Wednesday, May 01, 2024
‘Economic Suicide’: Biden Admin Justifies Tax Hike Based on Racial Criteria
The Biden administration’s analysis of its revenue proposals for fiscal year 2025 argues targeted tax hikes that disproportionately affect white people would ease racial wealth inequality.
Increasing taxes on capital gains and income-based wealth would reduce racial wealth inequality for black and Hispanic families, the Treasury Department outlined in the analysis published in mid-March. The Treasury points out that white families disproportionately hold assets subject to capital gains tax or are in a higher tax bracket, meaning a hike in those taxes would benefit black and Hispanic families.
The Biden administration argues for taxing capital income for high-income earners at “ordinary rates,” increasing the top rate from 37% to 39.6% for those who earn more than $1 million a year. Taxes on net investment income would also be hiked by 1.2 percentage points to 5% for those who make over $400,000 per year, bringing the total top marginal rate to 44.6%.
“Taxing capital gains at 44.6% at the federal level—not to mention state taxes—would be economic suicide,” Preston Brashers, research fellow for tax policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, adding:
Before the tax ever took effect, investors would rush to pull their money out of equities subject to such exorbitant tax rates. U.S. businesses would be starved for capital, and business activity would slow to a crawl. Ultimately, corporate income and capital gains income would fall off a cliff, so the net result would be less tax revenue, not more. The middle class and working class would be slammed with mass layoffs and lower real wages.
The Treasury estimates that white families are the recipients of 92% of the benefits of preferential rates on capital gains and qualified dividends, compared to 2% and 3% for Hispanic families. Only 0.4% of white families, less than 0.05% of black families, and 0.1% of Hispanic families will be affected by the proposed rule change on capital gains.
“So, if President [Joe] Biden’s goal of redistribution is to make the rich poorer, his proposal would be successful,” Brashers told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But if the goal is to lift up the middle class, the plan would fail spectacularly. Note, even the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center uses estimates that imply that the revenue-maximizing long-term capital gains rate is about 28%, so it’s clear that Biden’s proposal is on the wrong side of the Laffer curve.”
The proposal also calls for establishing a minimum 25% income tax that includes unrealized capital gains for those with wealth over $100 million. The Biden administration argues that the wealthiest taxpayers utilize their stake in unrealized gains to lower their total income and reduce their tax liability, but taxing unrealized gains may force many business owners to sell stakes in their company if they are not liquid enough to pay the burden.
“The wealthy already pay far more than their fair share, while the tax burden on large corporations ends up landing on individuals across the economy, including low-income individuals,” Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Biden administration also calls for ending a “loophole” that allows families to postpone their estate tax burden by creating trust assets that benefit multiple future generations and are not taxed on the death of the beneficiary. Around 30% of white families receive an inheritance that would qualify as of 2019, compared to 10% for black families and 7% for Hispanic families.
“Left-wing Biden economists seem unable to appreciate that raising taxes on capital hurts labor. Capital and labor work together to produce economic growth,” Edwards told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They are complements. The Biden economists seem to hold the Marxist view that capital and labor are bitter enemies, and that the only way that labor can win is for the government to crush capital.”
The Biden administration is also proposing to expand the child tax credit, temporarily increasing the amount given per child and permanently restoring the full refundability provision. The Treasury argues that it will ease racial disparities since a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic kids have benefited from it in the past.
“These proposals would also increase the fairness of the tax system by addressing some of the features that have historically reinforced racial disparities,” the proposal reads. “Over time, these proposals are expected to increase wealth accumulation by low- and middle-income families and reduce racial wealth gaps.”
The proposal was released in conjunction with calls from the Biden administration to drastically increase spending for fiscal year 2025, adding at least $14.8 trillion to the national debt by the end of a presumptive second term for the president.
The national debt has continued to grow rapidly under President Joe Biden, totaling more than $34.55 trillion as of April 26, up from $34 trillion at the beginning of the year, according to the Treasury Department.
Huge government spending is also putting the U.S. economy at risk of stagflation, with first quarter growth only totaling 1.6% while inflation remains high at 3.5% in March year-over-year.
“This hints at the false view that sadly underlies much of the Biden administration’s economic policy: high-earners only achieve success through luck, and low-earners can only achieve success through government handouts,” Edwards told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That is an appalling, un-American view.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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‘Harassment’: Feds Impose Trans Agenda on Employers for Pronouns, Bathrooms
Under new federal guidelines, an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a pronoun the person doesn’t want used.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the guidance on Monday. The guidance passed on a 3-2 vote, along party lines on Friday, a source familiar with the EEOC confirmed.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new enforcement guidance says.
The guidelines would affect most employers, private or public.
The EEOC announced last fall a proposed update of its harassment policy affecting to include sexual orientation and gender identity rules. This prompted opposition from 20 state attorneys general, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.
In November, the attorneys general contended what was then the proposed “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” updates would threaten the First Amendment rights of employers, employees, and possibly customers.
“Here, the proposed guidance would require employers to affirm or convey to employees and customers—often against religious conviction or deeply held personal belief—messages that a person can be a gender different from his or her biological sex, that gender has no correlation to biology, or that they endorse the use of pronouns like ‘they/them,’ ‘xe/xym/xyrs,’ or ‘bun/bunself,” the letter from the attorneys general says.
“This mandate flouts First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech—yet EEOC rejects any role for accommodation of contrary religious beliefs or speech,” the attorneys general add. “Further, EEOC’s for-cause insulation from direct presidential supervision unconstitutionally blurs the lines of accountability for this overhaul of workplaces nationwide.”
In 2021, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows attempted, in a statement, to unilaterally include these actions under harassment without public comment or a vote by the full commission. However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. A separate federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The commission did not appeal the rulings.
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer with more than 15 employees.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Burrows, a Democrat, of the new guidelines in a public statement issued Monday afternoon. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
Women’s rights are under attack by the EEOC, said Lucas in a statement issued Monday.
“Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary (male and female) and is immutable,” Lucas said in a public statement. She added, “It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. Relatedly, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”
In 2020, the Supreme Court held in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that a firm violates Title VII if it fires an employee “simply for being … transgender.” But, the Republican state attorneys general argued in the November letter, “Bostock gives no license to these and other of EEOC’s novel proposals.”
“Nor, in all events, can EEOC permissibly require these deeply controversial gender-identity accommodations without express congressional authorization—authorization not found in Title VII,” the letter continued.
The guidance does not carry the same weight as a law passed by Congress or a regulation imposed by an agency. However, the guidance essentially states the position of the EEOC. This means an employee inclined to claim harassment regarding a restroom or pronoun dispute would have the guidance to refer to. Also, under private litigation, a plaintiff could refer to the formal position of a federal agency.
“If you still believed that the Biden administration’s pedal-to-the-metal advancing of gender ideology is all about freedom and individual rights, this new EEOC ‘guidance’ should dispel that myth,” Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
“Employers may now find themselves in legal hot water if they prefer to use language, including pronouns, and preserve private spaces that comport with biological reality rather than the bizarre canons of gender ideology,” Richards continued. “We’re dealing with a totalitarian ideology that wants to destroy the present order. The sooner normal people understand that, the sooner we can dispatch this ideology to the history books.”
The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”
“The Biden administration is no stranger to twisting federal law to suit its aims, and the publication of the EEOC’s final rule on workplace harassment is a prime example,” Sarah??? Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Perry added:
According to the Biden administration, gender identity and expression are tantamount to ‘sex’ in federal law and require an employer to facilitate an employee’s ‘preferred pronoun’ use and requested bathroom use or face a possible complaint for sexual harassment.
This is both an untenable conclusion, and not supported by the underlying Supreme Court decision on which the Administration so greatly relies: Bostock v. Clayton County. What’s more, biological women are again rendered to second-class citizens under the EEOC rule and forced to give up any vestige of privacy and security they previously enjoyed.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the mandatory use of an employee’s requested name and pronouns—those which differ from that employee’s biological sex—is a patent violation of the 1st Amendment, and creates an unavoidable conflict between gender ideology, and freedom of speech and religion. I expect the swift filing of multiple legal challenges against the new rule.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/29/eeoc-harassment-to-not-give-trans-employees-preferred-bathrooms/ .
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Germany Allows Parents to Change Their Baby’s Gender
When it comes to gender politics, many in opposition acknowledge that adults have the ability to choose for themselves whether they pursue hormone therapy or body-mutilating operations, because adults can better weigh the risks of their decisions.
Children, on the other hand, are quite different from adults. Opponents of gender ideology are steadfast in the fight to keep these ideological procedures away from children because they understand how vulnerable children are to the manipulative nature of so-called gender-affirming care. Far too many kids have already become victims of medical experiments as it is.
This is what makes a law recently passed in Germany even more infuriating.
On April 12, the Bundestag, or the German parliament, “passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies,” Reduxx reported. This radical legislation, it added, “establishes ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth.”
Under the Self-Determination Act, citizens may be fined 10,000 euros ($10,719) for “deadnaming,” which is a term LGBT activists use when someone, without his or her permission, is referred to by the name given at birth rather than the name he or she chose as part of this identity façade.
And just when it appears it can’t get any more drastic, the Self-Determination Act also “permits parents to alter the recorded sex of children beginning from birth. From the age of 5 years old, it allows for name and sex changes if there is ‘mutual consent’ between the child and their parents.”
Physicians have emphasized that Europe is ahead of the U.S. in terms of how far gender ideology has gone. Some countries, though, such as the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and Norway have begun backtracking as more evidence comes to light of the harmful nature of such procedures.
