Gay" bill, and he probably believes in what I refer to as "socialist sexuality" or the idea that we should all have the same sexuality. So what? I deal with people I disagree with everyday and I don't discriminate against them.

If Stacey Campfield came to my restaurant or wanted to do business with me, I would treat him with the same respect I give all my customers. You would think this kind of common sense would be popular, you would think everyone does that, yet that's not always the case:

"“Martha Boggs, owner of the Bistro at the Bijou, said she ordered the controversial Republican legislator out of her restaurant Sunday in disgust over his recent remarks about the origin of AIDS. ‘He’s gone from being stupid to dangerous,’ Boggs said today. ‘It’s just my way of standing up to a bully.’ ‘He didn’t have much to say,’ Boggs said. ‘He left graciously.’”

What a hypocrite! These liberals preach tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness all day long yet look at how they treated Stacey Campfield, they threw him out like a black man trying to eat in the white section of a segregated restaurant in 1952. Where's the EEOC? Where's the NAACP? Oh right, Stacey is white and Christian so he doesn't have "La Raza" fighting for him. I guess he's the wrong raza.

Sorry Stacey, if you had been born brown that Bistro of BS would have been firebombed by now. I guess blonds don't always have more fun, specially when dealing with progressive supremacists. Hey Martha, what kind of cross will you be burning? One made of sage and potpourri?

Remember those "No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs" signs they used to put outside restaurants? Will be the new sign for Bistro at the Bijou be "No Republicans, No Christians, No Insensitives"?

You want to know why some people hate gays? THIS IS WHY! All you had to do was shut up, serve your customer and take his money. Is that so hard? Didn't they teach that at Culinary School?

I'm an insurance salesman, you think I discriminate against my customers? You think I'm going to tell a liberal "you don't need life insurance"? You think I'm going to reject selling policies to people who voted for Obama? Of course not! I've gone into houses that smell like crap and I still manage to smile, listen to my customers, and see if I can help them.

Politics is politics and business is business, and although you do have the right to discriminate against certain people, YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO!

That is why I'm calling freedom-lovers everywhere to Boycott the Bijou until Martha Boggs APOLOGIZES to Senator Stacey and treats him to a FREE DINNER in her restaurant.

You want to disagree with the Senator? Go ahead, but when he comes to your restaurant you serve him just like any other customer! Boycott the Bijou!

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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Examining political correctness around the world and its stifling of liberty and sense. Chronicling a slowly developing dictatorship


BIO for John Ray


Sarah Palin is undoubtedly the most politically incorrect person in American public life so she will be celebrated on this blog


I record on this blog many examples of negligent, inefficient and reprehensible behaviour on the part of British police. After 13 years of Labour party rule they have become highly politicized, with values that reflect the demands made on them by the political Left rather than than what the community expects of them. They have become lazy and cowardly and avoid dealing with real crime wherever possible -- preferring instead to harass normal decent people for minor infractions -- particularly offences against political correctness. They are an excellent example of the destruction that can be brought about by Leftist meddling.


I also record on this blog much social worker evil -- particularly British social worker evil. The evil is neither negligent nor random. It follows exactly the pattern you would expect from the Marxist-oriented indoctrination they get in social work school -- where the middle class is seen as the enemy and the underclass is seen as virtuous. So social workers are lightning fast to take chidren away from normal decent parents on the basis of of minor or imaginary infractions while turning a blind eye to gross child abuse by the underclass


Gender is a property of words, not of people. Using it otherwise is just another politically correct distortion -- though not as pernicious as calling racial discrimination "Affirmative action"


Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!


Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.


Juergen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."


The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amedment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.


Consider two "jokes" below:

Q. "Why are Leftists always standing up for blacks and homosexuals?

A. Because for all three groups their only God is their penis"

Pretty offensive, right? So consider this one:

Q. "Why are evangelical Christians like the Taliban?

A. They are both religious fundamentalists"

The latter "joke" is not a joke at all, of course. It is a comparison routinely touted by Leftists. Both "jokes" are greatly offensive and unfair to the parties targeted but one gets a pass without question while the other would bring great wrath on the head of anyone uttering it. Why? Because political correctness is in fact just Leftist bigotry. Bigotry is unfairly favouring one or more groups of people over others -- usually justified as "truth".


One of my more amusing memories is from the time when the Soviet Union still existed and I was teaching sociology in a major Australian university. On one memorable occasion, we had a representative of the Soviet Womens' organization visit us -- a stout and heavily made-up lady of mature years. When she was ushered into our conference room, she was greeted with something like adulation by the local Marxists. In question time after her talk, however, someone asked her how homosexuals were treated in the USSR. She replied: "We don't have any. That was before the revolution". The consternation and confusion that produced among my Leftist colleagues was hilarious to behold and still lives vividly in my memory. The more things change, the more they remain the same, however. In Sept. 2007 President Ahmadinejad told Columbia university that there are no homosexuals in Iran.


It is widely agreed (with mainly Lesbians dissenting) that boys need their fathers. What needs much wider recognition is that girls need their fathers too. The relationship between a "Daddy's girl" and her father is perhaps the most beautiful human relationship there is. It can help give the girl concerned inner strength for the rest of her life.


The love of bureaucracy is very Leftist and hence "correct". Who said this? "Account must be taken of every single article, every pound of grain, because what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything". It was V.I. Lenin


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Germaine Greer is a stupid old Harpy who is notable only for the depth and extent of her hatreds