Thankfully, the battle is strong in America from the side of those determined to keep children safe by preventing legislation such as the Self-Determination Act, known in Germany as SBGG, from happening in this country.
But several questions come to mind when analyzing this recent development: What implications does a law such as this in Germany offer for what’s next in the gender politics wars? Will similar laws pass elsewhere in Europe? How will America respond?
To help give insight to some of those questions, Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for strategic engagement and biblical worldview, commented to The Washington Stand.
“If we describe ‘radical’ as something far outside the lines of decency, this is definitely a radical policy,” Backholm insisted. “The idea that parents would be allowed to change the sex of their child from birth is outrageous. Any parent who wanted to treat their son as a girl from birth should lose their parental rights, not do so with the support and encouragement of the government.”
Addressing the details of the law passed in Germany, Backholm noted, “The name is ironic but perfect, much like their flagship holiday, Pride. The Self-Determination Act reflects their desire to define their own reality, but reality will never stop pushing back and will never lose.”
This, of course, is exhibited in the mountains of research and evidence that proves the biological reality of the two-sex binary, as well as the reality that biological sex cannot be altered by hormones and surgeries.
“Why is a child’s sex the only thing the parents can change?” Backholm asked. “Why can’t they change their birth year to make them immediately eligible for retirement benefits? Why can’t a child who feels like an old soul identify as a retiree?”
In answer to those questions, Backholm contended: “If we allow this logic to prevail, there’s simply no point in having identification documents. Germany should get rid of any attempt to describe someone’s characteristics and simply give every life (we shouldn’t assume their species) an identification number and let them make up the rest. That’s the only way to be consistent.”
However, he clarified, “that would be insane.” But the sad reality is that “it’s not more insane than this law is.”
For Backholm, the irrational possibility that “the elites” might decide we can “choose our own birth year … may be coming.”
As to how believers should respond, Backholm helpfully observed, “The correct response for Christians to madness like this is to say what we know to be true without fear.” Ultimately, he said, “The more people hear the truth spoken, the more likely they are to speak the truth.”
“These ideas cannot prevail over time,” he insisted, “but they can do a lot of damage before we come to our senses. Our job is to minimize that damage and encourage a return to reality as quickly as possible.”
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Deadly nitazenes drugs spark testing centres push
I hate to sound hard-hearted about this but I am not sure that testing rooms do any good overall. They may encourage involvement with drugs and thus lead to MORE deaths rather than fewer
Drug decriminalisation advocates are pushing for more supervised drug taking centres and testing facilities to be established to curb deaths caused by a synthetic opioid up to one hundred times stronger than fentanyl.
Nitazenes, a family of synthetic opioids that can be more addictive and potent than heroin and morphine, is contributing to an epidemic of drug fatalities across North America, and is now on the rise in Australia, having been detected in Victoria, South Australia and NSW.
The drug is already having deadly effects in Victoria, with the Coroner’s Court warning the opioid had been involved in at least 16 overdose deaths in the state since 2021.
Evidence suggests that nitazenes are coming from labs in China, although its origin is not restricted to one country, and are being sold off the dark web.
Experts, including Monash Addiction Research Centre deputy director Suzanne Neilson, used the World Health Summit to call for supervised injecting facilities, drug checking sites and public education on the benefits of naloxone, a medication that can reverse overdose effects, to help battle the infiltration of the drug and its deadly impact.
“We understand that in most circumstances, people are not intentionally purchasing nitazenes, what is most common is that people are purchasing other drugs,” Ms Neilson told The Australian.
“We do have some early warning systems in place, for example nitazenes that are detected in some emergency department settings … but it is quite limited at the moment in terms of testing for nitazenes. And because we don’t have widely scaled-up drug testing, we do get sort of limited information about what’s out there at the moment.”
Ms Neilson said nitazenes can be made to be similar to fentanyl or even 50 to a hundred times stronger.
“In Australia we have had a massive increase in overdose deaths … I think there is a significant threat of a future epidemic if we do follow in the path that we’ve seen in North America and the UK,” she said.
“Once (synthetic opioids) start to enter the market, what we’ve seen is a dramatic rise in deaths. We’d really like to know what’s going on before that happens to prevent those deaths if possible.”
Global Commission on Drug Policy chair and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark endorsed the controversial medically supervised injecting rooms in Melbourne.
“This is the kind of service that people need to stay alive, to stay healthy,” Dr Clark said.
“When you go to a centre like the safe injecting room, people bring in the stuff they’ve bought on the street corner (and it’s) tested, no one is going to die.”
She voiced her support for a second supervised injecting room in the CBD to go ahead, a measure the Victorian government committed to in 2020 but that has been met with backlash from the community and local businesses.
“The bottom line is that people that are using drugs need to be safe, and that’s why the centre is so important,” Dr Clark said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, April 30, 2024
'Progressivism': The Modern Zeitgeist
As noted below, it is true that Leftists now rule the "Zeitgeist". They have comprehensively completed their long march though the institutions. But there is cause for hope. This has happened before. "Progressive" ideas and assumptions totally dominated public thinkig in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. But that did become unwound after WWII when the rise to prominence of the ghastly Soviets forced a new fear and a new realism on people. And starting from Ike and his narrow view of the role of government a new era of American prosperity began. But once the Soviets fell, fear of Leftism evaporated.
The results of that were perverse. Once Leftism was no longer something to fear, it became more readily accepted and its old hatreds once again gradually became fashionable. Leftist whining was taken increasingly seriously. And the constant Leftist discoveries of new "humanitarian" causes -- from "affirmative action" to transgendererism -- has given them a continuing voice and respectability in public affairs.
It is a disturbing thought but maybe we need another war to divert attention from the foolish to more serious matters. With the containment of Russia in Ukraine, however, that possibility has thankfully retreated to an extent. Russia has now been revealed as a paper tiger. So while China remains restrained we can at the moment continue to be frivolous about what matters. On past precedent, however, that frivolity may not be permanent. Taiwan may uproot our calm
To fully understand current events, it is critical to comprehend that every human is a product of their times, their present culture, their “zeitgeist”—the term I will use in this column. The word “zeitgeist” means “the spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the generally accepted ideas and beliefs of the time.” In every period of history, a certain model of thinking dominates the age, and everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, is influenced by it. It's impossible to totally separate ourselves from our “zeitgeist” because we are surrounded by it every day, we grow up learning it and absorbing it, it is the inescapable environment universally acknowledged and rarely questioned—even if it’s wrong. Here are a couple of examples of historical “zeitgeist” to illustrate what I mean.
Christopher Columbus and his “age” was certainly different from ours. We don’t approve of many things they did (they wouldn’t approve of much of what we do, either), and the Left is especially vociferous in their condemnation of Columbus and the early European explorers. But their “zeitgeist” was completely different from ours. They saw no dichotomy between converting the heathen and looting them of their gold. Such a dichotomy is abhorrent to us, but we didn’t grow up in their “zeitgeist.” Reading modern viewpoints and opinions back into history is not an acceptable way to judge and interpret previous generations.
Certainly, the people of Columbus’s age “sinned” and knew they were doing so, just as we do (or should). But to understand them, we must understand their “zeitgeist.” The Aztecs whom the Spaniards conquered were hardly exemplary. We should learn from, but not blanketly condemn them when their culture, education, and surroundings were totally unlike ours. Failing to even attempt to comprehend previous people’s thoughts is most unjust. The Left are masters at it.
Another example. I quote: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races...I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
Those words were spoken by Abraham Lincoln in 1858. While obviously repulsive to Americans today, it was the “zeitgeist” of Lincoln’s time. Indeed, Harvard University had done a study of human skull sizes and discovered that the average skull size of a black person was smaller than that of a white person’s. And, in Lincoln’s day (and even into the early 20th century), it was accepted that the bigger your brain, the smarter you were. Whites are superior to blacks because they have larger brains! “Science” proves it! Now today, we know that brain size has nothing to do with intelligence, but that was the “science” of Lincoln’s day, and he would have been “unscientific” to reject it. How can we condemn him if we truly understand the “zeitgeist” of his age? We can’t, and we shouldn’t. What we should do is try to understand and learn from it.
Rising above our “zeitgeist” is a most challenging accomplishment, and not even historians can do it perfectly. If we had lived in Columbus’s Spain (or Italy) in 1492, or Lincoln’s Illinois (a Northern state, mind you) in 1858, we would surely have believed the exact same things they did. Some people are occasionally able to “think outside the box” and see truth from an eternal, fixed perspective, but that is a very rare commodity among humans. By and large, we accept the “zeitgeist” of our age.
“Zeitgeist” arises out of history, of course. It’s a process, not an event, and usually takes time to develop. Columbus and Cortez did not invent the dichotomy they lived in regarding converting the heathen and stealing their gold. If you think Lincoln’s words were bad, read his debate opponent, Stephen Douglas’s (a Democrat), sometime.
We haven’t arrived at our present “zeitgeist” in America overnight, either. Currently, most Americans’ thinking has become dominated by “progressive” ideology, and interestingly, a hypocrisy inherent in that thinking is to condemn anyone who lived before who might foil their political agenda—Columbus, America’s Founding Fathers, though rarely Lincoln, for rather obvious reasons.
Naturally, different cultures had/have different “zeitgeists”. Human or child sacrifice was an acceptable “zeitgeist” among the Aztecs and many other ancient “civilizations,” as was slavery, polygamy, war, and a few other currently frowned-upon customs. Our Leftist-driven “zeitgeist” has “progressed” from those practices to abortion on demand (no sense in waiting for the child to be born to sacrifice it), transgenderism, child mutilation, and, in China—the Left’s great model—mass murder, forced organ harvesting, and re-education camps.
Human inequality and racism are “zeitgeists” of nearly every culture in history and are evident today in the Left’s DEI program. Columbus’s (and Lincoln’s) “zeitgeist” accepted Jesus as God and Savior, and a world created by God, something our modern Leftist “zeitgeist” rejects in favor of Darwinian-based atheistic naturalism. Modern communication has shrunk the world, thus, much of Leftism is virtually universal now. Middle Eastern Muslims reject most of it, but they are barbarians, right?
Rising above our “zeitgeist” to see eternal truths is extremely challenging. Nobody does it perfectly. After all, doesn’t everybody have their own “truth” nowadays, as a recent modern “progressive” DEI-hire informed us?
https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2024/04/29/progressivism-the-modern-zeitgeist-n2638406
**************************************************Meet the Lawyers Taking Big Government to the Supreme Court—And Winning
As the administrative state implements more regulations on Americans, a team of legal veterans has come together to fight the expansion of unelected government agency power.
Sometimes, they even win.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which consists of a team of 27 lawyers and support staff, including former judges, had four of the cases they litigated go before the Supreme Court in 2023. One case was decided in their favor, the remaining three are pending.
Founded by Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger six years ago, the NCLA targets cases where they believe federal agencies have blatantly overstepped their authority or violated civil liberties..
“Normally, administrative power is understood as a separation of powers question, but it’s also a civil liberties problem because it dilutes our voting rights,” Mr. Hamburger told The Epoch Times. “We all get to vote, but the ability to make legislation is no longer in the hands of the people we elect.”
The U.S. Constitution vests Congress with law-making authority. However, government agencies are not only making laws today, he said, they also enforce those laws, then act as judge and jury over alleged violations. Taking a historical view on this issue, Mr. Hamburger argues that such administrative “absolutism” is not a new phenomenon, but merely a modern expression of absolute power once wielded by medieval kings.
The group’s clients include Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty, and Ms. Jill Hines, plaintiffs in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, which is currently before the Supreme Court. This case involves alleged violations of the doctors’ First Amendment rights by the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Surgeon General.
“It deprives us of the right to a jury; it deprives us of ordinary burdens of proof; it deprives us of having an unbiased judge,” he said. “We have ALJs and commissioners instead.”
ALJ’s are “executive judges for official and unofficial hearings of administrative disputes in the federal government,” according to a Cornell Law School definition.
“Administrative law judges are considered part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch, and ALJs are appointed by the heads of the executive agencies.”
In this way, Mr. Hamburger said, the administrative state has not only accumulated powers explicitly vested in other branches of government; it has consolidated within itself the power of all three branches.
Supreme Court Taking Notice
“In 2018, we started filing briefs at the Supreme Court and almost immediately we were having an effect on the discussions of administrative power,” Peggy Little, senior counsel at the NCLA, told The Epoch Times.
In one case, SEC v. Cochran, which Ms. Little led, appellate courts took the side of the SEC. This case challenged the lifetime tenure of ALJs, who act as judges for federal agencies.
“”We battled that for five years, and we had six circuit courts of appeals against us,” she said. “We got to the Supreme Court and we won unanimously.”
Ms. Little said she is optimistic that the tide of expanding agency power can be turned back.
“I think we are in a very important time for rethinking how our government should operate,” Ms. Little said, “and restoring the separation of powers and guardrails on agency power, that limit it to what Congress has actually empowered the agency to do, not what the agency itself thinks would be a good idea.”
Mr. Hamburger said the NCLA has several advantages when arguing their cases.
“We have the truth on our side, and I think the justices understand that,” he said. “Second, we take the Constitution seriously, while many agencies view it as a minor impediment to what they want to do in regulation.”
In addition, “the administrative state has changed,” he said..
“It isn’t like the 1930s where it was just an addition to the law; it is now the primary mode of controlling us,” he said. “It may eventually unravel our republic.”
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Judge Rules That the Transgender Care Policies in These States Are 'Discriminatory'
In recent years, many states have passed laws surrounding the transgender agenda. This includes laws restricting transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports, laws regarding which restrooms transgender students can use in public schools, and transgender health care coverage.
Predictably, left-wing activists push back on policies like these.
On Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that West Virginia and North Carolina’s refusal to cover certain health care for transgender people with government-sponsored health insurance is discriminatory.
According to the Associated Press, the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 8-6 in the case. The case involved the coverage of so-called “gender-affirming care” by North Carolina’s state employee health plan and the coverage of irreversible sex reassignment surgery by West Virginia Medicaid.
“The coverage exclusions facially discriminate on the basis of sex and gender identity, and are not substantially related to an important government interest,” Judge Roger Gregory wrote in the majority opinion. Reportedly, Gregory was first appointed by former President Bill Clinton and re-appointed by former President George W. Bush.
The case is likely headed to the Supreme Court, as West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey told the outlet that his office plans to appeal the decision (via AP):
During oral arguments in September, at least two judges said it’s likely the case will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Both states appealed separate lower court rulings that found the denial of gender-affirming care to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. Two panels of three Fourth Circuit judges heard arguments in both cases last year before deciding to intertwine the two cases and see them presented before the full court.
Earlier this month, a federal appeals court struck down a West Virginia law that protected female athletes from male athletes who think they are women, which Townhall covered. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to halt the law, which prevents so-called “transgender” athletes from competing on teams that align with their “gender identity” in the state’s public schools and colleges.
Shortly after, several middle school girls were forced to compete against the biological male who thinks he’s a woman who was at the center of the case. In response, the girls boycotted the competition, which Townhall also covered.
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Rules for Republicans
For Republicans to win in November, there are certain rules that will broaden the party appeal and hopefully bring victory at all levels of government.
Nothing can compete with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the effective playbook for the Democratic Party and its supporters for decades. Only recently did pro-Hamas protesters prevent travelers from getting to O’Hare Airport. Alinsky himself led similar activity, including having his people take up all of the bathroom stalls in the airport, so that travelers could not use the bathroom and thus make their lives miserable—until he got what he wanted.
With a majority saying that the US is going in the wrong direction and that America’s best days are behind her, the Republicans have an opportunity for a Reagan or Nixon level blowout against a president who regularly fights and loses to his teleprompter. Certain positions appeal well beyond traditional or even new Republican voters.
The Inviolability of Property Rights.
Freedom, pursuit of happiness, wealth—they are all meaningless if one is not certain in his or her ironclad right to property. In both personal and business spheres, property rights are being abused. Think of shoplifting—places like California have legalized stealing. How can I run a business if I cannot prevent people from stealing my merchandise? How can I make a profit if the police and the local government do not support my right to protect my store and its contents?
The same is true for the individual. Stories of squatters are horrific. That people cannot easily throw out such thieves and in some cases are required to continue paying electricity and water is ridiculous. Laws are needed that give property owners the upper hand in any case of squatting. In a normal world, the owner of a home would bring some brutes with him and throw the squatters out and sue the latter for whatever damage they did.
We do not live in a normal world. With that said, Republicans need to push the idea that property is an extension of an individual and is subject to protection from theft or illegal seizure. When shoplifting brings with it jail time, the problem will become much smaller.
A Controlled Southern Border.
There is no greater issue of internal concern than the completely open border. From drugs to criminals to potential terrorists, the open southern US border is a disaster. Communities far and wide have been negatively impacted by illegal aliens taking up space (airports in Chicago, Boston and elsewhere), resources (New York is spending billions on them), and causing social disruptions. The vast majority of Americans want the border controlled. Period. Republicans need to make a controlled border the centerpiece of their platform. It’s a winning issue and it stands in stark juxtaposition to the Biden administration’s open border and lack of enforcement of existing US immigration laws (and even fighting Arizona and Texas in their attempts to close the border in their states).
On some issues, the US has become a “2% Society”—where the interests of some small percentage of the population outweigh the concerns of the majority of Americans. Trans and crime are two such subjects. A woman might work years to win the big race, only to have a guy with a beard zip by her to take the gold. Criminals are being released, even in cases of serious crime, and the population has to fear being carjacked, stabbed, punched, or pushed in front of a train. These are winning issues for Republicans.
Trans. Ban all trans procedures and puberty blockers for children under 18.
While we allow adults to smoke themselves to death or drink their livers away, we do not allow children the same privileges. Children must be protected from charlatans in the schools and hospitals who are willing to perform Mengle-like surgeries on them. At the adult end, pass laws requiring at least one division of sports for biological women only. Americans have a very strong sense of fairness, and the women and girls need to compete without guys who have personal issues.
Crime.
There is no perfect position on crime but if you have to err, then do so on the side of the police. After Ferguson and George Floyd, the police are in retreat. They do not have the support of their superiors or the political echelon to do their jobs. The government must throw its weight behind policing, so that the 98% of Americans who are not involved in crime can enjoy their lives. The FBI needs to be restructured so that we do not have political investigations like the fake “Russian collusion” Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Taxes.
Lower corporate and personal taxes lead to greater economic activity and increased personal wealth. Lowering taxes will spur job growth and further economic activity. Let Republicans be the party of the workers and small business. Let Republicans be the antithesis of the tax-and-spend liberals favored by the Silicon Valley billionaires.
Tame the Universities.
Post 10/7, universities have shown themselves to be hotbeds not only to antisemitism but also to rampant anti-Americanism. Universities survive on the billions that federal agencies dole out for R & D. These funds must be conditioned on the universities being useful for America’s future. When reading General Leslie Groves' Now It Can Be Told, I was amazed at the extraordinary contribution of American universities to the successful Manhattan Project. They readily provided top professors, research facilities, key materials, manpower, and even their presidents as James Conant (Harvard) and Vannevar Bush (MIT) were key drivers to success. Federal funding has to be conditioned on universities being pro-American institutions. If they want to be funded and directed by China and Gulf Arab states and push anti-America agendas, then the federal government should drop funding such institutions.
Abortion.
It can also be a winning issue. While many conservatives were angered by Donald Trump suggesting that each state pass its own law, the former president realizes that California is not Tennessee. Win elections and enact laws; first, you have to win.
The American Project needs work. Republicans can put forth platforms that appeal to Americans of all backgrounds and political identification. Liberal New Yorkers also want to be able to walk in Central Park without preparing a last will and testament before leaving home. Republicans can win in the Fall. They need a winning message and they need to follow through on their promises.
https://townhall.com/columnists/alanjosephbauer/2024/04/29/rules-for-republicans-n2638329
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Monday, April 29, 2024
The surprising sexual kink that is most likely to result in orgasm, new study suggests
Well, what do you know? I had forgotten this. For a couple of years I had a relationship with C.W., an exceptionally good-looking woman with whom I also had an exceptionally good sexual relationship. I am not normally a great sexpot so that is surprising.
I was around 50 at the time but thanks to Viagra, we normally had sex at least twice a night. She once went around at her office job the day afterwards boasting that she had it seven times the night before I may have gone into her seven times but I certainly did not come seven times. She regularly used to go around with the top button of her blouse undone so people would get a glimpse of her big black bra so she would have been believed
And I did tickle her a lot while we were in bed. Her shrieks of laughter would stun other occupants of the house. And, yes, the tickling was a form of foreplay. It led up to intercourse. It was a custom we just hit upon that I attributed to her general good humour so have never done it with anyone else. From what I read below I failed to learn a lesson from my own experience. My present girlfriend is however very ticklish .. ....
Being tickled could be enough to bring on an orgasm, a study suggests.
First-of-its-kind research from Germany involving about 700 adults looked at the relationship between being tickled and experiencing sexual pleasure.
The researchers found that nearly 90 percent said they felt some degree of sexual stimulation from being tickled alone without other stimuli.
And one in four women and men reached orgasm exclusively through tickling.
The team found most participants who found tickling sexually gratifying enjoyed being tickled as children, suggesting that childhood experiences could 'shape their fetishism development.'
Sarah Dagher, study author and a PhD candidate at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, told PsyPost that the study shows that 'the spectrum of what can lead to sexual pleasure is broader than what we previously thought and extends beyond conventional concepts.'
The researchers recruited participants through a 43-question survey posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. Five 'tickle fetish influencers' also agreed to participate by reposting the survey link and pinning it to their profiles.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13354539/sexual-fetish-orgasm-time-study.html
****************************************************‘The Undoing of Civilisation’: What’s Driving the West’s Decline, according to prominent British writer
The key problems the West faces today is not military disarmament—the diminishing of a country’s military strength—but moral disarmament, argued a British pundit.
According to Brendan O’Neill, the chief political writer for London-based Spiked magazine, Western societies are going through a process of “decivilisation,” in which people, particularly the younger generations, are “disconnected from the past and live in utter dread of the future.”
“When your military won’t even say words like ‘strength,’ when your museums are hiding away artifacts, when Shakespeare has been added with loads of trigger warnings in case you get upset at his racist ideas, when the universities are overrun by academics who teach kids to hate the history of the West,” he said in Sydney on April 23.
“You can really see that this is … the institutions of the West destroying themselves in order to appease what they view as the original sins of Western civilisation.”
Speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney-based think tank, Mr. O’Neill said modern societies are facing an “incredibly serious threat” of moral disarmament, the process in which people are “stripping away the values and virtues that once defined who we are as a society.”
“I think the key problem we’re facing today is not necessarily military disarmament or physical disarmament, or not having the right equipment to fight back should they come our way, but moral disarmament,” he noted.
“The pushing aside of the core values and core ideas that [once bring society] together and the embrace of the woke ideology that is incredibly damaging to the confidence of our institutions, the confidence of the people in our society.”
The British author identified decolonisation—which he called “the cleansing of history”—and climate alarmism as the two “most popular” radical trends among the youth.
‘Wokeness’ Prominent Among Australian Youth
Australia is not immune to progressive social trends, and has become increasingly “woke.”
The statues of Captain James Cook—a renowned explorer who charted and claimed the eastern coast of Australia for Britain—have repeatedly become a target of anti-colonial activists.
On the day before Australia Day this year, the British explorer’s statue in St Kilda’s Jaca Boulevard in Melbourne was cut at the ankles and sprayed with the words “the colony will fall” in red paint. On the same day, a statue of Queen Victoria was also defaced and graffitied with a similar message.
[Illiterates! The colony fell in 1901,when Australia ceased to be a colony and became independent
The repeated attacks on the statue have prompted a council officer to suggest its permanent removal due to the serious damage incurred.
Anti-colonial sentiments were also prevalent during the Australian government’s campaign for the Voice proposal, which would establish a permanent Indigenous advisory body to parliament, and amend the constitution to recognise Indigenous people.
Australians emphatically voted against the proposal, with No proponents arguing it would sow further division in the community.
At the same time, governments and corporations have thrown support behind legislations that promote transgender ideology, such as the self-sex ID and conversion ban.
The Western Australian government, for example, became the latest state to introduce a gender recognition bill, which would allow people to legally change their gender without medical surgery. It praised the bill as a “significant legislative agenda” for people who identify as transgender or gender-diverse.
‘The Undoing Of Civilisation’
Mr. O’Neill said it’s tempting to view the rise of woke ideology as the “ideological exuberance” of young people who will “grow out of it eventually.”
However, under the surface, “something very serious” was happening, he said.
“We’re living through what can only be described as the process of decivilisation. The unraveling of the great gains of our society and the great culture of our society and the problematisation of these things as too male, too white, too old fashioned and not really appropriate or fitting to the modern era,” Mr. O’Neill said.
“It’s a vast project of the undoing of civilisation.”
He described civilisation as “a sense of permanence”—connecting with society’s history, being optimistic about the present, and having aspirations for the future.
However, that has been “completely robbed from the young in particular, who are now living in this permanent limbo of dread for what came before them and dread of what might come later,” Mr. O'Neill added.
Younger generations are feeling extraordinarily alienated from their own history, the result of being taught to “hate your own history, hate the old orders, the old museums, the old judges.”
“They live in a kind of limbo now,” the British author said.
“Everything about your past, you are encouraged and in some cases educated to hate, and at the same time, you fear for the future, you dread what is coming down the road.”
“And that is fundamentally the end of civilisation.”
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There Are No Adult Leftists
Allen West
Last week I traveled out to Santa Barbara, California, a damn beautiful area, for the purpose of speaking for the Young America's Foundation Rawhide Circle Retreat. The actual event was held at the Alisal Ranch in Solvang, which is a picturesque Danish-themed town in the Santa Ynez Valley.
My flight from Dallas took me to Las Vegas, where I caught my connection, SWA flight 274. I travel mostly on Southwest Airlines and had boarding position A2, meaning I got my prized seat, starboard side exit row aisle! Two gentlemen came along and asked to take the window and middle seat. The one fella in the middle seat was reading a book called “You Dreamed of Empires” by Alvaro Enrigue. Before he began with his book he was checking his news feed on his phone...and then it came.
This fella blurted out to his male partner, “Why don't they just leave the students alone in the tents?” He continued by saying that they were just peacefully protesting against war; he called them anti-war. He further asked when being anti-war became anti-Semitic. He took the position that the school term would be over soon anyway, so just leave them alone.
I suppose my fellow traveler did not understand that Jewish students are not being allowed to attend class at a school like Columbia University, which has $80K/year tuition. They are being told to stay sequestered somewhere and take their classes virtually. Hmm, does anyone smell a lawsuit coming?
Yeah, da ol' Colonel had to bite his lip, but then I realized what the real issue is...there are no adult leftists. Much the same as Peter Pan, they are stuck in a permanent childish, immature, irrational, and imbecile state of mental existence. Obviously, this fella who was sitting next to me did not realize, or perhaps he did and did not care, that if you were truly anti-war, you should not be taking up the position of a designated Islamic terrorist organization, Hamas, that attacked a sovereign Nation, Israel.
This cheeky fella certainly must not have been aware of the chants being proliferated in these “Hamas Youth Camps” that call for the genocide of Jews and the eradication of the Jewish State. That is the essence of anti-Semitism, not free speech. Or maybe this guy was unaware that a Jewish student had his eye nearly gouged out by a “peaceful Hamas youth protester” who stabbed him in the eye with the flagstaff carrying the terrorist banner.
As of Thursday evening at Alisal Ranch, I have not heard a peep from Columbia University alum Barack Hussein Obama on this matter. That silence is deafening, to say the least.
Where are the presidents of these respective universities? Oops, I forgot; everything is examined in context. But the prevailing thing we must understand and accept is that there are no adult leftists. The Department of Homeland Security has made an empty threat to revoke the student visas of foreign students who are expelled. Well, it would require adults in the campus administrations to take the action of expelling these miscreants. Recently, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went to Columbia University. Where was Senate Majority Leader, Jewish Senator Chuck Schumer? Again, no adult leftists.
Oh, by the way, we now know how dumb Biden's idea about a floating humanitarian pier into Gaza is; Hamas has fired mortars at the US-led engineering effort, and equipment was damaged. Yep, we do not have an adult in the White House. Heck, we do not have a functional person as president, but he can lick a mean ice cream cone...like a kid. Refer back to the Peter Pan assertion. I remember back when Nancy Pelosi first took the Speaker's gavel, and she quipped that the gavel was in the hands of the children of America...yep, literally.
The progressive socialist leftists, aka Democrat party, are more concerned about appeasement, negotiating, acquiescing, and compromising with delusional, deranged brats because that is the nature of the progressive socialist left, Marxists. For them, having the electoral patronage of children supporting a terrorist organization is more important than our Nation and our best ally in the Middle East.
See, adults make decisions, especially when it comes to disciplining children. Leftists believe that if your kid thinks they are a different gender, let them be, regardless of the harm and danger. And if you are an American adult and take a different position, then leftists believe you should not have children. Leftists who unfortunately have children allow their biological male kids to jump into swimming pools with the daughters of American adults, and you best accept that. This is why leftists have sought to overturn Title IX because they are not adult enough to tell their kids that this is foolishness. Heck, just like kids, they celebrate this whole delusion. So, what is next? Kids who want to affirm being an alcoholic?
I recall the saying, “Come let us reason together.” But how can you reason with people who have the intellectual capacity of the Scarecrow character from the Wizard of Oz? I could have easily interjected myself into the conversation with the fella on the plane sitting next to me, but his head would have exploded. I could have presented facts and articulated how supporting an Islamic terrorist organization that killed and held Americans hostage is not something we just brush off and appease. I presume he would have had to require the oxygen mask to be deployed for his personal safety.
While I was awaiting my flight at Dallas Love Field, Gate 4, MSNBC was playing “Morning Joe.” There was not a single iota of discussion about what was happening on these college and university campuses and expanding to other areas. The topic de jour was the Donald Trump trials. See, the mindless lemmings and useful idiots that frequent such outlets cannot bear to discuss anything weighty that goes against their dogma. If so, they throw fits and tantrums like a kid in the cereal aisle in the grocery store. Those are the kids whose leftist parents beg and attempt to reason with little John and Jane, throwing themselves on the floor.
I tried that one time with my mom. Elizabeth Thomas “Snooks” West was an adult, and she beat my tail. Guess what, I never did that again. My Dad, the ole World War II Army Corporal, beat me down because I did not speak to the adults sitting on their porches in his hometown of Cuthbert, GA, one day. To this day, I regard people as "Sir" and "Ma'am."
Always remember, the little radicals throwing fits on college and university campuses today will continue the leftist tradition of being stuck in Never Never Land. They believe that a little pixie dust can solve all the problems, and don't want to be bothered with anything tough. That is why the gentleman on Southwest Airlines flight 274 from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara said, “Just leave the kids alone in the tents; they aren't bothering anyone.” Yeah, they just shout out chants of genocide and death to America.
Or until something goes boom in America because the leftists’ kids masquerading as grown-ups have surrendered our national sovereignty, allowing our enemies to enter our Republic. If you think the summer of 2020 was bad, just wait for this summer. Those who remember the DNC convention of 1968, get ready. The radical children from then and the radical children of today. As the wise Jewish King Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” And no truer words could have been spoken when it comes to Marxists, Islamists, and the lack of adult leftists.
Steadfast and Loyal.
https://townhall.com/columnists/allenwest/2024/04/29/there-are-no-adult-leftists-n2638385
********************************************Ideology, education will not protect women from violent men
Only a Leftist with his childish belief in government as a cure-all would think that governments could reliably predict and stop men who kill their women
CLAIRE LEHMANN
A 28-year-old NSW woman, Molly Ticehurst, was found dead in her home last Monday. Two weeks prior, a man who had been charged with stalking and raping her appeared before court.
The police prosecutor charged him with a series of serious crimes and told the court his behaviour was “indicative of features in domestic violence offenders that we see often come to light after the most disturbing conclusions to their conduct”.
Despite this warning, he was released on bail.
Ticehurst is among 26 women who have been killed in the first 114 days of 2024. If the rate of violence continues, 2024 will be one of the worst years in recent memory for major crimes against women – with one woman murdered every four days. Despite the cries from the community to do more, and despite Anthony Albanese joining weekend rallies, there is a lack of leadership on what must be done. The current strategy isn’t working, and we need to understand why.
For the past decade or so, the focus of Australian governments has been on “primary prevention” – that is, preventing violence before it occurs. Ad campaigns that encourage boys and men not to slam doors or tell sexist jokes, as well as educational efforts in schools on “toxic masculinity”, are meant to have made a difference. But have they? It doesn’t look like it.
A recent essay co-authored by Walkley Award-winning journalist Jess Hill and UNSW criminology professor Michael Salter offers a sustained criticism of the primary prevention approach, arguing that our national strategy “outsources its results to future generations, and thus gives politicians the cover to adopt platitudes and evade accountability”.
Their central argument is a brave one: reducing inequality between men and women does nothing to reduce violence against women. The axiomatic claim that violence will disappear once inequality disappears is not supported by the evidence. They show that governments’ decades-long focus on gender equality has not moved the needle in terms of reducing violence against women. In fact, the opposite may be true.
The Nordic countries provide a warning. Those nations are all ranked higher in gender equality than Australia and other EU countries, yet also record higher rates of domestic violence and physical or sexual violence against women.
Through its National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032, the Albanese government has made the bold claim that it will work to end gendered violence in just one generation through attitude change, which is measured via surveys. But there are several problems with this plan. One of them, according to Hill and Salter, is its blanket focus on all boys and men – instead of identifying those most likely to offend.
Assigning guilt to the entire male sex may be a waste of time: “Situating all little boys as potential perpetrators not only risks diluting much-needed resources and effort, but it also invites confusion and potentially backlash from boys and young men who were never at risk of hurting their partners in the first place,” the authors write.
One reason it may be a waste of time is because the link between attitudes and behaviour is not clear-cut. We all know examples of high-profile figures (think Harvey Weinstein) whose public behaviour does not match how they act behind closed doors. Similarly, there is no good reason to think responses to a pencil-and-paper survey on attitudes will capture the future likelihood of violence.
To explain why this approach is inadequate, Hill and Salter draw attention to an alarming, yet under-reported trend. Young people aged between 16 and 24, are the most likely cohort to reject problematic attitudes regarding violence against women. Yet within this very age group there has been an alarming increase in sexual offending.
In the past, a child who had experienced sexual assault was most likely to have been targeted by an adult. Today, when a child is sexually assaulted, the perpetrator is most likely to be another child (or adolescent). If attitudes correlated directly with behaviour, we would not be seeing this trend.
Another failure of the strategy is to imagine everyone is equally capable of changing their behaviour as a result of changing their beliefs. “In our current prevention model, there does seem to be a default middle-class subject sitting at the centre of our interventions; a tabula rasa upon which we can imprint the right beliefs and attitudes,” write Hill and Salter.
Such an outlook disregards the harsh realities faced by many boys who later resort to violence. Boys who grow up to use violence are often raised in environments where violence, drug and alcohol abuse are commonplace, and where a general lack of impulse control means beliefs and attitudes are of secondary importance.
Much like teaching table manners to a person with no food, teaching proper attitudes to a person who has failed to develop self-control will be an exercise in futility. If we want to get serious about reducing violence against women, ideological attempts to assign collective guilt need to be discarded. Efforts should instead be redirected into identifying high-risk groups, and providing supports for drug, alcohol and trauma recovery. Perpetrators who have already offended, and who are at risk of reoffending, need to be locked up. They shouldn’t be let out on bail.
Believing educational materials alone can stop violence before it happens is naive. It’s unfair to victims who need governments to take real action to prevent future violence against women by perpetrators who have already been violent.
Commenting on the fact that Daniel Billings was released on bail after being charged with sexual intercourse without consent, stalking and intimidation, NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said: “I’ll say from the outset that police share the sentiment of the community. This shouldn’t have happened. And sadly, it’s not an isolated case.”
****************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
***************************************
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Ukraine is forced to haul its fleet of $10million US Abrams tanks back from the frontline after losing five of its stock of 31 with Russia ramping up hunter-killer drone attacks in latest battlefield blow to Kyiv
This would appear to be further evidence that the day of the tank is over amid the availability of modern weapons systems, particularly drones. But drones are slow so are a danger only when fired from a short distance away, before they can be acquired as a target by an air-defence system. As Iran showed recently in their attack on Israel, over a long range, drones are a piece of cake. Any modern fighter can acquire them on its radar and have plenty of time to shoot them down. Britain was shooting down jet-powered long-distance drones (the V1s) in WWII. So anti-drone capability in tanks might make them important again.
It should be noted however that in the Iraq war, Saddam's T72s were wiped out en masse by U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicles using missiles. So it may be that nothing will save the tank as a war machine. Drones will be the key in future wars
It might be noted however that Abrams tanks have previously been shown as vulnerable when used by non-US forces. That was at the time attributed to two things: That the USA does not export fully-featured Abrams tanks and that the tanks are designed to be used as only one part of combined operations
Ukraine has been forced to sideline US-provide Abrams tanks for now in its fight against Russia, in part because Russian drone warfare has made it too difficult for them to operate without detection or coming under attack.
The US agreed to send 31 Abrams to Ukraine in January 2023 after an aggressive months-long campaign by Kyiv arguing that the tanks, which cost about $10 million apiece, were vital to its ability to breach Russian lines.
But the battlefield has changed substantially since then, notably by the ubiquitous use of Russian surveillance drones and hunter-killer drones - tactics also used to great effect by Ukraine's armed forces.
Those weapons have made it more difficult for Ukraine to protect their American made tanks, which are considered high priority targets by Russian units.
Russian troops claimed to have destroyed the first Abrams tank in Ukraine in February, with several Russian military bloggers sharing a clip of the armour on fire following a drone strike.
Since then, Moscow's forces have honed their approach to tackling Western armour.
Five of the 31 Abrams tanks in Ukraine have been destroyed in the past three months.
The proliferation of drones on the Ukrainian battlefield means 'there isn't open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection,' a senior US defence official told reporters Thursday.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide an update on US weapons support for Ukraine before Friday's Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting.
For now, the tanks have been moved from the front lines, and the US will work with the Ukrainians to reset tactics, said Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Adm. Christopher Grady and a third defence official who confirmed the move on the condition of anonymity.
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Study found gender-diverse adults were 3 to 6 times more likely to be autistic
I don't question these findings but note that the link is far from universal or automatic. I am pretty disrespectful of social norms but with 4 thoroughly heterosexual marriages under my belt I am certainly not gender dysphoric!
The disorder of gender dysphoria has puzzled scientists for decades: why is it that some people feel they are born in the wrong body, while others don't?
Now, experts speaking to DailyMail.com believe one common characteristic among this group, estimated to be in the region of 1.4million Americans, may offer some explanation.
Research has shown those who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are up to six times more likely to be autistic than people without gender dysphoria.
The developmental disorder, which affects how people communicate, socialize and behave, is thought to overlap with gender dysphoria for a variety of reasons.
Several studies have suggested exposure to certain hormones in the womb could increase the likelihood of both problems, while some experts say the link could lie in a shared refrain from conforming to societal norms.
One of the largest studies ever to examine a potential link between ASD and GD involved data from more than 641,000 people.
The study, published in Nature Communications in 2020, found people who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times more likely to be autistic than people without gender divergence.
Dr Amethysta Herrick, a chemist and trans-education activist, who is a transwoman, told DailyMail.com believes this could be because people on the autism spectrum 'have the freedom to explore their identities and express themselves the way they would choose because social norms matter less.'
The 2020 study showed transgender and gender-diverse people scored higher on self-reporting measures of autistic traits, including sensory sensitivity, which is often a characteristic of autism.
Following the study and based on his own observations, Dr Michael Craig, a professor of psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience at Kings College London in the UK, concluded there is an inherent link between gender dysphoria and autism.
Dr Craig, who was also the lead for the NHS National Autism Unit, told The Times: 'There were certainly some days where I was fairly convinced 40 to 50 percent of the patients I was seeing were autistic.
'I was trying to find out what it is that might explain this overlap, but it’s a difficult area to research for all sorts of reasons.'
Overall, he estimated about 20 percent of patients he observed at the Tavistock gender clinic in London might have qualified for an autism diagnosis.
While no definitive connection has been discovered, the authors of the 2020 study proposed several possible links between autism and gender-diversity.
They wrote that autistic individuals may conform less to societal norms compared to people not diagnosed with the condition, 'which may partly explain why a greater number of autistic individuals identify outside the stereotypical gender binary.'
Second, prenatal hormones involved in shaping brain development have been shown to contribute to both autism and gender role behaviors.
Previous studies have examined the link between prenatal hormones and autism. A 2019 study found a link between elevated levels of the female sex hormone estrogen in pregnant women and autism in their children.
Separate studies in both 2015 and 2018 found pregnant women with high levels of certain sex hormones, including testosterone and progesterone, had an increased risk of having a child with autism.
Previous research has also examined whether prenatal hormones play a role in gender dysphoria, with one study suggesting high levels of prenatal testosterone in females and low levels in males may contribute to gender dysphoria.
As the study found that gender-diverse individuals have higher rates of neurodevelopmental conditions, Dr Aaron Reuben, a neuropsychologist, told DailyMail.com: 'It is plausible that these conditions could be linked, or that there could be overlap among autism and gender dysphoria.
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Iran’s Nightmares
Details of Israel’s recent limited retaliatory strike against Iran‘s antiaircraft missile batteries at Isfahan are still sketchy. But nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions.
Israel’s small volley of missiles hit their intended targets, to the point of zeroing in on the very launchers designed to stop such incoming ordnance. The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. That proximity was by design.
Israel showed Iran it could take out the very antimissile battery designed to thwart an attack on its nearby nuclear facility.
The larger message sent to the world was that Israel could send a retaliatory barrage at Iranian nuclear sites with reasonable assurances that the incoming attacks could not be stopped.
By comparison, Iran’s earlier attack on Israel was much greater and more indiscriminate. It was also a huge flop, with an estimated 99% of the more than 320 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles failing to hit their planned targets.
Moreover, it was reported that more than 50% of Iran’s roughly 115 to 120 ballistic missiles failed at launch or malfunctioned in flight.
Collate these facts, and it presents a disturbing corrective to Iran’s nonstop boasts of soon possessing a nuclear arsenal that will obliterate the Jewish state.
Consider further the following nightmarish scenarios: Were Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles ever launched at Israel, they could pass over, in addition to Syria and Iraq, either Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, or all four. In the cases of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, such trajectories would constitute an act of war, especially considering that some of Iran’s recent aerial barrages were intercepted and destroyed over Arab territory well before they reached Israel.
Iran’s strike prompted Arab nations, the U.S., the U.K., and France to work in concert to destroy almost all of Iran’s drones. For Iran, that is a premonition of the sort of sophisticated aerial opposition it might face if it ever decided to stage a nuclear version.
Even if half of Iran’s ballistic missiles did launch successfully, only a handful apparently neared their intended targets—in sharp contrast to Israel’s successful attack on Iranian missile batteries. Is it thus conceivable that any Iranian nuclear-tipped missile launched toward Israel might pose as great a threat to Iran itself or its neighbors as to Israel?
And even if such missiles made it into the air and even if they successfully traversed Arab airspace, there is still an overwhelming chance they would be neutralized before detonating above Israel.
Any such launch would warrant an immediate Israeli response. And the incoming bombs and missiles would likely have a 100% certainty of evading Iran’s countermeasures and hitting their targets.
Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated.
It should be harder for the theocracy in Tehran to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief, and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran’s successfully nuking the Jewish state.
The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines. Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles.
Iran must now fear that if it launched two or three nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies, or be knocked down by Israel’s tripartite antimissile defense system.
Add it all up and Iran’s attack on Israel seems a historic blunder. It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time Iran threatens to go nuclear. It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies. It opened up a new chapter in which Iran’s own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.
Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.
And the long-suffering Iranian people?
The truth will come out that Iran’s own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return.
So Iranians will learn their homeland is now vulnerable and, for the future, no longer off-limits.
And Iranians will conclude that Israel has more effective allies than Iran and that their own ballistic missiles may be more suicidal than homicidal.
As a result, they may conclude that the real enemies of the Iranian nation are not the Jewish people of Israel after all, but their own unhinged Islamist theocrats.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/26/irans-nightmares/
**********************************************Australia: Do Fact-checkers Check The Facts?
Government should never have the power to determine what is or is not the truth, let alone silence dissenting views. However, what would be even worse is if unelected, unaccountable activists had this power instead.
But that is what the federal government is contemplating under its proposed internet censorship laws.
In private correspondence, released under a Freedom of Information request last year, Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland let slip to the Prime Minister how the government’s proposed ‘misinformation’ Bill would operate. The proposed law would empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority to impose huge fines on social media companies that do not censor ‘misinformation’ to the federal government’s satisfaction.
Minister Rowland confirmed that ‘fact-checking’ organisations are expected to play a central role in this new regime, so much so that Acma will be given the power to request information from ‘other persons such as fact-checkers and third-party platform contractors to monitor compliance with misinformation codes, standards and digital platform rules’. Rowland informed the Prime Minister that ‘the draft bill would give effect to this suggested change’.
The Minister has given the game away. It won’t be the social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube or X charged with the censoring. It won’t even be the faceless public servants at Acma. No, it will be these so-called ‘fact-checkers’.
Today, there are three main, self-appointed organisations in Australia claiming ‘fact-checker’ status; RMIT FactLab, AAP FactCheck, and RMIT ABC Fact Check. These organisations already have arrangements with social media companies in which they investigate ‘misinformation’ and if they render a ‘false’ verdict, the social media platforms will censor that content.
But based on Minister Rowland’s comments, ‘fact-checkers’ will in the future play an even more prominent role, as the enforcers of the government’s internet censorship laws. They, in effect, will be given the power of law to be the official arbiters of truth.
These ‘fact-checkers’ are signatories to a code of principles requiring them to be fair and neutral. This includes that they ‘not concentrate their fact-checking unduly on any one side’ of a debate. Last year, the Institute of Public Affairs investigated how well they complied with this requirement during the Voice referendum campaign. Not surprisingly, they failed miserably.
The IPA reviewed 187 fact-checking investigations which related to the Voice referendum, an enormous 91 per cent (i.e. 170) of which concerned the No campaign. 99 per cent of these were deemed ‘false’. Barely half of the other 17 investigations (concerning the Yes campaign) were deemed ‘false’. RMIT FactLab was the standout, worst offender with every one of its 41 investigations concerning the No campaign.
The IPA expanded its research to other policy areas, which revealed the Voice was not some aberration but, rather, confirmed the left-wing bias of these organisations is systemic and entrenched.
In respect to fact-checks about Australian politicians, there have been 249 investigations conducted over the past five years. 65 per cent of these investigations could be seen as favourable to the political left. Only 35 per cent could be seen as favourable to the political right. A 30 per cent margin of difference, in political terms, is enormous.
The research also looked at ‘fact checks’ into Covid-19, and climate change and energy policy. Of the 534 investigations into claims about Covid-19, a staggering 94 per cent targeted critics of official government responses, with just 6 per cent targeting advocates of the official line. So much for holding government to account!
Climate change and energy were no better. Of 153 investigations, 81 per cent were targeted against critics of the official climate change and energy agenda (that is, man-made carbon emissions are harming the planet, and we need to abolish fossil fuels and mandate alternatives in response). Every single one of these were deemed ‘false’, misleading, or missing context. Yet, remarkably, of the 20 investigations conducted by AAP FactCheck into advocates of the climate change agenda, 76 per cent were deemed ‘true’.
Again, RMIT FactLab was the worst. All of its Covid-19 and climate change investigations – 100 per cent – were targeted at critics. A level of consensus any North Korean dictator could be proud of!
It is clear Australia’s so-called, and self-appointed, fact-checkers have no interest in shining a spotlight on official government policies. Rather, they aim to attack critics and amplify official narratives.
This is not journalism. These are some of the most hotly debated and controversial areas of public policy, yet apparently to ‘fact-checkers’ only one side is worthy of investigation.
Predictably, the left-wing media have leapt to the defence of the ‘fact checkers’. An article that appeared in Crikey on 9 April claims that debunking a conspiracy theory doesn’t favour the political left or right but benefits the whole community. Miraculously, the enrichment of society so graciously offered by the ‘fact-checkers’ just so happens to involve targeting politicians on the political right, compared to the left, to the tune of two to one.
It is no surprise that left-wing journalists will attack any criticisms of ‘fact-checkers’. The utopia of the elite class – one that celebrates the modern media, academia and politics – is a world run by experts. Whether dictating where you can move during the Covid-19 pandemic, or deciding what can be said on the internet, the experts know best. With zero self-awareness, the same Crikey article claims, ‘Everything is a team sport to the outlets and politicians waging a war on fact-checkers in which “truth” becomes a trophy to be awarded rather than a fact to be established’.
But hang on, isn’t it the political left which is advocating for a system in which a select group decides on what is, or is not, ‘misinformation’ for the purpose of censoring alternative viewpoints?
Of course, the defenders of ‘fact checking’ would feel differently if these organisations were populated by conservatives. But, proving yet again the modern left is beyond parody, the author of the Crikey article once worked for AAP Fact Check!
These will be the people who determine what is true or false, and what you can or cannot say on social media.
It will, of course, be mainstream Australians who are silenced online if the federal government gets its way.
https://ipa.org.au/research/rights-and-freedoms/do-fact-checkers-check-the-facts
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Thursday, April 25, 2024
The IRS Lied
Your government lied to you; who has seen this movie before? Despite assurances to the contrary to justify their $80 Billion influx in cash in order to hire some 87,000 new agents, the Internal Revenue Service has been caught red handed using the vast majority of the funds to target Americans earning under $200,000 per year.
In August 2022, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told senators who were skeptical of the new spending “These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans. As we’ve been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around the Department of the Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also vehemently denied the intentions of the IRS in no uncertain terms: “Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”
Despite these promises by those tasked with managing the American economy, and breathless propagandizing on behalf of the state by corporate media outlets, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that, once again, we have been sold a bill of goods. “President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class. As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000,” says the Journal. “Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million.”
It turns out the IRS has been unable to hire many new agents. Despite the goal of immediately hiring 3,700 new employees, the agency had only hired 34 in a year. According to a watchdog report, the IRS has lost 8% of its workforce between 2019-2023. Instead, the agency has decided to justify its bloated budget by preying upon working class Americans; a tale as old as time.
The claim by supporters of increased IRS funding that only the extraordinary wealthy would be targeted for audit may have resonated with some naïve voters, but it was always absurd on its face. Tesla/SpaceX founder, and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, an opponent of increased IRS funding, said at the time that his taxes are audited every year “by default,” a sentiment echoed by many of the nation’s most successful entrepreneurs. Syracuse University reports that in 2022, Americans in the lowest income bracket were audited at a clip of 12.7 per 1,000, as opposed to a rate of just 2.3 per 1,000 for all other filers. Millionaires, albeit a far smaller sample size, were the only demographic audited at a higher rate than America’s poor, a whopping 23.8 per 1,000.
Janet Yellen, Charles Rettig, and the Biden administration’s lies about IRS funding have predictably gone the way of the Bush 43 administration’s infamous “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” and the Obama administration’s “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” We were told that The Patriot Act would never be used to spy on American citizens, until, of course, it was. American voters would be wise to learn that if a potential government program or spending increase sounds predatory, and looks predatory, it is probably predatory despite claims to the contrary by government officials and their enablers in the media. British theorist Stafford Beer coined the term “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID.) If the state consistently fails to deliver on its promises, consider the possibility that it is rarely honest about its intentions.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/04/16/irs-lied/?omhide=true&trk=rm
**************************************************************The Latest Plan to Exacerbate California’s Housing Crisis
Against the backdrop of a national shortage of affordable housing, due in large part to government policies, California lawmakers want to restrict corporate investment in single-family rental properties. This would make the Golden State’s housing affordability crisis worse. Since California is often a bellwether for both federal and other states’ policies, renters should hope the flawed idea dies before it spreads.
One California proposal, Assembly Bill 2584, recently introduced by San Jose Democrat Alex Lee, would establish a quota system, banning “institutional investors that own more than 1,000 single-family homes from purchasing additional properties and converting them into rentals.” A second proposal, Senate Bill 1212, introduced by Berkeley Democrat Nancy Skinner, would prevent hedge funds and “other corporate investment entities” from buying single-family homes in California, starting next year.
Both lawmakers claim that deep-pocketed institutional investors, such as private-equity firms, hedge funds and real-estate investment trusts, buy so many single-family homes that first-time and low-income home buyers are priced out of the market. This claim shows how little these California lawmakers understand about the role most institutional investors play in the housing market.
The anticorporate housing crusaders overestimate the influence of institutional investors. According to the nonpartisan California Research Bureau, large institutional landlords own less than 2% of all single-family homes in the Golden State: 60,500 units statewide. Nationally, institutional investors owned only 5% of America’s 14 million single-family rentals in 2022, or approximately 700,000 units, according to MetLife Investment Management. Corporate investors don’t control a large enough share of the housing in any market either to dictate rental prices or to squeeze out desperate home buyers.
Despite their relatively small scale, however, corporate landlords are valuable niche participants in housing markets because they often purchase neglected properties and make them livable again. As Urban Institute researchers have noted, institutional investors can buy distressed homes in bulk, upgrade them and rent them out. Their lower investment costs and specialized expertise allow corporate landlords to make necessary repairs efficiently and economically—realizing economies of scale—expanding the supply of urgently needed move-in-ready rental homes.
The restrictions championed by Mr. Lee and Ms. Skinner would exclude these investors, exacerbating the shortage of affordable, single-family rental houses. Redfin reports that investors spend more than $100 billion nationally each year to buy and rehabilitate single-family homes. The solution to the housing shortage is more investment, not less.
California lawmakers have passed more than 100 laws to spur the construction of additional housing since 2017, yet they have failed to produce the promised construction boom that would drive down home prices. Many of the new laws have done the opposite, undermining the professed goals of affordable-housing champions.
Through their decisions and actions, institutional investors have been telling lawmakers that the way to ameliorate the affordable-housing crisis is to eliminate burdensome restrictions on home building and rehabilitation of existing properties, and to strengthen private-property rights.
Progressive California politicians say they want to restrict corporate investment in single-family rental markets because they think doing so would help everyday renters and home buyers. Instead, their proposals would force financial capital out, reduce the future stock of rental housing and increase rental prices. That isn’t an idea California should export.
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Anti-Hunting Laws Have Deadly Consequences
On March 23rd, California brothers, and avid Columbian blacktail deer hunters Taylen and Wyatt Brooks, 21, and 18, respectively, were shed hunting (bucks shed their antlers, typically in February) near Georgetown when they were attacked by a 90 pound male mountain lion. Since no game animals were in season at the time, both brothers were unarmed. The cat charged Wyatt first, knocking him to the ground and biting his face, at that point Taylen began to fight the lion in order to free his brother. Despite saving Wyatt from certain death, Taylen was bitten in the throat and killed by the predator.
“We would like to express our sincere thanks for the outpouring of support and prayers from family, friends and the community,” the Brooks/Welsh Family said in a press release obtained by outdoors/conservation based outlet MeatEater. “We are all devastated by the tragic loss of Taylen yet thankful Wyatt is still with us and are well-aware the outcome could have been even worse.” You can read a detailed report of the events from MeatEater here.
Mountain lion hunting was banned via ballot initiative of the California Wildlife Protection Act in 1990, and while the tragic death of Taylen Brooks was the first deadly lion attack in the state since 2004, there have been numerous attacks by lions including a 2022 instance of a lion breaking into a family’s home and attacking their dog, and a mother’s heroic 2021 fight with a lion in order to save her 5 year old son. Over 100 lions are legally killed annually in the state due to reports of attacks on pets and/or livestock depredation.
New Jersey was recently forced to re-open their black bear hunting season after skyrocketing numbers of bear encounters. Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order banning bear hunting on state land in 2018, eventually rescinding the order in 2022. “I feel awful,” said the governor, “but I can’t violate what are obvious facts that are potentially undermining public safety, particularly among kids. I just can’t in good conscience go on in this direction.” Four bear attacks have occurred in the state since 2013, one fatal, including a young woman mauled in 2021 while checking her mail, along with hundreds of encounters by bears with pets and property.
Other elected officials seem determined to learn this lesson for themselves. Colorado Governor Jared Polis’s administration, spearheaded by the governor’s husband, vegan anti-hunting activist Marlon Reis, is currently waging a war on the state’s hunting community. If the administration is successful via ballot initiative, it will ban the hunting of mountain lions and bobcats. “The onslaught has now escalated with the Proposed Initiative 91, which aims to strip away the very foundation of Science-Based Wildlife Management. By doing so, it seeks to deprive Colorado’s Wildlife Managers and the sporting community of their rights to manage, pursue, and harvest these well-regulated species” says Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management. There have been numerous recent encounters with mountain lions in the Centennial State, including an attack on a man’s front porch in 2022. Colorado has, by far, the largest elk herd in the nation, along with healthy populations of mule deer, white-tailed deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, moose, and black bear, all of which would be negatively affected by the banning of big cat hunting.
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation has been extraordinarily successful compared to conservation efforts anywhere else on Earth, but the work of men like Aldo Leopold and President Theodore Roosevelt is now under attack by adversarial politicians and their strategy of employing direct democracy via uninformed urban voters. Not only do hunting bans undermine the heritage of outdoorsmanship fundamental to the history of the nation, they also put people in danger. Whether it is a symptom of the fact that most Americans now live in major cities and are blissfully unaware of where their sustenance comes from, or the decades of anthropomorphism by Hollywood, anti-hunting legislation must be fought tooth and nail in order to preserve our customs and protect the vulnerable.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/04/23/anti-hunting-laws/?omhide=true
********************************************************Sidney Powell Handed Win After Judges Dismiss Disciplinary Effort by Texas State Bar
Sidney Powell, a lawyer who filed lawsuits after the 2020 election, got a win in Texas after an appeals court ruled that the Texas bar did not prove that she engaged in misconduct or fraud.
A panel of judges on the Fifth District of Texas Court of Appeals in Dallas ruled Wednesday that the state bar’s arguments lacked merit and evidence. They found that state bar prosecutors “employed a ’scattershot' approach to the case” that had alleged Ms. Powell did not have a reasonable basis to file lawsuits that challenged the 2020 election’s outcome in battleground states.
“The Bar employed a ‘scattershot’ approach to the case, which left this court and the trial court ‘with the task of sorting through the argument to determine what issue ha[d] actually been raised,'” Justice Dennise Garcia wrote in the court’s ruling. “Having done so, the absence of competent summary judgment compels our conclusion that the Bar failed to meet its summary judgment burden.”
A separate court had sided with Ms. Powell in the case last year, finding “numerous defects” in the evidence presented by the State Bar of Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline. The court also found that the bar couldn’t provide evidence that she filed frivolous lawsuits.
“Under these circumstances and on this record, we conclude the trial court did not err in granting Powell’s no-evidence motion for summary judgment,” the appeals court wrote.
The State Bar of Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline has not yet issued a statement on the matter. A representative for the Texas State Bar told Reuters that the commission would meet to determine its next steps but declined to comment further.
“The Dallas Court of Appeals has affirmed the Texas state court’s dismissal of the Texas Bar’s case against Powell. After three years of litigation, the Court of Appeals held the Bar had no evidence Powell violated any disciplinary rule in filing four federal lawsuits in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” she said in a statement this week after the court’s decision.
In court papers filed with the appeals court, Ms. Powell disputed the bar’s allegations that she provided altered evidence in her legal filings. She said the documents were provided by other attorneys involved in the case.
The court appeared to agree with her arguments. “Regardless of whether the challenged conduct must be knowing, intentional, or otherwise, a question we need not resolve here, it is axiomatic that dishonesty involves some conscious perversion of truth,” the judge wrote Wednesday.
Following the 2020 contest, Ms. Powell was among the most prominent attorneys to file lawsuits, alleging there was enough fraud in battleground states that swung it in favor of President Joe Biden. A federal judge in Detroit sanctioned Ms. Powell and other lawyers in 2021 over the lawsuits.
The 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals largely upheld those sanctions, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear Ms. Powell’s appeal.
Ms. Powell in October 2023 pleaded guilty in Georgia and took a plea deal with Fulton County prosecutors after she was charged with illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. President Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, has also been charged in the case.
He and more than a dozen other co-defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty. President Trump has said the Fulton County case is an attempt to interfere with the 2024 election, describing the charges as baseless.
Under the terms of her plea deal, Ms. Powell had to write an apology. “I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” she wrote in the letter, made public in December.
Fani Willis, the embattled Democrat district attorney of Fulton County who presented the charges to a grand jury, said that the apology letters needed to include “real contrition” but that they did not need to be long.
Jenna Ellis, another lawyer who was charged and took a plea deal in Fulton County, also wrote an apology letter. However, she read hers aloud in court while pleading guilty.
In response to Ms. Powell’s apology letter, President Trump wrote on social media last year that Ms. Powell never worked for him in an official capacity.
“Sidney Powell was one of millions and millions of people who thought, and in ever increasing numbers still think, correctly, that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged & stolen,” he wrote on Truth Social. He added that Ms. Powell “was not my attorney and never was.” If she was, “she would have been conflicted,” the former president wrote at the time.
“Ms. Powell did a valiant job of representing a very unfairly treated and governmentally abused General Mike Flynn, but to no avail. His prosecution, despite the facts, was ruthless. He was an innocent man, much like many other innocent people who are being persecuted by this now Fascist government of ours, and I was honored to give him a Full Pardon,” he added.
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Diverse Faith Groups Rally in Support of Bearded Atlantic City Fire Department Staffer
For more than 20 years, Alex Smith has worked for the Atlantic City, New Jersey, Fire Department, dedicating his life to serving his hometown.
In his current position as air mask technician, he fits masks and refills air tanks for firefighters engaged in fire suppression—an important role to ensure their safety while fires are raging.
For more than 20 years, Smith has also served as an ordained minister. He leads Community Harvesters Church, a vibrant local ministry dedicated to showing the love of Christ to the community. He and his church host a food pantry and tend a community garden to offer food and fresh produce for the elderly and financially struggling families.
The church also maintains a beautiful “tiny house” on church property for those in need of shelter.
His compassion also carries over to his fellow employees in the fire department. Smith serves as a chaplain in a program he started to provide a listening ear and spiritual support to those who regularly risk their lives to save others.
Smith’s religious beliefs and conscience require him to wear a beard to set a godly example for his congregation and follow the examples of the prophets and Jesus in Scripture.
Fire department policy, however, prohibits beards of any length.
Because Smith is an air mask technician and does not fight fires himself, he asked the city for a religious accommodation regarding his beard. After the city denied his request, he sued.
In 2023, a district court in New Jersey ruled for the city, concluding that accommodating Smith would be an “undue hardship” for the fire department because Smith could—hypothetically—be needed to fight a fire in the future. The district court ignored evidence that Smith had successfully passed a mask-fit test with his beard multiple times and that the masks used by the fire department are positive pressure masks, meaning that even if there were a slight leak, the firefighter still would not inhale any air contaminants.
But what constitutes an “undue hardship”?
The Supreme Court’s unanimous landmark ruling last year in Groff v. DeJoy determined “undue hardship” means a “substantial increased cost” to an operation or business, far more than the old de minimis standard courts often relied on.
Here, the city cannot show any increased costs because Smith’s beard would have no impact on his co-workers or his ability to safely do his job filling air tanks.
Other fire departments and the military have found ways to safely provide religious or medical accommodations to otherwise clean-shaven requirements. So, why does the city still deny Smith’s request for a religious accommodation, refusing to even engage him in discussions about how he could faithfully live out his beliefs on the job?
Smith has appealed the district court decision to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
He’s not alone in his conviction that he should not have to choose between his faith and his job. Recently, individuals and organizations representing a broad array of minority faiths filed six friend of the court briefs at the 3rd Circuit in Smith’s support, presenting the views of three Jewish organizations, the American Hindu Coalition, and two Sikh groups, as well as Muslim and Christian law professors and advocacy groups.
These briefs not only pointed out how the district court misapplied the law; they also highlighted a trend in other military, police, and fire department contexts toward safely accommodating religious beards, rather than excluding Sikhs, Muslims, and others from entire career paths.
Also voicing their support for Smith were four firefighters and paramedics—Jewish and Muslim—who in 2007 won a permanent injunction prohibiting Washington, D.C., from enforcing a requirement that they be clean-shaven. Now recently retired or nearing retirement, each worked for the District of Columbia’s fire department for more 30 years.
Some of these D.C. first responders regularly donned protective face masks and entered hazardous situations—something that Smith’s role does not even require. Their brief recounted their experience that first responders need not compromise their religious convictions to serve in the fire department.
Even though Smith doesn’t need to wear a mask to perform his job, Atlantic City still requires that he shave every day to keep his job. All the city’s concerns are hypothetical, but the harm to Smith from the city’s refusal to respect his faith is very real.
Given the robust protections of federal law and the Free Exercise Clause, as well as the experience of other fire departments safely offering religious accommodations to bearded employees, Smith should be allowed to continue to serve his community as an air mask technician while enjoying the religious freedom the law guarantees.
****************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See